The Ignorant Dramaturg

It comes as no surprise to me that we congregated here to speak about dance (and) dramaturgy. We all

can proudly register having behind us quite a few seminars, workshops and all sorts of meetings about

'dance dramaturgy'. Why the topic draws much curatorial attention today, however, has less to do with an

entirely new than with a recently more accredited practice, and perhaps even a profession whose role in

the creation of dance hasn't been sufficiently reflected before. Another approach would demand inquiring

how 'dance dramaturgy' follows in a line with other curated concepts in dance since 2000 – such as

'research', 'collaboration', 'theory', 'education and learning' – the concerns of which it might actually

reformulate and then why. I came here resolved not to pursue the matters like why dance dramaturgy

now, why only now etc., because they would inevitably lead me to deconstruct the subject and the whole

debate, so that we could go home with a little more sceptical and cynical faces than usual. Instead, I

accept this as an invitation to think 'what is dance dramaturgy?', but my knee-jerk reflex is to deviate from

the essentialist 'what' to more than one question. 'Dance-dramaturgy'? Yes, but who by, for and with?

Where and when? How, in which case and how much? Multiplying questions makes dance-dramaturgy a

minor – of a minority (minoritaire) – and, hence, a plural affair. Studying many cases one by one, we

would discover how the work of dramaturgy reinvents itself always different, whenever it is truly a matter of

a new creation as opposed to repeating a 'success-formula'. The temptation of unfolding the many

dramaturgies hides the danger of arbitrary relativization – everything and nothing is or can be (considered)

dramaturgy – and one loses a position to defend. Therefore, I'll promptly set out my position and task

here: I will contest dance dramaturgy in a specific condition of project-based freelance work – something

we used to refer to as 'independent'. If there should be a dramaturg, she isn't a staff member of a

company or a repertoire theater – someone who occupies a position of know-how, craft, or métier

dramaturg (the bright example of Marianne Van Kerkhoven comes to remind us of the 1980s-1990s). The

appearance of dramaturg in contemporary dance from 2000 on is all the more curious for the fact that

choreographers themselves have never been more articulate and self-reflexive about their working

methods and concepts. So, why a dramaturg then? My assumption is that we can begin to talk about

dance dramaturgy, and try to make this notion thicker, only when we accept that it isn't a necessity, that a

dance dramaturg isn't necessary. Rather than establish a normative definition, I would like to explore here

functions, roles and activities of dramaturgy in experiment, how dramaturg becomes the constitutive

supplement in a method of experimental creation – a co-creator of a problem.

But before I proceed with that, one more question from my own confusion: how do you write and how do

you pronounce this word in English – 'dramaturg' or 'dramaturge'? Adding 'e' appears as a feminine

ending – a playful warning against the feminization of work. Gendering the profession doesn't have to

reveal a woman-dramaturge sitting next to a man-choreographer – feminization, according to Toni Negri

and Michael Hardti, presupposes a transformation of labor from manufacturing objects to producing

1

services. In order to clear the ground of norm and necessity, let me unsettle a few assumptions about the

services dance-dramaturg is to provide.

1. Dance-dramaturg has the linguistic skills that place her on the reflexive pole of the tedious mind-

body split. This assumption entails a binary division of labor by faculties: choreographers are mute

doers, and dramaturgs bodiless thinkers and writers. I will show how the boundaries of these

faculties are blurred and constantly shifting.

2. Dance-dramaturg observes the process from the distance of an outside perspective. She is

expected to keep a critical eye against the self-indulgence or solipsism of choreographer. But

what if the job of choreographer, as Jonathan Burrows recently writes, is to 'stay close enough to

what we're doing to feel it, and at the same time use strategies to distance ourselves enough to

grasp momentarily what someone else might perceive.' He goes on to confer that choreography

might be 'something that helps you step back for a moment, enough to see what someone else

might see.'ii So again, the division between doers and observers won't do when choreographer

and dramaturg both exercise the outside-eye. My task will be to discern the more subtle nature of

this complicity and affinity in the shared faculty of seeing and reflecting.

3. The previous might be argued against with the following point: the special duty of the

dramaturg's critical eye is to go-between the choreographer and the audience, so as to mediate

and make sure that communication works on both sides. But this turns dramaturgy into a

pedagogy, where dramaturg puts herself in the priestly or masterly position of the one who knows

better, who can predict what the audience see, think, feel, like or dislike. We, makers and theorists

alike, are all obsessing far too much about spectatorship, instead of wisely relaxing, as Jacques

Rancière wrote in " The Emancipated Spectator"iii, and trusting that spectators are more active

and smart than we allow ourselves to admit. My position would be to fiercely object to the

stultification of this kind – the patronizing presupposition that audience won't understand if they

aren't properly – dramaturgically – guided. Instead of giving in to the pressure of accessibility

we're living in this neoliberal age, dramaturgs could be concerned about how the performance is

made public. This is to do with more than just publicity; it is an effort to articulate, find new

appropriate formats, in order to make public, indeed, the specific ideas, processes and practices –

the immaterial envelope of labor and knowledge sustaining the very work. I'm not saying that we

need dramaturgs to sensibilize those hostile and ignorant spectators… it's more a challenge to

combat hermiticism – to think how to make knowledge about performance-making available – and

perhaps interesting – outside of its own discipline.

4. The last hurdle to overcome is the notorious function of dramaturg aka company psychotherapist.

This dark and shameful side of dramaturgy is worth mentioning only to make crystal clear that the

moment that dramaturg is relegated to the role of a 'caretaker' of the moods and tensions in a

working process – a filter between choreographer, performers and other collaborators, for

2

instance – she has lost the power of creation, and perhaps, even joy. We dramaturgs probably

recall having one such dark experience to forget.

Now that we relieved our dance-dramaturg from these (traditional) services, are our hands empty enough

for another undertaking?

When asked to define what a dramaturg is, the Dutch theatermaker Jan Ritsema's statement appears

non-specific: a co-thinker in the process. I choose to depart from this, albeit, generic, view, to inquire: if

dramaturg is the sparring partner in thought, is she then as little or as much as a collaborator? Yes, but a

very special collaborator, dramaturg is the friend of a problem. Or more precisely, she is the

choreographer's closest friend in producing a problem: a friend in advocating an experiment, and an

enemy of complacency. The dramaturg is there to make sure that the process doesn't compromise in

experiment. What makes her a friend is proximity in being with and standing under (which isn't always

under-standing as well) the drama of ideas. Giorgio Agamben recently wrote: 'calling someone "friend" is

not the same as calling him "white", "Italian", or "hot", since friendship is neither a property nor a quality of

a subject…To recognize someone as a friend means not being able to recognize him as something.'iv

I'm engaging with the figure of the friend so as to do away with instrumentality and specialization of the

role and relationship of dramaturg with the choreographer. The kind of friendship I'm invoking here begins

with ignorance – not about what the two can exchange between each other or be useful for, because there

must already be some shared affinity to even contemplate working together – but ignorance about the

work to be made. Hereby, I'm referring to 'ignorance' in Jacques Rancière's parable The Ignorant

Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.v Emancipation is the pedagogy that Rancière

opposes to instruction, because it's a situation of learning something about which both master and student

are ignorant. Learning then rests on the assumption of equality of intelligence, as well as on the existence

of a third mediating term between master and student – represented in Rancière by the book that master

and student read in two different languages. Dramaturg and choreographer establish a relationship of

equals similar to the relation between two ignorant people confronting the book they don’t know how to

read. The 'book' is the work of research, that something, which binds by a radical form of effort that both

invest into the process of defining what is at stake and how. The work is the thing, the 'book' that

choreographer and dramaturg won't read but write together – that third link which guarantees the rule of

materiality. Whatever is done, thought or felt can be shown, discussed, and confronted on the work itself

with two pairs of eyes or more.

Now that we placed dramaturg on a par with choreographer, we have to ask: what does this work of

construction they are both dedicated to have to do with producing a problem? When I say a problem, I in

fact mean an approach or a method which forces the work on a performance to deviate from the possible,

i.e. familiar operations with: 'theme' or what the work claims to be about, 'language' or expression means,

signature or aesthetic preferences, process or the dynamic in which the work develops, 'dispositif' or that

which composes the attention of spectators. Listing all these categories already shows a certain stability in

3

a pool of options, possibilities recognizable because: 'we know what works, and what doesn't.' The

production of a problem doesn't begin with possibilities – they are a matter of knowledge that we account

for as the limits to be pushed – but with ideas that diverge and differentiate the conditions of the new.

Gilles Deleuze qualifies creation as virtual. To explain the notion of the virtual, he often cites Proust’s

description of his states of experience : 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract'.vi The

content of an idea is virtual, because it is differentiation, a differential relation between elements drawn by

a problem, a question. The problem lies in the idea itself, or rather, the idea exists only in the form of

questions. As questioning nowadays is a domesticated and worn out truism about almost any intellectual

activity, questions by which a problem is posed are distinguished by answers that they give rise to. So the

problem is measured by the solution it merits – if this solution is an invention that gives being to something

new, to what did not exist or what might never have happened. Stating a problem isn't about uncovering

an already existing question or concern, something that was certain to emerge sooner or later. A problem

is neither a rhetorical question that can't be answered. On the contrary, to raise a problem implies

constructing terms in which it will be stated, and conditions it will be solved in. The solution entails a

construction of procedure and working situation. To orchestrate in practical terms what I coin here as

methodology of problem I will take up the dramaturgy of the performance And then by Eszter Salamon.

(Frankly, I would much prefer to unravel a variety of cases and not to risk to idealize one self-

congratulating example, but time presses me to choose only one case to illustrate my view, and so it will

be one from my own dramaturgical practice).

The project began with a discovery of homonymy – hundreds of women all over Europe and the U.S.

having what the choreographer – and eventually her homonyms as well – considered a rare and unusual

name because it comes from a relatively small culture – Hungary. After Magyar Tancók (2006), a lecture

performance about her own becoming a dancer in Hungary, Salamon was interested to pursue further the

relationship between cultural contingency and individual agency in her own biography. But after

considering how arbitrary and insignificant the results of exploring the fact of having a name were, 'what's

in a name?' appeared a trivial question, a pseudo-problem. Interviewing more than a dozen of Eszter-

Salamons, the choreographer Salamon and myself were facing a myriad of stories from and about

ordinary people: individual, singular, and incomparable. Our initial speculation – that this material could

feed yet another solo that voids the identity of a singular by multiple subjects – proved uninteresting, it

i Negri, Antonio and Hardt, Michael: "Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production". Empire (2000). Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press. 280-303. ii Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer's Handbook (upcoming). London: Routledge, 39.iii Rancière, Jacques. "The Emancipated Spectator". Manuscript from the lecture held at the opening of the International Theatre Academy in Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2004, courtesy of the author.iv Agamben, Giorgio. "The Friend", What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2009), Kishik, D. and Pedatella, S. (tr.). Stanford, California: Stanford California Press, 25-37.v Rancière, J. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), Ross, K. (tr.). Stanford, California: Stanford California Press. vi Deleuze, Gilles. "The Method of Dramatization". Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2004). Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 101.

4

meant stating the obvious knowledge about identity construction and performative self-determination. The

question shifted to challenging the concept of self-identification itself. What does it mean to meet another

person whose being doesn’t concern you in any particular way? Isn’t it strange, and rather uncanny, to

peer into another person’s life when one has come across the evidence of it by pure chance ? What

makes these women speak like everyone else, as a singular but not a particular person? What makes the

expression of each one seem whatever, and yet being such that it always matters ? Our documentary

departure gave way to fabulation, using the trigger of homonymy 'as the minimum criterion for the choice,

the connection, and the confrontation of exactly those different life experiences. “What’s in a name”

became a matter of arbitrariness and coincidence that condition the performance, while the name “Eszter

Salamon” functioned metonymically – not as a sign of the congruence of the Salamons, but exactly as a

sign for individuation among singular homonyms.'vii

A considerable part of the solution consisted in constructing a procedure which would choreograph the

fabulation of singularities. And the methodology of problem involves exactly that: an invention of

constraints that will act as enabling conditions. As hiring dozens of Salamons from all over the world to

perform on stage wasn't an option, we decided to ask them to re-enact their spontaneous answers,

gestures and presence from the interviews. Then we filmed their "restored behavior' (R. Schechner) in a

particular studio setting, a mise-en-cadre, in which they moved in a space the audience sees in total, while

the camera shoots the figures off center in provisional shots, simulating the gaze of the theatre viewer'.viii

Thus the screen could extend into the stage, and vice versa, blurring their boundaries. Performers –

Eszter-Salamons the homonyms by name and their doubles as a kind of visual homonyms – circulated

between the screen and the stage as in one continuous space, split between past and present,

documentary and fiction, original statement and self-reflexive comment, non-theatrical imaginary space

and bare theater stage. It should be mentioned that apart from the assistance of a professional film-

makerix, the choreographer and the dramaturg were dilettantes of the medium they hijacked into the

performance. Constructing such a hybrid between theater and cinema meant questioning choreography

as well – and when I say that it could have been done only by dilettantes, I'm rhetorically distinguishing a

dilettante approach that contests and strives to expand its discipline and medium from an essentialist view

on professional craftsmanship. Dilettantes are those who ask questions beyond the specialist truth about

the medium. (Photo#1: Shooting by Arne Hector)

vii Vujanovic, Ana. 5"T5h5e5 5C5h5o5r5e5o5g5r5a5p5h5y5 5o5f5 5S5i5n5g5u5l5a5r5i5t5y5 5a5n5d5 5D5i5f5f5e5r5e5n5c5e5 5A5n5d5 5T5h5e5n5 5b5y5 5E5s5z5t5e5r5 5S5a5l5a5m5o5n5"5. P5e5r5f5o5r5m5a5n5c5e5 5R5e5s5e5a5r5c5h5:5 5A5 5J5o5u5r5n5a5l5 5o5f5 5t5h5e5 5P5e5r5f5o5r5m5i5n5g5 5A5r5t5s5,5 51 5V5o5l5u5m5e5 51535,5 5I5s5s5u5e5 515,5 525050585,5 55152535-15350viii Ibidem.ix The filmmaker Minze Tummescheit signs the cinematography and camerawork in And Then.

5

(Photo #2: "Story-boarding media", by Eszter Salamon)

6

Discerning dramaturgy from choreography would be difficult here, because they both mutated into a

composition of movement in text, in camera shots, light simulating cinema, montage between screen and

stage, soundtrack, performing modes, gestures and the least of all, dance. A composition of each of these

elements, and moreover of their relations, Vujanovic called a choreography of the Deleuzian 'concept of

difference which through repetition transforms the elements introduced into a process of abolishing self-

identity.'x

So what does the methodology of problem generate? Questions that will clear the ground and slowly

eliminate the known possibilities to enable producing a qualitatively new problem. This could be compared

with emptying hands I mentioned before. Burrows laconically calls it 'relaxing one's grip,'xi and I would say

letting go of habits that make the mind lazy and hands routine. The problem will distinguish itself insofar as

it demands constructing its own – different, singular or new, but impure and heterogeneous perhaps even

hybrid – operation. The operation is defined by the specific constraints which secure its consistency. The

result is a new dispositif – not an architectural arrangement but a reconfiguration of attention, meaning

that spectators will also have to experience how differently they see, think, feel, instead of leaning back

into recognition. The problem will also have the consequence of problematizing or unsettling views and

opinions about either what's being represented or how dance, choreography or performance is treated.

Now it will be the spectators who will no longer ask themselves the essentialist question 'what is this?' but

will, like we did in the beginning with dramaturgy, receive the gift of a problem in a plural of minoritarian

questions 'who, how and when, where and in which case' is this about, is this a performance etc.

The next series of points concerns dramaturg in this type of dramaturgy I conceive as the methodology of

problem. How does the dramaturg implicate herself in the production of a problem, and since she is such

a close friend of it, how can her position be discerned from that of choreographer? It's important that

dramaturg doesn't enter the process because the process is in need of a dramaturg; problems can be

created only out of desire without need, duty or obligation. For a friendship of problem two notions need to

marry. Affinity will not just mean being close, similar, akin, fond or understanding of something, but having

this feeling move forward or toward an end – I'm here deploying the French etymology à + fin as a sense

of finality. So affinity in a desiring production will provide a built-in constraint – limiting the amount of

choice – and will drive the process with a 'terminus' that yet doesn't pre-determine the process entirely

from the beginning.

If affinity is what dramaturg and choreographer share, what is it that they don't share? The motivation of

choreographer that might be personal – the place where the work affects the maker. But this place isn't

essentially the origin of the work, however often it is so claimed. Affinity can help choreographer abandon

the personal as a source of solipsistic defense reflected in statements 'because I think so, I like it, it means

to me personally…' and take an external, constitutive of the work of performance itself, social, political or

conceptual, but in all cases, self-reflected position. Affinity then grows into affiliation – connecting both

x Vujanovic, A. Op.cit. xi Burrows, J. Op.cit., 112.

7

choreographer and dramaturg to a framework of meanings larger than the individual artistic fantasy and

achievement. Friends of problem are also allies who don't defend a personal ego or mythology of the

great artist but certain views, assumptions, questions and criteria. These (views, assumptions, questions

and criteria) make them partial and hence, complicit – sharing responsibility about affecting a context

always larger than the performance only. Again the personal aspect of the relationship is evacuated to

make place for a commitment to certain politics, so we can never speak of dramaturg's loyalty to her

choreographer, but of fidelity to a position.

What about criticality and the critical distance considered as that which makes dramaturg relatively

autonomous in her work? Indeed, we now have to reverse the question: what is it that dramaturg doesn't

share with choreographer? What motivates her apart from interest in the specific problematic of the work?

To observe how thought arises in expression, and is its material act. This is quite different from the

common assumption that dramaturgs come with their concepts and theories and then seek ways to

smuggle them in a material form. The problems I'm talking about here do not represent pre-formed

concepts – they create concepts in expression, which cannot be separated from the situation in which it

occurs. Concepts born in expression do not pre-exist and transcend their objects. Instead of the identity of

object, concept has for its objective to articulate a multiplicity - the elements which are variable and

reciprocally determined by relations. One such expressive concept that developed in the making of And

then was 'third space', a space which doesn't exist actually, but virtually between screen and stage.

(Photo #3: from a performance of And Then in Lyon, 2007)

8

Marked by various cuts between memory and present, and by voices whose bodies disappear or sounds

that come outside of the field (hors-champ) where what can be heard exceeds what can be seen either on

stage or screen-image, the third space became a black zone maneuvering between a missing context and

the reality of theater. We began to think it as a construction site for the imaginary, as if it swallowed all the

blackouts in theater where spectators continue to edit the film. I risk now slipping into poetry. But what I'm

getting at here is a conceptual imagination that performance theory, when practiced only in cabinets, is dry

of, and begins to lack. We shouldn't forget that many powerful concepts in philosophy were abducted from

the non-philosophical hands of eloquent artists who reflected their own poetics. For instance, the infamous

body without organs that Deleuze&Guattari revamped from Antonin Artaud.

Whether dramaturgs are praised for smuggling ideas and concepts from performances into other

discursive sites – books, journals, classrooms, and hopefully, other fields of knowledge – or they are

considered as cheats, because they are always already sitting on more than one chair, occupying several

positions through various activities – teachers, critics, programmers, performers – depends on the ethics

of the choreographer. More and more today choreographers acknowledge the 'open-source' model for

how ideas and performance materials are created and circulated. Two years ago, Xavier Le Roy, with

whom I worked as a dramaturg on several performances, and I initiated a project that gathered a number

of choreographers and performers to work in social and economic conditions drastically different from our

habitual mode of freelance nomadic work and life style. These conditions were reflected somewhat in the

project title: 'Six Months One Location' (6M1L)xii. One other proposition was that each one of us, apart

from our own project, would engage in two projects of other participants. We were to choose or define in

what role we would engage: not just performing in it, but being the dramaturg or advisor or writer or singer

or light or sound designer.

(Illustration #4: Gérald Kurdian presents 6M1L in the book 6M1L, 15)

xii Cf. 6M1L (2009), Lulu Online Publishing: Everybodys. http://www.lulu.com/product/download/6-months-1-location/5342261

9

The rotation in function reflected the sense of flexibility, readiness to 'stand in' other roles, that for most of

these artists is the everyday reality of independent, self-organized work, so it was only a matter of

formalizing it and giving it a name. Le Roy then found the notion of 'intercessors' or 'mediators' (French

intercesseurs) in an interview with Deleuze. Deleuze introduces the figure of intercessor describing his

collaboration with Félix Guattari. He writes:

Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. They can be people - for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists - but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It’s a series. If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own. ...There’s no truth that doesn’t 'falsify' established ideas. To say that 'truth is created' implies that the production of truth involves a series of operations that amount to working on a material - strictly speaking, a series of falsifications. When I work with Guattari each of us falsifies the other, which is to say that each of us understands in his own way notions put forward by the other. A reflective series with two terms takes shape. And there can be series with several terms, or complicated branching series. These capacities of falsity to produce truth, that’s what mediators are about…xiii

Two points I would like to draw from this notion. Dramaturgy tends to normativize collaboration in dual

terms where dramaturg is expected to act as an analyst: to make sense of it all. However, as Deleuze

says, there's always more than one difference, and it's a series, a multiplicity of voices, those often

unrecognized mediators whose voices we borrow. The other point is to see dramaturgy against the truth of

one, as a path of falsification of the many; sometimes, even literally, to have the luxury of two dramaturgs.

Three is merrier than two, because ideas and energy are no longer mirror-bounced, seeking confirmation

or receiving doubt, but they begin to circulate, proliferate, and have a life of their own.

A lot could be said about the practice of dramaturgy, and its various technologies. But one characteristic

seems to me never stressed enough: the importance of taking time. If something different or new is to

happen, the working process has to be attended in its duration which then enables the perception of

change. By contrast, our production time is driven by efficiency. Therefore, dramaturgs are often asked to

act as consultants – to drop once or twice into the rehearsal and give their expert opinion. This occurs in a

late phase, when most of the research time is over, and dramaturg's job falls under the 'fine-tuning' of

composition, attitude, and performing style. Hence, dramaturg is relegated to a mentor who comes to

supervise the work according to a standard of success. In my own experience, I have struggled against

the question I hear every so often: 'Do you think it works?' I would answer: 'What do you mean – works?

xiii Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations (1990). Joughin, M. (tr.) New York: Columbia University Press, 125.

10

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

My car works, for instance, yes… but could we, please, talk about the performance in other, non-

normative terms?'

And if we are going to talk about it as a production of problem, then success cannot be the measure of

dramaturgy. As a practice, dramaturgy can at best be speculative. The thesis about speculative as

opposed to normative practices I developed from the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who

discusses Nobel-prize winning physics experiments next to American witch-feminists as equally valuable

practices.xiv To speculate means to place thought as belief or faith in a certain outcome without having firm

evidence. For instance, one speculates on outcomes of one’s application for subsidy or investment in

stocks, or any other venture in the hope of gain with the risk of loss. As a researcher, whenever you coin

or decide to apply a method, you speculate whether it will lead to a desired result, or if it will refute a

hypothesis, or be productive of anything at all. The key words to extract from speculation: uncertainty, risk,

daring. But to speculate pragmatically is to add not just caution against illusions or wishful thoughts, but a

perspective on a situation, a set of constraints by posing a problem, and an obligation to assessing the

effects a speculation, a thought, a decision, a method, will have had, in the future-perfect tense of this

performance. In dramaturgy, we practice speculation. We practice to 'stand-under' (support) before we

'under-stand'. We learn to do and say, let's think again, because we don't know now, but will have known

by then.

xiv Stengers, Isabelle. "Including Non-Humans into Political Theory" (2008). Manuscript, courtesy of the author.

11

12