Hall of Fame
Reza Abdoh
Fredrick Keisler
Liz Lecompte
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Meredith Monk
Francis Picabia
Valentine De Saint Point
Oskar Schlemmer
Reza Abdoh, Tight Right White (1993) Photo: Paula Court
REZA ABDOH
(Born 1963 in Tehran, Iran, died 1995)
While born in Iran and growing up in England, Reza Abdoh spent his working life in New York and Los Angeles (which was curtailed by his death to AIDS at the age of 32), writing, directing and producing multi-award winning, cutting-edge theatre. Known for his gritty, angry, caustic polemic, Abdoh confrontationally tackled the weighty issues of race, identity, sexuality, class, and AIDS, always relating the personal to the universal. His plays toured festival circuits and theatres extensively in Europe while arousing and provoking the avant-garde theatre scene of New York during the 1990s. Abdoh also successfully ventured into filmmaking during his career and directed a Verdi production for Long Beach Opera, but mainly focused on his work with Los Angeles Theatre Centre and then his own company Dar A Luz, formed in 1991.
Abdoh’s influences were from a decidedly American culture: its good and evil, its character, and its societal obsessions, and his full-scale theatrical works were often fragmented and non-linear including multimedia elements: text, dance, film and sound. They were performed in unusual spaces as well as conventional theatres and they frequently challenged their audiences in their form, style and content. Abdoh received huge acclaim and wide recognition for his work, winning awards including the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre Award for Outstanding New Work (1991), the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts and a ‘Bessie’ Choreographer and Creator Award for Sustained Achievement, posthumously in 1996.
^
Frederick Kiesler, Kiesler building his Bucephalus, Amagansett Cement & wire mesh (unfinished)
FREDERICK KEISLER
(Born 1890, Vienna, Austria, died 1965)
Austrian born, but based in New York from the mid 1920s, Frederick Keisler was an artist, architect, theoretician and theatre designer. Similar to the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Kiesler’s ideas were visionary and utopian, and often remained in the realm of design rather than completed buildings. The conviction and passion in his work was pivotal, as he believed that re-thinking and re-design could infiltrate society and ultimately change the world. Kiesler was always a part of the avant-garde art world throughout his career and he often designed art exhibitions, working as a member of De Stijl group in the 1920s, he also collaborated with the Surrealists, and famously worked with Peggy Guggenheim in the 1940s to create her gallery Art of This Century.
He is best known for two concepts: ‘the endless’ and ‘correalism’. The endlessness of his building designs were rooted in the fact that they were intended as multi-functional, open spaces, in line with his ideas on the blurring of art and life. His ‘Endless Theatre’ designs of 1923 were for a circular theatre, with spiraling stages that were interconnected by rings of seats. Kiesler was instrumental in re-thinking the separation between audience and performer, and his designs worked to eliminate some of this divide, thus creating a flexible theatre, open to new possibilities. In 1924 he exhibited in the International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques, in Vienna, to great acclaim. Correalism was essentially his expansive theory regarding the interconnectedness between man and environment, which he applied to his design concepts. These theories were explained in his 1939 book On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design, and from 1937-43 Kiesler headed the Laboratory for Design-Correlation at Columbia University.
^
LIZ LECOMPTE
(Born 1944, New York)
Elizabeth LeCompte is a founding member and director of New York’s The Wooster Group who began her career in experimental theatre in the 1970s with The Performance Group. Under the direction of LeCompte the collaboration of artists that comprise the Wooster Group have worked to produce film, radio and dance and as well as theatre for over 25 years. The Wooster Group generates its own outstanding work alongside radical restagings of classical and modern theatre pieces, creating a repertoire of work that has sought to cultivate new forms of expression. The group has used multi-media and outlandish set-design and has achieved status as an internationally renowned performance company that has led the field in situating itself between the different disciplines of theatre, art, dance and music. The Group works and performs out of The Performing Garage, in an original Fluxus designated building in New York’s SoHo, and they have toured extensively worldwide. Other founding members included Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Simth, Kate Valk and Jim Clayburgh.
LeCompte herself has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Skowhegan Medal for Performance, a MacArthur Award, The National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement, and the Village Voice’s OBIE Award for 15 years of sustained excellence.
^
Vsevolod Meyerhold, The Dawns by Verhaeren (1920), directed at RSFSR First Theatre, Moscow
VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD
(Born 1874, Penza, Russia, died 1940)
Vsevolod Meyerhold was one of the most significant Russian theatre directors of the twentieth century. Also an actor, theorist and innovative educator, he even delved into film production in the early 1920s. Working with the Moscow Art Theatre between 1898 and 1902 as an actor, Meyerhold soon turned to directing, within which he moved from realism to symbolism, experimenting in a laboratory style way. His most prominent theatre works were abstract, formal and dynamic, drawing from cubism and constructivism (he often collaborated with the constructivists, most notably Liubov Popova, for his stage designs). His performance practice developed very much in tandem with his theories, first published in 1907 (Theatre: History and Techniques), and his education work centered on the training of performers through a system he developed, named Biomechanics, involving series of planar, geometric movements and exercises, in line with constructivist ideals.
His career was in many ways inseparable from the politics of Russia; at first he enjoyed freedom to experiment under the Bolsheviks, even working as the Head of the Theatre Department at Narkompros (the Bolshevik cultural school) between 1920 -1921, but support for his work sharply dropped from Bolshevik leaders, and under Stalin Meyerhold was accused of being an anti-Soviet and was imprisoned and executed in 1940.
^
Coming soon
^
Francis Picabia, Francis Picabia in the film Entr’acte (1924)
FRANCIS PICABIA
(Born 1879, Paris, France, died 1953)
Francis Picabia worked across a huge range of media, from painting and drawing, to poetry, publishing and performance. Born in France he worked between Paris, Zurich and New York at different points throughout his career and was variously integral to and then disassociated from both the Dadaists and then the Surrealists. Picabia published the anarchic but long-running 391 Dada magazine from 1917-1924 and at first participated in Dadaist performances, but then wholeheartedly denounced the encroaching uniformity in their performance agenda.
Picabia’s most famous performance work, Rel??che (1924), was a large-scale, scandalous multimedia performance that explicitly aimed to provoke its audience. It included cinematic interludes, showing his film Entr’acte, a fundamentally anarchic film, shot by Reni Clair, moving from worm’s eye views of a tu-tu clad dancer on a glass plate (who was revealed to be a bearded Picabia), to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp playing chess, to a grinning character bursting forth from a coffin, post funeral procession. The skittish film was matched in the performance which had simultaneous events staged throughout including artists, actors and ballet dancers. Rel??che was performed in a Parisian music hall, with a score by Erik Satie, and a back-drop composed of silver discs reflecting bright lights into the eyes of the audience. The influence of Picabia’s diverse approach to large-scale theatre production can be seen in abundance throughout the history of twentieth century theatre performance.
^
VALENTINE DE SAINT POINT
Coming Soon
^
Oskar Schlemmer, Scene from Treppenwitz (c.1926-7)
OSKAR SCHLEMMER
(Born 1888, Stuttgart, Germany, died 1943)
Oskar Schlemmer’s progressive, experimental work in theatre and performance during the 1920s and 30s was hugely influential in the development of this genre in Germany and beyond. Schlemmer’s artistic practice was rich and diverse, as a theorist, painter, sculptor, muralist and lithographer as well as choreographer and performer. During his time teaching at the Bauhaus (the unique, utopian art school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Wiemar, Germany, which lasted in its permanent state of flux and evolution, within the deep political tensions of Germany, until 1933 when it was forced to close under the Nazi regime) he produced some of his most exciting work. Schlemmer joined the school in 1921 heading the sculpture workshop, but soon moved to head the stage workshop from 1923 ‘ 1929, where he practiced unorthodox teaching methods to celebrated results, eventually pioneering the Bauhaus’ touring theatre company, which visited European cities from 1927 to 1932. Schlemmer’s work was essentially formalist, concerning itself with the human figure, pure form and spatiality, stemming from his unusual grasp of the figure, its movement and the space around it. For Schlemmer these interests facilitated a natural maneuvering across various forms from painting to theatre. His avant-garde theatre work, most famously his Triadic Ballet of 1922, usually comprised of geometric forms in dance, stage sets, costumes and masks, and rejected traditional theatre, especially its literariness, instead focusing on more abstract notions and challenging what theatre could be.
Schlemmer’s work was also included in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937, Munich, in which the Third Reich denounced many avant-gardists in their bid for cultural unification. Schlemmer theories, an integral part of his practice are best outlined in his essays on ‘Theatre’ and ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Gropius’ book The Theatre of the Bauhaus (originally published in 1924).
^