In Sync?
For American ensembles, questions come first - then creativity

By Ferdinand Lewis

American Theatre, May/June 2000.

Ensemble theatres in America live on long hours and luck. It's a canny kind of luck, the sort that reveals itself after a lot of footwork. If it would be bottled, takers would line up around the block, but that won't happen anytime soon. In the meanwhile, ensembles are attempting the next best thing: making sense of what they've been through over the past 25 years.

A decade ago, critic Misha Berson reported in this magazine on America's ongoing ensemble theatre movement ("Keeping Company," April '90), describing small companies whose commitment to their work was matched only by the commitment of their audiences - and, in most cases, the depth of their poverty. Although most of the ensembles she interviewed are still operating today - and although the influence of their work is frequently far-reaching and profound - as an active movement, ensemble theatre remains a tiny blip on America's cultural radar.

"The work is community-centered, so it's low profile," explains Bob Leonard, co-director of the Community Arts Network at Virginia Tech and a veteran of what he calls the ensemble wars. "Ensembles are so intensely focused on their communities that they're invisible to the outside world." Because they are isolated from one another, ensembles are often unable to share experiences, resources and, well, luck. This contributes to the steepness of a new ensemble's uphill struggle.

Last year, however, things began to change. In June 1999, representatives from seven ensemble theatres around the country came together for the first time under the banner Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET) for a first-ever conference and festival, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the ensembles themselves. The troupes were Independent Eye of Sebastapol, California; Touchstone Theatre of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania; A Traveling Jewish Theatre of San Francisco; Irondale Ensemble of New York City; Dell'Arte Players Company of Blue Lake, California; and the Road Company of Johnson, Tennessee.

The ensembles met in San Francisco, saw each other's work, discussed approaches, compared scars. A Traveling Jewish Theatre's Cory Fischer said, "Just hearing other people's stories, how they've survived, was so important. We've all been so alone up until now." In 2001 there will be an expanded ensemble festival, another chance for the movement to find its voice and pool its luck.

It will also be an opportunity to discover how ensembles make that luck. I recently spoke to members of four thriving ensembles, each with 20-plus years in the saddle, to find out what approaches they share in common. At first glance, I concluded the answer was "not much." Beyond the obvious commonalities - that ensembles are artist-driven, for instance - there are as many styles and approaches as there are ensembles. What, then, are the threads that connect them?

An artistic movement is usually defined by the common solutions its artists have found to their creative problems: "The Fauves experimented with pure color," or "The Futurists broke with traditionalism." In the American ensemble theatre movement, however, there are few answers in common - the common thread turns out to be the questions that ensembles all must ask. Among these questions-in-common are:

What is our relationship to the audience? What is our source of inspiration? What is our style? How do we avoid burnout? Hold the ensemble together? Support members and their families? Reconcile the individual with the collective? What are our traditions?

An ensemble tends to define its mission by answering these and other questions-in-common, then bets all its chips on living up to that mission. For the most part, ensembles don't limp along. They either fulfill their missions or die. For this discussion, I chose the first four questions-in-common from the list above.

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