An Interview with Ubu Sings Ubu Director and Choreographer Dan Safer
Dan Safer is a director and choreographer whose work has taken him all over the world, from New York to Amsterdam to Bangkok. He’s worked with, among others, Jane Comfort, Bob McGrath and Chuck Mee, whose play Daily Life Everlasting he directed at La MaMa this past year. He currently runs Witness Relocation (last seen at A.R.T.’s 2010 Emerging America Festival with Vicious Dogs on Premises), a dance-theater company in New York City. Here, he talks about his process co-creating the mash-up musical-playevent Ubu Sings Ubu, which will be performed at OBERON Presents February 2016.
How did you first get involved doing theater?
I grew up in New Jersey, where no one else made the kind of work I wanted to do, so in high school I tried to make really pretentious, fake Pina Bausch stuff. It was awful, but at least I was trying. I went to NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing and studied physically based theater there. Then I lived in Bangkok for three years, studied a lot of traditional Thai work, and mixed Western and Thai styles. I always had a big dance background even though I was doing theater. When I came back to New York I interned with Jane Comfort’s dance company in New York, and that was a big influence on me. Then I began performing with Ridge Theater and Bob McGrath, who I still work with as a choreographer now. Working with Ridge and a lot of New York companies back then was a big influence on me, and it helped me figure out who I was and what I did.
How did Ubu Sings Ubu come about?
This was Tony Torn’s baby. He’s an actor I’d always wanted to work with, and we did a show a couple years ago called Civilization in which he played a giant psychotic pig. I helped him come up with pig movements and dances, and we just got along incredibly. Later, Tony got an offer from the Prelude Festival to do anything, so he decided he wanted to try out his dream show mashing up Jarry’s Ubu Roi with the music of the punk band Pere Ubu, and he asked me to choreograph some dances for it. It went really well and we decided to keep working on it. Tony and I would codirect, I’d choreograph, and he’d star and do the adaptation of the script. It’s a show I’d wanted to direct since I was in high school, so it’s been a dream show for Tony and me. Everything lined up.
When you first read Jarry’s Ubu Roi in high school, what about it spoke to you?
I grew up in conservative Princeton, NJ, but I was a punky kid with purple hair, and this was a play where the first line is “SHIT!” It had epic battles in it and let you go wild! I don’t think I understood it at all at that point, but to me it was this proto-punk play. If the origin of all this stuff I was fascinated by—Dadaism and absurdist theater, and also the Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys and the New York Dolls—had come to a critical mass, maybe it was Ubu.
It’s almost as though Alfred Jarry, Cocteau, and Artaud were the punk rockers of their day.
Totally! That’s why it makes sense to do it with the songs of Pere Ubu.
Ubu was famous for shocking people. I love the joke that the history of theater is the history of people rioting, and Ubu would absolutely fit into that idea. But what was shocking 120 years ago isn’t as shocking today.
Absolutely not.
In directing and updating the play, are you finding a contemporary way to give audiences the feeling of shock that they got 120 years ago when it premiered?
I think we’re pushing stuff, but no, I don’t know if anyone’s causing riots like that anymore. I think the culture’s changed too much. I think part of it is the thing I’m drawn to in punk stuff, which is this joyful nihilism. That’s kind of my thing. And people don’t often realize that the two can go hand-inhand, but they totally do, and maybe it’s the shock of that that we can achieve. That’s something that Tony and I line up on in every way.
Given that the show has no fourth wall, are you a director who likes to bring the audience close to the action?
Oh yeah. There’s no fourth wall. We don’t pretend the audience isn’t there, ever. People will get lap dances out there, and the bar is open the whole show. But we’re not so in-your-face with the audience. I always think of it as a feedback loop between who’s on stage, who’s in the audience, and how we feed off each other’s energy. The more you can clarify that relationship and augment it, the more the audience becomes a part of your show and not just observing it. So I really cling to that relationship. That’s the most important thing to me: how much of the show happens in the audience’s imagination, or their lap, or their face.
Interview by Jeremy Fassler, a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
