Free The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven by Chögyam Trungpa

agitated. “If our aim in life is to grab, then we shouldn’t disappoint ourselves,” he said.
Rinpoche responded, “If you grasp, you don’t get anything.”
“And what if we define ourselves as neurotic?”
“You get yourself, which is already neurotic.” ( Laughter )
The director was infuriated; Rinpoche remained quite cool. The whole situation became almost unbearably electric. Rinpoche said, “You see, I’m just presenting a satirical approach to the game. I’m not presenting ideal sanity at all. Nobody can do that. There has been Christ and Buddha and Muhammad and all kinds of saviors who offered themselves up to us as targets to be attacked. And still the work goes on. Nobody really provided any alternatives at all. That seems to be the most exciting and beautiful theater of all. Christ didn’t make it. Buddha didn’t make it. Muhammad didn’t make it! This is monumental failure! It’s fantastic! The theater of life and death! As you see, we’re not particularly religious people and you might want to avoid people who meditate because we’re not particularly religious.”
Rinpoche stood up abruptly and shouted, “We just meditate, just for the hell of it!” Then he saluted smartly and stormed out of the hall. He did not seem to limp as he marched away.
Aside from “terrible person,” the room was silent.
Next morning when we got up, we discovered that the Iowa Theater Lab had struck camp and disappeared.
At this Mudra conference, I discovered the theater I wished to create and the way I wanted to train actors. It was as though a question I didn’t even know I was asking was answered. The question? Can there be a more human basis for developing performance than that which resides in talent, personality, and ego territory? 45
     
    As Jean-Claude van Itallie noted in his remarks above, Robert Wilson and his company, the Byrd Hoffmann School of Byrds, presented some of their work in a performance at the conference. The piece they presented involved very slow, dignified movements. Andy Karr, a longtime student of Rinpoche’s and an early participant in the theater work, told me that Robert Wilson’s piece was “brilliant, nonconceptual theater. Fifteen years later, we would have had nothing but admiration for this nonconceptual performance art. But at the time, we couldn’t handle the space. You have to remember that Rinpoche’s students were almost all very young. The average age was around twenty-three. So we were like children, in some sense.” 46 The Byrd Hoffmann troupe had placed a large bowl of apples and oranges in the middle of the audience, to be consumed as refreshments during the performance. Rinpoche’s students took the idea of “audience participation” one step too far and began rolling pieces of fruit around on the stage and otherwise interrupting the normal course of the performance in a way that was disrespectful of the space that Wilson and his troupe were trying to create. As Andy Karr told me, “After the first piece of fruit rolled out onto the stage, all hell broke loose.” According to Midal’s description in Trungpa and confirmed by both David Rome and Andy Karr, Rinpoche was quite unhappy with his students’ boorish behavior. Since there was nothing to be done, however, he himself took an orange, peeled it, and ate it.
    Many of the theater people who attended the conference were infuriated by the disrespectful behavior of the Buddhist students, although David Rome reports that Robert Wilson himself “took the whole thing in stride.” There was a confrontational meeting the day after the performance, and some of the visiting theater people threatened to leave. (Based on remarks from Lee Worley and David Rome, it’s quite possible that this had more to do with the Iowa Theater Lab people than anything involving Robert Wilson and his group.) On behalf of his students, Rinpoche remained unapologetic. He gave a very powerful talk on the problems of egotism among