Confrontation, Simulation, Admiration

Confrontation, Simulation, Admiration The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater Kermit Dunkelberg The punning title of The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater, shown as a work-in- progress in the spring and late fall of at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York, invites many interpretations. Does it suggest theatre that is: Poorly executed? Poorly funded? To be lamented? All of the above? Is this the Wooster Group’s retort to Grotowski’s “poor theatre” of reduced means and monastic discipline (Grotowski ), or their own version of it? The Wooster Group’s self-mocking, reverent/irreverent, high-tech/low-tech, nostalgic/derisive production questions the state of contemporary performance by trying on the styles of a vanished group (the Polish Laboratory Theatre, dis- solved in ) and a vanishing one (the Ballett Frankfurt, disbanded in August —half a year after Poor Theater had its first showing). My focus in this article is on the sections of Poor Theater that deal with Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre (–). I see the Wooster Group’s production in light of the history of reception/rejection/appropriation of Grotowski’s work in the United States. In the wake of Grotowski’s first American workshop at New York University in , Richard Schechner founded The Performance Group. In the mid-s, the Wooster Group grew out of The Performance Group, be- coming an independent entity in . Poor Theater is in part a confrontation with an ancestor. In the spring program, “The Director” noted the importance of ancestors: The writers, the great writers of the past, have been very important to me, even if I have struggled against them. In facing up to Flaubert, Chekhov, or Racine it was like the struggle between Jacob and the Angel: “Reveal unto me your secrets!” But in actual fact, to hell with your secret. It’s our secret that counts, we who are alive now. But if I know your secret, Chekhov, then I can understand my own [...]. I’m speaking to my ancestors. And of course I don’t see eye-to-eye with my ancestors. But at the same time I cannot deny their existence. They are my base; they are my source material. It’s a personal question between me and them. (Wooster Group a) The Drama Review 49, 3 (T187), Fall 2005. © 2005 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg The words were Grotowski’s (:): or rather, an amalgamation of Grotowski’s and Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte’s. LeCompte had replaced the names of Sl-owacki and Calderon in the original citation with those of writers she has struggled with: as the director of Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (), Brace Up! (), and To You, the Birdie! (Phédre) (). LeCompte adopted Grotowski’s voice, in an act of ventriloquism and appropriation. In the performance, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and Scott Shepherd adopted the voices of the Polish Laboratory Theatre actors in the Grotowski/Szajna production of Stanisl-aw Wyspian´ski’s Akropolis (), as filmed in . Notwithstanding “ancestral” connections, LeCompte says she has never thought of Grotowski as a major influence. In the late ’s, she recalls thinking: “That’s interesting stuff, but it’s—you know, it’s ‘Polish drag.’ It was something weird. It was beautiful, and Catholic, and male, and ‘over there’ somewhere” (a). She remembers being struck by the intimacy of Akropolis (which she saw in New York in ), particularly “the incredibly big performances next to very un- comfortable people” and how “wonderfully skilled” and “musical” the actors were. When asked about The Constant Prince, she immediately recalls the experi- ence of “looking down” (a). The act of looking down—at a parquet floor— takes on unexpected resonance in Poor Theater. Still, “poor theatre” didn’t appeal to LeCompte as an aesthetic: The “no technology”—that whole idea that the actor was at the center— for me it was like: “Everything’s at the center! Why say the actor’s at the center?” [...] I didn’t want to limit myself [...]. I wanted to find some new thing that wasn’t acting. I wasn’t that interested in theatre. (a) LeCompte began as a painter. With other visually oriented directors of her gen- eration such as Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, and Ruth Maleczech of the Mabou Mines collective, she developed a theatrical language very different from the actor-centered, Grotowski-related Performance Group, Manhattan Project, and Open Theater that preceded them. The new directors often utilized flatter space and flatter, more distanced acting (even to the point of nonacting). They embraced technology. They explored the psychological subjectivity of the director and/or performers as subject matter, as in LeCompte and Spalding Gray’s trilogy-with-epilogue Three Places in Rhode Island (–). So why is LeCompte doing a performance about Grotowski now? “I don’t know,” she tells me. “No idea” (a). Poor Theater is subtitled “A Series of Simulacra.” The program offers these defi- nitions of “simulacrum”: Oxford English Dictionary: . A material image, made as a representation of some deity, person or thing. Something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing. b. A mere image, a specious imitation or likeness of something. Webster’s New 20th Century Unabridged: . An image. A mere pretense or semblance; vague representation; counterfeit; travesty; sham. (Wooster Group a, b) Simulation is far from the aims of Grotowski’s poor theatre, which sought to pen- etrate the conventions of representation in order to tap an existential core. The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater references neither an unmediated “real” (as realism attempts to do) nor a metaphysical “essence” (as Grotowski’s theatre did). The Wooster Group simulates video images of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. In doing so, they risk offering “a specious imitation,”a “sham.”This risk is inherent in Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Poor Theater 1. Kate Valk and Scott Shepherd in Poor Theater, “Part One: Our Akropolis,” at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004. In a documentary video by Ken Kobland, Wooster Group actors watch and imitate a video of an early documentary film by Michael Elster of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. (Photo by Paula Court) simulation, since “Simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as it- self a simulacrum” (Baudrillard :). Simulation implicates the simulator in an endless hall of representational mirrors. Poor Theater acknowledges its entrapment within the “edifice of representation.”“Part One: Our Akropolis”begins with a documentary video (by Ken Kob- land) of Wooster Group actors watching a video of an early documentary film by Michael Elster of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. “We enter the theatre,” the En- glish voice on the Polish video announces. “There is the atmosphere of a mon- astery.” With apparent skepticism, bewilderment, and fascination, the Wooster Group actors imitate the young Zygmunt Molik, Ryszard Cies´lak, Rena Mirecka, and Zbigniew Cynkutis as they train. In Elster’s film, a very skinny Ryszard Cies´lak Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg utters a raspy, guttural, quadraphonic tone. In Kobland’s video, Scott Shepherd, seated in a chair, searches for the sound, and the facial expression, in his own body. In the video equivalent of a trompe d’œil, we see Mirecka (in Elster’s film) ap- proach an actor to correct his execution of the physical isolation exercises known as the plastiques. Kate Valk (in Kobland’s video) stands in an identical position to Mirecka’s. She “whispers” to Scott Shepherd. We see Valk’s lips move, we hear Mirecka’s voice. In close-up, the camera pans across the faces of the Laboratory actors, frozen in the haunting “masks” utilized in Akropolis as a sign of the internalized oppres- sion of the concentration camp. Each black-and-white image of a Laboratory actor’s face is complemented by a color image of a Wooster Group actor imitat- ing the grotesque pose. The Wooster Group faces draw laughter from the audi- ence. The Laboratory faces, on the nights I attend, do not. The narrator in Elster’s film characterizes the actors before us as a group of fanatics searching for answers to the question: “In what form can the theatre of today continue to exist?” Meanwhile, in Kobland’s video, the Wooster technicians painstakingly en- deavor to construct in the Performing Garage a facsimile of the parquet floor at the former Laboratory Theatre space in Wrocl-aw,Poland. The exact dimensions and compass orientation of the floor in Wrocl-aw are laid out in the Garage. On the monitor, we see the faux-parquet floor installed, but on the stage in front of us, where the monitor stands, we see only tape marks on a black floor. The video details how, using a system of weights and pulleys, the two flatscreen video monitors at the back of the Garage were adjusted to the exact height of the sound and light booth windows in the wall of the Wrocl-aw theatre, which were “added after Grotowski’s time.” As the video ends, the Wooster Group actors enter the stage, to the sound of an invisible door being opened. The faces of the Wooster Group’s sound and video operators (Geoff Abbas and Iver Findlay) appear on the “sound booth” and “light booth” monitors. The voiceover on Kobland’s documentary informs us that in the summer of , the Wooster Group made a clandestine audio record- ing of their visit to the former site of the Polish Laboratory Theatre.

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