Making Contemporary Theatre

Book excerpt: 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.