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
Konstantin Stanislavsky spent his life looking for creative techniques to tame the actor's inspiration. Stanislavsky conceived his acting system to give the actor tools to control his/her stage ...presence, to be able to manipulate his/her impulses and spontaneity, and so to avoid becoming too familiar with the physical, emotional, and intellectual patterns of the actor/character's actions on stage. The American avant-garde theatre company The Wooster Group's and its artistic director Liz LeCompte's desire to create a new system of performative devices that could liberate the actor from the necessity to 'feel', 'sympathise', or 'transform into a character' on stage can be traced back to the same principles. This article argues that although the group rejects any theatrical heritage, in its members' wish to 'simply do things on stage' the company engages with Stanislavsky's preoccupation to keep his actors busy on stage, i.e. to stage the actor's Self within the designed score of physical actions and impulses. The Wooster Group's practice also prepares the cognitive turn in today's acting pedagogy: by forcing its members to be pragmatic or functional about their on-stage behaviour, the company is able to provide the impression of the performers' tamed spontaneity, inspiration, and impulse on stage.
The controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and ...the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source.
The controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and ...the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source.
La tentation de saint Antoine initially recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance painting or Flaubert’s onieric work‐in‐progress. A closer look at more recent adaptations of the story of Saint ...Anthony the Great, however, reveals that such transformations of the myth addressed shifting aesthetics in the twentieth century by combining genres and texts, designed to cast what Foucault considered Flaubert’s most modernist ideas in an entirely postmodern light. This paper examines two of these adaptations: first, Michel de Ghelderode’s multiple versions of the tale set in Flanders, published separately from 1919 to 1932, but not performed until 1957 as a radio play and marionette show; and, second, the Wooster Group’s provocative stage adaptation, which transplanted the hermit Anthony to an excess‐filled New York of the eighties in Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony.
What Flaubert created as a self‐reflexive commentary on the dangers of books, twentieth‐century adaptors turned into a postmodern statement about other contemporary media forms, including stage, radio, cinema, and television. More importantly, by strategically appropriating not only Flaubert’s subject matter, but also his composition technique and passages from his texts, these artists draw attention to the perils of a culture‐saturated twentieth century in which art had become adaptation.
The contemporary American performance group, the Wooster Group, seems to have staged Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré in keeping with the playwright’s idea that “All good art is an indiscretion.” The ...tension between “art” and “indiscretion” suggests a struggle between order and chaos based on a binary regime of representation resulting in the victory of truth. Sexual indiscretions appear to be a key element as on stage screens display gay pornographic images while sounds register the rhythm of desire by mixing the script, based in the 1930s, and theatrical signs from the 1970s and 2000s. Yet, Williams’s play and LeCompte’s staging offer a reassessment of such binary logic of representation. They create the possibility of productive postmodern indiscretions yielding the subversion of theatrical codes. An opaque indiscretion explores the complex articulations of performance operating on multiple levels and capturing the evanescence of art.
A man with "typically negroid " features , as indicated in the didascalia of character description, Jones is indeed reduced to a "type" (O'Ne ill 8). ...in spite of his attempt to depart from mins ...trels y-"one of the few truly indigenous American entertainments"-by giving center stage to a Black p rotagonist performed by a blac k actor, O'Neill parado xically fell back on some of the stereotypes which were conveyed in mins trel s hows (Banham 682). ...if Jones lost power at the end of both O'Neill's text and of The Woos ter Group's production, the actress embodying him in Le Co mpte's work recovered her dignity, contrary to the stripped Charles Gilp in. According to Philip Auslander, this deconstructive purpos e typifies "postmodernis t politica l theatre" that is a "theatre of resistance that 'investigates the processes which control g iven representations' through the examination of iconography and the effects of mediat ization on political imagings" (104). Demastes's collection was published in 1996, that is three years after the first production of The Emperor Jones by The Woost er Group. 5 The show has been made available on DVD by The Woost er Group, who sells i t in their on-line shop. Besides the revivals of the show, the marketing of this by -product also proves that The Emperor Jones was a great success. 6 The Wooster Group is not only introduced as "post dramat ic" or "postmodern" t heat er in Lehman's seminal Postdramatic Theatre (1999), but also in Johannes H. Birringer's Theatre, Theatre, Postmodernism (1991), Kerst in Schmidt's The Theatre of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005), Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelso n's Mapping Intermediality in Perform ance (2010), Nicola Shaughnessy's Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (2012), Maggie B. Gale and John F. Deeney's The Routledge Drama An thology and Sourceb oo k. From Mod ern ism to Contem porary Perfo rma nce (2012), to n ame just a few. 7 In the 2009 production under study, the part of Smithers is played by Ari Fliakos and that of the St age Assist ant by Scott Shepherd. 8 I refer to Smithers as t he "narrat ive cat alyst " of the play because it is his narrat ion of the islanders' rebellion that initiates Jones's journey into the forest. 9 In a note to her article " 'Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds': Cross-Dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones," Aoife Monks explains:
The Wooster Group's 2007 production of Hamlet ghosts not only the history of Hamlet and the many Hamlets that have come before, but also places it on stage alongside, interacting with, and ...re-transmitting the Richard Burton film of his 1964 Broadway production, which acts as a form of analogous 'master' text. This essay argues that this production foregrounds the place of the analogue and of theatre in a digital world, placing the Wooster Group bodies on stage as conduits for historical, lost and remembered bodies.
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