A Theory of Dramaturgy

Janek Szatkowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815354703
• eBook ISBN: 9781351132091
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

A Theory of Dramaturgy is the first text of its kind to define concepts and combine arguments into a coherent dramaturgical theory supported by an operative systems theory. This is a wide-ranging theory with historical and contemporary perspectives on dramaturgy, rather than simply a how-to book.

Dramaturgy began in ancient Greece, born from experimentation with democracy and commentary in the theatre on the human condition. The term itself has seen constant evolution, but thanks to its introduction into common English usage within the last three decades, it has gained new importance. Dramaturgy draws focus to the communication of communication, and in theatre it examines how moving bodies, voice, sound, and light can tell a story and affect values. Beyond the theatre, in daily life, dramaturgy becomes a question of "performativity", as we constantly have to act in relation to the roles that we occupy. It is because of this that the way in which society describes itself to itself is not just a matter for scientists and theorists, but for all of those who are met on a daily basis with devised, staged, and directed versions of important values and events in our contemporary lives.

Ideal for both scholars and students, A Theory of Dramaturgy explains how to approach the values, strategies, and theories that are essential to understanding arts and media, and investigates what art should do in the current world.

1

THEORY OF DRAMATURGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Both science and art, as we have come to know the two functions today, share an understanding of themselves in terms of difference from what already exists. Scientific results and artworks have to be new, in order to attract attention. This has made both science and art extremely sensitive towards “irritations” in their societal environment. “Irritation” could be described as events in the environment, which attract attention and provoke responses, from the system that observes. The major prerequisite for understanding the process of irritations is that they stem from the transition of modern society towards the evolution of many independent systems providing full societal functional differentiation. Science and art each have their distinct and defined functions as systems in society. Each system is free to develop its own endogenous dynamic as it reacts on irritations from its environment, and these dynamics cannot be coordinated. This in turn accelerates the societal self-irritation.¹ We are continually presented with problems in society in the form of communications that do not offer adequate solutions. We receive information on ecological disturbances, economic inequality, migration, effects of mediatisation in digital form, and an increases in ethnic, religious, and national conflicts. We further witness the emergence of ethnic distinctions in regions where the states are unable to pacify conflicts. The re-emergence of religious fundamentalism as reaction against a widespread “secularisation”. Gender trouble, racial motivated xenophobia, nationalism, protectionism, populism are all examples of how distinctions and boundaries (re)appear. Because they are bound to questions of identity, they become “hard distinctions”² that cannot be crossed, and often result in violence as a way to communicate an insistence on indispensable values. Absolute values always know who will oppose them, and see no reason to give way: “they know only victories or defeat”. Fanaticism and fundamentalism creates irritations that put pressure on decision-making in the world society and its functional systems. Migration becomes a political and economic problem, religious radicalism is seen as a problem for democratisation and treated as legal problems. Each functional system has to transform irritations into structures of expectations offering perspectives for solving given environmental problems. How does art (theatre) do that? How can science observe art processes in their attempts to define and transform irritations? That could be one way to describe the purpose of a theory of dramaturgy.

Art and science

Dramaturgy is genealogically coupled with theatre and its European history is at least 3000 years long. What we today call art has a shorter history of 300 years, and the first modern theories of dramaturgy is accordingly dated around the mid-18th century. The first authors of dramaturgical theory were artists (often playwrights) and/or philosophers; however, the new order of modern society also entailed the differentiation of science as functionally differentiated system. Science observes in form of theories, and negotiates truth questions. To do so science has developed many different scientific programmes from natural sciences focusing on causality and predictability, to humanistic sciences where experiments with other focal points of orientation unfolded rapidly in the early and mid-20th century. Our experiment investigates theories where concepts of communication and observation substitutes those of causality and predictability. A science that observes the arts, asks the question: how does art observe society and how does art provide meaningful communication about society to society? It necessitates of course the need to ask how a given work of art is recognised as such. Further to wonder, how art manages continually to provide new forms in diverse media, and how we observe and describe evolution of meaning in art. We leave behind questions about essence (what is art?) in favour of more constructive and operational questions (how is art observed?). Therefore, when we ask how dramaturgy contributes to create meaningful art, it might at first sight appear to be either a lofty and abstract question or a very exclusive, specific and narrow question, but when rephrased as a question of how communication is communicated and observed as art, a much wider horizon opens up. My hypothesis is connected to the fact that other functionally differentiated systems in modern society applies dramaturgical knowledge, be it in mass media like film, television, radio, in the emerging internet system, or in organisations in other systems. From its earliest beginnings, dramaturgy has been mixed up with politics, religion, and education. It still is, perhaps now more than ever. My experiment to construct a theory of dramaturgy should be seen in a broad perspective. We are concerned with constructing a theory that allows micro-analytical observations of works of arts and art processes to be coupled to macro-analytical observations of social changes. The theory should allow us to observe historical forms and contemporary practices, and it has to be useful on the floor of rehearsal rooms in the creational artistic process, as well as in comparison to the varied artistic forms and media.

Systems theory

To provide the reader with an initial overview of the theoretical construction, I will briefly sketch the outline. As the epistemological frame for the project I have chosen an operational systems theory, as it appears in the works of Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). While introducing a scientific programme it also provides a complex description of modern world society. In order to understand how meaning is produced, three dimensions are needed. Meaning needs communication to emerge. Without communication, no meaning. Communication needs time in order to evolve meaning. And to lead the process of meaning, the evolution of communication needs a “case”, a matter that enables the selection of adequate contributions to theme. In a modern hyper-complex society, the science system may observe how meaning in the art system functions.

Art as system

In the theoretical architecture of art as system, the central operation is the work of art. The work of art is described as a very special form of communication. It is condensed and characterised by a self-imposed undecidability. Where a scientific text is condensed by its wish to produce clear arguments and sharp concepts in order to persuade the reader to follow and confirm the truth-claims, the artwork is condensed by a wish to make any confirmation difficult. There are uncertainties in the work of art that claim our attention, and at the same time make us aware that this is a different type of communication. Struggling with the condensed communication the beholders may select meanings and connect as they wish to their own consciousness. Our leading question therefore, is how a given work of art creates condensation and uncertainty. The attempt to find and formulate answers will take us through a theory of communication, which centres on the concept of double contingency, i.e. the idea that as our consciousness is an operatively closed autopoietic system; it means that we do not have access to the thoughts, emotions, and cognitions of the other. Therefore, we are condemned to communication.

Communication and consciousness

When we cannot see into each other’s minds, nor feel the feelings of the other, we need to communicate in order to survive. In search of a theory of communication, I have been through quite a number. I report from this investigation, and discuss an attempt to construct a meta-theory. This discussion leads to the conclusion, that instead of looking for meta-theories, we need to explicate the epistemological perspective, from which we observe communication. A systems theoretical take on communication works with a concept of uncertainty at the base of all communication, contingency. In fact a double uncertainty: I have no direct access to your consciousness, and have to select and reflect upon what may be the case, knowing that it might always be something very different. Further, whenever you communicate something to me, you will risk meeting with either negation or affirmation (or a postponement of any such decision). We are all aware of this from our daily experience with human communication. The theory of communication rests upon the idea of communication as a social system. It takes two to communicate. Any enunciation can be chosen as communication, when we then select how to understand the condensed information and utterance. How do we manage this double contingency and triple selection of information, utterance, and understanding in real life? We introduce a simple model of consciousness based on the distinctions between perception, emotion, and cognition. I suggest that we re-investigate the distinction between person and role, based upon the insights of role theory, and reconstruct the concept performativity within a theory of dramaturgy in order to describe how the condensation and uncertainty evoked by the distinction person and role, contribute to the workings of theatre art (and society).

Poietics

New forms shattered old forms in a hitherto unseen tempo. The coexistence of different forms were not new. Tragedy, comedy, and farce thrived side by side, as did religious drama and marketplace mountebanks and jesters. What was new was the acceleration in evolution of forms, which also required an accumulation of answers to the question how to decide, what was new and could count as art. Pre-modern theatre was so closely interwoven with or clearly evicted from social power. Plato and Aristoteles had their disagreements about what good mimesis could do for society. Such discussions could be tempered in periods where clergy or aristocrats had the power to decide the matter, but it exploded when modern Romantic art discovered its new freedom in an autonomous system. The historical avant-garde (1890–1930) made it clear, that the autonomy of art, had had its own price to pay. Given the new position in a differentiated system as an institution of its own, art suffered from asphyxiation, and the avant-gardists dreamed of reuniting art and life, only it was too late. Modernity is in this sense irreversible. The art system managed to engulf the avant-garde, and its experiments. Today they serve as important cultural pieces in museums. When the lesson of the avant-garde dawned upon the artists, new experiments tried to make the struggle with the art system to an important theme in enunciations that were self-referential. When Bertolt Brecht turned from surrealism to Epic Theatre, it was with an emphasis of gestures of reference to theatre as form, and art, as a direct communication to spectators. This eruption of forms was interwoven with a constant evolution of attempts to reflect on the function of art. When the system of art reflects upon its own function and possibilities, it is a reflective theory, and we identify this as poietics. Poietics can be analysed at work in the artefacts, texts, performances, installations. Texts that artists make in attempt to describe what kind of art they deem necessary in times when society functions as it does generate especially interesting material for our analysis. At the top of the hierarchy, we find the inviolable values, which direct the choices in the process of aisthesis: how the spectators should be engaged and confronted or affirmed; and poiesis: how to programme the artistic creation of a work of art, rehearsals, training, and performativity. It is a local, normative value system.

Poiesis

To understand and describe the artistic creational process we need to develop an analytical approach and concepts fit for micro-analytical observations. We suggest the concept recursive creation, to describe how the creative mind constantly oscillates between observations of what has been achieved so far in the process, and a notion of the work as result. An oscillation between structure and vision. We identify two different kinds of structures (normative and cognitive) and combine this with a theory of the “implicit knowledge” embedded in every artistic creational process of operations. At the core of poiesis, we find the fluctuating, recursive movements led by attempts to work with condensation and redundancy, and with uncertainties and variation. In many cases, these operations are guided largely by the implicit knowledge of the artist or the group. We prefer the term implicit for the often-used “tacit” knowledge, as we insist that the knowledge can always be demonstrated in practice, thus is never silent. In poiesis and aisthesis, we are able to study the process of directing. To direct is to attune affectively the imaginary reality in a work of art, so that an audience is presented with a range of specific material forms of vitality in order to provoke a communication the allows spectators to reflect and self-reflect upon perceptions, emotions, and cognitions, enhancing a moment of conscious communication.

Aisthesis

Another source of undecidability is enforced by the fact that communication in theatre relies on our senses. In the phylogenetic evolution of a theory of the human mind, the senses have played many different roles. From times when senses were seen as disturbances and hindrances for the rational mind, to a position where reality could only be observed through our sensations of it. The way works of art appealed to the senses were used to distinguish different dramaturgical forms as tragedy and comedy. In a modern theory of mind, the old dualities have been uprooted and replaced by ideas of the more complex interdependencies of perception, emotion, and cognition in our consciousness. When art formulated its first modern self-reflections, it was assisted by the ideas of aisthesis. Aesthetics rose as a philosophical attempt to argue for art’s special potential in a differentiated society: art was an appeal to our senses, and thus in principle neither committed to moral or scientific truth. Kant provided the tripartite unity of the rational, scientific truth, the morally good, and the beautiful. The aesthetic discussion then took many turns in order to describe how the beautiful could be obtained in works of art, even by incorporation of the ugly, the horrific, the sublime, and the uncanny unheimliche. Was art aesthetically dependent upon truth and moral, even though art emerged as autonomous? It took some 100 years for the art system to recognise the full impact of the n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Theory of Dramaturgy for the 21st Century
• 2 Challenging Dramaturgy – Reflections on Praxis
• 3 Systems Theory – Draw a Distinction, Observe Observers
• 4 Art as System
• 5 Theories of Consciousness and Communication
• 6 Poiesis, Aisthesis, and Performativity
• 7 Analysing Poietics – Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret
• 8 Postdramatic Theatre
• 9 Immersion or New Realism?
• Index