Dramaturgy in Action III: The Performance-Maker & the Dramaturg (Part 2) | ADN Symposium 2016

ES: Thank you. Hi, everyone. I just want to start with me talking about a personal experience of being a victim of a dramaturg… I’m just going to introduce myself a little bit. I started with a joke of being a victim of a dramaturg because I was raised by a family who really forced me to do whatever they want. They’re moving back to a school system [1:10 unclear] when I studied my Bachelor’s in Solo, what we call [1:17 unclear] which is literally almost like a dramaturg, which is really directing and questioning and also at the same time it’s like saying, no, that’s not right, you’re wrong. You have to do this and you have to do that. Then I became more interested in the process of mentoring when I was able to study more, further, when I was getting my Masters in Fine Arts degree at UCLA. It is more about advising, what we call advisor, in the production of creating work, which is - then I realised that it’s actually a step by step, when I was looking back at my past, doing dancing and performing within my family, and then doing the dancing and performing with the school system in the Bachelor’s degree, and then doing the - my time at UCLA, doing my MFA degree, is really - becomes more clear and clearer, where there’s a lot of raising questions from this advisor or mentoring and share more specificated techniques and artistic needs, and shape ideas and concepts, and go down to the work more. All of the processes I mentioned before is actually leading towards the process between dramaturgy and choreography. At that time I was understanding more about what is forcing and then advising and then being more discussing on the work, although still far from the idea of dramaturgical process that I know in the future. The position of the advisor, mentoring and coaching, is very different. Dramaturgical process determines the quality of the work and my work message, whereas the mentoring process affects my status of my student, or as a choreographer. 

Jumping to 2012 when I was introduced to this new world, this underwater world, the world of diving and the culture of dance in the [4:05 unclear] Indonesia, which is what I want to talk more about - my recent work that I did, actually the last performance was here in Esplanade, this theatre [4:16 unclear]. I was working with a festival, doing a festival who’s really, a major festival which focuses [4:26 unclear] local arts and culture towards the community of tourism. It’s a trend that’s running across Indonesia within the provinces in Indonesia, each competing to make a festival that lifts the local culture into tourism opportunities. My time there involved, I was leading with this, what I call a new work [4:55 unclear], I’m not even dancing, a dancer and choreographer now, I’m a diver, a professional diver, I just got my rescue licence. The process of what I call [5:14 unclear] tourism project, which is actually inspired by diving, inspired by the destruction of the coral, inspired by the youth there, that really, you know, not having a lot of opportunities to achieve their dreams and so on. So then I created Cry Jailolo, which actually performed for the first time at Aswara in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, then during the talking and discussing with my team, especially with Iskandar and my producer at the time, Fu Kuen, then I was able to understand and try to sort of move forward and understand more about the job and the description and the role of the dramaturg. Then I asked, actually Fu Kuen and Iskandar asked me, who’s the right dramaturg for you? And I said I want to work with Arco Renz. We decided that Arco was my dramaturg for Cry Jailolo. The process of developing Cry Jailolo I was following a provisional working process with dramaturg [6:36 unclear] Arco Renz, my theoretical relationship with dramaturgy extended through the process of creating Cry Jailolo. I first started a discussion with Arco in the production [6:48 unclear] and Fu Kuen, so then lead to the time when Arco arrived in Jailolo and really working on the piece with me. Especially the two following sessions in the development of the rehearsal in Cry Jailolo, finally providing me with the direct neighbour in my knowledge and understanding of the function of dramaturg as a process of making dance work. Perhaps because my personal connection to Arco has been ongoing about almost six years now, creating a deep trust and understanding and that has the capacity to shape the discussion and the process in this work of Cry Jailolo. 

I just chatted with Arco yesterday, and I said, Arco, I will not speak about the dramaturg as [7:43 unclear] asked me to come to Singapore and I don’t know what to do except I just want to be really understanding the process of what we were working on together. So he wrote me back and he said, our way of working together as a choreographer and a dramaturg, is based on shared experience in different contexts across different projects, mutual understanding, sharing discussions, watching, discussing, trying out and of course diving, because I forced Arco to go diving with me. I personally think that dramaturgy is a rhythmical practice and it is that perspective that I am seeking to work for. Each project has its own rhythm. Thoughts, bodies and space have to vibrate together, which is very true, what happened in Jailolo. As a choreographer and dancer, I only professionally work with two dramaturgs. One when I was working with [8:58 unclear], he was inviting me to Freiburg working with the youth and the Deaf community in Freiburg in 2012. Then I was realising more as working as a producer of the festival, working with the, what do you call it, the owner of the festival and the they’re the ones who invited me to work on this project. And at the same time we were really engaged more with the process of not only communicating, like using the sign language from English to Germany, and then from Germany into English again, within the work, that speaks to me. It’s really a long process and a challenging process. I created a solo work with this young lady, very talented theatre artist, and what we called [10:21 unclear] and we used, I asked her to use the mask, the Javanese mask, which is then adding some more challenge for her. Eko, you ask me to listen to the music, that’s really challenging, but then now you ask me to put the mask on my face, I cannot see. So involving [10:46 unclear] in this project, it’s really not just translating but also working really deeply and discussing more about what I feel and what [10:57 unclear] feels [10:58 unclear] that I worked with in Freiburg… 

I’m going to go jump to Arco because I’m really looking forward to objectifying Arco right now… so this is Jailolo, and that’s Arco and Iskandar… the one with the hat is Arco, the one without the hat, that’s Iskandar, and these are all the boys working with me for Cry Jailolo, this is 2013, that’s before Aswara, I think. Oh no, this is when Arco came, and a lot of work, a lot of things that Arco did, [12:25 unclear]. This is another rehearsal, another rehearsal, and Arco was also helping me with the text, developing the text, the title, and the synopsis of the piece. This is after the second run, before we go to IDF I think, 2014, Indonesia Dance Festival in Jakarta. And that’s where we actually had our Indonesian premiere after Aswara when it became a one hour piece. And Arco was intensively working with us [13:18 unclear] three weeks, each season in Jailolo. And of course diving, as Arco is also now a diver, and we also were going to the [13:35 unclear]. Okay, last one. My two key experiences in working with dramaturgs have developed my awareness of how important it is to work with the dramaturg in the process of creating dance work, especially contemporary dance. Personally, personal ties and sharing artistic values come first. Next is a discussion of trust, understanding and integrating to dive, to search for the core of the work, to open up, share the same space between the research and within my dramaturg, to drive the conversation forward with like-minded commitment. Conclusion. To work with a playwright or dramaturg from, two actually were German, Arco and [14:35 unclear]. It really makes me understand [14:44 unclear] a question, if I will work with an Indonesian dramaturg. To work with a dramaturg from Indonesia who has the same understanding of culture and content might actually not allow for open space of interpretation and interpreting for wider audiences. Possibly ego and personal understanding of the treatment will be more important than transparency. This jeopardises the content. For me, from my experience, confidence and skill is not the main requirement to work together with the dramaturg. They need empty space, I think, that not only sees from their own eyes, but also has the opportunity to hold a broad perspective to see deep in the heart and mostly deeply into the heart of the work. So working with the two Germans actually allows me to give the blank space also for them, to understand and to, for me to drag them and do a research with them, together all over again. So it’s not about because he or she knows the same experiences and same culture as me makes it easier, but I think within the different contexts of cultures and different contexts or perspectives, I think it’s more giving a chance to open up more depth to discussions and into the work together. Thank you.

HN: Thank you. I think a certain reshuffling of seating is required. While that’s happening, I’m just going to fill in a little bit of blank for Eko, because I do know there’s a lot - just in case you think that Eko invited dramaturg Arco to go holiday in the beautiful island of Jailolo, Cry Jailolo the dance itself was centred on the environmental conditions of the island and the direct relationship with the, I would say the ocean and the fish in Jailolo, on Jailolo, therefore that was where the diving came in. Just, yeah, as long as people are clear that it wasn’t just diving. Alright. 

AC: Hello. Thanks so much for having us both here. I’ve been sort of thinking over the last day and about the way Lachlan and I work and in fact the opportunity for both of us to come here has been great in terms of us thinking and talking in a way that we haven’t actually done before, so I’m going to start maybe by giving a few bullet points that I was writing yesterday during the first day of the symposium, which was that Lachlan and I are creative partners who make live performance together, and we’ve been doing that for more than fifteen years now. I think that’s probably the most important thing that I’m going to say, because there’s something about that relationship that we’re going to try and trace a little bit today. My next thought was we think dramaturgically together, and that led me to two things. One which was in terms of the process, that happens on the floor, that’s where we think dramaturgically together, or I also thought about, something that struck me that Peter Eckersall said yesterday, and I would never have said this myself, but I thought, oh, I think maybe that’s what it is, it would have been nice to think that’s what it is, but the idea that we would have a dramaturgical vision, and I think we do have a dramaturgical vision that I’ll talk about a little bit. And even though we both work independently, we think there’s something about the way we work together that makes our work something more than the sum of our individual parts. We bring out the best in each other. And we’re committed to ideas of queer dramaturgies and identifying ourselves as queer… so it’s really we started as identifying ourselves as queer and talking about what that meant, and that’s become something that I think part of the dramaturgical vision has been, about how we identify and analyse and articulate that in various ways. I think one of the - what’s that thing, ways of thinking about that is queer practices. It’s something to do with understanding our own positionality in the world. You think queerly because our existences are determined by various factors and so our lived experiences are, of course, in conversation with the work that we make and they drive the politics of all our work and define what we choose to make, and really, in terms of thinking about queer dramaturgy, it really defines the processes and how we work. This one I don’t know whether to say or not, but I’m going to say it - I’m speaking for you here, so you might want to disagree, I don’t know [21:24 unclear]. We find discourses on dramaturgy often still very normative, even though they’re also quite satisfied with themselves because they are, perhaps, post-dramatic or quite radical formally, when in fact sometimes I can feel that they’re still largely not thinking about the non-normative perspective, the queer or maybe youth positions or all the people of different classes and different ethnicities or people living with disabilities. And the way I think about that is that when we think queerly or when we think about a queer dramaturgy it’s something about pushing at the edges of those discourses of dramaturgy.

As part of that as well, as part of a queer dramaturgy, we end up thinking quite a bit about ethics, and that queer practice I was talking about really has something to do with the intersection of queer and ethics, and in the last hour I’ve been thinking about ethics as dramaturgy or dramaturgy as an ethical practice, and that ties in with many other conversations we’ve been hearing about the cultural mediator, those sorts of relationships that are so vital. We’re talking about various things, this is just coming from the conversation yesterday, various points, so one thing I wrote was, well, I write about the work and I’m an academic, and so I sometimes write about Lachlan’s work as a writer, so the dramaturgy of his writing, and sometimes through practice as research, so my [23:27 unclear] was a practice as research PhD at Melbourne where I was taught by Peter Eckersall and really, so much of my thinking comes from Peter, and it’s really important, I think, for me to acknowledge that lineage that comes there, and that will come back when I think about teaching dramaturgy as well. So I write about my work as well and that’s part of the dramaturgical thinking, practice as research has a lot of that real depth of thinking that is dramaturgical practice. I don’t write about our work, and then it occured to me that what we’re not really very good at is archiving and documenting. We’ve got a little bit better, but you know, if you do think about it, those queer practices, they start off very much on the art side of the mainstream and they’re not very well funded. Sometimes people don’t like the word queer in applications or other things, and then things are made and then of course you go, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a video of that, but we don’t. But we’ve gotten better at it. And I suppose the last thing that I would say, and it really came through all those conversations [24:54 unclear] eliding conversations about dramaturgy and the dramaturg. We are most usually defined as a writer and a director, Lachlan as a writer and myself as a director, but I think it’s something more symbiotic than that [25:11 unclear] and so I would go back to that initial point about how we think dramaturgically together. So what we’re going to do today is really try to think about what that process has been and by looking at the beginnings of our work together as collaborators and then our recent work. 

LP: Okay, yeah, so, Alyson and I met in Melbourne about sixteen years ago, and I actually just graduated from the Victoria College of the Arts and just moved to Australia, and we were working on a community arts project that was for young gay and lesbian people at risk - I’ve never really been quite sure what they’re at risk about. So we were working together on this project together and I think what brought us together was actually a kind of shared horror at the lack of dramaturgy and a lack of process. I don’t think we would have necessarily articulated that so clearly then, but they got a director and they got a [26:28 unclear] board and we basically just spent our time eating biscuits and we were being paid for it. It was a really strange kind of experience, having ideas and imagining what this project could be and then actually beginning this project and realising that there was no process, there was no dramaturgy. I think what that did was it then kind of brought us together. I’d been working on a play that I’d been writing while I was studying directing and I think I realised that I didn’t have the skillset to be a director - mainly I find working with actors a little bit tiring. So I showed Alyson this play I’d been writing and I showed it to a lot of people - we have this thing going on in Australia at the moment, or maybe it’s always been going on, I don’t know where - you show people plays, you’re a playwright, and there’s a general expectation that people will then read them. And what was quite remarkable about me showing Alyson this play was that she actually read it. And so that was kind of the first step in our relationship - not only did she read it, she then came back to me and didn’t want to fix it, she didn’t want to tell me what was wrong with it or treat the play like some sort of sick bird that needed to be put in a tissue box and cared for. She actually wanted to work with me on it, so our relationship began from a very warm offer that wasn’t encased in criticism or expertise or that sort of need to fix it up. And I think that’s where the foundation of our work is kind of really [28:06 unclear]. Then we kind of talked about [28:09 unclear]. I’ve worked with a lot of dramaturgs as well in Australia and other places, and what really makes our work quite distinct is that actual joy of working in a spirit of generosity and it’s based on [28:24 unclear] rather than, as I was saying before, that sort of sense that anyone needs to be fixing up work, and a real kind of honesty in the room, the way that we work with one another. So we went on to work on that first play together, Bison, and I just find it - do you want to talk about it? I’m going to hand over to you now, the way that happened. 

AC: The great thing about Bison was that - it’s very interesting that Lachlan speaks in that way about me reading this play because I’m not really very good at reading plays, and I have to sort of acknowledge that on the first day of semester when I have a group of Masters of Dramaturgy students, I’m not really good at that part of it, literary dramaturgy. What I’m really good at is performance dramaturgy, but I’m really good at is watching and seeing what things appear in front of me in real time and real space. And so we set about - when I read this play, though, I loved it, because the answers weren’t in it already. It was really hard. Extremely difficult plays to realise in time and space, because in the space of a sentence, they can move you from one place to another, to another, it’s very, very fluid, and as the person who’s got to realise it on stage, you have to find a dramaturgy on the floor that is going to be as fluid and responsive and slippery as this language that he’s given. It’s also full of the most joyful metaphors that [30:20 unclear], one of my favourite [30:22 unclear] a new metaphor and the impact of a new metaphor when suddenly something’s put together for the first time and Lachlan’s writing, it kind of just glitters with these amazing metaphors, you know, like he just said about the sick bird [30:37 unclear]. 

LP: No, I was thinking before, I can’t remember who was [30:47 unclear], but about the whole notion of how the act of dramaturgy needs to be supported as well, and definitely in Australia, that the whole idea of - you know, you can’t do good dramaturgy unless it’s actually supported from a structure outside, like an institution supports dramaturgy or a theatre company actually invests in the idea that dramaturgy is important. I think that’s what, in Australia, with new Australian work we’ve got a crisis going on at the moment because there’s an acknowledgment that dramaturgy’s important but there’s not actually the time that’s put into that. I’m thinking about what else you said about the idea of when somebody picks up a play for the first time and reads it. I’ve just done a full ride of a [31:27 unclear] in the States and they have a team of people who read plays and they’re all really, really bright people but they all come from a particular school of reading plays, which means - if you pick up a play, it’s almost - I’m not sure how does this happen, but you pick up a play and it can very quickly be dismissed, and often the plays that I found were being dismissed in that group, and we’re talking about a group of six Yale graduates - they’d pick up a play and it wouldn’t make sense, it would have this kind of messy quality that I found really appealing, and it would automatically kind of get dismissed as being something that was in need of this [32:07 unclear] and I just thought that was interesting, because I think it’s about that first moment of receiving the work, isn’t it? Sorry to interrupt.

AC: Okay, so Lachlan’s first play - I mean, you know, it’s all really about the process, the examples are really just my way of getting towards different things we’ve moved through. I think we’ve got much, much better at thinking through this relationship between our lived experience of the world and the work that we make. So [32:43 unclear] Lachlan’s first play was very much - it was like seven performers [32:48 unclear] to six, they moved through lots of spaces, they [32:52 unclear], bars, all sorts of places. So that we did in 2000 and then we did it again in 2001, and then I went to live back in the north of Ireland, northern Ireland, where I’m from, I was attending Queen’s University at Belfast, and I realised that what happens in a post-conflict environment like that is that over thirty years there’s been so much emphasis on whether you’re Catholic or Protestant that in fact all discussions of gender and sexuality have been somehow erased and effaced, and I felt that Bison was the play to do there. So Lachlan said, well, yes, great, let’s do Bison, but you know, we can’t just do it, I’ll have to rewrite it, because there’s these growing numbers in HIV and I can’t do a play about gay male sexuality that doesn’t take into account the growing numbers of HIV notifications and also the impact of online dating and probably that impacts relationships a little bit too. So that then led to a process of, kind of cultural translation, but also a rewriting of the script, and since - because I think, then we did it in Belfast and that production kind of got redone, tweaked a little bit, then it went to London as well, and so we laughed about the fact that [34:19 unclear] same plays, but we think there’s something queer about that as well, this idea of theatre that, it isn’t done [34:25 unclear] thinking about Bison in about another twenty years, or Bison 19, you know, because we found this world that allowed us to rethink the changing impacts on lived experience there. And that really, during that process, one of the actors there was diagnosed with HIV too and we felt that we were really, it was really important that we make that work there, that we were making it for northern Irish men who were performing in their own voices in front of their friends and family, and it had a really huge impact in that kind of conservative environment. So that’s carried through, I think, with all of our work, and we’re working on a piece about HIV now that will be very different [35:22 unclear] public space, trying to find different ways to engage with audiences and publics that is not about trying to get them into a theatre to see a play about HIV but is about really building on work, on sound and that kind of [35:41 unclear] bodies, the [35:43 unclear] qualities that are in Lachlan’s writing so that they make these sound pieces that go out into public shopping malls and saunas and waiting rooms and really kind of [35:57 unclear] into space that way because we want to engage with various different communities and get out of that kind of sometimes alienating space for the queer community, of, you know, with the red carpet [36:13 unclear] theatres [36:15 unclear].