A History of Collective Creation

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, S. Proudfit, S. Proudfit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137331304
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Collective creation - the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance - rose to prominence not simply as a performance making method, but as an institutional model. By examining theatre practices in Europe and North America, this book explores collective creation's roots in the theatrical experiments of the early twentieth century.

Part I

Collective Creation’s First Wave

1

Preface to Part I: From Monastic Cell to Communist Cell

Groups, Communes, and Collectives, 1900–1945

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

Let us see now if in all the dramatic impedimenta of the past there is anything for the people.1

—Romain Rolland

Something there is (to paraphrase Frost), that doesn’t love a hierarchy; and something there is that loves a hierarchy very much. The history of modern collective creation is perhaps above all a chronicle of that tension—the counterpull of autocracy and democracy, of creative authority and the generative capacities of the group—and perhaps at no time more noticeably than during the first half the twentieth century.

Collective creation in its modern manifestations arose out of a complex network of transnational influence, diverse political models, varied aims and impulses. The pre–World War II years remain the most underhistoricized and thus, perhaps, most intriguing period of collaborative theatre making. This volume presents four precedents of collective creation emerging in the first decades of the century, in diverse locations: the first, early experiments in collective creation and improvisation led by Vsevelod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1905 (Chapter 2); the second, the Reduta collective of Poland, established in 1919, forebear to the theatre of Jerzy Grotowski (Chapter 3); the third, the almost accidental discovery of collective creation, beginning in the 1920s, by the performers working under the intermittent and ambivalent leadership of Jacques Copeau (Chapter 4); and the fourth, not an account of a single company, but rather of a mode of practice—the long story of documentary theatre making from Soviet agitprop to Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (Chapter 5).

But there are many other examples of early assays at collective theatrical practices still to be given their due in the context of collective creation studies. So little work has been done to date to draw together the threads of these disparate early experiments that it behooves us here to sketch out a preliminary history. It is beyond the scope of this work to attempt an exhaustive account; rather, we offer a sort of historical gridwork, establishing some of the key dates, locations, crosscurrents, and modalities of early collective practice (with emphasis on the United States, Russia, and a small selection of European countries), which we hope may serve as the basis for ongoing historical investigation in the field.

In its modern manifestations, collective creation emerges out of a political climate similarly dominated by the tug and pull of what we may loosely term democratic and autocratic impulses. Beginning—in so far as any historical pattern can be said to “begin”—with the European Revolution of 1848, we enter a “long half-century” of global uprising and suppression, partition and unification, imperialism and revolt, the overthrow of power and its restoration. The year 1848 saw uprisings and thwarted revolutions that touched some fifty countries; the decades that followed brought India’s First War of Independence, the Boxer Rebellion, the Paris Commune. 1848 also brought publication of the Communist Manifesto; the 1860s, the first volume of Das Kapital, and the (putative) abolition of slavery in America and serfdom in Russia, Poland, and Austria. These were the decades that witnessed the spread of socialism, communism, progressivism, trade unionism, and anarchism.

Collective creation emerges, too, out of an artistic climate that sees an almost messianic potential for art generally and the theatre specifically. In Russia above all—and it is in Russia that this present history begins—faith in the socially transformative power of art, articulated by philosophers, cultural theorists, and political thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, was to reach mystical proportions by the dawn of the twentieth century. The art-for-art’s-sake aspect of Symbolism notwithstanding, fin de siècle Russian theatre took from the nineteenth century a mandate to serve the social good. Russian radicals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s approached art with a certain civic utilitarianism: theatre, as the most social of arts, had a central role to play in society building, be it to uplift, instruct, or protest. One can trace an arc from the leftist-Realist notion of art’s mission of social transformation to the Symbolist vision of art’s mystical capacity to transform the human being. If the Realists, for whom social function trumped artistic form, would seem odd bedfellows with Symbolists, for whom artistic imagination was a value unto itself, in Russia the two philosophic camps nonetheless shared certain underlying continuities. As cultural historian Olga Matich notes, “Despite their vociferous opposition to the ‘new men’ of the 1860’s, the Symbolists were preoccupied with similar concerns: the ‘transformation of life;’ the ‘heavenly kingdom on earth;’ ‘the reconciliation of all opposites;’ and the coming of a ‘new’ religion.”2 For Realists and Symbolists both, the theatre was nothing if not social in nature and commission—understood, variously, as the art form of the people, the group, the community, the congregation. This evolving discourse concerning the theatre’s transformative promise and potentially potent role in human communities was fertile terrain for the emergence of two visions of alternative theatrical praxis that would play a vital role in the development of modernist collective creation practices: the ideal of a popular theatre and of the actor’s primacy in a collaborative creative act.

Central among Russian theorists of Symbolist theatre was Viatcheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), a philosopher, playwright and critic, follower (if critically so) of Nietzsche’s work on the cult of Dionysus, and “adherent of Vladimir Solovyov, whose mystical Christianity taught that the congregational and the individual religious spirits must be mediated by an artist-hierophant.”3 Ivanov, writes theatre historian Lawrence Senelick, held that “by reverting to its ritual beginnings, the theater will resume the choric or dithyrambic involvement of its audience, which will become a participant rather than an observer, a communicant with the higher truth.” In Ivanov’s own words, “The stage must step across the footlights and draw the community into itself, or the community must absorb the stage,”4 and “out of the Dionysian sea of orgiastic emotions rises the Apollonian vision of the myth, to disappear again in those same ecstatic depths, having illuminated them by its miracle.”5 Ivanov’s influence cannot be underestimated; as Senelick remarks, “the inspiriting concept of a communion in the theatre, of a solidarity of performer and spectator, of the dramatist as priest of a new cult, was contagious . . . his ideas can be found scattered through the dramatic theories of almost every Russian writer of the time.”6

It is against the background of this discourse that we begin to perceive a shift from the authority of playwright—and the more recent authority of the director—to the centrality of the actor—or rather, actors, for ideals of a performing ensemble and ideals of a generative collective would coincide and overlap. Relative to France and Germany, the director-auteur arrived late to Russia; the actor-auteur, early. In 1902—just four years after the opening of the Moscow Art Theatre—Symbolist Valery Briusov introduces the notion of actor as creator in “The Unnecessary Truth,” a seminal essay challenging the hegemony of stage naturalism and calling for a theatre in which the poetics of the actor is central: “The sole objective of the theater is to help the actor reveal his soul to the spectator.”7

Just three years later, in 1905—as Russian autocracy tottered but did not fall—Meyerhold and Stanislavsky began experimenting with new approaches to their work with actors, that might foster the performer’s generative capacities and shift the dynamics of creative authority within the rehearsal room. This is the subject of Chapter 2, “Revolution in the Theatre I: Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Collective Creation—Russia, 1905.” Their experiments were perhaps tentative, and certainly partial, and for all that both men spoke and wrote about the centrality of the actor’s creativity, they were far from prepared to relinquish their own creative authority. But they laid a foundation in several areas that were to prove critical to the further development of collective creation not only in Russia but, with time, internationally: the development of a “new” creative method—improvisation; a new institutional model—the laboratory theatre; and a new theatrical term—collective creation (kolektivnoe tvorchestvo), which Meyerhold used in print as early as 1907. In the wake of this short-lived but fruitful experiment, Meyerhold and Stanislavsky would turn their attention to other artistic concerns. But an impulse to create collectively had taken root in the Russian theatre, burgeoning, in the decade that followed, like so many seedlings from an increasingly fertile soil. Two particularly striking examples receive mention in Andre Malaev-Babel’s 2012 study, Yevgeny Vakhtangov: A Critical Portrait. The first concerns the work of Leopold Sulerzhitsky, cofounder, with Stanislavsky, of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in 1912. One of the earliest teachers of and contributors to Stanislavsky’s System, Sulerzhitsky inculcated in his students an ethos, a mind-set, and techniques that fostered collaboratively generated performance: “Sulerzhitsky was a close friend of Tolstoy’s. He took his MAT colleagues as well as his students to Ukraine and to the South of Russia and the Crimea, where he ‘treated’ them to a healthy diet of outdoor labor and improvisational performance parties . . . Sulerzhitsky was famous in artistic circles for initiating improvised concerts and entertainment. Moreover, he constantly instigated acting improvisations in the streets, in restaurants, and other public places . . . extending the creative process of transforming the dullness of everyday life into a theatrical festival.”8

Among Sulerzhitsky’s many students was Yevgeny Vakhtangov, who came to study with Sulerzhitsky in 1909 at the Adashev School in Moscow. And among the many ideas Vakhtangov appears to have absorbed from Sulerzhitsky was the notion of the actor’s creative autonomy. In 1911—the same year that Stanislavsky began to cast about once more for the possibility of founding a new theatre laboratory—Vakhtangov noted in his diary, “I want to form a studio where we can learn. The main principle: we must accomplish everything on our own. Everyone is a leader.”9 Vakhtangov indeed founded a studio theatre shortly thereafter (the Vakhtangov Studio); in parallel, he taught and directed for the First Studio of MAT, taking over leadership in 1916 following Sulerzhitsky’s death, and he would emerge as one of the most significant directors of the early Revolutionary period until his own untimely death from cancer in 1922. Over the course of his work in the two studios—his own, especially—Vakhtangov was to place an ever-increasing emphasis on the generative capacity of the actor and the creative autonomy of the collective. By the 1920s, those principles had become central to Vakhtangov’s vision of theatre. “Like many of the Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s, Vakhtangov was working toward freeing the human spirit—by enriching it with creativity. He saw the future of mankind as a community that will introduce a new man—a perpetual creator.”10

In Princess Turandot, his modernist commedia of 1922, Vakhtangov succeeded in approaching the threshold between life and art, between the actors’ story and the characters’ story, between the improvisational and the staged.11 But he dreamt of going much further. One of his students later recalled Vakhtangov describing his vision of the theatre of the future: “The time will come when the theatre will be an ordinary event of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes on Contributors