19 > 23.06.23
CN D Pantin
Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska began their collaboration in 1997, and together founded Nature Theater of Oklahoma in 2006. The company is committed to “making the work they don’t know how to make”, an approach that brings new amalgams of opera, dance, and theatre, combined with popular culture and humor. Their work has been commissioned by theaters and festivals around the world, including Rhurtriennale, Hebbel Theater, Wiener Festwochen, Burgtheater Wien, Mousonturm, Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Festival d’Avignon, Théâtre de la Ville, and Salzburger Festspiele. Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska have each been recipients of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts. They received two Obie Awards for their work on No Dice and Life and Times, and were recipients of the Salzburg Young Directors Award in 2008 for Romeo and Juliet. In 2018 they received the Nestroy Special Prize in Theater for their work on Die Kinder der Toten.
“With every project we make we always start from a place of ignorance, of really not knowing what to do. We have always some impossible material to work with – a recorded phone call, a novel in German which we don’t know how to read, or a monologue description of a battle which we think we want to dance – some thing which doesn’t tell us how it wants to be done. And then we try to do it. For this workshop we will probably work with some new text loosely based on the story of Philoctetes.”
Kelly Copper & Pavol Liska