Download How do THE WOOSTR GROUP `break the rules`? Bibliography

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How do THE WOOSTR GROUP ‘break the rules’?
Bibliography:
- Rabkin, Gerald. (1985) ‘Is there a text on This Stage?: Theatre, Authorship,
Interrogation’, in Re Direction : A Theoretical And Practical Guide. Eds.
Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody. London: Routledge. See pages 319- 331
The key ideas of Deconstruction, as found in:
- Fortier, Mark (2004): pp 58-81 & Barry, Peter (2002): pp 61-73
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Savran, David (1988) Breaking The Rules: The Wooster Group. New York:
Theatre Communications Group.
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People like The Wooster Group are inventing the only vocabulary that can deal with
the material of the last 20 years once we understand its strangeness “
(Peter Sellars – Theatre director)
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WOOSTER GP: LSD
Placed next to each other, LSD and Arthur Millers’s ‘The Crucible’ delineate the
major upheavals of two consecutive decades
- The crucible: Miller uses the Salam witch trials as an dramatic allegory of the ‘red
hysteria’ of the 50’s which culminated in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist ‘witch
hunt’.
- The next decade (60’s) drugs a powerful disruptive force,
not simply for their biochemical effects but because they became the basis for a subculture
complete with its own economy, politics and art which were, in Leary’s words ‘alienated
from the establishment power centres’. Where Leary urged a generation to ‘tune in, tune
out, drop out’ he presented a palpable threat to the dominant ideology of the time and
became in effect an ‘other’
- There are other parallels between the crucible and Leary. Both witch-hunts begin with
forbidden intoxications either in the woods or ingesting LSD. In both illegal activities
threatens suspicious and fearful authorities who then institute widespread persecution. The
girls dancing in Millers text leads to the hanging of the accused witches, while Leary’s
activities leads to his several arrests and trials.
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LSD (JUST THE HIGH POINTS)
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‘The ultimate example of deconstructionist ideas put into practice in the American
theatre’ (Arnold Aronson)
Post-structuralism is the THEORY
Deconstruction is the PRACTICE
Roland Barthes, Jaques Derrida, Michel Foucault
Meanings not found in sense of compelling presence or vision of reality
But in the collisions & collusions between texts
Emphasises the constructedness of texts and meaning
Suggests these fabricated meanings are shifting & unstable
Foucault - History is a series of overlapping legitimate Vs illigitimate histories
The play takes place in 4 sections.
In section 1 - the performers read some of the writings of Leary himself together with
selections of beat generation literature. These texts are all written by men, and are read by
male performers. Each night of performance they would randomly read from these texts.
These written texts form the ‘legitimate history’ of the time and to emphasise this the men
use microphones. This is juxtaposed with a recording of an interview with Leary’s ex-babysitter called Ann Rower. Her recollections of Leary’s behaviour acts as an ‘illegitimate
history’ In doing so LSD examines cultural memory - that is - history- by interweaving
personal memories with a great diversity of texts, by setting Ann Rowers recollections in
the midst of what is in fact on stage, a library.
ACT I
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Putting the ideas out there….
Playing with texts
Putting texts on trial for their ability to distill cultural experience
Allusions to Macarthy trials
Counterpointed by re-creation of Timothy Leary’s babysitters confessions
Re-created hearsay (illegitimate history) versus read texts (legitimate history?)
I want to use irony and distancing techniques to cut through to the intellectual and
political heart of the Crucible, as well as its emotional heart““
(Elizabeth LeCompte in a letter to Arthur Miller attempting to secure performance
rights for the play)
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Section 2 – ‘Just the high points’ of The Crucible illuminating its historical context.
Performers use period costuming for the first time. The women accused of playing witches
are wearing 17th century dress whilst the men however are wearing either fifties suits and
contemporary street clothes. This means that instead of playing the text as a costume drama
- it places historical difference on stage : it exposes the plays archaeological status both for
Miller and the Wooster group. The contrast between the costumes from 3 periods
acknowledges the Crucibles status in LSD as a reading, in the mid eighties, of a 1950’s drama
set in the 17th century.
ACT II
• A version of Miller’s The Crucible
• Speed Text!
• Costumes
• Voices
• Case of Tituba
In section 3 the performance becomes a re-creation of a rehearsal the company had late one
evening that was video recorded. The difference in this rehearsal of the crucible text was that
all the performers had taken quantities of the drug LSD. Of course the rehearsal broke down
and they started to either giggle at the text or trip on it, going off on extended monologues
about themselves triggered by the text. The company therefore playfully deconstructed the
text. They watched the results on video - all 7 hours of it, then painstakingly recreated the
experience on stage each night.
ACT III
• The trippy act
• Looks like chaos but is completely ordered
• What is this saying about performance?
Conclusion
The Wooster groups hallucinatory chronicle admits the several points of view that history,
even alternative history, represses. It listens to the voices of the excluded. It listens to
hearsay. It delights in the inconclusive and contradictory, in not putting pieces together, in
fostering dissent. It liberates that which is squelched in written history: the randomness of
political and cultural activity, the background ‘noise’ of events.
LSD therefore challenges the notion of history as a systematic development and suggests
that the memories and documents by which one hopes to know the past stand not as truth, but
as a testament to the inaccessibility of historical truth, to the impossibility of recovering
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intention, sensation, event. It performs questions, not assertions, structuring the piece to
move toward not a final synthesis (and therefore closure) but a distillation of the questions.
LSD demonstrates that history is always a fabrication - history in the play is a confluence of
many memories, texts and points of view. It is an illusion and product of human labour,. To
visualise this process of fabrication the Wooster group begins the piece not with pretence but
by acknowledging the concrete reality of the situation. Working from a real base, it shows
how theatrical - and historical - illusion is constructed.
LSD _ CONCLUSIONS
• Listens to the voice of the excluded
• delights in the inconclusive & the contradictory
• celebrates randomness of political & cultural activity (the background noise of events)
• challenges notion of history as systematic development
• challenges notion of theatrical construction
• performs questions not assertions
• structure moves towards distillation of questions not a final synthesis (avoids closure)
EXERCISE
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Take George Bernard Shaw’s play PYGMALION and engage in a deconstructive
interrogation of the text. Juxtapose the Victorian constructions of the notion of woman
and society and love with that of the contemporary singers today.
In juxtaposing the two texts – the literary and the musical – using the strategies of
deconstruction, show how each reveals the assumptions of the other.
The point of deconstruction is to INTERROGATE the various texts under analysis.