{"id":43043,"date":"2025-07-18T12:43:58","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T10:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/?p=43043"},"modified":"2025-08-04T15:38:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T13:38:41","slug":"making-sense-dramaturgy-in-times-of-loss-for-my-fellow-fellows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/making-sense-dramaturgy-in-times-of-loss-for-my-fellow-fellows\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Sense. Dramaturgy in Times of Loss \u2013 For my fellow fellows."},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[357],"project_type":[775,725,726,743],"class_list":["post-43043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-solitude-blog","project_type-community","project_type-formats","project_type-text","project_type-themes"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"How to make sense? A short attempt:\r\n\r\nIn my work as a dramaturge, I find myself in a constant state of asking.\r\n\r\nAsking the hard questions.\r\n\r\nAnd the easier ones.\r\n\r\nAsking: \u00bbHow are you?\u00ab \u00bbAnd you?\u00ab\r\n\r\nAsking for advice. For money. For comprehension. For more audience.\r\n\r\nAsking why nothing ever seems to change, even though we all know it\u2019s time.\r\n\r\nAsking why we keep creating and what it is that we want to tell.\r\n\r\nToday I want to start by asking: \u00bbWhat is dramaturgy?\u00ab\r\n(A short disclaimer: There is no one answer to this question, which makes it the perfect starting point for this attempt at making sense)\r\n\r\nDramaturgy:\r\n\r\nAn invisible red line that guides you through the experience of an artwork.\r\n\r\nA construct, a solid structure.\r\n\r\nWhat is told without being spoken. What connects works between the lines. What is seen on the border of the light.\r\n\r\nDramaturgy, a secret plan for the spectator, an orientation, a way of experiencing art.\r\n\r\nThe British choreographer Jonathan Burrows finds clear defining words for it in his Choreographer\u2019s Handbook:\r\n

\u00bbDramaturgy describes the thread of meaning, philosophical intent, or logic, which allows the audience to accept and unite the disparate clues you give them into a coherent whole, connecting to other reference points and contexts in the larger world.\u00ab1<\/sup><\/p>\r\nAs a dramaturge, I am sowing clues \u2013 for audiences and performers. I connect personal questions and emotions to different reference points and other contexts to open up from this personal perspective to a larger, global, one. In offering a prompt, a framework like a story, a world, a narrative, an image, and in providing space for the audience, dramaturgy can help activate spectators as well as performers in a way that allows a certain perceptual rapture.\r\n\r\nIn the years that I have been working as a dramaturge in theater, dance, and performance, I was lucky enough to experience the most different forms of working I could imagine.\r\n\r\nI was fed with linear and non-linear storytelling, the attempt to create space for non-human or more-than-human perspectives, embodied practices that used language as an impulse for movement or embodiment of language, where the spoken word was, in the end, completely lost. I developed formats without performers and with large groups of people.\r\n\r\nBut what always stayed and what I got to learn during all these processes, was finding ways of making sense.\r\n\r\nIn my everyday work I try to make sense of what I perceive:\r\n\r\nOn stage\r\n\r\nIn the rehearsal space\r\n\r\nOn a page I read\r\n\r\nBetween the lines\r\n\r\nIn the space between the text and the discourse it surrounds\r\n\r\nIn the audience, before, during, and after a show\r\n\r\nOf what is said and done between the performers\r\n\r\nOf what I hear outside the theater, from people passing by after a show.\r\n\r\nI try to make sense of the feelings of everyone involved in the work, as well as the work itself. I try to make sense of what I see on the news and in the world. Especially now. Especially in these times, which can be seen as times of loss.\r\n\r\nDon\u2019t get me wrong: I am not talking about finding a higher sense, or a solution of some sort. I very much agree with author Rebecca Solnit when she writes:\r\n

\u00bbto be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. There's a difference between noticing life and trying to capture it. Sometimes our need to make sense of things prevents us from experiencing them at all.\u00ab2<\/sup><\/p>\r\nBut as a dramaturge I am also a master of reinterpreting, so I understand \u00bbmaking sense\u00ab as an active process and I take it literally:\r\n\r\nMaking\r\n\r\nSense\r\n\r\nFinding threads and their connections, staying curious, questioning yourself, always and again and again \u2026 your position, your perspective, your privilege.\r\n\r\nTherefore \u00bbmaking sense\u00ab can be seen as an attempt of being fully present. Or rather: Just like the dramaturgical work: \u00bbMaking sense\u00ab can lay the groundwork to be fully present and capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.\r\n\r\nIn my understanding of the term, I want to challenge the idea that meaning can be found in one singular static form. Therefore \u00bbsense\u00ab is never just one answer, one form, one story, one perspective on which you can arrive. It\u2019s a search for resonance. It\u2019s trying to understand again and again, with everything that we have, and in this, allowing yourself to not know, in order to keep searching.\r\n\r\nSense also refers to the term \u00bbsensation,\u00ab meaning the ability to feel something physically. So \u00bbmaking sense\u00ab also means creating space for an embodied knowledge, an understanding through all our senses.\r\n\r\nAt times of drastic funding cuts and in which right-wing political parties continually question the role of art and culture, this active way of \u00bbmaking sense\u00ab is as important as always. It brings us together in our not-knowing and forces us to really think. What kind of world do we want to live in? And what is our role in it?\r\n\r\nHow do we keep making sense, when nothing seems to? How do we make sense, when everything is lost?\r\n\r\nJudith Butler finds an answer to these questions when she writes about the political impact of grief and mourning:\r\n

\u00bb[\u2026] by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.\u00ab3<\/sup><\/p>\r\nAs we grieve, we appropriate new understandings of the world and ourselves within it.\r\n\r\nWe become different in the light of loss, as we assume a new orientation to the world. This does not mean accepting it no matter what. But this definition of mourning helps us to stay active, rather than give into the powerlessness. The world is changing. Ignoring these changes won\u2019t make them go away.\r\n\r\nMourning is also a kind of \u00bbmaking sense\u00ab: Transitioning to a changed reality. Theater making is the same. We look for entanglements and threads of \u00bbsense\u00ab and playfully change perspective and position. No other art form offers you this way of experiencing yourself differently. In this de-positioning lies the secret. Using art, fiction, and storytelling to think of new possibilities of living together, and finding new ways of entanglement carry the potential to make the process of reconnecting tangible.\r\n\r\nThe theater is a place where we can playfully try to make sense together. Not by pointing out right and wrong, but by opening a space for discussion and exchange as well as emotions and real encounter.\r\n\r\nIf we don\u2019t try anymore, we\u2019re stuck.\r\nAnd I refuse to be stuck.\r\n\r\nThank you for following me this far. I\u2019m sorry if the thread of meaning got lost on the way. But that\u2019s also how dramaturgy works. So, I want to end with one last quote by Octavia Butler and then leave you to make sense of it:\r\n

\u00bbAll that you touch\r\nYou change.\r\nAll that you Change\r\nChanges you.\u00ab4<\/sup><\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_footnotes","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Fu\u00dfnoten","bgcolor":"","footnotes_list_hide_numbers":false,"footnotes":[{"footnote":"Jonathan Burrows: A Choreographer\u2019s Handbook. Abingdon and New York 2010, (available online at: https:\/\/www.kost-sachsen.de\/app\/uploads\/2020\/02\/epdf.pub_a-choreographers-handbook.pdf<\/a>), p. 46."},{"footnote":"Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York 2005, p. 6."},{"footnote":"Judith Butler: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London 2004, p. 21."},{"footnote":"Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower. London 1993, p. 79."}]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"has-bg-grey","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Theresa Schlesinger<\/strong> is a dramaturge working at the intersection of performance, discourse, and collective practice. Her work explores dramaturgy as a method of making sense through presence, doubt, and embodied knowledge. After positions at Schaub\u00fchne Berlin and Theater Bremen, she co-directed the OUTNOW! Festival and co-curated the discursive series After Tomorrow. As a 2023 fellow of the Marie Zimmermann Grant at Akademie Schloss Solitude, she investigated how dramaturgy can respond to loss, transformation, and the urgency of reimagining futures.<\/p>"}],"intro_preview_headline":"Making Sense. Dramaturgy in Times of Loss","intro_preview_txt":"What does it mean to make sense today? Now, in a time that feels fragile, fractured, unresolved? We Need Dramaturgy! These were the questions \u2013 and the conclusion \u2013 of this year\u2018s gathering on Dramaturgy Today<\/a>, which brought together guests and alumni of the Marie-Zimmermann Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Named after the influential dramaturge and festival curator Marie Zimmermann (1944\u20132007), the fellowship supports early-career dramaturges from the German-speaking theater scene. Its focus is on talents who seek to explore contemporary forms of theater beyond institutional boundaries \u2013 encouraging new perspectives on the role of dramaturgy in today's performing arts.<\/span>\r\n\r\nDramaturge and alumna Theresa Schlesinger addressed a letter to her fellow fellows, inviting us into her practice: a space shaped more by questions than answers, by threads of thought, care, and sensation. Between rehearsal spaces, performances, and the world outside, dramaturgy emerges not as a fixed method, but as an ongoing gesture of noticing, connecting, and holding space for uncertainty.<\/span>","intro_preview_img":43044,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"Theresa Schlesinger","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":false,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":"","post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":[41844,41050,44746],"related_posts_post":[37947]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43043"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43322,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43043\/revisions\/43322"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/37947"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44746"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41050"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=43043"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=43043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}