Wooster Group Research Articles

"Why Even Parody These Characters?": Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis

"Why Even Parody These Characters?": Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis

Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context

Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context

Under the Sign of The Mother

A key lesson of the Wooster Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s learning play The Mother concerns the meaning of ownership in capitalism. Unlike other businesses that moved into SoHo during the wave of deindustrialization that began in the late 1960s, the group of actors that owns a former metal stamping factory at 33 Wooster Street shows that their relationship towards their means of production is not only economic, but also ethical. This is at the foundation of their distinct theatrical aesthetics.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief by Lindsay Brandon Hunter

Reviewed by: Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief by Lindsay Brandon Hunter E. B. Hunter Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. By Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; pp. 192. As W. B. Worthen notes in his recent project to map the technicity of theatre, a great deal of contemporary scholarship tends to represent theatre "as engaged in a conflictual accommodation with the succession of performance-recording media: theatre/film, theatre/TV, theatre/digital media,"1 a characterization that does not reflect the inherent intermediality of theatrical practice. Although Worthen's project does not, of course, involve an analysis of campus politics, it is worth noting that the scholarly dichotomies he marks as erroneous could also describe the separations between departments of representational media on a great deal of campuses. In other words, courtesy appointments and exceptions aside, at the level of faculty, budget, and building allocation, theatre in academia has more often mirrored the dichotomies that characterize its scholarship than it has the intermediality of its practice. However, reorganization across these separations is becoming more common for degrees from BA/BFA through the PhD. Most recently, in 2021, UC Santa Cruz's Department of Theater Arts merged with the university's Art and Design: Games and Playable Media Program to become the Department of Performance, Play, and Design. And in 2020, Ohio State University combined its Department of Theatre with an interdisciplinary Film Studies program and a major in Moving-Image Production to become the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. A book review cannot outline the potential downsides, positive impacts, or unique circumstances that might attend such mergers. However, what can be accomplished here is a focus on one example of how the intermedial lines of inquiry likely to arise from these departmental reorganizations can manifest at the level of the field's key currency: the solo-authored monograph. Released in 2021 from Northwestern University Press, Lindsay Brandon Hunter's Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief illustrates how scholarship can thrive when theatre is considered with a broadly crossdisciplinary perspective. Given the aims and scope of Theatre Topics and the recent publication of other reviews that capably cover the book's core theoretical interventions,2 this review takes the opportunity to focus on how Playing Real might function pedagogically amid the field's recent departmental mergers. Playing Real draws together a wide spectrum of case studies, with chapters ranging from digitized conventional [End Page 112] theatre to born-digital contexts that Hunter marks as resoundingly theatricalized. Chapter 1 considers the 1964 Burton/Gielgud Electronovision Hamlet, as well as mid-2010s broadcasts from the National Theatre's NT Live and Royal Shakespeare Company's Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. Chapter 2 revisits the Electronovision Hamlet through an analysis of its legendary 2007 "reanimation" by the Wooster Group. The book then shifts from the theatrical to the theatricalized, with two chapters on various reality TV shows—those "mash-up[s] of artificial construction and supposedly authentic, spontaneous affect" (xxi). And Chapter 5 turns to alternate reality games (ARGs), which Hunter explains are "conducted across multiple media platforms . . . and employ real-world digital and material objects as artifacts that serve the games and their fantastic scenarios" (xxii). What ties together these disparate contexts, Hunter argues, is that each "has been decried as imperiling the real by setting up camp in a murky area in which the boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction are difficult to discern" (xv). It is in this "double artificiality of theatricality rendered through representational media" that she finds "a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief, including the playful reconfiguring of audience and participant relationships to qualities like sincerity, honesty, and genuineness" (ibid.). Graduate seminars or faculty reading groups might find in Playing Real a demonstration of situating seemingly far-flung case studies in one's home field and using the technical and theoretical vocabulary of that field to craft one overarching argument. In an undergraduate course, the book's inclusion of contemporary, populist case studies like reality TV and ARGs would invite students across majors—perhaps in a newly merged department—to think under the umbrella...

From Stage to Page: New Forms of the Performance Text

The paper deals with different forms of the performance text, still a new phenomenon in contemporary theatre, which requires new instruments for its analysis. The structural transformation of the written text into the performance, including the role of the spectator in it, confirms the fact that the performance text does not simply mean a new kind of the written text – and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather an essentially changed hypertext. Instead, the performance text could also be called an open text of the performance, in the sense that it requires spectators to become its active co-writers. Can we, therefore, define the performance text as a scenic écriture, collective writing, hypertext, stretch text, or even écriture corporelle? Furthermore, how can it be translated from stage to page to be preserved for future studies? The performance text is impossible without its author(s). Therefore, the paper deals with the performances of The Wooster Group, Motus, René Pollesch, Joris Lacoste, Milo Rau and Oliver Frljić, who are all constantly producing performance texts with their actors, without separating the process of writing from directing.

Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in the Wooster Group's The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" A Record Album Interpretation

This essay is a critical narrative of an experience of listening to the Wooster Group’s The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation (2017). The performance is a verbatim recitation of a 1965 ethnographic recording by Bruce Jackson of African American men toasting and singing works songs just before Texas prisons were desegregated. African American actors on stage hear the album through earpieces and re-perform songs and toasts in real time as the LP plays on a turntable visible (but mostly inaudible) to the audience. Their interpretation “transmits” the album to an audience. The essay, continuing that work of transduction, draws from the psychoanalytic notion of “free association” in order to think through the possibilities and limitations of listening across race and gender. It argues that association is a reciprocal way of listening and making theatre. It is also a way of working through history (recorded and unrecorded) in the face of intractable frameworks of racial antagonism in the United States. The essay assembles and “associates” photographs, songs, and excerpts of interviews with the show’s makers, as well as pairing concepts from the literature of listening and the archive of Black sonic performance.

Performing the Other: Post-Humanism and Mediatized Senses in The Wooster Group’s Production of The Room

The Wooster Group’s 2015 production of Harold Pinter’s The Room addresses the play’s neglected post-human elements. By juxtaposing trans-cultural media and simulacra, among other performance elements, the Wooster Group compelled spectators to engage with how, at the time of its original composition, Pinter raised questions of alterity, identity, and displacement as the United Kingdom was experiencing a demographic shift that challenged then-contemporary racist and masculinist definitions of the “human.” Additionally, The Wooster Group engaged with various aspects of post-humanism through embodied performance: the performers use prosthetic technologies to expose how characters express or fail to manifest agency, and incorporate various trans-cultural aesthetic sources as well as a strict and unconventionally literal adherence to the source text to underscore the distributed nature of selfhood. I suggest that these features of The Room can be brought to bear on more contemporary examples of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and classism and might be staged to speak to recent social movements, including Black Lives Matter.

Theatremachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context ed. by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi

Reviewed by: Theatremachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context ed. by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi Mischa Twitchin THEATREMACHINE: TADEUSZ KANTOR IN CONTEXT. Edited by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 342. After more than thirty years now since his death, the ambition of this collection of essays (in the words of one its coeditors) is "to reframe and reexamine Kantor's work in the critical context of contemporary theory and aesthetics, while reclaiming the critical and formal opportunities it offers" (xvi). One might pause to reflect on this "while," as it suggests an interesting caveat concerning the relation between the two aims—not least, with respect to a "critical" understanding of "context" in the book itself. What kinds of questions, after all, might the singularity of Kantor's work still provoke, not least as concerns the context of theatre studies? Although the tension between the critical and the aesthetic is perhaps endemic in theatre research, it becomes especially noticeable in light not only of Kantor's lifelong polemics but, more crucially, of the artistic and conceptual commitments that underlie them. Distinct from exploring Kantor's own sense of "context" (such as he attempted to define it himself in his manifestos and in his archive project, the Cricoteka), many of the essays here seem to want, rather, to apply some moral to Kantor's work—or draw one from it—whether this concerns, for example, art "after Auschwitz," ideas of the post-human, post-memory, or the Anthropocene. In this respect, the collection interestingly invites reflection on aspects of Kantor's reception today, of which it offers an important example of its own. The scope of the "contexts" in which Kantor's work is read here is indicated by the three editorial headings under which the essays are grouped: "in theory," "locally" (that is, in relation to Poland specifically, including its Jewish cultural legacies), and "globally." Besides new essays from scholars such as Hans-Thies Lehmann (addressing Kantor in respect of "post-dramatic tragedy") and Michal Kobialka (exploring the reality of "objects" in Kantor's theatre, distinct from the conventions of "props"), as well as valuable essays by each of the editors themselves, the collection includes translations of essays by many Polish researchers, which makes for a particular recommendation of the editors' work. Among these, Grzegorz Niziolek, for instance, evokes a sense of the "obscene" (48) in the relation (the "scandalous collision" [45]) between Kantor's theatre and history, specifically the Holocaust, within the postwar Polish context. Another key to the collection is the editors' invitation to their contributors to put Kantor into relation with other theatre artists, including (among others) Bausch, Tanguy, Perceval, and the Wooster Group, to propose international connections through which to consider his work anew. Insights are derived from attention to cultural contexts here, with Izumi Ashizawa's essay on "Kantor and Japan," for example, reflecting on the difference between the onstage role of the assistant in Noh theatre (koken), as distinct from the supporting character (waki) that Georges Banu famously suggested as a point of comparison for Kantor (233); and from Kris Salata's examination of the key notion of a "poor theatre" in an essay reviewing what is lost in the English translation of a distinction in Polish between biedny (in Kantor's use) and ubogi (in Grotowski's) (157). With respect to the context of theatre studies itself, however, it is interesting how rare are the moments where different essays offer, precisely, different (still less contradictory) refractions of the very question of "Kantor in context"—where the use of the singular in the book's subtitle (rather than "contexts") is perhaps already indicative. The sense that, as Katarzyna Fazan notes, "Kantor's actions provoke ambiguous interpretations" (190) is barely explored, and only the essay by Anna Burzynska offers the explicit caveat "that there is actually no such thing as one 'theatre of Tadeusz Kantor,' an easily defined, unchanging monolith" (255). While, no doubt, all of the contributors would agree with this, such awareness is belied by the recurring assertion of themes, often caught up in a critical will to identify "influences," whether that of Kantor on others or, more...

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

Teknologien som medspiller

Under the heading »The technology as participant« Tranholm discusses the role of technology in The Wooster Group’s work with Hamlet (2007). She argues that the juxtaposition of the technological and the living sets off a critical reflection on the production of meaning and images in the performance

Covid Conversations 3: Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk

Elizabeth LeCompte co-founded The Wooster Group with like-minded pioneers in New York in 1975, leading and directing its collaborators as deaths, departures, and new arrivals have changed its composition and emphases over the decades, segueing into a world-wide uncertain present. Kate Valk joined in 1978, the last representative of The Wooster Group’s foundational period, apart from LeCompte herself, who is still a key member of the company. References in this conversation are primarily to works after 2016. LeCompte briefly remarks on the importance of Since I Can Remember – one of the Group’s ongoing works in progress in 2021 – as an archival project that draws on Valk’s memory of how Nayatt School was made during her formative years. Having become, since then, a quintessential Wooster Group performer, Valk extended her artistic skills to stage direction, undertaking, most recently, The B-Side (2017). Both the initiative and idea for the piece came from performer Eric Berryman, who had brought Valk the collection of blues, songs, spirituals, and preachings on the 1965 LP made from the research of scholar folklorist Bruce Chapman. Berryman had been inspired to approach Valk because of her exclusive use of unadulterated historical recordings in Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), her directorial debut. The main work in rehearsal during 2020 and which was still locked down by the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of this conversation is The Mother, a Wooster Group variant of Brecht’s dramatized version of Gorky’s novel, directed by LeCompte. LeCompte discusses the current situation, emphasizing the increased vulnerability of independent artists and small-scale theatre, while giving a glimpse of the disadvantages for such groupings built into the North American system of project funding. The Wooster Group is a salient example of small-scale theatre that, despite continually precarious conditions, which the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated, has achieved its creative goals and has defined its place in the exploratory avant-garde flourishing vigorously in the 1960s and 1970s. This particular avant-garde, LeCompte believes, has seen various important developments over the years but might well now be counting its last days. The conversation here presented was recorded on 31 October 2020, transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and edited by Maria Shevtsova, Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Conjuring Abolition Phonography in A Record Album Interpretation

The Wooster Group’s 2017 The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation has three actors reanimate a 1965 vinyl LP of prison work songs. This formally simple production embeds a series of almost imperceptible shifts between past and present, thus “interinanimating” the men on the record and the men onstage, conjuring an “abolition phonography”: a mode of sensory (dis)formation that short-circuits the racial ideologies of the senses and points towards a collective future.

America’s Postsecular Stages

Dana Tanner-Kennedy stakes a claim for an unacknowledged category of contemporary American theater: postsecular theater. She argues that religious belief becomes a matter of choice in a postsecular era that struggles between post-truth reality and transcendental belief. Through in-depth readings of contemporary plays and performances—such as Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, Stew’s Passing Strange, and the Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals—Tanner-Kennedy suggests that these works rescript existing religious values and counter the historic secularity of the American dramatic canon since modernism. She advocates for a renewed emphasis on “religious literacy” in education so that academics and critics may better understand these works and their successors.

Performer l’archive, archiver la performance : archiviologie du Wooster Group

To what extent does contemporary performance contribute to the archiving process? The theatrical deconstruction carried out by the experimental Wooster Group underlines the archiving process on stage. The embodiment of temporal strata (past, present, future) stages a multimedia archiving performance of the New York avant-garde. However, the Wooster Group’s intermedial experimentations with digital archives raise questions about the limits of their art.

Gertrude Stein and the Metaphysical Avant-Garde

When American metaphysical religion appears onstage, it most often manifests in the subject matter and dramaturgies of experimental theater. In the artistic ferment of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, theater-makers looked both to alternative dramaturgies and alternative religions to create radical works of political, social, and spiritual transformation. While the ritual experiments of European avant-garde artists like Artaud and Grotowski informed their work, American theater-makers also found inspiration in the dramas of Gertrude Stein, and many of these companies (the Living Theatre and the Wooster Group, most notably) either staged her work or claimed a direct influence (like Richard Foreman). Stein herself, though not a practitioner of metaphysical religion, spent formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe under the tutelage of William James. Cambridge, at the turn of the twentieth century, was a hotbed of spiritualism, theosophy, alternative healing modalities, and James, in addition to running the psychology lab in which Stein studied, ran a multitude of investigations on extrasensory and paranormal phenomena. This article traces a web of associations connecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, and liberal Protestantism to Gertrude Stein and landscape dramaturgy to the midcentury avant-garde, the countercultural religious seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Off-Off-Broadway movement.

Postdramatic Theatre and Form ed. by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf

Reviewed by: Postdramatic Theatre and Form ed. by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf Dean Wilcox POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE AND FORM. Edited by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf. Methuen Drama Engage series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019; pp. 280. In the twenty years since Hans-Thies Lehmann gathered the disparate work of artists like Robert Wilson, Sarah Kane, the Wooster Group, and Tadeusz Kantor under the banner of "postdramatic theatre," the term has been applied to an ever-increasing assortment of works, artists, and disciplines. Much like Martin Esslin's "Theatre of the Absurd," Lehmann's moniker has taken on a life of its own. This volume seeks to problematize the term by reflecting on its various uses and abuses, and in many cases offering theoretical connections at which Lehmann's work only hints. The volume opens by exploring form as it pertains to performance in opposition to literary analysis. The editors are careful to note that this focus has often undercut concentration on social issues such as feminism, race, gender, and economics. Addressing these concerns, the work is divided into two parts, "Formal Aspects" and "Social Formations." In many respects, this volume can be considered a dialogue with Lehmann's approach, particularly stemming from the influence of his mentor, Peter Szondi. Wisely, Elinor Fuchs offers both a historical overview and a critique of the evolutionary tropes employed by Szondi and absorbed by Lehmann. Fuchs interrogates these critics over the use of a tripartite Hegelian structure in which "[t]he third, 'post' phase for Szondi abandons the classic shape of the pattern, and suggests decay, while the 'post' phase for Lehmann suggests a liberation, and even [End Page 267] a starting over" (27). In an attempt to avoid this culde-sac, Fuchs proposes two divergent categories: "drama," forged from the dialogic tradition; and "performance," which owes a debt to the avantgarde. In the latter, the performative aspects take precedence over literary and textual elements, creating a separate tradition rather than an evolution of a singular form. Fuchs's articulation of this division provides the framework for the text as a whole, which deals with Lehmann's characterization of the postdramatic "rather ambiguously as both a rupture with and a continuation of traditional drama" (33). Throughout, key elements of Lehmann's definition, such as narration, self-reflexivity, fragmentation, disruption of presence, and a shared space between performer and audience, reoccur as iterative themes as well as points of contention. These ideas are challenged on the basis not of validity but rather of the limitations of Lehmann's scope in defining them. Each author addresses one or more of these concepts and broadens the extent to which they can be applied and assessed. Emphasis is given to discussions of alternative spaces, festivals, state-supported theatres, contemporary dance, the Lacanian real, and dementia as devising strategies. Grappling with the limits of Lehmann, most authors employ alternative strategies for analysis located, for example, in the notion of the palimpsest via explorations of specific directing processes and texts; in pastiche, such as in the relatively new form of "concept-dance," in which critical distance and self-reflective practice inform the performance of quoted dance material where "the process of remembering in itself is considered a performative process" (165); and in "broader geographic and political economic forces beyond artist control" (50). "Formal Aspects" tackles the elements discussed by Lehmann in his section on aspects: text, space, time, body, and media. Each is addressed by an individual author in a "chapter" rather than an "essay," a clever approach maintained throughout that allows the volume to articulate a whole built from fragments. Even so, each essay requires a perpetual adjustment to a new voice, complete with a different perspective and theoretical position, and in some cases the chapters read like slices of larger arguments. As a result and to its benefit, the work appears like a multifaceted object, in which each surface allows a different vantage point. "Social Formations" offers inquiry into the avantgarde and the postdramatic within the context of festival performances, Lehmann's notion of the "real" filtered through Lacan, "l'ecriture de plateau" or "set writing" in contemporary French theatre, concept...

The Force that Sustains

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.

Theatricality and Absorption

How might theatricality and absorption, key terms of Michael Fried’s (1998 [1967]) Art and Objecthood, be repurposed in relation to developments in theatre practice and politics? Fried is concerned that theatricality is a problem for painting and sculpture, which should instead absorb the spectator into transcendence. Fried writes during a transition between modernist abstract expressionism and minimalism, approaches to visual art that he describes as respectively absorbing or distancing the spectator. Although Fried writes of painting and sculpture, his discourse has crucial implications for theatre. Soon after Art and Objecthood, The Wooster Group and Robert Wilson draw on a healthy context of anti-theatrical theatre as well as performance and visual art to develop new aesthetics. Rigorously analysing theatre practice rather than painting and sculpture alone reveals the paradoxical complexity of how theatricality and absorption are interrelated processes. The aesthetic analysis is here originally underpinned by a politics of representation in relation to more recent thinking concerning neurodiversity, ecology, racism and capitalist mediation. These four principles guide the politics of representation that create the conditions for theatricality and absorption. Following a brief reading of Art and Objecthood, analysis of practice by The Wooster Group and Robert Wilson provides insight into theatricality and absorption and their politics of representation. The intersections of aesthetic and political processes proliferate in such a way that requires a paradoxical appreciation of their different and changing systems. The significance of such insight is that theatricality and absorption operate interdependently in relation to political structures.