ABSTRACT

Decentered Playwriting investigates new and alternative strategies for dramatic writing that incorporate non-Western, Indigenous, and underrepresented storytelling techniques and traditions while deepening a creative practice that decenters hegemonic methods.

A collection of short essays and exercises by leading teaching artists, playwrights, and academics in the fields of playwriting and dramaturgy, this book focuses on reimagining pedagogical techniques by introducing playwrights to new storytelling methods, traditions, and ways of studying, and teaching diverse narratological practices.

This is a vital and invaluable book for anyone teaching or studying playwriting, dramatic structure, storytelling at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, or as part of their own professional practice.

chapter |10 pages

Breaking, Examining, Reassembling

An Introduction to Decentered Playwriting

part 1|80 pages

Decenter(ed) Playwriting

chapter 1|14 pages

Playwrights as Architects of Third Space

The Dramaturgy of Japanese Traditional Performing Arts

chapter 2|11 pages

The Dramaturgy of Nothingness

chapter 4|12 pages

On Disaesthetics in Hip Hop Dramaturgy

Ruminations on Thinking and Doing

chapter 5|9 pages

Context/Culture

Using Some of the Complex Dramaturgy of Black Theatre of the 19th Century to Build Contemporary Work

chapter 6|12 pages

Decentering Humans

Writing Our Way out of the Apocalypse

chapter 7|7 pages

Write Where You Are

part 2|61 pages

Decenter(ing) Playwriting

chapter 8|8 pages

Horizontal Theatre

Democratic Practices of the New Docudrama

chapter 9|14 pages

Toward Self-construction

A Filipinx Dramaturgy in the Diaspora

chapter 10|14 pages

Writing with Irene

Sustaining the Fornés Playwriting Method

chapter 11|13 pages

First People First

Community-based Theatre Praxis in Native American and Indigenous Spaces

part 3|53 pages

Case Studies in Decentered Processes

chapter 13|10 pages

Outsider Indian

A Decentered Narrative on the Long Journey of Native Playwriting

chapter 14|14 pages

Deconstructing and Reconstructing Zimbabwean Ndebele Izaga

A Conversation on Playwriting as Auto-Ethnographic Experiment

chapter 15|12 pages

Unarcheology

Anticolonial Aesthetics and Putting Things Back in the Ground

chapter 16|15 pages

Indigenous Placemaking and Storyweaving

An Interview with Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna, Rappahannock)