How I create… with theatre directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska

Though from quite different backgrounds – Copper is from Gainesville, Florida, whilst Liska was born in Skalica, then part of Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia – they found a connection in their respective approaches to theatre that has endured for almost three decades.

In 2006 the pair founded the performance art group Nature Theater of Oklahoma which, in their own words, ‘makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.’ Beyond their base in the US, their works have been commissioned by venues and festivals such as Germany’s Rhurtriennale, and Mousonturm, Austria’s Burgtheater Wien and Salzburger Festspiele, and Festival d’Avignon. And in July 2025 they added the Southbank Centre to this growing list as they brought No President to our Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Ahead of this run of performances, Copper and Liska were kind enough to speak with us about how they work, from how they stay focused to why they continue to do what they do.

When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

Pavol Liska: Over the last few years I’ve developed a habit, possibly an unhealthy one, of waking up at 2am when almost everyone in my hemisphere is asleep. While they’re dreaming or nightmaring I’m up and ready, calm and receptive; all my senses fully dilated, and able to record, process through the best parts of my mind, and organise, try to understand, then revise, revise, revise until a relevant form emerges. Preferably I’m at my desk, which is my altar, my inner sanctum, with my mechanical typewriters and stationery within easy reach. When everyone wakes up hours later, and I feel pointless again, I go back to bed for a nap.

Kelly Copper: Like Pavol, lately I have shifted into some kind of weird creative night life. So, at the moment I would say my most creatively productive time is at 3am on the edge of sleep; not sleeping but sleep working, a fugue state. Unlike Pavol, I don’t get up at that time, I do a good few hours of work prior to sleeping and lately I’ve found that solutions come to me in that weird mid-sleep state.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

KC: If it sticks around. Some things you plant and they just don’t ever open up, or there is no opportunity for them to grow. For others you have the material for years and no idea what to do with it, then suddenly something changes in your life or in the world and it unfolds. I think for all work it’s a case of hitting the right combination of material, time and opportunity – and you can never guess when all three of those will come together. I am extremely patient.

PL: When it nags and nags, keeps nagging like a bitter stepmother on a devious mission; when the subtext overwhelms the text at least thirteen-fold, and through repeated, relentless revision to match its nag quotient, it continues to peel off layers of protective habiliments, agents of misdirection, a delicious early morning striptease all for me, until it’s completely nude and vulnerable, true and absolutely undismissable.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

KC: People, time and space. I need all three of these to make a performance. Anything else is pure bonus. We made our first work with just the clothes we had on and whatever was in the room, and that’s maybe what I like best.

PL: For writing, I use mechanical typewriters, of which I have a collection whose size waxes and wanes. But when the muse becomes sluggish I’ve been known to go through the involved process of fashioning quill pens out of goose or turkey feathers. I’ve scoured the internet and spent a fortune on steel nibs and nib holders; have every brand and hardness or softness of wooden pencil ever produced, as well as all the disposable biros and other pedigrees of pen available to humankind. One of them is bound to work, right?

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you
want to create?

PL: In the theatres of Ancient Greece statues of gods stood at the back of the auditorium behind the audience, and the actors, dancers or singers performed for these marble gods, filtering the content through each audience member on its way to the ultimate recipient. Ideally I do that too, depending on the day or how atheistic or religious I feel. And if God happens to be dead to me on a given morning, then I invent some other form of divinity, and do my bestest to be worthy. The work is never created in a vacuum, whether I’m seemingly alone in my underwear or dressed up like a fairy in rehearsal. Never do I feel free, nor do I look for freedom, or think it’s productive and useful, to do what I do. There is always censorship, self or external, always restrictions, always a labyrinth of do’s and don’t’s to navigate. And if they’re hiding, I go out of my way to find them, because they bring out the best in me. Freedom of expression is overrated and I’ve never ever been free.

KC: Ultimately all our work is about, and for, an audience of strangers. Who those strangers are is constantly shifting as you change towns and theatres, but they remain the only real material we’re working with. We’re all in the room together and the work is for whoever is in that room – including me, including Pavol, including the performers. Ideally we all emerge from this experience changed in some way, and I look for this elusive, transcendent thing every night, over and over again. I couldn’t do the work if I didn’t remain interested, if I couldn’t keep searching for that. I would say that we never really ‘finish’ a show. We meet up with the performers two, three hours before and talk, give notes, keep working – what is going on in the world today? What sorts of things are in people’s brains, hearts…? What do we have to work with? And so the show is the frame in which we have to structure that experience, and it’s a strict one, with its own rules which we rub against.

Thankfully I feel totally free to create the work I want to create. We don’t have any government funding for independent artists in the US – so no one can dictate what we do. We let the circumstances for making work dictate what kind of work we make. So for No President, where we had a huge theatre and a budget for costume and set we made use of that, but for the show we’re currently working on there is zero budget, and we can work with that equally well. The work just needs time, people and space and we can always find some way forward. Nothing can stop us.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

KC: A long time ago I feel like I consecrated myself to my work; made every part of my life into work. We have made sandwiches for people as a part of our art-making. I’ve folded my sex life into art, my conversations with family into my art – for me it’s a vocation similar to a religious vocation. I wake up every day dedicated to the work in whatever form that will be practiced and that’s what gives my life meaning and interest. I think it helps that we try to keep growing the work in different directions, taking on a different form (such as ballet in No President). This in turn keeps us growing and interested.

Staying close to where there is pleasure in the work is also very important. I remember back in 2013 feeling jealous of the performers in our piece Life and Times: Episodes 3 & 4 because they had costumes. So for the next project Pavol and I also got ourselves costumes – and we still do so to this day; for No President we bought tutus and toe shoes to wear to rehearsal. If your life is your art then the trick is to stay interested and stay alive. What makes you feel alive and what makes you want to live? Those are the questions I regularly ask myself.

PL: From age four until 14, every day I’d wake up early, around 4am, and walk with my father to a faraway ice hockey rink where he would put me through hard drills (he was a coach) then school, and afterwards I’d go back to the rink to practice with my team. It hurt, but I accepted the pain as inevitable to improvement. This has been bred into me. I left home when I was 14, and my country at 18, and always had to work hard for everything I wanted, no safety net, no plan B.

But it’s not just pain that keeps me working and motivated; it’s equal parts pleasure. Although a pathological masochist, I derive extreme pleasure from my work. Nothing else in this universe, this earthly life, regardless of what petty historical events or silly things in my private sphere are taking place, however much my body or spirit hurt, nothing gives me greater pleasure than writing, than choreographing, than staging, so it’s really not a question of discipline. Dedication, yes, but that comes naturally. Every morning I wake up ecstatic to work – how else could I feel? And every evening I’m devastated that I have to go to sleep, the bed my prison, as I am forced to stop doing what I love.

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

KC: Through various ways, but one good one we often go back to when we’re stuck is to try to identify the most radical element in the work and make the entire show or work about that. Richard Foreman once gave that advice to Pavol and it really is very good for marking a clear path forward.

PL: I copy. Copy, copy, copy. Either I take my previous day’s work and mechanically start copying it, without any other goal than to transfer it from one sheet of paper to another; without any expectation to be creative or to add anything, or to improve, except perhaps to take pleasure in using a particular tool, a different typewriter, a dip pen I’d forgotten that I’d spent a fortune on and never used, or a pencil that I’d read a favourite author had used. Sometimes I don’t even copy my own work, but choose someone else’s – I type up a chunk of Shakespeare, a paragraph from beloved Kafka, or mangle a misguided sentence from detested Proust, with misspellings and in childish script, just to be irreverent and take them down a peg or off the pedestal. Mechanical copying has saved me and jumpstarted me too many times to count. And while copying with no desire and no expectation, usually the lazy muse wakes up and begs me to take her back.

Who do you look to for feedback?

KC: I feel lucky to make work with someone whose opinion I trust and who makes me better. I certainly trust Pavol’s feedback. We also both take the feedback from the audience. Not literal verbal feedback; we both sit and watch every show every night and feel viscerally how it is experienced by the audience and work with that information the next night. I know not everyone watches their work in every live performance, but I feel that it really teaches you where to put the work and the attention. And it’s hard to feel ‘oh everything I make is so wonderful’ when you’re confronted with how it’s actually experienced every night – you know all the peaks and valleys and that’s the most valuable feedback for us.

PL: Answering this question feels like composing an Academy Awards acceptance speech. Will I remember to acknowledge and thank everyone? Should I just keep it safe and generic? God, family, friends, agent (never have I had one), and some special someone, you know who you are (wink wink). It all depends on what I’m trying to get feedback for as each instance is specific. But in a social art form like theatre the answer is quite obvious; my collaborators must approve and stand behind the work as much as I do. Kelly is the first to give me feedback, and keeps me honest with myself.

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

PL: Now I don’t feel dumb ambition or have ulterior motives for the work. I’ve been in, and won, a few staring contests with death, and realise how little what I do matters, while at the same time being the only thing that matters. And I’m able to reconcile these two extremes, and take pleasure in every word I write and every move I choreograph. I also don’t rush as much as I used to, and would rather get one detail right than worry about making a masterpiece, because the detail contains the whole, and if I put all my love into each single, indivisible detail, I just might instigate a genuine miracle.

KC: I think I’ve become more patient. When you work with others and need others to help you make the work and yet have no control over anything once the performance starts – you can only watch it happen – it’s really hard, especially when you’re young, not to want to steer every aspect of the work and feel pissed off when something goes wrong (as it inevitably does). What’s changed is that I know everyone every night is putting their all into making this work with me, and at the end of the evening, no matter how disastrously it may have gone, I feel a genuine gratitude toward the people who struggled that night with me. And I can take the lumps without falling too deep into despair – I used to feel we’d never get another chance to work. With time comes more patience and grace and acceptance of everyone’s weakness, including my own.

What does success feel like?

PL: Success invariably feels like a stiff-necked, stuffy, dressed-to-impress reception with sad caterers in humiliating attire floating around noiselessly attached to plates of abstract faux-fancy foam-flecked fake horse-meat hors d’ouevres that I can’t wait to flee by any means available and head to some dirty corner of the city to stuff my face with too many slices of cheap pizza. I’m more turned on by failure than success.

KC: I don’t know who ever feels they’ve achieved ‘success’ as a performing artist. It’s all so fragile. I guess I hoped that you’d get to a point where you know your work is good and you can relax a bit, but the truth is you have to prove yourself with every new work; there’s nothing to rest on. I wish there was some kind of rest. I’ve learned to appreciate the few moments where you do have some fleeting sense of achievement, but it’s not like reaching nirvana or anything. You don’t get to heaven! Or maybe heaven is actually just getting to do it again… another show. Success feels like someone asking you to make another show, that’s it.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

KC: The words I always find helpful, though it doesn’t count as advice maybe, more as a mantra, are ‘you have everything you need’. I find these to be magic words and they’re always somehow true. Thinking of this gives me peace in moments where something is taken away – whether that’s support or time, or even when people leave. I just return to work with ‘you have everything you need’ in mind, and I find it shuts up the voices in my head.

PL: Yes, absolutely; the advice Morton Feldman gave to John Cage; to write a little bit, and then go back and copy what he has written, and in the process of copying, he would have more ideas. Hence my obsession with copying, which has saved my life many times. Copying is the absolute greatest, most productive creative practice.

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work?

KC: I think for much of my life I may have confused patience with determination. Something about that difference is opening up for me right now because of the work I’m doing. And perhaps one of those may be a better friend to me.

PL: The most recent thing I learned about myself was not through my work, but one on one in some dark alley; BYOF (bring your own flashlight), and if squeamish, don rubber gloves upon approach.

How do you know when you’re done?

KC: I don’t think we’ve ever been done… at least not with live work. It’s ongoing. With film work or with editing, I find when I’m changing things back and forth and it feels fussy, then generally I can be sure that it’s done. Or sometimes just when the time you have is up – it’s done. There’s a beauty and justness in that, as well. The unfinished finish.

PL: Someone once said – sadly I don’t remember who – that he knew he was done when in the morning he’d put in a comma and in the evening erased it and next day the same. Or it’s the case that you never finish, only abandon a poem or painting or whatever.

In theatre you’re done when you have to be, when the opening night comes, but then you keep working, endlessly. We continue to give hours worth of notes to our performers even before the hundredth performance of a show; live work is never done. You have to be relentless and never stop. The world changes continuously and we must stay alive to the changes and respond to them with our work. We’re not here to play an exhibition game, show off what we made years ago, and know that it’s great, a surefire win. We’re always getting ready to play the finale of a championship, aware that it could get ugly, feel terrible, and we might suffer a devastating debacle, but also we might win in a glorious fashion.

With writing, though, it’s more a matter of abandonment than of being done. But I appreciate my flawed and unfinished past writing and consider each piece a snapshot of myself at the time of abandonment. It’s all good.