Community Within the Ensemble

As my education in theatre continues to grow and my ideas expand on exactly what theatre is, I have learned that often the process of a play is far more beneficial than the product. As I taught and directed children's theatre camps this summer with The Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, this idea grew ten-fold. When it comes to kids and Shakespeare, it's more important to spark their interest during the process rather then depend on a flawless production. And I'm not sure why I never applied this to my own experiences in theatre. Ensemble theatre lies heavily upon the process. Ensemble theatre IS the process. It amazes me that a group of people can come together, use and respect each other's artistic differences and egos, and create a piece of brand new work. I am excited to be a part of A Perfect Wedding project to experience the ups and downs of ensemble work. Having said that, I recently listened to NPR's report on the Actors Theatre of Louisville's ensemble presentations in the Humana Festival this past year. What I found most intriguing was the statement from Anne Bogart at the very end, describing the audiences benefits from ensemble work:

"...they (the audience) are actually simultaneously experiencing the play, and the story in the play, but the are also experiencing a kind of society on the stage that is purposing in a sense a model of society of about how social systems might function otherwise..."

Ensemble work is not just about putting together a good piece of theatre. It is a community in itself representing the larger community in which it thrives. If art mirrors life, then ensemble work is the most accurate mirror in the theatre thus far. This project is based no on just the director's view, or just the playwright's, or actor's, but rather the view of a group of people coming together with one goal in mind. We are all simultaneously the directors, playwrights, actors, and even the audience members. And at the same time, ensemble work doesn't need people with any particular theatrical background. Just people with an interest, people with something to say. And that is how ensemble work can imitate and present our society the best. Communities and societies are all in a constant state of process, and we (in our mini-community) are adding a stimulus that may alter the process and therefore alter the product. And we are all a part of that product, so this is a wonderful opportunity to add to the process!

HI!!!!! :D

So how are you guys doing today? I'm Kyle, and I'm currently a sophomore at U of L. I'm studying as a theatre arts major, hoping to focus more on the directing side of creating shows, though after all the awesome acting classes at U of L, I've kind of been thinking about being onstage. I heard about the Community Theatre class from one of my other teachers, and I realized that it sounded like a lot of fun. I have never really worked on ensemble pieces before, so I think that this is going to be a great really awesome experience.

Hello

I really hope this works... but here goes.

My name is Kelly Anne, and yes, it is both Kelly and Anne. I am a junior at UofL, and a theatre major. I work as a carpenter in the scene shop, but I love performing. I am much more of a comedienne than a dramatic performer. In this class I am hoping to learn how to learn to better compose my material, and I just love Charles Mee. I am very excited about this play, and from what I have experienced thus far in the class, it is going to be a terrific show.

Intro

Hello everyone! My name is Gary Brice and I am a 2nd year graduate student here at UofL. I have been excited about this class for some time now. I saw "Fissures" and "The Method Gun" at Humana this past year and these productions really got me excited about ensemble/ community based theatre methods. Ultimately I want to have a theatre company or be apart of an ensemble group and I am confident this class will give me the tools I need to start working towards these goals. And I mean give me the tools to build the kind of theatre I want using the people and ideas around me.

Different Ways of Working, Part II: Ensemble Theatre Companies

After having established a foundation with The Viewpoints, we spent a little bit of time talking about "ensemble performance," and how/whether or not it's different than any theatre performance. As anyone knows who has worked hard on a theatre production, it always depends on the successful interaction of a group of people. But I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of cases in which companies defined their work as "ensemble based" to try to identify what that means in the current context of theatre in the United States. Part of the goal of this course is to find ways in a University setting to practice ensemble-based theatre and incorporate some of these ideas, techniques and ways of working into the training of artists who will be trying to establish their lives in theatre after they graduate. My hope is to introduce students to ways of working that might fall outside of what they encounter in acting or directing classes so that they'll have a broader set of tools from which to choose when deciding what kind of work they want to make after graduation.

But also, I don't necessarily think of "University Theatre" as being irrelevant or not legitimate artistic work in and of itself; I'd like to acknowledge that the distinction between "professional" and "educational" theatre is, in many ways, based on the exchange of funds ... the work itself has meaning and potential for communicating important ideas regardless of whether or not people are being paid to do it. In some ways, the University can be a place where experiments can happen and risks can be taken that professional work might not allow, so important discoveries are made and real knowledge is produced through our work here.

The SITI Company is an excellent example of a company that operates as an ensemble, and given the ideas about group creation written by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, which I cited in the previous post, it's important to note that their work has inspired the design of this course a great deal. But they are, in fact, one of many companies in the United States whose work challenges the "traditional" roles defined in modern theatre production. We actually began by discussing the introduction to The Joint Stock Book (now apparently out of print), about the Joint Stock Theatre Company whose work in England in the 1970s and 80s introduced an innovative method of play production that was rooted in actor-initiated research and workshops. (You may be familiar with plays by Caryl Churchill that came out of this process - Cloud 9 is one.) A few important thoughts that arose for me from this reading:

• This work is not easy, and it came out of a lot of frustrating debate, conflict and hard work. The success of some of the productions might overshadow the difficulties of their creation.
• Nonetheless, those difficulties and the ways the company worked through them provide not only a strong model for the process of theatre, they operate as a model for how a more democratic society might solve problems, as well. Working through conflict is an important part of the process of creation, not a hindrance to it; and taking the "easy way out" is not always the most productive.
• This quote:
  
  

  The Joint Stock Process allows the actors to develop a more complex view of their characters. Where the workshop explores lives that are incorporated into the final play, the actors bring to the rehearsal text a rich supply of observations that enable the characters to be more densely realized ...
  
  ... The benefit of the research is that it complicates received ideas about the subject. ... As the work progresses, as people begin to talk and tell stories, the generalisation breaks down and much more contradictory impulses and feelings are caught. To see these contradictions, to recognise the conflicting tensions within an individual life, is to restore a complexity to character work that, in practice, is so often denied in the name of consistency. (31)

  
  

So it's not only the Joint Stock Company's way of breaking down hierarchies that provides a good model for citizenship, it's also the difficult process of research that deepens an actor and audience's understanding of human identity. In other words, through engaging closely with community, maybe we as actors can include the people around us, our audience, in the ensemble; and through that inclusion we can also help to create a model for a society that appreciates and allows for the complexities and contradictions in human identity.

In addition, we listened to this NPR story about ensemble companies who worked at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville last year. It was interesting to note that, although this way of working has been happening for decades, it's still considered a "new" or "innovative" approach to playwriting and the creation of theatre. I wonder if this means less rigid hierarchical ways of working are inching into "the mainstream," whatever that is, very slowly. I also think it's interesting that they focus on this as a method for creating new work. This semester, we'll be doing both: we're doing Joint Stock-style research to develop solo character study performances that are new work; but we're also trying an ensemble method of creating a production of an already-written play.

Again, students, what's your take on all of this? Post away, or comment!

Different Ways of Working, Part I: The Viewpoints

We're moving right along with the semester, studying different tools for and approaches to creating theatre and performance to establish a foundation for our work together with the community on characters from (and eventually a production of) A Perfect Wedding. (By the way, I created a Facebook event for our first reading of the play on October 2. Please post the event on your page, share it with friends, invite people, etc.! We want to encourage as much participation as possible.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, we began by learning The Viewpoints as a tool for building a sense of ourselves as a group working together, and to give us a common vocabulary as we work over the course of the semester. We talked briefly about Mary Overlie's Viewpoints, especially because the extremely democratic foundation for her theory is extremely important to the work we're doing. I wrote about this in the first iteration of this class, and I'll quote myself here in addition to linking to that previous post:

Again, for readers who are unfamiliar with this method of training performers, the Viewpoints came out of Postmodern dance, and were articulated specifically by Mary Overlie. Overlie's original six Viewpoints (Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story) were later adapted by the SITI Company and director Anne Bogart to be used as tools for training actors and creating work for the stage. I have participated in an intensive training with the SITI Company and attended many shorter workshops, and also had the opportunity to work with Mary Overlie when she was briefly in residence at Texas A&M University, where I taught before this.

Essentially, the Viewpoints give actors and directors a common vocabulary from which to work when creating performance--actors engage in improvisations that allow them to have a greater awareness of different aspects of space and time. We have been using the SITI Company's list, which is as follows:

SPACE: spatial relationship, shape, gesture, architecture and topography

and

TIME: kinesthetic response, tempo, duration and repetition.

Part of the reason we are learning the vocabulary in this class is because it allows actors a great deal of agency in staging plays and performances: rather than the director saying, "I want you to go here or do this," the actors are training themselves to have a greater sensitivity to each other and to how they can use different elements of space and time to create meaning.

Both Mary Overlie and the SITI Company emphasize the idea that this is a profoundly democratic tool that is intended to reach for a non-hierarchical relationship. This is one of the reasons it seems useful as a way of building community based performance. In a discussion of how Viewpoints can help directors and actors resist the tendency in American theatre of trying to correctly stage or restage what one person (usually a director) wants to see or hear, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau write

Can the artistic process be collaborative? Can a group of strong-minded individuals together ask what the play or project wants, rather than depending upon the hierarchical domination of one person? Of course a project needs structure, and a sense of direction, but can the leader aim for discovery rather than staging a replica of what s/he has decided beforehand? Can we resist proclaiming "what it is" long enough to authentically ask "what is it?" (The Viewpoints Book 18)

In her essay "The Six Viewpoints" in the collection Training of the American Actor, Mary Overlie extends this collaborative vision to include the audience. She writes that the artistic experimentations of the 1960s and 70s out of which the Viewpoints grew used as their source of information people and things encountered in the everyday world. This shifted the role of the artist from a mystically talented "creator" to a sensitive "observer/participant." She writes,

This creative process, and the art it produced, centered on witnessing and interacting, and, in turn, redefined the role or activity of the audience. The audience, no longer presented with a finite vision from the artist, instead joined the artist as observer/participants. The redefinition of the role of the artist and the relationship of artist to audience created an environment of heightened equality or extreme democracy. (189)

My feeling is that this training is not only good for making us stronger, more focused and creative actors, it also makes us better citizens. I mentioned in class more than once that, in my experience, one of the most important skills Viewpoints training exercises is the ability to actively listen with one's whole body. I've told the students that if they learn nothing else from the class all semester, I hope that they will exercise their ability to really and truly listen, and listen well; conversely, I hope the audience (whose job in this culture is traditionally only to listen) will find ways to be co-creators and participants. Through all of this, I'm hoping that we might all begin to be a stronger, more active community of people.

Over a year later, my feelings about The Viewpoints as a tool that invites creativity, commentary and strong citizenship are the same; but I'm also interested in seeing how audience response might change if community collaborators also learn this vocabulary and use it as a tool for discussion of the social questions raised by the play on which we're working. The method seems particularly relevant as we work on A Perfect Wedding, since Charles Mee works with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. But also, since the play deals with different cultural ceremonies like weddings and funerals, I think it might be useful to look at the physical elements of space and time in those kinds of ceremonies and see how changing those elements might shift people's understanding of those ceremonies. For example: how are people arranged in space at a wedding, usually? Do women stand in a specific spot? What happens if you change the spatial relationship of people at a wedding along the lines of gender or age? Do our concepts of that institution's meaning change at all? Etc.

I'm excited to hear what the students and others have to say about using the Viewpoints to make and discuss performance as the semester rolls along.

An Introduction...

Hey there! I'm Natalie, and I'm a junior here at UofL. I'm currently a theatre arts major, with an art and English minor; even though I have been switching around my major for the last two years (but that's a whole other story...). When I first heard about this class, last spring, I didn't give it much thought simply because it wouldn't fit into my schedule, but after an opening came up this fall, I immediately signed up for it. Having taken a script analysis class with Amy last spring (in which we studied Charles Mee's play Big Love), I was curious to see how this class handled the topics of acting, performance, and community. And I gotta say, thus far, it's been awesome! Taking from what Jared said in his post, I love being able to create things and perform them, a task that is required of this class and one that I'm excited for. With that said, I am very much looking forward to this semester and seeing how this class makes us grow separately and together as actors, and as people.