RACHEL ROSENTHAL The Experimental Life of the Artist

Having resided on the cutting edge for most of her life, interdisciplinary artist-performer Rachel Rosenthal, known for her shaved head, feminist views, and an unwavering love of animals, the provocative and avante garde artist recently turned 83 and is showing no signs of slowing down.

These aren’t her golden years and there is no looking back. No, this month Rosenthal is premiering her Tohubohu! Extreme Theatre at her Culver City studio; she just released the first of three books, this one, the The DbD Experience: Chance Knows What It’s Doing! lays out the processes and exercises she invented and developed over the last 50 years offering a step-by-step, nuts and bolts guide to her methods; and she’s currently in the midst of an 8-week performance class.

Born in Paris into an assimilated Russian Jewish family, Rosenthal and her parents fled France during World War II and moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, via a short stay in Portugal before settling in New York City.

A graduate from the high school of Music and Art, Rosenthal became a U.S. citizen, and studied art, theater, and dance in Paris and New York after the war with such teachers as Hans Hoffmann, Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator, and Jean-Louis Barrault. She also was a member of a groundbreaking circle of friends that included American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, renowned pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, and American composer/poet John Cage.

She moved to California in 1955 where she created the experimental Instant Theatre, performing in and guiding it for ten years. A leading figure in the L.A. Women’s Art Movement in the ’70s, Rosenthal was honored by the City of Los Angeles as “a Living Cultural Treasure of Los Angeles.” Retired from the stage since 2000, Rosenthal resumed a long dormant career in visual art and is currently working in oil and watercolor. In addition to her work in the visual arts, Rosenthal is Artistic Director of the aforementioned Tohubohu! Extreme Theatre, a new ensemble of performers who present evenings of Total Improvisation one weekend a month in her studio space, along with guest artists from the world of visual art and music.

Venice was fortunate enough to sit down and speak with the eyebrow-pierced, sharp as- a-tack artist surrounded by her canine companions, a white Siberian hybrid named Sasha, and a Black Lab mix named Charlie; her Belgian Malinois Mrs. Moore was roaming around elsewhere

Venice: You recently turned 83 and you don’t seem to be slowing down at all.

Rachel Rosenthal: I think I’m busier than I ever was.

Is that just how you always have been?

I’ve had an on-and-off type life I think. When I was doing theater in the ’50s and ’60s, it was ‘on’ all the time. I was teaching classes and having workshops and performing for the audiences. The interesting thing about that period is that when we stopped, I suddenly looked around and the globe had changed. Everything was different and I had been so involved in what I was doing that I hadn’t paid attention and suddenly I found myself in this brave new world. That was a period when I got very involved in feminism and women’s politics in L.A. Then, there was a period when my husband and my animals and I went to live in Tarzana; that was more holding things at bay. Then I left him and I came back to L.A. and my actual big career as a performance artist started at the end of the ’70s. Then in 2000 I stopped performing and I decided to recreate the improvisational performances that I used to do.

Usually this is a time in someone’s life where they look back, but you seem to be looking forward.

I’ve got big plans. [laughs]

What inspires you?

What inspires me? Everything. [laughs] At first it was a great attachment to myself, to my life, to what it meant to the people I knew, to my family, to the way that I lived. I really went through so many different transformations in my life. Then I started to get into more political things; what is the planet doing? That’s what inspires me: everything, what I read, what I see, what I’m going through, what the earth is going through. Now, since I don’t do my own pieces and I haven’t performed since 2000, there’s something new that’s going to be brewing. First of all, my company is going to be my channel to the world, and doing theatrical improvisation is the hardest art form that you can attempt in life. But the interesting thing is that I’m finding new ways of approaching this form and new ways of approaching my art, and how I put it out. So it goes through them and at the same time I’ve written a book and I have two more to go.

You’ve been described as “fearless.” How does that help you as an artist?

I have been a shy and timid person all my life, and really scared of putting myself out and always fighting it to the death. I remember the first experience that I had of this particular way that I am when I was maybe two or three years old in Paris. My nurse would take me to this little forest outside of Paris and I remember that at one time I was playing with my little friends and out from behind a bush came this guy who opened his fly and showed us a very ugly thing. And the little girls disappeared like birds flying off and I looked at him straight in the eye and I looked at his dookie and I looked at him again and turned around, and very, very slowly with my ass really firmly held together, I walked back to my nurse. So this is what I’ve been all my life — very scared and going through the fear somehow.

Did you find being in a spotlight on stage terrifying?

I think I’m more interested in the artwork than in the situation that puts you on show. This is not something that I dwell on because I have too much to do. That’s what takes my focus.

You were born in Paris but raised in New York. How did that affect your sense of who you were? Were you American enough for your friends? Did you consider yourself a New Yorker or were you longing for the day you could return to Paris?

I longed for that for quite a time after the war. I wanted to go back and I did for eight years, back and forth between New York and Paris. But the truth is that I was formed by New York and by World War II because, first of all, I had the immense privilege and luck to be accepted at the High School of Music and Arts which was amazing. It was a time when all the refugees were coming from Europe and they all came through Music and Art to give us lectures and classes so there was this connection, but there was also a feeling of such liberty and openness in New York that I never had in Paris. In Paris I was always with a nanny or a governess and I never went anywhere alone. And suddenly I found myself alone in New York on the subway going to Music and Art which was way uptown in Harlem and it was such an adventure. I think I was ready for that experience of becoming free and that’s what happened in New York. I love New York.

New York is one of those cities where even if you didn’t consider yourself an American you could consider yourself a New Yorker.

Exactly, exactly, and this is what I considered myself for a long time until I came here [to Los Angeles]. When I came here it took years for me to accept that I lived here. Itonly came together very recently actually, maybe ten years ago, when I finally accepted the fact that I live in Los Angeles.

There’s a quote of yours when you moved to Los Angeles in ’55 where you said, ‘It was a pretty warm and dull desert.’ That’s a big contrast coming from New York.

You know, I usually go with the flow. I came here for several reasons and once I was here I started to get involved with animals and at one point I ended up with 17 cats. I wanted to go back to New York but I couldn’t see myself getting rid of my cats so the animals kept me here. And I bought, which at the time was a lot of money, a rickety house in the hills in Laurel Canyon where there was more room for the animals until people started to race up and down the hill and killed all the animals on the street so I went to Tarzana. But while I was in the Hollywood Hills it felt wonderful because I was close to nature.

There used to be that snobbery where people would say there’s no theater in Los Angeles.

Well, that was true up to a point but then my snobbery is, your theater is not my theater. [laughs] And I was going every so often back to New York to see what was happening and I saw a lot of changes that I didn’t like and I was happy I left.

What can you say about those days when you were palling around with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage?

I was so lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. It worked in that period, those eight years that I told you about, because I was at the right place in Paris and at the right place in New York. New York was painting and Paris was the theater and it was a complete transformation of these arts at those periods and I was right there which was wonderful.

That time with those artists you were with was a boys club, right?

Well, it was a gay boys club. [laughs]

How welcomed were women normally into that circle?

Well, there were very few of us. There was M.C. Richards and I don’t know what she was, sexually speaking. She was living with a gay man and looked like a man. I was at the time interested in experimenting about my sexuality so I was fucking around with ladies and of course I was madly in loved with [Jasper]. It was very confusing. [laughs]

And as an artist are you just like a sponge, absorbing everything?

Yes, yes, of course. Now I can see the inspiration in my work much more than I did at the time. At the time I was still confused as to where I was artistically and it was very difficult for me to find myself because I was involved with people that had already found themselves. I felt they were accepting me as a court clown. I was funny and full of life so they probably enjoyed having me around like a trained dog. [laughs] But I really appreciated the arts so much. I was really in tune with what they were doing and that was very enriching and very inspiring.

Tohubohu, your theater company, means chaos, and I read where you said it’s not what you do but what you have to go through in order to create something. Why do you think that is?

I was pretty pleased with having found that little phrase because I felt that it really said what it said in terms of what we do. We go through a great deal of pain to be able to come to the point where we can accept doing an art form where we’re in front of an audience and we take our first step on stage and we have no idea what’s going to happen. We are completely in the dark and things come to us and we are able to work with them and accept them and transform them and deal with them. And these ‘things’ are not just people; they’re the lights, the sound, the sets. It’s very Buddhist in a way, very Zen.

If something comes too easy do you think something must be wrong?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a sense of too easy. I think by nature the work that we do is very difficult. I see it as being one of the most difficult art forms.

What do you hope to accomplish with your theater company?

I’m presenting the company in February and we’re going to do one weekend of shows every month for a whole series.

Do you enjoy the intimacy of playing to 50 people in your theater? Your ego doesn’t want to perform in front of 500?

No, we’re interested in the art form, period. We try to squelch the ugly ego when it rears its head and, of course, it always does in one form or another because that’s the way we’re built, but we don’t enjoy it. We don’t let that flourish. Everybody’s focus is bettering themselves as artists. ▼

Tohubohu! Extreme Theatre premieres Friday, Saturday and Sunday, February 19-21 and will continue one weekend every month. For more information on Rachel Rosenthal see www.rachelrosenthal.org