Out of the (play)box: an investigation into strategies for writing and devising

Sarah Sigal observes that the ‘theatre-maker/writer/deviser Chris Goode has referred to […] a ‘phoney war’ between writing and devising’. This dissertation proposes a new method of playwriting, a (play)box, which in its ontology rejects any supposed binary division between writing and devising or text and performance. A (play)box is written not only in words, but also in a curated dramaturgy of stimuli – objects, music, video, images and experiences. Drawing on Lecoq’s pedagogy and in its etymology, a (play)box makes an invitation to playfully investigate its stimuli. It offers an embodied, sensory route into creation that initiates playful, affective relationships between the performers and provocations, harnessing the sensory capacities of the body in authorship. By writing using the affordances of afferent stimuli combined with language, I draw on and extend recent experiments in collaborative authorship. A (play)box is inspired by the ways that music, things, stage directions, a collaborative generation of ideas and physical devising tasks have shaped, structured and authored the work of recent collaborative theatre-makers. I offer a context and methodology of Practice-led Research, illustrated by the rehearsals of my collective responding to the (play)box, Provenance, where outcomes appeared that may not have been arrived at using conventional play-text