Devised and Ensemble

Julie Rada shares her process for casting devised pieces, and explores the extreme difference in the way auditions are run when a group is creating together.

Jamie Gahlon interviews Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza, now marking their thirtieth year as ensemble Culture Clash.

Jennifer Johnson, of The Charlestown Working Theater, who has trained with Double Edge Theatre, interviews Stacy Klein, Founding Artistic Director of Double Edge about the evolution of Double Edge’s training method.

"Audience participation" is a vague term, like much of theatrical terminology; it has come to mean different things to different people... What happens when the audience participates by becoming performers—without volunteering to do so?

Avant-garde performer and director Paul Zimet offers a brief overview of his role in Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and his forty-year history with Talking Band.

Everyone starts to wonder what they’re creating with Stephen Spotswood on his journey to devise a piece with both environmental studies and theatre majors.

Chris Kaminstein of the New Orleans-based ensemble Goat in the Road explains how they made Numb, an original piece about the origins of nitrous oxide and anesthesiology.

Based on interviews with local teachers and students about the current educational climate, Forgotten Futures creates space for discussion of the dysfunction plaguing Chicago Public Schools.

The class is split almost right down the middle between theater majors and environmental studies students, with a few crossovers. That first day we have a much more immediate question to answer: Did this mix of drama and science students have the capacity to merge together into the ersatz devising company we needed them to be? Would they be open-minded, generous, and willing to play? If not, the entire semester would be an uphill process.

Cory Hinkle writes about Western Society from the British-German collective Gob Squad, and its multi-media, audience-involving production that investiages wish fulfillment, starting with the recreation of "one of the least watched videos on the Internet".

There are a variety of ways people can stay connected. Each year we all step back and assess where we are with our lives, and who needs what. We want people to step in towards the heart of things when that seems right, and step back when they need to grow in a different way. There is a dynamic quality to it, but also a sense of stability—that's the trick.

Our process is open-source, inquiry-based and ever-evolving. We love hyphens. We flirt at the intersection of playmaking and script writing. We believe that theater requires the whole performer—mind, body, and voice. Often we draw strong, immediate connections that open up a dialogue between past and present, and play on themes of history, science, mathematics, and social justice.

Beau Jest in Boston is thirty years old. Over that time we have seen several transformations, but the impulse that brought us together has never changed. We are actor-driven. We only do projects we are personally invested in pursuing as a group. We like work that is physically inventive and imaginatively staged. We like to take our time developing a piece, and will spend anywhere from two months to two years on it. We use Beau Jest as a laboratory to explore new ways of combining gesture, text, and physicality.

In this, Strange Attractor’s first major process, we put our commitment to the test, and through that difficult process, we became an ensemble. We still worked without a director, but unlike our first casual process, now we cared about the outcome. We’d fundraised for airline tickets and stipends and gotten our communities excited about our company. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to make something—we wanted it to be good.

We’ve found most artists we come in contact with in Detroit aren’t bound to a single discipline—printmakers curate community food-based events, and trained painters build large-scale public installations. This inherent openness to working cross-disciplinarily has helped us to expand our ideas about the work of our company and the nature of our ensemble.

Offering insight into the relationship between ensembles and universities, Michael Rohd shares the text of a talk he gave at the Network of Ensemble Theaters.