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| Kate Valk with her ‘shadow’, the Argentinian actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart, on the set of ‘Vieux Carré’ at the Performing Garage, New York |
Kate Valk of The Wooster Group, a New York-based theatre collective, is “kicked up” after a long day of rehearsals. Exhausted but excited, she removes her heavy eye make-up at a dressing mirror while chatting to the rest of the company as they change (they always rehearse in full costume), pack away equipment and compare notes around her. Their new production of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, a play that bombed when it was first performed on Broadway in 1977, is due to open in Strasbourg in just two weeks and, Valk tells me breathlessly, “everybody is finding their feet more and more and the world is getting richer and richer – the world of the space and the world of who we all are.”
Until recently, Valk was struggling with Williams’ “artificial” dialogue, and with her own part; she plays Jane, a failed fashion illustrator slowly dying of “blood leukaemia”. But just a few days ago Elizabeth LeCompte, Valk’s director of 31 years, gave her an “outside influence” to use as a “medium”: Holly Woodlawn’s performance in Paul Morrissey’s 1970 film Trash. Suddenly, imagining herself with the gangly limbs of a drag-queen, Valk could see what to do. “I really shine when I have a mask – a way of moving, something that changes me,” she explains.
Having performed with the same company since the age of 21, Valk, who is now 52 and has youthful skin, tight bronze curls, and a strong, handsome face, speaks a language that might baffle those unused to The Wooster Group’s theatrical method. In the Wooster world, however, a sexually frustrated transsexual is a conservative example of the kind of “mask” that Valk has used to “get closer to her characters”. In the company’s 1993 production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1993), Valk was a blacked-up Brutus using Kabuki gestures; in House/Lights (1999), she recited the lines of Gertrude Stein’s Faust as relayed to her via an earpiece in a mechanical Betty Boop-ish voice, dressed as a 1930s vamp. In the 2006 Hamlet, the whole cast “channelled” the performances of actors in Richard Burton’s 1964 film version (Valk was both Ophelia and Gertrude), which was playing on a screen behind the actors. It’s a body of work that has earned her a reputation for being “without peer” and, according to the board of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, “the best actress in the US”.
Set up in 1974 by founding members including Elizabeth LeCompte, monologist Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe (who recently starred in Lars von Trier’s film, Antichrist), the company took its name from its location on Wooster Street in SoHo, where it found its home in a pokey two-storey building that they still use today.
Valk – whose family was not artsy but rather “worked their way into another class” – had, to the consternation of her father, decided to study at NYU’s Drama School. On graduating, she realised that she “wanted to be an artist rather than an actor” and, when she saw The Wooster Group’s early “Rhode Island” trilogy, joined the company as a seamstress. In 1981, she was picked up by LeCompte as a performer in Route 1 & 9, in which she made live performances onstage in takeout restaurants; it was a familiar environment, as she had worked for New York’s Ding-a-ling Taxi as a student.
Under LeCompte’s direction, The Wooster Group became synonymous with a style that was so influential that to many it now feels over-familiar: video screens on stage, voiceovers, a mixture of high and low cultural references. But even if the company’s ideas of “subverting the text” and “deconstructing the genre” might seem a little dated, LeCompte continues to reinvent the group, and recent productions, including the 17th-century opera La Didone (which channels the 1965 zombie film Planet of the Vampires) continue to receive rave reviews.
In a café around the corner from the Performing Garage, I suggest to Valk that The Wooster Group has been for her a family; it is hard to imagine many young actors today choosing to stick with a single company for 31 years. “Family,” she repeats slowly, looking troubled. “A family of bees? Not a human family.” According to Valk, The Wooster Group’s success comes from the company’s ability to adapt – or rather to accommodate the vision of Elizabeth LeCompte who is both “the boss” and, sometimes, “a complete child.”
Valk’s own role is, as she sees it, to make herself a transparent medium so that she can be “a stand-in for LeCompte on stage”. In such a context, it seems fitting that the company should perform Vieux Carré – a play that features an auteur-director observing the separate lives of those drawn together by a ramshackle tenement.
Since joining The Wooster Group, Valk has gained an international renown in the world of theatre despite, or perhaps because of, her refusal to be a star. “I’m a facilitator, a detail person,” she says, before moving on to her favourite topic: “Elizabeth is the boss and I defer to her. She’s the alpha energy in the room – way out in front conceptually.” Where other actors (“particularly English ones like Jeremy Irons,” Valk says) feel the need to understand a character’s psychological impulses, Valk sees it as her task to trust LeCompte’s decisions completely and so “to approach things physically”. Valk even goes so far as to suggest that her success as an actor is a product of LeCompte’s ability to find the right “medium”; when I ask how on earth she – a petite Caucasian female – managed to play an African-American convict-come-emperor, for instance, she brushes it away: “Oh, we just found the right mask,” she says. (She won an Edwin Booth Award in the same year.)
Last year, Rolex chose Valk for their Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Although Valk has taught before – she set up a fully-funded Wooster Group summer school in the Performing Garage for New York public school teenagers – she decided that Nahuel Perez Biscayart, a 23-year-old film actor from Argentina, should not be her pupil, but rather her “shadow” – “like when you learn to be a waiter in a café”. So, for the duration of last year, Perez Biscayart played the part of New York actress, following Valk both onstage during rehearsals (he memorised her lines, and even learned a complex fight scene she was practising) and offstage: visiting her friends, teaching her classes, even learning how to make the most of New York on her actor’s wage.
The idea had a pleasing symmetry for Valk, who was at the time shadowing opera singers onstage in La Didone (dressed, naturally, in a silver space suit). Even their upcoming performance at London’s Sadler’s Wells – a recreation of a Jerome Bell dance piece in which Nahuel claims to be Andre Agassi – suggests a Woosterish self-consciousness about the pleasure of posing as others.
When I speak to Nahuel Perez Bascayart about his time with Valk and the Wooster Group, he tells me about the importance of “producing, trying, failing, fooling around, and finding the beauty in accidents”, and of ensemble work rather than just “individual emotional experience”. But it is clear that – like most young actors today – work in a theatre collective for Perez Biscayart could only supplement a solo career in film; when I reach him, he is up a French mountain, shooting a period film directed by Benôit Jacquot. Kate Valk, on the other hand, will not be tempted to follow the path of her former Wooster co-founder Willem Dafoe in turning to Hollywood. She isn’t interested in fame; the world of film is very male, she says, and she needs company; film-work is too solitary. She tells me about sitting alone in a van for hours on the set of The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, and wrinkles her nose.
As if to prove her devotion to the stage, she relates her ambition to play Blanche in a film version of the Aldrich film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? – “to show the bitter end of a life in the theatre.” Her “mask” will be a giant puppet or “a grand guignol” – both empowered and powerless, demonic and vulnerable. The choice seems very like Valk – or rather perfectly unlike her, calling for a brand new mask to play with, blowing autobiographical truths into self-effacing monstrosity. When I ask where the idea comes from, she frowns, trying to remember. “Was it Liz or me?” she asks herself. “I think it was a mutual idea.”
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The care and feeding of creative talent
How do artists learn their job? It’s not a simple question. Arts education is big business, it carries powerful political and cultural capital, and there are many heartening stories. Venezuela’s famous Sistema, for instance, a music-education programme that has created a world-class orchestra out of the most apparently unlikely ingredients, is an example which suggests that if you throw money and enthusiasm at a problem, even an artistic problem, you can solve it, writes Jan Dalley.
Another example of the importance of teaching is dance, an artform that can only be learned from others, since there is no absolute system of notation of steps – human memory carries the art form’s history, and its future. And for centuries it was assumed that painters and sculptors would learn their craft (if not their art) from masters, sometimes in a formal system of apprenticeship.
But there’s the other side of the story: despite a plethora of art schools, for instance, there’s Damien Hirst with his “E” grade in his art exams. The English-speaking world is stuffed with creative writing courses, but there are many fine writers who believe that writing cannot be taught or learned, only absorbed by a quasi-mystical combination of osmosis and raw talent: an essentially solitary business. (When the great British poet Philip Larkin was told by a friend that he was teaching a poetry class, Larkin said, “I hope you’ll come down on it hard.”)
Artists, in this view, are born and cannot be made. Even when they are on their way, things can be tough: in Simon Schama’s interview, Martin Scorsese talks about how he felt, as a tyro director, that there was nowhere to turn for help.
Over the next weeks, the FT’s arts pages will be focusing on investigating different aspects of this story, and just how artists in various disciplines learn their craft. Our partnership with the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a biennial rolling programme that pairs a practitioner already at the top of their game with an emerging artist, begins today.
First, there is the opportunity for readers to come to a range of events taking place in London in December that discuss and celebrate fruitful artistic teaching and learning partnerships and the launch of our special microsite at www.ft.com/rolexarts. Two of this year’s mentors – Martin Scorsese, in film, and Kate Valk, in theatre – talk about their work this week; look out for more articles and interviews.
