Jeroen Peeters - And then it got legs. Notes on dance dramaturgy.
Writer, dramaturg and performer Jeroen Peeters draws from his experience in the field of contemporary dance to discuss principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.
At the start of the book, Peeters raises the stakes for this endeavour: “In this book, I approach dramaturgy as the development of a common ground for sense-making, for analysing material and exploring questions, for constantly observing and articulating the creation process, for pursuing the unfamiliar and accepting the haphazard, for experimenting with labour, time and instituted habits. Rather than being tied to a single position, dramaturgy is a collaborative practice, with multiple views enriching the work. Dramaturgy is furthermore a material form of thinking that involves a dialogue with things, technologies, productional conditions and a particular situation. The production of meaning is relational, situated and unstable, always in exchange with culture, society and life itself. The performing arts are an eminently social art form, first in the studio and then in the theatre, with a group of people coming together as an imaginary community in a situation initiated by the work, night after night. Eventually, this is what makes dramaturgical work urgent: the unceasing experimentation with the meaning of who we are and what we live by.”
In four sections - Material, Process, Conceptual Landscape, Composition - Peeters writes from his own practice to tease out notions like:
- Phantasmal Archaeology, in relation to "Boris Charmatz sought to explode representation by exhausting all the possible readings and resonances of a single gesture"
- detaching form and meaning, taking speech and gesture in different directions, in relation to Vera Mantero's series of exercises around translating texts into gesture
- a language that stays close to the anatomy of the body, or that uses experiential somatic imagery to unfold the imagination from there. ... This rather technical approach, i.e. anatomy-based imagery, to formulate movement helps me to "let the body speak by itself”
- Bojana Cvejié proposes a methodology of 'producing a problem'
- Negotiating the visibility of various subtexts as a complex dramaturgical skill on the part of performers
- Perhaps the 'zombie' indicates to us some aspects of what they have in common: due to its (bodily) condition, the zombie has a problematic relationship with memory.
- Once part of a composition, materials become symbolic objects: they reach for recognition or put up resistance, yet their meaning remains submerged: rather than signify, a symbolic object gestures.
all my highlights via docs.google.com/document/d/1mLLRtKcM6PUC_l8Q1m7p5wLSDxxg0AAEMSC-zply3b0/edit?usp=sharing