"What is dramaturgy anyway?"

"What is dramaturgy, anyway?" 

This was the inciting question to the 1994 issue of Theaterschrift called “On Dramaturgy.” The question of how to define dramaturgy, especially in a dance context, has plagued the field for decades. In her canonical essay "Anxious Dramaturgy" first published in 2003, scholar Myriam Van Imschoot names the definitional ambiguity of dramaturgy as the second of its three principal anxieties. Dramaturg and theorist Maaike Bleeker opens her 2015 essay, "Thinking No-One's Thought," with the admittedly now familiar refrain: “What is it that dramaturgs do? Is there a dramaturg that has never been faced with this question?” 

What is dance dramaturgy, anyway? 

While the question has provoked exciting debate, it seems there is no clear answer. Still, if confusion has persisted, so, too, has momentum in the field. That is, while it may be unclear what exactly dance dramaturgy entails, the topic and practice has only grown in popularity since its early days. 

It's said that the crossover of the dramaturg from theater to dance began in the late 1970s German dance scene, specifically with the relationship between Pina Bausch and then-magazine writer Raimund Hoghe, who began working together after Hoghe wrote a profile of Bausch for the German magazine, Theater Heute. From 1979-89, Hoghe helped Bausch develop her Tanztheater by collaborating with her on the search for structure in what were then new, more collaborative and process-based approaches to choreography (as André Lepecki puts it, in 1977 Bausch was the first who "dared to ask dancers a question.") Bausch and Hoghe helped signal the radical shift that was happening in Western modern and post-modern concert dance-making from more top-down ways of thinking about choreography to a choreography based in highly-researched, collaborative processes. Moving away from notions of pure movement and the supremacy of the single choreographer, dance and dancemaking deepened its investment in relational explorations of social, political, and theoretical expressions.    

Dramaturgs continued working in dance after Hoghe. By the early 90s in Europe, the field was garnering increased momentum. Dramaturg Marianne Van Kerkhoven began working with Anne Teresa Keersmaeker in 1986, Heidi Gilipin with William Forsythe in 1989, Hildegard De Vuyst with Alain Platel in 1995, Andre Lepecki with Meg Stuart, Joao Fiadiero, and Vera Mantero in 1993. Dance dramaturgy was a bit slower to get going in the U.S, but by the late 90s more than several prominent choreographers began enlisting dramaturgs as part of their process. Talvin Wilks, for example, began working as a dramaturg with Bebe Miller in 1997. Katherine Profeta started her longtime collaboration with Ralph Lemon around the same time, and Thomas DeFrantz began as an on-and-off dramaturg with Donald Byrd in 2003. 

Conversation around the field has also been proliferating since the mid-to-late 90s. Symposiums, seminars, and journal articles began appearing in the late 90s and early 2000s. A new literature of dance dramaturgy emerged soon after that during the mid 2010s with now classics like Katherine Profeta's Dramaturgy in Motion and the collected Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement. Today, dance dramaturgy seems to be only growing in popularity as a practice and topic of discussion. Anecdotally, one might say it's in the air. But evidence for this continued rise also abounds. Nearly half of 2023 Bessie nominations for Outstanding Choreographer listed dramaturgs in their programs while new publications like Jeroen Peters’ 2022 And then it got legs and Maaike Bleeker's 2023 Doing Dramaturgy have sharpened the growing discourse. An array of newly-founded institutional programs have also emerged over the last couple of years, indicating piqued interest in the academic landscape, and shepherding a new wave of “trained” dance dramaturgs into the field.

So, even if confusion about what dance dramaturgy is has persisted, the field seems to be garnering only more and more attention. When I began wondering why that is, why it feels as though dramaturgy in the dance world is a thing right now, I deployed a long list of emails to dramaturgy departments across the U.S. asking professors if they, too, felt like this was the case and if they had any hypotheses as to why. 

Memorably, one professor wrote back to me emphatically, “dramaturgy isn’t having a moment, it’s a movement.” I understood him to mean that dance dramaturgy today is not merely a fad, but that its current popularity is the culmination of steadily-growing interest since its inception. What I also found striking about his comment was this hint at what I’ve understood as dance dramaturgy’s relationship to motion. That is, just as dance dramaturgy is not having a single, secluded “moment,” its nature is also not that of a singular and contained entity. Rather, dance dramaturgy defies the stultifying effects of definition as a discipline that is both continually in motion and invested in the motion, or the emergent, of a work’s development. 

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What exactly dramaturgy entails, especially in a dance context, is amorphous, difficult to pin down. And perhaps, necessarily, so. Dance dramaturgy invokes a plurality of positions that make it nearly impossible to capture.  What might such a mysterious figure offer a choreographer? Hoping to answer the question, Katherine Profeta names a host of related roles she may play. "The list goes something like this," she writes, "researcher, editor, questioner, catalyst, historian, archivist, literary manager, outside eye, inside eye, advocate for the audience, advocate for anything but the audience, witness, midwife, gadfly, friend, and even amateur shrink." For Profeta, dramaturgy is never one of these roles singularly, but a kind of continual motion between them, a way of pivoting between various modes of relation with enough dexterity and receptivity to nurture the moment as it comes up.

Others have commented on dramaturgy’s lack of fixity. The editor of that 1994 Theaterschrift issue, Marianne Van Kerkhoven, wrote her own essay for the issue called, "Looking without a pencil in the hand," in which she proposes some twelve notes on dramaturgy. An excerpt from note 9: “[the dramaturg] has no fixed abode, he/she does not belong anywhere.” Dance dramaturgy is on the move. That is, dramaturgy is not rooted in any one fixed location or “abode,” but rather, evades containment, continually and perpetually becoming itself in the elaborated interrelational process of working together. 

I’d argue, then, that this ambiguity about what dance dramaturgy is represents not just an inconvenience or an indication of a lack of rigorous investigation or scholarship. Rather, its ambiguity is actually an essential part of its nature. By resisting the containing forces of definition, it refuses the demand to be a static, singular role. Instead, dance dramaturgy is a practice that fundamentally values an interrelational ethic of becoming.

It's in its lack of fixity that the dance dramaturg mirrors what I understand as their chief concerns. That is, if the dramaturg is in motion, is in a process of continual becoming, they are also scrupulously attentive, not to what a dance is or is not, but its process of coming-into-being, the unfolding dynamics of its actualization. A dramaturg does not attempt to own or contain, but is rather specifically attending to what is un-ownable about a work, to the work's process of coming into being. Writing on the role of the dramaturgs, both Bleeker and Lepecki traffic in this shared implication of the emergent. According to Bleeker, “dramaturgs do not deal with things but emergences.” For Lepecki, “the dramaturg works for and with the work-to-come.” Just as a work of dance is in a perpetual state of formation, the dramaturg’s role also emerges through and with the becoming of the work.

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Bojana Cvejić calls the dramaturg "the friend of a problem." And, it's true, the choreographer-dramaturg relationship often starts as a kind of friendship, the recognition of a spark that signals the potential for generative, intimate exchange. 

Like the dramaturg, a friend is not identifiable as a static, and thus ownable, entity. As Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben writes, "to recognize someone as a friend means not being able to recognize him as something.” That is, a friend does not foreclose their friend’s potential for becoming. However intimate friends may become, a friend does not say, once and for all, “I know you, I have finished knowing you.” A friend does not attempt to own you in this way. Just as a dramaturg attends to a work’s process, a friend can sometimes intuit how you are becoming, the rhythms of your self-actualization. 

I, too, began as, and remain, a friend. It was almost by chance when a few years ago, I had become close with choreographers Leah Fournier and Amelia Heintzelman after working as a co-editor at Critical Correspondence and taking a couple of classes at Pageant. Simply being around one another in the para-process of eating, dressing, talking about shows we’d seen or people we’d met felt like a way of participating in a more amorphous collaboration. Between us, there quickly emerged a mutual appreciation of the way each of us did our thinking, a hope, a sense, that we could actually think together.  

So, I would go to their rehearsals, as a curious observer, as someone who had done some writing about dance, but also as someone interested in writing as a form of movement. As a writer, I had been contending with a desire to trace, not my thoughts, but the rhythmic unfolding of my thinking. Part of my interest in dance was tied to this bigger suspicion that thinking, or meaning, was not about isolating or containing individual thoughts. Instead, I began to understand meaning as a movement or rhythm through, or towards, or between. I was drawn to dance as an embodiment of that ethic, one that animates or articulates the dynamic folding and unfolding of sense. 

At rehearsal, I took odd notes, recorded discussions, wrote speculative tangents about the images and narrative threads that appeared in my mind as I watched these bodies work through layers of making. I’d share my thoughts about what I was seeing, pose questions that seemed to have both a deconstructing effect and a capacity to help build on what was happening. After some time like this, Leah and Amelia took me to dinner and proposed I be their "dramaturg,” a term whose meaning I had only a faint idea. 

Despite my uncertainty — or maybe because of it — I agreed, and over the next several months, I continued visiting rehearsals for “Stunt Double,” the first of several projects we’d end up collaborating on. I enjoyed the gradual process of learning how to relate to a piece as it was coming into being, the endless attempt to articulate this process. As Profeta suggests, my role was never one contained to any one way of being. I oscillated between a range of postures as the moment called, attempting, in one way or another, to notice and draw out the work’s dynamic process of coming into being. 

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In my opinion, dramaturgy is also a work-to-come, a process of continual in-formation that is the dynamic interrelationality of meaning. It is an errant term, one that refuses location and which is concerned with what is in motion, what is equally undefinable, or between, in the becoming of a work. If dance dramaturgy is to be defined at all, it must be defined as a way of moving between various modes of relation, a way of moving between collaborators, and as a way of attending to what is in motion or emergent in the development of a work of dance. I imagine the position of the dramaturg, then, as no position at all, but a form of movement whose lack of finality signifies the potential for becoming together. Dance dramaturgy’s resistance to definition, to becoming final, determined, and thus contained, is therefore not only of its nature, but also an important example of how to be with, and relate to, the world in general.

Still, I wonder why dramaturgy as an idea and practice is so appealing now. My suspicion is that we are in a moment where a twofold drive is being acutely expressed, the "general antagonism" between a kind of utopic desire for the unnamable and the desire to own it. 

Dance dramaturgy is not an achieved practice, but a form of seeking. Its lack of finality, its to-come-ness, creates a kind of utopic space, a perpetual not-yet that drives longing. That is, just as dance dramaturgy is a practice of imagining into emergent dynamics, its “incompletion” allows for us to imagine into it, in turn. 

The kind of relationality that dance dramaturgy offers is desirable not least of all as a form of resistance to a socio-political economy that pretends to require the violent instantiation of unyielding borders between bodies — bodies of land, people, and knowledge – in order to supposedly establish their validity and value. This scheme suppresses the “between,” what Erin Manning would call the “processual field of relation.” Survival in such a world demands that we contain what we are, draw limits on our becoming, others’ becoming, and the potential for becoming together, in order to be more legible for sale and consumption, when survival, when what being is, is becoming. Under such oppressive forces, there emerges a renewed desire for relational being, a way of thinking and making that honors life as an interrelational process. 

On the other side, fueling another kind of interest in dance dramaturgy, is the ever-present colonial urge to name, own, and then re-disseminate what is beyond naming, as if it had always belonged to the institution. So, while one could argue that institutional recognition of dance dramaturgy is a good thing, a way of validating the value and labor of what might have once been invisible work, I’m wary. I’m wary of the institution’s rootedness in systems of oppression, the way it seeks to define and delimit a practice that fundamentally relies on and is invested in emerging interrelational processes. Dance dramaturgy’s indefinability is a threat to the machine that chases down “the other” and calls it a matter of security, that oppresses then exploits what it cannot contain. At the same time, what is beyond its hegemony of containment is this machine’s greatest desire.

Right now, it feels like the texture of our reality is defined by the writhing of these two drives: on one side, the utopic drive of interrelational becoming, and on the other, the colonial drive to contain the uncontainable. It is the warring of these two drives that produces the growing interest in dance dramaturgy we feel today. As it grows in popularity, I think we’ll have to work to sustain its ethic of relationality. Conversations, scholarship, and practice, of course, must continue, but with the understanding that any attempt to define dance dramaturgy is only generative insofar as it recognizes the incompleteness of that project.