Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide is the first comprehensive diagnostic handbook for building, caring for and maintaining ensemble. Successful ensembles don't happen by chance: they can be created, nurtured and maintained through specific actions taken by ensemble leaders and members. Ensemble Theatre Making provides a thorough step-by-step process to consistently achieve the collaborative dynamic that leads to the group trust, commitment and sacrifice necessary for the success of a common goal.

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.

Redefining Theatre Communities explores the interplay between contemporary theatre and communities. It considers the aesthetic, social and cultural aspects of community-conscious theatre-making. It also reflects on transformations in structural, textual and theatrical conventions, and explores changing modes of production and spectatorship.

Theatre Studios explores the history of the studio model in England, first established by Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jacques Copeau and others in the early twentieth century, and later developed in the UK primarily by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, Michael Chekhov and Joan Littlewood, whose studios are the focus of this study. Cornford offers in-depth accounts of the radical, collective work of these leading theatre companies of the mid-twentieth century, considering the models of ensemble theatre-making that they developed and their remnants in the newly publicly-funded UK theatre establishment of the 1960s. In the process, this book develops an approach to understanding the politics of artistic practices rooted in the work of John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci and the standpoint feminists. It concludes by considering the legacy of the studio movement for twenty-first-century theatre, partly by tracking its echoes in the work of Secret Theatre at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2013–2015). Students and makers of theatre alike will find in this book a provocative and illuminating analysis of the politics of performance-making and a history of the theatre as a site for developing counterhegemonic, radically democratic, anti-individualist forms of cultural production.

A new text on immersive theater.