 None has more influenced the theatre in the past half century, and no one is more provocative in it today, than the English-born director and theorist Peter Brook, born in 1925.

 Beginning his directorial career with freshly conceived experimental productions of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Cocteau, Brook was appointed, at age of twenty, to direct at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where his 1955 Hamlet was a sensation and became the first English play to tour Soviet Union.

 Brook’s heart remained in experimental stagings of new and classical drama, however, and in three landmark productions with the newly founded Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s he received immense international acclaim. These productions:  Shakespeare’s King Lear (1962)  Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964)  US(1966)

 Moreover, Brook’s essays on drama in Encore magazine in the 1960s, and his publication of The Empty Space in 1968 (translated into 15 languages), presented a brilliant recategorization of theatre that remains pertinent today.

 Brook divided the current theatre into 3 branches:  Deadly (conventional)  Holy (Artaudian)  Rough(Brechtian)  Rejecting all three, Brook concluded his study with manifesto on behalf of an “immediate” theatre.

 In 1971 Brook moved to Paris and created the International Center of Theatre Research, which he continued to head.  Brook’s stage work in the 1990s studies the individual human and includes notable productions such as The Man Who, an adaptation of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s study of neurological illness, and Le Costume, a South African play by Can Themba.

 In Brook’s Hamlet toured Europe and America with an intercultural cast.  Brook’s most recent productions continue his commitment to interculturalism: Tierno Bokar(2004), Sizwe Banzi Est Mort (2006).

 At the age of eighty-four and still directing and writing Brook remains one of the most adventurous and fascinating creators of the theatrical avant-garde.

 No director has more successfully explored – and essentially renovated – the visual elements of current avant-garde theatre than Texas native Robert Wilson.

 Born in 1941 and initially trained as an architect, Wilson emerged in the European avant-garde in the early 1970s as a brilliantly innovative creator (a playwright-designer-director- producer) of what at the time wee considered performance-art pieces, or tableaux vivants (‘living pictures’), rather than dramas.  According to his own words, when asked in a second grade what he wanted to be he replied “King of Spain” (and in fact it was the title of his first major production later on)

 After winning first prize in a children’s art contest in sixth grade he was asked “Now tell us, Bob Wilson, what do you think the Nicest Thing in the Whole World?” and he said “Big thick cat’s paw!!” (cat’s paws primary image in his first major work as well)

 In addition to the performance work he was beginning to do, Wilson created a major outdoor sculpture in 1968, similar to the earth works of artists like Robert Smithson.

 He was also performing with avant-garde dancer Kenneth King and director Meredith Monk. He also came to the attention of choreographer Jerome Robbins, who began provide some financial support for Wilson’s projects and incited him to teach movement classes at his American Theatre Laboratory.

 The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which incorporated much of King of Spain, was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in  It was four hours long and consisted of a series of largely non-verbal parts and painstakingly slow movements.

 Wilson took pains to note “This was not slow motion, but ‘natural time’ as opposed to the ‘accelerated time’ of conventional theatre”. By this he allowed audience time and space to think.

 In a certain sense, the use of ‘found’ everyday objects and performers and the repetition of images in Wilson’s work can be seen as an aspect of Pop Art as typified by the work of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who transformed the prosaic and commercial into subjects of high art.

 In the midst 1980s he became widely known in his home country and widely admired for the extent of his vision and artistic ambition.  Since the mid-1970s, Wilson’s work has been more focused within practical time-and-space limits, and he has begun to direct more conventional works, including classic dramas, operas, and original pieces of mixed genres.

 In his first dramatic production Euripides’ Alcestis at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge (1986) he used original music by performance artist Laurie Anderson, the addition of a Japanese kyogen epilogue, innovative laser lighting effects, and what has become Wilson’s trademark – glacially slow actor stage crossings – created intense mystery and engagement.

 Wilson continues to work in every aspect of the theatre: he is the director, author or adapter of the text, and the principle designer of all his productions.

 For his immensely popular 2004 production of Les Fables de La Fontaine at the Paris, Wilson returned to animals, selecting and adapting nineteen of the beloved children’s stories by the 17-th century French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine.

 Wilson continues to innovate in the twenty- first century, particularly in the area of boldly color-saturated lighting and contemporary music.  Wilson work is no longer considered performance art: his pieces have a theme, they are not improvised, and the performers usually play characters rather than themselves…BUT

 “I hate ideas”, Wilson has said, and in their place he presents visions, dreams, and impressions.

 Wilson has often been classified as a postmodernist, but the pervasiveness of the iconic symbol, the constant striving for the beautiful image, and the harmonious and unified structure of his works places Wilson’s mise en scene firmly within the modernist framework. His texts, however, with their use of pastiche, quotation, and self-referential content, certainly relate him to the postmodern movement.

 Julie Taymor, born in 1953, is clearly the junior member of this select grouping, end her record of achievement is consequently far slimmer than Brook’s or Wilson’s. Nonetheless, her contribution to the theatre is no less than colossal.

 The world knows Taymor for the gigantic commercial success of her Disney-produced The Lion King, which won Broadway’s Tony Award for best musical in 1998 and won Taymor an unprecedented two Tony Awards in both direction and costume design.

 Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Taymor spent many of her youthful years in global travel and study, learning traditional Asian culture and performance techniques in India, Sri Lanka, and Japan, learning from Balinese dancers and Indonesian wayang kulit masters in Seattle, and studying with noted avant-garde masters Jacques Lecoq at the School of Mime in Paris and with celebrated theorist/director Herbert Blau at Oberlin College in Ohio.

 Soon she started to direct classical plays.  Her first Broadway production was Horacio Quiroga’s Juan Darien in 1996, a fantastical music-drama about a baby jaguar who becomes human.

 The Lion King, however, with its budget of $20 million (an all-time Broadway record), far exceeded any scale on which Taymor had previously operated.

 Moreover, The Lion King is a global show for a global audience.  Designing the costumes and codesigning the masks and puppets, Taymor ingeniously mixed Javanese rod puppetry and Balinese headdresses with African masks and stilts.

 Taymor continues to create exciting an often brave spectacles, now on film as often as on a stage.  Her 1999 film of Titus, adapted from her earlier stage production, is a remarkable though controversial version of one of Shakespeare’s earliest, least liked, and certainly most savage plays.

 Her 2002 film Frida, about the life of Mexican artist Frida Kalho, won six Academy Awards.  In 2007 she made another film Across the Universe, musical based on Beatles’ songs.

 For the Metropolitan Opera in New York she staged a lavish production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, which she adapted into a shorter version staged in New York and carried nationally by satellite in 2007, and for the Los Angeles Opera she staged the world premiere of Grendel.