• About the Work
• About the Artist
• Interview
• Responses

Trailer for Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation’s single-channel video The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Roebling Hall.

Interview: The Rufus Corporation and Stephanie Smith

Jeff Wood, actor and writer

SS: How were you involved in the creation of The Rape of the Sabine Women?

JW: As an actor and writer I had the pleasure of collaborating with Eve and the group at many stages of development, creation, and production: research, story and script development, location scouting, casting, improvisation and rehearsal direction, edit consultation.

Did you draw inspiration from the ancient myth and/or David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women? If so, how did these sources influence your work on this new piece?

In considering the fight and Intervention sequences, The Intervention of the Sabine Women was a visual reference point both in terms of what to render and what to abandon. The moment of Intervention itself was acknowledged and used as direct source material while the style of the conflict (or fight sequence) represented in the painting was reimagined entirely. This reimagining of physicality and style was then able to filter upstream into our approaches to character and relationship: we worked with internal states and group dynamics rather than explicitly individual character melodramas.

In building a character, and a set of internal conditions for this character, I relied heavily on the myth itself, acknowledging and internalizing the relevant archetypes, particularly as imagined in the protagonist (Romulus). The triangulation of power, guilt, and sorrow at work in the tragic archetype was a psychological set of conditions, a sort of map/state, that could be brought into improvisational play. The triangulation replicates as a virus, or disease: from internal seeds of desire, loneliness, sadness ,and discontent; to intimate or domestic social unrest and conflict; to massive group disorder, violence, and chaos.

Were any other sources particularly important to your process?

As in most creation processes, many, many sources were employed. In this case: wartime photography; concert/crowd/rally/riot footage (The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter; Triumph of the Will; the Kennedy assassinations. . .); 1960s fashion and design sources (Life magazine, for example); available texts concerning the myth of Romulus and Remus, the founding of Rome, and the myth of The Rape of the Sabine Women itself; 1960s new wave cinema; Greek folk music; cross-cultural communal experience; cigarette smoking; internal tempestuousness; sexual fervor; drunken hallucinations.

Is it useful to you to think of The Rape of the Sabine Womenas an adaptation?

Adapting the classical period content to an early Continental 1960s style and politic allowed in particular an exploration of gender roles and relationships at a very specific period of articulation and transition.

What did you find most compelling about the process of making The Rape of the Sabine Women?

The opportunity to work with a truly international cast and crew. To build a work out of the exploration of these cross-cultural relationships. To gain some intimacy with the landscape and unique personality of Greek culture. The utterly organic and DIY approach to what amounted to a pretty massive undertaking. The real and chaotic group experience of being on the ground, inhabiting locations and making work from scratch—making work out of this uncertain and undetermined group process itself. The channeling of primal, classical, and perennial archetypes and psychological conditions into a living and improvisational process grounded in the modern ideals of experimental theatre, cinema verité and new wave cinema. Functioning like a traveling circus, working, living, and sleeping on the ground (literally), on location, in unfurnished apartments, and within the shifting conditions of a low-budget film shoot without psychological safety nets outside the scope of the process itself—an absolutely immersive experience in which the end result could not have been less predetermined.

What do you find most important/exciting about the finished piece?

That the work is having a life and that it’s possible. That it’s possible to make mysterious and multidisciplinary work. That the work is alive and has a life reflecting the lives that went into it. The questions are asked, and more questions are found in the music and the pictures, the architecture and the faces. That cinematic, theatrical, and narrative vocabularies can still be engaged and challenged. That it’s possible to make cinematic works of fiction that integrate but extend beyond the dominant or homogenized cultural forms.

Is there anything else you’d like to say? (Favorite stories are welcome.)

The House: the domestic/house sequences were shot by staging improvisational performances that were shot in either a hand-held documentary style or with a fixed camera in the way that one might shoot a theatrical play. This demanding and exhausting improvisational shoot lasted four days for at least fifteen hours a day, from the time we got up until the time we collapsed late at night (or early in the morning) on cheap foam mattresses on the balcony, lawn, beach, and the floors of rooms in and around the house. In this way the entire shoot was very much inseparable from our lives during it.

During the Meat Market scenes a sudden and violent rain storm interrupted shooting by filling the market with a river of sewage and blood.

In Athens, the male actors naturally began behaving like a pack of dogs. Eventually, we were joined by stray dogs whom had not been accepted into other packs. They would wait for us after rehearsal and accompany us through the streets at night, following us to dinner and home, hoping to gain access to Rome.

Walter Sipser, actor

SS: How were you involved in the creation of The Rape of the Sabine Women?

I’m an actor in the piece.

Did you draw inspiration from the ancient myth and/or David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women? If so, how did these sources influence your work on this new piece?

We drew inspiration from both the myth and David’s painting but were attempting ultimately to create something transformative and not merely a reflection or interpretation of either of those sources. The myth provided a platform and the painting (among other works) served as a kind of reservoir of imagery to draw from.

Were any other sources particularly important to your process?

We watched The Rape of The Sabine Women (1961) starring Roger Moore. I watched Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, which I had never seen. Gimme Shelter directed by the Maysles brothers about the disastrous Altamont Free concert in 1969 was particularly inspirational. We read whatever material we could find relating to the myth, which helped illuminate some of the underlying psychology of the story.

What did you find most compelling about the process of making The Rape of the Sabine Women?

The fact that the work was, to a certain extent, evolving as we shot it gave me the feeling that almost anything could happen and therefore choices made as a performer had the potential to influence the direction and shape of the piece.

What do you find most important/exciting about the finished piece?

I find different shades of meaning each time I watch it. It allows for a wide variety of interpretation and is, I think, the kind of work that really invites completion by the viewer.