Experimental theatre began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical.
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Theatre of the Ridiculous is a theatrical genre that began in New York City in the 1960s.
New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) is an Off-Broadway theatre noted for its productions of new works. Located at 79 East 4th Street between Second Avenue and Bowery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it houses a 198-seat theatre for its mainstage productions, and a 75-seat black box theatre for staged readings and developing work in the building next door, at 83 East 4th Street.
Gary William Friedman is an American musical theatre, symphonic, film and television composer. His career began in the 1960s in New York City as a saxophonist in an improvisational ensemble and as a composer for experimental theater. Friedman's 1970 musical, The Me Nobody Knows opened Off-Broadway and won the Obie Award for Best Music of a Musical before moving to Broadway and earning five Tony Award nominations. Friedman has also composed scores for numerous American films and television series such as PBS's children's television series, The Electric Company. His orchestral and operatic compositions have been commissioned by festivals and venues including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Ping Chong is an American contemporary theater director, choreographer, video and installation artist. He was born in Toronto and raised in the Chinatown section of New York City. Chong is internationally recognized as a director, and a creator of interdisciplinary theater work. He is an early pioneer of interdisciplinary theater and the integration of media into it. Chong is considered a seminal figure in Asian American theater and the Asian American arts movement.
Dixon Place is a theater organization located in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
The Talking Band is an American Off-Off-Broadway theatre company specializing in experimental theatre, based in New York City, New York.
George Coates is an American theatre director most notable for his work with George Coates Performance Works (GCPW), which he founded in 1977 in San Francisco, CA. The company produced over 20 multi-media live performances over a span of 25 years, winning a multitude of awards for its international performances, earning critical acclaim in Asia, Europe and South America and gaining North American attention at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. In the 1990s, he was the first to merge live performers within stage environments created by computer generated graphics in real time live theatre. Coates became known as a pioneer of experimental live theatre using stereographic projections and 3-D glasses populated by live actors and musicians.
Harvey Lichtenstein was an American arts administrator. He is best known for his 32-year tenure (1967–99) as president and executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, or BAM, as it became known under his leadership. He led the institution to a renaissance, championing contemporary performance, establishing the Next Wave Festival, and providing a vital venue for dance, theater, music, and collaborations that bridged disciplines. The long list of artists who came to perform on BAM's stages under Lichtenstein's purview reads like a Who's Who of 20th-century performance, and includes Laurie Anderson, Pina Bausch, Peter Brook, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Jerzy Grotowski, Mark Morris, Steve Reich, Twyla Tharp, and Robert Wilson. When Lichtenstein retired, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation made the decision to honor his considerable accomplishments by foregoing its own naming rights and dedicating the BAM Harvey Theater in his honor.
The Margolis Brown Adaptors Company (MBAC) is an internationally touring physical theatre company that also houses the Margolis Method Training Center now located in Highland, New York. It was established in New York City in 1984 by Kari Margolis and Tony Brown. As co-artistic directors, Margolis and Brown have thus far co-authored, directed, and sometimes performed in 16 full-length theatrical productions, as well as numerous site-specific works at such places as the Brooklyn Museum, Coney Island, and the historic John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge on the Delaware River.
Asian American theatre is theatre written, directed or acted by Asian Americans. From initial efforts by four theatre companies in the 1960s, Asian-American theatre has grown to around forty groups today. Early productions often had Asian themes or settings; "yellowface" was a common medium for displaying the perceived exoticism of the East in American performance. With the growing establishment of second-generation Asian-Americans in the 21st century, it is becoming more common today to see Asian-Americans in roles that defy historical stereotypes in the United States.
The American Opera Project (AOP) is a professional opera company based in Brooklyn, NY and is a member of OPERA America, the Fort Greene Association, the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./NY). The company's primary mission is to develop and present new operatic and music theatre works and has gained a reputation for the "rarefied range" of the projects it fosters. AOP was founded in 1988 by Grethe Barrett Holby who served as Artistic Director of AOP from 1988 until 2001, at which point Charles Jarden became the company's Executive Director and Steven Osgood the company's Artistic Director. Steven Osgood left the post of Artistic Director in 2008 to pursue conducting full-time but remains the Artistic Director for AOP's "Composers & the Voice" program.
Ruth Maleczech was an American avant-garde stage actress. She won three Obie Awards for Best Actress in her career, for Hajj (1983), Through the Leaves, (1984) and Lear (1990) and an Obie Award for Design, shared with Julie Archer, for Vanishing Pictures (1980), which she also directed. Her performance as Lear was widely acclaimed: her King Lear was portrayed as an imperious Southern matriarch.
En Garde Arts is a New York City-based theatre company, and a pioneer in the field of site-specific theatre.
The Civilians is an investigative theatre company in New York City founded in 2001 by Artistic Director Steve Cosson. The Civilians artists pursue their inquiries using interviews, community residencies, research, and other methods. Working with a combination of journalism and art, The Civilians creates theatrical events that seek to promote an inquisitions of current issues. According to Variety Magazine, The Civilians "travels far and wide researching a piece around a given subject, conducting interviews and comparing notes along the way, sometimes for years."
Universes is a New York-based American ensemble company of multi-disciplined writers and performers who fuse poetry, theater, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues and Spanish boleros to create what has been described as moving, challenging and entertaining theatrical works. The group, with four core members, breaks traditional theatrical bounds to create its own brand of theater.
foolsFURY Theater is a bi-coastal ensemble theater company based in San Francisco and New York City. Its mission is to revitalize the American theater by 1) creating ground-breaking visceral performances that inspire audiences and artists to reconsider and reconnect with the world around them, 2) emphasizing qualities of the theater that can only be experienced live, and 3) advancing artistic dialogue through training, research and presentation. The company presents reworked Shakespeare and classical texts as well as new works by experimental contemporary playwrights. Increasingly these are original pieces, created by the playwright in collaboration with the performance ensemble.
The Mark Morris Dance Center is located in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, at 3 Lafayette Avenue, on the corner of Flatbush Avenue. It is the permanent home of the international touring modern dance company, the Mark Morris Dance Group. Open since 2001, the Center also houses rehearsal space for the dance community, outreach programs for local children and area residents, as well as a school offering dance classes to students of all ages.
Caden Manson is the co-founder and director of Big Art Group, a performance ensemble based in New York City. Dedicated to advancing the boundaries of contemporary performance, Manson has expanded the field through his use of digital media, creative interdisciplinary collaborations, and teaching. Manson is the Editor in Chief and co-curator at Contemporary Performance Network, a community organizing platform and social network dedicated to facilitating collaboration among artists, presenters, scholars and festivals. He is the co-Artistic director of the Special Effects festival, an experimental performance festival which premiered in January 2014. He was the Head of the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014-2019 and is currently the Director of the Undergraduate and Graduate Theatre Program at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
