Vieux Carre I.

after trying for a while to find a way to upload the director’s notes on my post.. here’s at least the link to whomever it might concern http://vimeo.com/17178010#embed  and some notes of the Vieux Carre project from the wooster group site =)

VIEUX CARRÉ – director’s notes

Like Williams’ first big success The Glass Menagerie, Vieux Carré (1977) is a “memory play,” set in the boarding house in New Orleans where Williams himself stayed as a young man during the Depression. The young writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening there. Inhabitants of the house swirl up out of the writer’s mind as archetypal Williams characters, longing for release and haunted by thwarted dreams. In The Wooster Group’s version of Vieux Carré, the Group experiments with new modes of expression for Williams’ lyric voice.

Vieux Carre II.

The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media. We are based in New York City at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street, where we develop and perform our work. Our productions tour nationally and internationally.

 

Company

Aron Deyo, Ari Fliakos, Sandra Garner, Clay Hapaz, Teresa Hartmann, Cynthia Hedstrom, Daniel Jackson, Bozkurt Karasu, Elizabeth LeCompte, Bobby McElver, Jason Gray Platt, Jamie Poskin, Andrew Schneider, Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk

 

History

The Wooster Group originated in 1975 with works composed and directed by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte around Gray’s autobiographical impulses (the THREE PLACES IN RHODE ISLAND trilogy). Jim Clayburgh, Libby Howes, and Ron Vawter began working with the company during RUMSTICK ROAD, and Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk joined during POINT JUDITH. Peyton Smith joined for ROUTE 1 & 9. The Group has sustained a full-time, ongoing ensemble since this beginning. The company is constantly evolving, and with its many artistic associates has created and performed nineteen pieces for theater, eight film/video pieces, and five dance pieces. The company members are at the center of the work. Elizabeth LeCompte has directed all of the pieces and members who have “moved on” periodically return to remount repertory pieces and make new work.

More recently, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd have joined the core company alongside LeCompte and Valk. Fliakos interned with the Group in 1995 and joined the company as a performer in FISH STORY in 1996. Shepherd first worked with The Wooster Group in 1997 as a performer in THE HAIRY APE, and became a part of the permanent company two years later.

The Group has used both personal and Group autobiography, and existing texts as an organizing principle for their work. Sometimes the autobiography is foregrounded (POOR THEATER) and sometimes it is submerged (Ron’s illness as source material for ST. ANTONY). Sometimes plays are jumping-off points for a piece (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in L.S.D. (…JUST THE HIGH POINTS…), the last eight pages of Chekhov’s Three Sisters for FISH STORY). And, sometimes a play as a whole is re-imagined through the prism of our developing aesthetic (VIEUX CARRÉ, TO YOU, THE BIRDIE! (Phèdre), BRACE UP!, the O’Neill plays).

The Performing Garage has been The Wooster Group’s permanent home and performance venue since its beginning and all of their work has been developed there. It was bought in the early 1970s when Soho was still an empty warehouse district being reinhabited by artists. The Wooster Group owns and operates it as a shareholder in the Grand Street Artists Co-op, which was originally established as part of the Fluxus art movement in the 1960s. Before the formation of The Wooster Group, The Performance Group, under the direction of Richard Schechner, developed and produced work at the Garage. From 1975-1980 the two groups shared the space. Prior to The Performance Group founding The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster Street was a metal stamping/flatware factory.

Vieux Carre III.

howl.

Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959). “Howl” was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. Upon its release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore’s manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, and “Howl” went on to become the most popular poem of the Beat Generation.

The Beat Generation is a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being. Even still the Generation is in motion.[dubious – discuss]
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.[1] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.[2][3] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The original “Beat Generation” writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the Hippie counterculture.

and that’s my first post. enjoy!
eleni and fra, berlin 01.05.11

xx

eleni =)