In 1977 the co-founders of Creation Production Company drew up a mission for the company. The mission of the company was, and remains, to generate innovative forms of theatre through radical experiments with language, site-specific works, new music theatre, and explorations of political issues by integrating the visual arts, music, dance and architecture. As a founding member of Creation, and as an individual artist, that mission has guided my work. I have been influenced by the work of many theatre artists who have been driven by similar concerns such as directors Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Shuji Terayama, Tadeusz Kantor, and Jerzy Grotowski; choreographers Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, and Gene Kelly; writers Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein; as well as drawing from the world of architecture and the visual arts—from the Egyptians to the Bauhaus, and from Leonardo to Duchamp.
The list is endless as I have tried to absorb as much as I can from the experimentalists before and around me. These artists have been spiritual mentors and beacons. Goethe said: "The beginning and end of every artistic activity is the creation of the world around me through the world inside of me." I see all creative activity as a symbiotic loop that enables me to take in the world, to have it filter through me, and by necessity as an artist, to reinvent the world outside again, and again. A vicious circle and a life-sustaining circle; I breathe in, I breathe out.
As a writer, my texts for theatre sometimes border on the
naturalistic and sometimes on the abstract, but always they are both linguistic
and visual documents. I often use verbal choreography to describe at length
a particular action to counterpoint spoken text. In creating a work for the
theatre, I score the many aspects of the work in an effort to totally realize
the world of the play. I am fluent in the languages of the stage, and draw
from my choreographic, visual arts, and literary backgrounds to make works
that ignite the questions that are central to my life. I love a stage without
borders and pursue the many ways that the stage can run through our lives
beyond the proscenium.