sarma

Asked to share some thoughts about dance dramaturgy (1), I will not provide you with a history of it, nor with an attempt at an encompassing definition – I think it is difficult and somewhat problematic to speak about dramaturgy in general. I would like to speak from practice and from my own experience with dance dramaturgy, both within artistic projects and as a teacher of ‘physical dramaturgy’ in art schools and workshops for dancers and choreographers. This entails a fragmentary and specific view, one that even harbours conflicting views or practices. Yet I hope to propose a few statements that exceed the scope of particular processes and give a sense of what dance dramaturgy is or can be – a dramaturgy that is already happening as much as it is one that I’m hoping for and trying to contribute to.

Dramaturgical activity doesn’t always involve the actual position of a dramaturge: therefore I will address not so much the function of the dramaturge but dramaturgy as an activity pertaining to artistic processes.(2) Dramaturgy concerns the development of a common ground for the production of meaning, which I’d like to regard as a shared responsibility of all the collaborators. Moreover, dramaturgy pervades all aspects of the artistic creation process and ties itself to materials and media, bodies and space. How to develop a method that is singular to the piece in the making? How to create a shared ground where experimentation and exploration, desire and doubt have a place? And how do these elements transpire once the piece is being performed on stage?

Context is inside: unfolding material, folding in process

Let me start with a few lines by choreographer Boris Charmatz and dance scholar Isabelle Launay, a reflection that has profoundly marked my understanding of dramaturgy: “The scenographic and dramaturgical context is not established next to the dance. In this sense, it is not what you commonly refer to as ‘context’. Lighting and music do not merely ‘colour’ a dance that remains otherwise whole and itself. The ‘context’ is not something surrounding the dance – a mere adjunct – and even less a way of accessorising the movement. Rather, it alters the meaning as it is located within.”(3) In an interview Charmatz elaborates on this: “Things that go beyond the pure image of a moving body are constantly drawn upon: it is all about the whole history attached to a gesture, its cultural embeddedness, and its reception in the theatre. As a dancer you are permanently organizing your inner space, by incorporating the space, the light, the cultural framework, and so on; it is therefore not a feeling that adds itself to the gesture, but on the contrary it changes everything you do internally, and at the very moment itself. So the dramaturgy and the whole meaning potential are already contained in the gesture, the whole time.”(4)

For Charmatz, dramaturgy is intertwined with the body, meaning is a matter of embodiment and embeddedness. His is a truly physical dramaturgy that remains active on stage and incorporates the viewers’ projections, but it also works in an archaeological sense. The whole meaning potential is already there in the material from the very start; all one needs to do is look closer into it, exhaust the lingering meanings and make them explicit. Here, dramaturgy is a process of close reading.

The claim that context is not around but inside also twists a traditional notion of dramaturgy, understood as producing meaning by framing the movement material, by contextualizing it, by colouring it with discourse. Such a view tends to reproduce the practice/theory divide, a modernist specialisation and distribution of knowledge (and hence of power) as underpinning of clear roles for the choreographer and the dramaturge.(5) Yet from Charmatz’ view I’d like to retain another element: he focuses on the exploration of the material itself – and only via that way of the arguments, frames, canons, institutions etc. that grant it intelligibility. It therefore resists dramaturgy as a didactic tool reaching out towards the viewer, it thwarts meaning as something fixed and clear.

Some questions arise. How can one, through the analysis of culture at work within the material, discover the inner logic of the piece in the making? Can material have a right in itself, and if yes, how to turn that into a dramaturgical strategy? And what is this notion of ‘material’ actually?

Over the years I’ve developed a host of practices in collaboration with choreographer Martin Nachbar under the banner of ‘physical dramaturgy’, both in artistic and pedagogical contexts. Many of these relate to ‘reading’, such as exhausting the meaning that is already there, which can be applied to movement material or bodies engaged in choreographic activity. A few years ago we taught a workshop, Backtracking,(6) that departed from the standing and the lying body, as two poles framing movements such as falling or stumbling, which in turn can be regarded as choreographic operations deconstructing this frame. To simply exhaust this point of departure could have taken forever and took up most of the workshop. Through dialogue in a group constellation a wide array of ideas and associations will emerge from the materials read, so that both the ingrained cultural meanings as well as personal preferences and (viewing) habits are being mapped out. Even before the first movement takes place, a whole history resonates along: by exhausting that history, it may become clear where there are alternative areas left to explore, and also what is actually at stake for the artist(s).

While Charmatz speaks about an archaeological reading of bodies and gestures in the first place, I feel the need to extend the notion of ‘material’ to source materials, and the exhaustive reading to the analysis of texts and images. In order to surpass the approach of discourse framing movement material, we’d also need to address philosophical texts, theory or concepts as material, that is as something to work and tinker with, as something that can be used as a choreographic score – and not only as something to construct an argument with. Exercises we do in Backtracking workshops address literary and theoretical texts on three different levels: first a reading of the text’s argument or narrative (if needed with clarification of terms and of the discursive context); second a literal reading: a focus on the language used, especially the spatial and corporeal metaphors; and third: a physical reading, which takes the literal reading onto the dance floor. Reading the work of philosophers like Bataille, Deleuze or Sloterdijk, one comes across a great deal of writing about the body, yet developed at a writer’s desk: putting their metaphors and thoughts to a physical test is an interesting strategy to develop movement material – and more messy and exploratory than attempts to illustrate or stage theory.

            Now, through these various reading procedures there is already some traffic going on between different materials, between theory and practice, between producing movement and reading movement. The dramaturgical process is situated in this back and forth, embedded in the very choreography. And it gains a life of its own, which also moves beyond archaeology into the imaginary and into new meanings, to be sure. Exhaustive reading leads to various ways of digesting, unfolding and articulating material (conceptually, formally, spatially). It also means that one takes things seriously, even the stupid ideas – it is research-driven and grants a certain autonomy to the artistic process, even independent of the piece that will be its outcome. I believe that folding in the process and following its meandering course yields specificity and clarity. Yet for this, time is needed: if we dispense with the idea of dramaturgy as applying knowledge or concepts, then allowing for a process is a prerequisite and a challenge. The process has a right in itself – it has an internal logic that helps one move beyond the canon, habits and fixed positions, beyond what one already knows.

An open question is the key for reading and for collecting, selecting and developing material: dramaturgy is also related to thematic research, which requires that one symbolically marks a theme. Reading keys might be partly intrinsic to the material, but even then they will be combined with the thematic and formal interests of the process. The point I’d like to make is that material also has a right in itself, which gives us perhaps a clue about what is peculiar to how dance and choreography can function dramaturgically. The word ‘material’, omnipresent in dancers’ jargon, subverts what is usually understood as ‘subject matter’: not the construction of an argument is what constitutes a dramaturgy, but a shared fiction or concept as sedimented in particular images or movements. Recognizing the material’s proper weight, valuing, unfolding and articulating it, is a subtle exercise.

Dramaturgy is furthermore a specific way of looking and speaking within a creation process, which aims to recognize and name new material or insights that have potential. Giving a name to specific moments, qualities or sequences provides also the dancers with something to hold on to, it gives them an idea of what exactly is to be seen and makes it available for discussion and repetition – in which also the dancers can share their own viewpoint.

A recent creation with Martin Nachbar and composer Benjamin Schweitzer, nach Hause (2010), was almost fully developed on the basis of improvisation, and also the resulting piece left room for the dancers and musicians to organize their material. During the process I noticed how different the ways of speaking about these improvisations were. In the discussions afterwards, Nachbar would often give more technical comments, for instance about the relation between the movement of eyes, neck and spine in order to generate an active gaze; while for me it seemed more important at such moment to circumscribe the difference between a gaze of recognition, acknowledgement or collaboration. A narrow focus on movement material thus also asks for a way of speaking that opens up a space, that invites wider resonances of meaning, and that spurs on the imagination of all the people involved. Conversely, by working from a strong empathy with the dancers and trying to find out how and what they think, feel and sense while dancing, Nachbar manages to value the performer’s perspective. Which kind of speech helps a creation forward? How to connect an internal and external perspective or find a good balance between a technical language and one rich with imagination?

Dramaturgy as a common ground for the production of meaning should be a shared responsibility of all the collaborators – so not only of the dramaturge and/or the choreographer. This doesn’t mean that the process has to become necessarily collective in the final decision-making. Endless negotiation is highly impractical in large-scale group processes, just like democracy and consensus are not always the best tools to spur on creativity. Authorship in a more traditional sense still plays a role in creating a particular view and making radical artistic choices. And so does the role of the dramaturge, even in facilitating dramaturgy as a shared responsibility: claiming that role means to activate the implicit hierarchies in the studio.

Knowing when to speak and when to remain silent is important. And even: performing not-knowing, working against all the opinions and attitudes of ‘problem-solving’. For the dramaturge this is both reality and fiction: by being patient and pretending you don’t know, you might actually end up in a genuine state of not-knowing and openness for the unfamiliar.

The larger the team, the faster an excess of information can become a burden in the studio. Here we also meet a limit of dramaturgy as a shared responsibility: by displacing the dramaturgical discussion to a dialogue between choreographer and dramaturge outside of the studio, a redistribution of doubt takes place, which gives breathing space to the performers. Choreographer Meg Stuart says the following about this: “I involve the actors and dancers in the process – intensively. But if you share all your choice making with them, you burden them with too much responsibility. Each piece is an experiment in form and a search for new vocabulary, so to some extent known methods don’t apply. Sometimes it is helpful if the performers don’t know the whole picture. There is also the risk that my doubts will get printed on their bodies. The dancers shouldn’t be destabilised all the time. They need to embrace being on the inside and to trust the outside collaborators and their proposals.”(7)

Reflecting on his work with Meg Stuart, dramaturge Bart Vanden Eynde points to a third position – besides framing material dramaturgically and considering material as something with a right in itself – pertaining to the process-internal dynamics and how it transpires on stage: “This brings us to a third element that complicates the organisation of material. When you are looking at a piece as a spectator, you are an outsider confronted with a result, uninformed about the history of the creative process. Certain scenes are in a strict sense not necessary for the dramaturgical unfolding of a piece, yet they might have been vital for the creative process. A performance is always the result of a process, which means it contains scenes that derive their necessity from that history, which is something other than a dramaturgical or a formal, choreographic urgency. To take out those scenes would restrain both the creative process and the eventual performance.”(8)

When brought to the stage this third kind of material can be experienced as a burden by the spectators – often it concerns scenes that spectators regard as superfluous, too long, etc. – but it also has potential. Note that Vanden Eynde says ‘performance’, not ‘piece’, pointing towards the imaginary space of the performer on stage. In a collaborative approach, proposing and developing materials provides all the collaborators with an opportunity to find their own place within the creative process. In the resulting piece the material therefore has an important function: it offers a stepping stone to the performers to ‘work’ on stage and appropriate the piece night after night, and it gives in that sense the performers’ perspectives and their personal history with a creative process a place in the performance. In some pieces excess material and loose ends could play a deliberately recalcitrant role in the composition and contribute to the paradoxical idea of a ‘self-resisting dramaturgy’. These heterogeneous positions of performer and of material challenge the whole notion of an ‘ideal’ viewing position, including that of the first spectators, that is of choreographer and dramaturge, and so contribute to a complex imaginary space.

A shared common ground, familiar yet foreign

How to discover things one doesn’t know yet? How to create a space for that? When working in a collaborative manner, which is common in today’s performing arts, the question of defining or discovering the method proper to the desire of making a particular piece is a collective one. The collaborators’ intuitive knowledge and embodied poetics that guide this process, have to be shared. The availability of all the materials to all the collaborators has a practical aspect to it: scraps, books, texts, video tapes and photographs lingering in the studio are material traces at hand for everyone, they constitute an embodied archive of the process itself. All the rest is memory, individual processing, mutual witnessing and continuous exchange. Harder to grasp is precisely the ‘shared dramaturgy’, that sense of a large area, disparate and excessive yet nevertheless shared, upon which the process thrives.

Dramaturgy and the production of meaning require multiple symbolic markings: next to the theme (which could be a formal interest or a guiding image), there is also bringing together a group of collaborators, and there is the development of an imaginary space, a common ground. This process of constructing a ‘dramaturgical object’ by all the collaborators exceeds the perspective of the material and also of the method. It demands a space in which all the collaborators can construct their ‘private dramaturgy’, that is their own understanding of how to create dance material and deliver it in performance, or the inner logic of a lighting design, a set design or the music. This shared ground is both familiar to the collaborators and foreign to them – it affords to move beyond habitual choices and taste in order to discover unknown things, it is at once a space of exploration and of clear decisions within that. I call it a ‘dramaturgical object’ to point out its foreign character, that it concerns a third element the collaborators have to relate to and negotiate with. It displaces the process of negotiation from quarrels over likes or dislikes, or power games between collaborators defending their place in the work, to a negotiation with the specific inner logic of the piece and with culture at large.

Perhaps we could say that, just like the process and the material, this imaginary space or object that shelters the piece in the making also has a right in itself. While the material acts on a micro-level, the shared common ground acts on a more global level – and both are crucial for making and performing a piece, for keeping the process alive in either of them. These levels of the material and the shared ground are to a large extent intertwined, yet they don’t coincide. I give a few examples.

Working in 2007 with Martin Nachbar on Repeater, a duet with his retired father, a man of 68 without experience with making art or performing, we had several questions on the table: how to avoid a psychological or confessional approach? How to create a space in which an amateur performer would be at ease without diminishing complexity? How to structure the materials at hand? Almost by coincidence I came across a paragraph in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1984) that provided us with a ‘dramaturgical map’ and helped us clarify our intentions throughout the process, so over time. Precisely because it was a foreign element, it would also perform a certain resistance, and insist that we keep questioning things.

“This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting – the virility of fires, one might say – suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.”(9)

The words ‘laconic dialogue’ became a key for reflecting upon the relation between a father and son and how to stage it. It is an interesting case because we found our ‘dramaturgical map’ as a kind of readymade to which we could relate most of the other materials we had gathered or developed. I would like to call this paragraph a ‘conceptual scene’ – and in the case of a process in which this scene takes on a more heterogeneous, composite form and the dramaturgical object is more complex, a ‘conceptual landscape’. It is a space of thought in which one can take a walk – not just any walk, but along certain pathways afforded by the particular concepts at work. Concepts have physical, spatial and dynamic features, so material qualities, which come to the fore by considering them a space.

Making a list of the material, putting it on the table, or showing all the different scenes or sequences in one session are ways of collecting or starting a process – yet the question remains how to create perspective and imaginary space within that? Working on It is not the picture (2010) by Sabina Holzer in collaboration with Jack Hauser and Martin Siewert, we always had a large sheet of paper and a pencil at hand, so drawing and mapping became parallel activities that accompanied discussion: drawing as a way to literalize or illustrate thoughts, create different associations and diversions. Mapping as a way to think about possible relations to all the material. Note that everything is potentially material and needs to be dealt with (including whimsical associations, accidents, stupid ideas and even discussions over lunch). All of this became part of the process, it was a shared experience, and once named it could be shared as part of the process and guide our attention.

            From there we went on to place all the materials in space according to the map (using post-its as stand-ins with names, drawings, snatches of text) – but quickly, without thinking too much – to then walk around the space and clarify the connections there. Later on Sabina Holzer would do daily improvisations, touching upon all the materials and their relations, using the landscape as a space for instant composition and gradually develop the basic score of the piece. Conceptual cartography was a way to open up the process, draw maps while discussing, place them in space, and choreograph the piece – the notion of walking in a conceptual landscape and empathize with the materials was literalized on all levels of the process.

Currently I’m working with Eleanor Bauer on a piece for six dancers that will come out in February 2011, A Dance for the Newest Age (the triangle piece). It plays with several new age associations in search of answers to the collapse of modernity, but in order to bring them into the social realm of performance making, and outside the grasp of therapy. Eleanor Bauer is a highly discursive choreographer and also rather talkative in daily conversation – working against both her artistic and social habits so as to open up space for dialogue and things to emerge, is a central challenge in my dramaturgical work with her. It’s moreover a rather long creation process, so a recurring daily activity helps to give structure to the rehearsals. Rather than placing discussion at the outset or centre, I proposed to develop a movement practice as a daily, shared activity by all the dancers. A score by Pauline Oliveros, composer and sound ecologist, formed the basis for this, though it required permanent adaptation to make the sound score productive for dancing. The resulting practice we call ‘STC’, which is a score for global and focal attention within the ‘space time continuum’. It relates to warming up, to creating movement material, and to artistic research, as it entails daily discussions about what it produces, how to interpret and adapt it, and so on.

In creations and workshops, the choreographers deufert + plischke have developed during the past years a working method they call ‘formulating and reformulating’. Over a long time, notebooks circulate in the studio, with their texts always being reformulated by someone else. For the directory trilogy (2003-06), personal memories were the point of departure, which after repeated rewriting got removed from the original and gained a more accurate, fictional form. Being created in this collective practice is a shared diary or archive of the process itself – which as a medium contains the notebooks, writing and the intervention of other people. It is a way to construct an imaginary space with a group of people, share responsibility and authorship, and keep track of it. The notebooks yield stories and performance texts, but also movement descriptions and choreographic scores.

            Equally important is the radical perspective upon choreography: deufert + plischke don’t develop movement material through video, nor via showing and imitating, but only through a collective writing process. In that respect, the notebook opposes also the use of media, which by their technological nature strongly influence the result. In deufert + plischke’s words: “There is no visual regime of imitation in our work. For us, choreography is not a reconstruction of an original (as it is the case with video), but a process in which response is central, and hence responsibility and subjectification. How can you avoid the way you are conditioned to present your likes, dislikes, and the image you have of yourself?”(10) The inner logic of deufert + plischke’s work is anti-visual, which allows them to renegotiate the visual regime of the theatre and the ideal viewing position it presupposes. The common ground carried by the notebooks is foreign as well as heterogeneous, in that it doesn’t come into being through discussion and striving for consensus. All the efforts of negotiating one’s place in that foreign world is processed through writing.

Suspending the punch line

How to develop a method that is singular to the piece in the making? How to create a shared ground where experimentation and exploration, desire and doubt have a place? I hope that my thoughts on material, process and conceptual landscape suggest some answers. And yet I’m tempted to come up with a conclusion, well knowing that there are various endings possible.

In earlier versions of this lecture I would make grand statements about deconstructing the position of the dramaturge’s position as one of knowledge and overview. Philosophically speaking this means moving away from the position of the enlightened subject of knowledge, self-fulfilment and transparency. If dance and choreography today seek to question such a view of man on stage, that is on a representational level, then the question is how to be consistent with this on the level of method, process and production. Does it make sense to hold on to the dramaturge’s as a disinterested outsider’s position within a creation process?

            Now this strikes me as missing the point of speaking from practice, yet at the same time I can’t hide some convictions underpinning my thinking about dance and choreography, vision and spectatorship. I believe that dance and choreography, as a critical art form, can unsettle the fiction of pure vision and the power of dominant visual regimes. Although the performing arts do operate via watching, listening and perhaps sensing, they also propose critical operations that disturb familiar kinds of spectatorship, such as confrontations with blindness, horizontality, the dorsal space, the acoustic imaginary’s heterogeneity, and so on.(11) This has left marks on my thinking about dramaturgy – so if I speak about process (temporality), unfolding the dramaturgies immanent in the material (as opposed to the frame or the ideal image), or the landscape (which connects perception and interpretation with walking), then this background resonates along.

How can dramaturgy remain at work on stage in order to arrive at a complex, heterogeneous view? A piece combines both material and conceptual landscape. By insisting on process as that upon which the inner logic of a piece thrives, it is clear that it is infused with time – time of digestion, articulation and unfolding, but also time that still continues on stage. The internal logic and the realm of meaning are temporal and unstable, they never crystallize into something like a fixed, ideal piece. A piece only comes alive in the performance, a social event in which the imagination and the production of meaning are at work. The shared responsibility makes this a collective undertaking and imbues it with the multiple views that come with collaboration. And all of this makes the spectators active co-producers that are also negotiating the realm of meaning and take up their part of the responsibility – instead of passively consuming an ‘ideal piece’.

Still, for now I would wish for yet another ending, an ending that leaves room for your thoughts and conclusions, an ending in line with a dramaturgy that suspends the punch line.

Notes

(1) This essay was delivered as a lecture within Reflective Dramaturgy, a series of lectures organized by Maska and Taking Measures Festival at the Ljubljana Dance Theatre, 14 May 2010; then published in Maska (vol. XVI, no. 131-132, summer 2010). It was updated and expanded for a lecture within the Soda master programme at the HZT in Berlin on 15 December 2010, which is the version included in this book.

(2) Myriam Van Imschoot discusses this shift from the dramaturge to the ‘dramaturgical’ in ‘Anxious Dramaturgy’, Women & Performance, no. 26, 2003, pp. 62-65

(3) Boris Charmatz and Isabelle Launay, Undertraining : On A Contemporary Dance, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2011, p. 230 (translation modified); Boris Charmatz and Isabelle Launay, Entretenir: A propos d’une danse contemporaine, Paris: Centre national de la danse / Les presses du réel, 2002, p.158

(4) Interview with the author in Paris, 7 September 2004

(5) Cf. André Lepecki, ‘Dance without distance’, Ballet International, Febr. 2001, pp. 29-31

(6) Backtracking, a workshop organized by the festival Tanz im August and the Co-operative Dance Education Centre Berlin, which took place in Berlin from 21 August to 1 September 2006.

(7) In Jeroen Peeters (ed.), Are we here yet? Damaged Goods / Meg Stuart, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2010, p. 134.

(8) In Ibid., pp. 140-141

(9) Don DeLillo, White Noise, London: Picador, 1999, p. 239

(10) From a public discussion after a performance of deufert + plischke’s Reportable Portraits at the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz on 24 September 2007.

(11) Note, August 2019: In the meantime, these thoughts on contemporary dance as a critical force within today’s visual regime and the ways it seeks to articulate alternative body images and forms of spectatorship, has been developed in my book Through the Back: Situating Vision between Moving Bodies,  Helsinki: Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, 2014.