Contemporary drama practices refer to the current methods, approaches and philosophies that shape how theatre is made and presented today. VCE Drama students must understand these practices both to contextualise the professional performances they attend and to inform their own devising work.
Contemporary drama practice is characterised by:
- Devising over scripting: generating original performance from collaborative exploration rather than interpreting an existing text.
- Interdisciplinarity: combining theatre with dance, visual art, video, music, spoken word, and live art.
- Participatory and immersive forms: breaking the traditional audience-as-spectator model; inviting physical and ethical participation.
- Political and social engagement: addressing current social issues, often through documentary or verbatim approaches.
- Cultural pluralism: drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions, storytelling forms and performance vocabularies.
- Non-linear and fragmented narratives: rejecting the well-made play’s causal logic in favour of associative, poetic or collage structures.
- Self-reflexivity and metatheatre: acknowledging the theatrical frame; interrogating representation itself.
- Site-specific and environmental theatre: creating work for non-traditional spaces; letting the location generate meaning.
- Technology integration: using video, digital media, live feed, projection and augmented reality as integral performance elements.
Complicité (UK / International)
- Collaborative devising from images, physical exploration and ensemble research.
- Fluid integration of text, physical performance, design and technology.
- Works include The Encounter, The Master and Margarita.
Back to Back Theatre (Geelong, Victoria)
- Company of performers with intellectual disabilities.
- Work interrogates identity, disability, and the politics of representation.
- Practices include extended devising periods, documentary approaches, and immersive design.
DV8 Physical Theatre (UK)
- Begins from research questions about human behaviour.
- Combines verbatim research with highly physical performance.
- Can We Talk About This? combines speech and extreme physical theatre.
Version 1.0 (Sydney)
- Verbatim and documentary theatre.
- Works from research, interviews and found documents.
- Engages directly with political events and social controversies.
Circa (Brisbane)
- Physical theatre, circus, and aerial work.
- Pushes the boundaries of what a performer’s body can do and mean.
The VCE Drama Unit 3 Playlist features professional productions that exemplify contemporary practice. When analysing the production you attended, consider:
- Which of the above characteristics of contemporary practice are evident?
- Which specific contemporary practitioners or companies influenced the work’s approach?
- How do the contemporary practices employed serve the production’s themes and communication with its audience?
Contemporary practices are also available to student devisers:
- Use site-specific thinking: even in a school drama studio, spatial and environmental choices can be site-informed.
- Embrace interdisciplinarity: integrate sound design, projection, or text alongside physical work.
- Engage with real material: documentary or verbatim approaches ground devised work in actual human experience.
- Interrogate representation: ask not just “what story are we telling?” but “how does the act of telling it position the audience?”
REMEMBER: Contemporary drama practice is not a style in itself — it is a set of shared attitudes and approaches that can be applied across many styles. A contemporary production might employ Brechtian or physical theatre conventions while also using live video feed and verbatim text — the contemporary practice lies in the integration and the dramaturgical thinking, not in any single element.
Digital technology has profoundly expanded the range of contemporary drama practices:
- Live video feed: cameras capture action in one part of the space while the image is projected elsewhere — creating simultaneous close-up and distant views of the same action.
- Motion capture and projection mapping: performers’ bodies trigger projected imagery.
- Social media and participatory digital elements: some contemporary work invites the audience to interact with the performance via their phones.
- Pre-recorded and live audio layering: performers’ voices are processed, looped and layered in real time.
Not all contemporary practice involves technology — but the existence of these possibilities has changed how practitioners think about the relationship between live body and mediated image.
Contemporary drama practices are embedded in their social and cultural moment:
- The rise of verbatim and documentary theatre reflects concern with political and media manipulation, and a desire for testimony and witness.
- Immersive theatre reflects questions about agency, authorship and the role of the spectator in meaning-making.
- Ensemble devising reflects values of collaborative, non-hierarchical creative practice.
- First Nations and culturally specific performance traditions are increasingly valued and visible in Australian contemporary practice.
When encountering a contemporary production in the VCAA Unit 3 Playlist, consider: what contemporary social and cultural context does this work emerge from? What does it say about its own moment?
STUDY HINT: Follow the work of Australian contemporary companies beyond what you see in the VCE playlist — visit Malthouse Theatre, Belvoir St, Back to Back, Chamber Made, and other companies’ digital archives and program notes. Understanding contemporary practice requires sustained engagement with contemporary work, not just study of historical examples.
