History of The Performance Group

In 1967, Richard Schechner formed The Performance Group in New York “to experiment with environmental theatre, group process, training techniques, and the performer-audience relationship” (Shank 93). It began as a workshop where Schechner explored work based on “inter-media, Happenings and enviromental theatre,” “counter group techniques,” and “excercises he had learned from the Polish director Jerry Grotowski” (Harding and Rosenthal 308). Fourty-eight people went to the first workshop in November 1967, but they “had winnowed themselves to twenty or so” by January of 1968, when work began on Dionysus in 69 (The Performance Group).

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The group began working at a Welfare Center on the east side of Tompkins Square Park, but soon found that doing their physical and emotional exercises and devising work in such a public place was not ideal for the group or the community. In the text by The Performance Group on Dionysus in 69, Schechner describes how neighborhood kids would watch from outside, and that the group would sometimes hear “the kids running away down the steps yelling, “They’re fucking, they’re fucking! Come! See!” (The Performance Group). Clearly this space was not ideal for the experimenting group, and eventually the community was unhappy with them taking up the space for themselves, so the Group sought out a new space, and eventually found an old garage on Wooster Street, which became The Performing Garage (Shank 94). As Schechner described it, “it was big and high and, except for a huge green garbage truck parked dead center, it was ready for us” (The Performance Group). Acquiring this empty, flexible space for themselves allowed The Performance Group to truly begin working with environment the way Schechner wanted them to, by cleaning, painting, and building in the filthy garage over and over for nearly two months, all the while rehearsing and forming Dionysus in 69 (The Performance Group).

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The makeup of the group was uniquely flexible over its relatively brief 13-year life span; as Harding and Rosenthal describe in Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, there were three somewhat distinct “manifestations” of the group (307). The first, lasting from the group’s founding until 1970, created perhaps the Group’s most famous work, Dionysus in 69. The next iteration, through 1972, is remembered for its own major production, Commune. The third, which lasted through 1980, is generally remembered for its early productions of The Tooth of Crime in 1972 and Mother Courage and Her Children (1980). The third iteration “had a number of members from the second group but was much more fluid, adding new members as old members came and went” (307). The only three members that remained throughout the thirteen-year life of the group were Richard Schechner, Joan Macintosh, and Jerry Rojo (307).

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By 1975, Performance Group members Elizabeth Lecompte and Spaulding Gray had begun producing outside work with other Performance Group members as well as other friends as the Wooster Group (311). The two groups “coexisted during the last half of [the] 1970s,” but in 1980 the Wooster Group took over the lease for the Performing Garage, and The Performance Group came to an end (311).