Devising Performance

A Critical History

Jane Milling, Deirdre Heddon

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350316614
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Sous-sujet: Teatro

What is the history of devised theatre? Why have theatre-makers, since the 1950s, chosen to devise performances? What different sorts of devising practices are there? What are the myths attached to devising, and what are the realities? First published in 2005, Devising Performance remains the only book to offer the reader a history of devising practice. Charting the development of collaboratively created performances from the 1950s to the early 21st century, it presents a range of case studies drawn from Britain, America and Australia. Companies discussed include The Living Theatre, Open Theatre, Australian Performing Group, People Show, Teatro Campesino, Théâtre de Complicité, Legs on the Wall, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Graeae. Providing a history of devising practice, Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling encourage us to look more carefully at the different modes of devising and to consider the implications of our use of these practices in the 21st century.

1 Introduction

Devising or collaborative creation is a mode of making performance used by many contemporary theatre companies, and widely taught in schools and universities across Europe, America and Australia. Yet little critical attention has been paid to it. In her preface to Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, Alison Oddey admitted that the main reason for writing the book was that she ‘felt there was a lack of information on the subject of devising theatre’ (1994, p. xi). Ten years later, and after what turns out to be a surprisingly quick survey of books or articles that specifically concern themselves with this enduring and prevalent practice, it is apparent that very little has changed.¹ Given the widespread use of the mode of practice that we might call ‘devising’, it is curious that the conversation that Oddey hoped would result from the publication of her book has never really taken place. Perhaps it is precisely because devising is so prevalent, so present, that critical enquiry has been so sparse. Devising may appear to be a given, something that simply ‘is’. In response to a survey we circulated in 2004 to teachers of degree programmes in Theatre, Drama, Performance and Dance in the UK, one respondent replied, ‘Why would you not teach [devising]? It isn’t new for goodness sake, or cutting edge, or anything, it’s just how people usually make theatre.’²

This book sets out to demarcate and explore some of the parameters of devising or collaborative creation and to chart a history of this mode of practice in post-war British, Australian and American culture. Developments in Australian theatre, although less often placed alongside Britain and America in theatre histories, were part of a similar cultural trajectory, influenced by many of the same trends and conditions. Devising practice is taught at universities in all three countries, and exchanges of devising practices and devised performances between Australia and the UK and USA are increasingly significant elements of festivals and collaborative encounters. In studying modes of devising from these three countries we are not aiming to offer a general theory of devising, nor to suggest pragmatic, exemplary or idealised ways of working in collaborative creation. Rather than extrapolate from general principles about devising, we have looked at the companies who used or generated devising processes, and wondered about what they did and why they did it.³ Our aim here is not to provide a single narrative of origins, but to explore the cultural and political resonances of the emergence of devising processes in the work of British, American and Australian companies which stem largely from the late 1950s and 1960s.⁴

Overall, devising is best understood as a set of strategies that emerged within a variety of theatrical and cultural fields, for example in community arts, performance art/live art, or political theatre. Within these fields, a range of devising processes evolved in relation to specific and continually changing cultural contexts, intimately connected to their moment of production. The purpose of this history is to encourage us to look more carefully at different modes of devising and to consider the implications of our use of these practices today. What are the relationships between today’s practice and that of the last century? If the process and form of ‘devising’ was considered, in the 1950s and 1960s, to be both innovative and experimental, how might we engage with the processes and forms of devising in the twenty-first century? Why, where, when, how, in what way – and arguably, for whom – does devising take place today? How might we critically engage with devising as a practice and interrogate our own practice of it?

What is Devising?

To begin with nomenclature, British and Australian companies tend to use ‘devising’ to describe their practice, whereas in the USA the synonymous activity is referred to most often as ‘collaborative creation’. We shall use the phrases interchangeably in this text, although the terminology itself offers a slight variation in emphasis. While the word ‘devising’ does not insist on more than one participant, ‘collaborative creation’ clearly does. A second variation in emphasis takes us to the nub of the issue. When used in non-theatrical settings, ‘devising’ suggests the craft of making within existing circumstances, planning, plotting, contriving and tangentially inventing. By contrast, the phrase ‘collaborative creation’ more clearly emphasises the origination or bringing into existence, of material ex nihilo. Elements of both phrases apply to the practices of companies we study here. At the core of all devising or collaborative creation is a process of generating performance, although there is an enormous variety of devising processes used.

The use of the word ‘devising’ to describe this set of practices for making theatre has led some commentators to suggest that there is no distinction to be made between devised work and other modes of theatre production. One respondent to the questionnaire that we circulated argued that ‘devising’ could be used to describe the traditional rehearsal and staging of a play-text: ‘the terminology [of devising] has a tendency to suggest that script work is not devised, when clearly the performance is devised but with a script as a starting point’. This seems to us unhelpfully broad. In this present study, we examine those theatre companies who use ‘devising’ or ‘collaborative creation’ to describe a mode of work in which no script – neither written play-text nor performance score – exists prior to the work’s creation by the company. Of course, the creation and the use of text or score often occur at different points within the devising processes, and at different times within a company’s oeuvre, according to the purposes to which they intend to put their work. However, for the companies studied here, devising is a process for creating performance from scratch, by the group, without a pre-existing script.

Devised performance does not have to involve collaborators. To this extent the scope of devising practices is much larger than can possibly be encompassed here. We have deliberately limited our focus to collaborative creation and therefore place our emphasis on companies, rather than individuals. This decision inevitably produces omissions, particularly in the field of performance art, where the work is undoubtedly devised, though most often by individual artists.⁵ Though Chapter 3 explores some crossovers between avant-garde art/performance art and devising practices, our decision to exclude performance art results in the simultaneous exclusion of important radical voices, often of queer and feminist subjects. However, our aim is not to provide a critical history of performance art, nor to give an account of the various ways in which performance artists devise; other books already exist which do that more thoroughly than we could possibly hope to achieve here.⁶ This is not to deny that many performance artists, such as Carolee Schneemann, Franko B and Bobby Baker, exert a powerful influence on contemporary devising companies and that such connections remain in need of exploration; but this text must be regarded as only one of many possible engagements with a vast subject.

Also outside the limits of this study is devising which does not result in performance. For many companies, workshop or studio-based discoveries form the bedrock of the performance material; for others, the exploration in a workshop is an end in itself. When the Open Theatre first considered performing in 1963 there was a split in the company between those who wanted to share the studio discoveries and build them into a performance meaningful for an audience, and those for whom the studio sessions were simply actor-training exercises, sufficient in themselves and ultimately about equipping the actor for other kinds of text-based performances. By contrast, for current participants in workshops run by the Living Stage (Washington) discussed in Chapter 5, participation in the processes of devising brings its own reward. Therapeutic uses of play, improvisation, the creation of scenarios and the building of stories offer creative and empowering insight to workshop members, who form their own audience. While one or two examples of devising without performance are included in the chapter concerned with community theatre, to give an indication of the range of work that occurs under this heading, we are centrally concerned with devising as a process of generating performance.

For some of the companies we examine here, and for a great deal of the early rhetoric that surrounded devising, the idea of a devised performance being produced collaboratively meant: with all members of the group contributing equally to the creation of the performance or performance script. Moreover, the ideology of ‘collaborative’ practice equated it with ‘freedom’. For Oddey, for example,

there is a freedom of possibilities for all those involved to discover; an emphasis on a way of working that supports intuition, spontaneity, and an accumulation of ideas. (Oddey, 1994, p. 1)

The rhetoric pertaining to the process of devising is quite transparent here, and it is a rhetoric that is widely shared. In fact, it is possible to construct something of a ‘soundbite’ of those qualities frequently assumed to be implicit in devising which serve to give it an almost mythical status. Devising is variously: a social expression of non-hierarchical possibilities; a model of cooperative and non-hierarchical collaboration; an ensemble; a collective; a practical expression of political and ideological commitment; a means of taking control of work and operating autonomously; a de-commodification of art; a commitment to total community; a commitment to total art; the negating of the gap between art and life; the erasure of the gap between spectator and performer; a distrust of words; the embodiment of the death of the author; a means to reflect contemporary social reality; a means to incite social change; an escape from theatrical conventions; a challenge for theatre makers; a challenge for spectators; an expressive, creative language; innovative; risky; inventive; spontaneous; experimental; non-literary.⁷

In the twenty-first century, it is more than possible to take to task many of the ‘ideals’ embodied in the above. For example, is it necessarily the case that devising companies should be non-hierarchical? Were they ever? Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Joseph Chaikin, Richard Schechner, Liz LeCompte, Lin Hixson, Nancy Meckler, John Fox, Naftali Yavin, Hilary Westlake, Tim Etchells, and James Yarker were, or are, leading directors within their ensembles or companies. Does a director, who ultimately has the last word, who accepts final responsibility, complicate the notion of non-hierarchical work or democratic participation? Further, does the fact that many companies now operate as umbrella organisations, often run by one or two key figures, challenge the assumption of ensemble practice? In the pages that follow, it is not our intention definitively to prove or demolish the myths, but instead to ask where these beliefs about devising arise from and whether they are accurate in relation to historical and contemporary practice, and sustainable within contemporary social structures. At the very least, contemporary processes might require us to question what ‘collaboration’ means.

A shift in the significance of ‘collaboration’ within contemporary devising practices was articulated by Oddey:

In the cultural climate of the 1990s, the term ‘devising’ has less radical implications, placing greater emphasis on skill sharing, specialisation, specific roles, increasing division of responsibilities, such as the role of the director/deviser or the administrator, and more hierarchical company structures. (Oddey, 1994, p. 8)

Two recent books on devising, aimed primarily at the UK market of 17–18-year-olds studying drama or performing arts to examination in ‘A’ level or GNVQ National Diploma, exemplify the transformation of rhetoric about devising for contemporary companies and audiences. In Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide (2002), despite Clive Barker’s foreword, which argues that we should see devising ‘as attempting to supplant oligarchic, or even dictatorial, control by a more democratic way of working’, the content of the volume emphasises the separation of roles and foregrounds that of the director (Bicât and Baldwin, 2002, p. 6).⁸ Gill Lamden’s Devising: A Handbook for Drama and Theatre Students does not offer so radical a reworking of a collaborative ‘ideal’, in part because she draws on a wider selection of companies at work. Yet the central chapter studies four artistic directors under the heading ‘Devising as a profession’. In the 1990s, collaborative creation may have come to mean something rather more akin to traditional theatrical production. The idea of ‘devising as a profession’ also seems to mark a shift from categorising ‘devising’ as an innovative, fringe practice, to seeing it within the commercial, mainstream sector. As processes of devising are now so firmly embedded in our training and educational institutions, can we really continue to claim for devising any ‘marginal’ or ‘alternative’ status? And why should we wish to do so?

Devising and Script/Text

In the 1990s, Oddey pitted devised theatre as a marginal alternative to the ‘dominant literary theatre tradition’. We are in no position to argue, a decade later, that devised performances have become the dominant products of theatrical culture. A brief glance at the theatrical landscape of Britain in 2004 shows that the literary play-text remains central stage. However, any simple binary opposition of devising to script work is not supported by the briefest survey of the actual practice of companies who choose to devise. Many companies see no contradiction between working on pre-existing scripts and devising work, and move seamlessly between the two. For example, Theatre de Complicite produced Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1989), Ionesco’s The Chairs (1997–8) and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1992) between and alongside their devised physical theatre work. Judith Malina and Julian Beck of The Living Theatre likewise grew their own devising processes out of work on European Absurdist and American Beat plays. At the height of their period of devising work they also produced a version of Brecht’s Antigone (1967), and much of The Living Theatre’s current work grows from scripts.

While some of the rhetoric that has surrounded devising suggests that it emerges from a distrust of words or a rejection of a literary tradition in theatre, very few devising companies perform without using words. Even groups from a dance or mime tradition have been happy to use text, and the exceptions, such as Trestle Theatre’s fullmask shows, or Ralf Ralf’s gibberish comedy of political brinkmanship, The Summit (1987; revised 2004), still wish to emphasise the story and narrative clarity of their work. Many companies use text as a stimulus for their devising: adapting short stories, poems or novels; using found texts; cutting up existing texts; using historical documents; and quoting, citing or parodying classic play-texts. In some community-theatre contexts devising companies use verbatim performance, reproducing exactly the words of witnesses and interviewees, reassembled and theatricalised in collage.

The role of a writer or writers within a collaboratively created process can be fraught, as the study of the Open Theatre in Chapter 2 illustrates. Most companies we discuss have experimented with crystallising ideas and images into text, or a rehearsal score, at different moments in the devising process, and have explored a variety of relationships between writing and devising modes of work. Some use writers outside the process of devising, some use only the actors driving the devising to generate text, others straddle the difference with a range of involvement for a dramaturg. For a few of the companies here, the collaborative process involves a period of collaborative writing of a script to be performed, as discussed further in Chapter 4. A forthcoming study of the relationship between collaborative creation and writing in recent devised work in the UK will go some way to address this complex area in more detail.⁹ The desire, in some early devising companies, to have the actor as a creative contributor to the making of performance, and not an interpreter of text, has perhaps encouraged the idea that devising is anti-literary by nature, but this is by no means accurate. While many companies making work in the 1960s and 1970s were concerned to give voice to the voiceless, and to make new and different points of view heard and seen, this often involved the use of a writer-figure in the rehearsal room. The fuller repercussions of questions of authorship and authority in relation to text within performance are explored in the studies of companies that follow.

Devising and Improvisation

Improvisation has been a key practice in the devising work of many of the companies we look at here. Often, for companies whose working practices involve an initial period of the creative development of ideas in the studio, improvisation of some form is that part of the devising process. Frost and Yarrow’s study of improvisation briefly charted a range of Western precursors, before they identified three main strands to twentieth-century improvisation:

(a) the application of improvisation to the purposes of the traditional play; (b) the use of pure improvisation in the creation of an ‘alternative’ kind of theatrical experience; and (c) the extension of improvisatory principles beyond the theatre itself. (Frost and Yarrow, 1990, p. 15)

Obviously it is (b), the second strand of work, that primarily concerns us here but, as we discuss more fully in Chapter 2, improvisation developed for actor-training in preparation for work on a text, and creative improvisation for devising, share a heritage, often a form, and are not s...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Authors’ Preface to the Revised Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Devising and Acting
• 3. Devising and Visual Performance
• 4. Devising and Political Theatre
• 5. Devising and Communities
• 6. Contemporary Devising and Physical Performance
• 7. Contemporary Devising and Postmodern Performance
• 8. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index