What comes after dramaturgy?: Interview between Line Spellenberg and Joshua Wicke

Line Spellenberg: Can we talk a bit about the historical and structural context of dramaturgy we’re speaking from? Placements please!

Joshua Wicke: I think it’s important to mention that I am speaking from the experience of working within two different systems. One is the independent production system or scene. The other is the city and state theater system, which dates back to the 19th century and is tied to the concept of aesthetic education, as formulated by Schiller. This concept essentially expanded on Kant’s ideas on aesthetics from the Enlightenment, put them into practice, and also institutionalized them. I believe this forms the foundation of German dramaturgy. It was a role focused on deciding which canon and aesthetics were useful for educating the civic subjects of the emerging nation-state. Until Brecht, dramaturgy used to be a bit of a think tank of the theater, in between curatorial practice, aesthetic theory and managerial tasks. 

Brecht was the one who integrated dramaturgy into the production process, drawing from a Marxist line of thought. He believed that the separation between the artistic direction or curator and the hands-on production should be minimized. Those lines of thought reoccur in later state socialist cultural doctrines, such as in the GDR, where workers would be encouraged to write and writers to get engaged in production to connect more closely with the actual material conditions of work in the arts.

When speaking about German dramaturgy, you also have to address National Socialism. The municipal theater, as the institution exists today, with its ultra-hierarchical structure, has roots in Nazi times. The focus on a charismatic artistic director, with dramaturgs functioning as political cadres serving the fascist state, and the other divisions (such as the technical and administrative departments) organized in a pyramid-like structure — this dates back to that era. 

There have been various waves of reform of the institutional organization of these municipal theaters, the latest started maybe ten years ago. For instance, the attempted reform of Schauspielhaus Zürich, where I was working as a dramaturg, is part of that lineage. It has been trying to open up from being an institution that has traditionally been very focused on text-based theater, and where the technical and administrative structures were designed for that particular aesthetic. As soon as you start introducing other aesthetics, a lot of questions arise. Paradoxically, it is precisely in those moments of reform where dramaturgical power is increased.

The other model in Germany, with which you are also familiar, is the independent production scene. International Production Houses, which have their own specific structures, facilitate performances that have their own production structure, financial funding, and co-production arrangements. These houses usually don’t have extensive workshops or resources for stage design, for example. All this is managed by the productions themselves, so they are more autonomous. In this context, there is a clear division between production dramaturgy, which is embedded in the production process, and a dramaturgy that is linked to the institution and has more curatorial responsibilities.

While there has been an increased interest in thinking about dramaturgy in the last years, the institutional position has been under-considered, whether in the independent sector or state theaters, if you ask me. 

CS: I can just add a bit more to what you’ve already said regarding the so-called independent sector [Freie Szene], where I have been working for more than ten years in different positions and contexts. In this sector, commissioned work is relatively rare, and much of the work is self-produced by the artists. On the positive side, this allows for a highly autonomous production process. However, the downside is that artists bear the full financial responsibility and face intense administrative demands. 

There are dramaturgs employed by the international production houses, venues, or festivals that form the institutional landscape of the independent scene. These “institutional dramaturgs” have increasingly shifted their job titles in recent years, sometimes referring to themselves as curators or programmers. I think this reflects the fact that their roles rarely involve being embedded in the artistic process; instead, they focus more on shaping the program.

Based on my experience as a dramaturg / curator at an institution within the independent scene, I would say that the most intense phases of collaboration with the artists are around administrative demands. This typically involves implementing the artistic work into the early planning systems of the institution, following technical or safety regulations, or participating in outreach and marketing strategies. All of these factors require a certain degree of standardization, which impose constraints on the artistic process.

In my experience, the primary challenge for an institutional dramaturg is navigating these standardizations and regulations while safeguarding artistic freedom. It’s a constant act of translation between the worlds of artistic creation and administrative requirements.

Since you have also worked a lot as a production dramaturg, could you elaborate on where that work lies in relation to the institutional dramaturg?

JW: It depends very much on who hires you. Working as a production dramaturg at a municipal theater is very different from working as a production dramaturg for an independent production. In general, it’s a highly relational practice. Every artistic practice, every artist, and every production requires a different dramaturgical approach. I think this is what Bojana Kunst describes in her essay on dramaturgy, “The Economy of Proximity,” as a virtuous practice, in the sense of Paolo Virno, which renders the dramaturg a prototypical neoliberal subject whose practice is capable of adapting to many different languages and codes. Given the genealogy of dramaturgy as a mediator between the nation-state and artistic practice, it can be suspected that this access can also be used to deliver a (institutional or state) policy, or to capture fugitive aspects of artistic practice, this figure shares features with the consultant that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe. 

What I find crucial is that while there has been a lot of discourse on the independent scene, particularly around an essay by Bojana Cvejić titled, “The Ignorant Dramaturg,” which discusses dramaturgy as a means of co-creating problems rather than solving them, this perspective feels increasingly enticing in the context of state theaters and the production houses of the independent scene in times of austerity. Most dramaturgs in these theaters do the opposite; as you described mentioned, they mediate a wide range of artistic aesthetics and practices and are expected to take over responsibilities in marketing, admin, and production. They are invited by the theaters because those institutions need someone who understands the artistic work and can translate them into institutional terms.

Because it fuses managerial control, curatorial influence, and direct access to artistic production, the dramaturg occupies a position marked by an excessive consolidation of power. While this role is oftentimes euphemized as "neutral" mediator, equally obligated to artistic production and institution, already getting paid by the institution creates dependencies.  Essentially you become a problem solver for them. Historically, you could argue that dramaturgy has always had an aspect of policing.

CS: I guess that’s true. On one hand, you can call it enclosure, containment, or even policing. On the other, there’s the role of translating and mediation. I imagine your job at the Schauspielhaus Zürich embodied both, especially since it was a city theater undergoing a reform movement, as you described earlier. For this, they needed translators and mediators between the logistics and languages of the systems.

JW: I think the question of where the normative moment in dramaturgical practice lies is always present. I previously worked as a dramaturg at a state theater that was very conservative and focused on classical theater. What struck me were the numerous assumptions — sociological, demographic assumptions — about the audience, target groups, and even about the artists. It felt like there was always a biopolitical speculation at play, particularly in terms of compartmentalizing audiences. So, the role of a dramaturg at such an institution is closely linked to normative biopolitical thinking.

CS: Because you assume a certain gaze, mobility, experience, education, etc., for each audience.

JW: Yes, exactly. Each audience would be expected to experience this piece in a specific way. This is fundamentally tied to the idea or history of education that I mentioned at the beginning; specifically, the education of a “good civic subject” in a nation-state-to-come during the 19th century. David Lloyd's thinking about the "Racial Regime of Aesthetics" is instructive here to understand the intertwining systems of aesthetic discourse, emerging nation-state and racism in the 19th century. I believe institutional dramaturgy in that lineage is always linked to policy, particularly state policy. This also applies to the independent scene, to be honest, since every production there begins with an application process, where you might adapt to assumed and often blurry expectations and policies, and present your ideas in a certain language.

CS: Sure, since it’s all public funding and thus directly connected to state or municipal policy.

JW: Yeah. I was grateful when you sent me the Adorno text “Kultur und Verwaltung” (“Culture and Administration”) which says exactly that: municipal cultural administration has a lot of power in shaping language and thought.

CS: I wonder, actually, with all these power relations aside, if there is any cohesive idea of what a dramaturg is as a job, role or even just a practice. Maybe there isn’t a precise general understanding of what the work entails, and we are actually talking about a series of different jobs, with “dramaturg” being just a very old term.

JW: What I've always found beautiful about dramaturgy, in an idealized way, is the suggestion that a public institution affords a department without a fixed task. Again, think of Bojana Cvejić's "ignorance." But again, staying under the radar, unmarked while holding so much power seems increasingly problematic to me.

CS: I think what’s specific about the system in Germany is the strong link between public administration and art / culture, due to the substantial amounts of public funding managed by highly formalized administrative institutions. Adorno also writes about this in his text. By shifting the act of a (financial) commission of artistic work to seemingly more neutral professional institutions, the power dynamics become less visible, even though they remain present.

This connection is becoming very tangible right now with the situation surrounding so-called policies against antisemitism. It is now a concrete scenario that recipients of public funding are soon be required to sign declarations the contents of which are more or less determined by political authorities and include a commitment to the controversial IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism.

JW: In this particular moment, you can see what lies within all these power relations surrounding artistic production. As a dramaturg, you have to ask yourself how strongly you want to be connected to state or municipal policy. As pointed out by others, the so-called "BDS-resolution” that was initially brought to the table by the far right party AfD (Alternative for Germany), and that suggests that publicly funded cultural institutions backcheck their collaborators on the basis of a ridiculous generalized equation of the BDS Movement with antisemitism, established a legally completely blurry political norm and led to a lot of cases of cancellations.(1) While there have been efforts to protest such developments since 2019 on various levels, what I find troubling when speaking with my German colleagues in the current situation is them taking a position of mediation: using their privileged access to cultural politics to lobby against these measures, while artists are assigned the role to speak out against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. That distributes the risks of voicing critique publicly very unevenly.  

CS: So, coming back to the beginning where you spoke about the gaze of the dramaturg looking at the artistic work and dramaturgy’s relation to a sort of inherent educational project, where does this place us right now?

JW: The fear in Germany seems to be that cultural funding of the already precarious independent scene could be withdrawn more or less completely when they appear to misalign with dilettante and dysfunctional measures of state-imposed, so-called "anti-antisemitism." 

Interestingly enough, in the genealogy of the German cultural sphere you can find another project of education: the re-education program of a population where anti-democratic, authoritarian, racist, and antisemitic beliefs still prevailed after WWII. This is the backdrop of an extended attack of the cultural funding system via the defamation of cultural as being antisemitic, because they don't follow the so-called "Staats-räson" that problematically links the liberal anti-fascism as the foundation of the post-fascist order to an unconditional support of Israel.(2)

CS: As all of this brings to the table the (political) idea of “a public,” we can also think back to the biopolitical speculations at play in the dramaturgical gaze you mentioned earlier. 

JW: I would rather think about practices of “making public” in a double sense: presenting a work but also seeing what kind of “public” it performs and performatively produces. In that line, I’d also suggest thinking about instituting practices as Isabel Lorey suggests that might also be ephemeral, instead of institutions as fixed entities. 

More directly coming back to dramaturgy, there might be a distinction between education and “studies” (again turning to Moten and Harney) that undoes the figures of the consultant or intellectual that pass on their authority to the dramaturg. There’s a whole archive of radical democratic pedagogies that alternative, maybe post-dramaturgical practice can be learned from.(3) From Augusto Boal to Angela Davis, from militant investigations of the Operaismo Movement to Ulrike Meinhof's Film “Bambule.”(4)

CS: Considering the historical contextualization we have attempted, these pedagogical concepts/practices of openness show us a way to work against the current authoritarian tendencies. They can help us engage in a self-critical discourse of dramaturgy and accept and work with the ambivalence at the heart of it. Thank you for thinking through this with me and all your thoughts, Joshua!