ABSTRACT
This essay serves as an introduction to Section One of the volume, “Collaborative Performance Making and InteractivePerformance Practices.” The essay guides the reader through a brief history of the ways in which educators who primarily teach acting and directing can rethink their practices and pedagogies to develop more collaborative and generative methodologies that speak to the ways in which experiential theatres interact with their audience members. Particular attention is paid to the processes involved within devising practices as a way of developing a bridge to future training methods. Through a combination of ensemble-based practices that flatten hierarchies of creation and formal structural frameworks from experiential design, educators may evolve their own teaching styles to address the rise of experiential products that are proliferating on the margins of more standard forms of theatre making.
