This past week while I was the guest-tweeter for the LMDA Twitter Project an undergrad from a school in Utah contacted me as part of an assignment for a dramaturgy course she is taking. She was tasked with finding a dramaturg and asking them a series of questions about what they do, their methodologies, and how they interact professionally with their various collaborators.
My first thought was that it's been a little while since I was last billed as a dramaturg on a production, so maybe I should refer her to someone else who regularly holds that job description. But then I thought about my favorite recurring discussion at the LMDA Conference I attended at the Banff Centre a year and change ago, where the consensus was that dramaturgy is as much a way of thinking as it is a job description, and that ideally everyone involved in a production should be thinking in dramaturgical terms. Along those same lines, most of the better designers I know across various disciplines generally speak in dramaturgical terms on many levels, so I decided to answer her questions primarily from the perspective of how I apply dramaturgy to fight directing.
Below are my answers (with minor edits). I'd also like to thank the student, as her questions made me articulate some stuff I'd been thinking about for a while. Anyway...
My first thought was that it's been a little while since I was last billed as a dramaturg on a production, so maybe I should refer her to someone else who regularly holds that job description. But then I thought about my favorite recurring discussion at the LMDA Conference I attended at the Banff Centre a year and change ago, where the consensus was that dramaturgy is as much a way of thinking as it is a job description, and that ideally everyone involved in a production should be thinking in dramaturgical terms. Along those same lines, most of the better designers I know across various disciplines generally speak in dramaturgical terms on many levels, so I decided to answer her questions primarily from the perspective of how I apply dramaturgy to fight directing.
Below are my answers (with minor edits). I'd also like to thank the student, as her questions made me articulate some stuff I'd been thinking about for a while. Anyway...
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