Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance

The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Scott Proudfit, Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Scott Proudfit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137603272
• eBook ISBN: 9781137550132
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the role and centrality of women in the development of collaborative theatre practice, alongside the significance of collective creation and devising in the development of the modern theatre.

Tracing a web of women theatremakers in Europe and North America, this book explores the connections between early twentieth century collective theatre practices such as workers theatre and the dramatic play movement, and the subsequent spread of theatrical devising. Chapters investigate the work of the Settlement Houses, total theatre in 1920s' France, the mid-century avant-garde and New Left collectives, the nomadic performances of Europe's transnational theatre troupes, street-theatre protests, and contemporary devising. In so doing, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in A History of Collective Creation (2013) and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (2013), in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices ofcollective creation and devising are revealed as central—and women theatremakers revealed as progenitors of these practices.

Part I
First Wave, 1900–1945

© The Author(s) 2016

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (eds.)Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance10.1057/978-1-137-55013-2_1

Begin Abstract

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

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva^{1, 2} and Scott Proudfit^{1, 2}

(1)

Dixie State University, St. George, Utah, USA

(2)

Elon University, Department of English, Elon, North Carolina, USA

End Abstract

Arguments

This volume rests upon two premises: (1) That collective creation is pivotal 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 throughout 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 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 internationalist 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 investigating 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 cursory 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 unacknowledged 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 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 first 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 fit. 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 field, as researchers and editors.

Collective Creation

In preparation for our first two volumes, we spent considerable time discussing how best to define collective creation, the terminological predecessor to devising. Broadly construed, collective creation refers to group-generated theatrical performance. The devil is in the details. Does collective 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 modified 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 definition 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 defined 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 film, television, circus, dance, and a great many other collaborative or cooperative art forms we might name) is collective creation. This definition was of course too broad for our purposes. In the end, we arrived at a working definition:

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 infinite 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: collectivist, communitarian, communistic, democratic, anti-hierarchical.... Each insinuates an array of historically conditioned political associations into the definition—and it is precisely narrow historical specificity 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 affiliation.

Yet if political specifics change—communist, New Left, feminist, anarchist, 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 first 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 continuous process linking performative behavior—arts, sports, ritual, play—with social and ethical structure: the way people think about and organize their li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. First Wave, 1900–1945
• 2. Second Wave, 1945–1985
• 3. Third Wave, 1985–Present
• Backmatter