Devised Companions

Mark Jackson here, still feeling fresh from a weekend workshop with the folks from Creative Capital, hosted by Z Space. Twenty-four Bay Area artists from a variety of disciplines participated in an informative, inspiring, at times eye-opening series of lectures and discussions geared toward making better, more efficient, more effective business people of us all. As individual artists we are indeed our own business, and yet the chaos natural to making art often tangles up our ability to devise the best business practices for ourselves. The Creative Capital team came with loads of experience and ideas for articulating intentions, organizing time, making efficient and effective financial decisions, and staying true to ones art in the process.

Somehow this experience fits neatly into what has become a kind of theme in my career lately: devising.

This term, “devising,” is the trendy label for something that’s quite ancient, really. With regard to theater it means, in the most basic sense, not starting with a script. Generally speaking, with a “devised” piece a group will get in a room for a period of time and improvise in a variety of ways around a given theme, subject, or other source material. Eventually they’ll have made a show.

Summed up that way, it sounds easy. It’s actually the most physically, emotionally and intellectually demanding way to go about making theater that I am aware of. With no script laid out in advance to provide a basic map that everyone can point to in order to identify points A to Z, the collaborators have to draw this map on their feet, together. How exactly this is done can take many, many forms. For myself, the Viewpoints and Composition work as taught by SITI Company is a major tool. I also look to the examples of Théâtre du Soleil, Robert Lepage

and Forced Entertainment. Sometimes methods present themselves spontaneously, arising out of the needs of the moment. But whatever the formal approach, the key ingredients for success are openness, honesty, trust, daring, will, patience and compassion. One must cast aside pride

and ego at the threshold and leap into the dark hand-in-hand with everyone else.

Over this 2009/10 season I’ve been involved in three devised projects. The only one that Bay Area audiences might have seen would be JULIET, a piece I directed at San Francisco State University. JULIET used the second of the two title characters of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet as its starting point. From there the designers, cast and I started to make stuff up and eventually we had our show. It went off very well and even nabbed a mention in the New York Times.

This summer I’ll disappear into the creative cavern of Theater Artaud for two weeks with Beth Wilmurt, Jud Williford and Jakes Rodriguez in order to start working on The Companion Piece, a devised work commissioned by Z Space that is slated to open in late January, 2011.

Our starting points are American Vaudeville and the question as to what extent ones individual survival and identity depend on other people.

We workshopped The Companion Piece with students of the American Conservatory Theater MFA Program back in January 2009, and this helped give shape to the basic questions and structure of the piece. Lisa Steindler attended the final showing of that leg of the work and

decided to take it on at Z Space. So, this summer we’ll begin the sweaty process of filling out those basics we found in the previous workshop. And eventually we’ll have a show.

Again, sounds easy. But it’s always a scary moment, standing at the front edge of a process like this. So many questions hover and loom. So many possibilities dangle in the air. It feels like crisp cold wind in bright, hot sunlight. Such a contradiction gets the blood pumping, to

say the least. But it’s good to feel alive!

Wish us luck!

On and up.

Mark J