Elizabeth LeCompte

Sunday 1 June, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia will present the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to the director and playwright Elizabeth LeCompte.

“This is a personal, individual and at the same time collective story” reads Willem Dafoe’s motivation for the award of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Elizabeth LeCompte.  

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.

“Integrating the codes of music, painting, dance and the media – continues the motivation – Elizabeth LeCompte composed works that were met with great acclaim by audiences and critics worldwide and often fiercely debated, but would increasingly characterise what would become a reference point for avantgarde theatre over the decades. Since the 1970s and 80s, Elizabeth LeCompte has influenced creation for the theatre and opened it to the political and cultural debate, pursuing a consistent and unwavering path founded on extensive study and innovative technique – always centred on the integration of modern technology with the physical art of the actor, within a mise en scène of her design. In her many years of leadership, the director and author has taken on the classics and original texts, working constantly with the company to develop them (sharing the same salary equally with everyone else), and directing over fifty different productions. Theatre is a ‘physical action’, says LeCompte, to be proudly and obstinately practiced outside of the American production system, in an ongoing battle for creative independence, both individual and collective. After being honoured with the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government, and countless other awards, Elizabeth LeCompte will receive the Golden Lion of Biennale Teatro 2025.”

The Wooster Group directed by Elizabeth LeCompte will open the 53^rd International Theatre Festival on Saturday May 31^st and in repeat on Sunday June 1^st 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.

Elizabeth LeCompte (New Jersey, 1944) is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media who co-founded The Wooster Group at The Performing Garage in Soho, New York City. She has directed the Group since its emergence in the mid-1970s. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Fine Arts from Skidmore College. With The Wooster Group, LeCompte has composed, designed, and directed over fifty works for theater, dance, film and video. 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 dissecting and reconstituting classics such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Eugene O’Neil’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, and Brecht’s The Mother, as well as composing new works, such as Poor Theater and The Town Hall Affair. Prior to her work with The Wooster Group, LeCompte was a member of Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group with actor Spalding Gray from 1970 to 1975. In 1975, LeCompte and Gray began making their own work, starting with Sakonnet Point. Subsequently, LeCompte and Gray, along with Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter, formally founded The Wooster Group in 1980. In 1986, Peter Sellars invited LeCompte and the Group to be in residence at the American National Theater/Kennedy Center where they performed two works from their repertory, LS.D. (...Just the High Points…) and North Atlantic, and began development of a new work based on Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Antony. Invitations to present the work in Europe began around the same time. This led to a consortium of European presenters, including Kaaitheater in Brussels, Theater Am Turm in Frankfurt, the Vienna Festival, and the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, who in the early 1990s commissioned a major series of Wooster Group works – including Brace Up!, based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and its sequel Fish Story. Also during the 1990s, media pieces by the Group were included in three successive Whitney biennials. In 1997, the Group rehabilitated an abandoned Broadway theater for performances of their production of The Hairy Ape. Continuing to tour in Europe, the Group made its first of eight appearances at the Festival d’Automne à Paris in 2001. The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned LeCompte and the Group to make a performance to close its 2005 Dada exhibition, which became Who’s Your Dada?!. In 2009, LeCompte directed her first opera production, La Didone with Wooster Group performers alongside opera singers and a baroque musical ensemble. Mikhail Baryshnikov engaged LeCompte to open his new arts center in New York City with the 2010 remount of North Atlantic, followed by Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre. Over fifteen years in the early 2000s, the Group also presented nine of its works at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. In 2012, the Group was commissioned by the London Cultural Olympiad to collaborate with the Royal Shakespeare Company on a production of Troilus and Cressida. Sustained touring of the Group’s work to Asia began in 2014, with engagements in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Gwangju, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Tokyo over the decade that followed. The Whitney Museum selected the Group to create a ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of its new building in 2015. In 2016, LeCompte was invited by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Poland, to create a work in honor of Tadeusz Kantor’s centenary, which resulted in the production A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique). In 2023, LeCompte was selected as the Artist in Focus for the Festival International Neue Dramatik at the Schaubühne, Berlin. 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, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Cultural Ministry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the Theater Practitioner Award from Theatre Communications Group, The Skowhegan Medal for Performance, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and honorary doctorates from the New School for Social Research and the California Institute of the Arts. She won the 2016 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.