Within a changing landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, the functions, artistic principles and working conditions for dramaturgs are being redefined. What is their role in an environment that is no longer exclusively bound to a dramatic text and its author but is increasingly determined by collective practices that may include performance, dance and media art?
This issue of Performance Research explores themes arising from and responding to the international conference European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century, held in Frankfurt am Main in September 2007. Essays interrogate contemporary dramaturgy as an expanding field of tasks and skills, challenges and strategies. They explore a range of dramaturgical practices in contemporary theatre, dance, performance and media art and also draw attention to the personal and institutional aspects of dramaturgy. The majority of our contributors are working dramaturgs, whose theoretical engagements with the present and future of dramaturgy are deeply rooted in their own practice and experience. As dramaturg at the Kaaitheater (Brussels), a leading European venue for contemporary theatre and dance, Marianne van Kerkhoven has been a major influence on devising new forms of dramaturgy in postdramatic theatre. Her essay addresses the current challenges that dramaturgy faces in a rapidly changing political and economic landscape. Opposing the superficiality of an accelerating market of spectacles, van Kerkhoven instead asks for a dramaturgy of the spectator.
The emergence of new dramaturgies of and for the spectator is a key concern of many of the contributions in this issue. Katia Arfara considers the work of Rimini Protokoll, whose document-based performances, often involving non-professional performers, question the very nature of theatrical representation. The aim of their dramaturgical practice is to forge new relationships between stage and audience while challenging the binary opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’. Dramaturgy in these performances raises the question of what constitutes the theatrical event as such. Christian Biet proposes that we understand the theatrical event as a summoning, structured by heterogeneity and multiplicity, however much the spectacle tries to produce a community.
Dramaturgical practice's address to the audience is further explored in contributions that focus on collective experiences of movement and space. Bruce Barton draws on an in-depth reading of Dance Marathon, a performance by bluemouth inc., which crosses common divisions between text-based theatre and collaboratively devised performance. Barton calls for an ‘inter/actual’ dramaturgical perspective, which may allow us ‘to recognize and work with what a performance is doing, rather than what it is trying to be.’ In their joint contribution Peter Eckersall, Fujii Shintaro, Takayama Akira and Hayashi Tatsuki offer critical reflections on the politics of space and memory. They reflect on the work of Tokyo-based performance group Port B, who use German and Japanese dramaturgical models in their performances in urban space, encouraging audiences to become aware of the constructed nature of collective and personal memory. As all these essays show, dramaturgies of the spectator are engaged in politics of perception, which are also a major concern for other art forms. Particularly in media art, dramaturgical strategies that address perception become increasingly important, as Valentina Valentini explains in her introduction to an interview with artist Bill Viola. His multi-disciplinary practice explores a disquieting non-linear dramaturgy, encouraging new modes of perceiving and experiencing images in space and time.
Phil Smith addresses dramaturgy less as a working practice than as a mode of theatricality and explores its presence in a variety of different ‘genres’, from para-theatre, rough theatre and the grotesque, to performative interventions into urban space. Smith explores how in fact theatricality returns to such performances as ‘remnant, revenant and trace’ through a form of ‘detheatred’ dramaturgy of the everyday. Another important field of dramaturgical practice is dance. Here, Bojana Kunst notes a principal shift: from understanding the dramaturg as objective observer towards dramaturgical collaboration as the embodied and affective work of proximity. She argues that the open, process-oriented work of dramaturgy in contemporary dance is a result of changing manners of practice and modes of production and, again, of changing cultural and economic contexts. A similar approach is followed by Christel Stalpaert, who proposes a ‘dramaturgy of the body’ with a mutual responsibility for intellectual decisions and physical action. From this perspective, blurring the functions is not the result of institutional pressure but a social and aesthetic strategy. This may include the freedom to leave cognitively based methods behind and to take the risk of an embodied dramaturgy of failure and stuttering.
While media art, site-specific performance and dance all provoke new dramaturgical strategies, the traditional dramaturgical task of mediating the interpretation of dramatic texts in the process of theatrical production must not be neglected. But personal experiences of working in different cultural and institutional contexts reveal that even in established institutions the profession is changing. As Duška Radosavljevic´ discusses in reference to the situation in England, the place of the dramaturg is often not predefined and depends on personal preoccupations and engagements. Inspired by de Certeau's ideas on space and practice, she considers the dramaturg's place and domain as a navigation between fixed positions. Dragan Klaic, who describes himself a as ‘former dramaturg’, questions the demands of repertory theatre and asks for a different practice: engaged with the new social realities of contemporary life, the dramaturg would become, ‘a broker, interface, intellectual inspirer and Conceptual programmer’. Tim Etchells's personal statement performs the dramaturgical aspects of an artistic practice situated between writing texts and devising performances. Interweaving working notes with biographical memories, he focuses on the experience of doing time, a metaphor for both performance and dramaturgy. As many of the essays suggest, writing on contemporary dramaturgy means to embrace the loss of normative power and to address the diversity of possible approaches. Yet it is possible to outline some basic concerns for contemporary dramaturgy as a whole, even if it operates on ‘shifting grounds’. The opening essay by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi elaborates the main topics of the dramaturgy conference in Frankfurt, which they co-convened. The participants were invited to respond to a series of questions about their own ideas on dramaturgy, in terms of artistic tendencies, institutions and responsibilities. The selection of answers included here as short statements are intentionally personal, polemical or provocative – providing a glimpse into the diversity of new transdisciplinary approaches. On Dramaturgy is a contribution to this emergent discourse. The issue editors would like to thank Sandra Laureri, Martina Lenhardt and Hans-Thies Lehmann for their support.