Encountering Ensemble

John Britton

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781408155172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Encountering Ensemble, is a text for students, teachers, researchers and practitioners who wish to develop a deeper understanding of the history, conceptual foundations and practicalities of the world of ensemble theatre. It is the first book to draw together definitions and practitioner examples, making it a cutting edge work on the subject. Encountering Ensemble combines historical and contemporary case studies with a wide range of approaches and perspectives. It is written collaboratively with practitioners and members from the academic community and is divided into three sections:
1. Introduction and an approach to training ensembles
2. Practitioner case studies and analysis of specific practical approaches to training ensembles (or individuals in an ensemble context)
3. Succinct perspectives from practitioners reflecting on a range of questions including: What is an ensemble?; the place of ensemble in the contemporary theatre landscape; and training issues.

PART ONE

Defining ensemble

Introduction

John Britton

DEFINING ENSEMBLE

What is ensemble?

I will answer in the way Gordon Craig would have done – we can all feel that “ensemble” suggests something highly desirable. We can all instantly feel what it isn’t. No one can say what it is. Try and try again. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.¹

It seems such a simple question:

‘What is ensemble?’

Or, perhaps:

‘What is an ensemble?’

Is ‘ensemble’ a noun (‘this company is an ensemble’) or an adjective (‘this is ensemble performance’)? Is Brook’s ‘desirable quality’ something that, once developed, a company has? Or is it an essence, a quality of presence perhaps, or of inter-reactivity, which needs to be created afresh each time a company works together? If a company is ‘an ensemble’, what happens when someone leaves? Or a new person joins? Is it the same ensemble? A new ensemble? An ex-ensemble?

Years ago, when first my work began to focus on ensemble, I realized I did not know what the word meant, what essential quality it evoked – or even if there is an ‘essential quality’ of ‘ensemble-ness’. However, like Brook, and many other directors, performers, audiences, critics and thinkers, I sensed that ‘something’ existed.

This lack of definition – the sense that I could taste the ‘desirable quality’ of a moment but could neither describe nor capture it – led me to start using the word ‘it’ to describe my sense of ensemble-ness. While training an ensemble I would ask performers to sense when ‘it’ was in the room. Sometimes, in the middle of a scene or an improvisation, ‘it’ would leave. Sometimes the performers (once they had finished) would tell me that they had felt highly connected when I, their audience, had felt no such connectedness. They may have felt ‘it’, I didn’t. At other times, I would sense deep and instinctive interconnections between the performers but they, after the event, would describe themselves as having felt a little lost. Then there were times when we all felt ‘it’, all knew ‘it’.

So, we start this book with a simple, unanswerable question: ‘Ensemble – what is ‘it’?’

Just because the question has no answer does not mean that it is not worth asking. This book will be full of paradox and contradiction. One practitioner will flatly contradict another. One will write persuasively that the essence of ensemble is X only for someone else to argue that X is a myth and that the heart of ensemble is Y. My own practice has given me particular understandings, but they are not ones that other practitioners necessarily share. This book contains many voices. It is a conversation and you will find yourself wanting to agree with some contributors, and question others. This is as it should be. One of the things most practitioners agree on is that ensemble does not require unanimity. A book on ensemble should not require agreement either.

However, amid the contradictions and diversity of voices, we will find common themes, repeated preoccupations, shared visions and passions. This introduction will point towards some of them.

Definitions of ensemble

In 2004, The Director’s Guild of Great Britain and Equity organized a conference to discuss ensemble theatre. Their definition of the term was this:

Ensemble theatre occurs when a group of theatre artists (performers, artistic directors, stage management and the key administrative staff) work together over many years to create theatre. Other artists (such as writers, performers, directors, designers, composers, choreographers, etc) will be brought in on an occasional basis to refresh and develop the work of the ensemble – although the focus will remain on its permanent personnel.²

This definition suggests that ensemble is a product of a group’s organizational structure. If people from all areas of the creative process work together for an extended period, rather than on a single project, they are an ensemble. As David Barnett explores in his chapter on ‘The Berliner Ensemble’ later in this book, organizational structures can contribute to the development of ensemble. Does this mean that organizational structure is the essence of ensemble?

Robert Cohen sees longevity as central to any sense of ensemble:

. . . ensemble is a long-term relationship: a day-in, day-out collaboration in shared living, thinking and creating.³

This immediately raises the question that I suggested above – what if someone leaves? Or a new person joins? Is an ensemble still the same ensemble if all its members, over time, are replaced? These are questions John Collins, artistic director of Elevator Repair Service, examines in his chapter later in this book.

In his book on the work of Suzuki, The Art of Stillness, Paul Allain quotes Ellen Lauren from SITI:

In teaching as many students as we have in New York, there has now become quite a community who’ve had some exposure to this training. . . . This training can provide a very real vocabulary that actors can speak together; you can immediately become an ensemble, working in the same world with a similar sensibility.⁴

Lauren is suggesting that ensemble is a result of what performers have experienced before they even meet one another – a shared training which has given them the ability to inhabit ‘the same world with a similar sensibility’. As contributors to this book will assert repeatedly, shared training can be – some suggest must be – a core element in encouraging ensemble. But again, is ensemble only this? Does it need to be a specific type of training? Even if people share a specific and appropriate training, do they, when together, automatically form an ensemble?

Katie Mitchell in her book The Director’s Handbook, writes:

During this period of rehearsals, you could also consider calling the full ensemble occasionally for movement or voice work, or to relay any new research material. It is important not to lose the sense of a shared group activity or purpose. Do this once a week for an hour or so . . . Do not worry if . . . you do not have time to schedule these ensemble calls.⁵

We might assume that Mitchell is simply using ‘ensemble’ as a substitute for ‘cast’ or ‘company’. However, she cites, as formative influences on her own, highly successful work, Lev Dodin (The Maly Theatre of St Petersburg), Wlodzimierz Staniewski (Gardzienice) and Pina Bausch.⁶ These are significant figures in ‘ensemble’ performance so, in Mitchell’s use of the term, there seems to be an aspiration. She wants the cast to be more than just ‘a cast’, she aspires to ‘ensemble’ even if the practical realities of working in commercial (or state-subsidized) theatre make such an aspiration difficult to achieve. She suggests that bringing the entire company together, even if only briefly, helps reinforce the understanding that they share a common purpose.

Organizational structure. Longevity. Prior training. Common purpose. These elements of ensemble will rear their heads repeatedly in these pages. All are significant. Are any of them, in themselves, enough to define ensemble? Indeed, does ‘ensemble’ really exist? As Brook suggested, ‘we can all instantly feel what it isn’t’ (op. cit), yet can we say what it is?

Certainly, there are writers who suggest that their experience of ‘ensemble’ is qualitatively different to the experience of watching work which is not ensemble.

In his foreword to Maria Shevtsova’s book Dodin and the Maly Theatre, Simon Callow writes of his first encounter with a Maly production:

. . . the achievement was a collective one, like the playing of a great orchestra. What was exceptional was the melos, the underlying sense of the whole. More extraordinary, even, than the individual performances or the interplay between the characters, was the corporate life manifested on stage. The connectivity of the actors was almost tangible, an organic tissue which made them breathe as one and move with a profound awareness of everything that was going on within the group. . . .⁷

Callow’s phrase ‘corporate life’ suggests that ensemble is something created and sustained by performers, live, each time they work together. It is a function of something performers do.

The other elements – the shared purpose, long life of the company, shared training and many of the other recurring features of ensemble practice explored in this book – perhaps are strategies various practitioners have developed to equip performers to ‘live collectively’ in front of their audience.

This understanding of ensemble suggests that to understand ‘it’, we need to start by looking at what is happening between (and inside) performers and between performers and their collaborators (directors, writers, teachers, designers and technical artists). We must examine relationships, looking at what performers do and how they do it.

The origins of the story this book tells lie with the Moscow Art Theatre (Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko) and the Vieux-Colombiers (Jacques Copeau).⁸ Both companies originated, in part, in reaction to deep dissatisfaction with the quality of relationships that existed in mainstream theatre. In Moscow and Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, theatre was dominated by a ‘star system’, where contemporary ‘celebrities’ slotted into productions and delivered to audiences exactly what those audiences expected. The presence of a ‘star’ was considerably more important than the integrity and quality of the entire production. Stanislavski explained:

We protested against the old manner of acting, against theatricality, against false pathos, declamation, against overacting, against the bad conventions of production and design, against the star system which spoils the ensemble . . .⁹

Mark Evans, writing about Jacques Copeau, writes:

He intended his new company to act as a disciplined ensemble – a truly innovative theatrical ambition as, for many years, the pattern of employment had been based around clearly delineated hierarchies in which “stars” were hired to perform their “set pieces” alongside companies of jobbing actors.¹⁰

In reaction to their dissatisfaction with the status quo, these two extraordinary innovators turned to the idea of ensemble. The Moscow Art Theatre was specifically envisaged as an ensemble, its founders ‘agreed to create an ensemble which would place artistic aims above individual vanity’.¹¹ Toporkov, an actor who worked under Stanislavski towards the end of the latter’s life, quotes Stanislavski:

Our art is an ensemble art. Brilliant individual actors in a show are not enough. We have to think of a performance as a harmonious union of all the elements into a single artistic creation.¹²

Evans writes about Copeau’s vision of the relationship between performer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• PART ONE Defining ensemble
• PART TWO Contemporary ensemble
• PART THREE Forming ensemble: Some approaches to training
• Afterword: What is it?
• Bibliography
• eCopyright