Dramaturgy is a Spinning Thing

My professor María José, who is teaching Artistic Research this semester, instructed us to outline each other’s bodies. The outline then became a map and we’d start to locate where ideas, images, memories, and so on, were located in our bodies and fill them in with words or drawings. She told us to listen to and follow what obsessed us, and on top of my fingertips I wrote, longing, longing, longing. 

My professor Vinson, who taught Critical Writing for Theatre last semester, assigned us An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec. He sent us out of the classroom and told us to go somewhere and write down everything we saw. It was February and cold and I walked to Morningside Park. 

11:10am

children playing yelling

a statue of a man   

a child yells everybody

3 people 

white hat green beanie blonde hair

black white and brown dog holds orange ball he has blue eyes

owner holds the ball while they walk down the stairs and dog can’t take his eyes off of owner 

grey beanie 

man says hello I say hello back 

Vinson welcomed the limitations of our attention and inevitability of distraction, bias, and whatever else flutters between memory and judgment. By practicing observation, description, and argument we’d gain a deeper understanding of whatever it is we want to do with dramaturgy. Rather than veiling observations as questions in order to protect the feelings of the “artist,” our time was better spent wrangling honesty and with it, creating portraiture through writing. And with dramaturgy, we could not only capture but create the afterlife of movement. 

Last semester, my cousin won the NBA Championship. I decided I like being adjacent to sport and that dramaturgy has allowed me to stand closer to what I don’t understand. That I don’t need to know how the game is played and I don’t need to play it myself in order to be changed by it. When his team won, I sat between my boyfriend's legs on our couch and we squinted as confetti and our shoddy streaming service blurred the screen. Somewhere, beyond pride, was jealousy. I want to move like Kevin Durant. I want arms so long my fingertips graze my knees. I want to lope through space while my sneakers cut the floor and with gangling grace, just send a ball through a net. I want to make my parents proud. I want to dance for people who spill beer, place bets, kiss strangers, and propose to the loves of their lives. I’ll admit this is only a dream I have while sitting down, maybe only a dream I have when I’m writing. 

The thing about dance was, I felt I always had to be doing it to understand it. I could never step outside of it and see it from far away. Not to say that I always had to know what I was doing, but somehow even the unknown, undoing, and unbecoming was precise and so clear in feeling, if not form. When people ask what I do, I like to say I’m a dancer who does dramaturgy. Dramaturgy has complicated my relationship with everything, blurring form, feeling, structure, and narrative. So much so that when I watch a performance, I’m not looking to define or pinpoint what it is; instead, I’m looking for what it does. 

My professor Morgan, who is teaching Adaptation this semester asked us if we had an idea of what we’d like to adapt. I told I’m working on an adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Initially, I just wanted to adapt something I hadn’t finished reading so that I could make up what I think might happen, should or shouldn’t happen. I’m not certain any text will be spoken and the text should just work as a scaffolding for movement. I told her I knew I wanted it to be an adaptation that’s so loose that you wouldn’t know it’s Tom Sawyer unless you’re looking for it. She told me that when a work has the bones of another story it’s a palimpsestic adaptation. I had never heard that word before and fell in love with the idea of x-ray vision allowing you to see through a play. 

My concentration head Christian, assigned us Elinor Fuchs’ Visit to A Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play, first semester. For Fuchs, a play is a word in itself. She writes, “To see this entire world, do this literally: Mold the play into a medium-sized ball, set it before you in the middle distance, and squint your eyes. Make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole.” Then comes a set of questions on how time, mood, climate, music, and relationships operate, change, evolve, and dismantle within this world and within oneself–all to be asked while squinting. 

Last semester, on the day of the solar eclipse, Octavia, Sara, and I laid out on the campus green and sat underneath the phenomenon. There was something about everyone wanting to see something out of this world and almost beyond sight that made me feel so small and pleasurably unimportant. We took turns using those eclipse glasses, squinting, smiling, and complaining. We’re all black women and together we make up half of our cohort. We questioned if we were always going to be in service of a playwright or director.  Hungry, not so much for our validation, but for any validation. Were we doomed to forever be cast as the smart black best friend that could save a production with one perfectly-timed, intriguing question? What made us quirky, desirable, intimidating, or threatening? Did our being in the rehearsal room quell the need for diversity or threaten the process? What rooms did I even want to be in? And what about then? What about dance? I had enough of plays and at that point, reading plays bored me so deeply I wanted to stop reading them all together. And so, why did I go back to school, and by doing so, did I play into that worthless delineation between theatre and dance or did I go to further marry the two? Turns out the eclipse and its piercing, off-white blue sky provided the perfect backdrop for our existential dread, frustration, trust, and friendship. Since then, I’ve been spiraling, but I haven’t been alone.

This semester, Andrew and I are co-dramaturged Brennan’s second year directing project. Brennan was adamant about working, devising, and working within a non-hierarchical structure. We all wrote and performed our own material and our role as dramaturgs was shared and split amongst everyone who was inside of it. If anything, we dramturged the process more than the production itself. Most nights, Andrew and I sent each other disappearing voice memos about what we observed from the day, a sort of private dramaturgy and temporary archive of a fleeting process. Some nights I’d sleep over at his place and we’d stay up for hours drinking martinis, talking about what happened, what it made us feel, and then think ‘and then what happened next?’ in a sort of never ending loop towards meaning-making. 

I’m not a ceramicist, but I like to imagine that dramaturgs, much like ceramicists, curl over spinning matter. We tenderly sculpt and shape our material with endless consideration. We are aware of the composition of the clay itself, allowing the potential and limitations of its properties to inform how we work with it. By engaging with dramaturgy as a practice and a field of study, I’ve become acutely aware that the world is turning. I’m not a scientist and I know I don’t know as much about the planet as I probably should, but at times, I swear I can feel it turning. So that spinning matter before me, often the body’s movement and text, is changing me more than I’m changing it. As it spins, it blurs, and already fleeting images begin to bleed so much that I’m unsure of what I’m even looking at, but I know I’m being moved by it.