Richard Foreman Wants You to Wake Up

Many of the great downtown and avant garde creators who had contact with Richard Foreman went on to make their own work, sometimes in collaboration with or confrontation with his image. Foreman’s complex, often baffling, always overwhelming art called out the best in both the artists who saw it and the critics who wrote about it. Join us for a conversation with those critics and artists who know Foreman’s work from the inside out—and form his living archive. 

Panelists: Ben Brantley, Kara Feely, Travis Just, Jennifer Krasinski, Elizabeth LeCompte, Thomas Sellar, Helen Shaw, and Kate Valk.

Jennifer Krasinski and Andrew Lampert will share aspects of their ongoing research into Richard Foreman. Working together, they have uncovered a plethora of documentation and unstaged material that will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition dedicated to Foreman and his collaborators in the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. They will discuss their process and consider the question of what it means to transmit experience. Foreman’s iconoclastic productions are largely irreproducible, and yet they must always be performed anew in order to be seen. What is involved in authentically staging the work of a theater artist who insists that others must not interpret or imitate him when performing his plays? 

Moderated by Rye Gentleman and Helen Shaw.