A DRAMATURG’S DEDUCTION

A DRAMATURG’S DEDUCTION
Thoughts on the discussion at the Albery with the LMDA
By John Keefe

As so often in a ‘seminar-discussion’ situation there are many points and ideas that are raised but not picked up in the subsequent exchanges; the outstanding ‘baton’ that was not grasped was the issue of ‘audience’ and yet this was circled around many times. Thus not only should the question be ‘why is this being written?’ but also ‘for whom’? These are the kind of hard questions that theatre seems so often to avoid. 

It is quite clear that the initiative-project that caught all our imaginations (amid gasps of envy…) was “Nightswimming”, of which more elsewhere. But I found myself musing on other questions that came out of the presentations and exchanges. If we put ‘new writing’ at the centre and focus of theatre activity then what hard questions must we put as dramaturgs to the writers and producing houses concerning the purpose and quality of such work.
Thus at one point I found myself asking (to my self) “is the theatre policy being discussed here to encourage writing as a social-personal therapy? What is the artistic purpose or intention behind the stories which ‘need to be told’?” Because without such artistic intention all we have is scheduling or funding fodder which shows the world as it is rather than how it can/must/should be changed.
“Nightswimming” seemed to have an artistic ethos which was predicated on a theatre maker proving or demonstrating they had something artistically interesting to say as well as writing a personal-social document, and therefore a work that was worth supporting and developing. Thus I agree with Richard Shannon’s point that too many new scripts are rushed into production when they would better benefit from a proper gestation period when the writing and performance potential could be better realised.
But I was also struck by Liz Engleman’s image of the search for new writers/writing matched to directors and dramaturgs and theatres as “Date me and perhaps we’ll marry”. I liked the brutal yet tender honesty of this. Because it’s a search which we hope will have a successful consummation – but whether one of convenience or bliss will always only be answered in the processes themselves. Truly a “blind date”.
A number of dramaturgical principles were given which need more prominence, best seen I feel as practical questions i.e.:
- ‘How should the dramaturg be part of designing a process for a show?’,
- ‘What structuring frameworks and principles are to be used in developing new work?’,
- ‘How is a new work to be script-read so that the potential of its form as well as content may be realised?’.
I was struck by the desire for processes to be collaborative and the writer to be part of a robust yet supportive tension between the creative elements of theatre yet… How often this is not the case under pressures of funding/policy/ego/negative pragmatism is much more the common experience, sadly.
One has to ask, of course, to what degree writers themselves are in denial regarding collaboration.
The dramaturg can only be ‘advocate-critic-friend’ to the writer, the work, the staging if welcomed as the close collaborator who maintains a critical distance, to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar on the basis of the structuring framework and principles I would advocate.
A number of initiatives were described as means of encouraging new writing (some of these elsewhere characterised as gimmicks at the expense of proper development) but none came near the selection, incubation and gestation ethos that marks “Nightswimming” as a unique initiative, although some ventures were outlined that are working on the same ground.
The dramaturg’s role was also given a push into new directions e.g.: why not be proactive as well active in what is already ongoing?
My final image for my self was the script as a ‘lab for development’; the centre ground for the ongoing processes with which the writer, the dramaturg, the director, the designer engage when reading a script with an eye and an ear for its performance potential. How it’s images and metaphors and statements and passions and resonances will be present on stage, how it will allow the actors and figures to be present on stage in both body and voice, how it will challenge it’s audience.
This will be tested in the ‘researchal’, whose outcome will be then tested on some form of stage in some form of performance in some kind of theatre.
However the central questions remain.
Perhaps they always will remain questions.

Posted by Hanna at 08:52 PM in Articles | Email this entry

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