The Performance Group

Last updated

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. [1] [2]

Contents

History

TPG was an "environmental theatre" – meaning that each production took place in an entirely redesigned space. [3] Most of TPG's productions were directed by Schechner, though others including Joan MacIntosh, Stephen Borst, James Griffiths, Leeny Sack, Elizabeth LeCompte, and Spalding Gray either directed their own works or works by others. TPG's designers included Jerry Rojo, Michael Kirby, and Jim Clayburgh. Some of TPG's productions were collages of various texts, other productions were radical deconstructions of classics, and some works were brand new. Schechner resigned as artistic director in 1980. At that time, Elizabeth LeCompte became the artistic director of the company which was renamed The Wooster Group and continued to operate out of the Performing Garage. [4]

Productions

Many TPG works premiered and then were modified over several years. TPG's major works are (unless otherwise noted, productions were directed by Schechner): Dionysus in 69 (1968), based on Euripides' The Bacchae , text by Schechner based on group improvisations; [5] Makbeth (1969), (based on Shakespeare), text devised by Schechner; Commune (1970), a group devised work with the text arranged by Schechner and the company, which won Joan MacIntosh an OBIE for Distinguished Performance in 1970; The Tooth of Crime (1972) by Sam Shepard; Mother Courage and Her Children (1975) by Bertolt Brecht; The Marilyn Project (1975), by David Gaard); Oedipus (1977) by Seneca; Cops (1978) by Terry Curtis Fox; The Survivor and the Translator (1978) performed and directed by Leeny Sack; The Balcony (1979) by Jean Genet. [6]

In 1975, some members began to develop their own productions, led by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte. The trilogy (Three Places in Rhode Island) was performed in the Performing Garage but was not attributed to TPG. Performances include Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick Road (1978), Nyatt School (1978), and Point Judith (an epilogue) (1979). Eventually this divide led to the change in organization that created The Wooster Group. [4]

Related Research Articles

<i>The Bacchae</i> Ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides

The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.

The Wooster Group Experimental theater company, NY, NY, US (since 1975)

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.

Elizabeth LeCompte 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.

The Flea Theater Theater in the TriBeCa section of New York City

The Flea Theater, founded in 1996, is a theater in the TriBeCa section of New York City. It presents primarily new American theater and provides a venue for film stars to act on a very small (74-seat) stage, as well as a smaller black box theater for experimental and new works. The theater was founded by Jim Simpson, 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."

Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review.

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.

University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance is an undergraduate and graduate institution for the performing arts in the United States. It is part of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The school was founded by Calvin Brainerd Cady in 1880 as the Ann Arbor School of Music, and it was later incorporated into the University of Michigan with Cady joining the faculty.

Mac Wellman, born John McDowell Wellman on March 7, 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American playwright, 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).

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.

Performing Garage

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.

Brooks Barry McNamara (1937–2009) was an American theater historian, professor, and editor of The Drama Review.

"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.

Dionysus in 69 was a theatrical production directed and conceived by Richard Schechner, founder and longtime artistic director of the Performance Group (TPG), a New York-based experimental theater troupe. An adaptation of The Bacchae by Greek playwright Euripides, Dionysus in 69 was an example of Schechner's practice of site-specific theatre, utilizing space and the audience in such ways as to bring them in close contact with each other. Dionysus in 69 challenged notions of the orthodox theater by deconstructing Euripides' text, interpolating text and action devised by the performers, and involving the spectators in an active and sensory artistic experience. Brian de Palma, Bruce Joel Rubin, and Robert Fiore made a film of Dionysus, merging footage from the final two performances of the play in June and July 1969.

The Free Southern Theater (FST) was a community theater group founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Madison County, Mississippi, by Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. The company manager was Mary Lovelace, later Chair of the Art Department at U.C. Berkeley. The company disbanded in 1980.

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.

El Corrido is a 1976 musical comedy made for TV film directed and written by Luis Valdez, and produced by El Teatro Campesino. The film was adapted from Valdez's stage musical La Gran Carpa de los Rasquachis, which was also produced with El Teatro Campesino. El Corrido was aired on PBS on November 4, 1976 as part of its Ballad of a Farmworker television series on the series Visions.

Firehouse Theater

The Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis and later of San Francisco was a significant producer of experimental, theater of the absurd, and avant guard theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Its productions included new plays and world premieres, often presented with radical or inventive directorial styles. The Firehouse introduced playwrights and new plays to Minneapolis and San Francisco. It premiered plays by Megan Terry, Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van Itallie, María Irene Fornés and others; and it presented plays by Harold Pinter, John Arden, August Strindberg, John Osborne, Arthur Kopit, Eugène Ionesco, Berthold Brecht, Samuel Beckett and others. In a 1987 interview Martha Boesing, the artistic director of another Minneapolis theatre, described the Firehouse Theater as "the most extreme of all the groups creating experimental theater in the sixties, and the closest to Artaud’s vision." Writing in 1968, The New York Times said that the Firehouse Theater "has been doing avantgarde plays in Minneapolis nearly as long as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater has been doing the other kind, and with much less help from the Establishment." That same year, when a federal grant was provided to support the Firehouse, it was pointed out in the Congressional Record that the Firehouse Theatre "is the only major theatre dealing experimentally with the writing of plays and their production outside the metropolitan New York area."

Remi Barclay Messenger American actress

Remi Barclay Messenger, aka Remi Barclay & Remi Barclay Bosseau (b.1946) was a founding member of three prominent professional theatre companies in the New York City area – The Performance Group (l967–70), with Richard Schechner, Whole Theatre (1971–1990) and Voices of Earth (1988–2000), the latter two with Olympia Dukakis as a co-director. Her theatre work included years of acting, directing and teaching as well as creating workshops for a wide spectrum of institutions, schools and universities.

References

  1. Shank, Theodore (2002). "Richard Schechner: The Performance Group" in Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Revised ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 93–103. ISBN   0472085352 . Retrieved 13 August 2012.
  2. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, ed. (2007). "The Performance Group: Historical Overview." in Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. pp. 307–12. ISBN   978-0472069545 . Retrieved 13 August 2012.
  3. Schechner, Richard (1994). Environmental Theater (Revised ed.). New York: Applause Books. ISBN   1557831785.
  4. 1 2 Champagne, Lenora (Autumn 1981). "Always Starting New: Elizabeth LeCompte". TDR: The Drama Review. Actor / Director Issue. 25 (3): 19–28. JSTOR   1145357.
  5. Cohn, Ruby (December 1971). "Old Myths in the New Theatre". Educational Theatre Journal. 23 (4): 398–408. JSTOR   3205748.
  6. Aronson, Arnold (2000). American Avant-garde Theatre: A History. London: Routledge. ISBN   0415241391.

Further reading