The ABC of Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance

THE ABC OF MICRO AND MACRO DRAMATURGIES IN DANCE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD by

Katalin Trencsényi

More than ever, there is a need for critical refection that interprets the work of artists today in its social and cultural context; more than ever, the world needs a diferentiation of points of view, raising awareness of the existing paradoxes and contradictions, a diferent view of reality. Artists can help us read the world, decipher its complexity. One of the means at their disposal is to make use of dramaturgy in all the diferent forms that it can take. –

Marianne Van Kerkhoven

How do you document a research and training project taking place in hybrid formats, online and onsite in six diferent contemporary dance organisations in fve European countries over the course of three years (2019 – 2022)? How do you summarise the encounters between twenty artists (mid-career dancerchoreographers and dramaturgs), fve curators, six artistic leaders and their organisations, the local artists and the public of the four residencies? How do you distil the discoveries, the knowledge and experience gained on micro and macro dramaturgies in dance during this international collaboration on artistic research and training? How do you preserve the half-thoughts, the inspirations, the feelings, the intuitions, and insights in a way that would allow them to grow and develop? How do you share this with your professional community as a way of invitation across boundaries for continued conversation between bodies – and movements between thoughts? Our answer to this challenge is this glossary.

We are not without predecessors. A generation ago, in 1993 in Amsterdam, organised by the Felix Meritis society, practitioners and thinkers convened to discuss the emerging new phenomena in the performing arts with the aim of bridging the gap between practice and theory. In order to arrive at a terminology for these, the organisers of the symposium initiated a project of writing an ‘open encyclopedia’ that would include a developing vocabulary which would help to navigate in this new landscape. This initiation led to coining terms such as ‘new dramaturgy’ and ‘postdramatic theatre’. The entries and the essays that were inspired by this work were published in a special issue of Theaterschrift, ‘On dramaturgy’ (vol. 5-6, 1994), edited and introduced by Marianne Van Kerkhoven.

We, the dreamers and participants of Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance project, inspired by the action of our predecessors, especially the dramaturg and thinker, Marianne Van Kerkhoven (whose thoughts on micro and macro dramaturgy prompted the initiation of this pioneering international project) decided to follow in their footsteps.

The activity of creating an ABC was familiar to us. The task was introduced to the group by Petros Konnaris as part of his practice-sharing score during our residency at Bora Bora in Aarhus in March 2022 The invitation to think about our vocabularies on topics dear to our heart resonated well with the group. It was repeated and further developed at the end of the same residency, when the partners from the participating organisations had joined us, and we narrowed the ABC down to our vocabulary on dance dramaturgy. Therefore, it felt authentic to turn to this format again when thinking about the legacy of the MMDD project

The following pages are our attempt at creating a glossary, as fexible, fuid, and playful as possible – and as diverse as the project participants’ personalities. The words in this dictionary are the results of a distillation process, condensing these artists’ experiences into one word that captures most potently their personal journey and professional discovery within the context of this project. (In some of the glossary entries, testimonies can be found about the workshop at Tanec Praha in October 2022 where

this ABC was developed.) These carefully selected, highly individual, yet professional terms provided an impetus for the authors’ musings on dance dramaturgy. Each entry in this glossary was written by one of the MMDD participants – the variety of responses, approaches and forms refect the beautiful diversity and creativity of those who were part of this project in the past three years. Yet, the aim with this publication is not merely to mark the place we reached on our journey, exploring micro and macro dramaturgies in dance but allow colleagues and fellow wanderers to be inspired by our discoveries, and continue the conversation and the journey. The ABC can be read in many ways and directions, moreover, some entries call for a score or even an embodiment. As editor of this volume, I hope that the constellation of all twenty-seven entries will refect truthfully our fndings with the MMDD research as well as contribute to the development of this exciting feld and will inspire future explorations and dance

Photography: Lars Kjær Dideriksen

IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION

A text without full stops by Alexis

Vassiliou

Invitation | Interpret-Read-Listen the text without pausing and/or stopping | As if this text was a long poem without full stops | The text includes invented words

aturgy, maturgy, a maturgy, anaturgy, a maturgy, a laturgy, ramaturgy, a maturgy, laturgy, rgy, rgy, a gy, a rgy, a gy, to pace, an ace, to pace, a space, to space an ace, a pace, an ace to pace an age, an age, to space a rage, a rage to age, to age, a rage to pace an age, to pace a space to age, to age a rage, an ace, an ace to pace, s, sss, sssss, a pace, a pace for space, a space, a pace to space a space for pace, to laturgy, anurgy, to amaturgy, a maturgy, anaturgy, naturgy, rgy, a rgy, a rgy, rgy, a gy, a manurgy, rgy, aturgy, a maturgy, ramaturgy, anurgy, rgy, a rgy, raturgy, aturgy, fanurgy, anaturgy, rgy, gy, to lace, a lace, to lace a place to space, a lace, a pace to lace an ace, an ace, to pace, a place, a space, to lay, a day, a day to lay, a fay, to lay a fay, to lay a play, a play, a lay, a play to pace a fay, a pace to play, a space to lay, to fay, to lay, to lay a space, a pace, a phase, a phase to lay, lay, a lay, to phase a phase, to lay, a lay, a, a, a fay, to lay, to fay a lay, to delay, a lay, to delay a fay, to space a space, an ace, to place, a lace, a lay to lay, a lay to lay a lace, to lay a lay to delay, a lace, an ace, sss, sssss, an, ace, sssssss, a day to pace a day, a day, to pace, a gaze, to lace to gaze, a gaze to lace, an ace, to gaze, an ace to lay a lace, to lay an ace, to place, to place an ace, to phase, a face, a face to phase an ace, sssss, a phase to face, a face, a face to face, a place, to place a face, a place to pace a face, a place to phase a face, to phase, a face, a face to pace, a pace, to pace, to pace a face to phase, a gaze to phase, to phase a gaze, to gaze a face, a face, a way to phase a gaze, to pace a phase to gaze, a lace to face, a gaze, to praise, a way, a way, a way to praise a face, to phase a way, to pace a space, to make a way to face, to pace, to pace a face to space, to make an ace, to make a way to phase a face, to place a phase, a way to make a make, a gaze to grace an ache, to make a grace to race, to ace, to ache, to ache a gaze, to ache, a grace to gaze, a pace to race a face, to face a race, a face, a place to lay a race, a lay to pace a race, a race to phase, a way to lay a race, to lay a way to play, a way to lay a rage, a rage to crave, a crave to crave, a lay, to race a fay, to rage a race to crave, to crave, to crave a face to space, a pace to place a crave, to grave, a grave to rave, a rave to race a fay, a lay, to make a way to grave, to lace a place to fay, a place to place a fay to lace, a space to pace a grave, to crave an ace, to make a space for hay, to hay, a lay, to wake, to make a wake to wake, to wake a lay to hay, to pace a fay to hay, to place a face to hay, to hey, a hey to hay, to crave a hey to lay, to hey, hey, to hay a lay to hey, to make a lay to hay, to make a way to hey, to hey a gaze, a gaze to phase a face, a face, to way, a way to lay a lay, away, a way to phase a face, to face a way to fay, a trace to make a space, a trace to trace a way, to way a way, to gy, a gy, gy, to raturgy, ramaturgy, aturgy, arurgy, atraturgy, aturgy, a laturgy, maturgy to aturgy, to liturgy, to gy, to lamaturgy, to liturgy, to gy, a gy, to anaturgy, to laturgy, a space to lace a fay, a fay to make a lace, to lace a way to phase, to phase a face to ace, to face a lay to maturgy, to laturgy, a grave to crave, to crave a grave, to lay a hay, a hay to hey a lay, to make a space, a fay, a fay to fay a faith, to maturgy, to anurgy, to laturgy, a faith to pace a fey, a hay to lay a fay, a fay to faith a fey, to make a way to faith, a place to place a faith, to face a phase to faith, to aith, aith, to aith a lay, to lay a hey to day, to day a day, ay, ay, ay, to hey, hey, to make an ache, to fade, to ade, to fade a faith, to face an ache, an ache, to ace an ache, sss, sssss, sssssss, to place a space to ache, to make a lay to ache, to lay a day, today, to hay a day, to hey, a day to hey, a place to lace an ache, to ace, to face, to phase a face, to space a pace, to lace a place, to ache, to faith, to fey, to face, to face an ache, today, a day, a way to hey, a hay, today, a day, to maturgy, aturgy, rgy, gy, amaturgy, rgy, rgy, a gy, a way to lay a day, away, a way, a day away, yay, a day, ay, y, y, y,

Photography: Adela Vosičková

Photography: Adela Vosičková

ATTENTIVELY by

Maja Hriešik

More than mastering any set of tools or before discussing dramaturgy’s co-responsibility for the work’s structure, interpretation, the wider context or the art of composition – my entry point into the practice of dramaturgy narrows down to a simple word: attention. Dramaturgical playfulness as well as my collaborations begin with a quest to understand what awoke the attention of my counterpart, the dancer, and they are continued with an honest dialogue about how and if it did anything to mine. I guess, attention is also my physical link to the material and its potentialities; it is the manifestation of how concepts embody in my non-dancing body and situate themselves in my dancing perception. The practice of dramaturgy, therefore, involves various explorations of my own attention: moving around, pinching, and stretching it – with an intention to be better equipped once the work opens up to the attention of others. I am attracted to the idea of dramaturgy as the activator when striving to create “a better work”. Being attentive implies being both aroused and ready for action.

Being fascinated by attention as such is related to my understanding of it as a relating which is a natural condition for doing dramaturgy. Relating to the dancer (s), to the audience, but also to everything that transcends me – the amniotic fuid of the reality in which I am embedded. At the same time, it is also about the sensitivity to recognise what is tingling for a response from within, despite the fact that it is often irrational, contradictory, or nebulous. Attention, if I stick to the embryonic metaphor, is also an umbilical cord of some sort, a physical conduit that enables connection. Without connection and interrelations, things from outside don’t inscribe on the internal sounding board and vice versa. Without the connection nothing comes out from a dancer-dramaturg collaboration. Interestingly, the way a given fascination entered the realm of my attention often hints at possible ways of navigating the attention of others – how to conceive the particular choreography of the attention.

Dramaturgical work is also about admitting that our attention has a tendency to dwindle or even fall apart, that it needs a lot of care Because the industry (both the entertainment and the consumption one) also operates on its level, it courts us with a never-ending carousel of fickering delight. It fashes and distracts; thus, our attention is divided, and it is hard to sustain it. The dumbing occurs either with us passively gulping down everything that is pushed on us insistently, or by resisting the endlessly generated supply by hardening and armouring against it

I like to imagine human perception as a landscape. It consists of sediments of memories, eroded events and feelings, deposited by time, folding and faulting. Dramaturgy is dancing on that stifened, layered soil, sometimes standing on it solidly, other times trying to penetrate it and travel through.

The concept of attention is crucial for dramaturgy for another reason Giving attention to something refers also to caring for it Attention and dramaturgy are therefore about putting ourselves into the world around us, attending to it. Drawing from it, being nurtured and eventually giving back. Maybe this is why dramaturgy nowadays is merging with activism – it doesn’t end with creating a work of art. The responsibilities but also the powers of dramaturgy are expanding. When there are no pathways and no conditions for creation, dramaturgy can and has to try to reinvent them.

I love to see dramaturgy as a practice that creates an environment of sustainable relations, attentively. And I believe we all together contributed to this idea strongly via the Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance project

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

BRIDGES by Markéta Vacovská

Dear Reader, Milý čtenáři, I go through all the notes I took during my time with the MMDD project, in order to continue ‘The Notebook Game’ we played during the fnal public event of MMDD in Ponec Theatre in Prague on 15 September 2022. The game invited the audience to go through the project participants’ personal notebooks and to witness it by reading in silence or reading it out loud into the microphone or simply entering into a dialogue with the notes and rewriting them to create a new notebook as a varied landscape of associating thoughts.

Two weeks after the fnal event, I am holding my notebook again in my hands and I go through it one more time while sitting on the train and observing the autumn landscape passing by in fuent motion. I realise that in about twenty days of both MMDD residencies, one in Aarhus in Denmark and the other one in Prague, I took a substantial number of words, notes, signs, lines, letters, and symbols – a huge number of personal connections. I go through them one more time to balance, remember, summarise, and digest, but also to wait. To wait for what comes with all these new impressions, inputs, imprints, and experiences. How to relate all this to my daily life? How to link it into my practice? As I often say in dance improvisation but it’s also valid for the creative process in general – if you don’t know where to go, just stay where you are and wait. Then wait again, and trust.

So, I trust the process and continue to observe the landscape changing violently with the approaching capital, Prague, and I continue to think about the topic of bridging and connections. Bridging me to the landscape – and vice-versa. Bridging the roles. Bridging the positions. Suddenly, it seems to be the most important word in every creation. The act of bridging. To be able to be together but without losing individual energy, to create a place where everybody can contribute with their skills and experiences. To bridge the ‘I’ to ‘They’ and to ‘We’, where one cannot exist without the other. Dramaturgs, choreographers, dancers, makers… they all work collectively to expand and develop artistic proposals in order to investigate the micro to afect the macro. Simply put, it is a collective process based on the knowledge and practice of each party, a process that gathers experiences, thoughts, desires, and needs to present what is seen (or not) in new perspectives and viewpoints. Hopefully, all together, they can contribute to something important and topical in today’s world, even if only bringing a small change in thinking about how to accept and understand a constantly changing world and how to respond to it by adaptation and perhaps transformation. The adaptation is so familiar to the lifestyles of these creatives, the adaptation is their daily cup of tea. The transformation is the essence of their work, it is an exciting impulse, the so-called ‘joker’ that raises the average to above average and which reveals new and surprising meanings. Bridging the art to daily life

Bridging the ‘In’ to ‘Out’.

Bridging the ‘Micro’ to ‘Macro’.

Bridging the artists to other communities

Bridging the ‘Here’ to ‘There’.

Bridging the ‘Horizontal’ to ‘Vertical’.

Bridging the ‘Stability’ to ‘Liminality’.

Bridging the ‘Intimacy’ to ‘Shared experience’ through empathy

Bridging the ‘Attraction’ to ‘Perception’.

Bridging the ‘Intuition’ to ‘Structure’.

Bridging the ‘One’ to ‘Other’.

Bridging me to the landscape of not knowing. We always want to plan things; we want to know what will happen or must know what is happening. To take control, to understand, to avoid any kind of insecure feelings. That’s why we rely on in science and scientists. We need evidence to orient ourselves in life. Art is full of doubt, and randomness, there is a lot of not knowing, and there is a lot of waiting based only on trust without specifcally having anything concrete at the beginning of the process. There is a lot of intuition, perception, and sensory perception, and sometimes, we only have faith and willpower and nothing else But isn’t this faith the most crucial part of our life belief system? Faith that there is a reason? Faith that helps us overcome our constant doubting and uncertainty if we are good enough or bad enough… Enough for who?

The train is getting closer Sometimes it is good (and inevitable) to change strategies and adapt The train will stop in about ten minutes, so I leaf through the notes one last time and pick the keywords of our MMDD experience: perceiving mapping emojiing defning answering tornadoing wandering storytelling walking recycling waiting curating writing experimenting scenographing decorating disturbing vibrating unexpecting questioning embracing singing playing holding remembering pressing contextualising collaborating dialoguing reading improvising accepting understanding acknowledging creating co-creating collapsing dealing responding researching repeating recognising pointing connecting verbalising asking doubting thinking grasping shifting carrying enjoying hearing translating overwhelming performing producing experiencing dancing explaining analysing vocalising concentrating wondering sampling being observing calibrating traveling tuning relating infuencing presenting positioning attending listening reacting witnessing ofering rooting desiring framing trusting inspiring navigating contributing co-thinking discussing communicating embodying sharing feedbacking bridging transforming parting

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

COMUNITÁ (Community)

by Gerarda Ventura

In September 2022, at the fnal gathering of this European project, we were hosted by the project coordinator, Tanec Praha in the beautiful city of Prague that I did not know. During the last workshop of the programme, unrolling a long sheet of paper on the foor, Katalin Trencsenyi invited us to create a sort of ‘tree of life’ around the key words pertaining to dance dramaturgy, a bit like the ‘trees of life’ appearing in many Italian churches

Around the sheet we sat: the choreographers, the dramaturgs, the partners who participated in the project, forming a large and irregular ellipse.

My choice of word for our co-created glossary is comunitá, the Italian for ‘community’. Why?

I guess, we chose each other and we were chosen – each artist having the desire to confront one another around a common theme, without a preordained path but with the almost childish curiosity to encounter a new, unexpected experience.

The variety of experiences, ages, expectations, of needs for afrmation too, have been gradually replaced by the pleasure of dialogue and conviviality, and the diferent personalities have gradually manifested themselves by eliminating the veil of political correctness

The diversity of culture, albeit within the framework of political Europe, manifested itself without hesitation and without fear… we are citizens of a world that can hardly be framed in commonly recognised cases.

We have in fact created a micro dramaturgy of the community, where roles have often been mixed up with each other, breaking the barriers of responsibilities without losing their very function.

One aspect that I am interested in investigating as a next step is how to open this community/these communities to the outside world.

Our small community has surely come together, identifying itself around and through an artistic, and cultural activity, a segment of people’s lives rarely attended to and/or investigated especially in this historical and social era

Art and culture are not considered essential, they often remain the prerogative of small elites made up of acolytes who know each other and recognise themselves in a sort of social autism that satisfes them but isolates them altogether

The community I would like us to belong to is one that would be able to expand like wildfre. It should be capable of incorporating, like an amoeba, all those it meets yet not engulfng them but rather infecting them with the gift of curiosity and belonging.

This is the macro aspect that we tried to discover through our experience and that we will have to learn to manage if we really want to carry out the development of our project to its ultimate outcome.

Translated from the Italian by Giusi Nibbi.

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

DIALOGUE by Elena Tzanavalou

Dialogue comes from the Greek word dialogos (διάλογος ). Logos means words or speech and dia means through, across, between. Thus, dialogos means the exchange, the fow of speech through and between bodies; the bouncing of ideas of one another.

The notion of dialogue is not a debate or a negotiation, where defending one’s own ideas is at stake; nor is it a dialectic, where one aims to persuade the other. On the contrary, dialogue is a process that requires openness and acceptance. It is a synergy between the people involved, who, through the exchange of utterances, seek to create a shared meaning. This new meaning will belong to neither of them, but rather to the process itself. Dialogue then is a creative interaction; an encounter where new ideas can emerge. This process suggests “incompleteness, becoming rather than being, the created rather than the given, the unfnished rather than the fnished.” (Zappen 40)

Creation happens in conversation, and dialogue is the main tool through which a dramaturgical process unfolds, often in unforeseeable ways. As Jacob Zimmer notes:

Early, before rehearsals, the most important work happens: conversations that clarify the questions and curiosities that lead to making a piece. We talk about how to work, how to create the vocabulary, structure, and meaning. We talk about where to work since diferent rehearsal spaces produce diferent shows. We talk about when to work since diferent schedules produce diferent shows. We talk about what to do in the rehearsal – what kind of training, how much talking, how much doing: should there be feld trips, improvisation? Will we work through montage art or start at the beginning and work through to the end? (Zimmer 17)

This process is not without disagreements but rather serves as a path for all the diferent voices to co-exist creatively As Guy Cools argues:

In a good conversation, neither of the participants knows in advance what the topics discussed will be or how the fow and structure of the conversation will connect and link these topics. […] The utterances of everybody participating are usually based on what people already know: their experiences and assumptions. But it is in the shifts of the conversation and in the spaces between utterances that hopefully new insights arise that don’t belong to one person specifcally, but create a new, shared collective consciousness. […] [This process] doesn’t exclude misunderstandings or disagreements, but it is the only way to interweave diferent voices polyphonically. (Cools 118, 123)

Maaike Bleeker conceives the dialogue in the moment when the dramaturgical refection, which choreographers are perfectly capable of doing themselves, opens up to another person in the creative process (Bleeker 166)

Andre Lepecki during his collaboration with Meg Stuart defnes the dialogical process as:

[S]ystems of translation: from Meg to the dancers; from the dancers to the dancers; from Meg to Meg; from the dancers to Meg; from myself to Meg; from myself to the dancers; and from all of these to all the other collaborators (Lepecki in Damaged Goods and Stuart 66)

Photography: William van der Voort

Ruth Little’s conception of dramaturgy echoes similar views when she talks about her collaborations: At the beginning of our relationship, the choreographers I have worked with expressed to me their desire for an evolving exchange, and they were looking for a dialogue that is testing, supportive, challenging and sensitive to both process and to the nature of the work. (Little in Trencsenyi 223) To that, she adds that one of her roles as a dance dramaturg is to facilitate “a strong, immediate and responsive dialogue.” (246)

Finally, Joachim Robbrecht defnes dramaturgy as “the conversation that pushes the work along while afecting it on many layers. It is unpredictable and has an improvisational – and sometimes dilettantish – quality.” Therefore, the dramaturg is “a connoisseur of how conversations in an artistic process can be practiced, fed, and made productive for the work.” (Georgelou et al. 138)

In my conception too, dramaturgy is a dialogical practice; one that cannot unfold in isolation. It is an encounter; a practice that is developed in the space between bodies and that emerges in the dialogue and in the relationship amid collaborators Dramaturgy is a process structured by the dialogue through which the participants are ‘confronted’ by one another and evolve. As such, dialogue is a fundamental, fascinating, and integral part of the work of the dramaturg; it is their main tool in supporting the creative process of an artist as well as the element which frames and organises the whole practice. It is through this interaction between collaborators that an artistic process unfolds. Yet, it is usually up to the dramaturgs themselves to decide how far they will extend the dialogue. Some practitioners, such as Guy Cools, prefer to defne their role:

[A]s a dialogue partner primarily in relationship to the choreographer. I am there frst and foremost for him or her and I generally only engage with the other collaborators to moderate between them and the choreographer […]. The latter is also a strategy to avoid my voice getting too dominant, or the productive polyphonic conversation becoming a cacophony.”(Cools 121)

Other dramaturgs, such as Jeroen Peeters, often try to include in the dialogue all the collaborators involved so that even the light or music designer can be closer to the process and the concept (Tzanavalou)

However, the notion of dialogue, especially as understood within a creative collaborative practice, is not limited to the actual exchange of utterances. It extends to body language, gestures, eye contact or even exchange of energies. Even in the silent presence of the dramaturg in the studio, the dialogue has already begun since they infuence energetically the process. Words are not always necessary nor the right form of dialogue to tackle all problems depending on the collaboration and the idiosyncrasy of the artist involved

This is particularly evident in collaborations where artists and dramaturgs have a long history of working together. Dialogue then becomes rather a frame, a structure or an attitude of openness, incompleteness, and acceptance. An example of the latter would be Hildegard De Vuyst’s collaboration with Alain Platel:

Sometimes it was no more than a gesture of appreciation or an emotional exclamation during a dancer’s solo. Having spent ffteen years working together, Platel and De Vuyst don’t need to have lengthy conversations anymore: [As she herself states:] ‘We’ve worked beyond the stage of having to justify or explain’ (Trencsényi 234)

While every dramaturg approaches and organises diferently their practice around the notion of dialogue according to their way of thinking and to their collaborations, dialoguing remains an integral part of the practice. Dialogue ofers the space in which diferent bodies meet, exchange, and create as well as the tool that mobilises a creative process into being The dramaturgical dialogue is an open-ended and dynamic process, and it is only in the friction between bodies that thought, meaning, knowledge and new ideas can emerge and be activated; ones that do not belong to either party, but rather to that common and creative space in between.

Resources

Bleeker, Maaike. “Dramaturgy as a Mode of Looking.”

Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 13, no. 2, 2003, pp. 163–172., doi.org/10.1080/07407700308571432

Cools, Guy. In-between Dance Cultures. On the Migrating Artistic Identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan. Valiz, Amsterdam, 2015.

Damaged Goods and Meg Stuart (authors), Jeroen Peeters (ed). Are we here yet? (2nd edition). Damaged Goods, Brussels, 2014.

Georgelou, Konstantina and Efrosini Protopapa and Danae Theodoridou (eds) The practice of dramaturgy. Working on actions in performance. Valiz, Amsterdam, 2017.

Trencsenyi, Katalin. Dramaturgy in the making. A user’s guide for theatre practitioners. Bloomsbury, London, 2015.

Tzanavalou, Elena. Unpublished interview with Jeroen Peters, Brussels, 2019

Zappen, James Philip. The Rebirth of Dialogue. Bakhtin, Socrates and the Rhetorical Tradition. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2004.

Zimmer, Jacob. “Friendship Is No Day Job - and Other Thoughts of a Resident Dance Dramaturg”. Canadian Theatre Review, 155, 2013, pp.16–20. muse.jhu.edu/article/515345

Photography: William van der Voort

EMPATHY

by

Petros Konnaris

I am having a hard time writing this text. There is a resistance in making the frst step to write but also an indecisiveness about what. Maybe it is the not knowing that I am intimidated by…

To get myself into it, I decided to just start writing, and while writing, refect and attempt to fgure out where is this difculty coming from. I always enjoy the part of fguring out while doing, similarly to what Mirko and I were practicing in the Prague intensive. I believe it is a process of directing my attention to the dialogue between myself and the practice/piece; a watching, a soothing, and a simultaneous refection on myself.

_

Writing – getting used to the score, the touching of the laptop, warming up my body, understanding this new situation I am in.

Writing and thinking about my writing.

Writing and refecting on what and how I am writing.

_

This writing score, that could be a performance score, helps me understand the current situation. Maybe part of this difculty to write about empathy is because I cannot let go of the other words I could write about . Should I write about something else then? What would that be?

While trying to fgure out whether I want to change it or not, I realise I am partially grieving all the other words that I am not writing about. Words that embody the fndings of the collective thinking and triggered a disturbance in my practice I feel the responsibility to keep them close to my heart for a while longer to better understand their impact. Adriano, Evagoras, Fabritia and Salvo’s session on genealogy infuenced that responsibility. I had a conversation with Rodia (in my mind), asking diferent questions to map my intention and discomfort. In the end, I was reassured partially by Alexis (also in my mind), and my intuition, that empathy can provide a context, a starting point to contextualise and articulate my afective relationship to these words. To hold them, acknowledge the impact they have had on me and say thank you

Halfway through the page I am feeling very excited about this and quite comfortable to support my decision. I am currently imagining Naya smiling, sharing my excitement. Moving on, I am wondering what would the form of this text be? My initial response is a letter, inspired by Nikita’s letter box. Who should the addressee be though? The missing words? Could these words read a letter addressed to them? What happens if a letter is read by a diferent party?

As an alternative, I am thinking the format of a dialogue but then I end up in a similar chaos I also believe that the dialogue is already present in the text. Something about the writing and responding to it has a listening quality. Or as Jeppe would say, a perceptive quality.

I will experiment with this free-fowing, story-telling writing mode, reacting to what the actual process and materials are producing

I feel that this text in progress somehow has become about a dramaturgy of empathy A space for connections, questions, and positions to practice and rethink empathy An open-ended frame to highlight responsiveness A dialogue A dialogue with words, collaborators, materials, encounters. Sometimes with themselves. Sometimes with the materials left behind

Is empathy imbued in the dramaturgical practice?

Yes!

A form of understanding and becoming-with the (artistic) process This text is just that A process of processes that come together to make a new constructed language.

The text is close to the end. However, the grief has been replaced by a guild, and the missing words by the participants I have not mentioned yet What does this action, or this non-action produce?

I will return to the fnding of this writing process: To hold them, acknowledge the impact they have had on me and say thank you

Alexis, Adriano, attentive, care, curated atmosphere, dialogical, Elena, empathy, Evagoras, Evangelos, Fabritia, Francesco, Gerarda, gentle disturbance, gift, Ida, Katalin, Konstantina, Lisa, Maja, Margherita, Marketa, Marketa, Mirko, processes, Salvo, thoughts, Tereza, Tereza, Wim, with, words, Yvona.

Thank you!

Photography: Adela Vosičková

Photography: Adela Vosičková

GAZE by Fabritia D’Intino

My eyesight is getting worse lately and I realise that with no glasses I sense the world diferently, I move diferently. I wonder if this makes me a diferent person every time I decide to take of my glasses. Having some kind of easy-to-access superpower which makes the world around me melt and go out of focus. The way I see changes my thoughts, I suppose. It infuences the way my brain processes information, colours, lights, distances. My body tends to be more alert, my skin becomes more sensitive. I like to enjoy the feeling, accepting the unique state of being immersed in a blurry world. And together with these blended colours my mind also gets into foggy thoughts, bringing me elsewhere. I do think that the way we direct our eyes on things changes their signifcance. How do I situate myself in relation to what I am looking at? How am I involved in what I see? Can watching ever be a passive action?

I was born in the second half of the 80’s and I grew up in the era of television, an era in which we would experience the coexistence of the micro within our daily life and of the macro within the TV screen. Everyday life was diferent for everyone, but at the end of the day we would all connect through those TV shows. And we watched them simultaneously and collectively, it was something not so far from theatre, in a way. In Italy my generation shares the same visual references from those years. We had little opportunity to exercise choice. A certain view of the world would fall actively into our eyes, melting in our brains. Berlusconi was in power, he controlled all six main TV channels and his understanding of the female role in society was displayed in front of us, of me, every day. Women were many, their clothes tiny, their moves captivating. All of this was designed for the male gaze, and I was there, in the middle, receiving those images as a representation of the world.

It is no mystery that my practice is infuenced by those images. And with no doubt Italy still struggles with this visual legacy.

I try in my work to condense that voyeuristic eye, to make it the only possible point of view. By increasing the level of audacity, exploring and exploding the male gaze, I wish to allow us to go somewhere else. I wish the male gaze, if pushed to the max, could lead us to unexpected landscapes. I try to experience the objectifed body, dance in it, own it. Using it to access other dimensions, where the body can be liberated from the dictatorship of the vision

“Dance like nobody’s watching.”

A quote attributed to Mark Twain which later became a popular motivational maxim, a motto considered an exhortation to move freely and without fear. It’s an admission of how other people gaze on dance, informs dance itself It reminds us that looking is not an innocent act

Yet the word theatre comes from the ancient Greek théatron (θέατρον) ‘a place for viewing’, from theáomai (θεάομαι) ‘to see’, ‘to watch’, ‘to observe’.

Apparently, when in theatre or in theatre-like contexts, we are meant to surrender to the hierarchy of the vision

How do we relate to this dogma when we watch? And how do we relate to this dogma when we are watched?

Donna Haraway (in her essay, ‘Situated Knowledges …’, written in 1988) asks: “How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual feld? What other power do we wish to cultivate besides vision?”

As artists we create landscapes and universes to be experienced and to be watched. We build representations of bodies, we let them move in scenarios. We present images that will fall actively in the eyes of the audience

But those frames will not fnish their journey once they meet the audience’s gaze. They will indeed keep on travelling to be completed by the personal experiences, memories, thoughts and opinions of those who watch. They will generate infnite new problems and new solutions. They will meet people and they will start to talk with their identities. In this sense what we bring on stage will always be partial; it will always be a part to be completed by the eyes of those who watch.

Performance can then be seen as a way to co-create landscapes and universes, possibilities and alternatives. It’s a way to co-operate in moving signifcance, re-defning reality and expanding content. An act that starts from the gaze and moves through time and space, through knowledge, imagination, distraction, fction, concept and, maybe, magic.

During our MMDD sessions we were questioning the position of the dramaturg in the creative process, diferentiating it from the audience point of view, or the external eye.

I like to think of the dramaturg as someone beyond the visual dimension, someone that is not afected by the colour or the light, recalling the fgure of the oracle, a fgure that is able to give guidance and that by defnition is blind and therefore able to look beyond.

In this sense the ‘blind dramaturg’, the oracle, has to do with what is unseen, with the unknown, with mystery, ofering guidance to those who proceed by intuition, insights, trust and, maybe, faith. The dramaturg may be the medium through which we makers, too near to the work, can detach from what we see, excluding the close-up vision in order to open bigger questions and explore wider matters.

Applying a dramaturgical point of view is indeed an attempt to reveal what is hidden in order to make the invisible possible

I should then remind myself that when in doubt I can always access this oracle dimension just by taking of my glasses, sacrifcing the perfect vision and letting the muddy world take me far. Must trust the invisible to access the unknown.

Photography: Adela Vosičková

Photography: William van der Voort

GEDEELDE RUIMTE (Shared Space) Platforms of the Future – a Partner’s Perspective

by Lisa Reinheimer

This short essay refects the perspective and insights gained by DansBrabant as a partner organisation in the three-year Micro & Macro Dramaturgies in Dance research project. Partly through this project, we came to a greater understanding of a key anchor of our own practice as a development institution: the shared space

In an increasingly complex world, where diferent crises are occurring simultaneously, art remains an essential component for facing that world again and again. Increasing complexity also requires in-depth perspectives, sharp questions and navigators. Through art, we can practise what we fnd difcult and explore and bring to life alternative futures. This is not an individual task, but a shared one. These times call for art that connects us and the world, that depicts a common and, above all, shared future.

Those who analyse dance learn that dance takes place in a time-space continuum. That dance is an exchange of energy between performer and spectator in a shared space and time. Throughout dance history, that shared space could be a sacred ground, elevated on a stage, a circle, any dance foor in a bar or nightclub and even a public space. Perhaps more importantly, this shared exchange makes dance a social act, because what dance exchanges is about our humanity and our position in the world.

At the second MMDD intensive in October 2021 in Tilburg, titled Being There – the Environment of Care, the participants met physically for the frst time. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the frst intensive taking place in Italy was made online. In Tilburg, participants, curators and partners breathed together in one physical space for the frst time. Club SoDa, DansBrabant’s house, became a meeting and workplace, a concrete space to share each other’s practices, and from there to question and explore together.

What we as hosts found important for supporting this group was that they could land in our environment, that there was room to meet and space to explore together. A space where hierarchies fall away, where the institute does not operate outside the choreographers and dramaturgs, but rather works together with them.

In retrospect: we were looking for the preconditions for a shared space.

In the preparations for this intensive, banal and crucial questions arose: how do we meet the other in the aftermath of a pandemic? How do we share physical space? How is everyone’s voice (in whatever language or form) heard in that space? These questions underpinned the programme we put together for Tilburg. We could not yet look much further, beyond that physical gathering. Thinking ahead about how we could transcend that space again was not yet imaginable. First, we had to go back to the basics. To a togetherness

Thus, the micro also became our macro. Reorienting our position as humans in the world, with one leg in the virtual and one leg frmly on the soil. How do we map out where we are? How do we make space to be?

The environment we are in has a profound infuence on what emerges within ourselves. In how we move, in the perspectives that open up and those that don’t, in organisational forms, in shared mindsets and in connectedness. The frst year of MMDD was given the connecting theme of ‘weaving’. It connected Anghiari in Italy with Tilburg in the Netherlands. Two textile cities, a possible shared history embedded in the cities themselves. It was also a metaphor for bringing together and interweaving practices or, on the contrary, weaving them into a (clear) pattern through the collaboration between choreographer and dramaturg or interweaving stories that intersect in time and space.

What takes place in the studio is also related to what is outside. The Micro and the Macro.

In Tilburg, we invited participants into diferent spaces and set a rhythm to the week. Without time there is no space, so that too became an important theme in the programme. Time to arrive, time to warm up and get to work, time to share and exchange. Besides our own working space Club SoDa, we also invited them to the artist community in Tilburg, to our local theatre, to the Textile Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art and to a conversation about the state of dramaturgy. In each space, the participants had to search again for a position and a shared ground. Sometimes these were quickly apparent, sometimes not

To achieve a shared space, the process is of great importance. In Tilburg, positioning proved to be one of the key themes within this process. What position/space do you take and in relation to whom or what? In which constellations does it feel safe, and in which does it not? What is missing, who or what has no voice (yet)? Who defnes a position/space or what infuences a position/space? How does this lead to new insights?

The space flled with questions as a method to dig deeper.

What does it take to bring about change? What processes do we then need to set in motion, what dynamics are going to help us do this, what positions/voices/generations are still underexposed to achieve an equally shared space?

Four questions arose from this. In part, these questions were followed up in our own operations as an organisation:

What if we approach dramaturgy as an independent practice?

What if we focus on the process itself rather than the product or outcome?

What if we open up the process?

What if we gave the dramaturg the same space as the choreographer?

Leaping confdently into the unknown. Giving space to how we can discover that unknown and share experiences about it. By defnition, this is not something you do alone, but together. If it is unknown, you cannot fall back on known structures. It is precisely alongside each other, in trust and connection, that we map the unknown. ‘Nova Zembla’ becomes an interactive space flled with new images with their own logic, with their own threads

In the operation of our organisation, the process is central, not the outcome or the product. We look for opportunities to open up the artistic practice and also to whom and what is needed to do so.

So, as a start, we ofered a residency to a dramaturg and were deeply inspired by the experience. In the intensive in Tilburg, we found great value in opening up the process of being together with the participants, curators and partner organisations and sharing our fndings with all the project partners. We were entering an unknown territory. We gave space. And the space was taken. We shared the space

Photography: Rodia Vomvolou

HOLDING

by Konstantina Skalionta

What is the body of Dramaturgy?

What are the hands of this body?

How do they seek to hold other bodies?

How do they hold space and time?

How do they hold other bodies in relation to space and time?

How do these hands move as they hold bodies in time and space?

What is the rhythm of this dance, which weaves bodies in time and space?

What is the gaze of this body?

How am I being held by its gaze?

How does it feed my experience?

What is the voice and language of this body?

How does it speak to me?

What is vibrated in my senses?

What is activated in my imagination?

What is awakened in my memory?

What surfaces into consciousness, to be articulated, vocalised or physicalised?

How am I being held in constellation with other bodies?

In what way is this constellation dynamic, always in fux?

How do I relate to other bodies, or constellations?

What does this conversation put into motion?

Photography: Nela Wojacková

How do I seek to hold and be held?

How do I hold other bodies while being held?

What are the qualities of this holding?

What does it challenge or encourage?

What is informed or explored?

What is the imprint of this holding?

How deep is this imprint?

What is the space between holding and being held?

What is the potentiality of this in-between space?

How do we move while holding each other?

What do we become as we move?

What is our song?

How do space and time hold the imprint of our existence?

How do we hold ephemeral bodies?

How do we hold bodies that are fuid?

How do we hold bodies in a constant process of becoming?

How do we hold what isn’t yet born, what isn’t yet tangible?

How do we hold what becomes tangible only to transform?

How do we hold what becomes tangible only to be absorbed by space and time?

How do we hold the trajectories of those bodies?

How do we hold the imprint of their existence?

In what way do we become the imprint of their existence?

I engaged in this task of questioning, while in collaboration with dramaturg Rodia Vomvolou. This task has been developed by Rodia inspired by the practice of Efrosini Protopapa, Konstantina Georgelou, and Danae Theodoridou. In this process, questions become the only answers, creating an endless ripple efect of thoughts, realisations and experiences, which I come to understand as one of the functions of dramaturgy.

PROPOSITION: I invite you to explore this concept of holding by being with a piece of ice, no bigger than the size of your fst. Until it disappears from your eyes, engage in this process of answering with only questions in relation to the act of holding. I invite you to share these questions with me at konstantina.skalionta@gmail.com

The above invitation was inspired by one of the scores developed during the creative process of Once There Was a Forest (2021).

Photography: Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar

HOMECOMING

Coming Home. Dramaturgy as a practice of care in alternative artistic pathways

by Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar

I have always been attracted to artistic practices of imaginary worlds of what could be, what might become and what should be. I needed to know there was more to strive for, more to desire and more to achieve in and through making art. As a dramaturg I’m trained to observe, analyse and refect, zoom in and out and read the room where people trusted each other into the unknown of a performance to be. I was conditioned to question everything by an endless curiosity in the world and how something could be expressed or represented by movement and through the body. I invested in production dramaturgy, where the focus was on producing choreographies, narratives and new ways of representation in the feld of contemporary dance. Where to fnd the next artistic invention, a diferent angle for thinking or a new question to occupy (mainly a highly educated) audience with? Within a decade, my practice would completely transform. I’d like to capture this journey and where I am today after the project Micro Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (MMDD)

Art was able to provide answers to complex questions, large and small problems. Art was productive and would bring insight for self-development as well as collective growth. But in project MMDD I realised I had a blind spot. The project intended to focus on dramaturgy as a disciplinary practice within dance art as well as focusing on artistic processes and research in dance rather than the delivery of good performance products. This project motivated me to bring these questions in to explore dramaturgy in diferent ways and together with choreographers and dance houses. A critical refection by some participants on how the project was hierarchically structured and whom it would serve in the end made visible how problematic dance institutions had become from the position of individual artists. We had to determine that all people involved were participants and that there couldn’t be a position of expertise occupied by only few. Similar questions were brought in on who decides on programming and staging artists and by which criteria? With funding structures in place, we couldn’t seem to facilitate an equitable ground

I was intrigued by the question of how dramaturgic tools for dialogue, analysis, refection and co-creation could contribute to create concrete pathways for artistic research in dance. Dramaturgy to outline potential landscapes of study, research journeys to take and overseeing potential scenarios that could rise from experimentation. I envisioned this practice in the Concept Store for Artistic Strategies, where I profled dramaturgy as a practice in visual storytelling and making roadmaps for any creation to be realised. An attempt to make dramaturgy tangible for a wide audience, not framed within the niche of contemporary dance only. Dramaturgy as a mode of looking at anything that was invented. Dramaturgy as an expanding practice of dialogue for consulting purposes. This vision was aligned with the course of my practice, as I was hired to refect on and innovate professional art education and organisation. I created programmes, curated content, built digital platforms and restructured communication lines within organisations. I trained people in communication skills and created organisational frames for visionary ideas for art education

What I hadn’t acknowledged out loud was that production dramaturgy ftted the realm of capitalism believing in a liberal artistry of progression, always looking for the next innovative new performance that would enlighten an engaged audience. Since 2015, I started to question from what position I looked at artefacts, how I interjected into personal processes and the consequence of stepping in and out of rehearsals. I started to refect more critically on western theatre and the way it was and is currently supported, framed and institutionalised. Without actively knowing, I started to deconstruct my own privileged position from a core desire to connect to others through art. Therefore, I had to re-defne what I considered dance art to be, which meant I had to learn about other voices and unlearn methods of working I practised. I started to feel uncomfortable judging narratives, gestures and behaviour I couldn’t embody myself in a pre-defned and dominant value system I was educated in, especially for the exclusive territory that didn’t allow methodologies coming from other voices. I questioned the agency and worth of my work. My interests changed towards a social understanding of dance cultures. Not the production of art, but the process of experimenting and exploring artistic methods and the human exchange got more space in the research projects I worked in.

An intrusive pandemic turned around the global world we lived in instantly. How to refect by artistic means on macro systems that collapsed, leaving behind massive uncertainty, and imagine how the world would look by tomorrow? Therefore, I got sucked into an involuntary micro narrative of resilience, endurance, survival and uncertainty on a daily basis. The impact of the pandemic contributed eventually to destabilising the networked, organised global world. Instantly, we had to re-defne home to survive isolation, missed the workplace to meet professionally and feared unknown scenarios for an unsure future. On top of that, we had to come to terms with the unbearable sight of the ongoing deterioration of biodiverse nature by climate change, and staged destabilising of geopolitical tensions. People collectively experienced loss, trauma, stress and loneliness. I was urgently looking for sanity by connection, rituals and comfortable habits in the local surrounding of my personal and professional life. Artistic processes and theatre tours of performances vanished from the public stage, and artists were out of work instantly. As it had always been so clear to me that art was a vehicle to navigate through the fast-paced world, I now only wanted to be home.

The transformation I carefully directed and studied, instantly became a fast pace ‘back to the future’ flm experience, wondering whether what I imagined in art still made sense in a seemingly alienating environment Artistic collaborations, research and projects are contextualised vehicles to contribute to a future I want to be part of, a world I actually want to live in. This process of deconstructing systems and frames only just got started, facing dysfunctional policies, collective trauma, colonised pain, biased societal classifcation, internalised inequalities and cross-generational pain. This is mirrored in plenty of examples of artistic projects worldwide: it is inspiring to learn of artists working with bio-based materials and creating ecological art that grows and dissolves by nature’s law, or speculative designers imagining potential future roadmaps or answering complex problems. And flmmakers zooming in on hyper-realist stories from people that didn’t have a voice before

By these initiatives and courageous artists exposing vulnerable sides of their lives to produce insight into the complexities of our world, is an important key for change in institutions by a practice of care Not the training of skills, but the intentionality of using these skills matters when you start from care. I believe dramaturgy can contribute to catalysing, navigating, and creating pathways for building this with others, in a conversation and by a careful exploration: navigating fuidly in situated processes addressing complex contexts that could change in each moment. In other words, to see and sense clearly what happens in front of me, I have to accept I’m part of the problem and am insignifcant to any future solution

Dramaturgy can create methodical roadmaps of a caring art practice And it’s my intention to do so by diferent stories and ways of working as I did before Exactly this notion is the start of a new artistic research trajectory, where creativity and interpersonal exchange with others will be translated to any kind of medium, form or discipline to navigate new realities. I’m not where I could be, but I position myself where I’m needed. I’m not ahead of things or others I’m taking agency of co-creating a language of a diferent world to become

Photography: Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar

Photography: William van der Voort

ICEBERG by Salvo Lombardo

Since I started my research in the context of the project MMDD I felt it was essential for me to refect on the distinction between the dramaturgical construction of a performative work and the broader dramaturgical function which a given works falls under.

As a matter of fact, I think of the dramaturgical function today as an extremely porous process that is not merely focused on the linguistic components internal to the work (micro level); this function I refer to, on the contrary, begins from a level of macro dramaturgy and it has a potentially inexhaustible temporality that precedes, nourishes and accompanies all the diferent phases of the work. The scope of this form of dramaturgy is an inter-subjective scope

The performing arts system very often continues to identify the process with its fnal outcome, with the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Therefore, according to this pattern, the show, the performance, conceived as the only manifestation of what is visible, tends to compress, hide and pull away as ‘waste’ products all the connections, relations and thrusts that led to the emergence of that ‘peak’.

If anything, I am on the other hand interested in keeping the remaining mass of the ‘iceberg’ alive; I perceive this mass as a pulsing and inexhaustible body, as something more articulated which cannot be confned in the simple category of the process of the construction of the work. This ‘mass’ is located on a borderline area and requires the invention of ‘spaces in between’ that can be acknowledged as a central part of the work.

In terms of dramaturgy, I am actually interested in that liminal zone between the micro level and the macro level. That juncture between, on one hand, the construction of the visible and on the other hand, the texture, that is often invisible, that nourishes and accompanies the former in all its phases.

I consider the micro dramaturgical level as a circumstantial exercise, that is, linked to the implicit codes in the scene, its language and therefore its levels of writing. The macro function, on the other hand, concerns the context that is generated around a work: context intended as a reference system within which a creative process originates. The context, in this perspective, is not the frame of an event: it constitutes part of the work itself.

For this reason, ideally, the micro and macro levels of an artistic research are never separable; one informs the other

Once the macro level has been clarifed for me, the whole process begins to oscillate between the construction of the stage-performative work and the invention of ‘productive’ formats that extend and branch out the idea (e.g. workshops, relational practices, installations, panel, role-playing games, curatorial practices, etc.). This whole fourishing of formats (and related dramaturgies) should not be conceived as a sidekick or a residual dimension of the main event, but rather as a diferent level of experience, which implies a diferent language and diferent recipients.

It is therefore crucial and urgent to have the cultural policies of the contexts hosting contemporary creation, made fexible and porous (at least in my country, in Italy) as it is to entrench curatorial practices and trajectories of cultural innovation capable of meeting this need

My greatest desire is to contribute, with my work, to the legitimation of formats that also include what is not directly recognizable as a ‘performative event’.

I pin on the validity of dramaturgy as something that allows me to move and swing back and forth between these diferent levels: to reach the tip of the iceberg and keep the rest of its mass alive. This type of approach involves the construction of a multimodal dramaturgy

For this reason, in my experience, I come up with perpetual new linguistic branches that try to disturb those mechanisms of hierarchical classifcation of forms telling us that a work built and recognizable as a ‘work’ is more relevant than other expressive procedures (or other formats) often not yet fully categorized, but which are equally efective in expressing the meaning and the dramaturgical function that a given process brings about

The defence of the show alone looks like to me like a liberal-capitalist and fetishist tic based on the multiplication, enhancement and conservation of ‘objects’, dispersing all along the texture that deals with the ‘subjects’. In truth, the relationships between the subjects around them can produce their own aesthetics and require synergies and linguistic inventions that can be defned without hesitation as dramaturgy It is a polyphonic form of dramaturgy that sees the artist personally involved in a dialogue with the other voices.

Therefore, as an artist, I feel called to recontextualize each time the dramaturgical function of my work also from a co-curatorial point of view (or at least I try!). This type of exercise allows me to overcome binary classifcations every time I start a new process of creation: I can be an artist with a dramaturgical point of view that is shared with other players having a co-curatorial tension in dialogue with further other interlocutors. This process generates texture. This probably generates new formats. This coincides, in some ways, with the ‘mass’ of the rest of the iceberg.

I feel the need to focus not only on aesthetic issues. I feel the urge to fnd a way to stay in contact with other areas of the process, starting from the language, that also question ethical issues emerging from the work. The question I ask myself is no longer just: “What do I do?” but also “How, in what way do I achieve this specifc thing?”, “What position am I expressing myself from?”, “What forces are acting a resistance to the pure expression of my ego?”...

These resistant forces are positive forces that complete the development of a creative process, pushing me to move defnitively away from the blueprint of organism-creator individualism that goes according to a precise nineteenth-century design by the artist

The encounter of the diferent expectations, my personal ones as an artist and those of the context and other ‘voices’ that the context can include, opens up possibilities that can be translated into work practices. Dramaturgy as a practice of reciprocity

If dramaturgy can do this then I want to stroll about a little longer over its intermediate areas, between the visible and the invisible, between micro and macro. Always requalifying my position.

Translated from the Italian by Giusi Nibbi.

Photography: William van der Voort

Photography: William van der Voort

IGNORANCE by Margherita Scalise

Why do you assume you’re the smartest in the room? – Lin-Manuel

Miranda

We, human beings, are used to extending our existence through tools since the dawn of time. Weapons, spoons, pens, smartphones: nothing more than an attempt to be greater and more powerful. Since knowledge is power, we feel lost without access to books or Wikipedia. We feel naked without our tools. Most of the time, when we are asked to be involved in a project as dramaturgs, we feel the expectation of knowing everything, of being able to give a meaning to what is happening, to being the smartest in the room. Therefore, we prepare ourselves: we read essays, consult similar projects, dive into history, collect as much info as possible. And all that stuf will be accompanying us for the whole process. We put all of this in a backpack together with some snacks and we carry it with us the whole time. This is our extension tool, we think. We are ready to give information, to reassure that we have, thanks to our acquired notes, the answers to most questions.

Most of the time, we rapidly have to recognise that this is not enough. As the process goes on, our previously assumed knowledge gets drier and less and less useful. It must transform, following the life of the project. We are left without landmarks, the snacks are crumbled at the bottom of the backpack. We need to accept that we are ignorant.

This brings, in my own personal and artistic life, a nice amount of frustration, sense of failure and even depression. Just a friendly reminder to future me and all of you fellow participants of an artistic project: every transformation needs some pain. And without transformation things have no life. So, fnd your best way to handle that pain and go on.

We must get along with the fow, create new milestones for the process, keep walking hand in hand with the unknown. Find new snacks.

How to do that? First of all, by realising two fundamental truths: we are not alone, and we are not our brain only

The frst truth relies on the fact that the dramaturg is always having a journey with at least one other party – the maker(s), the choreographer, the director – who involved them or started with them the research towards a fnal result (maybe).

As Bojana Cvejić states in her article, “The Ignorant Dramaturg”: Dramaturg and choreographer establish a relationship of equals similar to the relation between two ignorant people confronting the book they don’t know how to read. The “book” is the work of research, that something, bound by a radical form of efort that both invest into the process of defning what is at stake and how.

Therefore, being ignorant is already in the premises of the process together.

Let’s not leave our alliances with the makers burdened by the shame of ignorance. Let’s be brave and overcome the “terror of not knowing”, as Andre Lepecki calls it in his essay, “Note Six, Errancy as Work” . I might suggest, out of my own experience, to acknowledge this ground of weaknesses with the maker before the beginning of the project. Discuss it together: what are the expectations for your dialogue? The second truth is something we constantly tend to forget: we are not only our brain, but we are in frst place bodies. Leaving aside our backpacks, our pre-built tools, at the end of the day (and to be honest, also at its beginning) we are nothing more than naked bodies. We overwhelm this pure and simple fact by accumulating more and more concrete and virtual tools and we tend to forget that we are already carriers of knowledge by just being there. The space we take in the studio, watching the rehearsals, listening to how our bodies are reacting, is probably the frst ingredient for helping the work to get layers over layers. It is not only the “outside eye” position, but the embodied knowledge, which goes far beyond the sense of sight

Our bodies are the frst ones to react to the work in the studio, to move accordingly, to dance microscopically with the other bodies. And they inform the work way more than we can rationally foresee.

During our last leg of the MMDD project in Prague I was witnessing the creative process of Petros (Konnaris) and Mirko (Guido). The spectators surrounding the performance space could not join them but were welcome to write and leave notes in the space. After one hour and more of still watching, fashed by a suddenly urgent question, I remember writing down: “ Is watching movement a movement practice? (Death to gyms!)” This question still resonates with me, weeks after.

We are all scared by not knowing. The glossary term ‘ignorance’ does not overlap fully with the not knowing – yes, I know. Being ignorant can mean neglecting something you could get to know. It is, in a way, a form of sloth. But the awareness of this is exactly the challenging situation that can trigger research, questions, and an active presence towards the work.

An artistic process should be scary to those who approach it therefore it should imply some bravery. As dramaturgs, we might be overwhelmed by the fear of not being up to the task, of being not enough, of… being too ignorant for it.

But at the very end, we must let it go. We must let go of the expectation of being the smartest in the room. We are just bodies, with a backpack full of stuf, entering into a (brave) new world. Nothing more. We can rely on the relationships, and on the space and time that are given by the micro (e.g., studio space, hours of paid presence) and macro (other projects, our private life...) circumstances and nothing more. Let’s pick up our backpacks, let’s load them with snacks, and eventually let’s leave them behind us along the way. Somebody else will ofer us cookies at the right moment.

Resources

Cvejić, Bojana. “Practical Dramaturgy”, Maska XVI, nos. 131-132, 2010, pp. 40-53, republished in SARMA, http://sarma.be/docs/2864

Accessed: 24 05 2023

Lepecki, Andre. “Note Six, Errancy as Work,” Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement, eds. Pil Hansen and Darcey Callison. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.61-63.

Miranda, Lin Manuel. “Non-Stop”, Hamilton: An American Musical. Atlantic Records, 2015, MP3.

Vomvolou, Rodia. “The embodied knowledge of the dramaturg” in: Vomvolou, Rodia, ‘Dare to stutter, dare to stammer’: Towards an alternative understanding of the knowledge of the dramaturg Master Thesis, Utrecht University, 2018, pp.39-49.

Photography: William van der Voort

Photography: Markéta Perroud

JOKER by Miřenka Čechová

The dramaturg I will write about in the following is a supervillain of the creative process. I see them as a leader of a collective artwork, as an anarchist frebrand of dramatic conventions, as a social worker of the ill community, as an agitator of the social dialogue and as a thief of collective thoughts. Voilà the dramaturg-joker!

The genesis of the word joker within the MMDD project

The notion of a joker occurred for the frst time within the Prague part of the MMDD project in relation to some  visual material that did not ft among the other proposed visual sources. Dramaturg Sodja Lotker used it during an exercise. We were tasked to bring a photo of our choice. The pictures were spread out randomly on the ground and Sodja asked us to arrange them as if we were curators of an exhibition. Then she asked us whether there were any pictures that did not seem to ft in the line. She called them jokers and placed them face down.

The second person who used the term joker within the context of the MMDD project was dramaturg Maja Hriešik She suggested dividing the participants of the Prague residency into pairs according to the hobbies they share, then gave us some time to have an exchange on our shared values. I was left alone. Maja suggested I could rotate and join any pair I please and refect on this experience at the end. At that moment, for me the position of a dramaturg-joker was born, a dramaturg that turns their exclusion into a privilege. The privileged task of a person who carefully chooses what they will point to. Alongside maintaining artistic independence, ‘performing the joker’ in a creative process allows for an aesthetically signifcant and original gesture. This brought to my mind the provocative idea of a dramaturg as a leader of the creative process, as a creator that transforms their original position of an ‘antagonist’ towards a choreographer or a director into the position of a creator.

Audition

for an ideal dramaturg

From this position, I call for the Joker as somebody I am longing to create an artistic relationship with, realised through battles and challenges as well as harmony in unity. It may sound like a utopian audition for an ideal dramaturg that I am trying to empower. This inevitably leads to a not totally subjective desire for a change of order and reconsideration of options, abilities and competencies related to the role of the dramaturg

Inspiration drawn from the Joker in the movies: the dramaturg as an anarchist power entering the universe of a choreographer

In card games, the universally comprehensible role of the joker card enjoys a unique and independent position. It has no particular value, does not yield to any rules and might enter the game any time, changing it with its mobility. It comes as a chance. It is an ace up one’s sleeve. It is a mobile power that the players want to possess, and which plays in their favour.

The leftover material called ‘joker’ brings the necessary disruption to the layering and developing of order, of the uniform material subjected to repetition and perhaps boredom after some time It is the dissonant semitone disrupting a melodious harmony to provoke an emotional tremor

The Joker character, the universally known supervillain, was born as a comic character who fought his way into many flm interpretations thanks to his provocative ambivalent interpretation and his socially critical overlap. A laughing psychopath, a doomed existence, a criminal genius – this is Joker in the movies.

He might be equally interpreted as the one who wants to reveal the truth hidden behind the mask of the empty globalised world full of violence and corruption.

Along the same line, my ideal dramaturg-joker breaks conventional thinking and stereotypes in theatre, exposes empty directing gestures shrouded in an aestheticized form. As a choreographer I require the dramaturg-joker to disclose my own shallowness, half-baked connections, quick solutions, meretricious gestures and involuntary copying and appropriation of non-original material. However, a critical condition is needed for all this – it is a dramaturg with a bodily experience. My ideal dramaturg is not only a brilliant intellectual but also somebody who understands and distinguishes physical qualities and who has a grasp of physical laws and body rules.

The Joker in the movies hated the stereotype of ordinary life, therefore he sought challenges, which is the reason for his obsession with Batman. I see this relationship of mutual need between the Joker and Batman as a relationship between a dramaturg and a choreographer. The Joker embodies chaos, Batman stands for order. Conventional theatrical thinking sees the dramaturg as a rule-maker, somebody who works on the cohesion of ideas and who brings extravagant directorial gestures back to a meaningfully justifable level. However, a dramaturg-joker has the opposite position. This radical role reversal, when the choreographer/ director aims at unity, while the dramaturg brings in diverted movement and disturbing impulses, is the food of new impulses which represent a new potential.

Without Joker’s and the dramaturg-joker’s creativity and unrestrained position, the order would be only a long boring boat ride on a bland river of fowing performance.

An essential characteristic of the Joker in the movies is the ability to see the laws of the universe without any personal illusions and self-delusions The dramaturg-joker shakes up and creates the universe of theatre work.

My ideal dramaturg-joker is such a partner who bewitches me with their unpredictability, their bestial radicality of thoughts that undermine all my routines, well-tried methods and principles. I expect them to oppose my ideas as well as to suggest solutions going beyond my thinking. The Joker tempts Batman to do something he has never done before. I expect exactly the same from my dramaturg. I want them to provoke me, stir me up the same way a lover does.

The instincts of creative passion yield exceptional decisions and emotions Does a dramaturg-joker become my teacher, too? Do I appoint myself a choreographer when I can advocate decisions face-to-face with somebody who surpasses me intellectually and artistically? Is not my ideal dramaturg an imprint of my dream artistic super-ego after all?

The Joker at the Forum Theatre: the dramaturg as an initiator of social activities from education to revolution

At the Forum Theatre, a similar, specifc role of the Joker already exists. The Forum Theatre or the Theatre of the Oppressed established by Augusto Boal has been created as a platform for initiating dialogue in society and fnding common solutions guided by democratic principles. In one moment, the audience becomes the one suggesting how to solve the oppression in the presented situation. It is the Joker who plays the leading role in this process The Joker guides us through the production The Joker bridges the gap between the audience and actors and in cooperation with all participants, searches for a solution and facilitates the debate

This inspired me to think about the dramaturg-joker as the one who brings the production to the audience. Based on the ensuing discussion and feedback, the Joker can change the performative work in the ensuing rehearsals as well as create related social activities. The premiere is not the end of the process for me

I learnt a specifc method of working from our ensemble, Tantehorse’s latest project, Propojme se vcera (Let’s Connect Yesterday), a performance that premiered in the reading room of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2022. It consists of adding another round of rehearsals after any public show. Thus, we incorporate both internal and external stimuli into the forthcoming performance. As a result, versions 2.0, 3.0… are created. This allows us to further develop the given topic based on the dialogue with the audience and with the performers within the production.

Another role of the Joker at the Forum Theatre is to enter the theatrical action The Joker can play any role. The Joker can stop the performance and convert newly proposed suggestions into action. The Joker – explains Martin Strnad in his dissertation – can comment on the performance, referring to its historical and political context. Hence the Joker creates theatrical dramaturgy not only ‘secretly’ during rehearsals, but also publicly and in a performative way, in front of the audience in real-time. In Forum Theatre the Joker’s role does not stop at the end of the show, though as noted by Barbara Santos, Julian Boal and Augusto Boal in their book on Forum Theatre. The Joker gives lectures, organises social activities for particular social groups and educates them through practical sessions as well as theoretical lectures. In brief, the Joker gathers the theoretical background to develop the method of the oppressed

From the perspective of left-wing activism, Slavoj Žižek arrives at a similar conclusion in his interpretation of the Joker in the movies. Žižek describes the Joker as an agitator pushing the audience to civic engagement, initiating the spectators to take their own radical political project in their hands. He calls on them to break free from the current coordinate system and spot the contours of something radically new.

The Forum Theatre conceived the Joker as an artist “who does not ground his acting in using his talent –like other artists – but in applying the talent of all participants of the collective production. An artist who places his art into the service of life”. (Santos et al. 43)

When talking about the role of a dramaturg in the context of creating an artwork, a dance piece, I require them to have a broader range of knowledge and skill-sets and widen their experience through similar social activities. Furthermore, the dramaturg-joker should try encouraging the audience to step out from the position of a passive art consumer (accepting the system and the social oppression) and assume their role as citizens

As Markéta (Vacovská) and Naya (Moll Olsen) noted during the MMDD project, “Let’s dance dramaturgy as a matter of concern for the others.”

The Joker as a thief of the collective mind

I have accepted the role of a joker – initially used for the independent or leftover material – and identifed myself with that. Sometimes I feel exactly like that. Being the joker can be a lonely and unattached position on one hand, but on the other, it can be turned into a privilege. The joker can travel, can witness directly or indirectly hidden things, can absorb and process. The journey of thoughts travelling through the collective mind that a dramaturg-joker can steal and ofer. Later on, the joker can change things.

I am making a dramaturgical choice in real-time – placing my own perspective over your ideas and ofers –changing the leftover material into something strong .

How do I decide as a dramaturg what is my own desire and what is the right note for the process?

From the position of a joker, I would answer that I basically share everything that disturbs the regular pattern of the process.

Overwhelming is close to chaos… I need to get the process overwhelmed by material to stop and breathe. To change the rhythm. To shift regularity into causality. Where do you place values? What is valuable? Can things that are not considered valuable change by the way we approach them?

The idea of turning garbage into a valuable thing uses the same principle as turning weakness into strength. Finding connotations, similarities, resonances…that’s another principle of a dramaturgy. Do you place value in things that attract your attention? Is the joker’s disturbance attractive? Does it bring something extraordinary?

Well… this is exactly what I do in my life and my art; I use my weakness and change it into my strength, I describe a weakness of society and change it into a new way of victory over ourselves. There could not have been a better ofer for me from Maja than this one.

Translated from the Czech by Katerina Vorlická.

Resources

Santos, Barbara and Julian Boal and Augusto Boal. Divadlem ke zmene: vybrané texty k divadlu utlačovaných (Theatre for Change: selected texts on the Theatre of the Oppressed), translated by Tereza Schmoranz and Martina Čermáková. Antikomplex, Prague, 2016. Strnad, Martin. Principy interakce jokera a diváků v představeních divadla forum (Principles of interaction between the joker and the audience at the Forum Theatre) Bachelor’s thesis, Masaryk University, Brno, 2020.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Joker a nulový stupeň sociální revoluce” (The Joker and the Zero Degree of Social Revolution), translated by Radovan Baroš, a2larm, 13.11.2019. a2larm cz

Photography: Adela Vosičková

Screenshot from the dance video Νήμα / Thread by Evangelos Biskas. Photography: courtesy of the artist.

NHEMA ( Thread) by Evangelos Biskas

What I have experienced during Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (MMDD) project is a miniature of a lifetime. Non-linear, full of inspiration and insights, and all very much related to presence and collectiveness. On the last day of the project in Prague, we were invited into a group meditation where we would envision our MMDD experience in ten minutes. The next step was to translate these visions into words in a piece of paper. Out of dozens of words, we had to choose three and eventually one. My choice was nήμα ( níma), meaning ‘a thread that is spun’ or ‘flament’ and it was the only Greek word on the paper. While I was envisioning my MMDD experience, I got a feeling of diferent memories being connected with each other creating a kind of life thread. Meetings, smiles and looks, tears and pain, hugs and handshakes, planes and airports, discussions, drinking, dancing... Something was passing through them all, connecting them all. It felt like a kind of mysterious essence that can’t be explained or talked about, but one that exists in between things, in the relationship between things. Maybe it relates to what some people call Destiny, or God, or Love. Or maybe even Dramaturgy. An unwritten continuity that has infnite wisdom, a thread like in Greek mythology the Three Fates used to play with, connecting past, present and future. That’s how this word and my consciousness crossed paths with each other.

Before getting into any kind of research about the word itself or thinking about what I should and should not write, I danced. A friend of mine has inspired me to consider dancing also as a way of processing things It is something I have been doing for most of my life anyway, but when she said it, I heard it diferently because I was in love with her. Here is a passage to my body processing what happened at MMDD, carrying the thread of diferent experiences mainly out of these two weeks in Prague

You can watch it here: vimeo com

While entering the process of words and mind, of course the frst impulse was to get some support from our friend, Google. According to Google and Wikipedia, níma translates to ‘thread’. Funnily enough, that brought me to computer science very quickly. After a defnition of what thread means in computing, that was very interesting but difcult to work with, my frst real station was this:

Scheduling, Preemption, Context Switching

Image source: Wikipedia By Hooman Mallahzadeh - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org

Program vs. Process vs Thread

I thought it looked so cool, even if I have no idea what it might mean or how it might function. I was fascinated by the thought of translating this scheme into a kind of dramaturgical tool, or something fancy in this direction, but I failed miserably. Maybe this could be something for you who is reading this. Or you could create a group game taking this as the board. Anyway, this was a reminder of a research project I did with friend and colleague Nikos Mouchtaris, where he created a program with which I was improvising. I used the program as a tool to learn new patterns in my dance by using (or not using) the random output of the algorithm Here is an example of what it looked like: vimeo com

And here you can fnd the actual program that I encourage you to use it dramaturgically, choreographically, creatively, dancilly or any other way you wish! I’ll put the manual at the end of this text. mouchtaris.github.io/v.0.1/bundle.html

Taking from the randomized sensation of the program, I’ll make a jump to a question:

What is the frst thought that comes to mind when you think of dramaturgy?

I thought of the dramaturg as an observer, and I thought about two diferent modes of observing and responding from: the receptor and the translator The receptor’s attention is on the sensorial and physical experience of what is actually happening, and the translator’s attention is on the history of things and the bridge between languages using one’s own interpretation. From here somehow, I got to David Bohm and his book, the Wholeness and the Implicate Order :

“…a great deal of our thinking is in terms of theories. The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria’, which has the same root as ‘theatre’, in a word meaning ‘to view’ or ‘to make a spectacle’. Thus, it might be said that a theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e., a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is.” (4)

“The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement This view implies that fow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve this fow…all matter is of this nature: That is, there is a universal fux that cannot be defned explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly defnable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal fux. In this fow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are diferent aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.” (11)

Applying this to dramaturgy, one of the things that I have understood is that no matter what we do, dramaturgy is an insight to use Bohm’s description, and exists in a fux. Maybe the role of a dramaturg is to actively engage in a process of sustaining the essentials, and to help to allow for what’s not essential to be removed or to be let go of, much like the digestive system of the body. Do we take time to grieve all the things that have to go?

An idea came to me, that of dramaturgy being an essence that also has to be grieved for Every process is new, every dramaturgy is dying and a new one is being born. No dramaturgy is forever, and thus each time to be a dramaturg means something completely diferent. Here is a poem I wrote for the one I loved that I now dedicate to dramaturgy (dramaturgy pronounces she/her in Greek):

I couldn’t save her

I had to let her go

I had to let her die

There was nothing else I could have done

The níma is cut here – until from a new yarn a new thread is spun

Thank you for taking the time to read and watch. Until we meet each other again, take care!

Manual for Randomised Dance

To open the command bar: Shift+control+k (if it doesn’t work try a diferent browser).

To choose a category, for example level: v.setg (3, 1, 1) -> the frst number is the category, and the last two numbers represent the probability of the option, for instance (1,1) means 100%, (0,1) means 0%, (1,2) means 50% and so on.

To choose a specifc option within a category, for example, cross: v.set (4, 1, 1, 1) ->the frst number is the category, the second number is the specifc option, and last two numbers are the probability. To choose between categories simultaneously: v.setg (2, 1, 3) v. setg (3, 1, 3)

v.setg (4, 1, 3) -> now there is a 33% chance between categories 2,3 and 4.

To change the time of the commands: v.sleepmin is the minimum time option & v.sleepspan is the diference between the minimum time option and the maximum one.

Photography: Lars Kjær Dideriksen

NO!

On dissent and friction

by Katalin Trencsényi

In The Practice of Dramaturgy, editors Konstantina Georgelou, Efrosini Protopapa and Danae Theodoridou “introduce dramaturgy as a catalytic operation” (25). When contemplating this “specifc catalytic function” (ibid.) perhaps the frst thoughts about this work are regarding actions of generative nature. For instance, inspiring the work through research, providing “dramaturgical mulch” (Koszyn 276) that is “rich, various, layered, fertile, organic, and somewhat random” (Proehl 72) – contributions that germinate ideas and action. Or the method Pina Bausch established of asking mobilising questions during the process which drive forward the development of the new piece (Trencsenyi 13). Or through somatic witnessing, dialoguing and editing (Cools 47) thus contributing to the shaping of the emerging work. Yet, this catalytic function can be accomplished through a ‘negative action’ too. As Maaike Bleeker notes in Doing Dramaturgy, “[s]uch supporting may also involve intervening, disturbing, disagreeing and challenging” (2). Similarly, Georgelou and her colleagues also posit “alienating” as one of dramaturgy’s key operations within this catalytic function (Georgelou et al 25). This estranging is realised by using interruption, interrogation, intervention, and distraction (49) as strategies.

In Dramaturgy in the Making, I too mused on the duality of the dramaturg’s role, that it calls for both supporting and challenging (263) and noted that fulflling these requires the dramaturg to occupy a position that is markedly diferent from the others in the working process. By volunteering to be a ‘nuisance’, that is to say putting themselves in the position of the ‘other’ within the creative process, this ‘alien’ or ‘outsider’ role allows the dramaturg to perform markedly diferent functions from the rest of the team. This place grants the dramaturg, when necessary, the opportunity to jolt the progress by opening up a “rupture” (256). This temporary rupture then allows time to reassess the process, reconsider the implications of the decisions that are about to be made, weighing up their consequences, and if necessary, adjusting the work.

If critical thinking is an essential element of the dramaturg’s way of working, what is the value of friction and how can dissent be included in a creative and meaningful, constructive way in the work? Since for every ‘yes’, there are at least as many ‘nos’ to be considered and options to be rejected in order to come to a decision

Friction, a term that originates from 17th century physics has become a popular notion today in informatics, explains linguist Marcus Tomalin (Tomalin 5), where it is defned as “any unnecessary retardation of a process or activity that delays the user accomplishing a desired action” (Tomalin 3). It is often regarded as undesired, something that has to be minimised or eliminated. However, notes Tomalin, depending on the action, friction can also be useful and benefcial, since it can provide, for instance, protection or allow time for refection.

Blogger (and CEO of HeyOcra tech company) Joe Teo comes to similar conclusions, widening the semantic feld of friction and applying the term to work and life management: “Good friction helps us make better decisions by making us think through the details and our assumptions It slows us down and prevents us from making rash or ill-thought-out decisions.” He distinguishes useful (“good”) and impeding (“bad”) frictions. According to Teo, friction can be welcomed in cases when (i) “[y]ou’re trying to understand your thoughts” in order to gain clarity; (ii) “you are in an emotional situation” in order to avoid impulsive decisions that we would later regret; when (iii) “you are making important, High Risk decisions” in order to ensure that there are efective processes in place that enable a good result; or (iv) “when you are trying to ensure quality” or accuracy – here friction can serve as part of a quality assurance system

All the above notions of friction, I would like to argue, can be applied to the creative process or describe this particular resistance and estranging function of the dramaturg’s operation

Resistance takes courage. Assuming this role of the ‘troublemaker’ within a process that is based on consensus amounts to a political act Standing apart from the rest of the team and maintaining creativity by an opposing action, by causing a calculated friction, slowing down, stopping or perhaps even undoing the work by voicing dissent – is an ungrateful role. To be a problem poser, instead of maintaining the (unspoken) consensus. Besides, to break up the concordance and invite temporary dissent instead is not without risks and stakes. It takes not only strength but also caution to exercise this action

Furthermore, performing this action amounts to questioning or even undermining the silent pact in the feld of the performing arts, where we are normally conditioned to say yes to everything, since this unspoken agreement releases that bold and courageous energy that enables us to free ourselves from inhibitions, fear or restraints, and go with the fow, explore, improvise, dare to try out unconventional ideas. The same consent also allows us to abide by the unwritten rule of our professional commitment to support the team, put the production frst or just simply get on with the work despite the adversities (“the show must go on”).

Being the ‘bug’ that slows down or stops this machinery can be an ungrateful but impactful role in detecting signals of potential problems early in the process. To draw attention to the working process and resist the force to carry along ‘business as usual’ but make the team take time to re-examine the work. To urge the creators to rethink decisions and question automatisms. To recognise problems in a complex system that is yet in development, at an early stage, when they can be still fxed. To spot mistakes in time to prevent issues escalating or becoming threats to the process, compromising the artwork or harming the fellow-creators, the organisation or the community. All these are valuable ‘negative’ contributions. If this is done well, the process improves: important details can be adjusted, overlooked issues can be discovered, unheard voices can be amplifed, inequalities can be addressed.

Saying no is difcult in our industry – the lower one is in the hierarchy, the more vulnerable their position and the harder it is to raise their voice and resist alone. The price for dissent, for creating friction can be high In a fragile and volatile industry where long-term planning is problematic, successful procedures rely on smooth operations that eliminate frictions The norm in the performing arts has been to give full commitment and do the maximum possible under often not ideal circumstances and ofer these extras elegantly, with a light-hearted generosity. In an industry where your reputation is your currency, being labelled ‘difcult’ can be perilous. Therefore, it is an ethical imperative for the dramaturg to take this role on

The dramaturg’s liminal (and somewhat privileged) position is well-suited for this role to catalyse and then contain the necessary friction that would serve the work. Either by perceiving and voicing the dissent in the rehearsal room or by recognising potential systematic problems and drawing attention to them

As the person in the room best placed to cry stop, it is important to diferentiate between the shades of dissent from signalling an issue to the complete rejection during a collaborative process

Photography: Marina Dmitrieva

At the MMDD Aarhus residency, at our frst session, during the preliminary conversations with the participants about planning the week’s work ahead, we discovered that whilst a ‘yes’ can be very straightforward in terms of its meaning, nos are less so. In fact, we distinguished several diferent meanings of ‘no’ during the collaborative process.

• No can mean: This would not be my frst choice. I disagree with you (my preference would be something else) but I accept the majority of the group’s decision so that we can go ahead together and continue the work. This type of no is the basis of representative democracy. We all accept the outcome of general elections, even if the winner is not the party that we voted for.

• No can mean: Something is not quite right: I have reservations, foresee some problems, and we need to renegotiate something in order to make some adjustments before the process can continue This is another ‘common no’ that is used during a creative process when we adjust elements of the work (for instance: the lighting doesn’t work, it is too dim, it needs to be brighter).

• No can mean: I disagree with you. Here our views, opinions difer markedly and irreconcilably. We need to stop and recognise that and henceforth work with that acknowledgement – allowing space within the work for those divergencies. “Approaching each other takes a long time”, noted Marianne Van Kerkhoven in her essay “European Dramaturgy for the 21st century”, embracing these discordant diferences with empathy, might be an important milestone on that journey.

• No can mean: I am against this and cannot be part of this. You can go ahead – without my participation. This one is an undesired and difcult no, but sometimes necessary.

• No can mean: Stop! I am vetoing the process! The problem I am raising is a major one. We all must change track This no is an alarming signal to do an immediate stop and fully assess the situation. We could not have found these nos without spending enough time making our ‘social contract’ on day one of the MMDD Aarhus residency at Bora Bora, clarifying how the group was going to work together, communicate with each other and make decisions. Later it emerged that the time invested in these detailed conversations was rewarded by a high level of trust during the work which arguably we could not have established otherwise.

Yet, these nos we discovered together were the dissents of collaboration. There are further, nonconsensual, radical rejections that can be important to be aware of:

• No can mean: I am provoking, undermining, destabilising, “overturning evident relationships” (Barba 11) in order to create a clear slate on which we can build anew. This can be on a scale from creating restrictions to even causing an “earthquake” during the process. Eugenio Barba notes that this might be necessary in order to derail the work from its usual track and provide a new “potentiality of links and approaches” (Barba 11) .

• No can mean: I am protesting, our rules of consensus are suspended. This is a strong and powerful device to employ when agreements seemed to have failed and there is a lot at stake: “a certain refusal to negotiation or a[t] least a refusal to change in terms of negotiation until the feld has been reset, rebooted.” (Spangberg 145)

• No can mean: I am sabotaging: a consensus is to be avoided at all costs since it would re-create or stabilise a system we are trying to avoid being part of and rather are aiming to dismantle

These nuances of nos are important They can serve as guidelines in any democracy. I am glad we stopped in Aarhus to explore them

Resources

Barba, Eugenio. On Directing and Dramaturgy. Burning the house Routledge, Abingdon, 2010.

Bleeker, Maaike. Doing Dramaturgy. Thinking Through Practice Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023.

Cools, Guy. “On Dance Dramaturgy”, Cena, no. 29, December 2019, pp 42-52

Georgelou, Konstantina and Efrosini Protopapa and Danae Theodoridou (eds) The Practice of Dramaturgy. Working on Actions in Performance. Valiz, Amsterdam, 2016.

Koszyn, Jayme. “The Dramaturg and the Irrational.” In: Jonas, Susan, and Geof Proehl, and Michael Lupu (eds), Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, New York, 1998, pp. 276-282.

Proehl, Geofrey S., DD Kugler, Mark Lamos, and Michael Lupu. Toward a dramaturgical sensibility: landscape and journey Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison [N.J.], 2008.

Spangberg, Mårten. Spangbergianism. Spangberg, Stockholm, 2011. Teo, Joe, “Good and Bad Friction”, Joe Teo, 13 December 2020 www.joeteo.com/blog/good-friction-bad-friction.

Tomalin, Marcus, “Rethinking online friction in the information society”. Journal of Information Technology. 2022, 38(1), pp.2-15.

Trencsenyi, Katalin. Dramaturgy in the Making. A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015.

Trencsenyi, Katalin. “Introduction. What’s the point of Bandoneon?”. In: Hoghe, Raimund and Ulli Weiss, transl. Penny Black, ed. Katalin Trencsenyi, Bandoneon. Working with Pina Bausch Oberon Books, London, 2016, pp.6-70.

Van Kerkhoven, Marianne, “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century. A constant movement”, Performance Research vol. 14, issue 3, September 2009, pp.7-11.

Photography: Bálint Somlyó

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

PERSPECTIVES

The certainty of diverging perspectives

by Tereza Krčálová

- You either gaze at an ant or the Sun. Something is micro, something is macro…

- Sometimes I dream about the Sun, while I am not a fan of ants.

- People always dislike what resembles them.

- Do you mean, what they feel connected with?

- You will notice connections once you see the world like the Sun!

- I see the world like an ant. But you are like the Sun.

- Do you mean I’m chubby?!

creative process

I have been interested in the relationship between the dancer, the dance creator and the spectator since before the MMDD project began. I wanted to thematise this relationship and create a performance that would investigate how this relationship is being formed and to what degree it is predetermined by social convention. Bearing in mind that in this feld, this convention has not become as stabilised as, for instance, the conventions in theatre and opera. It is dance therefore that ofers the opportunity and space for research and investigation concerning what the dancer comes with on the stage and how it increases the spectators’ expectations. What bonds can be established between the dancer (and the creator backstage) and the audience during the performance and what potential lies in the relationship between them?

I witnessed dancers often talking about the pressure they experience mainly because they exhibit their bodies. They said they couldn’t ‘hide’ anywhere on the stage; the slightest imperfection was immediately visible. At that time, I understood dance from the dancer’s perspective who thinks of it as relating to something ideal, perfect. Because it is the body through which contact with the surroundings is established

During the past two years, since the MMDD project started, I had the opportunity to work with graduates and students of the Duncan Centre Conservatory in Prague on three projects, each of which lasted six months approximately. My task was to outline the creative process and determine its basic principles and settings This task did not really originate from my decision made beforehand but rather from my intuition what was needed in the given situation. My role was based on the consensus that I entered the process when it was necessary to create an impulse, to throw the creators into a diferent situation because the previous one had been already exhausted, or it needed to be changed somehow because it proved dysfunctional in the given context. And I left the room when a totally free mental space was needed, allowing the dancers and creators space to work at liberty without intervention or disturbance. Each stage of the creative process was precisely defned, it had its own trajectory and purpose. During this work, I realised that I needed to distinguish three types of creative action. The word action is deliberate here because it is an act – an active way we take hold of the situation.

PERSP

The frst action is typically assigned to the choreographer – an author-creator who comes up with a vision It is providing leadership The second action is activation – the ability to develop the potential of external impulses, an active fulflment of the task. This one is usually regarded as the dancers’ task. The third action, typically associated with the dramaturg, is seemingly passive: the capacity to listen and observe, the ability to perceive various perspectives. When someone (the dancers, the choreographer etc.) has an idea, they want to implement it, trying it out, getting a new experience. The implementation of various ideas is the experimental work that allows us to open new perspectives in this frst stage

PEC

of the creative work. Yet, in this spontaneous moment, it is also possible to stop for an instance and look at the realisation of our ideas from various angles. We may fnd out that the investigation of reality from diverse positions and perspectives is even more adventurous than the realisation itself. Therefore, I consider observation, research and listening an equally important action as providing leadership because all these three actions are present at the beginning of the process and allow one to start listening to oneself and the others

Photography: Vojtech Brnick ý

I imagine the creative process as a living organism, continuously fed by new impulses; a creature born from intuition, which fnds support in the streams of thoughts and movements (that is to say that it does not exist isolated only in one’s imagination). Following this image of a creature, I would argue that in the creative process it is essential that all three above mentioned actions fow smoothly between every participating individual. As a result, everybody should be able to take a step back from the creative process and observe for a while as well as experience being a leader. I believe that once it works like that, various frictions and excessive correctness will gradually disappear because the dancers and creators will have the freedom to express themselves and contribute with their perspectives which will be refected in the work. All such perspectives imprint in the complexity of the fnal work, which happens naturally, subconsciously. If we bring awareness to these various attitudes without seeking to evaluate them and judge them, we can already create a rich material for future performances through this procedure.

contents

Dance has been interesting for me also because of the question of what new content it can contain. What content can it transmit? Is it possible to express an absolutely concrete content through abstract dance expression? What means do we need for it? How to use various tools sensitively which bring us into a specifc context, such as text, voice, theatrical procedures etc.? How to specify a topic without disrupting the essence of dance so that the result is not individual means of expression merely stitched together? I watch and analyse it in DV8 dance videos. Because, to be straight with you: hips don’t lie!

It is more and more important for me to understand how to work in such a way that a theme (a concrete, current, social topic and not merely a personal experience based on subjective emotion) fnds its way into the dancer’s body, so that it becomes embodied in the dance itself. In other words, the dancer dances absolutely particularly, and this way they deal with a specifc matter. So that their movement expression arises from a particular content. I am aware of dance having various forms and positions, and I often notice that dancers want to depart from their bodies and images in their minds. However, what I am truly interested in is this: how does the chosen topic shape the dance expression?

This way of thinking started with my previous experience which had a considerable impact on my practice. For many years, I studied the principles of theatre discovered by the Russian new wave, which placed the playwright (and the dramaturg) in the centre of the creative process and swept the director away from their authoritative pedestal The reason for such strong theatrical movement that shattered the idea of traditional theatre was: curiosity. At that time (in 2002), the world was becoming ‘messy’ in a positive way, various new social groups were being formed, new social trends were starting to appear. Playwrights discovered a strong need to start exploring the world and directly communicate with the spectators in the auditorium through the testimonies of real people. They focused on generating new topics and new ways of dealing with them. Like directors, playwrights had to dive deep into the topic frst to be able to bring them on stage later The material determined the form

material and structure

What is the primary impulse for creation in this case? At the beginning, a topic that is universal yet versatile enough is decided upon. Its unrepeatability and uniqueness determine the way the subject is approached, which is realised through the collection of material and the following sorting. The most important source of the material is the personal experience: the topic is anchored in an event, a real situation that somebody had encountered. In addition to ‘classic’ events, such as harm, betrayal and falling in love etc., reading a text or watching a dance performance can also be an event, as this can also be a source of one’s personal experience. The existence of an event implies that there will be some enactors, witnesses and people who learn about the event indirectly. All these three groups represent diferent perspectives. At this stage of the process, we don’t speak about the viewpoint(s) yet, as the viewpoint(s) will be formed later. The situation infuences everybody in its context and these people mutually infuence each other

This way of working ofers, for example, the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with a topic that is not close to the creators. The dramaturg (or the playwright), for instance, helps to fnd that individual or social experience that creates a bridge between the creators and the material. For me, this is the way of reaching further than having a merely subjective experience embodied by the dancer

A perspective is a position from which we look at a subject. In contrast to an opinion that can be formed sometimes easily, sometimes with great efort and struggle, but the desired result is supposed to be solid, stable and well-argued – a perspective, however, is something we can change. It is something literally at our fngertips – try to look at it diferently, try to walk in my shoes. Rather than accepting a diferent opinion, we are willing to accept someone else’s perspective since it is an ofer only to look at the subject from a diferent angle. In other words, the moment of persuasion is absent. The ability to adopt various perspectives is a source of freedom. We can change them without changing our attitude. Thanks to this, we gain new experiences.

For this reason, for me, the resulting form of a dance production is not an arrangement of a series of separate scenes and images, growing from the previous one, but rather a three-dimensional structure composed of a combination or intermingling of diferent perspectives. A dialogue between two dancers can be a dialogue between two perspectives. Into a dancer’s solo, two diferent perspectives can be interwoven. So that it is not about a narrative or a single story. Each perspective is a fragment of a mosaic referring to a whole. Yet, these fragments will never be assembled into one a single image for the spectator because the pieces are positioned diferently. We can only guess at the complete picture.

Translated from the Czech by Katerina Vorlická.

PLAYFULNESS and Liminal State

A

self-interview

Link to audio fle

by Mirko Guido and Mirko Guido

M: You wanted to play the audio fle before starting this interview. Why?

M: It is a recording of a signifcant moment.

M: Can you say something about it?

M: It originated from a task by Markéta Vacovská and Miřenka Čechová, after a lecture by philosopher Alice Koubová on the concept of resilience. We were asked to choose one or more concepts that had stuck with us during the lecture, and to use them as a guide for a wander in the city. I intuitively picked these two notions: playfulness and liminal state. But when I started walking, I felt that I was too brainy, and I found it difcult to wander. So, I decided to sing them Like a sort of mantra

M: What did it produce?

M: It was great. I stopped thinking about them. The words and the melody became a flter for my walk, so the experience took shape in a very particular way.

M: Continue

M: Wandering with a flter created a very special relationship with the city environment. It was neither seeking nor expecting anything. It was a kind of very tuned sensing and observing that, in a paradoxical way, made my wandering freer.

M: If your walk had been a performance, would playfulness and liminal state have been a kind of dramaturgical mechanism?

M: Maybe, but I am not sure.

M: What is dramaturgy for you?

M: There is something about the relationship between the micro and macro paradigms of an artistic practice that speaks to me about the function, role and importance of dramaturgical articulation

M: Can you elaborate?

M: My initial motivation to participate in the MMDD project was exactly the programme’s focus on the relationship between the micro and macro paradigms of an artistic practice, and how dramaturgy can play a crucial role in observing and refning that relationship. In recent years I have focused a lot on developing specifc methodologies within my practice. It has been and still is an important process for me But I also believe that dramaturgical thinking can enable me to further refne the standpoints of my work.

M: Do you consider the dramaturg to be the expert fgure who ensures a precise articulation of the work towards the audience?

M: Defnitely not. This view is a double-edged weapon that in the long run produces power axes and unhealthy expectations During the last days of the MMDD in Prague, I was intrigued by the question raised by dramaturg Rodia Vomvolou: how do we position ourselves in a creation process? Or for a choreographer, how do we position the dramaturg in the creation process? For me, this does not necessarily mean defning who and how is the perfect dramaturg, in a strictly formal sense. But the simple question, in turn, got me thinking of my own positioning as a choreographer, on my responsibilities and expectations in the collaborative relationship I see it as a form

of attention to relational sensibilities aimed at fostering a transparent and qualitative dialogue between collaborators. Artistic processes are demanding, they require dedication, creative engagement and a consistently active critical thinking, possibly from the whole team.

M: What is critical thinking in artistic practice for you?

M: It is remaining vigilant and refective on the subjects in question throughout the process, so that clear and solid standpoints can be generated. However, in artistic practice, critical thinking is not only an intellectual or linguistic procedure It also manifests through responses of physical sensitivity or intuitive drives We must give space and acknowledge these too.

M: When talking about critical thinking, I am reminded of an article by Cristina Caprioli (“JUMP CUTS AND REPETITION…”), in which she talks about choreography and artistic research, highlighting a crisis that, in my opinion, is not limited to the academic environment, but is a crisis of contemporary dance more generally One of the main points of her article is that we have a great need for critical thinking, and that just referring to critical thinking is useless

M: I agree. Referring to critical thinking or writings does not automatically mean we are practising it.

M: As dramaturg Sodja Lotker reminded us, contemporary performance is a space where we can think/sense together (with the public too) If text is not the main dramaturgical element, can dramaturgy itself be the articulation that conveys the logic of a performance?

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

M: Precisely because we speak of performance as a space for ´thinking´ together, we should not reduce the dramaturgical function to an intelligible translation of the logic of a performance I see choreography as a poetic gesture, thus afording us with an attitude of listening, not of subjective manipulation or defnition of a language. Choreography is a complex universe of frequencies, materials, interactions. Its interpretation is not to be understood as a vicious circle, but a virtuous one Leaning slightly on Heidegger’s philosophical thought, only by remaining suspended above this abyss, and by listening to the poetic language (choreographic in this case) is it possible for new subjectivities and new consciousnesses to emerge from this encounter

M: The notion of dialogue often emerges from your words. The choice of format of this very text is dialogical, but also in the presentation with Petros Konnaris you used dialogical methods, making it also an aesthetic and participatory experience

M: It was an unplanned and exciting situation prompted by a session with Maja Hriešik. Petros and I share an interest in the movement of relations between body, language and text. So, we started to share and combine some of our practices, and the dialogical method quickly became the core of the process: as a dialogue between dance, language, text; as an actual dialogue between Petros and myself; as a dialogue with the observers/public. We did not know what exactly we were looking for, but we felt that there was something crucial or important, as well as being enjoyable.

M: How do you proceed when the purpose is unclear?

M: It is a scary place Because one ventures into a kind of unknown driven by the feeling that there is something important in there We created the conditions to rely on the practices and gave ourselves time to explore them. We also allowed the gaze of an audience. A kind of research-performance, at an extremely early stage It is a very vulnerable position

M: You guys might need a dramaturg

M: Probably, at some point. Contemporary choreography is a relational and collaborative practice It is very complex to remain vigilant about the relationship between practices, methods, issues and intentions that unfold the process. We need creative attitudes, imagination, critical thinking, and also dramaturgical thinking. And I prefer to think-together. Thus, looking for the right collaborations and dialogues is crucial for a project

M: One last question. Why did you choose Playfulness (and Liminal State) as the title for this text? Are they relevant to your idea of dramaturgical process?

M: The liminal state is a moment of transition, of change. I believe we are approaching one on a socio-political level But one can observe it also during a creation phase, when being right in the middle between what a process was and what it could become. Not knowing is a frightening moment But I think it is also a moment to embrace and linger in Playfulness is a generous and intense engagement that can destabilise a subject matter, revealing angles,

paradoxes, counterpoints. Being playful with the things we hold dear or consider important, for me, does not mean undermining them. Quite the contrary, it is trying to grasp their larger spectrum Liminal state and playfulness are for me spaces from which a radical imagination can arise. The way our sociopolitical situation is getting fucked-up, we’re gonna need not just a simple turnaround, but a total anthropological shift. Do you know what I mean? So liminal state and playfulness are also my wishing and in bocca al lupo to all.

M: Are we verging too much into the macro?

M: I’m afraid so. That’s when I retreat back into my micro

M: A collaborator to dialogue with and help threading together the two paradigms would be good for you Perhaps a dramaturg?

M: Maybe yes

M: Thanks for the chat

M: Thank you

For information on the Self-Interview format: http://everybodystoolbox.net/index.php?title=INTERVIEWS

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

POSITIONING [BODIES]

by Rodia Vomvolou

Dear,

It is Saturday 24th of September 2022, 21:45 in the evening and this is my I-don’t-know-how-manyattempts to start this text. It is just a week since we left Prague after the fnal intensive of MMDD that took place at Tanec Praha, and I can still feel its imprint on me.1 But how do I write so soon about it? How to encapsulate in 1200 words all the insights, the aha!-moments, the questions, the urgencies, the positions, the failures, the frustrations, the afections, the dances, the connections, the relations, the knowledge of (and for) micro and macro dramaturgies in dance?

Bodies that position themselves Bodies that are being positioned Bodies that place themselves in relation to others Bodies that avoid taking a position. Bodies with diferent urgencies trying to fnd a common ground to position themselves in dance dramaturgy 9 Explicitly or tacitly Through practicing or through articulating 10

1 What is the imprint of dramaturgy? What is the imprint of the dramaturg? How can we make the imprint of the dramaturg more visible and graspable?

2 What is the position of the personal in dance? How much space do we allow the personal to occupy?

3 How do you crack open the shell of dance? How do you crack open the shell of identity? Is it your job as a dramaturg to crack open anything (a body/a dance/an identity)?

4 How do we open up to the particularities?

5 What are the urgencies of the dramaturgical feld? What is the urge of the dramaturg?

6 How can we consider dramaturgy an intersectional practice?

7 Do you consider dramaturgy a luxury?

8 How much does the dramaturg personify the sexy fgure of the process? Do I consider myself sexy for being a dramaturg?

9 Is the common ground relevant only for the ones that are in this ground?

10 What does consciously positioning as a dramaturg have to ofer?

We often forget that there is a diference between the personal journey in dramaturgy and the need to remain open and soft and vague in our positioning there as individuals11 and on the other hand the collective, discursive journey of dramaturgy and the dramaturg that needs a clearer positioning. Carrying a historic baggage of invisibility, the dance dramaturg could use some space and time to perform self-positioning by exploring their own modes of working, attitudes, practices, articulations and working conditions.12 The shift of intention that happened during the two years process of MMDD, from dramaturgs being there to support choreographers in individual projects to a hub of exchanging and sharing dramaturgical practices and knowledge, created a cracking in the traditional positioning of the dance dramaturg as the intellectual shadow companion of the choreographer/practitioner and allowed space for self-positioning

11 What are our genealogies as dramaturgs and what role do they play in our positioning?

12 What are the metaphors we use for our work as dramaturgs?

13 Is the body of the dramaturg always a colonised one?

14 How can we approach the knowledge of the dramaturg through the concept of practical knowledge?

15 How does the dramaturg connect with the voyeuristic?

16 How does the choreographer prepare the group for the presence of the dramaturg? How does the choreographer articulate what they need from the dramaturg in a process?

17 In which parts of the creative process do you work as a dramaturg and in what ways?

18 How can we practice dramaturgy from a position of not knowing?

19 Where is your knowledge coming from? Second-hand knowledge or frst-hand knowledge? And how does this inform your positioning as a dramaturg? What kind of alternative types of knowledge do you use as a dramaturg? How do we value knowledge and expertise without reproducing hierarchy and power relations?

20 What is an academic dramaturg vs a practical dramaturg? Does it connect with the genealogy/where it grew from, or does it have to do with the prism you work from?

21 How do we use the ease of articulation of the dramaturg?

22 How does knowledge and intimacy form each other?

23 How does not the silent, embodied dramaturg connect to this mysteri ous fgure operating from a position of power?

24 How can we practice dramaturgy from a position of care?

25 How do you work from a position of intuition and afection as a dramaturg?

Meso bodies:26 a list of bodies of the dramaturg through the way they are positioned in the feld of dance/performing arts.

26 How is the self-positioning of dramaturgs afected by the positioning of the dramaturg done by others (choreographers, dancers, institutions etc.) and what kind of negotiations that generates?

27 How guilty is a dramaturg without a performance?

28 Is the dramaturg in a symbiotic or a parasitic relationship with the maker?

29 Is the practice of the dramaturg autonomous?

30 How can we invest in dramaturgy as an artistic practice?

31 What is the diference between a creative and an artistic practice?

32 How can we invest in dramaturgy as a social practice?

33 What is dramaturgy haunted by?

34 How can we update the expectations of the people from the dramaturg?

37 What is the relationship of the labour of the dramaturg with productivity? How does the presence of the dramaturg raise issues of productivity?

38 Does the opening of the practice into other possibilities and artistic expressions require time and space and therefore fnancial wealth?

39 What is expected in relation to the economic agreement and the need of being productive with your presence as a dramaturg?

40 How can we redefne and re-imagine market-driven frameworks?

41 How much time are we willing to give back to the macro?

42 How does the economic foundation determines our daily work (Marianne Van Kerkhoven)?

43 How does a politicized dramaturgical practice come around?

44 In how many contexts/ countries/ cities do you fnd yourself working as a dramaturg?

45 How does your local context impact your positioning as a dramaturg? Periphery or centre?

35 What is macro dramaturgy?

36 How could the labour of the dramaturg become more visible? What does it mean to be labour intensive in dramaturgy?

46 What does it mean to have a sustainable practice as a dance dramaturg?

47 What would the role of the dramaturg in 100 years look like?

I know that positioning can be intimidating and tiring 48 Or performative and creative. A form of resistance or a form of limitation An act of privilege or an act of urgency. One thing is sure though, when shifting a position, all relations will be set in a (slightly) diferent perspective. So, changing a position almost always ofers new insights. And today we cannot aford to lose the possibilities of new insights.

It is now fve days later, Thursday 29th of October 2022, 11:23 a.m. and still I’m not sure if this letter aims somewhere. But, this is what I have for the moment. A temporary conclusion that we can overturn later.

Yours warmly,

Rodia

P.S. I know that most probably you already read the whole text by skipping the footnotes, but the actual content of it is there, in this tiny particle of a huge chaos, in all these overwhelming questions that emerged during MMDD. The forms which we think together are the contents of our thinking together 49

48 Maybe to relate yourself in a certain territory, sounds a bit softer?

49 This text includes thoughts, questions and articulations from the whole MMDD group, as emerged during the Intensives through the collective processes

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

Photography: William van der Voort

QUESTIONING

by Tereza Lenerová

The frst thing that comes to my mind is to search for what quest means. And the frst thing that jumps to me in Google I like so much that I decide to stick to it, as a defnition for my word. It says: “A quest is a journey towards a specifc mission or a goal.”

I like that! A question as a journey, a journey like a map, full of ups and downs, hills and valleys, curves and straight highways, crossroads and dead ends and possible new paths in reaching our goal. Isn’t that exactly where a question takes us? Like we say, “The goal is he path”, we can also say, “The answer is the question”. In the MMDD workshops we have done a lot of questioning. Many debates on certain themes, with many questions that were brought into the space, not necessarily being answered.

I value the power of a question where things become more open and perhaps dreamy, at the same time questions without answers give me a slight nervous feeling of no boundaries and sense of being lost. So, in a way I like it when questions open new paths, but perhaps it’s also necessary for me to arrive at a certain conclusion, let’s say an answer, where I can fnd stability again, to rest, to take a break, to settle and then be ready for another journey

It’s a bit like when I am creating a piece. In my creation process I am so used to bringing up questions, to not know and to doubt. I trust that what I am doing is the way even though this trust is sometimes so fragile. At the same time there is a certain desire to reach an answer, a conclusion a fnding that you can step on top of and feel like you have arrived at the fnal destination (which can then of course become again a stopover to another fnal destination).

Questioning can be powerful, and it can also be fragile. It is important how we question and how we create a safe space for questioning. Overall, I believe that a space for fragility in a creation process is necessary, because “what is not shaking is not strong” as the Czech philosopher theologian Tomáš Halík says.

During the MMDD workshops my attention was driven by the exercise that Rodia Vomvolou and Konstantina Skalionta introduced to us at the frst residency. I appreciate concrete practices that can serve as a tool for any kind of processes, and so I decided to share with you this exercise, that touched me in its simplicity and can be used in a creative process. I was fascinated by how many diferent questions can be asked over a certain theme as well as noticing how just a small change in the way a question is being asked can actually make a huge diference. How can we look at a question from another perspective by changing one word or how can we just simply be inspired in an associative way to form the next question? What I also found important was the importance of fnding the right question to start with.

Rodia explained to us the task: “This is a written task, and it is a re-articulation of the research question of the project. The maker writes down a question that is central to their work and by taking turns the dramaturg and the maker re-articulate the question by trying to unpack what it really asks. So, this is a task to delve deeper into the meaning of a specifc question“ (The original exercise comes from the book The Practice of Dramaturgy, edited by Konstantina Georgelou, Efrosini Protopapa and Danae Theodoridou.)

And so, I played this game with myself and had the dialogue with myself through questions.

In order to start I decided to choose a question that would refect for me my MMDD experience. Please, excuse me if strictly speaking I am not following the topic. But I will allow myself to play and take this game as a beautiful starting point and a point of inspiration

Is questioning more than answering? Does questioning bring us to answering?

Do we question in order to get an answer?

Is it enough to just bring questions?

Why do we question?

What do we question?

How do we question?

What kind of questions do you need?

What kind of questions you don’t need?

When is the time to answer your questions?

Do you have time to question?

Are there any rules how to question?

What do we want to achieve by a question?

How can we question without answering?

What is an open question?

How can a question serve?

How can a question open a journey?

How can I question a question?

Photography: Vojtech Brnicky

And because a question in my understanding is a journey towards a specifc mission or a goal, I decided to answer:

Questioning is opening

Questioning is curiosity

Questioning is a journey

Questioning is a bridge to new questioning

Questioning is searching for your own personal question

and can be uncomfortable

Questioning is provoking

Questioning is evoking

Questioning is diplomatic

Questioning is democratic

Questioning is hitting on an answer

Questioning is a way for transforming

Questioning is hungriness

Questioning is emptiness

Questioning is inviting

Questioning is frightening

Questioning is disturbing

Questioning is confronting

and can be forbidden

Questioning is appreciating the not knowing

Questioning is celebrating the not knowing

Questioning is feminine

Questioning is asexual

Questioning is circular

Questioning is a meeting point

Questioning is a departure

Questioning is sky

Questioning is space

Questioning is science and can bring silence

Questioning is important Even though it can take us from our comfortable zone and reveal our fragility. This is what I take with myself from my MMDD journey.

SILENCE (Being Silent) by

The more or less constant fow of words has been particular in the process of our MMDD Aarhus residency, so much so that from time to time you could see the restlessness in some of the bodies eager to express themselves through other means. However, there have been some exceptions to this, particularly when practice was shared. One Thursday afternoon silence became a strategy, and at the same time made impressions lock into each other across a span of years

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

Jeppe Hemdorf Nissen

“This is an exercise that I often use in my practice. It was introduced to me by Guy Cools – thinking about our talk earlier on giving credit to our sources of inspiration”, Francesco (Cocco) says and continues to describe how the participants, one at a time, need to alter the room by adding an element, removing an element or editing the composition of already placed elements without talking.

WHAM! At that moment I travelled twenty-six years back in time to a completely diferent setting. Being still in secondary school, I’m in a drama class introduced to the same exercise by a young student of dramaturgy (which at the time I really didn’t know what that was). But thinking of it makes me realize that this was a starting point. Getting introduced to a heap of old props, being asked to compose a room without using the voice to probe and negotiate. To be forced to take action from what is your aesthetic distinction without the safety net of speech seems to have dragged me into this mess of art

Years later starting at the university I met the source of what hit me. A short drama pedagogical text by theorist Janek Szatkowski named Åben prøve (open rehearsal) It’s a brilliant article (published in the 44th volume of KvaN magazine in 1996), as it’s really easy to approach it (if you can read in Danish). Both this essay and the above-mentioned exercise deal with the larger perspective of what art is in relation to human beings and at the same time, propose tools and principles for constructing a single artwork. The exercise is the frst of a series of exercises leading to constructing a one-minute performance at the end of the day if followed, but here at Bora Bora it was introduced standing alone, which can also work very well.

Here in the present, as a part of the MMDD programme’s residency at Bora Bora, being executed be professional artists, the exercise and its principles seemed as relevant to me as they were twenty-six years ago, since they hold some key elements in the search for dramaturgical tools to apply to a process – among others, the principle of keeping the space open, the principle of giving and taking, and the principle of negotiating in silence, thus not being able to make sense by words.

We tend to navigate in the world by simplifying things. Language is our tool for this, and it becomes really hard to keep the space open for uncertainty once we begin to squeeze phenomena into words. This is on one hand comforting as it helps us to feel on top of things. On the other hand,, it can also become oppressive as often in complex situations such as artmaking, it seems to close the space for negotiations too fast. Especially in a social artform as performing art, this can prove a problem since, even though we work with artists, it’s always harder to think outside a set frame.

Of course, in the case of the MMDD project, a mutual understanding for the group had already been established – although a lot of verbal and visual sharing already constructed hierarchies of meaning and expectations to modes of participation. Still, it opened a new perspective forcing us to act. The silence holds space for misunderstanding, mistakes, gentleness, observing and ambiguity – all very important aspects of artistic creation, as well as in life. On one hand, we have to reduce the inputs we get from the world, but on the other hand, artists have to question the way they do it, and here silence can be a good tool for keeping things open

It’s interesting how life sometimes takes you back to the starting point: How to get rid of the talking and how to, metaphorically speaking, jump into the 10.000 feet of water? As the main tool for doing dramaturgy is the spoken word, it seems kind of backwards, but sometimes the best we can do is to shut up and leave things to happen

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

SITUATEDNESS

by Naya Moll Olsen

As an entry point for writing this text, I started looking at a big piece of paper, full of words, that I have with me at home from the last MMDD intensive in Prague. It is from a session that Katalin Trencsenyi held on one of the last days of the closing event of the MMDD project. The session was a task of condensing important knowledge, experiences, insights etc. from the MMDD experience, into one word, which would be the topic or starting point of an essay This one

So, situatedness became my chosen one. I’ll include my scribbles on the paper from that session, to also give a glimpse of what the MMDD project has been for me. On the paper from the session, I have written:

MMDD for me has been:

Exchange

Nourishment

Connections

Confdence

Peers of the same interest or mode of working

Challenging/expansion of own thinking

Below this list, I have written diferent words or terms that became important to me during the two intensives I attended. The words were scattered on most of the paper, but a sort of list was appearing on the right side of the paper:

Temporary conclusions

The power of examples

Make space for unfnished thoughts

RELATIONALITY

Thinking with…

Situatedness (articulation of...)

Care as ethics and processual tool

Discursive awareness

Genealogy

What is the logic of the piece?

Dramaturgical practice of thinking with a piece – ability to ask questions to and around the piece

Embodied knowledge

Contextualization (micro -> macro)

From this brainstorming, we were asked to condense into three words on separate post-it notes. Mine was:

Situatedness Care Relationality

I think situatedness ended up being my word, since I also wrote the “power of examples”. During the last intensive of the MMDD project in Prague the group brought up several times the need to use examples when we were having discussions and talks. Often, in these setups of contextualising dance, it is my experience that we can disappear in meta-levels and there is a need to specify where we speak from, or what we speak of, since assumptions of shared references, values etc. often happen unconsciously. As freelance artists, we are always with one leg in and one leg out of a project, since in the overlapping of multiple jobs, positions, countries, we can forget to understand how much this informs us, when we enter a new process, that we just came from one, and after this one, we head on to the next. All these lingering from other projects. If we start to acknowledge the fact that we cannot reset to a neutral, very workable state, we can also start to be curious how the previous experiences inform the current process. How to include ourselves, to verbalise what we carry with us when we enter a process, to understand where we are speaking from. When we situate ourselves, we are informing what we are thinking, with a context that is personal. This provides the chance to fnd the conversation in the room that only the ones in the room can have

In relation to dramaturgy, I see situatedness as something to consider, both in the role of the dramaturg, and in relation to dramaturgy – let’s say the dramaturgy of a dance piece In terms of dramaturgy (of a dance piece), I associate situatedness as a way of seeing what is there. What is unfolding in time/ space? How is the piece thinking? How is it functioning? How does it operate? I look for the logic of the piece. This way I can look at the ‘alien’ that the dance piece is, and fnding its logic is for me key to understanding how the dramaturgy can be supported. When saying something works or doesn’t work, it is often unclear: in terms of what? If the logic of the piece is found or formulated, it is clearer to reference why something works or doesn’t work, instead of some omnipresent known or unknown set of standards of what is good/bad. For me, situating myself is also a way of allowing. I am not a distant observer, I ofer my whole body as a sensorial absorber, and I try to fnd ways to think with the piece. As a dramaturg, I think of situating myself as a tool to enter a process or feedback. Intersections of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity etc. forms our way of seeing. I place myself as a subject who has certain areas of knowledge, certain artistic background, certain ways of associating that is specifc to me. I am curious of what the piece produces, and I ask questions, to the piece and around the piece. When I say something, I make it clear that it is coming from me, and sometimes I know why I see something or I reference something, and I state it. And sometimes, I of course also don’t know, and I voice that. This is for me a counter to the notion of the ‘outside eye’ or a certain objective outside observer who can deliver a context to a dance piece. For me, the dance piece is a producer of knowledge, not something that needs context placed on top of it

‘Outside eye’ is a term I am personally trying to avoid. The ‘eye’ in ‘outside eye’ resonates to me as a detachment from an embodied view. The eye is placed in a body, a body that has its own history, as well as a lot of prescribed history placed on it. I rather like to use distance and proximity, to indicate one’s role in the creative process. Distance and proximity can provide a scale of involvement with the artistic process, but still acknowledge the partaking in the creative work. It can indicate how the dramaturg is situated in the process. Knowledge is situated in a body, a body that has a history, and a specifc point of view as Donna Haraway notes in her essay (‘Situated Knowledges…’, Feminist Studies, 14.3, 1988).

There is no neutral position, since whatever is unfolding on stage, is being absorbed and processed through a subject. Bringing yourself in as a subject, can invite others to do the same. I fnd that it can bring a beautiful trust in a process of honesty and care and a sense of being there with your whole self. For me, situatedness is a part of an intersectional feminist practice. It can be obvious and easy to say, but harder to do in practice I’ll keep trying

S(T)

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

STANDING TALL(ER)

by Nikita Maheshwary

I entered the MMDD project two years ago, unsure of what (all) the project and its envisioners meant by micro and macro (m&m) dance dramaturgies (DD) What is considered a sure-shot micro in the arsenal of DD or a respectful macro DD to delve into a deep discourse? I thought gingerly, maybe through and in this project, I will customise my personal box of m&m’s from all the pre-imagined, pre-determined and pre-existing defnitions that will be shared in the intensives. But, to my surprise (and, in retrospect – my joy), that wasn’t the case. The frst intensive, hosted online in March 2021 by the Italian partners, was a series of invitations. While we were invited to look into works and processes of diferent makers and ways of working of diferent institutions, there was also the parallel invitation to get-to-know each other (participants) through our individual practices. But underlining it all, was the (macro) invitation of interweaving. Interweaving dialogues, thoughts, dramaturgies, practices and happenstances. To be honest, at that time, I felt rather disconcerted by just receiving invitations and not clear proposals. I remember thinking – this is all fne but what’s the big plan? what are we collectively supposed to produce? what role am I to play as a participant? shall I just partake or give back? what do I give back? – and it took me rather some time to give into the state of not-knowing and leave with more questions than answers.

Second time around, in Tilburg, fog-headed and three-months postpartum, I decided to just be there. The intensive was called ‘Being There’; so, I guess that also bolstered my conviction. I realised by just being there and mindfully listening, and at times perhaps only witnessing, is good enough. It is good enough for thinking thoughts, weaving weaves, dancing dances, and for letting happenstances happen. This being ‘good enough’ was pivotal for me. Operating in the arts and arts academia which is driven with the constant neo-liberal capitalistic motto of being unique/excellent/the-best-you, this becoming of ‘good enough’ was liberating. Again, I (we) didn’t end the intensive with sharp defnitions and clear answers or my nifty box of m&m’s but we summarised it with more collective questions, critique, fractures and undigested thoughts

The embracing of fractures and the desire to chew further on undigested thoughts, I fathom, led the curators and partner organisations to reimagine the project further in all its complexities and incongruence. With the new cohort of participating artists, they determined to keep the emphasis of the project on ‘sharing practices and dialogues’ instead of focusing on once imagined outputs and production. I fnd this truly unique about MMDD – it’s rather rare to observe in pan-European projects that are codifed and articulated much in advance, and where the actual research/project is operated within clear structures and guidelines leading to a determined output, that the ‘process’ takes the emphasis

The same desire to chew on undigested thoughts and believe with much more belief (and support) in the power of happenstances, led me personally, to imagine a publication on the intimate dramaturgy of correspondence interweaved with my own practice of writing letters. Over the course of the year, as I wrote letters on themes of care, guilt, motherhood, nationalism, intersectionality and questionable historiographies looking through the lens of a brown dancing girl (naachnewali), correspondences trickled in from the MMDD voices and beyond on themes synonymous The process of exchanging thoughts and urgencies, being swept by it, letting them percolate and slowly take shape in one’s mind and body, made an intricate rhizome of plural ways of thinking on overarching topics that ultimately led to a box of letters - Dear You, – Yours Lovingly, Me, which saw the light of the day in our culminating meeting in Prague, September 2022

And now, as I sit, two weeks after the closure of MMDD project, reminiscing about the journey, I feel I stand tall(er). Even as I don’t walk away with a customised box of diferent coloured m&m’s and presumably will continue to struggle to encapsulate m&m DD in a coherent list; I stand tall. Because in this journey, by – being there and interweaving and disturbing patterns – we together imagined, lived, shaped and watched the micro and macro dramaturgies unfold. It is embodied and in folds of my skin, like true artistic research

I also stand taller overcoming two of my perennial hesitations. One, to persistently allow (or doggedly ask for) the uncertain, which hasn’t taken shape yet, the necessity of time I say necessity and not luxury because to fnd new approaches, understand what is already in the room and build further on that plurality, time plays a pivotal role. Second, through and in my work to invest in (a few) meaningful connections as opposed to building networks/transactional relationships. The prior is rather unnerving to implement in a life of a freelance artist, working for numbered days on a project, on temporary or small contracts; but in the scheme of macro things far more sustainable and rewarding, allowing one to delve deeper, mindfully engage and do better.

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

T R U

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

TRUST by Francesco Cocco

Trust: verb, noun, UK /trʌst/ US /trʌst/

U S t

The young lady who just approached the bench presented me with this Christmas card and this. It’s a one-dollar bill. It’s going to be returned to her shortly, but by presenting me with this bill, she reminded me that it’s issued by the treasury of the United States of America. […] Upon inspection of the article, you will see the words, “in god we trust.”

Trust is a fiduciary relationship in which one party, known as a trustor, gives another party, the trustee, the right to hold title to property or assets for the benefit of a third party, the beneficiary.

The Italian contemporary artist Pippa Bacca – offcially Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo – tragically died on March 31, 2008. She was a performance artist and the niece of the conceptual artist Piero Manzoni. Bacca’s mother, Elena Manzoni, was Manzoni’s sister.

We’re not here to prove that God exists, but we are here to prove that a being just as invisible and yet just as present exists.

Federal government puts its trust in God. It does so on faith and faith alone. It’s the will of the people that guides the government. And it is and was their collective faith in a greater being that gave and gives cause to this bill’s inscription.

Trusts are established to provide legal protection for the trustor’s assets, to make sure those assets are distributed according to the wishes of the trustor, and to save time, reduce paperwork and, in some cases, avoid or reduce inheritance or estate taxes. In finance, a trust can also be a type of closed-end fund built as a public limited company.

Born in 1974, Bacca had been making art for just under a decade before her death. Performance was her primary medium, although she created incredibly delicate paper cut-outs as well. She was an activist and a pacifst and her work revolved around ecological issues, kindness, and social responsibility.

Now, if the government of the United States can issue its currency bearing a declaration of trust in God without demanding physical evidence of the existence or the nonexistence of a greater being, then the state of New York, by a similar demonstration of the collective faith of its people, can accept and acknowledge that Santa Claus does exist, and he exists in the person of Kris Kringle! Case dismissed.

A living trust, also called an inter-vivos trust, is a written document in which an individual’s assets are provided as a trust for the individual’s use and benefit during their lifetime. These assets are transferred to their beneficiaries at the time of the individual’s death. The individual has a successor trustee who is in charge of transferring the assets.

Bacca was murdered in the midst of her last project. She was part of a world peace and trust effort known as “Brides on Tour.” She and a friend had departed from Milan on March 8, 2008, travelled through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, and arrived in Turkey on 20 March 2008. The two artists only wore wedding dresses and reported on their website that “That’s the only dress we’ll carry along — with all stains accumulated during the journey.” Bacca went missing on March 31st in Gabze, Turkey. Her violated body was found on April 11, 2008.

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

NOTE

Sometimes you have to force your trust in something or someone in order to help the process work. It means overcoming the instinct of wanting to understand or control something immediately. It means letting the process fow and letting the diferent voices be heard. It means letting the suspension of judgment foat in order to get the most from the present moment.

Self-forced trust can be an exercise that anyone can do in order to not let ideas die

It can be applied to an idea, to a proposal, to a person, to a group of people, to an exercise, to something that’s happening, to a process, to a fnal result.

It means to give time and attention to something that is not proven yet and to consider it real for some time

Self-forced trust doesn’t have a fxed length, but it has a lot to do with time. The more time you can give to listen to, or to do something you don’t fully comprehend, the more possibilities you have to discover something new or unexpected.

Self-forced trust is a sort of loan of trust since it is not usually gained by previous confrmations. As every transaction of this nature, it has its risks. It can lead to a loss of time or to a fnal total loss of interest.

Trust has a lot to do with the ecology of human relationship and avoiding conficts that are not useful to the process

It’s a word that deeply connects the creative and the human elements of the artistic process. By accessing the creative process, you are putting your most valuable assets of time, energy and ideas into the hands of the unknown and sharing a common temporary belief in the existence of something like Santa Claus or Godot

Resources quoted verbatim in the text-collage:

Kagan Julia, ‘What Is a Legal Trust? Common Purposes, Types, and Structures’, Investopedia.com, 17 December 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trust.asp

Miracle on 34th Street. Written by George Seaton, directed by Les Mayfeld, a remake of the original 1947 movie, 20th Century Fox, 1994. Tanga, Martina. ‘This Day in History: March 31’, Italian Art Society, March 2016 www.italianartsociety.org/2016/03/the-italian-contemporaryartist-pippa-bacca-ofcially-giuseppina-pasqualino-di-marineo-tragically-died-on-this-day-march-31-2008/

Towards a Dramaturgy of Interpolation (or Improbable Entanglements)

by Evagoras Vanezis

Unfnished:

in Greek: ημιτελής [imitelís] = half fnished

ατέλειωτος [atéleiotos] = endless

ανολοκλήρωτος [anoloklírotos] = incomplete

dancing around telos/fn, surface phenomena enmeshed in deep time

Failed pasts, orphan futures, unfnished presents open to exhalation-as-reconciliation A paradox

rif of unfnished thoughts, contained for a bit in indeterminate spaces (intention slips away, attention shifts)

rhythm add-ons

Anti-numbness is concretely political 1

Exhalation:

methodology; archaeology of the present Every breath is an anticipation of the next one –Mnemonic Interpolations: . . How long to now?

rif of how / where / when / and thanks to whom referential movements, costly attentiveness

rhythm add-ons speed and space (more speed)

1 Roepstorf

Photography: Alexis Vassiliou

Interpolation1:

Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater Project (1924) [the theatre is dead. admission 75 cents]

“In popular music, interpolation (also called a replayed sample) refers to using a melody – or portions of a melody – from a previously recorded song but re-recording it instead of sampling it Interpolation is often used when the artist or label who owns the piece of music declines to license the sample, or if licensing the piece of music is considered too costly.”2

The clock is ticking:

‘Bedtime Story’ by Madonna, where the lyrics above come from was released in 1994, written by Björk, Marius De Vries, and Nellee Hooper. It follows expectedly Björkian patterns: the fat ontology that often fnds solace in her lyrics, and does not discriminate between thoughts and things, human and non-human, reason and something that could be its underside. The video, the most expensive pastiche of surrealist imagery ever produced, mixed with futural vibes, is in the collection of MoMA. She only performed it once at the 1995 Brit Awards, wearing a Versace Grecian dress (she did the campaign for this collection, 1995, lensed by Steven Meisel), a long, blond wig, and was lit with white light. Two dancers were with her. In the end, they come in proximity, with her head resting on the shoulder of the dancer on her right, and her hand resting on the shoulder of the dancer kneeling on her left side She goes:

“And all that you’ve ever learned

Try to forget

Interpolation 2:

The 1960s came from an empty room 3

Interpolation 3:

It is a sunny and crisp day in March 2022

Adriano gives us the task to get out of Bora Bora’s black box and walk in pairs around Aarhus, one leading the way while the other follows and speaks. For ten minutes, the one who follows gives a lecture on a topic of their choosing, and then we switch.

I am paired with Naya.

Taking the position of the follower, I embark from the position of the lecturer. It takes me a while to get started, but all I can think to say is:

“Words are useless, especially sentences They don’t stand for anything How could they explain how I feel?”

3 Insley, quoted in Goudouna.

I’ll never explain again” rif of

I often feel numb when my body has not yet landed where I am, or when contexts are still undecided. So I went straight for the jugular, using knowledge accumulated over the years in my lexicon of queer contextuality. At this point, my time was up, and Naya continued with a lecture on midwifery, a topic she has great knowledge of. Whilst she ofered a neat informational package on something she had proper knowledge of, I was trying to start from the opaqueness of feeling. Which of the two is the most intimate is undecided, but I veer towards the touch of midwifery.

rhythm add-ons

When Björk was asked about her experience in writing this, she said: “When I was ofered to write a song for [Madonna], I couldn’t really picture me doing a song that would suit her...

But on second thought, I decided to do this to write the things I have always wanted to hear her say that she’s never said”.

[bridge]

And so, in the permanently unfshed entanglements of how things sit together, simultaneously touching and withdrawing at the point of closest contact, Interpolation 4: Björk writing for Madonna that which the latter would never say, carries the same liminality as Gilles Deleuze’s writing of books on the history of philosophy, oferings of ‘bastard children’ to otherwise legitimately followed European men

Oferings: methodology, a way of dramatizing the process of reading, writing, and ultimately of doing

It is because of this doing that I thought to say this | here performative acts, intermediate goals, peripatetic lectures just for pleasure, anecdotes from industries for interpolating layered time with the consistency of a sponge cake

[exhalation]

Reconciling experience and becoming: to become-with and in exchange with others. In what rooms will communities-to-come meet? The present trembles as we breathe. It is Glissant’s utopia that we are seeking, It is this bastard child we attempt to nourish.

unfnished idea: a performance exhibition that rifs of Kiesler’s Endless /unfnished and impossible\

Theater :

Maybe ‘Bedtime Story’ can play in a loop, interpolated into a spatial symphony The bodies of the dancers will touch space, and it will be glorious

The audience will come and go as they please. Both audience and performers, devoted followers and thus lecturers of the moment, will fail to recognize themselves as such. Communities of expensive surrealism; thanks to and perhaps against which, we interpolate our being-with with the moment

Resources:

Goudouna, Sozita. Beckett’s Breath, Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

“Interpolation (popular music)”. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 February 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_(popular_music)

Kiesler, Frederick. Endless Theater Project, Section. Diazotype, 118.7 x 256.5 cm, 1924. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/399 Accessed 18 11 2022

Kiesler, Frederick. “The Theatre is Dead”, Little Review, Special Edition: International Theatre Exposition, 11.2, Winter, 1926, p.6.

Leatham, Thomas. “Björk gives her conficted opinion on Madonna and ‘Bedtime Story’”, Far Out Magazine, 2022, September 1. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bjork-conficted-opinion-madonna/. Accessed 18 11 2022

Madonna. “Bedtime Story”, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSaFgAwnRSc. Accessed 18 11 2022

Roepstorf, Andreas. “Lecture for the MMDD participants”, Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, 25 March 2022. Lecture.

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

Screenshot from a video, courtesy of the artist.

WEAVING by Wim van Stam

Dear Reader,

I’m kindly inviting you to bring your left hand to your chest or rather a bit lower, to the height of your diaphragm, with your palm upwards as if you were gently holding something on it. Keep your fngers together and stretched loosely. Now let the tips of your thumb and index fnger of your right hand touch each other and move them, with suppleness, from right to left and back again above the palm of your left hand. As if you’re darning a sock. No, please don’t just read this, actually do it with care and precision. Thank you

For me, this small, apparently meaningless and homely gesture started a stream of thoughts to which I would like to invite you. It’s not a linear argument you’re going to read, but more like a braid, a webbing of thoughts, suggestions, ideas, a small tapestry of the mind. You can either read them from left to right or from right to left, from top to bottom or from the bottom up. It really doesn’t matter.

None of the threads is more important than the other, none of the lines is dominant or less important. They are all part of the same tissue. Or let’s call it a rhizome with reference to philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The rhizome has no beginning or end, it doesn’t really matter where you commence or complete, there’s no central structure, it knows no hierarchies or (op)positions.

Tilburg, the city I work in, is undeniably an ugly town, marked by poverty and its history of the textile industry. The hidden beauty of this town without a recognisable centre became clear to me only after city architect Ludo Hermans represented it as an old piece of jute cloth. A ragged plaid of rough threads, frayed edges and sloppy repaired holes. Ludo invited the citizens of Tilburg to draw new threads through the fabric, make new connections, repair scufs and mend the holes with love for the history of the city while resisting the megalomaniac visions of property developers.

Dance dramaturgy has no role or position, it exists only as a link, a connection to an endless number of other knots, junctions, inter-weavings, encounters, and events. To crosslink, to connect, to unleash a stream of events, and make apparent what is, could be the movements of the dance dramaturg.

An Agroforest is a man-made ecosystem based on self-maintenance, sustainability and plant-based food production. When built up properly from the start, it is principally self-containing and demands almost no human intervention. By a large system of underground rhizomes, the ecosystem takes care of its own, it divides and exchanges humidity and nutrients where and when necessary. All that is unnecessary is cleaned up What demands more from the system than it delivers in return is a parasite

In the past two years DansBrabant participated in a European project focusing on community building and development. In our case, it was a gradually growing group of women from diferent backgrounds, social layers and neighbourhoods in Tilburg. The women worked with diferent local and international professional artists and choreographers with Nikita Maheshwary as our rooted artistic catalyst. Very slowly this group of strangers grew into a small community, changing positions and roles within the social and artistic process Starting to take care of each other and of the community

Last year they performed together in a local art gallery. The presentation was based on their own memories and stories on how the textile industry in Tilburg afected their lives: about poverty, the movement of the weaving looms, the gathering of the women in the factories, telling jokes and sharing secrets. Right after their performance, this beautiful title of a collection of essays by Dutch writer and essayist Cyrille Ofermans immediately sprung to mind: “The people are more beautiful than they think they are.” This project forces me to reconsider almost all of my ideas and opinions on artistic quality, the signifcance of art and its social impact. It urges me to discover a new conceptual framework or a parallel discourse on artistic practices

This cluttered frst sample, an attempt to start a small embroidery, is a kind invitation to draw your own threads, to weave your own fgments of imagination through it, horizontally, vertically, it doesn’t really matter, Dear Weaver.

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

WITHDRAWAL

as a Dramaturgical Strategy by Guy Cools

Traditionally the role of the dramaturg is spatially associated with distance: critical distance towards the creative process in which others are actively engaged. Hence problematic metaphors such as the ‘outside eye’, placing the dramaturg outside of the process and reducing their physicality to one sense organ and their activity to that of (frontal) viewing and critical feedback. Following an argument originally introduced by Andre Lepecki, Myriam Van Imschoot (2003) states that the notion of the ‘outside eye’ separates the dramaturgy from the artist’s body.

“What Lepecki resists is the idea of the dramaturg (the eye) as the locus of power and knowledge, put at disposal of a choreographer, who (if we extend the metaphor) is perceived as being all body – a blind and dumb body, waiting to be illuminated by sight and speech.” (Van Imschoot 63).

I am more than just my eyes. I therefore prefer the term ‘outside body’. I used it for the frst time for the program brochure of R.A.F.T. (2005), an improvisation project realised by Marc Boivin in Montreal for which I was asked to be the dramaturg. I was present at all the rehearsals and the frst series of public performances and felt that my outside, silent body was an integral part of the show. Christel Stalpaert has further deepened this notion of the ‘outside body’ in her vision of a corporeal dramaturgy.

“The dramaturge’s ‘outsider’s eye’ should therefore give way to an embodied mind, where body and mind are connected, operating on an equal level. Departing from a Cartesian cogito, the dramaturge’s ‘external gaze’ is expanded to become an outside-body, exploring in a corporeal dramaturgy the bodily capacity to read and make ‘sense’ of an aesthetic of intensities.” (Stalpaert 102)

Fortunately, this reductive defnition of the dramaturg as an ‘outside-eye’ has already been abandoned for a while and more recent literature on the dramaturg, also introduces the notion of proximity both towards the artists (as in friendship) and the process. The dramaturgical process is often defned as an oscillation between proximity and distance, or, as Pirkko Husemann puts it: “the oscillation between inside and outside.” (Husemann 53) Maaike Bleeker invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of friendship in What is philosophy? (1994) when she describes the relationship between dramaturg and choreographer as the momentum that initiates ‘thoughts that move’. This relationship between dramaturg and choreographer is itself “a movement that involves both closeness and distance, both similarity and diference” (Bleeker 163) The same reference to Deleuze’s notion of friendship is picked up by Bettina Masuch (2009, 137), discussing her collaboration with Meg Stuart. Also, Bojana Cvejić invokes the fgure of “the friend so as to do away with instrumentality and specialisation of the role and relationship of dramaturg with choreographer” (Cvejić 25). And Jacob Zimmer (2009) entitles his contribution to the themed issue of the Canadian Theatre Review Friendship is no day job and other thoughts of a resident dance dramaturg (Zimmer 16).

In my own dramaturgical practice playing intuitively with the distance-proximity dichotomy has been one of my most fruitful creative tools. Not only does it connect ‘doing and thinking’, it is also one of the main tools to infuence the process somatically. To sense when to enter and when to leave the rehearsal space. How to be present in the room from active participation in physical explorations to seemingly ‘sleeping’ when engaging in my yoga nidra practice in order to sustain my own energy. To notice, to understand or misunderstand or to question what has happened during my absence as one of the most relevant starting points for the dramaturgical dialogue

Photography: courtesy of Guy Cools

As I grew older and originally inspired by a short volume by the French psychiatrist François Roustaing, Knowing how to wait (Savoir attendre, 2006), I have also practiced to be more patient, to hold back my feedback and not interfere too quickly in order to let things unfold themselves. Being patient is somehow opposite to my original nature, so I still not always succeed in it as the holding back sometimes also struggles with the ego that wants to be acknowledged for what it contributes to a process. In And then it got legs (2022), his recent monography on his dramaturgical practice, Jeroen Peeters also acknowledges the importance of holding back

“What would happen to the material if I suspended my immediate judgements and adopted a stance of withdrawal or resistance? Over the years I’ve gradually learned to hold back. Leaning back and witnessing is a way of performing silence and attention in order to install a calm, relaxed atmosphere in the studio.”

(Peeters 83)

There have been moments in my dramaturgical practice where I looked for the maximum proximity towards the process, joining the performers in their physical improvisations or explorations. But sometimes choosing the maximum distance or a complete withdrawal, can also be a worthwhile strategy. Again, there is a particular text that inspired me. In the immediate aftermath of the geopolitical changes in Europe in 1989, the literary magazine Granta invited a number of European writers to refect on these changes in a thematic issue, New Europe! (1990) The German poet and essayist Magnus Enzensberger wrote a tribute to Gorbachev and how the act of retreat ‘is the most difcult of all operations. (…) The non plus ultra in the art of the possible consists of withdrawing from an untenable position.’ (Enzensberger 136) With Gorbachev’s recent death and the growing political and economic world crisis, partially due to the incapacity of chauvinistic ego’s such as Trump or Putin to retreat, I am again reminded of the value of Enzensberger’s appreciation of the potential power of withdrawal. Already in 1990, Enzensberger concluded his essay with the recommendation that the West and its neo-liberal vision of capitalism shouldn’t ‘gloat’ too much and would also have to learn ‘the politics of retreat’ in order to de-crease. ‘The most difcult retreat of all will be in the war against the biosphere which we have been waging since the industrial revolution. (…) Certain large industries – ultimately no less threatening than one-party rule –will have to be broken up.’ (142) Think fossil fuel and eventually also the whole military-industrial complex. At diferent moments in my career, I have used withdrawal as a dramaturgical strategy. It not only has the potential to de-escalate a confict, it also redistributes the agency, with other people stepping in the vacant place you leave behind. After having initiated together with Gerarda Ventura the European Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance project and having brought together most of its partners and the members of the scientifc team that were responsible for its content, I took the decision halfway through the project to withdraw from it. The decision was motivated by a complex web of personal and professional considerations, which were heightened by the COVID-crisis. It was a difcult one as I had to negotiate both with my own sense of failure as well as with external perceptions and pressures. But the withdrawal also felt immediately the right choice as it allowed for my colleagues, Maja Hriešik, Katalin Trencsenyi, Alexis Vassiliou and Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar to take over the lead of the project in

order to defend its original mission, which has been to value the (dance) dramaturgical practice as a professional feld, that deserves to be supported on its own merits. As opposed to a vision that merely instrumentalises dramaturgy as a quality label to improve the market value of productions and their subsequent touring.

Resources

Bleeker, Maaike. “Dramaturgy as a mode of looking”. On Dramaturgy, the labor of the Question, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, vol. 13:2, issue 26, edited by Cindy Brizell and Andre Lepecki, NYU, 2003, pp. 163-172.

Cvejić, Bojana. “The Ignorant Dramaturg”. Perspectives on Potential Dance Dramaturgies, edited by Suzy Blok, Dancemakers, 2009, pp 22-33

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “The State of Europe”. Granta 30, New Europe!, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 136-142.

Husemann, Pirkko. “The dramaturg becomes obsolete, the dramaturgical remains important”. On Dramaturgy, Performance Research, vol 14. no. 3, edited by Karoline Gritzner, Patrick Primavesi and Heike Roms, Routledge, 2009, pp. 52-53.

Masuch, Bettina. (no title), Are we here yet?, edited by Jeroen Peeters Les presses du reel, 2009, pp. 136-137.

Peeters, Jeroen. And then it got legs. Notes on Dance Dramaturgy Varamo Press, 2022.

Roustaing, François. Savoir attendre. Pour que la vie change. Odile Jacob, 2006.

Stalpaert, Christel. “The Distributive Agency of Dramaturgical Labour and the Ethics of Instability. Becoming the Outside Body, Implicated in the Life of Others: Corporeal Dramaturgy and the Ethics of Instability / Sustainability”, Dramaturgies in the New Millennium. Relationality, Performativity, and Potentiality, edited by Katharina Pewny and Johan Callens and Jeroen Coppens Theater Schriftenreihe. Gunter Narr Verlag, 2014, pp. 97-110.

Van Imschoot, Myriam. “Anxious Dramaturgy”. On Dramaturgy, the labor of the Question, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory vol. 13:2, issue 26, edited by Cindy Brizell and Andre Lepecki, NYU, 2003, pp. 57-68.

Zimmer, Jacob. “Friendship is no day job and other thoughts of a resident dance dramaturg”. Dance and Movement Dramaturgy, Canadian Theatre Review, 155, edited by Phil Hansen, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 16-20.

Photography: Lisa Reinheimer

Photography: Nela Wojaczková

ÅND-ER-HOLDNING

[spirit-is-posture/attitude/stance]*

by Adriano Wilfert-Jensen

A: Too many dance performances in Copenhagen last autumn were made with the same production apparatus, looked the same, yet claimed diferent politics. This is a crisis!

B: Hold your horses, what’s the problem here?

A: Instead of learning from Walter Benjamin and having the author as producer of an exemplary production apparatus, we get productions as proof of the existence of authors!

B: But come on, who wants to be exemplary today, that whole teacher – student relation feels horribly old fashioned and hierarchical I am not responsible as an artist for improving an apparatus of production, that’s like some way-outdated attitude, way too linear and causalistic... I am...

A: (interrupts) Causalistic? but that’s not even a word!

B: (shrugs) Well now it is. What I was trying to say before you _______splained me was that I am decentering myself by trying to experience myself as entangled and my knowledge as partial. So, for me to be politically relevant means hesitating in front of a problem rather than trying to solve it.

A: Ok, fair enough... But I think you are misunderstanding both Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. What they propose is trying to improve their felds, even–and specifcally–when rethinking agency and embracing hesitation and so on. But if you and your colleagues all hesitate in the same way, and if you all try to make that hesitation look really good and sexy on Instagram, you are not really hesitating in front of a problem, you are marching for the camera! Which, ok, if you are facing your knowledge as partial, might not be a problem for you, but doesn’t it all get horribly boring if there can be no other change than endless manifestations of various selves trying to look sensitive to their entanglement?

B: Sure, but at least we are not centering some western modernist narrative of progress. And by avoiding that we are not using language as a power tool for domination.

A: Ok, ok point taken, I will check my Eurocentrism, but meanwhile, I think you should try and check that you don’t mistake the market opportunities in extracting and mediating your identity for politics We cannot allow identity politics to be hijacked by personal identity economics!

C: Hey dudes, calm the fuck down, this is the most boring entry I have read in like a million Creative Europe reports! What is it really that you are trying to think-feel?

(Awkward silence.)

D: I was listening in and would like and try to think along, because inspired by Alex Martini Roe I am

* Ånderholdning: a misspelling of underholdning [entertainment] which then also becomes: ånd-er-holdning [spirit-is-posture/attitude/stance].

exploring a feminism based on afrmation and development rather than on negation and reaction; So, I hear a longing for dance performances that are generative for other kinds of conversations and for conversations that are generative for other kinds of dance performances. Like showing up for the change you want to see rather than withdrawing in a paranoid know-it-all competition. And then I hear a frustration with the language available for such conversations. Like it’s always already in the same dominant grammar, or at least that’s the fear. And there is a sense that trying to make change or to make things better, anyway, especially as a white European, is also being part of a problem.

C: Que la merde! Hvad pokker! Was zum Teufel! !بحق الجحيم Wel verdomme! No sakra! Oh, dannazione!

D: Yeah, it is a mess... Sometimes when I see a dance performance, I realise that I have to change how I make dance performances. Like the world has changed, and I must follow. Or that used to happen. Now more often I go to see shows and I realise who I am or who I am not. It is as if Facebook has transformed the potential of intersectional analysis and activism to a cover for extraction and exploitation of attention and diference. And to stay sane we silently agree to pretend to engage the former while being subjected to the latter. No wonder people get paranoid…

C: But surely this isn’t the whole picture, I mean we just had a Documenta where de-colonial analysis and action was foundational for an altogether diferent production and curation apparatus on several levels? Aren’t you making a cynical and close-minded assessment here?

D: Hey don’t blame the medium, I was just trying to think along!

Ë: .....______xxxxx_____zzzzz______Ooooo_____mmmmm____WWWWW

A, B, C, D: Who, ... or... what are you?

DRAMATURGY: Oh pardon, I forgot to assume human form. Is this better?

B: Ah yes, thank you, much better.

DRAMATURGY: Great. So..., comrades, I am Dramaturgy. Before you lose your minds completely, consider engaging me in your conversation, ‘cause I feel this new phase in my polymorphic existence is about to emerge, like something is happening between the lines, another generative grammar, made from scraps, something we can’t yet read, but we will have known all the parts already. A combination of hidden languages, generous problems and serious lightness. I think together we can fnd ways to disagree better, which will allow dance performances we can’t even imagine yet to emerge, and make the “we” of that sentence porous and abundant. And last but not least, fundamentally change the world!

Photography: Adela Vosičkova

BIOGRAPHIES

Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar (1984, Netherlands) works as an independent dramaturg and in art education as theory teacher, coordinator and programme designer and recently as education innovator at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures at Avans University of Applied Sciences (www.thecurrent.is). Anne-Marije worked as production dramaturg for twelve years for several choreographers like Mor Shani, Joost Vrouenraets, Kristel van Issum and Sagi Gross. In 2015 she founded the Concept Store for Artistic Strategies (www. motionterritory com) to expand dramaturgy practice towards process and research facilitation. Anne-Marije has been teaching art theory, philosophy and dramaturgy at Fontys Dance Academy for over seven years. There, she also took part in an Erasmus+ Project “Inclusive Dance. The Transferable Skills of the Dance Artist” as researcher and content creator for a digital platform (2017, www.inclusivedance.eu) Aligned, she was one of four co-designers of the master “Performing Public Space” at Fontys University of Fine and performance art (2017)

Evangelos Biskas (GR) is a freelance dance artist working as a choreographer, performer, dramaturg and teacher based in Tilburg (NL). He graduated from the choreography department of Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts (FHK) and received the ‘Moving Forward-Young Dance Makers Award 2016’. In 2017 he started a talent development trajectory called PLAN (2017 – 2020) through the scope of DansBrabant (NL). He later joined Corpo Máquina Society (NL) as a maker (2020 – present). His choreographic work has been invited to theatre venues and festivals such as Festival Ardanthe (2016), Moving Futures Festival (2018 & 2022), Theaterfestival Boulevard (2021) and Dutch Dance Days (2022) Evangelos has made international appearances as a performer in the works of Guilherme Miotto, Charlotte Goesaert and Katja Heitmann among others. As a dramaturg, he has been working with Bill and Fred Productions (2021–present) Evangelos has been a guest teacher and mentor at Fontys Dance Academy (2018 – present) and the Academy of Circus and Performance Art (2022)

Photography: Annemee Dik

Photography: Circus ö graphy

Miřenka Čechová is a Czech director, choreographer, performer and writer. She is co-founder and house director of two theatre companies: Spitfre Company and Tantehorse, and also works as an independent director or dramaturg She is a PhD holder at the Academy of Performing Arts and a Fulbright scholarship recipient She received her frst recognition for her dance solos about transgender and identity (and was awarded the Best of the Contemporary Dance 2012 by the Washington Post and the Herald Angel Award at EdFringe). Miřenka specialises in the transformation of personal stories and documentary material with the help of multimedia to theatrical works both as a performer/writer and as a director. She also curates the ongoing series, Emergency Dances that consider dance creation as an activist practice and helps others to tell their stories of pain through dance pieces. Miřenka puts in her performance an emphasis on a close blend of sound design, flm, objects and body.

Francesco Cocco is a set and performance designer and dance dramaturg He is particularly interested in mechanisms of dramaturgical creation that are partially allowed to reveal themselves onstage He graduated in visual and performing arts at IUAV University and a master’s in Set Design at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts

Francesco designed the set for the operas: Il matrimonio segreto by D. Cimarosa (2016, Dutch National Opera), Gina by F. Cilea (2017, Fondazione Teatro la Fenice), Il sogno di Scipione by W.A. Mozart (2019, Fondazione Teatro la Fenice). He worked on research projects of performance design in collaboration with Elena Zamparutti exploring visual playfulness, audience participation and fragmented open dramaturgy ( Push, Push Baby! at Prague Quadrennial 2019 Walk! with Terrafne, Trieste 2020. Interspace Walking with DanceWell at Fabbrica Alta, Schio 2021). Francesco developed an interest in dance dramaturgy collaborating as a dramaturg with choreographers Matteo Carvone, Silvia Galletti, Andrea Scarfì and with the DanceWell project. He was invited to open the Venere in teatro dance festival 2022 with the performance A chi si perde

BIOGRAPHIES

Guy Cools is a Belgian dance dramaturg, currently living in Vienna. He has worked as a dance critic and dance curator. He curated from 1990 till 2002, the dance program of Arts Centre Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium. As a production dramaturg, he worked amongst others with Jean Abreu (UK), Koen Augustijnen (BE), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Alexander Gottfarb (AT), Lia Haraki (CY), Akram Khan (UK) and Arno Schuitemaker (NL). As a dramaturgical mentor, he has been mentoring Anghiari Dance Hub; the Biennale Dance College in Venice and the Atlas program of Impulstanz in Vienna

His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); The Choreopolitics of Alain Platel’s les ballets C de la B, co-edited with Christel Stalpaert and Hildegard De Vuyst (2019) and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art. (2021)

Fabritia D’Intino (ITA, 1986) graduated with a BA at Accademia Nazionale di Danza (Rome) and ArtEZ (Arnhem, NL) and she completed a master’s degree in Performing Arts (MAP_PA) in Rome. From 2013 to 2019 she has been the artistic coordinator of Barcelona International Dance Exchange (BIDE), curating activities in Europe and America. Her activity includes stage performances, public space interventions, participatory projects and research formats. She works mainly in collaboration with other artists. Fabritia’s work has been awarded national prizes (Ingenerazione, Tu35Expanded) and it had been presented in diferent international contexts including Theâtre De La Ville, Sadler’s Wells, Festival Le Grand Bain, Dance City UK, Festival OFF d’Avignon, Sismograf Olot, Mons arts de la scène, Teatri di Vetro, Festival Ammutinamenti, Danza Urbana, Young Jazz, Centro Pecci. As a dancer, Fabritia collaborates with diferent choreographers and visual artists Since 2018 she is part of ci e Catsandsnails (France) and Chiasma (Rome)

Photography: Daniele Mattioli

Photography: Pawel Wyszomirski

Mirko Guido (b Italy) is a choreographer and dancer He holds a master’s degree in New Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts

His choreographic works have been performed in several venues across Europe and, as a dancer, he has been a member of various dance companies in Germany and later on of the Cullberg Ballet in Sweden. In his work, Mirko explores questions of intersubjectivity and the body/self as a multilayered, multidirectional and relational subject.

Often intrigued by themes of transition and change, he moves between theatre, art galleries and public spaces, and by employing dance, voice, text, video and participatory methods, his work crystallises in very diferent performances.

Mirko is currently based in Aarhus, Denmark, and he is an in-house artist at Bora Bora – Dance and Visual Theater

Maja Hriešik was born in Novi Sad, ex-Yugoslavia, and has been living in Slovakia since the late 90s, where she completed MA studies in aesthetics, theatre directing and dramaturgy. She works in the feld of dramaturgy in diverse felds (dance, opera, flm), and oscillates between art and activism, theory and practice. She has worked as an editor of the dance magazine Salto (2006 – 2011), curated international theatre festivals, and hosted a programme on public space and activism on Slovak public radio. As a production dramaturg, she has been collaborating with Slovak and Czech choreographers of diferent generations Maja published a book of essays entitled On Corporeal Dramaturgies in Contemporary Dance (2013) and is a lecturer at the Dance Faculty in Bratislava (courses of dance dramaturgy, history and aesthetics of dance) She is one of the founding members of PlaST –Contemporary Dance Platform, a community-based project, aiming at creating better conditions and visibility for Slovak contemporary dance

Photography: Jens Sethzman

Photography: Michal Liner

BIOGRAPHIES

Petros Konnaris (Nicosia, 1988) is a performance practitioner working between the felds of live art, participatory art, and dance, and the artistic director of Dance House Lefkosia His artistic practice manifests in the form of durational happenings, 1 – 1 (one-withone) performances, public interventions, performance scores, and process-based artefacts Konnaris’ research focuses on the embodiment of care, the materiality of words, the audience as a witness, and feminist and queer discourse. His work has been part of festivals, exhibitions, and research programs in Cyprus (Open House Festival 2021, Bufer Fringe Festival 2019), Finland (The Posture of Impermanence 2021, New Performance Turku Festival 2016), Greece (Thessaloniki Queer Art Festival 2019), Spain (La Casa del Herrero 2017), and Thailand (Asiatopia Festival 2016) Konnaris holds an MA in Live Arts and Performance Studies from UniArts Helsinki and has published texts in books ( Performing Silence /2022, Figures of Speech/2018) and art reviews (Zoned out/2016).

Tereza Krčálová studied Bohemian and Russian Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague. During her studies, she started to research new Russian theatre, which based its conception on dramaturgy She translates Russian plays into the Czech language and develops the verbatim method. In 2015, she collaborated with choreographer Michal Záhora on the project Be spectACTive. In 2019 she joined his and Honza Malík’s new dance platform Pulsar. In cooperation, they produced two performances – Generation X and The End’s Turnabout Tereza created the project Dance manifest (a happening about the role of the dancer in society), initiated and cocreated the dance performance Absolutely unaccepted! for Prague Pride, and initiated the project dis play

She led six artistic meetings Catch the reality! and co-worked on the conception of the project Unstable, where graduates of dance got artistic and production support, and led it as a mentor.

Photography: Evagoras Vanezis

Photography: Maria Vivchar

Yvona Kreuzmannová founded and has been directing the organisation Tanec Praha (NGO) since 1991, after completing her studies at the Dance Department of the Academy of Music and a scholarship in Paris She is the executive and artistic director running TANEC PRAHA International Dance Festival, PONEC – dance venue and the Czech Dance Platform besides many projects supported by Creative Europe, and has active membership in several EU networks. From 2006 to 2008 she worked as an advisor to the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic and she continues to advocate for the arts as well as for the President of the Czech Centre of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) She teaches arts management at the University of Economics. In 2004 Yvona was awarded by the French President the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Merite National for her outstanding contribution to the development of European cultural cooperation

Ida-Elisabeth S. Larsen is an award-winning choreographer and a dance dramaturg currently based in Roskilde, Denmark. She gained her certifcation as a professional dancer from SEAD in 2007 and continued to supplement her education with a BA in Philosophy and Performance Design from Roskilde University In 2020 she completed her MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance via TeaK –University of the Arts Helsinki

The core of her artistic practice she unfolds as a co-founding member of the project Institute of Interconnected Realities Ida-Elisabeth has also worked as a dramaturg in various artistic collaborations and was engaged as such in the international performance festival series Works at Work (2014 –16). Ida-Elisabeth tours with stage productions regularly and participates internationally in various artist residencies and exchange programs. She was also an elected member of Dansehallerne’s Research Committee from 2018 – 19

Photography: Vojt

Photography: Jefrey Scott

BIOGRAPHIES

Tereza Lenerová is a Czech choreographer and performer After graduating from the Theaterschool Amsterdam, she embarked for two months to New York in search of experiences and then started dancing for various choreographers in the Czech Republic and abroad. Lenerová often collaborates with artists from other art backgrounds under the name of Tereza Lenerová and coll. Her work has been recognized not only in the Czech Republic but also abroad Her most striking and successful pieces were: Swish (Performance of the year 2017), Don’t Stop (selected for the Aerowaves Twenty21), and one of her last works, dis pla y, created together with Jitka Čechová, which received Czech dance platform award 2022. This year Tereza is working together with visual artist and flm director Jiri Havlicek on a new creation called Glove Concern, inspired by an abandoned glove factory in the hometown of her grandparents, which shall be premiered in autumn 2023 in PONEC Theatre Prague.

Salvo Lombardo is a multimedia artist, curator, independent researcher, and artistic director of Chiasma_Arti e Culture Contemporanee (Rome). His research moves between dance, theatre and visual arts and is positioned between theories and practices. In 2017 – 18 Salvo was an associate artist at the Oriente Occidente Festival (Rovereto). In 2019 – 21 he was co-curator of Resurface Festival (Rome) focused on decolonial and postcolonial practices In 2020 he was one of the founding members of Ostudio (Rome). Since 2021 he has been an associate artist at Lavanderia a Vapore (Collegno, Turin) and curator of Interazioni Festival (Rome) In 2021 he realised the digital-community art project Punctum for the European network BeSpectActive! Salvo is currently an associate artist at the MilanOltre Festival. [www.salvolombardo.org]

Photography: Murat Durum Photography: Carolina Farina

Originally from New Delhi, Nikita Maheshwary is a performance practitioner based in The Netherlands with over a decade of experience in choreography, curation, art education and research. Her art inquiries lie at the nexus of gender, culture, and identity. Through her work, she is deeply invested in telling stories of plurality, female agency, forms of marginalisation and class divide. Since 2018, also as a research fellow at THIRD, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam, Nikita is engaged in her artistic research project Naachne-wali: The Dancing Girl. Currently, she works as an independent choreographer and teaches artistic research and dramaturgy at the Circus Academy and Dance Academy, Fontys University of Arts, Tilburg. In association with DansBrabant, she is, at present, involved in the European dance project: Performing Gender – Dancing in your shoes (2021 – 2023)

Naya Moll Olsen is a choreographer, dancer and dramaturg. She holds a BA in dance and choreography from The Danish National School of Performing Arts, where she graduated in 2017. Both as a choreographer and as a dramaturg her work is embedded in phenomenology as well as feminist critique, emerging in questions relating to the phenomenology of senses, the body and its interrelation to the outer world/nature. In her landscape performances for dance and music made site specifcally for hospices in Denmark, Naya is investigating choreography in relation to landscapes, with care as a recurring theme. Care also refers to how she works with the relation to the audience, in how she produces works, and in her leadership. As a dramaturg, Naya is working closely together with the choreographer Emilie Gregersen, and has been a part of the unfolding of a performance trilogy about the phenomenology of senses, frst with Touch (2020), then Caresses (2021)

Photography: Chirag Bhasin

Photography: Liv Rossander

BIOGRAPHIES

Jeppe H. Nissen is educated as a dramaturg from Aarhus University and has been working with the independent artists of Aarhus since 2004 in a lot of diferent roles. Among these are dramaturgy, lighting design and scenography. Jeppe has been working as a producer and dramaturg at Bora Bora since 2011 where his main subject is the development of the dance feld in Aarhus and Western Denmark. His work focuses on facilitating the meeting between artwork and audience. Within the framework of Bora Bora, Jeppe approaches this from two main angles. One is to support the independent artists, by designing operational, lightweight programmes such as the Residency programme of Bora Bora. Or by holding space for knowledge sharing as in the Contextualizing Dance programme The other is to invent new ways for the arts to relate to the local society in meaningful ways.

Lisa Reinheimer (1985) wrote as an independent critic on creative practices and developments in Dutch dance for professional (inter) national art platforms, for festivals and institutions such as the Dutch Dance Days and European Dancehouse Network, and for and about various choreographers She curated context programmes and discussions for festivals and theatres. Creating space, context and connection are her guiding principles

For a long time, Lisa was associated with the Domain for Art Criticism where she developed programmes to renew dance criticism. She was also a senior lecturer in Dramaturgy, Arts & Culture at the Fontys Dance Academy, where learning to think critically, developing your own voice and defning your position were important aspects of her teaching

In 2020 Lisa delivered the State of Dutch Dance in the form of a podcast flm in keeping with her inquisitive nature. From January 2020 to October 2022, she worked as an artistic coordinator at DansBrabant, where she focused on the development of sustainable artistic practices and sought alternatives to production-driven work.

Since November 2022 Lisa is the director of Dansateliers Rotterdam.

Photography: Or-Emilie Yonah Photography: Jochem Jurgens

Margherita Scalise is a theatre-maker and dramaturg from Italy

She is currently based in Brussels and works in Belgium, Italy and other places in Europe After her bachelor’s degrees in Cultural Heritage Studies at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) and in Theatre Directing at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi (Milan), Margherita has been working as an assistant director and choreographer for Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez, in Brussels (2019 – present) In 2021 she took part in the studies of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, led by Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley; in 2022 she was part of a seminary on dance dramaturgy organised by Anghiari Dance Hub with Guy Cools.

Between 2015 and 2022 Margherita created 12 diferent pieces, ranging from theatre to dance and performance

She co-founded R.A.C. (Regist_A Confronto), the frst Italian trade association for theatre directors

Konstantina Skalionta is a dance artist and performance maker based in Cyprus. Her choreographic research and work use movement to explore the narratives that emerge from the interaction between human and non-human bodies.

Konstantina’s work has been presented in the UK, Cyprus and Italy, as part of exhibitions, platforms and festivals such as Larnaca Biennale, Cyprus Choreographic Platform, No_Body Festival, Summer Dance Festival, Seeking Roots Exhibition (NiMAC), UKYA Nottingham Take Over, Resolution, Swallowsfeet Festival and more. She has been a resident artist at the Dance House Lemesos (Moving the New 2020), the international centre of choreography Dance 4, NN Contemporary Gallery, Lyric Hammersmith, and Egomio Cultural Centre (Nicosia). She is an alumna of London Contemporary Dance School (MA in Contemporary Dance) and Central School of Ballet (BA Hons in Professional Dance and Performance, Choreography Award 2011).

Photography: Francesco Marchetti Photography: Artemis Evlogimenou

BIOGRAPHIES

Katalin Trencsényi is a dramaturg, theatre-maker and researcher of Hungarian origin, working in the felds of contemporary theatre, dance and performance. As a London-based dramaturg since 1998, she has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Corali Dance Company, Deafnitely Theatre and many independent artists. She is co-founder of the Dramaturgs’ Network (2001, UK) and is now sitting on its Advisory Council. Katalin is the author of Dramaturgy in the Making (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015) and editor of Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch (Oberon Books, 2016). Katalin taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (visiting lecturer), as well as internationally. In 2019, she served as Drama Creative Fellow at the University of Queensland. Currently, Katalin is working as a lecturer in the Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research programme at the University of the Arts

Helsinki

Elena Tzanavalou (Greece, 1989) is a performing arts educator, dramaturg and performer based in Brussels She holds a master’s degree in Drama and Performance Theory, History and Analysis from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR) and continued to supplement her education with a diploma in dance (GR). In 2019, Elena obtained a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven (BE), while currently, she is receiving training in Gestalt Therapy, aspiring to expand the scope of her feld. Elena has worked as a dramaturg, assistant director/choreographer, production assistant and performer in multiple productions and festivals in Greece, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In addition, she has been teaching theatre and dance (Greece, Spain, Ireland/ UK, Belgium) as well as movement improvisation, composition, and creative writing. Over the years Elena has collaborated with institutions such as the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (BE), DansBrabant (NL), and the National Theatre of Northern Greece, among others.

Photography: Lilla Kho

Photography: Danai Tezapsidou

Markéta Vacovská (CZ) is a freelance dance artist working as a choreographer, performer, dramaturg and teacher based in Prague and Pilsen (CZ). She graduated from the nonverbal theatre department of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague

Marketa is a long-time collaborator of Spitfre Company which is an artistic company that includes works of physical, visual and dance theatre. She has been performing and/or choreographing dozens of their productions

Marketa was awarded many domestic and foreign awards (Herald Angel, Czech Dance Platform, Theatre Newspaper, Next Wave, nomination for Thalia Award) and her solo piece One Step Before the Fall (with Spitfre Co.) was included among Aerowave’s Priority Companies 2014. Marketa tours with productions regularly and participates internationally in artist residencies. Currently, she cocreates a DanceWell community in the Czech Republic

Marketa perceives the human body as an endless landscape where the abstract meets the fgurative, the real meets the imaginative, and the intimate meets the performative.

Working between the felds of curation, art theory and criticism, and creative writing, Evagoras Vanezis’ practice engages with the production and contextualization of cross-disciplinary spaces and narratives. Working along and through the mediums of project, exhibition, and text, his hybrid methodology incorporates events, ecologies, fragments, footnotes, and margin notes from sources as varied as the history of aesthetics, the literature of 20th-century poetic materialism, feminist and queer theory, decoloniality, personal and collective experiences

Since 2016 Evagoras has organised various exhibitions, programs, and publishing projects in collaboration with communities, institutions, and other initiatives Recent projects include Anachoresis: Upon Inhabiting Distances, the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (co-curator, 2021), and Formworks, Thkio Ppalies Project Space (curator, 2019 – 2022).

Evagoras is currently a co-curator and fellow of A Natural Oasis?, Biennale of young artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM, 2022 – 3). He holds an MRes in Art Theory and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins

Photography: Lucie Vyslou

ilová

Photography: Panayiotis Mina

Alexis Vassiliou (1978, Cyprus) studied dance at Trinity-Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, music at the University of East Anglia and composition of music for flms and theatre at the University of Bristol In 2008 he received a scholarship (Dance-Web) as part of the 25th ΙmpulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. During 2012 and 2013 he was selected to participate (artistic residency) in two European programmes (E-motional Bodies and Cities and Act Your Age). In 2014 with his work Please Be Gentle, Alexis was selected among the fnal twenty artists of the Aerowaves network. He directed /choreographed various works that were presented at festivals locally and abroad. In 2016 Alexis was appointed as general and artistic director of Dance House Lemesos

Rodia Vomvolou (1993, Greece) is a performing arts dramaturg and researcher based between Amsterdam and Athens. She is currently doing PhD research on the self-positioning of the dance dramaturg, under the supervision of Prof Dr Maaike Bleeker at Utrecht University Her personal feld of interest focuses on practical dramaturgy and the fgure of the dramaturg as well as on the feld of contemporary choreography and artistic research in the current socio-political context and knowledge economy. As a freelance dramaturg and mentor, Rodia collaborates with institutions and dance houses in Europe as well as with independent artists in the Netherlands, Greece, and Cyprus. Since 2019 she is the mentor and curator of the Artistic Development programme “Moving the New” of Dance House Lemesos. Rodia holds an MA in Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy (Cum laude) from Utrecht University supported by a scholarship by John S. Latsis Foundation Scholarship, and a BA in Drama and Performance Theory, History and Analysis from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Cum Laude) https://www.uu.nl/staf/ TDVomvolouArsenopoulou

Wim van Stam (1959) is currently managing director of house for dance development DansBrabant in Tilburg, the Netherlands. He studied psychology and later philosophy and theatre studies in Utrecht and has been working in performing arts since: as a creative producer of small-scale festivals, a specialist in theatre for young people at the Dutch Theatre Institute, member of the jury for the Dutch-Flemish youth theatre price, business manager of the notorious dance collective Hans Hof Ensemble and as general director of venue De Regentes in The Hague

Former dancer, and since 1989 cultural operator for the performing arts, Gerarda Ventura has worked with, among others, Fondazione Romaeuropa, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Biennale di Venezia, and the Department of Culture of the City of Rome. Gerarda was the coordinator of the Equilibrio Award, a choreographic competition organised by Fondazione Musica per Roma with the artistic direction of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

She has been working as an expert for the Regione Toscana Commission to give an annual contribution to the performing arts structures. She was a dance programmer and consultant for Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria Since 2015 Gerarda has been the artistic director of Anghiari Dance Hub, a residency program for young choreographers

Founder of the Danse Bassin Mediterranee (DBM) Network, Gerarda was the Secretary General of the Euro-Mediterranean Platform of the NGOs and President of CON.ME. Contemporaneo Mediterraneo network. In 2019 with Alessandro Pontremoli she published the book La danza: organizzare per creare for Franco Angeli Editore

Adriano Wilfert-Jensen works with dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions of relations This materialises through making, performing, writing about, curating, representing and dealing with choreography, dancing for other artists, as well as other occupations like a series of cocktail hangouts, publications, research projects, teaching and so on.

In 2017 Adriano initiated the research project analysis, which led to the group dance performances feelings, 2019 and mixed feelings, 2021. With Simon Asencio, he founded and since 2014 is running Galerie – an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks. Together with Linda Blomqvist, Anna Gaïotti and Emma Daniel he organised Indigo Dance Festival, Magazine and Tink Thanks at Performing Arts Forum And with Emma Daniel, he is dancing for the dinosaurs in Spending

Time

. Adriano studied choreography at SNDO – School for New Dance Development in

and artistic research at a pass – advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels

With Dinosaurs

Amsterdam

Photography: Wim van Stam

Photography: Ventura Alberto

Photography: Adriano Wilfert-Jensen

MMDD PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (MMDD) is a three-year-long European research and training project, that brought together six leading contemporary dance organisations: Anghiari Dance Hub and Marche Teatro from Italy, Bora Bora Dance and Visual Theater from Denmark, Dance House Lemesos from Cyprus, DansBrabant from the Netherlands and Tanec Praha from the Czech Republic to explore and develop through exchange and collaboration dance dramaturgy as a creative and socially conscious practice. Initiated by Gerarda Ventura and Guy Cools, the project has been developed and collaboratively led by the partner organisations, coordinated by Tanec Praha and curated by dramaturgs Maja Hriešik, Katalin Trencsenyi, Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar and Guy Cools with dancer, choreographer and curator, Alexis Vassiliou. The curators were responsible for planning, developing and facilitating the programme in close collaboration with the artistic directors of each venue.

The aim of the project was to develop skills in micro dramaturgy which is the temporal-spatial composition of the actual performance and strategies that inform the creative process. At the same time, it also focussed on macro dramaturgy, that is to say how the artists relate to the society within which they operate and how dramaturgical strategies and methodologies can be transferable outside the domain of dance. The project’s longer-term objective was to develop contemporary dance and dramaturgy as critical tools to respond to and work with local communities and enable social cohesion.

The project provided an opportunity for dramaturgs and choreographers working in these fve countries (the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands) for professional development and exchange. This was ofered in the form of workshops, seminars, and collaborative explorations with support from leading professionals, within the framework of two, ten-day residencies organised each year (one in the spring and one in the autumn) The residencies also provided opportunities for the artists to engage with the local scene of the hosting organisation as well as the wider public to participate. The project concluded with a two-day-long presentation in Prague to share the fndings with the general public and encourage further thinking about and developing the feld together.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Participating artists:

Petros Konnaris (CY)

Konstantina Skalionta (CY)

Evagoras Vanezis (CY)

Rodia Vomvolou (CY)

Miřenka Čechová (CZ)

Tereza Krčálová (CZ)

Tereza Lenerová (CZ)

Marketa Vacovská (CZ)

Adriano Wilfert-Jensen (DK)

Mirko Guido (DK)

Ida-Elisabeth Larsen (DK)

Naya Moll Olsen (DK)

Francesco Cocco (IT)

Fabritia D’Intino (IT)

Salvo Lombardo (IT)

Margherita Scalise (IT)

Evangelos Biskas (NL)

Elisabeth Borgermans (NL)

Nikita Maheswhary (NL)

Elena Tzanavalou (NL)

Curators:

Guy Cools (B)

Maja Hriešik (SK)

Katalin Trencsényi (UK)

Anne-Marije van den Bersselaar (NL)

Alexis Vassiliou (CY)

Partner organisations:

Anghiari Dance Hub (IT)

Bora Bora (DK)

Dance House Lemesos (CY)

DansBrabant (NL)

Marche Teatro Polverigi (IT)

Tanec Praha (CZ) – Project Coordinator

PREVIOUS OPEN ACCESS MMDD PUBLICATIONS

Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance. Pandemic Dramaturgies & Project Management. Online Symposium for the Project Partners and the Scientifc Team.

18-20 October 2020, hosted by DansBrabant, Tilburg.

Programme. Edited by Heleen Volman and Katalin Trencsenyi. Tanec Praha, 2020.

https://issuu.com/tanecpraha/docs/mmdd_tilburg_symposium_programme

Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance. Pandemic Dramaturgies & Project Management. Visual Notes of an Online Symposium.

18-20 October 2020, hosted by DansBrabant, Tilburg.

Edited by Heleen Volman and Katalin Trencsenyi, illustrations by Jeroen de Leijer. Tanec Praha, 2021.

https://issuu.com/tanecpraha/docs/mmdd_pandemic_dramaturgies_symposium_2020_visual_n

Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance 2019 – 2022. Project Closure Document.

Edited by Katalin Trencsenyi. Tanec Praha, 2023.

https://issuu.com/tanecpraha/docs/mmdd_project_closure_document

Photography: William van der Voort

First published online in 2023 by

Tanec Praha

Husitská 899/24A, 130 00 Praha 3. ofce@tanecpraha.eu www.tanecpraha.cz

Edited by Katalin Trencsényi

Proofreading: Nick Tomalin

Graphic design: Tamás Gádor

Follow the MMDD project online: www.dancedramaturgies.eu

facebook page

instagram page

Each contribution copyright © the individual contributor

Foreword and compilation © Katalin Trencsenyi

Each photo rights © the individual photographer

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-80-11-03277-7

Photography: Nela Wojaczková