Devised and Ensemble

With no assistance from outside their group, several student performance groups devise their own work as a solution to the posted problem. The problem is a mix of text and images arranged on a page. The text and graphic elements are precise, and often not obviously meaningful beyond their ordinary appearance, but after a close read the details of the page may be seen as suggestive toward a response, provocation, or a call for investigation. This is what students must solve through performance.

Over the past seven years, the Post Natyam Collective’s creative practice has transitioned from in-person collaboration to web-based collaboration. Often our process is deeply informed by scholarly engagement, including feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern histories of Indian classical dance forms. Collective members often develop promising seeds from our shared processes into diverse products: dance-for-camera pieces, art installations, lecture-demonstrations, performance works, and scholarly papers.

What we really needed—and received—was a place to develop an unfinished work in a professional touring locale with Chicago audiences, and to prototype a student chorus that would be trained to perform in the work. Simultaneously Columbia College had the Double Edge ensemble embedded in its department for nearly a month. Acting students had daily access to training. Directors, playwrights, and actors could observe rehearsal and process regularly.

The rise of artistic multi-functionalism, and the open, assimilative, and collaborative values it implies, has coincided with the emergence of devising as a major theatrical discipline. Although devising is hardly new the process of developing work through collaboration among a group of artists has gained traction in recent years. It makes sense: both multi-functionalism and devising are solutions to an economic downturn, ways to continue creating complex and multivalent art in a scale-back climate.

In this installment, Mike Lew discusses the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the fraught practice of yellow face, and what equity for people of color actually looks like.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about Generation Sex, a devised piece from Teatro Luna looking at misogyny, violence, Latina identities, modern femininity, and more.

Chris Garza reviews Theatre Unbound’s Silkworms (a nun play) and takes a look into the director Isabel Nelson's devising process.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about the Chicago-based Albany Park Theatre Project, a youth theatre ensemble. She reviews APTP's 2014 remounted production of God's Work, at the Goodman Theatre.

Jonathan Mandell overviews five eclectic works by Texas playwright Kirk Lynn.

This week's conversation topic is "Dramaturgical Collaborations in Devised Work" and will be moderated by @ArtsEmerson—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, April 17 on hashtag #newplay at 10am PDT (Vancouver) / 12pm CDT (Austin) / 1pm EDT (New York) / 17:00 GMT / 6pm BST (London). On Thursday, get heard in the conversation by searching for #newplay in Twitter (sort by “all”) and by putting “#newplay” somewhere in your messages. Spread the word!

Bess Rowen interviews Christopher Andrew Loar of the New York Neo-Futurists, creator/director of The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill.

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.