Performing Dramaturgy

Dramaturgy of Form examines verse in twenty-first-century theatre practice across different languages, cultures, and media. Through interdisciplinary engagement, Kasia Lech offers a new method for verse analysis in the performance context. The book traces the dramaturgical operation of verse in new writings, musicals, devised performances, multilingual dramas, Hip Hop theatre, films, digital projects, and gig theatre, as well as translations and adaptations of classics and new theatre forms created by Irish, Spanish, Nigerian, Polish, American, Canadian, Australian, British, Russian, and multinational artists. Their verse dramaturgies explore timely issues such as global identities, agency and precarity, global and local politics, and generational and class stories. The development of dramaturgy is discussed with the focus turning to the new stylized approach to theatre, whose arrival Hans-Thies Lehmann foretold in his Postdramatic Theatre, documenting a turning point for contemporary Western theatre. Serving theatre-makers, scholars, and students working with classical and contemporary verse and poetry in performance contexts; practitioners and academics of aural and oral dramaturgies; voice and verse-speaking coaches; and actors seeking the creative opportunities that verse offers, Dramaturgy of Form reveals verse as a tool for innovation and transformation that is at the forefront of contemporary practices and experiences.

Outlining different perspectives, this classic and field-defining text introduces 'dramaturgy' as a critical concept and a practical process in an accessible and engaging style. The revised edition includes a new introduction and afterword which provides insight into contemporary developments and future directions of scholarship.

This groundbreaking book moves beyond the conventional association of dramaturgy with plays to consider the substance and process of dramaturgy for dance and movement performance. Focusing on text and language, research, audience, movement, and interculturalism, the author provides vivid, practical examples from her collaboration with renowned choreographer Ralph Lemon.

This comprehensive work is truly the first textbook in the field of dramaturgy. Most of the material-much of it by leaders in all areas of the theater-was commissioned for this collection, rather than being reprinted. Its currency and importance cannot be overestimated. A review of the history of dramaturgy as a profession, together with its European antecedents, gives students a sense of historical context. Selections from respected and recognized names in theater provoke student interest and communicate the benefits of those experts' experiences.

Dramaturgy in the Making maps contemporary dramaturgical practices in various settings of theatre-making and dance to reveal the different ways that dramaturgs work today. It provides a thorough survey of three major areas of practice - institutional dramaturgy, production dramaturgy and dance dramaturgy - with each illustrated through a range of case studies that illuminate methodology and which will assist practitioners in developing their own 'dramaturgical toolbox'. In tracing the development of the role of the dramaturg, the author explores the contribution of Lessing, Brecht and Tynan, foundational figures who shaped the practice. She excavates the historical and theoretical contexts for each strand of the work, uniquely offering a history of dance dramaturgy and its associated theories. Based on extensive research, the volume features material from the author's interviews with fifty eminent professionals from Europe and North America, including: Robert Blacker, Jack Bradley, DD Kugler, Ruth Little and Hildegard De Vuyst. Through these, a detailed and precise insight is provided into dramaturgical processes at organisations such as the Akram Khan Company, les ballets C de la B (Gent), the National Theatre and the Royal Court (London), the Schaubühne (Berlin) and The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab (Utah), among others. Dramaturgy in the Making will prove indispensable to anyone working in theatre or wanting to better understand the dramaturgical processes in performance-making today. The book features a foreword by Geoff Proehl, author of Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey.

Performing Dramaturgy is the first comprehensive guide to New Zealand dramaturgy. Charting the history and evolution of international practice, Fiona Graham examines the introduction of professional dramaturgy to New Zealand and the development of a practice based on tikanga Maori. Through interviews and local case studies, Graham investigates how dramaturges have collaborated with performance makers from playwrights to performance artists to create work that is nuanced and multi-layered. Informed by thirty-five years of performance development experience, Graham's Performing Dramaturgy is essential reading for practitioners and students of all creative disciplines who want to apply the principles of dramaturgy to their own arts practice. Like a good dramaturge, this book will unsettle assumptions, catalyse multiple development possibilities and offer strategies for dramaturgical composition.

This book explores how doing dramaturgy is informed by today’s highly diverse field of theatre, dance and performance. It does so in dialogue with fourteen performances and their makers, tracing the thinking-through-practice that underlies these creations. The first part of the book looks at how dramaturgs participate in practices of thinking-making and introduces a dramaturgical mode of looking at performances and the processes in which they are created. The second part of the book discusses the performances and creative processes of Manuela Infante, Julian Hetzel, Ivo van Hove, Anouk van Dijk, Falk Richter, Milo Rau, Kris Verdonck, Death Centre, Hotel Modern, Jr.cE.sA.r , Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Dries Verhoeven, the LGB Society of Mind, Sanja Mitrović, and Amanda Piña. Showing how ways of making and ways of doing dramaturgy mutually inform each other, this book is an essential resource for students and others aspiring to develop their own dramaturgical practice.

This is a concise survey of new play projects that bring together the worlds of science and performance, and the benefits that dramaturgical praxis can bring to both disciplines. Three approaches common to both performance and science – collaboration, experimentation, and interpretation – are reflected in a series of case studies that demonstrate the ways in which dramaturgical tools can inform the wider public about scientific knowledge and practice, provide a truly reciprocal model of co-operation in collaboration that happens early on in the research process, and inspire the creation of new dramatic forms that enact, rather than translate, the dynamics of scientific research. Part of the Routledge Focus on Dramaturgy series, this is a vital account of collaborative work for scholars and practitioners of theatre and performance, as well as readers across the sciences.

This book illuminates the shift in approaches to the uses of theatre and performance technology in the past twenty-five years and develops an account of new media dramaturgy (NMD), an approach to theatre informed by what the technology itself seems to want to say. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important artists from dumb type and their 1989 analog-industrial machine performance pH, to more recent examples from the work of Kris Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company. Engaging with works from a range of artists and companies including: Blast Theory, Olafur Eliasson, Nakaya Fujiko and Janet Cardiff, we see a range of extruded performative technologies operating overtly on, with and against human bodies alongside more subtle dispersed, interactive and experiential media.

Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts. The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and experienced by spectators in the last decade. Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.