This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review is devoted to ‘new dramaturgies’, but the theme itself might provoke question. Does the very word ‘dramaturgy’ imply approaches that are inherently tied to past frames of reference, outdated assumptions and formal and generic boundaries that can no longer be sustained? It might be objected that it is a word that dates from classical Greece, while modern understandings of dramaturgy as a concept and practice owe much to eighteenth-century Germany and G. E. Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Can we really put new wine into such an old bottle? What can this word ‘dramaturgy’ possibly bring to a postmodern, or indeed ‘postdramatic’, theatre? And what is its relationship to performance practice outside the theatre and without a core relationship to the drama (antithetical or otherwise).
Indeed, in his outline of the field, Hans-Thies Lehmann has proposed that it is unthinkable that one could develop ‘“the” dramaturgy of postdramatic theatre’, and he goes on to say that ‘the theatre of sense and synthesis has largely disappeared – and with it the possibility of synthesizing interpretation’.Footnote1 If dramaturgy is a term that has been used to describe ‘an initial synthetic approach’,Footnote2 how may we then understand the process of dramaturgy and the dramaturg's work as productive within a contemporary context? Might there be a persistent political problem associated with dramaturgy's determination to establish coherence and connection, given that the dramaturg has sometimes been associated with structures of power, within and external to the art institution?
While answers to such questions are implicit in this issue, we might begin by suggesting that dramaturgy links theory and practice through the many ways in which it invokes an applied contextual and kinetic analysis and understanding of the deep structures of theatre and performance works. A dramaturgical approach involves observation of the principles implicit in the unfolding of performance in process and production. If the subject and practice of dramaturgy are constantly evolving and understood in relation to their contexts, then the concept of dramaturgy must also be capable of development and expansion, beyond (yet including) expectations of dealing with the dramatic form implicit in the text, or notions of the dramaturg as ‘the critic in the theatre’ or the disembodied ‘outside eye’.
Dramaturgs and scholars have long attempted to free dramaturgy as a discipline, practice and term from exclusive concern with synthesis of meaning, with the dramatic text, or, still more narrowly, with Aristotelian dramaturgy. Importantly, this is not a purely philosophical endeavour, but has arisen out of the proliferation of new forms, working processes and questions facing contemporary performance and theatre practitioners and audiences. In this issue, we have attempted to draw together articles that consolidate and examine emerging aspects of contemporary performance from a dramaturgical perspective; equally, they observe the implications of such practices for dramaturgical thinking and process. Some of our articles discuss dramaturgy as a term, while others are involved in applied dramaturgy and dramaturgical analysis.
The shape of the issue has emerged organically and in response to the submissions received. It will be noticed that despite frequent and detailed references to other European practices, and despite the fact that not all our authors are British by birth, all of them are currently based in the UK. While this was not our objective, many of the UK submissions we received seemed to fit our purpose in reaching towards an overview, grappling with underlying tensions, even if in relation to quite specific examples. While we are not suggesting that such questioning is exclusive to this context, it may be that where there is no tradition of deploying the term ‘dramaturgy’, and where it appears as an emerging and increasingly significant field, this creates a drive for people to begin to ask fundamental questions about what dramaturgy is, and to define it in relation to existing practices – even if this urgency is sometimes implicit. Equally, of course, the converse can be true, for in the UK we can also see a tendency to apply dramaturgy rather narrowly and in the most familiar (or least unfamiliar) contexts: it may be that our resistance to a prevalent tendency to relate dramaturgy exclusively to literary management and ‘new writing’ leads us to overstate our case for ‘new dramaturgies’. We should also be wary that our desire to expand the term ‘dramaturgy’ does not lead to an overly diffuse, vague and therefore unhelpful presentation of the term and its practice. Perhaps it might; we take this risk, since it appears preferable to a reductive approach, and we look forward to debating this further with interested parties.
There is another reason for our presentation of a UK perspective, or of UK perspectives. Having just completed our book Dramaturgy and Performance (2008), we attended the conference ‘European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century’ at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main in 2007. While working towards this issue, we became aware that this conference would underpin an issue of Performance Research in 2010 (Vol 14, No 3). If CTR and Performance Research were conceived as, to an extent, ‘sibling’ journals, these two issues may also be considered as complementary or sibling issues. The Performance Research issue provides a perspective that reflects a wider European practice. It is also an issue that leans towards a discussion of pedagogy and the implications contemporary theatre holds for teaching dramaturgy as a subject and as a practice.
Our opening article is positioned in order to provide a working definition of dramaturgy, since it opens by positing a relationship between dramaturgy and architecture and reflecting on the ways in which an architectural understanding of dramaturgy might permit a dramaturgical approach to architecture. Cathy Turner begins by discussing the ways in which ‘dramaturgy is architecture’ (p. 153) in that it works towards an understanding of structures in space and time, in which performance and its environment work together. She goes on to demonstrate the potentially symbiotic relationship between dramaturgy and architecture by using a form of dramaturgical analysis based on Maarten Hajer's discussions of city planning, to explore the close relationship between site-specific art works and architectural process.
Turner's notion of dramaturgy is not proposed as one that defines it for the issue, however, since other perspectives sit beside this first one. Peter Boenisch's discussion of a ‘reflexive dramaturgy’ is more specifically focused on the relationship between performance and text. Here, the term dramaturgy refers ‘both to the resulting “texture” of a theatre production and to the process of “texturing” … located in two central operations: the (external) contextualization of a “text” (whether a play, classic text, or the stimulus for a devising process), and the (internal) mise en scène of a “texture” for performing’ (p. 163). Boenisch proposes that while UK theatre tends to confirm an antagonism between text and performance, ‘reflexive’ approaches, rather than attempting a synthesis of the two, make productive use of their co-existence and yet the gap between them, offering the observer what Boenisch, referencing Slavoj Žižek, describes as a ‘parallax view’, where observers are made aware of their own encounter with the text (p. 164).
Mary Luckhurst, author of Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006), comments on the rapid development of dramaturgical practice and thinking within UK theatre, particularly in relation to the recent institution of the ‘literary manager’ or ‘development dramaturg’. Taking dramaturg Hanne Slättne as an example, Luckhurst shows how her work with Northern Ireland's Tinderbox Theatre exemplifies, in microcosm, the changes taking place in macrocosm, demonstrating ‘a shift away from traditional dramatic literary heritages and away from the model of the writer as privileged worker in a fixed artistic hierachy to models which incorporate much more fluid systems of collaboration between varying artists and disciplines’ (p. 176).
Synne K. Behrndt's article moves us away from a specific consideration of the text to map the emergence of the dramaturg and ideas of dramaturgy within dance practices. This article provides a broad picture of an emerging field and offers many starting points for further enquiry. It is suggested that the development of the dance dramaturg might both prompt and parallel ways of rethinking dramaturgical practice within the contemporary theatre and where dance and theatre practices merge. The author ends by citing a number of ways in which dancers and choreographers have begun to explore possibilities for the ‘dramaturgical body’ or for a dramaturgy specifically related to movement (p. 194), and proposes that while expanded understandings of dramaturgy and the dramaturg are not specific to dance, they may be thrown into relief by this context.
The next three submissions are presented as ‘documents’ of contemporary practices and are more inventive in their layout and written in proximity to specific working processes. David Williams writes of his role as dramaturg to Lone Twin Theatre, and suggests some starting points for thinking about the dramaturg in devising, in a contribution adapted from a paper given at a conference on dramaturgy in Warsaw, Poland in early 2009. The document and its different articulations of dramaturgical thinking within devising reflect the open-ended and creative nature of dramaturgical collaboration as well as the challenges that devising presents for dramaturgs and other collaborators. Clare Finburgh's contribution edits together interviews with French theatre-makers in order to suggest what ‘dramaturgy’ and ‘dramaturg’ mean in a French context. It reflects current and urgent questions about writing and text that gesture towards the way in which changing dramaturgies also reflect a changing theatre. Deirdre Heddon and Alexander Kelly present an article written as a series of exchanges in which they discuss their working relationship as devisor and dramaturg on Third Angel's Lad Lit Project. The document is an example of the way in which dramaturgical thinking is often embedded within any form of collaboration: the process of dramaturgy also happens in the dialogue between people. Heddon was not originally the project's dramaturg per se; however, as the dialogue between her and Kelly developed, the nature of her input became dramaturgical.
In editing this issue, it was important to us that we should acknowledge two further areas of dramaturgical significance. While it is understood that the Northern European ‘institutional dramaturg’ makes a significant contribution to programming and that this is a central aspect of his or her role, the dramaturgical processes of the curator within UK receiving houses are infrequently discussed. We also felt that it was essential to reflect the considerable impacts of new technologies on emerging dramaturgies. We therefore offer Stephen Hodge's discussion and description of his programming of Second Live, not only as an interesting description of a significant project, but as a prompt to include such projects and their implications within the field of ‘new’ or ‘expanded’ dramaturgies.
Discussions of dramaturgy continue. Last year, we both contributed to the above-mentioned conference in Warsaw, at the Instytut Teatralny, in collaboration with Jagellonian University, where dramaturgy as a term and practice were explored in relation to Polish theatre practice (January 2009). More recently, we were interested to hear of a further ‘International Seminar on New Dramaturgies’ at the Centre de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo (CENDEAC) in Murcia, Spain (November 2009), while smaller events have taken place, such as the recent ‘The Dramaturg – Manager or Creator?’ at Glasgow University (November 2009). Other recent activities include Turner's special edition of Studies in Theatre and Performance, which explores new approaches to dramaturgical work with writers, taking the practical AHRC-funded research project ‘Writing Space’ as a starting point.
If it is possible to talk about a progression from some of the earlier discussions of dramaturgy, current events seem to have moved away from attempting to define it as a term and practice. Rather, the concept of dramaturgy may now be deployed as a critical engagement with the processes and architectonics of making and articulating performance.
If it might still be objected that the current issue leaves dramaturgy as an unsettled and ever-expanding term, we would argue that this reflects the complexity and breadth of current debates and practices. For dramaturgy is, as Claire MacDonald writes ‘a term in flux, a not yet settled word, a word that might even have the status of one of Raymond Williams's keywords – words that are significant, but contested, words that are argued over, words whose time is now’.Footnote3 New dramaturgies might be precisely those that seem to propel the term towards its future, whatever that may prove to be.
Notes
1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 25.
2. Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. by David Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 8.
3. Claire MacDonald, ‘Conducting the Flow: Dramaturgy and Writing’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 30.1 (March 2010, 91–100, p. 94).