Read Online The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven by Chögyam Trungpa - Free Book Online Page A

me help including an assistant, Maurice McClellan, who works at ITI. I invite the most exciting people I know in the theater. The avant-garde theater community is not huge at the time. We all know each other. Of those who say they’ll come, there’s Robert Wilson and members of his company. I’d given Bob his first job in the theater—designing the dolls for Motel in America Hurrah. Andre Gregory (whom you might have seen in My Dinner with Andre) came. He’d been a couple of years ahead of me at Harvard. Lee Worley came. She was at the time living in Santa Fe but I had met her in 1963 at the beginning of the Open Theater where she was an actress. That was Lee’s first contact with Rinpoche. Other friends came—the actor Nancy Cooperstein, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, the critic Gordon Rogoff the director John Lion, the photographer and designer Kozuko Oshima. . . . Some people did not come. The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, for whom I had translated from the French on his first trips to NYC, refused saying, “One guru at a conference is enough.” The British director Peter Brook could not make it. The American director Joseph Chaikin didn’t care to come, saying, “I don’t like organized religion.”
It’s my first visit to Boulder. I stay at the Boulderado Hotel with a view of the mountains. Rinpoche has named this conference The Mudra Workshop. We rented a fraternity house on Broadway near Baseline for the proceedings. Some of us gave workshops. I gave a playwriting workshop. The theater artists perform for the meditators who are gratifyingly shocked by the lack of conventional theater form. Robert Wilson stages a special performance. I write something quickly which both theater artists and meditators perform. There are panels and classes. I give one in playwriting which Irene Fornes takes. Rinpoche gives several talks and appears in a theater happening on the last day as a fortuneteller at the center of a maze created with newspaper walls. . . .
Rinpoche at the conference told people who asked him what buddha families they belonged to. He told me I’m ratna-vajra like himself. Rinpoche encouraged his students to classify different things including theater pieces and paintings as combinations of buddha, ratna, vajra, karma, or padma families. It’s a game I enjoyed. It honed our perceptions of the universal energies in the world and culture around us. Rinpoche was interested in many artistic fields of endeavor including performance, painting, poetry, and playwriting and he enjoyed practicing them all to one degree or another. The buddha families are a language in which to speak about specific energetic qualities common to all art, indeed to all phenomena.
Toward the end of the conference we put on an impromptu performance for each other. I wrote a little play which people read aloud. It included a parody of some of the people at the conference. I remember one line and the person who read it again and again: “I sing my own melody.” 42
     
    One of the participants mentioned by van Itallie, Lee Worley, has also provided some comments on the 1973 theater conference. Lee, who has been the head of the theater department at Naropa University (formerly Naropa Institute) for many years, describes her experiences at the conference:
     
In January of 1973 Jean Claude van Itallie invited me to Boulder, Colorado, to attend a theater conference. . . . I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having moved out of New York City with my baby daughter and her father the previous year. Three young men from my new acting workshop in Santa Fe wanted to come with me, and since Boulder was close by, the conference agreed to pay our way.
In addition to members of New York’s Open Theater, I remember that the conference drew people from the Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis, the Magic Theater of San Francisco, Robert Wilson’s company, and the Iowa Theater Lab. Conference participants were housed in the same large