Introduction

Abstract

“The group, not the individual,” writes Theodore Shank at the opening of his 1972 article “Collective Creation,” “is the typical focus of an alternative society.”¹ In the 1960s and 1970s—decades marked in so many Western nations by utopic yearning—the theatre, as elsewhere, became a site of society building, and, in the alternative theatres of North America, Australia, parts of Latin America, and Europe, the group was ascendant. Collective creation—the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance—rose to prominence, not simply as a performance-making method, but as an institutional model. This was the heyday of The Living Theatre, years that saw the nascence of France’s Théâtre du Soleil, The Agit Prop Street Players in England, El Teatro Campesino in the fields of Southern California, English Canada’s Théâtre Passe-Muraille, and Quebec’s Théâtre Euh!—companies associated, variously, with collective performance creation, egalitarian labor distribution, consensual decision making, and sociopolitical revolt.