Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance the Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Edited by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva • Scott Proudfi t Editors Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance

The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Editors Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva Scott Proudfi t Department of Theatre Department of English Dixie State University Elon University Saint George, Utah , USA Elon, North Carolina, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-60327-2 ISBN 978-1-137-55013-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55013-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949421

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image: Judith Smith and Janet Collard in AXIS Dance Company’s Foregone, choreographed by Kate Weare. Photo © Andrea Basile.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York For Carl Weber, once again: your infl uence only strengthens with time. (K.M.S.)

For Dr. William L. Proudfi t, for your love and wisdom (S.P.)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of Jessica Silsby Brater’s chapter “Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and the Mabou Mines Family Aesthetic” are based on material in Brater’s book Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (London: Methuen Drama, 2016). Parts of Julia Listengarten’s chapter “Pussy Riot and Performance as Social Practice: Collectivity, Collaboration, and Communal Bond” origi- nally appeared under the title “Profi le: Performing Punk Prayer: Pussy Riot and National Controversy” in Ecumenica, a Journal of Theatre and Performance , 5, no. 2 (2012).

vii

CONTENTS

Part I First Wave, 1900–1945 1

1 Toward a New History of Women in the Modern Theatre – an Introduction 3 Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfi t

2 Raising the Curtain on Suzanne Bing’s Life in the Theatre 29 Jane Baldwin

3 From Neva Boyd to Viola Spolin: How Social Group Work in 1920s’ Settlement Houses Defi ned Collective Creation in 1960s’ Theatres 51 Scott Proudfi t

4 A Democratic Legacy: Hallie Flanagan and the Vassar Experimental Theatre 67 Elizabeth A. Osborne

5 Alexandra Remizova: An “Actors’ Director” 81 Andrei Malaev-Babel

ix x CONTENTS

Part II Second Wave, 1945–1985 99

6 Mnouchkine & Co.: Constructing a Collective 101 David Calder

7 Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and the Mabou Mines Family Aesthetic 115 Jessica Silsby Brater

8 “Hers and His”: Carolyn Swift, Alan Simpson, and Collective Creation at Dublin’s Pike Theatre 129 Siobhán O’Gorman

9 From the Center to the Heartland: The Collective, Collaborative Conscience of Jo Ann Schmidman, Megan Terry, Sora Kimberlain, and the Omaha Magic Theatre (1968–1998) 145 Anne Fletcher

10 Historiographing a Feminist Utopia: Collective Creation, History, and Feminist Theatre in Canada 161 Michelle MacArthur

11 Monstrous Regiment: The Gendered Politics of Collaboration, Writing, and Authorship in the UK from the 1970s Onwards 177 Sarah Sigal

Part III Third Wave, 1985–Present 191

12 Judith Malina and the Living Theatre: Storming the Barricades and Creating Collectively 193 Cindy Rosenthal CONTENTS xi

13 Bryony Lavery: Nerves of Steel and a Forgiving Heart 207 Karen Morash

14 Women, Transmission, and Creative Agency in the Grotowski Diaspora 221 Virginie Magnat

15 The Women of Odin Teatret: Creativity, Challenge, Legacy 237 Adam J. Ledger

16 Doing What Comes Naturally?: Women and Devising in the UK Today 253 Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart

17 Devising Downtown: Collective Creation and Female Leadership in Contemporary New York 269 Rachel Anderson-Rabern

18 (The Waters) Between Africa and America: Revelations in Process, Theatrical-Jazz, and Sharon Bridgforth’s River See 283 Nia O. Witherspoon

19 Hands like starfi sh/Feet like moons: Disabled Women’s Theatre Collectives 301 Victoria Lewis

20 Pussy Riot and Performance as Social Practice: Collectivity, Collaboration, and Communal Bond 317 Julia Listengarten

Suggested Works 331

Index 337

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Anderson-Rabern is a scholar, director, and performer researching within the fi elds of collective creation and contemporary performance. Through theory and practice, she investigates aesthetics emerging from collaborative processes. Her writings have appeared in Theatre Journal , TDR: The Drama Review , and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (ed. Kathryn Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfi t, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has created performance with Miracle Theatre, Stanford Summer Theatre, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, and for multiple colleges and universities. She is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Franklin and Marshall College, USA, and co-founder of Wee Keep Company, an interdisciplinary laboratory for thinking and theatre-making. Jane Baldwin is an actress, critic, and academic. Her publications include: Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor ; The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings , which she edited; and Vies et morts de la création collective , co-edited with Christiane Page and Jean-Marc Larrue. Her essay “Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor” appears in Actor Training , edited by Alison Hodge. Her chapter “The Accidental Rebirth of Collective Creation, Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Léon Chancerel and Improvised Theatre” is published in A History of Collective Creation , edited by Kathryn Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfi t. Her latest work, “Jean Gascon’s Theatricalist Approach to Molière and Shakespeare,” appears in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater . Jessica Silsby Brater is a visiting assistant professor and the Theater Program Director at the University of New Haven, USA, where she teaches courses in contemporary performance, theatre history, directing, and theatre for community impact. She also serves as an Assistant Dean of the UNH College of Arts and Sciences. Her book Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work is forthcom-

xiii xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ing in 2016. Her writing has appeared in Theatre Journal , Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui , and the Journal of Beckett Studies . Brater is the founding Artistic Director of Polybe + Seats, a Brooklyn-based theatre company. She holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a PhD in Theatre Studies from CUNY Graduate Center. David Calder is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Manchester, UK. He completed his PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University in 2014. His essays on French theatre and performance have appeared in TDR: The Drama Review and in the anthologies Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (2013) and A History of Collective Creation (2013). He is preparing a manuscript on street theatre and the production of postindustrial space. Anne Fletcher is Professor of Theatre at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL. She is the author of Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the American Theatre (2009) and co-author (with Scott R. Irelan and Julie Felise Dubiner) of The Process of Dramaturgy: A Handbook (2010), Experiencing Theatre with Scott R. Irelan (2015), and a forthcoming volume on American playwrights of the 1930s. Fletcher’s work has appeared in journals including Theatre Symposium , The Eugene O’Neill Review , and Theatre History Studies . She has chapters in books including Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives ; Blackwell Companion to American Drama ; Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theatre ; Bloomsbury Anthology on American Tragedy (forthcoming); and Experiments in Democracy (forthcoming). Adam J. Ledger is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, UK. He taught previously at University College Cork and the University of Hull, and has directed projects internationally. His research centers on contemporary performance practice: books include Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century (2012) and The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming) as well as numerous articles and chapters on theatre practice and practitioners. He is joint artistic director of The Bone Ensemble: productions include Again , Caravania! and The Igloo Project. Victoria Lewis’s verbatim documentary play, On the Road: A Reenactment of the First Congressional Hearings on the ADA, September 27, 1988 , was presented at UCLA in April 2015. Publications include: “From Mao to the Feeling Circle: The Limits and Endurance of Collective Creation,” in A History of Collective Creation (2013); Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (2005); “Disability and Access: A Manifesto for Actor Training,” in a Politics of American Actor Training (2009); and “Theater Without a Hero: The Making of P.H.*reaks: The Hidden History of People with Disabilities ,” in Bodies in Commotion (2005). Victoria is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Redlands, USA. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Julia Listengarten is Professor of Theatre and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Central Florida, USA. Her translation of Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs’ premiered Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company and was included in Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890–1950 . She is the author of Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots (2000), co-author of Modern American Playwriting: 2000–2009 (forthcoming), and co-editor of Theater of the Avant- Garde, 1950–2000 (2011) and Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice (2012). She has contributed to many edited collections and theatre journals and is currently editing Decades of Modern American Playwriting: 1930–2009 (with Brenda Murphy). Virginie Magnat is Associate Professor of Performance at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her monograph Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women (2014) received the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention. This book and its companion documentary fi lm series, featured on the Routledge Performance Archive, are grounded in four years of embodied research and multi- sited fi eldwork supported by two major grants. Magnat’s publications have appeared in North American and international scholarly journals in the fi elds of theatre and performance studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, sociology, qualitative inquiry, and literary criticism, in English, French, Polish, Italian, and Spanish. Michelle MacArthur holds a PhD in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto, Canada, where she teaches as an adjunct instruc- tor. Michelle edits the book reviews section of Theatre Research in Canada and her work has been published in TRIC , Canadian Theatre Review , alt.theatre , and several edited collections. She was the lead researcher for the Equity in Theatre initiative, a campaign focused on redressing gender inequities in the Canadian theatre industry. Her report, entitled “Achieving Equity in Canadian Theatre: A Report with Best Practice Recommendations” (2015), can be found at www.eit. playwrightsguild.ca . Andrei Malaev-Babel is the Head of Acting and Associate Professor of Theatre at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training, USA. He served as an Artistic Director for the Stanislavsky Theater Studio, Washington, DC, where he was nom- inated for a Helen Hayes Award. He enjoyed engagements at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Institution, The World Bank, Kennedy Center, Young Vic Company (London, UK), and at the International Volkov Theatre Festival (Yaroslavl, Russia). He has authored and edited two pioneering volumes on Yevgeny Vakhtangov. He serves on the board of MICHA (Michael Chekhov Association) in New York City. Alex Mermikides is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Kingston University, London, UK. Her research interest is in contemporary performance-making, with a xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

particular focus on devised and interdisciplinary performance. Her publications include Devising in Process (2010, with Jackie Smart) and Performance and the Medical Body (2016, with Gianna Bouchard). Her practice encompasses directing, dramaturgy, and performance writing, and her most recent production, bloodlines , was produced at the Science Museum (London), Antwerp University Hospital, and elsewhere. Karen Morash is an associate lecturer and PhD student at Goldsmiths (University of London), UK. Her practice-as-research dissertation focuses on dramatists who engage with the devising process. She is also a playwright, whose work has been featured in British fringe theatres, including The 9.21 to Shrub Hill (New Diorama Theatre), devised with Waxwing Theatre Company. Her theatre company, Head for Heights, run in partnership with director Sue Dunderdale and translator Catherine Boyle, produces plays in translation using innovative methodology which develops work through working with actors and community participants. Siobhán O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the School of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK. She has also taught and researched drama, theatre, and performance at Trinity College Dublin and NUI Galway. She was a recipient of the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2013 to 2015. Her essays have appeared in a number of books and such journals as Scene , Irish Studies Review , and the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. She is on the editorial board of Studies in Costume & Performance and is co-editor of the Carysfort essay collection Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice. Elizabeth A. Osborne is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Florida State University, USA. She has written Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (2011) and co-edited Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor (2015). Other work appears in Theatre Symposium , Theatre History Studies , The Journal of American Drama and Theatre , Theatre Journal , and essay collections and encyclopedias. Osborne is on the editorial board for the Journal of American Drama and Theatre , the executive board of the American Theatre and Drama Society, and Conference Planner for the Mid- America Theatre Conference. Scott Proudfi t is Assistant Professor of Drama in the English department at Elon University in North Carolina, USA. Before receiving his PhD at Northwestern University, he worked with the Actors’ Gang and the Factory Theater in Los Angeles and with Irondale Ensemble Project in New York, often on devised plays. In addition, for seven years he covered the New York and Los Angeles theatre scenes as an editor for the publications Back Stage and Back Stage West . He was associate editor of A History of Collective Creation (2013) and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (2013). NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Cindy Rosenthal is Professor of Drama at Hofstra University and has contributed essays to The New York Times , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , Women and Performance , and TDR . She edited Living on Third Street: Hanon Reznikov’s Plays of the Living Theatre 1989–1992 (2008), co-edited Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and Their Legacies , with James Harding (2006), and also with Harding, The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum (2011). Current book projects include Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La Mama Experimental Theatre (forthcoming). She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts/New York University, and is a founding member of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble. Sarah Sigal has a BA in English Literature and Theatre from Gettysburg College, USA, and an MA and PhD from Goldsmiths College, UK. She is a playwright, dramaturg, and director working in physical theatre, devised work, site-specifi c performance, and new writing. Sarah has made work for the Shunt Vaults, the Albany Theatre, the Cheltenham Everyman, the Arcola, the Edinburgh Festival, the Bike Shed, the Rondo, the Etcetera, the Old Red Lion, Theatre503, and the Park Theatre. In addition to being a freelance lecturer, she has recently completed Writing in Collaborative Theatre Making for Palgrave Macmillan. Sarah is also the Live Performance Programmer for JW3 and the Creative Co-Director of Hush Hush Hoopla. Jackie Smart is Associate Professor of Drama at Kingston University, London, UK. She is co-editor, with Alex Mermikides, of Devising in Process (2010), and has published work on a wide range of British theatre and dance companies, including Forced Entertainment, Random Dance, Mathew Bourne’s New Adventures, Optik, and Gecko. Having started her career as a performer-deviser and later moved into directing devised performance, her main interest is in the creative process, particularly within the ensemble tradition, and she has a fascination with the ways in which the emotion–cognition relationship plays out within group creative exchange (in Trencsényi and Cochrane, 2014). Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a theatre director, teacher, and scholar, whose publications include A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, ed.; Scott Proudfi t, associate ed., 2013). Works in development include Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at Povarskaia Street: Art, Money, Politics, and the Birth of Laboratory Theatre, and a chapter on Vsevolod Meyerhold for the new Bloomsbury Methuen series on directors. She teaches advanced directing, devising, theatre history, Russian Expressive Movement, and Meyerhold’s Biomechanics at Dixie State University. Nia O. Witherspoon (Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a multidisciplinary artist- scholar who creates contemporary ritual space grounded in African diaspora sensi- xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS bilities. Working primarily in the mediums of theatre/performance, vocal and sound composition, and creative scholarship, Witherspoon’s work has been given awards by the Mellon Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Social Justice, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Lambda Literary, Theatre Bay Area, the Downtown Urban Theatre Festival, and the National Queer Arts Festival. The Messiah Complex , Witherspoon’s full-length play, premiered at Brooklyn’s acclaimed BRIC House in May 2015. LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.1 Suzanne Bing as a young woman 30 Fig. 2.2 The masked Suzanne Bing as Celestine in L’Illusion 43 Fig. 2.3 Suzanne Bing as the Actress in L’Illusion 44 Fig. 5.1 Alexandra Remizova, 1950s 84 Fig. 5.2 Oswald Glazunov as Matthias Clausen in Alexandra Remizova’s production of Hauptmann’s Before Sunset, 1940 91 Fig. 5.3 Tsitsiliya Mansurova as Inken Peters in Alexandra Remizova’s production of Hauptmann’s Before Sunset, 1940 92 Fig. 8.1 Pat Duggan, Derry Power, Austin Byrne, Dermot Kelly, John McDarby, and Pat Nolan in the premiere of The Quare Fellow at the Pike Theatre in 1954 137 Fig. 8.2 Carolyn Swift in the “Lotus Flower Dance,” choreographed by June Fryer and performed as part of Further Follies (1955). Swift’s costume was based on Kathakali male attire complete with a papier-mâché headdress made by Desmond McNamara, while the dance consisted of a mixture of Bharata Natyam steps 140 Fig. 9.1 Jo Ann Schmidman, Sora Kimberlain, and Hollie McClay in the Omaha Magic Theatre production of Body Leaks 153 Fig. 9.2 Megan Terry, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sora Kimberlain in Belches on Couches 155 Fig. 9.3 Star Path Moon Stop in production 157 Fig. 12.1 Judith Malina and Brad Burgess performing Occupy Your World, an expression of support for the Occupy Movement of 2011 200 Fig. 14.1 Rena Mirecka teaching the plastiques in Brzezinka (2009) 226

xix xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 14.2 Virginie Magnat and Rena Mirecka in Brzezinka (2009) 227 Fig. 15.1 Else-Marie Laukvik reprises her role from Ferai (1969) in Clear Enigma (2014) for Odin Teatret’s 50th anniversary 242 Fig. 15.2 Roberta Carreri and Julia Varley in Clear Enigma 244 Fig. 18.1 Big Chief leads See in River See. From left to right: Mankwe Ndosi, Nia Witherspoon, Marie Casimir, Sonja Parks 284 Fig. 18.2 Bridgforth (See Ori) conducts Ensemble in River See at Links Hall, Chicago, 2014. From left to right: Sharon Bridgforth, Jasmine Johnson, Mankwe Ndosi, Marie Casimir, Nia Witherspoon, Ni’Ja Whitson 290 Fig. 18.3 Bridgforth (See Ori) leads See in River See at Theatre Offensive, Boston, 2014. From left to right: Sonja Parks, Sharon Bridgforth 294 Fig. 19.1 Other Voices women’s workshop, Berkeley, 1982: Sun Chen and Celeste White 306 Fig. 19.2 Judith Smith and Janet Collard in AXIS Dance Company’s Foregone, choreographed by Kate Weare 312 PART I

First Wave, 1900–1945 CHAPTER 1

Toward a New History of Women in the Modern Theatre – an Introduction

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfi t

ARGUMENTS This volume rests upon two premises: (1) That collective creation is piv- otal 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 through- out 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

K. M. Syssoyeva Dixie State University, St. George, Utah , USA S. Proudfi t Elon University, Department of English, Elon, North Carolina, USA

New Left political theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, 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 1960s and 1970s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internation- alist 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 investigat- ing the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is twofold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaboration, 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 cur- sory 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 LeCompte, 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, Guerrilla 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, Hélène 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 unac- knowledged 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 INTRODUCTION 5

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 so doing, 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.

DEFINITIONS As we did in the fi rst two volumes, we have left it to individual writers in this collection to use the terminology of collaborative theatre-making— that is, collective creation and devising —as each sees fi t. At times, this produces slippage: one person’s devising is another’s collective creation; indeed, one person’s collective creation may be another’s directorial dominance. This, we contend, is a problem inherent both in the nature of academic and professional jargon—which, like all language, refuses to stay put and signify neatly—and in the nature of collective theatre-making. Theatre is innately multivocal, and its practices, involving complex group interaction, quite varied; collective creation both extends and foregrounds that multivocality and processual variation. Our easy relationship to the terminology employed by the writers with whom we are collaborating is an extension of our commitment to such polyphony—and of our faith that a close reading of the vagaries of usage may prove more fruitful than any effort to establish terminological dominance. That said, we do have our own perspective(s), derived from our shared investigations in this fi eld, as researchers and editors.

Collective Creation In preparation for our fi rst two volumes, we spent considerable time discussing how best to defi ne collective creation , the terminological pre- decessor to devising. Broadly construed, collective creation refers to group- generated theatrical performance. The devil is in the details. Does collective 6 K.M. SYSSOYEVA AND S. PROUDFIT creation imply Left politics? If a particular theatrical collective is politically to the right, is it then not practicing collective creation? Does collective creation imply the generation of a new work ex nihilo , as Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling proposed in Devising Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)? If a collaborating performance group develops the mise en scène for an existing play script without the aid of a director, would that then fall outside the parameters of collective creation (due to the pre-existing script)—and if so, what do we call it? Conversely, if the group creates an entirely new work of performance through improvisation, which is then “set” and “edited” by a playwright in the privacy of her study, with a mise en scène likewise improvisationally generated, then modifi ed and set by a director—is that still collective creation? And what are we to make of the “fact” that nearly all the “leaderless” collectives of the 1930s and 1960s have repeatedly been demonstrated to have had strong leadership? And so on. With the aim of teasing out resemblances in collaborative theatre- making across eras and cultures, we wanted to keep our defi nition of collective creation broad enough to account for a multiplicity of practices that might be reasonably considered to fall under its purview (including practices that were not so defi ned by their practitioners), and yet limited enough that we did not collapse into relativism. After all, it is commonly argued that, to differing degrees, all theatre is collaborative. Therefore, some theatre historians might reasonably contend that all theatre (along with fi lm, television, circus, dance, and a great many other collaborative or cooperative art forms we might name) is collective creation. This defi nition was of course too broad for our purposes. In the end, we arrived at a working defi nition:

There is a group. The group wants to make theatre. The group chooses—or, conversely, a leader within the group proposes—to make theatre using a process which places conscious emphasis on the groupness of that process, on some possible collaborative mode between members of the group, which is, typically, viewed as being in some manner more collaborative than members of the group have previously experienced. 1

The autological awkwardness here (a sort of infi nite ingress produced by the repetition of group, groupness, collaborative, more collaborative) arises from the problem of the political “baggage” of the more nuanced (or at least, varied) terms we might use in place of the neologism groupness : INTRODUCTION 7 collectivist, communitarian, communistic, democratic, anti-hierarchical.... Each insinuates an array of historically conditioned political associations into the defi nition—and it is precisely narrow historical specifi city that we sought to circumvent. As we looked at patterns of collaborative practice across some one hundred plus years and multiple languages and cultures, we found a mutualistic impulse at work that transcended ideological affi liation. Yet if political specifi cs change—communist, New Left, feminist, anar- chist, fascist, 2 etc.—collective creation (in the West at least) nonetheless tends toward the ideological, be it religious or political. In collective theatre-making, process is typically perceived as paramount, with artistic and/or political outcomes seen as deriving from methods of group interaction. And as we note in the fi rst volume,

processual method may well be ideologically driven in so far as [...] collaborative creation has often constituted a kind of polemic-in-action, against prior methodologies that the group has known: an investigation, a reinvigoration, a challenge, an overthrow. The extrinsic and/or oppressive structure, if you will, that the group perceives itself to be challenging through the generation of a new methodology may be aesthetic, institutional, interpersonal, societal, economic, political, ethical, or some admixture thereof. 3

Victor Turner’s paradigm of performativity in social structure offers a useful lens through which to examine tendencies of collective creation. Richard Schechner, in his introduction to Turner’s Anthropology of Performance , reminds us that Turner “taught that there was a continu- ous process linking performative behavior—arts, sports, ritual, play—with social and ethical structure: the way people think about and organize their lives and specifi c individual and group values.” 4 Building upon this line of thought, we might productively think of collective creation,

as straddling the threshold between the performativity of social life and performance as such—positing that collective creation foregrounds the creative action of social and ethical structuring in a dynamic interplay with the creative action of performance making. That theatre should lend itself to such an encounter seems a logical outgrowth of the dialectical play between drama’s traditional concern with the social and the intrinsically social nature of making and sharing drama. Viewed in this light, the particular politics of particular collectives become subsumed into a spectrum of possible socioethical impulses and outcomes—collective creation appearing less as a 8 K.M. SYSSOYEVA AND S. PROUDFIT

manifestation of any one ideological position than as a genre of performance making that positions itself at the intersection of social and aesthetic action. 5

Devising The historical shift to the term devising (a word which emerges into increasingly widespread usage in Canada, England, and the United States in the 1990s) marks an apparent practical shift away from overt emphasis on the perceived political potential of communitarian collaborative practices, to a more emphatically aesthetic emphasis on the generation of new work, irrespective of the politics of group dynamic. Devising, simply put, seems to lean toward some version of creation ex nihilo , and away from a concern with ideologies of group practice. Yet this apparent ideological shift in the terminology is deceptive. Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, for instance, introduced the term collective creation (kolektivny tvorchestvo ) into Russian theatre in his writings of 1906, to describe experiments at his Povarskaya Street Studio in 1905; yet the practices he explored there with actors, composers, design- ers, and fellow directors today look a good deal like much of contemporary, director-led devising: leveraging the generative creativity of the theatrical group, facilitated by an aesthetic leader with a strong vision and ultimate decision-making control, motivated principally by aesthetic con- siderations. Conversely, in the political context of Russia’s fi rst Revolution and the aesthetic context of the Moscow Art Theatre’s model of the auteur-director, Meyerhold’s collective-creation-light appeared radical indeed. 6 History plays fast and loose with defi nitions. In a similar vein, the term “collective creation” can be usefully applied to the communist and communist-infl ected theatre collectives that emerged in England and the United States (Workers Theatre), Russia (Bolshevik government-sponsored mass spectacles, for instance), and Germany (including, in addition to Workers Theatre groups, Erwin Piscator’s Piscator-Buhner, 1928–1931, and the “Brecht collective” of the 1920s and 1930s): yet such groups, while collectivist, were also emphatically hierarchical; such was the nature of the left political systems upon which they modeled themselves. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we fi nd that many contemporary companies which present as director-led devising groups, with a strong directorial public face, may in practice be heavily reliant upon a radically collective process in the rehearsal room (though INTRODUCTION 9 often, in the current era, one developed with a temporary pool of actors, hired by a small, director-producer-led core company); as British theatre scholar Alex Mermikides has argued, the drivers for such hybrid practices are frequently economic: sole attribution being easier to market, and long- term collective process being diffi cult to fund. 7 Our purpose in unmasking the tensions and histories encoded in the language of collective creation and/versus devising is not to throw out the terminological baby with the bathwater. There is value in current efforts to distinguish between collective creation as a more overtly socio-political practice emphasizing collective action in artistic context, and devising as a more emphatically aesthetic practice emphasizing the generation of new works of performance by a theatrical group, irrespective of social or political impetus. Rather, our purpose is to take up the call implicit in the writings of Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, to attend to the realities of practice—interpersonal, social, political, economic, aesthetic—that lie beneath the surface of loose habits of usage driven by marketing (personal and economic), linguistic trends, and the vagaries of attribution.

Proto-Collectivism As we work through the histories of collective practice, we necessarily encounter its embryonic manifestations: proto-collectives, straddling the spheres of collaborative parity and traditional hierarchies of theatrical labor. Consideration of these transitional or hybrid practices may serve to further our understanding of the fi eld. An excellent example in the United States is the Group Theatre (1931–1941). Headed by a triumvirate of artistic directors, committed to greater creative parity between director and playwright (a “new” notion in American theatre of the period), emphasizing ensemble over individual, and engaging in ongoing experimentation with improvisation, the Group Theatre was a good deal more collective in spirit than the commercial theatres against which it defi ned itself—and a good deal less collectivist than the communist Workers Theatres of the same period. By no reasonable stretch of imagination could the Group Theatre be broadly categorized as practicing collective creation; and yet, it holds a signifi cant place within a history of evolving collective practices. Two other examples of proto-collectivism appear in this book. The fi rst is the early directorial work of Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration—the subject of Chapter 4 , “A Democratic Legacy: Hallie Flanagan and the Vassar 10 K.M. SYSSOYEVA AND S. PROUDFIT

Experimental Theatre,” by Elizabeth Osborne. Osborne’s chapter is concerned specifi cally with Flanagan’s infl uence on a generation of young women theatre-makers, through her work at Vassar College. Though a signifi cant strain of work conducted by the FTP would fall squarely into collective creation models circulating in the period—in particular, Living Newspapers, a form of docudrama frequently relying upon teams of (often unattributed) writers, infl uenced by developments in Russia as well as the Workers Theatres of the United States, England, and Germany 8 — Flanagan’s work at Vassar was not collective creation. Like the later work of the Group Theatre, Flanagan’s Vassar productions would appear to have been a kind of hybrid or intermediary method: “traditional” theatre- labor hierarchies yearning toward greater communitarianism. This was far from accidental; Flanagan, during her European travels, had been greatly impressed by collectivist principles at work in aspects of Soviet theatre; arguably, her early explorations into how such ideals might serve to mod- ify the leadership role of the director would reverberate through the net- work of FTP theatres as a result of her infl uence. The second such example, also emerging from the interwar period, is that of director and teacher Alexandra Remizova of Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theatre, the subject of Chapter 5 , “Alexandra Remizova: An ‘Actors’ Director,’” by Andrei Malaev-Babel. Remizova came to her work by way of collective creation, as a very young actress with the Vakhtangov Theatre at the start of the 1920s, during Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s tenure as artistic director. For Vakhtangov, modernist theatre-making practices were merely a stepping stone on a path toward a freely creative society; speaking on professionalism in the theatre, he once remarked:

The time will come when the theatre will be an ordinary event of our life. Theatre will simply be in a square. Everyone, who feels himself capable, will act. Theatre will be free of charge—there will be no admittance fee, or performance honorarium. It will be a free art for free people. Narrow professionalism will disappear, all naturally talented actors will play. 9

In the years following Vakhtangov’s premature death in 1922, the company shifted away from the collective creation structures Vakhtangov had begun elaborating with his troupe, 10 hewing to the Stalin-era model of master directors. As a professional director, Remizova came of age in the post-Vakhtangov period, in an institutional setting that followed estab- lished theatrical practices; as such, she did not herself practice collective