Elizabeth LeCompte

Elizabeth LeCompte (born April 28, 1944) is an American director of experimental theater, dance and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s.

LeCompte was born and grew up in New Jersey. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Fine Arts from Skidmore College. She met director and actor Willem Dafoe at The Performance Group and began a professional and personal relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982.

With The Wooster Group, she has composed, designed, and directed over forty works for theater, dance, film and video, starting with Sakonnet Point in 1975. 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 taking apart and reworking classics such as Hamlet, The Emperor Jones, and The Hairy Ape as well as constructing new works from scratch.

Prior to her work with The Wooster Group, she was a member of the experimental theater company The Performance Group from 1970 to 1975. Subsequently, LeCompte and Spalding Gray founded The Wooster Group, along with Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter. For her work with these groups, LeCompte was included in Mitter and Shevtsova's 2004 volume discussing 50 influential theater directors around the world. Other writers consistently include her in the lineage of experimental theater artists that passes through Meyerhold and Grotowski to the present generation of "postdramatic" theater makers. As a New Yorker writer put it: "Luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde—Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter Sellars among them—describe her as first among equals".

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