Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, S. Proudfit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137331274
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This edited volume situates its contemporary practice in the tradition which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance examines collective and devised theatre practices internationally and demonstrates the prevalence, breadth, and significance of modern collective creation.

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Preface: From Margin to Center

Collective Creation and Devising at the Turn of the Millennium (A View from the United States)

Scott Proudfit and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

In A History of Collective Creation, we argued that collective creation, far from being a phenomenon of the 1960s (an anomaly within the history of modern European and American theatre practices, which are dominated by the single playwright and the authoritative director), may be better understood as a parallel tradition emerging circa 1900 in response to the rise of the director. We further proposed that modern collective creation practices evolved in three waves: the first, beginning at the turn of the century, cresting in the 1930s, diminishing circa 1933/34 in response to the international effects of events in Germany and the Soviet Union, and all but disappearing by the start of World War II; the second, building slowly in the wake of World War II and cresting in the 1960s and early 1970s; and the third, beginning in the late 1980s.

Collective theatre-making from 1900 to 1985 was the focus of A History of Collective Creation. The focus of this second book is the period “beginning” in 1985. However, unlike the visible break in European and US collective creation practices brought about by events leading to World War II, “any endpoint for [the] second wave of collective creation” (as we acknowledged in our first book) “is largely an arbitrary designation”—and any beginning to a third wave, impossible to pinpoint.1 And yet, if collective creation does not in fact vanish with the fading of the radical politics and counterculture movements of the 1960s, to be reborn almost three decades later as devising, “something” happens in those years: if not an ending, then a fading from view; if not a rebirth, then an evolution. That apparent disappearance and that evolution are the subject of this chapter.

A rigorous effort to determine “what happened” to collective creation following the 1970s raises an array of issues and themes central to our investigation: among them, evolutions in methods and forms that may constitute a rethinking (as opposed to an abandonment) of earlier praxis; the tendency of scholarship to lag behind evolutions in practice, leading to the production of new (ahistorical) definitions and paradigms; and local versus global conditions and causes.

Of necessity, this chapter claims to be nothing more than a view from the United States, emphasizing homegrown developments; a good deal of the discussion of developments in Europe will inevitably return to a consideration of how those developments impacted our own native theatre. In the course of the research, writing, and discussion in which we have engaged throughout the creation of these two volumes, we find ourselves increasingly in awe of the endurance, variety, and specificity of collective creation as a theatrical and social practice across time and across space. Thus, while seeking out patterns, tendencies, and confluence, we have also become sensitive to the need for the scholarship to proceed step by step, in order that we might better take each moment and each place on its own terms. That said, we are also highly conscious of the vast terrains of work that are, as a result, beyond the reach of this volume and this chapter—above all, the significant role and presence of collective creation throughout Latin America, and its impact on the rest of the world.

Locality

Periodizing the “rise and fall” of collective creation within a generic, socio-temporal frame—“the sixties,” for example—subsumes crucial differences under vague commonalities; we lose sight of the specific, local conditions that have brought collectively created and popular theatre into being, have given it its particular character, and ultimately constrained it, suppressed it, transformed it, or allowed it to continue. Equally important, we lose sight of the very different political stakes characterizing the conditions under which collective creation has operated. With regard to the increased visibility of collective practices in the mid-twentieth century (the “second wave,” which, broadly speaking, follows World War II, gaining visibility in the sixties), locally, the dates of that resurgence vary from country to country, with waves of collective practice emerging and submerging according to local political and/or economic change. If we’re speaking of “mid-century” collective creation in Poland, for instance, we’re talking about a series of successive waves, responding to a succession of political changes reverberating through the Eastern Bloc and echoing through the Polish student theatre movement—the Hungarian Uprising of 1956; the Prague Spring of 1968; the brutal suppression of riots in Gdansk, Poland, in 1970, and the accession of Edmund Gierek to Party Secretary that followed—culminating between 1972 and 1980 and “ending” (temporarily) with the imposition of martial law.2 In Argentina, collective creation proliferated in the mid-1960s, ending abruptly in 1976 with the March 24 coup that brought to power the brutal military junta that ruled over Argentina until 1983. Argentina’s collective creation movement had deep ties to communist agitation and the movement for workers’ and peasants’ rights; formally, it was strongly influenced by 1930s agitprop.3 In Czechoslovakia, collective creation, according to Peter Oslzly (a dramaturg and, later, advisor in the Vaçlav Havel administration), surged and subsided in a single theatrical year, 1989, the year of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, which culminated on December 29 in the election of playwright Vaçlav Havel to the presidency; for Czech alternative theatre, collective creation was a method by which to devise a dissident theatrical language, physical and absurdist, at once accessible to audience and inaccessible to censors.4

Nor is political subversion the only factor that brought collective practice to the fore in these post–World War II decades; in some instances, changing economic and institutional practices at the governmental level (what the British term the “culture industries”) played a significant role in facilitating the spread of “little theatre” and attendant experimental practices—collective creation among them. Throughout the twentieth century, many European nations experienced significant shifts in governmental control of, and support for, theatre—in particular, “decentralization,” the move to make “culture” more widely available to the population. Thus we find in Switzerland—to take one example—a wave of collective practice in the 1970s and 1980s, following on the heels of decentralization and changes in the structure of national arts funding. Increased public subsidy for the arts brought with it a form of social polarization, common within theatre practice, between the well-funded, prominent, aesthetically conservative, and typically centrally located theatres and the underfunded, obscure, and largely regional alternative theatres; thus a measure of support, and the measure of its insufficiency, together served as an impetus to the emergence of devising practice, which, with its frequent integration of multiple genres of performance and emphasis on the actors’ physical virtuosity, is aesthetically well suited to “compensate” for low production values.5

“Wave” is an apt metaphor for the ebb and flow of collective creation practices in twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance, because it suggests that even as these practices may appear to diminish in number and in visibility over a given period, in some places and times—for example, England, Canada, and the United States, in the 1980s—such apparent recession actually accompanies the build to a new crest. We witness this phenomenon in the United States in the decade between 1975 and 1985. Despite the continued tendency to historicize North American collective creation as a movement that dies out along with 1960s political activism, not all major US theatre collectives with nonhierarchical commitments ceased to operate at the end of this decade. More often, they reconfigured and/or transformed, as members departed to form new groups with new collaborators. The Open Theater disbanded in 1973, but Joseph Chaikin continued to create collectively with the Winter Group, and to influence the development of collective creation through his collaborations and teaching until his death in 2003; his final work, Shut Eye (2001), was created in collaboration with Pig Iron, a contemporary devising company whose interest in ensemble creation dates back to its founders’ first encounter with Chaikin as students at Swarthmore College in 1991.6 The Performance Group, established in 1967 by Richard Schechner, existed officially until 1980, though the exodus of Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray in 1975 to form the Wooster Group meant the collective had a very different appearance in its final years. And as to the Wooster Group, it has been producing work, both devised and scripted, for three and a half decades. Mabou Mines (founded by a group of “co-artistic directors” that included, in the early years, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Fred Neumann, Bill Raymond, David Warrilow, and Terry O’Reilly) was established in 1970; after forty years in operation, the company shows no signs of abating—although its organizational structure has changed with time, and, like the Wooster Group, its productions are not always devised or collectively developed. In sum, what did occur within these theatre collectives, in many instances, was a series of shifts—in the dynamics and structure of the creative group, in the degree to which devising process is director driven, and in the willingness to include both single-authored and collectively created work in the repertoire.

As to The Living Theatre, founded in 1947, it continues producing despite multiple “deaths,” actual and metaphorical: its first departure from America, in 1963, in the face of IRS investigation; the death of co-founder Julian Beck in 1985; and the death of the company’s subsequent co-director, Judith Malina’s second husband, Hanon Reznikov, in 2008. Indeed, despite a vague impression that the departure of The Living Theatre from the United States marked the beginning of collective creation’s putative demise,7 The Living Theatre did not actually create its most significant collective works until the period of European exile, during the mid- to late 1960s. This period of nomadism fostered communal living, as well as communal art, and led to the shift from the staging of solo-authored text to the generation of collectively authored spectacle, with Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (begun as workshop exercises developed with Chaikin in the United States and completed in Europe while touring Kenneth Brown’s The Brig), Frankenstein, and Paradise Now. Throughout the seventies, the company worked on a cycle of plays titled The Legacy of Cain—developed and staged primarily outside of the United States and with limited critical attention. Itinerance is key to understanding both the group’s diminished “significance” (read, visibility) and its influential reach. Off the grid, the group could pursue its program of generating collective theatrical resistance, in a manner both global (since its founding, the company has produced some 100 works across five continents) and local: the Cain plays (Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth, and the Strike Support Oratorium) were created for nontraditional venues to reach nontraditional audiences—the incarcerated in Brazil, slum dwellers in Palermo, urban high school students in New York, steel mill workers in Pittsburgh.

As with so many US collectives founded in the sixties and seventies, the saga of The Living Theatre continues to unfold. In the 1980s the company returned to the United States, initially establishing a home for itself at the Third Street Theatre in New York City, but clashes with bureaucracy continued to plague and uproot the company. The eighties brought renewed practical investigation into modes of audience participation; the nineties, a new period of homeless touring, culminating in an influx of funding from the European Union in 1999, permitting The Living Theatre to establish the Centro Living Europa in Rocchetta Ligure, in Italy’s Piedmont region. The Centro’s activities continue into the present under the direction of Gary Brackett, a member of The Living Theatre since 1985. The 2000s brought collaborations with political theatre-artists in Lebanon, establishment of a new storefront space deep in New York’s (now largely gentrified) Lower East Side,8 and ongoing engagement with the anti-globalization movement.9

Globally, too, we find many instances of collective creation practices arising, mid-century, in response to concrete, local social and/or political conditions; continuing, where feasible (and it has not always been feasible), into the present day; and transforming with the passage of time in response to shifts both internal (within the group) and external (economic, cultural, and political). To take one instance, in “The Case of Spain: Collective Creation as Political Reaction” (Chapter 11), Nuria Aragonés traces a lineage from the Soviet-influenced agitprop theatre of Spain’s civil war years (1936–39) through Spain’s mid-century collective creation movement, which arose circa 1967 in student and studio theatre as a reaction against the political, cultural, and economic landscape wrought by the Franco dictatorship—and that (despite the tenuous status of Spanish collective creation by the early eighties) continues, if sporadically, into the present day, as exemplified in the work of two regional theatre collectives: the Andalusian company La Cuadra de Sevilla, and the Catalonian collective Els Joglars. However, while both companies continue to employ various modalities of collective work, the content of that work, the organizational structure of the groups, the centrality of the director, and the nature of the methods employed in rehearsal and development have evolved with time.

In much of Latin America, numerous collectives founded in the second wave have, like The Living Theatre, continued producing into the present day, albeit most often with different personnel and organizational structures. A by-no-means-comprehensive list of ongoing collectives includes El Aleph, founded in 1968 (the first Chilean theatre company to experiment with collective creation); Ictus, founded in 1969 in Santiago, Chile (which functioned as a collective from 1969 to 1973); La Candelaria, founded in 1972 in Bogota, Colombia; El Teatro Experimental de Cali (EL TEC) founded 1963 in Colombia; Telba, founded in 1969 in Peru (which performs collective creations as well as works by single playwrights); Cuartotablas, founded in 1971 in Peru; and Yuyachkani, also founded in 1971 in Peru.

In sum, if an ending to the second wave can be identified after the 1960s, it is to be found not in an absence of collective creation at any given point, in the United States or abroad, nor in a dissolution of the most visible theatre collectives, but rather in the rise of a third wave, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the United States, this emergent wave would be marked by shifts in collaborative pr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Toward a New History of Collective Creation
• 1. Preface: From Margin to Center—Collective Creation and Devising at the Turn of the Millennium (A View from the United States)
• 2. The Playwright and the Collective: Drama and Politics in British Devised Theatre
• 3. Collective Creation and the “Creative Industries”: The British Context
• 4. Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret: A Collective Ethos
• 5. An Actor Proposes: Poetics of the Encounter at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards
• 6. Lecoq’s Pedagogy: Gathering up Postwar Europe, Theatrical Tradition, and Student Uprising
• 7. Created by the Ensemble: Histories and Pedagogies of Collective Creation at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre
• 8. Framework for Change: Collective Creation in Los Angeles after the SITI Company
• 9. The Nature Theater of Oklahoma: Staging the Chaos of Collective Practice
• 10. In Search of the Idea: Scenography, Collective Composition, and Subjectivity in the Laboratory of Dmitry Krymov
• 11. The Case of Spain: Collective Creation as Political Reaction
• 12. Collective (Re)Creation as Site of Reclamation, Reaffirmation, and Redefinition
• Notes on Contributors