On Getting People to Engage A few thoughts on festival dramaturgy

On Getting People to Engage A few thoughts on festival dramaturgy
by Martine Dennewald, dramaturg

“We have to find a way to continue talking […]. We have to engage. […] That’s all theater is: who’s in the room, whom you can interest in being in the room. And then extending the discussion.” (Peter Sellars)

Six months ago, I left the United Kingdom to go to Hungary, where I was asked to curate and coordinate an international Visitors Programme for the Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest. The aim of this series of private events was “to offer a number of international guests the possibility to experience cultural life in Budapest from an insider’s point of view […]” (Kortárs Drámafesztivál 2005a). Forty visitors – theatre and festival directors, dramaturgs, critics and academics – were invited to take part in an exceptional cultural programme. Over the week-long festival period, they were introduced to the different arts in Hungary by some of the most outstanding experts in each field, and they had the opportunity to meet a considerable number of Hungarian artists in person. The intention was to lay “the foundation for future co-operations off the beaten tracks of mainstream cultural exchange” (Kortárs Drámafesztivál 2005b).

Some of my work in London had been with LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) on the LIFT 04: Enquiry, an exploration of the potentialities of theatre, with “What can theatre be?” and “When the play ends, what begins?” as two of its leading questions. My participation in this project, dealing with dramaturgy and documentation, led me to consider the question of how effectively discourse on contemporary theatre and its implications was facilitated during that season at LIFT (Dennewald 2004).

The Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest was created in 1997 as a biennial, week-long festival to provide an overview of new writing in Hungary and to promote Hungarian plays and playwrights; the addition of an international programme in 1999 simply meant that there would now be a two-way exchange of plays and productions. There are also a number of different side events during each edition of the festival, such as an off-programme of Hungarian theatre productions, rehearsed readings of international plays in Hungarian translations, drama translation workshops, conferences etc.

The creation of the international Visitors Programme in 2005 can be read as a shift in the festival’s activities. The aim of promoting new writing (both international drama in Hungary and Hungarian drama abroad) is of course still paramount. In particular, the ultimate goal of selling Hungarian plays and productions to the festival’s international guests is expressed with rather more emphasis than before. However, the intention of the programme as described in the first communication to potential guests was much broader; it was designed “to foster an ongoing dialogue between the festival’s artists, theatre practitioners and journalists from abroad and the wider realm of Hungarian culture” (Kortárs Drámafesztivál 2005a, my emphasis).

Those who want to read more about the festival I would like to refer to Ian Herbert’s evaluation of this year’s Hungarian productions (Herbert 2005), and whoever is interested in Hungarian theatre and drama in more general terms to two of the Hungarian Theatre Institutes’ publications in English (Fábri 2004, Müller and Lakos 2004).

What I would like to share are a few thoughts on festival dramaturgy, based on my experiences in London and Budapest, with a particular emphasis on the discursive element of dramaturgical work. I will concentrate on the effectiveness of existing circles of conversation, on the successes and failures of the organisational side of facilitating access to discourse rather than the receptive side.

The reasons why the discursive element is so important to me are twofold, one of them being connected to the purpose and thus the organisational nature of festivals as opposed to theatres, the other tied to the specific role of dramaturgs within theatre festivals as I perceive it. Festivals are, by definition, temporally and spatially condensed series of theatrical events designed to happen at regular intervals; the connection with the notion of celebration is obvious.

If one asks oneself what the advantages of such a condensation are, it immediately becomes clear that festivals live on the idea that individuals – artists, the audience, the media – will be able to gather here at a certain point in time. Even nowadays, the theatre is often referred to as a mirror image of the parliament, a place of assembly, of discussion and debate (Cormann 2002), and whether or not this actually applies does not at all lessen the impact of this mythologie (in the Barthesian sense). A festival can thus easily be considered an unusually high occurrence of circles of conversation related to a particular art form, and my personal experience suggests that this is indeed one of the main reasons why theatre professionals and audiences attend theatre festivals: they want to engage.

In other words, it is precisely in its discursive nature that a theatre festival differs from the ongoing activities of a theatre, or more accurately in the concentration and potential connections of discursive events, which is mainly due to the celebratory nature of the festival, the predominance of professional interest among its audience and the scarcity of other cultural activities (e.g. at festivals in small towns during summer). It is interesting to note that LIFT, when it decided to embark on its Enquiry project in 2001, abolished every single criterion which could define it as a festival in conventional terms: it is now neither a temporally nor a spatially condensed series of events, and it does not happen at regular intervals. But at the same time, the discursive element is still vital: LIFT is conducting a ‘public enquiry’ into what theatre can be, with the explicit aim of encouraging discourse on contemporary theatre, its social implications and personal repercussions.

What follows from this premise is that the role of the festival dramaturg differs from that of the theatre dramaturg to the same degree as the respective discursive natures of theatre festivals and theatres vary. It is a difference that is often expressed through a negation: the festival dramaturg is not generally concerned with play development, historical and contextual research, or advising directors on the progression of their work. For the common perception is that the essence of a festival dramaturg’s work is in preparing and making programming decisions together with the artistic director, a task which is of course just as predominant in a theatre dramaturg’s occupation.

I would like to argue that festival dramaturgy can be defined in much broader terms, in terms precisely of the discursive nature of the event the festival dramaturg is in charge of. What he or she should be concerned with – over and above the programming decisions which are of course an important part of the job – is how to create new circles of conversation, and how to make existing ones more effective by creating the spaces and constellations for a public debate. This concept of festival dramaturgy is not intended as a surrogate for the communication, education and marketing departments of theatre festivals. It rather draws on these departments’ work in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time setting the general aims the whole organisation is geared towards in discursive terms.

I would like to point out a few contentious issues more closely related to the Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest in order to illustrate these general reflections. (The absence of a person explicitly filling the role of a dramaturg at the festival should not distract from the fact that dramaturgy as a function will always be covered within the organisation.) My examples can be divided into two basic categories: questions regarding the dimensions of access to discourse, and questions of discourse genres. Michel Foucault’s work on discourse as a practice defining its object certainly form the basis from which these thoughts operate (1972). But the task of accounting for the social dimension of specific discursive events has largely been assumed by what is known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and CDA’s more straightforward conceptual tools are perhaps more appropriate here.

Following Van Dijk’s four conditions of access to discourse (planning, setting, controlling and audience scope, 1996), I will consider just a few of the most striking particularities of the Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest 2005. The fact is, and this was often brought up during discussions between festival staff, that it had been difficult to find “proper” dramatic texts (as opposed to devised scripts) that met the festival’s quality standards either as a play or as a production. This is of course not a surprise, seeing as international theatre has been in what may be termed its “post-dramatic” phase for a few decades now (Lehmann 1999), and that drama as a category of literary texts can easily be considered abolished, at least in theoretical terms.

The consequence of which was that from the six Hungarian productions on the main programme, only half were stagings of plays that had been written beforehand, while two were devised productions, and one used an epic poem as textual material. Among the productions on the international programme, arguably the most interesting (and probably the most successful in terms of criticism and audience acclaim) was a production which hardly used any textual utterances at all.

This entirely predictable matter does not represent a problem in itself, for after all, the programme does reflect the state of Hungarian drama very accurately, e.g. the fact that in the most interesting theatrical events of the last few years, text is mainly seen as a material to be shaped by the director and his company of actors, musicians, etc.

Nevertheless, even a rough analysis of the conditions of access to discourse in this particular point reveals the questionable character of the procedure. For at no point is the paradox of a drama festival showing a large number of post-dramatic productions communicated to the public, and it is surprising that no reviews picked up on the subject. The programming dilemmas that stem from the festival’s nature as an event concerned primarily with the dramatic text were simply not mentioned in public. The suggestion that one could turn the very controversiality of “drama” into the main feature of the festival was never realised. The possibility of giving a broader constituency access to the controversy by opening the debate to the public, e.g. by organising a round table discussion during the festival on the topic of post-dramatic theatre, or at least by communicating and reflecting on the issues the jury and festival team had been faced with, was never brought up at all.

This general tendency is prolonged from the planning dimension to the other categories of access to discourse. As concerns the setting, the lack of a festival centre or at least a festival office in downtown Budapest meant that there was simply no place people could turn to when they required information or felt like communicating their thoughts and feelings about the festival. There was of course the possibility of writing an email or calling up festival staff directly, but this does not in any way represent a public forum for debate and the exchange of ideas. The festival club at Merlin Theatre did not manage to fulfil the function of meeting point between artists, guests, festival staff and audiences, either, mainly due to scheduling and programming difficulties, the complete absence of clear communication to establish the venue as festival club, the considerable distance from the guests’ hotel, second-rate food, and the fact that visiting companies preferred to stay at the venue where they had performed after the show.

With regards to the controlling dimension, it was clear throughout the festival that public discussion and debate were only encouraged in the most formal settings, where control over the discursive event unmistakably resided with the festival director herself or one of her substitutes. In Budapest, the number of such public events was small considering the amount of performances shown at the festival, and it is interesting to note that the two most substantial discussions on offer were organised at the request and by the initiative of other organisations. The Visitors Programme was an exception to this trend, in that it strove to leave the responsibility over the different discursive events to the participants (artists/experts and guests) to a significant extent. The consequence was that a number of conversations lacked guidance and consistency, which is certainly a case in point for a more thoughtful planning of these activities.

Finally, I would briefly like to consider the notion of discourse genres and its relevance for theatre festivals as discursive events. Maingueneau makes a fundamental distinction between two genres of discourse: in instituted genres, “roles played by […] participants are set a priori and, as a rule, remain stable during the process of communication” (2002:320f.), while conversational genres are “not closely related to institutions, roles or stable scripts; […] their frame is constantly evolving during interactions.” It has become clear from the above that most of the events at the Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest (performances and post-show talks) belong to a highly instituted genre of discourse, and that in fact little effort was made to encourage more conversational genres, with the exception of the Visitors Programme’s activities.

The question to ask here is of course whether public discourse is facilitated more effectively by conversational than by instituted genres of discourse, and I have already pointed out that many discussions on the Visitors Programme suffered from insufficient focus and structuring – they were in fact too conversational. My analysis of the LIFT 04: Enquiry has shown that by and large, the more public the discourse aims to be, the more instituted it is, while private situations favour conversational genres. At the same time, conversational genres appear to encourage sincerity and intensity of personal engagement to a higher degree than instituted genres of discourse (Dennewald 2004).

I would like to argue that ideally, festival dramaturgy consists in combining the openness and flexibility of the conversational genre with the accessibility and publicness of the instituted, and some of the most interesting events both in London and Budapest have indeed been successful in this respect. But instead of being conceptual and organisational coincidences, these events need to be carefully designed, and I have pointed out some of the conditions of access to discourse that can be helpful in this respect.

These are the dimensions we must look towards if we are interested in getting people to engage. And then extend the discussion.

REFERENCES

CORMANN, E., et al., 2002. L’assemblée théâtrale (Paris: Editions de l’Amandier)

DENNEWALD, M., 2004. ‘When the play ends, what begins?’ The LIFT Enquiry as a Catalyst for Discourse. In: Proceedings of the 2004 Alumni Conference, City University London (forthcoming)

FÁBRI, P., (ed.), 2004. A Shabby Paradise. Contemporary Hungarian Theatre, 2004 (Budapest: Hungarian Centre of the International Theatre Institute)

FOUCAULT, M., 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock)

HERBERT, I., 2005. Can You Hear Me In Budapest? Theatre Record, 8. Also available at http://www.theatrerecord.org/issue08_2005/attheback.htm

KORTÁRS DRÁMAFESZTIVÁL 2005a. First communication to potential participants in the Visitors Programme (Internal document)

KORTÁRS DRÁMAFESZTIVÁL 2005b. Festival brochure

LEHMANN, H.-T., 1999. Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren)

MAINGUENEAU, D., 2002. Analysis of an academic genre. Discourse Studies, 4(3), 319-341.

MÜLLER, P. P., and LAKOS, A. (eds.), 2004. Collision. Essays on Contemporary Hungarian Drama (Budapest: The Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute)

PÁVAI, Cs., 2005. Personal communication

SELLARS, P., 1997. Theater, Opera and Society. The Director’s Perspective. Grand Street, 61, 193-207.

VAN DIJK, T.A., 1996. Discourse, power and access. pp. 84-106 in: CALDAS-COULTHARD, C.R., & COULTHARD, M. (eds), 1996. Texts and Practices. Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis
(London: Routledge)

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