Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Editor, and Scott Proudfit, Associate Editor Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 collective creation in contemporary performance Copyright © Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit, 2013. All rights reserved. Chapter 7 originally appeared under the title “Created by the Ensemble: Generative Creativity and Collective Creation at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre” in Theatre Topics 22:1 (2012): 49– 61. © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Revised and reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 33126- 7 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Collective creation in contemporary performance / edited by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978- 1- 137- 33126- 7 (hardback) 1. Performing arts— Europe— History— 20th century. 2. Performing arts— United States— History— 20th century. 3. Experimental theater— Europe— History— 20th century. 4. Experimental theater— United States— History— 20th century. 5. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 6. Collaborative behavior. I. Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos, 1961– editor of compilation. II. Proudfit, Scott, 1971– editor of compilation. PN2570.C65 2013 791.094— dc23 2013009069 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Contents List of Figures ix Introduction: Toward a New History of Collective Creation 1 Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva 1 Preface: From Margin to Center— Collective Creation and Devising at the Turn of the Millennium (A View from the United States) 13 Scott Proudfit and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva 2 The Playwright and the Collective: Drama and Politics in British Devised Theatre 39 Roger Bechtel 3 Collective Creation and the “Creative Industries”: The British Context 51 Alex Mermikides 4 Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret: A Collective Ethos 71 Ian Watson 5 An Actor Proposes: Poetics of the Encounter at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards 95 Kris Salata 6 Lecoq’s Pedagogy: Gathering up Postwar Europe, Theatrical Tradition, and Student Uprising 111 Maiya Murphy with Jon Foley Sherman 7 Created by the Ensemble: Histories and Pedagogies of Collective Creation at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre 125 Claire Canavan 8 Framework for Change: Collective Creation in Los Angeles after the SITI Company 137 Scott Proudfit 9 The Nature Theater of Oklahoma: Staging the Chaos of Collective Practice 151 Rachel Anderson- Rabern Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 viii CONTENTS 10 In Search of the Idea: Scenography, Collective Composition, and Subjectivity in the Laboratory of Dmitry Krymov 165 Bryan Brown 11 The Case of Spain: Collective Creation as Political Reaction 187 Nuria Aragonés 12 Collective (Re)Creation as Site of Reclamation, Reaffirmation, and Redefinition 195 Thomas Riccio Notes on Contributors 211 Index 215 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Introduction Toward a New History of Collective Creation Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva ollective Creation in Contemporary Performance is the second book in a larger Cbody of research, which began with A History of Collective Creation (Sys- soyeva and Proudfit, Palgrave, 2013). Though these two volumes were conceived to be readable independently of each other, together they constitute a rehistorici- zation of collective creation and devising practices in Europe and the United States between 1900 and the present. A History of Collective Creation opens in 1905 and traces developments through the mid- 1980s. This present volume begins where A History left off. These two works emerged from the contributions of a scholarly working group, originally convened in 2010 with the aim of uncovering the roots of 1960s collective creation practices in an earlier theatrical era and tracing the legacy of those practices in the contemporary form of theatre- making now better known, in England and the United States, under the term devising. Along the way, we have been fortunate to be able to add several significant contributions to the present volume from scholars not in attendance in the original working group. Nonethe- less, and notwithstanding the evolving insights generated by our ongoing investi- gations, the premises that inform A History of Collective Creation have remained essentially the same for Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance. These two works, therefore, share a single introduction (with minor modifications), providing the historical and historiographic context from which the present vol- ume emerges and laying out the concerns, definitions, methodology, and para- digms that have shaped both books. Chapter 1 of this present volume, “Collective Creation and Devising at the Turn of the Millennium (A View from the United States),” builds upon the introduction, offering detailed consideration of some of the shifts and evolutions that have marked the progress of collective creation practice since the 1960s. Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 2 KATHRYN MEDEROS SYSSOYEVA Historiography “The group, not the individual,” writes Theodore Shank at the opening of his 1972 article, “Collective Creation,” “is the typical focus of an alternative society.”1 In the 1960s and 1970s— decades marked in so many Western nations by utopic yearning— the theatre, as elsewhere, became a site of society building, and in the alternative theatres of North America, Australia, parts of Latin America, and Europe, the group was ascendant. 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. This was the heyday of The Living Theatre, years that saw the nascence of France’s Théâtre du Soleil, of The Agit Prop Street Players in England and El Teatro Campesino in the fields of Southern California, of English Canada’s Théâtre Passe- Muraille and Quebec’s Théâtre Euh!— companies associated, variously, with collective performance creation, egalitarian labor distri- bution, consensual decision making, and sociopolitical revolt. The prominence of collective creation in the alternative theatres of the six- ties and seventies has, with time, led to a vague sense that collective creation— along with sex, drugs, and youth culture— sprang more or less fully grown from the thigh of ’68. This conflation derives from early historicization of collective theatre- making, such as we find in Mark S. Weinberg’s seminal work, Challeng- ing the Hierarchy: Collective Theatre in the United States (1992).2 For Weinberg, hacking a path through what was still a largely uncharted terrain of theatre his- tory, collective creation and the social and political upheaval of sixties America were virtually synonymous: “The generation of the sixties led this movement as part of its theatricalization of political life and its use of theatre as a weapon in its political struggles.”3 But the sixties are hardly the only era in which human beings have entertained utopic longings for a more perfect social union. Nor are they the only time that alternative theatre companies have yearned, not merely for more cooperative modes of work, but to hold, in their daily practices of work and collegial interac- tion, to a higher standard of interpersonal relations— to make of the artistic group a model for a better way of being together in the world, a space in which to enact, with a few likeminded collaborators, a backstage performance of a more civil soci- ety or, failing that, a refuge from an oppressive sociopolitical landscape. The conflation of collective creation with sixties counterculture and New Left politics has resulted in a tendency either to read present devising practices (fre- quently cited as less politically motivated than their predecessors)4 as a failure or rejection of the theatrical politics of the sixties or, perhaps more problematic, to divorce contemporary devising from its antecedents, giving rise to ruptured his- tories of practice.5 Such a temporally and culturally bounded reading negates a rich tradition of collective creation practices of other types, in other countries, in other eras— preceding, running parallel to, and following from their more visible sixties counterparts. Historical writing on collective creation is a recent phenomenon. Significant English- language works6 begin in 1972 with the publication of Theodore Shank’s aforementioned article in The Drama Review, followed 15 years later by the first Copyrighted Material - 9781137331267 Copyrighted