The Bridge Project
Mini teater, Ljubljana
22 December 2016
A night of two experimental films by Richard Foreman.
The Bridge is a long-term project by avant-garde theater pioneer Richard Foreman and his close collaborator Sophie Havilland. On December 22, 2016, the Mini Theater presented its development in 2016, as well as some other video productions by Richard Foreman, such as e.g. Once Every Day (2013). Richard Foreman began developing The Bridge Project together with Haviland in 2004 to promote international art exchange through workshops, symposia, theater productions, visual arts presentations, performances and multi-media projects. Between 2006 and 2008, Foreman’s works, produced by his Onthological-Hysteric Theater, began to include material recorded in The Bridge’s workshops – as a kind of film-score, which functions as a base for the live performances.
Productions created in this way include Zomboid! (2006), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! (2007), Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (2008).
Films
NOW YOU SEE IT: NOW YOU DON’T
“Individuals in and out of the undifferentiated cosmic energy. While waiting for the Messiah”
The film was shot over several years in various locations in Romania, Denmark and Switzerland as part of the long-running THE BRIDGE project, which Richard Foreman and Sophie Haviland jointly developed and implemented around the world, from Melbourne (Australia) to a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon. (Portugal), mansions and churches in Loughborough (UK), Giessen (Germany), a traditional primary school in Kyoto (Japan), an antique hotel and art academy in Vienna, and in Zurich (Switzerland) and Odsherred (Denmark), in a club dedicated to for social gatherings and in a jazz bar in Bucharest (Romania) and in the Ukrainian Cultural Club in Buffalo (USA), in 2012, in the latest edition, as well as in a bourgeois apartment in the center of Ljubljana.
ONCE EVERY DAY
The film does not follow the usual narrative arc of a “story” but focuses on a group of 14 actors who perform half-ritual behavioral patterns, while their eccentric impulses are repeatedly interrupted in completely unpredictable ways. The film jumps between different sequences (“still lifes” in color, expressionist black-and-white “images”, slow immersion in white light, etc.), and at the same time we hear the voice of the director and technical staff, who give the actors instructions and comment on the work process. The film was shot in Buffalo (New York, USA) as a series of unrelated shots, which Foreman mounted in a kind of “time mosaic of reformed consciousness”.
Colophon
ONCE EVERY DAY
Režiser, tekstopisec, montažer: Richard Foreman
64 min
NOW YOU SEE IT: NOW YOU DON’T
Režiser, montažer: Richard Foreman
Tekst: Leo Charney, Richard Foreman
Glasba: John Zorn, John Cage
69 min
Bios
Richard Foreman, founder and director of Ontological-Hysteric Theater, has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays both in New York City and abroad. Five of his plays have received “OBIE” awards as best play of the year—and he has received five other “OBIE’S” for directing and for ‘sustained achievement’. He has received the annual Literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a “Lifetime Achievement in the Theater” award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Club Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His archives and work materials have recently been acquired by the Bobst Library at NYU.
Foreman is the founder and artistic director of the non-profit Ontological-Hysteric Theater (1968-present).
Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.
Richard ForemanSophie Haviland is a writer, director and producer. She has presented her film and theater productions in the USA, Europe and Australia. Haviland moved from Australia to NYC in 1992 and then took over the management of Foreman’s St Mark’s Church Theater. She has produced seven performances of Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York and 3 international tours (Permanent Brain Damage – New York, Meltdown Festival – London; Pearls for Pigs – New York, Paris, Rome, Montreal, LA; Paradise Hotel – New York , Berlin, Salzburg, Paris, Copenhagen). In New York and Europe, Haviland collaborated with Ridge Theater on their play – also an OBIE Award winner – Carbon Copy Building (performances: The Kitchen, NYC; Settembre Festival, Italy) and with film director Hal Hartley on his play Soon (Salzburg Festival, Austria; de Singel, Belgium). She directed Sophocles’s Electra, Copi’s The Four Twins and her own text Amnesia. She also directed several short productions for numerous festivals in New York City.