a conversation with Linda Sandoval.
“Rachel Rosenthal is the Artistic Director and founder of The Rachel Rosenthal Company. She is an interdisciplinary performer who developed a revolutionary performance technique that integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable “total theater” experience. In the last twenty-five years of her performing career, she presented over 40 full-scale pieces nationally & internationally. Critics have called her "a monument and a marvel" and Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review, has critically ranked Rosenthal with Robert Wilson, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. Born in 1926 in Paris of Russian parents, Rosenthal's family fled Europe during WWII to New York where she graduated from the high school of Music and Art and became a U.S. citizen. She studied art, theatre and dance in Paris and N.Y. after the war with such teachers as Hans Hoffmann, Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator and Jean-Louis Barrault. Rachel moved to California in 1955 where she created the experimental Instant Theatre. She was a leading figure in the L.A. Women's Art Movement in the 1970's, co-founding WomanSpace, among other projects….In 2000 Rachel was designated as a Living Cultural Treasure of Los Angeles."
(From Rachel's website, rachelrosenthal.org )
Rachel has also received, among many other honors, an Ark Trust award for her work on behalf of animals.
…“spirit, soul, consciousness and miracle reside in everything. Animals teach us about life and death, if we let them. And in between about love, hate, tenderness, anger, pain, ruthlessness, loyalty, friendship, craftiness, resignation—every possible feeling with infinite shades and tone.”
(Rachel Rosenthal, from Tatty Wattles, a Love Story.)
Linda: Is accepting our own humanity the key to connecting with animals?
Rachel: I think it is an important part of the story but not the whole story. Because I think that we are really in a fog, especially now. I’ve lived a long, long time, decades, and I have seen so many changes over the decades and I think we’ve come to a part of our evolution in our history and I’ve realized that, in spite of the great scientific advances we are still pretty stupid and incoherent and we have set up a path which is both brilliant and erroneous at the same time which will be very difficult to alter. We have trouble changing things, we are habit people and we cling to our ideas. So yes, we must understand ourselves but that is not enough. We have to understand the cosmos. And we have to understand where we live in the universe. To find our position and our viewpoint of our position. And most of us don’t think that way. We are busy with our lives. We are busy making money, we are busy communicating, and we are busy trying to get ahead of ourselves and ahead of other people. Anxiety comes from the fact that we don’t have a center that ties us to the rest of creation…. we’re sort of floating and we don’t have a solid center. Most of us are too busy just trying to stay alive. So it’s a lot to ask of people to stop in their tracks and look at where they came from and where they’re going because there’s no time for that. Especially now when things have gotten so difficult. I think that knowing and being aware that we are not alone on this planet is vital for our survival.
Rachel writes:
“I look over the decades as over a chain of peaks after climbing a tall mountain…. I perceive the passage of time like a long panorama of extreme contrasts unfolding in a stately procession before or within me…I have transformed myself over the years to the point of non-recognition… Yet one part of me has never matured. I am emotionally and sentimentally stuck in my early years.”
Linda: Do you need to go back to that period of youth because that is still your essential story?
Rachel: When I was little I remember feeling that I was an adult. I was an only child and I was not playing with children my own age because I was a nervous child and the doctors and the powers that be in those days would then isolate you and I was very isolated. I had servants and I had a nanny and then a governess. My parents were on the second floor and I was on the third floor. I had a great deal of love and admiration and a feeling of being adored and supported by my parents and then on the third floor I was hearing how the servants were talking to each other…the big room where they did the ironing and the darning and I would walk around and hear what was happening and then I got very different messages, that I was stupid, that people were only nice to me because my father was rich. They said these things to me. So I came in contact with concepts that were new and frightening to me. When I heard these things I locked myself in the WC. I was so upset. There was a double life that I led. And I had trouble sleeping because I had such anxiety and nightmares, and I would be put into bed and told to stay there all night because this is what you do at night, you just sleep. And so I had a guilt complex. I was failing at sleeping. I remember one time it was so bad that I just had to get up and find somebody and the first thing that I did was go to the end of the corridor where the governess and the cook were in the cook’s room and I was at the door and I wanted so badly to knock. My hand just stayed up in the air and I never knocked. So I went back to bed. But I had another anxiety attack and I thought I would find my mother. So I had to go down the stairs in the dark to the second floor, and that was scary enough, and I came to my mother’s door that was closed and the same thing happened. I just couldn’t knock. Something stopped me. And later on in a piece that I did called Charm, I said you couldn’t go to your mother who was so beautiful and wonderful because of the “uglies”. Because everything in my parent’s apartment was beautiful and adoring and I didn’t want to bring what I thought was my own ugliness in there.
Linda: So you were caught between two worlds?
Rachel: I was skating between two goals to find my way. So I don’t feel on a certain level that I need to recapture youth because my youth was so anxiety making.
Rachel writes in her play, Rachel’s Brain:
“I am ugly
I am stupid
I’m an idiot
I am guilty
I’m a phony
I am nothing
I’m a failure
I’m a fraud
Five hundred million years of brain evolution for this?”
Rachel: Half of me feels these things about myself. And the other half, not. But unfortunately that half is very heavy in my life. It’s interesting because recently I was thinking, I was trying to collect my memories, because unfortunately with old age my memory is really shot, so I’m trying to remember things and I noticed that I was very aware that most of the memories I have about myself are mostly bad. For instance, my relationship with dogs. All the rescues and placements that I have accomplished for dogs and cats in need. I have done some good stuff. But that’s not what I remember. I remember the bad stuff. All of the negatives and then I get very upset. I could have memories of many animals who found wonderful homes and people who were good adopters. But then, I have a high opinion of myself also. The two things go along in their tracts. Always light and dark.
Linda: You talk about fairy tales where the child goes into the forest and brings the treasure out. But in there, in the forest, is darkness. Human fear is that dark hallway where we are afraid to knock on the door. Does the artist go ahead and knock on the door to find the treasure?
Rachel: My whole life has been devoted to an art form that is theatrical improvisation. Since the earliest time I can remember I was an improviser. And that’s really throwing yourself into the unknown. And you jump into it with your two feet and you don’t know if you’re going to drown. This is what I chose for me as my life. For a long time I was teaching that and developing ways to teach others. We know everything. We just need to come to the point where it is available to us. This is the problem. How do we open ourselves up to this knowledge that comes in, and little by little over the decades I was able to do that. To open myself and let things to come in. When I teach, I very often start a sentence not knowing what the end of the sentence will be and what will come out from me taken from whatever has come in and sometimes I feel my mouth is like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Linda: Like the oracle at Delphi.
Rachel: Well that’s the pretty way to put it. But I used to develop a curriculum, going one two three four five, getting everything in order…but now I realize I am much better as a teacher when I don’t prepare anything. And I do in my teaching what I do in my theatre work. In other words we’re here and here is the stage and you put your foot up and by the time you put it down you are in another world and you are in the unknown and have to deal with the unknown and then everything begins to happen. Because we all store so much information.
Linda: You said we are all like the library in Alexandria.
Rachel: Consciously and unconsciously.
Linda: When you perform, do you like to erase the boundaries between the audience and performer or do you just respect those boundaries?
Rachel: You know when I teach what I do is I have certain symbols that I give the students right away. One is a triangle. And one of the corners of the triangle is the performer, another angle is what I call the partnership and that is everything else on stage, objects, the other humans, the other non-humans, such as my dog Sasha taking a nap in the corner, the light, sounds, shapes, warm day or a cold day, what the wind is doing, this is all the partnership, and the third angle is the audience. And I feel very strongly that the audience is a part of the piece. Because whatever they’re receiving they’re emitting a certain kind of energy. They’re either refusing it or taking it in, or working with you, they have brains working, they’re telling themselves the story of what they are seeing and each person has a different story. So it’s all happening together and if one of these angles is broken then you don’t have a full or complete art form.
Linda: What did you mean when you said the fact of our planet and our life is the fact of our life or sacred consciousness?
Rachel: I just think that it’s not by chance that we have such short lives. A lot of animals have much longer lives. Turtles, parrots, some snakes. But we have short lives. And our dogs have short lives. I think that we have short lives because we have to be startled into realization because we are very lazy about realization. We don’t take the time to let things come in and have the “aha!” effect. This whole attitude of trying to understand what we’re doing here, why are we here, why are we NEEDED here in the history of the planet is something important to at least look at and we can’t come to this very easily. But I can feel this somewhat when the improvisation takes over and I am no longer just me. I am expanding in the universe and I am moved by forces that are outside myself and yet inside myself. There’s a whole way of interacting with the planet. I think that parts of our body are designed to react to the vibes around us but it’s pretty difficult to access them. But you can if you want to.
Linda: That is the sacred fact?
Rachel: I think that sacredness is very important and people who go into art are touching the sacred. That’s why I am disgusted when so-called artists want to develop only the dark side because I think that is very bad for the development of our species. Because it perpetuates and focuses on things that are evil. There is evil. Do not get caught up by that “claw” that keeps you there in the evil. You can discuss it but don’t perpetuate it. There are so many artists that use animals dreadfully.
Linda: That’s where you found your little friend the rat, Tatty Wattles, being abused by a performance artist.
Rachel: Yes, and that artist made his name in the art world by doing a piece where he burned live rats to death. And the rats were screaming and he was screaming with them and that was the whole performance. “The art.” I can’t understand human beings who don’t see animals for what they are. It’s so obvious but then we’re pretty stupid. I found Tatty Wattles in a cage in the middle of a gallery that was showing materials and objects used in performances, so in the gallery was the detritus of the performances and Tatty was part of the detritus. And I went to the woman at the desk and said, there’s no water and no food and nowhere for the rat to hide, rats need to make little places to hide. Is anyone coming to take care of this rat, I asked? And the woman at the desk said, “No”. Okay, I said, I’m taking it. And since he was part of the show I said, during the day he can be here in the gallery and then at five o’clock, when his job is over, I’ll come in and I’ll take him home with me. That went on for a couple of weeks and then at the end I said to the artist, okay, I’m taking the rat.
Linda: You talk sometimes about the importance of play: “We humans began our cultural history by playing. And we are not alone. Animals also begin their lives by playing." Anthropologists think that humans accomplished evolutionary leaps as a result of play. In the Chauvet Cave in southern France, there were beautiful animals painted on the cave walls. Humans created those animals some 32 thousand years ago. But then for five thousand years there was nothing. No humans entered the cave. Then the humans came back and began to paint again. Are we in a continuous cycle of abandonment and rediscovery?
Rachel: I saw a video once of a crow in a landscape of winter with snow on the banks and the crow would sit on that bank of snow and slide down like in a luge and would walk back up and slide down again. And when you look at the crow you say you know this is a game…this is play. This has no other reason for being than having fun. Having fun is something very special. I think fish do it. When the fish get into this shape, little fish that form sculptures in the water and then birds do the same thing in the sky. That has to be fun, a game. It doesn’t seem to have any other reason for being. They’re not sleeping or eating or fighting or making babies. They’re just playing. So this whole business of evolution and being on the planet and having the joy of living and realizing life is precious and wonderful and special and remarkable. You dance in the ocean in that shape. Some force of evolution created this.
Linda: So what does setting animals on fire have to do with our enlightenment? Is that perhaps dragging us back to those five thousand years where no one had anything at all to say?
Rachel: Exactly. Well, there are a lot of things to worry about. One wonders where all of this is going to take us. I keep having the feeling that we are going to come to a wall and then go no further. Then we are going to have to move. Either to the left or to the right. But we need a strong change of goal that will bring a surge of evolution. But let’s face it. The world is made up of two forces. Creation and destruction. And both are equally important and equally strong. And even though we would like very much for the world to be good and loving and together and creative and about life and not death, it’s not going to happen because it’s not the way our cosmos is made up. And we have to, unfortunately, live within this duality. When you look at what’s happening in the universe…such violence in the worlds all around. Even the sun is doing a lot violence right now. And it affects what we do. So there may be a nefarious period that we are going to have to go through. It’s very scary. The weather is scary. There are so many ways that the earth is beginning to move itself that it is very frightening. We can make it better by doing things that are obvious. Stop polluting, stop putting crap into the earth and moving it where it’s not supposed to be moved…cutting off the tops of mountains. We can stop doing that. These are things that can be done. Stop throwing all the garbage in the oceans and killing the oceans. All of this is up for us to do. But it’s not happening because people are making money. Money, money, money. Our species has become a slave to economics. All of this has to change and transform. I wish I could stick around and see what happens.
Linda: You write sometimes of the idea of “the other”. Sometimes it is in relation to animals, but also I wondered if being an immigrant to this country as an adolescent sensitized you to the feelings of “the other” in a way that allowed you to recognize human pain, or animal pain, or environmental pain? Are animals immigrants in human society?
Rachel: Well you’re probably right. Don’t forget you're seeing me in a kaleidoscopic way. Little pieces. You don’t see the juice that goes between the pieces in the soup. I’ve lived through it so I’ve been in the pieces and I’ve been in the juice, so I don’t have the same clear impeccable view that you have of me or that I have of you.
I would say that you are probably right because everything we experience becomes part of us. And we behave the way we behave because we have inherited a lot and experienced a lot and all of these things get mix-mashed together and become how you are. All my life I have felt like “the other.” I’ve stopped feeling French, but I’ve never became a true American. I moved many, many times and ended up in Los Angeles and I never felt for decades that I was really here. And so only in the last decade, I finally accepted the fact that I am an Angeleno. So naturally that comes into your being. The way I live with my dogs, there are no levels of existence, like I’m the highest and they are the lowest. We coexist and it happens we both coexist in the same place and we have each to make do with that fact. And we have to live in a way that allows us to be content. Whether we are sleeping or on a walk, or having dinner, we maneuver in such a way that each one of us has its needs met. They understand it and I understand it. And I don’t impose things we don’t have to impose. When I impose things I do so for safety. But not for convenience, like euthanasia. The animal will tell you when it’s ready to go. If you watch carefully you will learn. Most of my living arrangements have been a maneuver between their needs and my needs. I couldn’t live without them. So when I look at Thanksgiving and people are showing their thanks by killing millions of birds, I ask what is that? It’s insane. Be thankful and don’t kill. It’s not up to us to make death happen.
Linda: Do you think we’re becoming more afraid?
Rachel: I can’t say it’s more or less, but it’s constant. And the kinds of things we’re afraid of now are often new things …identity theft? What is that? Out of nowhere a new fear. You know what I fear now? I fear getting into my car because so many people who are driving don’t know how to drive. And I was nearly killed by a person who ran through a red light because she is probably texting and rammed me into another car and then a telephone pole. That is a new fear.
Linda: By chance you were in the path of that car. What do you mean when you say "chance knows what it’s doing"?
Rachel: The word is chance, but of course it can be other words that denote things that come from left field that don’t necessarily seem to belong to the source or the target or the way things develop because this is what we are continually dealing with. We have to be acrobats to balance and find the equilibrium between these things that come from left field and the things we develop ourselves that we deem necessary and that we desire. So, we have to trust that the things that are the unknown and the difficult and the things that we are not necessarily comfortable with are also nurturing.
Linda: Even that car with the woman texting and driving, can that be reprogrammed by you to be something…
Rachel: Positive? Sure, sure you have to. Otherwise you have to go to the loony bin. And I think that people that have mental problems of that nature are the ones who can’t adjust to the unknown and who live in fear and who live in terrible discomfort. For instance, there are things that I would never do. I would never go in an earth tunnel to discover the waters inside the earth because I would be afraid there would be an avalanche that would bury me. There are just certain things that you don’t do.
Linda: The little hand just doesn’t knock on that door.
Rachel: Yes. But the things that you can’t avoid, such as the car, create a new paradigm for you to live and you have to somehow work through that and take it in and become the new person that you have to become through this event. Just breathe with it.
Linda: A kind of baptism.
Rachel: Yep. You don’t spit it out like a pit in a fruit. If it’s there you have to find a place for it in your body.