Devised and Ensemble

foolsFURY is a theater ensemble from San Francisco that sees advantages in working with playwrights and devisors, and seizes opportunities to become a touring company. As they come up on their fifteenth year, artistic director Ben Yalom sheds some light on their transitions, and lets me in on how they are working toward what is next artistically and financially.

Alvina Krause, one of twentieth century’s most famous teachers of acting, believed, “if you can act Chekhov, you can act anything!” In the summer of 1976 she was 83 years old, long retired, yet still taking private students in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Little did she know that seven students from Northwestern University in Chicago would come to study “acting Chekhov” with her, and end up settling into the town for a much longer stay as the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE).

How do you work as a group? How do you work without a script? How do you ask someone to fund a group without a script? And how are you still together—financially, artistically? The non-traditional model of creation is frequently mysterious if only because it is hard to understand without doing.

Bertie Ferdman recounts productions from the 2014 UTR and COIL Festivals.

Chris Garza reviews Muy Very Authentico, from the Minneapolis based collective Theatre Forever. Garza shares his skepticism the production as it balances between absurdity/satire and offesnive misrepresentation.

Daniel Kelin shares his experience working with a youth-oriented agencies in Pohnpei, the Marshall Islands, and American Samoa.

When we devise theater with students, we can look at the abilities that can guide us in our creation of a piece.  Devised work allows students to be in a brave space of not knowing.   

Is ensemble a group of people working together over a long duration? Is it a non-hierarchical organizational structure? A way of being and working together with a shared sense of priorities?

I think about paradoxical needs this experience embodies—for community and solitude; structures and flexibility; stability and change—and the need for all of it, simultaneously, in our lives, our practices, our field.

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. 

Join us Thursday, Spetember 19 for our Weekly Howl.  This week's topic is Collective Creation in Theatre: Its History and Its Ramifications for Today.

Kristin Leahy offers an overview of the work Rachel Chavkin has been creating with the TEAM.

Vanessa Garcia shares an overview of working on a devised theatre piece.

The budding identity of American regional theater is fresh ensembles creating devised work that answers why with these people, in this place.

Ragged Wing Ensemble explores the concept of time with the centerpiece of an ice sculpture in Time Sensitive.

Rachel Grossman interviews the Neo-Futurists to explore the dynamic between art, artist, and audience.

Holler talks about ensemble building and how sometimes-for the integrity of the group-being kind is not always being polite.

In this essay, Rachel Grossman explores the junctions of ensemble theatre and audience.