Screening: Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's Die Kinder Der Toten (The Children of the Dead)

Screening: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Die Kinder der Toten (2017)

Thursday, April 18, 2024

The Segal Theatre

4:00 PM

Join us for a special screening of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's 2019 adaption of The Children of the Dead, by Elfriede Jelinek.  While in the in the Styrian mountainside town of Neuberg am der Murz, director duo Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska worked on location with local citizens, farmers, grocers, brass bands, the fire department, and even mountain rescuers to create a film based on other people’s recollections and descriptions of what is in the book.

From the creators: 

"In Die Kinder Der Toten, film is a kind of character, as well as a medium, through which the dead come back to life. The dead live on in home movies. So film is a medium of transmission – not only of story – but of spirit. It’s a direct link to the ghost world, to the past. Not media, but medium. If you look at the word for film screening or projection in French – it’s séance – exactly the same word used for conjuring up the dead, which is what it must have seemed like to people when they first beheld moving images made of light. Pure magic."

Biography: 

Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper.  With each new project, we attempt to set an impossible challenge for ourselves, the audience, and our collaborators — working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them.  No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness, rigor, and the audience plays an essential role -- whether as spectators or - just as often - as participants in the work.

Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work — Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.