The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice ? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate? The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher, Pedro Iñes, Simone Kenyon, Marty Langthorne, Tom Parkinson, Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson. Alongside the playtext, the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers, artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays. Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.

This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.

This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.

This book focuses on a rising generation of female storytellers, analysing their innovation in interdisciplinary collaboration, and their creation of new multimedia platforms for story-led performance. It draws on an unprecedented series of in-depth interviews with artists including Jo Blake, Xanthe Gresham-Knight, Mara Menzies, Clare Murphy, Debs Newbold, Rachel Rose Reid, Sarah Liisa Wilkinson, and Vanessa Woolf, while Sally Pomme Clayton’s reflections on her extraordinary four-decade career provide long-term context for these cutting-edge conversations. Blending ethnographic research and performance analysis, this book documents the working lives of professional storytelling artists. It also sheds light on the practices, values, aspirations, and achievements of a generation actively redefining storytelling as a contemporary performance practice, taking on topics from ecology and maternity to griefwork and neuroscience, while working collaboratively with diverse creative partners to generate new, inclusive presences for a traditionally-inspired artform. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in drama, theatre, performance, creative writing, education, and media.

Creating Solo Performance is an innovative toolbox of exercises and challenges focused on providing you – the performer – with engaging and inspiring ways to explore and develop your idea both on the page and in the performance space. The creation of a solo show may be the most rewarding, liberating and stressful challenge you will take on in your career. This book acts as your silent collaborator as you develop your performance, by helpfully arranging exercises under the following headings: Beginnings Creating character Generating material Using your performance space Technology Endings Collaboration Exercises can be explored in sequence, at random or according to your specific needs and interests as a performer. By enabling you to create a bespoke formula that best applies to your specific subject, area of interest, style and discipline, this book will become an indispensable resource as you produce your solo show.

Focusing specifically on solo making and performing, this unique and exciting text allows the experts to speak for themselves. In interviews with Misri Dey, six recognised solo performers working across a range of performance genres – including theatre, dance, live and performance art, site-specific performance, music video and film – provide insightful and practical strategies for creative making and performing processes. Interviewees include Bryony Kimmings, Tim Etchells, Bobby Baker, Mike Pearson, Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock. Engaging and accessible, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance and acting, scholars, lecturers and performance practitioners. It will also appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of women's studies, creative writing and the visual arts.

Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince), the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set, and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production. The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin, and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline, then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz, directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play. Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance, and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first, month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017), Peschel, Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline, Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team, then the actors, recruited from Sydney’s alternative theatre scene, developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting, a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth. While the Australian production was still in development, the South African team at Stellenbosch University, led by Amelda Brand, began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and, to some extent, the same text developed by the Sydney performers, but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music. Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays, written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team, explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar, detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes. Part of Intellect's Playtext series.