Approaches to Devising

Devising is the creation of original theatre by a group, without starting from a finished script. Instead of interpreting an existing play, a devising company generates its own material and shapes it into a performance. Devising is central to contemporary theatre and to the IB course, where collaborative creation is directly assessed. This lesson introduces what devising is and the main approaches companies use.

What devising is, and is not

In traditional text-based theatre, a playwright writes a script that a director and actors then interpret. In devising, the performance is built collectively, often with no single author, through experiment, improvisation, and selection. The company may still end up with a fixed structure, and sometimes with a written text, but that outcome emerges from