Woyzeck: Press Articles
WOYZECK PRESS RELEASE
(� 2000, Betty Nansen Theatre)
Robert Wilson and Tom Waits at the BETTY NANSEN THEATRE
Robert Wilson, one of the most epoch-making directors of this century, will be directing Woyzeck by Georg B�chner at the Betty Nansen Theatre, but that is not all. American all-around artist, Tom Waits, will join him and write new music and lyrics for our production, autumn 2000.
Wilson, Waits & Woyzeck
It is not an exaggeration that The Black Rider at Thalia Theater in Hamburg was one of the most important productions in Europe in the 90's. The reason, among other things, was that the combination between Robert Wilson's stringent imagery and Tom Waits' unorthodox heartbreaker music quite simply formed a synthesis. After The Black Rider they wrote Alice, another great success but since then Tom Waits has been devoted to his music and especially his family, and he has kept himself far away from the theatre altogether. Nonetheless, Robert Wilson and we have been able to draw him to Copenhagen in the autumn, where he has agreed to do a production of B�chner's play Woyzeck with Wilson.
We think it is a regular scoop, not just because Waits is one of the world's greatest living musicians and songwriters, but also because Woyzeck in its content is incredibly close to the core of Tom Waits' musical talent.
Woyzeck is a fantastic visually evocative text, which is considered a major dramatic work in modern theatre history. This fragmented and nightmare-like fable is based upon the true story of Woyzeck, a soldier who murdered his girlfriend in Leipzig in 1821.
With insight and social indignation B�chner portrays a man, who is subject to the laws and rules of a merciless society, and in a series of surreal snapshots he shows us a man, who is completely subdued by the will of society and his superiors. Woyzeck is seen and treated as a social experiment. He is alternately employed, unemployed and employed again. Only one thing is certain: His desperation, social as well as emotional, and his isolation from the rest of the world grows bigger every day. Woyzeck is "only made of sand, dust, dirt and filth", as it is said in the play - and in a relentless society he learns this bodily.
Woyzeck is a very modern, political drama, which tells the story of how all human values are destroyed when society pushes the individual to the brink of survival. The tightness and linguistic expressionism of the text are an obvious take-off for Wilson's abstract idiom and imagery. Perhaps that is why Robert Wilson himself has always dreamt of working with B�chner...
When Wilson and Waits produce Woyzeck at the Betty Nansen Theatre it will be the first time they create a performance at a Danish theatre with Danish actors and Danish musicians. Such an ambitious project will be of national and international importance.
Consequently, it is much more than a privilege to be the first in Denmark to perform a work by Wilson and Waits. It is an extraordinary chance.
Stage direction, visual design: Robert Wilson
Music and lyrics: Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan
Costumes: Jacques Reynaud
The cast: Jens J�rn Spottag, Kaya Br�el, Morten Eisner,
Lars Knutzon, Hanne Uldal, Ole Thestrup, Ulla Henningsen,
Morten L�tzh�ft, Benjamin Boe Rasmussen and Tom Jensen.
Dates: 18/11 2000 - 3/2 2001, Mon.-Fri. 8 PM, Sat. 5 PM.
Phone: + 45 33 21 14 90, fax: + 45 33 25 22 25
Georg B�chner and Woyzeck
Georg B�chner has been called the most modern classic in German literature and it is true in as much as that his three plays, which were all written more than 140 years ago, are performed more frequently today than ever. Especially Woyzeck has been the subject of numerous theatrical and literary interpretations since the first performance in 1913. Up to that time it was B�chner's first play "Danton's Death" that had kept his name alive through the years. Actually, Woyzeck had been printed as early as 1879, but it had not caused much attention at the time. It was not until the artistic expressionism that emerged around World War I, that people were able to appreciate the unique originality of the play, its linguistic scarcity and precision, the abrupt almost cinematic changes of scene and the naked, anti-lyrical delineation of character.
Curiously enough, it was a composer, namely Alban Berg, who cleared the way for the work's triumphant progress with his opera, Woyzeck in 1925. The title was the result of the original publisher's misreading of the name in the manuscript, and this is due to the fact that Woyzeck is actually only a fragment. Because B�chner died only 23 years old while he was still working on the play. Even though several of the poet's friends claimed that at the time of his death the manuscript was available in a form which B�chner himself considered more or less final, his family withheld the remaining papers for more than 40 years. When the author Karl Emil Franzos was finally given access to the manuscript in the 1870s, the handwriting was so faded that it took the use of chemical fluids to decipher the text approximately. But there were no page numbers and the bundle of papers, which Woyzeck was written on, was an awful mess. Since then the chemical fluids have made the paper crumble, so it has never been possible to find a definite Woyzeck.
Consequently, every new Woyzeck is the result of a selection, a kind of adaptation of the manuscripts that are available. At the Betty Nansen Theatre we will be playing a text which has been adapted by Robert Wilson's director's assistant during many years, Ann-Christin Rommen and his favorite dramaturge, Wolfgang Wiens.
Wolfgang Wiens now works as a dramaturge at the Burgtheater in Vienna where he is also on the board of directors.
Tom Waits facts
Born December the 7th 1949 in Pomona, outside Los Angeles.
Music: "Closing time" 1973, "The Heart of Saturday Night" 1974, "Nighthawks at the Diner" live 1975, "Small Change" 1976, "Foreign Affairs" 1977, "Blue Valentine" 1978, "Heart Attack and Vine" 1980, "One From the Heart" soundtrack 1982, "Swordfishtrombones" 1983, "Rain Dogs" 1985, "Frank's Wild Years" 1987, "Big Time" live 1988, "Night on Earth" soundtrack 1992, "Bone Machine" 1992, "The Black Rider" musical 1993.
The new album "Mule variations" was released on April the 16th 1999 and was followed by a number of concerts primarily in Europe.
Movies: The first appearance on the screen was in "Paradise Alley" 1978, directed by Sylvester Stallone. Later Tom Waits has starred in "Rumble fish", "The Cotton Club", "Down by law", "Ironweed", "Dracula", "Coffee and cigarettes" and "Short cuts".
Tom Waits met his wife Kathleen Brennan, who was working at Zoetrope Studio as a script editor during Coppola's movie "One from the Heart" in 1980. They married the same year and have 3 kids together. Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits work also artistically on a genuine collective basis and she will compose the music and songs together with Tom Waits when they both come to Copenhagen to work with Robert Wilson on the new adaptation of B�chner's Woyzeck.
The songs and music of Tom Waits have been song by many other musicians. Some of them are: Tim Buckley, Johnny Cash, Alex Chilton, Elvis Costello, Eagles, Everything But the Girl, Marianne Faithfull, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Rickie Lee Jones, Manhattan Transfer, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Primus, The Ramones, Jonathan Richman, Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Tindersticks, and Violent Femmes
Robert Wilson Facts
Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. He studied painting with George McNeil in Paris and later worked with the architect Paolo Solari in Arizona. Moving to New York City in the mid-1960s, Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others artists. By 1968 he had gathered a group of artists known as The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and together they worked and performed in a loft building at 147 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. In 1969 two of Wilson's major productions appeared in New York City: The King of Spain at the Anderson Theater, and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In 1971 Wilson received international acclaim for Deafman Glance, a silent "opera" created in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute boy whom Wilson had adopted. Wilson then went on to present numerous acclaimed productions throughout the world. Later came The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a twelve-hour silent opera performed in 1973 in New York, Europe, and South America and in 1976 Wilson joined with composer Philip Glass in writing the landmark work Einstein on the Beach, which was presented at the Festival d'Avignon and at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and has since been revived in two world tours in 1984 and 1992.
After Einstein Wilson worked increasingly with European theaters and opera houses. His productions were frequently featured at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, the Schaub�hne in Berlin, and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, among many other venues. At the Schaub�hne he created Death Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death Destruction & Detroit II (1987); and at the Thalia he presented four groundbreaking musical works, The Black Rider (1991), Alice (1992), Time Rocker (1996), and Poe-try, (2000).
Wilson has collaborated with a number of internationally acclaimed artists, writers, and musicians. He worked closely with the late German playwright Heiner M�ller on the Cologne section of the CIVIL warS (1984), Hamletmachine (1986), and Quartet (1987). With singer/song-writer Tom Waits, along with writer William S. Burroughs, Wilson created the highly successful production The Black Rider : The Casting of the Magic Bullets (1991). With David Byrne, Wilson staged The Knee Plays from the CIVIL warS (1984), and later The Forest, in honor of the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin (1988). He worked with poet Allen Ginsberg on Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988) and with performance artist Laurie Anderson on Wilson's adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis (1986). Writer Susan Sontag joined Wilson in creating Alice in Bed (1993), and together they are developing a new work, Lady from the Sea. Recently Wilson collaborated with singer/song-writer Lou Reed on Time Rocker, which opened at Hamburg's Thalia Theater in June of 1996, and Poe-try, premiered in Hamburg in January 2000.
The Betty Nansen Theatre
The Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen has created a reputation as one of the most interesting and successful theatres in Denmark. It has been in the hands of Peter Langdal and Henrik Hartmann during the last 7 years. Peter Langdal is a busy director. Besides from putting on approximately two shows a year at his own theatre, he also manages to work for all the big theatres in Scandinavia, inclusive Dramaten in Stockholm. Henrik Hartmann is an experienced producer, educated at The Royal Theatre. Peter and Henrik work on a genuinely collective basis.
The Betty Nansen Theatre receives states subsidy and is a more than 100 years old theatre with golden proscenium scene, balconies and 500 hundred seats. Connected to the main stage there is a huge studioscene, Edison, with two separate performing spaces, which was once a power station. This provides the Betty Nansen Theatre with a certain flexibility when it comes to finding the right space for a specific production.
The Betty Nansen Theatre grounded its international reputation in 1995 with a stunning version of Hair, which later on was a complete box-office success at the famous Mogador Theater in Paris for several weeks. Last Autumn the theatre had another triumph with Peter Langdals production of Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen", which the critics - as well as the writer himself - considered one of the best versions ever made of that play.
And now Peter Langdal and Henrik Hartmann with the financial help of The Kulturbro 2000 Foundation have succeeded in bringing one of the most asked-for theatre couples - Robert Wilson and Tom Waits - in the world to do a completely new version of B�chner's Woyzeck.
ANOTHER NIGHT AT THE OPERA FOR WAITS
Tom Waits discusses his latest collaborative foray into musical theater
By Andrew Dansby.
(November 4, 2000. � 2001, RollingStone.com)
There's this sense of Tom Waits as some sort of solitary post-apocalyptic sonic mad scientist. But what gets missed in romanticizing Waits' inimitable sonic palette is that the composer/musician is quite the team player. From slinging bebop folk with his Boho buddies Chuck E. Weiss and Rickie Lee Jones in the Seventies to his longtime musical (and domestic) partnership with wife Kathleen Brennan, Waits has always been interested in fusing his musical vision with kindred wandering spirits.
Waits' latest project brings Woyzeck, a nineteenth century play by doomed playwright Georg B�chner (who died at age twenty-three of typhus), back into the realm of the opera -- Alban Berg first adapted the play to music as Woyzeck more than seventy years ago. And as with their theater productions of Alice and The Black Rider Waits has collaborated with Brennan and avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, whose glowing resume of musical collaboration includes work with Phillip Glass (Einstein on the Beach), Lou Reed (Time Rocker) and David Byrne (The Trees). The third installment in what can be viewed as a loose trilogy finds Waits, Wilson and Brennan mining a carnivalesque tale of the title character, whose over-stimulated aggression from a military stint prompts a jealous rage that causes him to murder his girlfriend. It's a grizzly tale, with timeless themes, full of song and possibility. The play seems custom fit for the Waits/Wilson combo, as they continue to experiment with theater as a sort of visually dazzling Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill for the new millennium.
And that sense of collaboration shines through when Waits talks shop. And no one does it quite the same way; Waits crafts metaphors for the creative process as effortlessly as Snoop Dogg drops a new term for marijuana.
AD: Woyzeck, the play, has a healthy dose of singing in it, was there a musical appeal already there?
TW: Actually that's what scared me more than anything.
AD: Really?
TW: Yeah. You know when you're trying to teach somebody how to do something you want them to do and they have very little frame of reference or irony? It's difficult sometimes to transmit that kind of nuance. Or sometimes you discover that your idea wasn't as good as theirs [laughs]. You know, you have to be willing to jump off the building. Working with Wilson is like an underwater ballet. Once you've seen that and been in one, wherever you go, you wanna tell people to slow the hell down [laughs]. [Imitating stage direction] And please do a 360 right there at the drinking fountain for me, will you? Feet first.
AD: So now that you and Wilson have done this three times, do you have a comfortable approach?
TW: Panic. Followed my more panic. Theater is torture. That's why they call it "the fabulous invalid." But with Bob I think it's addictive because he does have a worldview on light and movement and text that takes the world apart in a way that I like very much. But it does kind of ruin you for Neil Simon, you know. Not that you aren't already ruined for Neil Simon. But he just starts with the senses. You have to give me a time [limit] here, because otherwise I'll start talking about my sick rat if we get going too long.
AD: No, please, continue.
TW: It's really kind of just the opportunity to work with Wilson. And that's where it stops. Because if we were going to just do theater, you can do it locally . . . if you dare. Plus it's not like making a record or a movie -- it's constantly going to change, you have to accept that. I like making records 'cause you go there, you're done . . . laminate it. This is very different. You're dealing with the drifting process.
AD: So you lose the sense of permanence?
TW: It's inevitable. It's nothing but unpermanent for days. So I write with my wife -- we've been through a lot of this. We wrote the songs for Alice, which was the last thing we did with Wilson. There's nothing like [working with Wilson], you know? It does ruin you for the rest. I don't know what it is, it's really hard to describe. You see people moving very slowly on stage dressed like a flying nun and saying non-sequitors and it's your job to score it. It's enchanting.
AD: Do you feel Woyzeck is a companion piece to The Black Rider? They both have a gothic, carnival-ish feel.
TW: True. Yeah, there's a murder in there. I guess I'm drawn to the carnival. You know I went and watched [the Hitchcock movie] Strangers on a Train to get some inspiration. It's so impressionistic, but it does draw from life. And then it becomes something very different from that. You kinda go along with the experience of working with Wilson, which is kind of like being an astronaut for a few months. You do feel sometimes you're sitting out there in the dark at a little table with these little lamps like you're at Cape Canaveral. And something otherworldly is being witnessed. Not sure where you're going, got plenty of oxygen, but . . . we like it [laughs]. For a sober person, like myself, it's the closest thing to a drug experience [laughs].
AD: And Wilson brings that feeling to the theater?
TW: It's somewhere between Freud and NASA, and it's like looking at water for the first time under a microscope and you say, "My god, there's a world in here! It's living, I don't know if I should drink it anymore." He has tremendous leadership qualities and you embark on an expedition with him. And you have to suspend disbelief in order to go and that's always thrilling, because real life can be kind of tedious.
AD: Did you and Wilson find it a challenge to modernize the story?
TW: Yeah, but he breaks the platter and glues it back together incorrectly. It's no longer suitable for serving, but it's fascinating on the wall. But Kathleen and I, we're like Plink and Plank. I call her "Plink" and she calls me "Plank." I certainly don't have any formal background in music. When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, "I'm off to Washington, Dad." You kind of go, "Sure. Sure you are, son." We still go into a room and sit at the piano and go plink . . . and . . . plank. And that's what the songs come out of. So I guess in the end, with theater, no matter who's doing it, you wanna leave whistling a theme that you heard and remembering a particular moment.
AD: "T'aint No Sin" [sung by William H. Burroughs on The Black Rider] was sure hard to keep from humming.
TW: Oh right. Mr. Burroughs. That's an old song from the Twenties. "T'ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones." That was his reference point for the whole play. He was looking rather skeletal himself and singing that tune was a Halloween moment. So we just integrated it, wove that into the score. That was a long project. But it got done and has played all over Europe. It only came to BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] once, you know. But over there, it's kind of, I dunno, I was gonna say like Cats or something . . . everybody knows it. But they're also more of a theater audience. They still participate in those traditions, whereas here it takes a lot to get folks out to a theater. Unless you tell 'em it's a movie first...or it's gonna be one [laughs]
AD: So this project isn't strictly scoring, though, right? There are full songs?
TW: Yeah. It'll probably fifteen songs in here by the time we're done.
AD: And do you get to play with those European instruments that you enjoy so much?
TW: Yeah, the bass clarinet and hand bells. That's something I never experienced before, these hand bells. Mostly religious organizations use 'em. Tuned handbells. Everybody has one, and there's like eighteen of you and you ring consecutively and do Christmas music [laughs]. Like little carolers. We get those woven in there. Then there's usual stuff, the pump organ. So yeah, it's got that circus thing, waltzes. I don't even entirely know what it is yet, because it's not done. It's not on its feet yet, so it'll probably undergo a lot of changes between now and the end.
AD: Isn't the debut just a few weeks away? You're really going to have to whip it into shape.
TW: Yeah, you do have to whip it. And there's a lot of elements, and even where you get it where you like it, it's not gonna stay. It's like drawing in the dirt with a stick.
AD: Alice was never released as a soundtrack album, like The Black Rider was. Any chance this one will sneak out?
TW: Maybe yeah. I guess Epitaph [Waits' new label] might put it out.
AD: The Black Rider felt like it disappeared without a sound.
TW: They [Island, Waits' previous label] didn't do much with it. But you know, people don't know what to do with recordings from theater experiences. People don't know what to do with them if they buy 'em. They wonder, "Should I have seen the show? And if I haven't will it make sense?"
AD: For whatever reason, it felt like The Black Rider had a brown vibe. Is there a color you think best represents Woyzeck?
TW: Oh yeah, well maybe this is more like black and yellow. Or lime. Black and lime. "Misery is the River of the World" -- that's one of the songs. Can't really think of all the titles right now . . . "All the World Is Green" is one.
AD: Sounds like you have a broad mood spectrum.
TW: Yeah, I guess we'll see what happens. We still have about three weeks before it opens.
AD: How long is it expected to run?
TW: Well as long as people keep coming. I really don't know how long it's gonna run. They'll stay on it. Keep it alive, I hope.
AD: Any idea if you'll bring it to the U.S.?
TW: It's too far in advance. But we could, I think. But theater you have to get used to the idea that it's gonna change, it's gonna grow, branches are gonna fall off. Folks are gonna live in it for awhile and then leave.
AD: Do you appreciate that sort of malleability?
TW: No! [laughs] I don't like it because I kind of like knowing that you work on something, then you've glued it to the floor and you know that it's gonna be there in a year. But I'm getting used to the fact, with theater people it stays alive in their heads. If you think about it, with the theater, everybody goes home at night, right into their houses, and if they all didn't come back the following day there wouldn't be a show. That's kind of exciting.
AD: Any thoughts as to why theater is received better in Europe?
TW: I don't know. Maybe it's just that you're closer to the source of all that over there. You're near the spring of it, and folks are still drinking it and bathing in it.
AD: We have more television channels too.
TW: Yeah, it makes you brain-lazy. The electronic media kind of says, "Please sit back and let us do this for you. You're not a professional." But over there, a lot of them have experience on the street doing theater and in warehouses.
AD: Are there any other plays you'd like to adapt?
TW: We're talking about this. I'd like to do a Beckett thing with Wilson.
AD: Woyzeck has a spare Beckettness to it.
TW: Well yeah, it has a certain kind of stripping down, kind of a cut-up text. I don't think Bob really likes words. He kind of thinks of them as tacks on the floor of a dark room and you've gotta walk to the door. I think he handles them very carefully.
AD: Do you have any plans to record another studio album in the near future?
TW: Yeah, going in to do another one pretty soon, after we're done with this.
AD: Is it already written?
TW: No, no, gotta start [laughs].
AD: But it won't be another seven years before it appears?
TW: No, God I hope not. I don't think so. We'll get something out pretty soon.
WAITS/ WILSON WOYZECK PROMO INTERVIEW
Peter Laugesens interview with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits,
Betty Nansen Teatret, November 2000.
(Transcription from audio/ video tape by Keith A. Durrans)
Waits: We met in New York City. My wife and I had written a play called "Frank's Wild Years". We asked Bob if he would direct the play, and one thing led to another. We didn't actually do that project, but we went on ultimately to do two other projects together. We did "The Black Rider" and "Alice", both with the Thalia Theatre. I agree that we're different men with different approaches to work with. The fact is, I think that if two people do know all the same things, then one of them becomes immediately unnecessary. There's something that I deeply respect about Bob's world view, it's sensitised me for the way that I think that now I see the world. I never noticed furniture before and now I notice chairs all over the world, everywhere I go. The key word really is `play', because I really get a lot of pleasure out of working with Bob and plumb the depths of myself, I think in a lot of ways. You lose track of the time. I mean how often do you get to go into a room and tell somebody about how the light should be, how the floor should be and everything you should hear and what you want everyone to say. It's ' great pleasure to go into a room where you can have something to say about all those details. So a true pleasure to work together. What with you Bob?
Wilson: Well ... I realised when Tom and I first met that I wasn't so aware of his work. Then I heard him playing the piano and I immediately was touched by it. When I heard Tom touch the keys somehow he touched me, he got me. From the beginning there was this attraction. I can't explain it because it's so complicated . . . it's funny, it's sad, it's touching, it's noble, it's elegant. It's his signature, it's something personal. As Tom said we're different and I think that that's the attraction. They say opposites attract and somehow we complement each other, but there's a lot of overlap too. He can talk to me about direction or the look of a stage, or a character, the development of a piece, and Tom doesn't mind if I say something about the music or the sound. There's a real trust, and I think that's very rare that you can trust each other. In that way it's a real operation. When I look back at "The Black Rider", I don't remember who did what, sometimes it was like it just happened.
Waits: Well I think Bob's in charge.
Wilson: I think there's no one in charge. I think my responsibility is to provide a space where I can hear Tom's music. Can I make a picture, a colour, or a light, or setting for where we can listen to this music. Often when I go to the theatre I find it very difficult to listen, the stage is too busy or things are moving around too much and I lose my concentration. If I really want to concentrate deep, I have to close my eyes to hear. I try to make a space where we can really hear something, so what we see is important because it helps us to hear. I think that's one of the reasons I'm attracted to Tom; his understanding of his body and that his body is his resource, his movements, how the music comes from that .... It's deeply rooted in the body, and so often I feel that the work doesn't get deep inside the bodies, but I think in Tom somehow it does. His feet are on the ground.
Waits: I think all things really do aspire to this whole condition of music. And Bob has a way of seeing and hearing - and you do start hearing and seeing really extraordinary things in very ordinary places if you just close one eye or tilt your head. Well the thing about working with Bob that you notice immediately is that he has a tremendous amount of leadership quality and that is something that comes immediately evident.
Wilson: It's really surprising though, because all the time I was in school I was almost terrified to speak. I would come home from school, go in my room, close the door, lock the door and stay alone ... never any leadership quality. I always feel like I'm six years old when I have to get up and tell somebody what to do, but then somehow it's the other side of you. It surprises myself that sometimes I can say OK now everyone be quiet or shut up. The thing that's great about Tom is that he of course writes songs for himself but he's able to write music and other people can sing it. You can look at the pieces that I've done with Tom, they can stand on their own without Tom having to sing the songs. I think that was a great test for Tom that he came in as a composer, can find a voice for other people or his music could be transposed to other singers, other personalities whose voices are very different to his. In that sense he's a real composer.
Waits: Yeah it's a challenge, it's a real challenge, I was wondering if I was going to be up for the challenge. It was sometimes where I was real cold, but it's ultimately very satisfying. But like I said it's hard sometimes when somebody else is doing your song. What I like about Bob is that if he's telling somebody how to move on-stage he'll come on up and he'll show them how to move, he'll do this most spontaneous and mystical physical movement. That is captivating and then he'll go like this and ask them to try on the same movements. They're never completely the same, but they break eggs for the cast each time he does that. And sometimes you can do that with the songs as well; you can sing it for them. Technique is not important, emotional telegraphing and truth is what is important and it requires no technique except emotional technique, but no actual, as to how many notes you can hear or how fast you can get there and how you fly it off those and the other notes, it doesn't really matter. That's what everybody wants to do when they come to the theatre they want to connect.
Wilson: That's the most important thing, if you can connect with the public. I think you start thinking about a lot of ideas then you dig deep down into the piece and gets very complicated. In the end you want to come back to the surface and sort of forget about everything and just sit there and experience it. So every night you can experience it on a different level or different wave that you don't want to fix any one idea ... oh well this is this or this is that. He is crazy, well maybe he's not crazy, maybe it is love, maybe it's not love... But in order to get there, to get the surface sort of simple and mysterious I think you have to dig down and find out all these different facets to these characters and this story so it is multi-faceted. But in the long run I hope it could be very simple and then I forget about all of those stories. Then I find other stories, so you get that surface to resonate, to kind of go in there and somehow fight with boxing gloves sometimes, it'll come to you or you'll go to it. It's like letting a child go. You watch him grow and walk on its own feet and there comes a time where you realise as a director, or someone who's helping make it that you no longer can do it and you've got to let these kids do it ... you just sit back and look at it. I think abstractly. I can just listen to the colour of the voice. Theatre is something plastic- make this quicker or make this slower or more interior, deeper... You can tell if the actors are thinking too much, if they're forcing an idea. Often you feel like it's blocked in the head. Open it up, receive, let it come to you.
Waits: I told someone the other day that the song doesn't begin at the beginning of the song. You don't want to feel the sense of stopping and then planting your feet, looking up to the balcony, throwing your head back and starting a song. You really do want to kind of create a condition of music that starts at the beginning of the play, or it starts in the lobby, so that it's all music really - what you're seeing and what you're feeling and what you're hearing.
Wilson: But for me I think it's all music in a sense of the deeper emotional presentation is in the music. Somehow it all has to be about a truth. I touch this glass and it's cool; that's truth. I touch my forehead and it's warm; that's truth, I don't have to express it. Somehow your feeling is your expression. So if you're just speaking the text, or if you're singing it, whatever, you don't really have to express it, your feeling is your expression. That is about truth.
Waits: You really have to give it away and at the same time you really are kind of spotting somebody who's on the trapeze. You can't tell them to get down and let you up there so you can show them how to do it. You kind of talk them through it or want to say the right things. You want to be able to have them retain their confidence and at the same time be able to receive new ideas. Those are sometimes two mutually exclusive things. Some people take lecturing very well and others just want you to go away and let them do it the way they want to do it. It's difficult so you learn by doing. It's like Bob was saying-you're making all of these discoveries, sometimes you reach to pull out the carrot and you only get the top, sometimes you dig for hours and no water. But the deeper that you go in the work the deeper the experience will be for the audience. I mean ideally that's what we're all trying. There's always surprising things that you didn't even know were in the play. Somebody comes and tells you something after it's started and you just kind of nod and say: I don't remember anything about that in the play. So we all have a 360 view or beyond that really. It's hard to describe how you do what you do. I collaborate on the music with my wife, Kathleen Brennan. I guess starting really is the hard part. I didn't know the story and had to find out all about it. In some ways it's like writing music for a murder mystery and a children's story at the same time. It's real tragedy, but at the same time it's a great story. You don't really start in the beginning. You start somewhere in the middle and split off and half of you goes down this way back to the beginning and the other of you goes off towards the end. I'm not sure exactly how we collaborate on music. Sometimes we start with titles. Kathleen will have a series of titles, and sometimes that's all you need is the title and you begin from there and the title itself stimulates ideas. And a lot of times we come here to the theatre and we're sitting out in the dark and Bob's doing something on stage an idea for a song will come if you're in the right condition for it. And with Bob you always have to be ready to improvise, which is a really great muscle to develop, something that a lot of people stop doing when they grow up and the good part about working here is that you get to stay in shape using your imagination all the time. Bob will say - give me something here, we need something here, we need some music right now, just go down there and... It's really as simple as that, learning how to create on the spot and Bob really gives you a chance to do that. And I guess that's why it's so compelling to work here in this way.
Wilson: Actually we don't talk a lot about it beforehand. Often I find if I talk too much about a piece beforehand I go to rehearsal and I am trying to make in the rehearsal what I've been talking about instead of letting the piece talk to me. So if you go there and look at it and try to respond to it. I don't know, it's always better to just do it. Like Tom said I don't know how you do it, but you learn to walk by walking and you can talk about it all you want but you've got to get out there and do it. So you just go and do something. Pretty much we start with a blank canvas or blank book and start sketching it out. When I first came to Europe to work I was working in Germany and I found it so strange that the actors had been in rehearsal for three months and they had been sitting at table and reading books and talking about the production. I thought - how could they read books for three months and still talk about it? I'd just get up and do it. The German actors found it very difficult because they wanted to talk about it first and have some ideas before they get up and do it. As Tom said it's always difficult to get started, but once you do just something, anything and then look at that and let that talk to you and then say let's do the next thing, I'll let the next thing happen. One way of directing is for me, writing a piece or creating a work by doing it and not sitting in a room talking about it, or at a desk writing something or making drawings, but actually getting in the space and seeing the actors; listening to the actor; looking at their body; hear the kind of sounds they make and let that talk to me and give me the direction of where to go. I, in the late sixties began working in formal proscenium theatres, and I know at that time it was a bit strange. There was an exhibition at the Whitley museum - "All Against Illusion"- well that was the sixties, and I was fascinated by illusion. Nevertheless I came from this period. I wanted to put it inside of a box and look at it 2-dimensionally and then I became more interested in formalism and the kind of distance of looking at things. The kind of freedom that one could have and that one was sitting in the audience, one was free to imagine and think whatever. It was not coming out of what the popular theatre was, which were the psychologic, naturalistic theatre groups coming from a more artistic background. I think without John Cage, Alan Caprow, Robert Morris and Rauschenberg I probably couldn't have been doing what I was doing, but I took it and went somewhere else with it. My work definitely came from those roots. Also from a dance-orientation, although the work wasn't so much dance and then again in some ways it is. Martha Graham said that for her all theatre was dance and in some ways I feel the same way, we're always dancing, it's always movement. So I usually start with the body first, with the movement first and later let the other things come.
Waits: You have to have kind of an innocent bravery because, like for example on this, trying to get started just looking for songs. Kathleen said - well it's a circus story really. You know it starts with the Ferris wheel and the whole thing and this gal Marie is a Coney Island baby, and so we started there. And she had this beautiful melody on the piano, and it was like the way a kid would play the piano and when I heard it I said, god that is just so simple and so beautiful, and I hung onto it and put it onto a tape recorder and I carried around. And now it's the opening melody in the story. It's the first thing you hear, what sounds like a child's piano lesson and it really works. So I think it's hard to say where ideas come from. I think you just have to be ... we were talking earlier, sometimes you scratch and you scratch and you can't find any seeds and a moment later there isn't enough pots and pans to catch it in. The beauty of that is that it could be a very ordinary thing that you get an idea from. Something falls, a pigeon flies in or you hear a siren. The other night when we were playing in here and we heard a siren went by the theatre and I thought for a moment it must be part of the sound department's ideas. Bob must have told somebody that I want a siren right here, but of course it was just something that happened. That type of thing happens all the time and that's what I love about doing this is - that there is a place where life overlaps.
Wilson: What's great about Tom too is he's never afraid to leave his mistakes. A lot of times we waste time trying to cover up our mistakes.
Waits: I guess you could also say there are no mistakes really. I mean there are no mistakes, in music there are no mistakes. It all has to do with how you resolve a particular problem that you're trying to solve in a piece of music and a lot of breakthroughs come through mistakes.
Wilson: To me one of the attractions of this play is that it's not dated. I mean who would ever think that this was a play from the 19's Century? It's much more contemporary modem than most modern plays. These big sort of blocks of architecture, construction. All of the contemporary playwrights I can think of are nowhere near as modem as this - it's classical but it's very modem. It's not timeless but it's full of time. It's a classical construction because his mind was thinking in a very classical, structural way. 500 years from now this'll still be interesting because there's no shit, there's no garbage. There is like this brick is here, this brick is here, this brick is there and that brick is there. And it holds up, it stays together. It's structurally very soundly constructed. And you don't get involved with unnecessary things like hology and all these other things, it's very direct. And at the same time it's about the mysteries of life - something that's very concrete and something that's not at all. He must have been a genius of his age to construct these few works that he did.
Waits: Well you know with stories the hard part of getting the truth out of anybody is that the people who really know what happened aren't really talking and the people who don't have a clue are diving across the table for the microphone. And who knows what really happened in the actual story, it really doesn't matter anymore because it's now a story. And once something becomes a story it's like a hammer or it's a tool or it's a vehicle. It deals with madness and children and obsession and murder-all the things that we care about and care about as much now as we did then. It's wild and sexy and curious and catches your imagination and makes you wonder about the people in it and it makes you reflect on your own life. So I guess those are all the things you want from a story and find them interesting 500 years later. The first thing that you realise, and it's widely talked about, is that it's a proletariat story. A story about a poor soldier who is manipulated by the government and has no money, is used to experiment on and slowly becomes mad. I guess if they had anti-depressants in those days they could have straightened him right out.
Wilson: It's also a love story. I haven't figured out how to do it and don't know how successful we'll be in doing it. It's a very strange love story. There's Marie and Woyzeck standing there both looking straight ahead. These two people are somehow separate and together.
Waits: No more writing the songs for other singers. My voice is going to be the voice of the monkey at this point.
Wilson: I've got a little monkey in this play and that's Tom.
Waits: I'll be embodied somewhere.
Wilson: He's right down front too.
SOMETIMES YOU REACH TO PULL OUT THE CARROT AND YOU ONLY GET THE TOP
Excerpt from Peter Laugesens interview with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, Betty Nansen Teatret, November 2000.
Edited and translated by the editors of the Woyzeck 2002 program.
Why Woyzeck?
Waits: Woyzeck deals with madness and children and obsession and murder - all the things that we care about. It's wild and sexy and curious and catches your imagination and makes you wonder about the people in it and it makes you reflect on your own life. So I guess those are all the things you want from a story and find them interesting 500 years later. The first thing that you realise, and it's widely talked about, is that it's a proletariat story. A story about a poor soldier who is manipulated by the government and has no money, is used to experiment on and slowly becomes mad.
Wilson: To me one of the attractions of this play is that it's not dated. I mean who would ever think that this was a play from the 19th Century? It's much more contemporary modern than most modern plays. All of the contemporary playwrights I can think of are nowhere near as modern as this - it's classical but it's very modern. It's not timeless but it's full of time. It's a classical construction because his mind was thinking in a very classical, structural way. 500 years from now this'll still be interesting because there's no shit, there's no garbage. There is like this brick is here, this brick is here, this brick is there and that brick is there. And it holds up, it stays together. It's structurally very soundly constructed. And you don't get involved with unnecessary things, like psychology and all these other things, it's very direct. And at the same time it's about the mysteries of life - something that's very concrete and something that's not at all. Georg B�chner must have been a genius of his age to construct these few works that he did.
Waits: Well you know with stories the hard part of getting the truth out of anybody is that the people who really know what happened aren't really talking and the people who don't have a clue are diving across the table for the microphone. And who knows what really happened in the actual story, it really doesn't matter anymore because it's now a story.
Wilson: It's also a love story. I haven't figured out how to do it and don't know how successful we'll be in doing it. It's a very strange love story. There's Marie and Woyzeck standing there both looking straight ahead. These two people are somehow separate and together.
Where do ideas come from?
Wilson: I think you start thinking about a lot of ideas then you dig deep down into the piece and (it) gets very complicated. In the end you want to come back to the surface and sort of forget about everything and just sit there and experience it. It's like letting a child go. You watch him grow and walk on its own feet and there comes a time where you realise as a director, or someone who's helping making it that you no longer can do it and you've got to let these kids do it ... I, in the late sixties began working in formal proscenium theatres, and I wanted to put it inside of a box and look at it 2-dimensionally and then I became more interested in formalism and the kind of distance of looking at things. The kind of freedom that one could have and that one was sitting in the audience, one was free to imagine and think whatever. It was not coming out of what the popular theatre was, which were the psychologic, naturalistic theatre groups coming from a more artistic background. It also came from a dance-orientation, although the work wasn't so much dance and then again in some ways it is. Martha Graham said that for her all theatre was dance and in some ways I feel the same way, we're always dancing, it's always movement. So I usually start with the body first, with the movement first and later let the other things come.
Waits: It's hard to describe how you do what you do. I collaborate on the music with my wife, Kathleen Brennan. Sometimes we start with titles. Kathleen will have a series of titles, and sometimes that's all you need is the title and you begin from there and the title itself stimulates ideas. Or Kathleen had this beautiful melody on the piano, and it was like the way a kid would play the piano and when I heard it I said, god that is just so simple and so beautiful, and I hung onto it and put it onto a tape recorder and I carried it around. And now it's the opening melody in the story. It's the first thing you hear, what sounds like a child's piano lesson and it really works. And a lot of times we come here to the theatre and we're sitting out in the dark and Bob's doing something on stage an idea for a song will come if you're in the right condition for it. And with Bob you always have to be ready to improvise, which is a really great muscle to develop, something that a lot of people stop doing when they grow up and the good part about working here is that you get to stay in shape using your imagination all the time. Bob will say - give me something here, we need something here, we need some music right now, just go down there and... It's really as simple as that, learning how to create on the spot. It can also be a very ordinary thing that you get an idea from. Something falls, a pigeon flies in or you hear a siren. That type of thing happens all the time and that's what I love about doing this is - that there is a place where life overlaps.
Wilson: Actually we don't talk a lot about it beforehand. Often I find if I talk too much about a piece beforehand I go to rehearsal and I am trying to make in the rehearsal what I've been talking about instead of letting the piece talk to me. So if you go there and look at it and try to respond to it. I don't know, it's always better to just do it. Like Tom said I don't know how you do it, but you learn to walk by walking and you can talk about it all you want but you've got to get out there and do it. So you just go and do something. Pretty much we start with a blank canvas or blank book and start sketching it out. When I first came to Europe to work I was working in Germany and I found it so strange that the actors had been in rehearsal for three months and they had been sitting at table and reading books and talking about the production. I thought - how could they read books for three months and still talk about it? Id just get up and do it. The German actors found it very difficult because they wanted to talk about it first and have some ideas before they get up and do it. One way of directing is for me, writing a piece or creating a work by doing it and not sitting in a room talking about it, or at a desk writing something or making drawings, but actually getting in the space and seeing the actors, listening to the actor, looking at their body, hear the kind of sounds they make and let that talk to me and give me the direction of where to go.
How do you collaborate?
Waits: We met in New York City. My wife and I had written a play called Frank's Wild Years. We asked Bob if he would direct the play, and one thing led to another.
Wilson: When Tom and I first met that I wasn't so aware of his work. Then I heard him playing the piano and I immediately was touched by it. When I heard Tom touch the keys somehow he touched me, he got me. From the beginning there was this attraction. I can't explain it because it's so complicated ... it's funny, it's sad, it's touching, it's noble, it's elegant. It's his signature, it's something personal.
Waits: I agree that we're different men with different approaches to work with. The fact is, I think that if two people do know all the same things, then one of them become immediately unnecessary.
Wilson: We're different and I think that that's the attraction. They say opposites attract and somehow we complement each other, but there's a lot of overlap too. He can talk to me about direction or the look of a stage, or a character, the development of a piece, and Tom doesn't mind if I say something about the music or the sound. When I look back at The Black Rider, I don't remember who did what, sometimes it was like it just happened, There's a real trust, and I think that's very rare that you can trust each other.
Waits: The key word really is 'play', because I really get a lot of pleasure out of working with Bob and plumb the depths of myself, I think in a lot of ways. You lose track of the time.
Wilson: I think my responsibility is to provide a space where I can hear Tom's music. Can I make a picture, a colour, or a light, or setting for where we can listen to this music. Often when I go to the theatre I find it very difficult to listen, the stage is too busy or things are moving around too much and I lose my concentration. If I really want to concentrate deep, I have to close my eyes to hear. I try to make a space where we can really hear something, so what we see is important because it helps us to hear.
Waits: Bob has a way of seeing and hearing - and you do start hearing and seeing really extraordinary things in very ordinary places if you just close one eye or tilt your head. Well the thing about working with Bob that you notice immediately is that he has a tremendous amount of leadership quality and that is something that comes immediately evident. There's something that I deeply respect about Bob's world view, it's sensitized me for the way that I think that now I see the world. I never noticed furniture before and now I notice chairs all over the world, everywhere I go.
Wilson: It's really surprising though, because all the time I was in school I was almost terrified to speak. I would come home from school, go in my room, close the door, lock the door and stay alone ... never any leadership quality. I always feel like I'm six years old when I have to get up and tell somebody what to do, but then somehow it's the other side of you. It surprises myself that sometimes I can say OK now everyone be quiet or shut up. The thing that's great about Tom is that he of course writes songs for himself but he's able to write music and other people can sing it. You can look at the pieces that I've done with Tom, they can stand on their own without Tom having to sing the songs. I think that was a great test for Tom that he came in as a composer, can find a voice for other people or his music could be transposed to other singers, other personalities whose voices are very different to his. In that sense he's a real composer.
Waits: Yeah it's a challenge, it's a real challenge, I was wondering if I was going to be up for the challenge. It was sometimes where I was real cold, but it's ultimately very satisfying. But like I said, it's hard sometimes when somebody else is doing your song. You really have to give it away and at the same time you really are kind of spotting somebody who's on the trapeze. You can't tell them to get down and let you up there so you can show them how to do it. You kind of talk them through it or want to say the right things. You want to be able to have them retain their confidence and at the same time be able to receive new ideas. Those are sometimes two mutually exclusive things. Some people take lecturing very well and others just want you to go away and let them do it the way they want to do it. It's difficult so you learn by doing, you're making all of these discoveries, sometimes you reach to pull out the carrot and you only get the top. But technique is not important, emotional telegraphing and truth is what is important and it requires no technique except emotional technique, but no actual, as to how many notes you can hear or how fast you can get there and how you fly it off those and the other notes, it doesn't really matter. That's what everybody wants to do when they come to the theatre - they want to connect.
Wilson: That's the most important thing, if you can connect with the public.
BLOOD MONEY ALBUM DESCRIPTION
(ANTI Records. April, 2002)
BLOOD MONEY
"The higher that the monkey can climb The more he shows his tail... If there's one thing you can say About mankind There's nothing kind about man You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again" (Misery Is The River Of The World)
Blood Money is etched. It's scratched out in bold, dark lines with marimba, trumpet and bass clarinet and contains some of Tom Waits most memorable melodies. The songs are declarative, sardonic, unforgiving, musical dispatches from the bottom of the heap.
"Blood Money is flesh and bone, earthbound," said Waits. "The songs are rooted in reality: jealousy, rage, the human meat wheel...They are more carnal. I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth. I like songs to sound as though they've been aging in a barrel and distressed."
"Life is whittled Life's a riddle Man's a fiddle that life plays on When the day breaks and the earth quakes Life's a mistake all day long Tell me, who gives a good goddamn You'll never get out alive..." (Starving In the Belly Of A Whale)
Blood Money is a new collection of thirteen songs originally written and produced by Waits and longtime collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan. "Kathleen and I are well suited to this material. She is hilarious, blasphemous and ominous. She's the brains behind Pa," said Waits.
Blood Money careens from the brutal to the tender with assaulting rhythms and romantic melodies. It's a grim musical deposition on the human condition, a dark mortality play where Tin Pan Alley meets the Weimer Republic.
"I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby For a buck, for a buck If you're looking for someone To pull you out of that ditch You're out of luck, out of luck" (God's Away On Business)
"She's a rose, she's the pearl She's the spin on my world All the stars make their wishes on her eyes" (Coney Island Baby)
"Misery Is The River Of The World" and "God's Away On Business" have a percussive backbeat that sounds like a dead army of marching skeleton men. This signature rhythm first appeared on 1992's Bone Machine, but the army seems larger on these songs. Waits attributes that to a new percussion instrument: "There's a lot you can do with a giant four foot dried, curling, boomerang seed pod from the Botang Tree that grows only in Indonesia," said Waits.
Blood Money features musicians: Charlie Musselwhite (harmonica); Larry Taylor (bass); Andrew Borger (drums, marimba, percussion); Matthew Sperry (bass); Gino Robair (percussion); Bent Clausen (piano, marimba); Bebe Risenfors (bass clarinet); Ara Anderson (trumpet); Colin Stetson (clarinet, bass clarinet) and Waits on piano, chamberlain...and calliope.
"It's a 1929 pneumatic calliope with 57 whistles," said Waits. "It's no wonder they used them in the circus, it can be heard up to five miles away. The studio is in a canyon, we were in an old house there and people in neighboring communities complained of the noise. While playing, your face turns red, blood pressure goes up, your hair sticks up like Einstein's and you're sweating like you ran a mile, what's better than that?"
"Golden Willie's gone to war He left his young wife on the shore Will she be steadfast everyday? While Golden Willie is far away Along the way her letters end She never reads what Willie sends" (Another Man's Vine)
Blood Money is based on the socio/political play "Woyzeck," originally written by a young German poet Georg B�chner as a spare, cinematic piece in 1837 and inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover. Waits and Brennan wrote songs for an avant-garde production of "Woyzeck" directed by Robert Wilson. "Woyzeck" premiered in November, 2000 at the Betty Nansen Theater in Copenhagen and went on to win Denmark's version of the Tony for Best Musical last year.
The Danish production has toured extensively in Europe to sold-out houses and wide acclaim and comes to New York and Los Angeles this fall.
"A good man is hard to find Only strangers sleep in my bed My favorite words are good-bye And my favorite color is red" (A Good Man Is Hard To Find)
Blood Money contains songs from the bottom of the world. There is a feeling the songs are trying to reach you from another time or dimension, where there is an eerie vaudeville cabaret playing fado, parlour songs and cambias. Appropriately, the record ends its macabre tale with, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Ironic in the spirit of Dennis Potter's use of music in The Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven, it is an oddly sanguine nostalgic adieu from a ship going down.