The Manifestos and Essays

By Ann Preston-Jones

"Richard Foreman reinvented dialogue, action, sound, stage design, and philosophical groundwork as no other stage artist in our history."—PEN/Laura Pels Master American Dramatist Award citation

These writings, collected from two earlier books now long out-of-print along with two recent interviews, provide a fascinating window into Richard Foreman's singular mind and creative process. Also included is The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), his last play before transitioning to more multi-media work.

Richard Foreman has written, directed, and designed more than fifty of his own plays, both internationally and at his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which he founded in 1968. He has received many OBIE awards, an NEA Lifetime Achievement Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Release date: Nov 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781559366526

Ann Preston-Jones

Ann Preston-Jones has an extensive knowledge of the county’s archaeology, with over thirty years’ experience working for Historic England and Cornwall Archaeological Unit. Her experience is mostly in the care, conservation and management of those sites which make Cornwall special and she has a particular passion for sculptured stone monuments. 

Book preview

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THE

MANIFESTOS AND ESSAYS

OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD FOREMAN

PUBLISHED BY TCG

Love & Science: Selected Music-Theatre Texts

INCLUDES:

Hotel for Criminals (The American Imagination)

Love & Science

Africanus Instructus

Yiddisher Teddy Bears

Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater

INCLUDES ESSAYS AND THE PLAYS:

The Cure

Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good

Symphony of Rats

What Did He See?

Lava

Bad Boy Nietzsche! and Other Plays

INCLUDES:

Bad Boy Nietzsche!

Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty!

Maria Del Bosco (A Sound Opera: Sex and Racing Cars)

Bad Behavior

Panic! (How to Be Happy!)

King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!

[image: cover]

The Manifestos and Essays is copyright © 2013 by Richard Foreman

The Manifestos and Essays is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156.

All Rights Reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Gregor Hall, Bookport International, 2104 Albemarle Terrace, Brooklyn, NY 11226.

The publication of The Manifestos and Essays by Richard Foreman is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Foreman, Richard, 1937–

[Essays. Selections]

The manifestos and essays / Richard Foreman.—First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-55936-398-3 (trade paper)

ISBN 978-1-55936-652-6 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3556.O7225A6 2013

814’.54—dc23

2013002064

Cover and book design and composition by Lisa Govan

Cover photograph by Anne Nordmann

First Edition, October 2013

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

THE MANIFESTOS

Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto I

Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto II

Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto III

THE ESSAYS

Author’s Note

Notes on the Process of Making It

How Truth . . . Leaps (Stumbles) Across Stage

14 Things I Tell Myself

The Carrot and The Stick

How to Write a Play

How I Write My (Plays: Self)

TWO INTERVIEWS

An Interview with Richard Foreman

by Julia Lee Barclay

An Interview with Richard Foreman

by Morgan von Prelle Pecelli

FILM NOTES

PUBLICATION HISTORY

About the Author

ONTOLOGICAL-HYSTERIC MANIFESTO I

(APRIL, 1972)

ONTOLOGICAL-HYSTERIC MANIFESTO II

(JULY, 1974)

One always begins with the desire to write a certain kind of sentence (to put on stage a certain kind of gesture. That kind then turns out to be about that-which-becomes-your-content).

The key, however, is in this sentence (gesture) cell. Most people don’t see the cell, are perceptually unable to see small enough (ephemeralization). Because their LIFE training is that to see small means to enter the realm where contradictions are seen to be at the root of reality—and that disturbing realization they would avoid at all costs.

The desire to write a certain kind of sentence (gesture) is akin to the desire to live—be—have the world be in a certain kind of way. (Art as a solution to what is—Musil. Through style, through smallest possible units. Bricks determine one style of architecture, stone another, etc.)

(A solution to the problem of what is

doesn’t imply a utopian vision—how

to fix the world—but how to BE

so that

One can respond to the world-as-it-is

instead of

responding to a dream world, an inherited

world in which institutions and training

hypnotize us so we see THEIR version of

reality.)

To UNDERSTAND the work is to understand the cell, and the possibilities and implications latent in the cell, just as the possibilities and implications latent in atom and molecular biology lead to a view of life and universe—the end in both cases being a patterned energy system.

Reach the pre-conscious: remove the personality.

Make the acts of the play not be aimed acts but isomorphic with the pre-conscious and its richness. In other words, acts that on each occasion evoke the source—rather than acts (as in daily life) which pick an object of desire and, in isolating that object from the whole constituting field, are the very means by which we cut ourselves off from the source.

Detach (abstract) acts from sensuousness (desire-aim) ground.

We are usually told that art should root itself in the concrete. That means—object-making, image-making, hypnotizing man with idols (beautiful things, stirring emotions, seductive personalities).

No, man’s task is to respect the imbalance in himself (Ortega) between nature (his outside—the concrete) and spirit (his inside— abstraction and dream). The concrete is what RESISTS man—so that he finds himself in that resistance. The TRUTH of man is that moment by moment resistance of the concrete—the concrete which RESISTS the inner project of abstraction, ephemeralization. FOR art to root itself in the concrete is to make the spectator believe for a while that he is either animal (who is that being who totally adjusts to nature—if it does not, it simply ceases to exist) or God (who is totally isomorphic with abstraction, dream, idea—for whom the wish IS the reality without the resistance of nature interfering).

Only art ROOTED in the abstract smallest unit of sentence or gesture as a KIND of projection of inner, which then stumbles over nature (outer), reflects the truth of man’s condition. Classical Realism, classical Romanticism (which includes, of course, Surrealism, Expressionism, etc.) puts man to sleep—returning him to animal nature or deluding him that his dreams are objectively real.

If a work of art has a MESSAGE it means it is putting the spectator to sleep. The minute man knows, he sleeps (Shestov). Because he loses touch with that IMBALANCE which he most deeply is. Art must keep man consciously rooted in that imbalance—and that can only be done if no conclusions are drawn (implied—as in the MESSAGE or RESOLUTION)—but rather, the spectator is moment by moment exposed to the true process of a certain kind of sentence-gesture (man’s inner quest for style, for a way of being-in-the-world) as it encounters the resistance of the real-object (nature).

So the work of art is ROOTED and PROCEEDS from the abstract (spiritual, inner) and uses the ABSTRACT as content—which content finds it HARD TO EXIST in the world of the object (nature) and that is the grand music which the work captures because that is TO-BE-MAN.

That’s what it means to say images alone don’t make anything new happen. The concrete image is an idol; empathy with an interesting character is the creation of an IDOL. We have an obligation to return the spectator to his own proper human space; oscillating back and forth between the frontiers of animal and God.

No development is possible. It’s false when it occurs in a work of today. It’s a reversion to primitivism. (Which is, of course, what people want, what we all want—to sink back into nature and sleep. To sink back into the mother—to end stress.) Development is the negation of stress, or rather the avoidance of stress. To return to the one human point—that imbalance between inner and outer—is to sit on the one true stress-point that is never resolved—just as the STRESS which is being-a-human is never resolved (unless one finally does opt for animal or God), DEVELOPMENT in a work of art is a giving-up, a moving-off that stress point into animalism or spiritualism. In both cases—dreaming, wish fulfillment, going to sleep.

When we say development, perhaps to be more exact, we should notice that development generally means the development of each item from the preceding item of a series—and it is this which is false. ANOTHER sort of development exists—details proceeding from an idea of the whole living-field.

The impossible, false developmental procedure in current art would be step A proceeding from step B—such development can be nothing but hypnotism and lie.

The only development possible which leaves us free to be awake and be human in our watching is one in which each detail proceeds from a continual referral back to the constituting process of consciousness colliding with world—the process that makes things for us be.

Bad art, Kitsch, develops detail from preceding detail. That is, the previous fact is an object, the response to (development from) that object is another object, and so on.

Creating a network of objects.

Idols.

Imprisonment.

We IGNORE the preceding fact or act—so it is allowed to VANISH as it should when its moment of being-there has passed—so the NEW