Making Sense. Dramaturgy in Times of Loss – For my fellow fellows.

How to make sense? A short attempt:

In my work as a dramaturge, I find myself in a constant state of asking.

Asking the hard questions.

And the easier ones.

Asking: »How are you?« »And you?«

Asking for advice. For money. For comprehension. For more audience.

Asking why nothing ever seems to change, even though we all know it’s time.

Asking why we keep creating and what it is that we want to tell.

Today I want to start by asking: »What is dramaturgy?«
(A short disclaimer: There is no one answer to this question, which makes it the perfect starting point for this attempt at making sense)

Dramaturgy:

An invisible red line that guides you through the experience of an artwork.

A construct, a solid structure.

What is told without being spoken. What connects works between the lines. What is seen on the border of the light.

Dramaturgy, a secret plan for the spectator, an orientation, a way of experiencing art.

The British choreographer Jonathan Burrows finds clear defining words for it in his Choreographer’s Handbook:

»Dramaturgy 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.«¹

As a dramaturge, I am sowing clues – 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.

In 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.

I 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.

But what always stayed and what I got to learn during all these processes, was finding ways of making sense.

In my everyday work I try to make sense of what I perceive:

On stage

In the rehearsal space

On a page I read

Between the lines

In the space between the text and the discourse it surrounds

In the audience, before, during, and after a show

Of what is said and done between the performers

Of what I hear outside the theater, from people passing by after a show.

I 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.

Don’t 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:

»to 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.«²

But as a dramaturge I am also a master of reinterpreting, so I understand »making sense« as an active process and I take it literally:

Making

Sense

Finding threads and their connections, staying curious, questioning yourself, always and again and again … your position, your perspective, your privilege.

Therefore »making sense« can be seen as an attempt of being fully present. Or rather: Just like the dramaturgical work: »Making sense« can lay the groundwork to be fully present and capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

In my understanding of the term, I want to challenge the idea that meaning can be found in one singular static form. Therefore »sense« is never just one answer, one form, one story, one perspective on which you can arrive. It’s a search for resonance. It’s trying to understand again and again, with everything that we have, and in this, allowing yourself to not know, in order to keep searching.

Sense also refers to the term »sensation,« meaning the ability to feel something physically. So »making sense« also means creating space for an embodied knowledge, an understanding through all our senses.

At times of drastic funding cuts and in which right-wing political parties continually question the role of art and culture, this active way of »making sense« 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?

How do we keep making sense, when nothing seems to? How do we make sense, when everything is lost?

Judith Butler finds an answer to these questions when she writes about the political impact of grief and mourning:

»[…] 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.«³

As we grieve, we appropriate new understandings of the world and ourselves within it.

We 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’t make them go away.

Mourning is also a kind of »making sense«: Transitioning to a changed reality. Theater making is the same. We look for entanglements and threads of »sense« 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.

The 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.

If we don’t try anymore, we’re stuck.
And I refuse to be stuck.

Thank you for following me this far. I’m sorry if the thread of meaning got lost on the way. But that’s 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:

»All that you touch
You change.
All that you Change
Changes you.«⁴