Experimental Theatre Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This volume rests upon two premises: 1) That collective creation is pivotal to the evolution of the modern theatre; and 2) That women have been central to the emergence and development of collective creation.
Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France). Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective. In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century. A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry. And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia. In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices. The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.