Kathryn M . Syssoyeva
Dr. Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a theatre director, teacher, and scholar, and founding Artistic Director of the predominantly queer-women-led, nearly-all immigrant, entirely feminist theatre collective, AnomalousCo. Her directorial work encompasses both collectively-created, transdisciplinary performance, and modern and contemporary drama. Her productions have been seen in New York (Center at West Park, Cloud City, and HERE), San Francisco (Circus Center, Bindelstiff Studios, Thick House, Galería de la Raza, Off-Market Theater, City Solo, and Franconia Performance Salon), Utah (where she ran a contemporary play series at the Kayenta Center for the Arts), Saint Petersburg, Russia (New Holland Island Pavilion), Gdansk, Poland (the SOPOT Festival), the Providence, Portland, and SF Fringe Festivals, and globally online. A teacher of acting, directing, physical theatre, and Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Syssoyeva has taught at Stanford University, Yale School of Drama, Utah Tech, Bowdoin College, Colby College, and Florida State University. Her work synthesizes methodologies drawn from Meyerhold, Brecht, and Stanislavsky, with a deep emphasis on the actor as creator. A recipient of multiple grants and residencies for both the artistic and academic aspects of her work, including Fulbright and Mellon fellowships, Syssoyeva holds a joint-PhD from the Department of Drama and the Graduate Program in Humanities at Stanford University. Academic specializations include avant-garde and contemporary theatre practices, collective creation, theatre for social justice, the work of V.E. Meyerhold. Book publications include A History of Collective Creation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
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Books by Kathryn M . Syssoyeva
Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France). Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective. In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century. A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry. And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia. In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices. The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.
Work In Development by Kathryn M . Syssoyeva
Papers by Kathryn M . Syssoyeva
When I die, everyone will go crawling into the files-"what secrets are in there?" None. Scraps and hieroglyphs.
-Meyerhold (Sitkovetskaia 2001:42)
O.M. Feldman's three volumes of Meyerhold's papers represent the culmination of 50 years of Meyerhold scholarship: much of it conducted not in print, but behind the scenes, in the reading room of the Russian Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), by an evolving team of scholars who have devoted decades to piecing together the complex history of a creative life that the Stalinist machine had sought to expunge. Though the years since Meyerhold's rehabilitation have seen the publication of numerous books and articles, Feldman's three volumes are the first works that allow the reader to glimpse the full breadth and complexity of Meyerhold's work-and of the fraught artistic life lived through two revolutions, civil war, continual social upheaval, and profound cultural change. The Meyerhold archives are vast. Their holdings are almost an embarrassment of riches, a fact to which Feldman's books bear witness: the three volumes of documents and commentary Feldman has published thus far (some 1,700 pages in all) take us from 1896 to 1905 (with a brief leap forward to 1918, to cover a series of course lectures). Meyerhold died in 1940.
A victim of the Stalinist repression, Meyerhold was assassinated in Lubyanka prison; his archives were classified material until 1955, when the director was officially "rehabilitated." Among the first scholars to set to work on Meyerhold's papers in the post-Stalin era was Alexandr Viliamovich Fevralskii, former literary director of GosTIM (the Meyerhold theatre). In 1968, Fevralskii brought out a two-volume collection of Meyerhold's writings: Stati, pisma, rechi, besedi (Articles, Letters, Speeches, Conversations; Fevralskii and Sitkovetskaiia 1968). It was the beginning of the mission that has since been taken up by O.M. Feldman: to "unlock" the archives by bringing Meyerhold's papers to print. That project would prove long and painstaking, obstructed by missing documentation, unattributed correspondence, and an official record of Soviet cultural history grossly at variance with reality....""
Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France). Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective. In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century. A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry. And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia. In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices. The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.
When I die, everyone will go crawling into the files-"what secrets are in there?" None. Scraps and hieroglyphs.
-Meyerhold (Sitkovetskaia 2001:42)
O.M. Feldman's three volumes of Meyerhold's papers represent the culmination of 50 years of Meyerhold scholarship: much of it conducted not in print, but behind the scenes, in the reading room of the Russian Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), by an evolving team of scholars who have devoted decades to piecing together the complex history of a creative life that the Stalinist machine had sought to expunge. Though the years since Meyerhold's rehabilitation have seen the publication of numerous books and articles, Feldman's three volumes are the first works that allow the reader to glimpse the full breadth and complexity of Meyerhold's work-and of the fraught artistic life lived through two revolutions, civil war, continual social upheaval, and profound cultural change. The Meyerhold archives are vast. Their holdings are almost an embarrassment of riches, a fact to which Feldman's books bear witness: the three volumes of documents and commentary Feldman has published thus far (some 1,700 pages in all) take us from 1896 to 1905 (with a brief leap forward to 1918, to cover a series of course lectures). Meyerhold died in 1940.
A victim of the Stalinist repression, Meyerhold was assassinated in Lubyanka prison; his archives were classified material until 1955, when the director was officially "rehabilitated." Among the first scholars to set to work on Meyerhold's papers in the post-Stalin era was Alexandr Viliamovich Fevralskii, former literary director of GosTIM (the Meyerhold theatre). In 1968, Fevralskii brought out a two-volume collection of Meyerhold's writings: Stati, pisma, rechi, besedi (Articles, Letters, Speeches, Conversations; Fevralskii and Sitkovetskaiia 1968). It was the beginning of the mission that has since been taken up by O.M. Feldman: to "unlock" the archives by bringing Meyerhold's papers to print. That project would prove long and painstaking, obstructed by missing documentation, unattributed correspondence, and an official record of Soviet cultural history grossly at variance with reality....""
"
This panel continues our investigation into collectively created performance. In A History of Collective Creation, and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave, 2013), Syssoyeva and Proudfit argue that modern collective creation, far from being a phenomenon of ‘68, may be best understood as a resistant tradition emerging c.1900 and running throughout the twentieth century, counter to a theatre of hierarchy and the dominance of the box office. A History began a project of tracing genealogies of collective creation. Logistics circumscribed this preliminary mapping to the circulation of artists and influences between Europe and North America. Our present inquiry seeks to broaden that investigation, and to complicate simplified narratives of exchange too frequently adopted when scholars discuss artists collaborating on performances across national/cultural boundaries. This panel investigates the possibilities and problematics of putting a wide range of cultural workers (and culturally situated methodologies) in dialogue. Their border-crossings may be external (as in the Odin’s Caravan Project; solo-artists of applied theatre touring globally to facilitate collective theatre-making in culturally disparate performance communities; or the Open Program of the WorkCenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, which has emerged from the Pontadera retreat founded by Grotowski to reconfigure itself as kind of touring theatre laboratory) or internal (such as Celia Herrera Rodríguez’s Fire Ceremony, which travels among and between Chicana/o and Northern Native communities, and Sharon Bridgforth’s work in the theatrical jazz-aesthetic, performing, through collective creation between performers and witnesses, the multiplicitous, contradictory, and queer histories of black subjectivity). Keeping in mind the distinctions between projects of “remembering” (i.e., Herrera Rodríguez) and projects of “borrowing” (i.e., Grotowski) we hope to facilitate a dialogue between constituencies that, since the birth of interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies departments, have remained distinctly separate.
Building upon our two studies A History of Collective Creation, and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), this panel proposes to take up the rich and complex relationship between women and the collective creation movement from a historical, theoretical, and political perspective.
Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender, collaborative process, authority/authorship, and attribution—including, but not limited to:
• Is the relationship between gender and collaboration in some manner inherent? Has the impulse to work collectively been primarily rooted in a gendering of values and predilections, or in a reaction to the “glass ceiling” of the professional mainstream? Is the frequently amateur, marginal, and/or underfunded nature of theatrical collectives a factor in the high presence of women on this side of theatre practice?
• Has the precedent set by earlier generations of women in theatre, whose labor was primarily behind the scenes or unacknowledged, led women in subsequent generations to seek out organizational structures which have permitted them to contribute without becoming the visible and central authority within a group of creators?
• Have the creative contributions of women artists—writers, teachers, actors, directors, choreographers, dancers—been historically “buried” by the conflict between attribution and complexities of collaborative process? (We might think of Susan Glaspell’s influence upon the early writings of Eugene O’Neill, or Elizabeth Hauptman’s engagement with the work of Brecht).
• Do we find instances—for example, arguably, that of the Provincetown Players—of a gendered tension between group-centered process and the rise to prominence of individual authors and directors? Are these tensions the same when the prominent artist is female?
• When women rise to prominence within a more or less collective structure, how is their authority framed by the critical community? i.e., is the authority of Littlewood, Mnouchkine, or Bogart regarded differently than, say, the authority of Grotowski, Barba or Brook?
The panel will consider these issues through investigation of instances of collective creation from the early 20th century (which saw the overlapping emergence of the settlement house, progressive education, and creative play movements; political pageantry and suffrage theatre; and the Little Theatre, socialist theatre, and Workers Theatre Movements—all marked by, or contributing to, aspects of collective theatre practice, and all involving a strong female presence), through the mid-century (which witnessed both the emergence of women’s collectives and the rise of prominent female directors and choreographers within collective companies), and into the present day.
"
Kyle Gillette, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Trinity University
“Institutional Politics: Shielding the Workcenter”
Rachel Joseph, Instructor of Theatre and English, Trinity University
“Community Reactions: Incorporating San Antonio”
Michael Hunter, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Introduction to Humanities Program, Stanford University
“Institutional Collaborations: Stanford, SF MOMA, and the Performance Art Institute”
Kris Salata, Associate Professor of Theatre, Florida State University
“The Encounter of Apprenticeship and Pedagogy”
Kathryn Syssoyeva, Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance, Florida State University
"...strangely, suddenly, deliciously slanted...": Nurturing and Demonstrating Student Experience
Description:
This panel investigates institutional dynamics, tensions and shifts encountered in hosting the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in three universities: Stanford, Trinity, and Florida State.
Abstract
In Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Shannon Jackson writes: “Like any coordination of human welfare, performance requires an encounter with some very difficult problems that are both formal and institutional.” This panel investigates institutional dynamics, tensions and shifts encountered while hosting the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in our respective universities (events initiated by Professors Salata, Hunter and Gillette). We consider interactions of the Workcenter with the university environment at four levels: administration, faculty, students, and community. Our questions, analysis and documentation examine challenges across a spectrum from institutional structure to student experience. At core, our investigation asks a single question: what are the relational possibilities between art and the university?
The praxis of the Workcenter proposes a form of "public" which insists on intimacy and direct connection as its basic condition. It depends upon slowness, accrual, rigour: both in the group’s work and, proportionally, in our approach to witnessing that work. If one meaningful definition of civic action is nourishing the quality of life in a community, then the meeting between the Workcenter and our institutions - the introduction of the laboratory model, the relational action of the performance, the transcultural interaction - constitutes a deeply civic engagement.
Panel members will briefly present challenges and solutions involved in the Workcenter’s encounter with their institutions and communities, as the prelude to a broader conversation about the university’s potential role in supporting forms of performance that might be compromised by the “interests” of bureaucracies, governments, even rigid communities.
Supplemental Information: The Workcenter of Pontedera
After decades of influential and groundbreaking work, in 1986 Jerzy Grotowski founded his
Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, which eventually became the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. Until his death in 1999, Grotowski worked intensively with Richards and a small group of actors, developing a systematic, continuous line of “performance research.” This research continues today at the Workcenter, under the leadership of Richards and Mario Biagini, and involves both extremities of what Grotowski called "the chain" of performing arts: "Art as vehicle" and "Art as presentation". The distinction between these two poles of performance is that "Art as vehicle" has as its aim the performer’s work on him/herself, with a view towards analysis of the ways in which certain modes and techniques of performance might lead to expansions of individual cognitive and perceptual capacities; while "Art as presentation," is oriented towards the perception of the spectator, with a view towards investigating questions regarding intersubjective communication and relationships.
Supplemental Information: The Residencies
Richards and his Workcenter team engaged with the FSU community over eight days, through an extensive acting workshop, classroom visits, performances of The Living Room, and a conference. The FSU School of Theatre is a home for 400 students and multiple programs: BA, BFA, MA, MS, and Ph.D. Because of this broad range of training and educational focus, the visit by the Workcenter created a perceptional challenge, as their “post-representational performance” is not driven by dramatic text, doesn’t seem to have a plot, invests very little in theatrical illusion, and doesn’t seek the spectator’s engagement in the ways traditional performance might. In addition, the workshop revealed seemingly irreconcilable differences between the modes of work, expectations, and methodologies employed by the host and the visitors.
The workshops and performances in San Antonio took place at Trinity University and were largely attended by the Trinity community. The institutional framework of the visit made the participation of the larger theatre community small yet meaningful. Members of the community that attended the performances were skeptical at the outset, but enthusiastic after witnessing The Living Room. As the large proscenium theatre and black box space traditionally used for theatre productions at Trinity were not right for The Living Room, we utilized a space elsewhere on campus, typically used as a meeting room for faculty and administrators. The Faculty Gold Room's conventional uses intersected with the hospitality and warmth of the Living Room in several significant ways, framing it within the civic life of the university.
In the Bay Area, Stanford’s initial support of the Workcenter’s visit sparked a broader collaboration with SFMOMA and the Performance Art Institute. Together, these institutions were able to support the Open Program of the Workcenter (with a team of 12 people) for a month-long residency, during which performances, workshops, and symposia took place at extremely diverse venues across the Bay Area. In the case of this residency, our focus will shift away from examining encounters directly between the Workcenter and the university, and look instead at how Stanford was able to participate in existing performance communities, as well as to help create a new community: over the course of the month, spectators and local arts professionals returned to participate in multiple performance events, creating a network of support and shared interest that was both based in the particular overlap between, on the one hand, the Workcenter’s traditions and the Open Program’s current explorations (notably the texts of Allen Ginsberg) and the Bay Area’s own social and aesthetic histories.
""""
Together with co-editor Scott Proudfit, I am currently completing work on a third volume, examining the central role played by women in the development of collective creation, and collective creation in the rise of the female theatre director: Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance – The Rise of Women Theatre-Makers, 1900 to the Present
I also have a development contract with Northwestern University Press for my book, Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at Povarskaia Street: Art, Money, Politics and the Birth of Laboratory Theatre (anticipated: Spring 2015); I am currently completing revisions.
Recent conference presentations include “Transcultural Encounters, Collective Creation, and Theatre of Repair” (ATHE 2014), “The Laboratory and the Institution: Encounters of the WorkCenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Three University Settings” (PSi 2013), “Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance” (ATHE 2013).
Chapters in development included “Practice as Research at the Meyerhold Studio, 1913-1917” for Kris Salata and Daniel Mroz’s Performance as Research/Practice-based Research, and “The Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg’s Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia: Post-Modernist Adaptation in Post-Soviet Russia,” for Adam Ledger’s forthcoming volume on adaptation and devising.
I am in the planning stages for a monograph investigating a critical phase in Meyerhold’s contributions to Russian theatre pedagogy, between 1913 and 1922: from the founding of the Meyerhold Studio in Saint Petersburg, in 1913, through the founding of GITIS (The State Institute of Theatre Arts) in Moscow, in 1922.
Practice as Research
I view my artistic practice, scholarship and teaching as a unified body of work. In addition to my seminal role, in the 1990s, in making Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and Russian Movement practices available in the US (discussed in my statement on Biomechanics), I continue to be actively engaged in the observation, study, and dissemination (here in the US) of international methods of theatre training, with emphasis on Russia and Poland. My CV details both my observations of theatre pedagogy abroad, and my development of programs bringing foreign practitioners to institutions in the US, and US students overseas.
Within my own teaching, my practice-based research concerns:
1) The integration of foundational 20th century schools of theatre training (with emphasis on the teachings of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Michel Saint-Denis, and Brecht) toward a comprehensive performance pedagogy;
2) The applicability of Soviet avant-garde acting methods to neo-avant-garde performance and devising;
3) Interdisciplinary and intermedial collaboration;
4) Collective creation and documentary theatre-making as critical pedagogy.