Polyphonic Dynamics as Educational Practice

Theatre and performance practitioners are forever seeking creative processes that foster a compelling fusion of visual and auditory theatrical signs to communicate story, character, theme, and worldview to an audience. Historically, mainstream Western theatre has privileged the dramatic (written) text as the guiding force for generating a theatrical performance. In 1931, however, aesthetician Otakar Zich questioned the traditional hierarchy of producing theatre and performance that begins with the script as a blueprint for production (Elam 5); in "The Sign in the Theatre," semiotician Tadeusz Kowzan categorized the components of theatrical performance into thirteen sign systems,¹ viewing each as equally important (45, emphasis added); and theatre and film director Jindrich Honzl noted the "changeability" among the various sign systems in his essay "Dynamics of the Sign in the Theatre" (1940) when he wrote that "the creative forces of one factor [sign] can replace or suppress others without decreasing the strength of the dramatic effect" (269). These and other semioticians theoretically shattered the traditional hierarchy of a script-driven theatre and offered new tactics for analyzing the multiplicity of elements that comprise theatrical performances.

Within the last century, theatre practitioners have echoed some of this theory with collective creation practices that dissolve a script-driven hierarchy through "the abolishment of individual authorship" (Vasquez 73) and the co-creation of all sign systems that comprise a theatrical performance. The work produced by such collectives is often characterized as dynamic, compelling, and inventive. Many produce exciting original work; many produce political theatre and/or theatre for social change.² Collective creation has become a firmly established and influential practice in world theatre.³

Certainly, this collective mode of creation with its record of success merits inclusion in theatre pedagogy. The linear script-driven approach to production, however, is still dominant in American university theatre practices and theatre textbooks.⁴ As theatre educators, we are responsible for offering students not only expertise, but also currency in our discipline. Moreover, if we are to educate enterprising and independent artists, what better way than to systematically introduce them to alternative creative processes in which they are challenged to contribute, to think outside their disciplinary boundaries, and to take responsibility for their own work? This essay is not so much proposing a new theoretical approach to collective creation; rather, it is an application of pedagogy, drawn from our practical experiences, to collective creation principles.

With this pedagogical aim in mind, we are interested in bridging the gap between semiotic theory and collective creation practice by proposing that theatre semiotics can provide a useful framework to guide the creative process—a framework that insists upon equality and interchangeability of theatrical signs that are co-created by a multiplicity of artistic "voices." In so doing, we align ourselves with Elaine Aston and George Savona to promote a view of "theatre semiotics not as a theoretical position, but as a methodology: a way of working" (1). Specifically, we are interested in how both Kowzan's theatre sign systems and Honzl's notion of the interchangeability of theatrical signs can encourage all practitioners on the production team to consider the full array of signs, including those outside his/her area of expertise, and allow the changeability among sign systems to inspire unconventional creative choices. In this essay, we explore the application of a semiotic lens to a collectively created production of Monkey King as a means to understand, articulate, and practice reflexively the ever-shifting interplay among sign systems during the collective creation process. We call this ever-shifting interplay "polyphonic dynamics." Our goal is twofold: to explore a useful fusion between theatre semiotics theory and collective creation practice, and to make a strong case for the integration of this fusion into mainstream pedagogical practices.

A Happy Accident

As theatre faculty at Kennesaw State University (KSU),⁵ we first found ourselves propelled into a collective mode of creation quite by accident when we undertook a production of Monkey King in 2005. The project was an original stage adaptation of the first section of Journey to the West, a sixteenth-century epic folk novel...