Devising Theatre and Performance is a hands-on guide for artists, students and teachers of performance at any stage of their practice. It offers a wide range of creative prompts and pathways enriched with critical thinking tools and questions, a hybrid approach Hill and Paris call ‘Curious Methods’.
This is a welcome addition to the field, created and curated by two experienced artists who have operated at the international interface of academia and professional practice for over three decades.
The collection is packed with fun, creative, thoughtful exercises distilled from over twenty years of running interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching both devising and performance making. As well providing numerous exercises and suggestions for devising, composing and editing original works, this book offers tools for giving and receiving feedback, critical reflection and framing artistic work within academic research contexts.
Readers can choose to dip in and out, to follow the book as a course or to work section by section, focusing on organizing principles such as working from the body, working with site, working with objects or performance activism. The book includes a detailed production workbook and a practice-based research workbook you can tailor to your own projects. The ‘Curious Methods’ approach encourages users to take the time and space their practice deserves while offering tools, nourishment and encouragement and inviting them to take risks beyond their comfort zones. The exercises are carefully described so that they can easily be tested out by readers, and are well contextualized in relation to vivid examples from contemporary performance practice and relevant political contexts. This compelling approach goes beyond many other books on theatre devising, which merely provide performance recipes; they do so by repeatedly highlighting the vital cultural relevance and potential personal impact of the experiments that they invite us to undertake.
The primary audience for this important new book will be academics, instructors and students in courses on devised theatre, improvisation, performance art, experimental performance and practice-based research. It will be essential for classroom use, for students of theatre and performance and live art – undergraduate, postgraduate and Ph.D., teachers and all those needing strategies for getting started.
It will also appeal to readers from the broader arts, humanities and social sciences who are seeking resources for integrating creative methods into their research.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Curious Methods
2. Pep Talk
Daily Practice
Outfoxing the Censor
Freewriting
A Time and a Place
Failing Better
3. Working from the Body
Arrivals and Departures
Begin Again
Tongue-Tied
Body Map
Body Memory
Invisible
The Sense of Smell
Homesick
Olfactory Portraits
Fight Flight Freeze
Gut Feelings
Secret Duets
Inheritance Tracks
Family Traits and Mannerisms
Persona
Walk This Way
Building a Persona
4. Working with Objects
Tactile Memory
Exquisite and Mundane
Inherited Objects
Box Stories
‘The Lovers’
Suitcase
5. Working with Site
Give and Take
Ghost Library
Ghost Duets
In Search of a Gesture
You Are Here
Map Making, Three Ways
Blurring Time and Place
Things ain’t what they used to be
Best Foot Forward
Marks and Scars
Dancing Place and Space
Private, Keep Out!
Taking Up Residence
Infinitesimal Detail
Fifteen Quick Freewrites on Place
Autotopographically Speaking
Silent Stroll
Closing Thoughts
6. Working with Pairings
Failure & Text
Desire & Proximity
Ritual & Object
7. Activism
Manifestos
Impulse Manifesto
Make Manifest
Lending and Borrowing
Signs
Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve
On Location
Stand Up, Speak Out
Living Newspaper
Ripped from the Headlines
Re-Enactment
Choose Your Battles
Verbatim Theatre
Explosive Material – a Journalistic Exercise
Explosive Compounds – an Ethnographic Exercise
One-Minute Plays
Mix Tape
Produce, Adapt or Devise?
A Moment in History
Cross That Line
Closed Border
Open Border
Tactical Toolkit
Make a Spectacle
Reflections
8. Production Workbook
Operating Instructions
Kick-Starting Process
Realm of Concern
I’ve always wanted to be able to …
Feathering the Nest
Look Book
Composition
Space and Composition
Dream Island
Fleshing It Out
Dancing the Dynamics
Workshopping
Index Card Storyboard
Dear Dead Darlings
Remember the Audience
Dear Audience
Feedback
Three Adjectives
Performance Response
Brief Hauntings
Companion Piece
Invited Guests
Bespoke
Cartomancy
Documentation
Pen Pal
Favourite Performance You Never Saw
9. A Practice-Based Research Workbook
Performing Knowledges
Back Stage
Escape Velocity
Glorious Manifestations
Generative Research
Mapping Your Practice
Diagrammatic Praxis
Secret Fear
Abstractions on Secret Fears
Defining Your Dramaturgy
Signatures of Practice
Art-I-Facts
Love Letter
Artist-Scholar Family Album
Methodologies
Phenomenology
Doing a Phenomenology
Phenomenological Journal
Autoethnography
Project Descriptions in 1st and 3rd
Specialist Knowledge
Autoethnographic Journal
Keeping a Lab Notebook
Designing Bespoke PBR Exercises – Two Case Studies
Gut Feelings
Up Root
Sowing from Seed
PBR Evaluation and Critique
Bespoke Evaluation Rubric
Amalgamated Evaluation Rubric
Bibliography and Further Reading
Index
About the author
Leslie Hill is a professor of theatre and performance making at the University of Roehampton London and artistic director of Curious. She is interested in the intersections of theatre and live art with politics, activism and social justice movements. She is author of several books, including Sex, Suffrage and the Stage: First Wave Feminism in British Theatre, which was published for the UK suffrage centenary in 2018 by Palgrave Macmillan.Helen Paris is an award-winning artist and artistic director of Curious, a London-based performance company that has shown work in 17 countries. Paris is currently artist-in-residence at Canterbury Christ Church University. Paris has published widely, specializing in somatic and immersive work and interdisciplinary research through her collaborations with the biological and ecological sciences. Her debut novel, Lost Property, is published by Penguin Doubleday.
Curious (https://www.curiousperformance.com) has produced over 50 innovative works for theatres and festivals, including the London Cultural Olympiad, the Edinburgh Festival, Centre Pompidou and Sydney Opera House. Frequently edgy, often humorous and always authentic, Curious ploughs a furrow between theatre, live art, installation and research. Curious combines rigorous dramaturgy and community outreach with performance-making to create impactful work that has been called ‘as smart as it is seductive’ (Irish Times). Curious delivers an international programme of workshops and mentoring alongside award winning publications and research. Curious is produced by Artsadmin.
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