Conversation Piece: Gender Trouble in Devised Performance

Abstract

This article explores the making of Conversation Piece, produced in spring 2022 with first-year students of the Drama and Contemporary Performance programme at Manchester Metropolitan University, a devised performance directed by the author. The piece, initiated by the group’s passionate engagement with identity politics, blended original verbatim texts, generated by the students from a series of interviews, with extracts of extant plays. My intention was to confront and explore radical shifts in the ways we consider gender, subjectivity, and language, and present our findings to a contemporary audience. The chapter examines the ways we navigated this complex territory, the dramaturgical shape and structure we devised for the material—and—and the insights we gained into our ability to think, act, speak and feel in 2022.