They’re showing That Night Follows Day in Rotterdam as part of De (Internationale) Keuze van de Rotterdamse Schouwburg in September and are busy working on a publication to go with the season. For the publication there are interviews but they’ve also set up a complicated email thing whereby different artists in the programme get to propose questions to each other. So, yesterday, this in email:
“The question that Pavol Liska and Kelly Cooper of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma ask you is: ‘How specifically do you subvert your habits? How do you trick yourself, on the most practical level, so your own work keeps changing and surprising you? How do you cultivate your creative longevity?'”
And my answer:
“I don’t have a strategy for this. I get tricked by accident – by being too tired, too busy, by being distracted, by getting fascinated with something that is happening, by becoming delirious (in a banal way, not thinking of hallucinogens), by making mistakes, generating accidents or by following a flow. I guess a ‘strategy’ could be putting yourself in a position where all that is more likely, however one would do that wether over a period of hours, days, weeks, months or years. As if creativity were a matter of making mistakes that you quite like and then trying (with all your best ‘craft’) to live and deal well with the consequences.”
I also proposed a question to Pavol and to Kelly, and to Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué from Lebanon, and the other artists in the season including René Pollesch and Romeo Castellucci. Do they consider themslves to be optimists? I’ll post here if there are any responses.
That Night Follows Day, 2007