Ok Radio

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with Lenore Manderson, writer, researcher and medical anthropologist at Monash University in Australia about our mutual fascination with the human body.  Join us as we discuss the body in practice and in performance, as signifier of vulnerability, power, visibility, ability, disability – and difference.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with Australian arts advocate, festival director, and world-renowned singer and performance artist Robyn Archer about building a life for herself in the theater – what about the resistance she’s faced along the way?  How do we continually track that resistance and disturbance in our lives and work (and curatorial choices) in order to avoid complacency?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with Erica Meyer, an Episcopal priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd in New York City about how she came to her calling as a religious leader.  How does she lead a community of people toward wholeness and sanctification?  Where does her belief come from and what does she do with her own doubt and grief?  What does any of this have to do with theater, you might ask?  (Really, go ahead and ask!)

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with artists Christer Lundhal & Martina Seitl about shared practice and crossed disciplines.  How do we open up new possibilities in perception, and create room for ambiguity and playful slippage in roles, in context, and in life.  Do we have to go all the way to the moon – or Mars even – just to get a change in perspective?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with Swedish choreographer and filmmaker Gunilla Heilborn about levels of commitment.  Do we always need to push it 200%?  What about we just try 80% and call it a day?  Join us as we examine our minimalist and maximalist tendencies and trace the influence of these habits and preferences on our work.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with Swedish playwright and director Mattias Andersson of Backa Teater in Göteborg about local and global art.  What does it mean to have a theater and to make work in the city where you grew up, to be in dialogue with a city of intimates?  How do we make the personal public – or is it vice versa?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with writer, editor, and theater thinker Tom Sellar about surrender and control – physical, mental, and structural.  Join us as we clear the air – talking about artists and critics, and the whole interdependency and strangeness around that relationship.   We rely on critics to write about the work, but what do we care about really?  Do we want intelligent writing or just positive gush?  Do critics appreciate that they are just seeing one performance and it all may be going horribly wrong?  All this and even more thoughts about social practice, multi-media, durational performance, art brut, and political theater. 

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with theater-maker Aaron Landsman about our mutual time together growing up in NY theater in the 1990s.  We examine how and why we are still here – still doing this.  Join us as we talk with Aaron, too, about his new work, City Council Meeting, and probe the intersection of faith, life, art and committed “social practice".

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks again with New York avant-garde legend Richard Foreman about sardines, and (reluctantly) also about theater.  We discuss his new play, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, which opens next week at The Public Theater, and also his critically-acclaimed film Once Every Day, which was recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival and at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks with David Garland, composer and creator of the music program Spinning on Air on WNYC in New York City – about host and guest, yin and yang, creative and receptive, intent and effect.  David also plays two of his own musical compositions, made with some very unconventional instruments, live for us in the closet.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma looks backward (and forward!) in theater time with curator Mark Russell of Under the Radar Festival in New York City.  Join us as we chat with Mark about his early years in the Austin, TX music scene, his tenure at PS122, the invention of UTR, and hopes and fears about his upcoming move to Lausanne, Switzerland.  Together we talk about drilling down, burning out, and branching out, and still somehow keeping one foot in the city we all love.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks again with choreographer/dancer/artist Mårten Spångberg about conning, cunning, consciousness, unconsciousness and – hey, by the way, are we just maybe making religious art?  What?  Political art?  What do we stand for?  What is an example of an idea that would be bad enough to scare us?  A conversation that ranges all over the place, even to Swedish motorbikes, chakra breathing, Baader Meinhof, Chinese mafia, ending in love and anger in the year 2013.  Hang in there.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma goes off the leash with the devilishly gifted and multi-talented performer/dancer/composer Mike Iveson, Jr.  Join us as we talk about about pride, prejudice and process.  Are we ever ONLY devised, dictatorial, collaborative, impulsive?  Top down authoritative or totally egalitarian?  Should we finally accept that process is a messy thing – resistant to even our best laid plans?  (All this plus much more about insects, sea walnuts, spiritual visitation, psychics, and alien possession.)

Nature Theater of Oklahoma goes deep with artist Xaviera Simmons, talking about infection, inspiration, difference, and indifference – race and (like - ohmigod!) audience.  What were we thinking?  Is anger, aggression and dissatisfaction a prod to artistic enterprise? or a burden we should leave behind?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to choreographer/dancer/artist Mårten Spångberg.  A far-fetched discourse on corruption, bullshit, undermining, alchemy, pain-in-the-ass, architecture - and so much more!  Including also rodents, moles, foxes, dragons, aliens, monsters and other totem species of the artistic animal underground.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to NPR correspondent Robert Smith about radio, reporting, and storytelling.  What happens when we put extreme constraints of time on narrative – as in durational theater and art projects (such as Chris Marclay’s The Clock and our current project, Life and Times) – and in public radio which is typically built in short 3-6 minute story segments?  We also examine the ways in which live performance and radio are both shaped (respectively) by the physical presence and absence of their audience.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to actor Scott Shepherd of ERS and the Wooster Group about strictures, exposures – and helicopters!  We also ponder the intangible and ineffable in theater and the surprising and inevitable consequences of vitamins, nutrition, and bad shellfish on acting

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to playwright and performer Sibyl Kempson about adjustments we have to make when real life gets more dramatic than theater.  How do we weigh life and death against the old showbiz notion of “the show must go on”?  Also, enjoy as we share a few choice words about ambient theater, New Jersey theater, theater for dogs, cats, cavemen and aliens - among others. (We also try podcasting with our eyes closed to see what we look like inside ourselves.)

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to Adina Tal, director and founder of Nalaga’at Center in Tel Aviv about her work with a diverse company of deaf-blind actors (Muslims, Jews and Samaritans working together) in Israel.  How can you direct someone who can neither see nor hear you - and who can neither see nor hear his audience or his fellow actors on stage?  What kind of deeper questions does this work raise about perception and understanding?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to theatre artist/dream-maker Joris Lacoste about his work with found audio in performance, and the issues it raises about originality, reproduction, truth and faithfulness.  We also talk about his recent work involving hypnosis.