I find it hard to come up with something specific to write this morning. I felt like I had a productive day yesterday, but somehow, I find it hard to recall exactly what I read and how it was relevant for my research. Maybe all I need is a little push…
To be honest, although I publish posts every weekday, I do feel a bit uneasy about making them public. At the same time, I see this as a challenge… as a way of exposing myself, my frustrations, my inconsistencies and my “mumbling”, whether they are being read by someone or not.
In my head, I always thought that if you present something it needs to be “perfect”, although I am not even sure what the standards of this perfections are… I think the mind is sometimes creating these imaginary boundaries which have no correspondence with reality, but they still persist and inform the way you perceive yourself, but also the way you assume other people perceive you. And I guess the latter part is what makes me feel more uneasy, the different ways other people might perceive you through what you present to them.
And I think this is one of the reasons why I have been writing less about what I am actually reading and the topic of my research. Because it still feels undeveloped, and not ready to be presented… But, at the same time, I decided to start writing this blog to encourage me to embrace this bumpy first stage of the research…the state where everything is possible and there are so many choices to be made in order to narrow down the scope of your research.
And I guess, being inconsistent, or confused and not yet as precise and rigorous as you would wish to be is also part of this process. But unless you figure out a way to deal with these initial stages you could not move forward… At least this is how I see it…
I come to realize more and more that each person has their own way of working in projects like that so the trick is to try and optimize your process based on your own needs. And this would also include making mistakes, getting of track, being lost and finding you path again or even realizing that there is another path that you can take that you think it is better.
This is also what I find fascinating about the way dramaturgs talk about their work and their thinking processes. One of the main skills that I have understood a dramaturg “should” acquire is to be able to adjust to the context and the needs of each performance or creative process. In the chapter I was reading yesterday, dramaturg Katherine Profeta was providing a wide range of examples from her own experience as a dramaturg that would qualify as “research” within the context of dramaturgical processes. In each example, her involvement as a dramaturg was radically different from the rest, or to be more precise , the dramaturgical tools and processes that were employed were different…
I am making this clarification because as she – as well as other dramaturgs – suggest the work of dramaturgy does not need to be – and in fact should not be- performed solely by the dramaturg, but is distributed among the different collaborators. This could be considered as another element of dramaturgical thinking.
So, although these “units” of knowledge that were acquired by each example she provided cannot be codified into steps that each dramaturg should follow, I think there is an underlying logic that informs dramaturgical thinking that allows for all these methods and tools to emerge that require exactly the ability to adapt and be flexible to the specificities of each project.
So I guess it is my time to work “dramaturgically” for my research…
The book I am referring to is:
- Profeta, Katherine. 2015. Dramaturgy in Motion: at Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
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