Dance Dramaturgy

Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement

Pil Hansen, Darcey Callison, Pil Hansen, Darcey Callison, Pil Hansen, Darcey Callison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137373229
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Ten international dramaturg-scholars advance proposals that reset notions of agency in contemporary dance creation. Dramaturgy becomes driven by artistic inquiry, distributed among collaborating artists, embedded in improvisation tasks, or weaved through audience engagement, and the dramaturg becomes a facilitator of dramaturgical awareness.

1

Introduction

Pil Hansen

In this collection, ten individuals from three continents have contributed their scholarly research and dramaturgical practice in a series of reflections on dance dramaturgy. They discuss complex dramaturgical approaches and they make proposals that refresh and advance the field while drawing upon professional experience, theory, and the work of international dance artists. As editors, we were aware that the contributors would be writing into an existing – and often circular – discourse, but we did not predict the degree to which they would challenge and break through its limitations. Following their lead, this introduction sets out to discuss and potentially reset tropes that have shaped the subject of dramaturgical agency in dance. In parallel with changing notions of choreography, that is, from codifiable structures to the complex dynamics of interaction between shifting body-minds, materials, and ideas, this discussion starts with the dramaturg as an agent and then evolves into reflections upon dramaturgical agency. Then it suggests that dramaturgical agency is located both in the possibilities that arise between collaborators and in the dancers’ enactment of task-based improvisation systems.

In other words, the discussion evolves from the agency in which an individual dramaturg anticipates compositional motivation and knowledge, through an agency which maps points of interaction and their affect from a position in between creators, to an agency that lives in and is produced by systems of action. These modes of agency depend upon the development of different modes of attention and awareness in the dramaturg; indeed, he or she can become a facilitator of a particular way of thinking and looking at the effect and affect of interactions. Ultimately, such a focus on awareness can distribute dramaturgical agency and responsibility among collaborators and spectators, or embed it in a task-based system of dance generation. Rather than dissolving the role of the dramaturg, these changes and proposals call for broad and differentiated articulation of the modes of engagement and relationships that dramaturgs embody or promote in different contexts: collaboration, participation, friendship, mentorship, critique, support, memory, dialogue, navigation, and many more.

Dramaturgs typically shift between, combine, and modify these modes, depending on the needs of individual projects. Though celebrating the adaptable nature of dramaturgical modes of engagement, our authors also offer unique examples of the memory and facilitation of dramaturgical agency and awareness that a sustained and deep-rooted engagement with a specific choreographic practice can lead to within a company, between collaborators, and in relationship to audiences – all the spheres that extend the cycle of distributed dramaturgical agency.

All chapters in this collection touch upon the interrelated concepts of agency, awareness, and engagement; however, each chapter addresses these concepts differently and makes proposals that emphasise one over the others. This introduction discusses the matrix of agency, awareness, and engagement through both our authors’ and others’ voices from the discourse on dance dramaturgy, so that the concepts are contextualised and reflected as key concerns of this book.

Agency

Anxieties

Tropes of anxiety have dominated discussions of dance dramaturgy since they were first effectively articulated by the Belgian critic and artist-scholar Myriam van Imschoot in her article “Anxious Dramaturgy” in 2003. Some of these tropes appeared in a less polemic form in Scott deLahunta’s report from the symposium “Conversations in Choreography” in 2000 and reiteration of this discourse inevitably contributes to its ongoing constitution in overviews of the field of dance dramaturgy (i.e., Behrndt, Trencsényi, SARMA). When I too begin my discussion with these tropes, it is done as a step towards fresh proposals that are embedded in practices from different contexts and times than those for which Imschoot wrote. This act of repositioning dance dramaturgy enables us to leave the anxieties and move forward through reflection upon a broader spectrum of advanced practices.

First among the tropes of anxiety is what Imschoot named “genealogy” (58). With this term, she referred to anxieties about where the dramaturg had migrated from when the professional role first appeared in the late 1970s German dance scene. Embedded in her question were a series of concerns about a particular orientation, a form of advocacy, and the privilege of knowledge inherent in this port of migration. Many dance artists feared that this inheritance might contaminate creative processes and the ownership of ideas about movement and the body previously unique to the choreographer.

The source of this fear is not difficult to discern: the term dramaturgy and the professional title of the dramaturg were established within institutionalised theatre practices long before they were used in the context of dance. The lineage of practice behind these terms often begins with Gotthold E. Lessing’s association with the Hamburg National Theatre in the late 18th century as a critic attempting to enlighten artists and audiences alike about the mechanics of dramatic models. It progresses to a description of the dramaturg in Bertolt Brecht’s productions, a person mediating between the ideological perspective of an idealist and the needs and priorities of actors to stimulate reflection and action in the spectator (Luckhurst 109–118). The last entry to arrive is the notion of the European production dramaturg from the 1990s as an academic working with directors to develop and implement staging concepts. These production dramaturgs could be employed by a repertory theatre to advocate institutional interests; they were in a position to relate singular practices to broader discourses of practice; and they took part in the director’s privileged knowledge about ideas to be realised or concepts to be implemented. Concurrent with these practices, however, dramaturgs were also facilitating the development of collaborative and/or devised theatre in the 1990s through approaches that were radically different and considerably more compatible with creation processes in dance (as demonstrated by the frequent citations of Eugenio Barba’s publications on dramaturgy). The conservative roles for the dramaturg, which the genealogy debate emphasised, were predominant in conventional theatre institutions when the title first appeared in a dance context, but there is no evidence indicating that dance dramaturgs mostly came from a conventional theatre background nor did the dramaturg become a figure of a comparably institutionalised production system in dance.

Reviewing the anxiety of genealogy from an international perspective twelve years after Imschoot’s article, this fear of an authoritarian mediator and keeper of predetermined models, ideas, or concepts may have migrated from conventional theatre institutions with the term dramaturgy, however the status, role, and function of dramaturgs have not. Despite isolated institutions that house dramaturg positions like those we recognise from theatre (for example Kaaitheater in Brussels, Belgium, and Dancemakers in Toronto, Canada), the professional backgrounds and practices of most dance dramaturgs have not validated Imschoot’s concerns.

Background

Part of the explanation is that the functions of the dance dramaturg were not merely imported, but rather evolved over time and independently from the theatre dramaturg. The history of dance features a series of individuals who facilitated creation in ways that, since the term dramaturgy has been adopted, stand out as forms of dramaturgical agency. Sergei Diaghilev’s role in mentoring choreographers at the Ballet Russes in early 20th century Russia, pairing them with innovators in other disciplines and exposing them to the international avant-garde, can be seen as a form of dramaturgical agency (Goletti). Another example from this period is the ongoing friendship and interdisciplinary exchange between the music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and the theatre designer Adolphe Appia on the development of rhythmic planes and the approach to dance Jaques-Dalcroze called eurhythmics. Dance scholar Selma Odom’s rich archival research on Jaques-Dalcroze’s letters and drawings reveals a process of filtering ideas through one another’s lenses that resembles contemporary dramaturgical approaches (Odom). In his working paper on the history of dance dramaturgy, Darcey Callison proposes that the relationship in the US between Martha Graham and dance writer/critic John Martin in the 1950s resembles the relationship that developed 30 years later in Germany between dance critic Raimund Hoghe and choreographer Pina Bausch. Both Hoghe and Martin wrote critical articles on the possible meanings and unconventional uses of the body in these choreographers’ work, and were subsequently invited to engage in ongoing dialogue about choreographic ideas and dance values (Callison, 1–2). In Canada, Elizabeth Langley stands out as a dance artist and educator who has both mentored and served as an outside eye for choreographers across the country since the 1960s. Her article on the dance dramaturg’s practical necessities reveals that she empowers choreographers by helping them articulate and communicate (in movement or words) their choreographic intentions, and by offering descriptions of what she experiences when watching. This input is not given with authority, or even as a representation of what a spectator might experience, but rather is based in a skillful ability to bracket, select, and articulate those aspects of her perception that can be useful in the context of the choreographers’ individual creative processes. These “pre-dramaturgs” were producers, artists from other disciplines, friends, critics, and teachers, and they laid the ground for the first long-term collaboration between a choreographer and a formally designated dramaturg, Bausch and Hoghe, a partnership which began in 1979 (Connolly 21).

The most commonly told story about the dance dramaturg starts that year, evolves through William Forsythe’s practice in the 1980s and 1990s, and concludes in the wave of internationally successful postmodern Flemish dance of the 1990s. As Callison argues, even contexts with a well-subsidised dance profession, like Belgium, measure success in terms that North American dramaturgs recognise as a product of capitalist market forces (1). Iconographic choreographers are valuable in the marketplace, and thus the dance industry of the 1990s produced choreographers that, in spite of their critical attempts to decentralise dance praxis, became celebrated as master authors and icons of dance. The dramaturgs shared by these choreographers – including Marianne Van Kerkhoven, Guy Cools, André Lepecki, and Heidi Gilpin – began to be seen as correlational factors, and perhaps even as instruments for success. That said, there is no indication that they saw themselves in this way; on the contrary, they have all written discussion pieces that undermine or critique such a notion (see deLahunta, Gilpin, Lepecki, Kerkhoven, Cools).

New dramaturgy

Since the late 1990s, a series of European symposiums on dance dramaturgy have led to journal issues and research projects that both constitute the discourse and facilitate exchange of practices, which move beyond it.¹ As a result of the latter, the story about dance dramaturgy of the 2010s has become less stable and more dispersed: diverse approaches and roles are articulated, at times based in dramaturgical work with choreographers who are less likely to gain iconic status due to more restricted resources or a reduced interest in laying claim to ideas about creation and the body through signature expressions. In 2006, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential book Postdramatic Theatre was translated into English and inspired a series of conferences and publications on Postdramatic or New Dramaturgy.² While primarily anchored in contemporary theatre practices, these terms are often used in dramaturgy publications with a small section on dance and they refer to the dramaturgies of stage and performance works that do not have dramatic narrative as their structural core.

Like dance, postdramatic performance works are often created with attention to process and depend on the spectators’ sensory and fully embodied engagement to become compositions. A need for new approaches and tools arises when thus departing from classical dramaturgical models and approaches, which support the composition of a structural core and the communication of a completed product. This challenge is often articulated as the difficulty of drawing out potential connections while working in process, of engaging with continuously changing materials, and of working without a specific target or conceptual frame (Williams; Barton “Turbulence”; Turner and Behrndt 29–33, 168–186). Theorising such a dramaturgy of connection through and beyond a concept of montage, the Canadian dramaturg, director, and scholar Bruce Barton directs our attention towards the effect and affect of interactions between ideas, sources, people, materials, and the perceptual practices of spectators. He names this focus a “dramaturgy of interactuality” and describes it as an invitation to “ creator-performers and audience members alike to recognise and work with what a performance is doing rather than what it is trying to be” (Barton “Interactual” 184).

Both this distinction between doing and being and the multiple difficulties associated with the elusive materials catalogued above articulate a basic condition of engagement that dance collaborators have been meeting well before and after the term dramaturg was adopted. Thus, the exchange – and reciprocal migration – of approaches between dance dramaturgy and the dramaturgy of postdramatic performance is ripe with a potential that arguably departs from any association with more conventional forms of theatrical dramaturgical agency.

Relational praxis

The second trope of anxiety listed by Imschoot, “what is dance dramaturgy?” has been more productive than that of genealogy. While this question still provokes responses at seminars and workshops, the growing field has consistently defied consensus and matured to acknowledge the value and necessity of remaining undefined. The functions, approaches, and strategies of dramaturgy are dependent on the specific sources of inspiration, movement approaches, and working methods of each individual project. A definition that encapsulates the layers of dramaturgy in one project may be counterproductive to another, and thus the adaptability of the dramaturg and the continuously evolving multiplicity of approaches has become a defining feature of the field. As a result of this insistence on situated differentiation, an experienced dance dramaturg will have accumulated a broad range of strategies for an equally broad range of functions that include: working with and against the training of dancers, facilitating a collaborative process, and discovering interdisciplinary connections; sourcing, generating, composing, and reopening material; inviting the attention, perceptual engagement, or participation of spectators. In my experience, and as evidenced by the accounts of this collection’s contributors, the dramaturg does not enter a process knowing what the performance-in-creation can be or how it should work. His or her strategies are not considered models or even methods and they cannot be applied directly. They are transitory, lifted from a specific context in which they worked in a particular way, and rendered abstract principles. These principles can then be drawn into a new project where they are further developed until they become useful. This skill is learned through training and with experience, but it does not add up to expert knowledge; it only comes into existence in response and relation to a collaborative process and thus remains dependent upon others.

Complementarity

This relational characteristic of the dramaturg’s agency brings me to the last trope of anxiety mentioned by Imschoot, a fear that the dramaturg’s knowledge is needed to compensate for something that the dance artist does not know. The US-based dramaturg and scholar André Lepecki has repeatedly targeted this drive of anxiety within dance dramaturgical discourse by proposing practices that either undermine the foundation and cause of anxiety or provoke us to move past it. A frequently cited example is his emphasis on the dramaturg’s embodied and perceptual proximity in the rehearsal room as an experiencing subject and collaborator instead of the objective observer and knowledgeable critic that Imschoot feared (see interview in Turner and Behrndt, 157). Lepecki’s radical positions solicit proposals to chart out a middle ground. For instance, in this volume the French dramaturg Bojana Bauer suggests that the dramaturg can be in close proximity to both moving ideas and moving bodies, while the American d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Agency
• Part II  Awareness
• Part III  Engagement
• Index