The Wooster Group

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The Wooster Group is an American post-dramatic theater group based in New York district of Soho . Her name comes from the address of her own venue, Performing Garage 33, Wooster Street, Soho, New York City. Since the group was founded in 1975, all of the group's theater productions have been made there.

effect

The Wooster Group is considered to be the most influential theater group of the 70s, 80s and 90s, as a pioneer of post-dramatic theater and as a pioneer of a theater of deconstruction that does not focus on its interpretation of a statement of the text, but on the implementation of the text broken in the Practicing current reading, i.e. generating a new, own performance text based on the text, instead of trying to serve the template true to the work. This often happens through the combination of different material levels, whereby the performance act is emancipated from the individual materials and the viewer is encouraged to say goodbye to the expectation of a "simple", conclusive interpretation of the piece and as the producer of "his" perception of the To experience staging. In doing so, they became early heroes and pioneers of a post-dramatic theater ( Hans-Thies Lehmann ), which develops the process of performance in an ironic and critical distance to its literary model, or completely emancipates itself from it. Many of the group's often award-winning productions have been invited to guest performances around the world - in Germany mostly at the Frankfurt Theater am Turm under the direction of Tom Stromberg and at the Berlin Hebbel Theater or its successor Hebbel am Ufer .

In particular, the Wooster Group was a style -shaping and pioneer in the use of video technology on the stage, always looking for contemporary forms of stage action and set design that challenged the audience to review their viewing habits and expectations and to play with them themselves. Pieces of the Wooster Group are often montages of different aesthetic levels and elements in which dance, video, film, soundtrack and architecture and above all an immense spectrum of often cited acting genres - from traditional Japanese acting techniques to movement and language culture of Afro-American culture to Hollywood style of the prominent members Ron Vawter and Willem Dafoe condense into often very complex systems of symbols.

Since the line-ups of the plays fluctuate greatly, one cannot speak of a classical theater ensemble , but rather of an association of artists who have the cohesion and the resources for the creation of the pioneering theater productions under the label "The Wooster Group" despite the allows comparatively adverse US public funding for theater. The list of artists who have worked with the group is long - including Laurie Anderson , John Malkovich , John Lurie , Steve Buscemi , John Jesurun and LeCompte's teacher Richard Foreman .

In addition to the fifteen theater productions up to 2006, a number of independent works in the fields of film , radio play and dance theater were created . The Wooster Group has influenced entire generations of European artists and theater groups - especially Jan Fabre , Jan Lauwers and his Needcompany , Peter Sellars , Robert Lepage , William Forsythe , BAK Truppen , Frank Castorf , René Pollesch , Forced Entertainment , Rimini Protokoll , Nicolas Stemann , the Big Art Group and the Toihaus Theater Salzburg .

history

The group emerged from The Performance Group (TPG) , an ensemble founded in 1967 under the direction of Richard Schechner . After the break with Schechner (1980), Jim Clayburgh , Spalding Gray (1941-2004), and Elizabeth LeCompte continued their work under a new group name at the same venue. Meanwhile, the Wooster Group names 1975 as the official founding year (the year LeCompte was first directed) and as founding members alongside Clayburgh, Gray and LeCompte Peyton Smith , Kate Valk , as well as the actor Ron Vawter (1948-1994, now well-known from US films) ) and Willem Dafoe , LeCompte's long-time partner.

The vehicle of emancipation from Schechner's style of leadership, which was initially inspired by the 1968 movement, but soon became strongly patriarchal, was the trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island (1975–1979) by Spalding Gray, directed by LeCompte. The most important elements of the Wooster Group aesthetic already came together in this first major achievement: actors who do not appear in a role, but initially as themselves and not in the role, but mostly play with it; Image generation technology instead of just images on the stage; Video projections that do not function as recordings but as actors; a 'stage on stage' in the form of a scaffolding that forms the structure of a simple house; and finally the associative, deconstructivist use of text templates such as O'Neill's One Long Day's Journey into the Night . Ritsaert ten Cate , the founder and longstanding director of the Felix Meritis Theater in Amsterdam, helped the Wooster Group gain fame and guest performances in Europe early on, which made it possible to finance the group's theater work for the first few decades. Only with the increasing fame of Ron Vawter and Willem Dafoe as film actors did interest in the work also increase in New York and the USA.

The projects Route 1 & 9 (1981) and LSD (… Just The High Points…) (1984) establish the group's worldwide fame. In Route 1 & 9 , the continuously white performers appear with black make-up and play scenes from the third act of Thornton Wilder's Our Little City , which rather creates a serene idyll of white small-town life - albeit in the ideolect of the vaudeville shows and the African-American ones The population of Harlem and Queens , white country life and black counterculture clashed in clichés of their symbolic worlds, without a clear message having been conveyed. LSD - just the high points (1984) condensed a recourse to the orgy theater of the Performance Group of the founding years and, in the manner of the orgiastic-pacifist The Living Theater, ironically dealt with the writings of Timothy Leary , William S. Burroughs and Arthur Miller . Miller's legal action against the fact that passages from his drama Witch Hunt were used and the reaction of the Wooster Group to no longer reproduce these passages literally, but in a specially developed artificial language, also helped the group to become better known in the USA.

As an outstanding masterpiece so far, Brace Up! valued (1991, second version 2003) - a production based on Chekhov's Three Sisters , in which the actors play a Japanese Gaia-nin group that wants to introduce Chekhov's play to US tourists instead of its traditional material.

Quoting different styles of acting is always an element in the productions of the Wooster Group. Her staging of William Shakespeare's Hamlet (2006) with Scott Sheperd in the title role is an outstanding example of the procedures of copy art in the theater and of the high level on which the Wooster Group's productions operate conceptually: the drama itself was not directly used as a model , but the famous recording of the Broadway production with Richard Burton from 1964. This recording can be seen in heavily edited form as a background projection, while the actors of the Wooster Group play and speak exactly the same as the actors in the original with the highest technical perfection. The relationships between the three originals (Shakespeare, Broadway, Wooster Group) became the scope of the staging, because almost always all three are active with changing weightings. For example, the Broadway recording, which is quite unrelated to verse, was cut by the Wooster Group in such a way that the verses are again spoken in Shakespeare's meter. This created a volatility on the image level, which the actors play along with (copied) just as virtuously as all camera movements in relation to the viewer (if the actor is close in the film, is he at the front of the stage in the Wooster Group, etc. .). In an elaborate process, the Wooster Group also removed entire characters from the original film, so that the empty Broadway stage set is often seen or only some of the actors or only parts of their bodies, while the camera movements and soundtrack remain unaffected.

Theater productions

  • Sakonnet Point (1975, Three Places In Rhode Island, Part 1)
  • Rumstick Road (1977, Three Places In Rhode Island, Part 2)
  • Nayatt Shool (1978, Three Places In Rhode Island, Part 3)
  • Point Judith (an epilog) (1979)
  • Sex & Death To The Age 14 (1979, monologue by Spalding Gray)
  • India & After (America) (1979, monologue by Spalding Gray)
  • Booze, Cars & College Girls (1979, monologue by Spalding Gray)
  • Route 1 & 9 (1981)
  • Hula (1981) & For The Good Times (1982, two dance pieces)
  • LSD (... Just The High Points ...) (1984)
  • North Atlantic (1984/1999)
  • Miss Universal Happiness (1985, commissioned writer and director: Richard Foreman )
  • Frank Dell's The Temptation Of St. Antony (1985/86)
  • Symphony Of Rats (1988, commissioned by and directed by Richard Foreman)
  • Brace Up! (1991/2003, based on Chekhov's Three Sisters )
  • Emperor Jones (1993/2006, based on the eponymous drama by Eugene O'Neill )
  • Fish Story (1994)
  • The Hairy Ape (1995, based on the eponymous drama by Eugene O'Neill)
  • House / Lights (1999/2004)
  • To You, The Birdie! ( Phèdre ) (2002, after Jean Racine )
  • Poor Theater (2004)
  • Hamlet (2006)
  • La Didone (2007)

Audio pieces

  • The Emperor Jones (BBC Radio 3, 1998)
  • Racine's Phèdre (BBC Radio 3, 2000)
  • The Peggy Carstairs Report (BBC Radio 3, 2002)

literature

  • David Savran: Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. Reprint . New York: Theater Communications Group, 1990. ISBN 0-930452-82-8 .
  • Johan Callens (Ed.): The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2004. ISBN 90-5201-270-9 . (Contains contributions by Johan Callens, David Savran, Michael Vanden Heuvel, Greg Giesekam, Philip Auslander, Bonnie Marranca, Markus Wessendorf, Simon Jones, Roger Bechtel, Gerald Siegmund , Branislav Jakovljevic, Ric Knowles, Frédéric Maurin, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Julie Bleha, Ehren Fordyce and Daniel Mufson.)
  • Andrew Quick: The Wooster Group Work Book . Routledge, New York / London 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-35334-2 (English, 287 pages).

Web links