When we just open a piece, everyone is caught up in the task at hand. It’s a review that makes one consolidate, formulate a clearer view of what we’re doing. You have associations with the time they were made and the history that the piece itself created. When I approach performing these in the restrospective, it’s not only a pleasure to perform so much and perform so much different work, but it’s very special to me because it represents a huge block of history. The same props, costumes, ideas, personas are weaved throughout the pieces consciously and unconsciously. It takes so long for us to make a piece, that someone who sees one in 1980, then might be busy those couple of months we’re performing in 1981 and might not see a new piece until ’83, so they don’t get the continuity. WD One attractive thing is showing a huge body of related work in a concentrated and finite period of time. LM For you personally as an actor, does doing a major retrospective give you a chance to sum up the personas which you have been working on for a number of years? Certainly there’s some sort of variation just thanks to accident and impulse, but it’s tightly scored. WDIt’s more like a dance or a piece of music. No matter how sophisticated a theatre-goer you are, you can’t help but wonder, are they just walking around? Obviously a tremendous precision has been developed and choreographed during rehearsals. LMI would imagine that it must take a tremendous amount of precision, for instance, when Our Town is being performed on video in Route 1 and 9-what you are doing on stage during the tape seems very impromptu. We did open rehearsals of it last year at The Kennedy Center, when we were showing North Atlantic and LSD, just some of the rough material.
It’s hard to know what it will become right now. There’s lots of layering and cutting and pasting. Visually we’re playing around with the characters in a Bergman film called The Musician. It’s very clear-the parallels between Lenny Bruce and Flaubert, right? … Who knows how many elements are going to be used because we’re still making the piece. I mean there are other sources besides Flaubert in the new piece.
There are other texts but that is the major source. WDWhich right now we refer to as the Flaubert piece, because a lot of it has to do with his Temptation of Saint Anthony. LMThe current retrospective The Road to Immortality includes Route 1 and 9 which is based on Our Town Part Two which may or may not be associated with The Crucible and the new piece. We know it’s there, that’s the important thing. So for all practical purposes it isn’t heard. WDNow the Miller text is totally obscured with texts that overlay Crucible. What was the ultimate impact of that on the piece? LM Arthur Miller brought the Wooster Group to court to prevent you from performing LSD which deconstructs the text of The Crucible. A lot of it is very verbal, even though some of it’s obscured with gibberish and fast speaking because of the Miller problem. We were doing The Road to Immortality Part Two ( … Just the High Points … ) aka LSD, no longer being able to be called LSD. Of course, there was the language problem. Places that we had played before had some sense of our history and tended to receive the work very well. Then we played Cardiff in Wales, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Milan. But then we went to London for three weeks at Riverside Studios and that was terrific.
They didn’t know quite where to place us, even though we were part of the regular Festival and the press didn’t respond well so Edinburgh was a bust for us. The Fringe was a lot of small companies doing Shepard plays and the main festival presented large productions, Ingmar Bergman directing opera, Peter Brook … very glossy and expensive. We did the Edinburgh Festival which is a very conservative festival. Willem Dafoe Seven cities, seven countries. Louis Morra The Wooster Group was on a European tour this summer. We had this talk two days after opening night and just as reviews of Platoon were hitting the stands. He is currently performing in The Wooster Group’s retrospective The Road to Immortality. His latest role as Sergeant Elias in Platoon has thrown him into the spotlight. He picked up roles in The Hunger and Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire and last year the critics applauded his performance in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA. LeCompte became director of the controversial Wooster Group, which grew from the ashes of Schechner’s company, and Dafoe stayed on as a pivotal force in the new collective.ĭafoe began a screen career in 1983, starring as the jaded and taciturn ’50s biker in The Loveless. He came to New York to work with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group where he met Elizabeth LeCompte. Willem Dafoe was born in an industrial town of 60,000 in Wisconsin.
Im Zeitalter der Kopein und Kopisten (In the Age of the Copier and the Copiest)
0 kommentar(er)
