Where Theater Revolutions Began: La MaMa Archive Tour with Spiderwoman Theater

There’s a treasure trove on East 4th Street that maps the history of downtown theater, culture and activism in NYC! Join The Village Trip for a special tour with head archivist Kylie Goetz, and a chat with featured artist Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater: the oldest, continually running, Native feminist theater company in the Americas. Spiderwoman Theater, a La MaMa regular since 1977, is celebrating its 50th Anniversary this year.

This extraordinary collection preserves for the ages–in video, scripts, photographs, costumes, masks, set pieces, posters, and marvelous theatrical machines–the creative work of a who’s-who list of breakout theater artists who were welcomed to pursue their unique original visions in La MaMa’s theater spaces. From Sam Shepard, Harvey Fierstein and Philip Glass, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, and Andre de Shields, to Richard Foreman, Joseph Chaikin, Elizabeth Swados, Tadeusz Kantor, Kazuo Ohno and Julie Taymor, they are all here, and so many more. Need to reconnect with your revolutionary sense of hope and possibility? Join us for this very special tour.

Established in the early 1970s, La MaMa Archive collects, preserves, and exhibits records of permanent historical value relating to La MaMa and the Off-Off Broadway movement. In doing so, it draws on a deep vein of in-house institutional memory, the passionate community of artists whose work has found a home on La MaMa stages, and the wide diversity of scholars, educators, and international artists with whom La MaMa collaborates.

La MaMa’s collections offer an intimate perspective on major social, aesthetic, and political movements of the 20th and 21st centuries that resonate with histories of peoples across the globe. Where else would you find original plays by Vietnam War veterans alongside video of performances about the AIDS crisis; unpublished scripts by Japanese filmmaker Shuji Terayama alongside photos and correspondence by Polish revolutionary director Tadeusz Kantor?

“It is impossible to exaggerate how crucial the [La MaMa] archive is to the stories of American theatre, New York City, and innumerable facets of creative culture and the wider social currents this work traced and fomented.”
–Alisa Solomon, Theatre Scholar, and Author

Spiderwoman Theater was founded in 1976, when Muriel Miguel gathered together a diverse company of women which included both of her sisters. They were of varying ages, races, sexual orientation, and worldview. The collective sprang out of the feminist movement and the disillusionment with the treatment of women in radical political movements of the time. They questioned gender roles, cultural stereotypes, and sexual and economic oppression. They took on issues of sexism, racism, classism, and the violence in women’s lives. Their weaving of humor with popular culture and personal histories, along with their sometimes-shocking style, broke new ground and excited the hearts and spirits of the women (and sometimes the men) in their audiences, in the United States, Canada and all over the world.

From the early 1980s, Indigenous communities in New York and nationally and internationally identified the women of Spiderwoman Theater as a powerful voice for their concerns and so the company emerged as a leading force for Indigenous women, artists, and cultural artisans.

Spiderwoman will celebrate their 50th Anniversary season at La MaMa with A Global Indigenous Theatre Festival, October 30 – November 7, 2026.