revisiting and reinventing embodied theatrical liveness
The Wooster Group was no stranger to me when I was studying. They were almost everywhere: in textbooks, in journal articles on their famous Hamlet, and in conferences. They have long stood as a synonym for avant-garde theatre in the English-speaking world, and beyond.
When it comes to Nayatt School Redux, I am not exactly surprised, or pushed off, by their signature screen/live approach: extracting archived performances projected on screen while actors enact the same scenes in front of it. While live-camera and multi-media projection now seem so common and even overused, theatre’s ontology was much under peril in the 1970s, threatened by mass media such as television and cinema. Thus, theatre was made forced to rethink and justify itself, and pioneers of theatre practitioners painstakingly navigate their ways in between embodied liveness and mediated materials.
The Wooster Group is one of these pioneers. Performing in the liminal space in-between archive and living embodiment to validate and surpass both, Nayatt School Redux is of no exception. As a contemporary reworking of Nayatt School, originally created by Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray, this remake opens with Wooster Group member Kate Valk unveiling newly restored archival recordings of Gray’s original performance, interwoven with her own encounters with the company, before the current ensemble reenacts scenes from the 1978 piece, including T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, moving toward a climactic reanimation of performative social disguise, chaos and despair.
Using Diana Taylor’s terms, The Wooster Group often stages the friction between archive and a live event, where the performance per se becomes a way of storing and transmitting knowledge. This was already evident from The Town Hall Affair where the documentary Town Bloody Hall, a documentary about a squawky 1971 Town Hall debate on women’s liberation, serves as the archival source material. In Nayatt School Redux, that archival source becomes Gray’s original performance recordings, in front of which Valk and later Scott Shepherd enact the same action to carry forward their bodies. To me, this feels extremely exhilarating to summon living memories through living bodies.
T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party was chosen by LeCompte and Gray in 1978 to integrate Gray’s innermost autobiographical voice and through a more theatrical, or in Richard Schechner’s terms, more “performative” frame. In this remake, that choice illustrates such performativity when the full ensemble reinvents the party scene as most ferociously raw, undisciplined, and desperately ecstatic, which still feels uncannily relatable today.
Some half a century ago, theatre was thought to be under threat of disappearance, supposedly eclipsed by mass media. Today, that anxiety returns with Netflix and its countless imitators. Under such conditions, Nayatt School Redux feels urgent and necessary: it is both a site and a signpost for us to revisit again and again, the ultimate value of embodiment liveness, and how such value can confront, mediate, and coexist with whatever new medium appears to demystify the ontology of theatre.