ABSTRACT
The plethora of phenomena in the theatre landscape of the last few decades that have challenged the traditional forms of drama and ‘its’ theatre with aesthetic consistency and inventiveness suggests that it is justified to speak of a new paradigm . . . These works of theatre also become paradigmatic because they are widely recognized – albeit not always welcomed – as an authentic testimony of the times. (Lehmann 2006: 24)
ANY ACCOUNT OF CONTEMPORARY performance has to encompass the varying nuances of an enormous diversity of experimentation in work produced over the past forty or so years in Europe and the United States. Some would agree with Lehmann that there has been a ‘new paradigm’ in theatre and performance, whereas others would see the di»erences in practice as signifying that no such paradigm is possible to either configure or fix. In this part we try to embrace these two positions and bring together diverse texts, which in di»erent ways represent points on a map of contemporary theatre and performance practice, from live and performance art to texts which link in more obvious ways with the traditional play written for production in a theatre. In order to explore how these materials might be seen as responding to their contemporary moment, we use a number of aesthetic and critical frameworks: the idea of the contemporary, postmodernity and the postmodern and the ‘postdramatic’.
