For the first time in our years long collaboration, Bennyroyce has asked me to contribute in the role of dramaturg. Begin Again, with it’s personal accounts of global events, is particularly ripe for dramaturgical creativity.
First, it is important to define this role. Just as in each creation process a choreographer plans and discovers methods and strategies in order to bring the work to life, a dramaturg works at an act of inventing her own methods and strategies in order to offer support to the essential vision of the work. We have been working together to better and more particularly define my role as the process of creating Begin Again progresses.
In order to more clearly communicate what we are doing, I have included below an excerpt from my work “Un-Airing the Dance: Choreographic Excavation Through Dramaturgy, which cites several dramaturgs’ approach to their roles:”
Dramaturg and professor Katherine Profeta explains that American dramaturg, editor, and lecturer Mark Bly thinks of this role with two words: “I question”. I consider Bly’s approach to be not as much one that edges toward a brutal interrogation, but rather, one aimed at guiding the choreographer to herself. If this questioning method is employed with care, I believe it can enable the choreographer and dramaturg to together discover exactly what the choreographer is searching for, while also creating capacity to understand what she may have already found during the process up to and including the moment of particular dramaturgical inquiry. Meanwhile, theater director and choreographer Ray Miller writes that the contemporary dramaturg manages the expansion by working as an “activist co-creator” or as a “dispassionate observer.” The notion of the “activist” here seems most vital, as the I believe that the writer, curator, and dramaturg Andre Lepecki illustrates similar practices along this instruction when he writes about a “not knowing” that is “resolved...by a practice of doing.”
When the performing arts theorist and dramaturg Konstantina Georgelou, choreographer and scholar Efrosini Protopapa, and performance maker, performer, and researcher Danae Theodoridou write that while the role of the dramaturg can be “relativized and obscure” and “ungraspable,” the key is to engage with what I am describing as the expanding realm by both choreographer and dramaturg devoting themselves to a “common area of inquiry.” This area of inquiry must be the same space carved out when Bly dares to “ask,” and must follow a path of discovery that begins with Lepecki’s “not knowing.” All of these different articulations of various dramaturgical approaches expose a certainty: that the expanded realm of the role of the choreographer, opening to include the role of the dramaturg, contains extreme, persistent, and functional overlaps.
To help answer the question of why a carving out of each creative role with extreme overlaps has sprung up, dramaturg Bojana Cvejic offers that the “appearance of the dramaturg in contemporary dance...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.” In this reflexivity, choreographers understand that the function of devising their methodologies precedes what I like to think of as an active spatial excavation process. This process, while certainly undertaken in part alone, is massive, moving, and unwieldy, and possibly much better attended to alongside what Cjevic refers to as a “friend”, or an individual invested in ensuring “the process doesn't compromise in experiment.” This reflexivity has also prompted choreographers to realize the need, and to find a way to repair the gap. It is inside the contemporary development of “this unique relationship between a choreographer and a dance dramaturg...that dyadic configurations” emerge in support of each work’s idiosyncratic modes of engagement and creative activities. By “dyadic”, I believe that Miller refers to his particular defining of the choreographer and dramaturg relationship as a distinct and peculiar thing of its own that is un-aired when the two figures meld their efforts together along the agreed upon line of inquiry. It is clear that, as Cvejic suggests, creating what she terms as a false “binary division of labor by faculties: choreographers are mute doers, and dramaturgs bodiless thinkers and writers” is not a functional outgrowth of the role of dramaturgy within choreography, as each role-occupier is working concurrently toward the same revelation of an un-aired work within the same set of agreed upon tools, so that “the boundaries of these faculties are blurred and constantly shifting.” The blur and the shift are defined by each coupled choreographer and dramaturg in ways that are completely clear only to themselves. What is not clear is how, as Ray Miller explains in an interview with critic Bonnie Maranca, bringing to the choreographer “a wealth of images, associations, sliver of music or design element, historical documents, or contemporary perspectives (serve) as ways to stimulate the choreographic imagination” operates within the shift and the blur (94). I suggest that with each agreed upon proposal, the resulting intervention exposes another layer of the eventually excavated work, shifting the blur closer to being the visible, and bringing the members of the dyadic configuration closer to knowing, that is, to perceiving the dance itself, and farther from Lepecki’s “not knowing.”
Miller suggests that “dramaturgs provide a natural crossover between theory and practice, between history and choreography, and between performance and audience response.” This natural crossover might be considered as something of an intercession, meaning that the crossover Miller refers to is a distinct activity (or set of activities), and not at all a passive positioning of the dramaturg between an active totality of choreographer(s), dancer(s), and performer(s) and an inert, receptive spectatorship. This approach can be illustrated by a sequence described by dramaturg Pil Hansen, who has identified a series of strategies she calls a “multiplicity of approaches” that dramaturgs can then use to cut, paste, overlap, disregard, engage, and re-engage with whatever they encounter. These strategies are “transitory, lifted from …(another) context, and rendered abstract principles.”
So, it is clear that choreographers and dramaturgs define and redefine their co-creative processes with each new work of dance. The most interesting and potent moments and connection on these defining fronts will eventually appear as Begin Again itself.
Phil and Marie in a sketch of a “floor duet” at Dance Conservatory Seattle in August 2022
- Marie