Interview with Dr. Joel Anderson (CSSD) Thursday, 25 August 2011 – British Library, London
Lecturer, author, translator - dramaturg?
Interviewed by Charisse Baxter
Many recent commentaries have discussed the role of the ‘traditional’ dramaturg as one who presents or expounds upon ‘meaning’. How would you describe the role of a ‘traditional’ dramaturg?
Many recent commentaries have discussed the role of the ‘traditional’ dramaturg as one who presents or expounds upon ‘meaning’. How would you describe the role of a ‘traditional’ dramaturg?
I think that the frustrating answer is that a dramaturg can be many, many different things, and many, many different roles. Some are highly practical things, and sometimes that’s the preserve of the dramaturg: to be engaged in the sorts of strictly material elements of the production; and then on the other hand the dramaturg is often doing quite the opposite – the most complicated and sort of subtle aspects of the production, to do with checking things, to do with nuancing something that’s coming through in a staging. To do with balancing different elements, maybe to do with historical perspective, and to do with the interpretation being performed… What you said before about the ‘meaning’ is interesting, yeah, I’m not sure if the dramaturg is necessarily the person who should be doing that, who should be in charge of meaning. I would have thought that’s what staging is, I would have thought that’s what directing is – you know, if directing isn’t choosing a meaning, or at least pushing a meaning, or maybe even playing with a meaning, then I don’t know what the director’s doing.
(Laughs)
Maybe that’s a valid question. Maybe we should ask this question – and I’m sure dramaturgs do sometimes. I tend to go with Patrice Pavice’s very useful notion that dramaturgy (and he’s not talking about, I don’t think, when he says this, he’s not talking about the role of the dramaturg, he’s talking about dramaturgy itself) that dramaturgy is something to do with the study of the conflict in the staging. The dramaturg has to keep an eye on the conflict, and even keep the conflict going. And there’s something in there that’s very close to the idea of play. People like Lecoq talk about ‘the play’, and that you’ve got to, in order for there to be ‘play’ there’s got to be some kind of conflict between elements – and the dramaturg is sometimes in the position of pushing things into some kind of set-up on stage that will enable a conflict, and will also clarify a conflict. I think a dramaturg sometimes has to clarify what’s at stake, and what’s the game, and ‘what’s the beef’ in a staging. And that is something where dramaturgs can be seen to be quite useful, because directors aren’t necessarily looking at that. Not necessarily. A director might be, I think, looking at representing a story, pushing a meaning, prompting a meaning of some kind, positioning an interpretation – directors have a possibly increasing, I don’t know, directors have to situate the staging of a play they’re doing now within a history of the play’s staging. With the classics that’s the big question –but even now, not with classics in fact, to some extent even with a brand-new play that could be the case, but certainly with a play that’s already been done a couple of times – the director’s got to be thinking ‘How does this interpretation fit in? Or not fit in? Or how does it break with previous interpretations, how does it complement them? How does it undermine them? How does if reference them? ‘ And often that’s what the director is doing – and that might be the other side of the coin… you might think, because that suggests research, it suggests historical awareness, it suggests awareness of a history of theatre, one might think that would be the dramaturg’s job. But maybe that is the director’s job! I don’t know. Because if the director is putting forward an interpretation, that must necessarily be taking its point of departure from something previous, I think. And we’re already on to the idea that there is some crossover between the role of the director and the dramaturg. But they are fundamentally quite different roles, I think, nonetheless.
The idea, then, that the dramaturg is the one who points up the conflict, makes that present and that awareness in order to have something to play with – how does that fit with this idea of the dramaturg as the observer or ‘outside eye’? Particularly in a ‘traditional’ setting, where you’ve got a script, you’ve got an established format for rehearsals and roles and things like that, if the dramaturg is pushing and tugging at questions and elements within the play, how might they also function as an outside eye?
I think that might just be the paradox of the dramaturg – that the dramaturg is in some ways closer than anybody to the play (or to the production, should I say), but in some ways has to remain distanced from it as well, and that’s the game for the dramaturg, I think. It’s to remain close to everything. One of the clichés about dramaturgs is that they’re obsessed with detail. But there’s lots of different kind of detail that that could be. Part of the ability to observe detail comes from being sufficiently distanced from the thing to be able to see it. One of the traditional defenses of the dramaturg, of the role of the dramaturg, is that the director (and we could critique this interpretation) is too busy. The director can’t see the wood for the trees, and the director is in the action of the thing, and the director can’t be bothered with things like the detail because the director is too busy, whatever, steering the boat, whatever they’re doing. And the dramaturg is there to kind of spot the details that are not observable when you’re worried about the whole thing. There’s something I wrote about a way in which one might envisage how the dramaturg functions as a kind of consultant. That might be one of the ways to apply vulgar metaphor; if the play is kind of a business, then the dramaturg might be the consultant who keeps coming in from the outside. The irony is, of course, that dramaturgs don’t get paid an enormous amount like consultants – consultants famously do very little and get paid a great deal (at least in the cliché - I have no idea if that’s true).
That is a metaphor I’d like to see carried across.
It’d be useful to have that. It’s useful because there is this idea that the consultant is valuable because they’re not in the thing, they’re kind of, not neutral, but maybe equidistant. And so that’s considered to be a valuable asset, and yet they’re supposed to be absolutely involved in detail. So there is some comparison to be made. The other business comparison (I have no idea where I’ve got to this) is that there’s some business book (I can’t remember which one – some kind of self-realization, self-help book I’ve read) which suggests that one of the mistakes people make in business is to fail to distinguish, to differentiate between ‘management’ and ‘direction’.
Okay…
It’s kind of helpful that the word ‘direction’ is in there. But a company or a project, according to this book, is about vision. It’s about seeing from high up the whole context, and thinking about which direction we need to go in, where we need to go. And maybe to some degree having any awareness as to ‘why’ as well, being connected to principles – whereas management is not about that. Management is about ‘how do we do what we’ve agreed to do with the best possible use of resources, the most efficient possible use of resources.’ Now, there’s lots we could critique about that whole idea, but I don’t know – which is the dramaturg? I don’t know. The dramaturg is both, sometimes I think. The dramaturg is about thinking ‘well how can we do this thing with what we’ve got, how can we make this come across’ but sometimes the dramaturg is also the one at the top of the tree saying ‘we have to go this way! I don’t care that we are making good progress that way – that way is the wrong way, we need to go this way! It would be nice if that were the right way, but it’s not – we have to go this way.’ I think there’s a way that maybe the dramaturg straddles those two roles, that when the dramaturg is doing one the director has to do the other – maybe we should think about that as a dialectic. Maybe, the key to understanding the dramaturg is that the dramaturg is sometimes being the detail person, sometimes being the larger lines-of-the-structure-of the piece [person]; but whichever one the dramaturg is doing, the director is doing the other one. Maybe we should think about it in those ways, in terms of a relationship so that maybe that’s the actual solution – if the director is doing this, the dramaturg (if they’re a good dramaturg) has to do the other thing and then vice versa, and there’s a kind of switching of roles. Maybe it’s the dramaturg’s job to be sensitive to those things and to be able to be dialectical, to choose the right opposing force to apply. I don’t know. Maybe.
That seems to be a big part of the problem, that no one knows, no one can say ‘This is what a dramaturg does’ – of course, there’s no way to apply that to every situation, to say ‘this is the way that relationship should work’, and that’s so much of what theatre is. It’s people. And it’s people working with people, and doing things with other people, and those roles always change and shift. Some of them just seem to have settled out into a little bit clearer parameters, and ‘dramaturg’ isn’t one that has settled into anything yet.
No. Well, not here [in the UK] at least. Maybe in some places.
Why in the UK do you think there’s been such difficulty in determining how to use a dramaturg? Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to, there’s so much question about not only ‘what do they do’ but also ‘do we even need them’? (To which we say ‘Yes, of course!’)
Yeah, we can kind of argue and special-plead for them, which is what I think we always end up doing in these contexts. In my article I say that there’s a way in which the dramaturg is almost the very antithesis of what most British theatre-people and commentators would consider appropriate.
(Laughs)
In that, it’s kind of one of those roles that really is not justifiable in a British context. Almost like the cliché that there’s no British public intellectuals, whereas in France there certainly is, and in other European countries there is this idea that that’s a role that should exist – and I sometimes think the dramaturg is something like that, and you’re just considered to be something that Europeans do, because they’re like that and they have the time and the money and they pay the taxes that make that possible. We don’t have such wasteful nonsense. I think that must be part of it. It has to do with a squeezed, subsidized theatre sector; I think it can’t be overstated that that’s part of it. So any role that can be done away with is probably done away with, and especially one that seems a bit suspicious anyway, that already can’t exactly justify just what it’s about. Then there’s definitely got to be parts of any understanding [and perhaps some] mileage in considering whether the forms of theatre that are popular or that are made here are forms that don’t need dramaturgs. There’s definitely a tension when it’s new writing versus classics as to whether or not the dramaturg is more or less useful, necessary, for such things.
And I’ve heard arguments for both…
Yeah.
… how and why to use a dramaturg in new-writing situations, and how and why to use a dramaturg in classical kinds of theatrical settings. It just seems to come down to personal preference. If you have a director that has worked with a dramaturg and appreciates what a dramaturg can do, then they’re happy to continue. Otherwise, you’ve got to talk them into it to make it happen. It’s an interesting kind of job. What are some of your experiences as a dramaturg? Have you any favorites, ones that were particularly interesting, particularly horrifying?
Not really. I’ve never been properly in the job market as a dramaturg. I have found myself doing that kind of work occasionally. So, no, it’s hard to talk about it – and I have no idea which kind I would be, if there are kinds of dramaturgs, I have no idea which kind I would actually be…
Do you have experience you would consider to be ‘dramaturgical’, as far as theatrical productions, working with directors, things like that?
I think, to go for kind of a very odd example, one area of theatre I’ve worked in where I found myself doing dramaturgy and found there’s a need to do dramaturgy, was when I was working in Theatre of the Oppressed, doing forum theatre. Sometimes I would be directing a show, sometimes I wouldn’t be. There would be a very clear need to establish exactly what the conflict was, and to think about a context both within the world of the play, but also outside it – to consider where the world of the play and its context would usefully (or not usefully) be rubbing up against an outside context, a societal context. That’s where I really saw the kind of Brechtian work of dramaturgy being useful, was in that kind of theatre. Partly because it’s all about conflict, and partly because it’s got to in some way be understandable and of interest to an audience, otherwise in forum theatre it doesn’t work, otherwise it simply doesn’t take place; the audience will watch the short scene and then ignore it or will not be able to engage with it. So that’s really a sort of odd example… I suppose it’s not odd in that it is very Brechtian theatre. That’s where I’ve really felt myself doing dramaturgy the most, in that kind of thing. There’s the work of research that needs to be done as well, and there’s a constant need to be, not… to be satisfied with what’s happening, and asking questions as to what’s going wrong or what might be wrong with what we’re doing. And when you’ve got something like forum theatre, when you’ve got spectators literally and directly and LIVE engaging and interacting with the production, then you have a really solid set of tests as to whether the production makes sense or not. Whether the conflict is clear, whether the conflict is one that you’d expected, and you also have to be ready to accept that you might have got it wrong and that the play is effectively corrected by the spectator – which is an interesting, constant feedback, sort of necessary feedback that takes place.
Very immediate.
Yeah. And then you kind of have to re-work things as well, and maybe you’ll do something once for one group, and then you’ll have to re-work it for another; maybe having had some response from an audience then you’ll use that to re-work the original piece – and sometimes you don’t, sometimes you have to keep the original because you think that’s more important or you think that’s what’s provoking the interesting responses. You have to make sure that the play itself as it’s presented initially isn’t more interesting than what happens when the audience interacts with it. You have to keep it, keep something back, effectively, and all of that seems to me to be work that a dramaturg might do more than what a director might do. And maybe this is a theatre without director, and with a dramaturg that kind of does the directing bit. Maybe.
And certainly there’s a role of the joker, somebody to lead the game, and to facilitate (or defacilitate) and to be present AND outside the production and outside the audience trying to create a possible interaction between the two. And that role seems to me to be very dramaturgical. It seems to be highly kind of based on, it’s not about supplying information but it’s about being aware of possible things and certain facts sometimes, and being open to what an audience suggests and able to contextualize what comes out of the production/performance as it happens – that seems to me to be a really interesting area to consider in terms of dramaturgy.
One last question – do you see differences between the work of a dramaturg in a ‘traditional’ setting and a dramaturg in a devised setting? A lot of what you’ve been talking about today has been very principle-based, from what I’m gathering, and you’ve got some larger principles that I can see applying to both (‘genre’ isn’t really the right word), approaches to theatre – both as traditional script-based, and devised. There seems to be a huge divide between the two, but the way you’ve talked about dramaturgy seems as though it fits either field. So do you see specific differences between dramaturgical work in those two fields?
No, because I don’t necessarily think the distinction between devised and text-based is very solid anyway. I think there are discernible differences, and there are things that happen in a devised form of theatre – it’s partly a question of the fact that devised theatre’s become kind of a genre, so there is a stylistic question we have to ask – but just to think about process. In devised work, there is an inherent dramaturg’s role that needs to be filled by somebody or by several people or by some process. Very clearly, if the task is to establish links between things, or to find a way of telling a story, or find a story itself, there’s clearly a kind of work of elucidating an underlining conflict and keeping track of things within a process, and researching around a process, and obviously all of that seems very dramaturgical. And as I’ve said previously that there’s a way in which that role is just distributed between the entire company, and everybody has to do some dramaturgy. Especially like Complicite, or maybe like the Theatre du Soleil (though you could argue that TdS don’t do devised work; in a way they do, in a way they don’t) – but certainly if you’re bringing material from your own life or your own study on a subject then there’s clearly a way in which you’re doing the work of a dramaturg (to some extent). I think.
And then there’s this relationship with text – and devised theatre has no single or obviously way for the role of the text. Some of it is based on text, sometimes that’s a theatre text sometimes it’s not; often it’s maybe not, and then it’s a text that’s been ‘theatricalized’, or dramatized, and the dramatization of a non-theatre text is very clearly dramaturgical work. But there also is a way in which sometimes the text in devised work is treated as a raw material, and is treated as a kind of primary material whereby it’s always positioned onstage as a found object, as text per se, and as a slightly immutable but editable object. So it’s the kind of work of montage that’s done with a text. Sometimes that will involve taking a text in its entirety and ensuring that every part of that text must appear, but the play then being where does it appear and in what order and who says what and who has which line and all of that. That seems to me to be kind of a way of treating it as a found object, and that in some ways seems to potentially banish dramaturgy because it’s about, to some extent, distancing the text from its meaning, it also summons dramaturgy at the same time because it suggests an order of sequences, an order of events, an order of words, and that seems to me to be intrinsically steeped in dramaturgical concern. So again, it is definitely dramaturgy but whether there is ‘a’ dramaturg - is that role not just shared out between the various participants? The fact that what people often mean when they say ‘devised work’ has a kind of research concern, it’s often about a certain question, or asking a question – you see this directly in work like Complicite, A Disappearing Number, which is a work about a mathematical problem, and it’s quite clever the way the problem is being solved as the play is going on. [Also] Mnemonic, whereby the story is being told, or the different bits of the story are coming together as the performance progresses… So, yeah, there’s a way in which the kind of research aspect of dramaturgy, the scholarship aspect must be very present in that kind of work. It even stops being research – it’s not like the kind of cliché, I don’t know if this even ever existed – the idea of actors doing research into the 16th century in order to perform the show, and the research is almost foregrounded in a lot of devised work, the very substance of the show is that research; and that the research process is actually shown. This is interesting for the university as well: devised work is almost begging to be seen as practices research because there’s a kind of overlap of research question and artistic quest.
I’ve got plenty to think about, and to look at – I’m seeing a lot of connections with some of the other articles I’ve read, so I really appreciate your taking the time to come talk with me about this… Thank you so much!
A pleasure.
- CKB
- CKB
