102
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
I am saying is I suspect that right now in theater there
is
a lot of
work described as boring, which is simply the awkward reorientation
of the function of theater and even the purpose of the audience. Just
in the last few years we have made some extremely drastic changes.
Continuity in the works that I am talking about has been completely
eliminated. It is usually different from performance to performance.
There is no dramatic continuity; the interaction tends to be a
coincidence or an innovation for that particular moment.
INTERVIEWER:
What else do you think is characteristic of mixed-means
theater?
RAUSCHENBERG:
An
absence of hierarchy. The fact is that in a single
piece of Yvonne Rainer you can hear both Rachmaninoff and sticks
being pitched from the balcony without those two things making a
comment on each other. In my pieces, for instance, there is nothing
that everything is subservient to. I am trusting each element to sustain
itself in time.
INTERVIEWER:
What do these changes imply?
RAUSCHENBERG:
All those ideas tend to point up the thought that it
would be better for theater that, if you went a second night, you
found a different work there, even though it might be in the same
place and have the same performers and deal with the same material.
I think all this is creating an extraordinary situation that is very
new in theater; so both the audience and the artist are still quite self–
conscious about the state of things.
INTERVIEWER:
You would agree with John Cage, then, that one of the
purposes of the new movement is to make us more omniattentive.
RAUSCHENBERG:
I think we do it when we are relaxed; all these things
happen naturally. But there's a prejudice that has been built up around
the ideas of seriousness and specializing. That's why I'm no more
interested in giving up painting than continuing painting or vice versa.
I don't find these things in competition with each other.
If
we are
to get the most out of any given time, it is because we have applied
ourselves as broadly as possible, I think, not because we have applied
ourselves as singlemindedly as possible.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you have then a moral objection to those dimensions
of life that force us to be more specialized than we should be?
RAUSCHENBERG:
Probably.
If
we can observe the way things happen
in nature, we see that nearly nothing in my life turned out the way
that, if it were up to me to plan it, it should. There is always the
business, for instance,
if
you're going on a picnic, it is just as apt to
rain as not. Or the weather might tum cold when you want to go
swimming.
