Parasite, Trickster, Servant: Dramaturgy as Disappearance

Making anything, but especially making dance, often feels like an act of supreme will, executed on many different scales. One has to hold the vision of the work and coax it into being, an experience that can often veer wildly and unexpectedly between radiant, life-affirming joy and soul-shaking despair and confusion. One also has to hold the practical space for this vision to emerge into: finding rehearsal space, scheduling dancers, raising money to pay them, hustling to convince presenters the work has value and should find a home in their institution. 

The way this work was often explained to me when I was younger was deeply connected to specificity and individuality. As an artist, you were supposed to identify your unique thing, come up with pithy yet intriguing language to describe that thing, apply for grants and residencies to get support to make the thing, and then publicly present the work to prove the uniqueness of your thing, repeating this cycle ad infinitum. The more specific and individual you got, the better opportunities you’d get, which would confirm the unique value of your vision. This cycle would repeat. 

There’s an ethic embedded in this arc, a commodity-driven mindset that collapses the value of one’s work with the strength of one’s individual vision. The more singular the work, the more value it accrues. The more visionary the artist, the more value they can command. The artist uses strength and power to cut through the material hurdles of producing live work in a world hellbent on extracting capital, emerging as a heroine who has maneuvered through overlapping precarities to present us with her vision in the form of a dance. 

There’s power in this conception of an artist’s work, certainly. Many of my favorite choreographers do seem to be visionaries, bringing into the world constructions of space, bodies, and time that I’ve never seen before. I think of Juliana May’s dense tangles of text and movement, perhaps the closest thing I’ve seen to a poem onstage. I think of the fierce, cool intelligence of Ralph Lemon’s work, how it slides between forms in search of meaning. I think of Beth Gill’s oneiric landscapes, fluttering between theatricality and abstraction. I think of the ordered chaos of Sarah Michelson, the mysterious worldbuilding of Walter Dundervill, the unflinching presence of Okwui Okpokwasili. 

I’ve experienced moments that feel like vision when making my own work, the holy intoxication of an idea presenting itself and clamoring to be made real. There’s pleasure in attempting the heroic, perhaps Sisyphean task of making something only I could make, collapsing the vast sea of the possible into the perfectly specific. 

But there are times, I confess, when I find this exhausting. If making dance often feels like bending the world to your will, I sometimes crave something that feels like an opposing vector. I want to disappear, become like smoke, or rain, something diffuse but undeniably present. Rather than struggling to make systems and people and circumstances serve my vision, I want to offer my skills, my perspective, my thinking in service to someone or something else. Rather than the power of a heroic actor hewing their vision out of possibility, I want a different kind of power, the power of wind, or the tide, or the mirror. 

Dramaturgy, at least the way I’ve come to practice it, offers a way of accessing this kind of power. In releasing myself from the need to be a visionary, I blur my edges and enter into a collaborator’s process. Sometimes this entry is stealthy, parasitic even, trying to inhabit and replicate their style as closely as possible so that I might help push the work forward. Sometimes my presence is more mischievous, a trickster, using my knowledge of an artist’s style to offer challenges that might reveal new frontiers to explore. And sometimes, I think of myself as a servant, not just to the artist making the piece, but to the piece itself, doing whatever I can to ensure it enters the world as precisely itself as possible. But, no matter the strategy I’m using, each is an attempt to practice a different relationship between ego, individuality, and outcome in performance, an invitation to myself to access other modes of being and making meaning in relationship to dance.

PARASITE   

You’re trying to get inside the way a choreographer’s mind works, to understand their process so finely that the difference between the two of you shrinks to almost nothing. The more you can disappear into this understanding, the easier it is to offer ideas that make sense, that are compelling, that might be useful. But inevitably, these offerings are filtered through your own habits of thought, meaning that this proximity makes the boundary between roles interestingly porous. By disappearing, as much as possible, into an understanding of your collaborator’s style, you gain the ability to influence the work as it comes into being.

I first come to understand this kind of influence in 2014. I am working with Eiko Otake in the Philadelphia 30th Street train station, a building that is all sand-colored stone and soaring ceilings. At its center stands one of those classic train info boards that, when updating its display, rapidly cycles through a rolodex of options before stopping on the correct one. It sounds like a flock of birds taking off but on fast-forward, or many different small machines jockeying to get in place before the start of a race. Eiko and I are sitting on a bench nearby, observing the room, the people in it, and the way this room makes these people behave. 

We are thinking about her first solo performance, A Body in a Station. How it might look, how it might be structured, how it might function in this specific place. We sit for a while, listening to the smear of voices punctuated by the announcer directing passengers to the next departing train. At some point, I suggest something she could do, and she says, “Can I see? You be me. Show me.” 

I understand what she means. I’ve been working with her and Koma for several years at this point, and it’s not an uncommon occurrence for me to stand in for one of them onstage so they can step out and look at lighting. I get up and move into the space of the station, trying to demonstrate the idea I’ve just been offering, about how Eiko might, rather than the singular presence she usually becomes onstage, become one of many, a body that, though different, is essentially the same as the ones waiting for their train. 

As I demonstrate this, in effect standing in for Eiko, I have a powerful embodied sensation. I become multiple. My body is my own, but also, it is hers. My fingers are hers, stretching out into space with her particular combination of hesitation and resolve, but also, they are mine. My feet are hers, floating above the ground like a cloud rolling over itself as it moves forward over a landscape, but also, they are mine. And strangest of all, my face, my gaze, is hers, but mine too, like I am wearing a mask of her face and looking out through it. This is the moment I realize I understand her style and habits of performance enough to wear them temporarily. Like a costume, maybe, or a like a skin. 

Looking back, I remember feeling a jolt of a strange kind of power, one built out of dissolution of the self. Taking on my collaborator’s style and thinking from inside it, I both disappeared and gained the ability to influence what the piece might become. This is one way I think about the practice of dramaturgy: trying to become another instance of the thinking mind or moving body that is generating the work, one that is the same but is not, because it is also me. I think about the perspective shift when you look through one eye and then the other in sequence: things move slightly between the left eye and the right, and in integrating that slight shift into one view, the brain is able to perceive depth.

TRICKSTER

Sometimes style or habit can be a trap. The things that have worked for an artist in the past aren’t working this time. They don’t know what they’re after, or maybe they’ve made a bunch of material, and, after putting it all together, they realize that some animating spark has yet to arrive. This is where I think of being a trickster, of using my knowledge about a collaborator’s history and style to disrupt their habits of making and thinking.

Style is a time-bound thing. This is why, when I begin working with someone, I ask them to send me as much of their work as they have, even the early stuff, even the stuff they think is bad. Then I watch it in chronological order, which is like watching a time-lapse video of their sensibility as it develops. I see an artist’s fascinations in protean form, see them being discovered, refined, worked through, worked over. The way I practice it, dramaturgy is not just about responding to and helping shape what is emerging in the current room only. It is about responding to what has emerged in past rooms, and what might emerge in future ones. It is about sensing an artist’s trajectory through time in order to help them answer the question: what am I doing now?

Sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they think they do, but the vantage point of the dramaturg provides a perspective that allows you to say: the thing you’re working on might be different than you think. There’s a subtle kind of power that can charge these interactions, a power that comes from saying I see you. You’re using the advantage of being outside the work to offer possibilities for what might happen inside it. 

Sometimes that might not matter. The artist might not be ready to see, or to acknowledge. They might have to bang their head against this particular wall for another week, another month, another process or two. There emerges a tension, then, between respect for the artist and their self-knowledge, their self-determination, and the desire to make them see a path forward that might be clear to you but not to them. And this is where the spirit of the trickster is a useful guide. 

I like to offer what I call provocations. What if you did this section, but inverted? What is the version of this material in which the motor is entirely different? What if everything was 50% faster and 50% less dense? What if you were oriented in another direction, not right or left but up or down? These provocations often end up being abstract, poetic, and in that sense function like a riddle. But crucially, these riddles have no answer. They are not meant to be solved, but to break something open,to make the work strange to its maker.

As an example, in the summer of 2022 I worked with Alex Tatarsky on their piece Dirt Trip, which had its NYC premiere at MoMA PS1. I first saw the piece in an early version that spring in Philadelphia, and when Alex invited me into the room as a dramaturgical eye, one of the first things we honed in on was the piece’s structure. They talked about taking inspiration from the patchwork coat worn by Harlequin, a stock character in the commedia dell’Arte, and how they wanted the piece to feel like a collection of fragments, a formal reflection of its subject matter, which was compost, decay, and regeneration. They wanted the piece to feel scrappy, made up of cast-off bits, but were having difficulty finding how they held together. 

I offered a provocation: think of a coat. A beautifully tailored coat is a marvel of design, a feat of structural engineering. What if the best way to reveal the patchwork quality of the piece is to put these pieces inside a much more rigid structure? Might the contrast between this rigid structure and the scrappy quality of the material make the texture of the material more tangible? Working with this idea of revealing the patchwork by focusing on the unifying structure, a useful understanding began to emerge, a point of clarity the rest of the piece could organize itself around. By inviting the artist to consider an impulse that contradicted their own, a new pathway emerged.

Working in this way can sometimes feel like friendly taunting, lightly oppositional. Using my knowledge of an artist’s previous work, I can zoom out from the present moment and offer challenges designed to push against habit and routine. Entering into a different kind of temporality allows me to look beyond the current moment in the room, using an artist’s past to expand the possibilities available to them in the present. Inevitably, these provocations are not totally neutral. They’re filtered through my own habits, tastes, and desires. By bringing my own sensibility into relationship with not only the present moment in the room but also the artist’s past, I exert a kind of power. 

But this power is tricky, diffuse. You can’t get attached to it, or can’t get attached to the response it gets. It’s a conditional power, a subjunctive one. It is a kind of power that is sometimes no power at all. But sometimes, by releasing any investment in the outcome of your questions and provocations, you gain a kind of influence that’s hard to describe. 

SERVANT

Sometimes I don’t want influence. I don’t want power. In fact, I desire a sort of non-power, a state of detachment from any desire for a work to do something specific. There’s a lovely lightness I often feel when working as a dramaturg, a freedom from the weight of responsibility for making the decisions that will collapse the vast field of the possible into the specific. But I want to aid someone else as they attempt this alchemy. I want to ask questions, pose challenges, use language to outline what I see in the room, and then I want to walk away. I sometimes think of dramaturgy as a series of offerings, leaving little tokens of respect and devotion at an altar. When this lens clicks into place, I feel my own ego dim, disappearing into service. Sometimes this service is oriented towards the artist I’m working with, but sometimes it’s not about them as much as the thing they’re making.

In my twenties, I was part of a collaborative theater company. As we made work after work, I began to understand something about ego that still guides my artistic practice: when making something with other people in a collaborative framework, no one’s idea is more important than the piece existing. That is to say, everyone must agree to sacrifice a little bit of ego in service of the work entering the world. 

I think of dramaturgy as taking this philosophy one step further. It offers a chance to practice an almost total release of desire for any specific outcome. I find myself asking questions like what does the artist want but just as often, I’m asking what does the piece want? I’m trying to understand the thing coming into being and make its birth as smooth and joyful as possible for the people attending to it. 

There’s something important to parse here, I think. Sometimes, what I think the artist wants and what the piece wants are two different things. I confess I love these moments, because they create a clear sense of something beyond or outside of me and the choreographer I’m working with. They invite me to attempt to enter a state of awareness that is both transcendently in the moment and also a kind of self-negation. I’m listening to the room, the echoes of an artist’s past work, their stated desires, and my own habits. Out of this cacophony, I’m trying to hear a melody that feels both familiar and new. In this way I find it akin to the flow state I’m sometimes lucky enough to slide into when performing. A sense that I am not doing something as much as tending to something that already exists. This is the thing I love most, perhaps, about practicing dramaturgy: this release of ego in service of something larger.

I love dance for the way it can blur: a string of minutes into a single smooth thing, an empty space into something dense and charged with meaning, a series of individual bodies into something larger, many-limbed, more collective. If I think of my favorite dance experiences, the ones that have reordered my thinking as a mind inside a body, whether that’s as a performer, a maker, or a watcher, I can see a common thread that emerges. All of them have an element of shifting the scale of my awareness so that my ego becomes smaller. I’m not arguing, of course, for a totally selfless way of working on everyone’s part. Some of my favorite artists seem driven by something deep and mysterious, an unquenchable need to be seen and known. But I find it a relief, often, to experience moments where that need, very present in me, fades to a background hum, allowing some other music is heard. What is that music? A kind of collectivity? A brief glimpse of what it might mean to live in service of other people, of community, of beauty?

Entering into a different kind of relationship to making, one filtered through and contained by another artist’s work, I paradoxically access a kind of creative power that feels restorative, expansive and uniquely generative. I often say that dramaturgy is the practice of disattaching completely from outcomes. It is an invitation to look and listen closely, to pay attention to the conditions shaping a piece’s creation, and to offer things that might be useful aids to its emergence. Severing the connection between proposed idea and execution, the role of dramaturg can feel like an endless stream of intuitive connection, a kind of dancing with dance itself, my attention jumping from moment to moment, always responding to the possibility and potential flowing through the room and the people in it. 

This feels, for me, like a necessary counterbalance to the titanic act of will required to bring a dance into the world. Instead of making time, space, and bodies bend to my desires, I’m the one bending, blending myself out, becoming a single stone that might have a small effect on the riverine flow of dance as a field. It’s my way of humbly making a small offering to the dancers, the choreographers, the rooms, and the history that have reordered my thinking about what is possible, about how bodies can be.