Dramaturgy in Action I: Practical Realities (Part 2) | ADN Symposium 2016

LY: Ok. I might be a special case. I mainly make theatre pieces with my students, and I am in the role of concept-maker, tutor and educator. So that is a perhaps easier and seemingly not that problematic version of dramaturg. But I do experience many difficulties some times. First of all, I am a documentary theatre-maker and the pieces I make deal with the current issues of China. China, as you know, is a country that is constantly changing, progressing, complicating, but still problematic. And one of the difficulties that I have, as you can perhaps imagine, is censorship. For example, YouMou, that is one piece that I did last year with my forty students. And I functioned as the role of theme-maker: I made a scene and set up the concept, and I also framed the whole piece. We started the piece on the public square and I will explain it later. The theme of the piece is the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the economic brilliant city of Beijing. The forty students each did interviews with more than 160 Chinese people from all social statuses: successful painters, businessmen, street cleaners and beggars on the street. We started the performance on the public square – it’s the Drum Tower Square – with a sort of flash mob dancing. And in China to perform in open-air public square is somehow a sensitive issue because it could be understood as political protest and gathering is always dangerous. Before the show my friends in Germany joked with me: “If you land in prison, we can help you get out. But we need at least three weeks time but we also might not make it.” But I was not arrested; it was not a big issue. For me to make this piece, I just functioned – I divided the forty students into groups and they each made small pieces: each ten minutes, twenty minutes. I just functioned as a tutor and guide. And sometimes also babysitting and put all the pieces together. But the whole frame – the starting point and the other pieces – I did the whole concept. That is, the audience watching the flash mob action on the square. And then the audience were divided into age groups and each group has a tour guide. The tour guide just guided the group through the small lanes in the nearby are of the Drum Tower, and showed the audience the real side of Beijing. Because the area is quite full of tourists and there are many sightseeing spots – but it’s an illusion. In fact, there are many poor people living in this area – in the small lanes. For example: twelve street cleaners live in one dormitory room that is about twelve square meters. Each having a very small piece, like one cube metre, and that’s the second part. And in the third part, in the theatre, the forty students who do the investigation also do a lot of theoretical readings – they are also the performance themselves. So you can see this whole piece is made of the students. The forty dramaturgs are students, but they have to act themselves. They have to function as directors for themselves. And the choreography was made by the students themselves. They have a movement tutor but they did the choreography by themselves. So this is the piece – 

Yup. And sometimes I also work with international directors, and then the cultural barriers are immediately visible. Last year I did a project called “About the Beautiful New World” with a very young German director called Matthias Jochmann. It was about the utopian ideas of communism in the elder Chinese generation. And my idea was each student – I have about ten students – they should interview their own grandparents about their ideas of a future – a better future – after thirty years. And now, thirty years have passed, and we land in China, right now. For me, as a dramaturg, I have to organize the whole process of investigation and organize the young director, Matthias Jochmann – he should go to each homeland of the ten students to make interviews. It was Spring Festival time so the students also go back home. They have conversations – the students and Matthias Jochmann – have conversations with the grandparents of the students. And there is a huge amount of materials: the recordings, the pictures, and they also have to collect materials of such things. For example: photos – that’s a photo of a grandma of a young student. And also diaries. And this is the application for the party member – to become a party member – belonging to the grandparent of a student. We have a huge amount of materials and I have to help Matthias Jochmann to pick up the useful materials and organize the whole text for the performance. And I also introduced the students and Matthias Jochmann to some so-called “New-Left” intellectuals. For example, Han De Qiang and Feng Xiang. They are still Maoist, and they are still having an utopian idea of a better future, right now. For example, Han De Qiang has opened a bio-farm nearby Beijing, and in the farm he just gathers eighty people from around the country. They live in dormitories and work on the farm, it’s really like a communist idea of utopia. He also hangs a huge portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall of the canteen. And I organized this conversation between Han De Qiang and Feng Xiang and the students and Matthias Jochmann in order to help them understand this very special idea of utopia in Chinese society, thirty years before and right now. And I also did a lot of historical and political research to try to explain everything to the younger generation – Matthias Jochmann is also quite young, in his mid-twenties. But we land in, for me, in some kind of a failure of the whole production because it is very hard for the younger generation to understand the whole history and cultural background of the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution. When we performed on stage, some audience members thought that it was superficial – it’s just a fragmented impression of China from a foreigner. But for me, it’s a very meaningful piece because I brought two groups of people: Matthias, as a young German who grew up in Frankfurt, and my students, also in their twenties, they can stand on stage and talk about their real opinions of what they see and experience, what their conversations with their grandparents was like. It was never done before. Some theatre critics liked the piece and they thought that it was very touching and genuine. But for me it is not that important. What’s important for me is, as a tutor and educator / dramaturg, I just made the – theatre as a forum. I brought different people together, they shared their opinions, then they talked. The show is like a forum, like a talk between generations, between different cultures, and that is the most important for me because it made young people grow. 

RL: Thank you very much. We move now to Sankar. 

SV: Dramaturgy Practical Realities. When I studied in School of Drama back in 1996, there was this one dreadful text that we had to learn: “Sanskrit Theory of Drama and Dramaturgy”. (Laughter)

I bet that nobody has read this book completely. I give it to How Ngean to continue his work. But what remained from that book is the kind of categorization, or the, to look at the structural analysis of a work. Part of it is literature, part of it is performance. I will go into the performance side of it to give you a brief of what it is. There are five stage which are mentioned, of the nature of the substance, the phase of the action. So these are the two columns. It’s full of taxonomy and columns. So one column is the nature of the substance and the second column is the phase of action. So these are all columns and tables to kind of categorize action and looking at structural engineering of a performance or a work. 

The five are (tapradirthy), the nature of substance is (beejan) which is seed, (bindu) is a seed and then it spreads, then it shows itself up like a creeper. And then (pergaree) is the conflicting force, and the (kharyam) is the substance. So how does the seed grow to become the substance. That is the nature of the subject. Then we have the (avastha) which is the phase of an action which is (arunban) - beginning, (aetnam) which is effort, then there is (pratyaasha) which is hope, then there is (nyethyapti) which is a challenge, then there is (falagamalam) which is the fruitation, or the achievement of the objective. So when these five are joint with the five phases of action, they become the five junctures. So we have the (mukersandi) the first juncture is the face, the second juncture is the counterface, the third juncture is the pregnant stomach, the fourth juncture is the pelvis, and the last one is the feet. So there is this beautiful metaphor of the body to sort of look at structure. So this stayed with me, and this structure remains on a very subconscious level whenever I look at creating work or curating festivals. I give you a brief example of a creation work I did and then I will go into the festival curation part. As a maker, I collaborated with a Japanese actor, Micari, quite renowned in Japan. To make a piece based on a local Malayalam vernacular poem written back in 1947. This poem is a story of an elephant – it is about the strength and the vulnerability of nature. So elephant becomes a big metaphor for nature because if you look at an elephant: the way he uproots a tree and throws it – you know the strength of nature. The same time if you look at the way that men – we, the people in Kerala – you know, break the will of an elephant and make it into a slave, you learn to know how fragile nature is. This poem is a very beautiful poem and I wanted to collaborate with this Japanese actor who does not speak Malayalam and who doesn’t know elephants the way we know elephants. So I initially started as a producer, then I started working as a director, then I started working as a composer, then I started myself in acting, then eventually the solution came when I started to intervene as a dramaturg. So we have a non-dramatic form that had to be dramatized. So that is where I felt I had to go in into this process as a dramaturg instead of a director. We started by cutting the poem into units and sections and beats and looking into the detailed structure of that. I explained the structure to my collaborator and then she would then propose back physical actions, physical phrases of actions or movements and then building these two things together, we created the piece. I was not interpreting the piece as a director, my role in this piece is more like a dramaturg. 

Coming back to this idea of the festival curation: this festival that I am curating is called the International Theatre Festival of Kerala which started back in 2008. From 2008 to 2014, it was more geographically focused. We had South Asian countries come for the first year, then we had the Afro-Asian theatre festival, then we had the Latin-American theatre festival. Then we had a change in the government, we had right-wing government come into power so we had three years of Europe, Europe, Europe. 

So in 2015 I was appointed as the Artistic Director of the festival. I won’t talk about that one but I will talk about the recent one – the 2016 festival. 15/16 there was also a change in the central government. We had the right wing Hindu fundamentalist party – we still have that in the central government. After they came into power, the secular fabric of society was kind of disrupted. I’m sure that you’ve heard about this news about atrocities against women on a high. We have this kind of caste-based pride, caste-based discrimination all on a high. There is a growing intolerance against progressive writers. There are huge issues in universities – children are going into protests and strikes and they are being violently cracked down. So all this is the context of the festival. For me, the body became very important. The body as a metaphor for structure. The body as a physical entity has an undeniable role in contemporary theatre and dance. The case of research and exploration on the human body’s social, aesthetic, expressive and transformative potentials have led to various aesthetic shifts in the field of performing arts in terms of form and intention. In the various modes of expressions in performance, whether it is movement or stillness, the body is the most perceivable and the only tangible medium of the actor and dancer on stage. 

Political. Bodies are controlled by various powers that constantly regulate, oppress, and restrict the possibilities of how human bodies can exist and inhabit a space. Institutional powers, governments, disciplinary codes, law and order institutions, economic production and consumption, religious scriptures, moral and social mores all intricately and thoroughly inscribe, categorize and mark bodies into hierarchies and systems. Individuals are denied the right to control their own bodies and in turn, bodies resist and protest against these modes of oppression and control. It is when bodies oppose each other that they are further segregated, sometimes overpowered, destroyed or transformed. Thus, political life performs itself through our bodies. Body political. The Body is often used as a metaphor to describe functions of a state, an organization, a group of people etc. Words and terms like head of state, headmaster, general body meeting, governing bodies, a body of people – are all structures where the head and the rest of the body are interdependent. At the top of the body is the head, which can’t move or do anything by itself but can generate the intention and the will to act. At the bottom are the feet that work to execute the head’s intentions, but they don’t have any agency making the decisions. Every body has a left and a right, every body has a trunk and its extremities, and margins as well. Every body has memories and emotions, and it is a treasure trove of capabilities. Each organ works in unison for the optimal functioning of the body. The body as a metaphor is particularly useful when accessing the health and fitness of society or a nation state. And it may be now time to turn our lenses to an entirely different set of bodies. The festival brought together tales of bodies that waged and witnessed wars. Bodies that are waiting, bodies that are seeking refuge, bodies that are excluded, bodies that are buried, burned alive, suffocated bodies. Bodies that are subjected to gendered violence, bodies that are split apart and destroyed. Bodies that do not fit into the bounds of race, caste, color and gender. And women’s bodies that continues to be the battleground for man’s sexual, social and political wars. The festival opened with the legendary choreographer Chandralekha’s last creation, Shareera, which means “The Body”. And ended with Mallika Taneja’s award-winning Thoda Dhyaan Se, “Be Careful”. So with this curation I hope to explore the multiple interpretations of the body – political and body political - over seven days and twenty performances, what I imagine to be a large play, with seven acts and twenty scenes. Thank you.  

RL: Thank you. And last and certainly not least, Giselle. 

GG: Thank you. Ok, I’m going to segue a little bit in the body as there’s this lovely image I would like to talk about. The reason why I chose this case study that I will be presenting is because it’s something I wasn’t prepared to work on as a dramaturg so the experience was different, to say the least. And more interesting to talk about is how I negotiated collaboration with the people I worked with. I guess my background is really – I’m really guilty with having a western understanding of dramaturgy, also because I started fairly late. I only started practicing in 2011. And it was during my schooling in the United States. From there, like knowing a little bit about histories and theories – it was a general theatre programme – I started doing more new play development work with playwrights in a room and reading and giving feedback. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from. So when I had gone home to Manilla in 2013 a lot of the work I ended up doing was kind of interesting because playwriting – when I was in school as an undergraduate then was kind of, according to Rody Vera, who’s also a playwright and a dramaturg, said the playwright was dying, playwriting was dying, back then. That was not too long ago, and now we have festivals trying to support new playwrights in that sense. But it’s interesting because in that amount of time – about twelve years – a lot of the work is really interested in looking at – there are a lot of canonical works being done in translation and adaptation. When I had gone back home I had done about four of those. And it’s interesting how that kind of production is one that necessitates a dramaturg or asks for one, whether from an institution or a director. So that was interesting. In between that, this particular production happened and I guess I will show you a clip. A marketing clip from the students, it was done at a university called The College of Saint Benilde. And they had asked us to come and work with their students on a production of an epic. A Southern-Philippine epic. And the person who asked me to come in was a choreographer, who had worked with previously another production and she was kinda interested in developing a new physical theatre, and what kind of stories should we tell in this particular form and those were the questions we were asking together before we started rehearsals. I’ll just show you what it looks like so the sonography is a little clearer. 

Maybe while that’s happening I can start reading a little bit. I’m not much of an academic so what I’m going to do is to read a little bits and excerpts from a blog. Over there, we can start with that (points to video) 

So that’s a brief excerpt of what it looked like. I’ll start reading a little bit because what I usually do is a form of archiving or remembering the work (through) blogging. I blog about the production and process and actually put together whatever we talk about. It becomes a resource, where I put my research, actors come to it and they can comment on it sometimes and we can talk about in rehearsals. Then I start telling stories about what happened in rehearsals if I can, within the time frame. This was done in October 2014, so the first entry was “Why This?”. So Agyu: Patungo sa Paraiso is a physical theatre adaptation based on Manobo epic, Ulahingen. There are many sources of the Ulahingen as there are sub-groups of the Manobo people. Many sources cite Ulahingen as an epic of (…) Manobos of North Cotabato. Other prominent sources are (…) – so these are all areas in Mindanao. (…) is the chant: many details of the epic are also changed depending on the storyteller – as with most oral traditions. The social situation – I highlight social situation – of the people at the time of the performance. But the general structure is the same throughout the many versions. The (…) is the base or the beginning, the story of how the characters enter (…) paradise after many years of exodus and hardship. The (…) are branches or episodes that follow the events of the Kepunpu’un. Each (…) is an episode complete in itself. Because of the breadth of this epic, the theatrical adaptation will only be dealing with common events of the Kepunpu’un, combining several versions so part of my process here is to have big Manilla paper on the wall and kind of tracking the different versions we were able to find based on the research we were able to access. Now the next question is this is an oral tradition right? This is an epic, so why this medium? Why physical theatre? The choice of medium is very personal to the artist, the director I worked with, and evolved to prove itself as a self-sustaining choice. The director/choreographer is named Delphine Buencamino, started theatre at a very young age and discovered dance at a later age. Having always had to choose between the two and then feeling always missing out on one, she decided to explore the possibilities of combining the mediums, combining theatre and dance and text and movement, especially because both media were performative and communicative and with the belief that the result would be powerful storytelling. In this instance we used the term “physical theatre” through a different shape then dance theatre, which can refer to any form of dance that communicates narrative. Although there are also many definitions of physical theatre and the world and can be used to describe performances ranging from mime to comedia dell-arte. This adaptation falls under the more contemporary understanding which simply means that narrative and character are told through an essentially physical means with choice of text that is economical to the storytelling. Since we are not working with a rip-and-script, but rather basing the story on many versions based on research – some dating 1965 and so on – the process will require the actors and creative team to improvise and devise, another justification for the choice of physical theatre as a way of mounting this text. Further, although the origin of the story is a solo chant, the content of the story has many scenes and situations that hold great potential for movement or action-based portrayals such as fleeing, fighting, hunting, building – hence the artistic decision to stage it as a movement piece. So why the subject? There are so many epics to choose from right? We selected this piece because we wanted to work with a source that is deeply Filipino, I guess a part of it is trying to figure out what that is, right? And something that is rarely seen or staged. It’s not as popular as other epic forms, at least in Metro Manilla, as far as I know. Many of the productions we see on stage today are foreign texts and this is the current landscape of Manila, translated or adapted for a Filipino audience. However, we would like to work in the reverse: using Filipino literature to expand the geography of canon classics in the world of theatre and prove that our local epics are as universal and transcendent as classic staples. We were drawn to this particular piece because of its obscurity, partially. One reason for it now being popular is that it doesn’t feature a love story – or at least it isn’t a large part of the narrative. What it does probe into are issues of territory, loyalty, defense, working for one’s people and the journey and challenges to paradise. It’s obscurity is what attracted us to the piece so as to introduce it to the Filipino students because it was for a university audience, beyond the other more popular epic forms. Moreover, there are many events that have similar parallels to biblical narratives like the Exodus and the multiplication of loaves and fishes. As well as Greek myths, like the interference of the gods and superhuman strength of the characters. We are aware, however, that part of our understanding of the Kepunpu’un is based on comparing it to those Western texts, as opposed to the reverse: using our own culture with which to view Western literature. But we wished to assert that Agyu is our Beowulf, Agyu is our Mahabharata, Agyu is our Iliad, Agyu is our Odyssey. It is a part of our national history; we must know it. The staging aims to change that by making the (Agyu) more accessible to the academia and our contemporary society. So it is about the objective. That is what we wanted to do. Let’s figure out what happened as we progressed. So I have a few rehearsal notes that I took around October. It started with Delphine and I really summarizing each Kepunpu’un and each versions and trying to figure out the differences: whether they were the same or they were not the same. It was really difficult but a lot of fun. So that was the first rehearsal and we talked about it with the actors. Of course, it’s an epic so it’s supposed to show a whole lot of people, like an entire community of people. But we were working with four dancers, as you saw, so how many people can you illustrate in that narrative with just four people? That was one of the questions that we were asking continuously. We did a lot of improvisation with them, but I’m not a dancer or a choreographer – I cannot move as elegantly, so I would just watch them as they did the improvisation. We would really just take bits and pieces of the epic or whatever we resonated with and try to figure out how they would express it via their bodies. And that was a fun beginning to that process. This is important dramaturgically because there are so many sources of this epic, right? So many researchers have their own versions of it, or the way they’ve contextualized it and framed it – depending on when that was. We decided on a version that was published in 1965 by Elena Maquiso who was a researcher. So that was when we decided we were going to stick with this particular version. So there’s that. 

What was interesting structurally with this is: we know that it’s movement right? And we know that it’s based on oral texts, so how do we move from that space to the other? We have versions of it, but the versions are really summarized versions, and we wouldn’t understand them in the original language. They are these summarized versions by these researchers. We wrote a script of each section or version and kind of pieced together a narrative that made sense to us when we’re talking about it in rehearsal. So what started out as “are we writing a script as we enter rehearsals everyday, like every scene?” It seemed really difficult to do, but that was part of the process and actually as we moved forward that script became shorter and shorter and we realized that we didn’t need a lot of those words any more. So we needed that structure in a written format? I don’t know. It’s a learning curve, I think, for all of us to be familiar with the text. Some practical things though: so I don’t know much about movement pieces; I’m a text-based person so that’s probably why we started there. 

To be frank, prior to reading Elena Maquiso’s research and doing the actual research for this, I did not know that much, culturally, about that part of the Philippines. So I was learning with them, which was kind of fun, because they would ask me like what would that be and I would be like: “I actually don’t know, let me get back to you” or “why don’t we figure it out in that room?” It was very interesting because a lot of my collaborators obviously have been choreographers before or have worked with regional work far more than I had. So they actually knew more about the work than I did but I was there as a dramaturg, so there was a very strange dynamic in the room. And I could feel that. One of the choreographers was at first kind of apprehensive because I would speak in a different language, sometimes it would be Taga-lish and all of those things would figure into the conversation. But after a while – the choreographer was performing, the director was performing – there’s really no one watching them perform. We would have someone record them or we would have mirrors sometimes when we had a room with access to rehearsal mirrors. No one could really see what was going and that was when they realized: “so what did you think about that exercise or that improvisation?” “Did that work or what did it tell you?”. And they would not tell me what they were doing. So I would be guessing: “it looks like you were climbing? Or building something? Or walking towards something?”. And we worked towards that, which was kind of fun. The other important part of this was there was another dramaturg in the room. I wasn’t the only one. I worked with Amihan Ruiz but she focused more on the sociological aspects of the work because she had more experience with that part of the country and knew a little bit more about the language and had more facility with the language than I did. So we worked together on that script and talked about what needed to be there, and that was also an interesting dynamic; I had never worked with another dramaturg before, at least in the formal sense of calling themselves as a dramaturg. So it was tricky and I’d like to think that dramaturgy would be at its healthiest when you constantly have to negotiate your relationships with people in the room, because then you become more sensitive to the needs of the production rather than working kind of mechanically like “oh I need to provide research or this or that”. Every time we stepped into the room it was kind of new like “what are we going to do today?”. So that was interesting. The next part of that production was ok, I think it’s pretty clear that even if we do a lot of research, we still don’t understand it in a way that’s supposed to be understood. It still felt very detached, because this is an epic in a place none of us grew up in, and we live in the city! How can we possibly tell this story and be believable? What are we doing? So we had that moment and we were stuck for a long time. It was a big dramaturgical change. So late October, while trying to devise the original epic, we felt like we were being trapped into the whole ethnic association. Delphine then decided to modernize the dance piece by resetting the story in an urban environment. We would however, in the original epic in the oral storytelling section, which would include particular segments, we had an invocation still in the beginning. There were still some spoken words in the beginning, but I think that was a large change from the process. To summarize how that change was expressed, I wrote it down in the dramaturgical note, which now relates to the body and I think this is how we kind of ended up understanding why it became a movement piece even more. In the 2010 documentary “Schooling the World: the White Man’s Last Burden”, the filmmakers took a look at the role Modern Education has played in the destruction of the world’s last sustainable indigenous cultures. Questions assumptions of cultural superiority and notions of a better life. What’s insightful about this piece is the argument that education and projects remove children from their communities to go to school in cities to compete for jobs they don’t have a chance at getting. At the end of it all, they come face to face with living conditions that are hardly humane. This may very well be the tragedy of the Western social, cultural and educational structure imposed in a different context. Drawing from this insight, Agyu: Patungo sa Paraiso – Agyu is the lead character, Patungo sa Paraiso is going towards heaven, or a version of heaven, examines the impetus of fleeing. The people from originally from Manobo moved from place to place. What were they escaping from? In various versions, it is usually a representation of a colonial oppressor. In this production we paralleled the desire to leave with the oppressive nature of urban poverty. Investigating those in rural areas who seek success in city centres but fall through the cracks being victimized by society’s demands. Michel (de Sutor?) writes that there are two ways to view the city: one as from a distance, atop a tall building where you get a panoramic view, a theoretical entity, an administrative construction that erases the complexity and density of actual urban practice. However the other view is more fascinating: the city below is what he calls the city traversed, mapped, and obscured by everyday practices like that of walking. Walking is an interesting concept in the realm of urbanity, especially in a city like Manilla. 

The structural interweaving of the modern day urban narrative is fastened together by the body dancing. It is the narrative embodied. The dancer’s body represent the community’s act of remembering as Aygu traverses Manilla we see the reality of our urban landscape. In fact, the performers themselves were inspired by actual urban encounters with trains and rains getting to rehearsal. In mapping their experience, they are mapping the city and showing us its perilous terrain. Which makes it easy to see what’s necessary to leave it. By showing us the drive to escape this odious world, we are led on an action-packed journey to paradise. As opposed to the hopeless sense of the rotten system of schooling the world shows us, Agyu presents an alternative ending where we do have the option to return to the pastoral, which we construed as heaven. When Agyu and his people flee for a better life, it is not a sense of self-aggrandizement. They don’t live for themselves but for another: as a family should. The hero’s journey – you know, Joseph Campbell – symbolizes the ability to control the irrational savage within us to find the wisdom and power to serve others. The myth of Agyu’s journey represents selfless desire to redeem their people and their society. This redemption manifests itself in the metaphorical notion of heaven, or Paraiso, and while we accept the supernatural phenomena in the epic tradition, we must understand the transcendent reference beyond itself. Heaven is not so much a literal space we must journey outward to, but rather, an inward space. It is then magical to see something large and epic actively represented in the body. Its materiality is so ephemeral and so small, and yet, it becomes the site of heaven. As storytellers, we wield incredible power in the act of embracing the narrative of our people, so much that it inordinately finds its place in our history. The question to ask then is if our past in indeed inescable, why do we flee? And should we? 

RL: Thank you Giselle. I know it’s late in the day but we’re opening up to more questions for any member of the panel. Yes please, somebody with the mic. 

A: This question is to How Ngean and to some extent to Peter. You said that you started in 2011 also in your dramaturgical practice. I was curious how your communication with artists who obviously have egos due to the pride in their craft. How has your communication with them refined or changed over the years, particularly if you’re involved in projects where you’re brought together and not say entrenched in the company’s work like Peter is. 

HN: You want answers from Peter or…

A: Yourself, in particular. 

HN: Ok. I guess the first assumption is that when you go into collaboration with the artist, yes, there is no denying that on the social grapevine, you will hear of how big the ego of the artist is. But if you go in thinking that you’re going to deal with big egos, for me I think that is a bit of a failure and self-defeating kind of move already. What I personally do with the way I sort of approach each collaboration – and this started with Pichet and Esplanade – is this chance to sit down, hopefully in a neutral and social place – coffee – where we talk, and just talk. And sometimes the first part of the talking doesn’t have to be about the work because we are at the end of the day two human beings getting to know each other first. And then the work is what brings us together, so we begin to tackle the work later. Sometimes, I have not had that misfortune where you don’t broach the work. Where you realize after a while, just talking about everything else in general – love, life and the universe – that it’s not going well and you go: maybe it’s not right. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve not had that kind of misfortune. So in terms of dealing with egos, I think all dramaturgs (am I going to be shot saying this), they also come with their egos. We have to. That’s why there’s a fierce loyalty to serving a piece of art, the work we work with. As Nanako pointed out, as much as she would fight the choreographer on certain cultural principles, she will also fight with the institution to support this particular choreographer. And that cannot just be based on some kind of academic, scholarly information. There is integrity, there is an ego involved. I just want to go into this quickly. We were talking about many new terms, for me the idea of “vested interest”. There is vested interest the minute the dramaturg goes into that work. How you negotiate that vested interest in that work where you are inside-outside-inside-outside, it’s another thing. So this managing of ego: I think we all manage it. There are certain projects where I have to manage my ego. That’s very obvious because I am still a human being. I think as dramaturgs we are also performance artists of our own, on our own. So it’s a fine line and there’s no easy answer to it. But to go into a project thinking that there is a very egotistical artist out there: this is not a good start I’m afraid. 

PE: I don’t think I’ve had that problem in a way, unfortunately, maybe. I’ve worked with people who I guess, we’ve shared a certain vision and we’ve developed that vision together. I’ve worked in a dramaturgical way to try and support and expand that vision at various times. I might have misheard – you used the word ‘entrenched’ – I hope I didn’t give the impression that I felt somehow entrenched in the process over time. I think dramaturgical work is work that can be sometimes very supportive of the process and sometimes can actually not be accepted by the artistic practitioners. So what we do as dramaturgs is to support the decisions that are made by the artistic team. I mean our work is there to serve the project and the vision of the project and of the artists. Unless enamored with the idea of dramaturgy as a contest, I think it’s something that’s true in some of the Germanic theatre traditions and especially after the 1970s you have these very prominent male dramaturgs who are famous for being loud, slightly obnoxious and endlessly talkative. I don’t think I have ever, I actually don’t know a dramaturg who works like that, and I certainly have not been involved in those processes myself. And I don’t encourage the replication of it. I’m much more interested in processes that call for a decentered dramaturgy. A dramaturgy where those kind of heroic, masculine ideas of control, are actually taken away or withdrawn from the project. I think in contemporary times those kinds of processes are much more helpful in creating a contemporary theatre aesthetic than a slightly more old-fashioned one of confrontation. 

A: I’ve got a question for the whole panel and it’s in regards to some dramaturgical thinking. I’ve been pondering for a while, and it has sort of been crystalized today. I’ll just like to acknowledge Peter: thank you for your elegant and eloquent exposition of dramaturgy that we’ve developed over the years. And it is our good fortune that we continue to learn from each other after more than twenty years. This is my thinking and it’s in the context of dramaturgy in action. And it’s to do with the performance. So we talked about the company and we’ve talked about the role of the dramaturg. But I’m really interested in the dramaturgy of performance. The dramaturgy of performance is invisible; it’s manifestations are the show. In much the same ways when you power up your computer, on the operating system you get a brand symbol, and the programmes you engage with are the show. So I’m interested in this notion of the dramaturgy of performance and talking about it. And using the word dramaturgy a lot today, it’s inevitable. But every time we used it, it has grown in power. And what I’m asking is really how to use the word in such a way so that it serves what we are trying to do, which is to make the best art possible. And in this way I am interested in the visibility and invisibility of the dramaturgy of performance and I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on that. 

SV: I somehow have these metaphors. (laughs) It’s what holds a building together: it’s the steel inside the concrete, you don’t see the steel, the stumps, the stirrups – you don’t see that. You see the façade that is shown. But deep inside the façade is this structure that holds the load, the weight, distributes it and holds it stable. 

HN: I’m going to steal from Dr. Loon actually. He gave something similar in akin to looking to what the dramaturg and dramaturgy does and he was explaining it to my students from my class. So you have an architect who designs the house. He is like the director or the choreographer. But at the end of the day, the architect needs to hire a structural engineer who needs to come in to check the structural integrity of the building. And that has always stuck with me and I’m so glad that Sankar has brought in that also which means Hooray! We are sort of getting somewhere with this imagery and metaphor. To use an example, especially with the work with Pichet for Black and White, he wanted to expand this Thai classical Khon into the contemporary world, to develop it. Thai classical Khon in essence in performance is very two-dimensional: it’s flat as in the movements goes (in a 2D manner). And it comes from a tradition of shadow puppetry and so on and so forth. When he developed it, he showed me how they were becoming three-dimensional meaning the movements took on a whole three dimensional field. They were no longer locked left-right diagonal. The kinds of formations they made filled out and I really liked it. And he was quite delighted that I found it interesting. And from there we talked a lot on how to work in that way, from (2D performance) it grew in height and became (more 3D). So if you’re looking at that kind of visibility: it started in discussions, it went to rehearsal, it went to the materialization of that where I understood what he wanted to do and then we tried to go into discussions of the minutia, the mechanical process of building and developing this physical vocabulary. 

NN: Thank you for the question. I will answer the question in my point of view in terms of visibility and invisibility. I think about ownership of the piece all the time when I work as dramaturg. You guys talked about artists’ egos, and our own egos in a way. Of course I feel uncomfortable sometimes that all I did vanished, or disappeared at the end of the product. And somehow it’s not too good working as a dramaturg. That moment came to me, but when that moment came to me I try not to go to rehearsals so early. (laughter) 

So that’s also the amount of time that I spend with the product. That’s how I deal with personal emotions. That’s one thing. And then I also have my own academic interest to artists or art work. I kind of enjoy being in the process of creating the piece. All the information during the creation process - about who interacts with whom, and what happened during the process – explains so much about the piece, rather than other theoretical discourse. So it’s not about postmodern adaptations of one piece, or globalizations of dance – it’s more like an existing theory adapting to performance analysis. I would do my practice as dramaturg as a sort of fieldwork even. Of analyzing dance pieces. And that’s my own academic interest to artists, as to how experimental pieces emerge in the discourse. 

LY: So I also did a research project on the German way of dramaturgy. I interviewed a lot of German dramaturgs. Some described the position of dramaturg using the parent and child relationship: the director / artist are like children, they are wild and have to be controlled by the dramaturgs, who are the parents. (laughter) But a German dramaturg also told me: “do you know why the Flemish dance theatre is so interesting? It’s because they don’t have dramaturgs.” (laughter)

But I also use a metaphor, a traditional Chinese fable. You shoot an arrow to a target and sometimes you miss and sometimes you hit it. A dramaturg for me can explain why you missed or why you hit it. 

GG: I’ll keep this short. One way I try to navigate that invisible/visible space especially when I can tell that they are not welcoming of my presence or any dramaturgical presence in the room. I find it really useful to frame my commentary as questions – it becomes less pointed. For some reason, the reception is much better and in a way, it becomes less of me prescribing what they should do but rather figure out why they make certain decisions and they think about it. And I don’t attribute it to myself because they came upon it themselves. So that works for me in the context of talking to Filipino artists, I’ll go back to the dramaturgy translation of it. I’ve seen it apparently written as Dramatuhiya in a particular production. I thought that was interesting because the ‘G’ is such a hard letter and it’s so German, it’s so angry. But the ‘H’ has such a soft sound, like it sounds like a breath almost. It feels organic almost. And hiya in Filipino is to be shy, which is kind of interesting right. I didn’t realize that until I saw that it comes from a very shy and quiet place. It seems to be very organic. So perhaps the intervention has that kind of personification as oppose to a sort of prescriptive form of dramaturgy. 

PE: Maybe sometimes we can’t see the performance because of the dramaturgy, and sometimes we can’t see the dramaturgy because of the performance. I think they’re two things to keep in mind. Dramaturgy defines a certain kind of process, and as we learn from Chairman Mao, Process is Performance. What you put in is what you get out. And I think that’s what is important too. 

A: So I see that there’s a spectrum of dramaturgy involvement. How Ngean as purely a sounding board, and with Yinan who tries to pull the strings of the students together. So my question is how do you discern and define what’s the appropriate amount of involvement such that you don’t become a co-creator. Maybe a dramaturg is a creator but my point is – companies need to hire, they hire dramaturgs. So if the boundary of a dramaturg is not so strictly defined then it’s a little bit difficult to justify funding. What do you all think? 

HN: Did you see that it justifies funding? 

A: If the role of the dramaturg can be that of the director or assistant director then, my question is how would it justify funding? Do you get what I’m saying? 

HN: Funding, as in money you’re saying right? So let’s hire two co-directors instead of one director and one dramaturg. Is that what you’re saying? 

A: Yes, essentially.

HN: Get out. (laughter) it’s an interesting one, and actually a live one. Peter. 

PE: So there’s a long history of artists who work with dramaturgs, who work with a dramaturg time and time again, continually. These are artists who I think have very complex and long history of ideas and they find value in working, very often, with one particular dramaturg. Fuji-san put up a list of very significant, maybe the leading theatre directors in the world, one could say, who have long term relationships with dramaturgs. They produce work of excellence, diversity and quality, and one could not simply quantify their work in terms of time and motion studies of whether or no they are repeating simple tasks. It’s completely the wrong approach. The kind of implicit thinking behind your question, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that there’s a kind of efficiency mechanism that rises from a dramaturg, that somehow you can create faster, cleaner, more entertaining, more spectacular, and it’s bullshit. It’s absolute rubbish. If you want to think about theatre in those terms, well then I think, we’re thinking of a very narrow set of theatrical practices that have very little real meaning to the complexity of dramaturgical thinking. They are much more concerned with, I think, a series of narrow economic parameters that are imposed on the arts from external thinking, and very conservative thinking I might add too. The question of people who employ dramaturgs from show to show is something I think that is asking a different skill set from dramaturgs entirely too. I don’t think we should question too much these long term and productive relationships between members of an artistic team and nor should we question the need to occasionally bring in a dramaturg to work as an outside eye as long as someone feels a need for that. But the economic imperative has got nothing to do with dramaturgs. 

A: Peter keeps widening and widening the perspectives on this, which is great. I have two perspectives and one question. I’m very familiar with the German model which is primarily as a director. They do boss you around, it’s true. But they do keep an eye on the big picture while the director gets involved with the detail. The American model I’m more aware of in script development, which is a series of questions rather than tell people what to do. It’s very good, asking is a development I brought to Australia to train our script-readers. So the dramaturg that actually helps the playwright is a particular thing, and the dramaturg that actually helps the director and the production particularly in the interpretation of shows is another thing. What I’m hearing here today is that the dramaturg is involved totally, from the beginning and in the rehearsal room even if you come in little bit late in the day. The fact that you’re in the rehearsal all the time. So what I’m hearing today that the Asian perspective is very much the future, I think, of where Peter’s widening the horizons on this, tomorrow, the dramaturg will be in every aspect of the theatre. My question is as dramaturgs, are you in the rehearsal room all the time or are you in before the production, or do you come in for the runs? It sounds to me that these dramaturgs are actually working as hard as everybody on the floor every day. 

RL: Anybody want to start? 

HN: Ok I’ll start. I really do not have much experience with so called traditional convention models of what Fuji-san was referring to as textural dramaturgy where it is really related to play text. Me being dance dramaturg and maybe performance as a wider description, yes, I do enjoy going into rehearsal. It is field work for me, as stressed by Nanako. And that is my personal stance. I do know for a fact that quite a few of us in the room not just here but there, that there is a commitment to going into rehearsal to see a process because we are all not all simply just in the strictest sense, a textural dramaturg as you have mentioned. So this is my way of trying to serve the work and support the artist. And understand by going through with him or her, it the rehearsal as much as possible. Economically, materially, sometimes it’s not possible but there is a protracted time. What I do not do is, and there’s been a few circumstances where performance makers have actually asked me: “we are one week to opening and I think something’s wrong and we’re not working out. Can you come and have a look?” 

And I’ll say “no thank you I can’t”. 

“I thought you were a dramaturg?!”

“Precisely I’m a dramaturg, I am not – I don’t fix things.” 

And I leave it at that and they go “uh”. I know I’m not helping the cause, but that’s precisely where I’m getting at. It is a process that you go through, personally from my point of view. Anyone else, please jump in? 

RL: Sankar, would you like to share about that experience with the Japanese artist with the Malayalam poem? 

SV: Always in the rehearsals. I am always in the rehearsals. But there is also another project where I watch rehearsals and give notes then go away, come back after a week, and look at the rehearsals again. It depends on the need, it depends on the work, whether you need to be involved all the time or if you just need to be a fly on the wall. If you are involved too much then some groups cannot cope with that, so it is better to be invisible in the process. Maybe pull people apart, talk to them individually – that also works really well, rather than addressing the whole group. 

HN: So maybe it’s not about frequency or intensity but rather that it is immersive in terms of getting involved in the process as in even if it’s invisible observation – you are still involved. You’re there. So there is a slippery thing of being invisible: bodily, you are there, the performers/directors/choreographers see you, you are there, but then the intensity and frequency of being there (shifts). 

RL: We taking one last question I think we have one here. 

A: Hi I’m from Manilla like Giselle. And it’s not really a question but more of a comment. Because I’m just really excited to be here and I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life if I don’t share what I feel right now. (laughs) because I am primarily an actress and a performance maker and I am just starting to articulate what dramaturgy is for me. But anyway I would just like to comment on being dramaturgs and being teachers at the same time because a while back I was lucky enough to develop a devised work with theatre practitioners from across the Philippines. And what sticked with me was what a performance maker from the Subanon tribe in southern Philippines said. He said that he was thankful that he experienced devising as a process because he said that it solved the very realistic problem that they had which was the lack of Subanon playwrights. It’s because the production of texts are deeply tied to prevalent mainstream systems of production. They end up restaging plays which are written by Filipinos from the centre, which is very far from them. And he said that he can see devising as a practice that can enable them to create their own content. My point is that I would just like to acknowledge the kinship that I feel with the works that you mentioned that asks performance to exist within the political space. I feel like that the task of dramaturgs is to create new structures that would enable new types of works or texts to exist, allowing other voices to exist, be seen, and heard. Because coming from the Philippines (and) it’s a troubled political space, the production of texts as a written thing is a difficult … thing. It’s difficult because it takes time, it takes education etc etc. 

I feel like, at least for me in our context, the dramaturg becomes an important bridge to create a new structure to allow something else to happen in performance. So I would just like to thank everyone. Thank you. 

RL: Thank you! Right, so thank you everyone for coming to the panel. If you have any questions or comments about the event please write to info@asiandramaturgs.com and to stay updated with ADN please like our facebook page at facebook.com/asiandramaturgs or visit the website at asiandramaturgs.com.