 a great center CUNY and that's teaching at the BMCC and also as part of her study is looking at dramaturgies, a young emerging dramaturg who also monitors the scene and then of course our executive officer Peter Akasal who is not only monitoring the scene but part of the dramaturgical world especially in Europe but also in Asian and Japanese theater but really has for his own work practice a real experience but also is very much involved in dramaturgy as a contemporary form of looking at theater through the lenses of something that's perhaps closer to theory you know than just the practice and I think it is a great great contribution so all three of you thank you for having for taking the time out of your lives to fly over come here Bernie and of course I'm also Peter so the format of the evening will be both all three of them will give a presentation between 10 to 15 minutes closer to 15 of course with some slides and we will have a discussion or they will talk to each other and we open it up fairly right away and I think really is a very very great moment to have some insights into contemporary thinking about dramaturgy and it happens very rarely and we are thrilled that we are able to to do this it's also livestreamed we have a microphone for the questions at the end and I think we start with our a guest of honor Catalan and we use this and is it Mike should we move it a little bit closer here yeah and it makes it a bit easier because we also have some size so again thank you so much if you have a cell phone please do take it out I'll do it too and see if it's off it never rings in our evenings it's really true and we will also have a small reception afterwards here so in case you have additional questions or something you couldn't ask it or didn't want to ask so here we go so thank you so much can you hear me yeah Frank mentioned the showbühne so I will pick it up from there and the legendary dramaturge of the showbühne Dieter Sturm was recently interviewed and in this interview he he was asked about the dramaturgy and his role as a dramaturge and he said that in his opinion the dramaturge is responsible for the igniting moment between three elements text actor and director and I really like this idea of inflammation igniting moment that he talked about because it is very similar to other descriptions other people use when talking about the nature of the role some people describe it as the catalyst others as a facilitator and basically all of them are talking about collaboration and good leadership where the decision is made as by a consensus and this book can I have the next slide please slide this book dramaturge in the making in a way is my journey to I was born and raised in Hungary and I studied dramaturgy there and because the Hungarian theater system is very similar to the German when it inherited the German theater culture theater system I never questioned my role as a dramaturge I or the necessity of my work until I went to the United Kingdom in the 1990s to okay yeah is it okay is it better okay can you hear me better I'm just gonna hold it okay yeah so can you hear me better now okay I don't think we need this between you and that's just a dramaturgy of space okay so so it never occurred to me to question my my role as a dramaturgo my necessity until I went to England to do my traineeship and I did it at one of the most prestigious theater schools and on day one I was told that dramaturgy doesn't exist in the UK what are we talking about so my book is is part of this quest or this journey about dramaturgy it is certainly true that when I arrived or landed in Britain in the 90s the role was still not settled there because it started only in the 1960s and when I arrived there was a very exciting and interesting dialogue about dramaturgy the profession was still fresh and it was encouraged by fairly recent publications on the subject by Mary Luckhurst, Kathy Turner and Cineburned so this new discourse it set it tried to settle the term dramaturgy within British theater practices at the same time that fairly new areas of theorization of the field new practices and new terms left there mark on it in this I saw an opportunity for dramaturgy to rethink and revise its terms and practices in the context of contemporary theater and performance and perhaps rejuvenate itself I also wanted to shift away from the question of what is a dramaturg and how to hide as a dramaturg operate and how is dramaturgy done what to do what what do we need to do in our what do we need in our dramaturgical toolbox if dramaturgy is indeed a craft and perhaps an art surely there must be certain methods skills and proficiencies to be learned in order to do it well to be a good enough dramaturg the motto of my book comes from an American theorist and dramaturg and the dear friend Jeff Pearl who also wrote the introduction to my book those of us working in the field need to continually describe ways of working as seriously and carefully as possible as if the future of the discipline depended on them if there's one thing I want to emphasize about the way my book approaches dramaturgy is that doing dramaturgy is an active not a passive thing and this is what the cover image which is depicting Akram Khan performing dash this is one of the case studies I use in the book this is what the cover image is trying to express next slide please it took me seven years to research and write this book and as a byproduct I edited another book with Bernadette Cochran new dramaturgy international perspectives on theory and practice and it's this book examines theory and practice of dramaturgy in our ever-expanding theatrical universe next slide please dramaturgy in the making consists of three parts and for the purpose of research I marked the territory of dramaturgy into three distinct strands institutional dramaturgy production dramaturgy and new dramaturgy and from each strand I selected leading professionals 50 professionals from Europe and North America working mainly for not for profit theaters and companies and interviewed them about one recent dramaturgical work they had been involved in scrutinizing that dramaturgical processes throughout the various stages of the work can I have the next slide please for this for the description of their work and this case studies I used the ideas of an American dramaturg Mira Rafalović who in a very beautiful essay describes her work as a dramaturg and the main thought of her essay is that during a creative process we ask questions and as our questions change these changing questions mark different stages of the creative process so I could use this scheme in order to examine the creative processes the case studies I collected and I could compare them and I have the next slide please so part one of dramaturgy in the making discusses institutional dramaturgy the work of dramaturgs literary managers artistic associates based at an organization let it be a theater company or a festival this is where the profession started with lessing and at its core is repertoire planning and new drama development so in a fantastic you can hear me now chapter one gives a brief historical and aesthetic overview of institutional dramaturgy it examines the formation of national theaters and shows that the role of the drama talk comes with progressive changes in the way we make theater particularly a people's theater especially a national theater chapter two through concrete examples including the national theater London the Shelby in the Berlin the Royal Flamish theater Brussels and the Stratford Festival of Canada it discusses the curatorial role of institutional dramaturgs chapter three takes two case studies one from the Royal Court theater and the other from the National Theater London and it discusses the dramaturgs facilitating role when working on a plane translation and chapter four it's via several case studies follows the work of dramaturgs in new drama development and starting from scratch when working with a pre-existing first draft when working with an established playwright and then working with several playwrights simultaneously in a retreat environment can I have the next slide please from this part of the book I just want to show you one quick example on new drama development should get treasure repeat that was a play cycle written by Mark Ravenhill and what connects these plays is that they all explore the theme of war and the company who had Mark Ravenhill to develop this cycle when staging the plays they were thinking what to do with them at the same time the British artist Anthony Gomley had an exhibition of his sculptures the watchers and these statues were displayed on various landmark objects landmark buildings all over in London and that gave the theater company an idea that perhaps they can scatter similarly the Mark Ravenhill plays in London the way Mark Anthony Gomley's statues were scattered so in a three weeks period you could within a three weeks period you could see these plays some of them were played at the Royal Court Theatre some of them at the National some of them you could listen through headphones on a street some of them live broadcast on BBC radio some of them you could see in a hotel room and and another was played in a bus stop so that's very interesting dramaturgy in my opinion can I have the next slide please part two of my book discusses production dramaturgy and it starts with a brief historical overview of production dramaturgy and the formation of the role and it shows how the role of the production dramaturgy evolves hand in hand with the role of the director and the next chapter through two case studies the tunnel herb Amsterdam and the Yoruba De La Theatre Budapest and various other dramaturgs comments shows the production dramaturgs work in tech space theater and chapter 7 shows the dramaturgy of device theater the role of the production dramaturgy when working on a device production can I have the next slide please I just wanted to show you an image from one of the case studies I use in the production dramaturgy part and it's the Roman tragedies by the tunnel hope Amsterdam directed by Yvonne Hove what is very exciting about this production that it's three plays by Shakespeare Coriolanus Julius Caesar and Antonin Cleopatra woven together into one continuous performance and this five and a half hour long performance is without an interval and the audience is situated in the middle of a political colloquium and this marathon performance is exploring the word of politics the other exciting thing about this production that you can see over there says five minutes until the death of Coriolanus basically what they did was that they incorporated the production notes the program notes in the performance as subtitle so you could you you got explanation you got footnotes you got some warning like you know Shakespeare play in the prologue you hear about the plot here you could you could time or get back from from wherever you wanted to wonder during the performance in time to see Coriolanus is death so that was a very interesting thing and the very very exciting dramaturgy by the way three dramaturgs worked on this production can I have the next slide please part three of the book explores dance dramaturgy and I was very proud that as far as I know before my book dance dramaturgy wasn't included in in this discourse luckily these days there are many more books exploring dance dramaturgy so part three discusses dance dramaturgy which is the most dynamically evolving strand of new dramaturgy in chapter 8 follows through the history of dramaturgical thinking in dance from Lucian to the 20th century and I just wanted to show that dance dramaturgy was thought about and discussed before there was even a word to describe it so when we when we talk about the development of dramaturgy in theater we are really struggling hard to link lessing with breath you don't have to struggle when you talk about dance dramaturgy it's really really exciting chapter 9 examines the history of the profession of the role of the dance dramaturgy beginning around the time that the previous chapter left it the first dance dramaturgy was Raymond Höge who worked for the Tanztheater Wuppertal with Pina Bausch and this is how the afternoon screening is linked to to this evening's talk because Pina Bausch was championing a method whereby she was asking questions from her dancers and and they build the performance together with her performers and the second film that we saw this evening oh sorry the third film that we saw this evening was about Lébelet Seydelabé and Alan Plattel is following in the footsteps of Pina Bausch he's using a very similar method and one of the case studies that can be found in the 10th chapter is from Lébelet Seydelabé again in fact it was the out of context for Pina production can I have the next light please so that's the Tanztheater Wuppertal and this is a Lébelet Seydelabé performing a production that was dedicated to Pina Bausch because it was created it was they were rehearsing it when they heard about her on timely death and this is a production which is still on the repertoire so every year the dancers returned again to perform one more time the show so they are maturing and aging together with the performance and this is again very much like what Pina Bausch used to do that her dancers matured and aged together with the performance and performed it for a very very long time can I have the next light please this is just a beautiful quote from Alan Plattel I wanted to share with you where he says that he he never makes no dances I just work with the material the material is not a written text or a book I work with the material that I see then I just place them and play with them I like to work with people who like to move and in that sense people call me a choreographer but whether it is a theater or dance or opera this is really not something I'm thinking of this is also a question Pina Bausch raised 50 years ago that performances are all these things together I don't make any distinctions anymore can I have the next slide please this is just an excerpt from out of context and this is a similar exploration of those kind of banned movements of this canacea that we could also watch in the in the production of label AC the lobby so they are venturing into movements that are kind of taboo for the stage and through these movements they are exploring something about human nature can I have the next slide please so to conclude I think a couple of years ago there was here another book launch about books dealing with new dramaturgy and one of the editors Magda Rumanska who in in that very same book about dramaturgy the rightly companion companion to dramaturgy she quoted that if the 20th century can be called the century of the author director the 21st century will be the century of the dramaturgy I'd like to kind of slightly modify this very very bold prediction and say that perhaps the 21st century is can be the century of dramaturgy because it is certainly true that we think about dramaturgical processes when we and and there's a huge attention that is given to dramaturgy and dramaturgical processes and there's a higher emphasis than ever on dramaturgy the weaving together of the material that will constitute the texture of the performance can I have the next slide please so the new dramaturgy's role is very beautifully summarized by Sundron Earth it means opening up a divided usually temporary space of negotiation and the creation and reflection of the evolving act of tracking the diverse traces of what is emerging it does not mean not making decisions it is much rather about the shouldering of responsibility with respect to the politics of decision-making can I have the next slide please and this is an image I'd like to share with you I would have loved to use this for my cover of the book but sadly I didn't get the rights this is Francis Isis tornado and you can see the artist running headlong into the tornado and one of my interview is Ruth Little who works with Akram Khan as her dramaturg this is how she described her work that this is like running headlong into this organic chaotic beautiful thing and I just like to close with with a thought from Maria Funker-Köven she's another very important person she coined the word the new dramaturgy a word we'll hear a lot about and this is a quote from her dramaturgies for me learning how to handle complexity if you'll have time at the end of this session I perhaps we read a short excerpt from the book but I think it's a good time to hand it over to Bertie and Peter and he had David want to handle complexity for coming thank you Frank and Peter for hosting things Kathleen for for your thoughts so I was asked to kind of provide some thoughts and reaction to her book I have to tell you I'm actually not a dramaturg and I was definitely not trained as a professional dramatur but I've come out of it thinking about dramaturgy because as you say it's the new 21st century thing to do so can we have the the first slide so my interest in dramaturgy arose from research that I did in for actually I've been researching performance that don't quite that are not text based text base for a while and that kind of use the theater in ways that producers presenters and curators are not used to using you know you don't go you know much better so so researching those performances I started to look at the people who were who had to book those and commission them and therefore let me to the curators the there you can call them presenters artistic directors and I I also there was kind of a trend 20 years ago starting that had contemporary theater festivals then they took out the word theater so it was contemporary performance festivals and they had a range so with Tom cellar whose editor of theater we cute we edited a special issue it's for the fall of 2014 where we interviewed a number of these emerging curators one of them is here sitting here in Norm Frisch and and really what what that showed me is that there was a drama turgy in curation that I hadn't been thinking about of course I hadn't been thinking about drum turgy at all till now really I mean a few till I met Peter about how curating works and so for that issue which again is fall it's called performance curators I wrote about the emergence of the performance curator in the 21st century in particular for the performing arts from content to context so how it went kind of a historical looking back at how really the role of the curator performing arts first of all was never a call the curator there's still today there's different names for him or her and started with kind of a selecting shows commissioning traveling abroad just picking shows to context in other words conceptualizing how a performance is even to be presented and you mentioned this in your book it's not just what the artist does in the space but it's how it's presented from do you have a box office do you don't know how you know what time of night all that is drum turgy is a presented throughout three weeks throughout I mean we know this so so among the curators we interviewed Norm Frisch we had people like Matias Leland, Judy Hussie Taylor, Joanna Warsaw, Lola Arias and Helen Cole among others and the questions we were asking what are practices that they implement what presentational forms do they implement how do they conceive of I mean seasons is a bad word but how are they conceiving how are they even thinking through this through these about how do they present these artists so I noticed that again not only were they selecting performances to fill a season but they were questioning the ways to present as much as artists are doing and they were questioning how to present performance in a new way or as the artist was was demanding so the first I'm just going to bring a couple of examples so you see what I'm talking about the first is Lola Arias and Stefan Kaeghi of Rimini Protocol they got together and conceived of a festival called Ciudades Paralelas parallel cities where they commissioned eight artists to create that of course they love to create a performance tailored for a functional location functional by that meaning that was quote-unquote real it had to take place in the world and the performance could not intervene with that reality so if you have something in a factory for example they couldn't stop making the cars if you have of course in a hotel you're not gonna have people but it was a working hotel and that kind of provided logistical constraints for example when they went to India so can I have the next slide so they did okay so Dominique Hubert who's here for Hotel Savoy maybe some of you saw Sir P.S. 122 they commissioned him to do the one in the building can we have the next slide they can miss also Stefan Kaeghi did one in a building where actually you're led by I didn't see this one but Lola explained to me you you a blind man kind of takes you up to the roof so you're in the roof of this building listening to stories and looking out the next one and this is all part of one festival the next one is to no I'm sorry go back oh yeah so this is the quiet volume that took place in libraries and it was created by Tim Mitchell's in at Hampton came to New York actually next actually go back because I I just want to share what that one was quickly so for this one you arrived to a library and you were given just headphones and then you were told to go to a place of study right and it was kind of time so at the same time you sat with one other person but you didn't quite know who else in this audience was studying or perhaps listening to headphones a lot of people now listen to headphones so you were as you kind of read books and engaged with the performance of reading and and a person speaking to you through the headphones and listening to a kind of story that was the performance so people could still study people could still do what they had to do and yet you were kind of a huge experience where you didn't quite know who was an audience who wasn't etc this took place this was in the palace of justice in Buenos Aires but again it took place outside of courts and this was Christian Garcia and finally this one was Hotel Maids by Lola areas where she and I think the next one is also hers yeah where she interviewed and talked about the people who were the late the people who were basically cleaning the rooms and the labor the invisible labor that that tends to take place in hotels and so she she interviewed them and then you would go to hotels and then kind of find out about their lives and what they had done to clean the room etc so I interviewed Lola about this as you know her work as an artist and in Curator and how she was thinking and she told me that the pieces were genuinely portable in the sense that the only thing we are transporting were concepts the concept of for each piece will be fully developed and each piece will be restaged in the context of each city with different performers different spaces and so on the only person traveling was the artist and his or her idea recontextualized at every site so in other words and again I hadn't been thinking about drama Turgi at all but what's really coming out is this new kind of this new form of John Turgi for for curating and performance practices so it's you guys parallel as the festival really emerged as an alternative bottle for live art touring rather than this kind of season or even festival of new work framework one more thing that especially she had in mind was this notion of portable concept so you were also economically sustainable you're not kind of touring this huge massive set that's very expensive and you're also hiring actors at every site locally so you're really engaging at the very local level in context through these performance pieces okay so the next example was yeah so Helen Cole she used to cure she used to be curator for all north be Arnold beanie which is more of a visual arts center but she was head of live arts there and she before as she was she had worked there for a long time and when she was leaving she wanted to kind of create an archive of all the amazing performances that very few people got to see and what started as a really small archival program for her which was that she got she got audience members who would talk to her about the feelings they had when they watched a performance and these were performances she knew had been good like last theory or Wooster group or some of these kind of canonical artists she she recorded them and as she was kind of archiving this she discovered that wow these she went back to that performance the memory people kind of got moved rethinking these so again what began as an archival project for the love of the sephemeral form with her practice of curating became a kind of what is kind of installation somewhat performance so what she created was it eventually became we see fireworks which is all these you go in and you listen obviously they're carefully selected it's in the dark they have a set you know kind of volume that she's put into them and the light bulbs represent a different memory and what happened was that as she toured this she created this space where people wanted to talk about a performance memory and so after you you experience this then you get in the room and you share your own memory of something and she says that I mean it's like up to 800 and above now but she's you know she'll edit of course curate dramaturgically whatever word you want to choose for the performance to kind of have what she calls us theatrical quality and she never called herself an artist before this but she she she says that this is part of curation and again going back to the new dramaturgy this was not a word that came up in the interview at the time when I you know I did the interview or that she said but now it just seems dramaturgical and this is what she she says about this when I started the 20 audio pieces I created a very small installation that was just between six and seven minutes and because I realized in experimenting that it's quite hard to listen to these intense personal recollections without something to focus on I began to play with the theatricality of these texts I put them in a dark space and I created an installation using vintage light bulbs that came on and off as the recordings are played so it almost felt like these light bulbs were characters or many performers almost playing in the darkness now again remember that these are memories of actual performances so sometimes and she she noted in the interview that one of the performers of I think it was back to back went there and didn't realize that they were actually talking about a performance that they had done so again it's a it's a kind of an archival memory so can I have one thing okay and so this was not included in the the theater journal piece but this is again I think kind of this new dramaturgical way of curation this is a new trend in these experiential museums now this one's called the empathy museum and they did a piece at the lift festival in 2016 called a mile in my shoes where what they wanted was to tape memories of stories from people and you literally walk in their shoes so they're again similar to quite bond there's no actor you're the actor spectator and you go and into this kind of small house and you walk in and you choose the shoes you want to wear and put them on and you put the recording that and then you literally walk in their shoes and you listen to the stories so again another kind of dramaturgy curating example and and the creator by the way as an artist curator although we can call them a dramaturg or not yeah okay so all of this can I have all right okay so all of this to conclude that this is kind of where I'm at and this led me to look I became fascinated by the fact that now we have so much performance in museums and in visual art spaces and I was wondering now hmm so these people are actually call curators and I wonder if they're using dramaturgy so the the dramaturgical thinking is kind of the new the thing I want to take on now to look at how performance is being utilized and curated in museums are actually using that term whereas in theater again before some of these people didn't call themselves curators and so these are just some of the performances we've seen at MoMA recently can we have one more so this was Mary Hasabi's plastic photo Peter I go so thank you and this one and this is where a good ending because this is where I'm gonna go we can talk about it later what's the role of dramaturgy in museum curation and how can we think about that thank you both to Birdie and Cuddlin and just to begin I'd like to really thank Cuddlin for her work on dramaturgy because those of us who work in dramaturgy and go to conferences about dramaturgy end up in situations where people are in you to the field constantly talk about all we need to define the term and and you just waste days doing this and now we can just say okay go and read Cuddlin's book it does it all so thank you so much for the work that you've done on this it's so important I think to to our field and I'm gonna talk a little bit about new media dramaturgy this is also a book publication that is very recent authored by myself Helena Greyhead and Edward Shear but the beginnings of this project questions that we ask what happens when words end in theatre when they run out of steam in a sense so we've seen a lot of theatre now I think and performance where playwrights not not performance makers in a more avant-garde sense or experimental sense seemingly mistrusting their own words and and we have a play that three-quarters of the way through shifts its register from dramatic text into performance and we have some kind of affective experience some kind of immersive environment some kind of transformation of the stage seems to unfold and the register of the of the performance changes we're no longer listening to some kind of dramatic story unfold some kind of narrative function that is expressed through the text and instead an audience is is shifting their register to seeing atmospheres appear on stage and I think this is really interesting it's really challenging it's really questioning I'm wondering one why this is taking place also in political terms I think it's very interesting question but also what happens to the to the play form what happens to dramaturgy how do we talk about a dramaturgy of things a dramaturgy of objects a dramaturgy of atmosphere smoke light sound and so on and so forth and that's something that this book addresses in hopefully in some detail next slide please also the beginning of this point we all must citationly quote Marianne vancookerven who is a very important figure in the world of contemporary dramaturgy she as far as I'm aware asked the first asked the question is there a dramaturgy of things can we talk about a dramaturgy of lighting sound space movement and so on and so forth and really planning the seed for this idea of a much more complex framework for dramaturgy that talks about the experience of the whole stage as it unfolds so I think that's a very important acknowledgement of somebody who was really thinking about the work already as this idea of a new new form of dramaturgy invoking atmospheres objects and forms was unfolding next slide please much of this appeared I think at least in one case study we can look at the appearance of this in the development of the work of the belgium based performance artist Christopher donk who is a visual artist and performance maker and for many years Marianne vancookerven was his dramaturg now Marianne passed away about three years ago now and he has another dramaturg named Christoph van Baal taking over but many of the key works and many of the key ideas that Chris developed in relation to a dramaturgy of things were done in conversation with Marianne and so there's a really strong sense of dialogue this is an image of a work of Chris's called end which attempts to stage the apocalypse in a series of five or six scenes that the work lasts for approximately 60 minutes and I can't remember there are five or six performers who walk across the stage from left to right in a random order and perform a singular task each of which is designed to show some or communicate some experience of the end times one person's falling from the sky another person's dragging a body bag another person's walking across the stage reciting a sort of stitching together of texts from all of the dystopian sources you could possibly imagine from Kormak McCarthy to the Bible and of course lots of Samuel Beckett it's it's a remarkable work because ultimately this work is a work that is a performance of objects and things as much as it is of humans and text and all of these things work in close concert with each other and give us this very layered very detailed sense of what Chris would call an uncanny experience and most of his work is as he says designed to explore the uncanny and to provoke some kind of discomfort in the audience and he sees this as a very important political thing but this idea of discomfort I think can be expressed most most clearly or most carefully through some kind of atmospheric projection into the space next next slide but we'll skip it and go to the next one so Chris's early works were object-based performances where people were encased in glass tanks wearing scuba diving gear so that the audience could view these work these bodies these objects these figures as he calls them in absolute close detail and then next slide please in exote he explores the uncanny power of nature as a kind of performative experience this was a work installed in an art gallery where there were three invasive species of fauna and three of flora introduced into the gallery space and over the three-month period they invaded and took over what was a garden and animal environment of indigenous plants and animals from Belgium and so you had the presence of these other he had to get special permission from the authorities we all had to wear scientific kind of like coats with the gloves and boots and like goggles to go into the space and there were a series of science like doors to get in and out because of course these evasive species were not allowed to escape into the the Belgian landscape because otherwise they would actually enact in in reality what they were being performed the performance of them was being done in the in the space next slide please one of Chris's major works is a work called actor one which is it comes in three parts the first part is the presentation of mist and just run that's a little movie very quickly in the first part of this piece we essentially watch an atmosphere as a performance the atmosphere is acting according to Chris's terminology and it makes a very strange effect there's a very subliminal music track underneath that there's a sense that one wants to immerse themselves in the smoke and this is a very carefully controlled environment which is very theatricalized because it's a stage with various lighting and and wind effects that produced this very uncanny atmosphere the second part which is called human it is a is a third-sized virtual reality figure of an actor reciting a becker text and it's extremely realistic detail and it's a three-dimensional projection on to I want to go into how it's done but essentially one is confronted with a very very lifelike miniature version of the actor reciting a becker text about being small and and it's of course this is the theater part where the great modernist playwright is having his text recited by this virtual reality figure and then in the third part of the performance which is we're moving through a theater an actual theater we meet the dancer three which is a jumping robot which many people become quite transfixed by and and feel empathy for this is a performance of futility and failure the robot bounces up and down on a single pogo leg and and inevitably it falls over only to be pulled up by the machine that is attached to and it and it re-performs its its task and and we project all sorts of drama on to this we wanted to perform it seems to perform better it seems to perform it seems to respond to our desire for it to perform with a great energy and detail and Chris informs me that much of the secret of this work is that he actually sampled R2-D2 from the first Star Wars movie as the voice of the of the dancer three and everybody of a certain age is very nostalgic for that sound and so there's a high degree of empathy for the piece around there so moving on just skipping the next slides and going right to the final slide in the package there I think we come back to this question of the dramaturgy of things that Van Kirkhoven talks about and and you know with so much live work now crossing into the world of objects and things which is called vibrant matter by Jane Bennett we can say that theater is entering new territories and about thinking about the way in which we are all connected to objects atmospheres and transforming realities this is what we aim to name in our phase in our phrase new media dramaturgy so thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much wonderful so maybe we all go here and maybe put up a little bit here if you're both in the stores now. It is in the stores as of last week. Maybe take the microphones since we are. It's in a dramaturgy series that's edited by Kathy Burner Kathy Turner and Cineburn and unfortunately that's an academic series and the books are quite expensive so get the library to buy it. I think yeah so maybe first comments to the presentation or my colleagues or. I was thinking what is the red thread throughout three very different presentations and I was thinking about that perhaps it's the soft narrative. So what Peter was telling about this robot performing a dance and and the audience members projecting feelings and a story into it and this is this is not only what the humans are wired to do that you you see events in time and you begin to create a story in your head about it and these can be very abstract things that you see see a pattern and you begin to create this soft narrative understanding and I think that this was the red thread in the three presentations we just heard. I guess this goes to the heart of what I've been talking about for quite a long time and forgive me if I'm repeating myself but I'm very much in favour of a notion of expanded dramaturgy a notion of taking the understanding of dramaturgy that we have in the theatre which is essentially understanding about how ideas and experiences are structurally or materially represented on the stage how they are designed so in other words it's a bridging between idea and practice and how we can apply this idea not only to the world of theatre but also to the world of performance to curatorship and more broadly into other social and political spheres. I think I'm interested in this idea primarily because it automatically takes us to an understanding of performance as something that is invoking ideas it's saying theatre must be about ideas it must be about something it can't just exist as a kind of entertainment or something and that those ideas should be made explicit in the not only in the in the language of the dialogue of the text for example of the work but also structurally embedded into the forms and so we see an argument about theatre about the world structurally embedded in the way that the stage is organised dramaturgically so that's my kind of link I think between them. No I just wanted to mention one thing if you haven't read her book it's wonderful and one of the terms that stood out for me was large-scale dramaturgy so and of course it's part of institutional dramaturgy but at least in my theatre training and background this is not something that we study to kind of look at large-scale dramaturgical structures we always just looked at either the play or the thing and this I mean maybe it relates to this extended thing you were talking more outside of performance but even within theatre training institutions I don't know that artists are kind of looking at the impact of large-scale dramaturgy institutional dramaturgy and maybe these kinds of things can be brought into the conversation. You're back to Marianne Funker-Koven who had this term macro-dramaturgy, macro and micro-dramaturgy depending on the scale of the focus. So what we are talking about is significantly or mostly about an expanded idea of dramaturgy the quote-unquote American dramaturgy often is the letter a manager and selects plays which you know he recommends but the artistic director does he or she anyway what they want and they just do some audience outreach meanwhile the European idea of dramaturgy really was a deep engagement with the subject matter connected to history, a history of the theatre and also in the current social political or economical situation but you were all saying in this expanded idea and the dramaturgy of things, of atmospheres, of material representation on stage is actually almost like a new definition of the term itself. I just think that because dramaturgy is always responding to theatre practices so the way the theatrical universe is expanding obviously our dramaturgy is expanding but this is not a dichotomy between old and new dramaturgy it contains it all and when he mentioned European practices I mean I feel really humbled that we have the forefather of American dramaturgy Mark Bly with us in the room and he worked with Livio Cilé at the Guthrie Theatre creating wonderful dramaturgical practices and fantastic performances and Cilé brought his experience from the Bolandra Theatre of Romania and that attention to details and Mison Sen and Mark and Michael Lupu they transformed theatrical research and they were talking about the relevance of the performance here and now so that concept, that idea, that notion that Peter is just talking about that a performance is expressing those ideas that we can talk about when we think about the work at the Guthrie Theatre. Let's say we give you a microphone so we... We are live streaming or that puts the pressure on us all doesn't it? Thank you Catalan. You want to say though whatever the three of you just said is really quite thrilling. I've been watching on National Geographic Channel lately the 10 part series on Einstein. I don't know how many other people have been watching it but a number of the things that you've all been talking about especially you Peter has reminded me a lot about that series and the whole notion... This has been a very liberating panel in a lot of ways the way you've been talking about dramaturgy dramaturgy as not just these things in a text not just about actors on stage not just about words in space but ideas, objects, a whole series of things events in space, events in time in space so that we are liberated in this 21st century I'd like to believe about thinking about dramaturgy in whole new ways. Not one way, not two ways, not three ways but there were open in all sorts of ways thinking about dramaturgy in spatial ways in new time ways and I think that's really exciting just to hear the way that each of you are talking about it curated ways, I love that idea but the whole notion of dramaturgy as an event in space is bumping into things I think is an exciting notion. I think that you mentioned... you began by talking about the North American context and then bringing in this idea of an expanded dramaturgy I developed many of these ideas working in the Australian context where really we began a conversation about dramaturgy in the late 1990s, early 2000s because a group of us wanted a different kind of theatre we've been working in theatre for 10 or 15 years and myself I'd been in the Suzuki Tadashi kind of physical theatre stream and we felt that the theatre needed to be more complex it needed to have more engagement with form and that form should be more meaningful and I won't go into the historical complexity of that but I think dramaturgy reappears at various times within particular theatre communities to provide something new that those theatre artists in those communities need because in a sense their community, their audiences and those practitioners need that kind of work now when we come into say the British or the American tradition we've got very different contexts for the historical evolution of dramaturgy the great thing about Australia is the theatre history is quite short and so you can kind of reinvent it quite quickly not that we managed to reinvent it they're still making well-made plays but I think that we're now starting to see even the text-based play transforms so when I see Richard Maxwell transform his stage into some kind of affective space when Okada Toshiki's play seems to sort of run into and moves out of the dramatic register into the performance art register where the stage just starts to melt something's going on there about the way in which even artists who traditionally work with the text which has traditionally been very much connected to this idea of literary dramaturgy even that seems to have been changed into a more kind of what we might call a performance dramaturgy and these things are becoming more mixed and so I think that's really exciting and it's a very exciting I was just thinking about the audience because we haven't really talked about the audience and I think one of the reasons that you're saying it's so exciting is because there's so much happening around performance now performance is everywhere museums, galleries, you know but because we want to attract the live and the people and theatre makers know how to handle the audience and storytelling is not just the event but it's how the audience so when you see an exhibit how does the audience, where do they enter how long, how much time and I just want to point out that I remember again dramaturgy, the word or the thing was not mentioned but I remember a long time ago I went to see a panel and Phillip Byther from the Walker Arts Center was talking and he was explaining how difficult it is at the time trying to sometimes talk to the curators of the visual arts branch of the Walker because they didn't understand how to orchestrate audiences they didn't understand that their job was eventing or eventfulness and I think that whole that his work, he didn't use the word dramaturgy but in a way it seems like how we approach audiences is part of this dramaturgical large scale approach I just think that we think more and more about processes and the process not only involves what goes on stage but what happens before the thing that goes on stage or gets performed and I have a question to Bertie because it was very interesting when you were talking about this portable concept but with some of our countries history of colonization how did you go about that these this is not a way of cultural colonization well I think that's very appropriate because appropriation, cultural appropriation I think has been the news a lot recently and I wonder if they had dramaturgs and the curatorial departments what would change but the issue of portable concepts I think is totally linked to this cultural appropriation how does one navigate as a curator you know what you bring how you presented, whose culture there was a whole other issue with American realness and they had on the cover I'm not sure how many people were following this image of a Native American and then Ben Pryor kind of had to you know do a whole evening just addressing that issue but yeah I think the notion of being dramaturgically minded as a curator and I'm neither would, I'm just a researcher would, I think this is part of the conversation about the importance of portable concepts cultural appropriation how audiences see it how other people are affected but I'm sure other people have other comments I just, I have to say that tonight's presentation is very exciting to me because one of the things I've been hearing from young dramaturgs recently people who have currently training or recently training in MFA programs in dramaturgy and Frank and I were talking about this just before this panel the cost of MFA dramaturgy training is rising so precipitously as people's incomes most of us are going down that in fact and theater dramaturgy as we all know or practitioners is a shrinking field so in fact many young dramaturgs now are understanding that the areas of growth in the field of dramaturgy are theme park development video gaming, virtual reality in which there is a tremendous hunger and need for dramaturgy their big crisis is storytelling they have the technologies they do not have the storytelling capabilities and anyone in those fields will tell you that so in fact for many young people who are graduating from dramaturgy programs now no matter how conventional their training may be in fact the only way that they will pay off the cost of their education their student loans is by working in these new media fields and yet for the most part their training is not preparing them for that and the dramaturgy literature is not preparing them for that because really what those fields are talking about is a dramaturgy of experience not of the stage per se and so I find this tremendously encouraging A because now this literature is beginning to appear which means that eventually it may trickle its way down into the training programs but whether or not it does it means that it is available to young people who are thinking about extending dramaturgy into these well they're not all new media I mean theme park development is not a new thing but it is a booming field of event dramaturgy and experience dramaturgy so I find this very encouraging and I attend very few panels or discussions of dramaturgy that even refer to these new fields in which many young people are heading I have a range of thoughts that I'm considering but one of them was I think it's Boana Kunst who talks who uses the verb stumble and the dramaturgy is one of the first to stumble and so what happened today Berdy especially with your presentation was that you were stumbling upon dramaturgy and that I think is what we who are dramaturgs do best is that we put ourselves forward to stumble and what that does for our field is takes away this idea of an expert and opens it up to an ability for collaboration to happen and it places the dramaturg as an artist in the room so that was something exciting to see today and then the other thing I've been thinking about within the field of dramaturgy there have been metaphors that have been used often and one of them has been a shifting baseline or the dramaturgy happens at fault lines and that's and then recently reading a lot about dramaturgy I have another new metaphor which is of the cloud and accumulation and which Peter I started to see within your presentation today and so thinking about an evolution of metaphor from the fault line to the cloud and accumulation which becomes productive for us within the field all of which is to say that we've gotten to a place now where we are actually talking about the doing of dramaturgy rather than the what of it so tonight is really exciting okay first of all I'm one of the newest students I'm one of the new dramaturge and I took the advantage of our sharing just now and I read quickly some of the pages in your book and it was wondering then what you call institutional dramaturge because you mentioned like lessing like sort of opened up the way and you're called in that book John Cobb in America as like you know one of the firsts and then we have Mark Bly here that you call the father of American dramaturge so my question would be I mean my training is mainly in criticism of dramatic literature so if you call lessing and John Cobb as drama critics part of institutional dramaturge how could we distinguish dramaturge today and we as critics of dramatic literature or even theatrical performances Thank you for the question I think well obviously this is a profession that evolved in 250 years in fact this is the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the Hamburg National Theatre but obviously as well theatre has changed a lot people and societies so I think institutional obviously for the reasons of my organizing the book I had to simplify things that's why I came up with the idea of institutional dramaturges and curating so dramaturges based at the theatre or festival thinking about the macro dramaturgy of that organization and the institution beyond one performance and yes in a way the move is when the theatre critic moves into the building because lessing worked as a critic however he was an amazing playwright he was a star playwright of his times he was kind of the Mark Ravenhill of the late 18th century Hamburg and that theatre was very clever to invite him to be on board and even launching their endeavor of establishing a national theatre in this very rich port town in Hamburg so what I'm saying is that when you have that critical perspective becoming part of the theatre making process that's the birth of dramaturgy and the beginning of institutional dramaturgy it's interesting that for me the evolvement of dramaturgy is very political so with lessing we have the aim for creating a national theatre producing new drama in the mother tongue in a country that there is no Germany there are separate various principalities and we are talking about a nation a national theatre and not performing in a French place but performing in a German place so that's a political act very very strong political act and then John Pohalt is the 20th century we've got Brecht and production dramaturgy when taking a play using a play as raw material for the performance and for the idea that you'd like to express through this performance and that's another very very political act to express your idea about here and there through the mise en scene and then John Pohalt to these collaborative processes of new dramaturgy and that's a very very political act working in collaboration I think in recent days theatre and the theatre making process is one of the few places where you can still find true democracy and I think we need to maintain and nurture that democracy so that's a very very political act again so this has just improved the evolution of dramaturgy as a political act You sort of admitted what the dramaturgy wants to do is to control the audience's appreciation of what's going on with the performance this kind of control I think you'd look at the introduction of Ipsen to America in England you had your playwright Shaw making his efforts Grantville Barker the actor manager doing it George Brand he's the critic they got to set up the audience so that they can get the reaction that's required to appreciate Ipsen same thing with Brecht you have your very fentlies moment when they have to make sure that a chaotic audience whose own traditions like America and Britain too is you don't know until the moment the play ends whether it's a hit or it's a failure or a flop that kind of anxiety of terror that we all in a sense grow up with on that angle was in the Germanic world they preferred not to have that to have the more guaranteed preparation and I think that the dramaturg rich environments that you're describing are really they're seeking to do that that's what the goal is one of the goals anyway I'm interested in when we can misread audiences too because we can try and address audience desire or concern and actually if you work in a more commercial sphere I think the challenges are even higher but so often we fail at that because audiences are very unpredictable and they'll see what they want to see in an event and the other thing is that a lot of the work in new dramaturgy is specifically open in its reading it specifically opens up the text to multiple readings and I think much to the consternation of some critics sometimes but there is this emphasis on a more participation more mobility of the text or more mobility of the play to be received in different ways now and that's also very dramaturgical perhaps an opposite kind of dramaturgical strategy to the the lessing strategy which is to try and make a well made play and many times now we see artists who intentionally actually try and pick apart that kind of structural model and do something different precisely to leave questions and leave possibilities for interventions by the audience Peter a question for you you worked with Quest for Dung I think on rumour that was it called rumour the piece it wasn't called rumour no which one was the video was the group of eight nine oh yes it's gossip oh gossip right gossip but tell us what did you do in the room in the space how did you shape the most different if you wouldn't have been there how did the collaboration look like gossip is a video artwork that Chris made which is a work that is about essentially the inspiration for the work is the discussion about refugees and cultural difference within Belgium even though it's a society that is divided along French and Flemish lines there's a lot of discussion about outsiders and so he created a work where he created figures archetypal Belgian figures people of different sizes and different ages and different genders and and using video very kind of video compression he made them all appear in exactly the same size so a young small person was exactly the same size as a tall old person and they were kind of squashed together in this impressive overwhelming video and then they all spoke their gossip about the neighbors oh they they don't put out their milk bottles they don't do this they don't do that and they all spoke at the same time so the gossip is a cacophony of sound and the viewing is that we experience this kind of a humorous but he says a very distorted version of xenophobia where there's this kind of obsession with difference but everybody ends up the same and squashed into these little boxes I didn't work on the show as a dramaturg I guess co-produced the show in Sydney when we invited Chris as part of our project to come and work with us and he came and did a workshop with artists we bought him there to workshop with Australian artists but we also worked with the performance space and we produced that work as a way of showing his work in some format we couldn't afford to bring and although we'd love to bring that you know I think it's an interesting question because staging the work it becomes a set of technical issues it's a work with multiple projectors so it's about getting the balance of the projections right so that you have this seamless presentation it's a work that the sound is very important so ultimately when you actually get to the level of the work arriving in the space all of the questions are technical and in a way all of that thinking about the work the artistic structure of the work is all is all already finished by the time it gets there now that's that's a very different experience to bringing a live work into a space where you're having to probably remake the work quite considerably I've been involved in touring shows quite often where you have to really re-dramaturg a work according to a new space but with the video work the dramaturg is more technical you have to fit the image into the space you have to make the data projectors work in the same way it's data projectors have very different brightnesses depending on the age of the bulb in them so Chris was obsessed with this this drove us to distraction he had the technician up and down the ladder constantly so for him in the end it was about making sure that the presentation was exact this is a question we are so often asked and one of the reason I curated the two films about Pina Barsch's working process is to show you that the work is so subtle so if you expected something sensational you were probably disappointed this is not Pina by the inventors this is about all those little nuances and the subtlety of the work that's why it's really really difficult to pinpoint what you did I think it's easier to pinpoint if I didn't do my work well but again we have Mark in the room and who has a very famous quote because he too was asked this question and I will paraphrase it but Mark answer that I can't show you what I did in this production but if you would poke it it would bleed me I'm wondering thinking about the chronology and the dramaturgy that you've given Katelyn of also thinking about new dramaturgy and perhaps a historical lineage that we need to go back to that's further back than where we're applying to it now I think of Adolf Appiah and his work with Del Cruz Anna Halpern and her husband who was an architect who very much influenced her artistic process and the obvious one is always Cage and Cunningham so when we're talking about new dramaturgy which are which is forms coming into the room and communicating with each other that where we are now actually has existed and probably existed prior to supplying the word dramaturgy to it and wondering about your ideas of new dramaturgy and whether that what that terminology does for us now or whether it's productive to put tension to that to expose a process in a collaboration that's been happening for quite some time the short answer is that it's a dialogue relationship and you are not necessarily even have to be called as a dramaturg to have that dialogue relationship and you can see many device productions where there's this dialogue relationship is happening without even somebody labeled as a dramaturg being on board that was the second half of the question Is new dramaturgy new? That's another question that is very often asked it's again like Hoven when they had this famous conference in the 90s I think it was in Amsterdam she just this was a realization that we had no terminology to those performances to those things that you couldn't describe with the traditional dramaturgy with Aristotelian dramaturgy so it was like let's call it new dramaturgy but again this is not a dichotomy it was just kind of a realization that we've run out of vocabulary at that point and we had to expand our vocabulary to deal with those occurrences, those performances around us that reached a critical level and we couldn't describe only in negative terms that this doesn't have a story in it or this is not like that or it doesn't have a proper beginning, middle and end so I think it was a kind of cry for help or an acknowledgement of that lack but since then I think many of my colleagues and many scholars worked on filling that gap and they published a glossary of new terms so we are we are catching up with the practices I hope I'm just going to push it out there but what about like somebody if you think interdisciplinary really that way but what about like Tino Sagal is he doing dramaturgy maybe the concept of this new dramaturgy is when visual artists are now conceptualizing performance in new spaces they're just doing new dramaturgy they just took it away again but I don't know it's to think about I'm also thinking about when Nato Thompson from Creative Time produced Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and Paul Chan took all the credit and the director Chris McAlron who we had here at the Martin Segal for a plenary with Nato Paul Chan and Chris McAlron who directed it and I remember Chris said I usually don't do panels with them because it's not considered the artists of the work so I'm wondering was Paul Chan the dramaturg? I don't know you know yeah now in retrospect I had an exact like he kind of conceived the play and I don't know I'm just wondering how this kind of interdisciplinary lens were now more performance in theaters occurring again like you said that says the ventness kind of 21st century like where how we can claim back new dramaturgy for me dramaturgy is just reminding us that all of these relations exist and are tangible and actually determine the outcomes of the work they're part of the process and it's a way of naming processes so perhaps Tino Segal's work doesn't make sense unless you understand at least from my perspective unless it's speaking about dramaturgy in so many ways because it's a reminding us of either the presence or absence of certain artistic processes in a very overt way there's one there Years ago I worked with Joe Anacolitis at the Guthrie on a production of Buchner's very political fairytale Leon Sonlena and it had Don Cheadle in it Jesse Borego amazing amazing production of course Don Cheadle before he's Don Cheadle Years we worked for 10-12 weeks on it in rehearsal it was set in the future in the distant 21st century in the southwest there was a movie in it that Leon Leon's had created his own home movie he was the son of an international business tycoon sort of a Trump-esque figure and it was based on Lenz Buchner's own novel and he was an art-toe-like figure in the end this was and there were all sorts of dances Texas-style dances on stage happening country-western music and later the assistant director Debbie Savitz decided to write a book about it she went around and did interviews with all the actors in this book and at one point she tried to describe the process and she finally said to me what do you think that was what was going on on stage all those actors every day we started with an hour-long dance session and she said how did they keep from bumping into each other and I said it was because at a certain point they realized they were not in the play but they were an event in space and it was as you say it was an absence of something else the stage event behaved in a different way and there was a different vocabulary that we evolved and it was different it was just different and I think that's the thing to call it a new dramaturgy I was the dramaturge but I didn't call it a new dramaturgy I wouldn't have had the sense to do that I was too busy working and so maybe one more over there as you speak it makes me think about a difference in dramaturgy the logic often being story and linear narrative and these experiences that are often more conceptual in construction how they're analyzing the structures and wondering how you perceive artists or professors or others nurturing I think a more conceptual approach or application of dramaturgy I guess encouragement of conceptual thinking how do you see that happening I was part of a group of people who set up an M.A. in dramaturgy at the Victoria College of the Arts in Australia and we began thinking oh this is so easy all we have to do is teach theater history and visual arts history and film theory and dance theory and cultural studies and and then there is the cradle from which the new dramaturgy will be born but in fact it is a very difficult question difficult because that's impossible within one subject to teach all that it's also difficult because I don't know this is a much more less philosophical answer but so many of the training programs teach for the jobs that exist and not the jobs that could exist because people are paying a lot of money so they're teaching for a theater that exists rather than one that is not yet quite realized in a way that we might want it to be it's an endless question I think that I don't know but one that we should always revisit I think we are a bit over time and we maybe wanted to ask you to read a bit from the book but if I summarize maybe a little bit the idea of the post-traumatic theater which perhaps doesn't cover what contemporary theater is about but his big pletoy was to say next to text is light and movement and the atmosphere and sound and the dramaturgy of projection so also the dramaturges maybe then just upgraded also the monstery and actually we have to take it as serious as the written word and we have to engage with the sound and light and the atmosphere and how people get in, how the audience reception takes place on the very same level as we intensely engage with the text and I think this really offers us this kind of new or modern dramaturgy or perhaps a framework to think new about theater and to cover a lot what is very different than 2015 years ago so you said you might have perhaps one part of the book you would like to read but if you want to say something of course just a very quick response to Amy I can only answer it with a metaphor this is a very tricky question but first and foremost I think we have to relinquish I am relinquishing the idea I don't know all the questions to all the answers and the dramaturgy is not the clever kid in the classroom I think we are lulling also this would be really really silly to claim and if Tim Herschel says the dramaturgy is doing time it's a nice metaphor I really like it I had two dramaturgs I witnessed two of my dramaturg friends having a serious argument that a dramaturgy is doing time or doing space I think it's both but as our understanding of time and space is changing and evolving I think perhaps this is our understanding of dramaturgy is changing and evolving and will evolve in the future and I think the key to dramaturgy is in its lively and its dynamics and room for this evolvement and change so the excerpt I brought is from the very end conclusion so I'm giving it a rena it's the two things about dramaturgy one day when economist and writer Glenn Wittman was having a drink in a bar in Los Angeles he got into conversation with a stranger when he revealed his job his new acquaintance became very interested Wittman recounts the ensuing conversation so what are the two things about economics I cleverly replied you know the two things for every subject there are really only two things you really need to know everything else is the application of those two things or just not important I said here are the two things about economics one incentives matter two there's no such thing as a free lunch the two things is more than just a funny game it can be revealing the good definitions are short and simple yet somehow between them they capture the gist of the subject not least through the dynamics between those two things ever since I heard about this game I was intrigued to find out what the two things about dramaturgy might be so here they are support and challenge the order is important support because that's why dramaturgs are called on board to support the director the choreographer, the artist, the playwright the concept, the production the creative team, the company the theater, the festival the community around the company the talent where the organization is the president sometimes dramaturgs need to support one party only but often it's more sometimes this means supporting people with conflicting interests watching and listening well is an art in itself describing vividly what we say is one of the greatest skills of our profession to know when it's time to intervene and when it is better to remain silent and leave the company to make gradually the discovery that positive trial and error requires artistic sensibility however simply reassuring people in their decisions is not enough our job is to help them to get as near to achieving their full potential as possible and this takes me to my second thing challenge a positive challenge questioning, igniting sparks creating friction and constructive disagreements pushing people to go beyond their comfort zone a good dramaturg does both supports and challenges and knows which one of these two things to apply and when this definition also reveals an important aspect of our work this is a relationship, a dialogue an interrelation between two or more people with the aim of creating or developing a piece of performing art work as a relationship it is dynamic, supportive and challenging and it progresses by way of positive questioning this relationship can be formed between two individuals, a whole group or between an individual and an organization the crucial element is the participant's attitude towards each other as a relationship it is individual for each creative process yet there are recognizable patterns in the work as a professional relationship it has certain constant constituents it happens within the framework of the theater making process with its rules, written and unwritten ethos last page procedures, opportunities and limitations in order to fulfill this role it requires sensibility skills and knowledge and a certain personal disposition a dramaturg needs to bear in mind although it is a creative role it is always a secondary one our job is not to make decisions but facilitate decisions and show the choices and implications of possible decisions a dramaturg's mode is questioning not statement the dramaturg's role is to have the theater makers through a succession of decisions to achieve their work the dramaturg may well be part of the actual creative process but at some point he or she has to become detached from it and withdraw and this is a vital part of the process dichotomy is at the heart of the job of the dramaturg being inside and outside the male and the female Apollo and Dionysus the creator and the recipient seeing both the forest and the trees supporting and challenging being a personality with an individual taste but also able to suppress one's ego when necessary the work of the dramaturg is often unpredictable dramaturg Ruth Little likens it to running headlong into a tornado into the unknown into danger and chaos and not knowing what the result might be the person in Francis Isis tornado photo series might be a dramaturg perhaps not in a desert facing a tornado but ready to throw oneself into the creative process and allowing an organic dynamics to unfold the moment the picture was taken captures the moment of curiosity being on the scene yet outside of the action observing it from a safe distance it also shows trust bravery and of course the danger involved in the situation being determined to immerse himself completely in it there will be a moment when man and tornado will be one and he will allow that to happen learning its rules from within then learning the rhythm dynamics and pattern of it he will gradually gain control break himself free at the other end his hair and shirt may be dishevelled he will still breathe soundly but I imagine he will look back again to take a final glance at that chaotic, dynamic beautiful and powerful complex he has experienced then he might carry on walking in the desert until he spots another corn swirling on the horizon the landscape is yours find your own path across it good luck enjoy