At a time when so many people are engaged in its study, contemporary theatre and performance have never been more challenging. Terms like 'postmodern' and 'postdramatic' have their own contested histories and no easily agreed upon meaning. 'Truth' in verbatim theatre is open to challenge rather than being assumed and theatre writing is a practice that can sometimes result in no words being spoken and nothing appearing on the page.
New Performance/New Writing offers contextualisation and guidance on innovative approaches to writing for performance. It explores a wide range of performance practices, including immersive and solo theatre, autoethnography and applied drama, from the perspective of performance writing, covering plot, story, narrative and devising. This new edition has been updated throughout and features:
- an expanded timeline, linking key moments in theatre to socio-political events
- case studies on practitioners, including diverse groups such as Kneehigh, Punch Drunk and Forced Entertainment
- questions, stimuli and workshops allowing readers to test the book's ideas in practice
