The Force that Sustains

Abstract

The Wooster Group performers create intermedial works by copying other performers on film through the aid of the monitors that are situated around them and the in-ear receivers they wear. The Wooster Group calls their 2003 production Poor Theatre ‘a series of simulacra’ – a copy without an original. Indeed, The Wooster Group performers are not really copying other performers. What they are looking at are recordings of performers that are transferred then flipped in reverse on the screen. Their scores are copies without originals. Even though the performers often use the word ‘copy’ in describing their technique, what they are trying to achieve is not an exact copy but to capture the soul of the performances; they inhabit the essences of the images they copy. To clarify, I am suggesting that, for example, when The Wooster Group performer Kate Valk copies Rena Mirecka as she sees her image and hears her voice in a video of Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis, she incorporates Mirecka’s body into her sensorium. The Wooster Group method is more than a technique for building scores, rehearsing, and performing. The company’s works are not mere representations; the performers acquire the power of the copied material to build a “relationship of perceptual, direct, ‘live’ communion”(Grotowski 2002:19) with the spectators; that is, the unique quality and “aura”(Benjamin 1968) of live performance that will resist its obsolescence in this age of mass production. In their work, theatricality becomes a force that enables a new kind of live performance, one that differentiates it from all of the other arts. I also argue that by involving digital media to achieve such heightened theatricality, The Wooster Group complicates the meaning of live, archival, and memory.