ON DRAMATURGY IN CONTEMPORARY DANCE AND CHOREOGRAPHY Sandra Noeth

Sandra Noeth is Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien, center for

contemporary dance, performing arts and theory, since 2009. She is internationally active as

dramaturge and curator and has been research associate at the University of

Hamburg/Performance Studies 2006-09. Main areas of research, teaching posts and artistic-

theoretical projects focus on ethics and politics of the body and dramaturgy in contemporary

dance and performance, with a specific engagement in non-Western body practices and

concepts. Recent publications in English: “Working (with) Dance. Notes on Contemporary

Dance in Morocco and Tunisia”(Performance Research 18.1, 2013), “On addressing: The

Bodies of Religion” (SCORES, ed. by Tanzquartier Wien, 2013), Emerging Bodies. The

Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography (ed. with G. Klein, 2011),

MONSTRUM. A book on Reportable Portraits (co-authored with K. Deufert/Th. Plischke,

2009).

Thesis on the political Agency of Networks

“There is more force in a question than in an answer.”

Thesis on unbinding Problems and absolving Complexity

“There are more non-relations than relations.”

These preliminary theses as well as the following inserted in this text have been formulated by

and are borrowed from architect and urban designer Adrian Lahoud.1 Although taken out of

their original context, they seem to address some crucial concerns and ideas related to

practices and concepts of dramaturgy in contemporary dance and choreography: questions of

structure and composition, of networks and relationality, of singularities and methodological

concerns, of intention, intuition, agency and the very headlessness of any artistic process; as

well as experiences of movements of the disquieting.2

How to build a Universe that does fall apart two days later?3

At the basis of the following notes lies an expanded notion of choreography which integrates

its historically grown medial hybridity (i.e. its constitutive exchanges with music, theatre,

painting, sculpture, architecture, scenography, media technologies etc.), moving back and

forth between everyday actions and organization, documentation and art work, live event and

institutional representation. Rather than distinguishing choreography from other arts, I

propose a space-time structure, formative principles and a dynamic and perception-oriented

dialogue that speaks in and with choreography and that implies transcending and breaking the

limits of the art form. This involves an opening of a physical and movement-based practice to

other disciplines, to writing and thinking, to the social and political, i.e. to elements and

dynamics of moving and being moved in culture, society and political life.

Historically linked to structuring, valuing and giving form to artistic and creative processes,

the concept of dramaturgy in choreography has been toppled anew over the last years not least

of all by a confident and self-reflexive community of artists. Both, in reaction to and as a

consequence of a ‘world in search of’, they have created room for collaboration in self-

organized research and exchange processes and re-appropriated concrete as well as imaginary

space that have emerged between definition of roles, division of labour and economic

processes of distribution. Consequently artists have e.g. been dealing with more ‘open’ ideas

of oeuvre and interpretation, worked on collective and ongoing practices of creating and

educating, or situated their choreographic work in or in relation to concrete social events and

spaces, and thereby also been challenging concepts of order and disorder, of parting and

participating. Hence, in a large number of contemporary choreographic creation and

production processes, form, content and idea of movement are interconnected. The

intertwining and the combinatory nature of research, conception, training, production and

dissemination in a performance not only has an effect on the shifting positions and demands

that artists themselves have to manage, but also reduce the need for a distinction of

choreographic discourse from choreographic practice.

In the course of these developments, a practical as well as methodological re-formulation of

dramaturgy (its concepts, operating elements and terminology) seems clearly needed: a re-

formulation that gives less priority to questions of structure or form in the sense of notation or

repertory in order to engage in tracing the balance and equilibrium of the singular elements of

choreography, the responsibility of all parties involved and the shifts and changes created in

their relationships. I therefore propose to think about dramaturgy less as a task than as a

potentially shared function within a process. As an often shared practice of understanding,

perspectivating and our positioning and repositioning in artistic but also in social or political

terms. As a practice that exercises resistance to too easy images and forward oriented logics

and that addresses strategies and processes of responsiveness, hesitation and affirmation in

our actions and encounters. As a practice that is not limited to the work’s entrance in front of

a public. As a practice that does not belong to anyone.

Much more, dramaturgy designates a space of negotiation that works on understanding how

different, multi-layered materials and elements are attached to one another - how they act,

react and interact, within and outside the process. It means more than binding together

separate elements, or achieving consensus. It is much more the attempt to integrate the vague,

the not-yet-attained, misunderstandings and paradoxical movements as well as the

monstrosity of all artistic work. This means observation, analysis and the precision of

intentions and intuitions as well as the re-evaluation of the (individual and collective, artistic,

institutional and political) prerequisites of our work, experiences and agendas. It means

dealing with our politics of decision and our protocols of encounter.

Dé-position: On the Body’s Individual and Collective Capacity for Action

Thesis on Failure

“We learn most about something at the moment of its collapse.”

Thesis on Scale as Problematic

“Scale is a mode of problem posing. It refers to the binding of near and far, strong and weak,

small and large. It is always conflated, always paradoxical.”

I approach choreography as a space of (conditional) hospitality,4 as a territory in which by

working on different options and perspectives, languages and influences, rules and obligations

our responsibility for our decisions becomes crucial. The question of the body’s agency is

therefore central when thinking about dramaturgy: What is the body’s capacity to resist, to

react, to respond to a moment of time, to affect and to be affected? How do dramaturgical and

choreographic practices and analyses operate in a ‘deregulated world’ today, having to handle

disturbing and disorienting experiences, the unknown, concurrent worlds, whose connections

and correlations, resonances and counterpoints, paradoxes and ambivalences must

continuously be re-integrated in life and work? What might be the physical, political

techniques for a dancer to gain agency? How does dance participate in mobilizing and making

visible a social, a collective body? What kind of (public, urban) space, and what kind of time

do moving bodies shape, mobilize and choreograph?

Thesis on Blind Spots

“The political dimension of any system is its blind spots.”

I propose to think about agency as a dramaturgical dimension, i.e.: how and why do things

work and not only: what do they mean? Thereby, addressing the body’s agency as a very

condition for choreography to potentially perform politically is based on the assumption that

‘the world’ is not given nor stable, but emerging as social, political, etc. texture creating

knowledge, meaning and action embodied in art works and practices.5 Agency consequently

is not limited to the reproduction or representation of existing structures, but upcoming as a

relation between bodies. It cannot be reduced to intentionality or a neo-liberal form of

productivity but operates in a mode of listening: a potentially critical attitude which

strengthens the responsive quality of choreographic and dramaturgical work and implies an

ethical dimension of the aesthetic. Not as an external system of judgement and evaluation, but

as one that considers the ‘Other’ not outside but always already part of us, already going

through us. Concretely, this also implies to rework and extend the traditionally elaborated

elements of dramaturgy (e.g. time, space, sound, movement etc.) through political, social, as

well as non-Westernized concerns.

Dramaturgical research consequently encompasses processes and strategies of participation,

of in- and exclusion, of closeness and distance, of trust and confidence, of affiliation and

preservation, it encompasses widening of our corpus and resources, about the way we move

and how we speak about movement, bodies and art. This perspective addresses the body in its

contemporary environments through issues of vulnerability and violence, practices of harm,

colonized, raced, poor, gendered bodies, issues of care and safeness, of mobility, a.o. as

potentially dramaturgical questions.

In choreographic terms, the French déposition offers a possible and perhaps helpful

description to illustrate the responsive and continually actualizing quality of dramaturgical

practice: Basically it means a binding, oral testimony before court, which authorizes the

subject as a civic and legal subject. If we spin a bit further along the word’s etymology, it

describes a movement which makes leaving one’s own position (dé-position) a prerequisite

for being able to take a standpoint, and thus making testimony possible at all. The decisive

factor here is the responsivity of one’s own act, which by the step aside, by moving away

from it but simultaneously staying connected, marks one’s position regarding the other, and

which through the interplay of response and responsibility, in the moment of mobilization sets

one’s own thinking and doing in motion. Besides its illustrativeness, the idea of dé-position

also puts the problem of positioning and classification at the focus of investigation of the

dramaturgical. Instead of understanding dramaturgy as a forward-oriented movement of

inscription or notation of bodies in motion, we have to seek a starting position again and again

in order to disclose the premises of our artistic and theoretical concepts, our thoughts and

words, our expectations and preferences as well as the prerequisites of our encounter, to view

our own position anew, to review it and make it visible. The issue is a continuous

reassessment of our own predilections and aversions, experiences and expectations, of our

own terms on which our acting and doing are founded. However, in this process of re-

positioning it falls short of mark to content ourselves with affirming the standpoints taken in

the sense of fixation and standstill. Rather, the metaphor, the movement of dé-position

proposes to try to understand how our own voice, which always has been an address and

required a response, how this voice, which seems so personal and individual to us, cannot be

separated from that which it shares and imparts. And how this voice (in which several voices

have always formulated themselves) connects with the other in a movement of address.

Waeving: Dramaturgy as a Practice of Agonal Dialogue

Thesis on Reality and Endurance

An object is only as strong as the network it is installed within.

Thesis of Reciprocity

The problem conditions the part, the part conditions the problem.

Dramaturgy means weaving a choreography of ideas, a protocol of being-together. In the

process, the focus lies not primarily on the identification of authorship, chronologies or a

succession of scenes, images, phrases and ideas, not on the creation of an imitable scheme or

the production of a certain form;; it is also not primarily about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and the

prevention of mistakes. On the contrary, in each process the question arises anew, how the

different formative elements and valid principles and tools are to be handled.

A dramaturge’s material is hence unstable. And it is precisely this moment of insecurity,

which sets the body, the voices in motion over and over again. This is not about formulating a

hasty metaphor, advocating too quickly or too simply designed, comfortable images and

readings or false promises of flexibility and hybridity. Instead, I seek to define dramaturgy as

a mode of thinking, as a tool without a fixed a priori in which failure in which ‘what escapes’

is an immanent component. To work and think dramaturgically means opening up a divided,

usually temporary space of negotiation and the creation and reflection of the evolving act of

tracking the diverse traces of what is emerging.

It does not mean not making decisions.

It is much rather about the shouldering of responsibility with respect to the politics of

decision-making. This concept of dramaturgy maintains a strong relationship to the outside. It

writes a protocol of encounters, which develops in the shared period of time, in the

contributed vocabulary of the situation. Dramaturgy means thinking about these traces of

delegating and sharing, about how information is generated, produced, communicated,

rejected, reapplied and finally brought onto the stage – in this respect it is not about

communication or mediation and not about the representation of a prefabricated status, but

about the contemplation of strategies and processes of community and participation.

Dramaturgy is concerned with the emerging and the moment of emergence, with the precision

of intentions and the formulation of questions and also means to draw closer to each other in

this process and in terms of an emancipated friendship, to become vulnerable, but also

tangible. Dramaturgy enters another, shared body, organizes processes between intentionality

and non-intentionality, between contradicting movements, bodies and relationships. We are

looking here at a practical concept of responsibility for one’s own work, but also for the

interaction of all participating elements and the temporary community of artists and audiences

– for a protocol of human and artistic encounters.

The relationship between dramaturgy and choreography is friendly one. Dramaturgy is not

aimed at suppressing choreography or forcing it into a specific dance-technical, aesthetic or

virtuous form. It is a monster – phantasmal, an analysis that in its survey of the conditions and

conditionality of encounters accepts and addresses the instability of life and of art as given.

Thus, dramaturgy is maybe exactly about ever anew building and constructing worlds that do

fall apart two days later. About a practice of an agonal dialogue that needs the fragility and

the composed in our position in order to be able to connect and to construct with one another.

About a texture, that can only be approached by questions:

x What is the MATERIAL of dramaturgy; its movement techniques, texts, languages,

media, atmospheres and feelings, expectations and needs? How do they intervene,

communicate and contradict, how do they seduce and exclude each other?

x What does the art work want to ENGAGE with? Is it about the DEFINITION OF AN

INTEREST (formal, personal, political, economic etc.); about a THEORETICAL OR

METHODOLOGICAL INQUIRY? Or, is it about a much more vague DESIRE, a

QUESTION, an INTUITIVENESS?

x What and who does the art work ADDRESS, and want to get in touch with?

x What are the structural and logistic decisions during a working phase? What are e.g.

the timely and untimely parameters of it: Durational aspects, restrictions, limitations,

references to the past, the present or the future? How does the contemporaneity of it

unfold?

x What are the personal, collective and institutional prerequisites of the process? How

can they be reflected upon? What are the strategies of collaboration, (co-)authorship,

co-habitation? How should feedback be organized; and which voices are to be heard,

in which way? How does the process of decision-making take place? How much

control, how much coincidence is needed or allowed? How do knowledge and non-

knowledge meet and articulate in the process?

What is the relation in between bodies on stage and bodies in urban space? What are the

conditions of the space – its dimensions, its codes and historical backgrounds, its ways of

dealing with conventions and memories? What is the concrete as well as the imaginary space

of the public? How is the relationship in between public – artists – civil society

conceptualized?What are the values and the strategies of valuing immanent to the work and

its reception

1 See Adrian Lahoud. “Thesis on failure”, unpublished document. See a.o.: “Post-Traumatic Urbanism: Architectural Design.” Ed. by Charles Rice/Adrian Lahoud/Anthony Burke (September 2010). 2 See Gilles Deleuze, “Nothing is more disquieting than the ceaseless movement of that which appears to be motionless.” Pourparlers (1972 – 1990), Paris: Editions de Minuit (2003). 3 See Philip K. Dick’s speech “How to build a Universe that doesn’t fall apart Two Days later?”1978. 4 See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 5 See Sandra Noeth. “Protocols of Encounter. On Dance Dramaturgy.” Emerging Bodies. The Performane of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, Edited by S. Noeth/G. Klein, 2011, pp. 247-256.