Their Work
Over its thirteen year life, The Performance Group had a wide variety of works exploring itsinteresting aesthetics of space. Schechner preferred to have the actors work in the performance space on the set as much as possible in process as the play was being created and the set was being built. As he wrote in his book Environmental Theater, “Work on an environment may begin long before a play has been selected or a script assembled. The basic work of TPG is with space: finding it, relating to it, negotiating with it, articulating it” (12). The group used exercises outlined by Schechner to get “int touch with” the space whenever they arrived somewhere new to perform, using all of their senses to feel, engage, and interact with the space (12). Many different physical exercises were important to the work of the group in their devising process, and occasionally became a part of the play, as with their first play, Dionysus in 69.
Dionysus in 69, performed in a space with two tall towers where audience could sit and action took place, was a retelling of The Bacchae using about half of the original text along with lines written in rehearsal by the performers and included in the play, making the performenrs themselves often part of the play, as they introduce their own names into text along with their character names.
The group’s next work, Makbeth, was an experimental retelling of the Shakespeare play as an a critique of authoritarianism in recent politics and warning of approaching fascism coming in the United States. The play had action occuring in multiple places throughout the spacesimultaneously, so there was no place where an audience member could see everything (Shank 98).
Their next play, Commune, did not start with any text at all, but instead brought together a wide variety of cultural objects, as Shank writes “the mythic element came from events in American history, ancient and recent, from literary works such as Moby Dick and the Bible, from politics, and from folk songs and spirituals (98). This play again had a complicated and interesting environment, and explored further with forced audience involvement. The play dealt with a murder commited by members of the Charles Manson commune, as well as the My Lai massacre by American soldiers in Vietnam, and at one point required audience members to volunteer to portray the civilians murdered in the My Lai massacre in order for the play to continue (99-100).
Over time, the group continued to explore with text and space, producing In the Tooth of Crime (1972), Mother Courage and her Children (1974), The Marilyn Project (1975), Oedipus (1977), Cops (1978), and The Balcony (1979) (Shank 101).
