Getting Off: Lee Breuer on Performance

By Lee Breuer

Since he first arrived on the New York art/theatre/performance scene in 1970, Lee Breuer has been at the forefront of the American theatrical avant-garde, creating challenging works both independently and with Mabou Mines, the company he co-founded with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. By blending disciplines and techniques from widely different cultures, he has created a unique performance genre fusing sound and musical components, visual arts, and arresting movement/dance/puppetry into a groundbreaking form.

Breuer’s work as a director includes radical adaptations of major works, such as his celebrated stagings of The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett, The Gospel at Colonus, inspired by Sophocles, a gender-reversed King Lear, and a revolutionary reinterpretation of Ibsen with Mabou Mines DollHouse.

Breuer has also been a prolific writer who redefines the concept of character and the use of biography in such works as The Shaggy Dog Animation, A Prelude to Death in Venice, Hajj, Ecco Porco, and La Divina Caricatura in a distinctive American voice.

In this volume, theatre historian and journalist Stephen Nunns has assembled a unique look into one of contemporary theatre’s most singular creative minds. Using interviews and excerpts from Breuer’s writings, with added historical commentary, the thrilling result is equal parts autobiography, artistic manifesto, and critical exploration. Extensively illustrated with photographs of his work from around the world, this is a one-of-a-kind portrait of the artist and theatrical activist at work.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781559368629

Book preview

THE THEATRE AND ITS TROUBLE (EXCERPT 1)

A version of this list of pseudo-philosophic riffs on theatre and art—inspired in part by Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics and Brecht’s A Short Organum for the Theatre (which in and of itself was a pseudo-philosophic riff on Marx and Hegel)—was included in Breuer’s 1987 TCG collection, Sister Suzie Cinema. Whereas Brecht’s writing was a description of a theatre of the scientific age, The Theatre and Its Trouble is more of a description of a theatre of the facetious age. Breuer has since critiqued the essay for its overt romanticism and floweriness, but it stands as a good indicator of his interests/obsessions at this point in his career.

1.    If a fact falls in the forest and you hear it not—is it a fact at all? Might it not have been your fancy? Theatre, de facto, did originate. I’m sure there was a time and a place. But I didn’t have a ticket. And no one sent me the reviews. I’ll content myself with truth according to the fanciful. Fancy, which is the soul of fact, makes fact ring true. And the truth is, theatre started with the wolves.

2.    Moon … mountain … snow blanket, snow pillow, snow sheet; the bed is coldly made, the table savagely laid, for a howling. Look! It is the moment of the turning around. The turning around was initiated in the theatre of the wolves.

3.    Sing, O wolves, of wolfish mysteries. Why does one wolf turn around? Is one chosen? Does one sing better than the rest? Is one inspired by the wolf ghosts of wolf ancestors? Does one preach the wolfish word? We hear. We echo. We howl. We harmonize—we wolves.

4.    Sing. Dance. Paint your faces. Don’t ask an actor why. Ask a singing bird, a prancing peacock. Ask any fish who changes colors. Applaud the mie of Tomasaburo! Applaud the postures of lions.

5.    Read your program. It is a genetic program.

6.    Performance is the method of natural selection adopted by culture. Culture is society’s DNA. Performance is fashion. Survival of the fashionable. That’s what it’s all about.

7.    What is acting? Acting is the moment when, after the performance turns around to the front, it turns back to the side.

8.    And half of you is half assing you. And that’s the theatre and its trouble.

CHAPTER ONE:

HAPPY JUST TO KEEP MY EDGE

In which Breuer contemplates the yin of Peter and Wendy, ’pataphysics, and redders and blackers

EXCERPTS FROM A LECTURE AT TOWSON UNIVERSITY, MARCH 2007

What I want to do today is … well, to tell you the truth, I can do whatever you want. But it seems that the gist is that we should have a conversation. And we should have a conversation on a couple of subjects that are very important to you: process and how to get it together to actually do something in the world—in this mess.

The first thing I wanted to do was show you some videos, by way of diversion. You see, I think my writing has changed, and I want to stop directing for a while and concentrate on writing, because I think I’ve moved into another area that I’m very, very happy about. Steve [Nunns] spoke about Ecco Porco.²⁰ Well, there was a small sequence in it that I wrote for Ruth [Maleczech] that we turned into a one-act called Summa Dramatica.²¹ It’s a spin on Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics. ’Pataphysics is defined as the philosophy of magical solutions. It’s a send-up of metaphysics and it’s absolutely hilarious. Jarry, as I guess you all already know, was the writer of Ubu Roi and initiated the so-called avant-garde in the world. And died a penniless drunk—an ether junkie asking for a