Rachel Rosenthal

RACHEL ROSENTHAL After living and working in New York and 45" Am, heA"Paris, how did you end up in California? Rachel Rosenthal was born in Paris. In the early fifties in New York, shewas an assistant to Erwin Piscator at his Dramatic Workshop, and later danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. After moving to California, she founded Instant Theatre (1956-69), and during the seventies worked as a sculptor and co-chairwoman of Womanspace . Rosenthal began presenting solo performances in 1975. REPLAYS, 1975 After 1953,1 came back to NYC and decided I wasn't going back to Paris. And that's when I got to be friends with Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and continued my friendship with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. I got very emotionally involved with some people in that group-it was a boiling cauldron of seething emotions-and I felt there was just no way for me in that situation. Also, I felt very energized and yet dominated by their charisma and somehow I felt that if I didn't leave this atmosphere, this group, I would never find what I had to give. Which was one of several reasons I went out to California. That was in '55. What were the beginnings of Instant Theatre? After I moved to California I started a workshop. At first it was just a simple actor's workshop. I was giving the actors exercises and improvisations-things I was thinking up. They enjoyed them so much that they stopped working on scenes and only wanted to do my ideas, exercises, and themes. One day I said, "We've found a new theatre. I 26 think we have something very wonderful here, let's do it for an audience." And then everybody disappeared. What happened? The actors were all up-and-coming Hollywood hopefuls-people like Tab Hunter, Tony Perkins, Susan Hallison, Rod McKuen, Vic Morrow, and Judd Taylor, who is now a director. They all said their agents would never allow them to do it, it's just too crazy and way out. So I was left with just a painter, a dancer, and an actor who had been an engineering student at MIT. The four of us decided to hell with everybody, we'll do it all by ourselves. And that's how Instant Theatre was started. It was just a little box space and there were risers and, instead of putting chairs on the risers, I had pillows. That was in '56. Who was your audience? In those days the audience was mostly poets and artists. Did people associate it with Happenings in New York? One of the problems we had is that we associated ourselves with theatre instead of with art. It was always affiliated with theatre because there was, at the time, to me anyway, no other affiliation possible. It suffered from that, because people's expectations of theatre were such that our theatre was considered totally way out. A lot of people just didn't accept it or understand it, and the artists for some reason stopped coming, possibly because of the affiliation with theatre. What kind of performances did you do? I'ni sort of embarrassed really to tell you about what Instant Theatre was. Because it sounds very self-serving and I'm making really high THE HEAD OF O.K., 1977 CHARM, 1977 claims, and there's no proof-there's no mechanical or electronic documentation, but there are a lot of eyewitnesses. It was a theatre that was the precursor of Happenings, Action Art, art performance, and Theatre of the Ridiculous. How have the history books passed your theatre by? Because we did it in California, and because I was maybe personally afraid to come out. I think that if it had come to New York it would have been very important theatre. Over there it was really buried. For awhile it didn't matter to me because in those days I had very Zen ideas-it's very ephemeral, it's for now, and so on. Then later on, I was very sad because I had nothing to show and everybody was getting recognition and...