'It's offensive to everybody'
Nature Theater of Oklahoma finally hit London - with a show called No President that processes Trump via cannibalism, penis costumes, and The Nutcracker...
By Maddy Costa
Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska have been working together from their home in New York since the mid-1990s, formed Nature Theater of Oklahoma (OKT) in the early 2000s, have an obsession with language – “specifically the English language” – and an eye-watering back-catalogue of work that has travelled across the world: to Austria and Australia, to Greece and Japan, to Switzerland and Singapore but not, by and large, to the UK.
“We always joke that it’s because of the language barrier,” says Liska, and it’s true: he said the same to me when I interviewed the pair in 2013, in advance of their first UK visit, to the Norwich and Norfolk Festival. That was with Life and Times, the eight-part transmutation into theatre, film, an illuminated manuscript and a musical, based on a 16-hour telephone conversation with one of OKT’s frequent collaborators. Since then, the couple have made an opera (Burt Turrido), a modern dance for cowboys (Pursuit of Happiness), several more films, and No President: the work that at last brings them back to England for their London debut.
No President is a ballet, of course. A ballet in which rival security guards – actors on one side, dancers on the other – compete to guard a theatre curtain, on to which flimsy premise Copper and Liska can throw everything from callisthenics to cannibalism (more on which soon). “We don’t know the ballet,” Liska says. “So let's learn about ballet. Let's learn everything we can possibly learn about ballet. I’ve always read that ballets were written, so how were they writing ballets? What does a text for a ballet look like? I want to write something like that.” This restlessness, this shape-shifting, this continual pushing to experiment is typical of how OKT work, and feels characteristic of a company that took their name from a passage by Franz Kafka.
But Liska admits there’s also something self-destructive about it. “We always want to sabotage ourselves. The moment we gain an audience and people think, oh, I love their use of phone calls and really dumb language, then we say to ourselves: let’s do the exact opposite. Let’s use as poetic and overwritten and grandiloquent language as we can... We always shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Although it arrives in London in the wake of the No Kings protest movement, No President is an older work: crafted pre-pandemic and scheduled for its first performance around the time of the 2020 US election, when Trump lost. “Ballet was a court dance, it was for power,” says Copper, “so we’re using the form that was especially for the king, to speak about power and corruption.” The initial idea was only to dance, to consider, “What's conveyed through the body and what does the body mean?”. But that plan floundered when they realised it was just too hard. “We really do try to dance it, it’s choreographed down to the syllable – but you also need words.”
Because Germany more readily funds experimental performance, that’s where No President was made, and for several years, that’s where the company believed it would stay. Their creation space was “a big, beautiful factory in the Ruhr valley,” says Copper, so epic in proportions that it inspired them to think bigger than big. “We said we would work with volunteers who had some kind of a relationship to dance, whether as an amateur or as a student, and then we fell in love with all those people. Instead of just putting them into one big scene, we put them throughout the show because they’re all perfect and weird. So we had this 20-person show that we finished right before the pandemic wiped us off the map.”
The stuff that happens is ugly. It’s got nails in it.
There was no need to rethink the show when it finally made it to New York in December 2024, shortly after Trump again won. “It came out of us trying to process Trumpism and nothing has changed politically,” Liska shrugs. Or it has, Copper reasons, and all gotten worse. “This was made around the time of #MeToo and all of that toxic masculinity,” says Copper, “but before abortion got rolled back. Sometimes it's weird to think: was this something that we felt was happening? You let things in and this was in the air?”
She says this because the show is uncomfortable to watch, by design. “We wrote it prior to the strict policing of language,” says Liska, “and we wrote it irreverently and offensively. It’s offensive to everybody, women, Jews, Muslims, it’s like everybody's attacked, ourselves, everything.” I feel myself flinching when they talk about this, but one of the things that draws me to this company is their rigour: they don’t do anything gratuitously.
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