Dramaturgy and artistic research: Methods and frictions

Abstract

With a view to addressing how we might engage with dramaturgy and artistic research as co-designing methods I will reflect on some similarities between dramaturgy and artistic research. I then reflect on devising as a methodology and discuss the extent to which devised performances and their performance dramaturgies could be viewed as results of inquiry-based processes. The aim is not to argue that artistic research is happening in all professional devising and performance making anyway, rather the point is to encourage us to look at their innovative approaches and strategies and to further the conversation and collaboration between professional practice and the academy’s research environment and structures.

Thresholds and frictions

First, I want to thank the conference organisers for bringing questions about dramaturgy and artistic research into sharper focus. As fields of practice and study dramaturgy and artistic research have in common that they have been intensely discussed and so in the last twenty years a diverse discourse on both topics has emerged. If this sounds straightforward enough, I note Henk Slager’s editorial comment that there may have been an overemphasis on disciplining artistic research – particularly by frequently raising the ontological question “What is Artistic Research?” (Slager 2021, 2). I can safely say that dramaturgy and the dramaturg have had similar challenges, yet the ontological question arguably needs to be addressed and attempted answered, if only to find that one disagrees or that there are many answers. It also seems important to say that the debates do not follow the same trajectory everywhere as concerns and questions are often also contextual specific.

But all this is to say that a conference which looks at the relationship, frictions and commonalities is, at least for me, a welcome initiative. I cannot claim to have come to the end of my thoughts on this, but I have been thinking more about the relationship between dramaturgy and artistic research since working at Stockholm University of the Arts, an institution which has degree awarding powers to examine students on artistic grounds. I have also worked within a Higher Education context where there was a degree of nervousness about artistic practice as a form of research, and where the write-up of the practice carried more weight than the work itself. I therefore appreciate the work that has been done to address the nature of research in relation to artistic practice, and the University of the Arts Helsinki, I know, has been at the vanguard of this development.

I experience it as a dynamic field, which is still debating and working out the terms and conditions. It is an ongoing negotiation which, within an institutional context, comes with its own set of anxieties and challenges but also, in my experience, a potential for rethinking received traditions, assumptions and conventions. It arguably provides a productive context for artists to develop and conduct investigations which would otherwise not be able to happen under the “conditions of an ‘ordinary’ artistic practice” (Kaila 2013, 116). As has often been noted artistic research is about creating knowledge production in and through performing arts, an articulation which naturally invites discussions of the nature of knowledge and how that is conceptualised and understood (differently?) in the context of artistic work and creative processes.

It is a well-made point that artistic research can invent new models for knowledge production, and that it can pave the way for more embodied and innovative dissemination strategies, but I understand what Simon Piasecki means when he remarks, with some exhaustion perhaps, that still “In the research community, the written-up object is often regarded as the research, when sometimes it may be the concluding product of that research” (Piasecki 2018, 213). And here we find some friction: Does the write-up, in some cases, become the research because it is complicated to identify how exactly artistic work itself and/or its processes produce knowledge – or “answers” a research question? This question interests me because as a dramaturg working in Devising a lot of my time is spent figuring out how the emerging material may be connected to an idea, concept or investigation and how best to articulate what and how it does so. One of the most difficult things is to find a common language to talk about “the work” and it takes even longer to find a shared understanding of what the exploration actually is, and what the performance “speaks of”. When it comes to artistic research, we may have similar challenges when it comes to understanding how the artistic work “communicates” its investigation. I think Cull has a point when she writes about what she calls “parallel scholarship”, and I quote at length:

It often remains a challenge to locate and speak confidently in a language or mode of writing for artistic research that has its own sense of “rigour”: that speaks with and alongside practice with a precision and care in relation to its contextual specificity, rather than overwhelming it with an imported conceptual framework or missing out on giving voice to the detail of the practice altogether in favour of demonstrating a parallel labor of scholarship.

(Cull 2019, 163)

Conceptual frameworks and theory can illuminate and offer helpful articulation, but they can also divert and distract somewhat if applied as a form of external validation. What kind of writing, thinking or conversation may we find if we pay careful attention to that which emerges? This is perhaps where dramaturgy comes in, sitting as it does on the fault line between practice and theory and between artistic creation and academic and reflexive traditions.

Eleonora Fabião has described how she, as a dramaturg, experienced “practice and theory as complementary references” (Fabião 2003, 29). In this role she was able to connect “artistic practice and theoretical thinking” in aid of making the performance and scenes “richer in terms of dynamics and meanings” (Ibid.). Similarly, Marianne van Kerkhoven has described the dramaturgical as a constant movement between positions and perspectives in order to feed “the ongoing conversation on the work and taking care of the reflexive potential as well as of the poetic force of the creation” (van Kerkhoven 2009, 11). And this ongoing conversation will take into consideration a wider context, as Nibbelink and Merx put it, dramaturgy is a “relational approach that allows for analysing the interaction between work, spectator, and world” (Nibbelink & Merx 2021, 8). Doing dramaturgy, to use an expression from Maaike Bleeker, can also involve a reflexive approach to process design where one attends to how “processes are organised, who is involved and in what role, where performances are shown, how and to whom, the setting up of working conditions and taking responsibility for their implications” (Bleeker 2023, 2). It is important to stress that dramaturgy need not be the exclusive domain of the dramaturg, rather it can be a process and sensibility which is owned, at least in principle, by everybody within a creative process. Jeroen Peeters puts it well when he describes dramaturgy as the development of a common ground for sense-making and “rather than being tied to a single position, dramaturgy is a collaborative practice, with multiple views enriching the work” (Peeters 2022, 7).

What these descriptions of a dramaturgical approach amount to is a sensibility where knowledge and reflection are used to support the development of the work. It can suggest an approach where instead of mobilising predetermined concepts or frameworks to explain and justify the work, one looks for ways to articulate, conceptualise, shape and enrich that which emerges. This process may also, Bleeker notes, “involve intervening, disturbing, disagreeing, and challenging” (Bleeker 2023, 2).

And here we encounter friction: what if dramaturgy is not only a space of dialogue, clarification, articulation, sense-making and building bridges but also welcomes complication or obtuseness with a view to discovering what else is there if one keeps digging. In a conversation with Chiara Castelucci about a stage figure in the Rome version of Tragedia Endogonidia, Romeo Castelucci makes a radical statement about dramaturgy which runs counter to most explanations I have read. He says:

Rather than render a figure communicable, one searches, not to hide it, but to complicate it, because the task of this dramaturgy – and of all possible dramaturgies, really – is to break or close down communication. There is no communication, no direct communication that works for everyone.

(Castelucci et al. 2007, 216)

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of Castelucci’s intentions with the statement, which is admittedly also taken out of context, but how may we (loosely) apply the sentiment to dramaturgical work? What does it mean to not create a common denominator for communication? Rather than rendering all meaning-making futile I see the statement as an invitation to create a dramaturgical context where “difficulty” can exist intentionally. Is the task of dramaturgy then to discover how to give form and context to something in all its contradictory and troubling complexity? And how may this support artistic research?

Where does artistic research (also) take place?

I now want to reflect on dramaturgy and artistic research from the vantage point of being a dramaturg who has worked in devised and collaborative performance. It always seemed evident, to me at least, that these open-ended processes where you begin the process with just an idea, question, concept or fragments of materials are in fact research processes in and through performance: you ask a question, or propose an investigation, and then spend a lot of time figuring out how best to answer the question. In devising, the process is akin a laboratory scenario where the performance makers and dramaturgs find something out about a given topic whilst simultaneously inventing innovative strategies, tools or methods with which to generate material. With no predetermined performance dramaturgy to structure the process, one invents the how in tandem with the what and why. This demands a lot of research and thinking at a conceptual level whilst practically trying out as one “builds” the dramaturgy and performance. The creation of the dramaturgy is a result of a process where one gradually gives form and context to insights. It is also a way to discover the complexity of the investigation: In a conversation, longtime collaborator director David Harradine explained that an idea or question naturally “grows in what it is” when the deviser or performance maker investigates what it “exactly consists of” and therefore has to “try to find out from different angles” (Harradine 2022). This kind of process therefore involves careful consideration of methodologies which could create conditions for something to happen. In contrast to a research project, though, the wealth of information, insights, discussions, methodological inventiveness and knowledge accrued throughout is often not disseminated in any other form than the performance. This may be enough, of course, but what happens if one sets out to extrapolate knowledge production from such a process?

Between 2008–2013 I collaborated with director David Harradine (Fevered Sleep) on three devised pieces, and it became clear to me that we had gathered an enormous amount of material. I wondered if there could be a way to document, illuminate, capture and map a devising process, which would tell the whole story of that process as well as give space to all the things, which were not directly visible in the performance itself. Written afterwards, using materials, images, research, diaries and notes, Harradine and I created Invisible Things: Documentation from a Devising Process, and two other projects followed. The intention with the documentation was not to have a container for all the material and research we had collated, rather the point was to share the findings and insights with others and also to show that dramaturgy involves a high degree of collaborative and material thinking which (also) happen by way of – and through – the proposals that a lighting or sound designer or other collaborator makes.

In their book entitled Listen to the Bloody Machine. Creating Kris Verdonck’s End, van Kerkhoven and Anoek Nuyens reflect on their endeavor to tell the story about the creation of Kris Verdonck’s performance End. They write, and I am here constructing a quote taking text from different places in the book: “How poor we are when it comes to describing ‘becoming’ […] ” (van Kerkhoven & Nuyens 2012, 21), capturing the complexity of the process of making is like “the growth of an onion: it starts somewhere as a tiny bulb, around which more and more layers grow […] the layers pile up, and they can be peeled off. A real centre is missing” (Ibid., 13). While the two authors acknowledge that they struggle to find a language with which to write from or about a sprawling process, they do in fact go on to do just that, and in narrating whilst reflecting on what happens in and around the making of End, van Kerkhoven and Nuyens demonstrate beautifully that a devising process contains a plethora of information, methodological inventiveness, research and sideways which are deservedly of attention in themselves. In telling the story about End, the book also becomes a discourse on the themes and ideas which Verdonck’s performance investigated, as told by those involved. There is a lot to learn about artistic creation from this book but also a lot about the ways in which creation becomes research.

I understand the difference between on the one hand, artistic development where a project is prepared for production and on the other, an investigation which is formalized as artistic research and which therefore ultimately has a different trajectory and possibly also greater scope for the speculative, detailed and specific investigation. Clearly not all arts and performance practice is research, but dramaturgically speaking, it is interesting to consider the ways in which a research sensibility is embedded within some forms of professional performance practices which also have to negotiate the conditions and demands of venues, funding bodies and a general public. Their methodological inventiveness, strategies, approach to discourse and process design often stay with the makers (and this is their prerogative), but how may dramaturgs and research institutions continue to play a helpful role in disseminating these? The two documentation projects to which I have referred were supported by educational research institutions (Utrecht School of the Arts and Winchester University). And there are of course other examples.

In her, for me at least, seminal essay “Anxious Dramaturgy” published more than two decades ago in 2003, Myriam van Imschoot proposes that what is needed are “more dramaturgical contexts in which artists, scholars, scientists, light designers, musicians etc. can have an ongoing dialogue about the work, the concepts they use, the ideas they are exploring” (van Imschoot 2003, 63). I have conveniently left out the last bit of the sentence where she writes “without the mediating filter of ‘the’ dramaturg” (Ibid.) because I trust that the general exhaustion with defining the mysterious figure of the dramaturg may has subsided by now. What does interest me here is the suggestion to facilitate more dramaturgical contexts where artists (with other experts) can have ongoing dialogue and exchange, and here I wonder if the dramaturg and maybe also the artistic research institutions have some role to play in furthering (already more than they do, and many do a lot already) the dynamic synergies between academy, its structures and the multiple practices which take place in communities and the world at large. I am not sure how workable it would be in lieu of the specific demands put on educational institutions, however there is food for thought in Hito Steyerl’s comment that “academic structures” could also be “redefined” to offer guidance and coordination of projects that are happening outside the academy (Steyerl 2021, 14). Whether this is the responsibility of artistic research institutions, I do not know, but as a dramaturg I am interested in how we could create more dramaturgical contexts which bring together and further the myriad of original research which is happening within artistic practice in the world at large as well as within academia and research institutions.

References

Bleeker, Maaike. 2023. Doing Dramaturgy. Thinking Through Practice. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG & Palgrave.

Castelucci, Claudia, and Joe Kelleher et al. 2007. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. London: Routledge.

Cull, Laura. 2019. “Artistic Research and Performance.” In Artistic Research. Charting a Field in Expansion, edited by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico, 146–174. London: Rowman&Littlefield.

Fabião, Eleonora. 2003. “Dramaturging with Mabou Mines: Six proposals for Ecco Porco.” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 132#26): 29–40.

Harradine, David. 2022. Conversation with Synne Behrndt. Stockholm University of the Arts.

Harradine, David, and Synne Behrndt. 2011. Invisible Things: Documentation from a Devising Process. London: Fevered Sleep.

Kaila, Jan. 2013. “Artistic Research Formalized into Doctoral Programs.” In Art as a Thinking Process. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, edited by Mara Ambrožič and Angela Vettese, 114–199. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Nibbelink, Liesbeth, and Sigrid Merx. 2021. Dramaturgical Analysis. A relational Approach. Last accessed 4^th January 2024. www.atwodogscompany.org/media/321-dramaturgical-analysis-a-relational-approach-.pdf.

Peeters, Jeroen. 2022. And then it got legs. Notes on Dance Dramaturgy. Brussels/Oslo: Varamo Press.

Piasecki, Simon. 2018. “Are there any pictures in it? Creative practice as a serious research vehicle.” In The Creative Critic. Writing as/about Practice, edited by Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley, 213–220. London: Routledge.

Slager, Henk. 2021. “Editorial.” In The Postresearch Condition, edited by Henk Slager et al., 2–4. Metropolis M: MaHKUscript Series.

Steyerl, Hito. 2021. “Response.” In The Postresearch Condition, edited by Henk Slager et al., 13–14. Metropolis M: MaHKUscript Series.

van Imschoot, Myriam. 2003. “Anxious Dramaturgy.” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 13(2#26): 57–68.

van Kerkhoven, Marianne. 2009. “European Dramaturgy in the 21^st Century. A constant movement.” In Performance Research 14(3): 7–11.

van Kerkhoven, Marianne, and Anoek Nuyens. 2012. Listen to the bloody machine: Creating Kris Verdonck’s END, Utrecht: Utrecht School of the Arts.