7 6  , : ) 5 ) < = : / A  ; < ) < - 5 - 6 <  ) 6 , : - )  * 7 B 1 +

Instead of making a statement on dramaturgy, The second role of dramaturgy in my work

I will focus here on describing the role dramaturgy concerns the creation of the thread that connects
has had in my own work and outlining a type of all the individual projects into one ongoing
dramaturgy that I am hoping will emerge with exploration. This refers not only to how this
more prominence in the near future. installation or that performance share elements
A while ago, a friend of mine asked me what a and expand on different aspects of them. Even
dramaturg’s role really was in theatre. He said that more importantly, it is about how I can use certain
his first association with the word was that of a elements from my projects, as well as from other
Turk who made a lot of drama. When I think about people’s projects, art history, politics, daily news,
it now, this rings quite true. A dramaturg in my weather, my friend’s lives etc. in order to
process is a kind of a ‘Turk’, someone who is contextualize them differently in each new work
somewhat alien, who maintains his or her I make. And further, how these elements can affect
otherness and distance from the process in order and loop back onto the original material they were
to be able to ask questions about it. And it is also taken from, and how they can re-appear with each
someone who makes a lot of drama, someone who new project. Therefore, this red thread of
asks questions about things that might otherwise dramaturgy extends itself through my projects in
slip by unnoticed or be taken for granted. time.
Most of my work is concerned with issues of The third level of dramaturgy in my work is the
presence and embodiment and procedures of one I find very important for future dramaturgies.
fictionalizing. I often take original material from By this I mean attitudes that can help make
other sources: films (embodying the movement of dramaturgies of real-life events transparent. They
the actors), my private life (moving my furniture may include: a dramaturgy of one’s of life (how
into my installation), weather conditions I fictionalize my own life to give it a grand
(collaborating with the factor of its unpredictability narrative); a dramaturgy of community life (that
and ‘givenness’). Then I set up ‘generators’ that makes visible the strategies of staging,
process this material to produce new work. These fictionalizing and performing day-to-day life); a
generators are, in fact, dramaturgical structures, dramaturgy of virtual life (that makes visible the
and their transparency in the work is as important strategies of fictionalizing, staging and performing
as the material itself. I might call it a dramaturgy of political and other events through the mass media
space, which renders both the content and the of TV, film and the Internet).
manners in which that content is produced visible Ideally, this kind of dramaturgy would be capable
at the same time. of underlining the network-like relationship
Working with a dramaturg is for me as important between these three threads and could incorporate
as working with any other collaborator. I set up a them into the art-making process, where not only
certain dramaturgical structure (a generator), life is a generator of art but art is a generator of life
which might, for example, be based on a timeline in a transparent way.
of a certain emotion. Once this generator is clear
to all of us, we use it as an anchor to hold the rest
of the elements together, a red thread that runs
through the process and the performance and to
which everyone can relate. A good dramaturg for
my process is someone who manages never to
lose sight of this red thread.

12
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DOI: 10.1080/13528160903519625
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For the past ten years – and more – I have been
teaching in London at one of the so-called ‘new’
universities in a subject area (we call it ‘Drama,
Theatre and Performance Studies’) that negotiates
between a large undergraduate programme, which
takes in about 150 students a year and tends to
focus on the dramatic and theatrical end of that
spectrum, and a PhD programme that caters
almost entirely for students whose research
proposals identify with the interdisciplinary – and,
for some, post-theatrical – field of performance
studies. My own work and interests move between
these various points of identification, with a
prejudice – I suppose – towards questions that
tend to strike me in ‘theatrical’ terms, most
recently questions about rhetoric, images and
spectatorship. Put like that, I know, the terms
sound very bland – no less bland, I suspect, than
any projections I might make on the topic of
‘European dramaturgy in the 21st century’. At this
end of the twenty-first century, I’m not sure that
I can get much further, for the moment, than
reflecting on theatrical experiences that seem, for
the large part, still wrapped up in the unfinished
business of the twentieth century (and earlier). For
the sake of this brief statement, I’d say those
experiences are basically of two sorts. One belongs
to a very particular location, conversation and
group of people, somewhere or other in London
through the mid-1990s, collaborating on a series of
long-laboured and then briefly-exhibited devised
theatre pieces under the name Theatre PUR. If
I know – or rather if I think – anything worth
thinking about dramaturgy, then much of it is still
indebted to lessons that I learned there. The
second experience is dispersed, distended, a thing
of multiple parts, and has to do with being a
spectator, in London and then, more and more,
outside of London and also outside of the UK,
following theatre in ‘Europe’, a pleasure that
belonged at the same time to getting ‘work’ done,
as evidenced by a collection of essays on European
Theatre co-edited with Nicholas Ridout (Kelleher
and Ridout 2006) and a book on the theatre of
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, co-authored with Nick
(again) alongside the artistic core of that
remarkable company, Chiara Guidi, Claudia
Castellucci and Romeo Castellucci (Castellucci et
al. 2007). For four years or so, following the
unfolding of SRS’s enigmatic gesturality in
Romeo’s eleven-part sequence Tragedia
Endogonidia was, I suppose, for me the core
twenty-first-century theatre experience to match
those years at the end of the previous century
spent breaking down gesture and intentionality
into microscopic particles in lofts in Hoxton and
Peckham with PUR. Whatever lights these and
other experiences can cast on a dramaturgy ‘to
come’ take the form, today, of the following: some
scraps, some scattered reflections upon works
seen and what stays with me when the work is
done, the time that remains and that opens, here
and there, into a thought about something done
well that might call for a ‘taking on’ of what was
‘good’ in these encounters. Not, perhaps, this
time, a return, or a doing-again, to be marked by a
Beckettian lessness (Beckett having put down the
marker for what can’t be gone back on in the
previous century, for what can only be followed up,
though be it with exquisitely diminishing returns),
but something for the new age (even if what it
looks like is a resigned fiction) like an endogenous
departure from what keeps re-appearing as of its
own accord, irrespective of our best efforts to make
it appear or even to look it in the eye.
So, those scraps, followed by a few brief
comments. First the scraps. Kinkaleri’s Nerone, the
collective for the first time putting actors up there
on the stage rather than themselves, two hours,
more than two hours, of unremitting blackness (in
spite of holes cut in the black floor), one of the
actors on the dark carpet starting, then stopping to
start again, to whip herself across her back while
the other plays ‘horse’, all to the perpetually
interrupted strains of Scott Walker’s ‘A Lover Loves’
(‘Corneas misted / colour high … ’). A rich
theatrical meditation on love and death that seems
to be that without having to say anything about
itself, without having to betray its ‘topic’, the scene
– or say, even, the story – somehow already oozing
its own after-image, that image (for those of us
who were there) as vivid and viscid as congealed
26
 
ink. You had to be there too for Bock & Vincenzi’s
invisible dances … , although it will have been
possible to talk after the show about the rigorous
pursuit of technologies of reproduction and
translation (actions become images become words
become fractured gesture …) around a source that
isn’t so much absent as barely accessible; the
extreme distension (spatially and temporally) of
the rhetoric of the stage to produce a choreography
of spasm and dancelessness; and talk too about
the gift to the spectator of a theatrical experience
turned, as it were, inside out, to be approached
perhaps only through some sort of anamorphosis
that will seem to reveal – in spite of everything –
such terror and at the same time such (loving?)
care. The same goes, although in different ways
(for the occasion, restricting the list to European
examples), for SRS’s Hey Girl!, where the
dramaturg function seems strangely to be deferred
to the performative machinery of the stage itself,
which offers up human appearance as if in
ambivalent tribute to the imperious demand of the
spectators (that’s us) that such appearances
should be brought forth – or the New Riga
Theatre’s adaptation of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel
Ice, where we might stretch the point to suggest
that here the function of conjuring a drama out of
the given materials is given over – or, after all this
time, we might do better to say returned – to the
spectators themselves. This isn’t the only show
27
recently where the actors have given the audience
books to hold and look at while the show goes on.
We looked at the pictures in the books, we watched
the action onstage, and we followed the story that
was being told to us (read out directly from
Sorokin’s text) and – at times – performed in front
of us. What ‘went on’ – for this spectator at least
– went on at once in all and also none of those
places. And, meanwhile, something alien,
something strange and inhuman, was captured
and turned over to look, remarkably, unnervingly,
just like us. Maybe, if I were to risk drawing out a
thread on which to hang a discourse about
European dramaturgy in the current ‘century’, it
might be the thread that ties one or another
anamorphosis to its ‘true’ appearance, a thread
that is spun out not from makers and shapers
behind the scenes or ‘in the picture’ but from the
twisted eye-beams of the spectator who dreamed it
all already, and who puts flesh upon the dream
every time the lights change, the curtains open and
the figures come on.
REFERENCES
Castellucci, Claudia, Castellucci, Romeo, Guidi, Chiara,
Kelleher, Joe and Ridout, Nicholas (2007) The Theatre of
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London: Routledge.
Kelleher, Joe and Ridout, Nicholas (eds) (2006)
Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A critical companion,
London: Routledge.
7 6  , : ) 5 ) < = : / A  ; < ) < - 5 - 6 <  - 1 1 + 0 1 : 7  0 1 : ) < )
THE OTHER DRAMATURGY BETWEEN
EUROPE AND ASIA
Japanese or East Asian theatre still holds many
possibilities for dramaturgical activities. East Asia,
which has its own theatre culture and tradition, has
actively absorbed European styles and artistry and
incorporated these other cultural dramas into its
own for the last hundred years. Especially in Japan,
next to the traditional theatre such as Noh, Kyogen,
Kabuki and Bunraku, modern European straight
plays (Shingeki) and avant-garde performances
and dances have been adopted from Europe. For
instance, the founders of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata
and Kazuo Ohno, were influenced by the German
Ausdruckstanz in their youth and went on to
establish their unique style. Today, many kinds of
theatre are performed every day in and around
Tokyo. In addition, European and Japanese
performers and directors have collaborated in the
past decade. This cross-cultural theatre
communication could lead to a new type of theatre
aesthetics in the twenty-first century.
However, there have been very few successful
collaborations so far. Most productions are no
more than co-operations between directors and
performers, in which the one side simply adopts
and integrates the other, or both remain as they are
without real confrontations with each other. The
chances for a new theatre have not been well
utilized strategically. That is why we have many
possibilities to enhance the cross-cultural theatre
communication on an artistic level. For this
purpose, firstly, we must recognize the theatre
forms and styles of foreign cultures more strongly
in their otherness and confront them with our own.
Secondly, we must playfully integrate, differentiate,
alienate and destroy them, which is possible only
in the cross-cultural dramas.
There seems to be no doubt that a lot of
dramaturgical effort is needed for this kind of
production. The experts of ‘production dramaturgy’
must join their knowledge of the theatre of many
cultures (as well as of their societies and histories),
their experiences, good sense and unerring
judgment. Unfortunately, very few experts can
perform dramaturgical work for both European and
Asian theatre. This situation produces the
necessity and possibility to foster such expert for
the future. Teachers, researchers and students in
theatre departments who can play this role must
and can make more direct contacts with theatre
practitioners and experts from foreign cultures.
This work is not easy but can contribute to a
dramaturgy that is suitable for more dynamic
theatre activities in the twenty-first century.
44
7 6 , : ) 5 ) < = : / A ; < ) < - 5 - 6 < 8 1 : 3 3 7 0 = ; - 5 ) 6 6
WHEN THE DRAMATURG BECOMES OBSOLETE,
THE DRAMATURGICAL REMAINS IMPORTANT
observations from choreographic practice
1. When Xavier Le Roy planned his production
Project in 2002, he didn’t invite a dramaturg to take
over the function of an “outside eye” in the working
process. He was interested in the idea of turning
the production of a dance performance into the
performance itself. Ideally, he wanted to produce a
presentation format in which process and product
would fall together. That is why he was unable to
separate the period of conceptual preparation from
that of the practical exploration of certain
choreographic methods or from that of the
analytical observation of the performative result.
Accordingly, he searched for participants who were
able to play several roles at once. They would be
performers, choreographers and dramaturgs in one
and therefore would be able to perform, produce
and analyse the choreography at the same time.
2. In similar ways to Le Roy, Thomas Lehmen was
looking for participants who were willing to be
involved and distanced at the same time. For his
project Funktionen (2004–5) he developed a
methodological toolbox with a set of choreographic
systems that could be given away to other artists.
That transfer was meant to lead to a potential
multiplicity of improvised choreographies. But
these systems were not only productive tools to
produce works that were no longer Lehmen’s own.
He also wanted them to have the potential to reflect
the communication processes that are happening
during an improvisation on stage. Accordingly, he
did not look for performers who would merely
execute certain instructions but for ones who were
‘mature’ enough to contribute to the development
of his methodology as well as to its exploration,
analysis, appropriation and transformation.
3. In both these cases, I entered the projects with
what I had brought with me: my non-professional
dance experience, years of studies in theatre, film
and media and a strong interest in Le Roy’s and
Lehmen’s work. Even though my official job title
was ‘dramaturg’ at the time, I didn’t join their
projects in this particular function, because a ‘pure’
dramaturg wasn’t what was needed. So I entered
without knowing my own role in advance but it
quickly transpired that I became even more than a
performer, a choreographer and a dramaturg:
inspired by the experience of being involved in the
working process on so many different levels
(without feeling particularly competent for this triple
responsibility) I started to document, analyse and
put into words what was going on. This was nothing
really special, because it was exactly what all the
other participants did too. The only difference was
that I slowly began to develop an interest in
theorizing these choreographic modes of work.
I asked myself which kind of working processes
and methods, which forms of collaboration and
formats of presentation Le Roy, Lehmen and their
participants used to approach their conceptual
goals. My theoretical interest and qualitative
approach emerged from within the choreographic
practice and was made possible not despite but
through my rather unclear function. From today’s
perspective – looking back at these collaborations
after completing my doctoral dissertation on
Choreography as Critical Practice I can say that an
access to such personal relations and partly fragile
situations needs involvement and distance at the
same time. One has to experience the creative
process, to get fully absorbed, and one has to find
a way to withdraw from it again in order to reflect
upon it. So what is needed is an understanding
through both doing and reflecting. Just diving into
the creative process can easily lead to an over-
identification with the artistic practice. Just
reflecting upon it entails the risk of applying
external criteria that may have nothing to do with
what is at stake. So theorizing choreographic
modes of work requires a constant change of
position between an insider’s and an outsider’s
perspectives.
4. This personal story of a dramaturg who wasn’t
needed as such but instead as a multi-tasking
participant and who turned into a researcher with
an interest in theorizing choreographic modes of
52
 
work reveals one characteristic trait of “the
dramaturgical”. I speak of “the dramaturgical” here
intentionally in order to highlight a quality instead
of a function. A dramaturg has many more areas of
responsibility than watching, writing and giving
feedback but one central aspect of dramaturgical
work is the oscillation between inside and outside.
Sometimes it is problematic, because it is always
neither/nor. In other situations this switching of
perspectives comes quite naturally, however. And
with regard to my particular object of study
(choreographies that are made to reflect their own
making), the dramaturgical could even be
considered as one possible access to a practice-
53
driven theory. Not theory that is imposed on
practice and uses it for its own purpose; rather a
theory of practice that derives from practice and
goes along with it. This kind of theorizing has a lot
to do with not-knowing: not knowing which
direction a creative process will take and not
knowing the result, but still knowing how to deal
with such vagueness according to the
contingencies of a given situation.
reference
Husemann, Pirkko (2009) ‘Choreographie als kritische
Praxis: Arbeitsweisen bei Xavier Le Roy und Thomas
Lehmen’, transcript, Bielefeld.
 7 6  , : ) 5 ) < = : / A  ; < ) < - 5 - 6 < 
LISTEN AND PLAY
When Gaby Hartel and I curated the ‘Woche des
Hörspiels’ (Week of Radio Drama), a Radio-Art
festival presented by the Academy of Arts in Berlin
in April 2007, our central idea was to open up the
festival, which for a long time had been a classic
radio drama competition and only rarely looked
beyond the literary tradition of the radio play. With
our festival relaunch we wanted to provide a
broader view on the vivid interplay between radio
art and related art forms.
The festival opening by LIGNA, a group of media
artists from Hamburg, was a plein air performance
at Pariser Platz, the square in front of the
Academy’s main building and a tourist hotspot
next to the Brandenburg Gate, the famous Hotel
Adlon, the French Embassy etc. For one hour, up to
100 people simultaneously started to dance, take
photographs of one another and lie down on the
floor as if listening to echoes of history from below.
To end, the whole swarm of participants went
backwards through the Brandenburg Gate unified
or, better, associated in some kind of ‘inverted
parade’, the entire choreography conducted by
LIGNA through instructions that the participants
received via radio (an approach LIGNA calls ’radio
ballet’).
To show the various interrelations between radio
and the arts, we invited playwrights, musicians and
contemporary artists who work with film,
performance, visual arts and with public space
(Katharina Franck and Nuno Rebelo, Chris Watson,
Susan Philipsz, Michaela Melián and Alvaro Zuniga,
among others) to demonstrate and discuss how
radio and sound come into play within their work.
Of course, such borderline activities are nothing
very new. Radio art is one of the younger art forms,
going back (as radio itself) less than a hundred
years. Right from the start, bringing subjects,
strategies and artists in from other fields had been
important for the development of radio art, and it
still is.
So, to answer a first question: yes, radio art does
– and will – need dramaturgy. The important role of
dramaturgs is to be curators and headhunters, to
65
. : ) 6 3  3 ) ; 8 ) :
discover authors and artists who have the ambition
to re-invent radio art, to bring in new methods and
ideas from the different contexts of their work.
Reflecting on what is new in radio art, I believe
one new tendency lies in the way that radio artists
currently return to ideas of intermedia as
prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. This period
must have been lucky radio days of discovery and
invention. In May 1969, for example, the ‘Literary
Studio’ at the WDR radio in Germany, Cologne,
presented a half-hour Action Game by the German
Fluxus-artist Wolf Vostell. The programme was
called 100 x Hören und Spielen (A Hundred Times
Listening and Playing). The listeners were invited
to follow instructions such as ‘Press your naked
belly against your TV-screen’, ‘Lick the buttons of
your radio while listening’ or ‘Sting yourself with a
needle, and have all electric devices in your
household running at the same time’. As an
attempt to organize a virtually collective indoor-
performance in a public/private-space, Vostell’s
game throws an interesting light on LIGNA’s
approach to working with radio today.
The experimental spirit of these early years
seems to have had a revival, both in radio and in
contemporary art. While positions of ‘Action Art’,
‘Conceptual Art’ and artistic interventions into
social processes have been (re-)discovered in art,
there has been a comeback of playfulness and of
game-like dramaturgies in radio-art too. (see, for
example, Ammer and Console On the Tracks, WDR
[2002]; Rimini Protokoll O-Ton Ü-Tek, DLR [2000];
and Deutschland 2, WDR [2002], pieces that found
interesting ways to explore everyday life, its rituals
and its theatrical potential as well as the acoustic
medium in which they take place and, finally,
language itself).
A second tendency I would like to point out is
the new relevance of the voice, its sensual qualities
and suggestive potential in radio and other media,
which have been the subject of a range of radio
plays, radio-docs and ars acustica-like productions
for over half a decade. Speculating about possible
‘Lessons from Listening’, I would suggest that
these sensual and emotional qualities of the voice
(a big theme in early radio theory) are a


fundamental and physical experience for every new forms of live performance or installation,
radio listener (at least that is how I feel). A voice which allow it to move beyond radio and to find
can have a similar impact on a listener as the ways to engage the public in a more direct sense.
movements of an actor have on the audience of a To support this, it is important that public radio
film or a theatre performance – you fall unwillingly stations open themselves up to new ways of
into the same rhythm, unconsciously imitating and producing and presenting radio art, that they
reflecting what you see or hear, like a mirror. This preserve money, resources and programme-slots in
power of the voice was placed under suspicion for their schedule for experiments (despite facing
a while, at least in Germany, where it used to play a further reductions and centralizations in the
certain role in radio propaganda during the expensive departments of radio drama and radio
Nazi-era. It was attacked by some exponents of the documentary), and that they open their archives,
‘Neues Hörspiel’ (New Radio Play) movement in support upcoming talents and realize the chance
the 1970s. But now it seems to be back on the of finding partners and live-audiences in a broader
agenda of radio art, and there are different cultural scene. And it is vital that on the other hand
approaches to how to deal with this power, theatres, festivals, universities and other cultural
bringing forth critical thought about perception players are ready to cooperate with public radios,
and a variety of tones. to support independent (art-) radio and to
Thirdly (and closely related to the second point), introduce radio art into new contexts.
there is a great and still growing group of works
that deal very playfully with the style of links to artists
documentary and fake facts, quotes or sounds. http://www.90-prozent-wasser.de/bohlen.html
Radio has the potential to mix ‘real’ reporting and http://www.chriswatson.net/
‘authentic’ fiction (Orson Welles’s famous radio
http://www.coderecords.de
play War of the Worlds, CBS [1938], is the best-
http://www.katharinafranck.de/
known example for this method). Since the early
1990s, genuine radio-artists like Hermann Bohlen http://ligna.blogspot.com/
and Walter Filz (later followed by the duo Serotonin http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/
and others) have been working in a very subtle way
with mixed material from radio archives and other
found footage. Standing in the tradition of the work
with ‘original recordings‘ as developed by the
‘Neues Hörspiel’-movement, they have a more
light and playful attitude.
These three tendencies represent a quite
subjective choice and, at the same time, express
which artistic ideas I would like to take with us into
the twenty-first century.
New aesthetics need new forms of production
and, especially, of cooperation. Talking about
institutional frameworks, I find it very encouraging
to see that artists and cultural institutions like
theatres, art spaces, media festivals and media
schools as well as cultural theory in general are
increasingly more interested in sound and sound
art, in radio and its aesthetic potential. Radio art
thus has already found new places of presentation,

66
7 6 , : ) 5 ) < = : / A ; < ) < - 5 - 6 < + 0 : 1 ; < 1 ) 6 0 7 4 < B 0 ) = - :
When I was asked to take part in a workshop
entitled ‘The Future of the Text‘ (at the conference
on ‘European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century’ in
Frankfurt in 2007), my first reaction was: ‘Why have
they asked me?’ Among all the things in the theatre
that I am interested in, texts don’t play a big role.
Giving it a second thought, though, I realized that
I had reduced the word ‘text’ to mean ‘dramatic
text’ or ‘play’ or ‘drama’, but obviously ‘text’ means
much more than that. (I am not referring here to
the idea of performance as text but to a very simple
understanding of ‘text’ as any way in which a
language is being used on stage). In fact, almost
all of the productions I have been involved in over
the last few years were text-based in one way or
another.
If not drama, what kinds of text are we talking
about? Where do these texts come from, and what
can be done with them? Over two seasons at
Schauspiel Stuttgart (2006–7), I worked twice with
René Pollesch, who incorporates theoretical texts,
film clips, pop music and personal experience in
his productions. I was dramaturg in a project that
combined nineteenth-century spiritual music with
texts by Hölderlin, Max Weber and Joseph Beuys,
curated two festivals for performance projects and
worked on adaptations of the Odyssee and a highly
experimental novel by Virginia Woolf. I also worked
on a project with Hans-Werner Kroesinger, in which
legal records formed the basis of the performance.
Looking at Schauspiel Stuttgart’s programme,
you will find adaptations of novels and movies and
a large number of ‘projects’ as well as new plays. Of
course, as the largest municipal theatre in the
region we also produce ‘classics’, but it is fair to say
that a lot – if not most – of the productions we work
on draw on sources other than traditional drama.
For us, novels or movies are sometimes a greater
inspiration than traditional plays. Quite often, plays
reduce complex realities to simple dramatic
structures in order to work well. We look for
sources that provide us with more or different
material than can be found in the majority of
dramatic literature and that also enable us to look
at things from different angles, using more
complex dramaturgies.
The word ‘material’ to me seems crucial for the
debate about the ‘future of texts’. This ‘material’
provides us not only with ideas, questions and
themes but also with images, actions and, last but
not least, something to do and to say on stage.
But how can this material be found and, more
importantly, transformed into something that is
worth being put up on a stage? This is where
dramaturgy comes in. A dramaturg is a person
involved not only in tracking down interesting
material but also in shaping and trimming it,
condensing and reducing it. The big question is:
how should this be done? I guess there are hardly
any limitations to where such material can be
found or how it should be assembled. Maybe the
only way to find out how to do it this by trial and
error.
So, what about the ‘future of the text’? I do not
have an answer but have many questions to ask.
First of all, I imagine the future of theatre to be
pretty pluralistic, meaning that different kinds of
theatre will cater for different tastes and needs of
different audiences –– or the other way around. Of
course there will still be an interest in classical
drama, because there still is and will be a huge
audience for it. (And there is nothing wrong with
that.) At the same time, artists will continue to use
other sources, and I expect this approach to
become even more popular. But – and here are my
questions – where will this leave the author, the
playwright or dramatist? Do we need university
programmes for dramatic writing? Who will come
up with and write down the things the performers
on stage will actually say? What will the
collaboration between author and dramaturg look
like? Will the dramaturg become a kind of writer,
too – in addition to his or her job as a curator,
producer, communicator and interpreter? Are there
any rules as to how to put together what research
and improvisation and adaptation have produced?
What will these new texts, which develop out of
research and take shape in rehearsals, look like?
Can they be separated from the performance?
Should they exist separately?
70
 7 6  , : ) 5 ) < = : / A  ; < ) < - 5 - 6 <  * - 6 <  0 7 4 5
THE WELL-PREPARED IMPROVISATION
A rather strong, and trendy, contempt for the
notion of text is not unusual these days.
Contrasting text-based theatre with theatre of
images or physical theatre is not necessarily
productive, either in academic theatre research or
in creative theatrical practice. Such a simplified way
of opposing various categories of theatre may
become in fact a cul-de-sac. In the area of research,
it risks confirming conventional categorizations,
instead of opening different strategies, even in
reference to historical material. In theatre practice,
an underestimation of text tends to lead to a
disregard of, for instance, one of the actor’s most
valuable instruments, the voice. The voice as a
corporeal fact, which communicates through
sound and rhythm, is frequently no longer trained,
probably as it is considered to be polluted with the
notion of text and the ‘meaning’ of literature.
Nevertheless, it is known from brain research that
it is precisely rhythm, sound and metaphor that
have an enormous impact on a recipient.
I recently worked with the stage director
Giacomo Ravicchio, artistic director of Meridiano
Teatret, who was, at the same time, the
production’s playwright and the set designer. The
production, called Transit, which premiered in
October 2007, included nine actors or performers,
among them a dancer and a musician, from
various ethnic backgrounds. The story took place
in Frankfurt airport, where the nine characters,
arriving from different parts of the world, had
become trapped in a kind of limbo when all flights
were cancelled for reasons unknown – the airport
terminal represented the place of our collective
terror, a place where one would probably not want
to linger.
The creative strategy and method we used is best
described as chaos. The artistic visions for the
project dated back maybe many years and, like for
instance the stage set, had been prepared before
the rehearsals began. The actual creation of the
89
performance took place during the rehearsals and
grew out of the inputs of the actors, dancers,
musicians, composer and light designer who made
up the production team. This led to a dynamic
interaction between chance, spontaneity,
improvisation, sudden inspirations and
unpredictabilities on one hand, and a thorough,
preparatory process of research and preproduction
on the other. What kind of process is that? It is not
a devising theatrical process, even if it in many
ways looks like one. The playwright, who was also
the director and the set designer, created the text
as an integrated part of the overall musical totality
in constant collaboration with the composer who
was present during the entire rehearsal process.
The process of producing Transit was in a way
very Italian. It looked like improvisation. The
classic Italian professional secret lies in the fact
that nothing should be as well-prepared as
improvisation. My role as a dramaturg was to be
the audience, the ideal spectator. This meant, to a
great extent, to insist on reduction; on identifying
what was the least necessary to articulate; and then
to argue for doing even less than that. Or the
opposite. What is thought to be clear frequently is
not. Modifications had to be made in different
registers; visual, sonorous, structural. The
production was a musically sensuous and sensual
totality and a ‘sponge’, to borrow a term from Jan
Kott. It absorbed and emitted. One has to train a
dialectical movement of intuition and reflection.
This working method was in fact not that
different from the other practice of mine which is
focused very much on classics, especially on plays
by the eighteenth-century Danish playwright Ludvig
Holberg. Dramaturgical manoeuvres take place in
close collaboration with the stage director and the
scenographer, constituting an artistic team. It is
based on systematic academic research. The
preparations are spread over a couple of years. It
all aims to supply the crucial freedom to improvise,
that is creativity.
 7 6  , : ) 5 )< = : / A  ; <)< - 5 - 6 <  / 7 : ) 6  ; - : / - 2  8 : 1 ; <) ˎ
Having worked for several years in a collective that
gathers together two dramaturgs, a philosopher
and four dancer-choreographers, there are a few
conclusions and deviations that have sedimented
over time and that still trigger our thinking and
practice:
– Dramaturgy is the ultimate space of power in
theatre due to its prescriptiveness, its always
already emergent nature and the obviousness of its
strategies. Dramaturgy is always already there,
even if we don’t focus on it; its perspectivality
excludes the surplus of all that is vague and volatile
for the clarity of its strategy to proceed.
– We as a group of artists were interested in the
productive rather than the reactive politics of
performance.
– Our ‘products’ (performances) do not represent
the relational aspects of authorship, the micro-
politics of the group or the organizational aspects
of collaboration, but our relations influence the
101
protocols of performance (not dramaturgy). Our
relations are not thematized but translated into the
procedures or paths of the performance (two solos
presented as a duet; discussions on the piece
within the performance; ready-made performance;
non-linear genetics of the material etc.).
– Collaboration between all artists included is there
for further individuation (not in terms of
authorship but in terms of individuated experience
in perception, language and productive force).
– Performances are only markers in time, singular
results of the homogeneity of the past in the
here-and-now, but we bet on the force of
inventiveness, on time-to-come.
– A notion of dramaturgy has become a metaphor
for perspectivalization and disciplinarization of
knowledge produced in the autonomous artistic
practice; dramaturgy either prescribes or reflects
new social relations within a performance; it might
serve as a blueprint for a new social narrative.
7 6  , : ) 5 ) < = : / A  ; < ) < - 5 - 6 <  2 - : 7 - 6  . ) * 1 = ;
1. Which theatre, performance or dance production in
recent years did you find particularly important?
The works of Andrea Bozic, Aitana Cordero, Ivana
Müller, Nicole Beutler, Laurent Chétouane, David
Weber-Krebs and Mette Ingvartsen.
2. Which artistic tendencies in theatre, performance
and dance do you regard as being important for future
dramaturgies?
I regard those artistic tendencies in dance and
performance as full of potential that are dealing
with questions that have not yet been exhausted. In
dance, notions of embodiment continue to
stimulate the creation of theatrical works but will
take on new directions. I am observing two
divergent tensions, which pull at dance from very
different aspects: one goes, as it were, back to the
autonomist theatrical event, the direction of the
image, and another moves away from the theatrical,
seeking a different relationality.
The most striking direction I have been
witnessing is the revisiting of the creation of
imagery in the theatre, as if we were to engage
again with questions of representation and
semiotic theory from the 1970s. But instead, this
revisiting is inspired by very different notions and
engages in a new, radical way with the tension
between visual culture and bodily experience. In
this sense the work seems not to focus on the
semiotic, but to introduce a new approach to the
image in the theatre. Not on what the images
mean, but on what they do, the function of the
images, which borrows from existing experiences
but achieves very different effects. I am thinking
here in particular of the aforementioned works of
Andrea Bozic, Aitana Cordero, Ivana Müller, Nicole
Beutler, Laurent Chétouane, David Weber-Krebs
and Mette Ingvartsen.
In general, the issue of creating an event and
gathering people continues to be questioned. This
is the second tendency I mentioned, which has to
do with new notions of relationality. It is being
approached by the use of immersion in installation
works, which accentuate the sensorial. I imagine
that new approaches will take on rhetoric as well
and will make use of dramatic enactment. I am
thinking here of the work of Blast Theory, Rimini
Protokoll, David Weber-Krebs and Boris Charmatz,
and, with regard to the sensorial, in particular the
work of Felix Ruckert, Brice Leroux and deepblue.
3. What, in your opinion, is the main responsibility of
dramaturgy today? Do theatre and performance need
dramaturgs? And how are their situation and working
methods changing?
I witness an increase in the work and need for
dramaturgs. I have mixed feelings about this.
Mainly I find that it is part of a general
institutionalization of art-production in dance. It
seems as if young makers respond to the over-
organization of the dance infrastructure by ‘arming’
themselves with support structures, of which the
dramaturg is a part. It shows their capacity to
organize, but I wonder what is driving this. I detect
a sense of incapacity to participate as free agents in
the production of art. It seems as if these makers
think they will never be fully able to organize their
own art production. Perhaps it is part of the
fundamental realization that art-making is less and
less a matter of individuals and more and more one
of groups. To respond to the question of whether
there is a need for dramaturgs, I would say that
there is a need for dramaturgy, not necessarily for
one dramaturg (quoting from a discussion on
dramaturgy we held in Amsterdam in 1999.)
This means for dramaturgs that their main
priority should be to help find optimal conditions
for the creative process and to keep an open mind
for the broad range of options that are possible, i.e.,
to avoid the formatting that happens through
institutional pressures. There is an increasing
wealth of experiences and of examples that
dramaturgs can tap into. The increasing academic
attention to art production and analysis here is
both an enormous asset as well as a threat. I see
the relationship between maker and dramaturg as
extremely case-specific, which means that
strategies for working will necessarily be different in
every new situation. It will entail any relevant aspect
that the creation of theatre or dance includes.
4. What are the institutional frameworks that should
be changed in order to encourage and enable
interesting theatre work?
110
 
Providing free space to allow new voices to enter the
art production is a continuing concern. This implies
contesting existing hierarchies in art production and
reception and, most of all, creating a climate that
allows for new voices to come through. As the
public debate about art has become very
institutionalized, this is a challenging agenda. The
increasing attention in academia to the arts should
help in the acknowledgment of the importance of
111
art works for culture in general. Still, art production
needs to confront the challenge for visibility, or
connectivity, to create new communities, for the art
to take part in social and political discourse (without
retreating to populist strategies). It will be a
challenge to create flexible structures for engaging
with the social environment in order to find a
legitimation of art production and a fruitful
exchange between art and society.
 7 6 , : ) 5 ) < = : / A ; < ) < - 5 - 6 < , 1 ) 6 ) / 7 6 B Î 4 - B 5 ) : < 1 6
THE ‘ATELEOLOGICAL ENDING’ IN
FRAGMENTED THEATRE WORKS
What kind of ending would avoid finality? What
happens when on the last page or in the last
seconds before the blackout on stage we come to
an end according to our watches but not to the
inherent time of the theatre text or performance?
And if the plot does not offer any kind of
resolution, would it still be a proper ‘plot’?
My doctoral research has been an attempt to fill
the gap in critical discourse about a special,
strange, uncomfortable kind of ending that
disputes about twenty-five centuries of drama
theory and that, due to its innovative nature,
requires new terms that fix its own form and
meaning.
We start at least with an assertion: that this kind
of ending appears in texts and performances that
avoid the traditional Aristotelian structure of
‘beginning-middle-end’ and the linear scheme of
cause-effect. The alternative to these structures is
often fragments presented without a rational logic
but connected through other ways. I will explain
what these ways could be, but first I would like to
clarify that in these fragmented plays the ending
loses its traditional value of ‘conclusion’ and even
its status as a fragment that is more important
than others. In principle, in these fragmented
plays, each fragment carries the same weight
within the whole. But this principle can vary,
depending on the purpose of the artist. Some
artists break into pieces a play or a performance
that previously had a linear structure. If this
happens the reader or the audience should be able
to reconstruct the previous story (I am thinking
here, for example, of Biljana Srbljanovic’s or Rafael
Spregelburd’s plays). But there are other artists
that invent a play by means of different kinds of
intuitions or images without thinking in a logical
structure. In these cases the reader or the audience
is not able to identify a story, or even a plot. René
Pollesch’s or Chuck Mee’s work often like that.
However, most postdramatic performances are a
hybrid of the first and the second kinds.
The fragment could be executed, I think, in three
119
principal ways: centrifuge, parataxis and rhizome.
The first depends on a centre or axis. Sarah Kane’s
4.48 Psychosis can be used as an example for this
mode. In the case of parataxis there is, in principle,
no hierarchy between the elements. However,
although there is no hierarchy between the
fragments, they together possess a ‘unity’ in the
performance which is not a linear causal ‘unity’ but
a sense in the whole. Hans-Thies Lehmann defines
parataxis as a common trait in postdramatic
theatre. The third alternative is the most radical
one: the rhizome. As Deleuze and Guattari
indicate, in a rhizome there is no centre, no
hierarchy, no possible connection between the
fragments. I point out this alternative although it is
difficult to find examples; the happening is the
theatrical form that Deleuze most appreciated.
After identifying these alternatives in the
disposition of the fragment, which place or
meaning does the ending in such plays have? We
cannot use terms like ‘dénouement’ or
‘termination’ for an ending that is no longer a
logical consequence of a linear structure. In these
kinds of fragmented alternatives, I see three
possible ‘functions’ of the ending: (1) an apparently
random interruption of the performance; (2) a goal
in itself (like Wolfgang Iser indicates in his book
The Implied Reader [1974]); (3) a projection of the
performance, often induced by the illusion of an
eternal repetition.
In this brief statement I would like to introduce
one more term, one that could be useful in naming
the peculiar ending of the fragmented play.
Accepting that it has no purpose of finality – unlike
traditional plays – the concept would negate the
idea of télos. However, I would not like to choose a
term that is preceded by prefixes such as post-,
because that itself would then include the idea of
linearity. I prefer – until I find a better one – the
prefix a-, which does not negate but excludes the
concept that follows it. As a result, an
‘ateleological’ ending does not negate the teleology
of the linear structure but offers a new alternative
where the terms of dénouement or plot require
revision at the hands of theatre theory.


1. Which theatre, performance or dance production in REFERENCE

recent years did you find particularly important? Iser, Wolfgang (1974) The Implied Reader: Patterns of
communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett,
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eraritjaritjaka by Heiner Goebbels; Die Zehn Gebote
by Christoph Marthaler; Tale of Two Cities by
Heather Woodbury; Der Idiot by Frank Castorf;
Prater Saga by René Pollesch; Red House by John
Jesurun; Isabella’s Room by Jan Lauwers.

2. Which artistic tendencies in theatre, performance

and dance do you regard as being important for future
dramaturgies?

In theatre: the hyperrealistic tendency, which

introduces media aesthetics to the stage. In
performance, the happening form, as exemplified
by some works of Jan Lauwers and Chuck Mee. In
dance, I am interested in the pieces of Trisha
Brown and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In any
case, I think the majority of future dramaturgies
will refuse the linear/dramatic form and will chose
the paratactic or even the rhizomatic forms.

3. What, in your opinion, is the main responsibility of

dramaturgy today? Do theatre and performance need
dramaturgs? And how are their situation and working
methods changing?

The contemporary dramaturg should be in

permanent contact with the stage and should
prepare texts for the space and the performers. In
my opinion, the theatre text today is just one
element among many components of the theatre
production.

4. What are the institutional frameworks that should

be changed in order to encourage and enable
interesting theatre work?

I come from Barcelona, and in my country there is

a huge difference between alternative theatre and
conventional theatre. I would like our government
to finance the radical theatre and the small theatre
spaces, too. Furthermore, the ‘professional’
manner of most of our theatre prevents the small
productions from being presented.

120
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