Dramaturgy To Make Visible

This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.

(Asian) Dramaturgs’ Network: Sensing, Complexity, Tracing and Doing explores the histories, stories, and practices of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN), a network of dramaturgs, performance makers, cultural producers and performance scholars in the wider Asian region that has been active since 2016. It explores two questions that have emerged through ADN dialogues and events. Are there Asian or Asia-based dramaturgies of practice and performance? And how does one write about these within contextually grounded frames, moving beyond Eurocentric paradigms? In selected essays, extracts from presentations, case studies and critical reflections, the collection explores the story of ADN, and the future of dramaturgy in and for performance in the region. It makes a strong case for rigorous and vibrant dramaturgical thinking, and is an open invitation for further dramaturgical work, opening up sustainable spaces for thinking and doing dramaturgy in the region.

The Dramaturgy of the Door examines the door as a critical but under-explored feature of theatre and performance, asking how doors function on stage, in site-specific practice and in performances of place. This first book-length study on the topic argues that doors engage in and help to shape broad phenomena of performance across key areas of critical enquiry in the field. Doors open up questions of theatrical space(s) and artistic encounters with place(s), design and architecture, bodies and movement, interior versus exterior, im/materiality, the relationship between the real and the imaginary, and processes of transformation. As doors separate places and practices, they also invite us to see connections and contradictions between each one and to consider the ways in which doors frame the world beyond the stage and between places of performance. With a wide-ranging set of examples – from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to performance installations in the Mojave Desert – The Dramaturgy of the Door is aimed at performance makers and artists as well as advanced students and scholars in the fields of performance studies, cultural theory, and visual arts.

Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy examines the ethics of specific artistic practices. The book highlights the significant continuities between translation, adaptation, and dramaturgy; it considers the ethics of spectatorship; and it identifies the tightly interwoven relationship between ethics and politics.

The aim of this book is to contribute a dramaturgical perspective to education. The authors write from a dramaturgical perspective about the planning of teaching, leadership in the classroom, the teacher-body, the teacher’s oral skills and ethics, communication, and about the spaces in which teaching takes place. The book is written with the pre-understanding that the ways in which art creates knowledge need to be illuminated and articulated more clearly in educational thinking, thereby enhancing artful engagement in education. Dramaturgical perspectives are presented as such a way – a form of knowledge that the artform of drama/theatre can contribute to teaching and learning in general. Through examples and analyses of empirical material, as well as through theoretical perspectives, the authors show chapter by chapter how dramaturgy and a dramaturgically inspired language and concepts create more possibilities of choice for teachers in planning and carrying out their teaching. Teaching and Learning through Dramaturgy brings to the forefront what will be enabled in teaching and planning of teaching, by making use of a dramaturgically inspired language and action, what in principle is possible in every subject.

These essays explore the many ways theater and dramaturgy are used to shape the everyday experience of people in mass societies. Young argues that technologies combine with the world of art, music, and cinema to shape consciousness as a commodity and to fragment social relations in the market as well as in religion and politics. He sees the central problem of post-modern society as how to live in a world constructed by human beings without nihilism on the one hand or repressive dogmatism on the other. Young argues that in advanced monopoly capitalism, dramaturgy has replaced coercion as the management tool of choice for the control of consumers, workers, voters and state functionaries. Young calls this process the "colonization of desire." Desire is colonized by the use of dramaturgy, mass media, and the various forms of art in order to generate consumers, vesting desire in ownership and display rather than in interpersonal relationships with profound consequence for marriage, kinship, friendship and community. While Young focuses his critique on capitalist societies undergoing great changes, he insists that the same developments are to be found in bureaucratically organized socialist societies. The Drama of Social Life is of interest to those who study theories of moral development, cultural studies, the uses of leisure, politics, or simply the uses of "make believe." It is intended for the informed lay public as much as for social psychologists.

Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance, and other arts. Merging strategies of audience engagement originating in different cultures, dramaturgies of interweaving are creative methods of theater and art-making that seek to address audiences across cultures, making them uniquely suitable for shaping people’s experiences of our entangled world. Presenting in-depth case studies from across the globe, spanning Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, the US, and the UK, this book investigates how dramaturgies of interweaving are conceived, applied, and received today. Featuring critical analyses by scholars—as well as workshop reports and artworks by renowned artists—this book examines dramaturgies of interweaving from multiple locations and perspectives, thus revealing their distinct complexities and immense potential. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, performance, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgies of Interweaving opens up an innovative perspective on today’s breathtaking plurality of dramaturgical practices of interweaving in theater, performance, dance, and other arts, such as curation and landscape design.

This concise, precise, and inclusive dictionary contributes to a growing, transforming, and living research culture within both humanities scholarship and professional practices within the creative sectors. Its format of succinct starting definitions, demonstrations of possible routes of further development, and references to new and revisited concepts as “conceptual invitations” allows readers to quickly uptake and orient themselves within this exciting methodological field for didactic, scholarly and creative use, and as a starting point for further investigation for future contributions to the new canon of critical concepts. Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities is the first book to outline and define the specific and evolving field of the creative humanities and provides the field’s nascent bibliography.