Is dramaturgy care work?: Song Tucker

The first professional offering of dramaturg was to divulge in the role of performance doula by Jaamil Kosoko for the The (chrysalis Archives) Activation #1 which premiered in the 2024 River to River Festival. This was my first time stepping into an official role of engaging in the profound diligence of care for someone else’s work. I was asked to hold the preparatory space of the performance. to be elaborately curious and push out concerns regarding the needs and desires of the work alongside the maker, Jaamil. The intimacy of caring for another person’s creative manifestation, feels, for me, to take seriously the ritual, and expansive capacity of collage. To take seriously the variated ways someone might show up in textures, reflection and refraction, in the decimals of sound, and ways that tense up against legibility. Jaamil and I spoke of what might it mean to engage in the “verb” of the thing, making space for the magic of event happenings in real time. This meant an invitation towards the multifariousness of art making in relation the artist. That called for spiritual grounding. How do we collectively set a foundation in which the otherwise, not yet manifested could emerge — for delight to happen? I took time engaging in a practice of journaling everyday in these spaces in which the activation would happen. I turned my attention below, towards the gold mylar sculpted and ready for Jaamil’s touch, the plaster of bowls of water ready to be applied, the glitter and shoe stains on cement floors. Then my attention widened and met all collaborative eyes in meditation of their contributions towards this project. This practice helped to attune towards the presentness of Jaamil’s activation and lean into the peripheries of the work. We spoke about the edges often. Each time we worked, I found myself splitting open comforts of what I thought the landscape of the work was. It was the particularities, the edges, that enlivened all foundational efforts, to make space for aliveness. 

Through close proximity to birth doula work through familial relation, what feels pivotal, is the prioritizing and making sacred the idea of preparation for life to come forward. I thought about the importance of listening as a profound responsibility to holding space. In the sense of dramaturgy, listening, an attunement to the hypersensitivities of being with creative work, might be the most dutiful activity one can find themselves engaged in. So I listened. I listened to Jaamil's breath capacities in relation to stillness and movement, learning when they might be comfortable, rested, and/or pushing bounds of what they might be physiologically and meditatively imagining for the work. I found myself listening to flesh on inanimate material, and receiving how body and material responded in real time.I listened to welcome all fierce potentialities of being in the “verb” of the thing. It is this kind of vigilance of paying attention that feels most vital to my role as dramaturg.