“The New Thing”: Three Axes for Devised Theatre

Writing in Theatre Topics in 2009, Susanna Morrow, Gleason Bauer, and Joan Herrington note a critical absence in the teaching of devised theatre. While devised work had become an increasingly common part of college drama curricula, only a “few of these programs . . . include training in the skills that inform the devising process” (125). The authors lay out approaches to address this gap and help faculty prepare students not only to create devised work, but also to ensure that such work “form[s] fresh, original theatre.” However, despite this critical intervention, the attention paid to teaching devised theatre remains on the themes, texts, issues, and communities that individual devised works address, and not on training, process, or form.¹ When these aspects are mentioned, it is often to refer to the “foundations” or “preparatory” work that precedes the “real work” of devising. This absence is understandable, given institutional pressures to both identify and quantify learning outcomes, as well as to make scholarly claims for devised theatre projects’ community and/or curricular impact.

In this essay, I describe “The New Thing,” a pedagogy for devised theatre that I have developed over the past fifteen years.² This approach prioritizes the materiality of performance in order to enable student artists to create and shape aesthetic experiences particular to a theatrical event. The New Thing intentionally deemphasizes, but does not exclude, the most familiar elements of theatre—character, plot, spoken text—in order to broaden student-actors’ relationships to theatrical materials. It utilizes three units of study, which I call “three axes,” on which students learn to create with: 1) the concrete materials of performance; 2) image and spectacle; and 3) a critical engagement with a problem. While The New Thing draws on some theatrical concepts, it gives equal attention to the visual-art practices of minimalism, Dada, and surrealism as an integrative approach to performer training and devising practice.³

The New Thing encourages students to defamiliarize the familiar—to, as Ezra Pound famously put it, “Make it new!” It teaches student-performers to give primacy to the live, theatrical event, so much so that this newness is inextricable from their rehearsed, scored, and memorized performances. The fact that every passing moment of the performance is a “new” one is considered not only a formal component of the work, but also a central part of its content.

However, The New Thing is more than spontaneity, ephemerality, and the novelty of its newness. Influenced by Mary Overlie’s The Six Viewpoints, it is equally “thing-ly,” addressing the material of the distance and angles of Space; the geometry of a body’s Shape; the tempos and durations of Time; the dynamic relation with the audience that Overlie terms Emotion; the kinesthetic properties of Movement, and the construction of a performance’s logic or structure, which she calls Story.⁴ What matters in The New Thing is always a question of the literal matter in the theatrical event.

At its core, The New Thing is a practice defined by its processes: of defamiliariz-ing, new-ing, and thing-ing. Its three axes are taught sequentially, as accumulative lines of embodied inquiry into the creation and performance of original work.

Axis 1: The Drama of the Material

The Perception and Crafting of the Basic Materials of Performance to Discover Their Dramatic Potential, without the Representation of Characters or Narrative

Conflict, the setting up, fulfilling, and/or breaking of audience expectations, and the logic of progression are discovered through the assembly and inhabiting of the material phenomena of the performance event. Explored within the context of minimalism, we temporarily set aside considerations of meaning, representation, and signification to allow the form of the performance to also be its content, for the performance to be “about” the materials of performance being enacted.⁵

Axis 2: Dream Story and Poetic (Il)logic

The Creation of Performance Work Guided by Intuition, Imagery, Association, Chance, Nonsense, Rupture, the Marvelous, and the Impossible

Axis 2 allows for the materiality of the performance to achieve symbolic value through the act of making. Rather than exploring a prearranged theme or...