STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LXII, 1, 2017, p.

61 - 68
(Recommended Citation)
DOI:10.24193/subbdrama.2017.1.05

Devised Theatre – a Short Introduction

ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI1

Abstract: The aim of the following article is to define the concept of devised
theatre, as well as outlining a brief history, and providing a description of
the main elements which constitute a collective performance. It also brings
in discussion the member roles in a group that practices devised theatre, and
the technique they use in creating a performance.

Keywords: Devised theatre, collective author, theatre, performance, independent

theatre, actor – director relationship, contemporary theatre aesthetic, authorship.

I have always believed that any theme chosen by an artist as a

starting point for a new performance will, in some degree, dictate a way of
working and even its own rhythm of development, which needs to be
taken into consideration. In the case of the devised theatre aesthetic, there is
no clear recipe.
First of all, we cannot overlook the fact that each of the artists involved in
a production have their own personality, and their own way of approaching
the proposed theme. Secondly, after the improvisation and experimental
level, there comes a moment when everything has to be framed in a fixed
form. Thirdly, the devised theatre process allows everybody the possibility
to defend their own ideas, to create within their idea framework, which
creates the need for a mediator who can reconcile the imminent conflicts, to
see the potential of development in some situations or to remove the dead
weight from the project.
Each time, during the first stage of production, the team is involved
in a brainstorming of ideas and images related to the proposed theme. These
should be noted and tested, even if they most often represent firsthand solutions

1. Independent researcher. alexandra.felseghi@gmail.com

 ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI

that require either development or abandonment. However, it is absolutely

necessary for this stage of “pruning” to exist, because it leads the team to a
more profound and creative theme analysis.
What does “devised/devising theatre” mean? In a simple form, the concept
can be defined as an original production, generated by a creative collective
working process. The dramaturgical support does not precede the cultural
product, which can be a theatre production or an experimental performance.
Often associated with the innovative and experimental, devised theatre
productions have immensely developed the possibilities and the limitations
of theatre shows and their perception, both from the practitioners’ perspective
and the audiences’. In most cases, the artistic groups that practice devised
theatre work are groups that love to experiment, that are constantly questioning
the topic/ideology they want to explore, as well as creating new ways of
thinking, and building new forms and structures.
Alison Oddey defines the “devised performance” concept as an answer
and a reaction to the relationship between director and playwright, and
also to the classical naturalism that

... challenges the prevailing ideology of one person’s text under another
person’s direction. Devised theatre is concerned with the collective
creation of art (not the single version of the playwright) and it is here
that the emphasis has shifted from the writer to the creative artist.2

Indeed, during the creative sessions between the members of a group

that practice devised theatre, a new kind of subject understanding is born.
Without excluding its intellectualism, the contact with the theme is, in the
first phase, more organic; and this is due to the fact that improvisation is
used as a main researching instrument. Keith Johnston evokes imagination
and spontaneity as principal sources of improvisation. Both elements are
based on a very instinctual level and, once passed through an intellectual
analysis, they lose their freshness and creativity; more often, they are born
effortlessly as a reaction to an external stimulus:

... unless we think it might be “wrong” ... Then we experience ourselves

as “imagining”, as “thinking up an idea”, but what we’re really doing is
faking up the sort of imagination we think we ought to have.3

2. Alison Oddey, Devising theatre: A practical and theoretical handbook, (London: Routledge, 1994), 4.
3. Keith Johnston, Impro (London: Methuen drama, 2007), 80.

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 DEVISED THEATRE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION

We cannot provoke the imagination by taking distance to the subject.

It is “a muscle”, as Ariane Mnouchkine puts it, a muscle that has to be trained
in school and in the rehearsal room. In order to provoke and test their
imagination, to keep it permanently active, the practitioners have to be in
the theatre situation all the time, not thinking outside of it.
Therefore, the approach that a group of devised theatre practitioners
ought to have is to be meta-intellectual, instinctual and also, autobiographical.
Most of this type of productions could be integrated in the field of “handmade
theatre” as critic Cristina Modreanu puts it in her book, Utopii Performative.4
Narrative in its classical understanding is almost always ignored, to the
benefit of the experiment, work-in-progress and improvisation connected
to artistic contemporary conceptions. This does not mean that “devised
theatre” or “handmade theatre”, as Cristina Modreanu calls it, ignores new
technologies, relying only on the performers’ physical potential. This is a very
complex technique, without an instruction manual, which appeals to all
staging, acting or dramaturgic possibilities. Its complexity lies in its polyphonic
structure.
As an independent form, devised theatre was born at the beginning
of the 2000s, but as a structure it was foreshadowed 30-40 years before, by
the “happening” events and the experiments of artistic groups in New York
and London. One explanation of the phenomenon could be given by the fact
that these two “centers” of artistic society were in continuous development,
and had effervescence that can rarely be seen today. In an interview for
Theatre Talk show, Richard Foreman and Willem Dafoe remember with a
kind of nostalgia that Performing Garage gathered a real community of
artists from different domains like music, theatre, arts, cinematography and
so on, under its roof in Soho. Performative experiments were born in this
interdisciplinary environment.
Between 1967 and 1980, Richard Schechner is the director of The Performance
Group in New York, a company in which he is also a founding member. By
trying to put into practice his theories about performance, Schechner gathers
young actors and directors, like Spalding Grey and Elizabeth LeCompte around
the idea of his company. The big challenge was to reconsider the communication
between performer and spectator, giving it a more direct spin. As an example in

4. Cristina Modreanu, Utopii performative. Artişti radicali ai scenei americane în secolul 21

[Performative Utopias. Radical Artists of the American Stage in the 21st Century]
(Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014), 166.

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 ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI

this respect, Schechner produced Dyonisus in 69 (1969), a performance that

reinterprets Euripides’ The Bacchae, keeping very little of the original text
when all is said and done. According to the main artistic direction in the ’60s,
which followed the ritualistic potential of the theatrical act (as in the case of the
productions by Brook, Mnouchkine, Grotowski, Șerban), Schechner succeeded to
introduce elements of physical theatre and non-realistic actions in this
“scheme”, to the benefit of the script. Also, the appearance of nudes in the
performance was an innovative and also scandalous act, through which the
authors wanted to highlight the predominantly sexual message. “For many,
Dyonisus in 69 produced a sense of democratic community-building and
challenged taboos of self- and group-expression, especially sexual expression.”5
Due to several tensions within the group, caused by matters of authority
and vision, The Performance Group split in 1975, when Elizabeth LeCompte
created Wooster Group along with Spalding Grey, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, Jim
Clayburgh, Peyton Smith and Ron Vawter. Unlike the original group, Wooster
Group gave up the ritualistic elements of the performance, and focused on
the political side, more functional in their contemporary society. In addition,
their shows combine classical texts and theatre elements with mass culture
and taboos, by using the collage technique. Pioneer of devised theatre, Wooster
Group continuously questions the place of theatre in society and, in trying
to answer, finds different ways of expression to avoid cultural clichés.

Books read, books open, books turned inside out, texts cut apart, turned
upside down; … The trilogy, the epilogue, parts one and two, parentheses,
exclamation point, a work-in-progress. Pull a quote from here, take that
paragraph, take out the whole section (…) Collage is the aesthetic
strategy at play.6

Thus, one can describe the working process of the Wooster Group
productions. Their shows are original compilations and interpretations of
famous texts, and also of contemporary issues of great interest to the whole
world.
Another collage technique is the one practiced by Richard Foreman,
who declares the following:

5. Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, 2nd ed.
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 112.
6.Bonnie Marranca, “The Wooster Group: A Dictionary of Ideas,” in The Wooster Group and
its Traditions, ed. Johan Callens (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004), 110.

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 DEVISED THEATRE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION

I write a little bit every day and I end up with a huge stack of pages.
And when the time comes to do a play ... I say: “let me find an
interesting page.” And I find the page and I see it’s pretty good and
look through the huge stack again. “What page can go with that?” I find
another page and it seem to relate somehow.7

By the association of independent texts, Foreman creates a script that

is the starting point for a performance. Obviously, the original script will suffer
adaptations through the creative process. I believe that a script is a living
organism that must provoke the taste for interpretation in the practitioners.
The written text should be as adaptable to a specific performance as an
actor that is looking to interpret a character.
Returning to the history of the devised theatre concept, critic Duška
Radosavljević attests that: “Devising, therefore, must be understood by reference
to its own context – as a term and a practice, it should be understood as
belonging to a particular historical ‘moment’ in the UK”8. Therefore, from a
historical point of view, the Belgrade-based critic locates the birth of
devised theatre in the second half of the twentieth century in Great Britain,
as a form of counter-culture, in opposition with institutional theatre. Similar
practices were depicted in the works of Jacques Lecoq, Ariane Mnouchkine
(France) or Living Theatre and The Performance Group (USA). In fact, even the
artistic group founded by Peter Brook at Centre International de Recherche
Théâtrale (CIRT) used devised theatre techniques.
Also, Radosavljević separates two perspectives from which devising
can be understood: aesthetic-methodologic (which refers to the creative process,
and to the script which is not pre-existent to the production) and political
(as a revolutionary method, born under the auspices of a practice against the
traditionalist ways of thinking in theatrical processes). In effect, no matter
how apolitical an independent artistic group considers itself to be, their art will
never be separated from politics. Independent theatre groups will always
react to some restrictive political or social factors, either consciously or
unconsciously.

7. Richard Foreman, interview by Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel, Theater Talk, PBS,
November 13, 2009, http://www.cuny.tv/show/theatertalk/PR1011221.
8. Duška Radosavljević, “Theatre-Making: The End of Directing as We Know It,” in Sfârşitul
regiei, începutul creaţiei colective în teatrul european / The End of Directing, The Beginning of
Theatre-Making and Devising in European Theatre, ed. Iulia Popovici (Cluj-Napoca: Tact,
2015), 189.

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The devised theatre technique is a concept born inside independent

theatre, as a result of social research, and of a substantial change in group
dynamics. First of all, one can bring into discussion the authorship issue. Who is
the real author of the artistic product? The actor is no longer a simple
executor, and starts to play a very important part in the process, joining the
“competition” for authorship, which was destined only for directors and
playwrights in the past. His contribution is captured in the dramaturgical
material he provides during the rehearsals.
Regarding dramaturgy, most devised theatre groups are using the
collage technique. Through the use of this technique, the result will not be
an independent script, but a dramatic and performative script that, without
being transposed to the stage, might not have great fluency. But, ultimately,
this is not the main reason of the written text; it just supports the entire
performance.
In the essay Theatre-Makers, Directors, and the Independent Theatre. The
Founding Narrative, critic Iulia Popovici points out the authorship matter, as
follows:

Under the Romanian copyright law, directors and actors have a more
limited form of copyright protection (they receive credit for their
work), since they are ‘interpreters’, and the playwright is the only one
having fully acknowledged copyright ownership.9

In Romania, due to the reminiscences of last century’s cultural policies,

devised theatre is only beginning to manifest; we’re now starting to think
about a “performance author”, not only about a “playwright” in a traditional
sense. The first term covers a wider area, which can include the Actor, Director,
Choreographer or Writer – all of whom can work together in the artistic
process. Also, the performance will not be complete until it is presented in
front of an audience, which will contribute their own perception to the
representation. In this case, even the audience might become a co-author of
the performance.
Thus, the playwright plays the part of Collective Memory, which
records, adapts and rewrites – an act that is as spontaneous and unstable as
the Searching. He does all of these things until the perfect form is found.

9. Iulia Popovici, “Theatre-Makers, Directors and the Independent Theatre. The Founding
Narrative”, in Sfârşitul regiei, începutul creaţiei colective în teatrul european / The End of Directing, The
Beginning of Theatre-Making and Devising in European Theatre, ed. Iulia Popovici (Cluj-Napoca:
Tact, 2015), 231.

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 DEVISED THEATRE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION

The dramaturg might spend hours in rehearsals just watching, listening,

writing, possibly drawing and recording. While this quiet documenting
and organizing of information might sound like a fairly dry and uncreative
act, the dramaturg’s creative imagination is very much involved in this
ordering process.10

The director’s part in the process is determined by the group’s need

to have a leader to point out the key-moments of the future performance,
and to consider the main ideas; this position gives him deciding power
concerning the options of the whole production. No matter how democratic
a group might be considered, there will always be need for someone who
can assume these responsibilities. Along with the dramaturg, the director is
looking to establish the “game rules” in which the performers can unleash
their creativity and to propose new goals and fulfill their personal tasks.

... if we were to draw a map of typical devising process, it might

reveal a labyrinthine journey of blind alleys, dead ends, associative
leaps, mysterious paths and links between passages.11

Radosavljević quotes Martin Puchner, who

... offers a classification of dramatic texts based on their levels of

autonomy from the anticipated mise-en-scène, including:
a) “dramatic text as instructions”,
b) “dramatic text as incomplete artwork”,
c) “dramatic text as a complete, finished object that can be read as any
other piece of literature”.12

First point refers to the situation in which a text is a starting point for
achieving an artistic concept. The second can be interpreted as a work-in-
progress. The third one concerns playwright works which were created
following classical rules, and are part of any cultural heritage.
Regarding theatrical collective work, this kind of theatre is based on a
matter of trust. The feeling of trust creates a total availability in the
relationship between the ones involved, by giving up the conventional barriers,
and working with others in a secured space, where nobody is being judged,
but on the contrary, encouraged to propose new elements and situations.

10. Cathy Turner and Synne K. Berhrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 176--77.
11. Ibid., 171.
12. Duška Radosavljević, “Theatre-Making”, 184.

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In her book, Ecologies of Theatre13, Bonnie Marranca makes a very inspired

analogy between Wooster Group’s works and Pirandello’s Six characters in
search of an author – an analogy that can be generalized in defining the
whole concept of devised theatre. In creating a performance, the authors
always start from human resources and their personal biographies, from a
pre-existent theme, from society, politics – or all of these combined, creating
unlimited possibilities.

References

Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, 2nd ed.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.
Johnston, Keith. Impro. London: Methuen drama, 2007.
Marranca, Bonnie. “The Wooster Group: A Dictionary of Ideas.” In The Wooster Group
and its Traditions. Edited by Johan Callens, 109-140. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004.
Marranca, Bonnie. Ecologies of Theater. New York: PAJ, 2012.
Modreanu, Cristina. Utopii performative. Artişti radicali ai scenei americane în secolul 21.
Bucureşti: Editura Humanitas, 2014.
Oddey, Alison. Devising theatre: A practical and theoretical handbook. London: Routledge,
1994.
Popovici, Iulia, “Theatre-Makers, Directors and the Independent Theatre. The Founding
Narrative.” In Sfârşitul regiei, începutul creaţiei colective în teatrul european / The
End of Directing, The Beginning of Theatre-Making and Devising in European Theatre.
Edited by Iulia Popovici, 223-234. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2015.
Radosavljević, Duška. “Theatre-Making: The End of Directing as We Know It.” In
Sfârşitul regiei, începutul creaţiei colective în teatrul european / The End of Directing,
The Beginning of Theatre-Making and Devising in European Theatre. Edited by
Iulia Popovici, 179-197. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2015.
Turner, Cathy, and Synne K. Berhrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.

ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI is a theatre director and drama writer living and working in
Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is the co-founder of Create.Act.Enjoy independent theatre and film
company, where she constantly practices and theorizes devised technique in theatre and
performance. Since 2016, she is a PhD in performing arts at Babeș-Bolyai University. The title of
her PhD thesis is A Foray into Independent Theatre – Performance and the Multiple
Creator.

13. Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater (New York: PAJ Publications, 2012).

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