Experimental theatre legend Richard Schechner recently spoke to Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine about Shakespeare, rehearsals and the significance of a performance artist.
The interview comes in celebration of his newest work, Imagining O, and his upcoming performance as part of the Peak Performance series at Montclair State University.
Imaging O is based on Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and the protagonist, O, in Anne Desclos' erotic French novel Story of O. From these characters, Schechner created a sexualized performance piece that utilizes the entire performance venue including the lobbies and hallways.
In terms of rehearsals for Imaging O, Schechner said “Do you know anything about farms? When you cut off the chicken's head and it still runs around for awhile? Well, that's me.”
Schechner has long loved experimenting with the intertwined work of Hamlet as he has created iterations of it including an “African American” Hamlet and a “gay” Hamlet. Imagining O will make his third stab at the age old play.
“And as I kept working on Hamlet, I realized that Ophelia is an extraordinarily important character who isn't really given the chance to give her own voice, or not much of it,” said Schechner, imagining an Ophelia that doesn’t receive male attention.
“At the same time, I thought about Pauline Réage's [the pseudonym Desclos used while writing Story of O] or Desclos' novel, and I happened to come upon this interview with her in The New Yorker where she explained who she was, why she wrote it and what it's about, and it struck me that there was a similarity between the characters of O and Ophelia,” he continued.
The performance then, will take a focused performance artist who is able to exude the sensual and ominous characters of his work.
“Looking back at the history of art, like abstract expressionism or conceptual art, each group of pioneers were not "successfully educated" and rejected their education and had other ideas—they didn't even knew what these ideas were at a certain point,” said Schechner on what makes a soliod performance artist. “I think a great education is one that stimulates a student to do his or her own work.”
Below watch clips from Swimming to Spading directed by Richard Schechner and written and performed by Lian Amaris.
