Staging Process: The Aesthetic Politics of Collective Performance 0810141450, 9780810141452

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Revising American Myths
Chapter 2. Staging Everyday Economies
Chapter 3. Dancing toward Gesture
Chapter 4. Constructing Ensemble Topologies
Chapter 5. The Ethics of Velocities
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Staging Process

Staging Process The Aesthetic Politics of Collective Performance

Rachel Anderson-­Rabern

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Anderson-Rabern, Rachel, author. Title: Staging process : the aesthetic politics of collective performance / Rachel Anderson-Rabern. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019022682 | ISBN 9780810141452 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810141469 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810141476 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ensemble theater—United States—History and criticism. | Experimental theater—United States—History and criticism. | Gesture in dance—United States—History and criticism. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) Classification: LCC PN2193.E67 A53 2020 | DDC 792.022—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022682

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

Chapter 1 Revising American Myths

15

Chapter 2 Staging Everyday Economies

43

Chapter 3 Dancing toward Gesture

71

Chapter 4 Constructing Ensemble Topologies

97

Chapter 5 The Ethics of Velocities

123

Conclusion

145

Notes

149

References

153

Index

163

Figures

Figure 1.1. Elevator Repair Service’s Highway to Tomorrow

23

Figure 1.2. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz

37

Figure 1.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker

39

Figure 2.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut

55

Figure 2.2. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet

56

Figure 2.3. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz

58

Figure 2.4. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz

60

Figure 2.5. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No Dice

61

Figure 2.6. The TEAM’s Mission Drift

65

Figure 3.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut

72

Figure 3.2. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut

74

Figure 3.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker

76

Figure 3.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury

77

Figure 3.5. The TEAM’s Mission Drift

79

Figure 3.6. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut

84

Figure 3.7. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut

95

Figure 4.1. The TEAM’s Mission Drift

100

Figure 4.2. The TEAM’s Mission Drift

108

Figure 4.3. The TEAM’s Mission Drift

115

Figure 4.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury

117

Figure 4.5. The TEAM’s RoosevElvis

119

Figure 4.6. The TEAM’s RoosevElvis

120

Figure 5.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet

132

Figure 5.2. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker

133

Figure 5.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker

139

Figure 5.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury

141

Figure 5.5. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker

144

vii

Acknowledgments

With gratitude, I acknowledge the many conversations and making-­processes that have inspired and tested portions of this work. Throughout my study at Stanford University, I was fortunate to encounter guiding ideas and thoughtful questions posed by Jean-­Marie Apostolidès, Dan Klein, Tony Kramer, Jisha Menon, Peggy Phelan, Alice Rayner, Rush Rehm, Les Waters, and many others. For their detailed feedback and multifaceted understandings of collaborative creativity, I offer profound thanks to Leslie Hill, Andrea Lunsford, and Janice Ross. Harry J. Elam Jr., my graduate academic advisor, provided great compassion and insight throughout this project’s early rumblings. Branislav Jakovljevic, my dissertation advisor, helped to guide that work into its next stage over the conclusion of my graduate career. Both of these exceptional academics are exceptional humans, and will always be mentorship models for me. My colleagues and friends, throughout our ongoing years of study and reflection, the bones of many of our conversations surely shape this book: Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Matthew Daube, Ileana Drinovan, Kyle Gillette, Rebecca Groves, Rachel Joseph, Ljubisa Matic, Derek Miller, Florentina Mocanu-­Schendel, Matthew Moore, Ciara Murphy, Daniel Sack, Kris Salata, Michael St. Clair, Arden Thomas, Nia Witherspoon. As bodies of research on collective creation continue to grow and expand, Kathryn Syssoyeva’s tireless advocation for this field’s place in academic/ artistic discourse and practice is extraordinary. She and Scott Proudfit have provided close readings of pieces of this work, and organized galvanizing platforms for welcome intellectual exchange. Part of the task of this project, which I expect to be lifelong, involves testing and exploring theories of power sharing in the rooms where process happens. Thank you, my friends and creative partners, who have agreed to play in those rooms with me. You have aided so many discoveries, and I hope there are many more to come: Holly Andrew, Charlotte Brooks, Joan McMillen, Paz Pardo, Slanters!, Morgan Spector, Amanda Schumacher, Vanessa Hilfinger-­ Tibbetts-­Hart, Charlie Wynn, Pamela Vail, my glorious students at F&M and elsewhere, and countless others. I have found that strands of collaborative ethos, with all possible challenges and small victories intact, twist through so many ways of working. Thank you to Meg Savilonis, an irreplaceable dramaturge, for the best possible ix

x Acknowledgments

partnering. Thank you to Erica Haskell and Brian Silberman for co-­teaching experiences that brought so many hopes to the fore, and confirmed so many complexities and joys that are relevant to this writing. In service of recognizing some of the messy everyday that predates the pages here, I value the time I had to think and to write, made possible by the childcare labor of others. Friends, family, babysitters, combinations therein, you are my beloved people: Clark Anderson, Keith Anderson, Lynne Anderson, Katherine Baker, Jason Bisping, Stacie Borduin, Wayne Borduin, Meg Day, Christine Driscoll, Giovanna Faleschini-­Lerner, Lee Franklin, Sabrina Hebeler, Peter Jaros, Cheryl Kremer, Carrie Landfried, Abby Lawlor, Katie Machen, Jeremy Moss, Leigh Moss, Marci Nelligan, Becky Rabern, Chelsea Reimann, Owen Sechrist, Jon Stone, Brenna Stuart, Jennifer Tomczyk. This is, above all, a book about thinking through the stakes of artistic processes. This is impossible, and irrelevant, without artists to think with and talk with. Some interviews I conducted did not find homes in this text, but imprinted into my thinking nonetheless. Thank you to Michael Rohd, Tina Satter, Anatoly Smeliansky, Mary Zimmerman, and others. Above all, I offer profound gratitude to the members of the four groups whose works center this project: Goat Island, with special thanks to Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish; Elevator Repair Service, with special thanks to John Collins and Hanna Novak; Nature Theater of Oklahoma, with special thanks to Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska; the TEAM, with special thanks to Rachel Chavkin, Alexandra Lalonde, Jake Margolin, and Nick Vaughan. One great motivation for me, in thinking through this project, is how much I believe your work matters. To Gianna Mosser, I so appreciate your attention to detail, your rigor, and your patience. You are a marvel. Finally, a word for the dear Atticus and the equally dear Alf. You have taught me how to manage time and to approach each moment with as much honesty and humor as possible. For me, this work finds its best relevance in you: adoring you two, my wee collaborators, is the most powerful group process I can imagine.

Staging Process

Introduction

This encounter with the work of the contemporary collective creation groups Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM levies simple questions as guides: When groups of performers work together onstage, what does the audience see in terms of that togetherness, and why is it important?1 How does ensemble emerge as a legible aesthetic in performance, and how is that distinct from (yet deeply interconnected with) collaborative ethos as a cornerstone of creative development? Moments and works that foreground ensemble, and more specifically that explore significations emerging from performing group bodies, proliferate throughout twenty-­first-­century theater and dance. William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, for example, represents collectivity, utilizing compositional practices that signify groupness rather enacting principles that manifest collaborative ethos. Three Atmospheric Studies is deeply and overtly political: in part 1, Forsythe choreographs an arrest—­with a complex variety of tempo shifts and frozen moments—­to no sound save the dancers’ breath. As a dancing body, the group of performers displays a heightened awareness of one another, an awareness Forsythe enhances by paring away all save the materiality of the individual and ensemble bodies. The remaining interplay, between the vulnerability of the individual and the virtuosity of intricate ensemble movement, poses political and ethical challenges through group-­centered staging. Yet, what is the relationship between a starkly moving representation of collectivity, as in Three Atmospheric Studies, and development processes that might emphasize the organism of the group as a creative and creating framework? “Group work,” a vague and encompassing term, is certainly present in this piece, architected into an ensemble made up of performers who have trained over time to be responsive to one another throughout acts of play and instants of simultaneity, and within rigorous choreographic demands. However, Forsythe’s creations are offered to audiences as such. While Three Atmospheric Studies manifests mutually attentive performers, this staged connectedness is distinct from processes of development that involve the group as creative author or authority. There are, then, varied resonances to the familiar term “ensemble.” Ensemble might suggest a kind of group-­centered 3

4 Introduction

aesthetic that is confined to the stage space, and might also suggest a concept of connectedness and even shared authorship that is enacted outside the stage space. A sticky term, ensemble gestures to a kind of idealized power sharing, while also underscoring crucial distinctions between enacted philosophies and aesthetic representation. The utopian trappings of related terminologies sometimes threaten to erase this distinction: ensemble, collective, collaboration, collaborative creation, collective creation, devising. These vocabularies are rife with competing histories, connotations, and idealizations. For some artists and artistic groups, they are even unwelcome, limiting categorizations: garments that don’t quite fit. As a precursor to unpacking some of that terminology, let me make a few of my own guiding assumptions clear. I believe that, when making performance, method matters. That is, method occupies a high-­stakes component of performance making that is both aesthetically and ethically significant to audiences as well as performance makers. Following from this, method marks performance, as scholar Henry Bial proposes in The Performance Studies Reader, remarking that performance “bears the hallmarks and scars of the process that created it” (Bial 2007, 215). While methods of performance making and resulting stagings are not equivalent, they are nonetheless discursive. Jen Harvie shutters these ideas toward the aesthetics of particular genres of performance making, writing of contemporary groups that overlap with many discussed here, “Characteristic aesthetic effects and thematic concerns visible in postdramatic theatre production are a result of its characteristic processes of creation” (Harvie 2010, 13). Including and extrapolating beyond the aesthetic and thematic content that Harvie notes, this book aims to unpack processes as acts with ethical and even political resonance. These assumptions, which situate process as the central focus of this research, consequently inform the performance-­making modes under investigation. Orienting toward group-­centered performance-­making methodologies, the twenty-­ first-­ century landscape of experimental companies creating original performance work is rich, nuanced, and growing. In the United States, New York’s historic imprint as an urban center where experimental and devised performance has proliferated and flourished, notably alongside political and social activism of the civil rights era, continues into the twenty-­first century. In addition to bastions such as the Wooster Group, which has been producing work for over forty years, groups established in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s contribute to a multigenerational performance-­ making community that produces in the first decades of the new millennium. In her introduction to Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, scholar Kathryn Syssoyeva terms the period of collective creation history beginning in the early 1980s the “third wave,” marking this contemporary set of performance practices as “post-­utopic, dominated by an ethical imperative (over the ideological) and an interest in the generative creativity of the actor” (Syssoyeva 2013, 8). Within the third wave in the United States, groups established in the mid-­to late 1990s and into the 2000s in and around New York

Introduction

5

are numerous and intergenerational: Elevator Repair Service, Radiohole, Collapsable Giraffe, Target Margin, the New York City Players, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Hotel Savant, Big Art Group, the TEAM, the Civilians, Half Straddle, Witness Relocation, National Theater of the USA, Banana Bag and Bodice, and many others. Taking up Syssoyeva’s vocabulary, third wave groups might make use of performance as a tool for social change, a way of engaging with and prompting dialogue with their community, but this tends not to be the ideological motivation for the majority.2 Yet, while many third wave groups do not overtly espouse particular dogmas nor pose specific questions or solutions for a community, they assemble and enact ideologies that are significant on the level of method. In “Introduction: Toward a New History of Collective Creation,” Syssoyeva further describes contemporary collective creation principles that embrace “group dynamics . . . marked not by an ideal of leaderlessness but rather by a striving toward an ethical leadership that aims to facilitate and support the centrality of the actor in the creative act” (Syssoyeva 2013, 9). In her work on British devising company Forced Entertainment, Alex Mermikides emphasizes the different shapes and contours such leadership might take, and describes what she calls a “system model” in comparison to an “ensemble model,” each of which situates the role of authorial leadership differently in terms of creating original performance. The ensemble model Mermikides describes deals explicitly with the role of the director as a consistent and persistent manifestation of authorial leadership (Mermikides [2010] 2016, 106). The substance and motivations of that leadership, balanced with renewed focus on the generative potential of the actor, fuse with everyday processes that in turn impact performance ethics and aesthetics. Practice such as this that centralizes method, including crafting space for shades of leadership, demands an equivalent scholarly focus; perhaps it is within methodology that the ideological significance of third wave collective creation becomes visible. Toward acknowledging the overlapping, multigenerational backdrop of contemporary devising groups in the United States, four third wave groups serve as foci for this investigation: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM. Taken together, these groups provide four points that emphasize differences and connections among American collective creation practices in the 2000s. While each company presented work contemporaneously throughout the first decade of the twenty-­ first century, they represent four decades of performance making: Goat Island presented their first performance work in 1987; Elevator Repair Service was founded in 1991, and Nature Theater and the TEAM in the mid-­2000s.3 All continue producing work in the second decade of the twenty-­first century, save for Goat Island, whose final performance took place in 2009. In terms of their presence in existing scholarship, these groups again offer a wide spread. Goat Island have both produced and prompted scholarly engagement with their work for the past thirty years. They coauthored a series of reading

6 Introduction

companions to accompany their performances It’s an Earthquake in My Heart and The Sea and Poison. These reading companions include essays by members of Goat Island, passages from literary and historical works that serve as source material for performance, and writings by performance scholars Peggy Phelan, Adrian Heathfield, Stephen Bottoms, Sara Jane Bailes, and others. They also created Schoolbook 2 (2000), which offers windows into the summer school sessions group members held in Chicago and Bristol, UK. Group member Matthew Goulish is one of the most prolific among the group in terms of utilizing writing as a tool of record and reflection: he published 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (2000), and coedited Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island (2007) with Stephen Bottoms. Goat Island also figures prominently in decades of scholarly articles as well as in books, including Live: Art and Performance (2004), edited by Adrian Heathfield, and Sara Jane Bailes’s Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011).4 Bailes’s book also involves Elevator Repair Service as a primary case study, and links some of ERS’s aesthetics to those of Goat Island. Just four years younger than Goat Island, ERS receives relatively robust scholarly attention as well. Interviews with director and cofounder John Collins appear in practice-­based periodicals like the BOMB and American Theatre, and writing by and about ERS and its members shows up in journals and book chapters, including contributions to Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (2010), edited by Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender; Encountering Ensemble (2013), edited by John Britton; and New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice (2014), edited by Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane. Sparser scholarly attention has been paid to Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the TEAM, though that has increased as the groups’ bodies of work have grown. Both have been the subject of multiple journal articles in TDR: The Drama Review and elsewhere, and have been theorized and historicized in anthologies and books, including Nicholas Ridout’s Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (2013); Encountering Ensemble (2013), edited by John Britton; Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, edited by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (2013); Daniel Sack’s After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (2015); and Theaters of the Everyday by Jacob Gallagher-Ross (2018). This litany of publications, limited samples from much larger subfields, gives shape to the overlapping spheres of theater and performance studies that intersect with the stakes of contemporary performance-­making practices. These companies, and others that create original performance in the new millennium, offer rich opportunities to rethink the nature of experimental performance as such, of collaborative dramaturgies, of links between process and performance, of relationships between theory and practice, of performed national and global identities. The terrain of group-­centered performance in the United States accommodates multigenerational communities; as new and established groups ebb and

Introduction

7

flow, that movement shapes ongoing genealogies of collective creation. Those genealogies are, then, works in progress that contain many endings and many beginnings, with the accelerations and decelerations we might associate with each. In 2008, just three years after Nature Theater got paid for the first time, the company toured four shows (No Dice, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, Romeo and Juliet, and Rambo Solo).5 In contrast, in 2008 Goat Island toured a single production: The Lastmaker. Following The Lastmaker (2007), the ninth and final live performance piece Goat Island made over the course of their twenty-­year lifetime, the group disbanded. Goat Island’s core members at the time, Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, and Litó Walkey, have remained active performers and educators since Goat Island’s final performance of The Lastmaker in 2009. Life and artistic partners Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, for example, subsequently founded Every House Has a Door. Bryan Saner has collaborated with Every House Has a Door as well as 600 Highwaymen, cofounded by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, while pursuing his own work as an interdisciplinary artist. Mark Jeffery is a Chicago performance artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Karen Christopher relocated her teaching and performance practice to London, and Litó Walkey is now based in Berlin, where she is an associate lecturer at the Inter-­ University Center for Dance Berlin (Walkey n.d.). On May 15, 2008, Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish participated in a discussion at Stanford University, led by Peggy Phelan, about Goat Island’s development and transitions. Describing the group’s decision to separate after The Lastmaker, Goulish remarked on the fittingness of ending after Goat Island’s ninth performance piece. Nine, Goulish stated, is the largest numeral; after the number nine, it’s just more of the same. While other group members might differently describe the decision to end the group, finishing at the point of greatest potentiality suggests a refusal to imitate oneself while illustrating an aesthetically compelling pattern. This reflects, even if the pattern making of Goat Island’s ending persists as a kind of mythology, a sense of symmetry and rhythm that moves through the group’s process and into performance. A meaningful introduction to their history must recognize the group’s pursuit of aesthetic completeness, a pursuit Goulish further conjures when writing of the moment when Goat Island came together for the first time. In 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, he recalls this initial meeting: “We did not know we were beginning a performance group or even that we were beginning a performance. We only knew that we were beginning . . . We unanimously elected Lin Hixson director” (Goulish 2000, 128). Through Matthew Goulish’s perspective, Goat Island’s organizational decisions—­to begin, to end, to elect a director—­are not practical concerns somehow separate from the creative act of performance making; they are all opportunities to engage in artistically generative contemplation. Like Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service has had a consistent director since the group’s formation (for ERS, in 1991), though the remaining membership of

8 Introduction

the group changes almost chaotically. In a 2009 interview, ERS artistic director John Collins referred to Elevator Repair Service’s performers as participating in a kind of “revolving door” organizational structure, involving themselves in individual productions and performances as their interest and other work allow (Collins 2009). Originally founded by seven individuals, including some who were friends and acquaintances from Yale and NYU (Steve Bodow, John Collins, Rinne Groff, James Hannaham, Katherine Profeta, Susie Sokol, and Colleen Werthmann), ERS has used more than forty different performers in the nineteen pieces produced between 1991 and 2018. No two performances have had the same cast; cast sizes have ranged from four to thirteen; and only one performer, Susie Sokol, has performed in nearly all productions created by ERS to date. The common thread is John Collins, who has directed or codirected all of ERS’s pieces; from 1992 until 2002 this was in collaboration with Steve Bodow, who served as codirector (Collins 2018). While Goat Island, ERS, and the TEAM utilize single directors, though each group distinctly reframes this role to facilitate group-­oriented processes of original performance making, Nature Theater of Oklahoma functions with two: spouses Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska are the group’s cofounders and codirectors. Unlike most contemporary collective creation groups, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is organized as a for-­profit company; they are a low-­ budget, small-­scale (and self-­described) “Mom and Pop” operation (Copper 2010). This is unique because it changes the way the group operates fiscally: instead of drawing support from state and federal grants accessible to nonprofits, as most performance groups do, Nature Theater garners support primarily from corporations and established theaters that sponsor the development of individual productions. Nature Theater also sets up distinct organizational processes. They are not, like New York City’s Radiohole, a collective in which roles related to production responsibilities shift and morph. They also did not, like Goat Island, democratically elect roles within the group. As other third wave groups have done, they contend with the long tradition of collaboration in performance making, both resisting and embracing its implications as they establish their own working process. For Nature Theater, the process proceeds from the working relationship of Liska and Copper, who codirect and coconceive Nature Theater’s shows, usually, as their press material sometimes states, “in conversation with” performers, friends, and/or colleagues (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2008). Liska and Copper met in the 1990s during their undergraduate years at Dartmouth College, where performer Zachary Oberzan and designer Peter Nigrini also attended.6 After graduating from Dartmouth, Copper moved to New York, where Liska later joined her. Following an occasionally integrated and occasionally independent period of experimentation in the mediums of film, photography, and visual art, Liska and Copper eventually reimmersed themselves in theater making. Subsequently, both pursued and obtained M.F.A. degrees. Copper completed hers in playwriting at Brooklyn College (studying with Mac Wellman), while Liska attended the graduate

Introduction

9

directing program at Columbia University (studying with Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick). Nature Theater’s first produced devised work, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, grew from Liska’s master’s thesis production in 2005.7 Copper’s and Liska’s graduate studies also connected the two with several ongoing, collaborating performers, especially as they cast and recruited for student projects. These collaborators include Robert Johanson and Anne Gridley, who also studied at Columbia, and Fletcher Liegerot, who studied with Bogart’s SITI Company. In a 2008 interview, Copper describes the delicate balance of putting together the ensemble, noting that they initially assembled group members after beginning work with Zachary Oberzan, the group’s first consistent performer, seeking to strike the right creative and personal balance (Copper 2008). As of 2018, Nature Theater moved away from the model of a permanent ensemble. While the group utilizes recurring collaborators, as with ERS the consistency of the company’s identity seemingly resides with Copper and Liska, the directors. As with ERS and Nature Theater, the seed for the TEAM’s establishment grew from collaborations developed throughout the founders’ undergraduate study. At NYU, members of the TEAM were steeped in the density of the devised and experimental performance of the city. Already a well-­established company by the early 2000s, ERS was just one of the groups that TEAM members studied as part of their university curriculum. The TEAM, like Goat Island, is directed by a woman, which is significant given that the artistic field of theater directorship predominantly features men in leadership roles. The youngest of the groups explored here, the TEAM was established in 2004 by Jessica Almasy, Rachel Chavkin, Stephanie Douglass, Jill Frutkin, B. C. Hastert, and Kristen Sieh (Martin 2010, 100). The group’s pace of performance making is significantly greater than Goat Island’s, for example. Whereas Goat Island created nine pieces over twenty years, the TEAM has created eleven works over fourteen years. This is an especially active level of performance engagement when one considers four key factors: the group’s commitment to communication-­heavy processes of collective writing and revision; increasing geographic distance as some group members have moved away from New York to different parts of the country; the group’s decision to prioritize meeting as a collective-­collaborating body only when they have raised sufficient funds to pay themselves for their time; and the explosive success of professional careers outside the group, notably Rachel Chavkin’s growing reputation as a director on and off Broadway.8 For example, in 2017 Chavkin was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for her work on Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a collaborative project with writer-­composer Dave Molloy. In 2019, she won in the same category for Hadestown. The group’s flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances have contributed to distinct ethics and aesthetics; they are, for example, the most consciously politically oriented among the four primary groups that corner this analysis. Their project, anchored in time and space,

10 Introduction

is inseparable from the political. As the group describes their mission, they write, “Our work crashes characters from American history and mythology into modern stories, drawing unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable connections across time to touch the raw nerves of the current moment” (The TEAM n.d.). The TEAM situates their engagement with the constantly shifting culture of the ever-­elusive action of American becoming. Organizationally, then, these four groups offer distinct conceptions of the director’s role within twenty-­first-­century collective creation methodologies. In broad strokes, unique models of directorial leadership are immediately apparent: the single director, elected by the group (Goat Island); the single director, a cofounder who started the group with the directorial or codirectorial role established (Elevator Repair Service and the TEAM); codirectors and cofounders who started the group following a personal and artistic preexisting partnership (Nature Theater of Oklahoma). These differences, each of which motivates modes of performance making that centralize performers and collaborators as creative partners, enable this book to achieve a scope that takes multiple post-­utopic strategies for fostering group creativity into account. Among these four case studies, trends of interdisciplinarity—­stuttering eruptions of dance, film, and music—­thread from group to group. Given the multidisciplinary experiences many of the group members bring into the rehearsal room, this is perhaps to be expected. Lin Hixson, Goat Island’s director, has a background as a filmmaker. John Collins, ERS’s director, initially worked as a lighting designer and sound designer, in addition to his work as a director, when he first arrived in New York. Pavol Liska’s education in directing very much ties him to New York’s experimental theater community, as does Kelly Copper’s playwriting study with Mac Wellman. The TEAM’s core company and collaborators include visual artists, musicians, playwrights, and designers. In addition to creating new blueprints for collaboration throughout performance-­making processes, each group also practices collaborative principles that put distinct disciplines and artistic mediums in conversation and collision. By interpreting these groups’ self-­articulated goals for process and performance through interviews and their own writing, and juxtaposing these elements with the aesthetics of their performances, a subtle politics began to take shape. This politics has footprints in performance, but that primarily operates on the level of methodology. Throughout these case studies, processes veer away from explicitly activist content (the TEAM is, perhaps, the exception) toward implicit engagements with the political. These include politicized relationships to historical models, to the everyday, to danced forms, and to time. From process into performance, displays of ethical frameworks emerge as consequences of juxtaposed speeds and velocities. While “slowness” is inescapably subjective, a term that cannot come into being without comparison (slow in relation to what?), here slowness serves as an invitation to orient toward relationships between power dynamics and speed. That is,

Introduction

11

as these contemporary groups seek rehearsal structures that trouble hierarchies between group members, or that engage with problems of ownership governing the creative product, they participate in processes that make space and time for collaboration. Scholar Paul Virilio remarks on the relationship between speeds and collaborative decision making, or democracy, saying that in order to share power there must be “time to share” (Virilio 2005 [1991], 32). This time, which I explicate as a manifestation of slowness, is embedded into the process of performance making for these groups, who each take between one and three years to construct a single piece. Methodology, examined in relation to performance, often slips through the cracks of scholarly inquiry. Process and method paradoxically mark performance yet remain obscured from the audience, and often from researchers as well. Yet, it is within the slippery and ever-­evolving experience of method that artists build the partnerships and ideologies that progress into the sphere of performance. As countless performers, directors, designers, and so on have experienced, through process groups either cohere into sustainable bodies or fracture into temporary experiments. Processes geared toward nonhierarchical exploration are experimental in and of themselves; they have the potential to serve as microcosms for collaborative and attentive ways of living, or to collapse under strained power dynamics or disorganization. These processes result in methodologies that take shape through forms and aesthetics in performance. Performance moments offer glimpses that might enable audiences to derive a sense of method, as performance grows from the day-­ to-­day decisions and attitudes that created it. Although methodologies of collective creation are cornerstones of this investigation, these methodologies are relevant and applicable to a wide variety of performance work, including prescripted theater and dance choreography. Scholar Duška Radosavljević reminds readers that scripted and devised performance are not opposed binaries. She writes, “Artistic and methodological values, inherent in collaborative ways of working associated with the creative practices of the latter half of the twentieth century in the West, are in fact to be found in many text-­based and playwright-­centred ensemble models” (Radosavljević 2013, 18). The role of text is evident in the work of Elevator Repair Service, for example, as the group has embraced performance utilizing preexisting literary texts as springboards, including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. In these cases, Elevator Repair Service uses the novel as choreographers might use an audible score, as source material that prompts investigation, problem solving, and composition within new mediums. “Devising” connotes at minimum departures from preexisting dramatic texts as primary entry points, a presumption that is demonstrably limited and unsatisfying. For artists, the term might usher in further aesthetic implications that seem narrow and pre-­prescribed. Nearly all the artists I interviewed for

12 Introduction

this book expressed some ambivalence about terminological categorizations in relation to their work: experimental, devised, collaborative, collectively created. It is crucial, then, to hold these terms as tools that excavate the outlines of varied and unique methodologies, rather than as overdetermined classifications. As Radosavljević notes, divisions that place devising processes apart from writing and playwriting are problematic. For example, Spalding Gray’s monologue development, with Elizabeth LeCompte in particular, occurred in-­process. The role of playwrights Caryl Churchill and David Hare within the Joint Stock process opened up opportunities for collaborative research and performer-­generated explorations to impact textual development. In their 2006 work Devising Performance: A Critical History, Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling extend imagined boundaries conjured by the term even further: “Perhaps it is precisely because devising is so prevalent, so present, that critical enquiry has been so sparse” (Heddon and Milling 2006, 1). Through their own contact with practicing artists, Heddon and Milling note that essential characteristics of devising principles show up in moments when artists are in-­process with preexisting dramatic texts as well. For example, dramatic texts can serve as artistic provocations and springboards for collaborating artists, and playwrights may acknowledge or even prompt this through writing. Stage directions might be exceptionally and intentionally open, or arrestingly impossible. In Post-­War British Theatre Criticism, John Elsom writes of an especially fulsome example from a play by Peter Shaffer: “John Dexter, the director, was first attracted to The Royal Hunt of the Sun by one laconic stage direction which caught his eye while leafing through the script—­‘They cross the Andes’” (Elsom 2015 [1981], 143). Might stage directions like this also engage, even demand, enhanced cocreative ethos? Forms of processes, as combined with and related to forms of performance, inspire this book. Twenty-­first-­century original performance making uniquely unites the two, which is perhaps one reason colleges and universities increasingly integrate devising practice and histories into curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Investigations of these practices and their stakes might, I hope, move toward ways of “seeing” performance that accentuate the significance of ways of working. Though I concentrate on four specific contemporary collective creation groups, I invite consideration of a much broader question: What might we discover about contemporary performance, and its relevance to our social world, if we make methodology the center of performance scholarship? In service of this question, in chapter 1 I introduce some historical foundations that inform contemporary practice, and discuss Goat Island, ERS, Nature Theater, and the TEAM in relation to American performance collectives of the 1960s and 1970s. Claims of the existence or absence of successorship, of course, erect power dynamics of their own. This is particularly problematic when in the sphere of collective creation experiments that espouse nonhierarchical models of working. Yet, many of the processes and aesthetics that

Introduction

13

coalesce into these four contemporary case studies have historical roots: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM all articulate ways in which their approaches to performance are indebted to performance makers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, and the Wooster Group. Within this chapter, I chart contemporary methodologies as they relate to previous work, seeking (the beginnings of) a genealogy of American collective creation that contextualizes third wave performance of the post–­civil rights era as a balance between historically motivated inspiration and historically informed resistance. Chapter 2 identifies everydayness as a key thematic of contemporary collective creation, and examines ways in which these groups make use of the everyday concept of employment. I analyze the employment imagery that filters into the performance work of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma in particular, which stems from source material drawn from group members’ real-­life, dual work roles as performance makers and temporary employees. These dual roles, I claim, enable these groups to resist the philosophy of the everyday by constructing new economies of performance. With the aid of Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the everyday, I sketch a blueprint for “everyday philosophy” as it relates to work in general, and to employment specifically. I then examine ways in which contemporary groups make use of this philosophy, by manipulating and transforming it in service of performance that transforms the productive potential of the employee role. In chapter 3, I extend the concept of “the political” in contemporary collective creation, a claim I advance in chapter 2 through the avenue of economy. I approach the political via Giorgio Agamben’s writings, in which Agamben theorizes the political in terms of gesture, as means without ends. Using Agamben as theoretical grounding, I investigate “gesture” as it applies to dance forms that appear in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM. Beginning from concrete gestural forms in performance, I discuss these forms as consequences of methodologies that investigate the potential of the untrained body. The untrained body becomes a complex symbol in performance, a purveyor of gesture that validates differentiation, performs acts of deskilling/reskilling, and allows the gestus of the work to emerge. In chapter 4, I trouble the concept of “ensemble” as one that conjures images of a closed processual system, wherein movement arises either within that system or between that system and external phenomena. This chapter primarily analyses the TEAM, lingering over their projects Mission Drift and RoosevElvis, as a topology. I argue that, as the group shifts and adapts to changing circumstances, the “ensemble” transposes and allows its structure to be preserved even as the shape of the group (or the project) changes. This effectively allows the group to unhinge itself while retaining collective identity. This chapter argues that, by borrowing mathematical vocabulary in order to evoke the TEAM’s performance aesthetic and collective processes as

14 Introduction

topologies, a liminal space opens up—­a space between intuition and rationality, apocalypse and utopia—­that describes ongoing, emerging American histories. Chapter 5 elaborates ways in which contemporary performance groups make use of conjunctions of speed and slowness in order to construct ethical frameworks: ways of living in the world. Though Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma do not identify themselves with explicit political ideologies, members of Goat Island claim their collaborative methodology as a political statement in and of itself. Working from this claim, I explore ways in which collective creation, with the slowness inherent in its immanent process and the speeds present in the aesthetics of performance, opens up velocity as politically relevant. Citing writings by Paul Virilio and Guy Debord, I imagine velocity as conceptually intertwined with economy and production, and outline a politics these third wave groups develop by virtue of their speed-­based engagement with construction, destruction, efficiency, inefficiency, and care. As I discuss politics in the last chapter, and as a throughline of the investigation at large, I treat the politics inherent in method rather than political content, returning to a primary question: Is there a politics inherent in processes of collaboration, or collective creation? This is a question informed by filmmaker Jean-­Luc Godard, who emphasizes connections between politics and process: “The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically” (Kiernan 1990, 109). What qualities characterize the collective creation processes of these groups specifically and processes of collective creation in general, and can we coalesce these qualities toward an understanding of the politics of making original performance work? Throughout this book, I keep collaborative process at the forefront of inquiry, returning to basic questions that I hope will be of use to scholars and practitioners alike. What are the stakes of working in this way? When performance groups construct models of original performance making, respond to everyday sources, generate creative material, and collect these into structured performance, what do they display? How do groups and individuals contend with the utopian overtones of collective creation and collaboration? How do they facilitate or even sometimes fracture collectivity? Sustainable collective practice, as chapter 1 elucidates, is full of barbs and dead ends. Yet, this way of working advances methodologies and produces performance moments that seem somehow important, that trade traditional conceptions of efficiency—­anathema to the creative process, yet very present concerns for groups who must subsist practically as well as artistically—­for something else of value. That something, whose outlines I have only begun to glimpse through analysis aided by audience experience and theoretical research, guides this investigation.

Chapter 1

Revising American Myths

How come so few people in their twenties are doing significant theatre? Where are the inheritors? . . . One of the paradoxes about a “tradition of experimentation” is that it must be, in Harold Rosenberg’s term, a “tradition of the new.” —­R ichard Schechner (1980, 52)

Successorship, inheritance, and tradition are slippery terms to ascribe to contemporary performance practice, and especially to group-­centered practices engaged with innovation and experimentation. Yet, reflections of and relationships to legacies of American experimental performance from the 1960s and 1970s are inescapable. Presumably, as Schechner’s call for inheritors surfaces during the cultural paradigm shift into the 1980s, he situates the changing artistic terrain in comparison to the explosive but receding performance experiments of the preceding decades. In close proximity to that history, he perceives and remarks upon a certain absence, even laments the inevitable historicizing of the evolving experimental moment. Twenty years after Schechner’s essay, within the artistic climate of the late 1990s, scholar Shawn-­Marie Garrett also perceives and remarks upon a certain absence, while refreshing historical comparisons from greater distance. Writing of third wave groups that include Elevator Repair Service, she emphasizes that “young companies in New York may have adopted the principles of their formalist forebears, but their formalism is largely devoid of argument, whether implicit or explicit; devoid of subjective idealism; devoid, in fact, of a commitment to form-­as-­idea” (Garrett 2001, 52). Notably, both Schechner and Garrett accentuate the gravitational pull of 1960s and 1970s performance work, albeit from different perspectives, different historical moments. Both suggest, at these respective junctures, a kind of failure to inherit, to carry experimentation forward into an ongoing “tradition of the new” (Schechner 1980, 52). Playwright Kate Kremer, in her 2014 essay that explores the nature of the contemporary avant-­garde, situates that gravitational pull as one that may inevitably position contemporary experimenting artists in terms of failure. 15

16

Chapter 1

Speaking of the clear and evident revolution of 1960s and 1970s performance work, Kremer notes that “‘avant-­garde’ is a tricky term insofar as it is defined colloquially as forward thinking or the leading edge, but the success or influence of that avant-­gardism can only be seen retrospectively.” Further, she finds that “it is hard to make that term, the ‘avant-­garde,’ apply to the now because it sticks so obstinately to then” (Kremer 2014). There is a certain irony in what Kremer refers to as the stickiness of the term “avant-­ garde,” if its manifestations of forwardness can only be deconstructed and theorized in hindsight. How, then, can contemporary practice be what it is, rather than always what it isn’t? Further, how might perceptions of what it isn’t shift and evolve as distance from comparative historical moments increases? Toward historicizing twenty-­first-­century collective creation practices, this requires shifting the framework through which historical influences emerge. What happens if we relax the imperative of chronology, and allow contemporary practices and aesthetics to retain the freedom to be in dialogue with their forbears, as well as the freedom to occupy a space of potentiality that is not yet subject to the successes or failures conjured by images of traditions and inheritance? By placing contemporary collective practices in dialogue with 1960s and 1970s experimenters, space emerges to examine the challenges of utopian overtones or romantic idealism that can accompany narratives of groupness or collectivity. There are many layers that make up the group work termed “collective creation,” aesthetic and ideological as well as processual, which offer extensive opportunities for contemporary groups to engage with forms and principles that emerged from earlier performance experiments. The third wave period Schechner and Garrett criticize at different junctures may draw significant inspiration from American predecessors of the 1960s and 1970s, yet it comprises companies that are both uniquely oriented and embedded into a long and ongoing history of collective creation practices. The roots of that ongoing history include the 1960s and 1970s, but are not exclusively indebted to those moments. The four case studies that anchor this book can help trace a multidimensional genealogy for third wave American performance, as Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM represent different generations of performance makers that collide in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. In terms of their relationship with historical models of experimental performance and group-­centered work, each of these four groups enacts methodological and aesthetic experiments that, by turns, reinforce and resist comparisons to American performance collectives of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. Significantly, key members of each of these third wave groups openly acknowledge and embrace the influences of artists and groups that have come before. Notably, many of these influences puncture disciplinary boundaries. By deriving methodological inspiration from multiple artistic mediums, these four third wave groups open up opportunities for the field of performance

Revising American Myths

17

studies to conceive of their collective creation practices as part of a broad artistic legacy that includes dance, writing, music, and visual art. For example, Goat Island describe their indebtedness to Yvonne Rainer and her work during the 1960s with the Judson Dance Theater. Nature Theater of Oklahoma has created work according to structuring and philosophical principles they link to the partnered exploration Merce Cunningham and John Cage undertook in the 1950s and 1960s. Elevator Repair Service has cross-­pollinated with the still-­active Wooster Group through performers, technicians, and occasional borrowed rehearsal space at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, and thereby shares Richard Schechner’s Performance Group as a common ancestor.1 The TEAM’s artistic director, Rachel Chavkin, notes, “An early stepping stone to my work with the TEAM was making a show with several collaborators (including future TEAM members Jake Margolin and Kristen Sieh) based around Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ that wove the poem with other writings by and about the Beat Generation, and in particular how those white writers fetishized, worshipped and appropriated innovations by largely African American musicians developing bebop jazz” (TEAM 2018). Taken together, these examples sketch networked relationships to artistic experimentation of the civil rights era. They include not only aesthetic inspiration but also critiques of inequities and white patriarchal power systems substantiated by earlier models of aesthetic experimentation. Perhaps, rather than having “adopted the principles of their formalist forbears,” as Garrett suggests of third wave performance groups at the end of the twentieth century, these twenty-­first-­century case studies sketch successorship as a tense product of pushes and pulls, alignments and resistance, rife with opportunities to dismantle and expose toxic power systems embedded in the cultural water of those forbears.

The Contemporary Landscape The first decades of the 2000s unfold as a time frame particularly tempting to situate against the historical backdrop of 1960s and 1970s American performance, in large part due to the extraordinary resurgence of group-­ centered and group-­generated work. Though collective creation practices never disappeared from the American landscape after their initial emergence, there has been a dramatic and visible increase of group-­centered performance work from the mid-­1990s into the 2000s.2 In 1996, eight American theater groups established the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET), following an intergroup dialogue at Towson State University in Maryland, funded by Theatre Communications Group.3 The NET defines “ensemble” such that close kinship with collective creation processes is clear: “An ensemble is a group of individuals dedicated to collaborative creation, committed to working together consistently over years to develop a distinctive body of work

18

Chapter 1

and practices” (Network of Ensemble Theatres n.d.). The NET functions as a resource that draws together groups of cooperating artists committed to methodologies that place collaboration and group work at the center of their “distinctive . . . [bodies] of work and practices.” More than twenty years on, from its inception in 1996, the NET’s national membership has grown from the original eight groups to more than two hundred. While the NET’s increasing membership indicates evident group-­centered creative inertia, this increase tells only a part of a larger story. Additional experimental groups, many of which performance scholars collect under the umbrellas of postmodern or postdramatic, are not members of the NET. This suggests that there is an even wider reinvigoration of devised group work—­ particularly in New York downtown theater—­than the NET membership indicates. Further, inevitably newer groups fall through the cracks. Yet all of these groups, and in particular this book’s four case studies—­Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, the TEAM, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma—­ contribute to the ongoing conversation regarding the evolution of third wave collective creation practices and the relationship of these practices to previous experiments. As analyses of these relationships unfold in this chapter, I must underscore that collective creation is not so much a methodology as it is a set of methodologies: no two processes are alike. Each process involves unique interpretations of what it means to collaborate and for what purpose, though the word “collaboration” itself inevitably hefts a certain utopian baggage. As I query and levy “collective creation” throughout this discussion, I remain mindful of the slippages that accompany the controversial task of overdetermining or overcategorizing processes. I recognize that collective creation processes emerge when ideals collide with the day-­to-­day realities of rehearsal and development practices, and acknowledge that many of the day-­to-­day realities of these third wave groups are outside the scope of this book. Collective creation processes, regardless of the historical moment from which they emerge, are not utopias. They retain the freedom to be problematic, chaotic, obscured.

Legacies of Collective Endeavor One pathway into the conversation among collective creation groups of the ’60s and ’70s and those of the 2000s involves examining the role of partnership, or shared resources, among groups in these two time periods. Writing early in the 2000s, Garrett claims that “among young theater makers in New York today, there’s no real sense yet of a shared endeavor, a common struggle, or a pressing need to join forces. Instead, the scarce resources and low sociocultural stakes seem to have produced a surprising amount of competitiveness” (Garrett 2001, 47). Garrett’s assertion of competition

Revising American Myths

19

reminds the reader or audience member of the high rent and high artistic population of New York’s downtown performance district. However, as third wave groups develop further into the twenty-­first century, two notable points take shape: fertile creative partnerships proliferate within New York’s contemporary experimental performance community, and political engagement through performance sometimes appears as subtle aesthetics or ideologies enacted methodologically. The first point, in fact, may be closely related to the second. Perhaps, as the new millennium continues to unfold, close associations among collective creation groups become too entangled, creating a kind of insular subculture in which the same people perform for the same people. This recalls Claire Bishop’s critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. Relational aesthetics, Bishop argues, affirms artistic practices that risk over-­harmonizing into self-­congratulation, when artistic practice could be better served by “relational antagonism” (Bishop 2004, 51–­79). One challenge, then, for third wave groups may be the very codification of what Schechner calls the “tradition of the new” (Schechner 1980, 52). Perhaps this codification, or conventionalizing of experimentation through shared performers and audiences, does the opposite of what Garrett claims. Perhaps it formulates a larger-­scale, new mode of “subjective idealism” that echoes aesthetic and ideological imperatives enacted by collective creation groups of the ’60s and ’70s (Garrett 2001, 52). Additionally, it is crucial to resist the temptation to dismiss second wave collective practices as idealistically intact or ideologically consistent; many groups of the ’60s and ’70s developed out of the fissures and splintering of, or individuals departing from, existing organizations and creative partnerships. The American model of process-­oriented, group-­centered devising gave rise to a performance community, particularly in New York in the 1960s, that was both constructively and combatively interactive. Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, the earliest and arguably the most influential figures in the history of American performance collectives, drew interdisciplinary partners and collaborators from the artistic community surrounding them, first at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre and later at their found performance space on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. They modeled original experiments that explored the organization and potential of creative collective process, and their performance space developed into a nexus that drew John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as well as other dancers and choreographers who later produced work at Judson Church. They also established an ensemble of performers that gave rise to other groups. As is well documented, Joseph Chaikin founded the Open Theatre in 1963 after performing with the Living Theatre. Chaikin eventually moved away from Beck and Malina’s work in search of a more actor-­centric mode of performance that could develop through workshops and critical feedback, and explored techniques for developing what Stephen Bottoms conceptualizes as the actor’s “disciplined spontaneity” (Bottoms 2009, 171). Yet, Chaikin retained great respect

20

Chapter 1

for the Becks’ commitment to action and practice, saying, “Everyone else talks, the Becks do” (Chaikin 1964, 196). As Sally Banes discusses in Democracy’s Body, the creative partnership of Cage and Cunningham was another locus of significant artistic influence throughout the 1960s and beyond. Among others, their work directly impacted musician and choreographer Robert Dunn, who began teaching a choreography class at Merce Cunningham’s studio in 1960. This class included Yvonne Rainer and later Trisha Brown, who joined in 1961. Brown had previously studied with Anna Halprin and went on from Dunn’s workshop, with Rainer and others, to produce work at Judson Dance Theater (Banes 1993 [1983]). Judson Dance Theater was initially formed by a group of choreographers who were motivated to collaborate and to openly and freely explore choreographic possibilities, in contrast to Merce Cunningham’s comparatively formalist techniques. The relative permissiveness at Judson included using everyday gestures and movements, as well as the everyday bodies of untrained dancers (Banes 1993 [1983]). As the Becks’ and Cunningham’s students and collaborators developed into independent leaders and practitioners in their own right, performance work of the 1960s flourished as diverse practices multiplied. Perhaps the most infamous case of artistic fissure in New York collectives of the ’60s and ’70s occurred during the latter part of the 1970s, when Richard Schechner’s Performance Group transitioned into the Wooster Group under the new directorship of Elizabeth LeCompte. Initially, as performance historians have extensively explored, LeCompte joined the Performance Group as Schechner’s assistant director, then eventually began working with other Performance Group performers on independently created pieces outside of Schechner’s rehearsals. Dissatisfied with Schechner’s leadership and artistic direction, this new faction of the Performance Group eventually ousted Schechner and began producing work under the new name of the Wooster Group.4 Throughout this transition, the group retained residence (and still performs) at the Performance Group’s rehearsal space, the Performance Garage. Though undeniably influenced by her time working with and observing Schechner, LeCompte took the company in new aesthetic and processual directions. As David Savran discusses in the monograph Breaking the Rules, “She found his [Schechner’s] mise en scène too highly symbolic and ritualistic and his approach to performance dangerously psychoanalytical . . . She believed that the group situation, in which he enjoyed the role of guru, took precedence for him over the art” (Savran 2005 [1988], 3). It was only a year after the Wooster Group replaced the Performance Group that Schechner asked the question, “Where are the inheritors?” (Schechner 1980, 52). Writing more than twenty-­five years later in 2008, well into the third wave, Schechner’s tone and validation of the work shift completely. In a persuasive commentary addressed to the president of the United States describing the importance of arts funding, Schechner writes, “What needs

Revising American Myths

21

more support are . . . companies like the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment), The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, and The Builders Association to name five notable New York groups” (Schechner 2008, 7). Though Schechner’s taste in 2008 reflects a long-­standing predilection for experimental and collectively created group work, he does not go so far as to name any of these groups as “inheritors” of a particular tradition. Perhaps this, along with the inclusion of the Wooster Group in Schechner’s 2008 list of “notable New York groups,” points to the entanglement of the historical relationship between collective practice and intergroup and/or inter-­artist conflict and resistance. Greater temporal distance results, as playwright Kate Kremer anticipates, in widened lenses with increased abilities to perceive expressions of an evolving avant-­garde. The model of a highly intimate experimental performance community continues in contemporary New York as a result of common educational backgrounds, scarce resources, personal relationships, and artistic partnerships. Collective creation and devising practices are now built into the pedagogical structures of many institutions of higher education, as are many avant-­garde artists of the second wave who have taken occasional or permanent professorial positions at colleges and universities. Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, cofounders of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, began their personal and creative work together at Dartmouth College. Most of the founding members of the TEAM met one another during their undergraduate years at New York University. Pavol Liska received his M.F.A. in directing in 2005 from Columbia University, where he studied with Anne Bogart of SITI Company. Likewise, Rachel Chavkin of the TEAM also received her M.F.A. from Columbia. Nature Theater’s Copper studied with Mac Wellman throughout her M.F.A. work at Brooklyn College, as did Half Straddle’s Tina Satter, Eliza Bent, Sibyl Kempson, Young Jean Lee, and many others. John Collins has worked as a sound designer for Richard Foreman and Target Margin Theater, and collaborated in this capacity with the Wooster Group from 1993 to 2008. Scott Shepherd, a core member of the Wooster Group since 1999, has also performed in and cocreated multiple ERS shows, and plays the central role in ERS’s six-­hour production Gatz (2006). Suzy Sokol, the most consistent performer throughout ERS’s history, occasionally appears in the work of other downtown experimental companies, including Half Straddle’s queer reimagined Chekhov, The Seagull: Thinking of You (2013). Trans performance artist Becca Blackwell, who also appeared in Half Straddle’s Seagull, collaborates with other downtown artists including Young Jean Lee and New York City Players’ Richard Maxwell. Tory Vasquez, a solo performance artist and repeat performer with ERS, is also Maxwell’s spouse. Eric Dyer, one of the founding members of Radiohole, has collaborated as a performer with Collapsable Giraffe and as a lighting designer for both the New York City Players and Elevator Repair Service; Maggie Hoffman, also

22

Chapter 1

one of the founding members of Radiohole, has appeared as a performer in multiple ERS shows. ERS projects have also featured performers who are core company members of the TEAM, including Frank Boyd and Kristen Sieh. Robert Johanson of Nature Theater of Oklahoma has worked with ERS, Radiohole, Witness Relocation, and others. These are just a few evident examples of intergroup cooperation and/or overlapping relationships. Writing in 2010, Paige McGinley describes these many links and lattices as the shape of a complexly interwoven performance community that cooperates on many levels: What is clear is that a living, dynamic community of people is making work in the downtown spaces of New York and globally: they are sharing festival stages, thematic interests, and even people, as they make up each others’ audiences and collaborators in side projects. To consider each company in isolation, then, would be a mistake. Going forward, we should pay attention to this organic community with fuzzy borders, taking note of the artistic, dramaturgical, and intermedial cross-­fertilizations that are almost certain to take place. (McGinley 2010, 37)

McGinley’s investigation of “a new generation of ensemble performance” claims that “ensemble-­driven work is at the center of New York contemporary performance” (McGinley 2010, 11). For many contemporary New York groups, cooperation tends to take place on individual levels rather than between groups as cohesive bodies. When factoring in performance space, this close collection of groups expands to include Goat Island. Though based in Chicago and notably apart from the many overlaps that characterize so many third wave New York collective creation companies, members of Goat Island are deeply invested in pedagogy and touring, both of which expand their artistic reach. Goat Island cofounders and life partners Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish have been long-­term educators at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as has fellow Goat Island member Mark Jeffery. Additionally, Hixson and Goulish have taught performance practice at Stanford University as well as for other academic institutions. Like ERS, the TEAM, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Goat Island’s frequent touring has taken the group on national and international journeys; in the United States, experimental performance groups often ghost one another at the specific venues that host experimental performance work. These include (among many) P.S. 122, the Kitchen, and Soho Rep in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; On the Boards in Seattle; and REDCAT in Los Angeles.5 Between 2005 and 2010, both ERS and Nature Theater of Oklahoma performed multiple times at On the Boards and in Portland,

Revising American Myths

23

Oregon’s annual Time-­Based Art Festival; Elevator Repair Service and Goat Island performed at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Goat Island and Nature Theater performed at the same venue in Zagreb, Croatia; and all four groups performed at P.S. 122 in New York. These four groups, as part of the same contemporary third wave community, follow one another with recent (or imminent) presences. However, despite similarities that include performance venues, touring schedules, and collective creation methodologies, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, the TEAM, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma each notably express themselves differently, especially when situating themselves in relation to their peers. In an interview with the author in 2008, John Collins wryly referred to ERS as the “poor man’s Wooster Group,” a group Collins worked with as sound designer, and which operates with a comparatively large budget of more than a million dollars a year (Collins 2009). Garrett riffs on this fiscal disparity in her article on New York’s experimental groups of the 1990s, saying, “These days, when the Wooster group wants new costumes it calls Prada; when ERS does, it treks over to the Salvation Army” (Garrett 2001, 48). As the third wave has evolved, this comparison now seems more apt between ERS and the TEAM, for example. The longest-­running of the four case studies, and producing in the main season of established Off-­ Broadway houses like the Public Theater, Elevator Repair Service’s fringe

Figure 1.1. Elevator Repair Service’s Highway to Tomorrow, HERE Arts Center, 2000. Left to right, Paul Boocock, Rinne Groff, Randolph Curtis Rand. Photo copyright © Drew Fellman.

24

Chapter 1

identity inevitably must shift to accommodate more generous resources and therefore a greater possibility of institutionalization. Perhaps part of what’s changed for contemporary collaborative groups has to do with individualized survival in an age when supposedly nonhierarchically oriented groups occupy financially hierarchical positions in relation to one another. In part because of these differences, third wave collectively oriented groups in New York do not, in comparison to the work of the 1960s, cohesively or consistently render poor theater aesthetics. While some groups tend more toward the poor theater pole, such as Goat Island, groups like ERS and Builders Association (founded in 1994) also create performances rich in multimedia explorations that can require significant budgets and prodigious technical support. Theater and performance in the twenty-­first century enjoy technological capacities that far exceed those of the 1960s and 1970s, changing the individual’s relationship to collective creation as a collective endeavor. With greater technical demands, there is a newfound place for the individual performance maker as technical specialist.

Traditions of Slow Process While the meaning and experience of forging collective endeavors shift from the 1960s into the new millennium, many American groups of both time periods share core collective creation values that centralize the group from process into performance. One way this manifests is through extended processes that develop unique methodological and aesthetic blueprints for each group, each production. Consequently, and with ethical ramifications that bear closer consideration in subsequent chapters, the collectively created performances of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM often develop slowly relative to the typical rehearsal process of a regional theater, for example. Like many of the ’60s and ’70s performance collectives, these four groups fulfill the NET’s definition of ensemble, which stipulates the commitment of “working together consistently over the years” (Network of Ensemble Theatres n.d.). While the core ensemble members dynamically change for every group, including second wave as well as third wave organizations, the principle of building a group through the process of making performance remains. To become an ensemble, the group must work together consistently, if not over years then at least throughout the extensive time commitment collective creation requires. The apparent inefficiency of experimental, collectively created work becomes clear through contrast: while contemporary regional American theaters perform roughly five to eight shows per season, third wave groups often work much more gradually. New York–­ based groups Collapsable Giraffe, Radiohole, and Elevator Repair Service produce on average one or two shows each year. Sara Jane Bailes notes that for Elevator Repair Service,

Revising American Myths

25

“while Gatz developed over a period over seven years, other shows take as little as six months to make, so the time span devoted to a making process can vary considerably” (Bailes 2010, 84). Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the TEAM produce at most one show per year, often taking longer for more demanding projects or working on multiple projects simultaneously. Goat Island are perhaps the most consistently patient, taking multiple years to create each of their performances. In a grant application in 2003, Goat Island acknowledged this: “We earned a reputation for working slowly. One critic described our process as ‘glacial.’ It was true. We took two years to develop a piece, and we still do. It takes us that long to get it how we want it” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, xiv). Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, radical performance groups also left room for the process of creation to grow and lengthen, providing models that validate the slower, exploratory work of third wave contemporary case studies. The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now developed out of months of total immersion in discussion and theatrical exploration during the group’s retreat to Sicily in 1968. The Performance Group produced its first work, Dionysos in 69, in 1968 after a year of workshops and explorations begun at New York University (Aronson 2000). The Wooster Group produced twenty-­six theatrical works, in addition to coproduced works and projects in film, dance, and radio, from 1975 to 2018. This averages out to roughly one theatrical production each year and a half. Joseph Chaikin, in an interview with Richard Schechner in 1964, described the extended workshop/rehearsal process of the Open Theatre, saying, “We’re in no hurry” (Chaikin 1964, 195). Pavol Liska, codirector of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, describes the group’s approach to making work, saying, “We never have a goal in mind, we just have a process in mind” (Lee 2009, 94). By focusing on the process rather than the goal of performance-­as-­product, Nature Theater offers a model of collective creation that is unhurried, that does not rush toward an end point but rather lingers over the journey. One important similarity among second and third wave American collective creation groups, then, involves unhurried processes of exploration that reframe efficiency away from modes that maximize visible production outcomes. This suggests that, for artistic experimenters, a “tradition of the new” might come into being through values applied to processes of making performance, rather than through thematic, aesthetic, or structural performance content.

Framing Histories of Political Performance When conceptualizing the relationship between performance and political engagement, especially when comparing groups reflecting and responding to substantially different sociopolitical moments, it is important to distinguish between political content and the politics of method. Much second wave

26

Chapter 1

American performance of the ’60s and ’70s tended to respond explosively, urgently, and politically to the concerns of the times, while many third wave groups resist didacticism and overt political agendas. As Harry Elam writes, “The turbulent events of the 1960s and 1970s brought issues of race, class, gender, war, and economic deprivation to America’s consciousness in profound ways” (Elam, 2008 [1997], 19). Consequently, groups formed that deliberately and passionately produced theater as a form of social protest, rebelled against repressed and marginalized voices, and advocated communion: the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, the Black Revolutionary Theater (BRT), At the Foot of the Mountain, Lilith, and many others. These groups are just a few examples of second wave work that created ideologically explicit performance as a means of spurring audiences to social action.6 This involved not only redefining the actor/audience/community relationship, but also the composition of the audience/community itself. El Teatro Campesino, for example, performed for groups of immigrant workers using mixtures of Spanish and English. The San Francisco Mime Troupe co-­opted performance spaces in parks and public squares in early versions of guerrilla theater, and in the 1970s carefully and consciously reconstructed the (then mostly white) company to achieve the troupe’s goal of a multiracial identity (Mason 2009 [2006]). The process of collectively creating theater, an anti-­hierarchy ideal for these groups, was then reflected in the performances that sought to remove the implicit hierarchies of performance, making theater that could both reflect and affect communities. Some alternative second wave groups, distinguished from social protest theaters such as those mentioned above, channeled their politically and socially engaged drive toward performance aesthetics emerging from particular processes. This approach tended to be equally ideologically transparent, and often focused on boundaries imposed by American society, culture, and politics at large. Organizations such as the Living Theatre, the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, the Open Theater, the Performance Group, and Grand Union, to name a few, broke open conventional notions of spectatorship and performance aesthetics as they sought to create modes of performance, and performance making, beyond the confines of the dominant political and social authority. Theodore Shank writes in Beyond the Boundaries that performance experimenters during this period attempted to provide an “alternative to the theatre of the dominant complacent middle-­class society which tended to perpetuate the status quo in its aesthetics, politics, working methods, and techniques” (Shank 2009 [1982], 1). By resisting the “status quo” through each of these arenas and utilizing their own distinct strategies, performance groups integrated sociopolitical concerns into the backbone of their work, whether or not the content of the work was overtly political. Even within the work of the ’60s and ’70s, ways in which political engagement threaded through performance and processes were distinct and

Revising American Myths

27

idiosyncratic to particular groups and projects. Postmodern performance explorations constituted yet another series of political engagements, enacted through structure and formalism. This experimentation initially took place through the work of musicians and choreographers, notably John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton. Through formalist techniques, including chance operations as a strategy for structuring musical composition and choreography, these more aesthetically oriented experiments also worked against existing hierarchies. They staged the dismantling of the hierarchies of their own art forms, challenging assumptions about what constituted appropriate sounds, movements, and bodies to include as performance. The sociopolitical agendas of these individuals and groups, while unique, were less explicit than those of the social protest theaters or the alternative performance collectives. These three categories of second wave performance—­ social protest, performance collective, and formalist experimentation—­are of course generalized and tangled. In the reality of practice, ideologies, individuals, and creative directions intermingled. The fertile music/dance interdisciplinary collaboration between John Cage and Merce Cunningham has been rigorously explored, as has Cunningham’s and Cage’s involvement with the Living Theatre, and the Living Theatre’s status as an epicenter of New York experimental performance throughout the 1960s. In Democracy’s Body, Sally Banes posits both Cage and Cunningham as inspiring and rebellion-­ inducing figures whose influences ghosted Robert Dunn’s dance workshops, which brought together choreographers who eventually went on to produce work together at Judson Church (Banes 1993 [1983]). In Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka, Harry Elam cites the “Cross fertilizations [that] repeatedly occurred and affected the theaters’ practices and even the social protest work of El Teatro and BRT. The Radical Theater Festival held in San Francisco in 1968—­featuring the San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Bread and Puppet Theater, as well as El Teatro—­was an example of this interaction” (Elam 2008 [1997], 26). Because of this blending, aesthetically driven work such as Cunningham’s choreography networked with more self-­consciously political performance and performance makers, renewing the concept that political engagement could trace through both aesthetics and methodology. Acknowledging that the political in performance might appear through means that are neither didactic nor explicitly activist, third wave collective creation groups contribute to evolving conceptions of political performance. In Restaging the Sixties, James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal discuss eight theater groups that operated during the 1960s (and beyond) that they historicize as having “redefined the relationship between theater and political activism” (Harding and Rosenthal 2009 [2006], 3). Harding and Rosenthal seek to establish legacies these groups have provided for contemporary

28

Chapter 1

performance, as they write in the mid-­2000s, when “political activism in the United States is once again on the rise” (ibid.). They imply that the legacy of radical group theater is an essentially political one, and further, that it is politically activist. However, some third wave groups demonstrably resist dogma, yet still construct politically expressive performance through contemplative processes and ensuing forms and structures. Although Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM take up and challenge nodules of collective process and practice as explored by radical collectives of the ’60s, each group adopts aesthetics that in some ways have more in common with the early footprints of postmodern practitioners John Cage and Yvonne Rainer. Art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud writes that the visual artwork of the 1990s, which he interprets according to his theoretical model of relational aesthetics, is “unlike Process Art and Conceptual Art, which, for their part, tended to fetishize the mental process to the detriment of the object” (Bourriaud 2002, 47). Bourriaud’s assertions map fittingly onto process-­centric (fetishized) performance, which pervaded performance collectives of the ’60s and ’70s as they increasingly devised original work. Further, Bourriaud claims that “present-­day art is roundly taking on and taking up the legacy of the 20th century avant-­gardes, while at the same time challenging their dogmatism and teleological doctrines” (ibid., 45). Bourriaud identifies the twentieth-­century avant-­gardes as overly inclined to instruct, and implies that in the “present day” of the early 2000s, such transparency is obsolete. Arnold Aronson echoes a similar sentiment about performance in the 2000s, arguing that the “‘avant-­garde’ has become somewhat passé” and has faded in favor of downtown performance aesthetics that utilize “a slightly jaded, distanced, ironic attitude or point of view” (Aronson 2000, 207). Considered together, Aronson’s assessment speaks to the missing link in Bourriaud’s claim. If the contemporary performance makers under discussion here are not dogmatic, then what are they? In response to didactic performance and fetishized process, the four case studies in this book create performance according to principles that query the power structures inherent in both manifestations. Both didacticism and fetishizing imply fixation, or idealization. In order to create performance with an obviously instructive message, that message must fit with the group’s self-­ understood and articulated identity. To fetishize suggests a view of process from within the confines of blinders that obscure the object or performance. Both actions create implicit utopias: didactic performance proceeds from the myth of a cohesive and stable group identity. Fetishized process seeks a utopia in which the performer’s inner experience constitutes the whole of the project’s value. Perhaps “irony” and “distance” as aesthetic markers of some third wave work have appeared as consequences of attempts to steer clear of utopias, which history has shown to be fraught with their own reinforced power structures.

Revising American Myths

29

Shifting the Bonds of Collaboration and Leadership Histories of American performance collectives of the ’60s and ’70s—­second wave groups—­delineate attempts to construct ideal, nonhierarchical models of living, creating, and performing, as well as ensuing and persistent problems of authoritarianism and power. Richard Schechner’s charismatic first-­person Environmental Theater, for example, reinforces the controversial power dynamics that plagued the Performance Group with Schechner as director. As Arnold Aronson reminds readers, group performance of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s constructed wide gaps between idealized, nonhierarchical ways of working and actual and acute power relationships that perpetually asserted themselves. He writes: “The reality rarely lived up to the ideal. Most groups functioned more on the model of the totalitarian phase of communism: there was a collective of actors, but the groups tended to have autocratic, even dictatorial, leaders in the form of visionary directors” (Aronson 2000, 80). These visionary directors, choreographers, and performance-­makers seem ironically inseparable from real-­world attempts to achieve ways of working reliant on consensus or democracy. Judith Malina and Julian Beck (the Living Theatre), Richard Schechner (the Performance Group), Joseph Chaikin (the Open Theatre), Peter Schumann (Bread and Puppet), R. G. Davis (the San Francisco Mime Troupe), and Elizabeth LeCompte (the Wooster Group) all functioned as directors whose individual contributions equaled or even eclipsed those of the groups they established and shaped. In some cases, this led to mutiny: Richard Schechner reflects on the splintering of the Performance Group, saying, “We moved to crisis, confusion, disruption, and explosion. As I tightened my authoritarian grip, the group members increased their pressures against me” (Schechner 1994 [1973], 263). Similarly, the San Francisco Mime Troupe fractured over a leadership struggle: “Some were determined that the Mime Troupe become a collective in its structure with all decisions made by the group as a whole. Davis, however, was equally determined that he continue as the company’s sole director and make all important decisions himself” (Shank 2009 [1982], 62). Looking back and reflecting on the process of the Open Theatre, Jean-­Claude van Itallie acknowledges that “there was the myth that everyone was equal, that the pieces were created by everybody. It may have been a necessary myth, to facilitate the actors’ commitment to the material. Yet it was a myth. Joe [Chaikin] was very much the head” (van Itallie 1983, 33). Versions of this narrative appear again and again in records of groups that sought to fashion themselves as collectives. Leaders remained leaders, perpetuating the notion of equally balanced collective creativity as a “necessary myth.” If performers were isolated from leadership’s sphere, directors and choreographers could be equally disconnected from performer experience. This is clearest in performative forms with relaxed boundaries between performer

30

Chapter 1

and spectator, as illustrated in an exchange between choreographer Anna Halprin and two of her dancers. In Experience as Dance, dance scholar Janice Ross quotes Halprin’s remarks on the success of Carry, a participatory piece that invited spectators to physically handle performers and each other. In stark contrast to Halprin’s glowing interpretation of the emotional togetherness that transpired during the event, Dancer 3 responds: “I find it hard to be really open with guys from the outside. They were kind of horny. They got me uptight” (Ross 2007, 217). Even for a very sensitive leader, the difference between the outside versus the inside experience of a performance moment is unmistakable. As auteur, Halprin focused her attention on the wider field of the performance—­the apparent responses of the participating spectators, the meaning of the project as a whole, her desire for the project to succeed according to her own standards—­limits her ability to focus on the dancers’ individual understanding of the unfolding moment. Similar, more extreme issues arose in the Performance Group’s Dionysos in 69: “Some male spectators took advantage of the ritual-­like scenes to join the action and fondle the female performers. The performers demanded that Schechner structure these scenes more rigidly so that clear-­cut and appropriate boundaries would be established” (Aronson 2000, 100). These examples foreground challenges and failures germane to group work of the ’60s and ’70s that sought to dismantle barriers between performers and spectators: protecting the physical and emotional safety of the performer. Resisting these boundaries between performer/director, in favor of departing from a history of male-­dominated and created power structures, many feminist theaters of the ’70s produced models of collaboratively created work that relied on consensus rather than on single artistic visions. Charlotte Canning’s Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A. devotes an entire chapter to the resulting difficulties of collectivity and collaboration, exploring the perpetual power conflicts that split many feminist collectives in the 1970s, including Womanrite and Spiderwoman, despite their desires for nonhierarchical rubrics (Canning 1996). Even for companies not led by guru-­like male figures, the strain of collaborative attempts could easily crack the spines of company dynamics. Canning also identifies the aesthetic challenge of the other side of the coin, when there is no clear artistic leader. She summarizes the viewpoint of a former member of San Francisco’s Lilith Theater, who describes how artistic consensus negatively impacts the work: “If everyone has an equal say then risks will rarely get taken because those who are hesitant will veto the new idea or image” (ibid., 71). This description illuminates the stymieing environment that can emerge within a group, when group dynamics enable hesitancy to replace artistic boldness. There are challenges in either direction: if a singular visionary drives the supposedly “collaborative” group, this can easily devolve into traditional director-­actor relationships, though with additional resentment arising from unrealized collaboration or compromising (for performers) performance scenarios. However, if there is no leader,

Revising American Myths

31

as the former member of Lilith notes, it can be more difficult to resist art by committee, more difficult to take the provocative chances that result in dynamic performance aesthetics. Following in the wake of these previously explored and identified tensions, third wave collective creation groups must contend with paradoxical problems: How do artistic leaders protect safety without being safe, and how do these artists get the agreement without the agreement? Perhaps confronting these questions is itself an act of successorship, an expression of legacy. Previous collaborative attempts have revealed the mirage of collectivity. Third wave groups create in a world that is, following historical models of collaboration and group work, somewhat less idealistic. This awareness prompts Kelly Copper, one of the directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to veer away entirely from descriptions of collaboration in her group’s work. Copper prefers to allow space for nonutopian creative tension to arise. Because she codirects Nature Theater with her husband, Pavol Liska, she often fields questions about their creative partnership. In an online interview, Copper identifies the problematic idealism inherent in the topic of their collaboration: “We’ve worked together a very long time. I would say this is a murky area. It’s not always ‘collaborative’—­that’s a sort of hippie word and it sounds prettier than what it is—­it’s often combative. Sometimes we have the same brain, sometimes we don’t” (Copper 2009). Collaboration as a “hippie word” hearkens back to the handicap of its association with the performance collectives of the ’60s and ’70s. In an idealized sense, collaboration suggests a creative methodology that is conflict-­free, although it is clear that creative and personal tension shapes the ongoing histories of collective creation. Nevertheless, “collaboration” persistently implies utopian processes with little relationship to the realities of everyday work. Copper’s comment underscores her contemporary perspective that the “hippie” way of doing and describing is antiquated, and suggests that “collaboration” grasps at a description of process even as it obscures that process, rendering it invisible (or at least misidentified and misunderstood) by making it sound “prettier than what it is” (ibid.). Inevitably, small, practical, and unromantic everyday considerations fuse to become building blocks for the process that in turn marks the performance. In 1976, Lee Breuer wrote an article describing Mabou Mines’ working process. Bluntly, he writes: “Usually two or three people arrive around eleven thirty. Those, usually, whose keys don’t work in the studio lock. Or if they work in the studio lock they don’t work in the front door . . . They get pissed off and go have coffee at the Bini Bon” (Breuer 1976, 29). Minor annoyances, major setbacks, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, these are also part of creative endeavors that take place over long periods. Everyday activity, as Breuer’s process description illustrates, is often fraught with obstacles. This is vividly and bravely recorded, as I will examine further in subsequent chapters, in filmmaker Paulette Douglas’s documentary The Team Makes a

32

Chapter 1

Play, which chronicles the fascinating and fraught journey of the TEAM’s development of Mission Drift (Douglas 2013). Since collaboration seems to reference a process that is obstacle-­free, and therefore impossible, the implications require analysis. Kelly Copper says that collaboration makes her work with Pavol Liska sound “prettier than what it is.” Her statement reorients toward the pedestrian territory of daily life and daily work. As Lee Breuer reminded his reading audience in 1976, a process stretches to contain multitudinous, mundane elements of everyday experience. It might contain lists of good dreams, bad smells, and missed connections. It might prompt memories of locked rehearsal halls. It might be boring. It might involve two directors or multiple collaborators agreeing, disagreeing, and debating. Just as real-­world collaboration isn’t utopian, so combat needn’t equate with negativity. Many of the impossible implications that have grown up along with the word “collaboration” as applied to performance come from pressure to “collaborate” by thinking the same way, or preferring the same thing. As Charlotte Canning’s research unearths, this can guide the group to pursue the least controversial, or least interesting, creative path. More often in partnerships of any kind, including the partnerships within contemporary groups as well as historical collectives, “sometimes we have the same brain, sometimes we don’t” (Copper 2009). Copper’s acknowledgment of this reality sharply defines the necessity of protecting partnerships from homogeneity. Though the tendency to describe collectively created work and artistic partnerships as “collaborative” is deeply embedded in performance vocabulary, including the vocabulary of this investigation, it is important to examine ways in which the term can be unsettling when applied to performance making. In his literature review Collaboration: What Makes It Work, Paul W. Mattessich and his research assistants distinguish among collaboration, coordination, and cooperation as distinct working strategies. One crucial way in which coordination differs from collaboration, according to Mattessich, involves its emphasis on independence and individual contribution (Mattessich, Murray-­Close, and Monsey 2008 [2001]). Applying this distinction to performance making, coordination suggests that there is a space for creative partners to separate themselves while continuing to work together. Simply put, they might combine or coordinate efforts but would not necessarily attempt to perform exactly the same job at the same time. This does not preclude the use of “collaboration” as a description of group work; I persist in referring to “collaborating groups” or “collaborative groups,” by which I mean groups that participate in the collaborative project of pooling time, resources, and ability toward the common goal of making performance according to specific group-­oriented processes. Goat Island, for example, are unfazed by the word’s “hippie” overtones and regularly refer to their work as collaborative.7 However, when we increase the level of detail, looking at the contribution of individuals, “coordination” can provide helpful descriptive

Revising American Myths

33

clarity. “Coordination” reminds us that sharing creative responsibility does not necessarily correlate with sharing creative roles. Coordinating partners or group members are, according to Mattessich’s definition, freer to divide the creative labor and under less pressure to converge toward either consensus or authoritarian dynamics. In Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska form a marriage and a creative partnership, and their website and performance programs list them both as directors. However, they create many of their works “in conversation” with performers, colleagues, family, and friends, acknowledging the many minds and experiences that form their source material.8 As partnering directors, they divide labor in acknowledgment of abilities, temperaments, and their exploration of the inspiring consequences of murkiness and combat. In a 2009 interview, Liska remarks on ways in which their distinct strengths and weaknesses fit together into a mutually beneficial creative process: “I get bored very easily . . . I can make material for five projects in one month, and then Kelly’s job is to make one project out of those five different ideas for a project . . . Kelly is able to look back, take the whole of the material and organize it . . . There’s no hierarchy. I’m restless and that’s not necessarily a virtue” (Lee 2009, 94). As is evident in both Liska’s and Copper’s descriptions of their partnership, idealization is anathema. Each emphasizes the contributions of the other, acknowledges the conflict that arises from their individual impulses, and fuses these into a unique model of a working process that, Liska articulates, allows neither to assume authority over the other. Goat Island, as another model of third wave collective creation, relate uniquely as collaborators, though they also craft processes and performances that resist hierarchies among artists. Though they make performance under the guidance of Lin Hixson as director, Goat Island intentionally resist the modern tradition of director as auteur with creative supremacy. In 1986, the group came together with the mutual desire to explore and create—­they were not assembled by the charisma of a leader or a guru—­and then the group, as Goat Island performer Matthew Goulish recalls, “unanimously elected Lin Hixson director” (Goulish 2000, 9). Programs and press releases list the members of the group alphabetically, seeking to avoid the traditionally superior designation for the director. Hixson’s role as director is just that, a role among other roles within the group. She provides challenges and questions that spark generative responses from the group, and then shapes material with an insightful editorial eye. Each individual member of the group researches, contemplates, remembers, writes, and develops action outside the rehearsal space that then becomes material for the group to work with. As Mark Jeffery, Goat Island performer, writes in Small Acts of Repair, “The process of making a Goat Island performance is a process of connecting physically with appropriated, separated and broken contours or terrains that we carefully join together, six individuals rotating in a core” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 166). The individuality of each member is crucial to Goat Island’s process.

34

Chapter 1

The joining and the development along the way align the voices of six equals into a whole (performance) that is greater than the sum of its parts. Emmanuelle Delpeche, a performer with the contemporary Philadelphia collective creation company Pig Iron, in an interview with scholar Kathryn Syssoyeva, “proposes that what may have changed since the sixties is the dream of a director-­less collective . . . [and] advocates for the role of the director within collective creation” (Syssoyeva 2008, 185). Perhaps rejecting the “dream” is the primary way in which many third wave groups have shifted away from the collaborative practices of their predecessors. Collaboration can imply utopian leaderlessness, an ideal that group theaters of the ’60s and ’70s struggled to embody through collective creation that manufactured “the myth that everyone was equal” (van Itallie 1983, 33). Throughout the second wave, these attempts provoked unsustainable collective practices that often only widened the gulf between leader and performer. Perhaps this project might adumbrate a concept applicable to Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, the TEAM, Nature Theater, Pig Iron, and others: many third wave groups explicitly accept and integrate the role of the director, approaching nonhierarchical process practices by valuing distinct roles as equally important but nonetheless distinct from one another, with no mythmaking required or desired.

Comparing Actor/Audience Dynamics Goat Island, ERS, Nature Theater, and the TEAM create projects that most often maintain boundaries between audience and performers, eschewing direct physical contact or immersion experiments that allow audiences to substantially impact performance structures. Taking the Living Theatre and the Performance Group as two representatives, some second wave American collectives experimented with tactics that sought to jolt spectators out of the complacency of daily life by engaging them in participatory physical acts. In Paradise Now, which the Living Theatre first performed in 1968, the fourth section of the performance consists of “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” during which “spectators are invited to speak out about sexual taboos, to undress, and to join the ‘body pile,’ a gathering onstage of actors and audience groping for each other” (Tytell 1997, 228). This usage of the bodies of the audience in order to manifest expressivity, freedom, and equality was also highly evident in the work of the Performance Group. In 1970, reviewer Dan Isaac commented that Richard Schechner, throughout his directorship of the Performance Group, “recommended the invasion of the private domain, the senses of taste and touch,” citing such hostile examples as the Performance Group’s production of Victims of Duty, which culminated in actors forcibly stuffing bread down the throats of audience members (Isaac 1970, 434). Additionally, Isaac remarks that “sexual assaults upon individual members of the audience is [sic] almost a trademark of Schechner’s work” (ibid.).

Revising American Myths

35

Schechner himself does not dispute this claim, but supports it in the form of the exhaustive details he includes in various writings about the Performance Group, particularly in Environmental Theater. These details explicate Schechner’s fascination with merging the physical and the psychological in an ongoing quest for vulnerability and authenticity in performance. As part of this search, and according to Schechner’s six axioms of environmental theater, the audience, through its spatial and psychological integration into the performance, becomes part of the performance canvas. Assimilated, at least on some level, into the theatrical event, the bodies of spectators transform into commodities that either cooperate with the participation asked/offered/demanded or resist. However, if the performance needs the audience, especially the physical bodies of the audience, in order to develop its action, then with or without the exchange of money, cooperation becomes the currency that allows the product of performance to move forward. This cooperation, then, becomes a resource the performance needs in order to sustain itself. Does this erect a power dynamic of its own? What ethical dilemmas can result from audience participation, especially if—­as the Performance Group was notorious for—­performance makers exercise dominion over the performance space and aggressively seek participation? Power structures, even if levied against the confines of dominant authority, easily reinforce themselves. Richard Gilman, a theater theorist and critic who took part in the Open Theater’s workshop process, describes some aesthetic and atmospheric ramifications of the rule structures imposed by particular forms of participatory theater. In his 1971 review of the Performance Group’s Commune, Gilman writes, “From almost all our recent stage phenomena of performance-­theatre, audience participation, games, and rituals there rises, along with undeniable daring and vigorous search, an atmosphere of surrogate behavior, a sullen or hyperthyroid but always willed esprit, narcissism masquerading as ‘openness’ and exhibitionism as honesty” (Gilman 1971, 326). Gilman offers the possibility of a gaping, and unacknowledged, divide between the performance environment as it is supposed to be and as it is. If performers and audience members must will a certain attitude or response, then the openness and honesty sought by the production is irreparably compromised: constructed response takes the place of spontaneity. Gilman goes on to include an amusing anecdote about a fellow audience member at Commune who became frustrated with Gilman’s note taking during the performance. The audience member becomes part of Gilman’s spectatorship experience, as an individual fallen prey to an intense desire to inhabit the responses sought by the production, and to prove himself the ideal spectator: “He had yakked at dirty words, yelled ‘Wow!’ at a nude scene, twitched with self-­satisfaction on hearing Anti-­Establishment views expressed, and done all this with a beady-­eyed attention to what others in the audience were doing, including me, and with that violent determination to have a good time, to belong and be with it, that reveals no sort of open spirit or

36

Chapter 1

impulse toward the communal but their terrifying absence” (ibid., 329). This description of the eager spectator is almost cartoonish, an audience member consciously displaying the labor required of his role. It is as though this spectator approaches the performance with behaviors and responses drawn from a preestablished script, resurrecting the disciplinary authority that collective creation experiments attempt to dismantle. The “violent” and “terrifying” consequences Gilman references are the consequential oppositions between the relationship the performance is purportedly trying to create with the audience (provoking openness, sincere thought, etc.) and the relationship created (rule-­oriented, boundaries reinforced). In the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM, the audience occupies a less participatory and consequently less ethically ambiguous role. Goat Island might, as in The Lastmaker, configure the audience into tennis court seating, eschewing the proscenium arch but generally eliminating direct contact—­either through gaze, touch, or dialogue—­among performers and spectators. Elevator Repair Service also tends away from environmental staging; both The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928 (2008) and Gatz (2006) utilize standard proscenium actor/audience relationships. Additionally, ERS adds to the framed boundary between performance and audience in both productions by building entire rooms onstage. These rooms function as stages-­within-­a-­stage, enclosing parts of the action and rendering it only partially visible to the audience, or visible only through Plexiglas. Nature Theater of Oklahoma changes the material of audience seating itself: sometimes the audience sits on pillows on the floor, sometimes in steep risers, and sometimes on folding chairs. Nature Theater’s pre–­Life and Times work uses or represents intimate, modest spaces rather than theatrical spaces, with the exception of Poetics: A Ballet Brut, which seats the audience in the upstage section of the stage floor as performer action takes place downstage and in the auditorium seating. Audience interaction tends to be minimal in the work of Nature Theater: a brief touch, a held gaze, a proffered peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Performers break the fourth wall, speaking earnestly to the audience in general rather than to particular audience members. Eye contact is not challenging, seeming to represent brief moments of connection, whatever that turns out to be, rather than instances of provocation. Several of the TEAM’s pieces include such moments as well: in Mission Drift, Miss Atomic uses direct address to the audience to complete a joke, make a connection, recognize mutual humanity. In terms of spectatorship, where does this leave these third wave groups, in comparison to earlier models? In Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, Carrie Lambert-­Beatty acknowledges that, in contrast to happenings, Fluxus performances, and radical theater performances, “Rainer and her peers seemed content to work—­or were intent on working—­within the convention of watchers, seated and silent, with moving, active performers before them” (Lambert-­Beatty 2008, 13). This is not, Lambert-­Beatty makes clear,

37

Revising American Myths

Figure 1.2. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, 2008. Left to right, Ben Williams, Susie Sokol, Scott Shepherd. Photo copyright © and courtesy of EMPAC.

an argument for interpreting conservatism in Rainer’s work, but is rather an opportunity for recognizing that “spectatorship as such was the social phenomenon to be, not negated, but explored” (ibid., 14). Rainer identified the audience as the nucleus around which to build the gaze of the performer. Perhaps, then, these four third wave groups with their similar “convention[s] of watchers” explore the nature and stakes of spectatorship. Whether by erecting clear plastic walls, engaging deeply in the task at hand, or inviting the audience to briefly share a gaze, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM draw attention to fixed differences between performer and spectator. Perhaps this performer/audience relationship has more in common with postmodern dance of the 1960s than with participatory radical theater of the same era, as it foregrounds the individuality of both performer and spectator through formalist aesthetic practices, thereby personalizing the performer/ spectator relationship as one worthy of both scrutiny and ethical treatment.

Body and Task as Obstacle While the didacticism of radical collective performance practice is a frequent point of resistance for a host of third wave groups, practices of postmodern dance, including exploring task-­based choreography and untrained or

38

Chapter 1

amateur dancing bodies, emerge with regularity. Increasingly, contemporary experimental performance puts conventional delineations between theater and dance under review—­by either seeking to erase them, expose them, or reveal them as absurd. Goat Island refer to their work simply as performance, and create complex montages of task-­ based physical movement, static images, and fragmented speech. Elevator Repair Service uses moments of choreography as interrupters in established theatrical worlds, opportunities for gathering and coalescing the energetic pacing of the group. Nature Theater of Oklahoma stages their devised Poetics: A Ballet Brut as a “ballet” performed by nondancers and composed of familiar, everyday gestures. The group’s Pursuit of Happiness (2016) is a collaboration with the Slovenian dance company EN-­KNAP Group, and No President (2018) includes a corps de ballet. The TEAM collaborates to develop gestures that they, sometimes with group members acting explicitly as choreographers, order into danced sequences that explode with infectious esprit. Dance, as it appears throughout the work of these four groups, is again and again produced by largely untrained dancing bodies. Without formal training, the quality of movement is distinct. Less fluid, less precise, the untrained dancing body is not the product of, as Sally Ann Ness describes, the repeated “dance gestures that mold, carve, and otherwise impress their way into ligaments, muscles, and even bones” of a professional dancing body (Ness 2008, 6). That is, untrained bodies have not been inscribed with physiological pathways formed by continuous effort over years of practice. Rather, as I will explore further in chapter 3, the untrained body is an obstacle that shapes performance through the performer’s physical limitations rather than through her virtuosity. The exploration of the amateur and untrained can be, however, as provoking to the ontology of theater as “hiccupping in choreographed movement” can be to critics of dance, as André Lepecki contends (Lepecki 2006, 1). In Exhausting Dance, Lepecki writes that the assumption of an assailable bind between movement and dance is so fixed that when contemporary choreographers experiment with “hiccupping” in their work, critics fear that “it is dance’s very future that appears menaced by the eruption of kinesthetic stuttering” (ibid.). Similarly, some performance critics assess third wave work that foregrounds the untrained body—­particularly the untrained dancing body—­as effectively an artistic dead end. Writing of Goat Island, spectator and performance scholar Ryan Platt despairs of any aesthetic merit to The Lastmaker. He writes, “Its use of movement was astoundingly amateur: blocky, clumsy, and uncoordinated ‘dance’ sequences” (Platt 2009). For Platt, amateurism is an indictment, an admission of inability that can only be labeled “dance” with reluctance. For Shawn-­Marie Garrett, the awkward dancing of ERS performers during Cab Legs (1997) is equally disappointing: “They perform simple, repetitive movements, crossing and uncrossing their arms in sync  .  .  . What happened to virtuosity?” (Garrett 2001, 46).

Revising American Myths

39

Figure 1.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, 2008. Pictured: Mark Jeffery. Photo copyright © Hugo Glendinning.

Virtuosity is, in the aesthetics of the amateur and the untrained, not a function of physical ability. Rather, this approach to dance requires the audience member to retrain her focus away from expectations of apparent technique and toward the revelations of imperfection and difference. These revelations, which cycle through this investigation, offer opportunities to consider ways in which both “imperfection” and “difference” suggest political ramifications. Rather than emphasizing untrained dance as a display of lack or absence, scholar Adrian Heathfield offers an interpretation of Goat Island’s movement that invites audiences to recognize vulnerability and awkwardness as aesthetic traits. He interprets Goat Island’s movement as “a kind of strategic humiliation, exposing their awkwardness, their vulnerability, their limits . . . [the performers,] necessarily, become more autonomous in their strategies for coping, in improvising un-­prescribed physical adjustments in order to catch

40

Chapter 1

up to speed as they fall behind” (quoted in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 77). Untrained bodies, according to Heathfield, reveal an unmaskable performing experience. The task before the performers is so difficult that they cannot escape the lived moment of the attempt. The performers are thrown off balance, they achieve, they falter. Precariousness, as the aesthetics resulting from explorations of untrained dancing bodies, merges with performance demeanors that grow from task-­ based movement. In a 1992 interview, Lin Hixson of Goat Island remarks, “I think we’re influenced particularly by the work done at the Judson Church in the 1960s, where there was a certain respect for pedestrian movement—­ like Yvonne Rainer pushing a vacuum cleaner as dance” (ibid., 69). Task-­like, pedestrian movement does not just comprise the content of a particular piece, but, if the performer pursues the task with unwavering commitment, actually shapes the demeanor of the performer. That is, tasks can generate an acting style, or a dancing style. Matthew Goulish, Goat Island performer and cofounder, describes the process of completing a set task in performance: “A lot of what we do is organized around a task or a series of tasks, and the way to deal with those tasks—­I’m talking as a performer now—­is with a feeling of urgency . . . In performance we become possessed by the spirit of the action, by the impossibility of doing it correctly” (ibid., 70). “Impossibility” shapes the quality of movement, and also demands a level of focus from the performer that equally contributes to the demeanor or manner of performance delivery. It is important to establish that this performance demeanor, an acting or performing style, can arise in response to task-­based obstacles. Radiohole, a contemporary New York collective, explore compelling moments when performers close their eyes, paint open eyes on their eyelids with black-­and-­ white makeup, and perform physical actions while sightless. The group’s recognizable aesthetic recurs in multiple projects. Sightlessness, here, functions as an obstacle that influences the manner of the performers’ movement. Other task-­based work abounds in third wave group work: Goat Island include many complex choreographic sequences that might require chairs to be lifted at precise angles, according to a particular rhythm. Elevator Repair Service, perhaps partly inspired by the Wooster Group’s tight integration of technical paraphernalia (video, sound, light), sometimes prompts actors to re-­create—­as precisely as possible—­dances from videos and incredibly complicated group movement in alignment with strict sound scores. Depending on the project, the directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma might assign difficult accents to their performers or require the performers, as untrained dancers, to memorize complex grids of choreography, “just to give them something to work against” (Lee 2009, 89). While the use of obstacle in performance has myriad aesthetic ramifications, choreographers of the 1960s describe obstacle as a tool for focusing the energy and attention of the performer. Yvonne Rainer had her dancers “interact with objects like floppy mattresses that were heavy or awkward

Revising American Myths

41

enough to ensure that performers manipulating them couldn’t embellish or accent the activity in any way” (Lambert-­Beatty 2008, 5). In an interview with fellow dancer, choreographer, and former teacher Anna Halprin, Rainer questions Halprin’s exploration of task-­based performance.9 Referencing her 1962 performance Five-­Legged Stool, Halprin replies: “Doing a task created an attitude that would bring the movement quality into another kind of reality. It was devoid of a certain kind of introspection” (Kaplan 1995, 83). This lack of introspection suggests that the performer must focus her energy and attention outward, resisting self-­consciousness and releasing individual subjectivity. This opens up amateurish or “awkward” movement and moments in performance as moments that arise from extreme difficulty, even impossibility. It also explores the beauty of functionality, of a body engaged in absolute commitment to a physical task. The relationship to earlier movement experiments resides in the level of the performer’s fidelity to the task in the moment, and to the task’s ability to stage the performer’s awkwardness or vulnerability. Mark Franko’s discussion of expressivism and chance procedure in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics provides additional perspectives regarding the development of performance demeanor in formalist practice. Franko identifies a unique expressivism formerly present in dancers of Merce Cunningham’s chance-­ based choreography, despite Cunningham’s insistence that performers divest themselves of emotional expression in favor of absolute concentration on the movement of their particular body in space. Franko argues that this expressivism gradually drained away over the many years of Cunningham’s choreographic career as dancers became accustomed to chance procedure, and consequently were able to overcome chance as obstacle.10 Franko writes, “The Cunningham dancer of the eighties and early nineties does not manifest the detached subjectivity in the way his or her predecessors did  .  .  . [and] is now too frequently a body devoid of intention, agency, and interiority, a body primed to mirror the dictates of chance” (Franko 1995, 81). Franko’s analysis of the “detached subjectivity” of earlier Cunningham dancers suggests that there can be a certain quality to task-­ based work that emerges when the performer is not “primed” (ibid.). Even if the performing body is virtuosic in some physical way, as Cunningham’s dancers generally were, this body still has the potential to retain subjective expression through uncertainty. In this case, uncertainty becomes a kind of magic spark that ignites what Franko calls the “detached subjectivity” of Cunningham’s works pre-­1980. For Cunningham’s dancers, this would not have resulted from lack of training, but rather from the dancing body’s unfamiliarity with certain formalist choreographic processes. Therefore, the demeanor of detached subjectivity that accompanies fidelity to task requires continual renewal through strategies that invite an intense level of presence in the performer, a sensitivity to the challenges posed by change. Introducing obstacle—­whether encountered through unfamiliarity, physical barriers, or untrained bodies—­is one way to stage the performer’s attention.

42

Chapter 1

Toward New Traditions These subtle instances of nonhierarchical process and performance structures, many of which reflect in third wave work, set the contemporary group processes and performance aesthetics of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM apart from those of their radical second wave predecessors. Simultaneously, these groups reinvigorate multiple principles and practices of postmodern dance of that same period. Using these four groups as four points that together map a plane, the landscape of third wave collective creation reveals itself as in conversation with, but not overcome by, the weight of earlier collaborative work. While these four groups do not use the radical and highly visible strategies of ’60s and ’70s collectives, they nonetheless work from and are inspired by tangled histories of unsustainable utopian attempts. Consequently, third wave groups have renewed potential to be conscious of sustainability, and to devise through both coordinating and collaborating principles that keep oppositions very much in mind. If there is a general aesthetic (informed by histories of collective creation) that can apply to the work of these four unique contemporary models, it is an aesthetic that embraces complexity and invites unresolved contradiction. Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM balance collective creation and individual contribution in preparation for performance while also mining the possibilities of imbalance and precariousness. Resulting performances do not necessarily communicate didactic stances. Rather, each group crafts distinct aesthetics and explorations that invoke boundarylessness within carefully constructed performance scores. This boundarylessness comes into being as these groups strip away nonhierarchical displays, and substitute a horizontal plane of collaborative creative potential to replace the verticality of layered authorities. Aesthetically, this consists of dismantling hierarchical divisions among media (dance, theater), purpose (activist, aesthetic), and performing bodies (untrained/amateur, virtuosic) toward a subtle, but nonetheless passionately invoked and ethically rendered, performance of collective creation in the 2000s.

Chapter 2

Staging Everyday Economies

The everyday is the space in which dialectical movement advances or comes to a halt, in an unpredictable blend of opaqueness and transparency, of clear-­sightedness and blindness, of determinability and transience. —­Henri Lefebvre (2008 [2002], 10)

The conjunction of economy and everydayness is a thematic meeting point that shows up in several works by Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM, a locality that ushers in political engagement. This is most evident when examining processes and aesthetics that contend with notions of employment. For many contemporary artists, and notably for members of groups like Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM, who live and create within high-­cost urban landscapes, “having work” (employment) goes hand in hand with “making work” (performance). For ERS and Nature Theater in particular, this reflects in projects that perform that duality of identity: office employees and performance makers. The tense reality of the need to make money directly impacts performance making, a relationship that is under-­interrogated yet clear. Even as vast numbers of artists, particularly experimental artists, cannot rely on their artistic practice as their sole means of financial support, performance scholars rarely attempt to excavate the multiplicity of labor-­based identities that characterize the artist’s hustle. There are many possible explanations for why work for money recedes from conversations about artistic creation. There may be reluctance on the part of artists themselves, perhaps due to stigma associated with being unable to support oneself through one’s creative practice. Toward another pole, such conversations could reveal the privilege of artists whose familial wealth underwrites their creative process, allowing for experimentation, risk, and time, protected from urgent fears of eviction, for example. Perhaps making a living simply does not fascinate, is by definition embedded in the colorless pattern of the everyday, easily dismissed and overlooked as separate from the performance work it enables. These possibilities 43

44

Chapter 2

are, however, inseparable from the crucial query that undergirds theories of everyday experience: Whose everyday? While creative work can, and often does, develop through methodologies and within environments that sharply contrast with one’s day job, here I consider the two as fundamentally interrelated. Their very contrast illuminates two complementary economies whose means of exchange is primarily performative: capitalism upheld by the role of the worker bee employee within a bureaucracy, and the economy of performance constructed by groups who use that role as source material for creative exploration. At different points over the lifetime of their respective groups, members of the organizations discussed here have sought temporary employment, and conspicuously office employment, in order to support the vocation of performance making. It is unsurprising, then, that imagery and experiences from office employment thread through some of the creative work itself. This evident thematic exploration is vividly present in Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz and Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No Dice. In these pieces, “work” economies entangle, making use of one in order to construct a second. This results in a complex relationship with the everyday, in which performativity—­as it relates to the role of the employee—­is the center of productivity. In these works by Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service, new economic structures play out on both concrete and symbolic levels. In Gatz and No Dice, both groups dismantle the supposed labor-­product exchange that takes place within the existing office environment, only to restore productivity to the role of office employee by reorienting her tasks toward the product of performance. This results in performance that differs considerably from activist performance strategies that communicate political engagement through readily available content. In contrast, these two examples illustrate that contemporary collective creation groups have the potential to create performance that is implicitly politically engaged insofar as the methodologies of creation—­for example, sourcing themes and images from labor tensions drawn from the everyday economy—­are themselves politically significant.

Employment as Everyday Work Unlike labor, with its latent imagery of the effort of the body, employment is a relational term. It situates the worker as employee within a stratosphere of status: hiring, firing, producing, seeming to produce, all in service of keeping one’s job. Two distinct definitions for “employment,” both of which relate to performance projects, persist throughout its etymological development. The first defines employment in the modern sense, “to make use of, apply,” and the second, which dates from the Latin implicaire, situates the term as “involve, be connected with” (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d., s.v. “employ”). These definitions correspond to the two performative processes members

Staging Everyday Economies

45

of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater engage in throughout their experience of everyday work. Employees, and office employees in particular, are subject to the demands of their employers, who “make use of, apply” the ability and the time of the worker (ibid.). In contrast, performance makers involved in collective creation pursuits, generally speaking, attempt to construct dynamics that, in place of the employee-­employer relationship, do not consist of one individual making use of another. Instead artistic collaborators intermingle over the course of a process, toward making performance whose processual task is to “involve, be connected with” (ibid.). These two definitions of employment, which reference two different relational (and economic) structures, unite under the umbrella term “work,” which can apply either to the creative process or to the day job. Perhaps, then, in order to clarify the performance economies prompted by structure, there are germane connections among work in general and philosophies of the everyday. Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life outlines the perpetuating economic cycles of “work” in everyday life, claiming that these cycles halt the “dialectical movement” that is possible, but paradoxically difficult, within the obscuring power of the everyday (Lefebvre 2008 [2002], 10). Lefebvre advances his critique from a sociological perspective, assessing class-­based social structures, imbedded behaviors that form ritualized social practice, and the social and individual alienation that results from unexamined, socially formed thought and action. His critique does not indict the everyday as such, but rather challenges prevailing attitudes toward (and unconsciousness within) the everyday, as trends that suppress dialectical engagement. Lefebvre describes his project as approaching a theory of needs, a positive program that seeks to liberate actual human needs from the socially conditioned perception of necessities. He writes of necessity in modern life as a kind of circular opiate, saying: In the realm of necessity, human needs became degraded. They represented “the sad necessities of everyday life.” People had to eat, drink, find clothes . . . and so they had to work. But people whose only reason for working is to keep body and soul together have neither the time nor the inclination for anything else. So they just keep on working, and their lives are spent just staying alive. This, in a nutshell, has been the philosophy of everyday life—­and it still is. (Lefebvre 2008 [1991], 173)

Lefebvre describes the resulting, corrupted “philosophy of everyday life” as hinging on a cyclical attitude toward work: live to work, and work to live. In the twenty-­first-­century climate, more than half a century removed from Lefebvre’s original writing in the 1940s, this persists as a familiar mantra. “Working to live” represents a basic exchange common to the everyday experience of lower and middle classes: one trades goods and services within an economic system, only to find oneself on the fringes of that system. Clinging

46

Chapter 2

to the fringes, the only way to maintain one’s grip is to continue to work. Yet, Lefebvre suggests that this economic system of work, which only pretends to meet human needs, is in fact a product of “the realm of necessity, [in which] human needs became degraded” (ibid.). Presumably, “working to live” enfolds the worker’s action into a system of representation that clouds her ability to recognize and respond to “need.” Instead, necessity—­a dishonest simulacrum of actual need—­takes its place. Need as a tool for determining reasonable exchange remains out of reach. If “necessity” persists as a representation of need, it becomes possible to imagine ways in which the entire everyday system of work forges economic frameworks reliant upon symbolic exchange. Writing of Oscar Wilde, literary scholar Carolyn Lesjak indicates Wilde’s espousal of an economy of pleasure that constitutes “an expanded notion of needs and use which privileges pleasure and the imagination over utility” (Lesjak 2000, 180). Wilde suggests that needs and use may not equate with utility, a concept Lefebvre gestures toward through his claim that the “necessities” of life as defined in everyday philosophy alienate the worker from her actual human needs. There seem to be important similarities between “necessity” according to Lefebvre, and “utility” according to Wilde. Both, it seems, threaten one’s ability to recognize “need” within the symbolically based economic structures of the everyday. For both Lefebvre and Wilde, “need” seems to involve essentials of human subsistence that are existential rather than socially conditioned. Additionally, both suggest that economies resulting from exclusive fidelity to necessity (Lefebvre) and utility (Wilde) are rife with the insidiousness of self-­perpetuation. This self-­perpetuating realm of necessity, while engaged in an ongoing cycle of movement (work, eat, work, drink, work, clothe) results in a philosophy of the everyday that opposes imagination. Imagination implies expansive movement and boundless possibility, while the cycle of everyday philosophy enfolds the role of worker into symbolic stasis. Individuals must work to stay alive, and spend their lives guided by that cyclical goal. To stay alive, in this model of everyday life, is not dialectical movement but maintenance. To “work” in the context of Lefebvre’s argument is to enable the perpetuating cycle of more work. In this sense, work is a process of exchange that neutralizes either forward or backward motion. It establishes motionlessness. This motionlessness is the fuel that allows the alienation (from need) instigated by everyday philosophy to continue. Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma stage this motionlessness, the sum total of cyclical everyday work, by creating performance that displays a specific kind of everyday work as a cycle composed by the everyday role of (temporary) office employee. The temporary office employee is a cog in the larger machinery of everyday work whose position is always tenuous: replaceable, disposable, she is by definition subject to constant change. In order to “work to live,” the temporary employee must remain in a constant state of instability, moving from job to job with no

Staging Everyday Economies

47

security, health care benefits, or sick leave, and with limited union representation. Union representation in particular poses a complex problem for the temporary employee: most work for staffing agencies, and are siphoned through the staffing agency to specific companies. The staffing agency ultimately controls the wages of the temporary employee, while the specific company controls hours and overtime. For example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled in 2001 that temporary employees working for Gourmet Award would be covered, with limits, by the provisions of existing union contracts that previously applied only to regular employees (Tasini 2001). However, these provisions did not apply to wages, lasted only for the brief term the temporary employee remained at Gourmet Award, and had no effect on the employer-­employee relationship between the temporary worker and the staffing agency. It was only in 2015 that the NLRB granted temporary workers the potential to exercise union rights, through a ruling that clarified joint-­employer status (Office of Public Affairs 2015). When ERS and Nature Theater display office work, they provide structure for the unstructured: they organize experiences and environments that impact, and sometimes emerge from, temporary employees. While this does not substitute for union representation, an option that was unavailable to temporary office workers in the first decade of the twenty-­first century, ERS and Nature Theater nonetheless make visible experiences of replaceable workers. That inherent replaceability, a defining characteristic of the temporary employee role, in turn gives rise to artistic practices that resist the symbolic motionlessness of everyday philosophy governing work. The number of American experimental ensemble groups, and collective creation groups especially, increases into the 2000s. Many of these groups, including Nature Theater of Oklahoma, generate revenue by touring and/or by accepting commissions abroad. Touring requires that, if individual artists are unable to make a full-­time living as performers and performance makers, they capitalize on the flexibility of temporary employment. In a 2011 workshop, Jake Margolin of the TEAM mentioned the wide array of temporary jobs he has taken in concurrence with his creative work with the TEAM: “If you’re a temp, you can pick up or put down your job whenever you like; you always have to be free to go on tour.”1 There are, however, certainly exceptions. Susie Sokol, a founding member of Elevator Repair Service who has performed in nearly all the group’s performances to date, is a second-­grade teacher. Her permanent position, however, may result in the group’s temporary employment of actors to take Sokol’s place when her work schedule does not permit her to travel with individual shows. To be “free to go on tour,” as Margolin describes it, is a freedom that comes with a price: economic entanglement in a work role designed more for the fiscal imperative of companies than for employee rights. Throughout 2010 and 2011, the New York Times published multiple feature articles on the status of temporary workers in the contemporary economy, all

48

Chapter 2

of which acknowledge the extraordinary increase in the temporary employment sector as growth that opposes the employment goals of most temporary workers. A survey by Staffing Industry Analysts, a research firm, found that “68 percent of all temporary workers are seeking permanent employment” (New York Times 2010). Despite the fact that most temporary employees see their temporary status as such, the growth of the contemporary U.S. economy makes moves toward permanent positions unlikely, at least in the immediate future. The Times article notes that in November 2010, temporary jobs “accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers, according to the Labor Department” (ibid.). While the percentage of temporary jobs steadily climbed throughout the U.S. recession of the 2000s, such jobs have been a significant means for companies to grow revenue for decades. In 1997, the New York Times wrote that “growth has been so explosive that the biggest firms providing temporary workers—­like Kelly Services and Manpower International—­now employ more people than some of the largest corporations in the country. Manpower, with 750,000 on its rolls, has more employees than General Motors, AT&T and IBM combined” (Chartrand 1997). The demand for temporary workers is, for employing companies, cost-­based. One human resources director explains the equation, and her preference for hiring temporary workers, saying, “An actual employee with benefits costs more than a temp or contract worker” (New York Times 2009). If a temporary worker is not an “actual employee,” then what is she? Evidently, she is on the fringes of the workforce even while her labor fully participates. If her time is less valuable, does this make her somehow less real? Whereas the flexibility of temporary work may appeal to the immediate needs of lower-­budget touring theater artists, this flexibility represents an imperfect exchange: temporary employees do not have a stake in their employing companies in the long term, and those companies have no stake in them. This leaves theater artists who seek temporary employment when their performance groups do not have the financial resources to permanently employ them on salary or to provide health care benefits without medical security. This uncertainty and vulnerability are hardly the exclusive purview of creative practitioners. The ontology of the performer’s body, however, renders that body a specialized asset/instrument that can become uninsurable—­unable to access benefits afforded to full-­time employees—­as a consequence of its own practice. Focusing on the condition of the experimental performance maker only emphasizes the inherent dichotomy between the economy of temporary work and the economy of collectively created performance: even as temporary employment engenders and relies on constant change, it also fixes the (isolated) employee in the immediate moment. Isolation, a consequence of impermanent employment, is in many ways an economic imperative of Lefebvre’s described “philosophy of everyday life” within “the realm of necessity” (Lefebvre 2008 [1991], 15). To be isolated is

Staging Everyday Economies

49

to be cut off from the human need to experience social contact and partnership. In this way, collective creation practices create an economy founded on methodologies that restore and respond to this need. Viewed from a different perspective, isolation removes the individual from the sphere of everyday influence, even as it results from temporary work roles instituted by the everyday cyclical economy. Perhaps, within the imposed role of the temporary office worker, “the philosophy of the everyday” imposes isolation that, in turn, allows individual employees to excavate a revolutionary space.

The Performative Economy of the Work Role Significantly, Lefebvre’s paradigm of work enables the work role either to substantiate or to resist the lure of everyday stasis through conceptions of the role as performance. He writes: The waiter in a café is not playing at being a waiter. He is one. And he is not one. He is not selling his time (for working and living) in exchange for the role of a waiter. And it is precisely when he is playing at being a waiter . . . in front of his costumers that he is no longer a waiter; by playing himself he transcends himself. Moreover, it is certain that a worker does not play at being a worker and could not transcend himself if he did. (Lefebvre 2008 [1991], 15)

Within this passage, seeming contradictions illustrate the dialectical tension with the concept of the everyday role: the waiter is not playing, yet also is. For the waiter, “by playing himself he transcends himself,” yet the worker “does not play at being a worker and could not transcend himself if he did” (ibid.). The role is evidently something to play, something composed of a variety of tasks that are familiar to the social world, yet the role persists as what we simultaneously are and are not. Transcendence, Lefebvre seems to suggest, arises not from “playing” as inauthentic expression, but as authentic enactment of being. The waiter is not authentic by “playing at being a waiter” but by “playing himself” (ibid.). Both potentialities exist within the work role, and both—­the actual and the enacted—­emerge as products of performative exchange. These potentialities indicate ways in which the employee as role player can participate in discourses that expose everyday economies even while remaining firmly entrenched in the performativity of the work task. While the waiter “is not selling his time (for working and living) in exchange for the role of a waiter,” as Lefebvre suggests, and incidentally inhabits that role as an unintended but unavoidable consequence of exchange, perhaps there are other consequences of that exchange that do fall within the dominion of the worker’s authority (ibid.). Consider the worker as role player engaged in two

50

Chapter 2

summary tasks: to objectively complete the action demanded by the work task, and to subjectively orient himself in relation to the role. Kristin Ross’s 1983 interview with Lefebvre provides a relevant example. In this interview, Lefebvre recounts an anecdote passed on to him by Michèle Bernstein, a member of the Situationists, concerning her work life: H. L.: Michèle Bernstein had come up with a very clever way to make money, or at least a bit of money . . . She said that she did horoscopes for horses, which were published in racing magazines. It was extremely funny. She determined the date of birth of the horses and did their horoscope in order to predict the outcome of the race. And I think there were racing magazines that published them and paid her. K. R.: So the Situationist slogan “Never work” didn’t apply to women? H. L.: Yes it did, because this wasn’t work. They didn’t work; they managed to live without working to quite a large extent—­of course, they had to do something. To do horoscopes for race horses, I suppose, wasn’t really work. (Ross and Lefebvre 1997, 70) For the Situationists, to work was to participate in the society of the spectacle, and therefore to contribute to the self-­manufacturing spectacular economy, a phenomenon I discuss in relation to speed in subsequent chapters. By way of challenging that economy, dismantling and confronting it, Situationist values advocated stepping outside the spectacle’s project of self-­manufacture and perpetuation. Work, which placed the time and the labor of the individual in service of the spectacular economy, was to be avoided. Hence Kristin Ross’s reminder of “the Situationist slogan ‘Never work’” (ibid.). However, Lefebvre asserts that Michèle Bernstein’s foray into horoscopes for racehorses “wasn’t really work” but was rather “a clever way to make money” (ibid.). This distinction reinforces the dual role of the everyday worker. On one level, Bernstein did indeed work: she adopted the role of horoscope writer by performing the tasks of writing and selling racehorse horoscopes. However, in terms of the secondary role of worker that relies on the intention of the individual, Bernstein did not participate in the self-­perpetuating cycle of working to live. Instead, as Lefebvre claims, Bernstein was consciously aware of her manipulation of the product of the horoscope, and through the horoscope of larger economic systems. Further, Bernstein sought a “clever way to make money” that was as far from the capitalist ideal as possible. Instead, she, like the other Situationists, “managed to live without working to quite a large extent” but, like every member of society, in order to live “of course, they had to do something” (ibid.). That “something” involved taking on a work role in one sense, while manipulating the secondary social role prompted by intention. In place of the cyclically constructed role of “worker,” Bernstein substituted a different role reliant on revolutionary ideals. Within Lefebvre’s concept of the everyday work role, there is always a secondary role that

Staging Everyday Economies

51

correlates to intention. Within that secondary role, which either supports or resists the pull of everyday cyclical economies of work, the individual encounters the everyday internally as “space in which dialectical movement advances or comes to a halt” (Lefebvre 2008 [2002], 10). This space is important, concerning the concept of everyday work as it appears in contemporary performance, because it asserts the potential for the individual to make use of the everyday work role in order to produce expressions ideologically opposed to the dominant everyday philosophy. Situationists describe this process as detournement, which Guy Debord defines as “the bringing together of two independent expressions, [which] supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy” (Debord and Wolman 1989, 9). This investigation offers a perspective on the consequences of detournement applied to the social role, in which the role intended by everyday society (that is, the role as an expression of what is socially familiar) combines with the intentions of the individual worker. This creates a product that is unintended by society, that gains “greater efficacy” through its status as product, arising from the misuse of the performative economy of social roles (ibid.). For example, Bernstein’s horoscope writing, as Lefebvre illustrates in the 1983 interview, becomes product-­as-­story. As the story is told to Lefebvre and then recycled through the decades, it transforms into a performed anecdote. In addition to the horoscope as product, Bernstein creates a more enduring product that measures value in terms of the laughter that accompanies her (and others’) tales of irreverent employment habits. This new product is ideologically opposed to the everyday work economy even as it replicates itself ad infinitum. The records of racehorse horoscopes may disappear, but the delight of the anecdote, which communicates a lasting resistance toward the motionless cycle of working to live, is infinitely replicable. This suggests that though roles of any kind are inherently performative, a claim Lefebvre continually returns to throughout Critique of Everyday Life, additional layers of performativity—­and efficacy—­surface when the role of the worker consists of two key components: task and intention. The secondary aspect of the role of worker as intention-­based formulates ways in which an individual’s status as worker enables her to construct a performative economy that makes use of the work task in service of a new product. This circles back to the project of several of the contemporary performance groups under discussion here: to reorient their roles as employees in service of performance that employs the role of the worker in the philosophy of the everyday.

Employment as Foundational Imagery With the performative and revolutionary potential of the work role in mind, the stakes increase when marking employment-­based imagery that filters through the work of ERS and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Employment

52

Chapter 2

dialectics emerge at the outset, embedded in the names of both groups. “Elevator Repair Service” derives from the results of a career aptitude test the group’s director, John Collins, took as a young man. Collins recalls, “The career predictions that came out were pretty hilarious and included Elevator Repair Man” (Bailes 2002, 196). Transformed into the name of a performance group, instead of indicating what the group offers (elevator repair), the name stands in for what for they won’t, or don’t, do. As a joke passed down from Collins’s personal history, “Elevator Repair Service” operates similarly to Bernstein’s horoscope/work anecdote. Through repetition, every time members of Elevator Repair Service tell the story of how the group came by its name, they renew Collins’s initial refusal to participate in the economy symbolized by the career aptitude test. The “pretty hilarious” joke resists the everyday system that seeks to bestow social work roles, without taking either passion or preference into account (ibid.). For Elevator Repair Service, employment is irrevocably tied to that system. In the case of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, “employment” is a seemingly beautiful promise the group borrows from Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika. In Amerika, protagonist Karl Rossman encounters a poster advertising employment in the Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. New York’s Nature Theater then quotes this poster on their website: “Personnel is being hired for the Theatre in Oklahoma! The Great Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you! It’s calling you today only! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place!” (Kafka 2004 [1996], 202). For Rossman, as for New York Nature Theater founders Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, the poster’s charm is in its claim that it will give everyone, even Rossman—­a recent immigrant with no employment prospects—­a job. However, behind the inclusive assurances of the advertisement, employment within Kafka’s Nature Theater is a utopian promise the novel never realizes. Rather, Rossman’s journey concludes in flurry of bureaucratic headaches: he has difficulty navigating his way into the hiring center, receives contradictory information from hiring personnel, fills out endless forms, partakes in a series of seemingly meaningless interviews, and finally finds himself on a train bound for the still-­unseen Great Nature Theater. Kafka seems to suggest that the everyday and the utopian conceptions of living and belonging are irreparably intertwined. To gain entry into the Arcadia of the Nature Theater, job seekers must first encounter its antithesis in the erratic, inefficient, and inevitable red tape of the everyday. This is the paradox of finding work: in its ideal form, a job is a beautiful thing. However, the bureaucracy of employment and the materiality of navigating a large company are another, and far less idealized, matter. This dichotomy is analogous to performance-­making processes enacted toward performance. Process, so often fraught with conflict as well as mundane details and obstacles, leads into a compressed (and

Staging Everyday Economies

53

controlled) performance. Borrowing Kafka’s symbolic imagery, process is the everyday red tape, and performance is a result rendered in ideal (or at least consciously composed) form. One cannot exist without the other. Moving from employment as a concept that informs their names, both Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma produce performance that interrogates the nature of both idealized and everyday employment within the office job of the temporary worker. Elevator Repair Service’s Highway to Tomorrow (1999) stages an interpretation of The Bacchae interspersed with found objects. They use, as New York Magazine describes, “no more props than you might find in your cubicle” (New York Magazine 2000). ERS’s Gatz (2006) takes place in a more literally rendered white-­collar atmosphere; performer Scott Shepherd reads The Great Gatsby aloud, word for word, as he maneuvers through the paper-­pushing tasks required at his shabby office. Nature Theater’s No Dice (2007) lifts its text from actual phone conversations with friends and family who were asked to describe their day jobs. The group then edited these conversations into a quirky montage that meditates on the symbiotic relationship between the task of the office worker and that of the artist. Both Gatz and No Dice meditate on office work as labor organized in accordance with at least one unspoken goal (from the perspective of the employee): to achieve the appearance of productivity. When Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater use temporary employment as source material, they develop creative responses to the unique economy of the office job: the primary goal of the employee is to keep one’s job, and in order to keep one’s job, one must seem busy. This posits employment as a part of an essentially performative exchange, in addition to the performative aspects that accompany any role within social life. The task of the employee is to convince her audience (employer) that she is working, which refigures her level of productivity as a consequence of perception.

Employment as an Act of Adaptation In order to create the perception of productivity, the temporary employee must continuously adapt to new conditions and new audiences as she moves from job to job. This ability, to adapt one’s performance to the given circumstances, is an essential skill that ultimately renders the temporary employee replaceable. Adaptation and adjustment are also indispensable qualities for contemporary collective creation groups, but they are more likely to orient these skills toward a group’s ability to endure over time. The state of the temporary worker is to be impermanent; the task of the performance group is to achieve sustainability. Nature Theater of Oklahoma seeks sustainability through their adaptation to everyday limitations, to the obstacles imposed by their financial

54

Chapter 2

instability. For example, the performance economy of Poetics developed in response to the restricted budget for the show. Codirector Pavol Liska describes his attitude toward obstacles, and his philosophy that obstacles provide transformative properties that feed into performance, saying, “I wanted to figure out how to deal with everything as material and not obstacles—­to use everything as creative material” (quoted in Benson 2006, 44). Liska’s philosophy helps to construct a performance economy that appropriates and adapts practical limitations into the fabric of performance. Most rehearsals for Poetics, for example, took place in a New York apartment, as the company could not afford a formal rehearsal space. The highly physical nature of the show did not lend itself to a sedate rehearsal atmosphere, and it wasn’t long before a downstairs neighbor complained of the noise. Unable to move their rehearsals to another location, the group adapted by staging a segment of Poetics as a dance performed in rolling office chairs. The chairs, symbols of office activity, evidently appeased the cranky neighbor. Likewise, Kelly Copper describes the inclusion of particular props and costume pieces as a result of budgetary constraints. The choreography of Poetics makes use of a variety of consumables, including pizza, cigarettes, and coffee. Eventually seamlessly integrated into the urban-­inspired gestural choreography of the piece, these objects also met practical desires of the performers: rehearsal overlapped with dinner, as well as with coffee and cigarette breaks (Copper 2008a). Jen Harvie identifies this collapse of processual limitations into aesthetic imperatives, and claims it as a common trend for many contemporary groups. She writes that companies “highlight how each show is literally made by the conditions of its production—­the dimensions and found furniture of rehearsal spaces, the limits of rehearsal time, the challenges of international touring, the genuine social dynamics within the company” (Harvie 2010, 13). In Poetics and No Dice, Nature Theater utilizes the qualities of the temporary employee, flexibility and adaptation, in service of an economy of performance that they can sustain on a shoestring. Their approach reorients these qualities toward performance, and layers their social roles as office workers with their roles as performance makers. As performance makers, they recoup authority over the use value of the everyday, “employing” the objects and experiences that surround them. Like Nick from Gatz, Nature Theater makes use of what Lefebvre calls the “sad necessities” of the everyday (mass-­produced novels, rolling chairs, fast food) in order to resist the motionlessness that these objects symbolize as part of the everyday cycle of working to live (Lefebvre 2008 [1991], 15). Using the tools of the employment economy, Nature Theater proposes an alternate model of progression: instead of working to live to work, they work to create, thereby allowing the first model to inform and even enable the second. The product of performance is a result of both the given conditions of temporary employment and the methodologies of nonhierarchical creation that make use of the everyday role of the temporary worker.

Staging Everyday Economies

55

Figure 2.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Left to right, Fletcher Liegerot, Anne Gridley. Photo copyright © Dieter Hartwig.

By combining displays of everyday philosophy with images of manipulation and resistance, some contemporary groups explore aesthetics that display, in terms of their roles as both performance makers and office workers, gestures toward authenticity. Nature Theater does not obscure the multiplicity of social roles among group members, preferring to render them—­with dialectical tension intact—­for an audience. For example, when Nature Theater publishes their performance texts, they indicate dialogue through the names of performers, not characters. This suggests that the role of the performer overlaps and integrates with the social roles performed as “character” throughout performance; we do not know where the performer leaves off and the character begins. Nature Theater directs our attention to the performative qualities of both. Traces of self-­display are apparent in the group’s refusal to theatricalize the edges of their performances. No Dice, for example, utilizes lighting that recalls the overhead fluorescents of cubicle life; it is not intended to flatter but to expose. Some of the group’s work stages transitions that are similarly anti-­theatrical. In Romeo and Juliet, performers Anne Gridley and Robert Johanson occupy the stage one at a time, by turns soliloquizing to the audience. As Gridley and Johanson exchange places, no music or other distraction entertains the audience. Instead, the audience listens to the clomping shoes of the performers; as one exits down the stairs on stage right, the other

56

Chapter 2

Figure 2.2. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet. Pictured: Anne Gridley. Photo copyright © Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

unhurriedly climbs the stairs from stage left. These moments all coalesce into one aspect of Nature Theater’s identifiable aesthetic. While the audience has no objective measure by which to differentiate the accidental from the staged, the authentic from the inauthentic in performance, we can recognize means by which performances direct attention to one or the other. Attention, therefore, seems to emerge as the currency of the performative economy Nature Theater, and others, stage through anti-­theatrical presentation strategies.

Recouping Productivity for the Employee In Gatz, Elevator Repair Service focuses their process of collective creation toward a performance that exposes the instabilities inherent in the perception-­based economy of everyday employment. In the first moments of

Staging Everyday Economies

57

the production, the main character, Nick, notices a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby laying on an unoccupied desk. He picks it up and begins to read the novel aloud as the movement of other office workers ebbs and flows around him. Initially, Nick’s manner of reading is circumspect: he uses his posture to try to hide the book from his fellow office workers, keeps his voice low, and pauses to type a letter or walk to the copy machine when other employees are especially close by. From the perspective of the audience, Nick’s attitude casts him in the role of a petty, low-­stakes criminal. But what is the crime? It is clear that Nick views his reading of the book as a transgression, yet it is equally clear that he has virtually no other demands on his time. The nature of his transgression, therefore, relates to his use of time in the eyes of others. His coworkers do not seem to be any more productive than Nick: they frequently get up from their desks to get cups of coffee, chat with one another briefly, move papers from one end of the room to the other for no discernible purpose, stretch, type furiously for a minute or two before staring off into space, and so on. Nick’s peers, however, have no hesitant body language, no need to hide their actions from one another. They are evidently confident that they enact their office worker roles adequately, as expected and required. Like Nick, they perform their roles as office workers by faking productive action. Unlike Nick, the other employees do not transgress in the eyes of their audience/employer, because faking productivity is so consuming as to make use of all available energy. These employees thereby act according to the predominant philosophy of everyday work, by affecting productivity in such a way as to leave no room for anything else. In contrast, Nick transgresses, not because he does not produce, but because he does. He generates performance that redefines the workplace as an environment that allows access to his imagination, a process performed for the audience through Nick’s act of reading, and the subsequent playful unity between his imagination and his office world. The resulting performance of Gatz, staged as an act of articulating and imagining the action of the novel, co-­opts the inherent performativity of the role of the office worker into a new performative economy. This new economy exchanges the performativity of the everyday for the performance of imagination, thereby enacting a progression and productivity that transcend the motionless cycle of everyday work. By staging a show that suggests that imagination can transcend the nine-­to-­five employment economy based on perceived productivity, Elevator Repair Service identifies the insidious undercurrent of exchange that accompanies the everyday role of the employee: if the employee must keep busy, she negates her potential to imagine and therefore to construct other economies. That is, her role requires constant, unproductive action that alienates her from her ability to control her intention, and therefore her secondary—­and potentially revolutionary—­role as employee. When Nick surreptitiously reads from The Great Gatsby, he resists this imposed stasis, thereby neutralizing his employer’s sense of ownership over the employee’s inner life. It is no accident

58

Chapter 2

that Gatz takes more than six hours to perform; in less time than it takes to complete an eight-­hour workday, ERS transforms the employment experience into creative terrain that restores revolutionary potential to the office environment by restoring imagination to the individual. Through different means than Oscar Wilde might have imagined, Nick resurrects an economy in which imagination is neither luxury nor necessity. It is need. Nick’s act of imagination displays an economy of need that supplants the realm of necessity shaped by the incessant, and unproductive, movement of his coworkers. The exercise of human need can oppose the stagnant everyday realm of necessity, according to Lefebvre, who writes, “Every human need, conceived as the relation between a human being and ‘the world,’ can become a power, in other words a freedom, a source of joy or happiness” (Lefebvre 2008, [1991] 173). Nick stumbles upon a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, the instigating action that gives rise to the rest of the performance, within the realm of necessity symbolized by the office setting. The pages of the book, bound artifacts that provide written traces of Fitzgerald’s own imagination, contrast with the single pages Nick’s coworkers transfer from one counter to another: this underscores the office worker’s acts of paper pushing as manifestations of disposability. Whereas the novel expresses endurance and meaning, and functions in Gatz as the “source of joy or happiness,” the office papers offer

Figure 2.3. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, American Repertory Theater, 2010. Left to right, Laurena Allan, Annie McNamara, Scott Shepherd, Vin Knight. Photo copyright © Mark Barton.

Staging Everyday Economies

59

no such potential (ibid.). They are objects that employees handle simply in order to have something to move. By moving papers without a goal beyond the mechanics of the task, the employees cycle back to another day at the job that consists of . . . moving papers. If need is, as Lefebvre remarks, “the relation between a human being and ‘the world,’” then paper pushing, with no established relation beyond its perpetuation, neither produces nor responds to essential need (ibid.). Further, ERS interrogates everyday economies using the temporal structure of performance. Transplanting the office workday into a theatrical framework, the group retains the performative roles of the office workplace: worker (actor) and employer (audience), though these roles—­ within a theatrical framework—­coalesce toward different goals and include an overtly mutual expectation of performativity. The group then challenges the limitations (or established boundaries) of the performance-­as-­product by presenting Gatz according to temporal constraints, six-­plus performing hours, that are closer to the time restrictions of a day at the office than to a typical two to three hour evening at the theater. Using everyday employment as creative material, they then devise performance that asks for an exchange (between producer and consumer) that departs from the standard economy, from the standard role of the audience. Whereas an employer asks for continuous movement, for busyness that creates the perception of constant task-­based engagement, Elevator Repair Service asks the audience for patience and partnership as they pit imagination against the dominant economic cycles of office employment. At the end of the performance, unlike the office worker’s experience at the end of the workday, ERS involves the audience in an experiential product: they enfold the audience into the durational experience of work role resisted. As the audience watches Nick, a single narrator and a single employee, gradually break down the dynamics of his office environment, the performance reveals the instability of the everyday performative economy. When Nick, a single office employee, inserts his imagination as a stopgap into the cyclical mentality of “work to live, live to work,” the entire system begins to devolve. From watching one employee hide his creatively productive transgression from coworkers, the action develops to include coworkers co-­ opted into new performative roles. Gradually, they begin to enact the actions Nick reads from the novel, and their roles as employees eventually fall away almost completely as they increasingly move in service to the performance of the story. Gatz thereby stages employment as a concept that contains, in the materiality of a novel encountered by chance, and in the voice of Nick as dissembling employee, the seeds of its own destruction. To tip dominant performative economies into expressions of resistance, Elevator Repair Service seems to suggest, one can begin even as an isolated employee working on the small-­scale, low-­stakes level of the temporary office job. In fact, that isolation might even provide the necessary conditions.

60

Chapter 2

Figure 2.4. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, American Repertory Theater, 2010. Left to right, Laurena Allan, Gary Wilmes, Scott Shepherd, Annie McNamara, Kate Scelsa, Vin Knight. Photo copyright © Mark Barton.

Performing Temporary Employment Whereas Gatz stages an office environment that displays ways in which employees can exert control over their performative roles as workers, Nature Theater’s No Dice self-­consciously fuses the role of temporary employee with the role of the artist throughout the performance. In Gatz, ERS maintains the fourth wall, and actors convincingly inhabit their office worker roles, at least until the function of the office space begins to break down. In No Dice, performers inhabit both roles at once: they speak in everyday office lingo, but their gestures, facial expressions, and costumes are the stuff of melodrama. For example, Zachary Oberzan delivers the mundane lines of an office temp, but the audience encounters his lines as speech emanating from a body made up as an exaggerated composite of “actor.” Oberzan wears a cowboy hat, an obviously fake moustache, and no shirt, and scrunches his facial features into contorted, melodramatic expressions. His clownish appearance clashes with his earnest descriptions of his work tasks. The combination of office worker and archetypal performer constitutes a self-­conscious mismatch that creates its own kind of sense. By offering the audience a “performing” temporary office worker who labors under the extreme demands of performance, Nature Theater draws attention to the performative nature of the role of the temporary

Staging Everyday Economies

61

Figure 2.5. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No Dice. Left to right, Zachary Oberzan, Anne Gridley, Robert Johanson. Photo copyright © Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

employee. Perhaps the accoutrements of performance are not so evident in everyday life, but by juxtaposing the overtly theatrical with the mundane, Nature Theater poses the question, Does the role of temporary employee performed within the philosophy of the everyday escape ridiculousness simply because it is familiar? One of the chief conditions of temp existence, Nature Theater suggests, is boredom. As one method of alleviating that boredom, performers Zachary Oberzan and Anne Gridley excitedly list the material benefits derived from pilfering: free alligator clips and paper clips, stickie pads, cans of Dr. Pepper. Thieving these small treasures, the two acknowledge, is one of the few perks of working in a low-­paying office: ANNE: Trying to get your money’s worth. That’s how you—­that’s how you really make up—­make up for the, uh—­deficiency in pay . . . ZACK: Yeah . . . the little that they’re paying me . . . (long pause). (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2007, 21) But this benefit, the two quickly agree, is limited; it is a gesture of resistance that ultimately leads nowhere. How many alligator clips and stickie pads does one person really need? As a gesture, stealing office supplies is less about

62

Chapter 2

gaining access to free commodities, and more about partaking in an impotent act of defiance. Zack and Anne’s stuttering performance language gives the audience room to reflect: Even if Zack were to take home a box of Dr. Pepper (a suggestion of Anne’s he summarily rejects because he doesn’t want to get caught), would it really make up for the deficiency in pay? A box of sodas costs around ten dollars. Stealing those ten dollars, represented by the box of sodas, is evidently not the point. Rather, Zack and Anne use small acts of theft as ways to express their job dissatisfaction; they must play out their dissatisfaction through means they can conceal. For, as the temporary worker occupies a perpetually precious work role, she is so vulnerable as to be—­in relation to her economic relationship with the employer—­essentially voiceless. As there are finite objects in the office, even strategically planning small-­ time theft becomes boring. It is not possible to maintain the brief rush of adrenaline that accompanies breaking the rules. Accordingly, Zack and Anne soon begin to repeat themselves, naming and renaming objects, repetitively debating the benefits of regular versus diet Dr. Pepper, before sadly returning to their mimed keyboard tapping. It is, Zack ventures, an existence without sparkle: ZACK: Yeah, work is good ’cause, you know I’m—­I’m—­I’m really—­ Like—­I get bored here. ANNE: Yeah, that’s when you need—­that’s when you need me to—­It’s like my job is now to . . . (pause) perk people up . . . ZACK: Right. ANNE: While they’re suffering. ZACK: Right. To help them out. ANNE: Yeah. Yeah so that—­to make—­to make your work . . . productive. ZACK: Right, right . . . ANNE: You know . . . to make your life into art. ZACK: Yeah, you’re taking—­you’re taking the boring part of my life and making it into art. (Ibid., 21) Within Nature Theater’s irreverent self-­consciousness of their stance as performance makers in relation to the source material of everyday work, they pose serious claims. Anne and Zack equate boredom with suffering, but then suggest that boredom/suffering makes productivity possible. Anne proposes that boredom gives rise to suffering, which gives rise to strategies for alleviating that suffering, which gives rise to productivity through art making. This trajectory also implies that Zack’s work, as he taps furiously away coding TARs (time adjustment request forms) is unproductive. But, as we learn throughout Anne and Zack’s scene together, Zack has entered 153 forms into the system in a single day, and he still has hours ahead of him. If he is

Staging Everyday Economies

63

accomplishing so much, yet is unproductive, what does this say about the Nature Theater’s representation of productivity as a site of activism? There seem to be two mingling threads of productivity/unproductivity, that of task and that of intention. Zack enacts the task demands of his job, meeting the quota of completed paperwork. However, as Kafka suggests within the bureaucratic imagery in Amerika, the task of the bureaucrat is almost totally alienated from productivity as a consequence of work. Zack finishes the stack of papers in front of him, but there is an endless supply that he will never finish. He participates in an ongoing project of paper that produces nothing concrete except more paper. The results of his efforts, which align employees’ actual work time with the time they have entered into the system (in Zack’s office world, TARs account for mistakes, gaps between time worked and work time recorded), support bureaucratic systems that impede productivity. Like the office workers in Gatz, Zack moves papers from one stack to another—­coding them into an additional computer system in the interim—­but all this “produces” is more work. This cycle, Nature Theater suggests, results in a precise form of boredom, in which the employee becomes bored within the action of work tasks. This boredom, then, is not the result of leisure but the result of work. Scholar Leslie Paul Thiele invokes Heidegger’s theories on boredom in the postmodern era, as a consequence of becoming enmeshed in technologies that accustom us to novelty and therefore to constant unconscious activity. Thiele writes: “Busy-­ ness is the chief means by which everyday life evades ontological questioning. The everyday achieves its escape from anxious thought in heightened worldly activity . . . Indeed, a continuous flurry of activity often becomes boredom’s chief defense against thoughtful anxiety” (Thiele 1997, 503). We meet this “continuous flurry of activity” in the office spaces staged by Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as instances where the task—­even if (and especially if) it consists of constant movement—­transforms into a mode of “not doing” that is both boring and unproductive. The “not doing” refers not only to the alienation of the office worker from the product, but also to the alienation of the worker from thoughtfulness and contemplation, from what Thiele via Heidegger terms “ontological questioning” (ibid.). Such questioning, which restores productivity to the role of the temporary employee, plays out in the work of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater through these groups’ explorations of aesthetics that excise the busyness of boredom. When these groups, as Zack says in No Dice, engage in processes of “taking the boring part of my life and making it into art,” they construct performance economies that use aesthetic properties as tools for opposing the busy boredom of everyday employment roles (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2007, 21). Interestingly, both groups offer epic-­length performances; No Dice and Gatz are each durational affairs that inevitably require audience members to confront their own thresholds for boredom within the

64

Chapter 2

space of the theater. Even as both groups propose boredom as a precondition for everyday dialectics, they provide performance that provokes the audience into confronting that state, in the content of deliberate performance, within the confines of the theatrical space.

An Aesthetics of Lessness Nature Theater and ERS resist the busyness that prevents ontological questioning by altering the performative relationship between artist/everyday and employee/everyday. This results in performance that visually articulates an aesthetic property I’ll call “lessness.” When Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma focus on employment imagery, they effectively express the confinement enacted by the employee role as such: Nick’s coworkers in Gatz move about the office space with a frenzied busyness, yet the performance suggests that the more they move kinetically, the more they remain symbolically fixed within everyday economic cycles. Likewise, Nature Theater presents the temporary office employee as a figure almost crushed by the inauthentic and highly repetitive demands of everyday role playing. These are staged interpretations of the employment of the everyday, as a stultifying economy that substitutes empty action for authentic productivity. Goat Island and the TEAM, in addition to ERS and Nature Theater, often create performance that resists this economy by embracing poor theater aesthetics that exploit the potential for performance to make space for both individual agency and formal, task-­based structure. However, these contemporary performance groups render distinct performance aesthetics that do not share consistent visual vocabularies. When one watches a Goat Island, Nature Theater, TEAM, or Elevator Repair Service performance, poor theater philosophy takes shape according to different principles. Goat Island explores a “poor theater” of space: few (if any) lighting cues, no set to speak of, and a handful of cheap objects transplanted from everyday life (old boom boxes, two-­by-­fours, shoes, a saw, a watering can, etc.). Nature Theater’s approach tends toward, in the first decade of the 2000s especially, performance on a shoestring budget that appropriates the shoestring. In one segment of Poetics: A Ballet Brut, Nature Theater performers exuberantly toss their T-­shirts into the crowd only to ask for them back due to budgetary constraints. For the TEAM, even the crowded stage of Mission Drift offers a collection of modest items: the cheap lawn chairs, plastic foliage, and dollar-­ store masks might have been assembled through repeated trips to Salvation Army. “Poor” might be inexpensive rather than minimal. For Elevator Repair Service, the group with the highest annual budget among these four, poor theater principles are increasingly more ideological than visual. For more complex production-­scapes, the group marshals a small army of technical

Staging Everyday Economies

65

Figure 2.6. The TEAM’s Mission Drift. Pictured: Heather Christian as Miss Atomic, center, with the TEAM ensemble. Photo copyright © Nick Vaughan.

paraphernalia throughout their national and international tours. However, they increasingly create performance inspired by preexisting literary works, which allows them to investigate the primacy of the performer in making text theatrical. Perhaps this suggests an ongoing exploration into Jerzy Grotow­ ski’s distinction between the literary and the theatrical: “This does not mean that we look down upon literature, but that we do not find in it the creative part of the theatre” (Grotowski 2002 [1968], 23). Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM all find strategies to foreground the performer, to make the actor the central and essential aspect of the theatrical event, though methodology varies. Grotowski’s foundational advocacy demands “the acceptance of poverty in theatre, stripped of all that is not essential to it.” For Grotowski, stripping away the nonessential “revealed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of art-­form” (ibid., 21). Whereas Grotowski describes a via negativa process that demands stripping away aspects of traditional theatrical production, Kelly Copper of Nature Theater discusses Nature Theater’s process of arriving at an aesthetic from a different direction. She notes that she and Liska “look for the least thing, the tipping point where it [the starting point of the theatrical investigation] turns into theater” (Lee 2009, 89). Copper and Liska begin from starting points that are essentially nontheatrical, and gradually add elements until they cross

66

Chapter 2

a boundary into the theatrical; through this process they produce aesthetics informed by minimalism. In the early stages of developing Poetics, Copper and Liska began with a question: Can we create theater, can we tell a story, through changing spatial relationships onstage and nothing else? (Copper 2008a). They structured the show piece by piece, using chance operations to determine entrances and exits, lengths of segments, three-­dimensional choreographic placement of performers, the order of danced gestures, and so on. This process was in service of the group’s philosophy of via positiva: eventually the formalistic experiment “turns into theater” (Lee 2009, 89). While chance operations open up another significant connection between contemporary work and the everyday, here I would like to focus on the consequences of using chance in service of looking for “the least thing” that constitutes performance. Processually speaking, this way of working is, even when undertaken slowly, highly efficient. In contrast to bureaucracy, a spectacle of empty and inefficient activity, Copper and Liska institute a system of performance-­making that minimizes waste. Their via positiva process ensures that they will make maximal use of each formally structured element of performance. Of course, this minimalist boundary between theatrical and nontheatrical is a subjective one, guided by the preferences and expectations of each director and each group. Goat Island approach this process from an aesthetic standpoint inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” of 1965: “no to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-­ heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved” (Rainer 1965, 178). In Rainer’s manifesto, some of the differences between her choreography, reductively minimalist, and Grotowski’s poor theater come into focus. Rainer describes key aspects of her minimalist aesthetic, which involves more than stripping away nonessential production parts. It requires active refusal, beginning from a place that requires redefining all aspects of performance, including the craft of the performer. It also, Rainer claims, demands changing the actor-­spectator relationship, getting rid of “involvement of performer or spectator” and therefore also “moving or being moved” (ibid.). Minimalism is, then, an aesthetic property that is concerned with the expressivity of the performer. Rather than privileging the performer as the creator and communicator of authentic experience and emotions, the minimalist performer is formalistic and impersonal. Perhaps performance produced by the actions and presence of a minimalist performer offers an opportunity for the audience to encounter performance-­ as-­product with their ontological anxiety intact. By combining aesthetic elements of both minimalist performance and poor theater practice, Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater develop economies of performance that hinge on lessness. Toward an understanding

67

Staging Everyday Economies

of “lessness” as a balance between individual agency and objective structure, Samuel Beckett’s prose work Lessness offers an applicable example. Beckett composed Lessness through a combination of Dadaist structuring strategies and creative writing. In their article “Chance and Choice in Beckett’s Lessness,” Enoch Brater and Susan Brienza describe how Beckett wrote the 120-­line piece. “He wrote each of the 60 sentences on a separate piece of paper, mixed them all in a container, and then drew them out in random order twice: the resulting sequence became the order of the 120 sentences” (Brienza and Brater 1976, 245). However, Brater and Brienza remind the reader that Beckett’s deterministic technique applies only to structure, and not to content. “Though the ultimate arrangement of sentences is left to chance, it is not chance, but Beckett, who has chosen the constituent parts. Lessness is, then, an ingenious interaction of choice and chance, the most important single act being the composition of the 60 elements” (ibid.). Composition is the creative act of writing, of forming each of the sixty sentences to be so structured, that preceded the arrangement. Lessness, as Beckett titles his work, encapsulates both deterministic techniques that remove human agency and (even unconscious) expression, while retaining a space for the creativity of the individual. This is very like the ethos of Goat Island, in which Stephen Bottoms can locate “no attempt to remove human agency from the creative process, acknowledging that the connections which exist between any two points are often very personal, intuitive ones” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 135). Goat Island, along with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, produce work through formalistic strategies that organize content (source material) supplied by the responses of performers. However, they enable structure to emerge as part of an aesthetic of lessness, combining concerns of volume/speed/sequence with material that develops according to “personal, intuitive” connections (ibid.).

Replacing Busyness This aesthetic of lessness, conceptualized as a combination of determinism and agency, emerges within the concept of employment-­as-­role. The temporary employee must accommodate to a work role that is universal rather than unique; she must participate in a “performance” of role that is so flexible and adaptive that it renders her disposable—­easily replaced by the next employee on the staffing agency’s roster. Yet, enacting the work task of that role, which might involve the busy action of (figuratively or literally) shifting papers from one side of the office to the other, or repetitively filling out forms that simply motivate self-­perpetuating systems of bureaucracy, the employee has the potential to become productive by either manipulating her intention toward the work role she inhabits, or by participating in acts of detournement that reframe her experiences into artistic expression. Both methodologies, which involve substituting the performativity of a new role (revolutionary, artist,

68

Chapter 2

or both), reverse the economic cycle of “working to live” that results in a politics of universal exchange: in summary, acts of productivity as resistance transform the employee’s “use” from universal to unique. For contemporary performance makers like those discussed here, creative methodologies might oppose everyday economies that treat temporary employees as commodities. Source material drawn from everyday experiences of employment might then employ aesthetics of lessness toward ontological contemplation. The substance of that contemplation is a consequence of the audience member and the performance maker recouping authority over their own intention and own experience. This intention and experience emerges when the individual excises the busyness “by which everyday life evades ontological questioning” (Thiele 1997, 503). This is, perhaps, an aesthetic reimagining of John Cage’s writings that foreground “silence” as dialectically restorative. As employees can utilize their own boredom as a productive opportunity, Cage reminds readers and audiences again and again that “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound” (Cage 1973 [1961], 191). What masquerades as silence, Cage reiterates, is the experience of soundlessness that accompanies a lack of attentiveness. Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber is well documented. He concludes, via his experiments, that human beings inherently produce and experience sound, though inattention may dampen one’s ability to recognize this. With that attention restored, it is possible to reframe not only the power of the everyday but also humankind’s fundamental dual identity: performance maker (anatomically produced sound) and audience (awareness of the self’s sound). Goat Island associate CJ Mitchell remarks on ways in which Goat Island’s durational danced segments contribute the audience members’ awareness of self. As the performers move repetitively with little sound, “the audience begins to hear itself in the silence” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 67). When (or if) the audience hears itself, all the audience members become aware of the environment in which they sit and view the performance, including their own presence within that environment. By hearing one’s self as that which is not silence, one becomes aware of the auditory details that establish this audience, comprising these specific individuals. In service of the particular composition, molded from absolute awareness within a given moment, nothing is disposable or replaceable. On a symbolic level, if an audience member hears herself in the silence, she dissolves the economically perpetuated fiction that there is silence—­she becomes aware of everyday gaps between perceived environment/condition and actual environment/condition. From this perspective, the contemporary performance work of this book’s four case studies possesses the potential to restore access “need” by inviting the audience to experience both imagination and awareness. If everyday economies make use of the (unproductive) employee, new economies of performance measure production through collective practice

Staging Everyday Economies

69

that unfolds according to methods of involvement and connection, of collaboration. In the resulting performance, “seeming busy” is as much a part of an economy of alienation as is “seeming silent”; in both cases, as Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater strongly suggest in Gatz and No Dice, one can resist alienation by substituting authentic productivity. This potential productivity resides in the attentiveness of the individual. The everyday, even as it temptingly lures the employee into a cycle in which empty gesture masquerades as productive activity, and productive activity masquerades as silence, is—­as these contemporary models of collective creation practice enact through methodologies and performance moments—­full of imaginative, and therefore revolutionary and productive, potential.

Chapter 3

Dancing toward Gesture

Nearly an hour into performance, four performers, who have been moving nearly continuously throughout the show, intensify their ecstatic dance in front of a red curtain. These four string together physical actions that seem somehow familiar: smoking mimed cigarettes, slapping their chests, stretching their arms far out to the sides, throwing imaginary objects over their shoulders, covering their faces with their hands, giving themselves bunny ears with their fingers. Their dance is a gestural montage crafted by four distinctly separate individuals, linked through movement though each dances alone. All the while, their feet pattern the floor ceaselessly with an enthusiasm that is part jazz square, part jog. Simultaneously, the performers’ upper bodies cycle through task-­ based gestures that coalesce into sequences that by turns repeat, fragment, and form alternate iterations. They dance with abundance but without technique; the four bodies do not exactly mirror one another. The gestures, so similar yet so different when mapped onto different bodies, are their language. In this performance moment, lifted from Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut, gestures place marginalized methods, bodies, and movements firmly, and with an attitude of acceptance, in front of the eye of the audience. That is, gestures resist hierarchies as a result of who performs them, the manner in which they are performed, the means by which they are created, and the material they render visible. In the previous chapter, I discussed themes of the everyday that twist through employment imagery in the performance of two particular contemporary groups, underscoring these groups’ commitment to exploring the marginalized, easily overlooked, and underinterrogated. Gestural forms also evidence this commitment, as demonstrated in the performance of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and also Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and the TEAM. Poetics: A Ballet Brut is a particularly rich example of how many contemporary devising groups increasingly frame these forms as dance. In Poetics, dance becomes gestural—­an argument I will elucidate with the help of Giorgio Agamben’s writings in On Gesture—­by foregrounding modest movements, including bunny ears, cab hailing, stretching, and the like, generated by unprofessional and largely untrained dancing bodies. These phenomena are, like collaborative practices 71

72

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Left to right, Fletcher Liegerot, Anne Gridley, Robert Johanson, Zachary Oberzan. Photo copyright © Dieter Hartwig.

that prompt them, so pervasive as to be nearly unseen and unseeable. Yet pedestrian bodies render these ordinary elements stubbornly, and unavoidably, visible. This not only pushes the boundaries of “gesture” as a definitive component of dance performance, but reimagines gesture in these contemporary performances as a means through which groups can invite the audience to experience the ethics of awareness. Nature Theater director Pavol Liska calls this prompted awareness an opportunity to “propose to the audience a way of living” (Benson 2006, 51).

Toward Differentiation What is gesture that it can formulate such a proposal? In two essays, “Kommerell, or On Gesture” and “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben describes gesture as both mysterious and material, a consequence of the sphere of criticism concerned with a work’s gestus, or intention, and gesture as kinetic expression of its own substance. He writes, “If dance is gesture, this is, however, because it is nothing but the physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature. Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such” (Agamben 2007 [1978], 155). Gesture can

Dancing toward Gesture

73

also be, as Liska indicates and Agamben illustrates, a politics. When Agamben writes on gesture, he does so situated within his larger political project: both politics and gesture are means without ends (Agamben 1999). This marks a clear connection between the gestural and the political that in turn establishes the groundwork for a broader critique of the political import, and for the “ways of living” proposed and modeled by the performance groups under discussion here (Benson 2006, 51). Moving from the inside out, charting the kinetic components of performance before analyzing the “gestic sphere” of whole works, movement produced by the performing bodies throughout Nature Theater’s Poetics offers an effective starting point for readings of gesture: shifting weight, stretching, rolling, hand waving, and so on. In “Notes on Gesture,” Agamben defines gesture in terms of structure and motion that neither contains the end in itself nor moves toward a particular end point. Through both negative examples, Agamben articulates what gesture is not: it is without end. For a movement to contain an end in itself, as Agamben describes it, is to be aesthetic. For it to be focused on a particular end point is to be directional (Agamben 2007 [1978]). Having eliminated both aesthetic and directional qualities from his categorization, Agamben considers the validity of claiming dance as gesture. He concludes that dance is gestural only insofar as it is only the “physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature” (ibid., 155). There are, then, two distinct properties that fuse to inform Agamben’s definition: physical tolerance and mediation. On a basic anatomical level, physical tolerance equates with endurance experienced by a motor body over time. The structure of the body or body part endures (tolerates) motion, maintaining integrity while supporting the act of movement. The hand waves, but though the spatial orientation of the hand changes, the structure of the hand as “hand,” an apparatus that lends itself to movement and to the support of movement, does not. In dance, “the mediating nature” of gesture is similarly physical. The waving hand mediates, or transitions, between two static states: the orientation of the hand before the wave begins, and after the motion of the wave is completed. To “display” that mediating nature, as Agamben puts it, is to focus attention on the process or nature of transition, rather than on the starting or ending point. Nature Theater’s Ballet Brut enacts the mediating nature of gesture, focusing attention on the process of movement as such, through messy kinetic differentiation. In segments where Anne Gridley, Robert Johanson, Fletcher Liegerot, and Zachary Oberzan perform the same choreography simultaneously, differences between their individual interpretations of the choreography become especially clear. As untrained dancers, the four lack the capacity to “aim” gestures as, for example, a ballerina might aim, and their bodies have not accumulated familiarity with dance steps accomplished over years of rigorous, repetitive practice. Instead, their arms extend at different angles, their spacing is uneven, and their feet hit the floor according to slightly different

74

Chapter 3

Figure 3.2. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Left to right, Zachary Oberzan, Fletcher Liegerot, Robert Johanson, Anne Gridley. Photo copyright © Dieter Hartwig.

rhythms. These are spontaneous expressions of each performer’s individuality, made possible not in spite of, but because of, their lack of dance training. Unable to exert full physical control over their movement, the performers produce a gestural vocabulary modeled on pedestrian motion, and then executed with a pedestrian (lack of) technique. This results in a style of performance that opens up the title of the piece, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, as a meditation on what it means to dance in brut fashion, adopting movement that expresses bruteness toward dance. While significations of destruction or violence are easy to identify, brut also connotes that which is “foul, ragged, shapeless” (Skeat 1882, 80). The differences in gestural production, the absence of sameness and simultaneity as similar movements map onto different performers, create a complex and unrepeatable layering of motion that has no pattern; it is both “ragged” and “shapeless.” Gridley, Johanson, Liegerot, and Oberzan produce an infinite array of spontaneous physical variations. These variations, each an unplanned micro-­ gesture, resist anonymity and foreground individuation, both anatomical and expressive. Interestingly, the “raggedness” of individual gestures takes place within a tightly formalistic performance structure. Nature Theater carefully organizes the choreography of Poetics (entrances and exits, the length of the piece, the length of individual segments, the position of performers onstage, the composition of gestural strands, etc.) according to aleatoric techniques.

Dancing toward Gesture

75

Within this carefully ordered structure, the identities of the four Nature Theater dancers as untrained assert a form that must make room for (brut) formlessness. The contrast between the precise choreography and the spontaneous variations resulting from the performers’ pedestrian experience with dance stages gesture as a transition from precise forms toward shapelessness, or differentiation. Intentional gestural shapelessness, arising from simultaneous movements with visibly different execution, materializes in the work of Elevator Repair Service, Goat Island, and the TEAM as well. For each group, dance can be both isolating (each performer dances alone) and collective (performers make similar attempts to render movement). One such sequence emerges in Goat Island’s The Lastmaker as the five performers stand in a line parallel to the audience banks, which are configured as tennis court seating. Evenly spaced, and dressed identically in brown trousers and blue shirts, the performers fall to the ground, get up as quickly as they can, run in place, attempt 180-­degree rotating jumps, and so on; the long dance, which comprises about one-­third of The Lastmaker’s total performance time, loops with punctuations of recorded “neighs” and clopping horse hooves. New York Times critic Claudia La Rocco describes the movement as “a dry little dance, in which the five performers briskly and with ritualistic precision execute pedestrian movement sequences to a regular beat. It is not cuddly. It is not exciting or emotionally fraught. The mind sometimes wanders, brought back to the stage by the intermittent recordings of horses cantering and whinnying” (La Rocco 2008). The mind wanders, as La Rocco puts it, in part because of the predictability of both gesture and rhythm; the performers form an unbroken, lulling pattern throughout the dance. Yet, the “ritualistic precision” she identifies erodes as the dance progresses, exhaustively, over time. The distinctness of each performer becomes increasingly apparent; the movements themselves are broad strokes, with all performers physically interpreting their task according to the constraints of their particular body. As the performers run, their feet do not hit the ground in perfect rhythm. Each sets up the 180-­degree jump differently, looking for rotational force either through their legs, knees, or arms; and the responsiveness of each body slows over time. This creates an inverse relationship between the physical energy of the performer and the level of gestural differentiation between performers: as time lengthens and physical energy decreases, the visibility of difference increases. Whereas Nature Theater stages brut, shapeless gesture beginning in the opening moments of Poetics, Goat Island’s use of durational dance foregrounds the labor of the performers over time. This labor, which unfolds through meditatively extended motion and rhythm, displays what Agamben calls the “physical tolerance of bodily movements” (Agamben 2007 [1978], 155). Aligning Agamben’s theory of gesture with Goat Island’s physicalized performance, gesture opens up as a differentiated display of transition that ultimately never escapes formal structure. Even as

76

Chapter 3

Figure 3.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, 2008. Left to right, Mark Jeffery, Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Brian Saner, Litó Walkey. Photo copyright © Hugo Glendinning.

labor emerges as an increasingly individuated process, that individuation is part of the “mediating nature” of gesture as Goat Island stages it; it is part of the architecture of the group body as it exists in motion over time. Whereas the dance sequences in Poetics and The Lastmaker unfold with a kind of radiating awareness between performers of their shared task, dance in ERS’s The Sound and the Fury comparatively insulates individual bodies. Dance erupts several times throughout the course of the show, first from two performers, Ben Williams and Mike Iveson, and then expanding to include the entire twelve-­person cast during the show’s finale. Unlike dancing in The Lastmaker, the ERS dances of The Sound and the Fury do not present the performers with durational obstacles in the moment of performance, nor do they echo Nature Theater’s movements from New York’s everyday urban landscape; they are brief, startling, and alien kinetic eruptions that some critics compare with the work of the Wooster Group. Scholar Paul David Young describes the disjointedness of the first explosion of the dance in The Sound and the Fury, noting how—­ unlike the Wooster Group—­ ERS performers establish their dances as unique through performance demeanors that communicate irresistible compulsion: The boys dance in a line, facing the audience, wild energy propelling their angular movements. One of them even fakes a fall as if

Dancing toward Gesture

77

Figure 3.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury at the Public Theater, 2015. Left to right, Ben Williams, Vin Knight, Mike Iveson, and Pete Simpson. Photo copyright © Paula Court.

overcome by the ecstasy of the moment or the anticipation of hearing Faulkner’s text once more. The Wooster Group prefers to imitate the machine in motion; ERS’ dancers seem unable to restrain themselves from jumping around, as if at a late-­night college party where the urge to dance is the moving principle and the idea of partnering of no concern. (Young 2008, 56)

As in Goat Island’s dance sequence from The Lastmaker and many of the dance segments from Poetics, Williams and Iveson dance “in a line.” The line, always parallel to the audience, references the boundary of the proscenium, offering up the bodies as representations arranged in a sequence that draws attention to difference: the eyes of Western audience members typically move across the performers one by one, reading their bodies from left to right. However, in ERS’s case the line of two does not invite recognitions of physical or kinetic uniqueness. Williams and Iveson are approximately the same age, weight, height, and complexion. They perform their dance only briefly, exploding into frenetic activity that recedes with similar abruptness. The “wild energy propelling their angular movements” does not offer movement as an opportunity for reflection, as does the dance from The Lastmaker, but does leave the impression that “the idea of partnering [is] of no concern.”

78

Chapter 3

Perhaps in place of partnering with one another, the bodies of the individuals splice into anatomical segments that interact vociferously across a single body, creating a kind of self-­partnering: expressions of barely containable, Dionysian “urge(s) to dance.” The choreography supports this urge, as Olga Muratova notes in her article on The Sound and the Fury, by dividing the body of each performer in three: “The dancers’ bodies become a three-­tiered ensemble: the legs are doing a typical flatfoot, buck-­dance routine; the arms live their own lives and make involuntary, spasmodic movements as if they belong to a person with a nervous-­system disorder; and the faces wear an absolutely impenetrable and detached expression of not being involved in the act” (Muratova 2009, 456). In this description, which Muratova summarizes from a conversation with performer Ben Williams, the individual body of the performer creates its own group body; each performer is a “three-­tiered ensemble.” As an ensemble, the individual body divides into three pieces along horizontal planes, each with independent tasks: the legs, the arms, the face. In addition to the divisions across the body of the performer, ERS also assigns discordant qualities to each of these divisions. The feet move according to repetitive patterns that are part “buck-­dance,” part line dance. The arms are given free rein, allowed to express the “urge to dance” improvisationally through “involuntary, spasmodic movements.” The expression of the face is detached, as though attempting to deny the “wild energy” that fuels the lower body. Each section of the divided physique performs its own movement vocabulary, fusing into the performer’s single gesture through the violent connection of three disjointed spheres. These spheres, when combined, map the gestural differentiation that accompanies the frenetic movement that the bodies themselves can barely tolerate. As Paul David Young puts it, the performers seem “unable to restrain themselves,” yet their bodies must contain the unrestrainable, resulting in gestures that are both physical paradox and glimpses of potentiality in motion (Young 2008, 56). Dance and theater also fuse in many of the TEAM’s pieces. Choreographic moments from Mission Drift explode like bombs loaded with historical sounds and movements. Amy Strahler Holzapfel describes Mission Drift as “dance-­theater,” and writes of the collage of culturally inflected segments interspersed with the unfamiliar: “The choreography of the show is richly iconic; gestures to the gyrating movement vocabulary of Elvis, the theatrical and grandiose expressions of Hollywood 1930s musicals, as well as snake-­charming ritual dance and Gospel choir movements occur alongside less culturally traceable sequences. Dancers often dance with objects—­ furniture and props—­blending the material and illusionistic reality of the world onstage” (Holzapfel 2015, 420). The esprit of dance in Mission Drift is both urgent and multidisciplinary. As the Las Vegas setting of the show is an oasis, a well that has expanded to contain real and artificial national and global icons, so dance in Mission Drift contributes to a story that creates its own well. Within that kinetic reflection, danced across the stage through

Dancing toward Gesture

79

Figure 3.5. The TEAM’s Mission Drift: The TEAM ensemble sings and dances. Photo copyright © Nick Vaughan.

lizard masks and echoes of the epic past, audiences can begin to glimpse the rabidity of unchecked progress. Danced gesture comprised of kinetic differentiation, therefore, moves according to different goals and guidelines through the work of these groups. In these specific project examples, for Nature Theater it threads through the variations of pedestrian movements; for Goat Island it unfolds over time; for Elevator Repair Service it emerges from the divided individual performing body; for the TEAM it collides histories and queries capitalism. Perhaps this indicates, for these groups, deep commitments making difference visible through movement emerging from group-­centric processes. If gesture is, as Agamben says, “a display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such,” then the “means” that these groups render visible through gesture is more than just the transition from one spatial orientation to another (Agamben 2007 [1978], 155). It is also the untrained body itself, a “means” that makes transition possible. By utilizing the untrained body as means, these contemporary groups challenge Agamben’s conceptualization of the gestural as separate from the aesthetic. While the movement of the body itself is not aesthetic according to Agamben’s definition, in the sense that it does not contain an end point in and of itself, the untrained body as means does connect to an aesthetic property: the aesthetic of the untrained and unskilled producer. This suggests that, when considering the untrained dancing body

80

Chapter 3

as a producer of difference, that body as a “means” that supplies deskilled aesthetic components is somehow separate from the mediating movement produced by that body. That is, Agamben questions whether or not dance is gestural, disregarding the dancer as producer of gesture. In order to consider fully the gestural qualities of dance produced by these contemporary groups, the producer of movement must unite with the nature and display of movement as such. This has the potential to trouble divisions between body and motion, producer and product, and to thereby blur boundaries between the gestural and the aesthetic. Even as the untrained body makes itself visible as means, through its display of differentiation arising from its unskilled status, it becomes elusive: Isn’t the intentional production of gestural differentiation and shapelessness another kind of skill? And if so, is the supposed untrained aesthetic simply another, subtler expression of virtuosity?

Bodies Though only Nature Theater’s Poetics claims the title of A Ballet Brut, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and the TEAM perform danced gesture that works against historic representations of virtuosic, trained dancing bodies. In Poetics, The Lastmaker, The Sound and the Fury, and Mission Drift, the groups consciously and deliberately construct choreography to be performed by nonprofessional dancers. This is, of course, not an unfamiliar phenomenon in performance. For example, groups like Judson Dance Theater and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop created pieces in the early 1960s that utilized professional bodies performing ordinary movement, aesthetics involving untrained dancers, and spectators as actors. In the 1960s, performance critic Jill Johnston asserted the aesthetic power of explorations evinced by untrained bodies. In Greenwich Village 1963, Sally Banes quotes one of Johnston’s reviews that states, “The sluggish run of a non-­dancer can be as moving and important as the beautifully extended leap of a dancer” (Banes 1999 [1993], 70). In Poetics, Nature Theater attempts to find nonhierarchical means of displaying both pedestrian and virtuosic bodies, which requires establishing a new relationship between trained and untrained performers as they both inhabit the performance space. In contrast, at both Judson and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, even when pedestrian bodies were visible and folded into composition, whether as performers or spectator/actors, they still frequently operated within hegemonic frameworks that separated them from trained dancers. Sally Banes chronicles the culture of equality that motivated choreographers at Judson Church, citing the use of “a mixture of experienced and inexperienced, trained and untrained dancers” as both practically necessary constraint and “an aesthetic and even political choice, allowing for full participation by all the workshop members and giving the works an unpolished, spontaneous, ‘natural’ appearance” (Banes 1993

Dancing toward Gesture

81

[1983], xviii). Banes, while expressing the sociopolitical and aesthetic value of untrained dancers, describes pedestrian bodies in terms of training, and in relation to their virtuosic counterparts. The trained dancers persist as standards against which untrained dancers are inevitably compared. Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, first produced at Judson Church in 1966, mixed dancers and nondancers, a combination Rainer continued to explore throughout forty years of staging and restaging the dance. However, it wasn’t until 2009, when Rainer worked on the piece at the University of California, Irvine, that she placed dancers and nondancers onstage together. Previously, she had divided the piece, grouping together bodies with like (or lack of) training. By juxtaposing virtuosic and pedestrian bodies, the limitations of the virtuosic bodies became visible. Rainer discovered that, in contrast to the untrained dancers, trained dancers “knew what they could not do, like balance on one leg convincingly or roll the head around while doing a difficult side step . . . What they didn’t know and couldn’t project was that sense of precariousness and achievement” (Rainer 2009, 18). Tellingly, the juxtaposition of dancers and nondancers onstage together, rather than performing successively in separate sections, spurs Rainer to reverse the standards of performance and to describe the trained dancers in terms of their strengths as well as “what they didn’t know and couldn’t project” (ibid.). Anna Halprin’s Myths cycle, first performed at the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1968, also used pedestrian performers, in the guise of audience members as spectators/actors. Recalling the demographics of the performing audiences, Halprin writes: “They were a mixture of hippies, student groups from the San Francisco Institute of Art, all types of businessmen, dance students and professionals, architects, city planners, psychotherapists, tourists, and those lured by our reputation for nude performances. In short: no pattern” (Kaplan 1995, 130). In this model of trained/untrained performance practice, Halprin led audiences comprising mixed and unpredictable experience levels through responses, exercises, and activities that used movement (and language) to foster personal expression and shared action. The performances investigated ways in which audience members could build community through creative acts, and Halprin looked for the moments in which “the individual experience turns into a collective one” (ibid., 149). Though the Myths cycle sought to build a collective community of equals, even if just for the duration of the evening, there nonetheless remained a division between the audience members encountering the Myths for the first time and the participating members of the Dancers’ Workshop. Halprin and the dancers functioned as guides, ultimately responsible for shaping, or at least initiating, the participation of untrained audience members. Unlike Trio A, individual movements of Myths were not choreographed, but rather scored according to the theme and investigation of the evening (Storytelling, Dreams, Masks, etc.). As a score, with improvisation and spontaneity written into the goals of the performance, participating pedestrian bodies did not fail or achieve the

82

Chapter 3

mechanics of choreography; there was none. They did, however, enact the goals of the performance as set out by Halprin and the Dancers’ Workshop members, all of whom had a sense of training and leadership that separated them from the spectators/participants. In these two cases drawn from dance history, Trio A and Myths, the guides/ choreographers sought to expose and to question the contrast between the trained and untrained body, respectively. Yet both displayed the pedestrian body through dance by transplanting it into a framework that was constructed and initiated, and ultimately controlled, by professionals. In Myths, Halprin imbedded that authority in the performance score, while for four decades of Trio A, the trained choreographer isolated professional dancers from untrained dancers within the stage space. In contrast, the contemporary groups under discussion here deliberately seek a kind of anti-­theatricality, similar to what Sally Banes, speaking of Judson Dance Theater, calls an “unpolished, spontaneous, ‘natural’ appearance,” by reworking the relationship between trained and untrained bodies in performance (Banes 1993 [1983], xviii). Elevator Repair Service and Goat Island eschew the comparison completely, presenting untrained bodies dancing choreography developed by those same untrained dancers. Without any juxtaposition between trained and untrained dancers, these groups create dance that renders kinetic idiosyncrasies arising from pedestrian bodies as distinct displays, separate from systematized dance training. This amounts to an intentional deskilling, or expansion, of the status of “dancer,” a process Nature Theater announces plainly through language: A Ballet Brut. In addition to shapelessness and raggedness, outgrowths of differentiation, “brut” conjures the “raw” aesthetic of art brut, a categorization for work produced by untrained visual artists. The term “art brut” was coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, following his encounters with, and subsequent exhibitions of, art produced by the mentally ill. Artistically untrained patients of insane asylums, Dubuffet found, created work untouched by influence, as the patients were completely isolated from the work of professional artists and from the world at large. This absence of influence provides the cornerstone for defining art brut as art “produced by persons foreign to culture, and who have not received any information or influence from it” (Dubuffet and Minturn 2004, 262). Art brut is often translated in the United States as outsider art, a term that stems from Roger Cardinal’s 1972 publication by the same name (Cardinal 1972). Outsider art is a designation attributed to visual art produced by an art maker who is removed from the professional art realm—­the more removed, the better. Some outsider artists are mentally handicapped; some create work while incarcerated; some create work inspired by their experiences of visions they call divine; some are hermits who choose to live apart from society. Performance groups who explore the aesthetic potential of the untrained dancer, for example, share kinship with basic principles of art brut and transplant these principles into processes

Dancing toward Gesture

83

that integrate, rather than isolate, the work from their surrounding culture and the everyday world. This results in kinetic representations situated simultaneously inside (culture) and outside (training). This inside/outside perspective results in performance that combines the performance aesthetics of untrained bodies with conceptual intention. Dubuffet discusses the “completely spontaneous and immediate” impulses of art brut artists, added to the fact that they were completely uninterested in, and oftentimes unaware of, organized exhibitions of their work (Dubuffet and Minturn 2004, 259). In contrast, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, the TEAM, and Nature Theater deliberately cultivate instances in which the kinetic presence of untrained bodies is not simply experienced or enacted, but purposefully displayed. They manipulate the “rawness” of unskilled brut art into consciously constructed presentation. In The Intangibilities of Form, John Roberts discusses the deskilling of art in the post-­Duchamp age of readymade and replicable art objects. This climate, Roberts claims, produces not only a deskilling of art, but its eventual reskilling, though recognizing this reskilling requires new frameworks of critical interpretation. He writes, “Artistic skills find their application in the demonstration of conceptual acuity, not in the execution of forms of expressive mimeticism” (Roberts 2007, 3). There is, then, a space for the work of untrained, contemporary collaborative performance makers, situated between the spontaneous, raw expression of art brut and the reductive artistic skill Roberts redefines as “conceptual acuity.” In performance, the untrained dancing bodies in Poetics: A Ballet Brut, for example, are displayed as such; this is related to yet distinct from the spontaneous, raw expression of art brut aesthetic. This display, which stages the contemporary untrained performer as representation—­a symbol of rawness rather than an expression of rawness—­gestures toward what Roberts might term the “conceptual acuity” of the whole. The display of brut movement is a means that enables the intentionally developed, and nonhierarchically presented, kinetic differentiation of gesture to emerge. In some of the work produced by these four groups, nonhierarchical choreographic expressions hinge on the untrained body as representation engaged in the deskilling/reskilling of particular kinds of work. In chapter 2, I discussed ways in which the employee (and especially the temporary employee) contributes to economies that deskill the labor of the office worker by requiring the employee to perform productivity, in place of actually producing. Here, I extend that exploration to include ways in which these contemporary groups undertake the deskilling of dance. Notably, these groups present deskilled dance as productive rather than reductive; there is nothing in their performance that presents an ontological threat to skilled dance, only to the hierarchical status bestowed on virtuosity. The prevailing social order can imagine the role of worker as one who produces or revolts, but not as one who thinks and acts outside this schema. Likewise, perhaps the untrained dancers of contemporary collaborative groups present

84

Chapter 3

Figure 3.6. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Left to right, Anne Gridley, Fletcher Liegerot, Robert Johanson, Zachary Oberzan. Photo copyright © Dieter Hartwig.

as ideologically revolutionary insofar as they construct a new function for the dancer: they do not dance as professionals, as isolationists/outsiders, or as performance makers exclusively driven by conceptual concerns. They dance as representations of the unskilled, reskilling the untrained body by transforming its physical displays, and not merely the conceptual framework driving the displays, into gestural displays of difference. These displays of difference approach movement as a terrain ripe for democratization, dance as an action that belongs as much to the untrained as to the trained dancer. In this way, though the performance groups discussed here appear to be utilizing an untrained/unskilled aesthetic, perhaps it is more fitting to interpret their work as enacting a new function of dance: to display attempts in keeping with the limitations and possibilities of the body dancing. Though the directors of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM find various ways to ignite the magic of danced precariousness, attempts to renew obstacles invariably encounter limitations. The materiality of the untrained body as “means” inevitably shifts and changes. Performing the same piece again and again is a form of training; untrained bodies cannot help but become accustomed to movement repeated over time. This “training,” however, is very different from dance training in the classical or technical sense; it is more akin to cumulative familiarity. This is not counter

Dancing toward Gesture

85

to the new function of the dancer, but it does underscore the importance of understanding the untrained/deskilled aesthetic of these contemporary groups as representational. By embracing the untrained body as representation, these groups keep similar overarching concepts secure: dance can be produced by any body. Through egalitarian aesthetics, in Poetics Nature Theater creates a complex framework that directly challenges hierarchical relationships, present even in postmodern dance experiments, between professional/unskilled dancing bodies in performance. One performance strategy the group employs involves transplanting the professional dancing body, in the form of a ballerina, into the pedestrian arena, rather than vice versa. Nearly an hour into Poetics, the four untrained Nature Theater dancers exit the stage, and the curtain closes. It swiftly reopens to a new and drastically different scene: a ballerina in a sparking tutu moves across the stage under a blue light. She dances to the slow, lyrical, opening strains of Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” a one-­minute, twenty-­second solo punctuated by audible audience responses. Every gesture is fluid and precise, deliberately supported by her underlying (trained) muscle strength. The sequins on her tutu catch the light as she travels en pointe. Audience members voice approval; the ballerina’s craft ushers virtuosity into the space. Then, unexpectedly, aberrant gestures map onto the ballerina’s body, interjections that interrupt her glissades and arabesques. She gives herself bunny ears, mimes cigarette smoking, hails a cab. Murmurs followed by laughter ripple through the space. This serious dancing artist engages and stages absurdity following formal choreography. Was that formality only a passing figment of imagination? When the ballerina appears, she enters into a space whose rules have been established by four untrained dancing bodies. Accordingly, everyday gestural vocabulary framed as dance has constructed a context for and aesthetic expectations of the materiality of performance. The ballerina’s body immediately destabilizes this territory on two levels: through her physical body, which stands in as a symbol for years of specific movement-­based training, and through the new standard of virtuosic ability she inevitably asserts. Physically, her body represents a set of standards that challenge Agamben’s conception of gesture as a “display of mediation.” These standards include, as Sally Ann Ness writes in Migrations of Gesture, the moments of stillness realized by the ballerina’s phenomenal sense of balance. Ness writes, “Ballet’s performative term  .  .  . is linked most basically not to the idea of mobility but to that of stability, to the maintenance of motionlessness, and to the apparent prolonging of stillness” (Ness 2008, 16). By exalting stability and (apparent) stillness, classical ballet, as a form, approaches the ideal of rendering the body as a frozen image, unpolluted by the extensive physical variations (unplanned shudders, shakes, wobbles, trips, etc.) of untrained or imperfect dancers. This link to motionlessness is, Ness goes on to argue, inscribed in the musculature of the ballet dancer. It is written under her skin

86

Chapter 3

and into the structure of her anatomy as shaped by years of practice. The body of the ballerina, then, represents an ontology of dance that is antithetical to dance as gesture, counter to displays of mediation. The motionless and balanced body is a body that focuses attention on arrival; arrival at a pose, arrival at the maximum vertical point in the arc of a leap, arrival at a point of balance. Further, the “gesture” inscribed within the ballerina’s muscles, imbedded into her physique, suggests fixedness—­even if the ballerina must trace and strengthen that inscription with continued daily training—­at odds with the ephemerality of gesture as transition. As a body that is by virtue of her training both imagistic and textual, the ballerina is a presence that offers both hierarchical and nongestural qualities. Following a brief display of the ballerina’s body as a virtuoso suggestion of arrival and stillness, the progression of the performance quickly corrupts her symbolic status; Nature Theater supplants the ballerina’s dance steps with pedestrian choreography. This transplants the ballerina’s body, with its spectacular potential, into the gestural world of dancers who lack formal technique. In this world, with its relatively simple choreographic configurations, Nature Theater rewrites the sense of what it means to dance, whether as a trained or untrained dancing artist. Dance becomes, rather than a matter of execution that requires particular aim, flexibility, and grace, solely a matter of esprit. Here, balance and stillness have no operative virtue. The act of lifting the arm into the pose of hailing a cab and holding it aloft does not provoke wonder in the witness. Pedestrian movement is by definition action that is accessible within the sphere of the everyday. Consequently, such choreography offers few opportunities for hierarchies of ability to assert themselves among performers, or between performers and audience. Therefore, as soon as the ballerina lets the extraordinariness of her ballet fall away, her body becomes—­as a performing apparatus—­stripped of virtuosity. Though she retains her potential for what Jill Johnston called “the beautifully extended leap of the dancer,” that potential is rendered inert as hegemonic division: she steps outside the authority of her discipline and into a gestural performance space (quoted in Banes 1999 [1993], 70). Her graceful bunny ears comprise, in comparison to four untrained Nature Theater dancers, simply another representation of kinetic differentiation: gesture expressed through intentionally disrupted simultaneity. It is possible to read this subversion of classical ballet as an instance of performative violence, A Ballet Brut as a brutal stance toward formal dance practice. The performance does, after all, dismantle the virtuosity and grace conjured by balletic form. However, Nature Theater sequences the choreography of the piece in such a way as to stage inclusion rather than its counterpoint. Though pedestrian gesture frames the ballerina’s body as a site of potentiality rather than virtuosity, this display comes only after the ballerina dances a classical solo. Subsequent gestures drawn from everyday action do not undercut the virtuosic expression of previous movement. Further, the

Dancing toward Gesture

87

ballerina is not an object of humor so much as someone who instigates and invites humor by willingly moving into a pedestrian world. She participates in conscious play. By folding the ballerina’s training into an expression of dance as a display of mediation, Nature Theater does not deny the capability of the ballerina’s virtuosic body. Rather, the group displays and celebrates her ability, and then dismantles “ability” as a hierarchy-­inducing standard. It is also important to note that due to the practicalities of producing Poetics, even the initial image of the ballerina, pirouetting to the hum of a fog machine, is a marginalized figure made visible. Though Poetics was first produced in Nature Theater’s hometown of New York City, most performances took place on tour, throughout the United States and eastern and western Europe. On tour, the group traveled with the four primary (untrained) dancers/performers, and hired performing ballerinas on a city-­by-­city basis. Due to availability and budgetary constraints (some ballerinas have danced with the group for free), the ballerinas who tend to participate in performances of Poetics are amateurs or former professionals. Kelly Copper describes the history of ballerinas who have performed in the show, saying that “most of the people that we get to work with are people that either had to give up ballet due to some kind of injury or they turned older” (Copper 2008a). With a laugh, Copper recalls a series of ballet students who performed with Nature Theater who were “maybe not as technically perfect” (ibid.). She also remembers an individual guest dancer at a performance in Hamburg, Germany, who was just past her professional days. The Hamburg ballerina was, Copper says, “pretty much retired. She was thirty-­five, and she had a five-­ year-­old daughter that she wanted to have see her dance one last time. And so, you know, it was great for us because she came to the theater to warm up for three hours before the show, she did a great one minute turn onstage, and then, you know, she would go home. She was like a real ballerina who just wanted to do it one last time” (ibid.). Though these ballerinas embody the character of a dancing ideal, as performers in the world of classical ballet outside Poetics, those who perform with Nature Theater tend to be marginalized or otherwise forgotten figures. As Copper says, for many of these ballerinas their eighty seconds of spotlight in Poetics is “maybe the only time they would be wearing a tutu” (ibid.). If nonhierarchical gestures are those that liberate the unseen and overlooked, then these amateur and retired ballerinas remake every dance step, both classical and everyday, into means for advancing the show’s gestus: to make the ordinary and overlooked visible. This prompts a rereading of the ballerina’s entrance, even before she drops her classical choreography, that marks her immediately as a symbol of nonhierarchical display. Though she enters in the midst of motion, the ballerina as a symbol orients toward (nongestural) motionlessness. Yet, as a semiotic reference point, the actual performer is not just a ballerina; she is a specific individual with her own historical relationship to the hierarchical demands of her discipline. As Kelly Copper mentions, most of the ballerinas

88

Chapter 3

who perform with Nature Theater do not exemplify physical balletic ideals. In Poetics, the role of the ballerina tends to be performed, quite simply, by a dancer unlikely to appear in a professional ballet. As such, despite her training, her body references both virtuosity and its own limitations. Like the untrained Nature Theater dancers, she encapsulates the esprit Yvonne Rainer noted in the 2009 performance of Trio A at the University of California, San Diego. Though Nature Theater juxtaposes trained and untrained bodies, they perform on an equalized plane of dance. The bodies project different levels, different “sense[s] of precariousness and achievement,” but regardless of the capabilities of individual bodies, they all have something to achieve, and some way in which they are precarious (Rainer 2009, 18).

Obstacle and Composition In order to develop that sense of precariousness and achievement throughout their dance sequences, contemporary groups can utilize choreographic strategies that exploit the creative potential of the obstacle. The performers, whose pedestrian bodies are one of the gestural “means” that encounter these obstacles, do so according to specific (and different) compositional processes. Nature Theater transplants recognizable everyday gestures into a performance/dance framework. Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and the TEAM mine their movements from a host of sources: cartoons, television, film, photographs, buildings, task-­based rehearsal directives, and so on. Like Nature Theater, Goat Island use dance as part of a meticulous performance structure. In The Lastmaker, for example, the major dance segments sits, as director Lin Hixson remarked during a post-­show discussion, like a “lake” in the middle of the piece.1 The dance has its own rules, its own boundaries, and its own stance toward the audience; the five Goat Island performers stand in a line and simultaneously dance a series of gestures inspired by the architecture of a Byzantine dome in Zagreb, Croatia. Goat Island choreograph an intricate looping series of motions that mirror the geometric shapes they associate with the dome’s structure. The dance, which lasts for approximately one-­ third of The Lastmaker’s total length, tests the performers’ physical endurance as well as the patience and attentiveness of the audience. Commitments to capitalizing on obstacle, and the degrees to which obstacle reveals the transitioning or mediating nature of gesture, operate on sliding scales across contemporary devising groups. Particular groups tend toward or away from obstacle as a generator of gesture and creative material. Nature Theater, for example, occupies a position on this scale that tends toward obstacle, whereas both Elevator Repair Service and Goat Island begin from states that are even further along in that direction. Nature Theater directors articulate how they “deal with everything as material and not obstacles,” while ERS and Goat Island consciously delve into danced gesture as a display

Dancing toward Gesture

89

of mediation between the possible and the impossible (Benson 2006, 44). For ERS and Goat Island, performers transition between impossible attempts and the possible outcomes. The performer’s body struggles to enact (intentionally) impossible directives, even while the body’s capability—­level of training, discipline of muscles, subordination to physical laws—­ties her to the sphere of the possible. The constant mediation or movement between these two states (attempt and outcome) is another element of dance, as these groups stage it, in which the gestural surfaces. Goat Island embraces this, referring to their movement sequences as “impossible dances,” a term that causes ERS director John Collins to exclaim, “Too bad that name is taken!” (Bailes 2002, 199). For both groups, mediating between the possible and the impossible enables each to utilize the generative capacity of failure. Sara Jane Bailes describes this in Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: “Whilst an intended outcome imagines only one result, the ways in which it might not achieve that outcome are indeterminate” (Bailes 2011, 2). The practical strategies for not achieving occur, for both ERS and Goat Island, through the directives that generate movement. For example, Goat Island might initiate movement according to a given task that is clearly impossible to enact: tie a knot in a rope of water, or watch the back of your head (Goat Island 2000). ERS might approach dance choreography through directives that ask performers to replicate the unreplicable, such as mapping movements from cartoons onto their flesh and blood bodies, so that they can “fail to do it and find out what we’re left with” (Bailes 2002, 199). While the creative potential for failure offers rich areas of exploration, notably in works such as Sara Jane Bailes’s analysis of the presence and stakes of failure, I am particularly interested in the movement between the possible and the impossible such processes entail. Before the groups, as Collins says, “find out what we’re left with,” they encounter failing as a process. As such, failure is intentional only insofar as it names an exploration of possibility often instituted by the director or facilitator. For the performer engaging in the action(s) of failure, failed attempts to achieve impossible movement effectively remove the locus of a concrete kinetic goal. Instead, the enacted goal transforms into urgent attempt. Consequences of exploiting attempts to achieve impossible movement simultaneously ensure both failure and success: the failure to enact the impossible, the success of excising predictability and maximizing discovery through the performer’s body. Through explorations of failure, ERS and Goat Island open up the performer’s ability to display the mediation between the attempt and the possible, cognizant of the fact that a stated “impossible” goal serves as a means of very realizable movement discovery. Conversely, one of Nature Theater’s strategies involves incorporating the obstacles of daily rehearsal realities into movement scores. Perhaps these approaches suggest two relevant categories of danced gestural development for these groups: provoking, which utilizes impossible tasks to create new forms of movement; and subsuming, which includes the obstacle in choreographic expression. These approaches, provoking and

90

Chapter 3

subsuming, produce distinctly different qualities of movement. Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, for all their important choreographic differences, stage unexpected kinetic forms, largely unrecognizable and alien to the audience. Nature Theater often utilizes movement that is familiar, that strikes chords of recognition. Yet, both approaches enable and explore new gestural forms. These three groups, beginning from states that orient differently toward the creative potential of obstacle, enact forms that transition between—­or stage the intersection of—­dance and theater. Occupying intermediary gestural space carved by the unpredictability of untrained dancing bodies, the resulting unpolished movement is not always welcome to audiences. New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als is one voice that found some of ERS’s dance sequences to be derivative of the Wooster Group. In ERS’s The Sound and the Fury, Als noted, “this influence is especially apparent early in the evening, when the piece is broken up by hokey dance numbers” (Als 2008). Nature Theater of Oklahoma draws individual gestures from everyday urban life, which—­as the movements themselves are mundane—­creates a different challenge in terms of the acceptance of their work as dance. Writing of Poetics as it was performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in January 2010, dance critic Janet Smith was frustrated by the choreography that seemed “scattered into an illogical, awkward ballet” (Smith 2010). Similarly, Small Acts of Repair notes that critic Henry Sayre describes Goat Island’s How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies (1996) as “a ballet gone awkward” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 63). Taking these critical responses together, an interesting series of adjectives, all related to dance as it transpires in these pieces, takes shape: hokey, illogical, awkward. Even as these critics indict the quality and validity of dance produced by these groups, the language of the criticism offers generative characterizations. If dance appears throughout the work of Nature Theater, ERS, and Goat Island as gestural through its nature as both display and mediation, questions persist: What kind of gesture? And how, exactly, might this as-­yet-­ unnamed gestural mode, perceived as hokey, illogical, and awkward, open up understanding of what these particular groups, with their particular performing members, seek to achieve?

The Politics of Gesture Giorgio Agamben’s writing on pure gesture in “Kommerell, or On Gesture” provides opportunities to reassess the stakes of the work produced by these performance groups. In this essay, Agamben quotes Max Kommerell, who describes pure gesture as a phenomenon that resides “beyond the gestures of the soul and the gestures of nature” (Agamben 1999, 79). In this sphere of pure gesture, “worldly wisdom, piety and art are indistinguishable” (ibid.).

Dancing toward Gesture

91

For Agamben, Kommerell’s characterizations of pure gesture “call to mind the redeemed world, whose uncertain gestures Walter Benjamin, in the same years, discerned in Kafka’s ‘Oklahoma Nature Theater.’” In his Illuminations, Benjamin interpreted Kafka’s Nature Theater as follows: “One of the most significant functions of this theater is to dissolve happenings into their gestic components  .  .  . Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-­changing contexts and experimental groupings. The theater is the logical place for such groupings” (Benjamin 2007 [1968], 120). For Agamben, Kafka’s Oklahoma Nature Theater (or Nature Theater of Oklahoma) occupies Kommerell’s description of a special “sphere, which one may call pure gestures” (Agamben 1999 [1993], 79). This not only identifies Kafka’s Nature Theater, the inspiration for New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as a purveyor of pure gesture; it also opens up performance as the natural home for its expression. Benjamin writes, “The theater is the logical place” (Benjamin 2007 [1968], 120). Theater, then, is especially endowed with the potential to generate, or display what Benjamin calls “ever-­changing contexts and experimental groupings” of gestic components that, together, form the modality of pure gesture (ibid.). Yet not every collection of ever-­transitioning contexts and gestic groupings constitutes pure gesture as Kommerell defines it. The gestic components must have unique characteristics that Agamben claims come to fruition in Kafka’s Nature Theater in particular. Their realization in the literary Nature Theater is a consequence, as Benjamin describes it, of the inevitable and unforeseen pattern that forms Kafka’s particular “code of gestures” (ibid.). But how, and why? Perhaps pure gesture, as Agamben describes it with the aid of Kommerell and Benjamin, maps onto the array of qualities critics have ascribed to the dance sequences of Nature Theater, Goat Island, and ERS: awkward, clumsy, and so on. Having claimed Kafka’s Nature Theater, an unseen specter of the writer’s (and reader’s) imagination, as a stage on which “pure gesture” unfolds, Agamben does not describe this theater further. It is as though Kafka’s Nature Theater advertises its enthusiasm to give anyone and everyone a job, yet is unreachable by both reader and character. As noted in earlier chapters, Kafka’s novel Amerika ends as protagonist Karl Rossman rides a train through mountains and over bridges, en route to the Nature Theater—­a self-­declaimed ideal of acceptance—­a space Kafka’s unfinished novel yields only as a promise. However, perhaps “pure gesture” need not be relegated to a sphere suggested by the potential of Kafka’s Nature Theater. Alternatively, readers might imagine pure gesture as constructed by encounters around theater and theatricality that actually take place within the novel. These encounters are not majestic utopian imaginings, but practicalities and performances that Rossman stumbles upon as he approaches Nature Theater’s representatives

92

Chapter 3

in pursuit of employment. The details of this literary scene reveal patterns of differentiated gesture. For example, at the Nature Theater’s recruitment center, Rossman first encounters playacting angels who produce “a confused noise[;] the trumpets weren’t playing in tune, there was just wild playing” (Kafka 2004 [1996], 203). Other people stand about in front of the angels, similarly unsure about how to proceed: “They admired the performance, but you could see they were disappointed too. They were probably expecting to find a work opportunity, and were confused by the trumpeting” (ibid., 204). Rossman uncertainly makes his way past the angels and into the recruitment center, where he abruptly finds himself in the midst of everyday bureaucracy. He waits in line with other job candidates as “the youths at first barged and shoved each other.” The head of personnel speaks to them, saying, “‘On behalf of the Theatre of Oklahoma, I’d like to welcome you. You’ve come early’—­actually it was almost noon” (ibid., 207). Only after missteps and multiple scoldings regarding misreading signs and failing to bring the proper papers does Rossman find himself hired and ready to ship off to Oklahoma. Kafka’s first images of his Nature Theater of Oklahoma are littered with fits, starts, and confusions. He ushers in these images with tuneless trumpeters and mismanaged queues. These encounters represent some pitfalls of everyday employment within bureaucratic systems, imbedded in the literary foundations of New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma. However, these representations also function as gestic components that, together, make up the sphere of “pure gesture” Kafka’s Nature Theater inhabits. In the novel, Rossman’s first encounters with the Nature Theater are as uncoordinated as the five Goat Island performers onstage, as they stand close to one another during The Lastmaker and make stuttering attempts at 360-­degree jumps. One might describe Amerika’s characters—­performers hired to play angels, other prospective employees, and the recruitment personnel—­with the same adjectives contemporary theater critics have used to describe danced moments developed by Goat Island, ERS, and New York’s Nature Theater: hokey, illogical, awkward. The trumpeting angels are enthusiastic but untrained, engaged in performance production that falls far short of virtuosity. Though they operate under an aesthetic different from contemporary minimalist experiments, enacting a celestial-­inspired spectacle, their spectacle produces only the strange cacophony that is their “confused noise” (ibid., 203). This confusion, which Kafka describes by painting an image of mismatched aural tones emanating from trumpets that “weren’t playing in tune,” uses music as a means of creating gestural differentiation: all the robed performers contribute, through their individuated inability to play synchronous tones, to the intricate variations of “wild playing” (ibid.). Like the scarcely containable passionate dancing of ERS, the durational exhaustion of Goat Island, and the ecstatic everyday movement of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Kafka’s theater, in its first performative moment on the page, defies synchronicity. In the place of a single tune, a single gesture, the chorus

Dancing toward Gesture

93

of angels produce near-­infinite aural combinations, a dizzying array of what Benjamin calls gestic components. In Benjamin’s reading, Kafka juggles possible symbolic structures for his gestic components in place of a clear sense of the gestus. Benjamin writes, “What Kafka could fathom least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event—­one might even say a drama—­in itself” (Benjamin 2005 [1999], 801). According to Benjamin, who describes Kafka’s literary choreography almost as one might describe a theater director with improvisatory leanings, Kafka develops drama within individual components and then makes meaning retroactively. These changing contexts and groupings posit Kafka’s literary stage as a kind of laboratory setting, in which gestus appears only later, as a consequence of unplanned associations. From this perspective, the audience (or reader) watches ongoing encounters unfold, and gauges how Kafka’s experimental groupings gradually assemble gestus almost accidentally. In Amerika there is no end point to the accident; the novel concludes with Rossman forever on the train, frozen in the process of transition. This is the literary gesture of Kafka’s novel, always mediating and never arriving. As an abstracted term levied and developed by Agamben, gesture emerges as an arm of the political. Gestus, shaped and cultivated by Bertolt Brecht, has roots more tangibly tied to the specificity of performance. Even in its Brechtian sense, gestus is slippery, and can refer to the craft of the performer, to music, to the theatrical piece as a whole. Theater director and Brecht scholar Carl Weber describes gestus in relation to the actor’s task, saying, “It is an ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures, the face and its mimetic patterns and rhythms, costume, makeup, props, and whatever else the actor employs to achieve the complete image of the role he/she is performing” (Weber 1999, 43). The “complete image of the role” rests on a series of components, all of which refer back to the character’s action/function/identity within a social atmosphere. In Languages of the Stage, Patrice Pavis invokes Mother Courage as a well-­known example of this; when Mother Courage bites a coin to test its worth, she “carries out a social Gestus which is quite precise. The act of biting on the coin establishes a whole fund of social dependencies (future clients, the producers of money and goods, authors and victims of fraudulent practices, etc.)” (Pavis 1982, 41). Gestus as applied to character considers the performer as a microcosm of social relationships. These include, as Pavis indicates through her reading of Mother Courage, economic relationships. When Weber describes the gestus of the actor as “an ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures,” “ensemble” at once refers to the splitting of the performer’s craft into a series of components (body, movement, gesture) and the collection of these into a social gestus that resides in the materiality of the performer’s presence and stage action (Weber 1999, 43). This gestus encompasses the gaps and slippages between performer and character, as both partake in the “ensemble” that references two distinct social worlds. This ensemble, which meets in the physical body of the performer, expresses

94

Chapter 3

the socially encoded movement and gesture of the character’s world, as rendered through the context of the live performer. In this way, the gestus of the performance unites contemporary context, the social world within which the actor crafts her performance, with character representation. In all its applications, gestus references and merges with the social. Applied to the performance as a complete encounter, gestus folds the performer into a wider socially based collection that includes mise-­en-­scène, interactions with stage partners, staging, and choreography, every element of production in service to the story. In his writing on Brecht, John Willett reminds readers, “there is no single word by which Gestus can be translated. It is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed” (Willett 1967 [1959], 175). For Weber, gestus is an ensemble; for Willett, it is rooted in relation. Both interpretations open up gestus as the consequence of collaborative acts. Either components of performer and craft link and intertwine to create a whole character (ensemble), or performers collaboratively develop characters as representative of particular relations. Pavis further claims gestus as inherently social by dissolving divisions between individual and social or group gesture: “The distinction between an individual gesture and a socially encoded one is also quite irrelevant to Gestus. For Brecht, gesture . . . belongs and refers to a group, a class, a milieu” (Pavis 1982, 44). In Brecht’s works, the gestus of the actor contributes to the gestus of the whole work, and both constitute arrangements of socially generated actions and behavior. Brecht offers up these related components through stylistic strategies intended to invigorate the audience’s objectivity and critique. Gestus is both the means and the meaning of making a particular set of behavioral codes visible. Perhaps, though Benjamin claims that Kafka’s grasp on gestus is slight, Kafka’s gestic components fuse into a cohesive gestural project throughout Amerika, which ultimately finds fruition in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. For, as Benjamin notes: “Kafka’s world is a world theater. For him, man is on stage from the very beginning. The proof is the fact that everyone is hired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards are for admission cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves” (Benjamin 2005 [1999], 804). In Kafka’s Nature Theater, all that is expected of the applicants is an ability to play themselves as performers. When Rossman encounters the awkward chorus of angels, the performers/angels do not have dramatic or musical expertise, but they retain other trappings of performance. They have costumes, props, and pedestals, and behave within a theatrical frame that marks them as symbolic. For them, the slippage between performer and character is significant, which is part of their gestural vocabulary as performers. The gestus of the Nature Theater involves not only an open criterion for its applicants, but also the theater’s unspoken criterion: willingness to perform

Dancing toward Gesture

95

in an unskilled fashion, to allow oneself to be framed as a representation of the untrained. While the ensembles Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, the TEAM, and Nature Theater experiment with variations of movement mapped onto untrained bodies, Kafka’s Nature Theater aligns with “gesture” as it emerges from untrained individuals acting in unfamiliar situations. Rather than foregrounding bodies, Kafka focuses on awkward encounters. The encounter is where awkwardness and illogic arise to color the gestus of the whole work. In this context, untrained bodies in the contemporary works discussed here might be material extensions of gesture as it transpires within Kafka’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Kafka imagines gestus as a fusion of the practical and the utopian. The utopian ideal of the unseen Nature Theater, which accepts untrained and amateur alike, intersects with the pragmatic offshoots of this project. If Kafka’s Theater accepts and employs everyone, then it stands to reason that not everyone will be equally good at their job. Though not everyone in Kafka’s Nature Theater can play a trumpet or act as an engineer, they must (and do) try. In place of virtuosity as idealized value, Kafka’s Nature Theater presents gestus as composed of attempts rather than achievements. Likewise, the intentionally untrained performers of Nature Theater, the TEAM, Goat Island, and ERS choreograph and perform dance that uses formal structure in order to express and display differentiated

Figure 3.7. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Left to right, Robert Johanson, Zachary Oberzan. Photo copyright © Dieter Hartwig.

96

Chapter 3

movement. Within that differentiated movement, which may be awkward and even clumsy, the performer’s impossible task surfaces: to express “the ability to play themselves” (ibid.). From this perspective, the misalignments and uncoordinated motion of this kind of contemporary choreography are not failures to achieve a certain standard of dance. Rather, they are slippages that reference a sphere of potentiality, in which pure gesture resides as an expression of whole mind and body commitment. Unlike the characters connected to Kafka’s Nature Theater, these contemporary performance groups showcase the attempt again and again, in repeated performances that tour across the United States and throughout the world. The gestus of this kind of work is of course distinct from that of Kafka’s Nature Theater. It is a socially motivated challenge that queries what modalities of bodies and gestures deserve representation, while displaying the impossibility of playing oneself. Through repeated performance and intentionally constructed precariousness, which reskills their aesthetic deskilling, even “authentic” gestural differentiation becomes self-­consciously representational. Representational gestus applied to these contemporary performances is part of what supports claims for the social and political relevance of this kind of work. Movement in The Lastmaker, The Sound and the Fury, Mission Drift, and Poetics: A Ballet Brut becomes gestural, as Agamben describes it, through active emphasis on the capabilities of untrained bodies, and the display of these bodies as means engaged in a constant process of transformation. This transformation mediates between spatial orientations organized to foreground the difference—­the ragged shapelessness—­offered by dancing bodies that are not explicitly, and physically, virtuosic. In this paradigm of gesture, a deskilled aesthetic arises from the groups’ consistent kinetic goal: to try. While these attempts communicate a supreme gesture, or gestus, of acceptance, they do so according to gestic components that are, like Kafka’s components within the final chapter of Amerika, dramas in and of themselves. For performers, whose individual gestus transforms over time as their deskilled dance is reskilled, thereby widening the divide between performer-­as-­self and performer-­as-­representation, gestic components become increasingly immersed in the social. Tied to the social world through gestural forms of movement, these groups produce forms of performance that threaten to elude Agamben’s conceptualization of both the gestural and the political as means without ends. There are ends for these groups, subtly imbedded in the slow process of making work as well as in the ragged, differentiated representational performances themselves: to model the time-­taking of collaborative process, to advocate for acceptance that makes space for the individual within the group, to use representation to dismantle the power dynamics of hierarchy. In this way, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater produce performance that is ethically engaged because, by offering and showing ways making work, these groups implicitly “propose to the audience a way of living” (Benson 2006, 51).

Chapter 4

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

Topology is the property of something that doesn’t change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don’t break anything. —­E dward Witten (Witten n.d.)

At a basic level, the artistic projects of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM align with mathematical processes: counting, pattern making, mapping, and communicating structure. Perhaps these are processes that supersede disciplinary divisions, with potential to accentuate shared attentiveness to aesthetics. When Nature Theater of Oklahoma embraces aleatory techniques as means for generating choreography, the group effectively stages a kind of performative mathematical uncertainty model that revels in audiences’ meaning-­ making impulses in response to (somewhat) randomly generated sequences enacted by live bodies. When Goat Island completes their life as an ensemble as they reach total performance works numbering the greatest single-­digit natural number (9), members of the group reveal their investment in aesthetic principles that govern group action outside as well as inside the performance space. As Paige McGinley writes about New York experimental performance makers, ushering the reader toward a twenty-­ first-­ century generation of performance groups including the TEAM, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Witness Relocation, Banana Bag & Bodice and others, she laments the absence of a three-­dimensional representational analysis. Such a medium might explicate the networked connection among groups that “mimics the fractal, spatial storytelling that characterizes so much of the work” (McGinley 2010, 13). Perhaps the very processes of ensemble-­centric performance making, ever evolving attempts to layer many sources and many voices into cohesive methodologies and performances, ask for language that evokes the geometric, the structural, the mathematical. Borrowed language can enable an investigation toward defining collective identity for some of these ensembles, marking out shapes and contours that make them what and who they are, able to be stretched and bent but nonetheless topologically intact “as long as you don’t break anything” (Witten n.d.). 97

98

Chapter 4

American Fractals In the era of the forty-­fifth president of the United States, rife with sharp ideological divisions, the ontology of “America” is newly infused with violence and uncertainty. Rhetoric from opposing political poles claims the term as a shorthand promise. For some “America” expresses a commitment to a progressive and inclusive future; for others it functions as a slogan for ravenous (white) nationalism. This particular sociopolitical moment, following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, trends toward conflict around the branding of “America” and what it means to make America great (again): Which shorthand will appropriate the semiotic resonance of the word? Which America will emerge victorious, and which will be supplanted? Political poles forge a myth of two Americas that is fueled in part, perhaps, by a well-­ established two-­party political system with deeply partisan habits. Binaries are, it seems, written into America’s code of governance. Within this climate, group-­oriented values and processes, collectivity and consensus for example, simultaneously risk deep suspicion and casual dismissal. In contrast to, and sometimes in direct response to, the binary leanings of America’s democratic processes, theater-­making groups like the TEAM adopt alternative power-­ sharing models that rely on highly adaptive creative methodologies and a flexible sense of group identity. This focus on flexibility and adaptation, whether by choice or necessity, enables the group to uniquely engage with American sociopolitical culture, to balance at the birthing point of infinite Americas that reject binaries through ongoing processes of becoming. The mutable architecture of the emerging American moment inevitably accommodates the towers and caverns of America’s histories, forging the identities of the present through brutality as well as promise. America is and has been, as Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon remind readers, “a contested term for a contested site” (Jestrovic and Meerzon 2009, 4). Just one country in the midst of two American continents, the United States successfully claims its title as “America” through ongoing utterances that enact an unapologetically colonial grammar. One way to view America is simply as a set of contested acts glimpsed only in pieces: stolen words, stolen space. In some ways, the central act that defines America is that of taking, and that centrality suggests the core of our divisive nationhood: to take from renders the victim as other, which renders a shared goal impossible. Collaboration and multiplicity fundamentally detract from radical, utopian individualism. It is this national face, the face that claims authority by rejecting collectivity, that the TEAM challenges through processes and aesthetics that consistently and openly work away from binary acts and representation. In works like Mission Drift (2011) and RoosevElvis (2013), the group crafts aesthetics that model versions of collectivity that anticipate the Trump-­era sociopolitical climate in the United States. Through language, character, medium, and image, Mission Drift and RoosevElvis function as premonitions: each piece

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

99

implements Paige McGinley’s “fractal, spatial storytelling” that inherently rejects the very notion of sharply opposed dualities, divisions that form the bedrock of dueling American myths. To speak of postcolonial America is to articulate impossibility, a fractal spiraling layers upon layers as utopias and dystopias collide. This impossibility is precisely where the TEAM has most consistently and explicitly derived inspiration, which shows up in their pieces that consistently explore American cultural figures/concepts and America’s evolving and emerging geopolitical landscape: Richard Nixon (Give Up! Start Over!), Allen Ginsberg (HOWL), Robert F. Kennedy and the Left Behind book series (Particularly in the Heartland), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and New Orleans (Architecting), Las Vegas (Mission Drift), Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis (RoosevElvis), American jazz (The Holler Sessions), and more.1 Mission Drift, which went through numerous titular iterations over the course of its development, is perhaps the most evidently entangled with the TEAM’s collective creative processes.2 The piece moves through time and space, following an enduring couple of Dutch colonists who become infected by manifest destiny, and who eventually find its spectacular and tragic fulfilment in Las Vegas. The process of creating the piece, which is chronicled in Paulette Douglas’s documentary film The TEAM Makes a Play, also evolved through self-­conscious movement through time and space, developing amid great obstacles over the course of years in multiple sites and cities across the United States and Europe. Through both process and aesthetic, Mission Drift enacts storytelling that preserves the chaos of collectivity and multiplicity as complex and valuable. In the first moments of Mission Drift, the audience meets a performance guide, a figure that seems to be part narrator, part showgirl, part lounge singer. Her name is Miss Atomic, and she establishes the space immediately as Las Vegas, or perhaps as some facsimile of Las Vegas that reflects what audience members might imagine Las Vegas to be. Miss Atomic’s hosting is seductive and musical; she directly addresses the audience and delineates each person present in the room as part of her mysterious, magical inner circle. She purrs, “We make our homes in impossibility” (The TEAM 2013, 13). With that “we,” she initiates audiences into a community of misfits, of outside eyes welcomed inside the event, “pagans, Vegans, insomniacs, gorgeous lizards, hospitality peddlers, sweethearts, assassins” (ibid.). Whoever or whyever we are, Miss Atomic invites each of us to enter performance as kin made so by our very differences, forged through our strategies of surviving long enough to stumble upon “our oasis in the desert” (ibid.). For Miss Atomic, secured within the framework of Mission Drift, that oasis is ironically Las Vegas, a sprawling, dried-­out island of glitter and neon where a fertile valley used to be. If Las Vegas, the economic and geographic muse for Mission Drift, has become a problematic oasis that revels in the explosively surface-­ level spectacular, Miss Atomic suggests that Mission Drift offers a watering

100

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1. The TEAM’s Mission Drift. Pictured: Heather Christian as Miss Atomic, center, with the TEAM ensemble. Photo copyright © Nick Vaughan.

hole of another sort. Ushered into her community through her inclusive yet elusive language (is “we” really all of us??), the audience’s oasis comes into focus as performance itself; sustenance flickers in Miss Atomic’s voice like a promise. She invites us into a performative landscape where “we hallucinate regularly” and confesses her tendency to “play the genies” (ibid.). Immediately, she situates herself as story-­spinner, music maker, master of ceremonies. Within each role, she might take on the responsibility of the genie, she might control the magic called theatrical production, she might escort audiences into experiences of performance that fulfill deep desires. But what manner of wish fulfillment will audiences encounter? Does she ask the group to hallucinate alongside her, and does she offer pleasure or pain? Miss Atomic’s voice primes listeners to nest in brief experiences of chaotic collectivity, moments

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

101

of joining the “we” she throws out like a lifeline, offered to anyone present in the shared space of Mission Drift. Welcomed as one of Miss Atomic’s Vegans, audience members are free to make their homes in liveness whether they are from Las Vegas or from the stars. Thus, from the opening lines of Mission Drift, Miss Atomic initiates paradox through her invitations: to alight within a live event that is already receding, to delineate sustainable habitats within a performance/city/nation whose borders never stop shifting, to quench thirst in a desert. Miss Atomic’s words evoke the imperative of the devising group as well as citizens of desert cities: to locate the meeting point between explosive passion and its desolate aftermath, to find the impossible. To make one’s home there. In stark contrast to the captivating clutter Miss Atomic suggests in her opening address to the audience, she next delivers a fable that introduces the concept of divisive nationhood, unrelenting binary, as creation myth. Before time there were two twin brothers. Myth, beast brothers. Big scale. They slept between mountains with their legs in separate valleys. Their names were Love and Wrestling  .  .  . Love did everything he could to build up the fucking land: dams, canals, hotels, high rises, casinos. And Wrestling did everything he could to raze the fuckers down. Tornados, earthquakes, explosions, whatever. And on they went, until one day, Love realized, “What the hell? Why don’t I get these fucking humans to do my work?” So Love put the lust for improvement and development and expansion  .  .  . and expansion into the hearts of humans, and claimed his Lazy-­boy throne in the sky. And then he changed his name. To Steve Wynn . . . Everybody’s heart has two houses. Two brothers living inside. (Ibid.)

There is something familiar about this story as Miss Atomic spins it for the audience; twinship is a sacred theme that threads through the mythologies of cultures across the world, forming a web through time and space. Like Romulus and Remus, Love and Wrestling are two faces of a single coin, responsible for the creation of cities that signify excess and decadence. Unlike these twins of ancient Roman lore, Love and Wrestling are physically larger than life, god-­scale beings whose competitive struggles become ongoing sets of provocations and responses, repeated so furiously that the story of their competition cycles like a snake swallowing its own tail. They play with the land as with a sandbox, with the short tempers and pettiness one might associate with the divine figures of Greek and Roman myth. As childish rivals, Love and Wrestling construct and destroy with the confidence of gods, but with the same primal territorialism one might expect from toddlers building up and tearing down one another’s toys. The twins’ game, played across the horizontal and vertical planes of the earth, seems to unfold according to Newton’s Third Law. Briefly summarized:

102

Chapter 4

for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Love builds up, therefore Wrestling tears down. Therefore Love builds up, therefore Wrestling tears down. There are, however, more elements to the law of motion governing the two forces Miss Atomic calls Love and Wrestling. Physicist Rhett Allain suggests a wording that more precisely reflects the reciprocity principle of Newton’s Third Law. He proposes a lengthier description: “Forces come in pairs. Forces are an interaction between two objects. This means that if object A pushes on object B, then object B pushes on A with the same force but in the opposite direction” (Allain 2013). This wording, reflective, as Allain states, of the relationship between objects and forces claimed by Newton’s Third Law, is metaphorically useful as well. Perhaps Love and Wrestling must be twins because “forces come in pairs.” As a twosome, they push on each other with the same force, in opposing directions: Love (building) pushes up on Wrestling (razing), and with equal force Wrestling pushes down on Love. Even as Miss Atomic names the impulse to create “Love,” she undercuts the positive connotations of the word by describing how this force—­unchecked—­can mask the land or keep it from running its natural course, by covering it with “dams, canals, hotels, high rises, casinos” (The TEAM 2013, 14). Yet, the balanced force provided by Wrestling creates a stable interaction. This changes when Love effectively cheats by substituting his work with the work of humans, abdicating his half, his responsibility to the paired forces, by outsourcing his labor. By retiring to his “Lazy-­Boy throne in the sky” and infecting humankind with a lust for expansion, Love unbalances the forces and shifts the rules of antagonism. Presumably, Wrestling still maintains his compulsion to raze the land. Now, in place of two paired forces pushing on one another equally in opposite directions, Love’s gaze sinks downward, also pushing toward the ground. With a tongue-­in-­cheek conclusion that indicts a living Las Vegas real estate mogul, Miss Atomic quips that Love then changes his name to Steve Wynn. Agents and architects of capitalism are, indeed, epic forces to reckon with. The binary manifested by Love and Wrestling reverberates allegorically; possibilities surface that speak to the inner state of both individual and nationhood. One comment on the nature of the individual is clear, as Miss Atomic closes her story with a summation: “Everybody’s heart has two houses. Two brothers living inside” (ibid.). Presumably, this is an enjoinder that acknowledges the constructive alongside the destructive potential of humankind, both of which are equally present and equally forceful. This tidy interpretation is perhaps overly reductive given the context of Miss Atomic’s full story and the remainder of Mission Drift, which suggests that unchecked construction enacts a colonial violence. At one point, Dutch colonist Catalina cries out in an expression of sexualized manifest destiny: “I want to have a thousand babies!! And I want to give them each a piece of this land. And I wanna do you on every acre of this continent” (ibid.). Rather, the TEAM’s text seems to suggest that, when balanced forces are perverted, as they become when Love

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

103

fills humankind’s hearts with “the lust for improvement and development and expansion . . . and expansion,” the resulting gravitational force downward toward destruction is undeniable (ibid.). By personalizing Newton’s principle of reciprocity, punctuated with the twins’ expletive-­ laden emotional responses to one another, Miss Atomic emphasizes the binary as central to both the individual and to America’s foundational psyche. She then advances that binary toward its inevitable and destructive conclusion: delegation. As long as Love and Wrestling participate in their antagonistic match, they abide by a particular structure governed by rules, representing duality while cooperating according to a shared intention. To describe this another way, in Miss Atomic’s fable the twins compete individually but play the game of competition together. When that relatively organized competition erodes and Love takes on an executive rather than an active role, the checks and balances provided by opposing forces are no longer effective. This dynamic seems eerily prescient in terms of America’s contemporary sociopolitical climate, one in which the relatively predictable machine of two-­party antagonism is experiencing substantial upheaval. Following the 2016 election, the forceful duality of American politics seems to trend increasingly toward unstable tension. As the Las Vegas Miss Atomic describes, a spectacle of excess, of expansion experienced to the maximum degree, so too American political structures begin to signify the spectacular. Mainly focused on or emerging from the nation’s highest executive office, following the election of President Trump there is an explosion: an excess of media coverage, an excess of informal communication (tweets), an excess of celebrity. In Miss Atomic’s origin story, when the binary of equal forces breaks down, one turns into a real estate mogul who contaminates humanity with a desire for excess and then watches the game from on high. In the Trump era of the United States, in place of the Lazy-­Boy in the sky there is a White House. And in place of Steve Wynn there is another real-­life real estate mogul, President Trump, who tests the limits of partisan loyalty while delegating responsibilities from the highest office in the land. Even as the trajectory of the Love and Wrestling tale advances toward a broken law of motion, Miss Atomic’s poetic statement about the human heart tends toward the infinite. This conjures a replicating image of the human heart that contains two brothers in two houses, creating a fractal-­like model. In this way, perhaps the TEAM’s Mission Drift offers up images of foundational binaries while simultaneously enacting a refusal of uncompromising duality. Miss Atomic’s description could infinitely loop, were one to zoom in and see the pattern continued: There were two brothers, and inside their hearts were two houses with two brothers living inside. And inside their hearts were two houses with two brothers living inside. And inside their hearts were two houses with two brothers living inside, and so on. By comparing the nature of the human heart allegory in Mission Drift to the properties of fractals, new ways to read the TEAM’s aesthetics emerge: complex pattern

104

Chapter 4

making and infinite possibility supplant the stable antagonism offered by enduring binaries. Like a performance ensemble’s process or assemblage of story, a fractal becomes itself through movement: to the human eye, fractals become legible and recognizable through the motion of magnification or compression—­of moving in or moving out. Famous fractals, such as the boundary of the Mandelbrot set, for example, are compelling static images made substantially more so when the process of detail-­unfolding is animated. Even as a static image, with the potential of detail-­unfolding alive in the imagination, the Mandelbrot set is what science writer John Briggs calls “the most famous object in modern mathematics,” which excites the fascination of nonmathematicians, who “have been attracted by the set’s haunting beauty and the idea of abstract mathematics turned into tangible pleasures” (Briggs 2008). Fractal animation software is now readily available, and one common form the “tangible pleasure” takes is through the mesmerizing motion of screen savers, framed like hanging artwork or like mini-­dramas bounded by a doll-­ sized proscenium arch, by the edges of the computer screen. If many are mesmerized by the movement of animated fractals across private screen spaces, perhaps there is something in that fascination that carries over into encounters with the “fractal, spatial storytelling” of contemporary performance groups like the TEAM (McGinley 2010, 13). Fractal-­like aesthetics can function as trackable markers; locating repeating pattern potential in Miss Atomic’s blueprint of the human heart is just one way an audience might perceive this aesthetic. In the TEAM’s Mission Drift, for example, storytelling moves from the general to the specific, from icon to individual and back again, through an evocative assemblage. Like the fractal, with no beginning and no end but only greater detail, the TEAM’s storytelling tries out different starting perspectives, plotting moments like points for the audience toward a whole that becomes gradually focused as the performance advances. Beyond her opening address and storytelling to the audience, Miss Atomic of Mission Drift is an example of a character, created by the group’s collective writing and rehearsal process, that contains multitudes. Played by musician and TEAM collaborator Heather Christian, Miss Atomic is at once narrator, singer, bandleader, and beauty contestant. Within the context of the performance, she is both soul of the story and of Las Vegas, a showgirl whose authority functions on multiple levels. In Paulette Douglas’s documentary The TEAM Makes a Play, which chronicles the developmental process of Mission Drift, viewers encounter the character as an addition that initially surprised Heather Christian, who had originally been contracted to compose the score for the piece. Following the group’s research into the history of midcentury “Miss Atomic” Las Vegas beauty queens, showgirls photographed as pinup girls to sell the spectacle of the mushroom cloud, Miss Atomic—­played by Christian—­was eventually written into the project (Douglas 2013). She

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

105

gradually becomes, as the documentary follows the working and reworking of Mission Drift, a narrative lynchpin that enacts the spectacle of the very big as well as the very small. While the spectacle of the Atomic Age initially conjures a vast disruption of space and landscape, it emerges from subatomic processes. The display of mass destruction, stitched into the white mushroom cloud–­shaped costume Lee A. Merlin wore in 1957 as Las Vegas’s Miss Atomic Bomb, and the expanse of desert outside Las Vegas that became known as “the most bombed place on Earth” were made manifest by splitting atomic nuclei (Blitz 2016). Miss Atomic of Mission Drift is, then, a figure heavy with symbolic resonance: she is the face of the Las Vegas showgirl cum Miss Atomic beauty queen; she is the implosion of weaponized radioactive particles; she is the soul of Las Vegas that Matthew Paul Olmos describes as “continually imploding on its own appetite” (Olmos 2012). Responding to the group’s performance at P.S. 122 as part of 2012’s Coil Festival, Olmos also describes ways in which Miss Atomic takes ownership over the pathways the audience traverses through layers of epic and quotidian stories: “Acting as a guide of sorts, Miss Atomic treats the world as though it is a cabaret-­style lounge in one of the downtown Vegas casinos, often talking at the characters, almost as if she is controlling them” (ibid.). She also enacts the spectacle of smallness, a lack of control represented by the energy potential of the atom that endures as a part of an ever-­changing whole until it is disrupted and weaponized. In the Pulitzer Prize–­winning work The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-­in-­ the-­Moon-­Marigolds, Paul Zindel’s scientifically minded Tillie opens the play with a monologue celebrating the atom’s function as a means of connecting time and space: He told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine. This part of me was formed from a tongue of fire that screamed through the heavens until there was our sun. And this part of me—­this tiny part of me—­was on the sun when it itself exploded and whirled in a great storm until the planets came to be . . . And he said this thing was so small—­this part of me was so small it couldn’t be seen—­but it was there from the beginning of the world. And he called this bit of me an atom. And when he wrote the word, I fell in love with it. Atom. Atom. What a beautiful word. (Zindel 1997 [1970], 1)

There is something in Tillie’s earnest explication of the power of smallness that flickers in Mission Drift’s gaudy Miss Atomic. In place of the idealized path of the atom Tillie describes, from an exploded star to whirling planets to her own hand, Miss Atomic’s very existence references the breaking of the atom, the fractured ideal of structure connected over space and time. In her world, commodification occurs across the landscape at all scales:

106

Chapter 4

JORIS: Are you excited for this morning’s test? MISS ATOMIC: I sure am Mr. Darling. JORIS: What do you think it’s gonna look like? MISS ATOMIC: Well, I saw the pictures from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I heard they just keep making these things bigger! So I think it’s gonna be big. JORIS: Big? MISS ATOMIC: Huge. I think we’re gonna feel it from here. And I think it’s gonna hit us all right in the face . . . JORIS: I’m so fucking happy. They’re gonna be testing these things almost every month, and I think we should celebrate each one here. (The TEAM 2013, 57) In this scene, Joris the Dutch-­colonist-­turned-­Las-­Vegas-­business-­tycoon exhibits Miss Atomic the beauty queen, and prompts her as he might prompt an audience plant. Through softball queries, he utilizes her sex appeal in order to frame the bomb tests as entertainment extravaganzas. There is little for Miss Atomic to respond to, save for the size of the bomb, the size of its blast. The phallic subtext is clear, the exchange an uneasy harbinger of the second decade of the twenty-­first century, when the U.S. commander in chief responds to nuclear threats from North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Tweeting, President Trump asserts, “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his” (quoted in Choudhury 2018). Like Joris, President Trump is a business mogul, a figurehead for excess and real estate holdings that consume vertical as well as horizontal space. While Miss Atomic is the prime audience and performance partner for Joris, President Trump’s communication casts the listening nation—­and the world—­in a role similar to the passive, gendered one inhabited by Miss Atomic. In this scene she functions, first and foremost, as an echo that underscores Joris’s preoccupation with size: “I heard they just keep making these things bigger!” (The TEAM 2013, 57). The disconnect, between her affect and the evident destructive capability of the bomb, is unmistakable. She references pictures of “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” as though describing other Las Vegas attractions, and “Mr. Darling” is as unaffected by her reply as she seems to be. This is, evidently, a time and space when mammoth scale overtakes mammoth consequence. Alternatively, perhaps this scene represents an environment intensely seeking to maintain and renew a grasp on the present. In Matt Blitz’s article “Miss Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Glitz of 1950s Las Vegas,” he notes that “while the world gawked and shuddered in fear at the sight of these explosions, 65 miles southwest of the testing ground, the residents of Las Vegas reacted about the way you’d expect: with kitschy, light-­hearted, commercialized giddiness” (Blitz 2016). Aided by this perspective, this scene might stage Miss Atomic and Joris’s performance exchange as an example of

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

107

forceful attempts to live in the present moment. Indeed, Las Vegas signifies and also creates concrete economies around the pleasure of the present. To the world, as Matt Blitz suggests, the explosive testing in the desert just outside Las Vegas generated fear. To Las Vegas, it was an opportunity to co-­opt another kind of spectacle for entertainment and profit. As the TEAM’s Rachel Chavkin observes in a 2010 interview, “Things look very different depending on where you’re standing in America” (Martin 2010, 116). When Miss Atomic stands onstage, she stands in for the Miss Atomics of history but also for the pleasure-­seeking attitude of the Las Vegas that successfully commodified the Atomic Age. She stands in America, or rather the TEAM’s performed facsimile of America, occupying multiple spaces at once. A powerful figure in terms of the structure of Mission Drift, she is powerless when caught in the web of the renewing present: her character as played in relation to Joris has had her words stripped away, pared down to bare bones of an agreeable bombshell: I think it’s gonna be big! Occupying multiple perspectives within Mission Drift, she is both inside and outside the story, outside and inside this moment drawn from American history, outside and inside photographic artifacts that show past Miss Atomics dressed in gauzy mushroom clouds. By occupying multiple locations simultaneously, Mission Drift’s Miss Atomic becomes like a static image of a fractal. One is always inside and outside a fractal as one zooms further into the pattern. Zooming out from the given perspective, replicating patterns tend toward infinity. Zooming in from the individual perspective, equivalently infinite complexities reveal themselves. While Jestrovic and Meerzon remind readers that America is a contested term and a contested site, the TEAM reminds audiences that America is also a contested act and a contested time. Emerging cultural and sociopolitical mythologies posit both America and theatricality as liminal spaces one must theorize rather than inhabit. Or perhaps habitation can occur only through performativity, grasped at through the staging of complex patterns made up of shifting perspectives. As the performance/performance text of Mission Drift sharpens into a whole, it retains a fractal-­like identity that enables performance scholar Daniel Sack’s reading of the piece’s final moments, in particular his description of the cast members’ gaze over the audience, as evoking “not the world of every possibility but the worlds of endless potentiality” (Sack 2015, 195). As the cast looks out, audiences are reminded that fractal-­like potentiality exists before and behind; there is no beginning and no end for that kind of spatial storytelling. It becomes itself by moving in any direction, by unfolding detail made evident by looking inward or outward, in any direction toward and within “worlds of endless potentiality.” Mission Drift, then, engages with the spatial, the geographic, and the topographic, as though formulating a map of the emerging American present in which American histories and imagined futures collide.

108

Chapter 4

Figure 4.2. The TEAM’s Mission Drift. Pictured: The TEAM ensemble. Photo copyright © Nick Vaughan.

Rock Bands and Revolving Doors While all the collective creation groups under discussion would define themselves and their methodologies differently from one another, each develops distinct sets of ethics. John Britton describes the concept as akin to a particular game the group agrees to play together. He writes that the “‘rules of behaviour’ are the ethics of a group. The ethics that underpin a creative process have a profound effect on the nature of the work produced” (Britton 2013, 309). Much of what happens inside a rehearsal room, or through the processes of assembling and organizing methodologies and source material, is beyond the gaze of audiences and scholars. There are, however, ways in which particular ethics or tendencies toward particular ethics announce themselves. One key component concerns the ways companies shift and change over time, ways in which they retain identities as established group or ensemble while sometimes unhinging and reshaping themselves. This might happen on multiple time scales, across years and apart from individual projects, or within specific performance development processes. This is the component of group identity I refer to as topological: How might we understand the particular properties of collective identity that can be moved and bent without breaking the whole of the collective? For particular groups, what makes group identity what it is?

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

109

John Collins, director of Elevator Repair Service, notes that for a healthy handful of contemporary collectively oriented companies, group “success is associated with their ensemble identity” (Collins 2013, 235). He marks out his own group, in company with others including the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, and Forced Entertainment. One could add to this list considerably, including proliferating collective creation and ensemble-­minded groups of varying generations that are more recognizable for their groupness than for individual member contributions: San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet, Radiohole, and so on. While there may be notable leaders associated with most of these companies, the powerful connotation of a group identity/aesthetic persists, and the ensembles retain credited authorship for performance works. Further, Collins discusses his experience as the Wooster Group’s longtime sound designer in comparison to his directorship of Elevator Repair Service, leading him to the observation that fixed ensemble members do not necessarily equate with ensemble identity. The Wooster Group’s membership has changed substantially over time, and ensembles fluctuate from production to production. Observing this shift from inside the group, Collins describes a period of time in the 1990s during which he became aware of the group’s constantly changing ensemble makeup: “The plays of The Wooster Group seemed attributable to a collective neither permanent nor exclusive. Nevertheless, a Wooster Group identity remained—­there were still a few familiar actors, LeCompte continued to direct and the shows bore recognizable trademarks” (ibid., 238). For Collins, the identity of the Wooster Group seems to be primarily rooted in directorship and aesthetics rather than in the contributions of particular performers. This model reflects in the ongoing history of Elevator Repair Service as well. Noting himself as the single common denominator in all of Elevator Repair Service’s projects, Collins suggests that the group identity of ERS emerges from a combination of consistent aesthetic leadership and methodology rather than from an ensemble made of particular individuals. He writes, “An ensemble method is more essential to longevity than the maintenance of an exclusive and permanent membership” (ibid., 236). Collins, therefore, distinguishes between an ensemble entity and ensemble action. He defines collectivity, a group-­centered ethos, as a phenomenon that relies on a particular mode of interaction among director, performers, designers. This interaction, it seems from Collins’s perspective, may rely most prominently on leadership provided by directors/facilitators. Interestingly, while Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM all adopt methodologies that utilize generated creative material, group identity—­ not simply group group-­ organization—­still has a close relationship with directorship. But what is the role of directorship within collective models? These contemporary groups do not adopt models of leaderless collectivity, but rather prompt renewed questions regarding the relationship between leadership and egalitarianism. If these groups create work that is attributed primarily to the group, what

110

Chapter 4

is the role of the director/facilitator in terms of establishing and reinforcing methodologies that give rise to that work and therefore to a group identity that is legible to audiences? In a 2017 interview, the TEAM’s Jake Margolin observes that as the TEAM grows and evolves, one concept under investigation is the constitution of TEAM projects as such (Margolin 2017). Rachel Chavkin addresses this further, adding: The question of what defines a TEAM project is a developing one. Previously, it was a project that I as director proposed to the group because the initial inquiry (examples: American capitalism, the history and present-­day implications of American/Scottish ties) felt like it was in line with our mission. I would gauge excitement/engagement amongst the company members to first and foremost see if/how/ whether that initial question would blossom into a larger project, and then secondarily to see who might participate in it, and in what way. Sometimes I would present ideas with specific artists attached, grown out of sidebar conversations: RoosevElvis is a good example of this, featuring Libby King and Kristen Sieh playing two historical figures each had become obsessed with as individuals, and involving Jake Margolin who has long been interested in subverting and expanding notions of gender. Now . . . now it’s expanding. In the past year+ we’ve added these Petri Projects where a company member can receive developmental support for a project that I’m not attached to as director. This is developing in part because we’re all individually pretty deeply empowered generators, but not all of us have our own strands or opportunities to develop work on our own outside of the TEAM—­as Frank Boyd did with The Holler Sessions in Seattle (that work was a co-­pro with the TEAM in large part because the character and much of the text grew out of a process for a TEAM/Sojourn Theatre commission for KC Rep in 2013). And there’s a real live and quite sensitive question as to whether the TEAM will have a producing relationship to these petri-­projects beyond development support. We’ve not crossed that bridge yet, though I imagine it will be a major topic of discussion at our 2019 retreat. (Chavkin 2019)

It may be inevitable, as careers of group members shift and change, for the group to reconsider and reevaluate its identity. Chavkin, for example, won a Tony Award in 2019 for Best Direction of a Musical, and takes on increasingly high-­profile projects apart from the TEAM.3 The resource of time can be scarce; while all members of the TEAM take some responsibility for collective fund-­raising, Chavkin and the TEAM’s producing director tend to be the strongest driving force behind grant writing and development opportunities for the company’s work. However, even as Chavkin’s contribution occupies a central space in the TEAM’s identity and practice, the group takes steps to

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

111

focus attention on the collaborative body rather than leaning into perceived hierarchies that can accompany the role of the director. For example, the group prefers to list founding members alphabetically, and their methodology of self-­organization is in some respects in sharp contrast to John Collins’s description of ERS. Collins asserts this himself, particularly in terms of how the two groups operate in terms of a commitment to a permanent ensemble. He writes: For many groups, maintaining a consistent and utterly recognizable contingent of performers is paramount. They organize themselves more like rock bands than producing companies  .  .  . The TEAM, an ensemble formed out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004, consists of a larger group of artists but defines itself just as rigidly. Their “members” have special privileges and responsibilities, greater and more serious than non-­member participants, and are expected to collectively represent the ensemble . . . That rock band approach embraces a go-­it-­alone, defiant self-­reliance  .  .  . These ensembles, unlike ERS, officially anoint their core members and organize themselves more as a utopian community, less as a hierarchical corporate structure. (Collins 2013, 247)

Collins suggests that this “rock band approach” adopts an unsustainable utopianism. Certainly, prioritizing a permanent or near-­permanent ensemble does communicate a certain idealism, a certain ethics reflected in the group’s rules of behavior or membership expectations. ERS is unique among the collective creation studies of this project, in that it is the only group that deliberately rejects permanent ensemble as a model. While Goat Island, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM have consistent directors and evolving and shifting performing artists (in the TEAM’s case, it is significant to note that membership has grown), turnover has been relatively low. However, sustaining a permanent ensemble requires enormous effort, energy, and compromise. Coordinating schedules, maintaining commitment, evolving artistically in compatible tandem with others, making space for other professional commitments when performance-­making groups cannot pay full-­time living wages to all members—­these and other concerns pose substantial challenges. In many respects, as Collins argues, letting go of the imperative of the permanent ensemble gives the group greater potential to operate sustainably. Of course, this requires a definition of “group” as a revolving door whose only consistency is, perhaps, its leader and his approach. In some ways, this institutionalizes the chaos of collective creation, forging an organizational model that becomes itself through constant change. Collins embraces this model freely, championing it as a cornerstone to Elevator Repair Service’s identity, one that is perhaps shared with other long-­ term performance-­ making companies. He notes at the end of his essay on Elevator Repair

112

Chapter 4

Service and the Wooster Group that “longevity may be best achieved through embracing a paradox: the most enduring ensembles are always falling apart” (ibid., 249). Here, Collins offers a parallel between “longevity” and “enduring ensembles.” Elevator Repair Service has become, since its founding in 1991, a prolific and established company. Far from its roots as a group that first presented work in New York in a tiny space at midnight on the Lower East Side, the group was, for example, welcomed as a contributor to the Public Theater’s main season with Measure for Measure in 2017.4 By opposing the rock band “utopian community” approach with “hierarchical corporate entity,” as Collins does above, one infers that ERS’s functioning runs closer to the latter. Considering the length of time the company has operated under the guidance of its director, this model is demonstrably effective for achieving longevity through flexible adaptation to constant change. However, there remains space to consider endurance as a characteristic both distinct and aesthetic. Goat Island reminds us, with their final piece, The Lastmaker, of the importance and creative potential of language. This piece investigates lastness, which juxtaposes the theoretical and the prosaic. Lastness might be, for example, a quest into the impossible task of making performance that somehow resists disappearance, an attempt that “always engages in the process of making and remaking, forever creating newness and possibility” (Anderson 2008, 667). It might explore a more concrete manifestation of lastness; for example, a “last” is also a solid foot-­shaped form used by shoemakers. Piles of shoes also figure prominently in the piece. Through these avenues and others, Goat Island’s investigation of lastness reveals values, rooted in performance, that move away from longevity as an ideal. If longevity is a lodestar, utopias are anathema, and Goat Island is rigorously committed to exploring impossibilities. The ethics of the TEAM, however, seem less invested in impossible ideals and branding and more invested in working through and developing ethics that require pragmatic and emotional perseverance. Collins suggests that the TEAM defines itself rigidly. If so, the group’s rigid definition gives way to vigorous commitments to collaboration throughout performance-­ making processes, which are inscribed with high levels of flexibility, mutual respect, and problem solving in the face of antagonism. Paulette Douglas’s documentary film The TEAM Makes a Play chronicles the making of Mission Drift through a series of moments distilled from a multiyear process. Mission drift, levied as an economic term, names the phenomenon of an organization gradually moving away from its mission statement, usually in service of following the money. In many respects, the TEAM’s making of the play processually enacts the group’s own mission drift, as they move from an initial idea along a circuitous and sometimes traumatic route marked out by feasibility to the opening of the final version of the show. The text and performance of the TEAM’s Mission Drift are the outcome of an often tenuous, disrupted, and enormously fraught process, one

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

113

that challenged the group’s commitment to collective creation. Paz Hilfinger-­ Pardo, who participated as a dramaturge on Mission Drift, writes succinctly of the vicissitudes the group experienced over the course of developing and performing the piece: “By 10 June 2010, two of the five company performers who had begun work on the show had stepped away from the project; before the piece’s premiere four of the five would be gone” (Hilfinger-­Pardo 2013, 230). Douglas’s documentary stitches together instances of profound disappointment and confusion on the part of ensemble members, throughout a process that seemingly came close to driving the group into the ground. Through a combination of interviews and footage from rehearsals, performances, and company meetings, the tensions and obstacles that accompanied the making of this particular piece are starkly clear in Douglas’s film. Some of these are accidental and logistical. For example, Rachel Chavkin was injured while the piece was in development in Las Vegas. As composer and performer Heather Christian remarks in The TEAM Makes a Play, this shook the stability that Chavkin, despite challenges and setbacks, had been able to consistently provide the group: “It sort of felt like the captain of the ship was a little lost. But of course she was lost, she was on oxycontin” (Douglas 2013). Additionally, funding partners were forced to pull financial support for the project at different points, scheduling conflicts provoked rehearsal and performance delays, and group members struggled to remain adaptive to shifting logistics. In the film, performer Kristin Sieh comments on the difficulties posed by developing the piece in stages, and particularly by workshop periods that took place in different states as well as countries: “I’m just a little annoyed that it’s like, all this scattershot little places, that are making it hard for everybody to have jobs, and we have to raise all this money . . . and we’re hardly paying ourselves” (ibid.). Perhaps even more challenging were the artistic differences and the lack of confidence that sometimes exploded across different moments of the development process. Early on in the process of development, when Mission Drift was still tentatively titled The American Capitalism Project, TEAM member Frank Boyd describes his disinterest in the project’s general direction: “I feel really doubtful and hesitant about, the whole idea behind this project right now” (ibid.). Over the course of Douglas’s documentary, most collaborators involved in the project articulated feelings of doubt, of tension, of confusion. These voices, each of which proposed possibilities as well as preferences, contributed to the sheer vastness of the material the group wrote and developed. Heather Christian, for example, indicates that she wrote nearly forty songs for Mission Drift, only seven of which were eventually used in the piece. Shaping, editing, and rehearsing the quantity of material became its own impossible task, and in an extreme effort Rachel Chavkin brought in playwright Sarah Gancher in hopes of aiding script development. This proved to be a highly controversial choice. Chavkin notes that this decision nearly derailed the project entirely and even threatened the stability of the group

114

Chapter 4

as a whole (Douglas 2013). Extraordinarily, after a fraught and sometimes uncertain process, Mission Drift was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011 and won the Scotsman Fringe First Award that year. Following this experience, the TEAM invested in their collective communication. They were offered space at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where they organized a company retreat that, the group indicates, “included bringing up two therapists focused on group dynamics and healthy workplace collaboration to do some skill-­building with us” (The TEAM 2018). Following the development of Mission Drift, the TEAM has continued to make work together, to expand and evolve as a cohesive ensemble. Glimpses of that process, however, offer markers that outline parts of the group’s distinct identity. Paz Hilfinger-­Pardo refers to the TEAM’s resilience and reliance on collective intelligence, and describes what she calls “the mundane magic of the TEAM’s process: not the magic of a sudden lightning bolt of genius, but the magic of a group of people plodding through a painful process of crossed desires, miscommunication, and compromise until one or two extraordinary moments finally arise” (Hilfinger-­Pardo 2013, 229). Hilfinger-­Pardo interprets Mission Drift, in its final iteration, as a performance of mourning, “a eulogy for the failure of the American dream, processing the company’s disappointment at its own failure to build utopia” (ibid.). However, perhaps this process is something other than an experience of failed ideals. It also reveals itself as a revelatory exercise in asserting the topology of the ensemble. This process makes clear, for example, that the TEAM can accommodate its own version of revolving doors. While the group itself embraces a clear and fixed permanent ensemble, Mission Drift serves as an example of a project that allows the group to quite literally remake itself, to step out one by one, without breaking the whole. On a small scale, this project adopts some principles that organize ERS, at least in terms of the consistency of the director and ensemble-­oriented development processes. That stability enables the revolving door to swing both ways. Jake Margolin, for example, who originally contributed writing and performance to the piece, rejoined Mission Drift later in the project to assist with choreography. Traces of all the individuals who worked on the project remain in subsequent performances, in the fragments of movement, character, and language developed and reintroduced throughout different parts of the process. Hilfinger-­Pardo reads this as a kind of repurposed nostalgia, a processing of failure: “The builders are not onstage with their words; every night, dances created by those who left animate the bodies of those who stayed” (ibid., 233). This also, however, invigorates another extreme possibility of collective creation, one that functions in direct opposition to the Las Vegas appetite for ever-­present pleasure. Hilfinger-­Pardo’s description reads almost like a foray into the supernatural, in which the tongues and limbs of performers are “animated” by those who are absent. Years before Mission Drift premiered, Rachel Chavkin writes of her work with the TEAM, “we are always trying to determine what we have

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

115

Figure 4.3. The TEAM’s Mission Drift. Pictured: The TEAM ensemble. Photo copyright © Nick Vaughan.

lost, whether it is for better or worse, and who we are even as we march onward. We are always telling a ghost story” (Chavkin 2010, 108). This may be, perhaps, another anticipatory footprint along the group’s charting of its own identity. One might imagine that the TEAM is not a rock band but an enduring ghost story: animating in time and space not only the histories and myths of America, but also the histories and myths of the group’s own creative communion. Unlike ERS, an ensemble Collins describes as “always falling apart,” the TEAM occupies another territory, a territory that renews and shares dense layers of experience and creative contributions, an ensemble that stretches and bends, but—­like the stories and characters of their pieces—­ bleeds into itself. Theirs is not a utopia but a relentless plodding forward that, as Hilfinger-­Pardo suggests, is its own (sometimes painful, sometimes violent) magic. In the second decade of the twenty-­first century, the group continues to unhinge itself; some group members, including founding members, live in different corners of the country. This will, inevitably, shape and shift the way the TEAM develops work, as the group has already begun to discuss and explore. Given the group members’ changing lifestyles, careers, and geography, another Mission Drift would likely be a practical impossibility. That process, however, establishes the TEAM as consummate travelers moving along creative roads of their own making, picking up and shedding

116

Chapter 4

partners as they go, even when at cross-­purposes, toward collective possibility together.

Gendered Highways In their introduction to Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance, Syssoyeva and Proudfit provocatively suggest possible links between gender and ways of working, and articulate under-­historicized examples of women’s contributions to ongoing histories of collective creation. They write, “The history of modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history” (Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2016, 5). That history, they argue, arcs across the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, and stakes women’s contribution to modern theater into its very foundations: process. In “Devising Downtown: Collective Creation and Female Leadership in Contemporary New York,” I note ways in which sex and gender align with artistic leadership generally in contemporary New York, but more precisely with particular kinds of leadership. Specifically, self-­identified women directors are more likely to head devising or collective creation companies than to direct on or off Broadway. This does not simply result from the greater numbers of devising and collective creation companies, but is due to greater percentages of women directors heading groups that adopt group-­oriented methodologies. Consequently, “this creates a bottom-­ heavy model in terms of female representation, in which most women artists in New York are working at the fringes of funding” (Anderson-­Rabern 2016, 273). Goat Island, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM all have self-­identified women artists in leadership positions. Elevator Repair Service is the only one of this book’s case studies headed by a solo man in the role of artistic director. While none of these companies can be said to be working on the very fringes of funding, at least not as compared to some of their younger or lesser-­known artistic counterparts, it is interesting to note ways in which explicit engagement with gender shows up, or doesn’t, in some of the work that emerges from these groups. The TEAM, whose core membership includes queer collaborators as well as people of color, most explicitly—­and sometimes controversially—­engages with race, gender, and sexuality through their storytelling.5 This is part of the America that moves under their feet, a topology that influences ways in which the group experiences, reimagines, and stages gender politics. Like the TEAM, Elevator Repair Service liberally draws upon twentieth-­century Americana, implicitly suggesting (or problematizing) histories. In the 2000s, ERS gravitates repeatedly toward personas, literature, and institutional constructions that undergird strands of American cultural and political identity: William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Jack Kerouac (No Great Society), the U.S. Supreme Court (Arguendo), Ernest Hemingway

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

117

Figure 4.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury, Public Theater, 2015. Left to right, Susie Sokol, Vin Knight. Photo copyright © Paula Court.

(The Select [The Sun Also Rises]), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatz). Three of ERS’s literary-­inspired pieces respond directly to novels written by white men in the 1920s.6 While there are many possible patterns to extract or interpret from the collection of Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), and The Sound and the Fury, one perceptible echo across the pieces is their ambivalent representations of gender and sexuality. Each of these three pieces, complex undertakings that take canonical American literature as a generative obstacle (or performance partner), presents the literal or figurative castration of characters supplying the central perspective. In The Select, the primary narrative figure, Jake Barnes (played by Mike Iveson), is an impotent veteran (Marks 2017). In The Sound and the Fury, the fractured and disjointed perspective of Benjy is embodied in a convulsive, bird-­like portrayal by female company member Susie Sokol. It’s not the cross-­gender casting that is unusual within this production; character, race, gender, and sexuality are fluidly picked up and put down by actors inhabiting multiple roles throughout The Sound and the Fury. Rather, it is the relative consistency of Susie Sokol as Benjy, even as performer Aaron Landsman also occasionally steps into the role. Though a long-­sleeved, red-­striped polo shirt indicates the character of Benjy, it is Sokol, an actor who presents as female, who most recognizably inhabits the role. Her portrayal gestures to the histories of theater and performance as exposures of nonbinary potential, of uneasy collisions between boyhood and feminine gender.

118

Chapter 4

Even before ERS’s performance begins, F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby already controversially signify queer literature. In Gatz, Scott Shepherd, the actor who speaks aloud the words from Fitzgerald’s text as he circumnavigates the office, splices together representations of Fitzgerald the writer, Nick, the novel’s narrator and narrative participant, and Shepherd himself as self-­conscious performer. Scholar Maggie Froehlich notes that “over the last thirty years, readers have come, to a greater or lesser extent, to accept Nick’s homosexuality.” Yet, she also reminds us that “anyone familiar with the biography is well aware that, throughout his life, Fitzgerald was terrified of being identified as homosexual and uneasy about his sexuality and sexual performance.” She then posits that, while not explicitly explored in The Great Gatsby, worlds open up if we “recognize sexual transgression as the open secret of the novel” (Froehlick 2010, 82). These worlds are, perhaps unintentionally, underscored by Shepherd’s performance in Gatz. He overlays images of Nick and Fitzgerald; the latter’s image is impossible to discard throughout Shepherd’s utterances, initially stilted as he performs his way into audible comfort with Fitzgerald’s prose. Completing the triad, Shepherd himself is a recognizable figure to audiences of contemporary, experimental performance, someone director Richard Maxwell calls “an iconic presence on stages in New York and Europe” (Maxwell 2011). Shepherd is also a palpably masculine presence, with a reputation for virtuosity in performance—­as, for example, through his technically complex work on the title role in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, which opened in 2007. Shepherd also, following a physical disagreement with actress and romantic partner Marin Ireland during their work on the Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida, represents for some a problematic, violent, and gendered power dynamic in the experimental theater community.7 In Gatz, Shepherd conjures the “open secret” of the novel’s treatment of sexual transgression, embodying Nick and Fitzgerald at once, while also communicating and marking his own personal/professional status and reputation. While Shepherd, as the voice recounting the novel, might represent multiple layerings of gendered representation and presentation throughout Gatz, the TEAM takes such multifaceted exploration further in their project RoosevElvis, which premiered in 2013. A two-­person piece, RoosevElvis is a mashup of cultural icons Elvis Presley and Theodore Roosevelt, who sometimes yield to or take over the identities of the project’s two central characters, Ann and Brenda, a queer twosome negotiating a fledgling relationship and a road trip. Played respectively by Libby King and Kristen Sieh, masculine icons Elvis and Teddy Roosevelt also give way to a host of other characters-­inside-­moments-­inside-­characters: waitresses, airline recordings, film sequences, dancers, John Muir, family members. In RoosevElvis, the TEAM interrogates archetypes of hypermasculinity as well as contemporary queer culture, by turns undercutting and testing the performativity in each.

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

119

Figure 4.5. The TEAM’s RoosevElvis. Pictured: Kristen Sieh. Photo copyright © Sue Kessler.

In one exchange, Ann and Brenda, who have met and arranged a visit via an online meetup, discover they are not as compatible as they first assumed: BRENDA: I really thought from your profile that we would be . . . ANN: What. BRENDA: Nevermind. ANN: What. BRENDA: I guess it was the “Reach for greatness, accept nothing less” bit. ANN: Oh . . . That’s just something me and Dale say. It’s about karaoke cuz we both suck at it . . . BRENDA: You. Are remarkably unbrave. (The TEAM 2015, 30) This exchange heralds just one of many disappointments the two encounter as they move back and forth between filmed and live interaction, romantic hopefulness and disillusionment. Ultimately, Ann and Brenda’s “big gay RV adventure” to Mount Rushmore is a bust, but their alter egos Teddy and Elvis connect more successfully. Whereas Ann and Brenda are limited by the known confines of time-­space reality, Teddy and Elvis have no such restrictions. Teddy and Elvis can appear, disappear, transform, and confess at will. They share a language of excess, archetypal physicality that enables them to compete, to perform ostentatiously for the audience according to mutually

120

Chapter 4

agreed-­upon conventions. In one such exchange, Teddy boxes while Elvis demonstrates karate. The two try to outdo one another with their tales of physical exploits, punctuated by demonstrations intended to dominate the other. They climb, jump rope, tell tall tales. The TEAM presents them as characters that revel in the exaggerated performance of gender, of drag, finding utter delight in vying for the right to monologue, the right to articulate superiority, the right to settle it all with a physical brawl: TEDDY: You want to take this outside? ELVIS: Sure, cowboy. TEDDY: You “cowboy” yourself. ELVIS: Come on. They take it outside. Sounds of wild animals. (Ibid., 57) Through these snapshots of hyperbolic masculinity, RoosevElvis underscores the multivocal identities made up of many such performances, intersecting and vivisecting one another within single individuals. By focusing attention on the surface contours of pompadours, whiskers, blue suede shoes, guns, beer, RoosevElvis assembles a series of gendered objects the show, not just the characters, can put on and take off at will. By rendering these archetypes

Figure 4.6. The TEAM’s RoosevElvis. Left to right, Kristen Sieh, Libby King. Photo copyright © Sue Kessler.

121

Constructing Ensemble Topologies

within a queer not-­love story, the group supplies a context that emphasizes not only the performance of gender, but also the performance of history and one’s Americanness. Ann’s deepest yearnings are for well-­trod monuments to white masculinity: Graceland, Mount Rushmore. Yet the show does not suggest her, or Brenda, as assimilationist. Brenda scolds Ann for her cowardice at one point, declaring, “America’s changing, Ann, it’s like ‘out.’ You don’t have to be so scared” (ibid., 60). Rather, the TEAM’s RoosevElvis explores gendered performance in their spectacular multiplicities, unearthing icons from the past through performance that acknowledges gendered histories while at the same time queering them in the present.

Conclusion These mythologies, and the groups’ distinct responses to them, circle back to naming rituals, articulations of identity as assumed by groups. Three of this book’s four case studies adopt language palpably connected to American landscape. The TEAM locates their overarching project as directly engaged with the thorny space-­time of their country’s becoming. Nature Theater of Oklahoma names a state, an island in the midst of a landsea near the geographical center of the United States, and the only state to solo title a Broadway musical (Burgess 2014).8 “Oklahoma,” then, references a theatrical mythology—­from Kafka to Rodgers and Hammerstein—­as much as an American one, a collision of imagined past, immigrant fantasy, and the perversity of frontierism. Almost as though responding to the violent excess of manifest destiny, one of Goat Island’s geographic parallels is a small island in the Niagara River, perched between the Canadian Horseshoe Falls and the U.S. Bridal Veil Falls. It is a modest borderland in the midst of the sublime Niagara Falls, made memorable by international treaties and tourism traffic. Interestingly, Goat Island also hearkens back to Homer’s Odyssey, a modern name for the goat-­laden island of the Cyclopes that excites, as Jonathan Burgess discusses, Odysseus’s colonialist reveries (Burgess 2014, 23). The performance group Goat Island is like an embodiment of a balanced oasis that functions primarily as a seeing-­place, from which one can face toward or away from American soil, toward or away from capitalist imperatives. It is possible to conceptualize the group, especially given their bounded history as a cohesive ensemble, as one storied landscape encountered in the midst of an epic journey. The group itself function(ed) as an impermanent home that foreshadowed the ongoing peripatetic artistic journeys of its members. These possible metaphors gesture toward ways of conceptualizing components of these groups’ identities, anchored in the topography of landscape by their uses of naming language. If two (Goat Island and Nature Theater) announce themselves through intertextuality, the third (the TEAM) perhaps

122

Chapter 4

most self-­consciously identifies themselves as architects of American “fractal, spatial storytelling,” seeking out connections between real and imagined Americas, real and imagined processes. In terms of group identity, the topology of ensemble, the TEAM functions as a living container that is itself fractal-­like, focused deeply into the infinite detail that is American geography and histories, formed by the enduring multivocal antagonism of collective authorship (McGinley 2010, 13).

Chapter 5

The Ethics of Velocities

The controversy is centred on the question whether it is the “beauty of speed” or the “discovery of slowness”  .  .  . that could lead us and the other coinhabitants of our common surroundings to a good, just and flourishing life. —­Sigurd Bergmann (Bergmann and Sager 2008, 15)

Many third wave devising groups appear, especially in contrast with their social protest counterparts, to be apolitical. This is evident in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma: these three groups engage more with formalist structure and aesthetics than with active attempts to sway the audience in particular ideological directions. Some groups—­such as Elevator Repair Service—­even outright deny the presence of political agendas in their work. In a 2002 interview, John Collins stated: “We don’t see ourselves as a public service organization, as a political organization . . . It minimizes and diminishes theater when you use it to communicate your political ideas” (Collins 2002, 15). The TEAM is a notable exception among the four case studies in this book, as the group explicitly identifies its mission in relation to American sociopolitical and cultural histories. Even for ERS, Goat Island, and Nature Theater, despite Collins’s rejection of political vocabulary, there do seem to be qualities, process-­based as well as aesthetic, that mark these examples of third wave work as politically engaged. These qualities center around the slow processual foundation these groups share as they make performance: they proceed from a basis of collective creation, an ethos of coordination and collaboration that takes time. These groups, who all take between one and two years on average to create a single performance, invite consideration of the relative slowness of their performance-­making methodologies and the politics contained therein. Remarking on the work of companies including Britain’s Forced Entertainment as well as Goat Island, Peggy Phelan writes that these companies, their performance as well as their way of making performance, “[suggest] that performance might be an arena in which to investigate a new political ethics in the dying days of this century” (Phelan 1999, 10). Goat Island’s Bryan Saner reinforces this sentiment by 123

124

Chapter 5

referencing his group’s process, saying, “Probably the greatest political statement that Goat Island makes is that it’s a collaborative group” (quoted in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 144). In this chapter, I take up Phelan’s invitation to explore the “new political ethics” that emerges in the contemporary work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as a consequence of these groups’ explorations of speeds. Further, I claim that these speeds can help to outline an ethics that emerges from collective creation methods, and is a particular consequence of acts of slowing and expanding the process of performance making. There is a certain tension between John Collins’s rejection of a political identity for his group and Saner’s open acknowledgment of collaboration as politically charged. This tension arises from problems of perception concerning what counts as “political,” and how that manifests in performance. Throughout this chapter, I will consider ways in which Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater, as third wave groups that are not explicitly politically motivated, enter into the political realm through the avenues of economics and ethics, advanced through speed-­related aesthetics. Without didacticism, indeed even through performance that excises dogmatic content, these groups nonetheless make ethical claims by modeling and staging ways of living. As Nature Theater’s Pavol Liska reminds us, these ethical claims make their way to the audience in the form of proposals. These proposals, even when embroiled in inner tensions and contradictions, offer a new way of conceiving of “the political” in contemporary performance: as a product of slownesses and speeds.

Collective Creation and Velocities of Being Toward a politics of speed, it is necessary to forge concrete links between ethics and collective creation. Whereas any form of performance may produce an ethics, I claim that the process of collectively creating work is itself foundationally ethical. André Lepecki’s definition of ethics, developed in relation to dance, is especially relevant toward supporting that claim. He writes: “Ethics emerges as the immanent force of philosophy, as a radical mode of composing the infinite velocities and slownesses of being. The task of philosophy becomes one of composing modes of living” (Lepecki 2007, 122). Both ethics and collective creation are modes of composition; both are concerned with composing what Lepecki terms “the infinite velocities and slownesses of being.” That is, both create frameworks, through their processes of composition, that organize and categorize that variety of speeds associated with being in the world. For many third wave collective creation groups, the experience of being in the world is deeply connected to their ongoing processes of making performance in the world. It is perhaps easier to make this speed-­based connection to collectively created work; acknowledged slowness threads

The Ethics of Velocities

125

through the process and performance aesthetics of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service describe processes that are “glacial,” or involve tendencies to “work on a project on and off for eighteen months,” respectively.1 Nature Theater implicitly communicates work ethics that unfold according to similarly gradual pacing; they composed the text of their productions No Dice and Romeo and Juliet out of over one hundred hours of recorded phone conversations each (Copper 2008a). Consciously or unconsciously, this ideal of slowness filters into the aesthetics of the performance works themselves. Goat Island are known for lengthy durational dance segments, such as the dance in the middle of The Lastmaker that challenge the audience’s patience and ability to be present in the moment. Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service are less likely to include lengthened gestures or segments; however, both groups produce whole works that operate in this vein. For example, Nature Theater’s No Dice takes over four hours to perform, while ERS’s Gatz takes approximately six. There is a clear penchant for time-­taking that feeds through the processes of these groups, and into their performance, but what does this signify? When Lepecki describes the task of ethics as composing the “infinite velocities and slownesses of being,” he uses the term “infinite” to designate the collective quantity of both velocities and slownesses, not to name the limitless potential of each. In their infinite expression, high and low speeds both tend toward the same result of stasis, of motionlessness. At first glance, Lepecki seems to oppose velocity with slowness. However, other vocabularies open up different comparisons; in physics, velocity is a vector. In chapter 3, I argue for the gestural qualities of contemporary work, claims that rest on analyses of the work’s mediating nature and its display of movement with no directional end point. As a vector, velocity is defined in terms of its speed (rate of travel) as well as its position: by definition, velocity connotes movement toward. It is a vector traveling at a certain pace, in a specific direction. This lens offers new ways to apply Lepecki’s terminology. Perhaps the “infinite velocities and slownesses of being” that coalesce into ethical standards refer to direction as well as to speed, and oppose the nongestural (directional) with the gestural (nondirectional). Considering both ethics and collective creation as modes of composition concerned with gestural possibilities, this reconnects with the political via Agamben’s writings. Gesture, as Agamben describes it, is immanent to his larger project of investigating the political. He writes, “Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings” (Agamben 2007 [1978], 156). Politics, as Agamben conceives of it, refers to a sphere that is, as “pure means,” allied with the self-­perpetuating and justifying machine that is the society of the spectacle—­a concept to which we shall return shortly. This self-­perpetuating machine opens up speed, as well as direction, as qualities that help orient collective creation processes toward the political.

126

Chapter 5

In Desert Screen, Paul Virilio suggests that “politics” has more to do with pace than with movement without ends. Responding to a question regarding the threat of increasing technological speed, Virilio says: “No politics is possible at the scale of the speed of light. Politics depends upon having time for reflection. Today, we no longer have time to reflect, the things that we see have already happened. And it is necessary to react immediately. Is a real-­ time democracy possible? An authoritarian politics, yes. But what defines democracy is the sharing of power. When there is not time to share, what will be shared? Emotions” (Virilio 2005 [1991], 32). Virilio claims politics as an arena of collective governance, of choice making that requires both reflection and time in which to practice that reflection. By allying politics with “the sharing of power,” he erects an ethics organized around the principle of taking time. This is significant because, as ethics is a sphere concerned with how humans ought to conduct themselves in the world, Virilio reinvigorates thinking as a manner of conduct. Further, he defines thinking as conduct that requires slowness and patience. Whereas gut response and immediate reaction can occur almost instantly, thinking—­and especially thinking in concert with others—­takes time. Virilio’s characterization of politics, like the shared authority/creativity that defines collective creation, is predicated on the ethical foundation that in order to share power, there must be “time to share” (ibid.). Of the four third wave groups discussed in this book, Goat Island takes the most time, and most integrates directorship and authorship into the creative action of the group as a whole. Theirs is an immanent process, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of immanence, which enfolds creativity within the group throughout their act of making.2 Goat Island’s degree of immanent process is one way of describing the group’s collaborative ethos. Further, they claim that ethos as a political one, which suggests that there is a connection between the immanent and the political. To be fully “within” takes time, and taking time constitutes a politics. By virtue of its tendencies toward immanence, collective creation also tends toward political engagement. These processes model power sharing, according to which there must be, as Virilio suggests, “time to share” (Virilio 2009 [1980], 32). This connection between collaboration and politics is somewhat counterintuitive, considering our Western political structures, which seem to have more in common with transcendent models in which an authority figure exerts control from some external position. However, I am conceiving of “the political” in performance as responses to dominant political structures, rather than reflections of them. I interpret political engagement, in this case, through difference. In turn, this suggests that those groups that tend most toward immanent processes, such as Goat Island, tend most toward an interrogation of hierarchical politics. The TEAM’s process also tends toward immanence, as the group commits and recommits to collective writing, and seeks out ways to retain collective identity while maximizing

127

The Ethics of Velocities

the opportunities of individuals. Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service, who also embrace collaborative processes, though to a lesser degree than some of their contemporary counterparts, tend more toward political interrogation (if dominant political structures align with transcendent models) than groups creating through processes that create divisions of creative authority. This opens up a new way of conceiving of “the political” in third wave performance, as a property based on process and emerging aesthetics, and the relationship of these to immanently structured methodologies. This allows these elements of performance and performance making to surface as subtextual, but very present, political statements in third wave work. Thus far, I have claimed that collective creation and ethics are isomorphic systems that compose modes of living, and that these modes of living consist of “velocities and slownesses of being” that are, by virtue of their expression of gesture and speed, tied to the political (Lepecki 2007, 122). This sets up an interpretive framework that suggests that work produced by collective creation practices can contain imbedded ethical standards. If so, what are those standards, and how do these seemingly apolitical third wave groups express them? Perhaps this is best addressed through slowness, a clear aesthetic that threads the work of contemporary collaborative groups from process into performance, as a means for structuring ethical proposals to the audience.

Efficiencies of Slowness Collective creation groups are not utopias. Rather, they are products of the pushes and pulls, dissents and alignments, that characterize any group-­ oriented endeavor. Within these realities, however, there do seem to be principles of making that validate the importance of process alongside product. Recognizing the presence of relative slowness in the work of Goat Island, ERS, and Nature Theater’s collaborative work, for example, it is tempting to posit this quality as indicative of a desire to embrace simplicity, to preference a way of living (and making work) in competition with, or in radical resistance to, technological progress. There is a measure of truth here; Goat Island adopt Taoist approaches to rehearsal that are almost maddeningly unhurried, as though they live every moment of process according to the Tao Te Jing proverb “He who strides cannot maintain the pace” (Lao Tzu 2018). Yet, even a “glacial” process of performance creation moves toward a moment of presentation, when the velocities of making coalesce into a compressed model of being. For groups that present work to an audience, there is always a product, however much the performance continues to adapt and change over time. Because of the inevitable relationship between process and product, speed and slowness emerge in these third wave case studies as interplaying and sometimes competing forces. Though a Goat Island process lasts

128

Chapter 5

for two years, their works take less than several hours to perform. In durational pieces such as No Dice, Nature Theater of Oklahoma breaks up the four-­hour performance for the audience: ecstatic dances and flashing lights regularly interrupt dialogue spoken at an unnaturally slow pace. The performances of Elevator Repair Service display a similar tension; the gradually unfolding dialogue of The Sound and the Fury fractures as the group inserts crazed allegro musical excerpts and floods the stage with performers churning in motion. Slowness is, therefore, an aesthetic in tense partnership with speed: a contemporary ethics arises out of these intermingling complexities. This suggests that romanticizing the exclusive value of slowness would affix the stakes of contemporary collective creation to outmoded foundations. The Paris-­based group Théâtre du Soleil, for example, exemplifies the 1960s use of slowness and inefficiency as means for combating inequitable economic conditions.3 They created work with anticapitalist content that partnered students and oppressed workers together throughout the protests and workers’ strikes of 1968. Théâtre du Soleil’s public performances sought to transplant theater out of its bourgeois purview and into the everyday world of the workers. In general, this made theater available to the people as a means of protest. Specifically, this consisted of using performance to combat dominant economic power structures that exploited the labor of the workers. French factory workers of the late ’60s, in response to economic crunches that promised them longer hours without pay increases, challenged the “efficiency” of these worsening work conditions. In one French automotive factory, workers extended the 1968 protests by organizing a careful sabotage: they created dents in the doorframes of cars passing on the assembly line, ensuring that each unit would need to be redone and repaired before sale.4 This significantly slowed the output of automobile production during the course of the sabotage, creating a rebellious economy of inefficiency. The workers were able to construct this economy within the capitalist structure, due to the fact that the quality of labor hours is, ultimately, at the discretion of the worker. The worker must agree to support the production system in order for that system to continue efficiently. For a company or for a larger economic system to acquire that agreement, it is necessary to make the enactment of speed and efficiency more appealing than the enactment of slowness and inefficiency. To adopt a Marxist vocabulary, workers could control the production potential of their labor hours by adjusting the speed with which they created commodities. When the workers dented the doors, they spent the time of an average workday on the floor of the factory. This time was, however, unproductive and even counterproductive, necessitating more labor hours in order to accomplish the same levels of use value and exchange value in the product. On the one hand, these factory workers worked in resistance to the negative impact of “efficiency” according to the factory owner. From another perspective, they did so according to highly efficient strategies of sabotage. In her article “Production,” Maria Gough discusses the worldwide

The Ethics of Velocities

129

labor impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was an efficiency expert; he divided the actions of workers into small components with the goal of “eliminating arbitrary or inefficient motions . . . [toward] increased production and reduced operating costs, thereby leading to greater profits for the factory owner” (Gough 2009, 106). Taylor’s studies into efficiency also impacted theatrical explorations of the time, including Vsevolod Meyerhold’s development of his system of biomechanics, which investigated the potential for the human body to divide its capacity for movement into precise, efficient, and replicable kinetic components.5 Interestingly, French automotive workers crafted a form of resistance in keeping with Taylor’s teachings, and maintained a high level of efficient action as they subtly dented car doors. They thereby used the tools of the capitalist system as means of resistance. In the midst of these labor protests of the late 1960s, Théâtre du Soleil took these and other worker experiences as inspirations for their devised work. They enacted processes according to deliberate time-­taking methods of collective creation, detailing strategies for using slowness and inefficiency as weapons of economic combat. For the times, efficiency was the negative tool of the dominant capitalist system, and “progress” meant a commitment to increased industrialization and to perpetually greater scales of commodification.6 In contrast to work like Théâtre du Soleil’s of the late 1960s, “labor” in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM does not manifest as the tool of the worker in opposition to the bourgeoisie. Instead, physical labor appears as a means for modeling attentiveness to a task and to the everyday components of the material world, to what Nature Theater calls, in No Dice, “the cosmic murmur” that surrounds us (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2007, 28). Pavol Liska remarks that he provides obstacles, perhaps in the form of complex choreography or difficult accents, in order to increase the number of things the Nature Theater performers must remain aware of: “I as a human being want to increase the number of things that I pay attention to around me, and that’s what I want my actors to do” (quoted in Benson 2006, 51). Lin Hixson of Goat Island writes of the importance of fidelity to the task as a tool for creating equal presences onstage, saying, “I find the relationships between the performers to be nonhierarchical when all the performers are equally required to complete a task” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 70). The performers of Elevator Repair Service must stay immersed and engaged throughout the marathon six-­hour performance of Gatz, foregrounding not only the labor of the performer but also the labor of Fitzgerald as writer, and the labor of bringing the two together. Within the white-­collar backdrops of both No Dice and Gatz, the action and choreography of performance unfold within the contemporary environment of the nine-­to-­five office job. In both productions, the staged “labor” that takes place in the office consists only partially of the paperwork and

130

Chapter 5

computer work demanded by the employee’s position. Physical labor is, in this environment, even sparser. More importantly, both performances display the labor of remaining attentive, closely examining everyday experience as a method for combating boredom and for immersing oneself in the moment. In chapter 2, I discussed this labor as an internal mode of resistance that constructs new economies of performance. Nature Theater presents the pleasurable aspects of performing labor in such an environment by finding hilarity in the tiny objects and moments of the office: meandering conversations, low-­stakes paperclip theft, the joy of free sodas, and so on. Elevator Repair Service displays the movement of the office symphonically: each performer is an instrument with a distinctive quality and tempo; each is as lyrical and as present as the spoken text of The Great Gatsby. For ERS, translating the labor of the office becomes labor in the form of almost musical composition. In the performances of these three groups, “labor” can be fast or slow; it is evident not only through the sweat and heavy breathing that accompanies intense physical exertion, but also through the subtler mental exercise of paying attention. Slowness, therefore, does not correspond to the simple and single function of impeding progress. In “Thinking Slowness,” art theorist Matthias Gaertner discusses a branch of slowness he calls “technological” that actually contributes to efficiency. He argues that slow action does not necessarily provide the individual with relaxing experience, with a break from the hectic pace of everyday life. Instead, he acknowledges that slow labor brings about an intensification of focus that is very much in keeping with the production demands of industry: “Working more slowly means working with a higher degree of concentration so that fewer things will be overlooked and less waste produced” (Gaertner 2000, 22). This discussion of technological slowness aids this project in two key ways. First, it makes a place for slowness within a world (rather than opposed to a world) geared toward technological progress. Second, it opens up the way slowness can operate aesthetically. Slow attentiveness, modeled by these companies, is not necessarily intended to bore or shock the audience. Rather, it might construct aesthetics very much tied to efficiency, in the sense of producing less waste, rather than in the sense of producing more products. Gaertner suggests that “working with a higher degree of concentration” effectively covers more ground; he equates slow work with thorough work. This assumes an additional quality, the manner of slowness, in keeping with the ethics of contemporary groups: care. Slow work and slow thinking both have the potential to be either efficient or inefficient, depending entirely on the level of care taken on the part of the worker or thinker. If one reads a page from a book in one hour versus one minute, the perceptual difference depends on the level of attentiveness and care: In the instance of reading a page in an hour, does the eye traverse the same terrain as in a minute, or does it move with greater focus and admit greater detail into its mode of perception? I would amend Gaertner’s definition of technological slowness to add

131

The Ethics of Velocities

that slow work and slow thinking have the potential to include higher levels of concentration. The elements missing in his definition are the discretion and intention of the individual.

Slowness and Care In some of the third wave performance interrogated here, slowness constitutes an approach to action, an invitation to take care “so that fewer things will be overlooked” (ibid.). By including source material drawn from the stories, literature, and conversations of the everyday world around them, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM make efficient use of the resources at their disposal. They see and restore use value to even the most unlikely words and objects. In Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, the audience watches as performer Mark Jeffery, dressed as Saint Francis of Assisi, handles tiny plastic toy birds with reverence, taking his time as he sets them on the ground and winds them into motion. In Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, performers enunciate everyday speech with relish: filler words become operative words, resulting in a comparatively extended performance text that delights in including “ums,” “uhhhs,” “sortas,” and “I’m pretty sures.” In the TEAM’s Mission Drift, care for objects, such as the defunct signs that litter Las Vegas’s Neon Boneyard, juxtaposes with profound empathy for the disenfranchised workers who support the city’s tourism industry. Elevator Repair Service unhurriedly choreographs to the entire text of The Great Gatsby; in the six-­hour Gatz, not one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words goes unspoken or unheard. Each of these is an example of care-­taking in performance, and care-­taking directly related to the pacing of the work. The toy birds, lightweight and delicately balanced on two plastic legs, must make contact with the floor in an exact location so as remain upright. The “ums” of Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, transplanted into performance from actual recorded phone calls, stretch out the length of each sentence; the group chooses to foreground—­rather than edit—­everyday spoken language. Fitzgerald’s written text, spoken aloud, anchors the movement of ERS as the action of the piece, set in an office, ebbs and flows with the pace of the words. All of these—­handling the birds, recouping filler words into dialogue, and reading a novel word for word—­are tasks. As such, the performers approach the action with the concrete goal of thorough completion. Additionally, thoroughness enables each group to communicate respect for their source material. For Goat Island especially, this respect is focused on the everyday world from which they lift that material. Although the toy birds are only plastic representations, Goat Island handles them with deliberate care not often enjoyed by humble objects. The resulting performance aesthetic, which pits the everyday exchange value of the object against its use value expressed in performance, reverses and questions the usual economy.

132

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet. Left to right, Robert Johanson, Anne Gridley. Photo copyright © Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Windup toys, each of which likely costs less than a dollar, are designed to be temporary. They are not built to last, yet they figure strikingly in Goat Island’s performance that investigates lastness. Unique even among the other modest materials of The Lastmaker—­boards, boom boxes, shoes, stepladders, and saws—­the toy birds do not have a use value beyond the performance. They are, therefore, in the midst of this performance, the smallest, cheapest, and most fragile of objects. Yet Goat Island chooses to frame their presence, and Jeffery consciously handles them delicately, prolonging their life as poorly constructed mechanisms. This care, evident through the performer’s slow and deliberate contact, effectively reconstructs the use value of the object. Though easily overlooked, violently wound, or quickly discarded in everyday life, the toy birds contribute to an enduring ethical system through their aesthetic presence in Goat Island’s work: they elevate smallness, slowness, and care. Thus, the group contributes to a new performance economy that measures value through use rather than exchange. Eric Paul Meljac interprets a related economy in his article “The Poetics of Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K.,” by linking Heidegger’s writings on care with the process of constructing dwelling places in works by Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee. In Michael K., the protagonist builds a modest dwelling that is unimpressive from the outside but highly functional and, more importantly, a product of careful consideration.

The Ethics of Velocities

133

Figure 5.2. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, 2008. Left to right, Litó Walkey, Karen Christopher, Bryan Saner. Photo copyright © Hugo Glendinning.

Meljac writes that, in the protagonist’s gesture of construction, “one finds the manifestation of care in its purest sense, that of the Old English caru, sorrow, anxiety, and grief, as well as ‘serious mental attention.’ Yet the word ‘care’ also reminds one of a state of grace, of kindness (charis)” (Meljac 2008, 71). Though Michael K.’s burrow offers little in the way of exchange value, as a dwelling it is an embodiment of contemplative action. It is not an exchangeable dwelling; it would not suit another, nor would another suit Michael K. Goat Island’s toy birds occupy a position in performance that is nearly the inverse of this: they are cheap symbols that stand in for the importance of care and kindness to even the most common and replicable objects. Whereas Michael K.’s burrow is one of a kind, a product of his own considered labor, the birds are offshoots of a spectacular economy that erases evidence of individual labor in an age of mass production. Contemporary groups create use value through strategies similar to the Situationist project of detournement: working within and manipulating existing economic structures to opposite ends. The economy of use, therefore, can take a multitude of different forms. It might, as in the case of Michael K., emerge from a quality of care that links the dwelling place irrevocably with an individual who imagines it and enacts its construction. It might, as it does in contemporary performance, juxtapose images of the speed of production (birds) with the consciousness of speed that care requires. To manifest care as “serious mental attention” or

134

Chapter 5

as “a state of grace, of kindness,” as Meljac suggests via Heidegger, one must take time: time to carve out the dirt that gives birth to one’s dwelling place, or time to notice, reevaluate, and then frame a new use value for objects that others consider disposable (ibid.). Perhaps, then, care is the antithesis of disposability. Lisa Campolo notes that Heidegger’s concept of care shifts and grows throughout his writings, but she continually returns to care as an element of his critique of technology. He opposes the careful mind with the technological mind, for “to the technological mind, everything is subject to calculation and valuation in terms of profit or return on an investment” (Campolo 1985, 435). In contrast, as Campolo characterizes Heidegger’s use of care in his earlier writings as “composed of understanding, state-­of-­mind, falling, and discourse . . . Heidegger finds that the ontological meaning of care as the structure of Dasein is temporality” (ibid., 441). This last statement, connecting the care of Dasein to temporality, is a foundational concept Heidegger explores in Being and Time. Care, in Heidegger’s terms, functions as a method of contemplation, a term that references a dialectical project that seems very closely related to Lepecki’s reading of ethics as “the infinite velocities and slownesses of being” (Lepecki 2007, 122). To care is to operate within a state of being that is not “subject to calculation and valuation in terms of profit or return on an investment” (Campolo 1985, 435). In short, to care implies a resistance of capitalist structures and the creation of new economic perspectives derived from method. Care need not necessarily describe a physical relationship between performer and object. Nature Theater—­who have devised many shows to date that derive dialogue from unrehearsed, recorded conversations—­primarily use language as their medium of expressing care through slowness. Poetics: A Ballet Brut is an anomaly in this respect, using danced gesture, rather than language, as a starting point for performance. Through their investigation of everyday conversation, Nature Theater indicates that slowness is, as a proposal for the audience, a way of living intricately connected to perception. In the introduction to No Dice, Kelly Copper references the words of John Cage: “Art is everywhere. It’s only seeing that stops now and then” (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2007). There are strong links between this sentiment and the staging of the everyday. By lifting everyday language, gesture, and bodies out of the background and onto the stage, all the groups discussed here stage ways of living that involve attentive perception.

Velocities of Destruction Slowness connotes a way of seeing that increases the number of perceptible details, thereby expanding space as well as lengthening the time experienced by the observer; this has the potential to be either a destructive or a constructive process. Does slowness construct new worlds and new performances, or

The Ethics of Velocities

135

consume them? A slow gaze admits additional complexities into view, which augments the amount of physical terrain the eye traverses. In addition to covering more ground, slow and attentive perception also enables the observer to engage in additional—­and even unforeseen—­actions. For example, if one opens a door to an office and briefly glances inside, what is visible? Perhaps a sense of general architecture and arrangement: a table, chairs, windows, impressions of colors and light. But if one lingers in the doorway and carefully observes for an hour, new actions are born. The observer might read the spines of the books on the bookshelves and allow those titles to spur ideas or avenues of thought. She might see the pattern on the rug for the first time, or the family photos on the desk and posters on the wall. She might find other senses engaged, as the sounds of the air conditioning or the leaf blower outside enter into her awareness. This mode of perception, attentively tied into the observation of the everyday, is closely connected to early experiments by John Cage. He is an undeniably strong inspiration for Nature Theater of Oklahoma and indeed for multiple third wave groups that draw material from everyday sources. Cage sparked and influenced the perception revolution that seeks to uncover the sound in the silence, and to expose that “art is everywhere.” Yet this kind of slowness, which expands the visible and sensory terrain, is not without ethical controversy. On the one hand, slow gazes and patient perception implicitly challenge hierarchical power structures. They make the invisible visible, equalizing the field of representation. On the other hand, they insulate the observer in the role of individualistic consumer, potentially enmeshed in (and contributing to) the society of the spectacle. One such consumer is the flâneur who strolls the Paris streets of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project—­a creature of the society of the spectacle who, through slowness, reinforces the spectacular split between product and labor. Guy Debord describes this split as one of the bases of the society of the spectacle, “whose product is separation itself.” Further, “the spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation” (Debord 1983, 21). These characteristics of the society of the spectacle as Debord identifies it in his 1967 political treatise seem to make use of mobilities different from Benjamin’s flâneur, a creature of the industrial mid-­1800s. The key economic element of the society of the spectacle is its propensity for mass production, for manufacture that erases the consumer’s sense of the labor of production and substitutes exchange value for use value. One of the means of producing alienation, a result of society’s propensity for mass consumption, and which Debord calls the “real product” of the society of the spectacle, is through speed. As part of the process of mass creating consumable goods, speed and efficiency necessitate sameness in the products produced; sameness, in turn, alienates the consumer from the labor that produces the object. The marks of labor, of craftsmanship, disappear from commodities. Also, as the speed of production increases, and assuming that the rate of production remains constant, the number of commodities proportionally increases. An extreme

136

Chapter 5

example might place a toymaker who carves each toy by hand at one end of the spectrum. Each of the toymaker’s creations—­even if made from the same pattern—­would be slightly different from one another, bearing unique edges from a hand-­driven planer or sander. At the other extremity, toys march down an assembly line, exactly alike or nearly so, untouched by human hands, at a rate of thousands per day. The “alienation” effect that drives Debord’s impassioned indictment of the society of the spectacle is an effect that, through fast-­paced and incessant replication, separates the consumer from the laborer, individuals from one another, and finally the individual from awareness. To be fully integrated into the society of the spectacle is to be indistinguishable, surrounded by the undistinguished. In contrast, the flâneur is the embodiment of slowness. Benjamin writes: “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs like to have the turtles set the pace for them” (Benjamin 2003, 31). The flâneur comes into focus through Benjamin’s writing as a kind of eternal detective, examining the faces of the crowd and the trinkets lining the stalls of the arcades at the literal speed of a turtle. However, while the flâneur lengthens the space he moves through by slowing his speed and taking in details, he contributes to spectacular society in ways similar to the production speed Guy Debord deplores. He institutes himself as a microcosm of consumption that simultaneously feeds into the spectacular society’s thirst for the exotic and the novel. While he visually consumes the objects for sale that line the arcade, he transforms himself into an ostentatious enactment of slowness, so at odds with the pace around him that he becomes another image of a curiosity to be consumed. He fuses with the society of the spectacle despite the fact that the velocity of the flâneur and the velocity of the spectacle appear to be at odds. As Benjamin remarks, again speaking of the curious image of the flâneur walking the arcades with a tortoise on a leash, “If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace” (ibid.). Yet, as evidence of labor disappears within the spectacular economy, so it does with the flâneur. He is a representation of idleness, a consumer who ingests commodity at an excruciatingly detailed pace; the turtle is a conspicuous display of this consumption. The flâneur, by comparison to the surging crowd around him, labors under having no labor. If the flâneur is nothing but a conglomeration of sensory input from the people and objects that surround him, there is nothing that it is like to be him; his slowness, exercised with idleness rather than with care, blurs his status as individual. That is the threat of the spectacular economy, to veil the human action that constitutes not only labor, but also ethical standards. If action is obstructed, either through excessive speed and replication, or through slow and single-­minded consumption, there is nothing but the self-­perpetuating—­and destructive—­product. The destructive ethics of the society of the spectacle is at least partially forged by speeds of being, and may be expressed through either fastness or

137

The Ethics of Velocities

slowness. In the society of the spectacle, the attentiveness of the individual is suppressed through an economy that dictates idleness and feeds off of product and replication. These qualities, then, according to respective aesthetics of slowness and speed, stand in for the labor and care exercised (and recognized) by individuals. Perhaps a process-­based component of the political projects of Goat Island, ERS, Nature Theater, and the TEAM involves restoring the “I” that the society of the spectacle erases, through the mainstream’s ability to create willing members of society who partake in the spectacle’s never-­ending parade of self-­perpetuating separation and consumption.

Velocities of Construction As they restore value to awareness, through everyday source materials and bodies that coalesce into aesthetics of individuation (awkwardness, amateurism, etc.), Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater participate in acts of construction. They reassemble and perform individualism, but they do so with an eye toward immanent processes and presentation. Each group implicitly seeks a balance that preserves the individual but does so without elevating the individual to a transcendent position. André Lepecki identifies this balance as the cornerstone of contemporary performance. Speaking of dance and choreography, he writes: No other art form in modernity has been responsible for physically creating a cohort of absolute “I’s” as much as choreography—­an “I” so absolute that it becomes transcendental, as in the traditional corps de ballet, where, quite tellingly, its anonymous members, relegated to the forces of a collective body where no one can be differentiated, i.e., no one can dance in his or her own name, are called, in French, sujets (subjects). And it is precisely for this very same reason that contemporary choreography has claimed for itself the task of dismantling the power of securing this absolute and absolutist “I.” (Lepecki 2007, 120)

Lepecki enters into the discussion of the dangers of a spectacular society from an innovative direction. He cites the destruction of the individual underneath the weighty influence of “an ‘I’ so absolute that it becomes transcendental.” He identifies contemporary choreography as seeking movement forms that enable the dancer to “dance in his or her own name,” which is to dance neither as an absolutist “I” nor as part of an anonymous backdrop. Considered in light of third wave performance that is collaboratively created and not exclusively choreographed, it is necessary to alter his emphasis and clarify what it means for a performer to “dance in his or her own name.” Lepecki describes the task of contemporary choreographers, which involves

138

Chapter 5

“dismantling the power of securing this absolute and absolutist ‘I.’” However, to dismantle implies a kind of violence, a destruction arising from a conscious and deliberate ideological stance. Instead, perhaps third wave groups such as Goat Island, ERS, Nature Theater, and the TEAM eschew destruction in favor of two levels of construction: composing a group of individuals into a collaborative body, and composing the source material and aesthetics resulting from that junction into devised performance. In contrast to collaborative models, Lepecki discusses two spheres that tend toward extremes of identity: the traditional corps de ballet as inclusive of both anonymous collective and absolutist “I,” and contemporary choreography that abolishes this relationship entirely. However, I propose that it is more useful to imagine ways in which Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater constitute three contemporary models that restructure and redefine both “I” and “collective,” as well as the relationship between the two. Third wave groups with collaborative foundations must navigate group-­ oriented processes and performances together with ethics and aesthetics that foreground the differentiation of the individual. For this kind of performance, to “dance in his or her own name” is not independent of the collective or of the absolutist “I.” It is, rather, an attempt to bring these two identities together in order to create a third alternative. Perhaps this is a process of transplanting the absolutist “I” into immanent ways of being, or recomposing the two worldviews—­with the transcendent subject outside the material world—­into a single domain made up of many equivalent, collaborating subjects. This clarifies one angle on the ethical and political project of collective creation at large: to preserve both the “I” and the collective nature of the group, while transforming the absolutist and transcendent model into an immanent one, and while restoring subjectivity and individuation to the anonymous corps. The language that emerges from this discussion, including restoration, preservation, transformation, and transplanting, references ways of approaching performance from the perspective of its constructive potential. This is the language of building not only performance itself but also, through performance, new ways of seeing, new modes of perception. These ways of seeing, so easily described through construction-­based language, unfold according to particular velocities. In the introduction to Small Acts of Repair, scholar Stephen Bottoms draws lines between ways of seeing, pointing to dominant modes of perception that Goat Island’s performances address. He writes, “Confrontation is more fun to watch than co-­operation, destruction more exciting than repair” (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 23). Though Bottoms does not precisely say so, there is a sense in which he seems to be crafting a velocity-­based interpretation of audience response. In his view, confrontation and destruction are “more fun to watch”; they are “more exciting.” They are, he seems to imply, “more,” in comparison to cooperation and repair, provoking products in the form of audience response: excitement and fun. These products, Bottoms

The Ethics of Velocities

139

Figure 5.3. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, 2008. Left to right, Mark Jeffery, Litó Walkey. Photo copyright © Hugo Glendinning.

suggests, do not fall within the purview of Goat Island’s works. Goat Island is a group of slowness and patience, of repair and cooperation; theirs is not an aesthetic of explosive excitement. This reinforces the binary between slowness and speed, mapping the positives of cooperation and repair at one end of the spectrum of velocities and the negatives of confrontation and destruction at the other. Bottoms’s argument also has ethical consequences: he claims a particular ethic for Goat Island, advanced through aesthetics that foreground repair and cooperation, two properties that model slownesses of being and working. He presents these slownesses as the qualities that mold Goat Island’s approach to perception, suggesting that because they work in modes that are less fun, and less exciting, the group shapes an audience with new, and slower, ways of seeing. Perhaps, however, that the interplay between velocities is less straightforward in the work of these third wave groups. While the undercurrent of slow watching and slow being persists as a consequence of slow ways of working, contemporary groups mix velocities in the production of their aesthetics, as though in conscious avoidance of a singular ethic. Returning to the example of Goat Island, rhythmic, durational movement sequences combine with brief flashes of speed. The group mixes tempos. In The Lastmaker, there are moments when performers leap suddenly into the air, or rush onto the stage

140

Chapter 5

and tag the ground before running off stage again. There are also moments when performers balance on two-­by-­fours held four feet off the stage floor in parallel to the ground; the act of balancing while other performers hold the ends of the lumber, slipping stepladders under the edges to help hold the weight, cannot be rushed. There is, then, an ethic at play in performance that makes room for both slownesses and speed. The subject, whether witnessing or performing, needs both. It is not a matter of pitting cooperation and repair (slow) against excitement and fun (fast), but of creating a performance space that acknowledges a time and place for each. We must have both, Goat Island seems to say, in order to achieve the contrast that makes both visible. In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio reminds readers of the potential for blindness that is implicit in the experience of high speeds. He explores the progressive inertia made possible by increasing technological capabilities, and considers how the closer we come to speeds approaching instantaneousness, the less we see. He cites militaristic uses of speed, saying that countries of the contemporary world seek power through “the ubiquity, the suddenness of military presence, a pure phenomenon of speed, a phenomenon on its way to the realization of its absolute essence” (Virilio 2009 [1980], 53). Virilio describes the epileptic consequences of living in a world in which speed is ever-­increasing; our minds drop out of consciousness, accustomed to the moments of blindness engendered by our experience of speed as “a phenomenon on its way to the realization of its absolute essence.” In keeping with Virilio’s identification of pervasive blindness, there must, then, be something at work in the ethics of these third wave performance groups—­ considering their preoccupation with the everyday—­that makes use not only of the excitement of sudden speeds, but of the blindness these speeds create. What does it mean to produce a way of seeing that deliberately includes moments of not seeing?

Ethics of Blinding In Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury, all the action surrounds Benjy; Faulkner writes his first chapter from Benjy’s jumbled, autistic perspective. In ERS’s production, Benjy spends most of his time center stage, his movement confined to spasms and darting gazes he can accomplish while sitting in a wooden chair. Hemmed in by the dialogue, all drawn word for word from Faulkner’s text, as well as the soundscapes that surround him, Benjy is the only character who does not speak. Instead, he sits as at a center of the storm of the household, recalling events and people through a series of overlapping and temporally distorted impressions; his is not a linear memory, and it plays out in starts and stops through the bodies of others. In the midst of the chaos that surrounds him, the twitching and oppressed Benjy seems an ironic figure of stability; while all the other ERS actors alternate between

The Ethics of Velocities

141

characters, Susie Sokol, playing the character of Benjy, is a constant. This life vest of constancy, however, doesn’t last. Approximately halfway through the performance, Benjy’s tension and anxiety, embodied by family members who mill around him onstage, boil over into a kinetic and aural explosion. Frenetic fiddling combines with recorded mooing, the sound of radio static, and the fast-­paced onstage dialogue of an argument between two of Benjy’s family members. Two performers, Mike Iveson and Ben Williams, begin their downstage flatfoot dance. Twelve people swarm the stage, divided into groups that stomp and clap their hands, twirl their heads around, join in pieces of Iveson and Williams’s dance, chase each other across the stage, and so on. It is impossible to know where to look; every corner of the stage is alive with unanticipated motion. It is an enactment of one of ERS director John Collins’s desires for vibrancy and confusion, muttered during a rehearsal in the late 1990s of Cab Legs: “I’ve got to shake things up somehow or I’m gonna go crazy” (Ebling 1997). Indeed, it does seem as though Collins’s hand, unseen and larger than life, has grabbed hold of the stage and shaken it like a snow globe. After a few moments, just as suddenly as the sound and movement began, they recede, and the energy settles. The bright stage lights focus down to

Figure 5.4. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury, New York Theatre Workshop, 2008. Left to right, Annie McNamara, Ben Williams, Tory Vazquez, Susie Sokol, Mike Iveson, April Matthis. Photo copyright © Sara Krulwich/New York Times/Redux.

142

Chapter 5

Benjy’s chair, now startlingly occupied by Aaron Landsman, not Susie Sokol, wearing Benjy’s identifying red jersey. The clash of sound evens out to the steady blowing of wind, accompanied by the echoes of a woman’s voice that might only be our imagination. Landsman, as Benjy, pants and sweats; several performers cluster close around his chair as they wipe his forehead and bring a teacup to his lips. Perhaps the chaotic movement staged Benjy’s dream, or perhaps a fit. Perhaps it does not map onto any actual event, but is just another impression. Whatever it was, it changed Benjy, literally substituting one person for another, right in front of the audience’s eyes, yet the change was almost impossible to see. In this brief scene, ERS uses speed as a means of masking changing states—­in this case changing actors who play the same character—­and slowness as a way of heightening the audience’s awareness of that change. As the movement and sound ease, the tight lights focus the audience’s gaze, drawing our sight toward center stage and the new Benjy. The audience has time to linger over that change; the panting breath of Landsman (as Benjy) underscores the labor of the change, for the audience as well as the performer. But what does this do, the use of contrasting velocities that hide the moment of transformation, the instant of change? ERS contrasts velocities within performance in order to build toward tension that, with the explosion and rapid return to slowness and restfulness, constructs catharsis. The release of energy, through the movement of a chorus of performers, is an expulsion that purges the audience of impatience, of anxiety, and vicariously allows us to experience the ecstasy of chaos in motion. This purging occurs purely as a consequence of formal structure, of layering of elements (sound, movement, light) in such a way that the velocity of performance increases, bubbles over, and then calms. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal calls catharsis into question, arguing that it functions as a formal mechanism for purging the audience of their political selves, of their revolutionary spirit. He writes that catharsis, according to Aristotle, purges not only pity and fear but also an additional impurity in the audience’s consciousness via the flaws of the hero; it is “purgation of the extraneous, undesirable element which prevents the character from achieving his ends. The extraneous element is contrary to the law, it is a social fault, a political deficiency” (Boal 1985 [1979], 32). In Boal’s critique of Aristotle’s model of catharsis, the audience empathizes with the hero and, through catharsis, purges the flaw of the hero’s lawlessness (or similar lack of virtue) that ultimately brings about his tragic end. By purging the element that is “contrary to the law,” catharsis reinforces the will of the state and oppresses the voice of the people, the audience. But what happens if we consider oppression, not of a member of the audience, but of the performer, of the cooperating maker who might seek, as Lepecki suggests, to “dance in his or her own name”? (Lepecki 2007, 120). Perhaps the catharsis of contrasted velocities is a means for liberating the oppressed performer, for creating an opening

The Ethics of Velocities

143

in performance that allows them to escape not only the transcendent “I” that implicitly occupies the apex of hierarchical working and performance structures, but also the transcendent “eye” of the audience. As discussed in previous chapters, one way that third wave performers combat virtuosity-­ based hierarchy is to render gesture, differentiated through the untrained and undisciplined extremities of untrained bodies, as means not directed toward a particular end point. In the contemporary performance examples of this phenomenon, including the dance segments of Goat Island, ERS, the TEAM, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, these gestures are visible (and consumable) under the gaze of the audience. In moments such as the instant when Susie Sokol and Aaron Landsman exchange the character of Benjy, catharsis occurs at the instant of invisibility, the instant when the performer is unavailable and hence unconsumable, as representation. Paul Virilio describes the attempts of Howard Hughes to achieve this same status, to retreat from the world into a hotel room where, perhaps, he would successfully disappear, convince himself that he was “everywhere and nowhere, yesterday and tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated” (Virilio 2009 [1980], 36). Virilio interprets Hughes’s actions as means of resisting his unquenchable thirst for inertia, as a simultaneous rejection and fulfillment of extreme movement and speed. Whereas Hughes achieves a kind of “infinite velocity” in the form of frozen motionlessness, cut off from the world, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM formally structure a series of slownesses paired with speeds. It is the combination of these velocities, which include relatively slow performance-­ making processes, and performances that include cathartic instants of invisibility, that these groups make use of toward engagement with the political. Instead of purging the audience of their revolutionary selves, catharsis reinforces the notion that subjects of the material world are not entirely available for consumption. Rather than using speed as an economic strategy for mass production, these groups use speed to resist the commodification of the performer. Of course, Boal’s critique centers on the politically coercive systems of tragedy, a genre quite different from the formal aesthetics and antididactic tendencies of the third wave work under study here. In place of virtue and law, these four groups valorize the everyday, and thus engage the political through their implicit projects of liberation. This occurs through the liberation of pedestrian objects as well as marginalized individuals: modest commodities regain use value through their presence in performance; the performer navigates immanent creative spaces with care and attentiveness. These models are embedded in the fabric of these third wave groups, complicating the assertion of ERS’s artistic director that it “minimizes and diminishes theater when you use it to communicate your political ideas” (Collins 2002, 15). For Goat Island, ERS, the TEAM, and Nature Theater derive source material, both textual and choreographic, from the everyday world that surrounds them. And

144

Chapter 5

Figure 5.5. Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, 2008. Left to right, Matthew Goulish, Litó Walkey. Photo copyright © Hugo Glendinning.

the everyday, formed of competing velocities, each with distinct capacities for construction and destruction, is the political realm of materiality. This materiality is more than economic; it is the materiality of ongoing human action that composes ethical models. The project of claiming the contemporary collaborative experiments as political is an ambitious one. But I hope to make a space for continuing avenues of inquiry. As noted earlier, Bryan Saner’s remark that “probably the greatest political statement that Goat Island makes is that it’s a collaborative group” invites consideration of collaboration as politically engaged action (quoted in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 144). As such, perhaps that engagement arises from aspirations to achieve nonhierarchical methodological models, as well from emerging aesthetics. Aesthetics of slowness and speed, for example, prompt ways of seeing that account for competing velocities, that craft ethical proposals that stage what André Lepecki describes as “the infinite velocities and slownesses of being” (Lepecki 2007, 122. These third wave groups pursue construction, and as such work against common binaries of slowness and speed, didactic and apolitical, individual and group. Velocities become means for uniting these binaries into immanent modes of collective creation. The resulting contemporary ethic of construction is a proposal of making, a modeled process of composition that invites the political into collaborative ways of working, performing, and living.

Conclusion

When analyzing these four third wave groups within the context of historical methodological models, as producers of performative economy, through gestural forms, and in relation to speeds and velocities, a central argument develops: methodology is itself simultaneously political, economical, and performative. Through investigations of collective creation goals and processes, performance-­making methodologies reveal themselves to be dynamic and discursive, responsive to their surrounding world and to their own evolving histories. In contemporary third wave manifestations, these processes give rise to performance that shifts from emphases on content to a kind of inauguration of form, in which “form” is the performed conjunction of process and aesthetic. Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the TEAM create in the wake of their predecessors, but transform utopian ideals of collectivity into models that grasp for sustainable, concrete organizational spaces. These spaces, within which these groups craft processes shaped by ideologies and formed into performance aesthetics, sanctify individual roles within a creative process toward methods of “collaboration” that are free to explore contradiction and combat. Resulting performance is then open to engage with the dialectical tension of the everyday, as it relates to groups’ everyday experience of performance making, as well as to their everyday experience of employment. Employment, which is not a vocation or career but rather a practical means for individual artists to support themselves, provides the everyday source material through which contemporary performance makers craft new economies of performances, systems of exchange that restore productivity to employees’ everyday task of “seeming busy.” As they interrogate productivity as a consequence of perception, these four groups also ask key questions: Who is the producing body, and what do they produce? Offering displays of untrained dancing bodies, these groups deskill the role of dancer and then reskill that role by validating gestural differentiation provided by the individual. Individual differentiation, prompted by the untrained and laboring body, allows groups to dismantle hierarchies imposed by virtuosity, and to render any movement—­regardless of the performing body or the social roles associated with that body—­free domain. 145

146 Conclusion

To reiterate: method matters. Within collective creation methodology, it is possible to locate a politics that is both processual and aesthetic, that emerges as a consequence of the economies constructed and the ethics posed by third wave groups. Through both economy and ethics, these third wave groups display the everyday, with the economic cycles, gestures, speeds, and velocities contained therein, in a light of awareness and attentiveness. They may not stage the political as ideology readily consumed by an audience, but rather as a series of moments that resist everyday stasis. Creatively, imaginatively, collectively, these groups adapt to given conditions. There are clear benefits to reframing “the political” in performance in conversation with methodology, not as content mapped onto process or performance, but as a quality both aesthetic and inherent in method itself. Reshaping conceptions of “political” to include method as both meaning-­ making and relevant within the broad scope of performance scholarship is a project with wide-­reaching consequences. Politics is, as Paul Virilio reminds readers, increasingly tied to the expressions and experiences of speed that make up access to information and chart the dynamics that define systems of government. Virilio discusses speed in relation to performance on a global scale, enacted militaristically as tools of war and humankind’s consumption of images of war, develop apace with technological capabilities. But speeds and velocities, like democracy, have small-­scale manifestations that are nonetheless socially and culturally important. The Slow Food movement, for example, suggests that within the most sensual and individualized acts of consumption, there exist opportunities to experience and to live according to a (slow) speed-­based philosophy of life. The related Slow Internet movement, a product of the urban culture in the northwestern United States, reimagines the benefits of returning to dial-­up internet as part of the coffeehouse experience, in place of fast and readily available WiFi. These movements are only two examples of ways in which speeds form the apex of current social questions—­ within coffeehouses, at the dinner table, or in the nearly invisible process of making experimental collectively created performance. These movements also remind us that speed is relative: “slow internet” occurs in comparison to the fastest technology available, rather than to internet in its nascent stages. “Slow food” is a process of consumption designed to heighten the consumer’s awareness of the labor of growing and the sensuality of eating; it also takes place within a single evening out. Like the enactment of power sharing, which easily tips into mythologized practices and idealized claims touting the absence of hierarchy, pacing is subjective. Perhaps, as when examining the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, and the TEAM, that relativity and subjectivity might remain intact as inherent aspects of their methods and aesthetics. This is part of a necessary tension: collaboration, as they stage it and live it, has no smooth edges, nor do the properties and consequences of awareness and attention. For this reason, the politics of making performance—­the politics of method—­continually shift to

Conclusion

147

reflect changing contexts. These politics are, in every context, windows into process as both reflective and responsive to existing environments. Through method, whose footprints we glimpse as we view performance, we can derive very present, very powerful, and sometimes very modest proposals for how to live—­as an ongoing process—­in one’s particular world. Interpreting the work of these groups as systems of politically charged relationships among processes and aesthetics has significant consequences. Marginalized aesthetics, including fun, slowness, smallness, and care, become revitalized as sites to explore political models and ethical proposals. Postmodern, experimental work can assert voices that intersect with the sociopolitical projects of overtly activist theater for social change. The principles and realities that drive the hidden process of rehearsal rooms regain acknowledgment as building blocks for creative innovation and sustainability. For group dynamics and collective creation, and above all for contemporary American capitalist culture at large, the rejoinder echoes: How we make is always a part of what we make, and how we make matters.

Notes

Introduction 1. The TEAM notes that the longer legal name, Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, was required when the group incorporated as a charity. However, the name the group references and prefers is the TEAM. 2. There are, of course, many complications and exceptions. Sojourn Theatre is one. This company positions itself as an activist group seeking to provoke community engagement. For example, their 2008 site-­specific performance “BUILT” asks the audience to engage in a participatory exploration of urban planning resulting from gentrification and population explosions, in order to consider how their home city of Portland, Oregon, might handle its changing demands for living space. 3. Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, cocreators and cofounders, started collaborating in the 1990s but did not use the name Nature Theater of Oklahoma until the mid-­2000s. The TEAM was founded in 2004. 4. For a list of the group’s coauthored publications as well as academic writing about the group, see http://www.goatislandperformance.org/. 5. The group chronicles this moment on video; see http://www.oktheater.org/. 6. Oberzan and Nigrini also relocated to New York, and in the early 2000s the four began working together under the auspices of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. 7. Though Liska and Copper have created work together since the early 1990s, they cohered into a formally organized group in 2002 and date Poetics (2005) as their first project in Nature Theater’s production chronology. 8. The group notes that there are outliers to this general model, including occasional retreats and company meetings. Chapter 1 1. For example, John Collins, the director of ERS, has designed sound for multiple Wooster Group productions. He was part of the design team that won the 1999 Bessie Award for design for Wooster Group’s House/Lights. 2. Many earlier groups such as the Living Theatre (founded in 1947) and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (founded in 1959) have produced continuously into the 2000s. Also see Syssoyeva (2013) and Syssoyeva and Proudfit (2016) for alternative genealogies of collective creation that locate roots earlier than the midcentury performance collectives. 3. The eight founding groups: A Travelling Jewish Theatre, Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble, Cornerstone Theater Company, Dell’Arte International, Independent Eye, Irondale Ensemble Project, the Road Company, and Touchstone Theater. 149

150 Notes

4. The Wooster Group was the legal name of the Performance Group from its inception but did not become the producing name of the group until LeCompte assumed artistic leadership. 5. REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theatre. 6. See, for example, Elam (2008 [1997]) for more on the cross-­cultural impact of black and Chicano social protest forms, and Canning (1996) for a detailed history of feminist performance from the 1960s to the 1980s. 7. See, for example, Bottoms and Goulish (2007). 8. “In conversation” is the group’s phrasing, utilized in promotional materials including websites and programs, 2005–­2017. 9. Anna Halprin was Ann Halprin until 1972, when she changed her first name to Anna. 10. According to Franko, Cunningham first utilized chance procedure in his 1952 work Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three. He continued to explore chance procedure as a primary choreographic tool until his final work, Nearly Ninety, which was produced in the 2008–­2009 season just before Cunningham’s death at age ninety. Chapter 2 1. Workshop for Hanging Georgia, written by Sharmon Hilfinger and produced by Bootstrap Company, Stanford University, March 2011. Chapter 3 1. This discussion followed the group’s performance of The Lastmaker at P.S. 122 in New York on November 15, 2008. Chapter 4 1. The Left Behind series, coauthored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, comprises sixteen novels written within the context of Christian evangelism. 2. The piece was first titled Bowling for Dollars: A Western. Then it became The American Capitalism Project, then briefly To the Boys and Girls in America, I Am Taking a Sick Day. Eventually it was titled Mission Drift. 3. Rachel Chavkin was nominated for a Tony Award in 2017 for Best Direction of a Musical in recognition of her work on Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. She won in the same category in 2019 for Hadestown. 4. See Harbison (2015) 5. See, for example, Daniel (2010). 6. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925); The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (1926); The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner (1929). 7. See Healy (2015) 8. Other musicals name cities (Chicago and Brooklyn, for example); other states appear in full titles (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and A Connecticut Yankee, for example). Chapter 5 1. See Bottoms and Goulish (2007) and Collins (2009).

Notes

151

2. Scholar Laura Cull offers a useful summary of Deleuze’s concepts of immanence and transcendence. In “Collective Creation as a Theatre of Immanence: Deleuze and the Living Theatre,” she writes: “From the point of view of immanence (which Deleuze professes to hold), there is nothing ‘outside’ this process: no creator, for instance, upon whom creativity is dependent, or by whom creativity is controlled from some external (authoritative and authorial) position. In contrast, an extreme transcendent perspective would posit a ‘two worlds view’ in which it is possible for some being—­whether in the form of a transcendent God or Subject—­to occupy a realm outside the material world” (Cull 2013). 3. Much of this discussion of Théâtre du Soleil and efficiency traces to David Calder’s contribution to the Collective Creation working group from the American Society for Theatre Research’s 2010 conference in Seattle, Washington. For a more complete analysis elucidating links between Theatre du Soleil’s work and May 1968 industrial sabotage, see Calder (2013). 4. See Vigna (2007). 5. There are several excellent sources that provide in-­depth analysis of Meyerhold and his methods, including Alma Law and Mel Gordon’s book Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1996). 6. See Calder (2013).

References

Agamben, G. (1999). Kommerell, or On Gesture. In G. Agamben & D. Heller-­ Roazen (Eds.), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (D. Heller-­Roazen, Trans., pp. 77–­88). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2000). Means without End: Notes on Politics (C. C. Binetti, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2007 [1978]). Notes on Gesture. In G. Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (pp. 149–­156). London: Verso Books. Allain, R. (2013, October 3). A Closer Look at Newton’s Third Law. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2013/10/a-­closer-­look-­at-­newtons-­third-­law/ Als, H. (2008, May 26). Intruder in the Wings: A Staging of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com /magazine/2008/05/26/intruder-­in-­the-­wings ———. (2013, January 23). Eight Hours of Like, Life. Retrieved from http://www​ .newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/eight-­hours-­of-­like-­life Anderson, R. (2008). Performance Review: The Lastmaker. Theatre Journal, 60(4), 665–­667. Anderson-­Rabern, R. (2010). “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun.” TDR: The Drama Review 54(4), 81–­98. ———. (2016). Devising Downtown: Collective Creation and Female Leadership in Contemporary New York. In K. M. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit (Eds.), Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-­First Centuries (pp. 269–­282). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Aronson, A. (2000). American Avant-­Garde Theatre: A History. London: Routledge. Bailes, S. J. (2002). This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 12(2), 183–­200. Cab Legs (1997) to Gatz (2006)— ———. (2010). Elevator Repair Service—­ Reversing the Ruins: The Power of Theatrical Miscomprehension. In J. Harvie & A. Lavender (Eds.), Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (pp. 81–­100). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ———­. (2011). Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. New York: Routledge. Banes, S. (1993 [1983]). Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–­1964. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ———. (1999 [1993]). Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-­Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Benjamin, W. (2003). Selected Writings: Vol. 4: 1938–­ 1940 (H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings, Eds., E. Jephcott & others, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 153

154 References

———. (2005 [1999]). Franz Kafka. In W. Benjamin, M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), Selected Writings: Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–­1934 (R. Livingstone & others, Trans., pp. 794–­818). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. (2007 [1968]). Illuminations (H. Arendt, Ed., & H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken. Benson, S. (2006). Working Downtown: Pavol Liska, Ruth Margraff, Annie-­B Parson, Tory Vazquez in Conversation with Sarah Benson. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28(2), 42–­60. Bergmann, S., & Sager, T. (Eds.). (2008). The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom, and Environment. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Bial, H. (2007). Part 7: Performance Processes. In H. Bial (Ed.), The Performance Studies Reader (2nd ed., pp. 215–­216). New York: Routledge. Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October, 110, 51–­79. Blitz, M. (2016, April 26). Miss Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Glitz of 1950s Las Vegas. Retrieved from http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy​ /a20536/who-­are-­you-­miss-­atomic-­bomb/ Boal, A. (1985 [1979]). Theatre of the Oppressed (C. A. McBride & M.-­O. L. McBride, Trans.). New York: Theatre Communications Group. Bottoms, S. J. (1998). The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality. Theatre Journal, 50(4), 421–­446. ———. (2009). Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-­Off-­ Broadway Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bottoms, S. J., & Goulish, M. (2007). Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island. London: Routledge. Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics (S. Pleasance & F. Woods, Trans.). Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Breuer, L. (1976). Mabou Mines: How We Work. Performing Arts Journal, 1(1), 29–­32. Brienza, S., & Brater, E. (1976). Chance and Choice in Beckett’s Lessness. ELH, 43(2), 244–­258. Briggs, J. (2008, October). Hunting the Hidden Dimension: The Most Famous Fractal. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/set.html Britton, J. (2013). Introduction to Part Three, Forming Ensemble: Some Approaches to Training. In J. Britton (Ed.), Encountering Ensemble (pp. 273–­312). London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Burgess, J. (2014). “If Peopled and Cultured”: Bartram’s ‘Travels’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ In G. R. Ricci (Ed.), Travel, Discovery, Transformation: Culture and Civilization (Vol. 6, pp. 19–­44). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cage, J. (1973 [1961]). Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Calder, D. (2013). “Against Efficiency: Théâtre du Soleil ‘s Experimental Relations of Production.” In K. M. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit (Eds.), A History of Collective Creation (pp. 171–186). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Campolo, L. D. (1985). Derrida and Heidegger: The Critique of Technology and the Call to Care. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 53(3), 431–­448. Canning, C. (1996). Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience. London: Routledge. Cardinal, R. (1972). Outsider Art. New York: Praeger.

References

155

Chaikin, J. (1964). The Open Theatre: Interview with Richard Schechner. TDR: The Tulane Drama Review, 9(2), 191–­197. Chartrand, S. (1997, February 16). Learning the Benefits of Temping. Retrieved from https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/jobmarket/021697sabra​ .html Chaudhuri, U. (2002). Land/Scape/Theory. In E. Fuchs & U. Chaudhuri (Eds.), Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chavkin, R. (2010). Five Years and Change with the TEAM: Moving Fast Past the Apocalypse. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 108–­109. ———. (2019, January 3). Email correspondence (R. Anderson-­Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. Choudhury, S. R. (2018, January 2). Trump Says His “Nuclear Button” Is “Bigger” and More Powerful Than Kim Jong Un’s. Retrieved from https://www​ .cnbc.com/2018/01/02/trump-­tweet-­says-­he-­has-­bigger-­nuclear-­button-­than​ -­kim-­jong-­un.html Collins, J. (2002). American Theaters Reflect on the Events of September 11. Theater, 32(1), 1–­21. ———. (2008, October 11). On ERS: The Sound and the Fury (R. Anderson-­ Rabern, interviewer). Los Angeles, Calif. In author’s collection. ———. (2009, April 16). 2009: Elevator Repair Service (R. Anderson-­Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. ———. (2013). Elevator Repair Service and the Wooster Group: Ensembles Surviving Themselves. In J. Britton (Ed.), Encountering Ensemble (pp. 234–­249). London: Bloomsbury. ———. (2018, December 24). Email correspondence (R. Anderson-­ Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. Copper, K. (2008, April 24). An Interview with Kelly Copper (R. Anderson-­ Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. ———. (2009, March 15). Nine Questions for Kelly Copper (Nature Theater of Oklahoma). Retrieved from www.ooblogway.blogspot.com/ 2009/03/9-­questions​ -­for-­kelly-­copper-­nature.html ———. (2010, March 3). 2010: Nature Theater (R. Anderson-­Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. Cull, L. (2013). Collective Creation as a Theatre of Immanence: Deleuze and the Living Theatre. In K. M. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit (Eds.), A History of Collective Creation (pp. 129–­143). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Daniel, R. J. (2010). Art in the Age of Political Correctness: Race in the TEAM’s “Architecting.” TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 136–­154. Debord, G. (1983). The Society of the Spectacle. Austin, Tex.: Rebel Press. Debord, G., & Wolman, G. (1989). Methods of Detournement. In K. Knabb 14). (Ed.), Situationist International Anthology (K. Knabb, Trans., pp. 8–­ Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Del Vecchio, J. (2010). The Most American Thing in New York City: The Historiography of the National Theater of the United States of America. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 155–­174. Demastes, W. W. (2005 [1998]). Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Orderly Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, P. (Director). (2013). The TEAM Makes a Play [Motion picture]. United States: Red Paw Productions.

156 References

Dubuffet, J., & Minturn, K. (2004). In Honor of Savage Values. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46, 259–­268. Ebling, M. (1997, September 16). Going Up: Elevator Repair Service Shakes the House. Retrieved from www.elevator.org/press_items/going-­up/ Elam, H. J., Jr. (2008 [1997]). Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Elsom, J. (2015 [1981]). Post-­War British Theatre Criticism. New York: Routledge. Estrada, E. (2011). The Structure of Complex Networks: Theory and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franko, M. (1995). Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Froehlick, M. (2010). Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent, and Homosexual Passing in The Great Gatsby. The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–­1945, 6(1), 81–­103. Gaertner, M. (2000). Thinking Slowness. In H. Freidel (Ed.), Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness (pp. 18–­26). Stuttgart: Cantz Editions. Gallagher-­Ross, J. (2010). Big Art Group Brings the Noise. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 54–­80. ———. (2018). Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Garrett, S.-­M. (2001). The Awkward Age: New York’s New Experimental Theater. Theater, 31(2), 45–­53. Gilman, R. (1971). Commune: The Performance Group. TDR: The Drama Review, 15(3), 325–­329. Goat Island. (2000). Schoolbook 2. Chicago: Goat Island and the Art Institute of Chicago. Gough, M. (2009). Production. In J. T. Schnapp (Ed.), Speed Limits (pp. 104–­ 121). Miami Beach: Wolfsonian-­Florida International University. Goulish, M. (2000). 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance. London: Routledge. Grotowski, J. (2002 [1968]). Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Routledge. Harbison, L. (2015). Interview with Rinne Groff. In L. Harbison (Ed.), How I Did It: Establishing a Playwriting Career (pp. 101–­120). Milwaukee, Wisc.: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. Harding, J. M., & Rosenthal, C. (2009 [2006]). Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harvie, J. (2010). Introduction to J. Harvie & A. Lavender (Eds.), Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (pp. 1–­16). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Healy, P. (2015, March 15). Sex and Violence: Beyond the Script. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/theater/sex-­and-­violence-­beyond-­the​ -­script.html Heathfield, A. (Ed.) (2004). Live: Art and Performance. New York: Routledge. Heddon, D., & Milling, J. (2006). Devising Performance: A Critical History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hilfinger-­Pardo, P. (2013). Building Chartres in the Desert: The TEAM, Collective Intelligence, and the Failure of Ideals. In J. Britton (Ed.), Encountering Ensemble (pp. 222–­233). London: Bloomsbury.

References

157

Holzapfel, A. S. (2015). From Landscape to Climatescape in Contemporary Dance-­Theater: Meredith Monk, the Wooster Group, and the TEAM. In N. George-­Graves (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (pp. 401–­428). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isaac, D. (1970). Review of Dionysus in ’69. Educational Theatre Journal, 22(4), 432–­436. Jestrovic, S., & Meerzon, Y. (2009). Introduction: Framing “America”—­ Between “Exilic Imaginary” and “Exilic Collective.” In S. Jestrovic & Y. Meerzon (Eds.), Performance, Exile, and “America” (pp. 1–­19). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kafka, F. (2004 [1996]). Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) (M. Hofman, Trans.). New York: New Directions. Kelleher, J. (2009). Their Hands Full of Ghosts: Goat Island at the Last. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2009, 31(3), 98–­107. Kiernan, M. (1990). Making Films Politically: Marxism in Eisenstein and Godard. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 10, 93–­113. Kremer, K. D. (2014, June 13). Inheriting the Avant-­Garde, or How Do We Carry It Forward? Retrieved from https://howlround.com/inheriting-­ avant-­ garde​ -or-­how-­do-­we-­carry-­it-­forward Lambert-­Beatty, C. (2008). Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lao Tzu. (2018, February 14). Chapter 24. In G.-­f. Feng & J. English (Eds.), Tao Te Ching. Retrieved from http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu24.html La Rocco, C. (2008, November 9). Time to Say Goodbye, with Dry Wit and Camp. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/arts/dance/10goat​ .html Lee, Y. J. (2009). Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Bomb, 108, 88–­94. Lefebvre, H. (2008 [1991]). Critique of Everyday Life (Vol. 1, J. Moore, Trans.). London: Verso Books. ———. (2008 [2002]). Critique of Everyday Life (Vol. 2, J. Moore, Trans.). London: Verso Books. Lepecki, A. (2006). Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge. ———. (2007). Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance. TDR: The Drama Review, 51(3), 118–­123. Lesjak, C. (2000). Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure. ELH, 67(1), 179–­204. Lippard, L. R. (1966). Pop Art: With Contributions by Lawrence Alloway, Nancy Marmer, Nicolas Calas. New York: Oxford University Press. Mandelbrot, B. B. (1967). How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Stastistical Self-­ Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Science, 156, 636–­638. Margolin, J. (2017, May 21). An Interview with Jake Margolin (R. Anderson-­ Rabern, interviewer). In author’s collection. Marks, P. (2017, February 28). How Dry He’s Not: Hemingway, Brought to the Stage in Lively Fashion. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com​ /entertainment/theater_dance/how-­dry-­hes-­not-­hemingway-­brought-­to-­the​ -­stage-­in-­lively-­fashion/2017/02/28/53cfae30-­fdc7–­11e6–­8ebe-­6e0dbe4f2bca​ _story.html?utm_term=.0d5143b7d97a

158 References

Martin, C. (2010). What Did They Do to My Country! An Interview with Rachel Chavkin. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 99–­117. Mason, S. V. (2009 [2006]). San Francisco Mime Troupe Legacy: Guerrilla Theater. In J. M. Harding & C. Rosenthal (Eds.), Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mattessich, P. W., Murray-­Close, M., & Monsey, B. R. (2008 [2001]). Collaboration: What Makes It Work (2nd ed.). Saint Paul, Minn.: Fieldstone Alliance. Maxwell, R. (2011, Summer). Scott Shepherd. Retrieved from https://bomb​ m ­ agazine.org/articles/scott-­shepherd/ McGinley, P. (2010, Winter). Next Up Downtown: A New Generation of Ensemble Performance. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 11–­38. Meljac, E. P. (2008). The Poetics of Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K. Journal of Modern Literature, 32(1), 69–­76. Mermikides, A. (2016 [2010]). Forced Entertainment—­“The Travels” (2002)—­ The Anti-­ theatrical Director. In J. Harvie & A. Lavender (Eds.), Making 120). Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (pp. 101–­ Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Muratova, O. (2009). Dionysian Symphony of Distorted Reality: Elevator Repair Service’s Eisegesis of The Sound and the Fury. Contemporary Theatre Review, 19(4), 448–­460. Nature Theater of Oklahoma. (2007). No Dice (K. Copper, Ed.). New York: 53rd State Press. ———. (2008). OK Theater. Retrieved from http://www.oktheater.org/ Ness, S. A. (2008). The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance. In S. A. Ness & C. Noland (Eds.), Migrations of Gesture (pp. 1–­30). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Network of Ensemble Theatres. (n.d.). NET: Network of Ensemble Theatres. Retrieved March 13, 2017, from http://www.ensembletheaters.net New York Magazine. (2000, November 20). Listings. Retrieved from https://www .elevator.org/press_items/279/ New York Times. (2009, December 21). Labor Data Show Surge in Hiring of Temp Workers. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/business/economy /21​temps.html ———. (2010, December 20). Weighing Costs, Companies Favor Temporary Help. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/economy/20temp.html Office of Public Affairs. (2015, August 27). Board Issues Decisions in Browning-­ Ferris Industries. Retrieved from https://www.nlrb.gov/news-­ outreach/news -­story/board-­issues-­decision-­browning-­ferris-­industries Olmos, M. P. (2012, January 11). On Mission Drift by the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment). Retrieved from http://newyorktheatrereview​ .blogspot.com/2012/01/matthew-­paul-­olmos-­on-­mission-­drift-­by.html Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). S.v. “Employ.” Retrieved March 21, 2011, from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=employ Orel, G. (2009, January 7). The Importance of Being Heartfelt. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/theater/11orel.html?_r=0 Pavis, P. (1982). Languages of the Stage. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

References

159

Platt, R. (2009, July 7). Psi 15: (Mis)Performance Studies (Shifts and Goat Island). Retrieved from https://ryanplatt.net/2009/07/07/ii-­psi-­15-­misperformance-­studies​ -shifts​-­goat-­island/ Radosavljević, D. (2013). Introduction to D. Radosavljević (Ed.), The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-­Makers (pp. 1–­26). London: Routledge. Rainer, Y. (1965). Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called “Parts of Some Sextets,” Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965. Tulane Drama Review, 10(2), 168–­178. ———. (2009). Trio A: Genealogy, Documentation, Notation. Dance Research Journal, 41(2), 12–­18. Rainer, Y., & Halprin, A. (1995). Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin. In R. Kaplan (Ed.), Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance (pp. 75–­100). Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. Ridout, N. (2015 [2013]). Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roberts, J. (2007). The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. London: Verso Books. Rokem, F. (2009). Theatres in America: Brecht and Kafka. In S. Jestrovic & Y. Meerzon (Eds.), Performance, Exile, and “America” (pp. 119–­133). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ross, J. (2007). Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ross, K., & Lefebvre, H. (1997). Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview. October, 79, 69–­83. Russell, M. (2007). A Coda: An Epilogue of Sorts. TDR: The Drama Review, 51(3), 76–­79. Sack, D. (2015). After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Savran, D. (2005 [1988]). Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: Theatre Communications Group. ———. (2010). Liberté, Fraternité, Corbusier! An Interview with Alex Timbers. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 39–­53. Schechner, R. (1971). Audience Particiption. TDR: The Drama Review, 15(3), 73–­89. ———. (1980). The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-­Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do About It. Performing Arts Journal, 5(2), 48–­63. ———. (1994 [1973]). Environmental Theater. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. ———. (2008). An Open Letter to the President of the USA. TDR: The Drama Review, 52(3), 7–­8. ———. (2010, Autumn). The Conservative Avant-­Garde. New Literary History, 41(4), 895–­913. Schmitt, C. (1996 [1932]). The Concept of the Political (G. Schwab, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

160 References

Shank, T. (2009 [1982]). Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Skeat, R. W. (1882). An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, J. (2010, January 28). Poetics: A Ballet Brut Is a Frustrating Experience. Retrieved from www.straight.com/article-­284144/vancouver/poetics-­ballet -­brut​-­frustrating-­experience Stoppard, T. (1993). Arcadia. New York: Samuel French. Sweetingham, L. (2012, November). Time Out with Gatz Star Scott Shepherd. Retrieved from https://www.timeout.com/los-­angeles/theater/time-­out-­with -­gatz-­star​-­scott-­shepherd Syssoyeva, K. M. (2008). Pig Iron: A Case Study in Contemporary Collective Practice. In J. Baldwin, J.-­M. Larrue, & C. Page (Eds.), Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation (pp. 180–­196). Boston: Vox Theatri. ———. (2013). Introduction: Toward a New History of Collective Creation. In K. M. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit (Eds.), Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (pp. 1–­9). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Syssoyeva, K. M., & Proudfit, S. (2016). Toward a New History of Women in the Modern Theatre—­An Introduction. In K. M. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit (Eds.), Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-­First Centuries (pp. 3–­28). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tasini, J. (2001, December 28). Union Contracts Cover Temporary Workers, NLRB Has Ruled. Retrieved from http://www.workinglife.org/wiki/Union_Contracts +Cover+Temporary+Workers,+NLRB+Has+Ruled+(Dec.+28+2001) TEAM, The. (2013). Mission Drift. London: Oberon Books. ———. (2015). RoosevElvis. London: Oberon Books. Rabern, ———. (2018, December 20). Email correspondence (R. Anderson-­ interviewer). The author’s collection. ———. (n.d.). About the Company. Retrieved February 2, 2018, from http:// theteamplays.org/about/about-­the-­company/ Thiele, L. P. (1997). Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology. Polity, 29(4), 489–­517. Tran, D. (2015, September 18). Rachel Chavkin’s Great Comet of a Career. chavkins Retrieved from http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/09/18/rachel-­ -­great​-­comet-­of-­a-­career/ Trencsényi, K., & Cochrane, B. (Eds.). (2014). New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Tytell, J. (1997). The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage. New York: Grove Press. Uchitelle, L. (2009, December 20). Labor Data Show Surge in Hiring of Temp Workers. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/business/economy​ /21temps.html van Itallie, J.-­C. (1983). The Open Theatre [1963–­1973]: Looking Back. PAJ: Performing Arts Journal, 7(3), 25–­48. Vigna, X. (2007). L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: Essai d’histoire politique des usines. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Virilio, P. (2005 [1991]). Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (M. Degener, Trans.). London: Continuum.

References

161

———. (2009 [1980]). The Aesthetics of Disappearance (P. Beitchman, Trans.). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Walkey, L. (n.d.). Biography. Retrieved November 17, 2018, from http://lito .klingt.org/bio/index.html Weber, C. (1999). Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition. In C. Martin & H. Bial (Eds.), Brecht Sourcebook (pp. 43–­49). London: Routledge. Wickstrom, M. (2010). The Labor of “Architecting.” TDR: The Drama Review, 54(4), 118–­135. Willett, J. (1967 [1959]). The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. London: Methuen. Witten, E. (n.d.). Viewpoints on String Theory. Retrieved August 8, 2017, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-­witten.html Young, P. D. (2008). Performing the Novel. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 30(3), 52–­59. Zimmerman, M. (1998). Some Sort of Awakening. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 20(2), 40–­48. Zindel, P. (1997 [1970]). The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-­in-­the-­Moon Marigolds. New York: Bantam Books.

Index

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. activism. See politics (and the political) Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 71–­73, 75, 79–­80, 85, 90–­91, 93, 96; on politics, 125 aleatory techniques. See chance operations Allan, Laurena, 58, 60 Almasy, Jessica, 9 Als, Hilton, 90 “America,” contested meaning of term, 98, 107 Aristotle, 142 Aronson, Arnold, 28, 29 “art brut,” 82–­83 At the Foot of the Mountain, 26 audiences and spectatorship, 26, 30, 34–­37, 68, 85, 138; in Mission Drift, 99–­101, 104–­7; performing audiences, 81 “avant-­garde” term, 16, 28

Blackwell, Becca, 21 Blitz, Matt, 106 Boal, Augusto, 142, 143 Bodow, Steve, 8 Bogart, Anne, 9, 21 Boocock, Paul, 23 Bottoms, Stephen, 6, 19, 67, 138–­39 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 19, 28 Boyd, Frank, 22, 110, 113 Brater, Enoch, 67 Bread and Puppet Theater, 27, 29, 109 Brecht, Bertolt, 93, 94 Breuer, Lee, 31, 32 Brienza, Susan, 67 Britton, John, 6, 108 Browde, Abigail, 7 Brown, Trisha, 20, 27 Builders Association, 21, 24 Burgess, Jonathan, 121 busyness, 63–­64, 68, 145

Bacchae (Euripides), 53 Bailes, Sarah Jane, 6, 24–­25, 89 Banana Bag & Bodice, 5, 97 Banes, Sally, 20, 27, 80–­81, 82 Beat Generation writers, 17, 99, 116 Beck, Julian, 19–­20, 29 Beckett, Samuel, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 93, 94, 135–­36 Bent, Eliza, 21 Bergmann, Sigurd, 123 Bernstein, Michèle, 50–­51, 52 Bial, Henry, 4 Big Art Group, 5 Bishop, Claire, 19 Black Revolutionary Theater (BRT), 26, 27

Cage, John, 13, 17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 68, 134, 135 Campolo, Lisa, 134 Canning, Charlotte, 30, 32 Cardinal, Roger, 82 care, 131–­34 catharsis, 142–­43 Chaikin, Joseph, 19–­20, 25, 29 chance operations, 27, 41, 66–­67, 74, 97, 150n10 Chavkin, Rachel, 9, 17, 21, 110, 113, 114–­15, 150n3 Chekhov, Anton, 21 Cherry Lane Theatre, 19 Christian, Heather, 65, 100, 104, 108, 113, 115 163

164 Index

Christopher, Karen, 7, 76, 133 Churchill, Caryl, 12 Civilians, the, 5 Cochrane, Bernadette, 6 Coetzee, J. M., 132–­33 collaboration, 4, 11, 14, 18, 30–­34 Collapsable Giraffe, 5, 21, 24 collective creation groups of ’60s and ’70s, 12–­13, 15–­21, 24–­42, 123 Collins, John, 6, 8, 10, 52, 89; on ensemble identity, 109, 111–­12; on ERS, 23, 109, 111–­12, 115, 123–­24, 141, 143; Wooster Group and, 21, 23, 109, 149n1 competition, 18–­19, 127 construction, 14, 102, 116, 133, 137–­38, 144 Copper, Kelly, 8–­9, 10, 21, 31, 32, 33, 52, 65–­66, 134; on ballerinas, 87–­88 Cull, Laura, 151n2 Cunningham, Merce, 17, 19, 20, 27, 41 dance and choreography, 3, 10, 13, 20, 37–­41, 71–­96; individualism in, 137–­38; untrained bodies in, 13, 20, 37–­40, 73–­75, 79–­88, 90, 95–­96, 143, 145 Davis, R. G., 29 Debord, Guy, 14, 51, 135–­36 Deleuze, Gilles, 126, 151n2 Delpeche, Emmanuelle, 34 detournement, 51, 67, 133 “devising” term, 11–­12 Dexter, John, 12 directors. See leadership Douglas, Paulette. See TEAM Makes a Play, The (documentary) Douglass, Stephanie, 9 Dubuffet, Jean, 82–­83 Dunn, Robert, 20, 27 Dyer, Eric, 21 Elam, Harry, 26, 27 Elevator Repair Service (ERS), 3, 5, 6, 9, 21–­25, 42, 116, 129–­30; antecedents of, 12–­13, 17; apolitical

stance of, 123–­24; dance in, 38, 40, 76–­78, 79, 80, 82, 88–­90; employment in, 13, 43, 44–­45, 46–­47, 51–­53, 57–­60, 63–­64; gender and sexuality in, 117–­18; group identity in, 109, 111–­12, 115; history of, 5, 7–­8, 112; literary adaptations by, 11, 116–­17; name of, 52; poor theater aesthetics of, 64–­65; productivity and pace of, 24–­25, 125, 140–­42; scholarship on, 6 shows: Arguendo, 116; Cab Legs, 38, 141; Gatz, 21, 25, 36, 37, 44, 53, 54, 56–­60, 58, 60, 63–­64, 69, 117, 118, 125, 129–­30, 131; Highway to Tomorrow, 23, 53; No Great Society, 116; The Select, 117; The Sound and the Fury, 36, 76–­78, 77, 80, 90, 96, 116–­17, 117, 128, 140–­43, 141 Elsom, John, 12 employment, 13, 43–­48, 51–­54, 56–­60, 63–­64, 67–­68, 71, 83, 113, 145; defined, 44–­45; performative role of, 49–­51, 59–­62, 64, 67; temporary, 46–­48, 53, 54, 60, 64, 67. See also labor “ensemble” (and related terms), 3–­4, 13; gestus and, 93–­94; group identity in, 109–­12; individualism in, 137–­38, 145; NET’s definition of, 17–­18, 24 ethics, 124–­27, 134, 139, 144, 146 everydayness, 13, 43–­59, 68–­69, 90, 128, 131, 135, 140, 143–­44, 145 Every House Has a Door, 7 Faulkner, William, 11, 36, 77, 116, 140 feminist theaters, 30 fetishization, 28 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 11, 53, 57–­58, 117, 118, 129, 130, 131 flâneur figure, 135–­36

165

Index

Forced Entertainment, 5, 109, 123 Forsythe, William, 3 fractals, 97, 99, 103–­4, 107 Franko, Mark, 41 Froehlich, Maggie, 118 Frutkin, Jill, 9 Gaertner, Matthias, 130–­31 Gallagher-­Ross, Jacob, 6 Gancher, Sarah, 113 Garrett, Shawn-­Marie, 15, 16, 18–­19, 23, 38 gestural forms in performance, 13, 71–­80, 84–­94, 96, 125; ballet and, 85–­87. See also dance and choreography gestus, 13, 72, 87, 93–­96; meanings of, 93–­94 Gilman, Richard, 35–­36 Ginsberg, Allen, 17, 99 Goat Island, 3, 5–­6, 22–­24, 42, 67; antecedents of, 12–­13, 17; collaboration in, 32, 33–­34, 121, 126, 144; dance in, 38–­40, 68, 75–­77, 80, 82, 88–­90, 125; history of, 5, 7, 9; name of, 121; politics and, 14, 123–­24, 126; poor theater aesthetics of, 64; productivity and pace of, 25, 97, 125, 126, 127–­28, 139–­40; scholarship on, 6; Schoolbook, 2, 6 shows: How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, 90; It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, 6; The Lastmaker, 7, 36, 38, 39, 75–­ 77, 76, 80, 88, 92, 96, 112, 125, 131–­33, 133, 139, 139–­40, 144; The Sea and Poison, 6 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 14 Gough, Maria, 128–­29 Goulish, Matthew, 6, 7, 22, 33, 40, 76, 144 Grand Union, 26 Gray, Spalding, 12 Gridley, Anne, 9, 55, 56, 61, 72, 73, 74, 84, 132 Groff, Rinne, 8, 23

Grotowski, Jerzy, 65, 66 group work, 3, 16, 18, 21, 30, 31, 32, 40 Half Straddle, 5, 21 Halprin, Anna, 20, 30, 150n9; Five-­ Legged Stool, 41; Myths cycle, 81–­82 Hannaham, James, 8 Harding, James, 27–­28 Hare, David, 12 Harvie, Jen, 4, 6, 54 Hastert, B. C., 9 Heathfield, Adrian, 6, 39–­40 Heddon, Deidre, 12 Heidegger, Martin, 63, 132, 134 Hemingway, Ernest, 11, 116–­17 Hilfinger-­Pardo, Paz, 113, 114, 115 Hixson, Lin, 7, 10, 22, 33, 40, 88, 129 Hoffmann, Maggie, 21–­22 Holzapfel, Amy Strahler, 78 Hotel Savant, 5 Hughes, Howard, 143 interdisciplinarity, 10, 19, 27 Ireland, Marin, 118 Isaac, Dan, 34 Iveson, Mike, 76, 77, 117, 141 Jeffery, Mark, 7, 22, 33, 39, 76, 131–­32 Jestrovic, Silvija, 98, 107 Johanson, Robert, 9, 22, 55, 61, 72, 73, 74, 84, 95, 132 Johnston, Jill, 80, 86 Judson Dance Theater, 17, 19, 20, 40, 80–­81, 82 Kafka, Franz, 52–­53, 63, 91–­93, 94–­96, 121, 132 Kempson, Sibyl, 21 Kennedy, Robert F., 99 Kerouac, Jack, 116 Kim Jong Un, 106 King, Libby, 110, 118, 120 Knight, Vin, 58, 60, 117 Kommerell, Max, 90–­91

166 Index

Kremer, Kate, 15, 21 Kulick, Brian, 9 labor, 33, 36, 43–­44, 48, 50, 53, 75–­76, 122, 128–­30, 136 Lambert-­Beatty, Carrie, 36–­37 Landsman, Aaron, 117, 142, 143 La Rocco, Claudia, 75 Lavender, Andy, 6 leadership, 5, 8, 9, 10, 29–­34; in collective models, 109–­10; gender and, 30, 116 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 12, 20, 29 Lee, Young Jean, 21 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 43, 45–­46, 48–­51, 54, 58, 59 Left Behind series, 99, 150n1 Lepecki, André, 38, 124, 134, 137–­38, 142, 144 Lesjak, Carolyn, 46 “lessness,” 64–­67 Liegerot, Fletcher, 9, 55, 72, 73, 74, 84 Lilith Theater, 26, 30 Liska, Pavol, 8–­9, 10, 21, 25, 31, 33, 52, 54, 65–­66, 72, 124, 129 Living Theatre, 19, 26, 27, 34, 149n1; Paradise Now, 25, 34 Mabou Mines, 31, 109 Malina, Judith, 19–­20, 29 Mandelbrot set, 104 Margolin, Jake, 17, 47, 110, 114 materiality, 3, 52, 59, 84, 85, 93, 144 Mattessich, Paul W., 32–­33 Matthis, April, 141 Maxwell, Richard, 21, 118 McGinley, Paige, 22, 97, 99 McNamara, Annie, 58, 60, 141 Meerzon, Yana, 98, 107 Meljac, Eric Paul, 132–­34 Merlin, Lee A., 105 Mermikides, Alex, 5 method and methodologies, 4, 11–­12, 18, 67–­68, 145–­47 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 129 Milling, Jane, 12 minimalism, 66. See also “lessness”

Mitchell, CJ, 68 Mitchell, Margaret, 99 Molloy, Dave, 9 Muratova, Olga, 78 National Labor Relations Board, 47 National Theater of the USA, 5 Nature Theater of Oklahoma, 3, 5, 21, 22–­23, 42, 130; antecedents of, 12–­13, 17, 135; chance and, 97; collaboration in, 8, 31, 32, 33; dance in, 38, 40, 54, 66, 71–­75, 79–­80, 82–­88, 89–­90, 97; employment in, 13, 43, 44–­45, 46–­47, 51–­53, 60–­64; finances of, 8, 47, 53–­54; history of, 5, 8–­9, 149n3, 149n7; name of, 52, 91–­92, 121; politics and, 127; poor theater aesthetics of, 64, 65–­66; productivity and pace of, 25, 125, 134; scholarship on, 6 shows: No Dice, 7, 44, 53, 54, 55, 60–­63, 61, 69, 125, 128, 129; No President, 38; Poetics, 7, 9, 36, 54, 55, 64, 66, 71–­ 76, 72, 74, 80, 82–­88, 84, 90, 95, 96, 134, 149n7; Pursuit of Happiness, 38; Rambo Solo, 7; Romeo and Juliet, 7, 55, 56, 125, 131, 132 Ness, Sally Ann, 38, 85 Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET), 17–­18, 24, 149n3 Newton’s Third Law, 101–­2 New York City, importance of, 4–­5, 19–­22 New York City Players, 5, 21 Nigrini, Peter, 8, 149n6 Nixon, Richard M., 99 Oberzan, Zachary, 8, 9, 60–­63, 61, 72, 73, 74, 84, 95, 149n6 obstacles in performance, 38, 40–­41, 88–­90, 129 Odyssey (Homer), 121 Oklahoma! (Rogers and Hammerstein), 121

Index

Olmos, Matthew Paul, 105 Open Theatre, 19, 25, 26, 29, 35 outsider art, 82–­83 partnership and shared resources, 18–­19 Pavis, Patrice, 93, 94 Paxton, Steve, 27 performance collectives. See collective creation groups of ’60s and ’70s Performance Group, 17, 20, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34–­35, 150n4 shows: Commune, 35–­36; Dionysos in 69, 25, 30; Victims of Duty, 34 Phelan, Peggy, 6, 7, 123–­24 Pig Iron, 34 Platt, Ryan, 38 politics (and the political), 13–­14, 19, 25–­28, 123–­27, 143–­44, 146–­47; economy and, 44; gesture and, 73 poor theater aesthetics, 24, 64–­66 postmodern performance, 18, 27, 37–­38, 147 Presley, Elvis, 78, 99, 118 process, 4, 8, 11–­12, 24, 25, 33, 127, 145; Breuer on, 32; politics and, 14, 28; Saner on, 124 Profeta, Katherine, 8 Proudfit, Scott, 6, 116 P.S. 122, 22, 23, 105 Public Theater, 112 Radiohole, 5, 8, 21–­22, 24, 40, 109 Radosavljević, Duška, 11, 12 Rainer, Yvonne, 13, 17, 20, 27, 28, 36–­37, 40–­41; “No Manifesto,” 66; Trio A, 81, 82, 88 Rand, Randolph Curtis, 23 “relational aesthetics,” 19, 28 Ridout, Nicholas, 6 Roberts, John, 83 Roosevelt, Theodore, 99, 118 Rosenthal, Cindy, 27–­28 Ross, Janice, 30 Ross, Kristin, 50

167

Sack, Daniel, 6, 107 Saner, Bryan, 7, 76, 123–­24, 133, 144 San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, 26, 80, 81–­82 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 26, 27, 29, 109, 149n1 Satter, Tina, 21 Savran, David, 20 Sayre, Henry, 90 Scelsa, Kate, 60 Schechner, Richard, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20–­21, 25, 29, 34–­35 Schumann, Peter, 29 second wave era. See collective creation groups of ’60s and ’70s Shaffer, Peter, 12 Shakespeare, William, 112, 118. See also Nature Theater of Oklahoma, shows: Romeo and Juliet Shank, Theodore, 26 Shepherd, Scott, 21, 37, 53, 58, 60, 118 Sieh, Kristen, 9, 17, 22, 110, 113, 118, 120 Silverstone, Michael, 7 Situationists, 50–­51 600 Highwaymen, 7 slowness, 10–­11, 14, 24–­25, 123, 124–­25, 127–­37, 139–­40, 142, 144; care and, 131–­34; slow movements (food, internet), 146; technological, 130 smallness, 105, 132, 137 Smith, Janet, 90 society of the spectacle, 50, 125, 135–­37 Sojourn Theatre, 149 Sokol, Susie, 8, 21, 37, 47, 117, 141, 142, 143 spectatorship. See audiences and spectatorship speed and velocity, 10–­11, 14, 50, 67, 123, 124–­27, 136, 139–­44, 146; dangers of, 140; velocity defined, 125

168 Index

successorship, 12, 15, 17 Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos, 4, 5, 6, 34, 116 Target Margin, 5, 21 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 129 TEAM, the, 3, 5, 7, 21–­24, 42, 98–­116, 118–­22, 149n8; antecedents of, 12–­13, 17; collaboration in, 9, 98, 99, 104, 126–­27; dance in, 38, 78–­80, 88; employment in, 43, 47; gender and sexuality in, 116, 118–­21; group identity in, 13–­14, 110–­ 16, 121–­22, 126–­27; history of, 5, 9–­10, 111, 149n3; name of, 149n1; politics and, 123; poor theater aesthetics of, 64; productivity and pace of, 9, 25; scholarship on, 6 shows: Architecting, 99; Give Up! Start Over!, 99; The Holler Sessions, 99, 110; HOWL, 17, 99; Mission Drift, 13, 32, 36, 64, 65, 78, 79, 80, 96, 98–­107, 100, 108, 112–­15, 115, 131, 150n2; Particularly in the Heartland, 99; RoosevElvis, 13, 98–­99, 110, 118–­21, 119, 120 TEAM Makes a Play, The (documentary), 31–­32, 99, 104–­5, 112–­13 Teatro Campesino, El, 26, 27 Theatre Communications Group, 17 Théâtre du Soleil, 128–­29 Thiele, Leslie Paul, 63 third wave era, characteristics of, 4–­5, 15–­16, 18–­19

topology, 13–­14, 108, 121–­22; defined, 97 Trencsényi, Katalin, 6 Trump, Donald, 98, 103, 106 utopianism, 4, 14, 16, 18, 28, 32, 52, 95, 99, 111, 127, 145 van Itallie, Jean-­Claude, 29 Vasquez, Tory, 21, 141 velocity. See speed and velocity venues for experimental groups, 22–­23 Virilio, Paul, 11, 14, 126, 140, 143, 146 Walkey, Litó, 7, 76, 133, 144 Weber, Carl, 93, 94 Wellman, Mac, 8, 10, 21 Werthmann, Colleen, 8 Wilde, Oscar, 46, 58 Willett, John, 94 Williams, Ben, 37, 76–­78, 77, 141 Wilmes, Gary, 60 Witness Relocation, 5, 22, 97 Witten, Edward, 97 women and theater, 116 Wooster Group, 4, 13, 17, 20–­21, 23, 25, 40, 109, 112, 149n1, 150n4; dance in, 76–­77, 90; Shakespeare adaptations by, 118 work. See employment Wynn, Steve, 101, 102, 103 Young, Paul David, 76–­77, 78 Zindel, Paul, 105