Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit

Image Courtesy: Willem Dafoe by Sasha Kargaltsev

Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit

What was your approach for this new challenge? And why did you accept this curatorial job in such difficult times? 

Oh, it seemed like an interesting challenge for me. It's not what I normally do. It gave me the opportunity to try and make a program that I thought would honor the things that I love about theater.

Venice, the Biennale has a great organization in place. They have beautiful spaces. When you come here to look at spaces, it just blows your mind how beautiful the spaces are that deserve good theater pieces in them.

So I get to have this structure behind me and I get to imagine a beautiful program. So that's a challenge, but it appealed to me.

Did you travel to all the theater capitals of the world? Your program looks like that you had a concept from the beginning.

When they told me about the appointment in July last year, the truth is I thought the only way I can do this, where I can really make a contribution, is do what I know. I'm not gonna go shopping. I'm not gonna go around and see what's cool or what's really current or anything.

So, instead…

I'm going to invite people that I've worked with, people that I've always admired, and people that some people would introduce me to. But basically, I had a pretty good idea of who I wanted to see in the program. It's a two-year appointment. I think next year, I'll do it a little differently because I have more time and I want the focus to be a little different. 

Well, the program clearly shows your signature, so to speak, and your artistic background with the Wooster Group and all these years in the New York avant-garde. And of course, with Richard Schechner, you go even farther back. It looks like a great heritage event. 

To be fair, there is some of that, but there's also other people, there's emerging artists and people whose work is new to me. And I also got to say that specifically the Wooster Group, it's not a nostalgia trip because they're still functioning. They're still making interesting stuff. And also, I was there for a very long time, but the stuff, the work that they're making now is a further refinement of what we were doing before. And it hasn't stopped developing. It hasn't stopped refining. So it's further down the line of, a company that I think, although it's quite small and quite humble, has really had a huge impact.

I've seen some of their recent work, like what they did on Grotowski and more recently with Tadeusz Kantor. And so it looks to me like a combination of European and American avant-garde. And you seem to bring that together again for Venice.

I mean, for what interests me is Liz (Elizabeth LeCompte) and Kate (Valk) and the company are working with a new relationship to technology. And usually when you're entering technology, things get a little cold.

But the truth is, because a lot of it is very precise working with things outside of yourself, the presence of the actor is very strong because these are not people that are automatons. They are observing something very clearly and then embodying it at the same time. And that's the kind of super, super concentration and super presence that is so compelling about theater.

When you say in your mission statement about the presence of actor, „theater is body, body is poetry“, is that a return to such purity like Grotowski was demanding it? Look at this, here I have this picture from the Wooster Group‘s „Hairy Ape“ and that was very technological theater with you. 

From my point of view, I could apply „body as poetry“ to the „Hairy Ape“ because that may have seemed very technical but the inside of it as a performer that was very demanding physically and it did bring me to some sort of a super state because the demands were so physical. And I think that was conveyed. This particular production

wasn't so much an interpretation of the O'Neill play as the O'Neill play created a world that we could live in that was kind of extraordinary. 

So there's still the theater actor with you and not so much the film actor that you have been in the last 20 years? 

They're the same thing. The process is a little different, but I always think it's a little bit like a musician. A musician is a musician and sometimes they go in studio and they record something and sometimes they play live. So the actor is still here, whether it's theater or whether it's film, it doesn't matter much.

Of course, they're different mediums, of course, but this kind of old-fashioned notion of the measure of a performance - I don't subscribe to that at all because there can be fantastically artificial, very correct performances in film and there can be very naturalistic, correct performances in theater. So it's not about size or way of performing necessarily. 

What's your personal choice for that matter? 

I like to try to do it all. You know, every time I do something, I always have to figure it out. So it's each time, it's not quite first thought, best thought but it is always returning and cleansing yourself of preconceived notions and trying to find a new way. Just so you don't repeat yourself and so you don't start believing certain things that might hold you back. You know, people talk about craft and there is a craft. There are instincts. You develop instincts after performing for a long time but that doesn't mean you have to uphold them. So you should always try to destroy yourself a little bit.

The program seems to be expanded by comparison with previous editions. Is it more than in the years before? 

I don't know because they didn't give me a number of performances, not really. I mean, they gave me some sort of guidelines. I don't know previous years well enough. I've attended the Biennale before but only for a workshop and a talk. So this is all quite new to me. 

There's also a German part that you invited with Thomas Ostermeier and Milo Rau (who's actually Swiss) but both I think are what we call the real actor‘s theater even though they are conceptual at the same time.

Yes, they're both people that I've been in contact with. I've followed their work and with both actually I've talked about working with them. It hasn't happened yet, but we're still in conversation.

So which means you could return to theater? 

Yes, absolutely. Via Venice. I'm always looking for a way to return to theater. And in fact, for the Biennale I'll do a small performance experiment. It's not a whole production but it'll be being on the stage again. 

What would that be? 

That's something I did with Richard Foreman before he died but we only did an audio recording. He put phrases on cards, like hundreds of cards. We shuffled them like playing cards. He took half of the deck, I took half of the deck and then we read them, alternating one to the other. Then we took them, reshuffled them and did it again. So these are phrases that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other but the actors in response to each other through rhythm, through inflection through trying to contact the other person sometimes try to make a connection and sometimes let it fall flat. It's an interesting exploration of language and how we communicate with each other. In Venice we'll do some in English and some in Italian. 

So that's like a chance-operation dialogue?

There's a randomness to it because it's not rehearsed because you'll get different combinations all the time. So the living element, the present element, the part that's dramatic or engaging to me is something's being formed in front of you. That's not pre-designed. The rules are designed, but the effect or what happens isn't designed. So for that, it's really an experiment. It could be a disaster.

Who will be your partner as this will need two people? 

An Italian actress called Simonetta Solder, who a friend suggested because she speaks English very well. And she helped with the translation of these very enigmatic phrases. bAnd she spent a fair amount of time in New York and we just basically hit it off. So Simonetta and I will be doing this back and forth.

You say the program of your second year could be different.

I'm still forming ideas, but if I told you that this year I wanted to program things that I knew, next year, I wanna find things I don't know. But one thing that will guide me is I think I'm still trying to figure it out and we're going to get in it very soon. I'm interested in how theater serves communities. But the struggle with that is sometimes some of those situations are socially very important but sometimes aesthetically they aren't as developed. So you gotta find that balance. 

And they're very contextual because they could not be presented easily that way in a Biennale. 

But that's what makes it interesting, I think because the context comes with them a little bit, if it's really a theater that is serving a community.

Let's get back to what one could call the bottom line of this year's edition. It's what you call the inquiry into the essence of theater. And that seems to be acting and the actors.

The theater uses everything but I think you need people for those events. I shouldn't make any rules, but for me it does start with the audience watching not only something that happens but people involved in that. So they see themselves. They see themselves in this world that's created in this event that's created. Without the people, they don't have a scale, they don't have a reference. If nobody's on stage, it is as if a tree fell in the forest. 

Your output in film is enormous at the moment. It's like seems like the peak of your career with nine movies this year alone. 

Well, I like to work. And if I find interesting things to do, I will do them.

How do you make your choices for a number of films of very, very different genres. „Poor Things“ was clearly an art house film. But then you have „Beetlejuice“, „Nosferatu“…

I like variety, obviously. And it's about people and situations, I think. Because it's seldom about character. And with each one of those people, I could give you the reason. The director is very important to me just because my relationship to directors has a lot to do with when they have a vision, they see something. I love being the guy that they sort of tell me what they want to see. And then I go in there and I try to embody it and even push it further or engage with it. This is the relationship I like.

If the director doesn't have that kind of vision, there's gotta be something else. And usually it's not enough. The director is very important. I try to balance things so I don't get stuck into thinking performing's one way or my process gets fixed. I think you gotta trick yourself out of a certain kind of comfort.

We all like comfort and we all like familiar things. But in the end, what really floats us, what really keeps us alive is a certain kind of variety and a certain kind of mystery and a certain kind of curiosity. 

So as people see you probably as an American actor, also representing at least American theater in a certain way, where do you see American theater at the moment? 

I don't know. Yes, I'm not that familiar with it, I've never been as familiar with American theater as I've been with European or even Asian or South American theater. With the Wooster Group, we used to travel quite a bit.

And after that collaboration with Bob Wilson, particularly, we toured a fair amount. So what I was seeing at festivals, what I was seeing when I was in periods and places where there was a lot of theater activity, that's what I was seeing. And as you say, I like to work a lot. I'm shooting a lot. I'm not in the States that much anymore. 

Your program also seems to symbolize the exchange between European and American theater, which has become less and less significant in the last 20 years. So I see this also as a gesture that it could be different. 

I think that exchange was very useful in the past. For a while, creatively, maybe it was in one direction, economically, it was in another direction, and then maybe it shifted. But living through that period that you speak of, I really saw the interchange and it was quite dynamic. And it was a mutually beneficial exchange. Sometimes when I see European theater, I see the origins of it from someplace else, but it has more support and therefore it becomes institutionalized, also in its language. Because the one thing about American theater, it doesn't have a lot of support. So there's always a scrappiness and inventiveness to it, even if it lacks a certain kind of sophistication and a broad understanding of cultural history.