Susie and Amy run Pinecone Performance Lab and facilitate the annual London Devised Theatre Intensive. (www.devisedtheatre.com)

We called this session to connect with other makers of devised theatre and to propose a way of developing artistic relationships between devisers who are not part of a permanent company.

Our discussion covered questions such as:
- what is the role of the dramaturg in devised work? (dramaturgs are not limited to working with text; it's more about the big picture of the piece.)
- how can we get venue support for a new piece, without being able to show them the script (since there usually isn't one)?
- how expensive does devised theatre have to be?
- could we get together for play sessions to share practice?

We talked about what excites us about devised work:
- democratic making process
- shared ownership of the work
- playful ethos
- potential for NEW stories that are part of making social change.

We shared references to companies doing interesting work:
- Boomtown
- FanSHEN
- Improbable (who cast their shows by 'scaring people off' - telling them that they will probably be working outside of their comfort zone most of the time. People who are excited by that are the right kind of collaborators; people who are going to struggle with that are probably not.)

ACTION:
We created a facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/devisedtheatre/
where we can connect, share resources, support each other, and plan in-person play sessions.
For those not on facebook, we'll run an email list to let people know about events coming up. You can join the mailing list at www.devisedtheatre.com

Other ways to get in touch:
Twitter @WeDeviseTheatre and @PineconeLab
email [email protected]