VDM Verlag Salient Negotiations: Devising and Surviving as Alternative Theatre Artists in the 21st Century

The strategies that North American nonprofit theatre companies employ to ensure pragmatic survival and artistic advancement prove critical to their abilities to continue working. When the artists in these companies utilize alternative approaches to creation, the abstract quality of the resulting productions often exacerbates the need for successful survival tactics, as performances may appeal to a limited number of paying audience members. Theatre practitioners who emphasize long term performer training and the lengthy development of devised productions, such as companies building upon the artistic tradition of Jerzy Grotowski, represent one extreme sect of these marginalized artists. Relying on data gleaned from North American Cultural Laboratory in New York and Number Eleven Theatre in Toronto, two companies influenced by this artistic tradition, this study employs a grounded-theory method of analysis to examine the strategies marginalized nonprofit alternative theatre companies use to negotiate the tension between economic viability and artistic integrity.