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Liitoja Interviews Wooster Group's Artistic Director Elizabeth Lecompte

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Liitoja Interviews Wooster Group's Artistic Director Elizabeth Lecompte Interview with The Wooster Group's Artistic Director Elizabeth LeCompte The Wooster Group had its origins in The Performance Group, the ground- breaking “environmental” theatre company founded in 1967 by Richard Schechner, the legendary American experimental theatre director. Elizabeth LeCompte joined the company in 1970 and five years later began to create her own work with Spalding Gray, apart from Schechner’s company yet still in its venue, the Performing Garage, located in the SoHo district of New York City. This former factory on, yes, Wooster Street, still serves as their home base where they develop (and often perform) their work. Perhaps one day someone will write a detailed account of the rift that occurred, leading to the departure of Schechner, and the morphing of his company intoThe Wooster Group in 1980, with LeCompte as its Artistic Director. Since its beginning the ensemble has been in a continual state of flux with members involving themselves in other pursuits only to fluidly rejoin. Simultaneous to these comings and goings has been an equally constant artistic evolution that has produced a considerable body of work: nineteen meticulously crafted pieces for theatre along with eight for film/video and five for dance. Note “pieces”, not plays. The Group does not present “plays” - they serve merely as springboards for some of the most complex, fascinating, bewildering and intellectually challenging work ever seen on stage. While not courting controversy they seem unable to avoid it. Acclaimed for brilliant individual performances as well as technological wizardry, Wooster’s unique creations are seen in festivals around the world. Relaxed and imperturbable, LeCompte fielded my questions for an hour in the quiet of a hotel room, displaying a mental acuity that utterly defies her beckoning seventieth birthday. ******************** Hillar Liitoja: The Wooster Group is one of the very few companies in the world I admire so intensely that it makes no difference to me what it is you are presenting. If you are in town, I will go and see you. In Toronto there is an organization called the Theatre Centre that is devoted to supporting every kind of “experimental” theatre. They just promoted your visit by starting off with - “Just two words: Elizabeth LeCompte”. This is particularly remarkable since the Theatre Centre is right now nearing the end of their biennial national festival. You’d think they’d not bother even mentioning you for fear of losing some of their audience. How does it feel to be the object of such intense respect and admiration? How does it feel to be such a star in a very circumscribed world? 1 Elizabeth LeCompte: Well, right now your saying all that, it feels great but I don’t really experience it like that in my regular life, because I don’t get a lot of that (laughs). I feel that I’m still at the very beginning of my career in some ways and even coming back here to Toronto I’m still exactly where I was 25 years ago when I came here. I’m still playing at the same Harbourfront, I’m still making work that’s considered experimental and it’s put on the last page of the Saturday Globe and Mail. I still feel that somehow I’m doing the same thing that I started to do, so I don’t feel any different from the way I felt 25 years ago. But your saying all that makes me feel really good right now and I’d like to know how long it’s going to last. I don’t think any longer than a really good movie that I walk out of and I’ve loved it and then I forget it, The Artist, something like that. No, your work stays long in the memory. I mean obviously there are those who would like to bolt from the theatre after twenty, or even ten, minutes … (she laughs) But those who stay … You started off as studying art, painting, I think, in particular. What inspired those studies? Which artists did you particularly admire at that time? Well, it started much earlier than that, it started when I was about eight I guess and I liked Benjamin West, a kind of primitive American painter. And so I decided then that I wanted to be a visual artist. After that I got involved very much with the new American Expressionism, and the New York School basically, when I was working as a student. But then for some reason, I think it was the politics of the time, the sixties, drugs etc, I got involved more with theatre, with communities of people working. And so from then on I sort of veered away from painting and I sort of integrated that world into my work designing the pieces that I made. And I had a lot of early interest in architecture as well. I had given some architectural and engineering drawings to the college that I went to, to apply for art, so from the very beginning I was more interested in architecture. But at the time, in the late fifties, it was very difficult for a woman to pursue that kind of career, especially if you came from New Jersey and you didn’t have any people who encouraged you in that way. So I guess I kind of veered off into architecture and from that into designing the theatre pieces. Your involvement with theatre started off with Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group. Well, not really. It started before that. When I was in school I was involved with a company in Saratoga Springs that was a called The Caffé Lena. It had a full café on one side and a loft on the other side. This woman named Spencer started a theatre company so on the weekends I would waitress at the café and then began to become involved in the theatre company. And this company, for a year and a half, included Spalding Gray [theatre creator and founding member of The Wooster Group] so I met him there and then we went together to New York. 2 And so it was basically Spalding who led you to The Performance Group. Definitely. What is it about a given play - or source material - that makes you decide to use it as a springboard to create a Wooster piece? I don’t know - cause it’s different every time. Maybe before I die I’ll see some kind of system, but it seems to me that I just go from some kind of question that comes up in the piece before and the question can be articulated - as it was with LSD … Just the High Points … - or it could be something that’s intuitive that I wasn’t able to develop in the piece before. It could be a performer that he or she has to do something; it could be that somebody lays an idea down and I just have nothing else to do in that time and so I pick that up just because I like to work; it could be that somebody approaches us and says I can get money for this and I’ve never heard of it before or I haven’t read it like Chekhov, you know, Ron Vawter said we should do Three Sisters, there’s a lot of women in the play and we have women in the company so we did that; it’s so many ideas that I don’t want to look back, I don’t want to know what it is. So in a way it’s intuitive and natural. I think so, it feels like a natural process. I’m sure it varies, but how much time does it take for you to go from the first glimmer - maybe we could do something with Chekhov’s Three Sisters - to the final decision - we are definitely going to base something on Three Sisters? That happens almost immediately. When we read the translation by Paul Schmidt of Three Sisters, I saw it almost immediately and then it took a year and a half. We performed it during that time and I worked on it all during that time but it took that long for me to complete the whole picture. I have a kind of a picture that’s out of focus, that comes up, and I think that makes me say, “I can do it, I can make the piece.” But I couldn’t ever articulate at that time what that is. I have to say it’s usually a visual, sometimes an aural, sense of what the piece will be. And then I’ll go way far away and then eventually I realize a lot of times I come back to that original picture. I imagine some elements are already there by the time you’ve made that decision to proceed, but once that decision’s been made, what are among the first things you want to explore and nail down? Hmmm, I like to get, as soon as possible, some physical space marked out and at the same time I like to hear the performers say the text cause I don’t 3 read the text separate from the performers. So when we read a text, we read it together or we do it together. But we never talk about it and we never sit down at a table and assign roles. I have an idea about who I think should play what but sometimes that doesn’t work out, we switch around. So I’d say that I like to hear it in the space with the performers I’m working with and the technicians.
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