Devising Theatre and Performance

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.

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.