Wooster Group

If you’ve never seen THE WOOSTER GROUP. You should take an hour to watch one of these videos. They’re videos of experiences that are really important to see LIVE, but they are important to consider, because TWG is almost certainly the most important American contribution to Global Performance in my lifetime, maybe even since WW2.

Although they are, I’m afraid, only a shadow of their former self these days (important members of the company have died or moved on), TWG pretty much invented the integration of media into live performance. They developed a style of performing that is much imitated but not matched (the deadpan downtown style which, in most downtown work, is just the absence of anything, was for them a total spiritual/psychological/personal commitment to a specific task and the form that the task occupied. And they cultivated the sophisticated use of collage to attack and to befriend dramatic texts from different eras and styles.

With Mabou Mines (Lee Breuer, Joanne Akalaitis), The ONtological-Hysteric Theatre (Richard Foreman), Robert Wilson, LaMama, and Charles Ludlam’s The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, TWG constituted the theater of my dreams, the work that I sat in my high school library reading about and then was able to see as a young adult. As I read about these artists and peered at the photos of their work, I had glimmers that there were ways of making theater that I had no conception of, that there was a world beyond my world. And as I began to see their work, I felt wave after wave of so many worlds unfolding for me, so many challenges to my ways of seeing and thinking. And so many puzzles: how did they make that? Why is that acting compelling when it looks like what all my teachers say is BAD? What kind of sense is it if I can’t say what it means? How can I learn to make work that is like that?

 And when I started to make my own projects, I stole and borrowed and was inspired by these are artists. And others. But my versions were always different. Sometimes because I wasn’t as good at doing it, but often, I noticed, my versions came out differently in ways that helped me to identify my own values. For example: I set out to make EVERY THING I DID be as cool and distanced as what Elizabeth LeCompte did with TWG. And I failed. Every time. There was always some big mush of feelingful imagery that would gush into (and out of) my work. And it took four years for me to realize, after trying like hell to suppress it, that in fact I am just a different artist than LeCompte.

EXPERIMENT:
You can do this after watching TWG OR you can do it based on something else you’ve seen.

Make your own version of someone else’s work. Really try to steal from them. But work honestly and hard to make it into a thing that is “good” to you.

Now look and see.

What is there of them?

What is there of you?

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