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I’m embarrassed at how late I came to dramaturgy as a discourse given that I’ve technically been working as choreographer Will Rawls’ dramaturg for over five years—but I’ve mostly understood my role as “helping Will out with his show.” My delayed introduction to dramaturgy discourse is due, in part, to the many delays we faced in devising [siccer], which made working on the project feel more like a fluid collaboration and less like I had a defined, titled role within a larger production. Our work, initially planned for six months, stretched to nearly five years due to emergency construction at The Kitchen, our commissioning institution, and then by the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of our early work took place through texts and phone calls, simultaneously typing in Google Docs, and occasional weekend-long residencies. We were technically sketching out theories, ideas, references, and concepts of a show but we were really working to keep an idea of an idea alive until movement-based work could take shape. When we were eventually able to program residencies and rehearsals with [siccer]’s five performers, the work felt loose and hypothetical; movements and ideas that we thought were established or locked in would be forgotten, nixed and/or reconstituted and reconfigured, becoming altogether new in the many, many, months it would take to see one another again. 

 It felt very much like a surprise when, years into the process, we began public showings with Q&As and I had to be very public and to address my work as the dramaturg, asked to articulate rather intuitive, collaborative work within a field — my title carrying with it centuries of formal, institutionalized history, especially in Europe. Within that context, I am a very bad dramaturg. I cannot situate myself within the conversations, practices, genealogies, theories, or methodologies that are distinct to dramaturgy. I do however work in Black queer dance and performance studies, where direct and indirect exchanges between artists and academics greatly determine our creative, intellectual outputs. Working as Will’s dramaturg has helped me reflect upon the ties that bind artists and academics working in similar fields. The major and minor texts, passages, figures, genres, and gestures shaping our work are increasingly known and understood among us; shared knowledge that is directly and indirectly circulated as artists may create work with the expectation that academics can or will write about it, and as academics produce scholarship that shapes how artists think and create.

The Dramaturgy Part

At the risk of being very casual, but with the goal of cutting to the chase, the technical practice of dramaturgy is not all that complicated: it requires the same practices of watchfulness, balance, concession, inspiration, and organization found in other creative-administrative positions in the arts and the academy. This is not to say the work is not creatively or intellectually difficult. I help Will, but also the performers and the production team, establish the theories and practices of [siccer], to help folks think, process, and move before, during, and after residencies, rehearsals, and performances. This has looked various ways over the course of the years, from me running semi-structured reading groups around key texts, to observing movement workshops, to debriefing after and planning for upcoming rehearsals. In formal and informal settings, we bounce ideas off one another, watch things together, read together, and of course talk endlessly. There are many different descriptions of, and relationships to, the labor of dramaturgy, and different theories and ethics of the place of the dramaturg within a production (e.g. as archivist, as researcher, the objective all-seeing eye, embedded co-conspirator). I ultimately consider my role as helping to craft and thread the “common sense” of the show: the theories and themes that bind the show together, that shape decision-making on and off-stage, and which bind and underscore the interpersonal relationships of the production. This common sense is made up of everything that comes from being together for an extended period, including feelings and thoughts and jokes and movement repertoires. Common sense surfaces in the feelings, gestures, and ideas that become learned, practiced, and repeated amongst the production, shaping interpersonal relations and undoubtedly seeping into — and at times explicitly choreographed into — the stage production. 

Common sense was also a key concept of [siccer], a performance that asks, in part, how shared expectations for Black performance emerge and seemingly become commonsensical. We thought a lot with Kara Keeling, who describes common sense as a collective set of memory-images that condition who, what, and how we see, feel, and act. Will and I were especially interested in how Keeling describes common sense as framed by genre conventions, which help people anticipate and understand relationships between bodies, settings, actions, plots, and the like. The repetition of genre conventions produces these relationships as natural, commonsensical. Genre can, however, become a trap: when a Black person appears in a horror film, they will be the first to die; when a Black person appears in public space, the police will shoot them; when a Black person appears on the performing arts stage, they will dance. 

[siccer] is an attempt to parse out the genre conventions circumscribing Black performance on stage, on screen, and in everyday life. We watched and discussed the conventions of murder mysteries like How to Get Away with Murder, heist films like Set It Off, and adventures like The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz. We examined the genre conventions of popular and independent music — ranging from Drake to the experimental work of performers Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, who provide [siccer]’s live score — and how they shape performers’ own relationships to the genres of movement emergent in social dance spaces and traditional dance studios alike. The reflections and experiences of the aforementioned performers, and of keyon gaskin, Katrina Reid, and Jess Pretty, are incorporated into the structured improvisations that form the basis of Will’s choreographic practice. 

We began incorporating the tools of film production, including musical scoring, to physically and sonically break down the conceptual and technical elements of capture found across these genre conventions. [siccer]’s stage, designed by Maggie Heath, is comprised of a green screen floor and green screen curtains that, in a traditional film shoot, would be replaced in post-production. A DSLR camera downstage left clicks every 2 seconds as performers engage with the tools of a film set, including LED light panels, ladders, and props that suggest a swamp setting. The performers’ engagements with the stage and the materials are done according to spatial rules of what the camera can and cannot see/capture. Should performers be in the sight line of the camera, demarcated by the green screen floor, they move only in the interval between shutter clicks, effectively moving in live, stop-motion. Free-flowing movement is allowed when performers are beyond the camera’s sightline. Exceptions to these rules play out over the course of the performance as the shutter intervals change and as the performers take varying levels of control over the relationships between sight, movement, and capture. 

By heightening the awareness of the spatiality of the camera, the mechanism of capture, [siccer] experiments the possibilities of undoing genre. For Keeling, the appearance of new, unexpected, and/or unimaginable images of Black people might literally force our sensory-motor apparatus to operate a higher level; the process of somatically reorganizing our common senses (who and what becomes legible when) may allow for new imaginaries about who, what, where, when, and how Black people exist. [siccer] experiments with the highly technical reorganization of the relationships between sound, movement, and capture to consider the possibilities of such newness. 

A Friend to the Problem

 [siccer] is hard to describe and kind of hard to watch, which I say with high praise. It is challenging in part because the work is so rooted in a theory of (Black) common sense and in the common sense of the production, both of which can be impenetrable to viewers, especially those who, like most, arrive at the show with their own commonsense frameworks for being audience to Black performance. The genre conventions shaping Blackness as a grim totality prime viewers — especially US Americans — to expect either joy or trauma (and/or that trauma will eventually overcome joy). These audiences are sometimes less familiar with experimentation, with experimenting with the forms and functions of race and Blackness, and with Black experimentation in general—which I don’t say as a slight but as an assessment of the ways that the history of racist relations in this country overdetermine our narrative expectations. In [siccer] the performers spend lots of time in visual, sonic, and linguistic disfamiliarity, de-forming otherwise legible reference points, be they particular gestures (twerking), plot lines (such as Dorothy looking for Toto), spaces (the comedy club, the disco). [siccer] rarely, if ever, resolves into clearly familiar terrain. 

This question of resolution, of fidelity to a known quantity, remains a productive dramaturgical problem within [siccer] and between Will and me. Part of my dramaturgical superpower is that, while I believe in performance — so much so that I got my PhD in Performance Studies — I actually don’t like watching it. I have way too much secondhand embarrassment to watch people be vulnerable in public, and I specifically struggle with durational performance, which happens to be Will’s bread and butter. I love efficiency too much. I love making cuts. I love moving on. I want things to be easy and I want them to be over. I have thus implicitly and explicitly operated as the worst possible audience member for [siccer], the one who doesn’t get it, the one who is a hater, the one who can’t sit still, the one who wants dance and not performance. This is a perhaps different approach to the craft than we find in dramaturgy discourse, which has generatively discussed the ethics of the triangulations between the dramaturg, the choreographer, the performers, and the audience. When it comes down to it, part of our job is to keep the audience in mind. This isn’t to say “help produce a show that caters to the audience,” but to remind everyone that we are fundamentally putting on a show. Putting on a show is indeed what [siccer] is all about: the minute Black people step on stage, or even step into view, some kind of show is expected. Will has always wanted to use experimentation as the tool for undoing this timeline of visibility (I see you), legibility (I know what’s happening), and expectation (I know how this story goes). His method is pushing words, gestures, and musical phrases to their limits, and doing so with an absurdist flair. I have always held the line that there has to be enough for people to hold onto for our experimentations with common sense, with genre, to become legible. Cut the Styrofoam frog, Will.

It's good to have an antagonist (me) in the room. Bojana Cvejić is perhaps more nuanced and generative in suggesting that the “dramaturg is the friend of a problem. Or more precisely, she is the choreographer's closest friend in producing a problem, a friend in advocating an experiment, and an enemy of complacency. … The kind of friendship I’m invoking here begins with ignorance…about the work being made” (“The Ignorant Dramaturg,” 2010). The relationship between the dramaturg and choreographer must be rooted in a shared interest in working together, but there has to be a strain of unknowing that drives our inquiries. This is the precise challenge within the academic-arts industrial complex in the US, where broad-based consensus on the definitions, expressions, and status of Blackness drives much of our intellectual-cultural productions. Academics and artists look to the same people and institutions, follow the same artists and academics, read the same books and engage with the same select passages. We all too often create work for one another and with one another in mind, implicitly and explicitly with the goal of direct response: that our words and our performances will be entwined on the page and in the artwork. This is often beautiful, intellectual and creative friendship. It just as often preaching to the choir. 

I am interested in how Cvejić routes the definition of “friend” through Giorgio Agamben, who writes “[t]o recognize someone as a friend means not being able to recognize him as something.” This question of recognition is important to my larger question about what the position of dramaturg can show us about relationships between artists and academics in knowledge systems that reward mirroring. Artists and academics need to push each other, not repeat what we already know to, about and for one another. There should be a mutually generative relationship between the stage and the page, the academy and the arts. We should be friends of the problem, egging one another on in ignorance, and ultimately refusing complacency, which, in my fields, is often expressed as agreement/consensus and results in the same ideas being published and performed over and over again. Will and I constantly negotiated the fine line between making [siccer] accessible to general audiences and pushing it into experimental terrain, which was at its core an effort to ensure [siccer] is not just a reflection of established ideas but an active inquiry into new ways of thinking — in this case, about Blackness, genre, and performance.

Stepping into the role of dramaturg has felt like a constant pressure point where I have had to reckon with my own desires for intellectual and methodological ease. It is a humbling experience to work as a dramaturg because the practice requires a kind of unavoidably public thinking: people will see this show and have visible, visceral responses in real-time, which is not always the case when one puts out an academic book or essay. And while we may break down concepts for students in our teaching, we don’t often get the opportunity to put pressure on the terms we use so that someone else can figure them into an entirely different language, such as movement. Being Will’s dramaturg has made me reflect on the terms that have become common sense in Black, queer, and Black queer performance studies and the art worlds we intersect with — especially terms like joy, liberation, and healing. These terms are often configured as both the method and the outcome of Black dance and performance (studies). We actively avoided these terms in developing [siccer], in part because we wanted to interrogate how these terms have become common sense in the fields we work in. Working dramaturgically has helped me think more methodically about what their component gestures are, how we trace and arrive at them, how we historicize them as chains of movement, and the intervals in which they stop and start. 

The way the dramaturg has to move across scales in performance contexts can produce ever better writing about the terms and conditions of Black performance and, with it, Black life, in more traditionally academic spaces.The partnership between choreographer and dramaturg, rooted in both shared commitment and productive tension, underscores the importance of not merely mirroring academic thought on stage, but pushing the boundaries of what Black performance and its dramaturgies can do. Disagreement and challenge are vital to this project. Cut the frog, Will.