Talking Dramaturgy & the Dramaturg (Part 2) | ADN Symposium 2016

Hello, I’m Nanako. First of all, thank you How Ngean and the organisers of this symposium, I’m very honoured to be here in Singapore again. I’m also very pleased and honoured to be in this panel, to hear all those information from professionals in dramaturgy. I hope my role, my responsibility in this panel is more about dance or performance, so I kind of wrote a little bit about the dramaturgy 101, but maybe I skip or I just skim it, and then I go into the dance part. So, and then, I’m not a native speaker, so I wrote down text, so I tend to read the text but please let me know if you have any questions, any concerns in terms of pronunciations and so on. So in the morning session we talked about tracing the history of dramaturgy, and then I think still from the dance point of view, it’s very important to have three points in Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which is actually Hide Taku-Ichiro-san has written in his text, in his book on dramaturgy, in Japanese, so there are three parts, like three points in the work of dramaturgs which is - planning of repertoire is one, production, sorry, so his role of dramaturg involves the planning of repertoire, production, and education. And functions that still remain central to the dramaturg’s role in contemporary German theatre. These three functions are still regarded as the main functions in the German Association of Dramaturgs, Dramaturgische Gesellschaft. So I take this kind of definition as a part of my dance dramaturgy work. And then the next part I’ll go briefly into postdramatic theatre, because it’s kind of a link to performance dance theatre that I’m going to talk about. German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann describes this new form of theatre, which appeared in Europe in the 1980s, as including both dramatic performance and dance. It was eventually reframed as postdramatic theatre, and in the following quotations, Lehmann explains some of the changes. I quote this small text: “In postdramatic theatre, performance art and dance, the traditional hierarchy of theatrical elements has almost vanished, as 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, but rather a dynamic balance to be obtained anew in each performance.” I think that’s also what we discussed in the morning session, that how this complexity of performance dramaturgy could be after this specific time of this theatre history. So I skip to... this postdramatic complexity in dramaturgy merges into the avant-garde movement within contemporary dance genres and practices. In Europe, the feudal [unclear] of dance, traditional ballet and signature techniques, such as [unclear] technique, are no longer the starting points for creating choreography. Therefore, new dramaturgical skills are required for two primary reasons. The influence of the US postmodern dance movement since the 1960s, and the impact of performance art. And dance scholar Myriam van Imschoot explains that in new forms of dance, dramaturgical skills can be understood as a competence in composing actions and reading their potential for significance in the weavings of the performance’s fabric. That’s her sentence. And this change in the directions of a new dramaturgical form of creation can be interpreted as a shift towards more research-oriented, open and interdisciplinary ways of choreographing, which often require the involvement of a practicing dance dramaturg. A dramaturg’s practical experience often articulates their particular approach to dance dramaturgy, which comprises descriptions of what dramaturgy may infuse in different working and creating processes. Compared to the dramaturgical practice in theatre, which may seek to distill the narrative meaning of a theatre piece for its intended audience, in one sense, dance dramaturgs aim to broaden the possibility of reading a piece in conjunction with its medium and method. Dance and performance studies scholar André Lepecki explains that his role as dance dramaturgy for Meg Stuart was to verbalise what he saw happening in a scene with what he calls ‘metaphorical explosions’ between sequences of events that happen randomly with no logic or coherent dramaturgy. A more comprehensive and critical discussion of the emerging piece would take place after rehearsals. Dance dramaturgy also invites critical discourse in order to talk about dance. And towards the latter half of the rehearsal process, Lepecki and his choreographer, Meg Stuart, work together to make the choreography more cohesive. So his performance analysis and contribution to discussions in and outside of the studio affected both the creative process and, through that, the reformulations of event sequences. Therefore dance dramaturgy in this case is the process through which interrelated metaphorical, analytical and critical discourses are absorbed into the creative process. In my understanding of dramaturgy in general, the term has two meanings. We discussed the definitions of the dramaturg in the morning, but I also, my text is also printed in the flyer, but one is ‘analysis of theatre theory’, how we see performance, and ‘theatre theory in practice’, so that’s how to make a performance. And the dramaturg integrates these two meanings of dramaturgy through his or her work. That’s my take. In the field of dramaturgy, dance dramaturgy in particular, is an innovating field. In contrast to classical dramatic theatre, in movement and dance performance productions, the audience are confronted with many different vocabularies and disciplinary perspectives, none of which play a hierarchical central role. They generally are not equally well-versed in all of them. And according to the Flemish dramaturgy, Marianne van Kerkhoven, dramaturgy and the dramaturg reflect the moment when theoretical and conceptual enquiries within dance become more pronounced and embedded. This engagement with discourse has produced a wide range of new approaches to dance that emphasise classical conceptions of choreography as well as foregrounding content and critical debate in and around the work. This is the kind of theoretical part of my talk, and then I’ll try to include more concrete examples that I’ve been working on in Japan and also outside of Japan. 

So as an example of the theoretical approach in dance dramaturgy, I’ll introduce two of my international dance projects. One is the Dance Archive Box project, and the other is my research project on dance dramaturgy in Asia at the Kyoto University of the Arts and Design. In the recent European contemporary dance scene, the form of reenactment provides an opportunity for artists to reconstruct dance histories as non-deterministic, non-linear and non-homogeneous. The questions of how to archive this most ephemeral art of dance illuminates the ontological and political questions that concern dance history. When a dance is archived to be recreated later, the originators of the work are mostly dead. Which is also the reason for archiving their legacy of dance. However, when a dance is archived and passed on to a second artist for a recreation, what happens if both the originator and the second artist are still present? Do they need to have the same communal roots or to consent to collaborate? If the second artist takes certain artistic liberties by recontextualising the dance, does that degrade the first artist’s work? Does the idea of sharing a dance subvert the boundaries of ownership and function in favour of artistic freedom for the second artist? Do the ecological circulations and artistic impact in the form of interweaving exceed the risks of cultural reappropriation - or not? How do the historical and economic backgrounds of the artists involved affect the power politics in the process of sharing dance? So, in this project, I discuss a contemporary dance archive project, Dance Archive Box. And this project was proposed and initially conceived in 2014 by Singaporean theatre director Ong Keng Sen, and it was presented at the international festival of arts [SIFA] last year. This programme was originally launched in collaboration with the Saison Foundation and with contemporary dancemakers in Japan. And in this project, dancemakers archived their own works not for conservation, but for performing and for having them performed. So it was planned that this international programme would end after it was handed over from its first sponsor in Japan to the second one in Singapore. But after SIFA, I inherited the project and recreated this presentation in Japan at The Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama this year. So maybe I’ll show some photos of this box. This is one of the archive boxes that we developed in the first part of the project. When the artists explored how to pass on works to people who do not belong to their group, I as a dance dramaturg played the role of cultural translator and negotiator to democratize dance knowledge without being submissive to culturally imperialistic globalised power. Communicating unwritten narratives in dance histories is aligned with my role as a dramaturg for this project. My objectives were the coax the various histories from the archive boxes and see if they could be transformed into more powerful realities, as well as to communicate through oral histories of the artists, vital information that was not included in the boxes. So one example is Chie Ito’s archive box, which was performed also by Natsuko Tezuka, Rani Nair, and Oohisui Hanayagi as users of this archive box. So just like briefly what’s inside, it’s a costume, some video, the maps, a kind of [unclear] seeds... yes. Since Chie Ito’s announcement last year that her dance company would be moving on from contemporary dance, Ito has been studying the uncontrollable nature of crowds, something she had remarked upon during this archive process. Her remarks suggested that she was inspired by a phenomenon in the audience, whose sense of self proliferated through performances of her archived work. Such essential information had slipped through the cracks and was not found in her archive box at the first phase, first part of the project, but was only discovered through oral history, through communicating with artists. And through the process of making their responses to the box, some users - we call artists ‘users’ who receive the box and make a response to the artist, we call these artists ‘users’ of the archive box. Some users started re-experiencing the history of the archive boxes and investigating archivists - so the people who made the archive box are ‘archivists’. The archivist personalities, which were included within the performative aspect in the archive box. Along the way, both archivists and users experienced linguistic and cultural translations within the global circulations of information. And through their own processes and in confronting the others, both archivists and users encountered conflicts, negotiations, control, resistance, arrogance, and vulnerability. Though the archivists might have tried to retain their original forms, they could never remain unchanged in the users’ responses. In contrast, miraculous coincidences also happened through exchanging archive boxes, even though archivists and users had never shared this information before. As a dramaturg, I played the role of the eye witness to observe these incidents. For example, this is Tezuka Natsuko’s archive box. A glass jar and a letter is inside. And then this glass jar was transmitted to Venuri Perera from Sri Lanka, and her concept of decolonizing the body by Natsuko Tezuka, so then Venuri Perera interpreted with a Sri Lankan passport in relation to westernisation and modernisation. Tezuka once commented that through the archive box, she wanted to transmit a kind of heat she felt during the creative process. During her previous creative process with her dancers, many of them appear to be suffering from fevers during the rehearsals, as if they were undergoing an initiation with the group. Her archive box as well might secretly demand that users be initiated into the heat. In her archive box of course, the fire could not be stored in a jar to be transferred to the next user. However, in the case of Perera, the fire appeared again to burn her visa application form during her response. By setting fire to her visa application, her underwear and her hair, and cleansing them in a bottle with powdered milk in her ritual, Perera aimed at setting herself free from the colonial past of her country, Sri Lanka. 

Regarding the practice of dance dramaturgy, I also carried out the research project that examined dance dramaturgy in Asia at the Kyoto University of Arts and Design, and explored the historical process of dance dramaturgy in relation to current performance making. So this is the next project. [aside: Two minutes? Ok, I’ll wrap up.] So basically this project - I organised two seminars and then the first part is the seminar with Raimund Hoghe, who is Germany’s leading choreographer-performer and also the dramaturg for Pina Bausch. I invited him and his team to Kyoto and presented his piece along with his seminar on dramaturgy. So dramaturgy in dance has really unpredictable elements, thus Hoghe’s collaboration with Pina Bausch between 1980-1989 is often cited as one of the first examples of a dramaturg working in a dance field. In the first seminar, dialogue between Hoghe and his collaborators was presented as a practical theory in dance dramaturgy. According to Mr Hoghe, dramaturgs in Germany, German performing arts, prior to him, concentrated solely on research in the library and were not related to production things. So he was deeply involved in Pina Bausch’s creative process where she had almost no prior work, no prior repertoire to be based on. And with dancers and collaborators, they started from scratch in rehearsals. He took this new role as dramaturg, as a dance dramaturg, which turned out to be historically related to Pina Bausch’s establishment of Tanztheater, so dance theatre. So maybe I skip the - and then the second seminar I invited - [gestures to screen] so this is Hoghe and Pina Bausch, and he also presented his piece An Evening With Judy. So for the second seminar I invited Japanese thinkers on dramaturgy. So one is Kikuko Toyama, and the other one is a theatre director in kabuki, contemporary kabuki productions, Yuichi Kinoshita. He also played the role of dramaturg, from my point of view, in his contemporary kabuki take Kurozuka and of other kabuki repertoires. He also talked about why we need dramaturgs in Japan, and his thoughts while working on Kinoshita Kabuki’s Kurozuka. So he also insisted that the dramaturg needs a speciality in the field of theatre or dance. He also is, he’s a specialist in theatre, kabuki theatre, so that’s also - that strengthens his role in the theatre productions, that’s also what he explained in the seminar. Kikuko Toyama also explained how this social aspect, like related to the dramaturgy of the piece or how the artworks, how the activities within and without the art context in Asia or in Japan could be also interpreted as an art or as a dance piece. And somehow like I think it’s also a social - how we include the social aspect into the dance is the role of my work as a dramaturg, if I work in those social dance or kind of, the dance project which is related to the social context in Japanese societies. So dance dramaturgy is still an emerging field, and even though this subject has been discussed since the 1980s, when dance dramaturgy was introduced in Asia, it was also inevitable that the developing critical discourse would dissolve into that about traditional and contemporary dance in Asia rather than adapting existing Euro-American discourse into an Asian context. In that sense, the practical theory that has been absorbed into Japanese theatre and dance in my examples, such as oral histories or communicating with artists, needs to be reconsidered in relation to practice as performing along with the theory embodied by the dramaturgs at work. Thank you, thank you. 

HN: Thank you to all three speakers. I’d like to quickly open this up for discussion, comments and questions. Whether it’s panelists speaking to each other or from the floor. Do we have any comments or observations or questions that you’d like to address to particular speakers? People are still getting warmed up; I will start with one. Please think of others, I’m sure it will come to mind. One of the things that I picked up on especially from the first two presentations with Shintaro and Peter were how - not so much the definition or the unpacking of the word dramaturgy or the term dramaturgy, or even the concept, but rather the different forms that have evolved. Kind of interesting how - especially for those of us who teach theatre, where we talk about different forms of theatre also, there seems to be with current developments in dramaturgy, some kind of alignment with dramaturgy to define theatre. From the example of the slow dramaturgy to dramaturgies of the real, right? And then Peter brought up new media dramaturgy. Where there seems to be almost an interchange of terminology of the word ‘theatre’ with ‘dramaturgy’ at play here. I would seek some kind of comment, actually. 

PE: I think it’s a good observation. It’s sitting, it’s making me reflect back on I guess the history of what we would call the discipline of theatre studies, and the way that it has had to define itself in relation to literary and cultural theory, but also trends in the humanities more broadly I think changed the nature of how we talk about our subject. And so dramaturgy I think is in some ways relating to some other contemporary theoretical discourses. If we’re talking about dramaturgy as a definition of theatre, of defining theatre, we’re really talking about the way in which dramaturgy lives within the study of theatre, we might teach in the academy, draws attention to questions of genre, form, context, interdisciplinarity - and the important aspect of this is it doesn’t privilege one particular, if you want to use a critical term, sign system of theatre. I had a very unusual entry into theatre studies because I’d never studied theatre studies, I’d studied drama but my PhD was in Japanese Studies, and I got a job in a theatre programme where semiotics was being taught quite rigorously. I guess the interesting thing there is all of the sign structures of theatre were being politicised and it was a moment of high cultural deconstruction, but essentially it was privileging certain kinds of things. It was privileging bodies and it was to a degree privileging a kind of textual analysis, or at least a very deconstructed version of that. I think the interest in dramaturgy is precisely because the field has become more interdisciplinary, and we can no longer just privilege one or two indicators of the performance experience. And so, dramaturgy allows us to think across a range of experiences of theatre simultaneously. I don’t know whether that’s helpful, but it’s certainly the case that myself and quite a few other people use ‘dramaturgy’ as a way of perhaps distancing ourselves critically from - from the limitations of some of the other critical frameworks. 

SF: I think dramaturgy has always to do with the structure - arranging elements into a structure, weaving elements into a text and those definitions can be applied to many new things. II’m principally working - my working language is Japanese and French, and I’m not a great reader of critical discourses in English, so I’m not too familiar with all the new dramaturgies you mentioned. So that’s all I can say now. 

PE: It’s - it just also reminds me, I mean theatre studies doesn’t determine theatre or performance. It really doesn’t, as much as professors might think we’re important, we’re not. I think what we’re studying using that critical terminology is absolutely something that has come from developments that, for example, Nanako and Shintaro were talking about. The field has changed, so the way we talk about the field, we’ve introduced that vocabulary I think into some of the critical frameworks. Partly in response to the fact that a lot of people working in the academy are also practitioners. There’s a lot of reasons for it, but I think that’s a significant one. 

HN: So, do we have any, or is everyone still mulling? All right, I have another one. Oh, sure. 

AS: Hi. So I’m a playwright based in Singapore. [laughs] That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m naturally hostile to dramaturgs. But I’m just looking at this title - looking for an Asian context, and I’m just wondering about how - could it be addressed a bit more. Why would we want to look for an Asian context, is there an assumption that dramaturgical practice is something that is emerging from, let’s say, you know, western or metropolitan centres of performance. Are there notions of paternalism, are there notions of imperialism involved in so-called importing dramaturgical concepts into this part of the world. Is there an assumption that drama in different parts of the world are evolving in stages and a level of sophistication is achieved once you have a dramaturg for your performance. So let’s say, you want to pitch a work toa  festival circuit, for example. Would it look better in your proposal if you say, oh, I have a dramaturg working with me. So this question - why the need for an Asian context, and questions about paternalism, imperialism, maybe importing certain structures in the visual arts world of the curator into theatre and performance. Thank you. 

HN: I’m just gonna answer that and then open it up to the three of you. The subtitle of ‘looking for that Asian context’ is totally my responsibility. As I was setting up this entire programme, there was this call, or there was this need for me to literally look at what it means to be, or what it means to collect or group together Asian dramaturgs, and why do we need to network with fellow Asian dramaturgs. And one of the things that I shied away from was to put together a programme where we did look at the theoretical viewpoints of dramaturgy in practice. Then there was this really great pressure for me to say, okay, do we actually need to look at what is Asian dramaturgy - is there such a thing as Asian dramaturgy. When I wrote to the three speakers, this is just a bit of background information, I left it quite open. There was always that email suggestion that they could pick it up - or might not. So it’s great that we are getting questions of these deeper political and sociocultural implications into areas of imperialism, postcolonialism -- what it means to inherit dramaturgy from a western point of view. I do not personally have any answers for that. But I do know that from this morning’s closed-door session, one thing was for sure -- the term itself, ‘dramaturgy’, was problematic and is and remains problematic in so many ways: linguistically, politically, socioculturally, in all areas. And we’re just beginning to understand that maybe we should do away with the term and just call it something else, but then what? Because then the problem starts all over again. So that’s how I’m reading what’s been going on this morning, and till now, I had the same, actually, question at the back of my mind, going, ‘no one’s really addressing the Asian thing’. But having said that, the anxiety of course then goes to, why should we address the Asian thing when dramaturgy itself is new to begin with, anyway, and why put on -- why locate it specifically, even though I did say its Asian dramaturgical aspects here. So just to give a bit of context. 

SF: [after significant pause] The term ‘Asia’ is still something mysterious to me. [laughter from the room] Japan as a country is a bit like the UK in Europe. We are a part of Asia and at the same time we’re outside. It’s a bit, um, like the position of the dramaturg. [laughter from the room] We’re inside and outside at the same time, and I -- yeah. [scattered laughs] 

HN: If I can just add, it’s I think for me, looking at the word ‘Asian’ in the context of what we’re doing, it’s very much, I would say, the same problem as the discipline of area studies. Southeast Asian studies, Asian studies, East Asian studies -- right? 

PE: I think I’ve two slightly incoherent responses. I remember a really nice story that a very distinguished playwright and director Sato Makoto many years ago did a collaboration project with the Australian playwright John Romeril. John had written a play when he was a young man that was about Australian prisoners of war and their treatment at the hands of the Japanese. This production was revived, translated into Japanese, and Sato did a wonderful production of it actually and at the time, and this was just an apocryphal comment, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but apparently Sato said to John: ‘Well, yes of course we’ll work together, because everybody else in Asia hates us.’ [laughter] ‘So we’re natural allies.’ I think this concept of Asia is deeply fraught and I’m -- it’s not really my place to say this inside Asia, but as I guess a professional scholar of the field, I’m somewhat resistant to retheorising back to certain kinds of essentialist cultural binaries. I think you’ve taken a critical term which is ambiguous and you’re exploring that critical term -- it’s a helpful term in some ways because it holds a very imprecise position within artistic practice more broadly. And so possibly it is a term that can have some interesting possibilities for practitioners in this time and place. But I’m very much taken, I think there’s a more sensible answer in your comment about the way in which when you bring the conversation of dramaturgy into particular places, they inflect through local conditions and local artistic practices. We very much had that experience in Australia, we did a ten-year project, a series of workshops that brought together very diverse groups of artists to talk about this idea, and we got many different answers. But I’m very much struck by the comment at the end of your paper [to Nanako] about the way in which, if you bring that conversation about dance dramaturgy into this region, you have this immediately, I mean almost confront some kind of dialogue around tradition and modernity. And so if there is a reason for bringing dramaturgy into this particular region, that might well be one of them, because it’s a very fascinating, I think, set of questions that are being provoked very much specifically within this region. That’s not a question that arises when you talk about the difference between ballet and contemporary performance in Europe, for example. So I think maybe that’s somewhere where we can take this conversation. That was my comment. 

HN: Do you have a question? Do you have a question perhaps to follow up, or... [Nanako thinks the comment is for her] no, Peter. 

PE: Oh, no, I was going to draw attention to that [gestures to Nanako], I was very struck by that comment. I found it really helpful. 

HN: Just to really quickly contextualise a bit, this morning, there were many discussions on the fact that within the cultural practices of Asia itself, the term dramaturgy, how do we align dramaturgy with mentorship for one, the idea of senior artists working alongside young artists of all fields. So there is, and I think Helly Minarti from Indonesia in fact struggled to use words to describe what would be normally termed or commonly termed as a dramaturgy, rather they wanted to break away from that because of the strong hierarchical systems, sociocultural systems there, where when you have a young artist paired with an older one, there is deference coming into play, there is the guru worship coming into play, how do we then get away from these systems? That’s something that we were talking about and unfortunately we just talked about it -- there is still much to talk about where then it goes back to Peter’s suggestion of dramaturgy being discursive and dialectical, as pointed out. Okay, moving on. Do we have questions from the floor? We have a gentleman there. 

A1: A question slash observation? 

HN: Sure. 

A1: This context of dramaturgy and an Asian context, for me, seems to be drawing things that originally were not linked -- to link now. It seems to be dovetailing towards a certain common direction. What I mean is this. I can’t remember the speaker who highlighted this notion of being aware of one’s own self, being aware of one’s own processes, dramaturgy draws awareness within the context of theatre or performance. 

HN: I think that was Alyson, self-identification. 

A1: Right, that was this morning. And I was just thinking, as we move further and further away from this notion of a monoculture, today the multi- to the trans-, it seems to reveal that a larger body of knowledge is emerging, it’s so large no one or a few persons can easily take down this body of knowledge. We need people to hold hands, to play with, to intervene, to disrupt, to make sense of all these things. And it seems like what originally appeared to be, you know, the director should know dramaturgy, the lifting of the page to the stage that enlivening, that embodying, that Brechtian approach, demonstration, regardless the director seems to be the one who has to know. To suggest to have a dramaturg or someone else with this person to do dramaturgy may, may seem to suggest this person lacking in info historically, aesthetically, performatively etc. But it seems to reveal that there is a gap, a critical gap, happening not only in many places -- we need someone else to hold hands with, and as you mentioned earlier, this dramaturg is not just one person, can be many, in all forms, all contexts, can be the actors, the scriptwriter, the arts managers, etc. So this larger body of knowledge from the context of culture, as we move away into something 21st century -- multi-, many, and there are these other trajectories with reference to the Asian context. I mean, the Asian context etymologically in the 13th century refers to the land of the rising sun, which requires us to have a sense of a global existence, land in the ‘east’, where the sun rises... a sense of the global. And who coins it? Is it a western context, is it a western convention that we are called Asia? Who called us to be in the east? And then therefore Asia? Sounds very postcolonial. To dialogue about Asian using English in itself is interesting. I think the larger context here is perhaps in this search for an Asian context, we are asking about, to be fair, maybe practitioners situated in Asia geographically. How are we doing theatre and what are the dramaturgical processes involved in our work? Just a thought. 

HN: Thank you for that. Do we have any comments or questions? Charlene. And then the gentleman over there. 

CR: Just to add on a historical note, in the 1980s, if not the early 1990s, Krishen Jit, a pioneer theatre director in Malaysia, a historian, critic, educator -- and in many ways I think he was also a dramaturg, though that word was hardly used at the time -- was writing about what is the contemporary, the indigenous contemporary that was emerging in Southeast Asia, but Malaysia particularly. And he wrote about what he termed the combination of eastern and western dramaturgies. So just to introduce that here in this forum because we’re looking at this notion of an Asian context, and the struggle with terminology is not new. And I think even when Krishen was writing about this notion of eastern and western dramaturgies, he goes on to clarify the western dramaturgy as highly literary and text-oriented in comparison to the more contextually grounded and emergent, in a way, although that too is a problematic dichotomy obviously, that in relation to the contemporary that raises other questions. But as the suggestion of a frame within which to consider an option to add the time, ‘the modern’, which was the dialogue that was percolating for him and other practitioners of that time, that was a suggestion, and that was one frame. And it just reminds me that the terminology is not only unstable now but then, you look back and what was unstable then, then gets a little bit fixed, and you forget, and here I refer to -- Krishen’s not here any more to say, ‘well that’s not what I meant and you got me all wrong’ [laughter from the room] as he most likely would have done, but you know, it sort of gets fossilised on the page. And then it relates to the notion of what then is archiving and documenting, which also came up this morning. So this space is one that has its history but then once you say it’s historical, we forget that it, too, is an unstable and fluctuating history. 

HN: Thank you. Very quickly, there was one more, we’ll take one more comment and -- hands up if you want the mic to go to you? 

A2: I assume first of all that this session is to unpack what it means of the ideas of dramaturgy in Asia and in Singapore. And I’d just like to maybe unpack a little bit further in the Singapore context, because in Singapore we study ‘theatre studies’, and there’s ‘performance studies’, and lots of people study it at the tertiary level, and I just want to understand in practical terms, as a performance studies scholar, what makes you different from someone who calls himself or herself a dramaturg? What kind of overlaps or things that you’re fascinated about -- what's the difference between for example a theatre studies scholar or someone who calls themselves a dramaturg. The second is more of a comment. For me I feel maybe it’s not so productive at this point to talk about the imperialism or the postcolonial ideas of dramaturgy in Asia, but I feel perhaps it is important for the Singapore scene to talk about the value of the dance scene or the theatre scene venturing into the ideas of dramaturgy, because I feel that if more theatre directors or dancemakers would work with a dramaturg here in Singapore to create works, it would be make perhaps really the work more conceptual, more sophisticated, so to speak, more critical -- and yeah. So to speak, yeah. Like Alfian says, would get you on the festival circuit around the world. 

HN: Thank you so much for that. Very quickly, just wanted to say that I’m actually quite taken or reminded, thank you for reminding us about ‘zapping’ from good ol’ Tadashi. It’s true, the zapping I think is something that we should think about, where if we’re looking at cartography, mapping which is important where there is a certain way of charting known paths into known territories -- there is always then the quick disappearances and reappearances, the quick discoveries and rediscoveries, and un-discoveries actually that might be happening here. So on that note, we would like to quickly zap this panel -- I would like to draw it to an end. I’d like to thank Shintaro, Nanako and Peter [applause from audience]. Thank you. Just a few housekeeping notes, our next session is at 4pm where we’ll be going into our first dramaturgy in action and hopefully will shed more light onto the kinds of practical realities that dramaturgs or practising dramaturgs are dealing with in different fields. More importantly, I think there is a request to clear the space to help use organisers put together or reconfigure the tables for the next session. Thank you very much.