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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“The Plough and the Stars on Campus and in the Community: A Proposed Model for Dramaturgical Collaboration Between Colleges and Schools”
How do you motivate a room of students in a college preparatory English class in a high-needs secondary school to study a challenging text? Through a partnership between the school and a dramaturgy project/theatre production at a nearby liberal arts college, students are motivated to do a close, textual analysis of the play The Plough and the Stars (1926). In this article Richard Pettengill, together with Dawn Abt-Perkins and Shannon Buckley, reflects on this program and the application of dramaturgical practices in schools.
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