Skirball Salon: Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska began their collaboration in 1997, and together founded Nature Theater of Oklahoma in 2006. The company is committed to “making the work they don’t know how to make,” an approach yielding new amalgams of opera, dance, and theatre, combined with popular culture and humor.  Starting out in dirty New York basements working with zero subsidy and cardboard sets, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has, since 2008, been commissioned by theaters and festivals around the world, including Rhurtriennale, Hebbel Theater, Wiener Festwochen, Burgtheater Wien, Mousonturm, Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Festival d’Avignon, Kampnagel Hamburg, and Salzburger Festspiele. Copper and Liska have each been recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts.  They have received two OBIE Awards for their work on No Dice and Life and Times, and were recipients of the Salzburg Young Directors Award in 2008 for Romeo and Juliet.  In 2018 they received the Nestroy Special Prize in Theater for their work on Die Kinder der Toten.

Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma is a New York based, award-winning art and performance group, under the direction of Pavol Liška and Kelly Copper. With each new project, they attempt to set an impossible challenge for themselves, the audience, and their collaborators – working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness and rigor. Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work, Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.