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Bibliography

Newfield, Anthony. "After the Orchard: A Journal." American Theatre, Jan. 1996, Vol.13(1), p.34

Solntseva, Alyona and Klimenko, Vladimir. "Transition: the theater studio movement." Theater, 1989, Vol.20(3), p.21

Collins-Hughes, Laura. "The play's the thing: the dramatic and narrative appeal of documentary theater." Nieman Reports, 2015, Vol.69(3), p.8

Isaac, Dan. "Theatre of Fact." The Drama Review: TDR, 1 July 1971, Vol.15(3), pp.109-135

Thielman, Sam. "Docu plays give voice to victims of war." Variety, Sept 21, 2009, Vol.416(6), p.59

"Theatre of Fact." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 2nd ed., 1996.

Youker, Timothy. "Reading Collage Drama as Documentary Drama: Trash Archives and Dissensus in Charles L. Mee’s Lives of the Artists." Modern Drama, 2015, Vol.58(2), pp.218-237

"Theatre of Fact." Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 2018

Beumers, Birgit and Lipovetsky, Mark. "The Performance of Life: Documentary Theater and Film." Russian Review, October 2010, Vol.69(4), pp.615-637

"theatre of the real" (Carol Martin)

investigative theatre (coined by the Civilians in 2001 - ATM - "An artistic practice rooted int he process of creative inquiry", verbatim theatre, ethnodrama

Bibliography

Collins-Hughes, Laura. "The play's the thing: the dramatic and narrative appeal of documentary theater." Nieman Reports, vol. 69, no. 3, 2015, p. 8

Isaac, Dan. "Theatre of Fact." The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 3, 1 July 1971, pp. 109-135.

Thielman, Sam. "Docu plays give voice to victims of war." Variety, vol. 416, no. 6, 21 Sept 2009, p. 59.

"Theatre of Fact." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 2nd ed., 1996.

"Theatre of Fact." The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 4th ed., 1983.

"Documentary Drama and Theatre." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance. Vol. 1, 2003.

Youker, Timothy. "Reading Collage Drama as Documentary Drama: Trash Archives and Dissensus in Charles L. Mee’s Lives of the Artists." Modern Drama, vol. 58, no. 2, 2015, pp. 218-237.

"Theatre of Fact." Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2018.

Beumers, Birgit and Lipovetsky, Mark. "The Performance of Life: Documentary Theater and Film." Russian Review, vol.69, no. 4, October 2010, pp. 615-637.

Mason, Gregory. "Documentary Drama from the Revue to the Tribunal." Modern Drama, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1977, pp. 263-277

Martin, Carol. "Bodies of Evidence." TDR: The Drama Review, Fall 2006, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 8-15. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/201932.

Odendahl-James, Jules. "A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages." American Theatre Magazine, 22 August 2017, www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/a-history-of-u-s-documentary-theatre-in-three-stages/

Parenteau, Amelia. "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Documentary Theatre?" American Theatre Magazine, 22 August 2017, www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-documentary-theatre/

"Documentary Theatre." The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, 2002.

Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

History

(revue to tribunal)

Started in Germany in the 1920s.

In Spite of Everything (Trotz Alledem) by Erwin Piscator was arguably the first documentary drama. Piscator claimed that "the whole performance was one huge montage of authentic speeches, articles, newspaper clippings, slogans, leaflets, photographs and films of the [First World] War and the Revolution." Plot and character were secondary to the distribution of facts.

Living Newspapers of the American Federal Theatre Project, which interlaced news events with fictional and archetypal characters such as the Little Man and the Loudspeaker, who spoke for and with the audience (need specific citation). Regions developed local Living Newspapers. The end of the FTP in 1939 put the genre on hiatus until 1963.

(ATM)

agitprop and worker's theater of Western Europe

Theatre of Fact, term applied in the 1950s to documentary plays which derive in part from the technique of the American pre-war Living Newspaper. (TOCT 4th ed)

"a twentieth-century extension of historical drama where the factual basis gives the action its credibility. In documentary theatre, documents themselves are projected into text and performance. Documentary theatre has a declared purpose and an evident factual base. It follows the model pioneered in the 1920s by Erwin Piscator. Non-naturalistic Epic Theatre techniques are used in documentary theatre to present oppositional critiques of dominant ideologies. It's four major functions are to reassess national/local histories; to celebrate communities/marginalized groups and their histories; to investigate important events adn issues past and present; and to be openly didactic in its use of information." ... "verbaitim play" was a 1980s variant of the local documentary theatre, and the British Theatre in Education movement used it extensiely as does radical theatre in the Third World." "Theatre of fact is a form of documentary drama exemplified by such plays as In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" - uses transcripts as source material (TCCTTCT)

Theory

(Bodies of Evidence)

created from archived material, including interviews, hearings, records, video, film, photographs, but does not include everything in the archive. The material must be curated by the artists to create the piece. The actors perform as themselves and as representatives of real people. "strategically deploys the appearance of truth while inventing its own particular truth through elaborate aesthetic devices"

(OETP)

"documentary plays are much closer to their source material, often incorporating documents themselves directly into performance." "USSR Department of Agitation and Propaganda employed Blue Blouse theatrical troupes in the 1920s ... staged zhivaya gazeta (living newspaper)." Following a 1927 Blue Blouse tour to germany, "agitprop groups like Berlin's Red Rockets started to use the political revue style of the living newspaper." "British left theatre groups such as Unity Theatre and Manchester's Theatre of Action produced living newspapers in the 1930s. In the USA, the FTP had a Living Newspaper Unit whose plays were researched and produced by unemployed newspaper and theatre workers." Meyerhold, Piscator, Brecht ("while Bertolt Brecht rarely used factual material directly, his use of film, slides, and placards significantly developed the ways documents could be incorporated into stage performance." hiatus during WWII and beginning of Cold War. Form revived with renewed political awareness in the late 1960s. "In West Berlin, Piscator embarked on a new series of documentary productions, including plays about the Holocost. In Britain, Theatre Wrokshop (the pre-war Theatre of Action) produced Oh! What a Lovely War (1963)... This epic theatre analysis of the Great War provided a model for new 1930s-style political theatre troupes like John McGrath's 7:84 Company, and further inspired a brief spate of Theatre of Fact plays, including Peter Brook's US (1966) about the US involvement in Vietnam and Ariane Mnouchkine's Murderous Angels (1971) about post-colonial war in the Congo. Documentary forms are still used inside and outside the developed world, usually as part of politicial opposition (in, for example, Chicano theatre in the USA and via Augusto Boal's 'arena' and 'forum' theatre methodologies in South America and Asia)."

(ATM 1)

"Artist as source material" (Anna Deavere Smith) - "artist-collected, interview-based materials"

"actors as co-authors"

"meta-theatricality - revealing the mechanics of theatre's process of collection, creation, and performance ... central aesthetic conceit of work built from interviews, especially if those interviews are conducted by the same artists who then construct and perform the documentary script."

"The Civilians bill their work as investigatory theater" - "does not press any particular political agenda or audience action, and embraces theatrical devices such as music and dance to expose dimensions of absurdity, hyperbole, and non-linearity."

upend privilege, interrogate structures of authority

(ATM 2)

tool for activism

Contemporary

(ATM 2)

movement away from the term documentary theatre

Neo Futurists "we do not aim to 'suspend the audience's disbelief,' but to create a world where the stage is a continuation of daily life

(TOTR)

Creators of performance reinterpret history and represent it according to their fascination, proclivities, imagination, and individual convictions about whether or not a definitive truth can be known, all the while using the archive as source material. The result is not the truth, but a truth, that many times conflicts with other narratives.

Piscator’s production of In Spite of Everything (1925) was a portrayal of German history from the outbreak of World War I to the 1919 assassination of German communist leader Karl Liebknecht. Documentary film footage 16 Theatre of the Real of the war functioned as what Piscator named a ‘chorus filmicus’ in reporting offstage events; the chorus was coupled with sketches portraying individual incidents (Mason 1977:263). Piscator thought the production to be a historically truthful montage of actual speeches, articles, newspaper clippings, slogans, leaflets, photographs, and films of the war and revolution. For Piscator, this was the first time that representation confirmed his experience with ‘absolute truth,’ and he felt the performance was as dramatic, suspenseful, and moving as fictional theatre (in Mason 1977:263–4). Piscator made theatre about the masses, not the individual.

In US theatre, they are influenced by two major streams of practice. Together these streams of practice flow from rethinking everything that happens on stage, including acting, directing, playwrighting, and stage design and environments and contributions from playwrights who began to write their plays by integrating different forms of documentary evidence. These two streams were also greatly influenced by ideas coming from Europe, especially the practice and theories of Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. Brecht’s plays and his dramaturgical theories demonstrated one way to create entertaining contemporary political theatre with incisive analysis. Brecht’s theories of acting insisted that performers self-consciously enact dramatic meaning so that spectators become critical observers of the action and active participants in the creation of meaning. Grotowski’s physical practice-based theatre research which deeply reconfigured actor training and performing, showed how theatre could emerge from the psychophysical inventions of the actor arising from personal experience formed into rigorous and precise ritualized actions. Taken together, Brecht and Grotowski gave theatre practitioners new tools for communicating a broad range of contemporary experience and content. The theatre techniques I discuss in this chapter include the use of personal experience and memory, non-matrixed acting (performing without creating a character), the use of the set and the mise-en-scène as forms of character, and the incorporation of selected verbatim documents and interviews.

theatre of the real stages memory and history to create new aesthetic versions of human experience. This staging constructs and reconstructs personal and social memory from the raw data of experience and history with the use of specific theatrical methodologies. The resulting creation of meaning often exposes the fault line between documentary evidence as fact and social memory as invention. Framing is a way of negotiating the difference between individual knowledge based on memories that are always in the process of being formed and reformed, and historical knowledge that is always in the process of being revisited and revised.

Examples:

My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) "a play about a young woman, Rachel Corrie, who writes about her experience in Gaza apart from the historical narratives that have created that particular place. The editors of her emails and journal entries, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, created a structure for the play by making omissions, additions, subtle changes of rhetoric, and juxtapositions." (TOTR)

In Spite of Everything (1925)

History

Zhivaya Gazeta and Piscator

While fact-based drama has been traced back to Ancient Greece and Phrynichus' production of The Capture of Miletus in 492 BC, contemporary documentary theatre is rooted in theatrical practices developed in Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. In the years after the Russian Revolution, the USSR's Department of Agitation and Propaganda employed theater troupes known as the Blue Blouses (so called because they wore factory workers' overalls) to stage current events for a largely illiterate population. The Blue Blouses dramatized news items and current events through song, dance, and staging, and by 1924 these performances were standardized into the form of the zhivaya gazeta or living newspaper. TALK MORE ABOUT THEM

Meanwhile, in Germany, Erwin Piscator was experimenting with incorporating documentary film footage and other primary source material into his "mass spectacles" and in 1925 wrote In Spite of Everything, a piece derived entirely from contemporary political documents and often sited as the beginning of the first period of modern documentary drama. In this and other early works, Piscator sought to depict the "absolute truth" and focused on the presentation of factual material in montage and collage form rather than the internal lives of the characters.

Depression-Era America

Documentary theatre spread west during the 1930s. In England, the form was employed by left-leaning political theater groups like the Unity Theatre, which presented both documentary and historical dramas in order to expose the truths of the common man, frequently combining fiction and reality to achieve truth. Unity Theatre's documentary shows focused on the living newspaper aesthetic of Eastern Europe, although their first piece Busmen (1938) combined abstract and stylized design aesthetics culled from expressionist and constructivist genres with naturalistic dialogue.

In the United States, the form was adapted by Hallie Flanagan Davis and Morris Watson into the large-scale Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project. Initially conceived as an "animated newsreel," the form evolved into its own theatrical genre, using spectacle and vaudeville techniques in addition to agitprop and Piscatorian conventions to tackle issues such as labor, housing, agriculture. Often, they included characters like Little Man and Loudspeaker to stand in and speak for and to the audience during the action, fusing fact with dramatic symbol and clarifying the narrative arc. These plays, like later iterations of documentary theater, were frequently communally created, often by groups of newspaper writers and theater artists. The end of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 brought documentary theatre in the United States to a halt until the early 1960s.

Post-War Era and the 1970s

While the documentary theater of the 1930s stressed the involvement of the audience, much of the work of the 1960s into the 1970s was influenced by Bertolt Brecht's distancing of the audience through aesthetic practices in order to question dominant ideologies. The work of this era focused more intensely on new or alternative perspectives on historical events by restructuring the documents to raise questions about the events. In Germany, these documentary plays focused mainly on the aftermath of Nazism and genocide. Many of them used transcripts from tribunals, such as In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heinar Kippart and Peter Weiss' The Investigation. In his "Notes on the Contemporary Theatre," Weiss details 14 components of documentary theater, stating that "the strength of the documentary theatre resides in its ability to arrange fragments of reality into a usable model," and that the artistic power of the genre comes from a partisan interpretation and presentation of factual material. He also detailed the sources for documentary theatre, including "minutes of proceeding, files, letters, statistical tables, stock-exchange communiques, presentations of balance-sheets of banks and industrial undertakings, official commentaries, speeches, interviews, statements by well-known personalities, press, radio, photo, or film reporting of events and all the other media bearing witness to the present."

This type of documentary drama was exported to Israel and the Middle East by Nola Chilton, whose theater of testimony focused on marginalized groups in the area and later influenced the work of American practitioners. During this period of time, however, the American genre became more overtly political with plays such as Martin Duberman's In White America, a piece based in Living Newspaper techniques of narration and song, presented by The Free Southern Theatre, a company that sought to make theater for black audiences in the south. It also became more experimental, leading to documentary-style performances, as artists like Joseph Chaikin and The Open Theater used historical documents as source material for improvisations (Viet Rock) or Luis Valdez combining verbatim text from newspapers, transcripts, and correspondence with a fictionalized story and characters in Zoot Suit.

In England, meanwhile, the use of tape-recorded testimony to generate script became a hallmark of the Stoke Local Documentary Method, developed by Peter Cheeseman. In his many plays, including Fight for Shelton Bar (1977), Hands Up, For You the War Is Ended! (1971), Cheeseman focused on the exact transcription of recorded interviews, and is one of the earliest pioneers of the sub-genre verbatim theatre. The theories of Cheeseman and other British practitioners of verbatim theatre informed much of American documentary theatre of the late 20th-century.

Late 20th-century and early 21st-century

The focus on individuals within the context of historical events that permeated the documentary theatre of the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for artist- and individual-centric documentary theater in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period of time, the focus shifted even further away from broad historical presentations to focus more specifically on how identity shaped personal relationships with major events. The seminal works of this period, which highlight the work of the artist as interpreter of the factual material, include one-person shows such as Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror (1992), collectively created shows like Tectonic Theatre Project's The Laramie Project (2000), and playwright-driven work like Anne Nelson's The Guys (2001) and Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (2002). In Eastern Europe, new German documentary theater also focused on the importance of the artist as interpreter through the development of media-driven non-narrative creations of auteur directors like Hans-Werner Kroesinger.

Contemporary Practice

Contemporary documentary theater is defined by it's privileging of subjectivity over universality and questioning of the definition of truth in an age where digital and physical realities collide. Many contemporary practitioners reject the term "documentary theatre" in favor of more equivocal labels like "investigative theatre" that allow for more leeway in the artistic interpretation of reality and moves away from the original concept of the artist as moral arbiter of the truth. Across the globe, documentary theater is increasingly used to help refugees and migrants tell their stories and provide context for new audiences, Just as Piscator utilized the new media of film and projection to enhance his productions, so contemporary documentary theater continues to rely on new media to explore the increasingly fuzzy line between reality and representation of reality. Similarly, documentary theater continues to rely on a democratic process of interview gathering and multiple artistic perspectives to create new narratives. This has led to a proliferation of plays, both verbatim and fictionalized, that focus on the stories of refugees and migrants that use interviews and workshops as the starting point for narrative plays.

Sources of Documentary Theater Aesthetics? Common Threads of Contemporary Practice?

Major Examples of Documentary Theatre

FTP

1960s/1970s

Late-20th Century

Contemporary.

Fires in the Mirror[edit]

Fires in the Mirror is a play by American playwright, author, actress and professor Anna Deavere Smith that chronicles the viewpoints of people connected to the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn in 1991.

The play is a series of monologues excerpted from interviews conducted by Smith with leading politicians, writers and religious leaders in addition to residents of Crown Heights and various other participants in the disturbance. Through interviews with 26 individuals, in 29 monologues Smith acts out each interview by herself. Exploring how barriers between groups can be breached.

The Laramie Project[edit]

The Laramie Project - Vigil - 2008 performance In November 1998, Moises Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming and began interviewing citizens about the October 1998 kidnapping and murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was studying at the University of Wyoming. Kaufman and his company spent over a year traveling back and forth to Laramie and conducting over 200 interviews. These interviews were then fashioned into The Laramie Project. The play is a collection of interviews with the people closest to this traumatic and controversial event. The interviewers in a presentational style later perform it, where the characters talk primarily to the audience. The Laramie Projectuses several actors and each actor takes on several roles. The Laramie Project is distinctive because the writers/actors/interviewers became characters in the play. Their thoughts and opinions became part of the script and in the original productions the actors played themselves.