Life as we know it

It was a good idea that New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma had: letting one member of the company tell her whole life on the telephone and turning the transcript into ten shows. This week: Episode II.

“The whole project started with a simple phone call to Kristin Worrall, a member of our company,” explains Pavol Liska. Liska asked Worrall to tell her the story of her life. “I expected that she would give an abridged version of her life during a talk of a couple of hours. But at the end of the first phone call she was only at age eight. So we agreed to talk again a couple of days later. By the end of the second phone call she was at age fourteen. In the end she needed ten phone calls to arrive at age 34.”

Why did the phone conversations go so well, do you think?
Pavol Liska: Neither of us knew what the project would be, but Kristin just took it seriously and surrendered to the process. You could also say sixteen hours is very little to condense your entire life. It is not that she has had an extraordinary life. There is no real drama, no sensational storytelling. She just goes through the stages of life that everybody can identify with. I don’t think it would work otherwise. It is not a project about her, otherwise we would have called the project “The Life and Times of Kristin Worrall”.
In Episode I, the transcript of the conversation was performed by a group of singing actors. What form are you using now?
Liska: The performers will sing, but in a completely different style and with a different orchestration. The type of music teenagers listen to is reflected in the music we composed. Robert Johanson composed everything on GarageBand while we were touring with Episode I. Inspiration came from 1980s disco-style music with a couple of playful quotations from Sting and Phil Collins. Young adolescents start to get into dancing and physically relate to other human beings. That is why there is more focus on dance.
Fumiyo Ikeda of the Rosas company is one of the dancers.
Liska: We have known each other for many years and this seemed to be the opportunity to work together. Still, I do most of the choreography. She is a performer because she would do too good a job choreographing. We really want to make sure that the audience does not consider the performance as an aesthetic rendering of someone’s biography.

Isn’t it difficult to create ten performances from the same material?
Liska: It gives you a lot of freedom to know that the story you have can hold any form. Even though it is very thin we know it will carry from one show to the next. That means we can fully engage in form and figure out what the function of theatre is, how is it different from film, television, or other visual arts. Ideally, I want people to abandon their concerns with the story and watch the form and structure. Because, looking back at the types of experiences that changed my inner life, those are generally long performances or films that were sometimes difficult to sit through, frustrating at times, extremely pleasurable at other times. That is what the audience’s experience is going to be when we start to put different episodes together. We are shaping time in a way that it is effectively changing something inside you.

Photos © Anna Stocher

Nature Theater of Oklahoma: Life and Times – Episode 2
8 > 10/3 • 20.30, €12/16, EN
Kaaitheater square Sainctelettesquare 20, Brussel/Bruxelles,
02-201.59.59, tickets@kaaitheater.be, www.kaaitheater.be