ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a case study of a theatrical devising process. Devised theatre refers to performance-making practices that take the deviser’s lived experience as a starting point, instead of a written drama play (Haagensen, 2014). In this study, I observed a devising process resulting in a performance named ‘5, 6, 7, 8 – A Ballet Odyssey’ carried out at Victoria College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne by a 23-yearold postgraduate theatre student. In this chapter, I give her a fictive name – Nancy – in order to maintain her anonymity. I also describe Nancy as the ‘deviser’ of the performance piece. I have followed Nancy’s creative devising process as a researcher and observer of her work. Nancy used her autobiographical memory and her experiences from her dancing community as inspiration for the work. This chapter focuses on Nancy’s creative process and how her lived experience is used, transformed and mediated into a performance work. The chapter shows the potential of using theatrical performance as a medium to analyse and understand how lived experience can be processed and developed in a performance-making process to be presented back to the community. The tradition of devised theatre can be traced back to the radical political climate of the 1960s and the cultural urge to build a bridge between art and everyday life (Heddon & Milling, 2006). Devising is today a widespread practice in community theatre, performance art, young people’s theatre and theatre in education, to mention a few. It does not refer to one single method or a certain aesthetic form. Rather, devised performance is characterised by diversity due to its nature of dynamically developing a suitable method and an aesthetic expression for every new performance work. In this chapter, devising is referred to as a life-based theatrical practice (Haagensen, 2014) since it focuses on the expression and development of the deviser’s lifeworld as its point of departure. The community referred to in the chapter is the deviser’s ballet school environment. In this setting the ballet school in a small town in Australia is the community location that frames and influences the deviser’s autobiograph ical experience. As a researcher I was interested to see how an everyday
autobiographical narrative was informing Nancy’s work and to study her subjective creative process, and its relationship to her cultural environment. I work as a deviser myself and have experienced many times how devising processes give opportunities for exploring both subjective and cultural experiences in the theatrical form-making process. In this study I was eager to observe another deviser’s process from the outside, yet one I know by heart and can easily identify with. Devising a performance based on lived experience provides for a deep involvement with the deviser’s life history, and strong subjective emotional processes can occur. As a researcher, I hoped having an outside eye could provide clarity on a process than I have experienced from the position of being a deviser, toiling with emotional and experiential processes during the creative process. I wanted to analyse how the cultural environment and the subjective mutually constitute each other and how lived experience can be given a performative expression in the devising process. In this chapter the role of researcher could be understood as narrator, unpicking and describing the interwoven elements of the devised performance.
