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All Together Now

 

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In the following Around the Teapot series, three writers reflect on “Adventuring Together: Ensembles, Collectives, Laboratories & Networks,” a weekend-long gathering of performance artists and scholars, from across the U.S. and Europe, held in Los Angeles. Intended to create a platform for self-generated, dynamic and passionate articulation of the joys and challenges of collaborative performance-making, the “Adventuring Together” Teapot offered a space to practice ensemble to both real and virtual participants.

The latest Around the Teapot (September 20-22, 2013), organized by American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory (ARTEL), was a vibrant exploration of collaborative theater through conversation and action. The weekend gathering was inspired by the recent publication of three books on collaborative theater practices: John Britton’s Encountering Ensemble, and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit’s A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance.

The weekend was imbued with a spirit of flexibility and generosity. Inspired by Open Space Technology—a style of meeting that allows people to self-organize and determine the structures and flow of conversations—the gathering was fashioned to celebrate a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and preoccupations related to collaborative theater-making. My overall impression from the weekend was like remembering something I always know, but somehow always need reminding: that collaborative artists need to continuously seek, build, and structure connection with other collaborative artists in order to sustain and grow their work.

The evening opened with conversation, food, music, and remarks by Britton and Syssoyeva. While the books approach collaborative theater from different perspectives, both authors noted how the topic of collaborative work demanded a multi-vocal approach. Both Britton and Syssoyeva gathered a large number of contributors to offer different perspectives, initiating a collaborative ethos in their very acts of writing about collaboration.

Syssoyeva expressed how the project of editing her books revealed collective creation as a diverse and yet consistent parallel tradition alongside mainstream theatrical traditions. Her work on the history of collective creation showed that despite the diversity among the practices, aims, and forms of collective creation, they all carry an interest in reimagining where power and authority exist within the process of creating theater.

Britton explored the many definitions of “ensemble,” an investigation that would continue throughout the course of the event. He highlighted an important principle that ensembles, even within the membership of the group, don’t have to agree. This openness to disagreement and divergence—founded upon a commitment to working together—characterize our playful, yet futile, efforts to pin down definitions of our terms.

This gathering was always on the move—from conversation to performance, from space to space, and from engaging with colleagues in the room to chatting across states and oceans via Google chat. This movement allowed us to experience the possibility of connecting with each other in different ways, both in space and time and across space and time. While there was a local focus to this event, emphasizing the state of collaborative work in Los Angeles, there was also an effort to connect with colleagues in other places to strengthen the wider community of collaborative and ensemble artists.

 

We have a particular kind of creative and enterprising expertise that we should recognize as abundance. Focusing on ourselves as exceptionally resourceful, rather than under-resourced, allows us to celebrate and extend collaborative theater’s knack for being all in it together.

 

Surprises were sprinkled throughout the weekend. Some were orchestrated and others spontaneously appeared. Wendell Beavers’ recorded performance rant about arts and academia unexpectedly lilted out of a cabinet when attendees walked into the restroom. As we toured the studios, we ran into Opera del Espacio performing a site-generated piece in the parking lot. I found out that a colleague, whom I have only known for a few years, was a part of a project that I saw as an audience member when I was eighteen. Seeing this piece was a life-changing theater moment for me and I was amazed to find out that, unbeknownst to me, her work had significantly contributed to my own foundation as a theater artist.

Much of the conversation circled around issues about sustainability, structure, and support. How do we continue to make work in the face of obstacles? What kinds organizational, intellectual, and creative structures sustain the kinds of work that we want to do? How can we actively support each other and ourselves in the process of making work? A spatial provocation to tour the spaces of Artworks Theatre by Bryan Brown and Olya Petrakova of ARTEL, led us to consider how to structure and manage creative communities.

One collective brainstorm focused on how to make, as Petrakova suggested, our own creative economies through recognizing the other skills we possess beyond theater making to support the creative community. An example of this new economy might be running a coffee shop within an arts complex that would provide paid work for an artist-barista and refreshments for the audience. Another conversation focused on sharing successful components of organizational models to expose artists to strategies that have been proven to work.

While we did explore our ensemble-based practices within the context of the studio, we often arrived at the proposition that we need to bring our ensemble-based ethics beyond the studio into our structures and relationships with communities and institutions. Values such as simultaneously encouraging individual and group contribution, generosity, holding divergence within unity, working toward a shared common goal, and creating the conditions for creativity can serve us well in contexts beyond the studio.

Furthermore, we have to remember that this is where we excel. Britton made a call for us to recognize that as artists working in ensemble-based/collectively collaborative traditions, we have a particular kind of creative and enterprising expertise that we should recognize as abundance. Focusing on ourselves as exceptionally resourceful, rather than under-resourced, allows us to celebrate and extend collaborative theater’s knack for being all in it together. 

 

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