How Working Together Works: A Practitioner’s Critical Manifesto of Collective Practice

I am enamoured with ensemble. I am committed to collaboration. I am drawn to devising.

So much so, that three years ago, after more than a decade of experience in this field of practice, I began a PhD practice-as-research candidacy on Collective and Devised Performance Practice at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) of the University of Melbourne. My journey from practitioner to practitioner-researcher stemmed from a curiosity and desire to better understand and articulate the experience of ensemble practice, the sensations of shared flow, and the conditions of collective creation. To do so, I perceived my research as a mirror of, to, and for my practice, as a means of digging deeper into the reflection and theory that already underpinned my work; to begin with the doing, from the ground up, from the studio floor, and the space in-between the bodies at work together. To this end, at the outset of my studies I partook in a few practical units with students of the postgraduate diploma in Performance Creation, particularly those in the animateuring scheme, one of which involved five animateuring students and myself collectively devising a performance.¹ We had known one another for a mere two months (and superficially at that), and yet the organic, fluid ease of the collaboration struck us all, and we quickly began discussing the formation of a collective. Our initial declared focus was not on presenting new work, but rather on continuing to train, provoke, research, and generate performance together. While we have since devised and performed small-scale to full-length works, we continue to consider our collective practice as a laboratory and incubator for us to investigate questions of training and dramaturgy for devised performance; and specifically for how a leaderless collective forms a shared practice of training for performance, and what strategies and techniques might be developed to move from the spontaneous, playful exploration and generation of material on the studio floor to the construction of a coherent, considered performance score. We have been doing so for over three years now. This is the, albeit perhaps not unique, birth story of Oddbody.

In my research and through a reflexive and rigorous investigation of Oddbody’s nascent collective practice, I unpack and conceptualize the emergent processes, qualities, tensions, paradoxes, ways of being, and dramaturgies of a collaboratively devised performance practice. As I research, reflect, and attempt to write about/through/around/within/to my practice, I encounter, as have other scholars and practitioners of this form of making, the near impossibility of establishing concrete models of practice. Dierdre Heddon and Jane Milling, forerunners of the scholarship in devised performance, aptly point to the specifity of context and fluidity of these modes of making and suggest that it is “problematic and disengenous to propose the existence of ‘models,’” as practitioners insist that they employ “different processes appropriate to different contexts and to different collaborations . . . processes [that] are not easily defined” (78). Oddbody has certainly found this to be true, recognizing a plethora of processes and practices applied to different aspects of training, devising, and performing work. And yet, in the current discourse around alternative forms of performance practice, there exists a contemporary interest in critically engaging with and perhaps even conceptualizing such collaborative, devised, and fluid processes of performance-making. In Acting (Re)Considered, Phillip Zarilli argues that “every time an actor performs, he or she implicitly enacts a ‘theory’ of acting” (3). Applying this to theatre-making, I suggest that every time a collective engages in a devising process, they enact a theory of collaboration, an ethics of being self with others, a performance of shared practice. How does feedback and reflection feed into the practice and what sort of language is used to discuss one another’s work? What are the first actions taken when beginning a day’s work in the studio? How are decisions or dramaturgical choices made? How long is lunch break? What are the underlining perspectives and principles that guide the shared training? These and many other similar questions address the “rules...