The Performance Ensemble and Collaborative Creation

Collaborative creation is often favored by those with strong political beliefs in the power of the community. Theater is always collaborative, however in creative collaboration traditional hierarchies of decision making dissolve and a group of artists share the responsibility of creating the script. They work through improv, discussion, and sharing of ideas, in this process there is not a single author. During the 1960's theater artists rebelled against the established written text and the hierarchy of control within the theatrical process when the social revolution sent the theater into a search for new forms. Groups such as Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater and Peter Brook's International Center for theater research searched for a new system of language based on sound and movement that attempted to transcended cultural boundaries. Theater companies began rehearsals with an idea or concept but no written text, the actors, designers, and directors began a process of collaboration creation; the performance text and dramatic text evolved together, and the creative performance team was the author of both texts.

Today groups such as Pig Iron Theater Company, The Neo-Futurists, Theater de Complisite, and many others keep this style of theater alive today. The Neo-Futurists have a 60 min show where they put up pieces of paper with numbers on them and the audience yells out which number they want the performers to do next. Each number represents a different skit entirely, every night that they do the show the sequence is different. The Pig Iron Theater Company does their show differently. They focus more on the visual aspect of their shows, their sets take you to a whole other world which allows the audience to be taken somewhere else as an escape from reality. The Pig iron theater Company has won many awards for their shows which include Hell meet Henry Half Way, Chekhov Lizardbrains, Poet In New York and Mission to Mercury, to name a few.

The video clip below is from a charity event that Pig Iron did that show cased one of its infamous characters Martha Graham Cracker.

Works Cited

The World of Theater

Pigiron.org

tcg.org