Instead of making a statement on dramaturgy, I will focus here on describing the role dramaturgy has had in my own work and outlining a type of dramaturgy that I am hoping will emerge with more prominence in the near future. A while ago, a friend of mine asked me what a dramaturg’s role really was in theatre. He said that his first association with the word was that of a Turk who made a lot of drama. When I think about it now, this rings quite true. A dramaturg in my process is a kind of a ‘T ‘Turk’, urk’, someone who is somewhat alien, who maintains his or her otherness and distance from the process in order to be able to ask questions about it. And it is also someone who makes a lot of drama, someone who asks questions about things that might otherwise slip by unnoticed or be taken for granted. Most of my work is concerned with issues of presence and embodiment and procedures of fictionalizing. I often take original material from other sources: films (embodying the movement of the actors), my private life (moving my furniture into my installation), weather conditions (collaborating with the factor of o f its unpredictability and ‘givenness’). Then I set up ‘generators’ that process this material to produce new work. These generators are, in fact, dramaturgical structures, and their transparency in the work is as important as the material itself. I might call it a dramaturg dramaturgyy of space, which renders both the content and the manners in which that content is produced visible at the same time. Working with a dramaturg is for me as important as working with any other collaborator. I set up a certain dramaturgical structure (a generator), which might, for example, be based on a timeline of a certain emotion. Once this generator is clear to all of us, we use it as an anchor to hold the rest of the elements together, a red thread that runs through the process and the performance and to which everyone can relate. A good dramaturg for my process is someone who manages never to lose sight of this red thread.
The second role of dramaturgy in my work concerns the creation of the thread that connects all the individual projects into one ongoing exploration. This refers not only to how this installation or that performance share elements and expand on different aspects of them. Even more importantly, importantly, it is about how I can use certain elements from my projects, as well as from other people’s projects, art history history,, politics, daily news, weather,, my friend’s lives etc. in order to weather contextualize them differently in each new work I make. And further, how these elements can affect and loop back onto the original material they were taken from, and how they can re-appear with each new project. Therefore, this red thread of dramaturgy extends itself through my projects in time. The third level of dramaturgy in my work is the one I find very important for future dramaturgies. By this I mean attitudes that can help make dramaturgies of real-life events transparent. They may include: a dramaturgy of one’s of life (how I fictionalize my own life to give it a grand narrative); a dramaturgy of community life (that makes visible the strategies of staging, fictionalizing and performing day-to-day life); a dramaturgy of virtual life (that makes visible the strategies of fictionalizing, staging and performing political and other events through the mass media of TV, film and the Internet). Ideally,, this kind of dramaturgy would be capable Ideally of underlining the network-like relationship between these three threads and could incorporate them into the art-making process, where not only life is a generator of art but art is a generator of life in a transparent way way..
P e rf rf o r m a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 4 ( 3 ) , p p . 1 2 . 2 6 - 2 7 , 4 4 , 5 2 - 5 3 , 6 5 - 6 6 , 7 0 , 8 9 , 1 0 1 , 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 , 1 1 9 - 1 2 0 © Ta Ta y l o r & F r a n c i s L t d 2 0 0 9 DOI: 10.1080/13528160903519625
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For the past ten years – and more – I have been teaching in London at one of the so-called ‘new’ universities in a subject area (we call it ‘Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies’) that negotiates between a large undergraduate programme, which takes in about 150 students a year and tends to focus on the dramatic and theatrical end of that spectrum, and a PhD programme that caters almost entirely for students whose research proposals identify with the interdisciplinary – and, for some, post-theatrical – field of performance studies. My own work and interests move between these various points of identification, with a prejudice – I suppose – towards questions that tend to strike me in ‘theatrical’ terms, most recently questions about rhetoric, images and spectatorship. Put like that, I know, the terms sound very bland – no less bland, I suspect, than any projections I might make on the topic of ‘European dramaturgy in the 21st century’. At this end of the twenty-first century, I’m not sure that I can get much further, for the moment, than reflecting on theatrical experiences that seem, for the large part, still wrapped up in the unfinished business of the twentieth century (and earlier). For the sake of this brief statement, I’d say those experiences are basically of two sorts. One belongs to a very particular location, conversation and group of people, somewhere or other in London through the mid-1990s, collaborating on a series of long-laboured and then briefly-exhibited devised theatre pieces under the name Theatre PUR. If I know – or rather if I think – anything worth thinking about dramaturgy, then much of it is still indebted to lessons that I learned there. The second experience is dispersed, distended, a thing of multiple parts, and has to do with being a spectator, in London and then, more and more, outside of London and also outside of the UK, following theatre in ‘Europe’, a pleasure that belonged at the same time to getting ‘work’ done, as evidenced by a collection of essays on European Theatre co-edited with Nicholas Ridout (Kelleher and Ridout 2006) and a book on the theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, co-authored with Nick (again) alongside the artistic core of that
remarkable company, Chiara Guidi, Claudia Castellucci and Romeo Castellucci (Castellucci et al. 2007). For four years or so, following the unfolding of SRS’s enigmatic gesturality in Romeo’s eleven-part sequence Tragedia Endogonidia was, I suppose, for me the core twenty-first-century theatre experience to match those years at the end of the previous century spent breaking down gesture and intentionality into microscopic particles in lofts in Hoxton and Peckham with PUR. Whatever lights these and other experiences can cast on a dramaturgy ‘to come’ take the form, today, of the following: some scraps, some scattered reflections upon works seen and what stays with me when the work is done, the time that remains and that opens, here and there, into a thought about something done well that might call for a ‘taking on’ of what was ‘good’ in these encounters. Not, perhaps, this time, a return, or a doing-again, to be marked by a Beckettian lessness (Beckett having put down the marker for what can’t be gone back on in the previous century, for what can only be followed up, though be it with exquisitely diminishing returns), but something for the new age (even if what it looks like is a resigned fiction) like an endogenous departure from what keeps re-appearing as of its own accord, irrespective of our best efforts to make it appear or even to look it in the eye. So, those scraps, followed by a few brief comments. First the scraps. Kinkaleri’s Nerone, the collective for the first time putting actors up there on the stage rather than themselves, two hours, more than two hours, of unremitting blackness (in spite of holes cut in the black floor), one of the actors on the dark carpet starting, then stopping to start again, to whip herself across her back while the other plays ‘horse’, all to the perpetually interrupted strains of Scott Walker’s ‘A Lover Loves’ (‘Corneas misted / colour high … ’). A rich theatrical meditation on love and death that seems to be that without having to say anything about itself, without having to betray its ‘topic’, the scene – or say, even, the story – somehow already oozing its own after-image, that image (for those of us who were there) as vivid and viscid as congealed 26
ink. You had to be there too for Bock & Vincenzi’s invisible dances … , although it will have been possible to talk after the show about the rigorous pursuit of technologies of reproduction and translation (actions become images become words become fractured gesture …) around a source that isn’t so much absent as barely accessible; the extreme distension (spatially and temporally) of the rhetoric of the stage to produce a choreography of spasm and dancelessness; and talk too about the gift to the spectator of a theatrical experience turned, as it were, inside out, to be approached perhaps only through some sort of anamorphosis that will seem to reveal – in spite of everything – such terror and at the same time such (loving?) care. The same goes, although in different ways (for the occasion, restricting the list to European examples), for SRS’s Hey Girl! , where the dramaturg function seems strangely to be deferred to the performative machinery of the stage itself, which offers up human appearance as if in ambivalent tribute to the imperious demand of the spectators (that’s us) that such appearances should be brought forth – or the New Riga Theatre’s adaptation of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Ice, where we might stretch the point to suggest that here the function of conjuring a drama out of the given materials is given over – or, after all this time, we might do better to say returned – to the spectators themselves. This isn’t the only show
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recently where the actors have given the audience books to hold and look at while the show goes on. We looked at the pictures in the books, we watched the action onstage, and we followed the story that was being told to us (read out directly from Sorokin’s text) and – at times – performed in front of us. What ‘went on’ – for this spectator at least – went on at once in all and also none of those places. And, meanwhile, something alien, something strange and inhuman, was captured and turned over to look, remarkably, unnervingly, just like us. Maybe, if I were to risk drawing out a thread on which to hang a discourse about European dramaturgy in the current ‘century’, it might be the thread that ties one or another anamorphosis to its ‘true’ appearance, a thread that is spun out not from makers and shapers behind the scenes or ‘in the picture’ but from the twisted eye-beams of the spectator who dreamed it all already, and who puts flesh upon the dream every time the lights change, the curtains open and the figures come on. REFERENCES
Castellucci, Claudia, Castellucci, Romeo, Guidi, Chiara, Kelleher, Joe and Ridout, Nicholas (2007) The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London: Routledge. Kelleher, Joe and Ridout, Nicholas (eds) (2006) Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A critical companion, London: Routledge.
THE OTHER DRAMATURGY BETWEEN EUROPE AND ASIA Japanese or East Asian theatre still holds many possibilities for dramaturgical activities. East Asia, which has its own theatre culture and tradition, has actively absorbed European styles and artistry and incorporated these other cultural dramas into its own for the last hundred years. Especially in Japan, next to the traditional theatre such as Noh, Kyogen, Kabuki and Bunraku, modern European straight plays (Shingeki) and avant-garde performances and dances have been adopted from Europe. For instance, the founders of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, were influenced by the German Ausdruckstanz in their youth and went on to establish their unique style. Today, many kinds of theatre are performed every day in and around Tokyo. In addition, European and Japanese performers and directors have collaborated in the past decade. This cross-cultural theatre communication could lead to a new type of theatre aesthetics in the twenty-first century. However, there have been very few successful collaborations so far. Most productions are no more than co-operations between directors and performers, in which the one side simply adopts and integrates the other, or both remain as they are
without real confrontations with each other. The chances for a new theatre have not been well utilized strategically. That is why we have many possibilities to enhance the cross-cultural theatre communication on an artistic level. For this purpose, firstly, we must recognize the theatre forms and styles of foreign cultures more strongly in their otherness and confront them with our own. Secondly, we must playfully integrate, differentiate, alienate and destroy them, which is possible only in the cross-cultural dramas. There seems to be no doubt that a lot of dramaturgical effort is needed for this kind of production. The experts of ‘production dramaturgy’ must join their knowledge of the theatre of many cultures (as well as of their societies and histories), their experiences, good sense and unerring judgment. Unfortunately, very few experts can perform dramaturgical work for both European and Asian theatre. This situation produces the necessity and possibility to foster such expert for the future. Teachers, researchers and students in theatre departments who can play this role must and can make more direct contacts with theatre practitioners and experts from foreign cultures. This work is not easy but can contribute to a dramaturgy that is suitable for more dynamic theatre activities in the twenty-first century.
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WHEN THE DRAMATURG BECOMES OBSOLETE, THE DRAMATURGICAL REMAINS IMPORTANT observations from choreographic practice
1. When Xavier Le Roy planned his production Project in 2002, he didn’t invite a dramaturg to take over the function of an “outside eye” in the working process. He was interested in the idea of turning the production of a dance performance into the performance itself. Ideally, he wanted to produce a presentation format in which process and product would fall together. That is why he was unable to separate the period of conceptual preparation from that of the practical exploration of certain choreographic methods or from that of the analytical observation of the performative result. Accordingly, he searched for participants who were able to play several roles at once. They would be performers, choreographers and dramaturgs in one and therefore would be able to perform, produce and analyse the choreography at the same time. 2. In similar ways to Le Roy, Thomas Lehmen was looking for participants who were willing to be involved and distanced at the same time. For his project Funktionen (2004–5) he developed a methodological toolbox with a set of choreographic systems that could be given away to other artists. That transfer was meant to lead to a potential multiplicity of improvised choreographies. But these systems were not only productive tools to produce works that were no longer Lehmen’s own. He also wanted them to have the potential to reflect the communication processes that are happening during an improvisation on stage. Accordingly, he did not look for performers who would merely execute certain instructions but for ones who were ‘mature’ enough to contribute to the development of his methodology as well as to its exploration, analysis, appropriation and transformation. 3. In both these cases, I entered the projects with what I had brought with me: my non-professional dance experience, years of studies in theatre, film and media and a strong interest in Le Roy’s and Lehmen’s work. Even though my official job title
was ‘dramaturg’ at the time, I didn’t join their projects in this particular function, because a ‘pure’ dramaturg wasn’t what was needed. So I entered without knowing my own role in advance but it quickly transpired that I became even more than a performer, a choreographer and a dramaturg: inspired by the experience of being involved in the working process on so many different levels (without feeling particularly competent for this triple responsibility) I started to document, analyse and put into words what was going on. This was nothing really special, because it was exactly what all the other participants did too. The only difference was that I slowly began to develop an interest in theorizing these choreographic modes of work. I asked myself which kind of working processes and methods, which forms of collaboration and formats of presentation Le Roy, Lehmen and their participants used to approach their conceptual goals. My theoretical interest and qualitative approach emerged from within the choreographic practice and was made possible not despite but through my rather unclear function. From today’s perspective – looking back at these collaborations after completing my doctoral dissertation on Choreography as Critical Practice I can say that an access to such personal relations and partly fragile situations needs involvement and distance at the same time. One has to experience the creative process, to get fully absorbed, and one has to find a way to withdraw from it again in order to reflect upon it. So what is needed is an understanding through both doing and reflecting. Just diving into the creative process can easily lead to an overidentification with the artistic practice. Just reflecting upon it entails the risk of applying external criteria that may have nothing to do with what is at stake. So theorizing choreographic modes of work requires a constant change of position between an insider’s and an outsider’s perspectives. 4. This personal story of a dramaturg who wasn’t needed as such but instead as a multi-tasking participant and who turned into a researcher with an interest in theorizing choreographic modes of 52
work reveals one characteristic trait of “the dramaturgical”. I speak of “the dramaturgical” here intentionally in order to highlight a quality instead of a function. A dramaturg has many more areas of responsibility than watching, writing and giving feedback but one central aspect of dramaturgical work is the oscillation between inside and outside. Sometimes it is problematic, because it is always neither/nor. In other situations this switching of perspectives comes quite naturally, however. And with regard to my particular object of study (choreographies that are made to reflect their own making), the dramaturgical could even be considered as one possible access to a practice-
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driven theory. Not theory that is imposed on practice and uses it for its own purpose; rather a theory of practice that derives from practice and goes along with it. This kind of theorizing has a lot to do with not-knowing: not knowing which direction a creative process will take and not knowing the result, but still knowing how to deal with such vagueness according to the contingencies of a given situation. reference
Husemann, Pirkko (2009) ‘Choreographie als kritische Praxis: Arbeitsweisen bei Xavier Le Roy und Thomas Lehmen’, transcript, Bielefeld.
LISTEN AND PLAY
discover authors and artists who have the ambition to re-invent radio art, to bring in new methods and When Gaby Hartel and I curated the ‘Woche des ideas from the different contexts of their work. Hörspiels’ (Week of Radio Drama), a Radio-Art Reflecting on what is new in radio art, I believe festival presented by the Academy of Arts in Berlin one new tendency lies in the way that radio artists in April 2007, our central idea was to open up the currently return to ideas of intermedia as festival, which for a long time had been a classic prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. This period radio drama competition and only rarely looked must have been lucky radio days of discovery and beyond the literary tradition of the radio play. With invention. In May 1969, for example, the ‘Literary our festival relaunch we wanted to provide a Studio’ at the WDR radio in Germany, Cologne, broader view on the vivid interplay between radio presented a half-hour Action Game by the German art and related art forms. Fluxus-artist Wolf Vostell. The programme was The festival opening by LIGNA, a group of media called 100 x Hören und Spielen (A Hundred Times artists from Hamburg, was a plein air performance Listening and Playing). The listeners were invited at Pariser Platz, the square in front of the to follow instructions such as ‘Press your naked Academy’s main building and a tourist hotspot belly against your TV-screen’, ‘Lick the buttons of next to the Brandenburg Gate, the famous Hotel your radio while listening’ or ‘Sting yourself with a Adlon, the French Embassy etc. For one hour, up to needle, and have all electric devices in your 100 people simultaneously started to dance, take household running at the same time’. As an photographs of one another and lie down on the attempt to organize a virtually collective indoorfloor as if listening to echoes of history from below. performance in a public/private-space, Vostell’s To end, the whole swarm of participants went game throws an interesting light on LIGNA’s backwards through the Brandenburg Gate unified approach to working with radio today. or, better, associated in some kind of ‘inverted The experimental spirit of these early years parade’, the entire choreography conducted by seems to have had a revival, both in radio and in LIGNA through instructions that the participants contemporary art. While positions of ‘Action Art’, received via radio (an approach LIGNA calls ’radio ‘Conceptual Art’ and artistic interventions into ballet’). social processes have been (re-)discovered in art, To show the various interrelations between radio there has been a comeback of playfulness and of and the arts, we invited playwrights, musicians and game-like dramaturgies in radio-art too. (see, for contemporary artists who work with film, example, Ammer and Console On the Tracks, WDR performance, visual arts and with public space [2002]; Rimini Protokoll O-Ton Ü-Tek , DLR [2000]; (Katharina Franck and Nuno Rebelo, Chris Watson, and Deutschland 2, WDR [2002], pieces that found Susan Philipsz, Michaela Melián and Alvaro Zuniga, interesting ways to explore everyday life, its rituals among others) to demonstrate and discuss how and its theatrical potential as well as the acoustic radio and sound come into play within their work. medium in which they take place and, finally, Of course, such borderline activities are nothing language itself). very new. Radio art is one of the younger art forms, A second tendency I would like to point out is going back (as radio itself) less than a hundred the new relevance of the voice, its sensual qualities years. Right from the start, bringing subjects, and suggestive potential in radio and other media, strategies and artists in from other fields had been which have been the subject of a range of radio important for the development of radio art, and it plays, radio-docs and ars acustica-like productions still is. for over half a decade. Speculating about possible So, to answer a first question: yes, radio art does ‘Lessons from Listening’, I would suggest that – and will – need dramaturgy. The important role of these sensual and emotional qualities of the voice dramaturgs is to be curators and headhunters, to (a big theme in early radio theory) are a 65
fundamental and physical experience for every radio listener (at least that is how I feel). A voice can have a similar impact on a listener as the movements of an actor have on the audience of a film or a theatre performance – you fall unwillingly into the same rhythm, unconsciously imitating and reflecting what you see or hear, like a mirror. This power of the voice was placed under suspicion for a while, at least in Germany, where it used to play a certain role in radio propaganda during the Nazi-era. It was attacked by some exponents of the ‘Neues Hörspiel’ (New Radio Play) movement in the 1970s. But now it seems to be back on the agenda of radio art, and there are different approaches to how to deal with this power, bringing forth critical thought about perception and a variety of tones. Thirdly (and closely related to the second point), there is a great and still growing group of works that deal very playfully with the style of documentary and fake facts, quotes or sounds. Radio has the potential to mix ‘real’ reporting and ‘authentic’ fiction (Orson Welles’s famous radio play War of the Worlds , CBS [1938], is the bestknown example for this method). Since the early 1990s, genuine radio-artists like Hermann Bohlen and Walter Filz (later followed by the duo Serotonin and others) have been working in a very subtle way with mixed material from radio archives and other found footage. Standing in the tradition of the work with ‘original recordings‘ as developed by the ‘Neues Hörspiel’-movement, they have a more light and playful attitude. These three tendencies represent a quite subjective choice and, at the same time, express which artistic ideas I would like to take with us into the twenty-first century. New aesthetics need new forms of production and, especially, of cooperation. Talking about institutional frameworks, I find it very encouraging to see that artists and cultural institutions like theatres, art spaces, media festivals and media schools as well as cultural theory in general are increasingly more interested in sound and sound art, in radio and its aesthetic potential. Radio art thus has already found new places of presentation,
new forms of live performance or installation, which allow it to move beyond radio and to find ways to engage the public in a more direct sense. To support this, it is important that public radio stations open themselves up to new ways of producing and presenting radio art, that they preserve money, resources and programme-slots in their schedule for experiments (despite facing further reductions and centralizations in the expensive departments of radio drama and radio documentary), and that they open their archives, support upcoming talents and realize the chance of finding partners and live-audiences in a broader cultural scene. And it is vital that on the other hand theatres, festivals, universities and other cultural players are ready to cooperate with public radios, to support independent (art-) radio and to introduce radio art into new contexts. links to artists
http://www.90-prozent-wasser.de/bohlen.html http://www.chriswatson.net/ http://www.coderecords.de http://www.katharinafranck.de/ http://ligna.blogspot.com/ http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/
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When I was asked to take part in a workshop entitled ‘The Future of the Text‘ (at the conference on ‘European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century’ in Frankfurt in 2007), my first reaction was: ‘Why have they asked me?’ Among all the things in the theatre that I am interested in, texts don’t play a big role. Giving it a second thought, though, I realized that I had reduced the word ‘text’ to mean ‘dramatic text’ or ‘play’ or ‘drama’, but obviously ‘text’ means much more than that. (I am not referring here to the idea of performance as text but to a very simple understanding of ‘text’ as any way in which a language is being used on stage). In fact, almost all of the productions I have been involved in over the last few years were text-based in one way or another. If not drama, what kinds of text are we talking about? Where do these texts come from, and what can be done with them? Over two seasons at Schauspiel Stuttgart (2006–7), I worked twice with René Pollesch, who incorporates theoretical texts, film clips, pop music and personal experience in his productions. I was dramaturg in a project that combined nineteenth-century spiritual music with texts by Hölderlin, Max Weber and Joseph Beuys, curated two festivals for performance projects and worked on adaptations of the Odyssee and a highly experimental novel by Virginia Woolf. I also worked on a project with Hans-Werner Kroesinger, in which legal records formed the basis of the performance. Looking at Schauspiel Stuttgart’s programme, you will find adaptations of novels and movies and a large number of ‘projects’ as well as new plays. Of course, as the largest municipal theatre in the region we also produce ‘classics’, but it is fair to say that a lot – if not most – of the productions we work on draw on sources other than traditional drama. For us, novels or movies are sometimes a greater inspiration than traditional plays. Quite often, plays reduce complex realities to simple dramatic structures in order to work well. We look for sources that provide us with more or different material than can be found in the majority of dramatic literature and that also enable us to look at things from different angles, using more complex dramaturgies.
The word ‘material’ to me seems crucial for the debate about the ‘future of texts’. This ‘material’ provides us not only with ideas, questions and themes but also with images, actions and, last but not least, something to do and to say on stage. But how can this material be found and, more importantly, transformed into something that is worth being put up on a stage? This is where dramaturgy comes in. A dramaturg is a person involved not only in tracking down interesting material but also in shaping and trimming it, condensing and reducing it. The big question is: how should this be done? I guess there are hardly any limitations to where such material can be found or how it should be assembled. Maybe the only way to find out how to do it this by trial and error. So, what about the ‘future of the text’? I do not have an answer but have many questions to ask. First of all, I imagine the future of theatre to be pretty pluralistic, meaning that different kinds of theatre will cater for different tastes and needs of different audiences –– or the other way around. Of course there will still be an interest in classical drama, because there still is and will be a huge audience for it. (And there is nothing wrong with that.) At the same time, artists will continue to use other sources, and I expect this approach to become even more popular. But – and here are my questions – where will this leave the author, the playwright or dramatist? Do we need university programmes for dramatic writing? Who will come up with and write down the things the performers on stage will actually say? What will the collaboration between author and dramaturg look like? Will the dramaturg become a kind of writer, too – in addition to his or her job as a curator, producer, communicator and interpreter? Are there any rules as to how to put together what research and improvisation and adaptation have produced? What will these new texts, which develop out of research and take shape in rehearsals, look like? Can they be separated from the performance? Should they exist separately?
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THE WELL-PREPARED IMPROVISATION A rather strong, and trendy, contempt for the notion of text is not unusual these days. Contrasting text-based theatre with theatre of images or physical theatre is not necessarily productive, either in academic theatre research or in creative theatrical practice. Such a simplified way of opposing various categories of theatre may become in fact a cul-de-sac. In the area of research, it risks confirming conventional categorizations, instead of opening different strategies, even in reference to historical material. In theatre practice, an underestimation of text tends to lead to a disregard of, for instance, one of the actor’s most valuable instruments, the voice. The voice as a corporeal fact, which communicates through sound and rhythm, is frequently no longer trained, probably as it is considered to be polluted with the notion of text and the ‘meaning’ of literature. Nevertheless, it is known from brain research that it is precisely rhythm, sound and metaphor that have an enormous impact on a recipient. I recently worked with the stage director Giacomo Ravicchio, artistic director of Meridiano Teatret, who was, at the same time, the production’s playwright and the set designer. The production, called Transit, which premiered in October 2007, included nine actors or performers, among them a dancer and a musician, from various ethnic backgrounds. The story took place in Frankfurt airport, where the nine characters, arriving from different parts of the world, had become trapped in a kind of limbo when all flights were cancelled for reasons unknown – the airport terminal represented the place of our collective terror, a place where one would probably not want to linger. The creative strategy and method we used is best described as chaos. The artistic visions for the project dated back maybe many years and, like for instance the stage set, had been prepared before the rehearsals began. The actual creation of the
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performance took place during the rehearsals and grew out of the inputs of the actors, dancers, musicians, composer and light designer who made up the production team. This led to a dynamic interaction between chance, spontaneity, improvisation, sudden inspirations and unpredictabilities on one hand, and a thorough, preparatory process of research and preproduction on the other. What kind of process is that? It is not a devising theatrical process, even if it in many ways looks like one. The playwright, who was also the director and the set designer, created the text as an integrated part of the overall musical totality in constant collaboration with the composer who was present during the entire rehearsal process. The process of producing Transit was in a way very Italian. It looked like improvisation. The classic Italian professional secret lies in the fact that nothing should be as well-prepared as improvisation. My role as a dramaturg was to be the audience, the ideal spectator. This meant, to a great extent, to insist on reduction; on identifying what was the least necessary to articulate; and then to argue for doing even less than that. Or the opposite. What is thought to be clear frequently is not. Modifications had to be made in different registers; visual, sonorous, structural. The production was a musically sensuous and sensual totality and a ‘sponge’, to borrow a term from Jan Kott. It absorbed and emitted. One has to train a dialectical movement of intuition and reflection. This working method was in fact not that different from the other practice of mine which is focused very much on classics, especially on plays by the eighteenth-century Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg. Dramaturgical manoeuvres take place in close collaboration with the stage director and the scenographer, constituting an artistic team. It is based on systematic academic research. The preparations are spread over a couple of years. It all aims to supply the crucial freedom to improvise, that is creativity.
Having worked for several years in a collective that gathers together two dramaturgs, a philosopher and four dancer-choreographers, there are a few conclusions and deviations that have sedimented over time and that still trigger our thinking and practice:
protocols of performance (not dramaturgy). Our relations are not thematized but translated into the procedures or paths of the performance (two solos presented as a duet; discussions on the piece within the performance; ready-made performance; non-linear genetics of the material etc.).
– Dramaturgy is the ultimate space of power in theatre due to its prescriptiveness, its always already emergent nature and the obviousness of its strategies. Dramaturgy is always already there, even if we don’t focus on it; its perspectivality excludes the surplus of all that is vague and volatile for the clarity of its strategy to proceed.
– Collaboration between all artists included is there for further individuation (not in terms of authorship but in terms of individuated experience in perception, language and productive force).
– We as a group of artists were interested in the productive rather than the reactive politics of performance. – Our ‘products’ (performances) do not represent the relational aspects of authorship, the micropolitics of the group or the organizational aspects of collaboration, but our relations influence the
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– Performances are only markers in time, singular results of the homogeneity of the past in the here-and-now, but we bet on the force of inventiveness, on time-to-come. – A notion of dramaturgy has become a metaphor for perspectivalization and disciplinarization of knowledge produced in the autonomous artistic practice; dramaturgy either prescribes or reflects new social relations within a performance; it might serve as a blueprint for a new social narrative.
1. Which theatre, performance or dance production in recent years did you find particularly important? The works of Andrea Bozic, Aitana Cordero, Ivana Müller, Nicole Beutler, Laurent Chétouane, David Weber-Krebs and Mette Ingvartsen.
Protokoll, David Weber-Krebs and Boris Charmatz, and, with regard to the sensorial, in particular the work of Felix Ruckert, Brice Leroux and deepblue.
3. What, in your opinion, is the main responsibility of dramaturgy today? Do theatre and performance need dramaturgs? And how are their situation and working 2. Which artistic tendencies in theatre, performance methods changing? and dance do you regard as being important for future I witness an increase in the work and need for dramaturgies? dramaturgs. I have mixed feelings about this. I regard those artistic tendencies in dance and Mainly I find that it is part of a general performance as full of potential that are dealing with questions that have not yet been exhausted. In institutionalization of art-production in dance. It seems as if young makers respond to the overdance, notions of embodiment continue to organization of the dance infrastructure by ‘arming’ stimulate the creation of theatrical works but will themselves with support structures, of which the take on new directions. I am observing two dramaturg is a part. It shows their capacity to divergent tensions, which pull at dance from very organize, but I wonder what is driving this. I detect different aspects: one goes, as it were, back to the a sense of incapacity to participate as free agents in autonomist theatrical event, the direction of the image, and another moves away from the theatrical, the production of art. It seems as if these makers think they will never be fully able to organize their seeking a different relationality. own art production. Perhaps it is part of the The most striking direction I have been fundamental realization that art-making is less and witnessing is the revisiting of the creation of less a matter of individuals and more and more one imagery in the theatre, as if we were to engage of groups. To respond to the question of whether again with questions of representation and there is a need for dramaturgs, I would say that semiotic theory from the 1970s. But instead, this there is a need for dramaturgy, not necessarily for revisiting is inspired by very different notions and one dramaturg (quoting from a discussion on engages in a new, radical way with the tension dramaturgy we held in Amsterdam in 1999.) between visual culture and bodily experience. In This means for dramaturgs that their main this sense the work seems not to focus on the priority should be to help find optimal conditions semiotic, but to introduce a new approach to the for the creative process and to keep an open mind image in the theatre. Not on what the images for the broad range of options that are possible, i.e., mean, but on what they do, the function of the to avoid the formatting that happens through images, which borrows from existing experiences institutional pressures. There is an increasing but achieves very different effects. I am thinking wealth of experiences and of examples that here in particular of the aforementioned works of dramaturgs can tap into. The increasing academic Andrea Bozic, Aitana Cordero, Ivana Müller, Nicole attention to art production and analysis here is Beutler, Laurent Chétouane, David Weber-Krebs both an enormous asset as well as a threat. I see and Mette Ingvartsen. the relationship between maker and dramaturg as In general, the issue of creating an event and extremely case-specific, which means that gathering people continues to be questioned. This strategies for working will necessarily be different in is the second tendency I mentioned, which has to every new situation. It will entail any relevant aspect do with new notions of relationality. It is being that the creation of theatre or dance includes. approached by the use of immersion in installation works, which accentuate the sensorial. I imagine 4. What are the institutional frameworks that should that new approaches will take on rhetoric as well be changed in order to encourage and enable and will make use of dramatic enactment. I am interesting theatre work? thinking here of the work of Blast Theory, Rimini 110
Providing free space to allow new voices to enter the art production is a continuing concern. This implies contesting existing hierarchies in art production and reception and, most of all, creating a climate that allows for new voices to come through. As the public debate about art has become very institutionalized, this is a challenging agenda. The increasing attention in academia to the arts should help in the acknowledgment of the importance of
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art works for culture in general. Still, art production needs to confront the challenge for visibility, or connectivity, to create new communities, for the art to take part in social and political discourse (without retreating to populist strategies). It will be a challenge to create flexible structures for engaging with the social environment in order to find a legitimation of art production and a fruitful exchange between art and society.
THE ‘ATELEOLOGICAL ENDING’ IN FRAGMENTED THEATRE WORKS What kind of ending would avoid finality? What happens when on the last page or in the last seconds before the blackout on stage we come to an end according to our watches but not to the inherent time of the theatre text or performance? And if the plot does not offer any kind of resolution, would it still be a proper ‘plot’? My doctoral research has been an attempt to fill the gap in critical discourse about a special, strange, uncomfortable kind of ending that disputes about twenty-five centuries of drama theory and that, due to its innovative nature, requires new terms that fix its own form and meaning. We start at least with an assertion: that this kind of ending appears in texts and performances that avoid the traditional Aristotelian structure of ‘beginning-middle-end’ and the linear scheme of cause-effect. The alternative to these structures is often fragments presented without a rational logic but connected through other ways. I will explain what these ways could be, but first I would like to clarify that in these fragmented plays the ending loses its traditional value of ‘conclusion’ and even its status as a fragment that is more important than others. In principle, in these fragmented plays, each fragment carries the same weight within the whole. But this principle can vary, depending on the purpose of the artist. Some artists break into pieces a play or a performance that previously had a linear structure. If this happens the reader or the audience should be able to reconstruct the previous story (I am thinking here, for example, of Biljana Srbljanovic’s or Rafael Spregelburd’s plays). But there are other artists that invent a play by means of different kinds of intuitions or images without thinking in a logical structure. In these cases the reader or the audience is not able to identify a story, or even a plot. René Pollesch’s or Chuck Mee’s work often like that. However, most postdramatic performances are a hybrid of the first and the second kinds. The fragment could be executed, I think, in three 119
principal ways: centrifuge, parataxis and rhizome. The first depends on a centre or axis. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis can be used as an example for this mode. In the case of parataxis there is, in principle, no hierarchy between the elements. However, although there is no hierarchy between the fragments, they together possess a ‘unity’ in the performance which is not a linear causal ‘unity’ but a sense in the whole. Hans-Thies Lehmann defines parataxis as a common trait in postdramatic theatre. The third alternative is the most radical one: the rhizome. As Deleuze and Guattari indicate, in a rhizome there is no centre, no hierarchy, no possible connection between the fragments. I point out this alternative although it is difficult to find examples; the happening is the theatrical form that Deleuze most appreciated. After identifying these alternatives in the disposition of the fragment, which place or meaning does the ending in such plays have? We cannot use terms like ‘dénouement’ or ‘termination’ for an ending that is no longer a logical consequence of a linear structure. In these kinds of fragmented alternatives, I see three possible ‘functions’ of the ending: (1) an apparently random interruption of the performance; (2) a goal in itself (like Wolfgang Iser indicates in his book The Implied Reader [1974]); (3) a projection of the performance, often induced by the illusion of an eternal repetition. In this brief statement I would like to introduce one more term, one that could be useful in naming the peculiar ending of the fragmented play. Accepting that it has no purpose of finality – unlike traditional plays – the concept would negate the idea of télos. However, I would not like to choose a term that is preceded by prefixes such as post-, because that itself would then include the idea of linearity. I prefer – until I find a better one – the prefix a-, which does not negate but excludes the concept that follows it. As a result, an ‘ateleological’ ending does not negate the teleology of the linear structure but offers a new alternative where the terms of dénouement or plot require revision at the hands of theatre theory.
1. Which theatre, performance or dance production in recent years did you find particularly important? Eraritjaritjaka by Heiner Goebbels; Die Zehn Gebote by Christoph Marthaler; Tale of Two Cities by Heather Woodbury; Der Idiot by Frank Castorf; Prater Saga by René Pollesch; Red House by John Jesurun; Isabella’s Room by Jan Lauwers.
REFERENCE
Iser, Wolfgang (1974) The Implied Reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Which artistic tendencies in theatre, performance and dance do you regard as being important for future dramaturgies? In theatre: the hyperrealistic tendency, which introduces media aesthetics to the stage. In performance, the happening form, as exemplified by some works of Jan Lauwers and Chuck Mee. In dance, I am interested in the pieces of Trisha Brown and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In any case, I think the majority of future dramaturgies will refuse the linear/dramatic form and will chose the paratactic or even the rhizomatic forms.
3. What, in your opinion, is the main responsibility of dramaturgy today? Do theatre and performance need dramaturgs? And how are their situation and working methods changing? The contemporary dramaturg should be in permanent contact with the stage and should prepare texts for the space and the performers. In my opinion, the theatre text today is just one element among many components of the theatre production.
4. What are the institutional frameworks that should be changed in order to encourage and enable interesting theatre work? I come from Barcelona, and in my country there is a huge difference between alternative theatre and conventional theatre. I would like our government to finance the radical theatre and the small theatre spaces, too. Furthermore, the ‘professional’ manner of most of our theatre prevents the small productions from being presented. 120
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