The book explores an artistic area which, recently, appears more and more in the public space, under the name (with or without quotation marks) of independent sector: artists, organisations and spaces that work outside the institutional framework and the commercial system, taking on missions for public service (educational theatre) and artistic innovation. How unemployed are the actors working as freelancers? What is the difference between being independent and private/commercial? How does the dynamic of exchange between public, private and independent actually work? What did the independent theatre scene invent and how did this happen? What is the position of the artist in a non-institutionalized working system?