VCE Drama students are expected to understand how established drama practitioners and companies develop their work, and to draw on these approaches in their own devising practice. Studying practitioner methodology illuminates the range of creative processes available to a theatre-maker.
Practitioners provide:
- Tested frameworks and techniques for generating and developing performance material.
- Philosophical underpinnings that give coherence and intention to stylistic choices.
- Concrete examples that enrich analytical and evaluative writing.
Bertolt Brecht (Epic Theatre)
- Developed work through Modellbücher (model books) — detailed records of production choices to be adapted, not imitated.
- Used rehearsal games and exercises to prevent actors from “becoming” characters.
- Incorporated political discussion and dramaturgy into rehearsal.
- Technique: gestus — finding the single physical attitude that sums up a character’s social function.
Konstantin Stanislavski (Method Acting / Psychological Realism)
- Developed techniques including “given circumstances”, “magic if”, emotional recall, and the through-line of action.
- Rehearsal involved extensive table work (intellectual analysis of text and character) before physical work.
- Relevance for VCE: even non-realistic styles can use Stanislavskian interiority as a foundation before externalising through style conventions.
Jacques Lecoq (Physical Theatre / Movement Theatre)
- Training emphasised neutral mask, mime, clown, and commedia.
- Developed the concept of “disponibilité” (openness/availability of the performer).
- Technique: exploration of the “zones of play” — the range between the most fixed and most free states of performance.
- Influential on Complicité, Theatre du Soleil, and countless physical theatre companies.
Pina Bausch (Tanztheater / Physical Theatre)
- Developed work by asking company members personal questions and building performance from their responses.
- Technique: question-and-response devising — “What moves you?” becomes material.
- Work often had no fixed narrative; instead built from repeated motifs and emotional landscapes.
Complicité (Simon McBurney)
- Collaborative devising from images, objects, stories and music.
- Extensive physical warm-up and ensemble training before devising begins.
- Technique: building a shared “physical vocabulary” across the ensemble before any narrative is fixed.
DV8 Physical Theatre (Lloyd Newson)
- Began from research questions about human behaviour, identity or social issues.
- Interviewed real people; incorporated verbatim speech into physical work.
- Technique: using documentary research to anchor physically abstract material.
Despite their differences, most practitioners share these development approaches:
- Iterative rehearsal: making, showing, reflecting, revising.
- Ensemble trust-building: the ensemble must be a safe, open creative environment before genuine risk-taking is possible.
- Externalising the internal: finding physical and spatial equivalents for psychological or emotional states.
- Audience awareness: constantly interrogating the audience’s experience — what do they see? what do they feel?
STUDY HINT: You do not need to study every practitioner in equal depth. Select two or three whose methods relate to the performance style(s) you are working in, and develop a detailed understanding of their specific techniques and the theatrical philosophy behind them. This gives your analytical writing depth and specificity.
When devising, practitioners’ techniques can be applied directly:
- Use Brecht’s gestus exercise: find one gesture that encapsulates each character’s social role.
- Use Lecoq’s neutral mask exercises to develop a shared, open physical starting point.
- Use Bausch’s question-and-response devising to generate authentic personal material from ensemble members.
- Use Complicité’s image-passing games to develop shared physical vocabulary.
APPLICATION: In your analytical folio or written examination, demonstrate that you have studied a practitioner’s technique in detail — not just their name or the style they are associated with. Show how their specific method influenced a specific choice in your performance.
Several contemporary practitioners begin their development process with research rather than improvisation:
Lloyd Newson (DV8) conducts extensive interviews with people who have experienced the issue the work will address. The research generates both content (verbatim speech) and artistic frame (what theatrical form can best communicate this reality?).
Alecky Blythe works exclusively in verbatim theatre: performers receive the recorded audio of interviews through earpieces and reproduce not just the words but the exact speech rhythms, hesitations and vocal qualities of their subjects.
This research-based approach is available to student devisers, particularly in documentary or verbatim work. Beginning with real human experience as the source material grounds devised work in specificity and ethical seriousness.
Many practitioners build structured reflection into their development process:
- After each rehearsal, the ensemble or solo practitioner reflects on what worked, what was surprising, and what opened new questions.
- These reflections are recorded and returned to.
- The development process is understood as a spiral (not a straight line): the work is constantly returning to and revising earlier decisions in light of later discoveries.
This reflective practice is mirrored in VCAA’s requirement for documentation — the folio is not just a record of what happened, but evidence that reflection was a genuine part of the development.
STUDY HINT: Read or watch interviews with drama practitioners about their development processes. This gives you concrete, attributable examples to use in written analysis. Avoid vague claims like “many physical theatre companies use…” — instead: “Simon McBurney of Complicité has described the ensemble’s development process as beginning not with a text or even a story, but with a shared physical and imaginative investigation of an image or object.”
