The Methuen Drama Reflections on Contemporary Performance Process series explores alternative styles of shaping and constructing different creative practices (including theatre, dance, performance, visual art, performance art, and film). Focusing on the examination of new practice born from cutting-edge research, it offers reconsiderations of both historical and contemporary approaches, and expands twenty-first century terminology, techniques, definitions, and perceptions of performance process. It encompasses, but is not limited to, devised approaches, rehearsal stages, training practices, and embraces examinations of incompleteness and fluidity. The series is underpinned by an organic understanding of process that does not presuppose or impose one way of considering “process“, but rather examines a multitude of critical and creative perspectives on process.

Interdisciplinary and international in scope, the series highlights the intersections between different areas and fosters productive dialogues between: key and emerging figures; scholars, artists/ practitioners and scholar-artists; various forms of media and materials; and critical and creative modes of expression. It speaks to the way in which previously mutually exclusive processes are now dynamically drawn together in different aesthetics and styles of practice.

Series Editors:  

Julia Listengarten (University of Central Florida, USA): julia.listengarten@ucf.edu

Alissa Clarke (De Montfort University, UK): a.clarke@dmu.ac.uk

Forthcoming Volumes:

1. Rhythm in Postdramatic Performance Process: Voyages into the Work of Mime Omnibus, Dairakudakan and SITI Company

Sebastian Samur, 2025

Combining theory and historiography, Rhythm in Postdramatic Performance Process: Voyages into the Work of Mime Omnibus, Dairakudakan and SITI Company presents a new means for considering rhythm in postdramatic performance by examining the creative processes of three major international companies: Mime Omnibus (Montreal), Dairakudakan (Tokyo), and SITI Company (New York). While rhythm is unanimously acknowledged as fundamental to performance – critical in every role, from performing and directing to design and dramaturgy - studies on the subject are limited and the phenomenon remains obscure. This book brings greater understanding to rhythm in postdramatic processes by putting forth a simplified model that can be applied to both interdisciplinary practices and theoretical analysis. 

This book can now be pre-ordered here.

2. Grotowski’s Process: Approaches to Theatre Practice

Dariusz Kosinski and Kris Salata, 2026

Grotowski’s Process contends that Jerzy Grotowski’s (1933-1999) cutting-edge theatrical and post-theatrical laboratory work still challenges the approaches to performance making, but more fundamentally, re-examines the actor’s process as a vehicle of far-reaching interdisciplinary and intercultural encounter. Grotowski disseminated his artistic research as a process itself, that is, through apprenticeship that could overcome the incompatibility between the discursive analysis and refined artistic practice. Ultimately, the book investigates Grotowski’s legacy as Process Theatre, interrogating the processes of the actor, director, and dramaturg, as well as that of the spectator, witness, and investigator of the theatrical event. This feature was considered as key in his lifework, yet one that remains undertheorized as the focus and framework in the Grotowski studies. The unique feature of this book is its structure as a dialogue written between two different scholarly perspectives that seek reconciliation: a progressive Polish scholarship represented by Dariusz Kosinski, and an investigative scholarship in the American milieu represented by Kris Salata.

3. Intercultural Processes, Practices, and Perspectives: Co-creating Playing 'the Maids' 

Bernadette Cronin and Jeungsook Yoo, 2026

This book is a case-study of an intercultural and interdisciplinary performance piece, entitled, playing ‘the maids’ (2013-2015), co-created by an international group of artists working with Phillip Zarrilli and Kaite O’Reilly as directorial/dramaturgical team. It demonstrates an example of contemporary intercultural performance practice in the current globalized environment where exposure to diverse cultures and cultural exchanges are not the exception but rather the norm. In capturing the multiple voices of the artists, this collection of contributions might be best described as a specific case study of processes, practices, and the unique perspectives each artist brought to the co-creation of playing ‘the maids’.

4. Politics of Process in Contemporary Performance Making: A Practice-Philosophical View

Stefanie Gabriele Sachsenmaier, 2026

What emerges at the specific intersection of the notions performance, process and politics? Through a close consideration of the processual — in contrast to predominant product- or outcome-oriented ways of thinking — the book explores the ways that performance comes about and exists in, and in relation to, the world. Set within a posthuman framework, it examines the ways that processes of creating performance extend into the wider sociopolitical field in considering their close connection to and their relevance in social life. In doing so, the book argues for contemporary performance as a key arena in which social change can be provoked.  

5. Karin Coonrod's Transnational Theatre: Processes of Collaborative Performance Making

Edited by Jozefina Komporaly with Noemi Farkas, 2026

This project aims to reflect on transnational collaborative performance making processes, with reference to the innovative and risk-taking participatory theatre of director Karin Coonrod. Juxtaposing interviews, personal accounts by collaborators, creative responses such as musical scores and performance drawings, production photos and critical analyses, the volume proposes to offer an insight into Coonrod’s directorial vision as a trailblazing platform for decolonizing theatre practice and for the exploration of space, sound and sight in performance. As a case study of intercultural and interdisciplinary practice, the book situates an international group of artists at its core, many of whom have been members of Coonrod's theatre companies: Compagnia de' Colombari and Arden Party. As an edited collection of contributions, it invites each collaborator to reflect from their own specific artistic and cultural perspective on the processes and practices of co-creating with Coonrod and to offer an insight into multi-directional dialogues predicated on psychophysical embodiment.

6. Understanding Domination in the White Avant-Garde: Theatre and Visual Arts in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Lara Cox, 2027

This book will explore the visual avant-gardes between 1945 and 1970 forged in the crucible of transatlantic travel. The book traces shifting attitudes to race held by white avant-gardists in the fine art and theatre industries, reflecting on the possibility of a “white Atlantic” as a (non-idealized) counterpart to Paul Gilroy’s term of the “Black Atlantic”. The chapters consider the integration of the question of decolonization in the work of photographer Carl Van Vechten and art collector Peggy Guggenheim in post-war Europe, Jean Genet’s association with the Black Panthers in the US, and the experience of theatre-makers connected with the US Black Arts Movement in the UK and France. At the intersection of Critical Whiteness Studies, Performance Studies, Theatre and the Fine Arts, Understanding Domination in the White Avant-garde will investigate how whiteness is enacted or dis-enacted, displaced or re-entrenched, in the earliest decades of contemporary history.  

7. Moving Spaces in Contemporary Performance: Space and Feeling in Theatrical Process

Elisha Conway, 2027

Space sparks feeling; this is especially true in theatre, a spatial artform that trades in feeling—sensation, affect, and emotion. Aimed at a dual audience of scholars and artists, this book develops and tests two spatioaffective theories that reveal the ways that space and feeling co-produce in the theatre, namely: German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s architectural theory of atmospheres, which this book advances through its application to theatre; and a new theory of moving-feeling, which builds upon existent affect theory to examine the ways that feeling literally moves us through space as well as how movement makes us feel. This project sets out to determine the techniques, modes, and conditions of production responsible for generating “atmosphere” and “moving-feeling” in contemporary performance and in so doing provides a guide for how to employ space to create feeling. 

8. The Theatre of Milo Rau: Dramaturgical Dimensions

Lily Climenhaga, 2027

The Theatre of Milo Rau: Dramaturgical Dimensions explores the hyperpolitical theatre of Swiss-German theatre-maker Milo Rau. Rau, together with numerous dramaturgs over the past nearly 20 years, has created a unique, internationally celebrated brand of documentary-inspired political theatre. This book situates Rau’s theatrical work among historical and contemporary political theatre movements, alongside its identification of four distinctive dramaturgical categories within Rau’s oeuvre: reenactment, recollection, reactment, and reclassification. Working with a massive theatrical archive and speaking with some of Rau’s closest dramaturgical collaborators, this study explores the commonalities and differences between productions. Posing questions about the aestheticization of violence, politics, democracy, autobiography, and the problematic centrality of the director himself, this book seeks a more nuanced understanding of the dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg of this complex artist’s theatrical work.