Making Contemporary Theatre reveals how some of the most significant international contemporary theatre is actually made. The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualizes recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualize and analyze the theatre-making practices of eleven different companies and directors, including Japan’s Gekidan Kaitaisha and the Québécois director Robert Lepage. Each chapter is enriched with extensive illustrations as well as boxed-off "asides," giving the reader different perspectives on the work. Chapters usually focus on a single production, such as Complicite’s 2003-04 The Elephant Vanishes, allowing detailed investigations of complex practices to emerge. The book concludes with a brief manifesto for making contemporary theatre by the editors, plus a bibliography suggesting further reading. Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for the theatre-making student and the theatre--goer alike, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is actually made.

Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

A lively, beautifully illustrated history of theatrical stage design from ancient Greek times to the present, coauthored by the world's leading authority, Oscar G. Brockett.

Making a Performance traces innovations in devised performance from early theatrical experiments in the twentieth-century to the radical performances of the twenty-first century. This introduction to the theory, history and practice of devised performance explores how performance-makers have built on the experimental aesthetic traditions of the past. It looks to companies as diverse as Australia's Legs on the Wall, Britain's Forced Entertainment and the USA-based Goat Island to show how contemporary practitioners challenge orthodoxies to develop new theatrical languages. Designed to be accessible to both scholars and practitioners, this study offers clear, practical examples of concepts and ideas that have shaped some of the most vibrant and experimental practices in contemporary performance.

Redefining Theatre Communities explores the interplay between contemporary theatre and communities. It considers the aesthetic, social and cultural aspects of community-conscious theatre-making. It also reflects on transformations in structural, textual and theatrical conventions, and explores changing modes of production and spectatorship.

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of ‘musicality’ in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.