In Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy Head!, Foreman used his actors gesturally. Although the actors had very few lines, they were deliberately blocked. One of the principle actions of the blocking had the actors point repeatedly at different objects on the stage. This pointing, like the sight lines, had everything to do with the viewer’s vision, and the way the eyes direct and shape attention. Likewise, this blocking found a way to have the audience attend actions “off-stage”—a politics of war (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) far away, and yet brought home by the fact of certain props, such as a fighter plane hanging from the ceiling, and the occasional sound of ammunition rounds in the soundtrack. While the fighter plane waged its war in the “sky” of the Ontological Hysterical Theater’s black box theater, Foreman’s actors pointed at twin video projections on the back wall of the theater, negotiating pre-recorded actions and text with actions and text in “real time.”

Throughout Foreman’s Q&A, the director used numerous metaphors to describe his process, likening it to a musical composition, whereby different elements or themes find themselves “woven” within a “compositional field”. He also spoke of his texts in terms of “resonance”. To use text as sparsely as his theater tends to nowadays (Foreman was more “line” based in his earlier works) is to build upon words, phrases, and sentences that have a certain gravity and therefore produce echoes, bordered by long silences in the “script,” as well as among sound and visual media events. However, Foreman admitted to having “the story in his head” all the while he is directing. This holding the narrative in his head is different than actually narrating, where narration proper risks providing a work that can merely be understood, and therefore not felt or experienced as something occurring—a “happening” or event dynamic. The consequences of Foreman’s theater, in this way, are to open a space for events as they nourish the imagination and consciousness as forms of thinking.

In Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land, theater is a physiological experience as much as a psychological and intellectual one. In fact, Foreman, more than almost any artist I am aware of, closes a crucial gap between the “physical” and “intellectual” through a synaesthesiac blending of multi media elements (video mainly), lighting (flashing bulbs embedded in the video projection screens and bright intermittent stage lights), and soundtrack (machine-gun-like sounds, orchestral and “trancy” music, and text spoken by actors on video). Through this particular synaesthesia, Foreman does not so much build upon narrative attentions, as bodily and phenomenological states. At moments I found myself actually going into “trance,” or a state I imagined to be that of trance. It was not so much as if I was dreaming, as that I could feel acutely my attention wandering. When I had finally succumbed to this more general state of attention, bright stage lights would come on, or synthesized artillery-fire would issue in the soundtrack, bringing me back to a more focused attention.