Talking Dramaturgy & the Dramaturg (Part 1) | ADN Symposium 2016

HN: Hi there. Before we begin, I’d just like to welcome the general public and audiences into this inaugural Asian Dramaturgs’ Network symposium. As you know, some of you know, we had a closed-door meeting this morning, it was really productive, very meaningful, I’m afraid we did have to make a decision to have it closed-door because there was quite a few of us involved in intimate discussions which would - and it was an interesting discussion - that wouldn't really benefit a audience of this sort, which is why for this particular session and a few others we do have more structured, no less interesting, panels. So very quickly, I’d like to welcome you guys back, for those who were here this morning, and welcome to those who are just beginning this journey with us. This afternoon, to start us off, we’re going to be looking at this title called ‘Talking Dramaturgy and the Dramaturg’, with a subtitle of ‘looking for an Asian context’. And even though I did come up with the title, it’s a little, yeah, the whole idea was to even question whether we do need to, or is there one, of an ‘Asian context’. 

So very quickly I just want to introduce our panelists and myself. I’m How Ngean, I’ll be moderating this particular session. So let’s go from the extreme left. On the extreme left we have Shintaro Fujii, who is professor in theatre studies and currently the chief of the department of theatre and film studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He specialises in contemporary performing arts with a focus on Francophone countries such as France, Belgium and Canada, and Japan of course. He works on dramaturgy of the works of prominent artists such as Romeo Castellucci, Alain Platel, Robert Lepage and Dumb Type. Next we have Dr Nanako Nakajima. Nanako is a scholar and dramaturg of dance, and a certified traditional Japanese dance master. She currently teaches at Aichi University in Japan, but is also a research fellow at Free University Berlin. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Saitama University and she was a Jacobs Pillow Research Fellow and a visiting scholar at Tisch School New York University. I am just going to give brief introductions as our illustrious panelists for today and the rest of this entire event, their CVs and their achievements really run quite long. So please refer to the booklets or programmes that have been given out. Last but not least, we have Peter Eckersall, Professor of Asian Theatre at the Graduate Centre at City University of New York. He has recently, his recent publications include We’re People Who Do Shows: Back to Back Theatre: Performance, Politics, Visibility, and quite a few others. Peter was a graduate of the Rusden theatre program and co-founded The Men Who Knew Too Much, a performance group that was active for much of the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, he was the co-founder of Dramaturgies and is the resident dramaturg for the performance group Not Yet It’s Difficult (NYID). NYID’s award-winning performance and mixed media works have been widely seen in Australia, Asia and Europe. So without further ado, I’d like to invite Shintaro to start us off. Each speaker will have 20 minutes, and then after that we’ll open it for discussion and Q&A to the floor. Shintaro, thank you.

SF: Can I have the PowerPoint? I don’t know how it works... 

HN: Would it be better if Nanako and Shintaro - would it help if you guys switched places? Or are you ok there?

SF: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you very much first of all to the organisers in Singapore. I’m very much honoured and excited to take part in this inaugural symposium of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. I teach Waseda University in Tokyo, in the theatre studies department, and I am not really a specialist of dramaturgy in the practical sense, even though I dramaturged one or two times and then I’ve been doing dramaturgical things without being called a dramaturg. But anyway, here are some theoretical contributions that I might be able to make. I would like to make a small remark - dramaturgy is a very funny concept in this postdramatic age, when drama is less and less synonymous with theatre, the prefix ‘drama’ sounds very, very old-fashioned. And the term ‘performance’ is more and more often preferred to that of ‘theatre’. Isn’t it strange that genres such as dance, circus, opera - which by definition are not dramatic at all - hire more and more dramaturgs. [laughter from audience] It is striking that dramaturgs as a physical person and interesting dramaturgy and symposia and publications on dramaturgy are fluent in the contemporary landscape. Here is a list of some big name artists in Europe and in North America that are working with dramaturgs, and a list of recent publications in English and in French. This is my first remark. And then, when you try to think about dramaturgy, everyone agrees, indeed, that dramaturgy is a very tricky object, difficult to discern or define because of its polysemy that the term acquired with history, and because of the quite important differences according to languages, cultures, theatres and artists. I’m a specialist of performing arts in Francophone countries such as France, Belgium, and Canada, and in these countries, the notion and the practice of production dramaturgy is quite recent. That dates back to the 1960s, approximately. And there are almost no house dramaturgs in institutionalised theatres, unlike in Germany which has a tradition of institutional dramaturgs that started 2.5 centuries ago with Lessing, who wrote his Hamburgische Dramaturgie in the 18th century. 

Another source of possible confusion - dramaturgy can be found on different levels and be attributed to different people. First, dramaturgy can be discussed on the level of a written text, dramaturgs in the sense of playwrights, and etymologically, like it was remarked this morning, dramaturg in the Ancient Greek meant ‘playwright’, “dramaturge” in modern French, like in many other European languages, still means both ‘playwright’ and ‘dramaturg’. Second, on the level of performance, it is in a sense related to the collective work of a director, a choreographer, a dramaturg, and actors and dancers. This is, in fact, close to the idea of mise-en-scene or directing, that [unsure of name, at 10:09-10], a French theatre specialist says, he does not make any difference mise-en-scene in the theoretical sense and dramaturgy. Matthias Langhoff, a German director, theatremaker, also says - he doesn’t make distinctions between dramaturgy, mise-en-scene and decor. This usage is a little confusing because usually, the author of a performance is a director or choreographer, even if this authorship of a performance can sometimes be questionable. So, the dramaturgy of a performance is more attributed to the director-choreographer, with eventually his or her dramaturg, rather than to the dramaturg alone. And to make things even more complicated, as Patrice Pavis states, it also belongs to the spectator. And then, there was Brecht after the second world war, who inseminated the idea and the practice of production dramaturgy all over Europe. And then, since the 1980s, there was a shift from the Brechtian concept of dramaturgy, or the ‘old’ dramaturgy, to a more contemporary process-oriented ‘new’ dramaturgy. The term is taken from Marianne van Kerkhoven, the famous Flemish dramaturg. The new dramaturgy was born when the field of theatre was expanding, having gone through the Einsteinian revolution, according to the expression of [the French theatre specialist]. On the one hand, with the anthropological understanding of theatre led to include extra European forms of theatre into the theatre, on the other, postdramatic forms were very much developing. But in fact, these two dramaturgies, textual and performative, are not so different as they seem to be. Eugenio Barba does not define both in the same terms as the work of the actions in the performance, that is, the way different elements are woven into a performance, which can be constituted as a text. Text, etymologically, meant ‘weaving’. These are both a structure of the composition. Dramaturgy has always something to do with structures. It is about controlling the whole, the expression is again from Marianne Van Kerkhoven. These definitions, common to textual and performative dramaturgy, can hold true for the third definition of dramaturgy, which concerns the curatorial activities of house dramaturgs, of a theatre, of a festival, like we discussed this morning. This dramaturgy is related to the team of intendants and dramaturgs, producers, who decide to direct a principal of the activities. The term may be specifically related to the profession of ‘dramaturg’ - there are degree programmes in Germany or in France called ‘dramaturgy departments’ which train the future dramaturgs. Separately from that for the directors. And we also find usages as sociological metaphors as we discussed a little bit this morning too, to make things even more complicated. So to recapitulate, dramaturgy can belong to a playwright or a director or a theatre, or its intendants and dramaturgs, or a dramaturg proper, or any individual group or society, or a spectator, so there is no wonder it’s complicated to understand what dramaturgy is. And then I wanted to raise one point. It is possible and sometimes useful to distinguish a dramaturg from a dramaturgical function, which may not necessarily be fulfilled by a dramaturg. Not only are dramaturgs responsible for dramaturgy. Again, [the French theatre specialist] stresses the importance of nurturing the collective consciousness, the dramaturgical thinking, rather than creating a post of a dramaturg. And Alyson just made a remark at the end of the morning’s session, and I was really surprised at how she could anticipate my talk - ‘collective consciousness’ and ‘dramaturgical thinking’, these words I prepared consciously. It is very much possible that there is dramaturgy where there is no dramaturg, and yes, in some countries, as we discussed this morning, in Indonesia for example, there are people doing, effectuating dramaturgical functions, without being called a dramaturg. In Japan, too, there’s an appearance of the dramaturg as quite recent, it’s only for the past 20 years, but even before that, there was a dramaturgical function which was done by others who were never called a dramaturg. And then there’s another dramaturg, a Flemish woman, Myriam Van Imschoot, who was saying that you do not need a dramaturg to achieve the dramaturgical, and I totally agree with her. We can think of some examples of collective dramaturgy without a dramaturg. I can think of [unclear] from Flanders, [unclear] from Discordia, and Van Imschoot was citing the name of Boris Charmatz, a French choreographer, and [unclear]. There are many artists who don’t work with a specific dramaturg, but their works show very, very interesting dramaturgical points. 

And then, I would like to talk about contemporary dramaturgy, what interests me personally in the contemporary performing arts, and in the contemporary performance dramaturgy, in the sense of dramaturgy of a spectator. My first point concerns the activation of spectatorship, the presence of the audience. The spectator is part of the performance and the dramaturgy takes the audience more into consideration. We know that in visual arts, since Relational Aesthetics written by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998, the relationship with audiences is becoming an integral part of some artworks. There has always been, and then theatre, even before visual arts, theatre has always been relational. And it is - it is becoming even more so in contemporary theatre. There are more participatory performances that require the physical actions of the audience, and present reflections, asking for reflections from the audience, seeking a sort of emancipation of the spectator, according to the title of a book written by Jacques Ranciere. I recall Situation Rooms, a performance done by Rimini Protokoll, where 20 spectators, each coming into a three-dimensional set, it’s actually sort of a building, and they each come from a different entrance, guided by the virtual images on their iPads and each will be eventually playing a role for 19 other spectators who are becoming actors, actually. And there are no professional actors in this performance, except virtual ones you see on the iPad. The second point is that there is what I would call a dramaturgy of screen. That means sort of a dialectic of image and screen. I take these terms in reference to the theory of Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, dialectic of showing and hiding. That is very theatrical. I am thinking of such artists as Romeo Castellucci, Gisèle Vienne, [unsure of final artist name, 21:13-14], who present clear-cut, very aesthetic images on stage, yet intentionally left opaque. The image is also serving as a screen that hides something behind. Gisèle Vienne puts her work in parallel with the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet,  the writer who is usually associated with nouveau roman, or new novels. Gisèle is talking about the need not to let the audience understand everything, some things should remain enigmatic, otherwise the audience will be bored. I also remember Romeo Castellucci defines theatrical communication as a non-communication. The theatrical communication shouldn’t function in the mode of normal communication in a society. A last remark, the movement to new performative dramaturgy brings about a change in the nature of textual dramaturgy. The status of text or a piece of theatre has been radically changing. A text is often now written during and/or completed after the work-in-progress process, collective creation. The text is more and more integrated into multi- and intermedial performance, so again, to represent what I said about the definition of dramaturgy by Eugenio Barba, performative dramaturgy and textual dramaturgy are influencing each other. We shouldn’t make too much distinction between the two. And to conclude, to finish, we can safely say that dramaturgy is in the heart of a large transformation of process of theatre. It is in the heart of the transformation. Thank you for our attention. 

[applause] 

HL: Thank you so much for laying out quite a foundational map, actually, for the rest of us to think on and to then continue on this chat. Now I will invite Peter to continue. 

PE: Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Also just to extend my thanks to the organisers and say what a pleasure it is to be here and to talk about this complex topic of dramaturgy. I’m going to follow on from Shintaro’s paper a little bit. In some ways I’m going to shadow the paper and introduce some of the same ideas from a slightly different perspective, I think. I’m very much aware of the fact that this is an exercise in mapping, but I was thinking also of another critical term introduced by Uchino Tadashi called “zapping”. May years ago, about 10 years ago, Uchino wrote quite an influential essay of essentially a mapping of 1960s avant garde performance into the present day. And he called this essay “Mapping and Zapping”. Mapping suggests a certain kind of relationship to ideas, perhaps lines connecting ideas, a certain kind of spatial or temporal relationship. Zapping offers the possibility of going into a black hole, and then just reappearing somewhere else. It creates perhaps slightly less obvious connections, and in some ways I think creates the possibility for things to coexist even though we don’t quite know how they do. This somehow speaks, I think, to an important concept of dramaturgy. It leads us to a number of critical tools, too, in giving - sorry, critical terms, which I think have already been introduced and foregrounded in the paper that we’ve heard and will continue to be discussed in the following paper. The ways we might describe this might use different words, but it strikes me that the word ‘network’ is very important. Dramaturgy as a practice - both as a theory and a practice - is always imbricated in a certain kind of network of relations. It enables and comes, arises from collaboration, contestation and disruption. And so all of those terms were, I think, introduced this morning, in this morning’s discussions. It also makes me think of the term ‘apparatus’. Some of the conversations we were having about both the existence of dramaturgy as a cultural practice or as a production practice within the context of contemporary performance-making, maybe in Singapore for example, there’s something very much apparatus-like about the existence of dramaturgy. This means that we are introduced to notions of systems, this means that we’re introduced to various regimes that might teach us how to do dramaturgy, but it also means that, like the kind of Agamben notion of apparatus, it’s something that we don’t really want to keep too close to, it suggests a certain kind of closure and a certain kind of possibility for surveillance, almost. 

So, moving on from these critical terms, I want to sort of elaborate on David Pledger’s discussion of dramaturgy as an operating system, and think of it how we think about an operating system existing within a cultural system. Thinking about how dramaturgy starts to bridge those two possibilities. Dramaturgy for me and also for my teachers, and for the work that I’ve always done with people like David in NYID, has always been a bridging process, it’s always been about bridging something or other, bringing together people, ideas, critical practices, politics, performance forms, in the context of live performance and sometimes media. So, for me dramaturgy is always a bridging practice, it’s always between things. It’s always, I think, in Marianne van Kerkhoven’s terminology, ‘a space of becoming’. She talks a lot about the possibility - or she used to - talk about dramaturgy as always being something that was malleable to this idea of bridging possibly discrete and sometimes oppositional practices. So there’s a very strong framework around dramaturgy as a bridging practice, but that also means that there’s also this somewhat flexible understanding of what it means. And this opens it up to the possibility of these kinds of critical terms, like network, like assemblage, that I’ve been discussing. Dramaturgy is also about addressing the wider conditions of society and culture and relating those conditions to performance, I think that’s something that we’ve all acknowledged this morning. But that also means that there are new possibilities for dramaturgy, I think, to operate in this, shall we say, extra-theatrical or extra-performative dimension, and this cultural dimension. I overheard a slightly funny conversation from some curators the other day at an art gallery where they were lamenting the fact that all they seem to do these days is make conferences and symposia. And in a way, I think dramaturgs are moving into this kind of practice as well. So we can think about the work we do in a production context, but we can also think about the work we do more broadly in a kind of discursive space, in a space of the possibility where performance is being represented as a form of research, as an ‘ideas’ practice, in relation to the broader cultural space. This, I would argue, is a dramaturgical process, and it should be seen as something that is part of the dramaturgy of performance. That then gives us this notion, which I’ve used in the past, this being an expanded dramaturgy. Something that expands from the possibility of the theatre and essentially ‘zaps’ itself into all of these other critical, political, cultural spaces of possibility and transformation. There is this very productive relationship then, that is held within the crucible of dramaturgical practice, between artistic processes, be they performance processes, theatre processes, or dance - and other artistic processes, I’ll argue in a minute, and this wider cultural sphere. And the way that those interactions happen, I think, are explored sometimes by dramaturgs. They’re also explored by other artists constantly, but dramaturgs very often come to a project with a view that they’re interested in perhaps writing about those connections, developing those connections and making them not just visible in the critical act of making performance, but perhaps extending the life of that performance into some other critical sphere. So this aspect of dramaturgy which is about perhaps debating and actually creating conferences and symposia, as the curators were complaining about, perhaps moving into the sphere of creating other kinds of discursive events, bringing people together, and so on and so forth. 

The other idea I want to introduce is - I think that contemporary theatre is inherently dramaturgical. And I don’t - but what do I mean by this, I mean that contemporary theatre and, well let’s use the word performance, it’s a more helpful critical term, and perhaps artistic term, because it’s perhaps more inclusive of the range of performative actions that are taking place in the world - contemporary performance is dramaturgical because it has a very strong awareness of its own forms, its own conversations, its own possibility for existence as a cultural form. And it’s very often making those conversations, even if they’re hesitant conversations about its inherent politicality or its inherent enculturation or its inherent space of critical discourse - part of the production itself, it becomes visible in the operational logic of a work itself. A good example of this is a recent film performance called Event for a Stage by Tacita Dean, who made a film work essentially, a two-camera film work which was performed live at Carriageworks in Sydney, and was also filmed live, featuring the actor Stephen Dillane, most well known for his work in Game of Thrones, but actually is a very complex figure, he’s in some ways an interstitial figure, he’s between so many things. And in this performance, he essentially performs a performance where he’s responding to text that he’s being fed by the film director, live in the space, while also recounting his own life story, his own biography, as somebody who was born in Australia but has worked for his whole life in England and has returned to Australia to pay respects to his dead father. And so there’s layers of story that are being explored and perhaps exploited in this work that are made very visible to us as the audience. There’s layers of conversation about form - are we watching a performance? I actually didn’t see the work as performance, I saw it as a film work because the ultimate work is shown now in an art gallery context as a live film work, but very interestingly, always shown using 16mm film projection, so there’s also a conversation about material, the materiality of film in this work. And the work concentrates on this dialogue between the actor and the camera and the clapperboard and these multiple layers of story and the fact that he has to respond both to the sort of insistent interruptions from the director, who’s giving him new pieces of text, and the fact that film cameras have only something like 12 minutes of film in them, and they run out, and at the end of that time, he has to pause his performance in a live performance context and then make the connection to the next part of the story as they reload the film camera and move on to the next phase. So it’s a very interesting film in the sense that it is a mediatized version of a performance which is really, I think, on one level, very much a conversation about dramaturgy. It’s all about the kind of networks of story, material, materiality, form, context, all of which are kept alive at the same moment in this performance. It’s quite a stunning piece of work. 

We also see, I think, the proliferation of terms associated with dramaturgy. Some of these are very helpful, perhaps some of them are a little bit obscure. I was reminded of my use of the word ‘slow dramaturgy’ yesterday as one way to attempt to describe what I was seeing in the work that Shintaro’s already described that came into this kind of new dramaturgical moment in Europe began to see this work, it looked very different to work that had come before, I didn’t really know how to describe it, and so I became fascinated with its dramaturgy. In what way was this form different to what had previously been seen? Eddie Paterson, a colleague of mine from the University of Melbourne, tried to theorise this idea of slow dramaturgy. But we also have Cathy Turner’s work on architectural forms of dramaturgy, the connection of dramaturgy to space and urban existence. Her own company in the UK takes people on these kinds of encounters with urban space and they discover things as they go along these journeys, which are both tangible things like the existence of buildings and so on, but also the stories behind those buildings and the kind of micro-histories that exist. 

Carol Martin has introduced the term “dramaturgies of the real” into our conversation, responding I think to a vast amount of work that has taken place in the last decade or more. Companies like Rimini Protokoll, but I think many, many other companies, that are bringing in this sort of context of reality into the performance space, and we have become a little bit, in a way, less pleased with the idea of theatre. We’re less pleased with the idea of acting, we’re less able to deal with the kind of reality of, not the reality but the kind of - the historical appendages of this fake form of people acting, putting on fake costumes, adopting fake accents, putting on all of these kinds of - essentially layers and layers and layers of mediated resistance to the idea that you’re just being there on the stage. And so now when we go to the theatre, very often we’re not even sure we’re watching theatre. We’re watching people talk, we’re watching people do lectures, we’re watching people write stories, we’re watching people film other people, we’re watching people really have sex, we’re watching people suddenly talk and then, for no apparent reason, dance. We’re watching a series of quite interesting interruptions, but also in some ways, all of these things are drawing attention to the kind of, the dramaturgy of the real. The reality that’s being depicted on the stage as an actual reality, as something that’s been lifted from a kind of slice of life that is then relocated into the theatrical space for some kind of temporary rearrangement of those items, those experiences, those strips of behaviour, if you like, for the purpose of the performance. There’s no idea that this is another space, though. It’s something that we bring out of the real and the real continues beyond that space. And the idea that theatre interrupts that or is different to that, or is kind of smiley-face frowny-face, or the kind of separation of the stage and the audience, that’s something that has been challenged by these notions of the dramaturgy of the real. I’m also interested in the kind of way in which new dramaturgy and this dramaturgy of the real has introduced I think a way of understanding - and I use this word, it’s a very complicated word to use, but - ‘objective’. An ‘objectiveness’, this new kind of objectivity that is coming into dramaturgical practice. So we see this, I think, very interestingly, in the work of Okada Toshiki for example, in Japan. But also Raimondo Cortese in Australia, is another artist who does this, and there are many, many artists now - we see this in a sense introducing animals into performance in Castellucci’s work or in Ivo van Hove’s work. There’s always an opportunity to interrupt the kind of fictional stage with this kind of objective depiction of something. This objectification of an experience, this description of something that’s happening, this lifelike relationship to an objective reality. And I think this is very challenging, because objectification is something that we’ve been very critical of in relation to the depiction of human subjects on the stage for example, for many decades, we’re very concerned about, and I think especially in this context, in so-called non-western contexts where we’re talking about dominant cultural practices in theatre, there is this history of objectification, for example, of Asian bodies in a way that’s quite discriminatory. But what I’m talking about here is much more a kind of Brechtian sense of bringing some kind of awareness of an objective reality to the stage, some kind of distanciation. And so what I see dramaturgy doing in this, is introducing processes of interruption, introducing processes of ways to remove the spectator from this imaginary world of the stage, and also empowering actors with the ability to actually be themselves in performance, and actually present themselves on stage but also we see a lot more people in directing and so on and so forth who have a particular objective style. They develop a critical voice and they explore that critical voice over a number of works. 

The final thing I’m going to talk about very briefly is new media dramaturgy, which is a concept we’ve been working on in a research project that my colleagues Helena Grehan, Edward Sheer and myself have been developing over the last couple of years. And here, we’re working on and about and with a group of artists who have taken their work into object spaces, using objects in performance, using robots, using nonhuman elements as performance, and there’s a lot of concern now about the way in which these agents perform. They certainly express, they certainly entertain, they certainly create contexts for conversation and ideas. The artist says that his process is to listen to what these things want to do. So he doesn’t try and over-determine the work by saying, I’m going to apply my artistic vision. He says, I’m going to observe this object in the space and I’m going to find out what it wants to do. Now this is an interesting way to describe an artistic process, but it’s also interesting from the point of view of this idea of this kind of new form of objectivity. If we approach theatre from the point of view of thinking, well, what do these people want to do, what does this thing want to do, what do these stories want to tell us, well then I think we can think about dramaturgy as a kind of critical practice of this kind of certain objectivity that I’m talking about. 

So, just to wrap up, I think if we’re talking about zapping, well then we’ve had a number of jumps through cyberspace there, where we’ve gone from the possibility of dramaturgy linking us to the real, linking us to the object, linking us to the ideas of a critical practice, linking us to the world of symposia, discourse and art events, and all of these things I think are certainly activities that are very strongly associated with dramaturgical practice. The last big one that we’re going to introduce in this panel is dance, and dance dramaturgy, but that’s another story, so, thank you. 

HN: And with that great segue, I don’t want to interrupt - Nanako would you [inaudible]? Thank you.