RSVP cycles

RSVP cycles is a system of creative methodology for collaboration. It was developed by Lawrence Halprin.^[1][2] Lawrence Halprin presented the system in a 1969 book The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (Halprin 1970)^[3]

By chance, when I finally put the headings together, they spelled RSVP, which is a communications idea meaning "respond".

Halprin 1970, pp. 2–3^[4]

The name is an initialism referring to its four components:^[5]

Resources

Anything that can be used in the process, including time, physical materials, other people, ideas, limitations etc.

Score

Instructions for the work. This can be identified along a gradient scale of being an Open or a Closed score.

Valuaction

A process of dynamically responding to the work based on values.

Performance

Setting the work in motion.

Within each stage there is a micro-cycle, which includes all the other elements (e.g. scoring the resources, resourcing the performance, performing the score etc.). There is no set order in which stages should be completed, and one can jump from any element to any other element as long as there is consensus.^[6]

References

Cross-reference

1. Schechner 2002, p. 200.
2. Dunđerović 2003, p. 22.
3. Raby 2010.
4. Halprin 1995, p. 125.
5. Halprin 1995, p. 124.
6. Shelleda 2011.

Sources used

• Dunđerović, Aleksandar (2003). The cinema of Robert Lepage: the poetics of memory. Wallflower Press. ISBN 978-1-903364-33-8.
• Schechner, Richard (2002). Performance studies: an introduction. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14620-3.
• Shelleda, Leah (2011-11-05). "Collaboration, Occupation & The RSVP Cycle". After the Jug Was Broken.
• Halprin, Anna; Kaplan, Rachel (1995). Moving toward life: five decades of transformational dance. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-6286-9.
• Raby, Gyllian (2010). "Improvisation and Devising: The Circle of Expectation, the Invisible Hand, and RSVP". Canadian Theatre Review. 143 (1): 94–97. doi:10.1353/ctr.0.0047.

Further reading

• Halprin, Lawrence (1970). The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. G. Braziller.
• "Review Symposium : The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. Lawrence Halprin. (New York: Braziller, 20 7 pp., $15. 00)". Urban Affairs Review. 6 (4): 495–498. June 1971. doi:10.1177/107808747100600406.