RACHEL ROSENTHAL
45″
Am, heA”Paris,
Rachel Rosenthal was born in Paris. In the
early fifties in New York, she was an assistant
to Erwin Piscator at his Dramatic Workshop,
later danced with the Merce Cun-
et
ningham Dance Company. After moving to
California, elle
founded
Instant Theatre
(1956-69), and during the seventies worked as
a sculptor and co-chairwoman of Woman-
espace. Rosenthal began presenting solo per-
formances in 1975.
REPLAYS, 1975
After living and working in New York and
how did you end up in California?
After 1953, 1 came back to NYC and decided I
wasn’t going back to Paris. And that’s when I
got to be friends with Bob Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns and continued my friendship
with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. je
got very emotionally involved with some peo-
ple in that group-it was a boiling cauldron
of seething emotions-and I felt there was
just no way for me in that situation. Aussi, je
felt very energized and yet dominated by
their charisma and somehow I felt that if I
didn’t leave this atmosphere, this group, je
would never find what I had to give. Which
was one of several reasons I went out to
California. That was in ’55.
What were
Theatre?
the beginnings of
Instant
I moved to California
After
I started a
workshop. At first it was just a simple actor’s
workshop. I was giving the actors exercises
and improvisations-things I was thinking
en haut. They enjoyed them so much that they
stopped working on scenes and only wanted
to do my ideas, exercises, and themes. Un
day I said, “We’ve found a new theatre. je
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think we have something very wonderful
ici, let’s do it for an audience.” And then
everybody disappeared.
What happened?
The actors were all up-and-coming
Hollywood hopefuls-people
like Tab
Hunter, Tony Perkins, Susan Hallison, Rod
McKuen, Vic Morrow, and Judd Taylor, OMS
is now a director. They all said their agents
would never allow them to do it, it’s just too
crazy and way out. So I was left with just a
painter, a dancer, and an actor who had been
an engineering student at MIT. The four of us
decided to hell with everybody, we’ll do it all
by ourselves. And that’s how Instant Theatre
was started. It was just a little box space and
there were risers and, instead of putting
chairs on the risers, I had pillows. That was
in ’56.
Who was your audience?
In those days the audience was mostly poets
and artists.
THE HEAD OF O.K., 1977
CHARM, 1977
Did people associate it with Happenings in New York?
One of the problems we had is that we associated ourselves with
theatre instead of with art. It was always affiliated with theatre
because there was, à l'époque, to me anyway, no other affiliation
possible. It suffered from that, because people’s expectations of
theatre were such that our theatre was considered totally way out. UN
lot of people just didn’t accept it or understand it, and the artists for
some reason stopped coming, possibly because of the affiliation
with theatre.
What kind of performances did you do?
I’ni sort of embarrassed really to tell you about what Instant Theatre
était. Because it sounds very self-serving and I’m making really high
claims, and there’s no proof-there’s no mechanical or electronic
documentation, but there are a lot of eyewitnesses. It was a theatre
that was the precursor of Happenings, Action Art, art performance,
and Theatre of the Ridiculous.
How have the history books passed your theatre by?
Because we did it in California, and because I was maybe personally
afraid to come out. I think that if it had come to New York it would
have been very important theatre. Over there it was really buried. Pour
awhile it didn’t matter to me because in those days I had very Zen
ideas-it’s very ephemeral, it’s for now, and so on. Then later on, je
was very sad because I had nothing to show and everybody was get-
ting recognition and credit for all kinds of things that I had done long
before. So I say I’m embarrassed because it really sounds like sour
grapes in a way.
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How about now-do you find a theatre audience or an art audience for your work?
Now I’m very happy that historically the two have come together, in what is now termed art per-
formance. I do my work in galleries. I want to branch out and do things which are really be-
tween the two-between theatre and art-because I think my work is very theatrical actually.
What was the theoretical basis of Instant Theatre?
The whole premise of Instant Theatre was that you could create theatre spontaneously, et
collectively, and I assure you that it didn’t come from theory. Because first of all I’m not a
theoretical person, I’m an action person, and I never would have had the chutzpah to come out
with such a theory if I hadn’t seen it happen first. I saw it on stage. Then I started to codify my
training methods in such a way that about nine months of training would enable the performer
to do it.
Can you describe the training approach you
devised?
There were two things that were important in
Instant Theatre. One was the development of
a free creativity in the individual, and a cer-
tain style, a certain form of work that would
kind of push them into an aesthetics which
was my aesthetics really, and then also the
ability to create with others, to be subser-
vient, to the whole. In training we used a lot
of movement, a lot of vocal stuff, awareness
exercises. In the beginning, I even used
massage.
I did everything to get people
loosened up, to bring things out.
When you got together to do a piece, what
exactly did you do?
There were four ways of doing pieces. Le
whole company would do pieces which
would last a whole act, like 45 minutes to an
hour, that were completely free and that
would start simply from a set. And the set
would be a big assemblage on the stage. Le
aesthetics of the period were very much an
influence. They were found sets-things that
we would find in back alleys or that people
would give us-old chairs, old window
screens, tar paper.
So we would start out in this set, et le
space and the mood of the set would get
things going. One person would start and,
very much like action painting in a way,
would set the first touch of paint if you will
on the stage and then other people would
come and bring things and build a piece, le
idea being that you had to be very aware,
very sensitive, to what was happening,
enhance what was happening, or bring colli-
sion. Surprisingly enough, these pieces had
tremendous form, they always achieved their
own kind of inner logic and had a beginning,
middle, and an end, not in a narrative way,
but somehow in a formal way.
Another way was what we called a point of
departure. Very often we asked the audience
to give us oither a word or a phrase or a mood
or the name of an artist or the name of a
INSTANT FAIRY TALES, 1977
(The Devil with the 3 Golden
Hairs – Bros. Grimm)
INSTANT THEATRE, 1977
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THE AROUSING
1979
writer or whatever, and that would be the
point of departure. We also had what we call-
ed forms, and the forms were very much like
in music, where you have say, in classical
musique, sonata forms, symphonic forms, ou
whatever. They were set forms which were
always different because the content would
always be different. Enfin, we would do
structured improvs, but we would do very few
of them, because, simply, there was very lit-
tle time.
Were you influenced at all by Viola Spolin’s
theatre games and techniques?
(SHOCK,
She came to my theatre. I was never influ-
enced by her. She only became prominent in
the beginning of the sixties and Instant
Theatre was long before that. To tell you the
truth my influences were really John Cage
and my painter friends. I was also influenced
by Artaud.
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THUNDER)
29
THE DEATH SHOW
1978
What about the Black Mountain people? You were working
simultaneously, or maybe a few years after them.
I was influenced by Black Mountain only in a roundabout way,
because I knew John [Cage].
There are precedents in artworld performance, even going back to
the Bauhaus or Black Mountain Happenings. But in theatre, the only
avant garde group that was know at the time was of course the Living
Theatre. Were you aware of them?
I knew the Living very well, et, as a matter of fact, King Moody, mon
then husband and partner, had worked for them in New York. Ils
asked me to come to New York to teach in their theatre. That was in
’60. It just didn’t seem possible then.
They were still doing plays; avant garde theatre was literary then.
And improvisational theatre has always been literary in the theatre
world context. So you really were doing art world stuff.
CHARM, 1977
GRAND CANYON
1978
-beautiful,
Exactly. You see this is why we had so much trouble. Because people
just did not understand. They enjoyed it, because it was so visual, donc
but we also broke down space and time, we broke down
personality components, and we used objects in a very de-
materialized way. This is why I become very jaded sonetimes. I see
so much theatre which bores me because in the years we did Instant
Theatre we did so much of that stuff in such a fabulously beautiful
chemin. Sometimes we bombed but there was always something ex-
citing about it because of the fact that we worked with so many dif-
ferent things.
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very harsh on myself, very self-destructive,
and I felt ashamed of most everything that
had happened to me or that I had done.
the women’s movement, and my
Through
own growth, I was able to take a whole new
appraisal of my work and change it around to
work for me, instead of my being smothered.
I got very involved in establishing a woman’s
space and in several of the galleries that
were women’s galleries. I started to see a
great deal of women’s work. At that point I
started to do performances which redeemed
my life by turning it into art.
There are always surprises when people use
very directly autobiographical material,
aren’t there?
My main surprise, I’ll tell you, has always
been the response of the audience. When I
prepare a piece, I always think it’s just terri-
ble, that it’s going to bomb, that it’s com-
pletely narcissistic, and so personal
que
nobody’s going to accept it. Now, I know that
that’s how I am, so I just don’t pay attention
anymore, no matter how negative I get. Alors
I do it for an audience, and my big surprise is
always their response, which is completely
personally involved and with them going
through a certain private catharsis of their
propre. With each piece, although now I’m ex-
pecting a bit more, it’s still an incredible ex-
expérience.
How did you move then from group perfor-
mance to solo performance?
In ’66 I quit doing Instant Theatre because of
trouble with my knees.
How many years have you been doing solo
les performances?
Since ’75.
Are your solo performances self-consciously
autobiographical?
The way I’ve been functioning with those per-
formances has been
to sort of try very
truthfully to get to the bottom of different
phases of my life, so that by the time I die all
my performances, end to end, will recreate
my life. I’ve found lately that the end result of
the honesty and truthfulness I try to put into
recreating my life is a total mythology. That
was really an interesting discovery for me, à
find out that this structure of recreation had
become a myth and runs parallel with me. It’s
made up of the same ingredients, and yet it
is a complete fabrication.
Has the women’s movement and feminist
politics influenced your work at all?
I owe a tremendous amount to the move-
ment. I think they brought me out. For about
5 années, I was totally isolated. I was doing my
sculpture and living in the Valley. I stopped
Instant theatre in ’66 and I got involved with
the women’s movement in ’71,
’72 I think.
Did your performance work change?
It didn’t change, it began. I think the move-
ment enabled me to accept myself and my
life because up to then I felt that my life had
been a complete waste and a mistake. I was
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