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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Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre
In an age of mass migration and postmodern aesthetic sensibilities, the borders between different performing arts (dance, theatre, and performance) and fine arts blur even further, whereas theatre and new media interweave in hybrid performances. These changes force methodological questions of performance making as well as the artists’ and the audiences’ focus on the construction, performance, and fundamentals of making and encountering self in and through the media of performance. this collection aims to encourage a dialogue on the function of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg in constructing performatie encounters within the conditions of onstage and offstage multilingualism caused by the realities of global movements.
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