One of a Kind
One afternoon in May 2009 at The Performing Garage in New York’s Soho district, a theatre performance is taking shape. Elizabeth LeCompte, director of a world-renowned troupe, The Wooster Group, sits behind a rehearsal, flanked by video and audio technicians; in front of her is a large open space, with two video displays upstage and two more downstage, pointing in the direction of the cast.
On the screens, a solo dancer – a bearded man wearing tights, his countenance without expression – is performing a balletic dance to a vintage recording of chamber music. A woman wearing a negligee and a flowing blonde wig (Wooster Group mainstay Kate Valk, almost unrecognizable in her costume), is imitating the dancer’s movements as she moves across the stage, copying his gestures, steps and twists with her own body.
LeCompte then suggests that another actor joins her. Nahuel Perez Biscayart rises from his seat. Thin, tall and intense, he joins Kate Valk on the stage. Over the next hour or so, LeCompte encourages the actors to simplify their imitations of the video dancer’s movement, to imitate him first with their entire bodies, then just with their shoulders and backs, and finally with their backs alone, until what started as a series of comic, clumsy imitations becomes a graceful, fluid interaction with the video image. Through the entire rehearsal, LeCompte listens to suggestions and feedback from all the performers and offers direction and advice; both director and performers play close attention to the video image and the music score, manipulated by the engineers.
“Liz runs a very open rehearsal room, with a lot of different systems going on at the same time,” says Valk. “You won’t find another one like it anywhere. Our process doesn’t rely on the same kind of highly defined hierarchy – director, playwright, designer, performer – as the making of other plays.”
For almost a year now, Valk and Biscayart have been exploring the nature of theatre, especially the highly specialized, collaborative, avant-garde theatre that the Group represents -- making the protégé-mentor relationship between Valk and Biscayart one of a kind.