HN: Welcome back. Thank you very much for those who have been staying with us since this morning, and welcome to those who’ve just attended the second session today in the Asian Dramaturgs Network symposium. This afternoon we will be featuring a session on the performance-maker and the dramaturg. I will now go into a speedy introduction of the speakers… on my extreme left, Alyson Campbell, who is currently the coordinator of graduate studies in theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia, where she leads the Masters programme in directing and dramaturgy. But she is also a practitioner, and for this particular session, she will be sharing with us her experiences in performance-making, with Lachlan Philpott, who is based in Sydney. A playwright, he has also done extensive work as a teacher, mentor and dramaturg at international organisations, theatre companies, schools, and tertiary institutions around the world. And then we have Yair Vardi, who is a curator, theatre-maker, dramaturg, performer and lighting designer. His research interests deal with the relationship between dramaturgy, curation and creation as structural and artistic tools for making art, which I am sure he will illuminate on. And then of course, last but not least for now, we have Eko Supriyanto, leading Indonesian dancer and choreographer. He’s the founding artistic director of EkosDance Company and Solo Dance Studio in Surakarta, Indonesia. So without further ado, I’d like to start just by predicating that the speakers will have twenty minutes, and I think we have Max-Philip now. Here we are - we have Max-Philip Aschenbrenner. He is a performing arts presenter, dramaturg, he has studied media studies, interaction and process design, and has a Masters degree in dramaturgy. Welcome, Max. So just to recap, each speaker will have about twenty minutes. We’ll try and keep this quite tight because we ran over the last time, and we’ll start the ball rolling with Yair.
YV: Hi. So my timer is on number three. Okay. So I will split this twenty minutes, twenty-one minutes, to seven parts, and each part you will hear the [unclear], and I hope this practice, this minutes practice will not shoot my legs because this is the first time I’m doing it in English. I will explain why I’m doing it and it will be actually clarified towards the end of my presentation since it’s the dramaturgical structure of my recent piece, Cultural Basket of Good. As well you can see my computer, which is - it’s the practice of Cultural Basket of Good, it means that the structure of work, how I work, is present and the audience can see how I think, how I construct, and how I actually do the dramaturgy. I’m working as a curator, it’s my daily job, and then I’m working as a maker and as a lighting designer, and in every part of my work, I’m thinking about dramaturgy. So if someone will invite me to light their piece, I will say, okay, I’m doing dramaturgy with my light - this is the essence and this is the logic of my work. If someone, when I’m curating a festival, I will always think about it as a dramaturgical line in time and space, so the pieces will be the objects and the time of the pieces, the putting the pieces one next to each other will be the curation and the dramaturgy of the audience when they are entering the festival. So a piece, one material next to another material next to another material, is the dramaturgy of the festival.
I will talk in both ways - as a maker and as a dramaturg - in this presentation. I will try to explain - I find it more easy to explain what I need from the dramaturg as an artist. When I’m dramaturging someone else, I’m trying to be the same person that I need as a maker. I wrote this very personal text, I call it Tim Etchells’ Dramaturgy [5:37 unclear] - let’s say Tim Etchells is an English director from Forced Entertainment, and I will start to read it, I hope that my three minutes - I will wait for three minutes of introduction to end, and then I will start the three minutes of actually what is dramaturgy for me or what is the dramaturg for me. What is interesting is the gap, really, between what we call dramaturgy, and what we call the dramaturg. I need the dramaturg to fix my head in general, to bring me back to the ground, to be a doctor of my conceptual thoughts, to explain to me what I can or cannot do, to tell me what is appearing from my materials, what is appearing from my beliefs, and how I can communicate them. To make sure I’m communicating, to make sure I’m not just presenting my association of narratives but my line of thoughts is communicated and has a logic that can be understood, to tell me things that I don’t know, to make me rethink myself and the piece, to make me fall in love with the materials that I think are stupid and to break up with the materials that I think are genius. To make me be clear, to make me be smarter, to make me be responsible for my own acts, to hold my hand when I’m lost, to make me be lost, and to remember it is fine to be lost. To break my heart if something doesn’t work, and to believe in what I’m doing until the very end when I’m not successful with doing what I thought I can do, to believe in me and in the project while at the same time crushing it to dust. To ask what I want all the time, and make me tell what I want, to support what I don’t know that I want, to tell me what the piece knows much better than I do. The dramaturg is the most intimate position in my process. Very few people I know can be my dramaturg. It should be based on working together for years, of being friends and colleagues for a long, long time. My dramaturg needs to undress me, don’t believe in me when I’m very assertive, to understand when I know what I’m thinking about even when I cannot put it in words. It should be based on knowing how thinking and language works in my head, in my heart.
And to take it more generally, I will use Bojana Cvejic’s words about dramaturgy. Dramaturgy for me can be a rite of ignition concerned with the actual project it’s dealing with. I do believe that each project should have different definitions and determinations of what the role of the dramaturg should take, and by that position and role of the dramaturg. I will use the words of Bojana Cvejic from an article, the Ignorant Dramaturg. Cvejic is drawing the relationship between the dramaturg and the creator, the dramaturgy and the creation… and not about what the two can exchange between each other or to be useful for, because there must already be some shared affinity to even contemplate working together, but ignorance about the work to be made. Hereby I am referring to the ignorance by [9:20 unclear].
I will show three cases, two of my work and one work that I dramaturged. I will start with my work, You Never Look At Me From The Place I See You. It’s a piece I made in Berlin in 2012, and it premiered in Israel in 2013. It’s a light piece, so it’s a piece for light and observers of audience. There are no performers. In the piece, the performers are the people and the space, so I’m illuminating all of, all elements of space, so what you can see now is that I’m illuminating pipes, doors, sound, and electricity, and then you will see that I’m illuminating the audience at the same time. The premise of this piece was how can I create a piece without creating materials, basically. So how can light, how can I build dramaturgy just with light, just by lighting what is already there in the theatre space. Now this piece was very interesting, I had two dramaturgs working with me. One was more kind of more artistic consultant and one was more like the person who actually hold my hand and made me think about this piece, because I dealt with light and light needs a studio space and you need to actually make this in the theatre, in the specific space it’s going to be presented. This piece actually had half a year of drawing, thinking and discussion, discussing for making it, because I had the theatre just for two weeks, so basically the whole process of this piece was to observe this space, to think about different kinds of methods, images, ways of working inside the space to draw the light in the space, and actually doing and actually making, we had just two weeks. So the dramaturg in this, the dramaturgs in this respect had a great deal of work because we needed to think and we needed to imagine what could appear and what could happen, how we can fix time, how we can build images. So what you just saw, it was twenty minutes kind of a live movie all constructed by lights, illuminating the elements in the space, so the audience watch [12:21 drowned out by the background sound]. So we can understand how much [12:30 drowned out by the background sound].
The next piece I want to talk about is called Practice Makes Perfect. It's a piece by Natalie Zuckerman, and it premiered this year in Acco Festival for Different Theatre, it’s one of our most important theatre festivals in Israel, and I was the dramaturg, and at the end I was co-director, and it was a very interesting kind of process. I will just read some words about the piece to give some context - an autobiographical performance based on Natalie Zuckerman’s personal story, who suffers from unseen disability after a childhood accident. Zuckerman invites a running instructor, a professional dancer, her partner, friends and family on stage to give her a string of exercise and lessons through the prism of the disabled body deal with everyday physical actions like getting up from the floor, falling and walking. Through this madness action she is able to expose intricate physical processes of our normative body that we take for granted. I wrote this text and when I’m reading it in English I still don’t know how to read it. What was interesting - so we’re talking about an autobiographical piece about Natalie while she’s performing in the piece with five different performers, where each one of them has their own professionality, like champion of running, professional dancer, her partner, her mother, all on stage, trying to teach her how to deal with her disability. While the question raised in the piece is, am I disabled? Can you tell me if I’m disabled? Since it’s a very personal autobiographical piece, while Natalie is performing, we started to work on this piece together from early stages while she didn’t really know what the piece will be. She had this idea that she wants to be a dancer and she wants to be a, to invite a professional dancer to teach her how to dance. And we started from this starting point, while I didn’t understand why she wants to learn how to dance, why she’s not using her disability as an anesthetic for, and why does she want to be, you know, the perfect body or the body that she doesn’t have. And all of those questions were raised during the process over and over and over again, because I couldn’t understand, and because I couldn’t understand, I thought that Natalie is not understanding at the same time, because she couldn’t explain. And slowly, slowly, my questions intrigued her, and she discovered what she wants to say, what the piece is about. We worked on this piece for almost a year. It had two presentations - so one, it was her final piece in her Masters degree… well.
The last piece I will talk about is my recent piece, Basket of Cultural Goods, and we’ll start with this picture just to explain what we have done. This is the only piece I have ever made in my life without a dramaturg working with me. I will just read some text just to give you context. Seven artists meet their audience in a salon turned laboratory. A private room historically used as a public space inside people’s homes, this is transformed from a traditional public space of the theatre into the private space of the home. Basket of Cultural Goods searches for Israeli identity as well as for national identity while creating it live on stage. It seeks to find the roots of individual identity and our simultaneous acceptance of, and resistance to, the nation-state. How does the Zionist body control our physical one? Why do we buy airplane tickets every morning and by every evening decide to stay in the country? Why is everything political and how our alter-egos and [17:35 unclear] are related to all of this. Come visit our salon, let’s undress, dress, take off and try on, Israel 2016. So this was the topic of this piece and what you can see in the picture is our salon. It’s based on the stage, as you can see we are five, each one of us has a table with a computer while our thoughts and reflections are streamed on two screens that you cannot see from both sides. So the reason that this piece doesn’t have a dramaturg is because I invited five, four of my very close colleagues, all artists or practitioners as dramaturgs, as performance dramaturgs, to be with me in the salon and to think together about Israeli identity and what does it mean to be make art in Israel 2016. All of them are both artists and performers and dramaturgs, and the structure of the piece was talks. So it was salon talks, every talk was like three minutes on timers, and so the timers stopped us, and it dealt with the way we are thinking, the way we are reflecting, and the way we are bringing the dramaturgy of thinking and reflecting upon Israel. So how the structure worked was it was all improvised, so we had a score of on which the subjects we were going to talk, the pairs always change in each performance, so we can really talk and not reenact our talks from rehearsals or from previous performances. And while we, a couple of us talked, one of us will reflect, will write the commentation, document the talk, and we try to bring the dramaturgical concepts and thinking of how we think, of how we talk. And then you will have three minutes after our talk for three minutes, you have three minutes of reflection by other creators in the piece. So basically the dramaturgy appeared all the time in this piece, or the dramaturgical thinking, why we didn’t have a dramaturg, because when I looked for a dramaturg to work with me on this piece, I discovered that all my friends who can dramaturg me are occupied with me inside the piece. And it was a very interesting problem because at the same time I think that the piece suffered from not having a person in between, sitting outside and is responsible on that dramaturgy of the piece. The piece dealt with dramaturgy as a subject.
So I have another three minutes to talk about this piece because I think it’s the more interesting piece to talk about when you are talking about dramaturgy. So at the end what we have is a piece dealing with dramaturgy with a line of thoughts with how people and how artists think about reality, and my wish was, I believe that when we are making art, we are giving some kind of a present to our audience. It’s very, like I’m trying to be very, I don’t think I’m very important, I don’t think that I’m thinking so smartly, but I think that I’m a professional in my own thoughts, and this is what I have to give to the audience. And then when, coming to speak about culture and what does it mean to be Israeli, what does it mean to think about culture as Israeli, this is my expertise, this is what I’m doing during all my life and this is what my partners are doing. So this piece has like five different storytellers, because each one of us is telling his own story, giving his own reflection, her own point of view of what is being Israeli. Sometimes as the creator of the piece I’m kind of, someone is telling you something super political that I totally disagree and I cannot even believe that my piece is giving a voice to this kind of point of view, but it is five different people, five different dramaturgs, five different creators, which are telling the story of their Israeli culture. But it is very personal culture, yeah, because we are not a mirror to the public, we are five people inside the public trying to make sense out of this situation that we are living in, and I think that this is what dramaturgy is doing to pieces, like, it’s trying to make sense from all the materials that it’s working in, and trying to give a structure and trying to make them visible and trying to make the audience think or know what the piece is talking about or what the artist’s materiality is talking about.
And I think that I’d like to go back to the relationship between the dramaturg and the maker. It was very interesting to get a lot of dramaturgical feedback from the peers, from the four different people I’m working with, and then I realised that, okay, they are very smart, they know how to speak and they think - last three minutes. So they think in a dramaturgical way, but then they are performers in this piece. So each one of us, especially towards the end, had a lot of fears, you know, anxiety about, okay, we need to do this piece, like, we have two hours now that we are improvising, the audience is coming in, we need to take responsibility about what is actually happening - oh wow, I forgot to put the slideshow so you can actually see more pictures from this piece, sorry - and we need to perform. So then I understood, okay, they are talking with me in a dramaturgical language, but actually they are talking about their own anxiety as performers inside the piece, and this made me, it was very interesting for me, because those are my friends, those are the people that I’m working with, those are actually my dramaturgs. But when they need to be performers, when they need to take responsibility about what they are actually doing in time, they have a totally different thinking and needs and this is as well, when people ask me for what do we need, the dramaturg, or what is this kind of position, this is really the answer, because as I said in the beginning, like what I needed as a maker that doesn’t really know, like Natalie didn’t know what she wants and I was there to make sure that she knows what she wants in a one year process. This is the function that I need as a dramaturg and no one can give me this inside the process because each one inside the process needs, like, has a different kind of set of things that they are concerned with. As a performer you are concerned that you need to actually carry the piece on your shoulders. As an artist, do you need to make sure you have materials and your heart is being translated? And as a dramaturg you need to make sure that the structure of the piece and all the elements in the piece are making sense. And… what’s going on with the time, nineteen seconds. And I think I will finish with this and let you see some more pictures. Thank you.
HN: Thank you.
MA: Hello. Sorry for being late. Lunch took too long. That happens from time to time. I will speak today about myself, basically as a dramaturg, and the way I try to do it is to go from here, around 2000 [28:27 unclear] back to Greece, to the future in Korea. Let’s see whether this works.
HN: We’ve about seventeen minutes.
MA: Better start quickly. I would like to start - shall we do a video of an artist collective that is called Solaris Project? We just watch like fifteen seconds together and then I will start talking while this is still running in the back… [distorted Carly Rae Jepsen in the background] This is a work by the artist collective Solaris Project, I think everybody knows the song. The pictures we see come from a reenactment of the music video by, the girls are the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, the boys are a group of Marines fighting in Afghanistan, and these two videos overlap. If you watch it twice the speed, that we cannot do here now unfortunately, we would get the song back but the pictures are not so nice. The text that we can see in this movie comes from a book by the French collective Tiqqun that is called Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, and I would like to start with a quote from this book. Starting in the 1950s, after two devastating wars, deconstructing its first empire, capitalism realised it could no longer maintain itself as the exploitation of local human labour if it did not also colonise everything that is beyond the strict field of production. Faced with the challenges and moves of socialism and decolonisation, capital itself had to socialise and to decolonise. Consumer societies are our contemporary societies, societies based on the values of competition, materialism and disconnection, or we could also say individuality, seek out their best supporters from among the marginalised elements of traditional colonial societies. Women and youth first, followed by migrants and artists. To those who were excluded yesterday and to therefore have been the most foreign, the most hostile to capital, this process first looked like emancipation. The quotation ends. My thesis, this is a process that started in the second half of the 18th century with the invention of the middle class. More about this later. Although this globalised digital revolution enables flat anti-hierarchical direct communication, it also creates a permanent peer to peer surveillance and shapes a commodified repertory of life’s desires, expressions and gestures. Consumer societies emancipated each one of us, made each one of us middle class, but at the same time, it emancipated us as slaves. How we could maybe say this in more juicy words is, our world today is shapeshifting between idle shows, fashion spectacles, plastic surgery, orgies or homemade internet porn, and in the end our everyday lives here. We constantly try to deliver our best performance, we constantly try to be the superstars of our own ambitions and imaginations, always radical. We might therefore call this society that we live in not only a consumer society but a society of perfomance, or a society of performers. Each one of us always creates his own universe all the time, and uses each other and everything around as a possible actor, extra or object.
I’d like to illustrate this thought with another video, we can watch this later again… [indistinguishable video in the background] This is an excerpt from a piece called Cabaret Crusades, a three part film work of the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky based on the book Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf. It’s a book that looks at the Crusades, the European history, only through Arab sources that he researched for a very long time. This is part one that we did together in 2010 I think, in 2009, 2010, and it raises a lot of the questions I tried to just circulate around in my beginning statement. I think in a very practical sense also, in a sense how does it formally, in this movie, it’s like, who is manipulating whom, what are the motives for these manipulations, why do we enjoy being manipulated, maybe, and the way he did it in this movie here is that he uses - it’s puppets that were made in the Renaissance times or even before, when the Crusades had basically just failed, but the richness of where these puppets had been made in Morano was of course very much influenced from the connections, trade connections, the Christians conveyed through Jerusalem and further on down the Silk Road, and was the gatekeeper for this in Europe. So they could all of a sudden form all these beautiful things that we see here, that are now considered to be world cultural heritage, but we could use them for this movie. Looking at this, did we always already live in a society of performance, or in a society of performers, and how - that’s my next question - can we relate to it with the concept of performing arts if we want to believe that performing arts is still something different than casting shows or plastic surgery or orgies? My thesis is, each act of performance always points towards a single narrative, a consumer, a competitor, one other, whereas each act of performing arts always addresses a whole, a society.
I’ll immediately show another video that helped me think about this a lot - about the Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, whom some of you might know, maybe - this is without sound. And it’s just a short excerpt of one of the works that I wanted to show, which is called The School, the whole project is called The School [A/N: Does he mean The Class?]. And what she does is, what we can see, reading texts about death to corpses, to dead people. She does it in different contexts, in museums, she goes to hospitals and reads to the corpses there - she’s a professor for visual arts and interdisciplinary arts at the University of Chiang Mai, where she also teaches. Before she teaches the humans, that starts at ten, she teaches the dogs of the city in the morning in contemporary arts, which is also a rather interesting track I don’t want to follow now because we have to focus. Here we clearly see she is not addressing a counterpart or a partner for her dialogue, but she is addressing a whole society, in this case a whole society of the living and the dead.
And I think in fact we all know that our consumerist societies as I was talking about, that pretends to be organised around the living, the ones that can consume and compete, are in fact built upon generations and generations of deaths and not yet born. And performing arts, I believe, is the space those entities created to remind us. It’s always ghosts or spirits that appear in performing arts or on stages, ghosts that at the same time consist of actual materiality, whether it’s characters, imagined audiences, other representations. So before we can finally talk about the problem of the dramaturgy, we need to go a bit further back in history, but to sum it up, what I just tried to say, I use a quote of German writer Qrt from his book Zombologie, where he says, one who is dead cannot speak about it, and the one who speaks about it is a fool because he knows nothing. And I think that’s the position that the dramaturg always has to have. We can already see this at the very beginning of theatre in the Western context I’m talking about, which is in Greece, so I don’t mean the idea of performativity in a sense of the first people in caves dancing to their family why they were not successful in hunting a mammoth, but that idea of a theatre that is addressing society, so we speak about ancient, we speak about the classical times [40:46 unclear]. At the beginning, what we have there, it’s only the legendary chorus choir that we hardly know anything about, none of its original texts have survived, we don’t have key descriptions, we don’t have proper pictures, but the thing we know is that its obvious function was the representation of man as a community. At the same time, though, the chorus also fulfilled another task, that this community of man is determined and manifested through a god-given status. The performances were outside, the nature was always there, and it was very clear that we are part of something much bigger than what we can imagine. Depending on the sources, Euripedes’ first protagonist [41:35 unclear] from 400 to 300 BC, he wears a mask and he simply imparts his new principle of individualism that you see at the start of these societies without actually being it or believing it, maybe. And this rather bold idea of an independent self still can only be thought out in contrast to the collective of the polis, the choir that is upstage with him. And as we have learned from this onstage representation, the polis as such can only be understood in relationship, again, with what is around. At this time therefore, I would say theatres could be considered sanatoriums, as can be seen especially well in, for example, ancient [42:31 unclear] where priests used bath treatments, diets, exercises, to condition their patients or spectators, for their public lives in the Athenian polis. The tragedies they once staged as a byproduct conveyed basic societal values, the melody of the presentation even was considered to be healing.
Now further on with the dramaturg, off to the future. In Greek, literally dramaturg means to write a drama, to create a plot as an active word. I jump back to a more personal story of where the term first comes back in modern theatre, which is with [43:13 unclear] 1767. A guy that was a writer, who was at this time then fully employed by the theatre, to criticise the shows every evening as a daily writing practice, which is basically this first book. Looking at the context, we have a historical shift there from Baroque times to classicism, from feudalism and absolutism to republican ideas, 1767, I just said, the French revolution is already knocking at the doors. Most relevant for theatre, a shift from God to the human as the central philosophy. Kant is sitting at his desk at this very time thinking about his very famous anthems that he would publish later [43:58 unclear] dare to think by yourself. The function of theatre therefore moves from praising the king to inventing the new idea of the bourgeoisie, not only a citizen, a [44:10 unclear] of the society, the so-called middle class. And this move happens from two sides. One is, we heard it in the morning, translation, [44:20 unclear] before they wrote their own texts, were mainly busy translating Shakespeare, and the second and more interesting one, I think, is through the tool of architecture and realising that it’s a political tool. Prussia, which would then become Hitler Germany basically later, is just starting to exist at this time. Frederic II conquers big parts of Poland, nowadays Russia, nowadays the Czech Republic, nowadays Ukraine. What is interesting and what we can still see today is that the theatre buildings in Wiesbaden, which is a small city in Germany, and Odessa, which is today still a four and a half hour flight, are exactly the same architecture. The decoration is a bit different, but what it shows is that it was a very simple useful functional tool for the newly conquered people, let’s call them like this, to teach them the German language and to make them proper Germans.
And now I’d like to jump to my last example, to the future, which comes from my last job I did in Korea… it’s by the Korean artist [45:40 unclear] and the work is called Climates of the Next Scene. What she did is she researched for three and a half years in different online communities and representations in different online communities how there could be a way out, or what could be outside, or how the world I was describing could look from the outside. The presentation in the end is this two characters that are talking and show us the different realities that have been moving through the different discussions that have been having with people working in these different [46:21 drowned out by the background sound]. It’s very sad, it’s a very sad thing of course. And what I wanted to end with is basically looking at this picture, we see a next step here, I think, where dramaturgy or the performing arts or what we call it, could move to, and the questions of who is an actor, who is a director, who takes what part, who’s the audience, basically, the ciizens, a move to the next level, and to put my last hypothesis on this, I think as long as we can ask these questions, who’s doing what in a society, this can always be a very small nucleus for everything that can happen with us here. Like Tim Etchells’ quote again, never forget that you’re more than us. I think dramaturgy and also the position of the dramaturg, the way I try to develop it, is relevant, so I hope we can formulate these questions further and further. Thank you.
HN: Thank you so much. Now we move on to Eko.