Photo by Nature Theater of
Oklahoma

Monday 11 | 11:30am | Segal Theatre

US | 2016 | 155 minutes | directed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma
English

In 2014 Nature Theater of Oklahoma partnered with Matchbox Festival to make a
new project in the Rhine-Neckar region of Germany. Over the course of the next
year and a half directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska visited ten small local towns,
and wrote their own version of the Nibelungen saga (a story which originates in this
region) and cast it from an acting pool of its citizens and locals. In fall of 2015, they
set off with a movie camera and a core cast of 8 on bicycle to various locations
where they staged and shot a film over the course of 3 weeks, working with local
artists, clubs, church groups, choirs, fire departments, historical re-enactors, office
workers, dogs, and farm animals. Their script called for a dragon, a Viking ship, a
storm at sea, a treasure, a magic cloak which makes people disappear, a trained
German shepherd, a state funeral, a double wedding. They were not at all sure
what they would find. They were surprised every step of the way.

Photo by Ditz Fejer

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.