The Demon Dramaturg

It's very strange to me just how nervous the word 'dramaturg' seems to make people - specifically, directors. I haven't figured out yet why this is the case. Practitioners who write about dramaturgy have also mentioned this peculiarity; for some, the word is just plain ugly, for others it's fiercely intimidating. It's so odd - dramaturgs are really more like the Care Bears (or, for the younger generation, Barney) of the theatre world... we just want everyone and everything - actors, designers, audience, the ideas going into the performance - to get along! (Well, OK, there's also the fact that if we're doing our job correctly we're poking and prodding and challenging and potentially annoying the performance into 'getting along'... imagine Barney with devil horns.) ((Not much of a stretch, really - but I digress.))

I find it unfathomable, in this day and age, that any serious theatre practitioner could be unfamiliar with the concept of 'dramaturgy', i.e., the fact that any piece of performance has a particular structure made up of whatever types of performative elements (text, visuals, storytelling, movement, etc...). The relationship of those elements (the underlying structure) is the 'dramaturgy', the make-up, of the piece.' So, if you have dramaturgy, wouldn't it stand to reason that you might have someone who deals with it as a specialization? If you have clothes on your actors, you've got a costumer somewhere. A playwright writes the play. A composer develops your music. Actors act (hopefully). And, a dramaturg dramaturgs (deals with the essential structure of the performative experience)! ('Dramaturgs', as a action word, is a term under discussion.) The specifics of a dramaturg's job are, of course, up to the dramaturg, the director, and the producing body of the theatre or company, but it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that dramaturgs exist and can be useful.

Tomorrow morning myself and a few other Drama MA students are meeting with a group of 4th-years who are interested in dramaturgy. Perhaps they were sucked in by the apparent danger and mystery of the word - as a collective whole, they don't have any idea what a dramaturg does.

I'm so impressed they're not letting that stop them.