Charlene Rajendran on "Difference and Aesthetic Agency – Dramaturging Choices For Change" | ADN Satellite Symposium 2017

Thank you to Australia Theatre Forum, OzAsia, the National Arts Council Singapore and C42 for making this satellite ADN symposium happen.

My experience of ADN has been one of learning and having good conversations within sessions and between them. This seems to continue and I thank the speakers from yesterday for opening new questions for the work of dramaturgy and how we operate.

Some of what I will talk about today resonates, if not overlaps, and repeats even, some of what was spoken about yesterday, and I hope this leads us to new questions, be they provisional or certain.

The power point slides operate as a kind of parallel text and you can choose to read them or not, and sometimes you can choose to listen to them rather than to me, if that works for you as well. Make it work for you, and see how it works.

1. This work we do, as dramaturgs, as dramaturgical thinkers, as people who take this idea of dramaturgy seriously, and do something with it, similarly and differently, whether we fully understand it or not… this work we do is valuable as it makes space for some critical enactments and provocative platforms that would not occur if not for this work. So I start with the declaration that dramaturgical work is critical, and increasingly crucial in a world that is becoming ignorant and indifferent to the discipline of digging into histories (and not just accepting the hegemonic narratives fed to us), examining the politics of identity (and not simply using cultural categories to perpetuate identity wars), and rethinking notions of co-existence with all living species on a vulnerable planet (rather than pretending there is no problem to begin with). In short, dealing with difference. [Slide 2]
2. Hence this work is not merely about the making of performance and the aesthetic managing of performance texts, but the work of looking closely at the human condition, interrogating the socio-political practices that affect local and global expressions of this, and attending to the highly personal and cultural affects that lead to particular platforms, conventions and practices of art-making. In all their multiplicity.
3. Dramaturgical work is inextricably related to artistic thinking and doing, in that it focuses on the ideas and practices that go into an art work. This is its intrinsic value, paying attention to the relationships and interconnections that are needed in art, and that potentially expand and critique how these ideas and practices can work. Simultaneously prodding to see what else can be done to reconfigure these ideas and practices, and how they are understood, experimented with and performed in the art work. It thus produces space and time for alternative responses to our world that stem from a commitment to questioning, researching and collaborating through art. This is not a self-obsessed and market-driven process, but one that is responsible, courageous, civic conscious and aesthetically alive.
4. Hence this artistic process is informed by two key qualities. Firstly, developing imaginative provocations, [Slide 3] which involves thinking symbolically, using metaphor and allegory, engaging with the play of fiction and reality, about issues that are no less urgent and demand attention. So that the work of the imagination is understood as primary, and not relegated to a secondary position after rationalist modes of thought that deny imaginative insights. Instead the imagination is recognized as necessary for the creativity and innovation that are crucial to human survival, with the artistic process spearheading spaces for this to be nurtured and sharpened.
5. Secondly, particularly in relation to performance, this artistic process entails making collaborative choices. [Slide 4] Which means listening to a range of views and generating dialogue about these opinions in relation to the focus, approach, form and intention of the art. And then making decisions that draw from this interaction and cross- fertilisation of opinions. Where difference is not feared, but embraced with an appetite for interaction. An often agonistic space where there is disagreement, and where the otherwise silenced voices are allocated more space to be heard. Hence, more often than in the ‘real world’, dissensus as Ranciere would have it, can occur.
6. But if imaginative provocation and collaborative decision-making are to be given priority, skills are needed to facilitate and stir these processes, as they are often messy, uncertain, ambivalent and unpredictable, arousing a certain amount of anxiety and insecurity when those involved are pushed to review their methods or approaches, or when critical opinions clash and create disruption that threatens to undo working ties. The risks of things falling apart are always present, and thus managing the outcomes and dealing with the possible fractures, is also part of dramaturging. People, as much as the art work, need to be looked after and built up.
7. I believe these skills are leadership skills. I highlight three in particular. First, the dramaturg must be closely attentive to what is being created and actively present. [Slide 5] This enhances the sense of value that a work has. Such that the need to scrutinize detail and investigate motivations stems from the conviction that these add to the legitimacy of the work, and its role in the larger workings of life. It’s not just about being fussy, but locating what matters and why and how. Critical attention makes these links purposeful, and active presence puts focus on these connections when they are articulated and become part of the artistic discourse.
8. Which leads to the second skill of deep listening, [Slide 6] in which ideas are heard in the discussion, the rehearsal floor, and all the spaces in between. Listening with sensitivity to what is said, what is done, how this occurs and discerning the sonority that is produced. The dramaturg is largely silent, but adds a quality of apprehension and response that is meant to thicken and deepen the work. This silence is not flippant nor frivolous, but it does not dismiss play either. Deep play, where the stakes are high, and the ritualistic intensity of energy is palpable in the silence, is understood as part of a heightened atmosphere that is generated when something unpredictable yet crucial takes place. Something that stems from an experiment, or an excavation, but which seeks to dig deeper into a truth that would otherwise be glossed over.
9. And third, a political consciousness. [Slide 7] A skill that the dramaturg acquires in relation to the work she does and the context she works in. This means understanding the power relations within the art project, as well as those that circulate in the community, society, nation and region. Histories and narratives of selves and others are crucial in this regard, and increasingly, the question of difference – be it racial, national, ethnic, religious, ideological, sexual, class, educational, professional, material, and so on – becomes pivotal in the workings of a cultural landscape. And dramaturgical thinking has to take it on with rigour and sensitivity, as the dramaturg is meant to raise the difficult question, probe the problematic decision and affirm the radical choice where needed.
10. So whether we call ourselves dramaturgs, advisors, curators, mediators, facilitators, companions, stirrers, listeners, Jokers, we are involved in this work and it has implications. Ones that I would like to examine in relation to three Singapore practitioners, whose dramaturgical thinking has been potent in shaping a landscape, namely the Singapore performance landscape, even if they are not known primarily as dramaturgs, but as directors, writers and public intellectuals. They are Kuo Pao Kun, Ong Keng Sen and Kok Heng Leun – one of whom is no longer with us, and one of whom is in the room. [Slide 8]
11. As theatre practitioners and performance makers who have been actively present in the theatre and arts scene, deep listeners of the social and aesthetic terrain, and politically conscious navigators of the cultural landscape, the choices they have made stem from their dramaturgical thinking. I want to suggest that they are socio-cultural and political dramaturgs who have observed closely and studied the landscape of society, and then proceeded to make suggestions, ask questions and provide provocations through the art they make, and the spaces they have produced for critical art and artists to grow. [This is not an exhaustive list, as there are others who have also played an important part in the process, and I am conscious that they are 3 ethnically Chinese men, whom I have selected. There are others who do this work as well – T. Sasitharan, Alvin Tan, Haresh Sharma, Alfian Saat, Natalie Hennedige, Ngiam Su-Lin – and the 3 chosen are widely different in themselves. So please indulge me as a non-Chinese female in considering these choices.]
12. If we look at the work of Kuo, Ong and Kok, while varied when compared to each other, it is easy to observe that it has been highly interdisciplinary and intercultural, bearing in mind that both those terms are to be read as loose frames for dealing with difference, rather than prescribed modes of style or form. Responding to the Singapore context, which is materially urban, technological and affluent, while culturally postcolonial, multiple and global, and politically conservative, singular and paternal, they have spent time reading this complex yet tiny space in relation to the production of culture and the arts. And recognized the importance of negotiating difference, not just because society is officially multicultural and the pace of change in Singapore is intense, but also because the kinds of change that occur, from material to cultural to psychological, demands response. This demands a capacity to work with shifting and fluid frames of reference. Such that being able to work with the liquid modern, has been evident and being skilled in difference, or 'campur’ has been most valuable. ‘Campur’ is a Malay word for mix, but used more regularly in local patois to mean all kinds of putting together that stems from a co-existence that is porous and overlapping, without becoming a melting pot. We ‘campur the way we speak, eat, dress and live, and somehow this has a less formidable and more organic meaning than difference or hybridity. So I use it to refer to the performative mix of spoken, sonic, movement and visual languages in performance, and suggest that this is a Singapore- Malaysian, if not Malayan, version of difference.
13. For Kuo, Ong and Kok, I think ‘campur’ is potent, but unsettled. It remains deeply imbued with potential, but is challenging, and thus important to make accessible and to bridge. It is an assemblage, a collage, a mash-up, and various other things that challenge the way culture and the arts is experienced and apprehended. This is conscious work that involves ‘redistributing the sensible’, to draw on Ranciere again, in relation to how the arts is perceived and navigated, what is discussed and how it is experimented. [Slide 9] Making opportunities for revising notions of the arts, and thus altering what is possible by including more options and capacities, which means incorporating more people in the discourse.
14. In redistributing the sensible, or in Malayan terms, ‘working with campur’, they have taken on leadership capacities that have advanced the role of artists in society. It would take much too long to go into the details and complexities of what each one has done. So I will focus on one particular aspect for each, arguing that these choices have advanced aesthetic agency in the Singapore context. If agency is the capacity to act with independence, critical awareness and a strong sense of potential to be explored, then aesthetic agency refers to the ability to do this in relation to artistic choices that propose their own notions of Beauty and Truth. [Slide 10] I am not referring to aesthetics in the German, specifically Kantian sense, where there is a reaching for an Absolute or Sublime. Nor do I subscribe to Adorno’s notion of agency as belonging to the work of art.
15. I do refer to aesthetics as that realm that produces certain kinds of judgment and evaluation, that stem from particular cultural contexts, and the forms and styles that gain situated value or cultural capital because of histories and politics therein. In a space like Singapore, owing to colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and more recently a certain kind of fundamentalism, and other forms of imposed values, the notions and norms of beauty, good, true and value, need to be questioned, revised, dismantled, reconfigured or rejected even, in order to develop contextually-grounded and contemporary modes of making and giving value to art. In this respect aesthetic agency, like social and political agency, demands work and cannot be assumed. Power relations are embedded in discourses and practices, and this work is about learning and un-learning. If the work of learning, is to grow new and alternative understanding, a shift towards more depth and skill, and a capacity to then wield alternative vocabularies of thinking and doing, then learners, or unlearners, must think of themselves as active participants in the discourse and not just passive receivers. The dramaturg is often concerned with what is learnt, what else needs to be learnt, and how and why this learning occurs.
16. So I suggest that when Kuo set up learning spaces for performance, at the start of his career through to his final years, and was an educator alongside being writer and director, he was dramaturging a society where the opportunities to learn the arts were few and far between. He did not train to be an educator, but recognized that if people could not learn the arts in a disciplined and rigorous manner, then the landscape would remain depleted of the key nutrients needed for new work to grow. [Slide 11]
17. In 1965, when Singapore became a nation, and Kuo Pao Kun and his collaborator-wife Goh Lay Kwan, set up Singapore Performing Arts School, which later became the Practice Performing Arts School, now The Theatre Practice, this was a significant intervention in the ecosystem. This was a non-profit organization that taught theatre and dance at a time when there were barely any affordable spaces for children and adults to learn the arts. It is the longest-standing professional bilingual group in Singapore, making it a bold venture. As when Kuo and Goh took this on, it was not an iron rice bowl but a risky choice. Nonetheless one that they felt was crucial to feed the work they believed needed to be done. They continued to make performance, but they invested in a space where learning was important to the making.
18. Both had the advantage of training abroad. Kuo was at NIDA in Sydney, from 1963-1965, having come to Australia to work as a radio announcer and translator in Melbourne in 1959. Goh was also in Melbourne, training at the Victoria Ballet Guild, and she went on to become principal dancer. So it was on this large island that they met, and then when they returned to their tiny island, they set up a domestic and artistic union. In fact the day they married, July 1st, was also the day they registered SPAS.
19. Seeking to decolonize and make contextually based performance, their training in the West was adapted to the needs of a Singapore context. Instead of mimicking Western-based processes, they experimented with these systems and styles in relation to what people in the region were already performing. They drew from languages and vocabularies from the folk, traditional and contemporary styles they encountered. And we can then make links between this process of thinking about the arts, and the kinds of performances Kuo went on to make later, such as Mama Looking for Her Cat in 1988, which was a seminal multilingual performance that has since led to the use of more than one language in Singapore theatre being a fairly ordinary occurrence. While theatre is still categorised according to language, and this impacts audience profiles who attend, these patterns can be links to how people are schooled, and thus to unlearn is to make space where options are palpable and concrete. For Kuo, learning the arts entailed learning about how society breathes and dealing with difference as part of this space.
20. Difference was never a barrier but a possibility. And education was not geared towards standardizing cultural norms, but working with these multiplicities. [Slide 12] Kuo’s notion of Open Culture, in which one is rooted in a particular culture, not necessarily of one’s prescribed ethnicity, and open to a range of other cultures that then feed into an extension of oneself and an evolution of a larger culture, was his way of asserting an alternative to the official multicultural policy of separate parallel cultures that co-exist but do not intersect or cross into each other. This is still a struggle for the city state, which aims towards a ‘perfect’ multiculturalism, recently talked about, but not a deep multiplicity, that allows for fluid yet historically valued borderlines. Even though everyday life is becoming increasingly campur.
21. As cultural hybridity, or campuran, became more ordinary, and notions of a local intercultural existence, was accepted by people, even if not officially, as part of the Singapore identity, local performances expressed this difference more regularly. [Slide 13] This affects how Kuo is thinking through culture, and he then went on to set up the Theatre Training and Research Programme in 2000, which is now the Intercultural Theatre Institute. This shifted from looking at the multiplicity of cultures within Singapore, to more global perspectives that challenged notions of the contemporary performer. Bringing together traditional and contemporary practitioners to teach and learn, the approach underlined a need for an intercultural understanding that was more profound and politically aware of the power hierarchies and complexities of difference in performance. Again, Kuo was offering an alternative to a Western-based interculturalism of simply staging performers and forms from different traditions and nations, to develop these capacities for difference within bodies and not just between them. The school, has had to contend with a range of issues just to keep alive, but nonetheless is a valuable site on which certain kinds of thinking and doing can occur.
22. Kuo is now a renowned pioneer theatre director and playwright, whose work is part of the Singapore canon. So it may be difficult to remember that he was not always an established figure who enjoyed the benefits of sanction. Transition, Being at the Margins and Working from the Edge were very much part of how Kuo contributed to and contested the ways in which art was framed, positioned and created in Singapore. This was political and personal. He was an active presence who spoke out in relation to the fractures and frailties in the cultural landscape, sometimes at great cost such as when he was detained without trial under the Internal Security Act for alleged communist activities from 1976-1980.
23. If you read his writings and speeches, now published in a collected edition of his works, you see that he spoke on education, the economy, culture, identity, politics, even the need for play. He was not just interested in art but its relationship with everyday life, and in how it led to thinking about and feeling for people. And this came through time and again. [Slide 14]
24. For Kuo an underlying key principle in learning that is now often cited was: Better to have a Worthy Failure than a Mediocre Success. A dramaturgical principle for the arts in Singapore where everything tends to be laced with high stakes and high pressure burdens to be successful. Kuo founded the Substation in 1990, which remains an independent arts space for experimental arts, and where many artists have benefitted from having a space in which to try out new work with relatively low financial resources yet high morale support. His vision to make space for taking artistic risks and prod critical engagement was exceptional, and many practitioners were nurtured and encouraged by Kuo to keep doing so. His was a very active and attentive presence.
25. Which leads me to the second socio-cultural and political dramaturg I want to talk about, Ong Keng Sen. As Artistic Director of TheatreWorks since the late 1980s, Ong is known for his spectacular intercultural and interdisciplinary performances such as Lear, and more recently Trojan Women, with a whole gamut of works in between. His leadership of TheatreWorks has led him to program a wide range of performances that included the classics, but initially gave emphasis to new and local work that expressed a Singapore in transition and struggling with its own apprehension of change and difference. History, myth, memory, technology, land, politics, identity, precarity, ambivalence, have been some recurring themes in his oeuvre. All the while experimenting and culling new approaches to thinking about and making performance in the Singaporean, Southeast Asian, then Asian and now global context. [Slide 15]
26. Again, not unlike Kuo, Ong recognizes the need for artists to have platforms to learn from each other and collaborate, so that notions of culture and nation would become more porous. The Flying Circus Project is a key project that exemplifies this. This is how it is articulated on the TheatreWorks website: 
    
    “Established in 1996, The Flying Circus Project or FCP is a major programme exploring creative expression in Asia. Its focal points are individual creative action, encountering difference and strategies of art practice, emphasizing the tenacity of local sites – with their artists, activists and public intellectuals. The FCP is curated around the central notion of “world creating”, how do we form new micro- worlds, which are responsible, articulated and ethically engaged?”
    
    So apart from the artists coming together from various parts of the world, they are world creating – making worlds, new-micro worlds that then of course change the way the world is. Aesthetic agency.
27. The Flying Circus Project was initially geared towards revitalizing artistic expression within Asia through juxtaposition in tradition. Engaging with traditional masters to start the ball rolling, the aim was to engage tradition as a living process rather than a museum piece. The notion of culture as active and fluid. Performers, contemporary and traditional, came together to learn about and understand each other’s work, and then examine how there could be interactions, intersections, across cultures and disciplines. In order to do this there was a need to listen very deeply to what was happening and how practices and ideas needed to change. Also, as Ong identifies, the political act of Asians coming together to ask questions about what was Asian, was propelled by finding dialogue that was ‘autonomous, empowering and equitable’. This laboratory, and not production process, was meant to be eked out by everyone – a collaborative and imaginative vision. A vision that needed to be found, rather than already decided in advance.
28. In an early interview about the FCP,1 where Keng Sen talks about this work in Berlin in 1998, he acknowledged that this project was propelled by an interest in crossing borders and the cultural mix that exists within one self, his self to begin with. He talked about code- switching, moving between different cultural sensibilities, as part of an internal landscape that he has negotiated as someone who is Singaporean. So to counter a feeling of loss or displacement, the process was fueled by a validation of the mix, the campur, rather than a search for authenticity that is rooted in a single clearly defined history. This helps dismantle rigid borderlines of selves and others without denying their particularity or situatedness. Instead, it develops a capacity to think through one’s limitations and extend one’s boundaries by embodying and enacting artistic processes in dialogue. It pushes for difference to act as catalyst to new aesthetic possibility. Open Culture with new options for choice.
29. Responding to changes and listening for what else is needed, the FCP has since changed. It is no longer focused on Asia, as since 2004 European, American, Arab and African artists are included. And from a laboratory it has now included the setting up of alternative universities of daily life. [eg. Phnom Penh, working with Rithy Pan’s Bophana Centre of Memories and Archives]. Clearly learning is a focus and experimenting is part of this politically pedagogical dimension.
30. More recently Ong’s role as the founding Artistic Director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts, from 2014-2017, has meant being responsible for a national platform of artistic meaning making. [Slide 16] The festival has been highly regarded since its inception in 1977, and is exceptional for its breadth and depth in the Southeast Asian context. And as one would expect, Keng Sen was an apt choice to take leadership of this festival and take it to a new level, as he did. But I want to highlight a new aspect of the festival, the OPEN, that speaks to how his dramaturgical sensibilities were working to intervene in the landscape. Earlier this year at ADN in Yokohama, Keng Sen spoke very clearly about how he saw his role as festival director as creating interventions. Where he sought to create greater transparency, and that his work included being like an ombudsman, a term that suggests mediation between sites of conflict. He talked about the difficulties of making work when there is a prevalence of censorship, because this precludes the possibility of certain kinds of failure – echoing in some ways Kuo’s identification of the need for a worthy failure more than a mediocre success. Here the ombudsman opens up spaces for critical dialogue and this becomes a form of public office, where the capacity to comment on, work with and cut into policies about the arts in Singapore, as well as capitalist tendencies about life as a whole, are part of the responsibility that a festival director takes on in his dramaturgy of the festival.
31. So Ong developed the O.P.E.N. which is a ‘pre-festival of ideas’ that gives focus to being open, participatory, engaged and in negotiation, rather than being concerned with the consumption of a festival, which tends to be about value for money, and getting a good deal. Instead the OPEN emphasizes exploration by raising questions and pushing for public engagement. This occurs a two months before the festival begins, and in the final iteration led straight into the festival proper. The website suggests it is styled as a popular academy, to ‘build a certain type of consciousness’, and ‘attitude to art’ where there is ‘a belief system and a space for really asking questions – a kind of Camelot’.2 [Slide 17] Where we gather around the table to really talk – we use the image of the roundtable as a format for conferencing and dialogue. But how far do we go in realizing the ideals of equity and justice when we do? Do we really have capacity for dissensus through campur?
32. Several discussions about the role of the festival director and the festival in the city have emerged since Keng Sen took on this position, and even as a new director takes over, the dialogues continue. They relate to funding, censorship, programming, etc. Perhaps this has been another dimension of the interventions or mediations that are not just related to a ‘pre-festival’ of ideas, like OPEN, but a ‘post- festival’ of ideas as well. Where the active presence, deep listening and political consciousness of the ombudsman enables the landscape to continue its response and take on responsibility.
33. Ong’s work can be read as advancing how the Singapore arts landscape becomes more mature, able to innovate with confidence, and create art that stirs deep. The trajectory of the Flying Circus Project, that movies into the OPEN, then deepens the discourse while opening up options. This is a form of arts advocacy that underlines the importance of taking ownership and being participant. Recognizing how public engagement and civic consciousness are key to the relationship of art, art makers and art audiences.
34. Which leads me to the work and dramaturgical thinking of Kok Heng Leun, Artistic Director of Drama Box, and currently Nominated Member of Parliament for the Arts. [Slide 18] Heng Leun has been acutely involved in the navigation of these spheres as a writer and director, and sometimes production/performance dramaturg as well. (And as you heard at the roundtable yesterday) His artistic choices are informed by a deep sense of critical engagement with people who are often not regular theatre-goers, and a concern for social justice and empowerment.
35. Heng Leun takes seriously the question of how to develop conversations with the public through the arts, about issues that are potent in their everyday life, and significantly in spaces that are within their lived environment. Hence for the past two decades particularly, his work has spanned the conventional theatre space, but reached out into the void deck, the open air field, a hospital foyer, and other sites that are non-conventional performance venues in order to give get audiences involved in the conversations he puts together. One outcome of this work is that Drama Box now has two inflatable theatres, called the Goli, that are unique in their presence and vision for performance in the community. [Slide 19]
36. Heng Leun has not avoided the difficult issues, using Forum Theatre, immersive and engaged arts processes to deal with tough topics and complex emotions. These range from death and dying, the SARS epidemic, land acquisition, and questions of racial identity. Making the work of Drama Box a critical reference point for the state when it comes to seeking dialogic arts processes about sensitive topics that many others might veer away from for fear of reproach and reprimand.
37. In 2012 Heng Leun steered an interdisciplinary engaged arts project called IPS PRISM, collaborating with a think-tank, the Institute of Policy Studies and a range of artists to look at issues of governance. [Slide 20] This was an unprecedented moment, in which this think- tank worked with artists to think about public aspirations for the state. And allowed for public conversations about governance through Forum Theatre and other interactive arts portals that were a generally more edgy than usual. Not blatantly oppositional as the intent was dialogue, but much more imaginative and collaborative than otherwise generally associated with a think-tank. And Heng Leun’s work continues to advocate for political consciousness to be seeped into the fabric of art-making in order to ‘create a diversified, creative and sustainable future for Singapore… with wisdom and empathy’.
38. More recently Heng Leun has become an NMP and this of course opens up a new dimension of leadership. In this capacity he is not only engaging with arts policy, but making a concerted effort to position the arts as central to all of society. He locates art as a way of thinking and not just a product, and challenges society and those in leadership, namely other MPs to do likewise. In order to reflect the views and needs of the arts community he has organized several town hall sessions, held consultation focus group discussions with artists, stakeholders and audiences, and continues to be engaged in advocacy through the kinds of projects that he helms, such as Both Sides, Now, which deals with an aging population and issues of death and dying.
39. Heng Leun has spoken up on a range of issues, that include censorship and the funding for the arts, as well as urban planning and the rights of women. Not because these are extraneous to the arts, but because these are concerns that artists take on and talk about in their work. He has expressed the view that art needs to be seen as important, in order for it to be taken more seriously and in order for the arts to become a higher priority. This is no easy task, but requires leadership in order for it to occur. [Slide 21]
40. Heng Leun’s dramaturgical thinking negotiates the arts as central to the advancement of society, and encourages the public to be active in dialogue and participation. His approach to why the arts is critical pertains to the capacity that the arts has for generating different modes of being that are needed in society. Difference is again a catalyst for an aesthetic agency that is propelled by political, social and personal purpose. One that admits the tensions and difficulties of negotiating the cultural landscape, but builds on an imaginative and collaborative process for creating new options that empower greater agency and solidarity. In many respects, I think the Arts NMP has to work through a dramaturgy of politics and performance, and then make choices about how to perform accordingly.
41. In a world that is increasingly lacking good leadership across a range of sectors, not just in politics, but in education, economics, culture and the environment, arts leadership that is informed by good dramaturgical thinking can assist. Imaginative and collaborative decision making skills are needed, particularly in relation to issues of difference, and this is something artists take on when they critically develop and dramaturg a process, a performance, an arts landscape even. Especially when this includes an intercultural or interdisciplinary approach that foregrounds difference as a key working dimension in the artistic endeavor.
42. Hence by thinking about dramaturgy as interventions into the broader socio-cultural and political space, the dramaturg takes on a deeper level of engagement with society, involvement with artists and commitment to the art making process as well. It is not merely about improving the quality of art making, but addressing the needs of an arts ecosystem as well. Perhaps initially through a performance or project, but gradually through an overall capacity to participate in, and affect the way the arts is positioned and responded to more widely. [Slide 22]
43. In an edited volume of essays on the ‘Grammar of Politics and Performance’ Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt investigate the relationship between politics and performance to discover structural similarities they call grammar and argue that ‘political thinkers need to consider a dramaturgical and performance analysis such that politics cannot be analysed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance’ (p.2). Their interest in the conjunction of politics and performance is to suggest fresh approaches to a globalising thrust of neoliberalism and look at the importance of identities, causes and the naming of groups that affect how difference operates in society. As they state in their introduction, ‘ this book is an attempt to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue that goes beyond the polite acknowledgment of academic efforts to think beyond our disciplinary paradigms and show a wide array of connections between and among vocabularies, concepts and methods of approaching the topic’ (p.17)
44. If we look further at the work that Kuo, Ong and Kok, and others like them, we could perhaps evolve a grammar of dramaturgy and leadership as well. In which principles of working in the arts are recognized as leadership qualities that advance aesthetic agency and deepen the discourse on the arts. This is arts leadership and aesthetic agency that I hope we can expand through the increased attention and participation in dramaturgical thinking, in mini- symposia such as this, and other platforms where we review our work as dramaturgs, or whatever we call ourselves, and strengthen the dramaturgical quality of the choices we make for change.
45. Thank you. [Slide 23]