Staging Process

“Staging Process is the most significant study of collaboratively created theater in America written in the last twenty years. With clarity of voice and purpose that will resonate for scholars, practitioners, and viewers alike, Anderson-Rabern elucidates new ways of thinking through a process-based politics of theater. Here we find performance that models living and working together with care.” —Daniel Sack, author of After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance
 

“Anderson-Rabern reclaims the arena of politics for third-wave collective creation in theater. She accomplishes this by documenting aspects of four major groups’ techniques and performances and, second, by elaborating a vocabulary about gesture, everyday-ness, topology, less-ness, slow-ness, and ethics that describes both the process and the product of the company.” —Sara Freeman, coeditor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics
 

“Rachel Anderson-Rabern offers important new insights into devised theater in America at the turn of the twenty-first century. Investigating, among other things, the questions of process, method, and labor within groups such as The Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, TEAM, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she gestures towards a new sense of the political grounded in ethos of collaboration and self-organization.” —Branislav Jakovljevic, author of Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945-1991

"This book is certain to impact future discourse." —S. R. Irelan, Western Michigan University, CHOICE 

". . . highlights the myriad ways the ethical and political character of group processes inflect performance. The book’s lucid prose and bifocal aims should make it useful to advanced undergraduates and grad student practitioners interested in artistic method, as well as scholars of contemporary performance interested in the relationship between aesthetics and politics." —Andrew Friedman, Theatre Topics