Join us to celebrate Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Pavol Liška and Kelly Copper – in conversation with Jay Wegman, director of NYU Skirball, and Frank Hentschker, director of CUNY’s Segal Center – in advance of the North American premiere of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No President.
Skirball Salons: Conversations with Artists and Scholars are held in the NYU Skirball lower lobby.
Presented by Deutsches Haus at NYU and NYU Skirball.
SPEAKER BIOS
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 (Executive Director, The Segal Center) who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the CUNY 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. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series, the annual fall PRELUDE Festival, the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series, and The Segal Film Festival of Film and Theatre. Before coming to The Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theater festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by Heiner Müller; created a performance with Joseph Beuys; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne) and worked for Robert Wilson. Next to programming Segal Theatre Center events Hentschker taught Theatre History at Columbia University and Beijing University and is currently working on a book about Robert Wilson’s play texts. Hentschker was named Chevalier of the L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
“Personnel is being hired for the Theater in Oklahoma! The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is calling you! It’s calling you today only! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theater that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry, be sure not to miss the midnight deadline! We shut down at midnight, never to reopen! Accursed be anyone who doesn’t believe us!”
— Franz Kafka, Amerika
Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. With each new project, we attempt to set an impossible challenge for ourselves, the audience, and our 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, rigor, and the audience plays an essential role — whether as spectators or – just as often – as participants in the work.
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.