The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (9 page)

Rinpoche at the conference told people who asked him what buddha families they belonged to. He told me I’m ratna-vajra like himself. Rinpoche encouraged his students to classify different things including theater pieces and paintings as combinations of buddha, ratna, vajra, karma, or padma families. It’s a game I enjoyed. It honed our perceptions of the universal energies in the world and culture around us. Rinpoche was interested in many artistic fields of endeavor including performance, painting, poetry, and playwriting and he enjoyed practicing them all to one degree or another. The buddha families are a language in which to speak about specific energetic qualities common to all art, indeed to all phenomena.

Toward the end of the conference we put on an impromptu performance for each other. I wrote a little play which people read aloud. It included a parody of some of the people at the conference. I remember one line and the person who read it again and again: “I sing my own melody.”
⁴²

One of the participants mentioned by van Itallie, Lee Worley, has also provided some comments on the 1973 theater conference. Lee, who has been the head of the theater department at Naropa University (formerly Naropa Institute) for many years, describes her experiences at the conference:

In January of 1973 Jean Claude van Itallie invited me to Boulder, Colorado, to attend a theater conference. . . . I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having moved out of New York City with my baby daughter and her father the previous year. Three young men from my new acting workshop in Santa Fe wanted to come with me, and since Boulder was close by, the conference agreed to pay our way.

In addition to members of New York’s Open Theater, I remember that the conference drew people from the Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis, the Magic Theater of San Francisco, Robert Wilson’s company, and the Iowa Theater Lab. Conference participants were housed in the same large fraternity house where the meetings and workshops were held. It was a cold February and there was no way to get away from each other. In typical theater fashion, everyone was behaving in very self-important ways. Each day different companies gave workshop demonstrations, and each evening there were performances. To keep my novice actors from freaking out in the company of professional artists, we met daily and worked on creating a skit based on a short story by Trungpa, “Report from Outside the Closet,”
⁴³
which had been included in the conference’s information packets.

I enjoyed being caught up in the whirl of the conference, away from home and baby for the first time, admiring everyone’s work and worrying about my own presentation, fascinated by the Tibetan gentleman with the limp who seemed to show up everywhere, disrupting events, creating chaos, causing everyone’s ego to inflate larger and larger, and yet not doing much of anything. At the same time as everyone seemed to be growing more and more crazy, it felt like quite a safe situation with someone at the helm deliberately allowing us to spin out of control within a loving, protective container. . . .

My company only felt comfortable with the people from the Mudra Theater Group, our hosts for the conference. They were Trungpa’s students who had been training with him in performance exercises. We visiting actors and directors eagerly awaited their presentation scheduled for the end of the week, but they seemed unenthusiastic, embarrassed, and apologetic. In fact, they didn’t seem to know exactly what they were going to do, or even why they had hosted the conference. One or another of them would mutter to me about the excruciatingly painful exercises that Rinpoche had them do. I got the feeling that it was devotion alone that kept them in the Mudra work.

The Mudra Group presented work on “sound cycles.” . . . These little poem-like things use Sanskrit and English words as well as breaking up words into individual syllables.
⁴⁴
The emphasis is not on the content of the pieces but on using the whole body as the vocal chamber and on clear diction of the vowels and consonants, thereby letting the sound convey its own content.

Rinpoche was seated in front of the conference attendees. At his feet sat a disheveled young man with curly blond hair. During the course of the Mudra presentation on sound cycles he seemed to be crawling all over Rinpoche, singing off key, “Terrible person, I’m a terrible person.” Or perhaps it was “Terrible person, he’s a terrible person.” I was offended. He was either drunk, high, or crazy. I thought him inappropriate and disruptive. Why doesn’t someone remove him, I huffed. Rinpoche didn’t seem to mind.

During the question period someone asked what Rinpoche meant by the word
neurosis
. He replied that without neurosis there is nothing to work with. All art has both neurosis and its absence. This gives a lot of material and the possibility for relating to space. “It would be an extremely good and friendly gesture if tonight we would all agree that anybody involved with an acting situation or the public entertainment world is neurotic. Let us really believe in that. We are all somewhat fucked-up people. It’s an embarrassing thing to say, but it doesn’t seem to be my particular embarrassment.” I could feel tension heating up the room.

The drunken character continued to sing “terrible person.”

That afternoon the Iowa Theater Lab had demonstrated their work. I didn’t attend, but my actors reported that when the director cracked a whip and dictated commands, the actors meekly obeyed. As the evening’s discussion continued, this director started engaging Rinpoche in an argumentative dialogue. His point was that he thought of actors as the most sane people. “Some of us are greedy for life. Some of us grip it, some of us are deeply involved in grasping at life. We love life.” He became increasingly agitated. “If our aim in life is to grab, then we shouldn’t disappoint ourselves,” he said.

Rinpoche responded, “If you grasp, you don’t get anything.”

“And what if we define ourselves as neurotic?”

“You get yourself, which is already neurotic.” (
Laughter
)

The director was infuriated; Rinpoche remained quite cool. The whole situation became almost unbearably electric. Rinpoche said, “You see, I’m just presenting a satirical approach to the game. I’m not presenting ideal sanity at all. Nobody can do that. There has been Christ and Buddha and Muhammad and all kinds of saviors who offered themselves up to us as targets to be attacked. And still the work goes on. Nobody really provided any alternatives at all. That seems to be the most exciting and beautiful theater of all. Christ didn’t make it. Buddha didn’t make it. Muhammad didn’t make it! This is monumental failure! It’s fantastic! The theater of life and death! As you see, we’re not particularly religious people and you might want to avoid people who meditate because we’re not particularly religious.”

Rinpoche stood up abruptly and shouted, “We just meditate, just for the hell of it!” Then he saluted smartly and stormed out of the hall. He did not seem to limp as he marched away.

Aside from “terrible person,” the room was silent.

Next morning when we got up, we discovered that the Iowa Theater Lab had struck camp and disappeared.

At this Mudra conference, I discovered the theater I wished to create and the way I wanted to train actors. It was as though a question I didn’t even know I was asking was answered. The question? Can there be a more human basis for developing performance than that which resides in talent, personality, and ego territory?
⁴⁵

As Jean-Claude van Itallie noted in his remarks above, Robert Wilson and his company, the Byrd Hoffmann School of Byrds, presented some of their work in a performance at the conference. The piece they presented involved very slow, dignified movements. Andy Karr, a longtime student of Rinpoche’s and an early participant in the theater work, told me that Robert Wilson’s piece was “brilliant, nonconceptual theater. Fifteen years later, we would have had nothing but admiration for this nonconceptual performance art. But at the time, we couldn’t handle the space. You have to remember that Rinpoche’s students were almost all very young. The average age was around twenty-three. So we were like children, in some sense.”
⁴⁶
The Byrd Hoffmann troupe had placed a large bowl of apples and oranges in the middle of the audience, to be consumed as refreshments during the performance. Rinpoche’s students took the idea of “audience participation” one step too far and began rolling pieces of fruit around on the stage and otherwise interrupting the normal course of the performance in a way that was disrespectful of the space that Wilson and his troupe were trying to create. As Andy Karr told me, “After the first piece of fruit rolled out onto the stage, all hell broke loose.” According to Midal’s description in
Trungpa
and confirmed by both David Rome and Andy Karr, Rinpoche was quite unhappy with his students’ boorish behavior. Since there was nothing to be done, however, he himself took an orange, peeled it, and ate it.

Many of the theater people who attended the conference were infuriated by the disrespectful behavior of the Buddhist students, although David Rome reports that Robert Wilson himself “took the whole thing in stride.” There was a confrontational meeting the day after the performance, and some of the visiting theater people threatened to leave. (Based on remarks from Lee Worley and David Rome, it’s quite possible that this had more to do with the Iowa Theater Lab people than anything involving Robert Wilson and his group.) On behalf of his students, Rinpoche remained unapologetic. He gave a very powerful talk on the problems of egotism among artists. Andy Karr reported that, in this talk, Rinpoche connected very strongly with many of the people there. Jean-Claude van Itallie says of Robert Wilson’s piece and the “furor” that unfolded around it:

I think Andy Karr’s and David Rome’s descriptions of the Bob Wilson performance are fairly accurate. It took Bob several days to prepare his piece. He was, as always, very serious about it, working behind closed doors. Watching the piece after being kept waiting for several hours, the meditators were shocked. Some giggled. A few booed rudely. They didn’t know what to make of what they were seeing. The piece was slow, visually beautiful, and devoid of story. Rinpoche was respectful toward the work. If he was angry at his students, he didn’t reprimand them in front of the theater people. Indeed, as David Rome and Andy Karr point out, he instead delivered a lecture to the theater people about ego. I felt that everyone, including Rinpoche, enjoyed shocking the others by what he or she said, wrote, or performed. This was theatrical in the best sense—we shocked each other’s preconceptions of the world.
⁴⁷

Toward the end of the conference, in addition to presenting the sound cycles, Rinpoche’s students built a huge newspaper installation that was divided into a number of rooms. Participants made their way through this maze, and in each of five rooms they encountered a person who represented one of the buddha families and who would, if supplicated properly, answer questions. Rinpoche himself was in one of these rooms. David Rome told me that “he was somewhere in the middle of the maze, maybe toward the end, just sitting in a simple chair in the middle of a newspaper room, saying nothing.”
⁴⁸

Jean-Claude van Itallie commented:

I remember the newspaper maze pretty much as you describe . . . Rinpoche sitting in an armchair toward the end of the newspaper room. . . . Sitting in his chair, he said nothing if you asked him nothing. People didn’t expect to see him there—he was a surprise. He said, “I’m curious if people will speak to me.” He was ready to answer anything anyone asked. He was being a fortuneteller, but you had to ask him a question to find that out. If anyone asked him anything, they were the exception. Most people passed through the newspaper room respectfully and asked Rinpoche nothing.
⁴⁹

The day after the conference ended, Rinpoche introduced the first series of Mudra Space Awareness exercises, which became the foundation for the theater work done by his students for many years. The exercises involve assuming various postures and then intensifying the space around oneself. Very slow, deliberate movements and intensified breathing may also be part of an exercise. Rinpoche described his motivation for introducing these theater exercises as follows: “The problem in acting is not being able to relate with the space which surrounds the body. In other words, the problem is in the relationship between the projector (which is the actor in this case) and the projections (which is the audience). Unless we are able to develop a sense of sympathy with ourselves and a sense of sympathy with space, there is a tendency to become hostile and feel a need to impress the audience.”
⁵⁰
He also described the approach to intensification as follows: “In order to learn to relate with space we have to learn to intensify the body and build intensive situations as much as possible. Can you just try to feel the space around your body? Pull your muscles as if space is crowding in on you. Clench your teeth and your toes. . . . Very strange to say, in order to learn how to relax you have to develop really solid tenseness. You can breathe out and breathe in but don’t rest your breath, just develop complete intensification. Then you begin to feel that space is closing in on you. In order to relate with space you have to relate with tension.”
⁵¹