Meetings with Remarkable Wo/Men: On a Long Journey to Theatre

By Naum Panovski

Many artists share the conviction that the theater is a collaborative, multicultural art that stands as a heartbeat of the community trying to find relevant answers to the fundamental questions of our existence.

Offering a variety of perspectives, Meetings with Remarkable Wo/Men focuses on the work of a handful of extraordinary theater artists and innovators. It gives priority not to interpretations of their work, but rather to their words and voice, to their views and ideas. In so doing, it addresses various issues, ranging from arts and politics to history, philosophy, culture, identity, and memory. In an immediate, simple, conversational way, it explores the development of the most influential models and movements in theater and performance in the last fifty years. Most importantly, it underlines the notion that it is the quest for our humanity and our human condition that matters the most in creating art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480843219

Naum Panovski

Naum Panovski is a professional theater director, writer, a professor of performing arts, criticism, theory, aesthetics, and humanities. Panovski is a Fulbright Expert and Scholar as well. He was born in Skopje, Macedonia, then part of former Yugoslavia, and graduated from the noted Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade. Later, he studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earned a Master’s Degree in Dramatic Arts from the Faculty of Drama in Belgrade, and a Ph.D. in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. During his long professional career in theater, he has worked as a director or a dramaturge on more than ninety productions performed in theaters in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Italy, France, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Poland, or U.S. As a professor of aesthetics, criticism, theory, literature, culture, arts and society he has taught and lectured at The University of the Arts, Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, New York University, Yale University, The Catholic University, Lincoln Centre, Smith College, Bentley College, La MaMa Symposium in Spoleto, Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, and many other institutions. As a theater critic and writer, he has authored two books, Directing Poiesis and Theater as a Weapon and has written numerous articles published in theater and performance journals worldwide. He has also presented his work in conferences, panels, and symposia; served on boards, and held various artistic leadership positions. Naum Panovski is a recipient of many distinguished awards for his creative work, and he is internationally recognized. The Master Thesis “Hamlet our Contemporary - Panovski’s Production” discussing his cross-disciplinary and multimedia vision of this seminal play written by Ms. Aurelie Clemente Graduate student M. A. candidate was submitted to the Universite Paris VII Sorbonne - UFR d’Etudes Anglophones in September 1996, Naum Panovski’s work was inspired by the theories and practices of the experimental theater of Adolphe Appia, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook, Joseph Chaikin, Richard Schechner, Tadeusz Kantor, Carl Weber, Robert Corrigan, Mata Miloševic, and Mirjana Miocinovic. www.naumpanovski.net

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Copyright © 2017 Naum Panovski.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4320-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4321-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901139

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/24/2017

CONTENTS

Prologue

Robert W. Corrigan

The Father Of Us All

The Idea Of A Changed Human Being Who Always And Above All Looks Human

Joe Chaikin

A Flight Of A Daring Seagull

On Making Humanity Visible In Theater

Jaen-Claude Van Itallie

A Theater Poet Writing On His Feet

The Playwright As A Bridge Between The Stage And The Audience

Charles Marowitz

A Radical Who Did Not Intend To Be A Sweet Fellow.

On Theater, Directing, Culture, And Politics

María Irene Fornés

The Strong Woman Who Gave Voice To The Oppressed And Humiliated

On Writing As A Process Of Dealing With Our Own Angels, Demons, And Swamps

Richard Schechner

The Rebel With Cause Who Challenged The American Theater

On Dionysus In 69 And Nudity

Anne Bogart

My Buddy From Nyu

On Viewpoints As A Road To A Creative Freedom In Theater

Mira Furlan

A Powerful Voice In Dark Times Forced In Exile

On Brutality Of War That Shaped Our Lives

Peter Brook

The Theater Guru In Permanent Search For The Profound Human Being

Mata Milošević

The Worldly Mensch From Belgrade

On Stylized Theater And Freedom Of Expression

Epilogue

Naum Panovski

For my daughter Frosina,

my smart first reader

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the conversations in this book originally appeared in journals and theater magazines in Europe, and I am deeply grateful to the editors of Scena Theater Magazine from Novi Sad, Serbia, and Pulse Weekly from Skopje, Macedonia for publishing my work and for permitting me to publish them here in English. All of the conversations published here appear in the English-speaking world for the first time.

THANK YOU NOTE

I am deeply grateful to all the people with whom I had the privilege of meeting and working on my long journey from Yugoslavia, the country where I was born, to the United States, the country which I chose to be my home and which has embraced me in my quest for theater that matters as well as in the pursuit of my dream. The list of these kind friends is long. Their support, encouragement, imagination and many valuable comments have provided me with helpful ideas and were a stimulating model in writing this book.

The many students that I had in my classes, lectures, workshops and rehearsals have had a motivating impact on writing and shaping this book. I have learned a lot from them.

My family, Frosina, Damjan, and Nevenka, who has courageously followed me on that almost-40-year-long voyage, has been a nonpareil company on that road. To them, I am particularly thankful.

My special thanks goes to my deceased parents, Angelina and Blagoja. Without their enormous love, generosity, continuous encouragement, and support along the long road while they were alive, this journey and this book would not have been possible.

PROLOGUE

The wo/man is the measure of all things

After Protagora’s Man is a measure of all things

Why this book? What is this collection of conversations and comments all about? Why now, these snippets and fragments of meetings with these rare and remarkable men and women? Who are these people?

This book of conversations is about the work, ideas, and theater innovations of a handful of extraordinary people I was privileged to meet and, in some cases, work with, on my four decades-long journey through the exciting world of theater and American academe.

These conversations bear witness to the extraordinary work of this group of selected artists, scholars, thinkers, and philosophers who have influenced and inspired many other significant critics and practitioners in the world. Their seminal work has profoundly shaped the theater in America and the world, and in so doing they have had a deep and lasting impact on all of us.

Over the years that span more than half a century, we sometimes met intentionally, sometimes frequently, sometimes occasionally, but always cordially and sincerely. These collaborators, caring friends, and above all, inspiring teachers, opened their hearts and minds for me. Some of them opened their homes to me as well. They generously shared their knowledge and experience, their cultural imprints and worldviews, in a way true teachers and masters from the past shared their skills and wisdom with their students or apprentices. They powerfully demonstrated how knowledge is transferred from one generation to the next so we can continue the journey.

The meetings, comments, and conversations cover a wide range of topics and ideas: from what motivates these remarkable men and women in their professions, to what are the driving forces in their work; from what is at the core of their creative model, the roads their lives and works have taken; from what is human and what does it mean to be human in this challenging time, to their visions about the future of the arts, theater, and humanity as a whole.

These extraordinary people, each one in their own profound way, urge us to see anew the idea and practice of creating theater and performance today. They suggest that it is the immediate interaction, the exchange of energy and experiences, the conversation and communication that people establish in a theater, which makes it a powerful art. They argue that theater brings people together, unites other arts in its own realm, and creates a specific artistic world that enlightens, entertains, heals, and questions the mysteries of our human condition. In so doing they also unveil in myriad ways the elusive secret of who we are and what we are.

The book focuses on the authors and gives priority not to interpretations of their works, but rather to their words and voices, to their views and ideas. They cover various issues from arts and politics, to history, philosophy, culture, identity, and memory. In an immediate, simple, conversational way it makes the readers familiar with the development of the most influential models and movements in theater and performance in the last fifty years. Most importantly, looking at the book from the point of view of comparative and cultural studies, it underlines the notion that it is the quest for our humanity and our human condition that matters the most in the creative arts.

These conversations demonstrate how these exceptional wo/men have paved myriad roads to a shared vision of theater and the world. They suggest, as Emanuel Kant or Hannah Arendt suggest in their writings, that we should search our collective past so we can bring our collective experiences into the present, in order to heal our wounded souls, harmonize our lives, and open horizons to our hopeful future. They reveal the most important segment that brings them together on the pages between the covers of this book. They share the same conviction that the theater is a collaborative, multicultural art which stands as a heartbeat of the community trying to find relevant answers to the fundamental question of our existence: what a piece of work is a wo/man?

All these years they have stood as rock-solid road signs on bumpy roads and acted as lighthouses in dark times on rough seas to many significant theater makers in the world.

On a personal level, they affected my life and work immensely. Following their signs on the roadmap, I was inspired by their creative ideas. The theater became my refuge, my home, and my motherland. Journeying on that road, I have tried all my life to raise my artistic voice against the darkness of our time and to look for what is human in all of us. On that road, I have also lost one country that was violently murdered; I refused to be confined in another small blind and very often intolerant one. Full of hope, I entered a third one, huge, open, full of promises and dreams… dreams… and disappointments as well. However, despite all these mutations and transformations that I have undergone on my long journey, thanks to these remarkable women and men I have not lost my theater, my homeland. It was always there to keep me alive.

This modest book also grows out of my sincere belief that the only way to go forward is to see what we as human beings have done and to know where we have been, whom we have met on the road behind us. The intention is not to praise the authors, but rather to carry on the torch, and make these amazing wo/men present among us again, because, their answers, ideas, opinions, and visions are still relevant and valid insights today.

In the end, it must be noted that this book is not a memoir although it includes personal experience. It is based on facts and the life-long work of a theater professional and scholar. Providing contextual and historical background to the conversations with these remarkable people, this book on one hand addresses theater ideas, views, concepts, and models, while on the other, it provides background to what and who these people are as ordinary human beings, and how their unique lives complemented their work and artistic visions.

The book is also about a passage of time; how time shapes and molds our lives and work. Traveling in a cyclic way through time and space, and describing when, where, and how these meetings happened, the conversations actually confirm that no matter the time (when) and place (where), no matter the form or style, the most significant pillar in theater is our continuous search for the values of our human condition - the search for the human being as a measure of all things.

So, here are the snippets of the meetings, comments, conversations, and interviews with these remarkable wo/men who have paved countless roads in the search for theater and better world.

1. ROBERT W. CORRIGAN

The Father of us All

Robert W. Corrigan, scholar and thinker, critic and prolific writer, editor and translator, creator and theater maker, lunatic, lover and poet, innovative educator and mastermind behind many theater programs, was one of the greatest movers and shakers of American theater academe.

I met Robert Corrigan for the fist time in the early seventies. It was not in person, though. I met him through his writings and his work as editor and founder of the Tulane Drama Review (TDR). It was his notable essay The Theater in Search of a Fix¹ written in 1961 and published in TDR that attracted my attention. I read it translated into Croatian in 1970, when it was published in the then-influential journal Mogućnosti, based in Split, Croatia. It made a vast impact on many theater makers and scholars in the former Yugoslavia and touched many theater hearts and minds then. His prolific views on theater about the broken and lost theater language, his analyses of Samuel Beckett, Michel de Ghelderode, and Antonin Artaud, his criticism of the theater clichés, and the need for a serious theater fix were groundbreaking at a time when poetic realism was a dominant acting style and when it stood at the core of the American mainstream theater. To paraphrase the prominent writer Jerzy Kosinski, Robert’s book was a collection of extraordinary essays on the theater that celebrated the many ways in which the theater exposes the enduring conflict between man’s image of himself and the limitations of his condition. At the same time, they were inspirational readings not only for young theater makers, directors, playwrights, critics, and the like who dreamed of taking roads not taken, but for seasoned practitioners, writers, and critics who felt trapped in the realistic canon. The Theater in Search of a Fix made me think of coming to America, to meet Robert and eventually study with him. It took me almost fifteen years to achieve that.

I arrived in New York as a Fulbright Fellow on August 21, 1975, and then spent one year as an MFA student of Directing at the New York University (NYU) School of the Arts working under the guidance and mentorship of Carl Weber. It was the same theater school that Robert founded with Ted Hoffman and where he was the first Dean. By the time I arrived in New York in 1975 though, Robert had already gone to California, building a new academic community as the first president of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. That was not an easy task for him there. I assume there is much more to be said about his struggle with the windmills there in order to implement his vision and create the school of his dreams.

I did not meet Robert the year I was at NYU since he was gone, but his school was there, open to everyone who wanted to enrich his or her mind with new ideas and extraordinary experiences.

NYU School of the Arts, in the mid-seventies, was marked in many ways by Robert Corrigan and his vision. Many of his collaborators, his brothers-in-arms in the struggle for a model and form of theater that would provide an open door to a needed Theater Fix, such as Ted Hoffman, Richard Schechner, Brooks McNamara, Michael Kirby, Omar Shapli and Joe Chaikin were still there. They and many other distinguished artists and scholars who taught at NYU at that time or hung around in the West Village set the tone of the great school which heavily inspired and influenced the way of perceiving theater both in New York and in the world. That vibrant quest for the new models of expression in the theater was what Schechner called American Challenge in theater at that time.

I did not expect, that many years later, I would have an opportunity to meet Robert in my native Skopje, Macedonia. As the old Arab proverb goes: If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.

Robert came to Macedonia in the late Spring of 1987. That year he was on one of his many European scouting trips in search for new talent and was scheduled to spend a few days in Skopje meeting students, artists, and scholars. He had a spirited and inspiring lecture at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Skopje, and I met him there after the event. He was, as he always was on similar occasions, smiling. His cheerful blue eyes danced, and his cheeks giggled. He was happy to meet new people, see new faces, and generous in sharing his time with those who wanted to shake hands with him, ask questions, or just to meet him.

I introduced myself to him humbly, mentioned my work and my graduate studies at NYU briefly, and asked him if he was available for lunch. He gladly accepted my invitation.

Needless to say, it was a life-changing lunch meeting. It was not the conversation on the currents in the American and European theater, or his profound interest in my work and my ideas about the Poiesis² process in arts, or my plans to write a book on theater and directing as a Poiesis process that made that day a turning point in my life. No, that was not it. I am sure today, that it was that great kindred soul that all of a sudden, that hot day, started to unfold in front of me. I was having my first class with Robert that day. It was not only a lecture on secrets on theater and drama, about the relationship between family and society, but it was a fascinating lecture about life and living it to the fullest. It was a lecture that a reader could not find written in his writings. The apprentice was learning from the Master. Robert was sipping his glass of red wine under the burning Macedonian sun and enjoying every single drop of it. He was artfully elaborating on family, drama, society and politics, on the role and place of food and good wine in his life, on the issues penetrating the challenges in the world theater and drama while his new apprentice was listening and learning.

At the end of one of his comments, showing his incredible sense of humor and irony, he laughed: "You see, everyone believes ‘In Vino Veritas.’ I don’t believe that is true. ‘In Theater Veritas.’"

A month later, in July 1987, I was Robert’s guest, spending a marvelous week in his home in Dallas. Robert was the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) at that time, a position he held for several years.

Robert and his wife JoAnn, who was his irreplaceable partner in his editorial and publishing crimes, were always exquisite hosts. They always did everything to make their guests feel like part of their family.

Whenever he had guests for the first time, Robert tried to introduce them to the wealth of his immediate community. He liked to arrange meetings with local scholars, artists, and writers, take his guests to The University of Texas at Dallas, the local theaters, downtown Dallas, the Book Depository (the infamous location from where JFK was assassinated), and to other places that he found inspirational. He also took his guests to places with delicious food and excellent vintage red wine. Most of the time it was Beaujolais. Robert was a great red wine, particularly Beaujolais, enthusiast.

One dry and sunny summer day in Dallas, in between my peripatetic classes with Robert, we sat down and had this extensive conversation – an interview on family, theater and society, on the need for change in theater and society, on new theater language, and above all on what is at the core of being human today.

During the interview, Robert sat in his armchair next to the window in his vast living room overlooking the creek. That was the place where he usually read the newspapers and had his morning coffee. He wanted to be informed and kept up with world events. He felt very comfortable there. I sat opposite him in the leather director’s chair. We talked and talked… and talked, for more than four hours.

Two days later, on the way to the airport on my way back home, in his profoundly witty way, Robert asked me to come back the following year. He wanted me to join him in his new rigorous and competitive program at the Graduate School of Humanities at UTD and to complete my book Directing Poiesis working at the same time towards my Ph.D. under his mentorship.

That moment changed not only my life but my family’s as well.

That moment, I also learned that Robert Corrigan was not only a prolific scholar but an extremely caring and generous person. He was a generous friend and philanthropist. He proved that time and time again.

The next four years I spent traveling back and forth between Dallas and Skopje. Many things happened during those years, both good and bad. On the good side, I got my Ph.D., and wrote and published my book Directing Poiesis.

On the bad side, my former country Yugoslavia violently disintegrated. In 1991, on the first day of the bloody war and at the beginning of the brutal destruction of what was once a great multicultural country, on my way back to Macedonia with my family, I found myself disgusted with what I saw at the Belgrade Airport. It was at the peak of Milošević’s regime. The airport was blanketed with huge posters of him. Nationalistic hysteria ran high, and we were, for no reason, brutally harassed, and called offensive and rude names at passport control and at the customs checkpoint. We were in total shock. My kids were scared to death. I knew, that very moment, that there is no future for a person like me in that country of blood and honey³ which was about to be transformed into a fragmented postmodern landscape of ashes and burnt bones.

We continued our journey back home, but it was not the home that we wanted and