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Dear wonderful people,
Hello from the other side of the radio silence. My last newsletter in April was going to be a bit about mentors, about whose teachings you’ve dwelled with; as Martin Shaw asks, which great trees have you sat under? Before it could be written, though, a mentor arrived for me quite unexpectedly: a broken right wrist! The arrival was quite spectacular and the following experience has been pretty all-consuming – challenging and, in ways, wonderful. My wrist has been, and still is, a surprising, demanding mentor - something between a dusty sage who swept in one evening unannounced and a baby left bawling on the doorstep. I do not regret sitting under this tree – and I am happy now to be typing with both hands! It’s good to be back here with you.
So, as another heat wave arrives in Berlin, the summer doesn’t seem like it’s coming to a close. And yet: new arrivals are on the way. Like the cranes who will soon be arriving to their autumn stopover grounds, there are a series of workshops soon landing in Berlin! I’ll be offering, along with my close creative and pedagogical collaborator Adi Weinberg, a series of weekend workshops, diving into the practices of dramaturgy, storytelling and puppetry. Over the next three newsletters, this one included, I’d like to lay out my research, thinking and personal practices in these areas. A kind of rumination in advance of the workshops.
First up, on Saturday 30th September and Sunday 1st October is the workshop Dramaturgy in Movement – this is for dancers, theatre-makers, directors, dramaturgs, writers, creators from any field – all those who enjoy moving and have a curiosity and interest in dramaturgy.
So off we go into the boglands of the dramaturg...
EARLY DRAMATURGS
-“I always attended the two last rehearsals before every play because my opinion was worth having just before the play was produced. My remarks were taken down in shorthand and I was always told I was wrong, but in the end my opinions were always taken and proved all right. When an actor has been rehearsing a play for weeks he becomes blind to its faults. I could say things to Alec about his work that nobody else could, and when I went in to the last rehearsals I was called the sledge-hammer.” – Florence Alexander.[1]
The dramaturg has been around for a while, in the UK certainly since the sledge-hammering times of Florence Alexander, wife of the theatre manager of St. James’ Theatre, London in the 1890s. The role was more common in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Germany than in the UK. As John Willett comments in “Brecht On Theatre”, in Brecht’s time (in the 1920s), the dramaturg was “a permanent play-reader, playwright and literary odd-job man who is part of the staff of every German theatre”. And so the dramaturg has stayed, down through the years to Raimund Hoghe, long-term dramaturg with Pina Bausch, who let the dramaturg role slip across forms into dance. Now, in many disciplines, the dramaturg is no stranger in Germany and beyond.
The last five years in particular have seen an explosion in the literature on dramaturgy and dramaturgs, as many processes, working in a variety of performative forms work with people occupying this role.
A dip into that literature is fascinating but not quite for now. In brief, my favourite thinking that I’ve come across so far: Hansen offers dramaturgy “as sets of actions and/ or relations [...] including mediation, mentorship, critique, errancy, friendship”[2] among others and Profeta, in her book, combines these “into two dominant "verbs" of dramaturgy: asking questions and building structure.”[3] DeFrantz proposes that the dramaturg must have the ability to split their focus; having the quality of being "simultaneously inside and outside the work."[4] Lepecki suggests the dramaturg must have the spirit of “a "going without knowing" found in practices of errancy, wherein we understand "to err as to drift, to get lost, to go astray," practices that ultimately value doing, not simply knowing.”[5]
The remit of the dramaturg and dramaturgy seems wider and more applicable than ever before.
MULTIPLE STRANDS OF DRAMATURGY
I call myself a dramaturg, as well as a storyteller, puppeteer and facilitator. Each somehow weaves into and out of the next and I realise I’ve been widening my own remit as a creator and been slowly woven into a dramaturg over the last twelve years. Maybe this is part of a response to the time we live in. I think I’m not alone feeling more aware of myself less as a clear individual and more as a multiplicity, a complexity – I am professionally and personally many. Perhaps this widening is a necessary strategy to cope with the precarity of living and working now.
To shift metaphors for a moment, I see less the straight path stretched out away from me and behind me – but the messy, wiggly, multiple waterways that have led to me being me, a dramaturg, now.
So let’s go back upstream for a moment.
I had the opportunity, in 2011 or so, to join a project initiated by Ben Haggarty of the Crick Crack Club. Ben, along with Hugh Lupton, Sally Pomme Clayton, TUUP, Jan Blake and others, paved the way for performance storytelling in the UK, working over time to bed it in, to let it expand and become a familiar part of the rich cultural landscape of the UK. Ben has a huge energy and enthusiasm and when I met him it was being poured into research of something he’d wanted to explore for a long time: the epic storytelling tradition of the Pandvani singers (sometimes Pandwani) of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh in India, who tell the stories of the Pandavas, the brothers whose exploits are found in the epic story the Mahabharata.
In this project, which became and still is Pandvani 108 – I was lucky enough to see Ritu Verma (above) in performance and to have a small exchange with her form through a workshop. Each Pandvani singer, who sings/tells parts of the story of the Mahabharata, is accompanied by a number of musicians and a ragi.
This ragi plays a particular role in relation to the singer/teller. They are in a continuous call-and-response with the singer/teller. They help to drive the performance, to amplify the story. They gleefully interject, clarify, repeat, question and break into song. They have, simultaneously, one foot (deeply) in the performance and one foot (also deeply) in the experience of the audience. It’s a subtle thing to see, especially when you don’t understand the language but there’s something beyond the verbal, a kind of listening and communication between them that reminded me of watching great jazz musicians.
Here’s Ritu, with her Ragi behind her on the harmonium. You can’t quite see him but you can hear him!
Pandvani 108 took elements of the Pandvani form and tried to apply it, with great gumption, to other stories, many from a Western tradition. It was thrilling but deeply unfamiliar, a bit like being chucked into waters very far from home. I didn’t quite have the energy, the volume or the speed to keep up with the research at the time and stepped out of the boat at some point. But the ragi had gotten under my skin: it was a role so difficult to hold and so incredible to witness/experience that I’ve been gently turning it over ever since.
RAGI-ING TO DRAMATURG-ING
For me, my slow research into the ragi and ragi-ing has been a deep water source for the way I practice being a dramaturg. And other water sources flow in – my time directing in London, my years of facilitation (as a sailing instructor, to a tutor to a facilitator of performance, especially collaborative, devised performance), to my journey with and experiences of puppeteering.
For me dramaturgy is a practice of embodied listening – what Thomas Hübl calls attunement – to the multiple layers of things happening – in me, in the space, in the story, in the others around me.
These layers include (amongst, I’m sure, many others):
1. the artistic (the performative work we’re channeling, forming, shaping)
2. the personal (how it resonates with each person connected to the process on an individual level, from the cultural to the ancestral, the private to the familial etc. How we can allow and release what comes up on the personal level; to keep it in balance with and feeding into the artistic work)
3. the interpersonal (how it’s all getting done between the whole team, including all the communication, verbal and non-verbal that’s happening – consciously or not).
This embodied listening and being able to articulate, to give language to what you feel, is a life’s work, I think, and a vital part of creating or co-creating a radical, inclusive, trauma-aware, playful space. And there are so many other aspects involved in how you help create that space. I was recently very inspired by this conversation between Thomas Hübl and Krista Tippet for Hübl’s new podcast Point of Relation.[6] With Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast, he embarks on a beautiful, roaming conversation which at one point lands on qualities that Tippett finds important in the spaces she creates. She’s talking about interviewing but I think it applies to creation of many spaces, including artistic creation spaces. She said she wants to cultivate hospitality, which she defines as a social technology used all over the world, a way of bringing your best self to the space and allowing the other to bring their own best self. Secondly she talks about approaching people in that space with humility, which she defines as opening yourself to being surprised by the other.
I resonate so much with these as aspects or aspirations of my own approach to dramaturgy – and there’s a final piece missing that builds on this humility: what my clown teacher Robert McNeer, after Carl Rogers, works with as the base of his clowning teaching: “unconditional positive regard”.
In a recent essay (which I very much recommend you read), Robert writes: “In a beautiful image, he [Carl Rogers] compares looking at a human being with looking at a sunset: “When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” (Rogers, 1980) Unconditional positive regard comes from a capacity to witness the remarkable in the ordinary, and helps one to perceive process more than result: not what you are, but what you are becoming.“[7]
With attunement, with embodied listening, with the information you feel in this space, the dramaturg can be the one who helps name, discern and suggest what wants to happen next in the process. How the person in front of you might go on, unfold. How what they are doing can become more – more fully itself.
This is the research behind my approach to dramaturgy. I’m lucky to be sharing research space with Adi Weinberg, who brings a rich background in movement research and has a deep ability to listen to emergence. In the upcoming workshop we will be looking at some of these separate and joint areas of research, some foundational tools of the dramaturg as we see it: embodied listening, guiding the process (ragi-ing!) and storytelling in space. If you’re interested in joining the research and in range of Berlin on 30th September and 1st October, we’d love to see you there. More info/tickets via the QR code or by following the link below:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/catgerrard/994482?
I hope to see you there! Next month, we splash into storytelling and a new story I’ve been exploring recently: the story of rewilding...
Yours ragi-ish-ly,
Cat
P.S. Incidentally, if you want to see some dramaturgy in action... the latest creation of Adi (as choreographer and dancer) and myself (as dramaturg) is “If The Bull Won’t Come”, which premiered last November and has been invited back to the fabrik Potsdam, in Potsdam. We will be performing on 20.10 and 21.10 at 19:30. Info and tickets here: https://fabrikpotsdam.de/event/1047
P.P.S. And about those jazz musicians. Here’s my favourite band from New Orleans: Shotgun Jazz Band, guided by the inimitable ragi Marla Dixon. Here’s their song: Whenever You’re Lonesome
[1] From a review of by Mary Luckhurst’s Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006) by Shelley Orr
[2] Dance Dramaturgy in Theory and Practice - a review of new works in the field of dramaturgy - by Ariel Nereson
[3] ibid – on Profeta Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance
[4] ibid
[5] ibid
[6] Listen to the whole podcast here:
[7] Robert McNeer - “Present Continuous” https://www.hltmag.co.uk/apr23/present-continuous