Devising Theater / Performance

This volume rests upon two premises: 1) That collective creation is pivotal to the evolution of the modern theatre; and 2) That women have been central to the emergence and development of collective creation.
    Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective 
Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France).  Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective.  In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
    This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
    Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century.  A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry.  And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
    This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia.  In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices.  The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.

A History of Collective Creation examines collective and devised theatre practices in Europe and North America, beginning in 1900. Long associated with U.S., British and French theatre collectives of the 1960s, collective creation in fact has its roots in the theatrical experiments of the early 20th century, emerging just after the rise of the modern director.  Tracing a lineage from explorations of collective creation in the work of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Copeau, St. Denis, Piscator, Reduta, Grotowski, and early documentary theatre, through mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, A History of Collective Creation proposes that collective creation played a pivotal role in the evolution of the modern theatre.

This essay is a reflection on some aspects of dramaturgy observed during the creation and development of One by One, a silent tragicomedy designed by the Auckland company, LAB Theatre, in 2011 and restaged in 2013. The emphasis of the essay is on pedagogical aspects at the core of the company’s work, as they inform the creative process and lead to the blending of the actor’s function into that of the dramaturg. The following discussion makes apparent the fact that this process of hybridisation, made possible by implementing features of devised theatre, emancipates the actor and brings improvisation to a better use. The play was based on the notion that theatrical action must be ‘suggestive’ rather than ‘descriptive.’ This idea originated in the works of Konstantin Stanislavski (1988) and Jacques Copeau (2000) and was developed by more recent theorists of dramaturgy into a practical framework for theatrical performance in general. The success of One by One depended very much on the implementation of these principles. The achievement was duly noted by reviewer Lexie Matheson (2011), who appreciated that One by One “exists on its own, doesn’t need explanation, doesn’t explain itself; it just unravels with delicacy and tenderness, like a good yarn should.”

Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance examines collective and devised theatre practices internationally--with emphasis on Russia, Europe, and North America--from the late 20th century, into the present. Building upon the authors’ previous work, A History of Collective Creation, this volume situates contemporary collective creation in a tradition which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and traces the aesthetic, social and political shifts that have marked this mode of theatre making, from mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, to present-day devising practices.

This contribution is a conversation between Avia Moore and Sarah Hart on our experience as North American students in the MA Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts during the final two years of its existence. We are now PhD students in Performance Studies, at York University (Toronto) and the University of California Davis respectively. This issue of TDPT comes at a moment when the uniqueness of our Dartington experience has become a reference point for our process of reverse migration back into North American academia. We reflect on the tension between looking back and moving forward through the lens of Dartington’s Devised Theatre approach: ‘These people, this time, this place
what do they produce?’ Most significant was the crosspollination of disciplines, diverse skills brought together in an isolated, idyllic environment that stimulated creative play. Dartington taught us a way of thinking, which we continue to cultivate. This is a self-reflexive conversation drawn from personal experiences at and beyond Dartington. We asked questions, recording and notating our conversations. We paraphrased these answers through correspondence, compiling an edited version here. Finally, responding to the peer review process, we recorded an additional conversation and integrated parts of it into our previous responses. This methodology reflects our shared and divergent perspectives, and the constant balancing act between theory and practice that we found so important to the Dartington ethos.

This article explores how two performance makers – Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin of the company Haranczak/ Navarre – approach the rehearsal process as an ecological practice in and by itself. Drawing attention to such things as listening, openness and patience, Karen and Sophie explore how their devising strategy transcends the studio and becomes a form of relating to the world in general. Karen and Sophie illustrate their ideas by drawing on generative metaphors and by grounding their insights on their empirical experience of making Control Signal (2013) and miles & miles (2016). In the article there is an attempt to extend the dialogic nature of Haranczak/Navarre’s work into the editing process, to create, that is, an extended climate of attention.

This article explores the generative role that child collaborators can have in the development of an ecological performance practice. It elucidates how children might uniquely do the ecological in the context of devising professional contemporary performance. Specifically, this article focuses on a piece of practice-led research, Wild Life - a performance project that sits between choreography, live art and contemporary theatre. Wild Life involved collaborating with eight professional and non-professional performers between nine and 60 years to co-devise a performance that explored and enacted ‘wildness’. The process of co-creating, directing and critically reflecting on Wild Life has led me to propose that intergenerational collaboration is a particularly dynamic performance ecology through which to understand and develop an ecological practice.

The main proposition of this article is that the ecological potential of performance lies in the actualities of devising in collaboration with diverse people, where children are treated as capable and skilled artists in their own right who have unique performance aesthetics, styles and abilities. I discuss how child collaborators might significantly enable live theatrical performance to do the ecological in its very modes and moments of enactment. I propose that the spontaneity and pragmatism of, what I call, the just doing-ness of child performers, can implicitly draw attention to what Jane Bennett (2010 Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, London: Duke University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) describes as the ‘vital materiality’ of the human and, in doing so, performance can draw attention to our inevitable human interconnection and interactivity with(in) vibrant nonhuman matter.

This discussion brings diverse fields into dialogue with each other in order to offer a unique discussion on children, performance and ecology. These fields are: performance and ecology; children in contemporary performance; intergenerational practice; and, vital materialism.