Devised Theatre

In a typical play, there is one playwright, one director and many actors. Devised theatre takes a different, more collaborative approach. In this unit, students work alongside the teacher/director to create an entirely original theatrical production based on the personal interests, passions or questions. Students are held individually accountable for their contribution while also working as a team to create a meaningful, transformative work that slowly takes shape over nine weeks and culminates in a performance for a live audience.

Dissertation by Keith G. Fitzgerald.

Theatre Triad is a new approach to devising collaborative ensemble theatre starting with the three main components of Performance: Voice, Movement, and Text. These components were deconstructed and reconstructed in pairs as the basis for the devising process. The performance process begins with creating an ensemble followed by four steps: exploring the theatrical genres affiliated with the pairings of Voice and Movement, Movement and Text, Voice and Text, and completed with reintegrating all three components. Through this process many things occur, a new play is created, ensemble members focus on exploring the elements of acting and performance, and a strong foundation of acting skills is laid for young actors. Theatre Triad can also be used as a method for teaching a number of courses in Devising Theatre or Acting classes. In this paper you will learn how Theatre Triad works as both a production approach and method in actor training.

Abstract:
A formal appraisal of group-based devising in theatre is long overdue. For all the scholarly attention paid to devising groups and their unique practices over the last four-plus decades, there has been little consideration of devising’s more general and systematic attributes. Such a gap in scholarship constrains the scope of discourse in the field while effectively abandoning the practical sphere to work without critical or conceptual support to orient their practice. The current work addresses this gap by locating a consistent general form at the foundation of devising practices, offering orientation for practitioners in an ambiguous and often puzzling creative endeavour. This is accomplished via two significant literature reviews that uncover and compile attributes and practices consistent across group-based devising, which taken together present a general pattern. This study then uses the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to analyze this pattern, illustrating how groups devising collaboratively can be understood as operating as a system with the goal orientation of devising performance. This assertion offers context to explain elements of group behaviour, while also presenting the dynamic of a system tasked with creative activity. This systems framework is then applied to case studies from the work of Toronto’s [elephants] collective to demonstrate how it serves to clarify practice. In sum, this dissertation offers scholars and practitioners tools with which to understand and organize group-based creative practices, foregrounding the conditions experienced by all devising groups creating performance (time, communication, structure, interpenetration and the coordination of action), while illuminating how to reconcile a group’s formal foundation with their creative activities.