Dramaturgy of Shifts and Turns

Reflecting on my approach to dramaturgy, I find that the traditional notion of dramaturgy as an external framing device — a structure imposed on "something," — feels increasingly inadequate. After all, “the form is in the material, and our choice of material itself.” I extend this idea to my creative process where form is already embedded in the specificities of my research process, methodologies, and its ethics.

For example, Behind Fear stages choreographies of fear by exploring paradoxes of security and safety culture in a way that emerges from direct relational encounters. Through the playful appropriation of safety and wellness procedures, Behind Fear navigates both external and internal senses of safety and the mechanisms through which our desire for it is constructed. In the process of researching, every interaction with an expert — from security guards to film scholars, criminologists and therapists — became part of the dramaturgical fabric of Behind Fear and helped select symbolic frameworks for the performative materials. These exchanges did not merely provide content; they shaped the material in a way that allowed the form to emerge performatively, through abstraction and reassembly of principles from various fields. 

Similarly, Beyond Love constructs a participatory environment where the audience plays an integral role in questioning the commodification of love and intimacy. Set within a choreographic speed-dating frame, the piece invites the audience to navigate encounters hosted by both human performers and the companion robot, exploring how technological development choreographs the ways we relate, form relationships, and experience emotional connection. In Beyond Love, involving the audience early in the process not only shaped the work but also fostered a sense of temporary community throughout the process.  Their role as co-creators of the experience influenced the reflection and production of the performance itself. Here, dramaturgy did not function as an external frame (like that of a photograph), but rather as an innate process, embedded in both the material and the relational dynamics of the process. This understanding has been crucial in my work, where the material and the framing are inseparable.

My artistic processes unfold as long-term collaborative research, bringing together specialists and non-specialists alike. Dramaturgy, in this context, sits at the heart of collaboration and exchange, functioning as a bridge between social realities and performative expression. These collaborations often lead me into social contexts outside the traditional dance and theatre paradigm — such as public spaces, professional environments, and interpersonal settings — where I engage with different forms of knowledge, expertise, and lived experiences. Through these interactions, I gather performative material, relational insights, and embodied knowledge that I later recontextualize within the theater space. However, this movement is not simply a linear process of collection and presentation; rather, the theater itself becomes an extension of these social encounters, transforming into a space where lived experiences, performer-audience dynamics, and dramaturgical structures converge. In this way, the audience is not merely a bystander, but an active participant in the unfolding dramaturgical exchange. 

This interweaving of diverse perspectives within the artistic process reflects a broader shift occurring across artistic and academic landscapes. The evolving landscape of knowledge has shifted away from discipline-specific silos toward a more open, interdisciplinary exchange. This interdisciplinarity of positions suggest that a dramaturg need not always come from the field of dramaturgy. For instance, in Beyond Love, I collaborated with Andrew Hardwidge, a performer, choreographer, and anthropologist, as dramaturge. His background in anthropology provided an alternative lens through which to examine the social choreographies of love, technology, and human intimacy, enriching the dramaturgical framework beyond conventional performance methodologies. Similarly, in Behind Fear, the dramaturgy was shaped not solely by artistic perspectives, but through direct engagement with security professionals, criminologists, and therapists, whose insights helped shape the symbolic structures and performative logic of the piece. These collaborations reflect an expanded dramaturgical authorship, where knowledge production is distributed across different fields rather than being centralized within one domain. 

In exploring these shifting dynamics, I became increasingly interested in the ways that creative processes are shaped by implicit social scripts — how choreographers, dramaturgs, performers, and even audiences engage in ways that reinforce assumed functions and hierarchies. I wanted to move beyond these embedded structures, unsettling the prescribed roles within the creative process to observe what new forms of relationality might emerge in their absence. 

In both Beyond Love and Behind Fear, I approached dramaturgy as a dynamic process rather than a fixed function, allowing it to emerge organically from the interplay of social relations rather than being confined to a single individual’s role. This perspective decentralizes dramaturgical authority, distributing agency across performers, participants, and even the evolving conditions of creation itself.

While expertise and specialised knowledge play a significant role, this relational approach reduces the distance that such expertise sometimes implies. By disabling the distance associated with specified knowledge and emphasizing dramaturgy as a relational, shared process, collaboration blurs the distinctions between different roles. It allows us to speculate  that, in such cases, any collaboration could shape dramaturgy, and different collaborators could be considered dramaturgy agents. For instance, in Behind Fear, Mohanad, the security guard, was a source for the dramaturgy through his invaluable input. Likewise, in Beyond Love, engaging the audience early in the creative process enabled them to actively influence the development of the dramaturgy. 

This transdisciplinary approach to dramaturgy not only dismantles the implicit hierarchies, but also repositions dramaturgy as a medium for navigating and negotiating multiple perspectives within artistic creation. Its primary function becomes the facilitation of relationships between different forms of knowledge, creating a space where diverse epistemologies interact and transform one another. I am interested in considering how dramaturgy can serve as a conduit for collaborative meaning-making across disciplines. 

This shifting, interdisciplinary approach to dramaturgy also extends to the ways in which meaning is framed and reframed within performance, shaping not only the material itself but also the audience’s engagement with it. In both performances, I worked with the dramaturgical methodology of frame-shifting which builds upon Erving Goffman's sociological concept of framing as a schema of interpretation. In his seminal work Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Goffman argues that we understand and navigate social situations by applying preexisting cognitive frameworks, or “frames,” to make sense of the world around us. These frames dictate our interpretations, expectations, and behaviors within specific social contexts. 

If we assume that our reality is structured through symbolic frames that construct our experiences and condition our behavior, what happens once we break that frame? I believe that once we break or shift the symbolic frame that regulates our reality, we can rupture our sense of reality itself so that a new one can emerge. Goffman himself addresses the concept of a “breaking frame,” pointing out how the disruption of these “frameworks or schemata of interpretation” often exposes their unspoken rules and underlying assumptions. Therefore, breaking frames makes us aware of the assumed, pre-existing frame.

In my practice, this methodology was employed to expose the constructed mechanisms of fear and love by both exposing their existence and producing situations that induce these affects, so that the audience can both deconstruct and experience them. This enabled the creation of performative setups where the construction processes could be revealed. At the same time, even though the spectator was confronted with the construct, the intention was that he or she nevertheless would still be affected by it. This duality allowed the audience to intellectually grasp the constructed nature of their affects while still experiencing them on a visceral level. The intention was not to undermine the validity of these emotions but rather to spotlight the complex interplay between construction and genuine experience. To what extent is our experience of fear/love in reality already a fiction, and how does that relate to the fictionality of the theater space? Departing from the assumption that our reality is constructed, I further juxtaposed the notion of simulated reality with the simulation and fiction of the theater space. 

As I stage these social choreographies through transposing of different social formats to the theatre space (e.g. format of an auction, life coaching or a speed-dating), it places the audience in a position of co-producers in the experience and meaning of the performance. This participatory set-up allows me to explore how an audience can become a temporary community, on the one hand by addressing them as subjects, and on the other hand by involving them as actors in this constructed reality.  In this sense, the spectator becomes part of the dramaturgy’s body, not an external framing element towards which is mediated, but an intrinsic one. The dramaturgy of these performances, therefore, does not reach towards the audience; rather, the audience is implicated and folded in the dramaturgy and, by extension, the performance itself.

This interweaving of diverse perspectives within the artistic process reflects a broader shift occurring across artistic and academic landscapes. The evolving landscape of knowledge has shifted away from discipline-specific silos toward a more open, interdisciplinary exchange. This interdisciplinarity of positions suggest that a dramaturg need not always come from the field of dramaturgy. For instance, in Beyond Love, I collaborated with Andrew Hardwidge, a performer, choreographer, and anthropologist, as dramaturge. His background in anthropology provided an alternative lens through which to examine the social choreographies of love, technology, and human intimacy, enriching the dramaturgical framework beyond conventional performance methodologies. Similarly, in Behind Fear, the dramaturgy was shaped not solely by artistic perspectives, but through direct engagement with security professionals, criminologists, and therapists, whose insights helped shape the symbolic structures and performative logic of the piece. These collaborations reflect an expanded dramaturgical authorship, where knowledge production is distributed across different fields rather than being centralized within one domain. 

In exploring these shifting dynamics, I became increasingly interested in the ways that creative processes are shaped by implicit social scripts — how choreographers, dramaturgs, performers, and even audiences engage in ways that reinforce assumed functions and hierarchies. I wanted to move beyond these embedded structures, unsettling the prescribed roles within the creative process to observe what new forms of relationality might emerge in their absence. 

In both Beyond Love and Behind Fear, I approached dramaturgy as a dynamic process rather than a fixed function, allowing it to emerge organically from the interplay of social relations rather than being confined to a single individual’s role. This perspective decentralizes dramaturgical authority, distributing agency across performers, participants, and even the evolving conditions of creation itself.

While expertise and specialised knowledge play a significant role, this relational approach reduces the distance that such expertise sometimes implies. By disabling the distance associated with specified knowledge and emphasizing dramaturgy as a relational, shared process, collaboration blurs the distinctions between different roles. It allows us to speculate  that, in such cases, any collaboration could shape dramaturgy, and different collaborators could be considered dramaturgy agents. For instance, in Behind Fear, Mohanad, the security guard, was a source for the dramaturgy through his invaluable input. Likewise, in Beyond Love, engaging the audience early in the creative process enabled them to actively influence the development of the dramaturgy. 

This transdisciplinary approach to dramaturgy not only dismantles the implicit hierarchies, but also repositions dramaturgy as a medium for navigating and negotiating multiple perspectives within artistic creation. Its primary function becomes the facilitation of relationships between different forms of knowledge, creating a space where diverse epistemologies interact and transform one another. I am interested in considering how dramaturgy can serve as a conduit for collaborative meaning-making across disciplines. 

This shifting, interdisciplinary approach to dramaturgy also extends to the ways in which meaning is framed and reframed within performance, shaping not only the material itself but also the audience’s engagement with it. In both performances, I worked with the dramaturgical methodology of frame-shifting which builds upon Erving Goffman's sociological concept of framing as a schema of interpretation. In his seminal work Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Goffman argues that we understand and navigate social situations by applying preexisting cognitive frameworks, or “frames,” to make sense of the world around us. These frames dictate our interpretations, expectations, and behaviors within specific social contexts. 

If we assume that our reality is structured through symbolic frames that construct our experiences and condition our behavior, what happens once we break that frame? I believe that once we break or shift the symbolic frame that regulates our reality, we can rupture our sense of reality itself so that a new one can emerge. Goffman himself addresses the concept of a “breaking frame,” pointing out how the disruption of these “frameworks or schemata of interpretation” often exposes their unspoken rules and underlying assumptions. Therefore, breaking frames makes us aware of the assumed, pre-existing frame.

In my practice, this methodology was employed to expose the constructed mechanisms of fear and love by both exposing their existence and producing situations that induce these affects, so that the audience can both deconstruct and experience them. This enabled the creation of performative setups where the construction processes could be revealed. At the same time, even though the spectator was confronted with the construct, the intention was that he or she nevertheless would still be affected by it. This duality allowed the audience to intellectually grasp the constructed nature of their affects while still experiencing them on a visceral level. The intention was not to undermine the validity of these emotions but rather to spotlight the complex interplay between construction and genuine experience. To what extent is our experience of fear/love in reality already a fiction, and how does that relate to the fictionality of the theater space? Departing from the assumption that our reality is constructed, I further juxtaposed the notion of simulated reality with the simulation and fiction of the theater space. 

As I stage these social choreographies through transposing of different social formats to the theatre space (e.g. format of an auction, life coaching or a speed-dating), it places the audience in a position of co-producers in the experience and meaning of the performance. This participatory set-up allows me to explore how an audience can become a temporary community, on the one hand by addressing them as subjects, and on the other hand by involving them as actors in this constructed reality.  In this sense, the spectator becomes part of the dramaturgy’s body, not an external framing element towards which is mediated, but an intrinsic one. The dramaturgy of these performances, therefore, does not reach towards the audience; rather, the audience is implicated and folded in the dramaturgy and, by extension, the performance itself.