Creative Communities

Ensembles and Teams

The ensemble—or team—is paramount in the areas of acting, dancing, and athletics. Even when the performer performs alone, the solo performance is part of a team score, as in ice-skating, diving, or track. Solo dancers or solo actors are supported by large behind-the-scenes companies doing everything from set design to lighting and costumes—all essential to the production of the performance. Athletes have trainers, caddies, equipment assistants, groundskeepers, and other behind-the-scenes workers. Collaboration is the hallmark of creativity here. Though individuals are themselves creative in their various domains of costume, lighting, set design, directing, accompanying, and such, the performance as a whole is collaborative, with each individual subsuming his or her creativity and putting it to the good of the whole performance.

Before the Actors Theater, there was the Group Theater in the 1930s in New York City. The Group Theater modified the Stanislavski system. The Group Theater was built on the idea of “ensemble”; that is, no one actor was more important than another, but all were essential cogs in the machine, parts of the whole, members of the collective. This idea coincided with the worldwide rise of socialism as a political system. The presence, at that time, of the Left Wing attraction to communism is evident in the theories of the Group Theater; they felt that the whole company must live together in a communelike existence. In fact, many of them were later blacklisted during the infamous McCarthy hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. Actors blacklisted included Edward G. Robinson, Zero Mostel, Leo Penn (the father of Sean and Chris Penn), Will Geer, Burgess Meredith, Paul Robeson, and Lee Grant.

By the 1960s, Judith Malina and Julian Beck had founded the Living Theater. Malina and Beck modified the purpose of the theater to include dramatic social consciousness. They believed that theater transformed the participants as well as the audience, and many of the plays were staged with students, factory workers, schoolchildren, and other nonactors, as well as the members of the company. The actor's technique was subsumed to the social message of the play. The emotional impact of the plays was often so strong that the [Page 180]audience joined the actors in protest, marching out of the theater with them.

Peter Brook and Paul Scofield founded the Theater of Cruelty. The Theater of Cruelty emphasizes improvisation and the collective lives of the actors in company. Brook's company for The Mahabharata included actors of many ethnicities.

...