Immanent Authorship: From the Living Theatre to Cage and Goat Island

Abstract

I want to begin this chapter by exploring the extent to which the dual notions of immanence and transcendence might be used to differentiate specific approaches to authoring performance. The concept of immanence, I will suggest, has implications for how we think about a variety of forms of authorship, including both collaborative, collective devising and directing. Indeed, I want to propose that immanence provides a productive way to consider the relationship between these authorial modes. Our investigation of immanent authorship will begin with an elaboration of immanence and transcendence as philosophical concepts: conceived by Deleuze as the two ideal poles of a continuum of relation to creative production, with the former tending towards a ‘bottom-up’ approach in contrast to the top-down tendency of the latter. Secondly, I want to look at the resonance between these ideas and those of the Living Theatre as one company that might be understood to belong to a broader ‘collective creation’ movement — an emergent tendency within theatre companies, particularly in and around May 1968,¹⁴ towards undoing the hierarchies and divisions of labour that had become the normative mode of organization with respect to theatrical creativity.¹⁵