Salon Series at Manuela: ‘Sugar High’ with The Wooster Group & Willem Dafoe

About Willem Dafoe 
Having made over one hundred fifty films in his legendary career, Willem Dafoe is internationally respected for bringing versatility, boldness, and daring to some of the most iconic films of our time. His artistic curiosity in exploring the human condition leads him to projects all over the world, large and small, in Hollywood films as well as Independent cinema.    

Dafoe has been recognized with four Academy Award nominations: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Platoon; Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Shadow Of The Vampire, for which he also received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations; Best Actor in a Supporting Role for The Florida Project, for which he also received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations; and most recently, Best Leading Actor for At Eternity’s Gate, for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination. Among his other nominations and awards, he has two Los Angeles Film Critics Awards, a New York Film Critics Circle Award, a National Board of Review Award, two Independent Spirit Awards, Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup, as well as a Berlinale Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement. Most recently he was awarded the Iris Award for Best Actor from Greece’s Hellenic Film Academy for his role in Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside.  

Recent films are Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.  Upcoming projects include Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi; Patricia Arquette’s Gonzo Girl; Nadia Latif’s The Man in My Basement; Kent Jones’ Late Fame and Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing.  

Dafoe is the Artistic Director of the theatre department for the Venice Biennale’s 2025 and 2026 seasons. He is one of the original members of The Wooster Group, the New York based experimental theatre company. He created and performed in all of the Group's global work from 1977 thru 2005. Since then, he has collaborated with Richard Foreman on Idiot Savant at NYC's Public Theatre, with Robert Wilson on two international productions: The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic and The Old Woman; Marina Abramovic's opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas; and with Romeo Castellucci, on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil. 

About Elizabeth LeCompte  
Elizabeth LeCompte is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media. She co-founded The Wooster Group and has led the company since its emergence in the mid-1970s. LeCompte has directed and designed over fifty theater, film, and media pieces, which challenge convention with their structural, technological, and visual experimentation.  

LeCompte studied fine arts and art history at Skidmore College in the 1960s. In the mid-1970s, she and writer-actor Spalding Gray began making work together, creating three seminal pieces Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School. In 1980, they formally founded The Wooster Group at The Performing Garage in Soho, along with Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith.  

In addition to fifty years of creating and producing work at The Performing Garage, the Group has had a national and international reach. In 1986, Peter Sellers invited LeCompte and the company to be in residence at the American National Theater/Kennedy Center. Invitations to present work in Europe began around this time, leading to a consortium of European presenters who commissioned a major series of productions. In the 1990s, three Group media pieces directed by LeCompte were included in successive Whitney biennials. In 1997, the Group rehabilitated an abandoned Broadway theater for performances of their production of Eugene O’Neil’s The Hairy Ape. European tours continued, including eight appearances at the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned LeCompte and the Group to make a performance to close its 2005 Dada exhibition. In 2009, LeCompte directed her first opera production, La Didone. Mikhail Baryshnikov engaged the Group to open his new arts center in 2010, and in the early 2000s, the Group presented nine of its works at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. In 2012, LeCompte and the Group were commissioned by the London Cultural Olympiad to collaborate with the Royal Shakespeare Company on a production of Troilus and Cressida. Sustained touring of the Group’s work to Asia began in 2014, with engagements in eight major cities. In 2016, LeCompte was invited by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Poland, to create a work in honor of Tadeusz Kantor’s centenary, and in 2023 she was the Artist in Focus at the Festival International Neue Dramatik at the Schaubühne, Berlin. Most recently, LeCompte co-directed and designed Symphony of Rats which will open the 2025 Venice Theater Biennale. 

LeCompte has received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and an inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, USArtists, and the National Endowment for the Arts. LeCompte was named a Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres and, in 2025, she will receive the Golden Lion Award in Venice. In 2023, LeCompte was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.    

About Kate Valk  
Kate Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979. She began as an assistant to Elizabeth LeCompte, working on scripts and costumes, and became a performer in the Group’s works from the 1980s through the early 2020s. During that time, she co-created and performed in all the company’s work. Valk has directed three Group works: Early Shaker Spirituals, A Record Album Interpretation; The B-Side, “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation; and Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. Most recently, she co-directed Symphony of Rats with LeCompte. Valk founded the Group’s Summer Institute for public high school students, now in its 28^th year. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and was a mentor with the Rolex Arts Initiative. 
 
About The Wooster Group   
The Wooster Group is a company of artists based in New York City that makes work for theater, dance and media. We develop and perform our work at The Performing Garage in Manhattan at 33 Wooster Street. We also bring our work to other venues in New York as well as other theaters around the world on national and international tours.  
 
The company has sustained a full-time, ongoing ensemble since the mid-70s. We are constantly morphing. With our many artistic associates, we have created and performed over 50 works directed by Elizabeth LeCompte.  
 
Our commitment to working as an ensemble and self-producing outside the commercial system has allowed us to create work in-depth over long periods of time. This way of working defines our artistic practice and evolving aesthetic.  
 
About Manuela 
Located on the corner of Wooster and Prince Street, in the heart of SoHo – New York’s historic cast iron district, Manuela is a welcoming neighborhood restaurant and bar where great contemporary art and food combine to create a convivial atmosphere and sense of abundance. Art is at the heart of Manuela; guests will find dramatic site-specific commissioned works of art – many of them functional elements of the restaurant and bar – created by eight internationally renowned New York artists. The menu both responds to and celebrates American seasons with freshly prepared dishes cooked in an open kitchen over the wood-fired grill or in the charcoal oven.