wexner center for the arts


Performing Arts

Photos by Peter Nigrini


Photos by Peter Nigrini
Photos by Peter Nigrini

Nature Theater of Oklahoma

In Nature Theater of Oklahoma's uniquely off-the-wall theatrical world, conceptual inquiries underpin a playful sense of fun. The New York–based company won many local fans with Poetics: A Ballet Brut and No Dice performed here in 2008, and we've co-commissioned this next pair of productions, which you can see here in the same week. In both, as in No Dice, phone interviews Nature Theater directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper record with close friends and company members are used verbatim as the plays' texts.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Poetics: a ballet brut


Wed, Feb 6 - Fri, Feb 8, 2008
Black Box on Mershon Stage

Avoid the hex of the unbeliever! See both these shows by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an exciting young performance group based in New York and directed by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper.

Their name comes from a line in their inspiration, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, and their creative stagecraft transforms ready-made materials and found dialogue into revelatory DIY theater.

Poetics: a ballet brut is a wryly constructed dance piece delightfully unhampered by its performers’ complete lack of formal dance training. It takes a vast assortment of common gestures and movements to hilarious new heights. As it unfolds, Poetics expands from casual encounters to a delightfully skewed dance of life of grand proportions. The Village Voice calls it “smart, witty, highly physical, and eager to twist notions of theatricality.”

This event made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Performance Residency Program. Major contributors of the National Performance Network include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. For more information: npn.org.




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