Looking and listening with knowledge
“Looking and Listening with Knowledge”
by John Keefe
This is a revised version of a paper originally published in “state of Mime”, Summer 1995, European Mime Federation.
I envisage this paper as part of a dialogue: with Marianne van Kerkhoven’s original piece (see after word), and with those who are now about to read it as an exchange of responses and observations.
The paragraphs (an extending echo to ‘Looking without pencil in hand’) are dense, complex, rich; designed to provoke a wry smile, an insight, a ripple of response across the pond of thought and feelings. But mainly to reveal the work of the dramaturg as interrogative, metaphoric, penetrative, catalytic……….
They appear in no particular order.
Some definitions;
Dramaturg: the author of the playtext.
Dramaturg: the literary editor or manager or researcher.
Dramaturgy: the text or weave or work of the actions in performance (from Barba).
Visual Dramaturgy: when all the means of expression have equal status (from Arntzen).
Dramaturgy: (from ‘wissenschaft’; of knowledge) is the science or knowledge of drama, theatre, performance and the stage. Science not only as theory but also as practical craft and passionate vision.
Dramaturg: the theatre scientist who collaborates with the director, having a questioning oversight of the making of the performance text or score: the construction of interacting sign systems that make the narrative whole.
I subscribe to my final 2 modern definitions whilst happily acknowledging all performance practice that has gone before.
1. The Dramaturg sits quietly, looking and listening with knowledge. Sometimes with pencil in hand, sometimes without; always noting what is seen and heard. Always part of the processes of construction.
2. Theatre is framed and grounded in common and universal principles of art: perspective, balance, movement, rhythm, mass, weight, colour, sound, chaos, order, structure, space, play. Whilst there may be no ‘fixed laws’ application of such universal principles. Each production rests on and is informed by these principles in practice.
3. Theatre sits between the lasting and the ephemeral, sits on the cusp between the real and the sur-real, the rational and the irrational; reveals the shadow between the mythic and the every-day, play and caprice, Apollo and Dionysus; is individual purpose and intention becoming a collective, shared experience.
4. The Dramaturg draws on the universal, the everyday, the mythic, the archetypal, the erotic to look at each work for itself through his/her own evolving processes, vocabularies and methods; draws on accumulated knowledge expressed through the passionate instinct and considered insight, the act of the moment.
5. Of course dramaturgy is also the passion of looking and listening.
6. The dramaturg does not perform or usurp the function of writer or director (although works with the eye of both) but is the first spectator. He/she is not the ‘outside eye or ear’ but is both inside and outside the work at the same time. This cannot be ‘pure’; the dramaturg cannot escape his/her own biases and should not seek to. (‘work with your prejudices do not deny them’, Enrique Pardo)
7. A dramaturgy of this kind rests on the practice of Verfremdung (after Brecht and Schiller) and Dialectic (after Benjamin and Adorno); looking and acting with the engaged detachment and the passionate thinking to render the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is the central paradox that orders the dramaturg’s role; to be within and of the creative process yet estranged from it to best serve it.
8. To extend this defining image further. To be a friend to the work from this position of intimate distance. To suggest order to the chaos of creating without being remote from that chaos as force and energy. To act in the finding of the extraordinary within the ordinary routines and accidents of the creative process. To affirm whilst challenging, to be a collaborator in the creation of text and narrative. To have a ‘Brechtian’ cast of mind that looks directly yet obliquely, seeing the same piece as it changes phase by phase.
9. If what is performed is in some respects only an echo of the original impulse of intention, then it is an echo with its own substance. The echo is the work insofar as it is the work as seen, with its own richness and complexity whilst remaining the child of the original impulse. The dramaturg does then have concern for the first ideas, not as stultifying genesis but as touchstones for the evolving work giving visibility to the echo, the shadow.
10. Clearly, if the dramaturg acts with knowledge then this is always being accumulated from all fields, experiences and forms (looking at the picture, reading the book, listening to the music, watching the film, observing the world).
The dramaturg is a store of facts and connections; instinctively or half remembered things that are jogged into life by what is seen and heard. But it is not a dry store of dusty goods and withered material. It is a store that is replenished and fertilised by use, passion, and desire. Dramaturgy is not in the twilight zone of art and science, but of both, of all forms and materials.
11. Dramaturgy is the wooden walls of small drawers with brass handles found in the hardware store of my childhood: the dramaturg opens each drawer to reveal new objects of indeterminate but indispensable use.
12. However, dramaturgy is not dramatology (the history-analysis of theatre) but of course performance dramaturgy will draw on dramatology.
13. Dramaturgy sees the poetry of theatre, but not this alone nor at the expense of ideas and intellect within the theatre work. The dramaturg thinks with feeling and feels with reason with the awareness that the processes of the intellect and the emotions can become self blinding or dazzling. Both the intellect and the emotions can become the seduced or seducer.
14. The performance dramaturg has concern for the ‘mise-en-scène’: the performance text or score, the narrative whole, the recit.
15. Dramaturgy has concern for language: as carrier/shaper of meaning and social relations; as the articulation not only of ideas but also of what may go beyond words yet must be brought into the dialogue of texts, rhythms, and images that is the work.
16. The dramaturg is concerned to restore the language of the theatre to its practitioners. The dramaturg confronts ‘jargon’ as the esoteric extremes and exclusions that disenfranchise practitioner and audience without denying the place of the technical vocabulary of a craft, skill, or art form.
17. First and last, the dramaturg shares the responsibility of art to reveal humanity to itself; is aware that the theatre is not the church of the brothel, not the pulpit or the bear pit, not sacred or secular but is of all these, as humanity itself is. As the dramaturg looks and listens with knowledge so, finally, these are the actions of self knowledge.
“The chorus holds the individual parts of the tragedy apart and enters between passionate outbursts with contemplation.” (after von Schiller)
“Be for what you are against and against what you are for.” (after Decroux)
© John Keefe 1995/2002
After word.
This paper draws on my experience as dramaturg for the Mime Action Group/European Mime Federation workshop-symposium “Moving Into Performance”, Manchester, 1994 and on subsequent professional practice.
It is also a response to Marianne van Kerkhoven’s text “Looking without pencil in hand” (Theatreschrift 5-6 1994).
The concepts of Verfremdung and Gestus were further developed as part of a paper on dramaturgy and transversality given at the symposium on Transversal Theatre, “Artistic Boundaries Crossed” in Amsterdam, September, 1995.
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