This Dramaturgy Database reflects our ongoing research of dramaturgy at Utrecht University. The database consists of (full text) interviews with Dutch and Flemish dramaturges, essays and reports on dramaturgy seminars and other documents that show how (Dutch) dramaturgy has developed in the past decennia.
A dramaturg at work (in orange boots).
Courtesy to dramaturgs Anna Wagner and Nele Beinborn (Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm), photo Gabriel Poblete
This picture perfectly captures the work of a dramaturg, which is strongly characterized by flexibility. As Bojana Kunst notes, ‘as a participant in the process, the dramaturg can occupy a variety of roles: those of practical dramaturg, producer, festival director, stage manager, writer, journalist, teacher, workshop leader, coach, lecturer, academic, artist, dancer, production network member, cultural politics advisor, mentor, friend, compass, memory, fellow traveller, mediator, psychologist. The complexity of the dramaturg’s profession – the affective ability to move between theoretical reflection and practical knowledge, to be an external eye and an involved participant at the same time – is often too hastily reduced to a sort of aesthetic elusiveness.’
Bojana Kunst, ‘The Economy of Proximity: Dramaturgical Work in Contemporary Dance.’ Performance Research 14.3 (September 2009): 81-88.
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Playing with the Borders: Dramaturging Ethnicity in Bosnia
In this article, Sonja Kuftinec claims that playing with borders, dramaturgically, ethnically, or geographically is never permanent, not completely statisfying. This kind of play reveals the possibility for transgression, for remapping, for revelation and cohesion. Kuftinec looks at the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic identity has been recently redefined, from the perspective of the performance process to understand how the community constructs and the individual enacts ethnicity, and how the individuals relation to a more narrowly defined ethnic community can expand. In order to examplify the elusive and essential nature of ethnicity, Kuftinec uses examples from her dramaturgical and directorial work with youth in Bosnia between 1996 – 1998.
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