Pages: 14

Arendell’s introductory chapter begins this literary journey with a brief history of devised theater practice that travels from Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and Living Newspapers through notable troupes such as Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, and Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre. She then moves to explore five collective theater ensembles: Chicago’s Goat Island in relation to the failed repetition of Pina Baush, Augusto Boal’s Teatro Campesino and Carol Maples’ Giving Voice Troupe, Anna Deavere Smith’s Verbatim Theatre, The Tectonic Theatre Project’s Moment Work with The Laramie Project, Pig Iron’s use of Jacques LeCoq mime techniques building from embodied characters to complex physical theater scripts, ending with The Riot Group. Arendell includes current interviews with the initial Pig Iron collaborators on subjects of writing (Suli Holum), directing (Dan Rothenberg), music (Dito van Reigersberg), teaching (Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel), and developing a pedagogical platform that supports devised theater (Allen Kuharski), as well as current interviews with colleagues Carol Maples (Giving Voice) and Adriano Shaplin (The Riot Group). In the larger scope of theatrical production, what is now referred to as ‘devised theater’ is a relatively recent development. Beginning in the United Kingdom as early as the 1960s, this type of collective and collaborative theater had a later American start date. Calling on theorists Rosemary Parsons, Mike Vanden Heuvel, Duška Radosavljević, and others, Arendell presents a brief history of devised theater based in Europe and the United States.

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What is now known as devised theater is the result of a mixture of ingredients: found or created textual passages; images from experienced memory; movement that echoes or tries to reinvent period styles in ways that give flight to spoken word; music that captures subtextual affect; and a collision of topics, characters, historical narrative, and social scenarios that shuffle, reorganize, and juxtapose events, personae, and settings. In many ways, devised theater has been made possible by performance art, causing some current troupes to label themselves performance ensembles rather than theater companies. For example, the Chicago-based Goat Island Performance Group, whose approach dabbled in all of these categories, drew on both the methodology and literal movement phrases of other devising practitioners who surrounded them in order to craft their own productions. One of the group’s most credited appropriations pays tribute to the late German choreographer, Pina Bausch. In Goat Island’s It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, the group copies or repeats movement phrases used in Bausch’s Café Müller with an acknowledgment of both the original choreography and their failure to repeat these phrases as once performed by Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In this chapter, Arendell explores what happens in Goat Island’s failed repetition of Bausch’s material. She claims the company’s director, Lin Hixson’s use of Pina Bausch’s choreography as a repetitive stutter that leaves residual gaps of failed mimicry.

Pages: 15

One of the most useful traits of devised theater is its potential to change over time. For Luis Valdez’s devised play, Los Vendidos (The Sellouts), several things are clear. Valdez wrote the play based on improvisational work done by his troupe El Teatro Campesino, a company he founded in 1965 primarily in response to the Delano, California grape strikes. Valdez was himself the son of farmworkers in this area, so the actos he and his performers improvised changed slightly every time they came together to perform them. Theater served Valdez as a mouthpiece against the oppression of farmworkers. His actos involved improvisations by his actors playing stock characters. Under the topic of grape strikes and farmworker unrest, there would always be a stock Farmer and stock Farmworkers, and the drama would begin from a position of discontent born from class conflict. Those in power demanded back-breaking work under unlivable conditions. Valdez created a stage space for actors to voice these discontents, and finally published this acto in play form, although the stipulation about a fixed time, place, and politics is always understood as a fluid, changeable, scenario. Arendell begins this chapter with the reference to Luis Valdez in large part to capture and mark the most obvious American trickle down of Augusto Boal’s Brazilian version of these sorts of politics in his own country, in what Vanden Heuvel classifies as the first wave of US devising. She includes an interview between herself and her colleague Dr. Carol Maples about her student troupe, Giving Voice, which models itself after Boal’s practice. This is Arendell’s way of demonstrating what an American version of Boal in the next generation of his work can strive to create.

Pages: 13

The texts Anna Deavere Smith compiles and uses for her performances are verbatim versions of what her interviewees tell her, so there is a question of authorship. She takes an editorial approach to arranging these characters in her line up on stage, so perhaps she is more of an editor-performer than an author-performer. And yet, these performance texts would not exist if Smith had not made the effort to select and interview key players as well as unknowns in her social dramas. The whole point of verbatim theater is to put on stage the actual words of real people, and because these often resemble testimonials, there is of course a permission form that those interviewed must sign giving Smith the sole rights to their responses. One would assume that every time her published play books are sold, there is no cut of the profit that goes back to these interviewees. So, on some level, Anna Deavere Smith borrows other people’s stories to craft one of her own devising that strings these texts together in ways that make these characters speak across cultures to each other, in her body, on the stage. She is both script assembler and performer, theater maker, and compiler of the text. Another term for her work is ‘investigative theater.’ It is a form that uses people’s lived experiences and responses to those events as evidentiary material much like that found in live court cases or police investigations. Under those other legal jurisdictions, the rules for use of interview material have similar, but possibly more restrictive guidelines. Even though Deavere Smith worked primarily alone as the solo performer for her productions of Fires in the Mirror, Twilight Los Angeles, and others, there were individuals who helped build these pieces: directorial input from George C. Wolfe is credited on Smith’s televised version of Fires in the Mirror, and any of her interviewees are collaborators, or at least part of her collective process of culling material. Arendell argues that Smith’s stage presence speaking other people’s words verbatim positions her as more of an intermediary than a mimic. She fully embodies the characters she plays through study of their vocal inflections, their gestures, the sounds of their words as much as their meaning in order to bring not just herself as interpreter to the stage but also the spirit of those interviewed.

Pages: 18

Founded in 1991 by Moisés Kaufman, Tectonic Theatre Project’s influences include a long list of famous performers, directors, choreographers, and designers. Given the various theatrical specialties that these individuals represent, it is not hard to understand why Tectonic went straight for devised theater as their preferred mode. Everyone mentioned in this chapter is somewhat difficult to put into a single artistic box. This is what made any number of practitioners invent a new form that would embrace and allow for multiple ways of making theater. At the heart of every devised theater ensemble is collaboration. The Tectonic ensemble not only shares the power of creation, they share equally the various production roles demanded by theatrical performance. This assures each individual member a fair and deeply invested voice. There is a unique strength in collective collaboration, even though Tectonic believes in structure that depends on at least one outside eye. No matter where any of these ensembles begin, the sense of research and group thought remains a staple in every one of them. Arendell explains that one version of devised theater is adaptation of pre-existing texts. This is often where young groups begin because it is safe, and audiences appreciate having something known to fall back on in experimental theater. Adaptation, however, only takes companies so far before feeling a bit stifled. Other possibilities include improvisation that leads to an original text, starting with known examples to either mimic or grow beyond these, throwing a bunch of interdisciplinary artists together to tackle a theme, interview subjects and paste together their responses, take pre-existing formats and fill them with new material, docudrama, and so many more. The options are virtually unlimited, which Arendell feels is one of devised theater’s strongest selling points. You will never run out of things to do. While Tectonic steers away from labeling themselves as documentary theater, they still use interview formats for information gathering, and their approach to bookending these sessions in unexpected ways still feels more geared toward overarching storylines. Tectonic weaves interview material together in ways that are less episodic and more theatrically narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes this new text takes the form of a score, other times a visual picture, and still others a dance of unspoken language.

Pages: 31

In 1992, Sepinuck was commissioned by the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia to make a piece about Vietnamese refugee teens living in Southwest Philadelphia. An 18-year-old white boy had been killed trying to break up a fight between groups of white and Vietnamese men. The result of this event was the rapid arrest of six Vietnamese teens and their sentencing as murderers in the first degree. The first time her company performed Between the Crack about this event was exactly one year after the killing took place. With hired security in place, they performed this piece for a school full of children in Philly and after shouting epithets and taunts to the performers, an original song changed the tenor of the audience with its vulnerability and viewers rose to a standing ovation by the show’s end. In this case, it took the honest delivery of a musical number to change the tide of hatred and potential violence. Sepinuck’s 1993 piece, Growing up Female, is one that Arendell herself acted and sang in as part of what Sepinuck has now termed the Daughters of Connection. This work touched on the experiences of women and girls, aged 8–91, from African American, Latina, Asian, and white backgrounds. In Sepinuck’s Living with Life, the documentary film about her piece by this name, Philadelphia male prisoners living life sentences sing and act their way through the painful repetition of their arrests and the realizations that followed them. This show involved eight ‘lifers’ with no possibility for parole. Although Sepinuck’s work has traversed issues anywhere from life imprisonment to domestic abuse to refugee discrimination to teenage runaways in Poland, perhaps her most trenchant work has been the two years she spent in Derry, Northern Ireland staging stories from both the Irish Catholic (Derry) and the English Protestant (Londonderry) sides of what amounts to years of religious warfare. What Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness offered this war-torn set of cultures was the possibility of healing in a post-conflict society where tension and remorse continue to paint the landscape with deathly memories. We Carried Your Secrets is an intergenerational piece that examines what it means to be the children of religious warriors and the family members of those who lost fathers and children and brothers with very little legislative change to remedy past violence. Arendell includes a copy of this piece at the end of her chapter.

Pages: 106

Jacques Lecoq’s mime methods and Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre were where Pig Iron Theatre Company began. Pig Iron Theatre Company now offers an MFA in Lecoq-inspired devising practices run in conjunction with the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and named Advanced Performer Training. Arendell argues that out of all the current American ensemble troupes, Pig Iron is most dedicated to Lecoq’s influences, even if the company has forged its own path beyond their training with Lecoq. Arendell argues that we might position Pig Iron as a second wave rather than third wave of ensemble theater, although it would be more accurate to say they probably bridge Vanden Heuvel’s movement from second to third wave, in the ensemble era post-Chaikin. As a young company Pig Iron caught the end of the twentieth century’s push toward group-inspired production, and although the mid-1990s were not as flush as artistic funding in the 1980s, this group definitely started their development at a time when the economy favored grant funding for independent artists. They are a deep-thought theater process that has also enjoyed commercial success, although in their early years, they traveled the Edinburgh Fringe routes that have now extended themselves into the Philadelphia Fringe closer to their home. This company has always been one that straddled divides, whether these be dance versus theater, text versus mime, or collaborative versus playwright driven. As one of the company’s co-founders, Arendell vouches for its collective efforts at both staging and writing. Each of these plays starts its life as a set of performer improvisations based on themes. What Pig Iron absorbed from Lecoq’s training was a pursuit of new vocabulary, both physical and vocal. In this chapter, Arendell includes the first copy in print of Pig Iron’s 1996 play, Dig or Fly, in which she herself played Amelia Earhart.

Pages: 43

In this eighth chapter, Arendell not only includes a second interview with Adriano Shaplin about his own company, but also puts in print his 2012 devised play, Sophie Gets the Horns. Shaplin has a much closer relationship to his own company’s devising process and the plays he writes in response to their improvisational work stay very true to what happens in their theater-making. Sophie Gets the Horns is a play written by Shaplin and directed by Rebecca Wright. This raises implicit questions about who got to call the shots in relation to the text when staging this play, especially since Adriano played the role of BERNARDO. It also returns us to Arendell’s overarching notion that devised theater has many collaborative voices. For Shaplin, acting in his own play while being directed by someone else might produce inherent difficulties that would cause The Riot Group a power struggle. What these scenarios usually come down to is a question of whose voice is the loudest, playwright or director, and in this play production, the actor/playwright. Based on Shaplin’s experience with The Riot Group, devised playwrighting comes with an implied directorial responsibility. Many decisions are made in the staging process about what to retain from the text for devised theater, raising questions of copyright and authorial voice and whose word is the final word in devised production. Arendell suggests that perhaps the performers in a devised theater piece provide some sort of creative lubricant that solves these power struggles by means of putting ideas on their feet and letting the chips fall where they will. If something written doesn’t work in the playing of it, this usually demands a rewrite of the script. With The Riot Group, Shaplin often takes sound design as his own textual accompaniment. He often designs sound for his shows in ways that tie text to musicality in fundamental ways. In Jazz music, a theme is introduced that then travels to each individual musician who riffs on this original phrase of music to create personal variations. It is possible that riffing off jazz themes is the closest devised theater can come to a structural methodology where the theme is equivalent to the show’s mission or purpose. This is shared by each player in a devised piece in ways that let them fit the music of theater to their individual strains such that the audience never bores of hearing these transformations. Arendell observes that the emphasis in Shaplin’s plays is on the off-beat, which ironically feeds the theme when speaking musically; this whole sense of a contrapuntal emphasis where you do off-beat, off-beat, off-beat instead of the downbeat and by the time you get to the end of it, it’s back to being on the downbeat pulls your audience in more because they realize that something’s slightly lopsided about it until it resolves itself and they understand that’s the whole piece right there. Shaplin’s plays in published form include a note about the company claiming that scripts are written by Shaplin with roles tailored for the ensemble. This offers one more devising option that leans more heavily in the direction of playwriting based on company improvisation.