Theatre Du Jour is concerned with the actor’s training, the process of performance creation, and the meeting between actors and audience through performance.

Theatre Du Jour was founded in 1982 in Washington, DC by B. Stanley and George Kaperonis. Their initial work consisted of performances built in equal part on texts written by Kaperonis and physical staging devised by Stanley. As the work grew, the codified scores of physical action that had been created for performance (specific, detailed and repeatable), became the focus of the company’s actor’s training. These “scores of action” began to reveal a correlation between the actor’s execution and the emergence of the creative moment, an impulse to action that held a spark of life that was engaging to watch and hear. But accessing this impulse throughout the actor’s entire process remained elusive. Though the group trained regularly and performed hundreds of times in theaters, clubs, festivals, and on the streets, the discovery process in the training remained separate from the performances. After five years, the company members parted ways.

Stanley’s research didn’t end there, however, and was furthered by the influence of Ingemar Lindh and the Institutet for Scenkonst in Pontremoli, Italy. At the Institutet from 1989-93, Stanley encountered the work of accessing of the actor’s impulse, not in pre-determined scores from a director for performance, but in scores created by the individual actor in their training. These scores (the actor’s personal material) were then developed by the director into performance material. The creation of performances at the Institutet were always a collaboration between actor and director. But the question remained: How can the actor carry the work of training through their entire process and into performance?

Back in Washington, DC in 1994, Stanley assembled a group of actors to perform Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood, which utilized the principles with which he had worked in Italy. Some of the actors wanted to pursue the work further and a new incarnation of Theatre Du Jour emerged. With a determined commitment to developing a process that would lead to performances that were based on and grew directly from their training, these actors embraced the unknown and set about learning to learn. The work continues with the understanding that the questions the actors and director encounter are the work of theatre, and that it is important to maintain a sense of experiment and research throughout the entire process -- from training to performance creation to the performance itself. Theatre Du Jour is not just experimental theatre; it is an experiment within theatre.