Devising a Collective Future

In the opening moments of the 2023 neh Institute titled "Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theater," Quinn Bauriedel, co -artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre, offered a guiding principle shaping the companies, artists, and ideas of American devising: "Here one day, gone the next."Though potentially discouraging -Who remembers the companies of the past?Is our work so precarious that it could disappear at any moment?-this became a useful frame for thinking about the life cycles of devising companies, their ephemerality, and the challenges surrounding their archiving and historicizing.We began to see the fleeting nature of this work as both our challenge -How do we more successfully record, transmit, and teach this work when its own history is contested and poorly documented?-and our inspiration.Inside constant change lies a hope for transformation alongside the possibility of a good death, a healthy end to an ensemble's life.This mantra also became the defining quality of our time together: a brief, intense, fruitful period during which we formed a fleeting ensemble of our own, one that, like artistic companies, persists in a state of flux and collaborative possibility.During the two-week gathering, we developed a shared resistance to the seemingly entrenched dominant narratives of ensemble-and company-created theater.By identifying the cracks and gaps in the Western history, we built an archive that includes work by ensembles of color that have been overlooked, embraced performance forms not typically held under the umbrella of devising, and engaged in interdisciplinary analysis building a web that connected embodied knowledge, theater history, American studies, performance studies, and beyond.This issue of Theater reflects creative collaboration grown in the fertile soil of information, resistance, and relationship-building during the institute and aspires to look beyond its borders.Of particular focus is a return to the heart of devised theater: a polyvocal expression that hopes to embrace multiple perspectives and ideas through collaborative creation.Contemporary devising emerged out of the political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, a rising spirit of collectivity that led to a desire for different, nonhierarchical structures for art-making.American artists and activists have been returning to and remaking this kind of collectivity since the start of the pandemic: it flared under the leadership of Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, stewarded the continued growth of the labor movement that has continued through the United Auto Workers' historic 2023 deal, and, as I write in November 2023, sees a roaring emergence of collective action opposing the United States' complicity in the ongoing violence in Palestine and calling for a permanent ceasefire.Progressive collectivity is finding renewed urgency in a reframing of and reckoning with the past, rely-