ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the kind of knowledge generated by laboratory theatre processes and questions if and how it can be made accessible and relevant within a community theatre context. By drawing an affinity between laboratory theatre practices and practice as research (PaR), particularly where research into the craft of the actor is concerned, the essay also proposes a reconfiguration of knowledge generated through PaR. However wilful, extending practice into a new context, with its wholly new set of unknowns, is also an act of displacement. It is a dis-location in the sense employed by Baz Kershaw as he argues, 'the most crucial effect of performance practice as research is to dis-locate knowledge'. The chapter argues that complementarily to the notion of embodiment, knowledge in the laboratory can be conceived through a model of containment, and understood as contained in various shapes, forms, containers.
