Editor's Letter

I fell backwards into dramaturgy. I was an intern for Young Jean Lee on Lear, though she gave me the title “Assistant Director” — a rather meaningful act of care. Through Lear I met choreographer Dean Moss. It was a time in downtown NY theater when every play had a dance break. I worked with Dean to help the actors to realize a minor dance in Lee’s otherwise epic adaptation of Shakespeare’s story of losing your/the father. From there Dean began inviting me into his rehearsals as a dramaturg. Simultaneously, I wrote an essay on Neil Greenberg, Jeremy Wade, and Jack Ferver while at Performance Studies (NYU) starting my PhD. Jack and I became friends and, knowing that I was interested in getting back on stage, he told me Ishmael Houston-Jones was preparing for a revival of Them. I signed up to audition and told my advisor, José Muñoz, who, much to my surprise, offered disapprovingly responded that  research, not rehearsals, would have to be my priority as a PhD candidate. I withdrew from the audition and took Jack up on his invitation to be his dramaturg on Rumble Ghost. 

That was almost fifteen years ago and since then, I have fallen in with dance dramaturgy, and with the philosophical questions dance dramaturgy asks one to consider: How close can one get to an artistic process without being one it’s agents? Who is the work’s author and what does authorship mean? How does one navigate the intimacy of collaboration and what does it teach us about power and control? Am I part of the work or apart from it knowing that, as the dramaturg, I will always have arrived late and left early from the process? In short, no matter what the credits say, what whatever work I’ve done will remain invisible. Dancing at this threshold is the closest thing I have to an artistic practice—not because it takes creativity, but because it requires me to constantly face the unknown.

Theories of dance dramaturgy can be found in a growing body of literature on the field (see our incomplete reading list in this issue).  But for Issue #61 of the Movement Research Performance Journal the editors decided stay in the not-knowing by inviting contributions from those whose work touches on dance dramaturgy with curiosity, anxiety, anarchy, as well as a conviction for the intimacy it requires and a resistance to its history of institutional/state authority. At the heart of the issue is a special section by Contributing Editor Ligia Lewis. Across Lewis’ works there are not only a range of dramaturgs, but the role of dramaturgy shifts and morphs in relationship to the differing works and over time.  The reinvention of the dramaturg that Lewis’ work articulates is something that has proliferate throughout the field of contemporary dance. The rest of the issue includes a range of texts, some from practicing dramaturgs, others from to those who have reluctantly accepted this title, and still more who reject the role outright — all exploring a simple question: why has there been an explosion of interest in, perhaps even desire for, dramaturgs in contemporary dance? The explosion I’m thinking of is not about a growing professionalization of dance dramaturgy (though that is certainly happening…). I mean simply that more dance and performance artists are including dramaturgs as part of their process, and at the same time seem to be continually reinventing what the dramaturg is meant to do. What can we make of the desire for the dramaturg as well as the desire to continually reinvent this figure and its function? 

Issue #61 doesn’t answer these questions, but it does find concert with questions I hear echoing across the field, one that I think express a certain urgent need to invent new ways of working together. This urgency without resolve is partly what fueled a series of gatherings André Lepecki and I have hosted, called “Dramaturgy Support Group.” By way of concluding, I offer below a short excerpt from one of these meetings.

—Joshua Lubin-Levy

Excerpt from “Dramaturgy Support Group, Part 2,” a Movement Research Studies Project, MR 9th Street Studio, January 17, 2024

André Lepecki: Welcome. First of all, thank you for being here in such a cold night. This is the second event we're calling the “Dramaturgy Support Group.” It's very informal, more of a discussion. But I can start by saying I can only talk about dance dramaturgy. I cannot talk about any other forms of dramaturgy, especially the German version of it. But the idea for these meetings — Eiko Otake did this beautiful event in Colorado and we were both there, and we started talking about dramaturgy. I know Josh dramaturgs a lot. And so, it's just gossiping about what is the task or the labor of the dramaturg, which is always this strange figure that is not really the author. It's definitely not the interpreter. It kind of hovers somewhere. It's kind of needed, but no one knows why. So it’s a strange figure.

Josh Lubin-Levy: A strange figure or role we’ve both spent time inhabiting. I think about my history of dance dramaturgy and the work I’ve done with dancers and choreographers in the practice of realizing their work, not my work, as directly connected to this place we’re gathered in, Movement Research, and my work at this organization running the Movement Research Performance Journal [MRPJ]. The MRPJ is not a journal of dance criticism. It, too, is a tool for artists to work out what it is they are trying to do. So, in a way, it’s a dramaturgical space, or a way of dramaturging.

AL: So the idea for tonight is really to spill over to ask questions and in the spirit of a support group to try to figure out, maybe, not what is dramaturgy, but how does one dramaturg? Is that a verb? I don't know, a dramaturg does dramaturgy, right? And is there a common language, a shared experience we can begin articulating together. I’m of a different generation, different country and continent, and actually different tradition. I grew up in Portugal, but encountered the same kind of stumbling into dramaturgy, stumbling to this practice. I don't know how to dance, but I had friends who invited me to be in the studio and, all of a sudden, asked me to start giving my opinion. And you think, "What about this?" and as you talk, that becomes a kind of knowledge and the kind of figure that is quite interesting because it's a knowledge of how I see it, but it doesn't mean that's how it is. It's not tautological. But my experience has also been that every time you start a project anew, even if it is with the same choreographer, whatever method you developed previously that kind of worked, you have to figure out another strategy for that particular project. I don't know if you have the same... 

JLL: Exactly.

AL: So it's quite interesting because it doesn't produce a canon, it doesn't produce a set of rules one can follow or even teach, but it does produce a kind of accumulated experience that you can deploy according to different dynamics. When you said the MRPJ isn’t criticism but rather artists producing their own discourse, it seems to me that dramaturgy is an artist-produced mode of knowing, and knowing how to make the work happen.

To read the full transcript visit mrpj.org