In contemporary theatre, the rehearsal space has become more than just a site of preparation. Increasingly, it is being treated as a performance in itself, a space where the body is not merely trained but tested, where failure is not avoided but archived. This shift reflects a deeper evolution in how performance studies approach embodiment. The emphasis is no longer solely on the final presentation but on process, repetition, fatigue, and the politics of visibility within that process.

In devised theatre and experimental performance practices, the rehearsal has become an aesthetic and political tool. Directors such as Rimini Protokoll and choreographers like Meg Stuart construct works that either integrate or are entirely structured around real-time physical repetition and emotional depletion. These performances often center exhaustion as both a thematic and physical state, treating the body as a document of labour. What results is a performance that invites the audience not to consume a polished spectacle but to witness the cost of creation.

Theatre scholar André Lepecki has written extensively on the idea of the “still act,” where the pause or slowness of the body on stage carries as much power as movement. In many contemporary performances, stillness is not a lack of action but a result of accumulated energy – of trying, failing, continuing. This is evident in rehearsal-based works where performers return to the same gestures repeatedly, allowing the body’s memory and weariness to shape the performance in real time. This approach is not without precedent. The body has always been central to performance.

What distinguishes the contemporary turn is the choice to prioritise the incomplete, the broken, and the processual. In works by companies like Forced Entertainment, rehearsal is staged not as a means to an end but as a space of vulnerability and endurance.

The audience is made to sit with the discomfort of watching actors navigate boredom, frustration, and fatigue. These elements are not cleaned up before performance. They are the performance.

There is also a political dimension to this aesthetic. In staging exhaustion, contemporary theatre critiques the relentless pace of modern productivity. It resists the capitalist demand for polish and perfection by placing the unfinished and the overworked on stage. The body in rehearsal becomes a metaphor for broader systems of labour, often feminine or queer-coded, that are historically erased or undervalued. It draws attention to process as a site of meaning rather than just a path to product.

By centering rehearsal and fatigue, this form of theatre shifts the audience’s attention to how meaning is generated through time and repetition. It calls for a different kind of spectatorship, one that values process over resolution, presence over performance, and the body not as a vessel for story, but as the story itself.