This chapter traces the development of American experimental theatre ensembles from the 1960s to the 2010s. It emphasizes how the values of the 1960s youth culture and Off-Off-Broadway, including egalitarianism and anticommercialism, informed the devising practices of groups such as the Open Theater, the Performance Group, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. It also addresses how efforts to critique and expand on the work of 1960s ensembles have informed the work of such later groups as Spiderwoman, Split Britches, the SITI Company, Tectonic Theatre Project, Pig Iron Theatre, and the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. It argues that developments in form and process by American devising ensembles reflect an evolving understanding of theatre’s relationship to the social sphere and to the practice of freedom.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.

Chapter 9: This chapter begins by noting that as science has become more interdisciplinary and recognized as a form of contingent knowledge circulated across cultural fields, devising has emerged as a suitable method for creating performances with scientific content and themes. By virtue of its multivocality (involving a number of authors), its multimodal forms of storytelling and address (through language, dance, physicalization, digital media, installation and site-specific environments, and the like), and its presentational modes, devised performance can often render scientific ideas performative, capturing not just what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’ and how they disseminate in the public understanding. Across scientific fields that are increasingly interrelated, devised performance provides new ways to move beyond merely conveying scientific ideas, choosing instead to invite spectators actively to map domains of knowledge and construct ideas that are constantly in transit.