Making contemporary theatre reveals how some of the most significant international contemporary theatre is actually made. Using eye-witness accounts and over 80 photographs, it offers extraordinary insights into the innovative and exciting methods used by the most influential emerging theatre companies, including the UK's Complicite and Forced Entertainment and New York's The Builders Association, as well as theatre artists such as Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Where other books on theatre-making tend to focus on playwriting, acting or directing, this book explores the contributions made by all of theatre's creative artists, from directors to performers to multimedia designers. The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualises recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualise and analyse 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 with suggested further reading.

Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for theatre practitioners, students and theatre-goers, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is created and realised. Book jacket.