THPERF 301: Approaches to Making Performance

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Alison Oddey, Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook (Routledge). Supplementary texts — Helen Nicholson Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre; Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed and Games for Actors and Non-Actors; Anne Bogart & Tina Landau The Viewpoints Book; Richard Schechner Performance Studies: An Introduction; Philip Auslander Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture; Jen Harvie Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Online resources — NYU Performance Studies open course materials; Royal Central School of Speech and Drama open materials; Tectonic Theater Project The Laramie Project resources.

1. Approaches to Making Performance — An Overview

To ask how performance is made is to ask a deceptively simple question that quickly multiplies into dozens of others. Who initiates the work? From what starting material — a script, a news article, a city block, a body, a community grievance, a piece of music? Who holds authority in the room, and whose voices are permitted to shape the final product? What counts as “finished,” and for whom is the work significant once it reaches an audience? This course treats performance-making not as a single craft but as a family of processes, each of which encodes particular values, politics, and aesthetic commitments.

Richard Schechner’s foundational insight in Performance Studies: An Introduction is that performance is a “broad spectrum” of human behaviour, ranging from ritual and play through theatre, dance, sports, and everyday social interaction. Once we accept that performance is not limited to staged plays in purpose-built theatres, the methods for making performance expand accordingly. A protest march, a participatory workshop in a refugee centre, an installation in an abandoned warehouse, a one-person autobiographical show, and a full-scale musical each require distinct making-processes, but they share a family resemblance: someone or some group is shaping bodies, time, space, and attention with communicative intent.

The course organises this variety around a central analytic question borrowed from Baz Kershaw’s The Radical in Performance: what is the relationship between the approach to creation and the significance the work acquires in the community where it is performed? A conventionally rehearsed Shakespeare production staged in a proscenium theatre carries meaning partly because of its processes — auditions, table work, blocking, tech week — which reproduce a recognisable theatrical tradition. A devised piece made collaboratively with unhoused community members in the same city will carry its significance through entirely different channels: the labour of co-creation, the risk of self-exposure, the physical proximity of audience and performer, and the political stakes embedded in who gets to tell whose story. Throughout the term, students study method not as neutral technique but as a set of ethical and aesthetic decisions whose consequences extend far beyond the final show.

2. Text-Based Creation — From Play to Production

The most familiar approach in the Western theatrical canon begins with a written play-text and proceeds through a recognisable sequence: script selection, rights clearance, directorial concept, casting, table work, staging rehearsals, technical rehearsals, previews, opening. This is the model inherited from nineteenth-century actor-manager traditions, institutionalised in twentieth-century repertory and subsidised theatre, and still dominant in university drama programmes, regional theatres, and commercial Broadway or West End production.

Text-based creation is sometimes dismissed by devisers as conservative, but it has its own rigour and craft. The director — figured here as both dramaturgical interpreter and collaborator with designers and actors — must move from reading to staging without betraying the complexity of the text. Methods such as Stanislavski-derived given-circumstances analysis, objective-and-action work, beat breakdowns, and physical actions training offer systematic ways to move from page to stage. Later refinements, including Uta Hagen’s substitution work, Sanford Meisner’s repetition exercises, and the Grotowski-inspired via negativa, give actors tools for making language live inside their bodies.

Yet even within strictly text-based approaches, a great deal of invention happens. A director’s concept, the designer’s imagery, the casting choices, the cuts to the script, and the rhythm of a scene all constitute authorial decisions. Brecht’s practice of dramaturgical adaptation — reworking classic texts to foreground political contradictions — shows how text-based work can be far from merely illustrative. Contemporary directors such as Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, and Robert Icke are celebrated precisely for rethinking the relationship between script and stage image. Alison Oddey, while foregrounding devising, stresses that the opposition between “text-based” and “devised” work is often overstated: nearly every production mixes pre-existing writing with collaboratively generated staging, and even the most text-faithful production is always also a made thing, shaped by rehearsal room choices that no playwright fully controls.

3. Devising — Collaborative Creation from Zero

Devising describes approaches in which the performance is generated by the makers themselves, often without a pre-existing script, frequently through collective improvisation, research, and experiment. Alison Oddey’s Devising Theatre remains the field-defining textbook. She traces British devising from the alternative theatre movements of the 1960s and 1970s — Joint Stock, Welfare State International, Monstrous Regiment — through to companies like Forced Entertainment, DV8, and Complicité, and notes that devising grew partly out of dissatisfaction with the playwright-director-actor hierarchy and partly out of a desire for work with immediate political and social purchase.

Devised processes share several features: they begin from a stimulus (an image, question, object, place, piece of text) rather than a finished script; they rely heavily on improvisation and tasks; they treat the rehearsal room as a laboratory; and they defer textual fixity until relatively late, allowing structure to emerge from experiment. Companies like Frantic Assembly foreground physical dialogue and choreographic sequences generated through building blocks such as their well-known “hymn hands” and “chair duets.” Complicité (formerly Théâtre de Complicité), under Simon McBurney, layers physical ensemble work with literary and scientific source texts, generating shows like The Street of Crocodiles or The Encounter through months of research-driven workshops. SITI Company, co-founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, combines Suzuki training with Viewpoints to give ensembles a shared physical vocabulary from which devised work can grow.

Devising is not simply a technique but a politics. It redistributes authorship, often makes decisions by consensus, and tends to put the performer’s body and biography at the centre rather than the playwright’s language. It also raises difficult questions: how are credit and royalties shared? How are disagreements resolved? How does one archive a show whose “text” exists only in video, notes, and living bodies? Oddey insists that devising must be judged on its own terms, not merely as a deviation from scripted theatre, and that its rigours — of research, listening, and shared responsibility — are every bit as demanding as conventional rehearsal.

4. Verbatim and Documentary Theatre

Verbatim theatre is a subset of documentary theatre in which the performance text is drawn, sometimes word-for-word, from interviews, transcripts, court records, or public documents. Its twentieth-century roots lie in the Living Newspaper projects of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project and in Peter Weiss’s documentary dramas such as The Investigation. Contemporary verbatim practice in English-speaking theatre is shaped by two towering influences: Anna Deavere Smith and the Tectonic Theater Project.

Smith’s Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 grew from hundreds of interviews with people on opposite sides of racial conflicts. She performs the interviewees herself, carefully reproducing their vocal rhythms, hesitations, and idioms. In Letters to a Young Artist she describes listening as a moral and artistic practice: the performer becomes a vessel for other voices and, through attention to speech as a physical phenomenon, makes space for complexity that journalism often flattens. The method makes the interview itself a research instrument, the transcription a form of scoring, and performance a way of holding contradictory testimonies in the same room.

Tectonic Theater Project, led by Moisés Kaufman, developed The Laramie Project in the aftermath of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. The company travelled to Wyoming, conducted more than two hundred interviews, and returned to New York to assemble the material using Kaufman’s “moment work” technique, which treats each unit of theatrical time — a line, a movement, a lighting change — as a sculptural element. The resulting piece weaves testimony with reflective passages by the company members themselves, making the process of investigation part of the play’s content.

Verbatim work foregrounds ethical questions that scripted theatre can evade. Do interviewees know how their words will be used? Are they compensated? Does editing for theatrical effect distort testimony? Can a performer ethically play across race, class, or disability lines when the source is a specific person? These questions anchor later course discussions of ethics and representation.

5. Autobiographical and Solo Performance

Solo performance, especially the autobiographical mode, flourished in the United States and Britain in the late twentieth century, partly because it required minimal resources and partly because it gave marginalised voices — queer, feminist, racialised, disabled — a platform that institutional theatre often denied. Tim Miller’s body-centred queer solos, Spalding Gray’s monologic memoirs delivered from behind a desk with a glass of water, Holly Hughes’s confessional feminist performances, and Bobby Baker’s domestic performance-art pieces are canonical examples.

Making an autobiographical solo is deceptively difficult. The performer is simultaneously author, director, designer, and subject, and must find a structure that turns private experience into public meaning without collapsing into self-indulgence. Common methods include keeping a journal of memories and images, improvising around photographs or objects, structuring material around recurring motifs rather than chronology, and testing drafts in front of small, trusted audiences. Spalding Gray famously refined his monologues through repeated semi-improvised performances before committing to a text. The aim is not confession for its own sake but the transformation of biography into a shared reflective experience.

Solo performance also raises formal questions about the relationship between performer and persona. Is the “I” onstage the real person or a character named after them? How does the performer manage the slip between direct address and narrative? Peggy Phelan’s writing on the “ontology of performance” and its relation to presence, and Philip Auslander’s later critique in Liveness, both offer useful frames. For Phelan, live performance’s ephemerality is part of its ethical and political force; for Auslander, liveness is itself shaped by mediatisation, and the solo artist working with microphones, cameras, and projections is negotiating a contemporary media ecology rather than escaping it.

6. Site-Specific Performance

Site-specific performance refuses the neutral empty space of the conventional theatre and instead makes works whose meaning is inseparable from the place in which they happen. A disused factory, a forest, a courtroom, a hospital corridor, a suburban living room — each carries its own history, acoustics, architecture, sightlines, and social associations, and the site-specific maker treats these as co-authors of the piece.

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’s Theatre/Archaeology is a central theoretical text. Pearson, co-founder of the Welsh company Brith Gof, and Shanks, an archaeologist, argue that site-specific performance should be thought of as a layered reading of place in which performance excavates, reactivates, and recomposes the traces already deposited there. Their practice, developed in contexts ranging from abandoned industrial buildings in South Wales to rural farmlands, rejects both the conservation-ist impulse to leave places untouched and the commercial impulse to treat them as mere backdrops.

Making site-specific work typically involves extensive fieldwork: visiting the site at different times of day, interviewing those who use it, mapping circulation patterns, researching its history, and letting the space dictate structural choices. Rehearsals often happen on site rather than in a studio, which changes the relationship between actor, audience, and environment. Audiences may move through the space, follow characters, or find themselves implicated in the action. The British company Punchdrunk’s immersive productions such as Sleep No More commercialised one branch of this tradition, turning an abandoned warehouse in New York into a hotel-like labyrinth that audiences traverse freely.

Jen Harvie’s Fair Play warns, however, that site-specific and immersive work can become an accessory to urban regeneration, gentrification, and neoliberal experience economies, dressing redevelopment in the glamour of art. Making site-specific work responsibly therefore requires attention to who owns the site, who is displaced by the work, and what trace the performance leaves behind.

7. Community-Based and Applied Theatre

Community-based and applied theatre encompasses performance practices made with, for, and by specific communities outside mainstream producing theatres: schools, prisons, hospitals, care homes, refugee centres, neighbourhood associations, and workplaces. Helen Nicholson’s Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre is the landmark account of the field. She takes her title from theories of gift exchange, arguing that applied theatre works through reciprocal obligation — the facilitator offers skills, time, and attention; participants offer stories, presence, and trust — and that what circulates between them is neither quite therapy, nor pedagogy, nor art, but something shaped by all three.

Making applied theatre typically reverses the order of conventional production. Rather than beginning with a script and looking for an audience, the facilitator begins with a community and a question: what do we need to understand, enact, or change? Workshops use games, image work, improvisation, and storytelling to build trust and generate material. A public sharing, if it happens at all, is only one possible outcome; the process itself — the sessions in the common room, the stories unearthed, the relationships built — is often the “work.”

The field demands a specific ethic. Nicholson stresses that facilitators must resist the fantasy of parachuting in with ready-made solutions. Participants are not raw material to be aestheticised for outside audiences; they are co-authors whose judgements about what to share, and with whom, must be honoured. Consent is ongoing and revocable, and the facilitator’s relationship to funders, commissioners, and institutions must be transparent. In practice this means long engagements, co-evaluation, and attention to what happens after the project ends. Applied theatre sits at the intersection of art and social practice, and its making-processes are as much about cultivating attentive, equitable working conditions as about producing finished performances.

8. Forum Theatre and the Theatre of the Oppressed

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed gave applied theatre one of its most influential and portable methodologies. Writing first in 1970s Brazil and later from exile in Europe, Boal argued that Aristotelian theatre was a “coercive system” in which audiences identified with heroes whose catharsis dissipated political energy. He proposed instead a theatre in which the spectator becomes a “spect-actor” — someone who not only watches but intervenes, interrupts, and alters the action.

Forum Theatre, the best-known technique, begins with a short scene dramatising a situation of oppression: a worker harassed by a boss, a student bullied at school, a woman denied access to a clinic. The scene is played once through to its unhappy ending. Then a facilitator (Boal’s “Joker”) invites audience members to replace the protagonist and try alternative strategies, each of which is played out to see whether it works. The scene is rehearsed not to discover an artistic solution but to practice political possibility. Games for Actors and Non-Actors collects hundreds of warm-ups and exercises — image theatre, invisible theatre, cops-in-the-head — designed to build the physical and imaginative capacities needed for this kind of participatory rehearsal.

Making Forum Theatre well requires careful groundwork. The scenarios must emerge from the actual experience of the community rather than being imposed from outside; the oppression must be specific and recognisable; alternative actions must be realistically testable, not utopian fantasies; and the Joker must balance facilitation with non-coercion, refusing to impose the “correct” answer. Critics such as Baz Kershaw have noted that Forum Theatre can slide into tokenism when it is extracted from its political context and deployed as a diversity-training exercise. Used with integrity, however, it remains a remarkable tool for turning performance-making into collective political rehearsal, fulfilling Boal’s claim that theatre can be a “rehearsal for the revolution.”

9. Physical Theatre and Movement-Driven Creation

Physical theatre treats the body, rather than dramatic language, as the primary site of meaning-making. Its lineages are plural: Jacques Lecoq’s Paris school and its descendants (Complicité, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Kneehigh); Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theatre” and its investigations of the performer’s physical and psychological thresholds; Tadashi Suzuki’s actor training, built around grounded stances and vocal intensity; and Étienne Decroux’s corporeal mime, from which a whole genealogy of gestural theatre descends.

Lecoq’s pedagogy, described in The Moving Body, begins from neutral mask work and progresses through the “seven levels of tension,” clown, buffon, tragedy, melodrama, and the study of “movements of nature.” Students learn to build a character from a walk, a weight distribution, or a rhythm before any line of text enters. This orientation reshapes how performance is made: instead of analysing a script for psychology, makers generate material through physical tasks and let meaning emerge from images and rhythms.

Viewpoints, as codified in Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s The Viewpoints Book, offers another movement-driven vocabulary. Bogart adapted the original Viewpoints developed by Mary Overlie in postmodern dance into a training for ensemble theatre-making. The nine physical Viewpoints (tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, repetition, shape, gesture, architecture, spatial relationship, topography) and five vocal Viewpoints give an ensemble a shared language for generating and describing staging without any director’s imposition. Companies use these tools to compose scenes in real time, experimenting with contrast, complementarity, and surprise.

Physical theatre also confronts limits. Intensive body training carries injury risks and can become elitist, rewarding conventionally abled, normatively shaped performers. Contemporary practitioners increasingly adapt their methods for disabled performers and for bodies that refuse the Lecoq or Suzuki ideals, insisting that physical theatre means working with the actual bodies in the room rather than with an imaginary universal performer.

10. Dance and Choreographic Approaches

Choreography, as a performance-making practice, has long exchanged techniques with theatre. Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis gave early twentieth-century modernists a vocabulary of effort, space, and weight that shaped both ballet and theatre training. Merce Cunningham’s chance procedures, developed with John Cage, demonstrated a mode of composition in which sequence and accompaniment were determined partly by roll-of-the-dice processes, disrupting the expectation that choreography should express a fixed narrative. Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater fused dance, speech, and autobiography, building her celebrated works at Wuppertal through long research periods in which dancers responded to questions she posed about their lives.

Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy argues that choreography is not just the arrangement of steps but a social practice of modelling what it feels like to inhabit another body. Foster traces how different choreographic traditions — balletic virtuosity, modernist abstraction, contact improvisation, hip hop — produce different imagined kinesthetic relations between performers and audiences, and thereby different ways of training perceivers to empathise. To make dance, in her account, is to shape who empathises with whom, and how.

Making dance typically involves some combination of improvisation, task-setting, set phrases, and compositional editing. Contact improvisation, developed by Steve Paxton and colleagues in the 1970s, gave dancers a way of generating material through weight-sharing and rolling points of contact, dissolving the distinction between “choreographer” and “dancer.” William Forsythe’s improvisation technologies use geometrical instructions to generate movement, while choreographers such as Akram Khan and Crystal Pite often begin from personal narrative or ethical question. Across these methods, the studio functions less like a factory and more like a laboratory in which the dancers’ bodies are instruments, collaborators, and research subjects at once.

11. Performance and Intermediality

Contemporary performance is rarely unmediated. Video projection, live camera feeds, motion capture, sound design, social media, and networked audiences are now part of the basic vocabulary of much professional work, and performance-making processes have had to adapt. Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture provides the theoretical backbone for this chapter. Auslander argues that “liveness” is not a timeless, natural category but a historically produced concept shaped by its opposition to recorded media. In a world saturated by television, streaming, and smartphones, live performance competes for attention by incorporating, quoting, and reworking mediatised forms rather than claiming purity from them.

This has practical consequences for how work is made. Companies such as the Wooster Group, the Builders Association, Gob Squad, and Rimini Protokoll rehearse with screens and cameras as primary collaborators. Designing the video and sound becomes a compositional task as central as blocking. Live-coding performances, networked shows performed simultaneously in multiple cities, and pieces that use audience members’ phones as instruments all demand new rehearsal rooms in which technicians, programmers, and performers work side by side from day one.

Performance-making online — video-call theatre, Twitch streaming, virtual reality performance, and interactive installations — exploded during the pandemic years and has left a lasting mark. These forms compel makers to rethink space (what is “on stage” when each audience member is alone at home?), presence (how do I “share space” with someone through a screen?), and authorship (what happens when audience chat becomes part of the performance text?). Intermedial performance thus unsettles familiar distinctions between performer, designer, technician, and audience, often requiring hybrid skill sets and collaborative working cultures that resemble software development as much as traditional rehearsal.

12. Ethics, Representation, and the Community

Every making-process discussed so far has ethical ramifications, but certain recurring questions deserve explicit treatment. Who has the right to tell which stories? A white director dramatising Black history, a non-disabled performer playing a disabled character, a wealthy company devising about homelessness — each scenario raises questions about appropriation, voice, and accountability. Contemporary practice has converged, imperfectly, on principles such as “nothing about us without us,” cultural consultancy, intimacy coordination, and affirmative consent in rehearsal.

Jen Harvie’s Fair Play extends the analysis to the political economy of performance-making. She examines immersive, participatory, and socially engaged work and asks what labour these forms extract from audiences and community participants, who benefits financially, and how the “creative city” narrative uses performance to underwrite gentrification. Her critique does not discourage participatory work but insists that its makers account honestly for their relationships to money, real estate, and institutional power.

Joe Kelleher’s short, argumentative Theatre & Politics reminds us that the political work of theatre is not reducible to the content of the stories told or the demographics of those telling them. Theatre can be politically significant through its formal arrangements — how it distributes attention, how it models listening, how it configures strangers sharing space. Ethical performance-making is therefore an attention to all three levels: content, process, and form.

Practical ethical tools include consent protocols for devising, opt-in and opt-out structures for audience participation, community advisory boards for verbatim work, trauma-informed facilitation in applied contexts, and transparent credit and pay structures. None of these substitute for ethical judgement; they are scaffolds that help makers notice decisions that would otherwise pass unexamined. The course treats ethics not as a brake on creativity but as one of its conditions.

13. Research for Performance-Making

Performance-making, in almost all the approaches studied here, is a form of research. Even the most commercial production benefits from historical, textual, and contextual investigation. Devised, verbatim, and applied work depend on it absolutely. What distinguishes “research for performance-making” from research in other disciplines is that its outcomes are embodied rather than written: knowledge is stored in scenes, gestures, rhythms, and audience experiences rather than in journal articles.

Research methods for performance-making borrow widely. Archival work in libraries and museums may yield images, testimony, and historical texture. Ethnographic methods — interviews, participant observation, oral histories — are central to verbatim, documentary, and applied practice. Somatic research, in which the maker treats their own body as a laboratory, underwrites physical and choreographic work. Practice-as-research, formalised in academic performance studies programmes, treats the rehearsal room itself as a site of knowledge production, with performances standing alongside or instead of written theses.

Key working practices help research translate into material. Keeping a rehearsal journal, photographing studio work, videoing improvisations, and maintaining an organised archive of source documents allow a company to track where ideas originated and to honour debts to sources. Regular reflection sessions — what Tectonic Theater Project calls “moment work debriefs” — convert tacit rehearsal-room knowledge into shared understanding. Writing programme notes, post-show discussions, and published articles connects the work to broader public conversation.

Research ethics — consent, confidentiality, accurate representation, appropriate compensation — apply to performance-making research as strongly as to any other kind. Anna Deavere Smith’s interview protocols, which include asking permission to record, clarifying how material will be used, and offering interviewees the chance to review their own words, model one rigorous practice. University ethics boards increasingly require such protocols for student projects, and the course treats these not as bureaucratic hurdles but as part of what serious performance-making involves.

14. Audience, Reception, and Significance

A performance becomes meaningful only when it meets an audience. Different approaches to making performance presuppose different audiences, relationships, and criteria for success. A commercial musical’s “success” is measured in ticket sales and long runs; a Forum Theatre session’s success is measured in whether participants test new strategies they can carry into daily life; a site-specific piece’s success may lie in whether it reshapes how locals perceive a neighbourhood; a solo autobiographical show’s success may consist in the recognition it offers to audience members who share similar experiences.

Schechner distinguishes between the “integral audience,” whose presence is essential to the event (worshippers at a ritual, members of a community being addressed), and the “accidental audience” drawn by curiosity or entertainment. Making decisions about form and process should be guided by which audience is being sought. A piece designed for integral audiences may look structurally incomplete or impenetrable to accidental ones, and vice versa.

Reception is also shaped by conditions that the maker cannot fully control: programme notes, venue reputation, ticket pricing, marketing, critical reviews, and the physical architecture of the performance space all filter how the work is received. Responsible making therefore extends beyond the studio into the logistics of presentation — choosing venues and times that match the intended audience, setting accessible pricing, providing captions and audio description, and designing post-show engagement that matches the work’s ethical stance.

The course closes by returning to its framing question: how does the approach to creation shape the significance of the work in the community where it is performed? No single method is always best. A rigorous close reading of a classical play can carry as much social significance as a community-devised forum piece; a mediatised intermedial installation can produce as much intimacy as a solo memoir. What matters is the fit between method, material, makers, and audience, and the honesty with which the makers answer the question: for whom, and for what, are we making this? Across twelve weeks, students develop the vocabulary to ask this question precisely, the methods to answer it in practice, and the critical judgement to recognise when an approach is working — and when it is not.