The Need to Keep Moving

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Notes

¹ I speak of ‘England’ because England has been the main site of my practice. I am quite aware that the word ‘dramaturg’ tends to have a bit more currency in Scottish and Northern Irish theatre, for example, while I am not fully acquainted with the status of a dramaturg in Wales.

² ‘The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy … Justifiably, the bridge is the index of the diabolic in the paintings where Bosch invents his modifications of spaces’ (Certeau 1984: 128).

³ ‘The theoretical and practical problem of the frontier: to whom does it belong? The river, wall or tree makes a frontier. It does not have a character of a nowhere that cartographical representation ultimately presupposes. It has a mediating role’ (Certeau 1984: 127).

⁴ This is also reminiscent of the thinking of the human geographer Doreen Massey addressing the notion of space by conflating the local and the global especially by reference to the movement of tectonic plates. This has found some relevance in the site-specific performance work by Deirdre Heddon who sums Massey's concept up as: ‘In this understanding, place is a specific meeting place composed of shifting networks’ (Heddon 2007: 48).

⁵ Dan Rebellato's recent distinction between the terms ‘globalization’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ (2009) is particularly pertinent here, and the latter term is taken in the sense defined by Rebellato as a positive manifestation of the trend.

⁶ Turner and Behrndt also quote Uprichard's suggestion that it is the director who ‘takes snapshots on the ground’, while the dramaturg ‘holds the map of the process’ (Uprichard quoted in Turner and Behrndt 2008: 176). I would, however, like to give the dramaturg a more dynamic role in the process – as elaborated in this paper.

⁷ In re-examining the changing relationship between the text and performance and the strategies for their creation, Patrice Pavis also concludes that this new trend ‘encourages us to go forward, to move our feet and not get stuck in the same position forever’ (2008: 125)