Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising∗

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

∗An earlier version of this article was first presented at a DramaFORUM conference in Warsaw, Poland (January 2009)

1. Barba uses the term ‘action’ to describe all elements that ‘work directly on the audience's attention, on their understanding, their emotiveness, their synaesthesia’; in Eugenio Barba, ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work’, New Theatre Quarterly, 1.1 (February 1985), (pp. 75–78).

2. Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 174.

3. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 55.

4. Anne Bogart in an interview in 2003: ‘I am a scavenger. I am not an original thinker and I am not a true creative artist. So the notion of scavenging appeals to me. That is what I do. Like a bird that goes and pulls different things and makes a nest. I think it is more a nesting impulse, of taking this and that and weaving it together to make some sort of marriage of ideas … I juxtapose ideas. I like the satisfaction of putting things together like that. That is my talent, if I have any talent: to be able to hold up a number of things in the air at the same time.’ Quoted in Scott M. Cummings, Remaking American Theatre: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 39.

5. Quoted in Ric Allsopp, ‘Open Work – Postproduction – Dissemination’ (unpublished paper presented at ArtEz Symposium, 15 November Arnhem, 2007), p. 9.

6. Allsopp, ‘Open Work’, p. 6. In his discussion of an ideogrammatic approach to poetics, Allsopp borrows this phrase from Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. Köhler originally used it to describe the orienting ethical positions required to constitute a ‘field’.

7. Some questions that recur for me: why does it seem that so many of the most productive source materials and stimuli for thinking-through composition reside elsewhere than in publications about theatre? Why do so few university-level theatre studies reading lists seem to reflect this extra-disciplinary plurality of stimuli? I'm thinking in particular of publications such as Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations, a remarkable book in which a novelist/poet and a film editor, Walter Murch, discuss in detail their long-term engagement with questions and practices of composition, a ‘science of patterns’; see Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Editing of Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. xx.

8. Romeo Castellucci, On the Idea of Crescita in Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 162.

9. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage, 1993).

10. Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 39.

11. Barry Laing, Rapture: Excursions in Little Tyrannies and Bigger Lies (PhD thesis, Victoria University, Melbourne, 2002), p. 10.

12. Matthew Goulish, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 97–102.

13. Heidi Gilpin, ‘Shaping Critical Spaces: Issues in the Dramaturgy of Movement Performance’, in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed. by Susan Jones, Geoff Proehl and Michael Lupu (Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1997), p. 87.

14. ‘Analogy follows another notion of matter, that of extension. By spreading the dream out, disclosing connections all over the place, an image takes on weight and can even make me feel that I am walking on its ground, that I am everywhere in the dream rather than it in me. Analogy is a word used in comparative anatomy for referring to a relation where there is likeness in function but not in origin … Analogies keep us in the functional operation of the image, in the patterns of similarities, without positing a common origin for these similarities. The operative term is like. This is like that.’ (James Hillman, quoted in The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, ed. by Thomas Moore [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 244.)

15. Laing, Rapture, p. 55.

16. Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’, on The Future (Columbia Records CD, 1992).

17. Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (London: Faber, 1997), p. 91.

18. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, p. 388.

19. For a discussion of conversation, see Scott DeLahunta, Isabelle Ginot, Myriam Van Imschoot, André Lepecki, Susan Rethorst, Diana Theodores and David Williams, ‘Conversations on Choreography’, Performance Research, 8.4 (December 2003), 61–70.

20. Cf. Romeo Castellucci: ‘[…] dramaturgy, in essence, is an economy of figures and time, and of rhythm’, in Castellucci et al., Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, p. 213.

21. Richard Williams, ‘Zidane Checkmates Fellow Grand Master Figo’, Guardian, 6 July 2006. p. 2 Sports section.

22. See Susan Melrose, ‘Intuition’, Performance Research, 11.3 (September 2006), 75–8.

23. See André Lepecki: ‘Just like the dancers and choreographer, I enter [the studio] to find a (new) body. That's the most important task of the dance dramaturg – to constantly explore possible sensorial manifestos'; in André Lepecki, unpublished transcription of ‘Conversations on Choreography’ sessions (SNDO, School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, March 1999).

24. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, p. 133.