The work of seven up-and-coming performance companies—Hotel Savant, Temporary Distortion, New Paradise Laboratories, Knife, Inc., Ex.Pgirl, Witness Relocation, and Banana Bag & Bodice—explores intermediality transnationalism, and political affect. All emphasize the continued dominance of networked, spatialized storytelling.

Making noisy art for noisy times, New York ensemble Big Art Group's hyper-mediated aesthetic stages the sensory surfeit of modern life. Employing batteries of screens, prismatic live-feed video, and roaring digital soundscapes, the company's experiments with attention and perception create a new model for political theatre grounded in the contested dynamics of spectatorship.

In Architecting , the TEAM inaugurates a unique form of theatrical labor. This labor moves beyond identitarian politics to imagine, in the midst of neoliberalism's tendencies to development through destruction, an entirely new kind of space in which an Idea, in Alain Badiou's sense, is resurrected.

Carol Martin and Rachel Chavkin discuss the intellectual formation and working methods of the young American theatre company, the TEAM—Theatre of the Emerging American Moment.

Under the artistic direction of Alex Timbers, Les Freres Corbusier has carved out a niche for itself as a purveyor of an anarchic, hyper-literate variety of what Timbers calls post-ironic theatre, an “aggressively visceral theatre combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research.”

New York's Nature Theater of Oklahoma stages devised work that explores the experiential and aesthetic properties of fun. Their particular presentation of everyday source material resists idealism while irreverently yet sincerely proposing ways of living: attentively, and with pleasure.

Carol Martin and Rachel Chavkin discuss the intellectual formation and working methods of the young American theatre company, the TEAM—Theatre of the Emerging American Moment.

A flush of new theatre ensembles producing, for the most part, group-devised work prompts questions about the viability of the term avantgarde , the confluence of events behind the activity of this latest “bunch of experimental theatres,” and their relationship to the original “bunch” from the 1970s.

The TEAM's award-winning play Architecting is primarily about the reconstruction of the South during the Civil War and after Hurricane Katrina. Through Architecting , the TEAM, an all-white theatre company, comments on American race relations by engaging in an ethical performance of blackness.

New York City-based NTUSA uses a census-based creation process to develop vaudevillian spectacles that investigate the construction of local and national histories. Their performances expose tensions between art as a commercial enterprise and a community-building effort, testing the boundary between esoteric avantgarde and purely entertaining, popular performance.

Since 2001 the Civilians, a small but prolific New York-based company best known for its investigative theatre, has been creating shows on an array of topics such as the culture of the evangelical church, divorce, the porn industry, and ecological disaster. Under the artistic direction of Steve Cosson, the Civilians challenge what audiences have come to know as documentary theatre.

If the recent attention given to Pig Iron Theatre Company is any indication, 2010 may be the year of the pig. Although the group's founders met 20 years ago, it was their 2003 show James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret and the 2010 production of Chekhov Lizardbrain that landed the Philadelphia group in the New York theatre scene. Pig Iron's abiding investment in adaptation's possibilities and continued commitment to physically intricate performance is now being passed on through their latest venture: a training program in physical theatre.

Derek Ahonen, playwright, director, and founding member of the Amoralists, describes the journeys he takes his characters and audiences on in his plays, as well as the journey of the Amoralists themselves—from literally betting on their success in Las Vegas to finding an unlikely but snug niche as the well-made-playmakers on the contemporary avantgarde theatre scene.