Devised theatre

Devised theatre (also called collaborative creation, particularly in the United States ) is a form of theatre where the script originates not from a writer or writers, but from collaborative, usually improvisatory, work by a group of people (usually, but not necessarily, the performers). This is similar to commedia dell'arte and street theatre such as busking.

It is not always distinguishable from improvisational theatre but by the time a devised piece is presented to the public, it usually has a fixed form: the improvisation is confined to the creation process, and either a writer, a director, or the performers themselves, will have decided exactly what is to be included and the running sequence.

Devising Methods

It is very hard to pin down exact methods for devising seeing as every group of collaborators will have different ways of approaching the creative hallo process. One method that is very common, however, is that the focus at the beginning is on form, and then thematic ideas are extracted and worked with retrospectively.

Games are often used as a starting point for devising.

The method used will depend a lot of the style of the performance group - a group who makes naturalistic theatre, might, for example, start with building characters and then gradually begin to build narrative strands together out of character-based improvisational interaction. A group of more choreographic nature would be more likely to start with improvisation using space and/or contact improvisation.

In addition to a thematic element that is retrospectively applied to the material being generated, it is also common for the sequence of the material to be retrospective too. This, however, as with most elements of devising, varies depending on the group in question.

Whether the group includes a director or not will also affect the nature of the process. With a director, the performers will create a lot of material, but without any knowledge of how the director will decide to piece it all together until quite late in the process.

History of Devised Theatre

A number of theatre practitioners, including Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook started experimenting and developing the idea of the actor as a creative artist in their own right, as opposed to a functional worker there to carry out the wishes of the writer and director. However, whilst the actor was being encouraged to make creative decisions about how they perform, they were not being encouraged to make decisions about what they perform. Etienne Decroux, a mime artist and educator, broke this mould and started encouraging his students to create their own work, and for this reason, some refer to him as the father of modern devised performance. Although, many company companies started experimenting with radical interpretation of playtexts, including many elements of devising in the process, the first fully devised performance was Oh, What a Lovely War!, which was created by Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop in 1963. It is interesting to note that this was a highly successfully commercial production, and most devised performance currently is struggling to receive recognition from the wider theatrical community, although it is recognised by the performing arts community and it widely taught to performing art students.LOL

Further reading

• Oddey, Alison (1994). Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook. Routledge.
• Tufnell, Miranda (1993). BODY SPACE IMAGE. Dance Books.