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
No Dice


Sat, Feb 9 - Sun, Feb 10, 2008  |  6:30PM
Performance Space

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.

With No Dice, you’ll come for the magic and stay for the ham sandwiches. An epic of the everyday, it’s a relatively short, 4-hour distillation of a quasi-legendary melodramatic spectacle originally 11 hours long. Using a text drawn from over 100 hours of the company’s recorded telephone conversations, the actors filter the seemingly mundane through the conventions of amateur dinner theater—and bring it all home with surprising and rewarding cohesion by the evening’s end. A critic for Portland’s Oregonian notes: “While the performance style is exaggerated, often downright goofy, there's a precision of diction, movement, expression and timing that puts them leagues ahead.…Nature Theater knows how to inspire a willing suspension of linearity.”

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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