The Dramaturgy of Dance The Colour Blue

At the very moment of creation, theatre may be ‘of its time’ or be ‘timeless’. That is to say the production has a life beyond that which was originally expected. Whilst a reasonable assessment may be made as to a play’s immediacy, it is impossible to tell with any accuracy whether the piece will endure. The designed terms of engagement; however, may undergo something of a resonance shift, subsequently establishing a useful range within which the play can operate, thereby readily connecting with different audience types. Under these circumstances, an element of timelessness emerges, further fuelling the play’s useful life.  Whilst it is not possible for playwrights to design or discern ‘legacy’ at the time of writing, they can ask the question: why now? In so doing, they may well be incognizant to the fact they have also answered the question “why then?” as they write a play which speaks across time.

Why now? Because I want to. This is the reason for making theatre. Why now? Because it is relevant. This is the motivation behind the reason. Why now? Because it is universal; a communitarianism connecting the individual to wider society. This is the objective arising from the motivation. However, if the piece is to have relevance beyond an intimate social circle, then it has to resonate with meaning which itself must be communicated through recognition and arrangement of pattern. [1]  This is dramaturgy. It is; however, not the only flavour of dramaturgy. There is dramaturgy as a role where the dramaturg observes, reflects, tests, and comes to a place of reawakening that releases creative and imaginative energy. [2]

Dramaturgy is a mind-set which understands and respects the creative role of fellow artists involved within the production. It is a sensibility that allows the director to optimally communicate the text to an audience through the language of design: movement, projection and sound. [3]  It is not a foreign or distant idea tacked onto the original work. The dramaturg’s job is to drive the interpretation of the text; approach the play as if it were a new world heard through a hitherto unbreached wall. [4]   Whilst methodologies vary, the inner workings of a dramaturg are never more exposed than when answering the simple question ‘What is dramaturgy?’ it invites as many definitions as practitioners, each with their own need to define it. [5]   The constant demand for a dramaturg to define what they do regularly results in a return to first principles: interrogating the nature of what it is they do, why they do it, and how they might better undertake it next time round. The search for definition can itself be transitive: between the verb and the noun; the doer and the outcome. [5]   And everything in between.

It proved to be no simple task to answer the question ‘what is dramaturgy’. It appeared…that dramaturgy involves everything, and it is hard to pin down. Is it only possible to think of dramaturgy in terms of spoken theatre? Or is there a dramaturgy for movement, sound, light and so on as well? Is dramaturgy the thing that connects all the various elements of a play together? Or is it, rather, the ceaseless dialogue between people who are working on a play together? Or is it about the soul, the internal structure of a production? Or does dramaturgy determine the way space and time are handled in a performance, and so the context and the audience too? We can probably answer all these questions with ‘Yes, but…’

-        Marianne Van Kerkhoven [6]

We can deduce, therefore, that everyone who works in the creative process to realise the world of the play contributes towards its dramaturgy acting as an adhesive to bind all the various elements together. Equally clear; however, is the fact that not everyone involved in the production is a dramaturg. For to dramaturg requires constancy: a person who frames an interpretation so that the warp of the source text wefts seamlessly into the mise-en-scéne. They hold the power to disrupt the continuum not of another world but of this one so that what is on show can be defined not only by what is present but also by what is absent.  [7]   So, trust is pulverised with insecurity, expectation sintered with anxiety, and confidence atomised through a gauze of perpetual uncertainty. In this set-up, the dramaturg acts as an elastic constant in a constitutive equation between the director and the audience. The greater the value, the more lasting the impression. The performance becomes a palimpsest of the written text where visible strain induces unseen stress: ‘as the stretch, so the force’, Hooke’s law. [8]   These forces are manifested by an actor who plays upon the character much as a musician might upon an instrument and in so doing establishes a communion with the audience. Here, the dramaturg curates components in the right order and proportion, securing the correct translational quality from source material to performance in order to realise the desired vision of the director.

The most useful entry point into practicing effective dramaturgy is to understand that it is a mind-set and a creative role that understands and respects the creative responsibilities of other artists.

-       Theresa Lang 2

Even as the dramaturg takes the play apart to analyse the pieces, the guiding mind of co-dependents comprising director, actor and dramaturg visualise the play as a whole so that the entirety of the play is sustained.  [3]   The process connotes ebb and flow – a restlessness that lingers in the play between text and stage, words and sounds, bodies and materials, performance and audience, duration and movement, and ideologies and aesthetics. Dramaturgy is, above all, a constant movement: a dance.

The play, Dance The Colour Blue, weaves together a story of a group of people with a book they forgot to close.  At its heart is the dramaturgy of transformation, the power of hope: Magical Hope, Patient Hope, Realistic Hope. Each is imbued with intent. The first to offset despair; the second to will for the best; and the third to usher in a probable outcome of events. Each is presaged by a kiss that carries with it a sense of the nakedness of the moment - moments which proliferate a life with vulnerability. The play is a meditation on the silent grief we each carry for the people we once were. The central characters meet in a pub where one of them works. Nicky, new behind the bar, is a source of intrigue for the regulars and subsequently becomes an object of affection for Mikey. They share with each other a level of honesty that is generally absent from those with whom they are more closely related. In Mikey’s case, that is his circle of friends. It becomes evident that what is true in the immediacy of the moment does not necessarily hold in the broad sweep of things. Nicky slowly succumbs to the rhythm of the regulars, their camaraderie, and their pranks; grateful, as a synesthete, for the colour they bring to her world where the most unexpected aspects of life - music, words on a page - are replete with colour. This view of the world is strangely familiar to Mikey for he, alone amongst his peers, sees the world through a life-limited lens where there is neither day or night, systole or diastole, here or there…just the unavoidable imminence of now. He bites into his dreams thinking they are his waking life…shares his book and survives in living memory.

The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem, is the story of a mortal man (Odysseus) and his homebound journey having heroically fought in the Trojan War. He lost his ship and all of his crew when lightning struck upon stormy seas, washing him upon the shores of Ogygia.

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered on the sea, and how he worked

to save his life and bring his men back home.

He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.

They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.

-   Homer [9]                                                          

Ogygia is the home of Calypso, a nymph who cares for Odysseus and vows to free him from death by never letting him leave the island. She is eventually persuaded to change her mind by Hermes whereupon Odysseus continues his journey home to his wife Penelope in Ithaka. For twenty years Penelope has held the fort against insolent suitors with guile. They would strip her of their home, and potentially her life. Aspects of this strand of the epic appear in the play which exists on the dialectic of two story strands: the primary story of friendship, unrequited love, guilt, and obligation; the secondary story influenced by The Odyssey. The former shows the depth of feeling of loss as Nicky buries herself ever more deeply into the possession that meant most to her new-found friend, Mikey.

There is a dramaturgy of interplay between the two strands: respectively the analogy of Penelope/Odysseus with Nicky/Mikey. Indeed, if Mikey feels himself to be Odysseus, then it is evident that Nicky, far from seeing herself as Penelope, perceives herself as something more akin to a bodiless agent: an observer of the misogynistic vicissitudes of time. Neither, it happens, see themselves as others may well see them because neither are able to face up to the reality of the situation they are in. There is a deeper reading here: if Mikey succumbs to Calypso he does not return home to Ithaka and Penelope becomes a widow. To the outside world, he is dead. Furthermore, in this reading, Odysseus cannot be thought of as a hero as he has become immortal – a god - and in Greek mythology, heroes are mortal. Pursuing this analysis, Mikey’s influence on Nicky is more akin to that of Athena. This casts Nicky (metaphorically lost at sea) in the role of Odysseus, which subsequently casts Liz as Penelope: home. And so, Mikey and Liz become foils for Nicky in her pursuit for happiness: the former encourages Nicky to go on a journey that will end with the painting of his song and her masterpiece; the latter encourages her to ‘advance out of the book’. Both, in their own ways, urge Nicky to come home. This is a dramaturgy of pattern and role. [2]  This sensibility is a composition of curated elements from a multitude of possibilities within The Odyssey to express the inner working of the characters. These inner workings are unconscious, for the characters find themselves engaging in a series of coping strategies: Nicky working in a pub to escape loneliness only to find herself grieving a situation she cannot define; Mikey losing himself to a book which displaces his thoughts from the dire situation he is in; Suzy smoking cigarettes to calm the nerves her job so clearly puts on edge. This unconsciousness may even extend to the playwright. However, it is not unintentional.

We must make the assumption that in the world of the play, there are no accidents. Nothing occurs ‘by chance’ not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance.

– Elinor Fuchs [3]

Some delineation is required here. The chance that Fuchs is referring to is bounded by the world of the play. However, that world may be subtended by the chance of the real world. Samuel Beckett, for example, was interested in exploring the effects of patterning and aleatoricism in his text Lessness: the relationship between author and chance as shaping forces in a text. [10]    It is text informed by mathematical operation: mathematext. Beckett wrote 60 different sentences in six families, each written on separate pieces of paper. They were then mixed in a container from which they were drawn at random. He ordered the sentences into paragraphs aligned with the families to which they were affiliated. The mathematics of chance are clear in his process. However, this process is not entirely aleatoric: it is, instead, a process of ‘pseudo-chance’. The most obvious evidence of this is the numbered families to which the sentences were aligned.  Then there are the choice of words, the number of paragraphs and the formation into sentences – it is here the motifs of Beckett’s writing style emerge. Authorship was centred in this ‘mathematics of chance’ and, therefore, the presence of an author remained intact as the shaping force of the text. Thus Fuchs’ observation that “nothing occurs ‘by chance’ not even chance” remains true because our guiding hand as a playwright is that of a percentage volume of logic.

The characters in Dance The Colour Blue all take chances, none of them could be termed aleatoric. There is; however, the presence of stream of unconsciousness. At one point in the play, the ever logical Liz says “I’d rather shave half my head...die the other half green…wear a liquid silver bedsheet with…visible…bite marks on it”. It is conflicted imagery uttered by someone who is normally in control but instead succumbs to an inner disturbance of the here and now to engage with the ‘something to be done’. A transcription of the author’s unconscious dialogue, it features disjointed leaps in ideation and bizarre word creation.

The ‘curatorial dramaturgy’ aspect of the play – the secondary story engaging The Odyssey decontextualizes text from the source text to extract meaning and recontextualises it to reveal the hidden meaning of Mikey’s existence. [3]    However, curation is as much about what is omitted as what is included. [11]    As playwright, I was constantly aware that an intertextual dramaturgy between The Odyssey and a new contemporary play (Dance The Colour Blue) was potentially destabilising and would take considerable refinement to allude to the epic without the play itself losing rootedness in the everyday setting of a pub.  Considering Penelope in The Odyssey, there are several relationships that can be drawn upon: Penelope and Odysseus; Penelope and the Suitors; Penelope and Telemachus. These woven relationships mirror those between Mikey and Nicky, Nicky and the chorus, and perhaps less so, Nicky and Don in Dance The Colour Blue. The relationships unravel: a metaphor for Penelope’s shroud: woven by sunlight, unravelled by moonlight. However, the theme which spoke loudest to me was that of the loneliness Penelope feels, not knowing whether her husband is alive or dead, and that undertow of uncertainty underscores the loneliness yet more. Extracted from the epic, this thread was used to liberally season the play. It is there in the aloneness of Nicky as she works behind the bar in no particular rush to go home, and in fleeting moments when Mikey involuntary ‘leaks’ solitude. It lends both, in quite different ways, an enigmatic quality…which draws people to them.  It is there, too, in the ‘barfly’, Don, who sits at the bar, day in, day out, visibly alone. He intuitively observes the various relationships; knowing, perhaps all too well, where they will lead. It is the loneliness of the ‘survivor’ who simply exists as a human being. For most, loneliness is temporal. In Don, the audience perceives its atemporality: a constancy in his life medicated with copious quantities of alcohol. He cuts a romantic, yet tragic, figure.

The abstraction of The Odyssey lends Mikey a residual trace, a disembodied agency, which haunts the consciousness of Nicky. Similarly, it impacts his long-term friend, Liz, albeit to a lesser degree. That unusual dichotomy of familiarity and unstated boundary powering the dynamism of the best of friends has unintended consequences.  She has only a cursory knowledge of the book he treasures.  And when fate distorts our existence, it torsions our thinking. In this way, the book acts as a sort of reverse matryoshka doll of painted moments… it ends up owning Nicky: poetical content bleeds through the bind of the book into the eyes of the beholder, before finally touching the untouchable. Nicky loses herself in the metanarrative of the play: one involving Penelope and her discourse with a house servant in The Odyssey. It can be viewed as a dramaturgy of translation for it involves not so much the words Penelope speaks (words Homer ascribes to her) but their mutation down the centuries – saying much more about the societal values in which the translators lived.  Reading these translations, Nicky is haunted by their contrasting voices. The manifestation of her distress – of losing someone (Mikey) without ever really getting to know them - is dialectically juxtaposed with the realisation that Penelope’s words have been manipulated down the ages. Penelope has become a residual trace. Whilst it may be tempting, therefore, to see Mikey, as Penelope, it should be resisted. Mikey has an active agency, influencing his object (Nicky), whilst Penelope has only a passive agency, reacting to events.  And so Nicky becomes lost, not to Calypso, but to the memory of ‘what could’ve been’.  She also risks losing her Penelope: Liz.  [12]

It may be tempting to wonder if any of this really matters. Whether it does not complicate the meaning of the play. I would argue that it does the opposite: dramaturgy is the engine which powers the play; delineates it. Throwing stones at the stars is not made futile by the fact they never land there. The very action connotes direction and purpose. Reimagining Penelope maps that character back through the ages of time to Homer, whilst simultaneously reflecting generational misogyny back at us.

Why now? Because after 9000 years, it is still relevant. That is dramaturgy.

References

[1]. Etechells, T. (2009), ‘Doing Time’. Performance Research, Vol. 14, No. 3:76

[2].  Hopkin, D.J., Beck, L., (2009), ‘Being Dramaturgical: A Conversation about Geoff Proehl’s’ new book ‘ Toward A Dramaturgical Sensibility’ ‘, The Journey of Dramaturgy, vol.19 (2)

[3]. Shuhy, D. ‘A Designer and A Dramaturg Walk into a Bar: A Question of Analysis’, Christopher Newport University

[4]. Bly, M., (2003), ‘Pressing an Ear Against a Hive or New Play Explorations in the Twenty-First Century’, Theatre Topics 13(1):19-23

[5]. Lang, T. (2017), ‘Essential Dramaturgy’, Routledge, Ch1, p6

[6]. Lawrence, A., (), ‘New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice’, Trencsényi, K., Cochrane, B. (Ed.)

[7]. Leithart, P. (2004), ‘Derrida on Presence and Absence, Evangelical, 12th January. Derrida on Presence and Absence | Peter Leithart (patheos.com) (Last accessed 11/02/23)

[8]. ‘The Big Picture’, p12, Catalyst, November 2009, 8469-catalyst_20_2_438.pdf (stem.org.uk) (Last accessed 11/02/23)

[9].  Wilson, E., (2018), ‘The Odyssey’, Homer, New York, London, W.W. Norton & Company

[10]. Salazar-Sutil, N., ‘Theatres of the Surd: Mathematical Thinking and Its Influence on European Avant-Garde Theatre (1890-1980)’, University of Surrey, 2010.

[11] . Kohler, R., ‘Dramaturg Or Director? Navigating A Liminal Role In Reviving The Misfortunes of Arthur’

[12]. Trencsényi, K., (2015), ‘Dramaturgy In The Making’, London, New Dehli, New York, Sydney, Bloomsbury