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A Future Paved with Teapots

 

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In the following Around the Teapot series, three writers reflect on “Adventuring Together: Ensembles, Collectives, Laboratories & Networks,” a weekend-long gathering of performance artists and scholars, from across the U.S. and Europe, held in Los Angeles. Intended to create a platform for self-generated, dynamic, and passionate articulation of the joys and challenges of collaborative performance-making, the “Adventuring Together” Teapot offered a space to practice ensemble to both real and virtual participants.

Around the Teapot brought together a diverse group of people with much in common: theater practitioners, teachers, scholars, and critics met over the weekend in Los Angeles to discuss and, ideally, create new connections within and between collective, ensemble, and laboratory theater practices.

Initiators Bryan Brown and Olya Petrakova largely oriented the gathering towards the future: in preparation for the weekend, participants were asked to present aspects of their own work that might encourage new insights, methods, and networking models amongst the group and beyond. For most of the weekend, we met together in a sustained encounter, moving rapidly between short formal presentations, guided conversations, and practical sharings. The result was a sense of collective discovery and, perhaps surprisingly given the situation of the arts in the U.S., profound optimism.

A “terminology discussion” on Saturday morning established the frameworks for much of what followed: Kathryn Syssoyeva (editor of the two-volume A History of Collective Creation, just out from Palgrave) and Bryan Brown each presented slide show accounts of the development of, respectively, collective creation and laboratory, both as linguistic terms and as historical modes of working (together).

Brown began by asking whether the term “theater laboratory” is a metaphor: “Can there be tangible connections between the site of scientific knowledge generation and an artistic organization?” Tracing the historical development of the scientific laboratory as a form of activity, from its alchemical origins, through the public experiments of eighteenth-century coffee houses, and into the laboratories housed in nineteenth-century museums, he emphasized continuities in the search for knowledge across various disciplines and discourse, pointing to the essentially experimental and inquisitive nature of the laboratory model of theater.

Syssoyeva, suggesting that sharpening the language we use to describe our practice also sharpens the practice, proposed that historical theatrical practices that variously fall under the terms devising, lab, studio theatre making, and collective creation together constitute an “ongoing alternative tradition” running throughout the twentieth century, and counter to “the theater of inflexible hierarchies and the dominance of the box office.”

Using an incredibly suggestive montage of images, she made the case that this approach to making theater is fundamentally invested in social transformation. By drawing connections across a range of historical practices, Kathryn suggested that the roots of collective creation lie in the social movements of the turn of the twentieth century, such as the workers’ and women’s movements, which used theater as a tool for social change.

Jose Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, used visual documentation of the work of his company, the Latino Theater Company, to show that the tradition of collective creation in the Latino theater shares many qualities and techniques with its Anglo-European counterparts, albeit using different terms.  From Valenzuela’s perspective, this difference in describing methods has much to do with the vital importance of politics in the Latino tradition, which always precedes, and leads to, form.

 

 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?

 

John Britton (editor of Encountering Ensemble, due out this month from Bloomsbury) followed these presentations by leading a roundtable discussion on the question: what is ensemble? Britton shuffled through a number of possible definitions: 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?

In response to these, Britton proposed the contours for his own definition, which would look more to what happens on the stage than to the structural and organizational conditions behind it: ensemble is a psycho-physical act, something actors do onstage, which is evident in the quality of their presence in relation to others. 

In Britton’s terms, this act of ensemble is the product of certain ways of working deeply—ways that find better soil to grow in Syssoyeva’s “alternative tradition” than in the landscape of commercial theater. For me, Britton’s way of thinking ensemble offers to re-focus attention away from the way a company is built and onto the things it builds.

As Claire Bishop has argued in her recent book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, our heightened contemporary concern with the ethical structuring of companies or even individual performances (where a lack of hierarchy/tyranny in the structure makes for a “good” model, and even the whiff of an auteur lurking somewhere in the wings renders the whole thing corrupt) can often obliterate our ability to look at performances themselvesto understand and evaluate what they’re doing, and whether they’re doing it well. Britton proposed a way of understanding ensemble that might allow us to take in what is valuable about each performance, even each actor, before we go on to ask about the ethics of the work’s creation and support.

In a small group breakout session later in the weekend, Britton posed an important question: how do we survive? How do we support each other? Answers ranged from the utopian to the micro-logistic, but at this point in the long shared conversation, the weekend began to remind me of the gains made through the coalitional political arrangements in the social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Beyond the terminological (and methodological) distinctions, a shared history was helping to define a shared horizon, and a tangible sense of energy and momentum left me hoping that the encounter will continue, around more teapots.

When that happens, I would hope there might be a better opportunity to consider.

Valenzuela’s questions during the same breakout session, which asked how we might achieve a diversity in ensembles that is adequate to the task of speaking to, and transforming, contemporary US demographics. Reminding us that the population of Los Angeles is approaching fifty percent Latino and thirty percent Asian, Valenzuela prompted us to think carefully about who our audiences are, what we wish to say to them, and how the type of work we spent the weekend discussing and sharing, which has always sought to contribute to the shape of the social, might continue to strive towards that task.

 

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