An aviation industry maxim characterises an airplane as a cluster of 'four-million parts flying in close formation'. The legendary Wooster Group operates on a similar model. Their downtown New York productions have, over the last 25 years, defined the 'explosively postmodern' and hi-low 'deconstruction' of experimental performance.

A self-described ensemble of individual artists working under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the group swaps around the multiple tasks of production - tech, dramaturgy, performance - as it displaces and recombines such 'dead texts' as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Chekhov's Three Sisters, Racine's Phaèdre and Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights.

In a video of a post-performance discussion held at New York's American Place Theatre in 1980, the company introduces itself: Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, and - coming down from the tech booth after working the lights - Willem Dafoe. The piece just presented, Rumstick Road, is part of the Group's first trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island, and is based on Gray's childhood, most specifically his mother's suicide. It incorporates extracts from Gray family letters, photographs and recordings. Throughout the audience's questions, Gray emphatically disavows the work as autobiographical, insisting that although Rumstick Road (his family street address) draws on personal history, the work itself is a company creation. Both product and process are collaborative. 'Everyone does everything', says LeCompte, - except for me. I always direct.'

The Wooster Group's newest offering, Poor Theatre: A Series of Simulacra, is a provocative incarnation, a cadavre exquis of three lives, three artists: Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), the founder of the Polish Lab Theatre whose seminal text titles the production; visual artist Max Ernst (1891-1976); and William Forsythe, the American choreographer whose three-decade-old experimental Frankfurt Ballet