The long artistic journey of the director, or as she likes to define herself “theatre creator” LeCompte, is forever linked to that of the Wooster Group, the historic company she founded with Spalding Gray in the early 1970s. This was the era of off-off-Broadway, permeated with the experimentation of the Living Theatre or Joseph Chaikin, while New York protested against the war in Vietnam. After taking possession of a post-industrial space in SoHo, on Wooster Street, reinvented to become a theatre, Elizabeth LeCompte built a creative journey that would be recognised and appreciated by Richard Foreman, Bob Wilson, Peter Sellars, Susan Sontag, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sam Shepard and many others.
The Wooster Group will open the 53rd International Theatre Festival on Saturday May 31st and in repeat on Sunday June 1st with the European premiere of Symphony of Rats (Teatro alle Tese, Arsenale), a production that after almost forty years, brings back to the stage a famous play by Richard Foreman, who recently passed away.
Note: a talk moderated by Lorenzo Pavolini will follow.
