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Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook. By Alison Oddey. 1994. New York: Routledge, 2004; pp. xiv + 254. $37.95 paper.
The Performer's Guide to the Collaborative Process. By Sheila Kerrigan. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001; pp. xii + 178. $18.95 paper.
Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide. Edited by Tina Bicât and Chris Baldwin. Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire: Crowood P, 2002; pp. 160. $32.75 paper.
"Devising" in Through the Body: A Practical Guide to Physical Theatre. By Dymphna Gallery. New York: Routledge, 2001; pp. x + 242. $21.95 paper.
Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration. By R. Keith Sawyer. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003; pp. xi + 214. $22.50 paper.
Applied Theatre: Creating Transformative Encounters in the Community. By Philip Taylor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003; pp. xxx + 137. $18.95 paper.
The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. By Baz Kershaw. New York: Routledge, 1992. pp. x + 281. $32.95 paper.
Devising theatre, or creating work collaboratively without the guidance of a preexisting script, may be taken up for a variety of reasons. Among a host of other possibilities, devising offers theatre artists opportunities to explore issues of personal or local importance; to experiment with stylistic or thematic modes of expression; or to work collectively to make pieces in which all company members have a voice. Working to create theatre from scratch also presents certain challenges, including those of finding working methods that serve the company's artistic goals; establishing productive decision-making procedures in groups in which traditional theatrical hierarchies may have been eliminated or modified; and learning to contribute to various developmental processes through which an initial idea finds its staged expression. Under discussion here are several works that directly address the opportunities and challenges of devising by focusing on the processes that different groups have used to create their own work, as well as several suggestions for further research on different aspects of devising.
In Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, Alison Oddey, a British educator and artist who has been devising theatre since 1977, acknowledges the difficulty of creating a comprehensive study of devised work, observing that "the uniqueness of process and product for every group concerned" is what distinguishes devised performances from those more conventionally structured around a preexisting...