Comparative dramaturgy and/as performance research

Abstract

In 2017 a new international M.A. in “Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research” has been established as a double degree programme for students but as well as a shared project of five European Universities and Academies (based in Brussels, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Paris and Oslo) closely related to the theory and practice of artistic research in the realm of theatre and performance. The CDPR project aims to stimulate transcultural perspectives both on theatre historiography, performance studies and on contemporary theatre practices, challenging established narratives on theatre history and contemporary performing arts. The idea of the project is to stimulate the cultural exchange of expertise and practices, with special attention to processes of hybridization. It responds to the increasing significance of international networks in the field of performing arts and, more generally, to the growing importance of cross-border collaboration in the arts. In this paper, we present our experiences and explore the potential of this new field of research and education opened up by the programme, and discuss it in the context of a book that we are developing collaboratively on comparative dramaturgy.

Introduction

“Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research” (CDPR) has been established in 2017 as a double degree programme for M.A. students, a shared project of five European Universities and Academies (based in Brussels, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Paris and Oslo) closely related to the theory and practice of artistic research in the realm of theatre and performance.

The name of this programme was initially an attempt to translate a name we had found in German: Allgemeine und Vergleichende Dramaturgie – general and comparative dramaturgy. This quoted the name that the comparatist Peter Szondi had once given his new foundation of literary studies in 1960s Berlin. Connected with this was the promise of a new foundation, for which we had a whole series of reasons, but whose exact form we wanted to leave for future practice.

The CDPR project aimed and aims to stimulate transcultural perspectives both on theatre historiography, performance studies and on contemporary theatre practices, challenging established narratives on theatre history and contemporary performing arts which often take the context of the nation-state for granted or, the other way around, reduce the complexity of transcultural hybridization to postmodern globalisation. The basic idea of the CDPR project is to – in light of an altered image of what it means to be a dramaturg – open up a new field that can be described as “Comparative Dramaturgy”. The idea has developed out of the past decades’ broadened concept of theatre. But most importantly, comparative dramaturgy both as a theoretical framework and as a practice tackles international and intercultural questions in the face of progressing globalisation and transnational aesthetics, aiming to understand the proximity of the other, often seen as threatening, as a chance.

The idea of the project is to stimulate the cultural dialogue, and exchange of expertise and practices, with special attention to processes of hybridization. Finally, CDPR should allow us to develop new, transnational perspectives on theatre history itself, by not taking for granted established narratives on the development of national theatre traditions within the framework of modern nation-states, and, consequently, by accepting that theatre and performance also functioned as a travelling object throughout its own history which can only be understood through a transnational perspective. Our project responds to the increasing significance of international networks in the field of performing arts and, more generally, to the growing importance of cross-border collaboration in the arts.

Some time ago we decided to translate the project of the programme, the ideas, experiences and convictions associated with it, into a kind of workbook for theory and artistic research. We have models for this, such as Richard Schechner’s workbook on performance studies. It is meant to be the rather playful development of a doctrine, rigorous but flexible and daring, with many outlooks in all directions, especially also on practices that have played only a marginal role in our Western-influenced socialisation. As a first step, we have accordingly agreed that we will develop the contents of the book in the form of an abécédaire. The skeleton of the book will consist of ten key terms that we have chosen rather contingently, which we then want to continuously supplement and expand with further terms. In keeping with the character of CARPA8 as a colloquium, we will take you into our laboratory and let you witness a development process in which we are still rather at the beginning at the moment. Thus we have chosen four of the ten terms to be outlined and established here in a brief manner. The result that we present is entirely provisional and in the spirit of experimentation.

Language (NMS)

The classical dramaturgy founded in the 18th century by Lessing, Diderot and others (Lessing 1981; Diderot 1996, 1079–1501), which places theatre and language at the service of nation building on the level of language, voice and acting, is based on the idea of an archeoteleological world history in which the so called “Babylonian” confusion of tongues disappears in a unity of subject and system of the future that is assumed to be higher. The CDPR’s conception of language, on the other hand, is based on an interest in an irreducible polyphony that opposes the Esperanto of the mundialatinisation known as “globalisation” (Müller-Schöll 2023, 144–146). It has always already been concerned with “plus d’une langue” (Derrida 1988, 31), with more than one language and therefore at the same time with no language at all. In the national languages, polyphony refers to the multiplicity of dialects, idiolects and idioms, which runs counter to their artificial universality. For German, for example, language atlases record sound shifts on the maps of certain regions that resemble the contour lines of the mountains and further unfold the various dialects themselves into multiple variants. In France, the diverse oral language forms of the different immigrants, the young, the regional dialects and accents resist their standardisation in the academic standard language. In all nation states, there are opposing small/“inferior” languages that infiltrate the officially recognised high language, comparable to Yiddish in Kafka’s Prague, as described by Deleuze and Guattari (1976, 36). The countries and nations are petrified snapshots of the perpetual global dissemination of languages. In their irreducible plurality languages are suggesting different principles of investigation and categorisation than those of classical dramaturgy which was related to the nation state and its restricted economy (Müller-Schöll 2019a).

Performance as a research object of the Comparative Dramaturgy stands for the understanding of language as a practice to be considered in the course of time and space, permanently subject to reformulation and therefore to the principle of change (de Saussure 1962; Starobinski 1980; Weber 1990, 39–60). As such, it is at once local and even more: singular, as well as global. Because each individual performance is to be understood as singularly plural in itself, it is, as a global phenomenon, an irreducible multitude of the singular. In contrast to spoken theatre (Sprechtheater) with its idea of the transfer of text, the drama, to the stage, to the mise-en-scène, a comparative dramaturgy in its study of performance examines the theatre of language (Sprachtheater), which can be found in every spoken theatre and beyond that in every performance in general, as “language as such”, which precedes the “language of man” and points beyond it (Benjamin 1980, 140–157; Müller-Schöll 2019b).

Position (SO)

The British performance artist Tim Etchells once defined dramaturgy quite generally as

[…] the positioning of information, the positioning for the most part of some things as being more proper, some things less proper, or maybe some things apparently more real, some things apparently less real than others. A matter of giving weight to information, of creating hierarchies. A matter of sequence and managed revelation arranged across time.

(Etchells 2007)

The structuring of information, the creation of hierarchies and the arranging of scenes – referred to here – correspond to a rather classical understanding of the concept of dramaturgy and point to a specific mode of artistic production, which doesn’t match with all the different forms of contemporary artistic works nowadays and their manifold processes of creation (Georgelou et al. 2017, 19–22).

However, what is remarkable in the formulation Etchells uses is the describtion of dramaturgy as positioning. Based on the Latin origin of the word – ponere (to place, to set) – one could consider dramaturgy therefore as a practice of taking and formulating a position. Thus dramaturgy is not to be thought of simply as mediating the position of a dramaturg, but is itself a position. However this position could not be thought of as a fixed standpoint, but rather as a referential point that can resonate and therefore become open for possible co-operations and collaborations. As a practice dramaturgy is about taking a position that at the same time proves to be applicable to other positions and also takes objections into account.

Contemporary dramaturgical practice finds its starting point in a variety of different materials and elements, which it interweaves. Therefore dramaturgy as a position is in itself never simple, but in the best sense always complex, multi-layered and entangled. Consequently, it must be understood as an ephemeral construction, as an expression of a respective constellation of materials and elements in relation to each other. Thus dramaturgy as a position is a shape of a temporary knowledge.

The term comparative dramaturgy marks this circumstance in two different ways. On the one hand, it refers to the process that precedes dramaturgy as a position – to the work on the material that goes prior to it, to a practice of setting things in relation to each other. On the other hand, the concept of comparative dramaturgy implies that the position found must itself always be put up for negotiation anew. Dramaturgy as a position therefore means taking a position with the constant willingness to leave this position again. Taking up a position thus always marks the beginning of a dialogue with other positions, which may result in a position being changed. In this sense, dramaturgy can also be understood as a research practice that presents results and enables a view of the whole, but at the same time keeps this whole open to proceed further.

Play (KV)

Dramaturgy is often associated primarily with intellectual labour. Dramaturges read books, explain, provide context, reflect, analyse – they are the head, not the body. Many actors and directors maintain that dichotomy, between doing and thinking, between practice and reflection, between stage and table. Certainly, that intellectual work is part of dramaturgical labour, but at the same time it is not the essence. No dramaturgy without play, no play without dramaturgy.

Players of video games talk about gameplay. Game then denotes the set of rules and constraints that guide you through the game, the narrative structure that allows you to progress. The second part of the word, play, refers to the freedom each player makes use of when making choices, sometimes intuitively, sometimes consciously. Those decisions are dictated by the moment and the situation and are co-determined by the personality of the player himself. You have cautious players, wanton players, crafty players and the kamikaze pilots, who deliberately try not to play the game. Play invariably takes place in the here and now, is instantaneous and therefore unpredictable. Gameplay then is the complex relationship between those poles.

Theatre, too, is “gameplay” because it exists by grace of the interaction between a set of cultural and aesthetic conventions on the one hand and the grace of the moment on the other. Without the first component, theatre is merely playful but directionless; without the second, theatre is dead. Play, like theatre, stands outside everyday life and yet is connected to it. It is precisely because of this distance that theatre exposes the play we play in everyday life. Play is distance and at the same time presupposes implication. Play is also waste, it is fundamentally useless, it leads to nothing, unless the joy of play, i.e. the pleasure of losing oneself in the game, not from a psychological perspective, but from the kinetic energy of acting that is at the same time also thinking. But above all, the game we call theatre presupposes playfulness, the capacity to play and thus to let go of the game. Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: “Summing up the formal characteristic of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (Huizinga 1997/1938, 13).

Therefore, the performer on stage is not only an actor, but always a player. Being an actor is a craft, a profession, and for that you must have specific skills. That’s why you can go to theatre school. Being a player is something else. For that you must have the gift of openness and willful stupidity, which gives you the freedom to turn input into impulse. Unfortunately, you cannot learn that in school, although you can discover it there. Therefore, the stage actor is always a bit like the pirate Jack Sparrow, volatile and unpredictable but utterly charming. Sparrow lives by grace of fiction, and that is his main weapon. Nothing he says is fixed. Only he manages to be addressed by the commodore as “Captain Jack Sparrow” even though his ship is lost (de Sutter 2019, 13). He refuses to play the game of power, just by never ceasing to play.

Dramaturgy is perhaps above all that: creating the condition to keep playing all the time without really having a premeditated plan (but you have an intuition) – of not knowing (yet). And that form of noble ignorance is miles away from the intellectual legitimation or pragmatic readability that one traditionally hopes to find in dramaturgy. André Lepecki writes that dramaturgy is “an ‘inexact-yet-rigorous’ methodology not aligned with knowledge and knowing, but with errancy, erring and error” (Lepecki 2010, 181). Dramaturgy is not a previously defined program, but takes shape during rehearsals and onstage, there and then, at the moment of action. Therefore, you do not work towards a previously determined point, but you let the cloud of elements and references, from the broad range of possibilities, coagulate, condense to a proposal, which you then develop further, discard, recuperate. That process is what we call rehearsal. Dramaturgy does not happen before rehearsals, does not come post factum, but is always present throughout that process, instable, doubting and sometimes inefficient. It is therefore necessarily situated, contextual. The comparative point of view is the best antidote to self-reflexive blindness. Dramaturgy is the vital breeding ground for play. When play disappears from a culture, a culture becomes blind to its own specificity. This is precisely why tyrants always fatally discard their jester.

Body (KT)

Some thoughts on the dramaturg’s body and labour

From the middle of the 20th century onwards, one of the many tropes that emerged to describe the function of the production dramaturg was that of being an “outside eye”. This metaphor was meant to portray a distant observer, a watchful consultant, an expert, existing in a state of neutral detachment from the artistic process in question. The dramaturg’s labour was portrayed as a static, logocentric, Cartesian activity. Therefore, their observations, reflections, and interrogations about the work (in progress) were considered as objective, normative, absolute, and aiming to be “pure” (van Kerkhoven 1994, 142). This definition was closely linked to the notion of the dramaturg as a beholder of knowledge, “guardian of the concept” and coherence (Wildschut 2009, 387), a safeguard of the work. This was manifested in the dramaturg’s labour of research, analysis, observation, interpretation, and interrogation of the work.

Through this metaphor, “outside eye”, the dramaturg’s spatial position was also demarcated: somewhat distant from the active sphere of creation, being physically placed on the margin between the creators and the spectators. From this liminal position the dramaturg gains access to a different perspective and is able to support the (director’s) work by “sustaining a wider perspective” (Turner & Behrndt 2008, 161). Yet, by using this expression, not only is the passive, watching dramaturg separated from the active sphere of generating the work, but this metaphor also ignores or truncates their body: it is the eyes that see and notice and the brain which reflects that are the active agents of their work. The dramaturg appears as someone who “conceptualizes ideas through language and is somehow disconnected from bodily experience” (Wycisk 2020). Yet even the presence of these “eyes” is conditional: they come into existence insofar as the director/choreographer needs to draw on the dramaturg’s knowledge and gaze.

From the 1980s onwards, collaborative practices (devised performance and contemporary dance) in which “the dramaturgical process [is] rendered public” (Stalpaert 2014, 100), destabilised this earlier positioning of the dramaturg from many angles (epistemological, political etc.). Instead, they brought forward the idea of multiple views and situated knowledges; placed the dramaturg nearer to the creative process, and posited their a-priori not-knowing as a working strategy (Lepecki 2010, 194). This collaborative and affective turn resulted in a principal shift from regarding the dramaturg’s labour as the objective observer to the “embodied and affective work of proximity” (Kunst 2009, 82). Around the same time, there were voices coming from text-based, director’s theatre too that attempted to show the complexity of the dramaturg’s place and role in the working process. Mark Bly expanded the idea of dramaturgical research beyond the textual (Bly 1997). Whereas Geoffrey S. Proehl widened the notion of (dramaturgical) knowledge to include emotional and physical knowledge, introduced the dramaturg’s not-knowing, and drew attention to the interconnections of knowledge and subjectivity in the act of doing dramaturgy (Proehl 2008, 9–10, 89, 106). The new tropes used for the dramaturg’s changing role also express this shift towards recognising the dramaturg’s embodied knowledge and labour. The image of the body-less, intellectual observer in the rehearsal space mellows into an “embodied mind” (Stalpaert 2014, 102), an “outside body” (Cools 2019), a “somatic witness” (Ibid.) with a felt and catalytic presence in the room. The dramaturg becomes an individual, who when responding to the work in the making acknowledges their tacit knowledge and affects, embraces their failures. They “dare to stutter and stammer” (Stalpaert 2009, 123), in order “to move beyond the rigid structures of language” (Stalpaert 2014, 103) and somatically explore potentialities through a corporeal dramaturgy. This mobility, having “a (moving) body in the theatre making environment” (Radosavljević 2009, 45), wandering on unstable epistemological grounds, “wayfinding and wayfaring” (Laurence 2022). rather than signalling directions, becomes integral to the dramaturg’s labour. “Not knowing where to go next, and going anyway” (Lepecki 2010, 194).

These changes of the perception and presence of the individual dramaturg’s body within the space of creation, and the shift in their practice from “pure” observation to a more fluid action (with potential physical participation in the creative process and sometimes even in the performance), bring about many questions. Some concern its implications to the practice of the dramaturg; others may be posed about how these changes may reverberate in text-based dramaturgical work? Furthermore, how could this shift impact non product-centred, expanded dramaturgies? And finally, how should these changes in the position of the dramaturg be reflected in the training of future dramaturgs? How to prepare someone to solve issues by moving (solvitur ambulando)?

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1980. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.” In Gesammelte Schriften II(1): 140–157. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bly, Mark. 1997. “Bristling with Multiple Possibilities.” In Dramaturgy in American Theater. A Source Book, edited by Susan Jonas, Geoffrey S. Proehl, and Michael Lupu, 48–55. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Cools, Guy. 2019. “On Dance Dramaturgy.” Cena 29(December): 42–52. seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/cena/article/view/97633/55067.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1962. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.

de Sutter, Laurent. 2019. Jack Sparrow: Manifeste pour une linguistique pirate. Paris/Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1976. Kafka. Für eine kleine Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Mémoires für Paul de Man. Wien: Passagen.

Diderot, Denis. 1996 “Théâtres.” In Oeuvres by Denis Diderot, 1079–1501. Paris: Robert Laffont.

Etchells, Tim. 2007. Unpublished manuscript of the lecture Offical/Unoffical.

Georgelou, Konstantina, Efrosini Protopapa, and Danae Theodoridou, eds. 2017. The Practice of Dramaturgy. Working on Actions in Performance. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Huizinga, Johan. 1997/1938. Homo Ludens. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Pandora Klassiek.

Kunst, Bojana. 2009. “The Economy of Proximity. Dramaturgical work in contemporary dance.” Performance Research 14(3): 81–88.

Laurence, Miranda. 2022. “Nowhere in Particular: the problem with dramaturg as cartographer.” Unpublished conference paper. IFTR World Congress, Shifting Centres: In the middle of nowhere. University of Iceland Reykjavík. 20–24 June 2022.

Lepecki, André. 2010. “We are not ready for the dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy.” In Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, edited by M. Bellisco and M.J. Cifuentes. Centro Parraga.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1981. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus. 2019a. “Singular plural theatre: Representation, Identity Politics and Appropriate in Contemporary Theatre and Theory after Brecht and Marx.” European Journal of Theatre and Performance 1.
journal.eastap.com/2019/01/17/singular-plural-theatre-representation-identity-politics-and-appropriation-in-contemporary-theatre-and-theory-after-brecht-and-marx/.

Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus. 2019b. “Über Theater überhaupt und das Theater des Menschen. Benjamin, Brecht, Derrida, Le Roy.” In Das Denken der Bühne, edited by Leon Gabriel and Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, 59–80. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus. 2023. “Polyphonie oder Esperanto.” In Johan Simons. Dialog mit dem Tod, edited by Susanne Winnacker, 142–162. Berlin: Theater der Zeit.

Proehl, Geoffrey S. 2008. Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.

Radosavljević, Duška. 2009. “The Need to Keep Moving.” Performance Research 14(3): 45–51.

Stalpaert, Christel. 2009. “A Dramaturgy of the Body.” Performance Research 14(3): 121–125.

Stalpaert, Christel. 2014. “The Distributive Agency of Dramaturgical Labour and the Ethics of Instability: Becoming the Outside Body, Implicated in the Life of Others.” In Dramaturgies in the New Millenium. Relationality, Performativity and Potentiality, edited by Katharina Pewny, Johan Callens and Jeroen Coppens. Tübingen: Nar Verlag.

Starobinski, Jean. 1980. Wörter unter Wörtern. Die Anagramme von Ferdinand de Saussure. Berlin: Ullstein.

Turner, Cathy, and Synne Behrndt. 2008. Dramaturgy and Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.

van Kerkhoven, Marianne. 1994. “Looking without a Pencil in the Hand.” Theaterschrift (On Dramaturgy) 5–6: 140–149.

Weber, Samuel. 1990. Rückkehr zu Freud. Jacques Lacans Ent-stellung der Psychoanalyse. Wien: Passagen.

Wildschut, Liesbeth. 2009. “Reinforcement for the choreographer. The dance dramaturg as ally.” In Contemporary Choreography. A critical reader, edited by Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschutt, 383–398. Oxon: Routledge.

Wycisk, Karolina. 2020. “Dramaturgy Like a Ghost? A Few Remarks on the Dramaturg and Words in Dance.” Didaskalia.
didaskalia.pl/en/article/dramaturgy-ghost-few-remarks-dramaturg-and-words-dance.