Traditionally, the role of theatre and performance scholars is to examine theatre from critical and theoretical perspectives that adopt an outside-in approach. That is to say, our vantage point locates at some disembodied, critical distance from the process and the practice, from the making and the moment of showing. Increasingly, however, there are signs of inside-out approaches to theatre where avenues of theatre and performance enquiry are shaped by means of getting closer to practice. The first three articles brought together in this issue have their own, distinctive inside-out routes to theatre and performance knowledge.