Discussion

Tribute to Roy Walford

Judith Malina

It is the visionary who inspires the world to change.

There are only a few of these in every generation and Roy

Walford is one of the long line of such explorers who,

throughout history, have taken us from where we were to

where we are yet to be.

Roy Walford is a futurist. Where most of us seek a little

light for the next steps, he leaps into the unknown, into the

realm of undiscovered territory, a next dimension, a second

biosphere…and a challenge to the inevitability of death.

The Living Theatre, an experimental group that has for

more than 50 years sought to expand and deepen the formal

and philosophical aspects of the theatre, has been privileged

to enjoy Roy’s friendship and collaboration.

He has encouraged us in our many talks and discussions,

as well as in his writings, to seek radical solutions, to

challenge conventional assumptions and to explore the

limits of possibility.

Roy spent time with us in Italy 20-odd years ago, when

Hanon Reznikov was working with our company on

The Yellow Methuselah, a poetic vision of the possibilities

of life extension inspired by G.B. Shaw and Kandinsky.

Roy educated us on the scientific foundations of the subject

and encouraged us to pursue the idea ‘as far as the mind can

reach.’

When The Living Theatre was arrested in Brazil in

1971 on charges of subversion during the military dictator-

ship—we had performed anti-authoritarian plays in the

streets in the context of a restricted and censored cultural

situation—we asked our friends around the world to speak

out in dramatic terms against both our imprisonment and the

oppression of the Brazilian people. Roy found himself in the

heart of Africa at the time, experimenting with the body

temperatures of certain species of fish, with a view toward

understanding the possibilities of increasing life span.

How could he dramatize our plea? In the tradition of

protest theater, he placed a can of Brazilian coffee in the

center of the village square and walked around it with sign

explaining to everybody the principles of free expression

and its risks. Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator would have

heartily approved. He was not one to find any situation

beyond the grasp of his profound human ingenuity.

In The Living Theatre we like to say that, according to

Piscator and Brecht, everything must be theater. That is, all

our actions and words and research must take on the

heightened quality of attention and intensity and

truthfulness that the theatrical moment entails. Roy

Walford’s life is an example of a life lived always on the

level of art, the high level of the highest awareness.

What could be, from, let us say, a Piscatorian position on

the forms and content of political theater, what could be

more acutely relevant to the world’s most pressing problems

than the magnificent spectacle of Biosphere 2? The world

watched a group of experimenters create a world within the

world, to instruct us on what is needed, or what will be

needed if our atmosphere fails us—among the thousand

lessons that their courageous explorations taught us.

The settings, the discipline, the study, the recording of

each event, even the struggle for survival, even the times

of despair and conflict are part of a great drama the results of

which are still being tallied. Roy’s commitment and depth

of participation in this epic work is immeasurable, and we

may be glad that he has spent so much of his valuable

energy in recording and analysing that important drama.

Our politics have been a particular binding force.

The Living Theatre has considered itself an affinity group

from its beginnings in the 1940s, when the invention and

development of new forms was written into its earliest

statements. And among its sponsors and advisers were some

of the best and wisest in the world of the arts.

But from Roy Walford, the acuteness of the scientific

mind and its demanding precision has disciplined our work,

has demanded a strict form to leaven the wild leaps of our

imagination and simultaneously, in the most elegant of

paradoxes, demanded wild leaps of our imagination to

explode or extend the strict forms.

0531-5565/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.03.010

Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 911

www.elsevier.com/locate/expgero

E-mail address: hreznikov@aol.com (J. Malina).