Collaborative TheatreAKA Devised Theatre

Historical InfluencesGroups/Companies from the 1960s-1970s

The Open Theatre – Joseph Chaikin

The Performance Group – Richard Schechner

Mother Courage

The Wooster Group

• Formed out of The Performance Group.• Directed by Elizabeth LaCompte• Spalding Gray – Monologue Pieces• Willem Defoe

RTS 1 & 9

Notes the marginalized peoples and segments of American culture ignored by Wilder’s idyllic world. (title refers to

highways through industrial wastelands)Our Town juxtaposed with blackface vaudeville routines

LSD – Just the High Points

Incorporated THAT legal battle into their show.Sued by Arthur MillerUsed multimediaAppropriates text from The Crucible

CHARLES MEE

ANN BOGART• Director – SITI Company• Viewpoints• Open process• Ensemble regularly

contributes to the creation of scripts through improv

• Playwright• Writes loose adaptations – often classical works (Iphigenia 2.0, Big Love)• Pastiche / Appropriation

“Stripped of their original context, they take on new meanings, and inflections, but like

items unearthed at an archeological site the artifacts imply (but do not identify) the

ancient vase of which it was once a part.

“Bogart does not approach rehearsals with a set blocking concept in mind. Her sentences often begin with “What I know is…” followed by her

decisions about the nature of the piece. And yet, this implies an important aspect of Bogart’s

philosophy. Quite simply, that there are always things she doesn’t know.”

bobrauschenbergamericaInspired by the works of mid 20th century

abstract artist Robert Rauschenberg.

The development of bob began with a workshop in the cold basement of New York’s La Mama Gallery in the East Village with eight members of SITI and Mee. Mee had previously compiled two lists as a starting point. The first list, entitled “Stuff in Raschenberg’s works” included “stuffed chickens”, “JFK”, “a goat”, “automobile tire”, and two dozen other items Mee had encountered in the Guggenheim’s catalogue of the artist’s work. The second list, “Stuff it makes me think of”, included “chicken jokes”, “Automobile race track announcer”, “dialogue from Baywatch”, “the sound of a car door slamming”, “the sound of a conversation in Rauschenberg’s studio while a print is being made” and dozen more free associations from the mind of Mee himself. These lists set the tone for the workshop as each participant was required to bring a considerable amount of homework on both Rauschenberg and associative texts and images from their own lives and experiences.

Leotards hanging on the line.

SITI Companyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiNuCC44jnc

Collaborative TheatreMusical Theatre

New(ish) Plays you should know

http://www.rudemechs.com/index.htm

•Premise

•Write down your guru

RASA Boxes

Scenes from Streetcar

A Tiger! (in dress pants)

The Lights!

The Lights!

VIDEO CLIPhttps://vimeo.com/33561503

How they created it… a letter from the playwright.Our process is different every time. It has been the case that a script is written first, but generally not. The playwright is usually in service to the collaboration in the same way that everyone else is.

For instance, the last big moment of the play, the pendulums, were created by an actor. That was not written or directed so much as actor generated. In that case, the playwright's job is to support it with the text.

But it goes the other direction too.

The main sentence I want to share with you and your students is that everyone brings his or her expertise to the collaboration. My expertise is writing. And to a certain extent structure. So that is how I collaborate. Others collaborate with their bodies, others with their dramaturgical abilities or their understanding of magic or technical aspects of theatre...

The playwright's job is a strange one in a collaboration. I wrote several hundred pages in an effort to find my place in the method gun. I wrote the beginnings of two novels. I wrote several plays. I rewrote the first act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, line by line with Stella Burden and her students as the main characters... I wrote essays and acting manuals in the voice of Stella Burden. Out of more than six hundred pages we found the original text of the Method Gun... We married it with Tennessee Williams and Chekhov and kissing practice, etc. And that is how we got where we are...

LoveKirk

How does the popularity of collaborative / devised works reflect postmodern sensibilities?

Postmodernism Basics

MASTER NARRATIVES – BAD!HistoryReligion

Story structure

BINARIES – BAD!Gay –Straight

High art – Low Art

SIMPLISTIC – BAD!In art and ideas,

complexity and pastiche!