Elizabeth LeCompte | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 28, 1944 New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Director |
| Partner | Willem Dafoe (1977–2004) |
| Children | 1 |
Elizabeth LeCompte (born April 28, 1944) is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s. [1]
LeCompte was born and grew up in New Jersey. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Fine Arts from Skidmore College. She met director and actor Willem Dafoe at The Performance Group and began a professional and personal relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982. [2] [3] [4]
With The Wooster Group, she has composed, designed, and directed over forty works for theater, dance, film and video, starting with Sakonnet Point in 1975. These works characteristically interweave performance with multimedia technologies and are strongly influenced by historical and contemporary visual arts and architecture. She is known both for taking apart and reworking classics such as Hamlet , The Emperor Jones , and The Hairy Ape as well as constructing new works from scratch.
Prior to her work with The Wooster Group, she was a member of the experimental theater company The Performance Group from 1970 to 1975. Subsequently, LeCompte and Spalding Gray founded The Wooster Group, along with Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter. For her work with these groups, LeCompte was included in Mitter and Shevtsova's 2004 volume discussing 50 influential theater directors around the world. [1] Other writers consistently include her in the lineage of experimental theater artists that passes through Meyerhold and Grotowski to the present generation of "postdramatic" theater makers. [5] [6] As a New Yorker writer put it: "Luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde—Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter Sellars among them—describe her as first among equals". [7]
LeCompte has lectured and taught at American University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, Connecticut College, the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Northeastern University, the O’Neill Center, Smith College, the University of London, and the Yale School of Drama. In 2018, The New York Times critics ranked House/Lights the 16th greatest American play since Angels in America . [8]
Among her honors, LeCompte has received the National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater, the MacArthur Fellowship, [9] the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Cultural Ministry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, [10] a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, [11] a United States Artists Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, [12] the Theater Practitioner Award from Theatre Communications Group, [13] The Skowhegan Medal for Performance, a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Performance Artist Award [14] and honorary doctorates from the New School for Social Research and the California Institute of the Arts. She was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. She won the 2016 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. [15]
In 1977 LeCompte began a relationship with actor Willem Dafoe. They never married and ended their relationship in 2004 after 27 years. The couple have one son, Jack. [16]
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
Spalding Gray was an American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He is best known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for his film adaptations of these works, beginning in 1987. He wrote and starred in several, working with different directors.
William James "Willem" Dafoe is an American actor. Known for his diverse roles in film, he is the recipient of various accolades, including the Volpi Cup for Best Actor as well as nominations for four Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, and four Golden Globe Awards. He has frequently collaborated with filmmakers Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, Lars von Trier, Julian Schnabel, Wes Anderson, Robert Eggers and Yorgos Lanthimos.
The Wooster Group is a New York City-based experimental theater company known for creating numerous original dramatic works. It gradually emerged from Richard Schechner's The Performance Group (1967–1980) during the period from 1975 to 1980, and took its name in 1980; the independent productions of 1975–1980 are retroactively attributed to the Group.
Maura Therese Tierney is an American actress. She is best known for her roles as Lisa Miller on the sitcom NewsRadio (1995–1999), Abby Lockhart on the medical drama ER (1999–2009), and Helen Solloway on the mystery drama The Affair (2014–2019), the last of which won her a Golden Globe Award.
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
The Flea Theater is a theater in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It presents primarily experimental theatre by Black, brown, and queer artists, as well as a venue for film stars to act on a 74-seat stage. The theater was founded in 1996 by Jim Simpson, Sigourney Weaver, Mac Wellman, and Kyle Chepulis. The Flea earned early acclaim for original productions of post-9-11 play The Guys and political works by A. R. Gurney. According to the New York Times, "Since its inception in 1996, The Flea has presented over 100 plays and numerous dance and live music performances. Under Artistic Director Jim Simpson and Producing Director Carol Ostrow, The Flea is one of New York’s leading off-off-Broadway companies."
Ron Vawter was an American actor and a founding member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. Vawter performed in most of the group's works until his death from a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 45.
Kate Valk is a founding member of The Wooster Group, a collective of artists who make new work for the theater. Kate Valk began her work with the group in 1979 while she was a student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
The Performance Group (TPG) was an experimental theater troupe that Richard Schechner founded in 1967 in New York City. TPG's home base was the Performing Garage in the SoHo district of Lower Manhattan. After 1975, tensions led to Schechner's resignation in 1980. The troupe reinvented itself as The Wooster Group under the leadership of director and theatre artist Elizabeth LeCompte.
John McDowell Wellman, is an American playwrighter, author, and poet. He is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. In 1990, he received an Obie Award for Best New American Play. In 1991, he received another Obie Award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, and the 2003 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2003).
Supafloss, an American comedy rap duo, was created in 2000 in Los Angeles by actors Michael Rivkin and Kirk Ward. They were discovered by the band Tenacious D, and have since opened for Tenacious D at a variety of venues such as the House of Blues, The Viper Room and more recently The Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and Madison Square Garden in New York. Supafloss has also opened for the popular band Ozomatli at the House of Blues.
Non-Aristotelian drama, or the 'epic form' of the drama, is a kind of play whose dramaturgical structure departs from the features of classical tragedy in favour of the features of the epic, as defined in each case by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics
The notion of postdramatic theatre was established by German theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre, summarising a number of tendencies and stylistic traits occurring in avant-garde theatre since the end of the 1960s. The theatre which Lehmann calls postdramatic is not primarily focused on the drama in itself, but evolves a performative aesthetic in which the text of the performance is put in a special relation to the material situation of the performance and the stage. The postdramatic theatre attempts to mimic the unassembled and unorganized literature that a playwright sketches in the novel.
The Performing Garage is an Off-Off-Broadway theater in SoHo, New York City. Established in 1968, it is the permanent home of the experimental theater company originally named The Performance Group that morphed in 1980 into The Wooster Group, and their primary performance venue.
"Speculations: An Essay on the Theater" is a treatise by experimental playwright Mac Wellman. It was published with the collection of plays entitled The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. It is also available, with additional material not included in the book, on Wellman's website.
Back to Back Theatre is an Australian theater company that engages with disabilities on stage. The company is based in Geelong, Victoria creating its work nationally and touring around the world. The work produced by the company explores questions about politics, ethics, and philosophy in humanity.
David Savran is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century theatre, music theatre, US theatre, popular culture, gender studies, and social theory. He is a Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Zbigniew Bzymek is a filmmaker, experimental theatre and music video artist who lives and works in New York City. He is best known for his film Utopians, which premiered at The 61st Berlin International Film Festival and for winning the Grand Prix at the 31st Rencontres Henri Langlois. He has been called "a young filmmaker to follow" by Stéphane Delorme in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. In theatre, he has worked with Krystian Lupa and Elizabeth LeCompte and has been a longtime member of The Wooster Group.
Willem Dafoe is an American actor known for his work in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Platoon (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Flight of the Intruder (1991), Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), The Boondock Saints (1999), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Spider-Man (2002), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Manderlay (2005), Antichrist (2009), The Florida Project (2017), At Eternity's Gate (2018), The Lighthouse (2019), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Poor Things (2023).
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