Richard Foreman read from an onoing new work as part of the Segue series at Artists Space in New York. The reading was recorded in his SoHo loft about a week before the event on March 16, 2024. Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Artists Space, gave the introduction:
PennSound is happy to announce a major expansion of our Richard Foreman page edited by Jay Sanders. The page for Foreman, for me the greatest visionary theater director of the period, includes the full production films and videos of many of his productions.
Richard Foreman includes these note to his theater work ZOMBOID! in his new collection from Contra Mundum Press –– Plays with Films, edited by Rainer J. Hanshe. Thanks to Contra Mundum and Richard Foreman for permssion to publish this excerpt here. Check out Contra Mundum's other titles, including Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Pessoa, Bates (on negative capability), and, one I am eager to see, the first substantial translation into English of the great Italian poet Emilio Villa.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Notes on my next project, ZOMBOID!
Amongst the many possible strategies of "spectator oriented" art — two seem to me to stand out. In one style — the spectator is carried on a rollercoaster through various pre-determined emotional focal points. In the second, more meditative style, events are slowed up and relatively detached from each other so the spectator can project his or her own depths, resonating with the presented "material."
Richard Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)
The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended was on Saturday, May 4, 2013.
After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain objects can be moved or carried on holy days.
Richard Foreman at Segue / Artists Space
Richard Foreman read from an onoing new work as part of the Segue series at Artists Space in New York. The reading was recorded in his SoHo loft about a week before the event on March 16, 2024. Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Artists Space, gave the introduction: