I saw the Wooster Group perform the other week at the Cornet, the type of theatre its so rare to see getting made nowadays. With all the hallmarks and energy of that period of the 1970s in which everything new in art seemed to be happening in New York. Coming out of the theatre we decided to walk off our pent up excitement, tracing past Hyde Park and then into Soho, myself lost in nostalgia for my own background in experimental theatre, and Yasamin with a longing to try recreate it somehow. We both reached a conclusion that this type of work just can’t be made in London anymore, not because it’s not the 1970s or it’s not New York or we don’t have the same kind of training, but simply that it seems impossible to get the kind of freedom and space they had to make it.
For much of the past ten years I’ve been obsessed with the culture and work that came out of the 1960s-1980s New York experimental art scene. Your Tina Girouard’s, Yoko Ono’s, Teching Hesih’s and Philip Glass’, even going so far as to make multiple works in conversation with two of those names, the most overt being 2022 - 2023’s I Love Or Hate Everyday, which was an interpretation of Hesih’s One Year Performance 1980–1981, or Time Piece for short. While making that work, I constantly felt the difference between our conditions when making these supposedly similar works. Mine constantly had to bend and fit around my day, truly taking place in the gaps between photos, while Hesih didn’t have to interact with the pressures of work and life admin. He spent an entire year just on this one piece, secluded from concerns around rent payment and the responsibilities of a job. It became a constant nagging of “if only, if only, if only” and felt like a stark reminder that times have changed and the lost of living has only ever gone up.
Looking at reviews of the recent Wooster Group tour, people seem to agree, you can’t make this type of art in this type of economy. Largely I agree, the price of space is astronomical (more than £200 a month for a studio space seems criminal) and most artists must be working at least a side hustle if not two, just to keep a roof over their head. But something within this forfeit seems overly pessimistic. What if, if not materially, than spiritually, we could recreate something of the magic produced under those conditions.
Running several of my own projects and groups that lie outside of structures of institutional support (LCLO and Temporary Space), the expectation that one can make any money from this feels squarely off the table. It’s impractical and feels frankly naive to go into it with any kind of expectation other than that you’ll spend far more than you’ll make. But did the Wooster Group start as a business venture? I highly doubt they felt lucky or indebted to the wider economic system that they were founded within. The 1970s in New York was notorious for its lack of support or funding for artists. While maybe not as foolhardy as it seems now, becoming an artist during that period was just as difficult and unstable. As the recent film adaptation of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1974 interview with photographer Peter Hujar beautifully paints, artists of the 70s also spent most of their time worrying about invoices, rent and who knew who.
So what would it take to make something spiritually similar to the Wooster Group today? Fine space is at a premium, but then why not host it in the park or the street? Or even your living room or bedroom? It would be remiss of me not to highlight that these settings also were big textual considerations of the day. While you would lose some of the advantages that a regular rehearsal space and a stage gives in terms of props and materials, that loss also brings its own set of advantages and textures to play with. While we can look at some of these works as impossible feats of days gone by, they all started with broadly the same question. What would it take to make something that came before but with our budget or reach? And how can we make the most of that difference?
27.05.2026 - what would it take to make that now?