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The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy

Magda Romanska

Dramaturgy on shifting grounds

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Hans-Thies Lehmann, Patrick Primavesi
Published online on: 30 Jul 2014

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Part III

MOTION
DRAMATURGY IN

Demolitions, definitions, and demarcations

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27
Dramaturgy on shifting
grounds1
Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi

The current development of theatre and performance takes place in changing

cultural landscapes, defined by new media technologies and new perceptional habits.
Hybrids of theatre, dance, performance, installation, exhibition, film, and media art
are gaining importance, often based on new production methods and institutions.
Transdisciplinary theatre projects attract new audiences by deviating from the
familiar interpretation of dramatic texts on stage. Thus contemporary dramaturgy is
facing a challenge: to develop creative ideas in cooperation with authors and
directors; to ensure the quality of theatrical work based on a fruitful communication
process within the production team; to invent helpful concepts for season schedules
and for cultural institutions in general; to enhance unconventional modes of
exchange and discourse; to build up global networks and to use them effectively.
Pragmatic tasks like management and public relations, promoting theatrical
events in local and regional contexts are indispensable, but they can’t replace artistic
skills.
The aim of the international conference European Dramaturgy in the Twenty-first
Century in Frankfurt am Main in September 2007 was to face and reflect on the
ongoing changes in the dramaturgical practice and to ask for new concepts and
strategies. Starting points for these discussions were some obvious tendencies that
are significant for the current situation: that distinctions between theatre and per-
formance are increasingly blurred; that the practice of postdramatic theatre demands
new styles and competences of dramaturgy; that a constant dynamics of crossover
and interdisciplinary art, of physical and choreographical theatre takes place that no
longer necessarily needs dramatic texts to which a dramaturgy in the traditional sense
could be applied. In postdramatic theatre, performance art, and dance, the tradi-
tional hierarchy of theatrical elements has almost vanished: as the text is no longer
the central and superior factor, all the other elements like space, light, sound, music,
movement, and gesture tend to have an equal weight in the performance process.
Therefore, new dramaturgical forms and skills are needed, in terms of a practice that
no longer reinforces the subordination of all elements under one (usually the word,
the symbolic order of language), but rather a dynamic balance to be obtained anew
in each performance.

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Media worlds

The shifting grounds that theatre institutions have to face are first of all the changing
realities of a global media culture. This does by no means imply that theatre should
adapt to media realities as the new norm. Rather, it will have to develop various
strategies of playing with the difference and tension between live and recorded.
Theatre tends nowadays towards creating “real” situations and to taking its starting
point from the bodily experience of spaces. For some time now theatre has mingled
with all kinds of artistic practices, including variety spectacles, musicals, mime,
slapstick, and so forth. Operating within the larger framework of a culture of media
and mediated performance, theatre is bound to an inter-mediality where the “inter”
is decisive. Thus, theatre may open up and explore the “inter” as an artistic space –
instead of trying only to copy media technologies or maintaining a defensive ontology
of live “presence.” Even in the experience of “now and here,” the media, the structure
of the double, the différance have always already intervened. Dramaturgy from this
perspective does require a particular sensibility not only for social, cultural, and
political contexts “outside” but also for the power relations within theatre institu-
tions. Therefore the dramaturg should no longer be defined as the controlling power
of the theatre. The dramaturg may instead become a negotiator for the freedom of
theatrical experimentation and risk.
In the current media culture, dramaturgy needs to reflect upon and respond to
altered ways of perception and participation, to rethink the position and the possible
functions of the spectator. Media technologies also offer new dimensions for the
self-reflection of theatre and performance, between repertoire and re-enactment,
digital archive and physical memory. That does not mean that dramaturgy is forced
to adapt to or to comply with each new technology. What is essential may rather be a
new way of thinking about media, techné, technology as new possibilities to con-
ceptualize spectating, viewing, witnessing, participating beyond the simple dichotomy
of subject and object. The dramaturg is not supposed to function as an expert of
technology but to think and act “with” it as an experimentalist. Who in the theatre
is afraid of new media?

Dramaturgies of the body

In new kinds of dance, as in performance art and in physical theatre, the functions
of the body are no longer subordinated to pre-existing structures and systems, stories
or narratives. Dramaturgy may be helpful here not by filling the “gaps” but rather in
doing the opposite: opening the one-way street of production and reception towards
an open process, perhaps a shared and mutual productivity in the proliferation of
movement. Increasingly important is also the influence of technical media on the
appearance of the dancer/performer on stage, in terms of presence, intersubjectivity,
and “interactivity.” One of the basic questions, not only for dance dramaturgs, is
how the theatrical situation (the copresence of performer and audience) and the role
of the spectator (as voyeur, witness, and participant) are changed by the use of media
technologies. Various dramaturgical methods and strategies are needed for the

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different questions raised by dance and choreography, but all of these questions
share the awareness of an increasing desire for new corporealities and for unusual
experiences of the body.
Images of the body are a dominant feature of mass media in neoliberal Western
societies. The human body is praised as a value in itself, however manipulated,
trained, gendered, and over-sexed, advertised as a product for consumption and
abused as a battleground of ideologies, sacrificed for economic profit and for religious
or political ideas of every kind. In the age of technical and scientific progress, the
ideology of perfected bodies has its counterpart in the elaboration of more and more
effective ways to destroy and extinguish the physical existence of whole populations.
The very distinction between human beings and animals or machines, an essential
precondition of humanist ethics and aesthetics, is radically questioned by the logic
of technical progress itself. Dramaturgy in dance and performance art is therefore
not confined to the narration of stories through elaborated movement. It may also
work on structures of physical and spatial relations, among the performers and
between them and the spectators. An important issue for dramaturgy here is the
tension between different notions of choreography, dance, and movement that are no
longer bound to the system of linguistic signs. They require their own “languages” as
for instance the Improvisation Technologies by William Forsythe can show. Therefore
dance dramaturgy is not at all marginal in relation to dramaturgical practice in theatre,
opera, or ballet.

Politics of discourse/beyond interpretation

Since the times of Lessing, the notion of dramaturgy (not only in Germany) has been
deeply rooted in the project of enlightenment, in the urge to educate the people and
to build up the cultural identity of a nation. The development of a political theatre
was based on this tradition, in the 1920s and 1930s (Brecht, Piscator, Eisenstein,
Meyerhold et al.) and again in the 1960s and 1970s (Kantor, Weiss, Handke, Living
Theatre, Boal et al.). After the decline of twentieth-century ideologies, the relation
between performing arts and politics has changed too. In political theatre it has often
been the role of dramaturgy to place a production in the framework of a social and
political context, for instance, by giving some allusions to real events during the
performance or by providing additional information in program notes.
In the last decades the urge to interpret and to explain the repertoire in light of a
current perspective has often been questioned. The attitude in Susan Sontag’s pro-
grammatic essay “Against Interpretation”2 has since been adapted by many artists
and dramaturgs who rather tend to let spectators themselves reflect upon their
position than teach them lessons in politics. Thus the political and (in a broader
sense) the critical potential of theatre and performance often depends on how the
position of the spectator is defined or questioned. The function of theatre as a
public sphere requires a dramaturgical discourse that is more ready to pose ques-
tions than to give answers and that is constantly reflecting its relation to political
contexts without patronizing the audience or insisting on a particular interpretation.
More important than the dramaturg is the dramaturgy, collective whenever possible.

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Training

If dramatic writing loses its dominating influence on many kinds of theatrical practice,
dramaturgy still remains indispensable for the whole field of the performing arts and
also for the production of film and media, the organization of festivals and exhibitions
etc. And yet the question remains open if and how a “profession” so manifold and
difficult to define could be taught and trained. In times of rapid change, the dramaturg
of the twenty-first century will need to be open-minded, ready to accept the job as a
position on shifting grounds and to question the categories that used to define the
art of theatre. Just as it is a quality of contemporary art not to be always easily
recognizable as such, it is a quality of contemporary theatrical work often to trans-
gress our traditional definitions. Successful dramaturgical practice within the theatre
institutions of today demands a productive flexibility, a capacity to shift grounds
oneself and to switch from an argument based in literary knowledge to an argument
based in visual arts or in music, from choreography to document, from the strategy
of presenting something in front of an audience to a strategy of communication.
Dramaturgy needs the development of a number of skills and competences – but
among these skills is the capacity to renounce skills altogether, to be open and sensible
to unexpected changes in the process of rehearsal and production. This does not mean
faceless and faithless self-negation. The dramaturg has to learn that professionalism
easily turns into normalization and routine. And that a sort of Heideggerian Gelassenheit
may be an essential quality of dramaturgical practice – the calmness to let things happen
without imposing one’s own ready-made concepts on a work in progress. Working
in site-specific forms of theatre and performance already requires a certain sensibility
for space and context, but it can also be an inspiring way of learning and training
dramaturgical practice, on shifting grounds.

Notes

1 This article is a reprint from Performance Research 14.3 (September 2009): 3–6.
2 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 1961), 3–14.

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