Mabou Mines

Mabou Mines is an avant-garde theatre company founded in 1970 and based in New York City. In 1997 they staged Peter and Wendy a version of the Peter Pan play staged using Bunraku-style puppets.

Mabou Mines is a collaborative, avant-garde theater company based in New York City. Founded in 1970, the company took its name from an old mining town in northern Nova Scotia, near where founding members by JoAnne Akailitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow developed The Red Horse Animation, the group's first original performance piece. Since then Mabou Mines has produced scores of plays, collaborated with well-known writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers, garnered heaps of critical praise and awards, and performed around the globe, cementing its reputation as an innovative force in the theater world.

Influenced especially by Jerzy Grotowski's teaching and Beckett's work, Mabou Mines went on to produce experimental theater pieces that resulted from intense collaboration and improvisation, and incorporated elements of visual art, dance, mime, puppetry, and music. Arc Welding Piece (1972), for example, featured an artist using an arc welder to make cuts in a large piece of metal, while actors expressed various states of emotion, their faces enlarged by magnifying lenses. In 1974, Fred Neumann joined the group to work on The B. Beaver Animation. Bill Raymond joined shortly thereafter.

In its early years, Mabou Mines moved easily between the art world and the theater, often performing in galleries as well as stages. But its work with Beckett's writing firmly situated the group within a theatrical context. After an early residency at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York, the company began performing at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, and other venues in New York and elsewhere.

From the beginning, creative roles were fluid and collaboration was key, but Lee Breuer served as the company's primary director. In 1975 however, Akalaitis directed Cascando and opened the door for other members to take on new roles, for the company to expand, and for multiple projects to come together simultaneously. Akalaitis went on to direct Dressed Like an Egg (1977) and Southern Exposure (1979), and wrote and directed Dead End Kids (1980); Neumann directed Mercier and Camier (1979); Maleczech directed Vanishing Pictures (1980).

The company expanded its repertoire and continued its tradition of collaboration, working with talented performers and artists, including composers Bob Telson, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, and David Byrne. Mabou Mines has adapted works by Shakespeare (Lear, 1990), Franz Xaver Kroetz (Through the Leaves, 1984; Help Wanted, 1986), Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, 1985), and Bertolt Brecht (In the Jungle of Cities, 1991). The company has toured extensively in the United States and abroad.