Savran- Death of the Avant-garde

The Death of the AvantgardeAuthor(s): David SavranReviewed work(s):Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 49, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 10-42Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488655 .Accessed: 23/05/2012 12:46

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The Death of the Avantgarde

David Savran

Jerzy Grotowski, 65, an avant-garde Polish director who was one of the most influential theatrical innovators of his time, died an. 14 at his home in Pontedera, Italy. (McKinley 1999:Co7)

In a shock move that will rebound around the artistic world, the leading avant-garde ballet choreographer William Forsythe has been told by the German city of Frankfurt that it intends to close down his company, the internationally renowned Ballett Frankfurt. (Brown 2002:25)

Why does the avantgarde refuse to die? So many of its illustrious practitioners-from Alfred Jarry to Jerzy Grotowski-are long dead and buried, but their descendents continue to be hailed (or scorned) around the world: insurgent artists who look to their revolutionary forebears for inspiration. There is, paradoxically, a long tradition of the avantgarde, despite the fact that the historical avantgarde of the late 19th century launched itself (notoriously!) in opposition against the commodity status of the work of art, the institutionalization of art, and the very idea of tradition. (The word is derived from a military term denoting those leading a charge.) With the triumph of an angrily antibourgeois modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, aspiring artists found-and still find-that they could accrue larger amounts of symbolic and cultural capital the more anti- commercial and antibourgeois their work became. As a result, in a cultural economy that mobilizes around the idea of an avantgarde, cultural and economic capital typically figure in inverse proportion to each other. The more closely producers are associated with pure (i.e., noncommercial) art, the more they will forego economic profit (at least in the short term). Alternatively, the closer they move to the marketplace, the more steeply their prestige is likely to decline (see Bourdieu 1993b).

Since the 195os, theatre in the United States routinely has been singled out as a field in which the avantgarde has played an especially important role, in part because of its efficacy at breaching the border between literary theatre and performance-based practices. For both academic and nonacademic observers, the evolution of postwar theatre typically is figured as a progress narrative in which a radical, experimental, and noncommercial vanguard leads the way both aesthetically and politically. (Henri de Saint-Simon, a revolutionist and early advo- cate of a scientific socialism, first applied the term to artists in 1825, envisioning them as "the men who ceaselessly impress on mankind the progressive movement which has made man come up from the crudest brutality" [Saint-Simon in Iggers 1958:240; see Aronson 2000:6].) Indeed, the hierarchical disposition of theatrical practices required that avantgarde and rearguard, art and commerce, highbrow and

The Drama Review 49, 3 (T187), Fall 2005. ? 2005

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

IO

Death of the Avantgarde II

middlebrow, be set in opposition against each other. Experimental performance needs the idea of a staid, bourgeois theatre to oppose. At the same time, the commercial theatre needs the fantasy of a noncommercial realm of pure art that it can

reject as esoteric and effete yet secretly imitate, and from which it draws inspiration and prestige. This circumstance continues into the 21st century, moreover, despite the fact that the economic and cultural hierarchy that segregates Broad-

way (richest in economic capital but poorest in symbolic capital) from Off Broadway (with variable amounts of several forms of capital) from the avantgarde (poorest in economic capital but richest in symbolic capital) has become increas-

ingly compromised. Yet in many quarters this hierarchy is virtually an article of faith, held in place by a fantasy (which Bourdieu calls a "collective misrecogni- tion") about the inimicality of art and commerce (1993b:8I). It is replicated both in newspaper and magazine listings for New York theatre and in the work of academic and nonacademic critics alike who continue to rely on the concept of an artistic vanguard to denominate a set of cultural producers and practices-usually the ones they happen to like. Even card-carrying postmodernists often use the term "avantgarde" despite their scorn of progress narratives and their contention that modernist hierarchies have been superseded by a new cultural dispensation.

When the American avantgarde (or more properly, given its relationship to the first European avantgarde, neo-avantgarde) is cited, the same names tend to crop up again and again. Indeed, as it has become more and more institutionalized and

legitimized academically, a clearly delineated canon of work has been nominated by acclamation. Arnold Aronson, for example, traces a familiar genealogy of avant-

garde (aka experimental) theatre (aka performance), beginning with Black Moun- tain College, the Living Theatre, John Cage, and Allen Kaprow; culminating in the Open Theatre, The Performance Group, Mabou Mines, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman; and ending with the Wooster Group, a branch of The Perfor- mance Group that in 1980 began calling itself by what in fact had been the

Group's legal designation since 1968, which Aronson regards as "the last major exponent of the postwar American avant-garde movement" (185). Although Aron- son acknowledges other traditions, some observers supplement (and complicate) this genealogy with the inclusion of practitioners more closely aligned with the rise of identity politics: El Teatro Campesino, Karen Finley, Split Britches, Holly Hughes, and many others (see Carlson 20o3 and Shank 2002).

There may be a near consensus on the early development of avantgarde theatre in the U.S. and the composition of an avantgardist canon, but there is little

agreement on its terminus-if it can be said to have reached a terminus. In the

early I980s, Richard Schechner composed a eulogy for the avantgarde (that has

yet to be superseded), which enumerates the various causes of its decline and fall. He carefully details the changes that took place in performance practices as well as the many social and economic developments of the late 1970s and early I980s that effectively destroyed the context in which an avantgarde theatre can flour- ish. According to Schechner, the avantgarde failed primarily because of the end of an activist culture both in and around the theatre; a drying up of economic

support for experimental work; a creeping formalism; and the aesthetic, organi- zational, and pedagogical shortsightedness of its practitioners and critics (see Schechner 1982). Aronson, in contrast, having observed the progressive institutionalization and canonization of the avantgarde over the 20 years after Schech- ner's eulogy, insists that the obsequies were not pronounced until the 199os. Like Schechner's (but more formalistically inclined), Aronson's postmortem provides an account of multiple injuries, including the demise of an oppositional culture, the escalating cost of Manhattan real estate, changes in governmental and non- governmental funding for the arts, the aging of the '60s generation, and the AIDS epidemic (2ooo:205-II). I agree with both Schechner and Aronson that

12 David Savran

the avantgarde is effectively dead and I would add to the causes of death the hege- mony of deconstruction and poststructuralism (both in and out of the academy) and the increasing exploitation of nonprofit theatres for their artists and product by commercial producers intent on replenishing their stores of cultural and symbolic capital. I find it impossible, in fact, to construct a narrative of the death of the avantgarde that does not list multiple injuries sustained over a period of many years. Yet the more historical and sociological I try to make my analysis of what I would like to call the last wave of the avantgarde (the one epitomized by the Wooster Group), the more I find this vanguard vanishing before my eyes.

I don't know what avant-garde theatre is today. (Grotowski 1969:85)

The death of playwright-actor Spalding Gray, whose artful monologues put a personal spin on the anxiety of the last decades of the 2oth century, was confirmed yesterday, two months after his disappearance Jan. Io. [...]. During the 1970s, [...] he lived with director Elizabeth LeComnpte and to-

gether they helped form the Wooster Group, a troupe that is best known for applying avant-garde technique to classic theater. (Siegel 2004:FI12)

Despite what seems to be the long decline of the avantgarde in the U.S.-or rather, of the conditions that once allowed an avantgarde to thrive-one theatre company is repeatedly singled out as both "the last major exponent" and "one of the most"-if not the most-"highly regarded" of the "avant-garde companies": the Wooster Group (Aronson 2000:185, Shank 2002:327). Because it has "become synonymous with an American post-modern avant-garde," theorists and historians often choose to conclude books about contemporary theatre with

analyses of the Wooster Group's work (Jackson 2004: 11o; see, for example, Carl- son 2001 and Shank 2002). Even the popular press invariably stumbles upon phrases like "resilient[ly] and stubbornly avant-garde" for a thumbnail description of what it routinely dubs "the premier experimental-theater company in Amer- ica" (Zinoman 2005:14, 13; see also McKinley 2002 and Traub 2004). Virtually every one of the countless obituaries (both in the U.S. and abroad) for Spalding Gray found it necessary to affix the label avantgarde to the company of which he was a founder and in which he honed his craft as a monologuist. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that the Group's work is taken to exemplify (in a relatively unadulterated and radical way) not only the distinctive features of the American, postwar avantgarde but also those characteristics that Peter Biurger identifies with the now classic, historical avantgarde: a revolt against the purported autonomy of the aesthetic, a desacralization of art, criticism of theatre as an institution, a de-

light in provoking shock, an undermining of the opposition between producer and spectator, a "radical negation of the [...] individual creation," a "liquidation of the category 'work,' " and a perverse fondness for "killing the 'life' of the material" licitly or illicitly appropriated (1984:51, 56, 70).

The manufacture of the Wooster Group as the epitome and summit of Amer- ican avantgardist theatre can be charted with remarkable precision by examining the coverage of the Group in the New York Times, the most important arbiter of

upper-middlebrow taste, style, and culture (see Savran 2003). Ignoring the Group during its first five years, the Times only published its first (lukewarm) review of Rumstick Road when it was remounted at the American Place Theatre in 1980. On the rare occasions when the two lead theatre critics for the Times in the 1980s, Frank Rich and Mel Gussow, deigned to review the Group, they attacked and ridiculed it for producing "avant-garde detritus" they judged "vapid," "stale," "pointless," "unfunny," "tasteless," and "predictable" (Rich 1984; Gussow 1984, 1981I). The Group's approach to its source materials they described as "assaults"

Death of the Avantgarde 13

1. Left to right: Scott

Shepherd, Kate Valk, and Ari Fliakos in Poor Theater, "Part One: Our

Akropolis, " directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004. (Photo by Paula Court)

that merely "trash dramatic works of the past" (Gussow 1984). (These were the

years when I was writing Breaking the Rules [1986] and even my friends who loved the Group's work thought I was crazy to write a book about a theatre company dismissed or condemned by the Paper of Record.) In 1987, however, Stephen Holden took over the Times's avantgarde beat and penned somewhat more

thoughtful critiques of what he deemed "one of the last bastions of intense avant-

garde seriousness in the contemporary theater." Directed by a now "intrepid" Elizabeth LeCompte, even the Group's most controversial piece, Route 1 & 9 (1981), was judged to "resonate [...] with a post-countercultural despair" (Holden 1987a:CI; 1987b, sec. 2A:2).

By 1994 the Times' coverage of the Wooster Group had been transformed as a

4 David Sauran

result of changes both in personnel and cultural politics. Then-second stringer Ben Brantley wrote an appreciative review of Fish Story in which he praised the

piece's "authority and precision" and its "deeply felt emotional core" (Brantley 1994). Since then, Brantley has been promoted to chief critic for the Times and his reviews of the Group's work (beginning now on the first page of the Arts sec-

tion) have moved from congratulatory to hagiographic. (Since the beginning of his tenure, he has endeavored to amass cultural capital by championing the work of the consecrated avantgarde.) He notes that the company has "refined and

strengthened its craft over the years" and that even the blackface performance (formerly a flashpoint of controversy) of Kate Valk as the EmperorJones "acquires a searing depth" (Brantley i998:E3). When reviewing House/Lights (1999), he

judged it "bedazzling" and opined (contra Rich and Gussow) that there was

"nothing random-feeling about this mixture of elements" (Brantley 1999:EI). He deemed To You, the Birdie! (one of the hottest tickets in New York during the 2001/02 season) an "exhilarating dissection" of Phcdre and hailed Kate Valk a

"dazzlingly accomplished leading lady" (Brantley 2002:E ). To celebrate the 2005 revival of House/Lights, Brantley wrote an essay teeming with superlatives. The

performers he dubbed "among the most vital and theatrically disciplined you will ever see" while the company he esteemed "the American theater's most inspired and articulate interpreter of an age in which machines mediate between the per- ceiver and the perceived, between subject and object" (2oo5:EI, E7).

The Wooster Group's construction as the most celebrated and high-profile com-

pany to which the label avantgarde is affixed is a complicated affair. And while the advocacy for its work by the New York Times and other arbiters of middlebrow taste is an important factor, that represents more effect than cause of the prestige- and the mystique-it gained during the late I980s and 199os. Unquestionably, the celebrity of Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe, two founding members, was in part responsible for turning both critical and popular attention to the Group's work. Gray's modest career in Hollywood and his great success as a monologist beginning in the 198os (especially after the release ofJonathan Demme's film of

Swinmming to Cambodia [1987]) helped put the Wooster Group on the map, despite the fact that Gray performed live with the Group in only one piece after Point

Judith (1979). Willem Dafoe's celebrity, however, was far more important to the

Group's pop-cultural profile in part because he continued to perform with the

Group until 2003. From the time of his Academy Award nomination for Platoon

(1986), Dafoe's fame brought to the Performing Garage many curious onlookers who would not otherwise have been caught dead at a play of Racine or Gertrude Stein. (One night when I attended the 2000 revival of North Atlantic, I spied Adam Sandler and his entourage in the audience. They clearly had no idea what they had gotten themselves into and seemed to be having a very unpleasant evening.) It is unlikely that Time Out New York would have put Kate Valk and Elizabeth

LeCompte on its cover were it not for the fact that their images were dwarfed by the smirking face of Willem Dafoe and a sensational teaser: "The inside story of how NYC's most provocative players survived death, scandal, and heartbreak"

(Zinoman 2005). It is even more unlikely that Entertainment Weekly would have

weighed in on To You, the Birdie! (awarding it a respectable B+!), if Dafoe and

Frances McDormand had not been in the cast. And even for the Group's tradi- tional downtown audience base of intellectuals, artists, and students, there was an undeniable thrill in being able to see a leading screen actor in an intimate space, his artistic home, performing work that so delightedly transgresses the norms of both literary theatre and Hollywood narrative cinema. At the Performing Garage, Dafoe and LeCompte were free to undermine and manipulate Dafoe's Holly- wood persona, transforming his work to play.

But the celebrity of Gray and Dafoe has been only one cause of the Group's

Death of the Avantgarde is5

acclaim. Despite the hazard of (my highly prejudiced) value judgments, I cannot avoid pointing out that Elizabeth LeCompte, the chief architect of and visionary behind the Group's work, is by any measure one of the greatest and most innovative theatre directors of her generation. (Having seen film clips of and from the Group's early work at a commemoration of Spalding Gray at the Performing Garage in September 2004, I was quite overwhelmed-yet again-by the breath- taking beauty and brilliance of her early pieces. Viewing them again, in frag- ments, after such a long gap of time, was like watching a home movie of your first meeting with a first love, some 20o-odd years before.) And LeCompte has been fortunate to work with some extraordinarily gifted performers. Under her

guidance, the Group quickly developed what could be called a house style of performance. Gray, Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Valk, Ron Vawter, and the many associ- ate artists helped to remake acting not by attempting to become characters but by merely standing in for others (to borrow Vawter's phrase), the ones who could not be present, pointing to the absent others with an unparalleled dynamism, virtuosity, and rigor. (Although the Wooster Group did not invent this mode of performance-which is in part derived from the work of Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Schechner, and others-they have been instrumental in perfecting and

disseminating it.) In that sense, the Wooster Group performers have always been the producers not of characters but simulacra. And their performances represent not impersonations, but, to borrow Joseph Roach's term, acts of surrogation. (Roach's concept of surrogation is based in part on Schechner's own theorization of "restored behavior" [1985:3]. And it is surely no accident that Schechner, one of LeCompte's mentors, is responsible both for theorizing and putting into

practice the trope of performance as "restored" or "twice-behaved behavior" [see Schechner 1985:36-37].) In an original take on Brechtian acting, they do not embody others but allow themselves to be haunted by those absent others whom

they reference. Unlike the Stanislavskian actor (especially in the American Method version) who attempts to deny the fantasmatic nature of the character

portrayed by investing said character with the actor's subjectivity, the Wooster

Group performer vigorously goes through the motions, taking on a role (as one

might don a mask) while signaling the impossibility of impersonation. To distinguish between the two approaches, I would like to borrow a page

from Freud on mourning and melancholia, two different ways of reacting to loss (the absence of a person or object), and, according to Freud, two processes by which subjects are constructed. He distinguishes between the melancholic-un- aware of or unwilling to face loss-and the mourner-all too conscious of loss. While the former (mistakenly) believes the loss to be within the self, the latter understands that the loss is without (no matter how much the mourner may still desire or identify with the lost object or not fully understand "what it is he [sic] has lost in" the person or object [Freud 1949:155]). In this context, the Method actor, unable to acknowledge the absence of a character, could be said to be suf-

fering a kind of melancholia, mistaking the role for the self and attempting to

introject it. Internalization then becomes, in Judith Butler's words, "a strategy of

magically resuscitating the lost object [...whose] loss [...the] melancholic refuses" (1990:61). The performer, on the other hand, schooled in the kind of work that the Wooster Group epitomizes, takes on the guise of mourner, always cognizant of the phantasmic nature of performance and the impossibility of completely in- ternalizing the absent other (see Freud 1949). He or she deliberately and rigor- ously incorporates the other, "'sustaining' the other through magical acts of imitation" (Butler 1990:57). The former produces (false) interiority, the latter, magical simulacra (which LeCompte, trained as a visual artist, uses to trace her "people" [Reilly-McVittie 20oo4]).

Given the Group's use of this mode of impersonation, it is little wonder that

16 David Savran

so many of its pieces have explicitly or implicitly been acts of mourning. And while Rumstick Road is the most unambiguously so, all the other pieces are haunted by multiple losses, and by the knowledge that the very ontology of performance is defined by disappearance. So many of the plays it has used in its

pieces are explicitly about death and irremediable loss, from The Cocktail Party to The Three Sisters, from Our Town to Phedre. But, as Marvin Carlson points out, the

dynamics of mourning inform far more than the thematic content of these works

(see Carlson 200oo:69-73). They also function as formal elements. Consider that the ground plan for every piece the Group has performed consists of a transformation of the house that appeared in Sakonnet Point (1975), LeCompte's first

piece, 30 years ago (a work whose subject is both the loss and sustenance of childhood innocence). Even the use of trompe l'oeil video in its recent work (is it live or prerecorded?) is disorienting enough to problematize the ontology of live performance and to impel one to think differently about the relation between original and copy. Live performance is set next to modes of mechanical reproduction to provide a sense not of ontological transparency but of instability and evanes- cence. This move means that the site of performance is the space not of the now, but, to borrow Paul Auster's words, of "memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time" (1988:83).

Despite the Group's dedicated play with the ontology of live performance, its

preeminence in the field of what is now quaintly referred to as avantgarde theatre depends foremost, I believe, on its uncanny skill in breaking the rules in order to fulfill the deeper and inflexible logic of avantgarde production. According to Bourdieu's analysis (which is worth quoting at length), insurgent producers historically have performed an idiosyncratic brand of rebellion, a heresy that ends

up ironically reinforcing the rules of the game:

The dominated producers, for their part, in order to gain a foothold in the market, have to resort to subversive strategies which will eventually bring them the disavowed profits only if they succeed in overturning the

hierarchy of the field without disturbing the principles on which the field is based. Thus their revolutions are only ever partial ones, which displace the censorships and transgress the conventions but do so in the name of the same underlying principles. This is why the strategy par excellence is the "return to the sources" which is the basis of all heretical subversion and all aesthetic revolutions. (1993b:83-84)

The Wooster Group has-unpremeditatedly-carved out for itself a position as the sovereign of that oxymoronic designation, the consecrated avantgarde, by ob-

sessively returning to the diverse sources of modernist theatre, from The Tenip- tation of St. Antony to The Hairy Ape, from Our Town to Doctor Faustus Lights the

Lights. This disinterment of once-revolutionary plays, moreover, functions to support the principle of a modernist canon by reinforcing the notion that certain texts and practices instantiate a kind of ahistorical and timeless radicalism. It en- ables the Group, in Bourdieu's formulation, "to turn against the establishment the

arms" that the guardians of cultural orthodoxy use "to justify their domination." And it's hardly an accident that the very characteristics that Bourdieu associates with the consecrated avantgarde are precisely the qualities that have long distin-

guished the Group's work: "asceticism, daring, ardor, rigor, and disinterested-

ness" (84). Until 2003, the classic sources to which the Wooster Group has turned have

always been texts written before the members of the Group were even born. But with its new piece, Poor Theater:A Series of Simulacra (200oo4), the Group for the first time exhumes not a play text but a directing text from the recent past. Turn-


ing not to a literary antecedent, it literally rehearses, translates, and mimes the mise-en-scene of the most fabled and mythologized theatre director of his time, Jerzy Grotowski, the man who, C.W.E. Bigsby notes, "set the tone for the Amer- ican avantgarde theatre of the I960s" (1985:59). Grotowski's impact on what

Bigsby labels the avantgarde cannot be overestimated. Although his company, the Polish Laboratory Theatre, did not perform in the U.S. until 1969, his 1968 book, Towards a Poor Theatre, inspired a generation of theatre artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Richard Schechner. Schechner, in particular, was instrumental in disseminating his ideas in the U.S.

by sponsoring a 1967 residency for Grotowski at New York University and pub- lishing dozens of articles about and interviews with Grotowski (dating back to

1964) in TDR, which, Lisa Wolford points out, "played a fundamental role in in-

troducing Grotowski's work to Western audiences" (Wolford 1997:3). In part one of Poor Theater, the Wooster Group looks back at Grotowski to examine its own

history and its origins in the Performance Group (founded and directed by Schechner) and in the cultural and theatrical ferment of the I960s. Near the end of part one, the Group commemorates an even earlier source of avantgardist praxis, Max Ernst's accidental "discovery" in 1925 of the technique of frottage, the technique of making a rubbing of a textured surface as a first step in improvising a drawing. In part two, the Group references, imitates, and quotes the method and person of William Forsythe, the former director of the Frankfurt Ballet (and contemporary of LeCompte). But Forsythe is presented not as a source of the Group's work but as a second instance, along with the Wooster

Group itself, of those who were inspired, if only indirectly, by the ecstatic, hier- atic art of the I960s. In Poor Theater the Wooster Group thus revisits the primal scenes of the (American) avantgarde.

Translation Exercises

Jerzy Grotowski is a genius, but I shudder to think how many misbegotten "Grotowskis" his Polish Laboratory Theatre will spawn. (Clurman 1974:161)

When I hear words like "influence," I shudder. I like unfaithful disciples, not

unfaithful in the sense that they want to betray the serious attitudes toward the profession but unfaithful in that they wish to utilize our principles according to their own needs. Those are the authentic disciples. I'm very happy with those! (Jerzy Grotowski in Shivas 1968:D5)

DAVID SAVRAN: How did you build Poor Theater? Why did you choose Gro- towski? Why Forsythe?

ELIZABETH LECOMPTE: They were going to be two separate pieces. I'd

thought about Grotowski because I was thinking about just simplifying my life and simplifying the work. To You, the Birdie! had been such a struggle with all the different elements, bringing them together, and because finally a lot of it rested on me. It took a long time and there was a painful weeding out. I'm very happy with the piece. It's beautiful. But it was a really hard process and took an immense emotional toll. So I thought that I wanted to simplify everything and just work with three or four actors, pull everything in, go back to the Garage. And Gro- towski came up in that mix of things. I originally thought it would just be a piece on video. And because I said the word "Grotowski," and you have to apply for grants and all that, people started bringing in things and I started reading them again or looking at them for the first time because I didn't have that much to do

i8 Davild Sautn

2. Scott Shepherd andAri Fliakos in Poor Theater, directed by Elizabeth

LeCompte, at The

Performing Garage, NYC, 2oo4. The actors perform an extended, live reenactment in Polish of the last section

ofAkropolis, guided by the

1968film of Growtowski's

production (playing on the

monitors,far right) and assisted by their Polish translator, Zenon Kruszelnicki (Ari Fliakos). (Photo by Paula Court)

with Grotowski early on. I mean, I was very close to him because some people whom I had worked with had worked with him. But I never worked with him.

SAVRAN: And Forsythe?

LECOMPTE: We'd been fooling around a little with the videos and improvising off them and I knew that Billy was really into "improvisation"-that's in quotes. So I thought, maybe I'll just develop something vis-a-vis Billy, with our kind of weird improvisation. So we started working raw off the TVs, just running around, taking anything off the TVs. No technique, no nothing. Because if we'd put a Billy tape on, we could imitate it, but we couldn't tell where the source came from in the body. We wanted to know that so we could inhabit it more. At the same time, not holding onto it. It's difficult because as soon as you know a little, it's very hard to throw everything away. And then slowly we began to bring in dancers from Billy's company. We worked hours and hours on learning odd ways of being legible on the stage, ways that Billy and the Forsythe company were exploring. Billy came down and gave us a workshop. And so we began to inte- grate that into the running around. Just "dancing"-quote unquote. That was very exciting.

SAVRAN: Had Richard [Schechner] worked with Grotowski?

LECOMPTE: I think Richard had something to do with bringing him over to the United States. And I think there'd been a Grotowski workshop here, some- time in the '70s, but even though I was here, I didn't attend. I was probably on tour with Wooster Group work. [In fact, the 6-30 November 1967 workshop at NYU was crucial in birthing the experimental theatre of the late I96os. Partici- pants included Schechner as well as members of what almost immediately became The Performance Group and The Manhattan Project.] I saw his pieces, the ones that he brought here. I'm pretty sure that I saw...you know, I don't know which one I saw anymore. I either saw both of them, Constant Prince and Akropo- lis, or I only saw one and the other one I know because of the movies. So I don't remember anymore what I actually saw. Did I see one? Richard Schechner might remember because he got us in. [Neither LeCompte nor Gray were yet members of The Performance Group in 1969 when the Polish Laboratory Theatre per-

Death of the Avantgarde I9

formed in New York.] And then we went to Poland because Richard was invited to the Wroclaw Theatre Festival in 1971. We were doing Commune there as part of the Performance Group and so then I saw Apocalypsis cum Figuris there in Wro- claw, in Grotowski's Laboratorium space. I remember that. What I remember of it is in the new piece. It just seemed, I don't know, it just seemed like a curious

thing. It seemed like something we wouldn't do. And whenever there's some-

thing like that I go, "Oh!" Because I never really liked the writing in the Poor Theatre and never was drawn to it. And so I thought, maybe I should go toward

something that I'm not drawn to very much and see if I can't enter with less emotional stuff involved. Because there was such a tremendous amount of emotional stuff involved in making To You, the Birdie!

We began working on the Polish because we brought somebody down to teach us Grotowski's plastiques [emotional and psychic bodily exercises], Zenon Krus- zelnicki, and he turned out to be a Polish teacher as well. And I, of course, wanted to copy exactly. I wanted to hear Akropolis. I wanted to hear it live in a room. So I watched the films and I thought, "Wouldn't that be fantastic if I could

just hear it again." Because I could still remember hearing it from when I had first seen it. So we just tried to do that with the Akropolis in our ears. We would try to say the Polish and I'd get a sense of what it would be like, but it was gibber- ish. So we slowly figured out what the sounds were in Polish and Scott [Shepard] got a computer program where you can take all the Polish sounds and get written Polish. And that was interesting to me, but it wasn't enough, it wasn't rich

enough. So then Zenon started teaching us the Polish. And we spent hours and hours on it, deeply absorbed in it. It was wonderful practice. It had to do with kinds of meditation, where you place your voice, your tongue, how you hold

yourjaw-all kinds of things that were very exciting and wonderful. Good places to be for what was happening with us.

SAVRAN: This piece is really a return to your roots. Grotowski was such a god, such a guru, in the late '6os, early '70s.

LECOMPTE: Last night during the break I listened to some students talking about the Grotowski section and

they were arguing back and forth about whether or not it was good to go back to the old masters, whether it was good to elevate these works to masterpieces and

copy them or whether that was foolish. It was wonderful to hear, because it was a very lively discussion about how to continue work, which is what I think I was trying to do by going back. I was searching for some way to continue.

SAVRAN: I also find this the most reflexive of your pieces. It may be about Grotowski and Forsythe, but it's also unmistakably about the Wooster Group.

LECOMPTE: It's about us. Exactly. Through two other companies.

SAVRAN: And how you work. The way you use im-

provisation, the way you put pieces together.

LECOMPTE: I'm glad I have it now, with all the sadness. I'm glad it's there. I guess that doesn't happen by accident, though. (LeCompte 2004)

3. Scott Shepherd as William Forsythe with Kate Valk in Poor Theatre. In this section, the Group references, imitates, and

quotes the method and

person of William Forsythe, the director of Ballett

Frankfurt. (Photo by Paula Court)

20 David Savran

SAVRAN: Was making Poor Theater like working on the earlier pieces?

KATE VALK: Liz approached this piece very differently. She's much looser, much

like, "If you guys don't want to do it, I'm not going to make you. I'm just going to go with what people want to do." There wasn't the thing that we had to get right. And this one has nothing but room in it for me, that's what's so brilliant about the whole setup. In both sections you have the thing itself and then us trying to do it. You enjoy both of them at the same time. Envious of each other. But

they are separate. (Valk 2004)

Poor Theater is the only Wooster Group piece to feature an explanatory subtitle: A Series of Simulacra. Even more obviously than in the Group's other works, every component is a re-presentation, rehearsal, simulation, translation, or copy. The

piece is in three parts (as of December 2004). The first rehearses Grotowski (with two, brief inserted sections on Max Ernst), the second Forsythe, and the third a rather startling amalgam of the two. The near symmetry of the first two parts produces them as analogies, metaphors that reference each other-and the Wooster

Group. The symmetry is reinforced by the program notes which (uncharacteris- tically for the Group) provide a good deal of information about source materials.

They contain biographical sketches of Grotowski and Forsythe and edited citations from each that offer a (skeleton) key to deciphering both their work and

LeCompte's. In an early version of the program, the referential undecidability of the citations was reinforced by the program's identifying the sources only as "the director" (Grotowski and/or LeCompte?) and "the choreographer" (Forsythe and/or LeCompte?). In the most recent version, the citations are credited to Gro- towski and Forsythe with an added text taken from Ernst's writings about the ori-

gins of frottage. The program also includes a brief description of the play whose

final 20 minutes the Group reenacts, Akropolis (1904) by Stanislaw Wyspianski (a Symbolist author associated with the first wave of the avantgarde), known outside of Poland primarily because of Grotowski's legendary production (first mounted in 1962) that visited New York and was recorded as a one-hour film.

Poor Theater is the most explicitly reflexive of the Group's pieces. Not only does it put the performers on view as performers, it also (for the first time) uses a stand-in for Elizabeth LeCompte (Sheena See) and, in an early version, projected the director's image across a video screen, standing in for and mouthing the words of an indignant Margaret Croyden. (Croyden, who failed to understand

why the Group would possibly want to reenact scenes from Akropolis, was "aghast" that the Group purloined her image and voice without her knowledge. "'You're

operating like the C.I.A.,' Ms. Croyden said she told Ms. LeCompte" [in Zino- man 2004b:E2]). Part one shows the Wooster Group doing research on Gro-

towski, in a mock-documentary in which the performers and director try on his

acting exercises, re-create a visit to his Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, and perform an extended, live reenactment in Polish of the last section of Akropolis, guided by the film and assisted by their Polish translator, Zenon Kruszelnicki

(played by Ari Fliakos). Part one includes two interpolated videos that show Sheena See making frottages. While the videos play, she comes out onstage and

speaks freely paraphrased translations of Ernst's texts. Part two, combining several interviews with William Forsythe in an audio feed to Scott Shepard, turns the latter into a stand-in for the choreographer who garrulously explains his way of working while his company (the Wooster Group as a stand-in for the Frank- furt Ballet) improvises behind, around, and with him. Part three combines the literal repetition of the Grotowski section with the improvisational style of the

Forsythe to reenact very freely the final moments of Grotowski's Akropolis, in which Wyspianski's dramatis personae, the dead who have come back to life dur-

Death of the Avantgarde 21I

ing the night of the Resurrection-transformed by Grotowski's mise-en-schne into prisoners at Auschwitz-"throw themselves out of the world," disappearing into the crematorium as "the lid of the box slams shut" and "the smoke rises in

spirals" (Flaszen 1968:75). As LeCompte realizes, Grotowski is an unlikely choice for the Wooster Group.

Her admission that she never liked Towards a Poor Theatre will surprise no one who knows her work. For although there is a genealogy that links LeCompte to Schechner to Grotowski (see Wolford and Schechner 1997:xxvii), LeCompte has been a bit apprehensive about acknowledging her debt to other directors and, in particular, to the experimental theatre of the I960s (in part because of the dif-

ficulty she has had in being properly accredited as the foremost woman director

4. Ari Fliakos dances behind Scott Shepherd, lecturing to the audience as William Forsythe in Poor Theater, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004. (Photo by Paula Court)

22 David Savran

amid a clutch of male avantgardists). Yet given the reflexive nature of Poor The-

ater, LeCompte produces Grotowski, Ernst, and Forsythe simultaneously as like- nesses and foils against which to position herself. (If the famously reserved

LeCompte had set out to make a piece about the Wooster Group's way of work-

ing, she would have been hard-pressed to find better or more voluble interlocutors than these three avantgardists.) Looking back at Grotowski, I can't help but notice far more differences than similarities between the sacred, ecstatic theatre that Grotowski championed (along with many other European, postwar avant-

gardists) and LeCompte's resolutely secular, deconstructionist approach to text, performance, and mise-en-scene. Her relatively low profile in the public eye and disinclination to explicate her work is quite the opposite of Grotowski's forceful

public persona as guru (or "super-saint") and eagerness to expound his philoso- phies of theatre, performance, culture, and society (Grotowski 1968:48). For Gro- towski falls into the curious category of being the one who cleared a path for the last wave of the American avantgarde yet whose ideas and methods that avant-

garde finally rejected. First, the differences: Grotowski's was a transcendent, spiritual, ritual-based

theatre influenced by Polish antecedents like Juliusz Osterwa and Wyspianski as well as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, existentialism, Hasidism, noh, kathakali, and others. Both embracing and rejecting Enlightenment epistemologies, it aspired to

"cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness" and "enable [...] us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light" (Grotowski 1968:21, 256). A

"psycho-analytic" and therapeutic theatre, it aspired to transform "the actor's wretchedness" into "a kind of holiness" (35, 34). His actors were consequently charged with the task of a "complete stripping down," "self-penetration," "laying bare of one's own intimity [sic]," and entry into "a state of trance" (16, 37). Most

important, under the sway of Artaud, Grotowski-like so many other avant-

gardists of the I96os-sought a theatre of absolute presence in which the actor aimed for "a climax that can never be rehearsed" and "never be reproduced" (204). His essentializing tendency, Shannon Jackson points out, led him to seek

"to transcend theatricality in the figural sense" and to reinforce "the assumed lit- eralism of theatrical performance" (Jackson 2004:127-28). This quest for literal- ism required that metaphor itself be sacrificed to "experience" and "existence," because metaphor is "the core of the difficulty," as intolerable as the degraded copy. "Reject this word," demands Grotowski: "metaphor" ([1973] 1997:219-20).

In constructing multiple simulacra, Poor Theater flagrantly repudiates the absolute presence for which Grotowski yearns, or in Jackson's words, the "links between theatre and naive metaphysics" (2004:128). Instead, it generates chains of metaphorical relations, one person or thing standing in for another that it resembles and to which it refers-Sheena See for Max Ernst and Elizabeth

LeCompte, Scott Shepard for William Forsythe, the Performing Garage for the Polish Laboratory Theatre and the Frankfurt Ballet offices, etc. Metaphor, sim-

ile, analogy, translation, simulacrum. These terms all figure an implicit or explicit, voluntary or involuntary resemblance between one term and another, all the while asserting the nonidentity of the two. In other words, they assert both difference and identity: "a metaphorical statement appears to be perversely asserting something to be what it is plainly known not to be" (Black 1993:21). This "perversely" oxymoronic ontology is a key to understanding how the last wave of the American avantgarde both capitalized on and rebuffed Grotowski's methods. Because this avantgarde spurned the fiction of absolute presence and celebrated the simulacrum, it is little wonder that Poor Theater should use the word in its subtitle or that the program note should include not one but two dictionary defi- nitions of the word. Both betray a Platonic (or Grotowskian?) dis-ease with rep- resentation insofar as the simulacrum is known as a bad copy, a "mere" image, a


"mere" pretense, a counterfeit, a sham. Yet the last wave of the avantgarde fa-

mously rejected this Platonic derision. Having discovered (via Derrida, Bau- drillard, or assorted deconstructionists avant la lettre) that signification always represents an infinite chain of substitutions and deferrals, artists like Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Elizabeth LeCompte came to realize-and delight in the fact-that all performances are bad copies, no more truthful than frottages, black pencil rubbings left behind on sheets of paper. Even the piece's title (Poor Theater) represents an inexact copy, taking as it does a variant spelling (in defer- ence to U.S. orthographic conventions) of a word it borrows from the title of Grotowski's renowned book (Towards a Poor Theatre).

Grotowski's attempt to annihilate re-presentation must not, however, blind one to the many similarities between his work and the last wave of the Ameri- can avantgarde he helped inspire. A number of his guiding principles are surpris- ingly congruent with the projects of the Wooster Group (and, for that matter, LeCompte's uncompromising contemporary, William Forsythe). These include:

turning the theatre into "a place of provocation" where both audiences and performers can be challenged by acts of "transgression," the violation of "ac-

cepted stereotypes," and the "defiance of taboo" (Grotowski 1968:21-22); using "classics" to "confront the past" while treating them as found objects for use in

performance-collage (Grotowski in Croyden 1997:84-85); seeking to build a

"bridge to the past" since that alone provides "the source of our creative efforts" (85); developing a (sometimes counterintuitive) mise-en-scene that does not

simply and mechanically "illustrate [a] play, but meet it," thereby forcing a "con- frontation" between performance and text (in Schechner and Hoffman [1968] 1997:47, 54); using what Grotowski calls "untheatrical" scenic elements and props, more likely found in "flea markets and junk shops" than ones specially manufac- tured for the stage (52); rooting performance in physical labor and praxis (in both

Akropolis and Route 1 & 9, for example, the building of the set); and finally, a commitment to process and collaboration, to using improvisation in rehearsal, and to

grounding performance in the group as collective (see Wolford 1997:8). Poor Theater's construction of Max Ernst (1891-1976) as a precursor and model

is far less ambivalent than its commemoration of Grotowski. Ernst functions in the piece both as a direct link to the first avantgarde (or what Bourdieu calls a "return to the sources") and as the inventor of a technique that is analogous to and elucidates LeCompte's modus operandi. As a partisan of three of the most radical strains of the historical avantgarde-Expressionism, Dada, and Surreal- ism-Ernst epitomizes the revolutionary artist who, in Walter Hopps's estimation, "sustained an ever-changing sequence of innovations in technique and

approach to imagery virtually unparalleled in the course of twentieth-century art" (in Camfield 1993:12). Like LeCompte, Ernst employs two appropriative forms, collage and frottage, that transform and recycle existent materials or, in Andre Breton's words, that "liberate [...] external object[s] [...] from their rela-

tionship as objects so that they could enter totally new combinations with other elements" (in Camfield 1993:17). LeCompte, meanwhile, juxtaposes and inter- weaves numerous performance texts (or rather, the rubbings and traces of performance texts) to produce a kind of frottage that both preserves and cancels the structures she appropriates. Both use found material to overcome what Sheena See (echoing Ernst) calls the "virginity complex": "if I'm standing in front of a blank piece of paper, I, I don't, I...I...I go blank. I don't know where to go. I don't know where to start" (Wooster Group 20oo04).

If Ernst is imagined as the good father in the Wooster Group's Oedipal drama and Grotowski as the bad one-a progenitor that the Group imitates, competes with, and rejects-then William Forsythe is constructed as LeCompte's sibling. (They are almost the same age and their first pieces were produced only one year

24 David Savran

apart.) And while his work is not, strictly speaking, indebted to Grotowski, it is, like hers, an outgrowth of the extraordinary artistic and social ferment of the

i960s. It can be seen as analogous to that of the Group because of the focus Forsythe maintains (like Grotowski) on the body of the performer and the vital use he makes of improvisation in rehearsal. Moreover, like LeCompte, Forsythe is committed less to sweeping innovation than to what is usually referred to as

"deconstructing the great tradition" (Tusa 2003:1). In his case, however, the subject of the deconstruction is not modernist theatre but classical ballet, in which he has a reputation for having "broken every rule" and for producing work that "defies ready categorization" (Tusa 2003:6; Sulcas 2000:89). Like LeCompte, Forsythe works in a "highly collaborative manner" in which company members "write text, make videos, make costumes, etc." (Caspersen 2000:37). Like her, he does not proceed from concepts (knowing in advance "what the piece will be") but from what is happening in the room, "what is actually in front of my eyes" (Forsythe in Tusa 2003:I4). Like her, he delights in a compositional eclecticism in which "anything can go with anything" (Forsythe in Sulcas 2000:9I). Like her, he is a maker of "metaphorical possibilities": "what we do is translate" (Forsythe in Riding 2003, sec. 2:15). And while Forsythe's reputation as an insurgent and translator and his approach to improvisation are key elements with which Poor Theater plays, his role as a state-supported artist who suddenly found his generous subsidy withdrawn is more important for understanding the poverty upon which Poor Theater meditates and the losses it mourns.

Only the Smoke Remains

Part of Bill [Forsythe]'s beauty and strength is that he lets go of things when

they are dy)ing, and he recognizes that which is being born. (Caspersen 2000:26)

It's been reported that Willem Dafoe, 48, has left his partner of 27 years, the theatre director Elizabeth LeCompte,for an ltnnamed 29-year-old uwoman. (Felperin 2oo4:3)

SAVRAN: In Poor Theater I see many echoes of other pieces. Route 1 & 9 more than any of the others.

LECOMPTE: Maybe because there are four people.

SAVRAN: I was also thinking about the premise of Akropolis, the dead coming back once a year. The cemetery of the tribes.

LECOMPTE: Cemeteries, of course. That's the last act [of Our Town]... I hadn't even thought about that.

SAVRAN: Doesn't this piece revisit the past?

LECOMPTE: All of that emerged, not so much by accident as by what we were able to do. Because we had planned to have Willem in the piece. He was going to be Cieslak and he'd have a section for him coming through the second part of the piece. But as usual, I always had to keep his part in the back of my mind, keep a space because he had so little time whenever he came back. I really had to construct his scores and make his parts. He didn't improvise with the rest of the company. Route 1 & 9 was the last time he spent any time with the company. He embarked on six to eight months of moviemaking and I didn't see much of him because I had to get the piece up here. But it just emerged without Cieslak because there was nobody to sub in for him. With To You, the Birdie!, I had to con-


struct it for him. This one I didn't. I didn't put anything there. And it worked for me and I didn't want to put Cieslak in because for me, somehow, Cieslak was the

beginning of the breakup of the group, because he got so much attention here in New York. It was all about Cieslak, the beautiful actor, and I saw the breakup of

everything that Grotowski would do, with his own deification and Cieslak's deification. The community that had made the work was gone. And, I suppose, it was natural that I would avoid what had happened. So we actually made the piece more about trying to find out why we were making the piece, which seemed truer to me, more honest. Something about Cieslak and Grotowski, the two big egos. Originally I had been interested in asking, why was he deified? But I just got more into the polity. More into the community. More into the process of how you make a community. How you make something work in a community. And because we videotaped as much as we could, we had a lot of material to sort

through. It took us a while to discover what we wanted to focus on. But once I focused on the video, the two video windows-what do they call them downstairs?

SAVRAN: The light cabine...

LECOMPTE: And the sound cabine, yes, those two structures that hold the video-I got pretty clear. A visual and spiritual center about an empty video cab-

ine, the video and sound cabines as grand totems, as easels for paintings.

SAVRAN: As gravestones. Ghostly apparitions.

LECOMPTE: Yes, all ghostly apparitions, everything somehow just floating and

transparent and not really there. Anyone who knows Grotowski knows that Cies- lak was the major thing and anyone who knows us knows that Willem is a part of the Group. But he's not there, neither is Cieslak. There it is. The emptiness.

SAVRAN: Another reason it reminds me of Route 1 & 9 is because that piece was about the absence of Spalding.

LECOMPTE: That's right. It was just Spalding's voice at the end from afar. I just wish...I hope there'll come a time with Willy when I'll be able to record his voice and, in some way, include that he's gone, in a good way.

SAVRAN: Of course it also makes me consider how the landscape has changed- next year it will be 30 years since Sakonnet Point.

LECOMPTE: That's right. Oh, my God.

SAVRAN: So I was struck by the return to the Performing Garage, the fact that the videos that begin parts one and two are shot here.

LECOMPTE: That had a lot to do with thinking back about Grotowski and [the Performance Group's] Dionysus in 69 and the Garage door opening and everyone walking out. And that early use of video and film, where you'd see the performer in the film and then the performer would walk out onstage-Squat Theatre used it. There's a lot of quoting from '70s stuff like that.

SAVRAN: So Dionysus in 69 connects with the video that ends part one. Leav-

ing the Garage, walking through New York, down Canal Street. It's the same as it used to be-and completely different.

LECOMPTE: It looks the same and completely different. In fact, some people didn't recognize New York because the snow covers it. When I go to Europe, they're always saying, "How can you live in the commercialism of SoHo?" But I never noticed it because I'm in my head. I walk out and I see the same things. It's like different decorations in the shop windows. It's just, you know, funny new

26 David Savran

people are inhabiting it. It would be like one of those fast-motion films where the architecture stays the same and the people-you see the change in the cur- tains and the lights go on and off and everyone's moving in, they're moving out, they're going up, they're going down. To me, it's just there. And oddly enough, Canal Street is still-besides everything being Chinese-it's still that crazy mixture of junk that always excites me. But now it's a lot more pocketbooks instead of motorcycle and old radio parts.

SAVRAN: Does this work feel retrospective to you?

LECOMPTE: It doesn't because what we're doing now is so present for me. Not that that isn't a part of it. I'm sure it's a very important part of that. It's just that I couldn't work from that. It would just be nostalgic. I have to work from what are the momentary questions I'm asking. Right now, how am I going to go on? What is it in this moment that makes me continue? So, it's very present-minded for me. But I don't deny that it would have those resonances for you. I can see

them when I see it. But I didn't make it out of that and I don't see it that way at

night. Each night I try to see it as it is. Just exactly what is actually happening on the stage and the small room without metaphor, so to speak.

SAVRAN: Because so much is improvised. They make it new every night.

LECOMPTE: It's also because Scott is stepping forward and telling the audience about a crisis in his life. It's very subtle, but he's talking about how to make work. And he's contradicting himself. One moment he's saying he works in one way and the next moment he's saying, "Why not throw it all away?" He's really at the edge of dealing with who he is and what he... He's questioning. Couldn't we all

just get up and dance? Why am I out here dancing while you are watching? He's

dealing with the most basic questions about what he works from and why we make art. Same way that Spalding was facing the audience. Same way he was

dealing with what happened to his mother and his father. So it is like the early work. There is this one person out front, and then there are these people behind, who are moving through, and you can attach what you want to them, or you don't attach.

SAVRAN: Did you see much of Spalding in the last few years?

LECOMPTE: More in the last two years because I would go to the hospital. And then I saw him after that, at home. More than I'd seen him in years, probably. He came to the piece that last night. He was supposed to commit suicide that night. He'd gone to the ferry. It was the 19th of December. He'd written-or he'd recorded a tape on the I8th of December, "My Last Tape." And in it he describes how he's going to throw himself off the ferry. And he talks, you know, a lot about the water and the fear and a lot of things like that. And then the next night, the 19th, which was our last night of performing [Poor Theater] in December, he came in to see the piece. Ken [Kobland] was supposed to meet him at his house, but he never arrived. And so Ken came down and said that Spalding didn't come, but he's probably going to arrive late. So I left Yvan [Greenberg], our box office person, outside and Spalding came about five minutes after the show had begun. He'd gone to the ferry, but for some reason hadn't jumped off. That was the last time I saw him. He came upstairs after. He was very disturbed. Couldn't focus on anything. I hugged him and he said something about liking the piece, but I don't think he saw anything. And that was it. (LeCompte 20oo04)

Cemetary Upon Cemetary

PRIAM (to Hecuba):This night we are alive, awake, dreaming, and eternity pulls us both:


you toward the ages that used to be- me toward the ages that will be. But those who are alive, their power and energy they use up in this one night and perish before our eyes. (Akropolis translation by the Wooster Group [20041)

Death is certainly far more obscene than any of us can imagine.And the worst

things we ourselves could imagine are nothing compared to what the body can wreak upon itself (Forsythe 2ooI:3)

The Wooster Group never chooses an intertext casually. Or rather, once it has decided to appropriate a play or other text (whether performative, verbal, visual, or aural), it does its research conscientiously. Its interpretations are therefore never random. As a rule, LeCompte is drawn to a play less for its thematic content than for a striking combination of words, an image, a sound, or an idiosyncratic connection she makes with it. Because she does not, to borrow Grotowski's words, "follow the easiest road of associations," her interpretations sometimes seem counterintuitive and willful. But this method is indispensable, as Grotowski understood, for "show[ing] the unknown side of things to the spectator" (1968: 235-37). At the same time, the Group's pieces subject classic plays to a kind of cultural archaeology, defamiliarizing them so they become visible as cultural arti- facts-for example, a spectacle of whiteness and repression (Our Town) or an ex- oticized minstrel show (The EmperorJones). So too with Grotowski's production of Akropolis, which is positioned in Poor Theater as the highest achievement of the consecrated avantgarde (just as in Wyspianski, "the 'Akropolis' [is used] as the sym- bol of the highest point of any specific civilization" [Flaszen 1968:61]). Yet the

production's iconic status does not erase the play's content, which Poor Theater sets out in Polish and broken English.

Wyspianski's Akropolis is a dance of death. (This dance contrasts sharply with the free-wheeling, whimsical, joyous, Forsythe-inspired improvisations that com-

prise part two.) One night a year, Grotowski explains, "the figures on the royal tapestries come back to life and play out episodes from Old Greek and Hebrew

history" (in Schechner and Hoffman [I968] 1997:50). Not only are the dramatis

personae dead, but they revisit and reenact scenes of tragedy, sacrifice, and death central to the Western tradition, among them, the fall of Troy, the struggle between Jacob and the Angel, and the resurrection of Christ. In part one of Poor Theater, the Polish translator, Zenon Kruszelnicki (Ari Fliakos), carefully explains the play's central conceit:

The victims...come back to life-to earth. And uh..."na plemion cmen- tarzysku,"...eh, for the, uh, tribe of, eh, cemeteries, but it's an idiom...I don't know how to translate the English...It means...literally it means- the, tribe, eh...cemetaries' tribes...So, uh, like so, if you can imagine the earth which is covered with only cemeteries...that's what...you have millions and millions of people always dying, dying...so the land is covered with cemeteries. (The Wooster Group 2004)

Grotowski's mise-en-scbne sets cemetery upon cemetery by choosing to use Wyspianski's play to exhume "Europe's ruined past" and to set it not in the royal palace in Cracow (the Polish Akropolis), but in another and far more horrific and haunted Polish site, Auschwitz, and to reimagine the figures on the tapestries as concentration camp prisoners (Schechner and Hoffman [1968] I997:50). The end of Grotowski's production marks not the summit of Western history but the

28 David Savran

last in a long line of failed sacrifices, a march to the crematorium with Christ/ Apollo, "a headless, bluish, badly mauled corpse, horribly reminiscent of the mis- erable skeletons of the concentration camps" (Flaszen 1968:74). As Grotowski describes it, the prisoners begin to "sing, 'Here is our Savior,"' " the procession disappears into the hole during the song of triumph," and the smoke rises from the crematorium (in Schechner and Hoffman [1968] 1997:51).

Akropolis is unusual among Grotowski's works because it was "decided that there would be no direct contact between actors and spectators" (Flaszen 1968: 63). (The Wooster Group, in contrast always addresses the audience directly as audience.) The unacknowledged spectators, sitting throughout the performance space, inhabit a different realm. They are as dead to the characters as the characters are to them. "People of another world," Grotowski notes, the spectators appear "either as ghosts which only got in the way or as air. The actors spoke through them" (in Schechner and Hoffman [1968] 1997:5i). The production dra- maturg, Ludwik Flaszen, reverses Grotowski's formula and, elaborating on the

play's central conceit, hypothesizes that the actors represent the dead, "those who have been initiated in the ultimate experience" (Flaszen 1968:63). For Flaszen, the spectators, outside "the circle of initiates, [...] remain in the stream of every- day life, they are the living. This separation [...] contributes to the impression that the dead are born from a dream of the living" (63).

Like Akropolis, Poor Theater memorializes the dead as a dream of the living. The

Performing Garage doubles as and commemorates the now-defunct Polish Lab- oratory Theatre and Frankfurt Ballet, the two video screens in part one func-

tioning like tombstones, windows on another world. And the one who presides over this memorialization is the ghost of Max Ernst, the consummate avantgardist, whose inclusion in the piece was a very late addition (proving yet again the indispensability of that which Derrida calls the supplement). Standing in for Elizabeth LeCompte, Ernst (in his Histoire naturelle) describes the origins of frot-

tage, how one day in August 1925, an "insupportable visual obsession" led him to place sheets of paper "at random" over the floorboards of his room in a hotel on the French coast and rub an imprint of the boards onto the paper with a black lead pencil. This activity generated a "hallucinatory succession of contradictory images" that effected a "sudden intensification of my visionary capacities" (in Quinn 1977:127).

Representing a graphic automatism (all forms of automatism were much loved by the Surrealists), frottage relocates the production of meaning from maker to spectator, the one who actively sees and interprets that which the artist randomly records. Yet as Ernst also notes, the unique power of the practice lies in its function as an aide de memoire, a re-creation (or rubbing) of a "memory of childhood," in his case a wooden panel in front of his bed which "had played the role of op- tical provocateur of a vision of half-sleep" (127). Ernst's frottage thus records an impression of a hotel room floor that reminds him of the "imitation mahogany" on which he fixated 30 years before and which lulled him to sleep: a tracing of floorboards that are tracings of a counterfeit panel that is a tracing of an idealized piece of mahogany that is a tracing... And so forth. In Poor Theater, however, the frottage explicitly commemorates another simulacrum, the obviously fake parquet floor (like Ernst's "imitation mahogany") that the Wooster Group carefully installs in the mock documentary at the beginning of part one to simulate the real parquet of Grotowski's Laboratorium. But does not frottage also commemorate LeCompte's compositional method? For just as Ernst's rubbing "converts Du- champ's Ready-made into graphic terms," does not hers take texts and performers as readymnades out of which she builds her pieces (Spies 1993:9)?

As defined by Ernst, frottage represents the most melancholy of all art pro-


cesses, a preservation of the trace, a refusal to relinquish the loved object in favor of "'sustaining' the other through magical acts of imitation" (Butler 1990:57). It is no wonder, then, that Ernst's "discovery" of the technique of rubbing was in fact a rediscovery, for it had long been practiced by collectors and souvenir hunters "as a way of taking impressions of designs and inscriptions in low relief on grave stones and monuments" (Rainwater 1986:14). Rather than trace a public memo- rial, however, Ernst's frottage commemorates a private loss, a loss so personal and so unintelligible to the conscious mind that it can be recognized only by one's "meditative and hallucinatory faculties" (Ernst in Quinn 1977:127). As Sheena See explains in Poor Theater (while a video of her making rubbings plays behind

her), frottage transforms "the floorness of the floor" into something quite magical:

I've got to emphasize here that as soon as I put the paper on the floor and

started-put the paper on the floor and started rubbing, these shapes and

figures they just appeared appeared on the paper just appeared appeared on the paper... (Wooster Group 2004)

If Poor Theater traces a set of private losses, its foregrounding of this most com- memorative of artistic practices cannot help but evoke other shapes and figures that just appear, a series of more public losses. For the death of the avantgarde is more than a figure of speech. Thirty years after Sakonnet Point, so many pioneers (far too many to enumerate) of the last wave of the avantgarde are dead. And

many people once associated with the Wooster Group are dead. Some of these losses remain private and unpublished: the death of Steve Borst in 1982, one of the leading actors of The Performance Group; of Ursula Easton in 1985, one of the children from Nayatt School (1978); and of Michael Kirby in 1997, theorist and

performer in L.S.D. (1984). Others are in the public record:

Ron Vawter, an avantgarde actor who was a pillar of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater collective in SoHo, died on Saturday on a plane flying from Zurich to New York. He died of a heart attack in his sleep and had AIDS, said his agent, Philip Carlson. (Pace 1994:Bio)

5. Sheena See on the

obviously fake parquet floor that the Wooster Group carefully installs in the mock documentary by Ken Kobland at the beginning of Poor Theater to simulate the real parquet of Grotowski's Laboratorium.

(Video still C Ken Kobland/The Wooster

Group)

30 David Savran

Paul Schmidt, a librettist, translator, poet, teacher and actor who collabo- rated with many major avantgarde theater artists, died at St. Luke's- Roosevelt Hospital Center on Friday. He was 65. The cause of death was

complications of AIDS, said his brother Jim. [...] For the Wooster Group's 1990 theater piece, "Brace Up!" Mr. Schmidt supplied a translation of Chekhov's "Three Sisters," then incorporated dance sequences and video, and he also appeared in the piece. (Holden 1999, sec. 1:47)

Spalding Gray, the monologuist, actor and raconteur of "Swimming to Cambodia" fame, was reported missing by his wife Sunday night, police officials said. The disappearance of Mr. Gray was of particular concern to the authorities. Mr. Gray, 62, had a history of depression, was taking med- ication, the police said, and had attempted suicide in 2002. (Tavernise 2004:B3)

SAVRAN: Watching Poor Theater, I kept reflecting on your early work. I know you don't usually think in these terms, but does it strike you as a memory piece?

VALK: Today's the tenth anniversary of Ronnie's death. But it's so funny because I don't know... I'm not so haunted by the past. You know, so much is going on now. There are so many people here now, and so much stuff. You know what I mean? I wonder where the ghosts are.

What does remind me of the early work is a delight that's more collective. I don't feel the same enthusiasm I felt when I was younger. You must know, you question things in a different way and the energy's just different. But four performers-and it's been very, very nice. The room has been very nice. Very de-

lightful. (Valk 2004)

Poor Theatre!

SAVRAN: Why did you title the piece Poor Theater?

LECOMPTE: Poor-nobody in our culture really understands what poor means. So I started out with "poor theatre" in the sense, "I don't know what more I can do. I'm up against so much more money, so much more attention." Theatre is the

poor relative.

SAVRAN: The Wooster Group?

LECOMPTE: No, theatre in general. And the Wooster Group, too, because I have to look at how much we make and put that next to the world I knew from Willem, what he makes, and I think, "This is untenable. How long can we go on like this?" The only way we can do it is by sharing everything and becoming like

they were in the '6os. Or we have to let it go. So I was thinking in those terms when I used the word "poor." But then it slowly became more about, "Is it good or bad theatre?" "What's poor theatre and what's rich theatre?" What does that mean? Poor us. I started seeing all the different ways of thinking of that word, which Grotowski...it doesn't translate the same. "Poor theatre" isn't poor-no props, no costumes. Because he had plenty of props and costumes in all his pieces. Compared to us.

SAVRAN: He had a state-supported...

LECOMPTE: A state-funded theatre. They got good pay and everything taken care of.

SAVRAN:Just like the Frankfurt Ballet.

Death of the Avantgarde 3 I LECOMPTE:Just like the Frankfurt Ballet.

SAVRAN: And like the Wooster Group.

LECOMPTE: Only difference is the amount. We still can't pay a living wage.

SAVRAN: And box office does not come close to covering it?

LECOMPTE: This box office allows everyone to make $28,000 a year. Could you live in New York on $28,00o a year now? Yes, if you were very, very careful.

SAVRAN: But you've been getting grants.

LECOMPTE: We got grants all the way through pretty much. We had a bad time after Route 1 & 9, but we just pulled in our belts and made it through. We've learned to live in a very small community.

SAVRAN: How does Forsythe link up with these economic concerns?

LECOMPTE: We were working on a small audio piece and a bunch of us were downstairs reading in the Times how the Ballet Frankfurt was going kaput because there was no money supporting that kind of work anymore. Billy's audiences had dropped off and he'd started fighting with people and this, that, and the other. And I thought, he was well-funded and he thrived and he had made a whole arc of some wonderful work-and it was over. I felt a kind of sadness about that. I had seen it because we toured there so much. I thought of him as an American who had found a place in Europe, something I didn't do. You know, I had the chance to do that. When we were young, I could have gone over there and formed a company and been very well supported. I didn't do it. I couldn't do it.

SAVRAN: As I was watching the video of Canal Street, I was thinking how much SoHo has changed. There used to be artists here. But poor theatre! It's just a tiny part of culture now.

LECOMPTE: Yes. And our little place here is tinier than...tiny, tiny.

SAVRAN: In this incredibly rich part of the world.

LECOMPTE: It's kind of funny. I like those paradoxes. Because we're incredibly poor and we own this space. Which makes us incredibly rich. But what does that mean? It doesn't get us a meal at the end of the day. And we're perceived as be-

ing incredibly rich. But I think people believe that Willem supported us. Which was not true. He never supported us. And for good reason. We knew we wanted to make theatre about all of us. We never wanted the NEA to be the only sup- porter. We always wanted to make it on box office so that we had the freedom. If we did offend someone, it wasn't going to destroy us. But I'm sure it looked like we were being funded by Willem.

SAVRAN: Actually, that's what I thought.

LECOMPTE: No. He wasn't taking a salary and I wasn't taking a salary. And he would give us sometimes $75,ooo a year, when we needed it. As a gift. But our

budget is $I.2 million. So he was our biggest single donor, but he wasn't supporting us. I mean that in the best way. He would have loved to, but he knew...we all agreed it was not the way we would go.

SAVRAN: In a sense, you've always done poor theatre.

LECOMPTE: Yes. Haven't wanted to. Always wanted to have a lot more money. I don't think at my age it's going to happen. I'd love to have enough money to pay everybody a salary they could really live on. Love that. It's not going to hap-

32 David Savran

pen. One of those things. I'm going to die without that. But there's always healthcare. We do give healthcare. (LeCompte 2004)

New York City has seen its rich cultural offerings seriously diminished by a weak economy, a drop in tourism, city budget cuts and a decline in private contributions following the terrorist attacks.

Museums, thecaters, concert halls, opera companies, public gardens and zoos throughout the five borolughs are cutting performances, exhibitions, days of operation and stqff members. This is only the beginning, arts executives say. "It's like a patient uwhose health is slipping," said Randall Bourscheidt,

president of the Alliance for the Arts, an advocacy group. (Pogrebin 2003:A i)

The Frankfurt Ballet [...] chose Paris for its final performance Saturday night [...]. One of the most exciting chapters in contemporary dance was over.

(Riding 2oo4:E1)

Poor Theater mourns the death of the avantgarde. By revisiting the man who in-

spired so many artists, it implicitly compares today's consecrated avantgarde with what in Poland by the mid-I96os constituted a well-established and -funded "alternative theatre movement" (Cioffi 1996:22). By bringing a surrogate for Wil- liam Forsythe onstage, it implicitly contrasts the Wooster Group's poor theatre with what, until its demise in July 2004, had been a richly state-supported ballet

company. If Grotowski functions in Poor Theater as an incitement to remember and mourn the monuments of Western culture, the promises of the I96os, and the many dead, then Forsythe functions to bring into focus the economic, political, and institutional crises that have effectively killed off the avantgarde. This division of labor does not, however, mean that Grotowski's institutional positioning is irrelevant to a discussion of theatre economics.

Although Grotowski was always, Schechner notes, "better received outside Poland than within" (1977:23), his theatre was only one among many subsidized Polish theatres, ranging from the large national theatres to the small, alternative theatres that started at universities in the 195os and catered to audiences of students, artists, and intellectuals. Yet, as Daniel Gerould emphasizes, Grotowski was not atypical insofar as Polish theatre during the 196os did not have to address a

"complacent, entertainment-seeking audience" (in Cioffi 1996:56). Its fare was dominated by so-called absurdist plays from Western Europe and the work of Polish writers like Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Mrozek. (It was also less rig- orously censored than some other Eastern European theatres.) Although ticket

prices "would not keep audiences away," Polish theatre was never exactly pop- ulist, but was frequented "more by the intelligentsia than by the workers" (Temkine 1972:17). State-subsidized and without a "commercial stage," it did not offer the

opposition between orthodoxy and insurgency that is necessary for the production of an avantgarde. So if, in Gerould's words, "all Polish theatres were avantgarde," they could be so only in comparison with Western European and other

stages (in Cioffi 1996:56). Even within this aesthetically permissive environment, however, Grotowski's

theatre was unusual during the I960s insofar as it was often met by "indifference" or "hostility" from the "Polish theatrical establishment" (83). His was, in the words of Polish critic Boguslaw Pepel, "a theatre for the elite [...,] a theatre for snobs, as museums, exhibitions, and clubs for the international press are for snobs" (in Temkine I972:58). This scornful reaction to his work in Poland is surely linked to the fact that he became-despite performing only in Polish- one of the first theatre artists after World War II to establish a universalizing rhet- oric of performance and a "complete and transmittable method" of acting that


was not tied to the Polish (or Eastern European) theatre tradition (Schechner 1982:34). His enunciation of an ascetic theatre to combat and transcend both the "Rich Theatre" and "the impasse of movies and television" (Grotowski 1968:Ig)-much of it perforce imported from the U.S. or Western Europe- became paradoxically a sign of his embrace of a kind of rootless, cosmopolitan avantgardism (of which Ernst, Forsythe, and, to a lesser extent, LeCompte, were or are examples). Most important, Grotowski's universalizing and ultimately for- malist theatre was predicated on political renunciation. Although he had been ac- tive in "a revisionist Communist youth organization" until 1957, he later became, in Cioffi's estimation, "an experimental theatre director" instead of "a political activist," one, moreover, "who was far less political than many who had not

openly identified with the revisionist movement" (1996:82). Jan Kott provides a more cynical explanation: "Grotowski made the heroic decision to be uncom-

promising. But under the conditions of repression, such a decision exacts the

price of supplanting politics with metaphysics" (in Cioffi 1996:83). During the late 195os and the I96os, theatre in the U.S. was organized very dif-

ferently from theatre in Poland. The presence of a vigorous and lucrative commercial theatre and the near absence of government funding encouraged the construction of an alternative, nonprofit theatre, based on what Bourdieu calls

"small-scale" or restricted production "in which producers produce for other

producers" (i.e., highly professionalized audiences), that would in theory oppose "large-scale ('commercial') production" (1993b:82; 1993a:39). Furthermore, the

growth of the counterculture and the widespread social and political upheavals of the period, especially the civil rights movement and the struggle against the Viet- nam War (and imperialism more generally), encouraged small-scale producers to

adopt adversarial positions. At the risk of retelling a much-too-familiar story, I want to emphasize that most of the avantgarde theatres of the I960s were as committed to social revolution as they were to an aesthetic one. But the collapse of the New Left at the end of the decade happened to coincide with the first visit of the Polish Laboratory Theatre to the U.S. During the next few years, with the

winding down of the Vietnam War, the decline of activism, the rise of an iden-

tity politics that displaced class politics, and the worldwide recession of 1973/74, the sense of political urgency abated. As Grotowski's theories were quickly becoming canonized in the American theatrical lexicon and even in theatre train-

ing programs, his formalism was becoming more and more seductive to those keen on "supplanting politics with metaphysics." (The use of Grotowski to au- thorize a political retrenchment in theatre in the 1970s was a distinctively U.S. phenomenon. Elsewhere, especially in Latin America, avantgardist theories and

practices were crucial in consolidating a politically activist and sometimes even

explicitly Marxist theatre [Graham-Jones 2005].) These were the years in which the politically committed avantgarde of the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, Bread and Puppet, The Performance Group, El Teatro Campesino, and many others was superseded by what I have been calling the last wave of the American avantgarde that includes Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines, and (of course) the Wooster Group.

At this point, I want to return to my starting point and note the very curious

position of this last avantgarde. Setting themselves against aesthetic orthodoxies, they have tended to eschew politically charged or polemical work in favor of what Schechner calls "virtuosity" of performance and mise-en-schne (Schechner I982:27). Indeed, the "strangely hermetic and self-referential" quality that Aron- son discerns in the work of the Wooster Group could well apply to that of almost any of these artists (9IgI). During the 1970s, so many American cultural producers backed away from the political radicalism that had been allied (however vari- ably) with antiwar, anticapitalist, antiracist, or antiimperialist activism. As class

34 David Savran

politics was supplanted by identity politics and political radicalism by cultural rad-

icalism, a critique of capitalism gradually disappeared from American avant-

gardism. After 1989, Marxism was consigned to the dustbin of history while

capitalism, Aijaz Ahmad observes, has been giddy in triumph despite being mired in stagnation and riven by its own contradictions, becoming in the pro-

cess more threatened and threatening than ever before" (1999:96). In many arenas, Marxist cultural critique was replaced by deconstruction, which, Samir Amin

points out, "had the merit of exposing the metaphysical nature [...] of post- Enlightenment bourgeois discourse" and the "teleological thrust" of "the steady onward march of Progress" (1997:136-37). But deconstruction (like the post- modernism it underwrites) is unable to oppose the massive economic and political reaction that has taken place in the West since the dismantling of the welfare state began in the late 1970s (the onset of one of those terrible periods, Amin

notes, "when the gluttons hold their orgy" [1998:8]). Because it is "impotent to contest capitalist globalization," deconstruction-along with what passes for the

avantgarde-has arguably for almost 30 years "been co-opted through the main

strategies of the globalized neoliberal project" (Amin 1998:66). In Breaking the Rules (1986), I championed the deconstructionist logic of the

Wooster Group's work at a time when deconstruction and Foucauldian analysis seemed far more revolutionary tools than they do today. Intent as I was on dis-

covering in the Group the fulfillment of the 1960s dream of a perfect alignment of aesthetic and political radicalism, I argued that its work was motivated and but- tressed by what I then described as a radical politics (albeit one I realized even then was far more indebted to Foucault than Marx). Although LeCompte denied she was politically motivated, I assumed (wink, wink) that she was understand-

ably reluctant to lay claim to a leftist agenda during the severe attenuation of the National Endowment for the Arts under Reagan. I now take her at her word, however, when she asserts that her work is dictated not by politics but essentially by formal principles and the injunctions of performative and spectatorial pleas- ure. (Looking back on my interactions with the Group over a 2o-year period, I now believe Ron Vawter to have been the most politically motivated and committed of the founding members.) But LeCompte is by no means unique in this

regard. Ernst, too, unlike so many avantgardists (especially his fellow Surrealists), refused "a direct involvement in current events or topics" while Forsythe's work eschews explicit political content (Camfield 1993:19). Even during the most vi-

olent and criminal years of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield-sponsored imperial aggres- sion, the work of the consecrated avantgarde has in the main remained "above"

politics (Foreman's King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe [2004] is a notable, if curious, exception). An auspicious and impressive rebirth of anti-imperialist political satire has happened elsewhere: in the alternative press, on the internet and cable TV, in street performance, Off Broadway, and even in the Broadway musi- cal (viz., Sondheim's The Frogs [2004]). But the avantgarde has opted for ambiva- lence over commitment.

If what I am calling the last wave of the American avantgarde counts as an

avantgarde at all, it is in part because of its commitment to making challenging, hermetic, deconstructionist work and to small-scale production--i.e., its poverty. The artists most regularly associated with it (with the exception of Wilson) re-

mained small-scale producers into the 1980s. Many have continued to work in

small, nonprofit arenas (producing work for other professionals), while making oc- casional forays into large-scale production (like Broadway, the Brooklyn Acad-

emy of Music [BAM] Opera House, or large European venues). This oscillation between small- and large-scale production inadvertently points out the increas-

ing difficulty of separating the commercial from the noncommercial sphere. Since the early years of the Reagan administration, government funding for the


arts has been drastically reduced while corporate sponsors have tended to favor more well-established, elitist, or conservative arts organizations. As the theatre industry as a whole has contracted, more and more so-called avantgarde work has been developed in nonprofit theatres in the hope that it will be picked up by producers for runs in commercial theatres or in prestigious and well-financed arts centers, regional theatres, and festivals (like BAM's preposterously misnamed Next Wave Festival). As Aronson recognizes, "the avantgarde has become a kind of cultural establishment," a highbrow rejoinder to MTV, hip-hop, and indepen- dent film (2000:2o6). Virtually all emergent or small-scale American theatre artists style themselves insurgents, all the while hoping to tread the narrow path that leads (in New York, at least) from the Fringe Festival, Dixon Place, or P.S. 122 to the Public Theater, BAM, Lincoln Center, or even Broadway. The Wooster Group's 1997 New York production of The Hairy Ape at the Selwyn Theatre on 42nd Street was, after all, a coproduction between the Group and a commercial producer, Fred Zollo. This and countless other collaborations verify the fact that the ability to draw a distinction between the noncommercial and the commercial theatre has become almost exclusively the province of accountants, tax lawyers, and those ready to argue over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (see Savran 2003).

In the field of culture, the concept of an avantgarde is ineluctably tied to the modernist cultural hierarchy that opposes art and commerce, esoteric and popular, live and mediated, progressive and reactionary, avantgarde and kitsch. But this hierarchy no longer obtains, or at least no longer takes the form it did for most of the 20oth century. Given an unprecedented commercialization of the public sphere, diversification of cultural production, proliferation of new media, and widespread skepticism over progress narratives, it is peculiar, indeed, that so many arbiters of culture still want to believe there exists a cohort of producers committed to the kind of utopian projects put forward by Saint-Simon or the historical avantgarde. Perhaps theatre artists and critics in the U.S. continue to use the label "avantgarde" because as a cultural field, theatre represents an archaic means of production, a handmade product that resists the mass-production and distri- bution given films, compact discs, DVDs, and other popular media (see Savran 2003). Because of its anachronistic position, theatre offerings are still hierarchized much the way they were 30 years ago. This antiquated hierarchy continues to es- teem the remnants of a highbrow experimental theatre, or what Bourdieu describes as "the 'poor theatre' which caters to the dominant class fractions richest in cultural capital and poorest in economic capital" (1993:86). This poor theatre is always defined in part by its opposition to both the kind of upper-middlebrow plays that win the Pulitzer Prize and the lower-middlebrow spectacles that keep Broadway alive. The transformation of theatre into an archaic form did not of course happen overnight, but dates back to more or less the same period (the 1970s) when what I am calling the last wave of the avantgarde coalesced. Given the economic, political, and social conditions of its emergence-and despite its many extraordinary achievements-I am tempted to conclude that the last avant-

garde was never really an avantgarde at all. Like the field of which it is a part, it was produced as a kind of living anachronism, less an oppositional cultural formation than a set of clearly recognizable and marketable theatrical styles that can be taught, analyzed (by academics like me), expropriated, and traded on international markets. (Interestingly, one of the most notable survivors of this last wave, Richard Foreman, explicitly figures the avantgarde as an exhausted, quaint relic in what he claims to be his final theatre piece, The Gods Are Pounding My Head! [AKA Lumberjack Messiah, 200oo5].)

Because of the archaic character of the theatrical field-poor theatre!-and the way it continues to conform to a modernist cultural hierarchy, there remains

36 David Savran

a remarkable resistance to giving up the word "avantgarde," and not only in the

pages of the New York Times. Its persistence does not mean, however, that its value is what it was 30 years ago. In fact, an unmistakable change did indeed occur around the time the Times decided that the Wooster Group's work was dazzling, searing, and exhilarating. The consecration of the avantgarde in the late I980s and 199os was the result of more, I believe, than a fin de si&cle cultural reassess- ment. It also represented a branding of the avantgarde, the production of the label

"avantgarde" as a kind of registered trademark. This process coincided exactly with major changes in the marketplace as Calvin Klein, Nike, Starbucks, Martha Stewart, and the Body Shop (among many others) developed distinctive logos and brand identities that allowed them to sell their goods, as Naomi Klein ex-

plains, "not as 'commodities' but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle" (1999:21). Just as this process of branding "liberated" sneakers and coffee "from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing," so, too, avantgardist artists, "liberated" from the need or even the possibility of being aligned with an

oppositional political formation, became "free to soar, less as the disseminators of

goods or services than as collective hallucinations" (22). Ironically enough, the

production of the avantgarde as brand, collective hallucination, endlessly alluring and prestigious commodity, signals less a modification than a complete reversal of its original meaning. If the first avantgarde (as exemplified by Max Ernst) represented a protest against the commodification of art, its now-consecrated remains represent a kind of hommage to mediatized culture, an attempt both to scorn and embrace the commercial sphere. In Poor Theater, this double-edged strategy is perhaps most apparent in parts two and three in the use of footage from

Hollywood westerns as a spur for the simulated Frankfurters to improvise their

syncopated footwork. Poor Theater's positioning as a work that both sustains an avantgarde that no

longer exists and mourns its death comes most concretely into focus in its use of the Frankfurt Ballet as a surrogate for the Wooster Group. Part two of the piece, in fact, begins with a video that remakes a portion of Mike Figgis's 1995 docu-

mentary about William Forsythe entitled Just Dancing Around. In the Wooster

Group's rendering, the Performing Garage doubles as the offices of the Frankfurt Ballet while Scott Shepard stands in for the choreographer, wearing the same T- shirt Forsythe wears in the documentary, imitating his voice and movement with uncanny accuracy, and mimicking his contempt for the relentless commercialization of art. The recent disbandment of Forsythe's company highlights both the economic problems facing the avantgarde of yore and the astonishing differences in funding for the arts between the U.S. and Western Europe. As Forsythe has re-

peatedly maintained and Alan Riding has confirmed, he came under attack by local politicians (despite his company's playing to 96 percent capacity houses) because of "their dislike of Mr. Forsythe's avantgarde work and their preference for old-fashioned tutus" (Riding 2003:2, I5). "A few people with a lot of money inside and outside politics," Forsythe says (in words that, for many American read- ers, will recall the protests lodged against the defunding initiatives of the National Endowment for the Arts during the I98os and I990s), "are trying to impose their

personal taste on the entire cultural landscape" (in Riding 2002:E5). Despite Forsythe's conflict with the Frankfurt city fathers, however, he succeeded, even before his resignation became final, in founding a new, "slimmed down" version of his old company to be supported jointly by Frankfurt and Dresden at a rate of subsidy only very slightly below that provided the Frankfurt Ballet (Riding 2oo04:EI).

Forsythe's economic and artistic difficulties seem almost trivial in comparison with the problem of state funding for the arts in the U.S. In 2002, Frankfurt provided $80 million for the arts, $5-7 million alone for the Frankfurt Ballet, or 87


percent of the company's budget (Riding 2002:E5). In the U.S. that same year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded a total of $II5 million in grants. That works out to a difference between $124 per capita (for Frankfurt) versus 40? per capita (for the U.S.). Even if one adds in the grants given by the considerably more generous New York State Council on the Arts, the total for New York State in 2002 still comes to only $2.72 per capita. In other words, Frankfurt provides 46 times the funding for the arts per capita than the NEA and NYSCA combined. As a well-established (if hardly affluent) company, the Wooster Group has a strong recent history of fundraising. However, unearned income does not come close to the level of support afforded the Frankfurt Ballet. Between 2001 and 2004, the Group's operating budget averaged about one million dollars per year, approximately one sixth that of the Frankfurt Ballet. Of that, only 42 percent came from public and private sources. For the 2004 fiscal year (I July 2003 to 30 June 2004), the period during which the Group was making Poor Theater, unearned income from public and private sources totaled $429,ooo and represented about 45 percent of its operating expenses. That year the Group also in- curred an operating deficit of $153,ooo (Bassin 2004).

Differences in the level of state funding also help to explain the dissimilar recent histories of avantgarde practice in the United States and in those European countries that offer far more generous subsidies to theatre companies. One of the most striking features of the consecrated avantgarde in the U.S. is the relatively advanced age of most of its most noted practitioners, most of whom (like Le-

Compte, Foreman, Wilson, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Lee Breuer, and

many others) were born in the 1940s. In Germany, on the other hand, many of the leading avantgarde practitioners are a full generation younger than their Amer- ican counterparts: Thomas Ostermeier (born 1968), Rene Pollesch (born 1962), Michael Thalheimer (born 1965), and Sasha Waltz (born 1963). They also happen to be the directors of the large state-supported theatres (or in the case of Thalheimer, closely associated with one of them). In the U.S., fundraising for so-called experimental theatre companies is almost entirely dependent on the

identity and profile of the artistic director (aka the visionary) at the helm. In Ger-

many, on the other hand-with the notable exception of the Frankfurt Ballet-

companies tend to function as ongoing producing institutions that retain their

particular artistic profiles regardless of who happens to be the director. The generous financial support by the German state of well-established institutions- rather than illustrious individuals-has allowed for a much more rapid turnover of the so-called avantgarde and a much more dynamic theatre tradition. In the U.S., on the other hand, by the time a young and innovative director is able to attract large grants from public and private sources, he or she is no longer young and-more often than not-no longer especially innovative.

In Poor Theater, a sense of crisis, even of doom, is produced by multiple effects that both underline and problematize the inevitability of the end-of the piece; of the Frankfurt Ballet; of the Wooster Group; of a poor, poor theatre; and of the

performers themselves who will finally disappear into a mock-up of Grotowski's crematorium. Perhaps the most ominous effects are the repeated announcements in part two made in German and translated simultaneously on a video screen: "At- tention: the theatre will close in fifteen minutes." In fact, the number and place- ment of these announcements is improvised and so varies from night to night. But they always produce the sense of a countdown. (The text of the announcements is taken, in fact, from the final seconds ofJust Dancing Around.) The sense of an inevitable and predestined end, however, is problematized by the sequence of curtain calls. At the conclusion of part two, the performers take their bows. Then, without warning, as if the piece were afraid to end, part three begins, almost as an afterthought or encore, combining the conventions of both Grotowski

38 David Savran

and Forsythe. At the real end, the performers reenact the final seconds of Akropo- lis, disappear into a hole in the bleachers, and vanish. When the audience members realize that this disappearance represents the real ending of the piece, they begin to applaud-again. But to no avail. The performers never reemerge to

greet the applause. Awaiting the reappearance of those who are gone, the audience glimpses only the empty performance space, with its two gravestonelike markers, as the applause trickles to silence.

Poor Theater is a performance of its own impossibility. Its refusal to provide audiences with an immediately comprehensible or consumable work of art, to translate from a language that sounds utterly foreign to most Americans, or even to

acknowledge the audience's applause at the end, signals the Wooster Group's con-

tinuing commitment to an impossible avantgardism, its unwillingness to surren- der to an ending or to relinquish all that has passed away. Positioning itself as both a last act and an epitaph, Poor Theater memorializes belatedness. It suggests that the sublime pathos of the avantgarde that was never really an avantgarde at all is the result not of its capitulation to the commodity or mass culture or the Frank- furt City Council but of the fact that, although dead, it continues willy-nilly to

produce simulacra: resurrected phantoms like Christ/Apollo at the end of Akropo- lis, like Grotowski himself (a patron saint of the last avantgarde), like Max Ernst, like the now-defunct Frankfurt Ballet, and like the many lost performers whose mechanical reproductions must now forever stand in for them. Yet these simulacra will always and involuntarily exceed their performance. Think of the unut- terable sadness of Spalding Gray, some 25 years after confronting his mother's suicide in Rumstick Road, fashioning for himself a watery grave. Or of the video-

tape (made for Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Anthony) of Ursula Easton, her face partially paralyzed, reading from Flaubert's text as she was dying of a brain tu- mor. Or of Ron Vawter's heart breaking at 35,ooo feet. If the Wooster Group remains in the vanguard of a tragically belated avantgarde, perhaps that is because it has for a generation rehearsed a communication with the dead, raising the ghosts of its interlocutors and antecedents, signaling through the flames.

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42 David Savran

Wooster Group

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David Savran'sfirst book, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (Theatre Com- mnunications Group, 1986) remains tile only monograph on the

W•ooster Group. His most recent book is A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theatre

(University of Michliqan Press, 2003). He is Vera Mowrry Roberts Distinguished Professor

ofAmerican Theatre at the Gradiuate Centet; City University of New, York.

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