Abstract
This chapter investigates the ways in which New York based theatre company The Wooster Group create a scenographic environment that promotes the experience of what is termed “a loss of self” in the performer. The analysis focuses on The Group’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré (1977), which was first staged in 2009 and identifies how Williams’ idea of writing configures a similar state of loss in the play-text’s concept of progress, freedom and escape. The practices of writing and performing on The Group’s stage are presented as encounters that destabilise notions of replete identity and which also promote the possibility of a live and present engagement with experience itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
LeCompte explicitly uses the term witness to describe the audience’s function in performance in David Savran’s Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York, TCG, 1988, p. 45.
- 2.
I am drawing on Jean-Francois’s Lyotard’s concept of ethics here, which owes a great debt to Kantian thinking on ethics, aesthetic judgment and the sublime. See especially Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis, 1988; see also James Hatley’s “Lyotard, Levinas, and the Phrasing of the Ethical.” In H. J. Silverman (Ed.), Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 15–83.
References
Benjamin, W. (2003). Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940 (H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings, Eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kaye, N. (1996). Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents. Amsterdam: Harwood.
LeCompte, E. (1993). “Notes on Form”, originally published in the program for The Wooster Group’s performance of Fish Story at the Weiner Festwochen in 1993. A version is published in Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication, 1(3), New York. For an electronic version see: http://www.e-felix.org/issue3/Lecompte.html.
Quick, A. (2007). The Wooster Group Workbook. London: Routledge.
Savran, D. (1988). Breaking the Rule. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Shilling, L., & Fuller, L. K. (1997). Dictionary of Quotations in Communications. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Silverman, H. J. (2002). Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime. London: Routledge.
Valk, K. (1991). Unpublished Interview with Marianne Weems and Cynthia Hedstrum, The Performing Garage, New York.
Vawter, Ron. (1991). Unpublished Interview with Marianne Weems and Cynthia Hedstrum. New York: The Performing Garage.
Williams, T. (1963). The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Anymore. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
Williams, T. (2000). Vieux Carré. New York: New Directions.
Williams, T. (2007). Memoirs. London: Penguin.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Quick, A. (2018). On Leaving the House: The Loss of Self and the Search for “The Freedom of Being” in The Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré. In: Pinchbeck, M., Westerside, A. (eds) Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97969-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97970-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)