Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

By Palgrave Macmillan

This book explores the role and centrality of women in the development of collaborative theatre practice, alongside the significance of collective creation and devising in the development of the modern theatre.

Tracing a web of women theatremakers in Europe and North America, this book explores the connections between early twentieth century collective theatre practices such as workers theatre and the dramatic play movement, and the subsequent spread of theatrical devising. Chapters investigate the work of the Settlement Houses, total theatre in 1920s’ France, the mid-century avant-garde and New Left collectives, the nomadic performances of Europe’s transnational theatre troupes, street-theatre protests, and contemporary devising. In so doing, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in A History of Collective Creation (2013) and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (2013), in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation and devising are revealed as central—and women theatremakers revealed as progenitors of these practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137550132

Book preview

Part I

First Wave, 1900–1945

© The Author(s) 2016

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (eds.)Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance10.1057/978-1-137-55013-2_1

1. Toward a New History of Women in the Modern Theatre – an Introduction

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva¹, ²  and Scott Proudfit¹, ²

(1)

Dixie State University, St. George, Utah, USA

(2)

Elon University, Department of English, Elon, North Carolina, USA

Arguments

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 1970s, 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 1960s and 1970s, 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 twofold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaboration, 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 LeCompte, 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, Guerrilla 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, Hélène 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 so doing, 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.

Definitions

As we did in the first two volumes, we have left it to individual writers in this collection to use the terminology of collaborative theatre-making—that is, collective creation and devising—as each sees fit. At times, this produces slippage: one person’s devising is another’s collective creation; indeed, one person’s collective creation may be another’s directorial dominance. This, we contend, is a problem inherent both in the nature of academic and professional jargon—which, like all language, refuses to stay put and signify neatly—and in the nature of collective theatre-making. Theatre is innately multivocal, and its practices, involving complex group interaction, quite varied; collective creation both extends and foregrounds that multivocality and processual variation. Our easy relationship to the terminology employed by the writers with whom we are collaborating is an extension of our commitment to such polyphony—and of our faith that a close reading of the vagaries of usage may prove more fruitful than any effort to establish terminological dominance.

That said, we do have our own perspective(s), derived from our shared investigations in this field, as researchers and editors.

Collective Creation

In preparation for our first two volumes, we spent considerable time discussing how best to define collective creation, the terminological predecessor to devising. Broadly construed, collective creation refers to group-generated theatrical performance. The devil is in the details. Does collective creation imply Left politics? If a particular theatrical collective is politically to the right, is it then not practicing collective creation? Does collective creation imply the generation of a new work ex nihilo, as Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling proposed in Devising Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)? If a collaborating performance group develops the mise en scène for an existing play script without the aid of a director, would that then fall outside the parameters of collective creation (due to the pre-existing script)—and if so, what do we call it? Conversely, if the group creates an entirely new work of performance through improvisation, which is then set and edited by a playwright in the privacy of her study, with a mise en scène likewise improvisationally generated, then modified and set by a director—is that still collective creation? And what are we to make of the fact that nearly all the leaderless collectives of the 1930s and 1960s have repeatedly been demonstrated to have had strong leadership? And so on.

With the aim of teasing out resemblances in collaborative theatre-making across eras and cultures, we wanted to keep our definition of collective creation broad enough to account for a multiplicity of practices that might be reasonably considered to fall under its purview (including practices that were not so defined by their practitioners), and yet limited enough that we did not collapse into relativism. After all, it is commonly argued that, to differing degrees, all theatre is collaborative. Therefore, some theatre historians might reasonably contend that all theatre (along with film, television, circus, dance, and a great many other collaborative or cooperative art forms we might name) is collective creation. This definition was of course too broad for our purposes. In the end, we arrived at a working definition:

There is a group. The group wants to make theatre. The group chooses—or, conversely, a leader within the group proposes—to make theatre using a process which places conscious emphasis on the groupness of that process, on some possible collaborative mode between members of the group, which is, typically, viewed as being in some manner more collaborative than members of the group have previously experienced. ¹

The autological awkwardness here (a sort of infinite ingress produced by the repetition of group, groupness, collaborative, more collaborative) arises from the problem of the political baggage of the more nuanced (or at least, varied) terms we might use in place of the neologism groupness: collectivist, communitarian, communistic, democratic, anti-hierarchical.... Each insinuates an array of historically conditioned political associations into the definition—and it is precisely narrow historical specificity that we sought to circumvent. As we looked at patterns of collaborative practice across some one hundred plus years and multiple languages and cultures, we found a mutualistic impulse at work that transcended ideological affiliation.

Yet if political specifics change—communist, New Left, feminist, anarchist, fascist, ² etc.—collective creation (in the West at least) nonetheless tends toward the ideological, be it religious or political. In collective theatre-making, process is typically perceived as paramount, with artistic and/or political outcomes seen as deriving from methods of group interaction. And as we note in the first volume,

processual method may well be ideologically driven in so far as [...] collaborative creation has often constituted a kind of polemic-in-action, against prior methodologies that the group has known: an investigation, a reinvigoration, a challenge, an overthrow. The extrinsic and/or oppressive structure, if you will, that the group perceives itself to be challenging through the generation of a new methodology may be aesthetic, institutional, interpersonal, societal, economic, political, ethical, or some admixture thereof. ³

Victor Turner’s paradigm of performativity in social structure offers a useful lens through which to examine tendencies of collective creation. Richard Schechner, in his introduction to Turner’s Anthropology of Performance, reminds us that Turner taught that there was a continuous process linking performative behavior—arts, sports, ritual, play—with social and ethical structure: the way people think about and organize their lives and specific individual and group values. ⁴ Building upon this line of thought, we might productively think of collective creation,

as straddling the threshold between the performativity of social life and performance as such—positing that collective creation foregrounds the creative action of social and ethical structuring in a dynamic interplay with the creative action of performance making. That theatre should lend itself to such an encounter seems a logical outgrowth of the dialectical play between drama’s traditional concern with the social and the intrinsically social nature of making and sharing drama. Viewed in this light, the particular politics of particular collectives become subsumed into a spectrum of possible socioethical impulses and outcomes—collective creation appearing less as a manifestation of any one ideological position than as a genre of performance making that positions itself at the intersection of social and aesthetic action. ⁵

Devising

The historical shift to the term devising (a word which emerges into increasingly widespread usage in Canada, England, and the United States in the 1990s) marks an apparent practical shift away from overt emphasis on the perceived political potential of communitarian collaborative practices, to a more emphatically aesthetic emphasis on the generation of new work, irrespective of the politics of group dynamic. Devising, simply put, seems to lean toward some version of creation ex nihilo, and away from a concern with ideologies of group practice.

Yet this apparent ideological shift in the terminology is deceptive. Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, for instance, introduced the term collective creation (kolektivny tvorchestvo) into Russian theatre in his writings of 1906, to describe experiments at his Povarskaya Street Studio in 1905; yet the practices he explored there with actors, composers, designers, and fellow directors today look a good deal like much of contemporary, director-led devising: leveraging the generative creativity of the theatrical group, facilitated by an aesthetic leader with a strong vision and ultimate decision-making control, motivated principally by aesthetic considerations. Conversely, in the political context of Russia’s first Revolution and the aesthetic context of the Moscow Art Theatre’s model of the auteur-director, Meyerhold’s collective-creation-light appeared radical indeed. ⁶ History plays fast and loose with definitions.

In a similar vein, the term collective creation can be usefully applied to the communist and communist-inflected theatre collectives that emerged in England and the United States (Workers Theatre), Russia (Bolshevik government-sponsored mass spectacles, for instance), and Germany (including, in addition to Workers Theatre groups, Erwin Piscator’s Piscator-Buhner, 1928–1931, and the Brecht collective of the 1920s and 1930s): yet such groups, while collectivist, were also emphatically hierarchical; such was the nature of the left political systems upon which they modeled themselves. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find that many contemporary companies which present as director-led devising groups, with a strong directorial public face, may in practice be heavily reliant upon a radically collective process in the rehearsal room (though often, in the current era, one developed with a temporary pool of actors, hired by a small, director-producer-led core company); as British theatre scholar Alex Mermikides has argued, the drivers for such hybrid practices are frequently economic: sole attribution being easier to market, and long-term collective process being difficult to fund. ⁷

Our purpose in unmasking the tensions and histories encoded in the language of collective creation and/versus devising is not to throw out the terminological baby with the bathwater. There is value in current efforts to distinguish between collective creation as a more overtly socio-political practice emphasizing collective action in artistic context, and devising as a more emphatically aesthetic practice emphasizing the generation of new works of performance by a theatrical group, irrespective of social or political impetus. Rather, our purpose is to take up the call implicit in the writings of Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, to attend to the realities of practice—interpersonal, social, political, economic, aesthetic—that lie beneath the surface of loose habits of usage driven by marketing (personal and economic), linguistic trends, and the vagaries of attribution.

Proto-Collectivism

As we work through the histories of collective practice, we necessarily encounter its embryonic manifestations: proto-collectives, straddling the spheres of collaborative parity and traditional hierarchies of theatrical labor. Consideration of these transitional or hybrid practices may serve to further our understanding of the field. An excellent example in the United States is the Group Theatre (1931–1941). Headed by a triumvirate of artistic directors, committed to greater creative parity between director and playwright (a new notion in American theatre of the period), emphasizing ensemble over individual, and engaging in ongoing experimentation with improvisation, the Group Theatre was a good deal more collective in spirit than the commercial theatres against which it defined itself—and a good deal less collectivist than the communist Workers Theatres of the same period. By no reasonable stretch of imagination could the Group Theatre be broadly categorized as practicing collective creation; and yet, it holds a significant place within a history of evolving collective practices.

Two other examples of proto-collectivism appear in this book. The first is the early directorial work of Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration—the subject of Chapter 4, A Democratic Legacy: Hallie Flanagan and the Vassar Experimental Theatre, by Elizabeth Osborne. Osborne’s chapter is concerned specifically with Flanagan’s influence on a generation of young women theatre-makers, through her work at Vassar College. Though a significant strain of work conducted by the FTP would fall squarely into collective creation models circulating in the period—in particular, Living Newspapers, a form of docudrama frequently relying upon teams of (often unattributed) writers, influenced by developments in Russia as well as the Workers Theatres of the United States, England, and Germany ⁸ —Flanagan’s work at Vassar was not collective creation. Like the later work of the Group Theatre, Flanagan’s Vassar productions would appear to have been a kind of hybrid or intermediary method: traditional theatre-labor hierarchies yearning toward greater communitarianism. This was far from accidental; Flanagan, during her European travels, had been greatly impressed by collectivist principles at work in aspects of Soviet theatre; arguably, her early explorations into how such ideals might serve to modify the leadership role of the director would reverberate through the network of FTP theatres as a result of her influence.

The second such example, also emerging from the interwar period, is that of director and teacher Alexandra Remizova of Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theatre, the subject of Chapter 5, Alexandra Remizova: An ‘Actors’ Director,’ by Andrei Malaev-Babel. Remizova came to her work by way of collective creation, as a very young actress with the Vakhtangov Theatre at the start of the 1920s, during Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s tenure as artistic director. For Vakhtangov, modernist theatre-making practices were merely a stepping stone on a path toward a freely creative society; speaking on professionalism in the theatre, he once remarked:

The time will come when the theatre will be an ordinary event of our life. Theatre will simply be in a square. Everyone, who feels himself capable, will act. Theatre will be free of charge—there will be no admittance fee, or performance honorarium. It will be a free art for free people. Narrow professionalism will disappear, all naturally talented actors will play. ⁹

In the years following Vakhtangov’s premature death in 1922, the company shifted away from the collective creation structures Vakhtangov had begun elaborating with his troupe, ¹⁰ hewing to the Stalin-era model of master directors. As a professional director, Remizova came of age in the post-Vakhtangov period, in an institutional setting that followed established theatrical practices; as such, she did not herself practice collective creation. But as Malaev-Babel argues, she had internalized Vakhtangov’s communitarian ideals, and these inflected her teaching practices and modified her leadership style, marking her as an actor-centered director to a degree not typical in Russian theatre practice of the period. It also marked her directorial vision; much like the contemporaneous Hallie Flanagan, Remizova believed herself to be collaborating with society at large, with the spirit of the times; this imbued her work with a strong current of social relevance. Remizova’s case has particular resonance in the Soviet context: first, in that like other women director-teachers working within the hierarchical, cooperative directing structures of the Soviet theatres, her contributions were obfuscated by the prominence of male colleagues further up the chain of command; second, in that as a discussion of collaborative method in the Soviet theatre her case makes critical inroads into under-historicized terrain; and third, in that her directorial career (Soviet Russia produced few women directors), emerging as it did out of her training and work with Vakhtangov, raises questions about the ways in which collective creation may have served to empower women theatre artists.

Histories

The history which follows is—necessarily—preliminary, fragmentary, limited in scope. Our aim at this stage is to prompt further historical investigation. Our hope is to add a significant puzzle piece to the ongoing recovery of legacies of female theatre artists in the modern and contemporary period, and to sketch out a few of the paths of innovation and transmission which have become visible to us in the course of our ongoing research. We are painfully aware of the limited global scope of our current offering. As noted above, this work focuses on the United States, Canada and Quebec, and parts of Europe; it also gestures toward West Africa, but does not voyage there. It is also predominantly Caucasian in emphasis. This particular bounding is the result of the current state of English-language scholarship in collective creation and devising practice. And it is unfortunate, because collectively generated creative practices—by both women and men—have robust ancestries in a number of performance traditions lying beyond the borders of the cultures represented herein. This, we hope, will be the subject of our next phase of investigation.

Our first two volumes argued that in its European and North American contexts modern collective creation may be productively regarded as having evolved in three overlapping waves, each marked by distinctive ideological, aesthetic, and processual characteristics, shaped by both local and global events, political and cultural. The time periods in question are, roughly speaking, the first third of the twentieth century, the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and the mid-1980s into the present.

The First Wave

The first wave, spanning a period from the dawn of the twentieth century through the start of World War II, and following close upon the rise of the modern director, was driven by an array of oft-contradictory aesthetic, political, and social impulses. These include (to borrow from our earlier writing):

the search for the total artwork, necessitating new models of collaboration with designers, composers, and writers, and an actor capable of conceiving her work within a complex mise en scène—possessing, in other words, a directorial/choreographic sensibility. They also include the modernist fascination with popular, often physical, theatre traditions—especially mime, vaudeville, and commedia dell’arte, forms generated by a performer-creator. Institutional inspirations were likewise diverse and included models of group interaction at once collective and hierarchical, such as Catholic and Russian Orthodox monasticism and Soviet communism. Political impulses, too, varied, from the antimonarchist turn in prerevolutionary Russia to Bolshevik collectivism less than two decades later; progressive protest in the Depression Era United States; Polish nationalism following the collapse of the Russian Empire and defeat of Austria and Prussia in World War I; competing forces of nationalism and antifascism in interwar France; Communist leanings among the German left of the Weimar period. ¹¹

It is in this period, for the purposes of our introduction, that we wish to linger, for already in the first wave we begin to see a striking emergence of women generating new theatre-making processes which would reverberate through the century to come. Three examples—two from the United States, and one from France—will serve here to illustrate the creative ferment of this period of women’s collective theatre-making, and its ties to movements for social change.

In the United States, much new theatre-making originated from the Settlement House Movement, which had strong ties to the Little Theatre Movement. Thus toward the close of the nineteenth century we find Jane Addams of Hull-House (founded in 1889) importing the New (European) Drama of social concerns onto stages accessible to America’s urban poor; she is supported in this endeavor by her partner, Ellen Starr, who posits (like her British and, later, Russian counterparts), that the working class might benefit even more from making theatre than from watching it—and that the theatre they make, moreover, must be rooted in physically expressive forms that would free the laboring body from the constraint of hours, days, years of mechanistic motion. ¹²

[Starr and Addams] made artistic activities central to the Hull-House educational program; Addams worked especially hard to establish the settlement’s Dramatic Section (beginning in 1893), which gave theatrically gifted members of Hull-House opportunities to perform in the plays of Shaw, Ibsen, Galsworthy, and Hauptman, and has been cited by some as the unofficial start of the Little Theatre Movement in the US. ¹³

By 1914, Hull-House, in institutional partnership with the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, had established the Recreation Training School of Chicago, known informally as the Hull-House School. Under the direction of sociologist Neva Boyd, a leading proponent of the recreational play movement, The Hull-House School offered a one- to two-year-long social group-work training program, consisting of dramatic arts, gymnastics, dance, group games, play theory, and social problem theory. It was at the Hull-House School, under the tutelage of Boyd, that Viola Spolin—best remembered for her groundbreaking work in improvisational games for actor training, broadly disseminated via her 1963 textbook, Improvisation for the Theater—received her training in recreational play and games, working with immigrant children from 1924 to 1926. This lineage of transmission—from Addams and Starr, to Boyd, to Spolin, and from Spolin to the radical US collectives of the 1960s, including the Living Theatre and the Open Theater, as well as the Chicago Improv Comedy Movement developed at Second City under the leadership of Spolin’s son Paul Sills—is the subject of Chapter 3 by Scott Proudfit: From Neva Boyd to Viola Spolin: How Social Group Work in 1920s’ Settlement Houses Defined Collective Creation in 1960s’ Theatres.

Spolin was not alone in seeing a fruitful connection between children’s imaginative and dramatic play and the generative capacities of the adult actor. In 1915, director Jacques Copeau and his principal collaborator, actress Suzanne Bing, established a course of actor-training for students aged six to fourteen, focused upon sound, movement, and gymnastics. This line of development is the subject of Chapter 2, Raising the Curtain on Suzanne Bing’s Life in the Theatre, by Jane Baldwin. Though Copeau periodically taught the children, Bing was the principal teacher, and her work there experimental. In 1916, Bing would combine her own system with ideas drawn from her investigations into Jacques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics. In 1918, Bing and Copeau would further explore childhood play in New York, where Bing taught for a time at Margaret Naumberg’s progressive Children’s School, founded on the principles of John Dewey and, especially, Maria Montessori, with whom Naumberg had trained in Italy. In this atmosphere of creativity, play and freedom, ¹⁴ Bing would further develop such theatre-training activities as games, animal observation, mime, dance, rhythmic movement, and story dramatizations. Bing’s experimental work with children would ultimately serve as the basis for her work with adult actors at the Vieux Colombier School, and later, with the Copiaus, Copeau’s de-facto collective creation company in Burgundy. ¹⁵ The pedagogical developments of the Vieux Colombier School and the Copiaus, in turn, would prove central to the emergence of French mime and of the French collective creation lineage associated with the work of Jacques Lecoq and Ariane Mnouchkine. They would also mark the work of Copeau’s nephew, director and teacher Michel Saint-Denis, who, in turn, would develop the curriculum for five schools internationally, among them Juilliard in New York, the Old Vic in London, and the National Theatre School of Montreal. ¹⁶

Back in the United States, the movement to create a working-class theatre from the multi-ethnic, multilingual immigrant laboring force that crowded into the rehearsal halls and auditoriums of settlement houses at the close of each long day, in search of education, relaxation, and self-expression, spread rapidly—and blossomed, most of all, at New York’s Henry Street Settlement. Established in 1893 among the immigrant tenements of New York’s Lower East Side by social activist Lillian Wald, by 1915 Henry Street had grown its own theatrical wing, the Neighborhood Playhouse. The Neighborhood Playhouse, too, was headed by women: the young, German-Jewish activist philanthropist sisters Alice and Irene Lewisohn. The Neighborhood Playhouse would contribute significantly to the development of political, community, and collective theatre practice in the coming decades. Beyond its worker-centered mission, it was also a space for women theatre artists,

emphasizing a synthetic approach to staging that integrated dance and drama (necessitating, in turn, a team approach to production), [while] providing training and performance opportunities to the impoverished immigrant communities of the Lower East Side, developing street festivals and pageants which celebrated the diverse performance traditions of an immigrant population (especially dance), facilitating the coexistence of professionalism and amateur, community-centered work, and providing a venue for such workers’ theatre collectives as the Freie Yiddishe Volkbuhne, the radical Jewish performance group of the Bundist Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle). ¹⁷

The Playhouse’s most enduring offshoot was its School of Theatre, founded in 1928 by Irene Lewisohn and board member Rita Morgenthau, to provide theatre and dance training for the working class community in which it was based. ¹⁸ In the 1930s, the Neighborhood Playhouse and School would play midwife to the radical dance movement: two generations of experimental dancers [...] trained or taught there, including Blanche Talmud, Helen Tamiris (who later directed the Federal Dance Project of the WPA), Edith Segal, Anna Sokolow, and Martha Graham. ¹⁹ From 1935, it would become home to the training program developed by Sanford Meisner.

The Second and Third Waves

The second wave of collective creation praxis spans a period from approximately the mid-1950s into the early 1980s. Behind the scenes, however, collective creation was beginning to re-emerge almost the moment the war ended; Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s collective set off to war in 1939 with a theatre history reading list, preparing them to get straight back to work as soon as they’d set down their guns; ²⁰ Judith Malina (who first encountered collectivist theatre principles while studying directing with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School in 1945) co-founded the Living Theatre with Julian Beck in 1947, though they would not come to collective creation till several years later. ²¹ The second wave was marked, in the main,

by the utopic, communitarian ethos, antiauthoritarianism, and Marxist-inflected politics of the generation of ’68 in noncommunist states (e.g., France, America, Canada, and England). It was informed, too, by aesthetic possibilities arising from developments in avant-garde dance, music, and the visual arts. This is the period of collective creation associated with the striving toward fully participatory artistic democracy and the leaderless ensemble. ²²

This period saw the rise to prominence of numerous women theatre-makers, many of them discussed in the chapters of this book—among the best known internationally, Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, and Ariane Mnouchkine. With the feminist movement and its tools of consciousness-raising came a wave of all-women’s collectives, many formed by theatre artists unhappy in the male-dominated collectives with which they had begun. This exodus has been well documented; see, for example, Victoria Lewis’s article, From Mao to the Feeling Circle: The Limits and Endurance of Collective Creation, in A History of Collection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). We might think here of Lilith a Woman’s Company, At the Foot of the Mountain, Théâtre Experimental des Femmes, Nightwood Theatre, Women’s Theatre Group, and Monstrous Regiment, to name a few of the most visible. But this was also a period in which less widely celebrated women theatre artists were carving out significant creative space in companies dominated by the names of their male leadership: here we might think in particular of the women of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, discussed in Virginie Magnat’s Chapter 14, Women, Transmission, and Creative Agency in the Grotowski Diaspora, and the women of the Odin Teatret, discussed in Adam Ledger’s Chapter 15, The Women of Odin Teatret: Creativity, Challenge, Legacy—as well as the actress-creators of the Gardzienice Center for Theatre Practices, among them Mariana Sadowska, Dorota Porowska, Elżbieta Rojek, and Joanna Holcgreber—who would co-create, transform, and transmit, globally, a vital legacy of third theatre collective performance practice and pedagogy.

The third wave can be said to have begun in the early 1980s; it continues into the present day. Broadly speaking it is characterized by a postutopic impulse,

dominated by an ethical imperative (over the ideological) and an interest in the generative creativity of the actor. It is impelled above all by the development and ever-widening dissemination of pedagogies of collective creativity and actor-generated performance (emerging in particular from Grotowski’s brief tenure in the United States, successive waves of graduates from l’Ecole Jacques Lecoq, and workshop tours conducted by Théâtre du Soleil and SITI Company). It is spurred, too, by intermediality and resurgent interest in theatre as total artwork. Economic realities of the present decade have given it renewed impetus. ²³

This is the period in which collective creation slips into devising, and the rising presence of women theatre artists (writers and directors in particular) has been hailed by the press in the United States and England, a phenomenon discussed by Rachel Anderson-Rabern in Collective Creation Downtown 2014: Female Leadership and the Economics of Everyday Living (Chapter 17), and Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart in Doing What Comes Naturally?: Women and Devising in the UK Today (Chapter 16). This is also a period which witnesses a resurgence of feminist protest-performance, from the Guerrilla Girls of the 1980s in the United States, to the global FEMEN movement (launched in Ukraine in 2008) and Pussy Riot in Russia (founded in 2011), the subject of Chapter 20, Julia Listengarten’s, Pussy Riot and Performance as Social Practice: Collectivity, Collaboration, and Communal Bond.

Questions

What follows are the prominent themes which thread through the work of the twenty-one scholars gathered here, and through the modern history of women’s collective theatre praxis.

Emergence and Disappearance

One of the thematic continuities that binds the diverse case studies in this volume is the idea of emergence. Time and again in the modern theatre, companies committed to non-hierarchical, collective input from a group of artists by necessity have made equal space for male and female practitioners, offering women an alternative to the typically patriarchal hierarchy of the commercial theatre. Moreover, experimentation with (or commitment to) documentary theatre in the twentieth century within many collectives has demanded a type of gender consciousness raising, as the personal storytelling aspects of documentary theatre’s devising practices have encouraged the emergence of women’s experience within artistic and institutional structures. It is not coincidental, then, that so many prominent recent and contemporary women directors have emerged from collectives. But if women artists have arisen to visibility from within collective practices, the story of their influence has all too frequently disappeared back into those same practices.

The paragon of this group of women in the United States, Judith Malina, is profiled in Cindy Rosenthal’s Chapter 12: Judith Malina and the Living Theatre: Storming the Barricades and Creating Collectively. Rosenthal describes the emergence and repeated re-emergence of this legendary theatre-maker, who remained relevant and influential even after the closure of the Living Theatre’s Clinton Street storefront theatre in 2013 and her personal relocation to the Lillian Booth Actor’s Home. In particular, Rosenthal traces the under-recognized role that Malina’s work played in the development of the Occupy Movement in recent years. As she argues, Malina’s early street theatre is one of the primary roots and inspirations for Occupy. But while Malina did not fail to recognize this genealogy—as her final productions reveal—perhaps the Movement did.

Such forgetting, or at least not fully appreciating, of Malina’s far-reaching influence is a reminder, of course, that women theatre artists have continually needed to demand acknowledgment, even in the sphere of group-collaborative theatre. Patriarchy and hierarchy are not easily left behind. This is suggested in the United States in particular by the significant number of women theatre artists in the 1970s who left male-dominated collectives to form female-only collectives. The argument could be made that the male-dominated collectives which experienced this exodus of female members were not, as yet, truly creating collectively.

Equally troubling is the possibility that collective creation, no matter how gender-equitable in practice, may contribute to the suppression of women’s voices and the erasure of their work by the very nature of processes that often operate without easily traceable attribution. The creative contributions of women artists—writers, teachers, actors, directors, choreographers, dancers—have been repeatedly buried by the conflict between ascription and the complexities of collaboration. We might think here of Susan Glaspell’s influence upon the early writings of Eugene O’Neill at the Provincetown Players, or Elizabeth Hauptman’s engagement with the work of Bertolt Brecht. The second chapter in this volume, Jane Baldwin’s Raising the Curtain on Suzanne Bing’s Life in the Theatre, makes the case that Bing, a woman whose teaching can be considered a crucial starting point in the modern practice of collective creation, has been virtually forgotten by theatre historians. Likewise, Andrei Malaev-Babel’s Chapter 5, Alexandra Remizova: An ‘Actors’ Director,’ re-characterizes the career of a women theatre artist whose central role in shaping the Vakhtangov Theatre’s famed troupe, between the 1940s and 1980s, has been obfuscated by the public prominence of the theatre’s