Elizabeth LeCompte

Elizabeth LeCompte (born April 28, 1944) is an American director of experimental theater, dance and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s.[1]

Life and career

LeCompte was born and grew up in New Jersey. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Fine Arts from Skidmore College. She met director and actor Willem Dafoe at The Performance Group and began a professional and personal relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982.[2][3][4]

With The Wooster Group, she has composed, designed, and directed over forty works for theater, dance, film and video, starting with Sakonnet Point in 1975. These works characteristically interweave performance with multimedia technologies and are strongly influenced by historical and contemporary visual arts and architecture. She is known both for taking apart and reworking classics such as Hamlet, The Emperor Jones, and The Hairy Ape as well as constructing new works from scratch.

Prior to her work with The Wooster Group, she was a member of the experimental theater company The Performance Group from 1970 to 1975. Subsequently, LeCompte and Spalding Gray founded The Wooster Group, along with Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter. For her work with these groups, LeCompte was included in Mitter and Shevtsova's 2004 volume discussing 50 influential theater directors around the world.[1] Other writers consistently include her in the lineage of experimental theater artists that passes through Meyerhold and Grotowski to the present generation of "postdramatic" theater makers.[5][6] As a New Yorker writer put it: "Luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde—Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter Sellars among them—describe her as first among equals".[7]

LeCompte has lectured and taught at American University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, Connecticut College, the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Northeastern University, the O’Neill Center, Smith College, the University of London, and the Yale School of Drama.

Awards

Among her honors, LeCompte has received the National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater, the MacArthur Fellowship,[8] the Chevalier des Artes et Lettres from the French Cultural Ministry, a Guggenheim Fellowship,[9] a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship,[10] a United States Artists Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award,[11] the Theater Practitioner Award from Theatre Communications Group,[12] The Skowhegan Medal for Performance, a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Performance Artist Award[13] and honorary doctorates from the New School and California Institute of the Arts. She was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

Wooster Group Works Made by LeCompte

Theater

Three Places in Rhode Island

The Road to Immortality

Dance

Film and Video

Radio-Audio

See also

The Performance Group

The Wooster Group

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 Mitter, Shomit, and Maria Shevtsova, ed. (2004) Fifty Key Theatre Directors. London: Routledge.
  2. ↑ "Willem and Giada Dafoe". English-language website of Vogue Italia. March 4, 2010. Archived from the original on February 8, 2012. Retrieved February 8, 2012.
  3. ↑ Spalding Gray (20 October 2011). "Spalding Gray on Hollywood, Writing, and Willem Dafoe". Slate. Retrieved 3 July 2012.
  4. ↑ "Willem Dafoe - Dafoe Trades Old Love For Young New Flame". Contactmusic. 2 March 2004. Retrieved 3 July 2012.
  5. ↑ Schechner, Richard. "Theatre Alive in the New Millennium." TDR/The Drama Review 44.1 (2000): 5-6.
  6. ↑ Fuchs, Elinor. Review of Postdramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann. TDR/The Drama Review 52.2 (2008): 178-183.
  7. ↑ Kramer, Jane. "Experimental Journey: Elizabeth LeCompte takes on Shakespeare" The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2007.
  8. ↑ Elizabeth LeCompte at the MacArthur Foundation
  9. ↑ Elizabeth LeCompte at the Guggenheim Foundation.
  10. ↑ Elizabeth LeCompte, New York, USA Rockefeller Fellow at United States Artists
  11. ↑ Anonymous Was A Woman award winners
  12. ↑ TCG National Conference 2007 – TCG Awards at Theatre Communications Group.
  13. ↑ Elizabeth LeCompte at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

External links

Wikiversity has learning materials about Performance art
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