by Willem Dafoe sits in his house in Rome, a crowded bookshelf and a desperate wooden door. The 69-year-old actor, born in Wisconsin, could say goodbye to any ingenious, bristle-shabbling craftsman in opposing shirt and horn-oriented specifications. (Perhaps he even built the bookshelf and worried the door himself.) But it is the hand that is the giveaway: it crunches again and again as he speaks until the hair is in jagged forks. As a visualization of what is happening in his brain, it is unsurpassed.
In April we talk about the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (and death), which feels suitable, since it is about Dafoe’s appointment as the artistic director of the International Theater Festival at the Biennale Venice, which has caused our video call today. He looks like laying when I indicate the importance of the date and then returns to his usual Wolfian expression. “Ah, Shakespeare doesn’t care,” he says with a hand shaft. Dafoe has never had a big relationship with these pieces. “There is a lot and shows when people run them. Many lead the audience. These are things that I am not very important. Could there be a learning on the horizon?” Why not? “He says with a stupid headwack.
In one piece he stands in the sea, which is dressed as a nun and a fish swing
There is no Shakespeare in Dafoes Biennale selection. The accent in a program entitled “Theater is body. Body is poetry” is firmly in the experimental and avantal guard. There will be works by Thomas Ostermeier and Milo Rau. Davide Iodice will present a version of Pinocchio in which young autistic actors and actors with Down syndrome will bring different incarnations of the title character to life. Dafoe also included the European premiere of Sinfony of Ratten by Richard Foreman, the experimental playwright and which he counted as a friend in January. Almost 40 years after its first production, the play is staged by the pioneer of the New York Company The Wooster Group, who co -founded Dafoe. “Richard said to them:” Do what you want, but I don’t want to recognize it, “he says admiringly.
The actor will take part in Foreman’s no-title, in which he and Simonetta soldering aids will read phrases from cards that happen to sound in one of the Burroughsian cut-up technology. “Richard was a loose thinker,” he explains. “His answers were always unpredictable.” Dafoe approaches his tenure in Venice with the same Sangfroid he saw in Foreman. “Some of these pieces will sail, others are not. What is important are the people who talk about things and feel that the theater lives.”
Dafoe, a four-time Oscar candidate, has been in Kathryn Bigelow’s fetishist biker film The Loveless Hills Pulp Fantasy Streets from Fetishistic Biker in the early 1980s in the early 1980s, in which he is black Vinyl hip hip hip hip hip-hip-hip-hip-hip-hip-hip-hip-dogn-hair. He was the sergeant who deals with the sound of Samuel Barbers Adagio for strings in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and gave the Messiah in Martin Scorseses the last temptation of Christ human. He recently performed in films by Wes Anderson, Robert Eggers and Yorgos Lanthimos. In Lars von Triers Antichrist, he let his penis by Charlotte Gainsbourg powdered. Well, it’s a living.
However, his roots and heart are part of the experimental theater. Together with his former partner Elizabeth Leamptte, the monologist Spalding Gray and others, Dafoe created the Wooster group in the second half of the 1970s from Richard Schechner’s performance group. For almost 30 years, wrote, played and helped Dafoe to build sets in the same converted factory in Lower Manhattan, which today remains the basis of the group. He only hiked away in 2004 when he left Leccptte-with which he had an adult son-and married the filmmaker Giada Colagrande.
Could those of us, who have never seen him on stage, really be said that he “got” as an actor to “get”? “I think I gave up the idea that someone would get me,” he admits. “I probably had it when I was younger. Now I like the idea that every project redefined it.”
At 22 in New York, he was fresh from another experimental group, Milwaukees Theater X. began to make small parts very modest and to be carpenters.
Nothing less than a time machine could bring us back into the intoxicating flowering period of the New York Fringe Theater scene, but there are delicious titbits online that stretch out in pieces in pieces until the late 1970s. The clips do not seem to be too far from its serar screen creations, such as the slim crook Bobby Peru, lazy spirit and tooth, in David Lynchs Wildly, or the febrile Seadog with a Popeye tube in Eggers’ The Lighthouse. A clip from Point Judith, for example, shows that Dafoe is in the sea as a nun while he was swinging a fish. “Well, that was a small part of it,” he admits, maybe it is striving to have reduced fearless theatrical adventures to a trout and a pennant.
Splip to the 1991 group today. I have to congratulate you sincerely, and this time he is wearing a suit and a moptop like a beatle from the early 1960s and holds a dead fish again. What gives? “I am fishing,” he twitches. “So there.”
The concept of a Wooster group of group that was “ready” was always elastic. The company would simply rehearse all day and perform everything they had that evening. The heading of a Harper article in 2020 summarized the philosophy: “The 40-year rehearsal: the endless work of the Wooster Group in progress.” The film was often included in the shows, together with the recorded audio, to which the line -up was sometimes lip -synchronized. The material contained unlikely bedding: Flauberbert and Lenny Bruce, say, or a soap opera by Thornton Wilders Our Town in connection with the Vaudevillian sketches of the Afro -American Comic Pigmeat Markham.
Recognition was not universal. Arthur Miller refused to allow the group to carry out part of the tiegel on their show -LSD, but they continued until he threatened legal steps. The goods of Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams also withdrew permission. Brickbats rained from critics, says Dafoe me. “We had a difficult time. Finally, we found that word of mouth was better than a Snarky review in the village voice, so Liz had stopped the critics in her infinite wisdom. When we began to have a certain recognition in Europe, the New York critics asked.
Today’s influence of the Wooster Group is omnipresent. Take the use of microphones in Ostermeier, including its most recent, important production of the seagull with Cate Blanchett. “Yes, the microphones were one thing that we did and I started seeing a lot,” dawe Dafoe agreed. “We started working in isolation. When we started touring, we came back to locations and said: ‘Wow, The Looks familiar. ‘I don’t mean that in a snotty way – that’s how things work. People came through as interns and then 10 years later they were Broadway directors. “
Anyone who has seen Complicité production has seen the Wooster effect. “Simon McBurney is a friend and he definitely saw the work. He is a sponge.” McBurney was also one of the authors in MR Bean’s Holiday, in which Dafoe plays a presumptuous Arthouse director, whose Cannes premiere is kidnapped by Rowan Atkinson’s Slapstick hero. “Simon focused on the filmmakers so that I can thank him for this special experience,” laughs Dafoe. Traffic flows in both directions: He suggested McBurney for roles in Abel Ferraras Siberia and Eggers’ youngest Nosferatu, none of them are half as much fun as MR Bean.
Dafoe is diplomatic today whether he prefers to act for theater or cinema. “Musicians are musicians – sometimes they play in the studio and sometimes they play live.” But obviously it is the stage that unlocks its deepest passion. “What you see will not happen at nine o’clock, eleven o’clock. Something nice in the theater stays with you forever because it happened You. The theater brings its feet into the fire, it puts her finger in the wound. “The hand has now stopped making.
• The Biennale of the Venice Theater, directed by Willem Dafoe, runs from May 31 to June 15th
