The Wooster Group: A Dictionary of Ideas

Anthology

The Wooster Group brings together the intertextual, the intercultural, and intermedia in a new definition of the liber mundi. This theatre chooses all species of texts from the cultural heritage, then stages their dissemination in new spaces and environments, generating a multiplicity of narratives and images.

This is the legacy of John Cage's "library of sounds" and of Rauschenberg's mixed-media works. As an aesthetic strategy it takes for granted that in using the archives of art and culture as a database the issue is not one of ownership, but of distribution. Viewed in another light, the deterritorialization process of this kind of theatre, if extended into the world of cyberspace, changes the very nature of the way we think of art and authorship, composition and interpretation, and the notion of boundaries between art forms, art and everyday life, one culture and another, the created and the ready-made. This approach highlights process—the artwork and the work of art.

It is more and more apparent that the post-war American avant-garde model, based on the cutting up, quoting, redistribution, and recontextualization of the world archive of accumulated texts, images, and sounds prefigured the digital mode of perceiving space and time and meaning. This is the new design of information.

Books

Inside House/Lights is Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, inside Nayatt School is T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, inside Point Judith is Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Jim Strahs's The Rig; Thornton Wilder's Our Town is the center of Route 1 and 9 (The Last Act); The Crucible shapes L.S.D.Brace Up! stages Chekhov's Three Sisters and fragments of Brace Up itself appear in Fish Story. Then there are the films, the paintings, the songs, the dances, the television shows. All of them fragments—replacing, restructuring, recreating, pushing the frame. The text of Frank Dell's Temptation of Saint Antony, includes a long compilation of writings and other media: the Flaubert classic, Lafcadio Hearn's "Argument" which prefaced his early translation of the French text, material by Lenny Bruce who was sometimes known as Frank Dell, books on magic and spiritualism, original writing by Jim Strahs (the Group's in-house playwright), and scenes based on Ingmar Bergman's film The Magician. The frantic voice of Dell at the end of the text explodes, "the the books in the library the the they run they play they see radical things."

Foucault characterized Flaubert's work as "the book of books," a fanciful library of books that can be "taken up, fragmented, displaced, combined, distanced by dreamy thought. . . ." It is this French tradition, and the later English-language examples of Joyce and Pound and Burroughs, that are the antecedents for the Wooster Group's textual and rhetorical styles. Even as it breaks open and reconstitutes literary material, the Wooster Group staging still exudes a modernist belief in the significance of art as a "language" within a work.

Books read, books open, books turned inside out, texts cut apart, turned upside down; books on the floor, words spilling underfoot. The trilogy, the epilogue, parts one and two, parentheses, exclamation point, a work-in-progress. Pull a quote from here, take that paragraph, take out the whole section, cut the play apart, redo it, retranslate, show it on video, record it, perform it live, do it all at once. Collage is the aesthetic strategy at play.

This is texture rather than text; theatre "pieces," precisely. The Wooster Group are not beloved readers. They are browsers who skim the pages of books, randomly collected. They like the sound of words rather than their meaning. They are more interested in passages than in writing. This is the contemporary style of reading—scattered, naive, non-linear. Texts that can be interrupted. A book that can be opened to any...