In New York there's little public funding for the arts so theatre companies rely largely on philanthropy. Young artists have to be entrepreneurial about the way they make work and, in my experience, that results in both the best and the worst of fringe theatre.

It also means that a lot of people end up working for free. I spent a lot of time working in three jobs in order to stay financially viable and that's not uncommon. But for a young director there are also benefits, one of them being that with enough energy and goodwill you can bring a lot of talented people together on a tiny budget. I was able to realize projects on a scale that I couldn't have dreamt of in London.

Because there is so much energy and so little financial stability on the fringe I discovered enormous enthusiasm amongst New York's downtown theatre community for working on classical texts. If a director can offer their company the climate of an "actor's gym" in a rehearsal room, then they will attract actors of great caliber - even if there is very little money involved - who are excited by the opportunity to "work out" with great material. Two years ago, when I directed a rarely produced Maxim Gorky play on a shoestring budget I put an advert in the paper calling for anyone interested in being involved. Within a week we had two thousand applications.

I believe that New York's theatre culture is amongst the most progressive and experimental in the world. It's been the home of the post-war Avant Garde and that energy for experimentation still exists. American theatre prides itself upon collaboration and in my experience it's perfectly normal to work out who you want to work with before you decide what you're going to work on. To host a dinner party, but not to know what you will cook until your guests arrive.

Ensemble companies - such as SITI Co., Steppenwolf, Atlantic Theatre Co., The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines - lead the way in American theatrical innovation and are inspiring younger artists to explore new methods of collaboration and to forge their own unique styles and working methods. Taking the dinner party analogy a step further, many companies also work from a recipe that they believe in: popular rehearsal techniques include Anne Bogart and Mary Overlie's Viewpoints, the "Method" acting techniques of Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler, the Grotowskian exercises that filtered into America through NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing and the postmodern experiments of Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group and others.

There are more young ensemble companies in New York than in any other major city in the English-speaking world. There are also several institutions in the US that are dedicated to providing the time and space to allow ensembles to take risks and experiment. Sundance Lab, HERE Arts Centre, Three Legged Dog, Chashama, the Orchard Project and the Wexner Centre for the Arts are among them.

The quality of new writing in America is extremely high at the moment, and young American writers are also having a great impact abroad. In particular, there is a trend towards expressively theatrical work that engages and ignites an actor's imagination. I think it's been helped by graduate playwriting degrees and new writing programmes - both offering the opportunity to develop plays with actors in the room - as well as the long-term developmental support that American institutions are now offering their playwrights. The downside of this culture is that many a play is eternally developed, but never produced and an example of a backlash against this culture is provided by 13P, an ensemble of 13 of America's most promising young playwright's, whose mission statement is "we don't develop plays (we do them)."

There's a lot of exchange between the US and UK when it comes to theatre. I think there's a hunger and enthusiasm for cross-cultural perspectives in the US. The theatre culture there has a more international outlook as a whole. In London we get a limited amount of good international work. The Barbican's Bite season, the Spill festival and a select group of theatres are changing that, but it's much more sparse here than in New York.

James Dacre was talking to Katie Jackson.

To find out more about working in America, read James's run down on visas and theatres that accept British work.