Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide to Devised Theater (Second to None: Chicago Stories) - Softcover

Johnston, Chloe; Paz Brownrigg, Coya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810138786 ISBN 13: 9780810138780

Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Featuring the work of: About Face Youth Theatre • Albany Park Theater Project • Barrel of Monkeys • Every house has a door • FEMelanin • 500 Clown • Free Street Theater • Honey Pot Performance • Lookingglass Theater • The Neo-Futurists • The Second City • Southside Ignoramus Quartet • Teatro Luna • Walkabout Theater • Young Fugitives

Ensemble-Made Chicago brings together a wide range of Chicago theater companies to share strategies for cocreating performance. Cocreated theater breaks down the traditional roles of writer, director, and performer in favor of a more egalitarian approach in which all participants contribute to the creation of original material. Each chapter offers a short history of a Chicago company, followed by detailed exercises that have been developed and used by that company to build ensemble and generate performances. Companies included range in age from two to fifty years, represent different Chicago neighborhoods, and reflect both the storefront tradition and established cultural institutions. The book pays special attention to the ways the fight for social justice has shaped the development of this aesthetic in Chicago.

Assembled from interviews and firsthand observations, Ensemble-Made Chicago is written in a lively and accessible style and will serve as an invaluable guide for students and practitioners alike, as well as an important archive of Chicago’s vibrant ensemble traditions. Readers will find new creative methods to enrich their own practice and push their work in new directions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHLOE JOHNSTON is an assistant professor of theater at Lake Forest College. She performs and workshops with the Paper Machete, Write Club, Second Story, and the Neo-Futurists. 

COYA PAZ BROWNRIGG is an associate professor of theater at DePaul University. She is the artistic director of Free Street Theater and cofounder of Teatro Luna, and is a regular commentator on race, media, and pop culture for Vocalo radio.

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Ensemble-Made Chicago

A Guide to Devised Theater

By Chloe Johnston, Coya Paz Brownrigg

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2019 Chloe Johnston and Coya Paz Brownrigg
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3878-0

Contents

Ensemble-Made Chicago: An Introduction, 
500 Clown, 
About Face Youth Theatre, 
Albany Park Theater Project, 
Barrel of Monkeys, 
FEMelanin, 
Free Street Theater, 
Honey Pot Performance, 
Lookingglass Theatre, 
The Neo-Futurists, 
The Second City, 
Southside Ignoramus Quartet (SIQ), 
Teatro Luna, 
Walkabout Theater, 
The Young Fugitives, 
Acknowledgments, 
Time Line, 
List of Exercises by Type, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

500 Clown

Theater sucks, no one likes it, but everyone likes the elements of it.

— Ensemble Member Adrian Danzig

The performers make sounds that aren't quite human. They climb down the stairs, through the audience. Scottish kilts are thrown over their shoulders. Their heads are shaved in a variety of ways, their hair dyed various colors, they wear disheveled white shirts, high socks, biker pants, knee pads. Each has one ear painted bloodred. Not only do they acknowledge us but they also play with us, check in with us. We are part of a game we don't know how to play, but the joy is in realizing they are changing the rules as we go along. Sound effects, made by the actors, let us know they are not simply stepping onto a stage — they are flying. In the world of the clowns, every movement and sound is a new discovery. Plastic bags somehow become violent weapons — before they are used to trick-or-treat. Then, in direct violation of the rules of parents everywhere, the plastic bags are stretched over their heads, and suddenly they are the three witches of. "When shall we three meet again?" Unlike those witches, who seem to be the arbiters of fate, these clowns are responsive, every gesture and laugh the audience makes pulls them in a new direction. Once music begins, they are pulled into that, it's impossible not to dance. At least 50 percent of the audience is pretty nervous that someone is going to get hurt. In any other show, the scene in which explosive devices are attached to a performer's groin might be the climax of the show. Here it is amazing — but there is more chaos to come. More fragments of the familiar script are tossed around: "Fie, my lord," "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" At the mention of blood, the clowns can't help but use it — at first, each smudge a wound, by the end blood is the air they breathe. There is something poignant about seeing these three beings we have come to know, drenched in blood, their sadness a meditation of the absurdity of violence. But still, we laugh. According to Paul Kalina, one of the performers onstage, we are watching "the clowns' attempt to do, but they can't do it, and in not doing it, they do it." The set collapses. Everyone survives.

The anarchic energy of clowns challenges what we think we know about performers on a stage. They are neither acting, nor being themselves. Though the aesthetic could be considered a kind of physical theater, there's a particular philosophy, an ethos of honesty and discovery, and an embrace of risk that shows like 500 Clown Macbeth showcase that seem to cut to the heart of the live performance experience. 500 Clown was formed in 2000 when performers Adrian Danzig, Paul Kalina, and David Engel, directors Leslie Buxbaum Danzig and Jon Foley-Sherman, and set designer Dan Reilly created 500 Clown Macbeth. The show premiered in a bowling alley turned arts space on Chicago's North Side. According to Buxbaum Danzig, "Six people attended opening night ... Three weeks later — after no advertising but plenty of word of mouth — over one hundred people filed into the space." The Chicago Reader described how the characters seemed to be "thrown into a Keaton-esque universe, [where] they must deal with uncooperative props and set pieces, and small dramatic gestures quickly devolve into dangerous stunts." Perhaps unconsciously, the reviewer was responding to something fundamental about the company's performance style; Adrian Danzig describes its clown aesthetic as "Think Buster Keaton, not Bozo."

Performer Molly Brennan was in the audience for that first performance, and when David Engel left the company to pursue other projects, she was asked to join. The artists came from a variety of backgrounds, with training from physical-theater schools around the world, including the Dell'Arte school in California, and with Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier in France. The artists came together out of a common frustration with the limits of naturalistic, text-based theater and a desire to produce something visceral and exciting for the audience — and maybe a little scary. They wanted to create something with wide appeal, for audiences of different tastes and backgrounds. As Danzig puts it, they were guided by the question, "What if we had an audience that was five to eighty-five years old and spoke every language?"

From the beginning, the company embraced its different influences, in part by declining to talk about them. Rather than articulating a common definition of clown performance, its members performed it. As Buxbaum Danzig writes, "Company members found that verbal debates on clown stymied creative collaboration, but when translated into the physical activity of performing, the different views have led to energetic and complex productions." They soon decided the audience would be their guide — as Danzig wrote, "We just had to listen" — creating a style focused on a broad and visceral appeal. Kalina had spent some years as a street performer, a world in which capturing an audience's attention is paramount, and this background infused the company's work.

Central to the company's appeal was the slight cognitive dissonance between its rowdy, dangerous, and untamed energy and the canonical works to which members were drawn. Their approach to the material revealed to the audience that which was wild and grotesque at the heart of the text. Macbeth is the story of the way uncontrolled ambition leads to endless violence, and each murderer is haunted by ghosts and witches. The characters are at war throughout the play, their bodies and psyches under constant attack, and finally their psyches fall prey to the chaos they've unleashed. In staging this story, the performers pushed themselves to their physical limits and embraced the absurdity of the horror the characters inflict. One reviewer, when describing the transition of 500 Clown Macbeth from the fringe venue of Charybdis to the more mainstream Looking glass Theatre, noted that "Danzig's infamous crotch-lit-with-two-hundred-firecrackers stunt is gone this time — sadly, no pyro allowed at the Looking glass — but it has been replaced with an equally uproarious sight gag involving an exploding hot water bottle. You've got to give props to any guy who continually thinks up new and novel ways to potentially disfigure his groin." For these clowns, the stakes were just as high as for the ruthless Macbeths, and their reckless ambition is shaped by humor as much as violence. Still, the violence of the text never disappeared.

For their next project, 500 Clown took on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the story of a man-made monster that resembles his human makers. The company continued to find ways to startle its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810138786
• ISBN 13: 9780810138780
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei