ADN Report | ADN Satellite Symposium 2018

HN: Hello, everyone, good morning. My name is How Ngean. First and foremost, I’d just like to quickly wish everyone a Happy Lunar New Year. Today is the first day and what an auspicious start to our ADN meeting here at TPAM. Before I begin, I really would like to thank TPAM for hosting us again this year, for allowing us to have a space, where we can gather and talk about dramaturgy in all sorts of forms and manners and disciplines, and ways of talking about it, basically.

What we'd like to do for the very first session today, we have quite a few sessions going up to tomorrow. But I think for the first time we've decided that we needed to talk about what ADN is about. You have seen just now a short clip of perhaps five minutes of some of the kinds of discussions, themes, subjects that have been brought up in, I think, collectively, up to 32 hours of symposia that we've had stretched in three countries or three sites. And that's just a glimpse of what we've been doing. And we're very excited that we have come so far. And we're still - there's still a long way to go. But let me just start with very basic stuff with you about ADN.

We are about three years old at the moment, the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. We are actually still, I think, struggling in many ways in a healthy way to talk about what we are. Roughly, we are definitely a network of people, made up of people. We are at the moment very activity based. And the idea is to have a network where we do open sharing of knowledge and exchange. It is also in a way formalised because our activities are formalised so far in the shapes and forms of symposia, discussions, roundtables, and we do tend to do that in a more structured manner for the simple reason that dramaturgy is messy. And there must be some form, I feel, a way that we can talk about it in its many forms, disciplines and arguments, about dramaturgy. ADN has a sort of mission to gather this knowledge, right. We have been doing that for the previous few events when we set up all these kinds of different panels and roundtables. And we are also actively archiving, documenting, and perhaps, in the future, find some kind of way where we can share this archival repository that we have.

So what is ADN not? We're not a professional body who's looking for, or giving our accreditation. I think all of us agree that dramaturgy can be conducted in a professional manner when we work with our fellow makers, whether it's Dance, Art, Theatre. But we're not seeking for that kind of professional association yet, because I think all of us at ADN feel we still need to talk about it, and perhaps do something about it later on in terms of what it means to engage in dramaturgy. And therefore, we are still far away from that. We are also not consultants. We are not a body who is made up of dramaturgs who can offer you a diverse range of services, so to speak. We're not about that. I think we're still at the stage where like I said again, there's just so much to talk about in terms of dramaturgy.

On a personal level, this project was started by me when I started immersing myself in dramaturgical work only in 2009. Before that I was a performer, and perhaps sometimes a performance maker. I fell into dramaturgy in 2009 when I was asked to help someone do a choreographic work. And then someone said, “You’re dramaturging.” And that started a whole curiosity for me of what does it mean to be a dramaturg and what does dramaturgy mean?

In looking back, I was digging for answers from actually a very Western point of view. There was of course, a very strong and a very pedigree lineage of dramaturgy going back to the Western idea of theatre and text. But increasingly, we were doing a lot of works in this part of the world that were different. They were interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, in different channels. Visual Arts was combining performance. Performance was looking at multimedia that stretched not just into video projections, but then there was livestreaming, social platforms. But there was always then an inkling of how do we then look at the philosophies, and the structures, or even the work methods of dramaturgy that go beyond canonical text.

So there was a curiosity in me to find out more. This curiosity in me to find out more then led to a curiosity to find out who's out there. I really wanted to engage with other people from the region, especially, who were doing similar kind of dramaturgical work. But I wasn't sure who they were. And I thought it might be good to just start off with a symposium and that was the beginning of Asian Dramaturgs’ Network.

So in terms of what we've been trying to do, there is a focus on dramaturgy, in the function of the dramaturg, I guess, a very conscious effort to connect regional thinking, if you like, from an Asian point of view. The term ‘asian’ here, in previous meetings as we've already discussed, is problematic, but it's problematic for me and for quite a few of us in a productive way. Because then it offers layers of interpretation based on sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, whether it's Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines. And we've been lucky to have always invited participants from quite a few countries all over the region, focusing on very specific kinds of practices, whether it's theatre, dance, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary work. I would also like to stress, and I think we are quite proud that, we are artists-centred network, where most of the time we get together to talk about processes and artistic creation. And also what goes into that, whether it's thinking or doing. ADN is, I feel, at the moment, is also quite special because I still see ourselves as a roving or nomadic project and network if you like, with a home base in Singapore. I'll explain a little bit about what I mean by “home base”.

In our three years leading up to now, we are still quite organic in the way we organise as a team. More importantly, we are still organising ourselves according to our events and activities. So there are many, many other ways that we want to do what we want to do with this network and we're still trying to figure it out.

So as you saw just now in that little clip, so far we've already had three meetings where we've gathered quite a few people together. And we've gone into many areas. We have had themes, subjects, topics of discussions that are formed into panel discussions, roundtables, keynotes. And now we're here again in our second year in TPAM, where we have a little satellite [symposium].

So far, the kinds of themes that we have been dealing with – the first one was literally just to talk about dramaturgy, and what it means to be a dramaturg in its many forms and variations and permutations. And then last year on our first outing in TPAM, we wanted to look maybe, perhaps, at how do we look at Asian dramaturgy or what's out there in terms of Asian dramaturgy.

In Adelaide, we went over there, where we have a sort of had a special focus looking at the Social and the Cultural. And now here today, we're here hoping to talk to all of you and to each other about dramaturgy and the Political. Here I just like to say just a quick thing about the Political. When we talk about ‘political’ here, we were looking at the idea of the dramaturg or dramaturgy as an intervention into the process of creation process of artistic work. And it was always about change rather than something that to resist. The change here or the introduction of change is always meant or viewed in a productive and meaningful manner.

Very quickly – we are also now planning our next edition which is at Yogyakarta, September 2018.

ADN as a sort of a roving entity – not  quite physical, made up of people ideas, thoughts. We do have a home, and that home is in Centre 42 in Singapore. When I mooted the idea of such a network, I communicated with some old friends at Centre 42, Singapore, where then they agreed to come on as a partner. In the beginning, it was strictly a partner in administration and management. But later on, we have really become colleagues, where there's open discussion about how we want to take ADN into the future, how we plan things, how we document our findings, how we even critique some of the things we've done. Centre 42 itself is very unique and special – is probably it's the only space, I would say, a formal space in Singapore where it is incubator first and foremost. It is text-based. It is a hub where new work happens, it is a hub where process work is encouraged. It is a hub where original writing goes into production development. And it is a hub for archive and documentation. And all of these activities first and foremost were centred on looking at theatre in Singapore, historically and also of the present. So it was great that Centre 42 magnanimously opened their home to us at ADN. This is just one part of what we want to talk about today or what we want to introduce.

I want to now quickly introduce the people from Centre 42 for which this wouldn't have happened. Centre 42 is made out of Casey Lim, Executive Director. Casey, can you just stand – he’s right at the back. Ma Yanling, who is Company Manager. So the speakers and participants, I'm sure you've got a lot of emails from her. Daniel Teo, who has been instrumental in actually organising, planning, and dramaturging, if you’d like, research and documentation for ADN in past activities. And then there’s Gwen Pew, Programmes and Communications Executive. And, last but not least, we have Robin loon with us, who's the Principal Consultant, with Centre 42. And he has been instrumental in suggesting, promoting and recommending many sorts of projects that involve developmental works for Centre 42.

So, basically, what I've done now is I've just given you a very brief introduction to what ADN is about. In the next section, we're going to split three ways where we report to you specific activities that have happened with at ADN. Robin will start first. And right after that it will be Charlene Rajendran, who is Co-director of ADN. Oh no, I will go second. And then Charlene will wrap up. In the second half of this particular session, we would like to go into some kind of discussion where we hope to engage all of you in different topics. So without further ado, Robin, would you like to join us.

RL: And a very good morning to participants. Welcome to ADN 2018, Yokohama, TPAM. To all fellow Chinese, [“happy new year” in Cantonese]. Alright. So for each component, we are going to – the brief was for myself and Charlene, and How Ngean, to extract certain things that were quite instrumental that that really affected the way that we have been looking at dramaturgs and dramaturgy. So, I'm not going to give you a summary of what went on, but I'm just going to pick out a few things that I thought were very provocative. And I wanted to share them with you and, and perhaps also illustrate how a forum like ADN can be very, very instrumental and useful in bringing up these issues.

From the start, we already know that – and actually the theme of that event was conceptualised by How Ngean. It's about mapping, so mapping in and out. So I'm just going to use the metaphor that he's created, which is about mapping, and to really encapsulate the 2016 symposium. And that was a three-day event. There were lots and lots of sessions starting as early as eight, nine o'clock.

So first of all, I'm just going to talk about the mappings. And mobilising things, in terms of the various kinds of findings, the language to talk about. We all know what we do can sometimes be seen as the work of a dramaturg, dramaturgy, but do we have the same language to talk about [it]? So again, that was the purpose of 2016 – to gather people. So it was a gathering. And again, it was a gathering primarily of dramaturgs. A gathering of artists who've been worked with dramaturgs. And also, most interestingly, we had a huge group of practitioners interested in the work of the dramaturg, and just wanting to know a lot more of what it constitutes, and what it is. So I think that that was one of the key things that we accomplished by just bringing people together. Where are you from? How are you? And so forth. What is it the work that you do? And we had various rigorous sessions where there was a lot of talking over topics, over their own works.

And the second thing is about matching terms. What are the terms of engagement? Is there a common language for dramaturgs in their respective contexts? Should there even be one? How do we communicate our practices across – Are there standards? And this horrible word that I don't like to use, but my institution uses – are there any ‘benchmarking’ of these practices? Because isn't that one of the first few things to talk about professionalizing, a kind of parity?

But I think the most important thing that 2016 brought about was really conversation. It opened up the conversation to really find out what each other does. I think that's one of the most important thing as a starting off point.

So, matching terms – I’m  just going to talk about two particular terms that struck me because I came to dramaturg and dramaturgy, academically, but also through practice. And I know the history of dramaturgy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've read all the books about it. But I think what was particularly interesting for somebody like me, who is bilingual – I work in Chinese and in English – is really to find the terminologies in different languages and that opened up conversations about crosscultural, and about translation. So, Yinan, who is with us again, actually introduced a term of the dramaturg as the gou zuo, which for the longest time, a Chinese dramaturg, terminology was a gu wen, which is actually really, just a consultant. So it used to be called a xi ju gou wen which is a text consultant or play consultant, which is fairly generic.

And as you see from the clip in the beginning of today's presentation, the whole idea of gou zuo is it can be a nominalised group, but it can also be very active. You are constructing, you are making. So it's a lot more hands on. And again, you've heard How Ngean talk about the pengganggu versus the pendamping, which of course is the idea of somebody who provokes. And this was Helly Manarti’s idea. And that brought out conversations about how active is the role of the dramaturg. Again, any common kinds of practices or any kind of common benchmarking. What is the relationship between the dramaturg and the artist? And I think most importantly, what does one expect a dramaturg to do? Indeed, what does a dramaturg’s own expectations of the work? So again, it opened up these conversations from just really naming, giving the dramaturg a name.

So from there we went on to conversations about ethics, responsibilities. There were many conversations about how does the dramaturg configure his or her subjectivity, cultural background, training and discipline, when dramaturging a piece of work. And this came from Nakajima Nanako, who is a trained traditional Japanese dance artist, when invited to dramaturg a particular word that fused traditional Japanese dance, she was very conflicted. The traditional Japanese dancer in her said, “Well, that's not the right way to do it.” And she found herself struggling as to whether to represent the art that she's been trained or to serve the needs of the work. So that she shared with us, which was something very – because most of us come into dramaturgy, not as our main practice, but also as a peripheral practice. We would have main practices in the performing arts or in any of the arts. But how much should that – We always say that “Oh, that should inform on our practices.” What is the nature of this information? How do we allow this in – How  do we get informed and not let it dominate? So this was a very interesting point that Nanako brought up. And I guess again, the whole idea of benchmarking, professionalising of dramatugs. So again, big question, is he or she part of the creative process? Or is he or she merely a service provider? Yes, of course, the inclusive part of me will say, “Well, why can't then be both?” Certainly you can be, but they would demand very, very different techniques, very, very different processes. So again, these are the interesting conversations that have come up about the names, how active the role.

You've heard a little bit about from what David Pledger talks about. Now he described dramaturgy – So, people keep asking – One of the biggest questions asked all the time is what is this thing called dramaturgy? Is it just structure? Is it dramatic structure? So, he has a very interesting definition of it, which is a series of logic and decisions made in the alchemy of the artistry. So the – He called it the operating system. And he says that the dramaturg has to be multifaceted, have lots of interfaces with the artistic processes. The dramaturg has to work within the system, as well as to create the system, and to be lots of things and to do a lot of things in between these two positionalities. So the whole idea of the operating system and where the dramaturg is positioned is something that David brought into the conversation.

And then of course with that came negotiations. Right, so yeah, we have all these. David Pledger said there are all all these positions, but what do we negotiate? And there are certain times, in 2016, we talked about what is the difference between a dramaturg and a curator? What is the difference between a dramaturg and a programmer? What is the difference between a dramaturg and a producer? Should a dramaturg also be a producer? When – Or the new terminology of the creative producer – can the creative producer double as a dramaturg? Should these roles be separate? So what are these new roles and what are these designations? Negotiating race, language and culture? I think this was one of the big talking points that Ken Takiguchi, who is with us again this time, talked about in his work as a dramaturg, that it is not a simple case of just translating. He focused on his work in Hotel (Wild Rice, 2015), where he did the research and ended up also talking about how, as the Japanese dramaturg, he had to also negotiate and mitigate the cultural differences. Then again, negotiating events – the festival circuit, the context. Expanding the role of the dramaturg beyond performance making. Can a drama to go beyond just performance making? Which is a topic that we've talked about a lot: how can a dramaturg’s work be transferable to other contexts?

So hopefully this time when we talk about dramaturgy and the political that we can find ways in which we could transfer the know-how and skills of the dramaturg into a different context. Our friend has just walked in, Shintaro Fuji, was also talking about the differentiating between dramaturgy and dramaturgs. Again, the whole traditional idea of dramaturgy as playwriting, mise-en-scen, performance unfolding. And he talked about how useful it is to distinguish between dramaturgs and dramaturgy, and realised that there are individuals who will not designated as dramaturgs, are nonetheless doing dramaturgical work. So there was – I don't think we've completely cleared that up even after three meetings, the difference between dramaturgy, which is the art itself, or what David Pledger talks about in terms of the operating system, and the work of the dramaturg. So a lot of the times when we use the words, it’s confusing. So when he talks about my dramaturgical responses, is it his response as a dramaturg, or the dramaturgy that is part of the works, responds or needs to respond. So these are terminologies that have not been cleared up. And I'm hopeful that I think that we continue the conversation, and we particularize – we need to particularise and localise its uses and its effectiveness within our own working contexts.

So I go back to the idea that we're not here to make big academic theorisation, although it will occur. But I think it's very important that as practitioners, as dramaturgs practicing in our fields, that we find a way to talk about it that is meaningful to us. That works for us in the practice. And again, Peter Eckersall mentioned new media dramaturgy, about factoring nonhuman elements, the whole idea of technology. How much technology is playing into the work of the dramaturg?

So I'm just going to quote a few people and just highlight a few things. Yair Vardi from Israel was quite forthcoming. He is a huge, huge, huge fan of the dramaturg because he insists that he has somebody working as a dramaturg every time he works. And this is what he said. He described his dramaturg as someone intimate, someone to hold his hand. He called his dramaturg, an ignorant dramaturg, as the dramaturg is ignorant of the work being created. But what he was inferring was the dramaturg needs to be extremely open about the creative process, especially the product that will be created in the end. So Yair believes that a person sitting outside and thinking dramaturgically is very useful and that the role of the dramaturg includes making the audience think about what the material is talking about. The role of dramaturg as an insider and an outsider. So we go back to 2016 when How Ngean talked about the whole idea of mapping in and out. So this dual role of – slightly, slightly split role of – I'm in the process, but I need to step out of it. I'm an advocate for the –I'm a collaborator of the process, but at some point, I also need to be an advocate for the audience as part of the [work’s] reception. As we all know, as artists and practitioners, there is almost zero control we have over reception. Our work can be received in 101 ways that we have no idea. But I think, again to have I think Yair’s point, is that you have a dramaturg already be there, thinking and viewing it as an audience, is useful.

Ekko Supriyanto talks about how a dramaturg should be a mentor, should be an advisor, should be a coach. Should be somebody discursive rather than focusing on opinion. He talked about, again, the whole idea of a sounding board, a discussant. Somebody to talk to these things about. Somebody that has a unique position of being in the process and outside of it.

Sankar – and I like his analogy, so I'm just going to share with you these thoughts that came up. He said, “The dramaturgy of work is not dissimilar to the steel beams and pillars that are responsible for maintaining the structural integrity of a building. While the role of a dramaturg is similarly analogous to that of a structural engineer, that an architect would hire in order to ascertain the structural soundness of the building before it is taken over by a tenant. Yet the structural engineer alone is not solely responsible for the building. In fact, it is collective responsibility of a team of engineers, architects, electricians etc. In the same way, the structural beams and pillars responsible for maintaining the facade of a building remains largely invisible to the outside eye. They remain integral to the building structure.”

Two things. I think the whole right thing right now is a misunderstanding of what a dramaturg can do, and what a drama is supposed to do. We all know of these cliché: Oh, that piece was so bad, it needed a dramaturg. As if a dramaturg is just going to go in there and solve everything. Again, this kind of misunderstanding of the role of a dramaturg – he is not responsible. So you can't go to [the dramaturg and] say, “This piece was so bad when you were the dramaturg. Did you do anything about it?” What could a dramaturg do in that sense? But the other thing that is most crucial is acknowledging that the work of a dramaturg is invisible, that it should – I don't know, I feel that it should not really be so visible in the sense that it takes over the performance makers – the actors, the designers – those are the words that should be made completely visible.

Our director talked about the unique space which the dramaturg occupies within the creative process, is critical, discursive, whose presence is constantly shifting and has to be negotiated. I think he encapsulated the whole idea of these shifting negotiating roles, the various positionalities that David Pledger was talking about. “Not to say that however that the lack of dramaturg in a work means that there is an inherent lack of the criticality in the work, but the presence of the dramaturg appeared to be a fairly good indication of the negotiation, either cultural or otherwise, that takes place within the work, either between traditional or contemporary aesthetic, or even between the political and art institution.”

I thought that might be interesting to throw back in, in today's session. I'm going to end my little survey with something that I was very much struck by [what] co-director of ADN talked about, and that's Charlene Rajendran. And in one particular session, she talked about – she was invited to watch a rehearsal. She was invited to, you know, just come in as an observer. And she asked two very big questions, which seemed like very innocuous questions: One, where do I sit? And two, what do I say? So again, what she talked about, again, is the duality of the dramaturgs – of their ability not just to reflect, but also to be self-reflexive of methodologies. And it forces the dramaturg to articulate the nature of the processes, engage with the work and make sense with the space. So I think Charlene was talking about where am I in all this? She spatialised the process: Where am I in the peripheral? Am I in the centre? Am I constantly moving while the actors are doing their work? Where do I position myself? Where do I sit? So she drew from the metaphor of cartography – the ability of the dramaturg to not open only to map the terrain of the world, but also to map his or her own processes, allows the dramaturg not only to work instinctively or intuitively, but also collaboratively, and also gives the dramaturg a critical distance.

So the word that I took away from her talk was the whole idea of intense watching. First critical spectator is the dramaturg. That's the first person seeing your work, right. Then after the person sees the work – and I didn't include in there – the dramaturg has to listen. So as much as we would like to share with you, we also would like to hear what you have to say. And on that note, thank you very much for your attention. I'm going to move on to How Ngean for TPAM last year. [Audience applauses]

HN: Thank you, Robin. I didn't even know I said what you said I said. Thank you. Very quickly as we set this up, just gonna give you another roundup of what happened in TPAM.

Robin has done us a great service of actually synthesising and really summarising the critical points of what we did in that first meeting. And yes, it was an important one because it really then stretched our notions and our thinking about dramaturgy. And what the dramaturgs do. In formulating the next event, which was at TPAM 2017, it got me thinking again about, “Okay, so we've done mapping in a roundabout manner where we wanted to talk – we wanted to open up discussions on dramaturgy with specific context of Asia. Where do we go from there?” I was still interested in going into Asian dramaturgy and mapping it out. And then we thought, “Let's still go on that track. Let's go into tracing Asian dramaturgy.” So for three days we did just that.

What happened was that, I think, at that time, we all wanted to experiment or we wanted to explore the possibility of different dramaturgies coming out from different disciplines. And in the course of three days, we presented, offered, suggested, recommended different kinds of discussion formats, panels, roundtables, that revolve around actually very different subject points, different kinds of performances, different genres of performances, that stretched from contemporary performance, to dance, to theatre.

Two key things came out of that: Because we were inviting quite a few speakers from the region – So, this idea of the Asian dramaturgy and the Asian dramaturg was in a way inherent in the conversations and discussions that came out from the topics. But more than that, last year what was really interesting was there was then this chasing of perhaps looking back at some of the kinds of rubrics or manuals or ideas about performance-making from a traditional, not so far we away distant – with Asian roots. We had speakers talk about the Natya Shastra, which is a performance-making manual that dates back to quite a bit, a thousand years, I think, and how that set the tone for a particular kind of system, organisation of performance-making in India, but also then brought up debates about what does it mean to be locked down, rooted in – to  be, in a way, forced into a particular way of thinking, a way of doing, which is what we are trying to get out of these days. But more importantly, we found out that there were lots of people actually, with the concept and the idea of dramaturgy, very alive in the way they were practicing, in the way they were making.

We had panels on the female performance, gendered queer dramaturgies, dance dramaturgies. And there was a special one on dramaturgy in Asia where we sort of tried to interrogate explored some kind of historicity there. Then there was the intercultural and the interdisciplinary. And then there was a special one – Japan and dramaturgy.

I think it was very apparent that in our first meeting, language played such a huge role in what we want to talk about in discussing art, in discussing culture. Dramaturgy as a concept started from text. But here we are saying dramaturgy is now stemming into completely different kinds of ways of performance – dance, multimedia. So why are we still going back to language? Because art makers are at their best when they deal with their specific culture, language and social milieu. And so this came about since we ended up in TPAM, it was a perfect opportunity to have a panel where we could listen to Japanese art practitioners and dramaturgs talk about their work, and to talk about the dramaturgical thinking and positioning in their works. From simple – not so simple act of translation, to cultural translation, to history.

Then it became also very apparent that I could not do or we could not do a network of dramaturgs that were literally consisting of dramaturgs. So in this particular meeting, what was interesting is we had practitioners from all fields, whether they were dance-makers, theatre-makers, producers, playwrights, talking about dramaturgy. And it – For me, it remains one of the driving forces when I speak to people or when I want to invite certain people to join us in our discussion of dramaturgy and the dramaturg. I have had many, many people, some of you in the audience going, why are you inviting me? I'm not a dramaturg. My answer is always very simple. Because I think you're already engaging in dramaturgy. You just don't use the word. And I go through a series of questions. And for me, it seemed that the people who come with us, who join us in this discussion, have one thing in common, which is that the making of the work follows a certain kind of criticality. There is an emphasis on structure, but the structure can remain open, and it changes because there is a need to change it. And more importantly, it's self-reflexive. It is always about how to make the work better from a critical point of view. And for me, that was important. For me that was important because all of us in Asia also – we do have our colleagues, our art-makers, our dance-makers, our theatre-makers, who will come to us and say, what's this thing you're doing called dramaturgy? What do you do as a dramaturg? And we have to then talk about it in the most meaningful way without using the word ‘dramaturgy’ and the word ‘dramaturg’.

Continuing on or picking up from what Robin said, Yes, the first installment the first edition in Singapore, there was a lot of talk about the separation of dramaturgy as a concept and the function of the dramaturg and the realities of dramaturging. But it was clear that perhaps one thing we did agree on – because of the role of the drama to inside, outside, there is a need to have a figure that is not the maker, perhaps, an observer, an outside observer, who would actually be part of this performance-making project. So what I'm trying to say at the end of the day is ADN is not made up of just dramaturgs. We are all makers, producers, writers in different ways and also it was borne out of a need to hear practitioners talk about how they make their work, and perhaps in the talking of how they make their work, we also see different ways of viewing dramaturgy – structurally, conceptually, politically, critically.

Also in TPAM 2016, we decided to try and have a bit of a different format in keynote speaking where there was an interview with Ong Keng Sen. And here again, it was to test and to push the boundaries of dramaturgy to include curation and programming. What does that mean? And Keng Sen talked about then, his role as artistic director and as curator of the Singapore International Festival of Arts, where the dramaturgy of the city played an important role in programming for his three years as the artistic director. As we’re always in a way, looking at numbers, we had 25 speakers over three days, and that in itself was amazing. From Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, Philippines. And they all talked about different ways of doing work that had a dramaturgical position, a dramaturgical thinking and awareness of how they were approaching their work. It was 10 sessions of all different kinds of formats, that made up to 16 hours. Why are these numbers important to us? These numbers were important to us because then it translated into important documentation and archival work. Some of you who are new to us, if you go to our website, we have actually uploaded most of the video recordings of our works, according to different panels, sessions and formats. Why is video documentation important to us? We did not want to lose any of the nuances in terms of the language in which we talk about dramaturgy. And therefore it was important – 16 hours of documentation.

We're into our third year, we're still trying to look at different ways of how to communicate to disseminate, to distribute, to talk about this documentation. How can we then draw now on documentation to actually further layer our conversations and our activities in the future?

I'll end here and pass it on to Charlene who's going to talk about our little satellite that happened in Adelaide, Australia. Thank you. [Applause]

CR: Hi, good morning, everyone. And Happy Chinese New Year again. Feels like, wow, there's a lot to take on and then they're gonna see some more.

I think I'll start by, perhaps, introducing myself a little bit because I'm not part of Centre 42 officially. So what am I doing as part of this organic community, which I'm very, very pleased to be part of, because it might also inform some of the ways I choose to talk about this next one.

I teach theatre at the National Institute of Education, which is part of a university called Nanyang Technological University. But my entry into academia is through the back door. I was very much a practitioner first, and yet didn't do any degrees in theatre as many people of my generation coming from Malaysia didn't either. I learned from people who really didn't do degrees in theatre either. And so dramaturging was a very, very new word to me, introduced to me by How Ngean really, when he said he was going to be a dramaturg, and I didn't understand what he was going to do. But I recognise now that since I was 13 years old, involved with young people's theatre with someone called Janet Pillai from Malaysia, a pioneering children's theatre director, I have been involved in dramaturgical thinking about theatre, about theatre-making. And as a result, I think the way I teach theatre now and the way I contribute to theatre-making, stems from a very embodied way of understanding dramaturgy, and what it means to be a dramaturg even.

So, this opportunity to be part of ADN, and to listen, and to hear and converse about this idea, has been very valuable, not simply because people use very different languages about talking about this work. But it made me aware that the work extends way beyond performance-making in the broadest sense of the word. Particularly as I think for many of us, who are involved in this kind of work in ADN, the work stems from a contemporary sensibility in which the text is important, but has a very different kind of importance. It's important even when it's resisted, fragmented, deconstructed, made, polyphonic, made very multiple, mediatised etc. And the understanding of what is text has also become very complicated. Whether you want to talk about it in a postmodern sense or just using the word ‘contemporary’, which is more open I feel because it allows for what is traditional to be part of that discussion. And because that extension beyond just performance-making is part of an educator’s work and I think that's what I've done the most in my life. I've turned up to class and taught, to earn a living, in part, but also because I think that’s part of my performance-making sometimes. I think because that allowed me to understand my teaching a little bit better and some of the teaching that I appreciate, it also then raises questions for me about what this network allows us and pushes us to think about.

Okay, so the Adelaide mini symposium is a much smaller one in which it was literally one and a half days. We started on an afternoon, and we finished by the next evening. And it was particular because for the first time after the first two, it was just Singapore-Australia. And it was unique in that sense. It was part of a larger event. It was part of a larger event in which there was OzAsia, Australia Theatre Forum, and more significantly, a special meeting between Singapore and Australia, that had come out of a larger government to government memorandum of understanding that pertains to economics, education and particular kinds of visas that are now possible. So it was part of a larger politic between these two nations, these two islands, you might say, one very small and the other one very large. And the motivation to create this small meeting was to bring people who are Australian-based and Singapore-based together to talk about what they're doing in their own context. But then to look beyond dramaturgies of mere performance – no, I shouldn't say “mere” – dramaturgies of performance as the only way of thinking about dramaturgy, to this idea of dramaturgies of the Social and Cultural. And what does that mean? It was not attempting to define by any means what this means, but more so to think about where it could lead, where it was already beginning to happen, and why so?

So there were two keynotes, two roundtables and a wrap-up session. And so it was significantly different from the kinds of session – Well, the kind of programming that had been done from the earlier two as you’ve heard How Ngean and Robin talk about. So I’ll say a little bit about the two – the four sessions, and then mainly draw from the wrap-up session in terms of what I think was some key ideas that emerged through the context of this particular meeting.

So David Pledger was really looking at his own work, and how a particular project, 2970° Boiling Point, concretised how he had used his dramaturgical thinking to make a project that pushed an audience to start thinking dramaturgically, even though he was not using that word with an audience, obviously. But to think critically about context, to think critically about power, to think critically about self and other, and to think critically about notions of culture, popular and otherwise. And the motivation is clearly out of a sense that this neoliberal capitalist environment that we operate in, this operating system works in, is reducing the space for that kind of thinking, very consciously and very overtly. And because of that, the desire to create artwork that opens up that space, tacitly, covertly sometimes, as well as overly and directly and confrontationally and in-your-faced-ly, sadly, if there's such a word, is important.

That was David's keynote, which was mindboggling, and left us a little bit speechless at the end of it because there was so much to take on. It was almost as if, if we had a little chip about what he was thinking about, and we could just put it in that might help, but it really took some time to process and I think that's in itself, a real tribute to what he was trying to say and do with that keynote. And what I was trying to do then with myself was to draw from the work of three practitioners in Singapore: Ong Keng Sen was one of them – you've just heard how he was part of our last TPAM, ADN. Kuo Pao Kun and Kok Heng Leun. How as practitioners they have made certain choices that respond to the Singapore landscape, socioculturally and politically, as well as artistically, and looking at them as artists who think things through dramaturgically, how we read their interventions into the landscape, as ways for not just generating platforms for artists, but pushing artists also to rethink the role of the artist in society, which is not an easy thing to do in a context that is constantly trying to commodify the artist and the artist’s work and put a price tag at the end of the day. Either the price tag is in a particular piece of work or the value of the artists, or in terms of certain KPIs and so on and so forth.

Right. So that was the kind of thinking we were trying to deal with. And I think speaking for myself, and I think, David as well, we were just curious about how presenting this material in this kind of context would create resonances, or if they would. And I think we had to wait till the wrap-up session at the end where we could really kind of open the space for it to breathe. The two roundtables brought together very practitioners who are Singapore-based and Australia-based to talk about their work and to talk about how they see it as responding to a sociocultural landscape, but also developing particular strategies, particular frameworks, particular ways of intervening and interrupting, but also simply just responding to in a very gentle, calm way sometimes. And these two roundtables or panels opened up the discussion, and in many ways often overlapped with what the keynotes were trying to say and do. And that was a very healthy feeling, I think, that there was not just the sense in which there were these big ideas and then they would these small ideas. In no way was that happening. In fact, there was very much a push and pull about how things work, why they work, and what else can work. A curiosity about what else can work.

It was very clear that these two contexts are very different – the Australian context and the Singapore context – politically, socially, culturally, and of course, in terms of landscape, no need to say. And because of that difference, the question of what is culture and how does the art operate in this landscape of culture became quite curious.

And I want to respond to what Tim was saying because it emerged for me – okay, Tim Roseman was the gentleman in the video that some of you saw earlier, who basically for him identified the fact that when the Singaporean-based artists were talking about dramaturgy, or being dramatugs in his view, he felt we were responding to society and trying to make meaning of society in a way that he felt Australian practitioners were not doing. And I wondered why? And I think one of the reasons why is because the politics are so different. In Singapore, things are much more highly patrolled, to put it mildly. You're watched, and you have to be much more aware that certain kinds of dissent and resistance are not going to be tolerated. No point kidding yourself about that. So you have to find alternative ways, and you have to work with structures, and you have to work with landscapes. More subtly, perhaps. And perhaps that's why the work of the dramaturg and the work of people who are thinking dramaturgically, is about finding these options for dissent and resistance and alterity, that emerge through that kind of critical thinking. Perhaps, in a political context like Australia, where you can say just about anything, you can disagree with members of government in very high places, and you're not going to be penalised in the same way. So maybe the urgency is different. And I don't know – I put it out there because we are thinking through what is political for this, this particular session. And I think these are difficult questions. These are difficult questions when notions of left and right are no longer clear. Notions of what is resistance is also no longer clear to me. And that's a healthy lack of clarity which stems from the space of the contemporary. But it's also one that can create feelings of precarity that I think are difficult to negotiate.

So what emerged out of the Adelaide roundtable and I think the discussions over tea and coffee and lunch, which were important – I’ll look at three particular words or sets of words. The first one is ‘participation’. And unlike Robin and How Ngean, I'm not going to tell you who said what, because I decided that this is part of a dialogue space. And although it's important to contextualise who said what sometimes, sometimes it's also perhaps good to just take the idea, especially if you know who it might come from. So the person in the photograph is not the person who said whatever it is, okay? So don't hold Kathy Rowland responsible for this or attribute her to it. It's just a sense of who was there and give you a visual to enjoy.

Okay, so the word ‘participation’. Now, in looking at performance and the sociocultural, this idea of participatory democracy became part of the dialogue. People are making work, whether it's called engaged arts or community arts, or even interactive or immersive or, you know, dating back to avant garde and experimental and all the rest of it – this idea that participation is important because you don't want the passive observer and what is active and what is an emancipated spectator ala Ranciere – all those things become important to the discussion. But what does that participation lead to? What kinds of thinking emerge through the participation and are we then complicit in a larger attempt to ignore, if not deny, a certain lack of responsibility that larger structures like the State are not taking on, for dealing with certain kinds of sociopolitical problems. For example, in the Singapore space, one of the projects I work on with Kok Heng Leun is Both Sides, Now, which looks at the issue of aging and death and dying in society. And Singapore is an aging society. And there is a lot more funding and support for that project, which is very exciting because we're now in our third iteration. And it is a three-year project rather than just a one off. But some of these questions that arise in the project and in an arts response to the project, raise questions that are structural at a state level. How do we negotiate those kinds of things? How do we bring them into the discussion that we need to have? So what kinds of participation? And what kinds of expectations do we have of audiences to be involved in and to participate, and therefore eliciting their trust? What is the ethical dimension that emerges here – came up as a very important question that I think we need to be asking in terms of the investment of time, space and energy, but the investment of resources that we feel warrant these kinds of participation.

The other two words are ‘context’ and ‘complicity’. And I think what became very evident was, as I've indicated, context makes a big difference to how we understand what we're doing as dramaturgs and dramaturgically. But also, it makes us aware of certain kinds of complicities that we become part of, by becoming part of a project and artists deal with this all the time. Well, aware artists deal with it all the time. It raises questions because I think that in as much as we're trying to deal with the social and cultural and now political, it's harder to then acknowledge and manage the slipperiness of how we are framed, because that framing can be completely contradictory to what we're trying to do within the work itself. And I think there were – there have been instances of artists talking about how they've created a certain work and it's part of a festival, and the festival publicity completely turns over what the work is about, because it needs to fit the festival theme. And those kinds of dramaturgical questions and ideas of complicity need to emerge. It's hard because sometimes we don't get it. Sometimes, it's hard to hear, it's so far away. It's not just intercultural. It's I-don't-understand. Intercultural assumes a level of understanding already that you can actually operate in that inter-space. I don't know if we can say it's non-cultural, but it's non-something. And how do you then begin that process of understanding?

Finally, this question of what is this network? And how do we think about this network? And is it even making sense? So David reintroduced the idea of the mobile laboratory. And this idea of a mobile laboratory, then led to the questions of what kind of experiments? One image of the spaceship was a nice image I thought to think about, particularly now that space travel is really you know, for the tourists already. And what kinds of different ways of thinking, experimenting, and sometimes just doing nothing but playing with what's in the lab. You know, like you have all this fancy equipment in the laboratory. Sometimes you just got to go and muck around in there, like you do in a workshop.

So I think it leads very nicely into what we're trying to do in Yogyakarta, which is to make more space for just doing and seeing what happens in that laboratory context. So that's an idea of some of the things that happened in the Adelaide context, and the Adelaide meeting. And I think now I invite How Ngean and Robin back to – what it is we do next.

HN: I guess you've heard quite in quite a bit of what we've tried to do and what we have done so far. Perhaps quickly, we just like to open ideas, thoughts, comments or questions that you may have for us before we go on to something else that might strike you that…

RL: Just really would love to hear your responses, any ideas or even rebuttals to certain things that were being talked about? And we're really looking for diversity of ideas before we actually try to kind of move the conversation to a difference, literally to a different space or to a different context. [Long pause. An audience member indicates they want to respond] Yes, please. [Use the mic] because we're recording this. Yeah, we need a good audio capture. Thank you so much.

Aud.: No problem. Thank you very much. This is my first time into this space. So my name is _______ and I'm also from Australia. And in fact, I was one of the moderators at David Pledger’s Practicing Democracy. So that was very interesting to see that there.

I'm really interested because as a producer primarily, I find myself often being the cultural dramaturg. So not just the dramaturg for the work and the structure of the work and, you know, although I have a – I'm not a specialist and I don't fit into any of the silos particularly, but I'm a very good generalist. And then that outside eye that really contextualises the work in a wider cultural frame. And I'm wondering whether that's come in – you've kind of touched on it in different ways through your various presentations, but I'm wondering whether that has been identified as a kind of quite particularly separate piece of work, because I feel like I that's the that's the missing link for me often, in terms of I can see where the works dramaturg to within the context of other performing arts works, but not necessarily where it fits in this much bigger sociopolitical context.

HN: Thanks for that. Thank you for suggesting the next topic of discussion at our next ADN.

I think you're right in saying that it's always been floating there for us this idea of cultural difference and negotiating that and bridging and all that comes along. One of the key things that came out, especially with the Japanese speakers and Japanese participants in our events was the idea of the translator, where Ken Takiguchi then pushed it and said, “We're not just translating language, we're translating culture.” And then we pushed it some more with many other discussions with the dramaturg being the moderator, the cultural mediator, cultural bridge even sometimes, in intercultural work. The question of where we want – if we do want to dedicate a particular space and time to talk about this kind of bridging cultural mediation, I think that's something that personally I feel that we need to – but I also feel that then it has to be culturally specific. For instance, in Jakarta, there is the negotiation of language already happening. We have this we are trying to create this new thing in Yogyakarta and thank you – laboratory, yeah, we should call it a laboratory next time round, not meeting anymore. But I'm also very aware we need interpreters, we need simultaneous interpreters, we need translators. Because dramaturgy is a concept and as a practice is very rooted to very specific cultural practices and norms. And perhaps then when we add these specific sites, we can then perhaps dedicate one or two sessions to the kinds of issues that you're talking about. And we realised that that was why there was always an urgent awareness, wherever we go, we try to have these some panels that are in the so-called native language, for instance, with the Japanese panel, there will be simultaneous interpretation happening. And then when we go to Yogyakart. And of course, already the mind reels with what happens when we go to India. Right, what happens there, what happens when we go to Thailand. So I think that could only be tackled with what we would call site specific, culturally specific sites, I think. You guys want to contribute any…

CR: The only thing I'd add is this idea of the intermediary has become more present in the ecosystem of projects that are interdisciplinary. Not just interdisciplinary between the arts but, for example, negotiating between artists and the Ministry of Health say. And so the producer is in that sense an intermediary that has a particular kind of function. And in the Singapore context now, there is more legitimacy for the notion of the intermediary, which I think is important in response to what you're saying, whereby whether you call the person, a creative producer or an intermediary, that intelligence and that capacity affects the artwork, and its dramaturgical possibility, as a result of either its presence or absence. I mean, it's that crucial. So yeah.

 

Aud.: [Muffled at first because mic wasn’t used] Can I just respond to that though because those big [muffled] are draining finances away from the art. [Beings speaking into the mic] So that also kind of requires a dramaturgical understanding of how the economics is being impacted by all these different layers of administration and bureaucracy and negotiation? Can I also ask just one thing? Please, please, please, can you have a dramaturgy on environment? Because nobody's talking about it, and it's, you know, it's a crisis, right?

RL: I just – one final thing, and this is coming from a person from I think – Charlene and I both teach at tertiary institutions. And I think Charlene and I share this – we’re very – because of the pedagogies that we use and the institutional demands, we’re very specific. We need a certain conciseness and precision in terms of terminology. Now, again, I've been accused of splitting hairs so I'm going to run being accused of that.

A producer that negotiates within different capacities, and across different institutions. Again, this is where we still haven't really figured out – while understanding of the dramaturgy of that network, and the dramaturgy, or the dramaturgical operations of that specific context, right, could just be a producer doing dramaturgical work there and not a cultural dramaturg. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. You see, I mean, so again, the term ‘dramaturg’ – and that's something that I'm quite keen to respond and when you take that on – And it's not just, it's not just a nomenclature. I think we struggle so much with naming it. And I think we need to also give it certain boundaries. I think those boundaries haven't been haven't been defined yet. But certainly an understanding of dramaturgical operations is something that we'd like to promote too. And that's something that – and that in relation to the work of a dramaturg, which is another point that I wanted to talk about, is really about and – Charlene talked about the intermediary, about mediation, and really, it's about negotiations. And I think the focus of that negotiation would be slightly - well, I wouldn’t say slightly different – but will be very, very, very much contextualised and very localised in the event itself. That's my hunch at the moment. But certainly, I think there's possibility and if we move on to the environment, I think then you know, it will open up. Like I said, I really want to be able to move dramaturgical intelligence and dramaturgical literacy – if there's such a word – into different contexts, so that people can start thinking about it that way, the way that David was trying to push for in Adelaide, right? It's just a different way of thinking. And then because we think in different way, maybe we can arrive at a new and different solution. That's all I can hope for. Thank you very much.

HN: Just one more note, as we speak there, we have been talking – Centre 42 and ADN have been talking about perhaps it's time to do a special session on producers and dramaturgy. And what does that mean? We are seriously considering that for one of our activities this year. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, Virkein.

VD: Hi, my name is Virkein and I'm from India. Firstly, I'm actually quite glad that the fact that there's a certain amount of questioning on both just the word, from dramaturge to dramaturg, from dramaturgy and dramaturging. It's quite interesting for me for you to be able to have that conversation across so many countries and what that means. While I still think personally that I don't really find the need to necessarily define it very much, because I feel like it's constantly negotiating where it stands when it comes to be it a project in the environment, a cultural creation, you know, operating in a festival, managing it, curating itm X-Y-Z, this is something that I would probably talk about in the morning, but because I come from a background of architecture and design, something that really might help in if one wants to really define it, and something that exists already is systems design and thinking, and that pretty much sort of talks about what you just spoke off where you take a certain process, the process has systems, and that particular structure sort of allows you to pick it up and take it into any context that you require me, be it a project or performance or anything else that you think that it's – sort of makes sense of. So even though I don't necessarily think it needs to be defined as what the boundaries of a dramaturg are in any context, but as I still feel that may be an interesting thing to sort of take a bit of inspiration from another part of another discipline altogether. I find that quite interesting always to do. And take, especially with terminologies, you know, there's one that we continue to talk and talk and talk and try and define within the same terms that we know. But if one was to just go into another world altogether and pick up some words from there, it might just make a little more sense to say, how is it that we can define this a little bit more and doesn't need to be as complicated but it's actually more simplified, rather than complicated.

HN: Thank you. Just to add on a bit to that, what has been quite interesting in the last few editions we've had – Yes, there has been a lot of talk about defining. But as we define, there was also a lot of playfulness in destroying what we have defined immediately. And it was something that I think came out of the need to talk about the practice of dramaturgy, the practice of dramaturging and the role of the dramaturg because it's no longer bound by text. We're talking about dance dramaturgy as recent as last year. Choreographers have come up to me and said, there's no such thing as dance dramaturgy because dramaturgy is text. So that's just one statement out there. And then already, from the academia, books are coming out, people are already suggesting ideas on dramaturgies of lighting design, dramaturgies of architecture, set design. And then, of course, the conventions of scenography – what happened to that? We don't call it scenography anymore. We're calling it dramaturgy of architecture and set. So there is this ongoing talk, which is great. I think it's good because then we take away what we want. And as long as there is an open system, I think that's one thing that's clear to all of us here.

Aud.: [Muffled because mic wasn’t used] It’s just constantly changing even the words you said it yourself, what we used to call set design became scenography. And then scenography became something else. And, you know, now you're saying doesn't exist, but it does exist, right. But in other ways and other terms. So I think because the terms constantly change, and what each of those terms do by the end of it, I just find it personally to be quite limiting when we're trying to define it. I guess in that moment, it makes sense. But that that moment is changed and it sort of becomes something else.

HN: Absolutely. The thing about what we were talking about here is, yeah, is constantly changing. And therefore – but it needs to – we need to talk about it. Actually, I do feel we do need to talk about it, and then how we define it in different ways. And, again, going back to the idea of cultural and aesthetic specificity, it's very different how we view dramaturgy from one discipline to another. Thank you.

RL: I think that's a great idea. And I think we should also take into consideration how we could in future additions of ADN symposiums to get some – do workshops where we literally gather people from architecture, and just brainstorm and talk about what are the commonalities – Great idea because it's about construction. The second thing is I want to go back to what Sanker said, and the quotation, that “For the longest time, the work of the dramaturg is invisible. So maybe what we're trying to do is make something invisible, visible.” But then why do you want to make something invisible visible, when it's supposed to be invisible? So again, you have the paradox and conundrum, and I completely understand what you're talking about. But I think there is also the reality of the circumstances in which we practice. So there's the artistic aesthetic practice, but the context in which we operate, then we move on to political context, we move on to economic context. So if that's the case now, how much do you pay a dramaturg? Right, do you pay him by how much he does? So what is it that he does? So it's got to come down to simple budgeting. And at some point, while he does this anyway, so well, can’t you let a director do that? So we'll save money? A director does that once you got the play right. So again, roles, designations. So it's a little bit more, I think, that it's so complex now in the world, in the globalised world that we work in and in terms of the kind of multinational, economic kinds of termino – contexts that we work in that I think the need to define the dramaturg is not just to make him or her feel better about himself, or to clarify to other people what he or her does, but also at some point – and again, I struggle with this because I think that it is inherently valuable – but also to make a claim for value. I think that's very important. I think it never – we’re kind of like I'm an artist, my art should speak for itself. But I think because the work of the dramaturg has always been so invisible, I think we need to make a claim for it. Value. And I think what we're trying to do is that is trying to come up with various claims for the value of the dramaturg. And some of it could be from the roles he or she plays. But some of it could be just outcomes, outputs, impacts, and so on, so forth. So, which is why we're trying to find a different ways of talking about it in the various incarnations of the forums that the ADN is trying to put together, and I'm very excited that that Yogyakarta is going to be another iteration of just providing a different frame, a different context to have that conversation. Charlene?

CR: Two quick responses. One is, I think it's important – I love glossaries. And I think it's important for us to start thinking about definitions as parts of glossaries rather than dictionaries, because I think there's a big difference. The defining, prescriptive definition and one that provides clarification within certain contextual discussions. And the glossary often is about a certain context, you know, it's a particular book that has particular key terms that may or may not be familiar. And what you decide goes into a glossary or what you leave out of a glossary is also very political. Which words are assumed to be familiar or otherwise. A dictionary is very different function. It's supposed to have all the words that are supposed to work in this language. Right.

The other responses, I think that when one is articulating the role of the dramaturg, or the work of dramaturgy, it's very different from then it being instructional to any dramaturg who decides to be a dramaturg. Or who is asked to be a dramaturg. I think it can become very useful to have reference points in any study, in any development of a skill, in any expansion of one's own capacities, in any area of work. But it can be the very thing that you then decide not to do, which makes it useful. And for that reason, having available these notions, I think is important not for the reason of simply putting boundaries, which is sometimes necessary. Like for example, if I'm asked what is a dramaturg, if I'm teaching a course on dramaturgy and the dramaturg, I better have something to say, because it's my responsibility to students not to simply say, well, it's whatever you decide you want it to be. Which would be very different if I'm in a dramaturg workshop, and young dramaturg is saying, you know, I'm working on this, what should I do then? I'm kind of – I'm going to respond very differently. So the ways in which these mechanisms and strategies work, I think it's something to bear in mind. But yeah, architecture. I think it's necessary. It's – I mean, mapping, architecture, very, very connected.

HN: Any other comments or questions?

Aud.: Hi, my name is _______. I'm not from Asia. I'm from Switzerland. And thanks How Ngean for inviting me to listen to this. First of all, I would like to salute this project and this initiative, because in my opinion, it's a defense of sense and essence. What dramaturgs do. And I would have a question. I'm an artist and producer for other artists. And my question would be from the point of view of artists is – I can imagine with – you're reaching quite far with Asia. It's a big thing with a lot of different cultural and political contexts. How do artists realise that they might or might not need a dramaturg? Or are they aware of the necessity of of having one in different parts of Asia? Maybe I'm throwing a rock in the pond, but it's – already in Europe, it's a tiny place, but it's traditionally and culturally by countries it's really different what a dramaturg is, and what the role and whether we need one or not. So I'm just curious how younger and older generations of artists regard a dramaturg.

HN: I'll go first. Thanks, Gabor for that question. It's a good one because I've had friends, fellow artists, colleagues come up to me and say, “So do I need a dramaturg? And what do I do with this dramaturg?” [Audience laughs]

I think usually, okay, do I need a dramaturg? My question is always what kind of problems or issues you think you're having with your artwork? And if you say, I need an outside eye, for sure, you need a dramaturg or you may want to work with a dramaturg, is my response usually. How do I work with the dramaturg then becomes something that we are still happily talking and happily playing and negotiating. It's building a new relationship. The notion of the director in theatre only happened 500, 600 years ago, the specialisation of the role of the director. The role of the director and a producer was collapsed into one in Western notions, and even Eastern actually. Traditionally, there was no director, there was no producer. There was a man or woman who went around saying, “I'm forming a troop which can make us some money. Let's do something and do a little performance and see where we go from there. Today, we'll do this story. Tomorrow we'll do another story.” That took 600 years. I'm not sure where, you know – and then everything is going fast.

Suddenly, we have creative producers, suddenly we have curators. I just came from a curators workshop where friends of mine who are from the visual arts laughed and said, “Yet again, how can you have appropriated from us?” What is this about being a curator and performing arts? Do you really need to call yourself that? Are you trying to legitimise your practice? So, it goes on and on. When I gave a very quick lecture in Solo, which is a very artistic small town in Indonesia, on the ideas of dramaturgy, I actually talk about dramaturgy. And I do not actually talk about the dramaturg. And I talk about what I do – case studies of how I work with choreographers or directors. And then it opens up the thing about definition rather than pinning it down, there are ways that I show what I do with the maker. That's one way to do it.

With a young artists, and this is this was one response that I had back in 2015 when I said, “You know, do you think there's space to do a network for dramaturgs?” Someone actually said, I remember it very clearly, this person's face right in front of me now in my head going, “Oh my god, that's so trendy. That's great. Do it! Do it!” Because of that person, I almost didn't do this network because I really resisted it. I was like, shut up. I'm not gonna do this because it's trendy. And then I found out as I was going through the hoopla of applying for funding, funding bodies came up to me and said, “That's very trendy.” So how do we avoid that? One way is what we're doing today. Talk about it in different ways from different types of disciplines and peoples and hopefully get to a place where there is value. There is some kind of integrity. And the word that I have been locked on the last few sessions last year, in fact was – ethics. How do we do right by what we do? How do we do right by the maker? How do we do right by the concept of dramaturgy?

CR: I think one of the things that has changed considerably in quite a few Asian cities, and they hope more people will respond to this is many more programs of higher education in theater and performance are emerging. And like it or not, that is creating a “market”, to use that word in inverted commas. As a result, certain kinds of interests in the dramaturg are related to that landscape of formal education that is relatively new in many Asian cities. Yet, some of it is because young people, younger artists realise, okay, this is a valuable thing I might want to try out. But some are also responding to the fact that their formal education had very little contextual education attached to it. It was very focused on a skills based practice, for example, and that, while they may now be trained because they have a certificate, and that's relatively new in the ecosystem of contemporary practice, not traditional practice. Their interest in gaining literacies in what they're doing is shifting.

So it's a great research project to kind of respond to what you're asking, to go and find out you know, if it's trendy get a grant, and we'll find out why and what people are doing to respond to the landscape. And in some ways ADN is trying to do that, but not with that kind of determined focus. But I think it would yield some very troubling material as well about why and what's going on. And the hierarchies that emerged in last year's discussion, for example, of where you place the dramaturg in relation to a director or performer may become really complicated and disturbing in more feudal societies, for example, where the associations of formal knowledge gain credence over practical knowledge. And that's tough to reckon with. So I don't know if I want to know, almost.

RL: I have a just a variation of that response. When do artists know when they need a dramaturg, young or old? Well, the other side of the coin is that, again, I don't know whether it because it's trendy or – because it seems many funders and many arts institution have obligatorily stated that every production needs a dramaturg. Yeah, new works, which is very odd, which you think oh, that's really good, it's very supportive. But then when you think about it, are you using the dramaturg as a creative or an artistic police. Or why is it obligated? So it has gone to such a point that it's mandatory that you have a budget line for a dramaturg, whether you need it or not. So it is imposed upon you, which is a practice that I abhor, because I think it's terrible to tell people that they need this.

So, again, to come back to whether or not I think I'm going to go back to what How Ngean said, it really is about two things – the artist and the art. The artist has a particular temperament. And he or she may be able to work with another person that performs the role of a dramaturg purely because of either shared commonalities or personalities, and that can develop into a very interesting collaboration. And then of course, the artwork itself may not benefit from a dramaturg. There are artworks that may not benefit from a third person, especially if it is about the singularity of particular vision. So again, I don't have an answer to that, but I just wanted to again, move the camera to the other end where now it seems that you know, it's mandatory to have a – whether it's trendy or not. There seems to be a kind of installation of that as part, and it's a forced and inorganic kind of imposition. I think there are hands?

Aud.: Hello, I'm ____ from _____  in New York. And first of all, congratulation, of course, on this significant initiative and the question, without any subtext, but just as a question, is – it is the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. But is there an Asian dramaturgy? Is there an Arab dramaturgy? Is there European dramaturgy? Is there African dramaturgy? As an open question. And if there is a special Asian one, what do you feel is special? What is your discovery? Is it like a homeopathic medicine that works for this body of work? Or? Or do you think it's universal?

HN: Thank you. Many of these questions have been brought up. In the last few editions, one of the most hotly talked about things outside the sessions were: Why are we talking about Asian dramaturgy? Because it sounds as if then there is a ghettoization of it, right? Number one. Number two – someone came up to me say, “Oh, I see what you're trying to do here. It's great. You want to reclaim the word for Asian purposes because we are so different, right?” And I say to them, yes and no, because there is a history, a very strong pedigree of the concept and practice of dramaturgy and dramaturging based on certain rubrics that go back to European theatre and performance. It's just that now how do we look at the expanded field of dramaturgy? That's one. Number two – this question of is there an Asian dramaturgy is what we are here to discuss. And I'll say this, the last TPAM one, we did not talk about Asian dramaturgy, but we talked about certain dramaturgy in certain disciplines, where then when the speaker started talking about certain ways of working, it was culturally socially linguistically entrenched. So, the word ‘Asia’ needs to be dismantled too. It needs to be dismantled, it needs to be studied, deconstructed in many ways. One of the ways that we talked about was the idea of actually dramaturgy existing in historical texts, in historical performance manuals and guides, so to speak. The Natya Sastra, for one. Zeami with his treatises on Noh. For us, for me, and for a few of us, we believe these are actually the beginnings of dramaturgical texts or manuals that are actually, specifically, Asian in outlook, but then comes the problem of the hierarchies of these kinds of performing systems. The Guru, the master, especially body to body transmission, for example, Baratanatyam, Odissi, even Noh. Transmission of a body discipline is very hierarchical. There was also a feudal system involved, even in Indonesia.

So, is there an Asian dramaturgy? I'm not sure I'm interested now to answer that question. I'm interested to know what are the different types of Asian dramaturgies are out there, that usually are linked to the types of disciplines of work that we do. We have speakers who are visual artists, who became dramaturgs to a dance work in a festival. We have theatre dramaturgs who are also dance curators for international dance festivals. And to me, that's interesting. That's for sure. Though, deep inside me, I'm sure that it has something to do with the fact that I'm very aware that when we talk about Asian performance, especially from a traditional base until today, there is no clear delineation and separation between dance, drama and song. The written text is sung, the written text is moved, the written text is performed in different, different ways. And therefore, there is different ways of looking at text. But these different ways are then splintered into different, different fragmented ways again, according to all the different cultures. Yes, we can always say Southeast Asia and South Asia, East Asia, but let's not even go there. That's why in my ambition to try to have these kinds of topics – we have 25 speakers over 16 hours for three days. It's a bit crazy, but that's what documentation is about where then we can go, okay, Shintaro was specifically talking about this. Or Kaku was talking about this setting in Japan, in Nagoya. Not even Japan, in Nagayo. Helly was talking about Bandung in Indonesia, not Indonesia. Thank you. I'm not sure whether that answers anything.

RL: Again, it's about, very quickly, that ‘A’ in ADN. The whole idea of calling it, making a claim that it's an Asian dramaturgy. I think it's not a generalised notion of this certain characteristics that is specifically Asian or Asian defining. I think we started off mostly geographically within this region. How is it practiced here? Yeah. So it's more in terms of a demarcating, right, as a category of we're looking at this particular region or what has now come into the public consciousness as Asia. So the ‘Asian’ is not a kind of a deep defining feature of Asian-ness, but more within this region. And as an academic and researcher, the research questions I like to ask is, how much is your practice affected linguistically in terms of geographically, as a dramaturg? And what does that do? So I think within the particularities of the region, and the area and the topography and the geography, I think those are things that we would like to look at. I think we have one more question.

Aud.: Hello, guys, good morning. I'm ______. Actually, it's with regards to the earlier discussion about, you know, certain new works that have a mandatory dramaturg and also about what Charlene said about how now there's a growing market, because a lot of tertiary institutions are marketing a performing arts, you know, a career that you can make money out of, as opposed to before. So then the question that I find myself asking is, and I know you guys say that ADN is not about giving accreditation, but how does how do you know that somebody qualifies to be a dramaturg for your work? And it's not just some poser charlatan? You know, and, yeah, no offense to anyone. But is that like, you know, when you when you have a piece of work, and you feel that right, I would like somebody to come in and, you know, be a dramaturg, how do you know who to call and whether that person qualify for that job or can satisfy that role effectively? Yes, that is all.

HN: Two ways that I personally know of because of experience. One is obviously someone who knows me already. The maker knows of who I am and what I do and whatever and we enter into a series of conversations. The other one, of course, is then, in a more formal, structured, systematic setting where the commissioning body says, perhaps you would like to work with a dramaturg. And then there's a recommendation. Having said that, in both instances, there is actually a very heavy – not heavy – long process of matchmaking I find that I need with the artists. We have quite a few series of discussions, meet ups, where literally, I'm interviewing him or her as much as the maker is interviewing me, auditioning if you like, and it's through the series of getting to know each other that you have a sense of what's happening. And the maker will always respond in very different ways. I have worked on quite a few now projects already and some makers actually take me because they find that I'm antagonistic. Some makers take me because they realised that they needed someone to really push them in a certain way. Some makers said they just want somebody to talk to. The relationship. I do want to say, though, that the relationship between maker and dramaturg actually gets stronger incrementally if there are continuing projects rather than just one-off. I do believe in that. And I think in this day and age, with everyone being savvy or street smart, the charlatan dramaturg exposes herself very quickly, actually. Because I have, well, in my experience, the question I always ask is, do you think you could even try to go into dramaturging or you want to be a dramaturg, the first question is when you look at a work, do you go: The director should…? Or do you: This work is like this. For me, I'll say this without offending anyone, I hope, people always say the dramaturg is a failed maker. And it's sometimes true. I do correct young dramaturgs when they say yeah, the director or the choreographer should be doing – No, they shouldn't be doing anything. You should be responding to the work and asking a series of questions. Which is why when I enter into conversation with artists most of the time, I'm the one doing the asking. That's one way to do it. Thank you.

CR: Quick audition is not possible. Of course talking to people, as How Ngean has already said, But I really think that who is qualified is really tough to respond to. Because the needs of a project are very different, and the complexities of the individual artists and so on, so forth. However, a fundamental capacity, I think, is the capacity to listen deeply. And if you feel – or whoever feels – the artist feels this person I'm talking to can't listen, then you know, it's not working. Even if the person seems to say things that you as an artist have trouble with, that's really not a problem. That could be quite fruitful. But if you feel as an artist, this person is unable to hear me, then for that project, it's highly unlikely this dramaturg is qualified. And I don't mean qualified by any kind of certification, obviously. But it's not qualified. And there may be reasons that dramaturg was chosen. But it's not working because you can't hear each other.

HN: I think on that note, we will close this particular session. Thank you very much. Thanks, Charlene. Thank you, Robin.