A new start

Today, I had a very slow start dealing with some other practical issues so I feel this reflection will be a bit short.

I have decided to shift the focus of my research and start working on less crazy ideas (although I will still keep them at the back of my mind) …

It becomes clearer and clearer now that my main focus should be to try and bring together all the different voices of dramaturgs and try to demonstrate that although, as all of them argue, that there are no fixed methods that a dramaturg can employ, that each performance has its own specificities, so each time the dramaturg needs to adjust to his dramaturgical approach to meet the requirements of each performance, there is still a common way of understanding “dramaturgical” thinking.

I came to understand the creative process of making a performance as a complex problem, with an increasing number of variables that need to be accounted for, and many decisions need to be made but always without any certainty. And these variables are not only concerning the meaning-making processes, or decisions on how to do things… but also the points of view of all the collaborator of a piece. And the role of the dramaturg could be partially understood as the one who tries to balance of all elements together. And, this is what I find quite fascinating… How can you deal with such uncertainty, with such a complex system? What are the guiding principles that allow decisions to be made? What kind of skill is required to work in such a system? These are some of the main questions that I would like my research to focus on… Is there, maybe, an existing framework that can allow me to provide an analytical account of “dramaturgical” thinking. What would be the main elements of such a framework?   

Another important point that I started thinking about recently, was that I had vaguely made a distinction between dramaturgy in the way that I used in theatre productions and dance dramaturgy, but the more I think about it the less explicit the distinction appears in the texts that I have encountered…

So, some more questions started popping up…

• Is this vagueness in the literature intentional? Does it say something about the field of dramaturgy as a whole… Maybe that the way dramaturgical thinking is employed throughout the creative process is so broad that it “intentionally” resists the division into different categories based on the type of performances that it produces?
• And, what does this say about the state of contemporary performances?

Or….

• Are there some medium specificities that make dance dramaturgies different from other types of dramaturgy?
• Would it be maybe worth exploring what the benefits would be if actually the attempt of a distinction was to be made?
• Is there something unique that movement and dance has to offer when it comes to the dramaturgical methods that are employed by the practitioners?

There questions are still rather broad and vague, but I think they some potential, and after some narrowing down and some further clarification, they will help me form the thesis….