Bringing my Euro-Southern perspective to this seminar on dance dramaturgy feels like a thankfully joyful act of sharing present and past experiences, fears, considerations, positive feelings, and questions I had no opportunities to share before. On a personal level, it is also a way to comfort that part of me that sometimes has been feeling isolated and fragile while working in Italy over the last years. 

Dance dramaturgy is not my side job, nor a role I can perform because of other professional identities. Managing multiple hats is an issue I had already encountered over the years, but becoming a dance dramaturg was a choice I tacitly made during the ending echo of my dancing career, when in my mid-twenties I decided to move towards academia and research to root and widen my dance knowledge and methodologies. If, and when, I wear multiple professional hats today, I do so from the perspective of my main profession: dance dramaturgy. 

Over time, I had to elaborate a clearer perspective on my own professional positioning, because it was immediately clear that it received no full recognition from the same system I had grown up in as a dancer and then as an aspiring dance scholar. Even if it comes from the deep core of the performing arts, dance dramaturgy cannot count on a systematic positioning within its field of reference; that is a fact. 

My southern European perspective becomes relevant, at this point, because I started with the prospect of my role as a sort of luxury presence within the productions I was involved in, knowing that funding and systemic limitations would limit my presence and growth from the beginning. I learned to look at my professional evolution entirely outside a frame of stability. I learned to deal with disconnections, discontinuities and the will to recognise the efforts some companies and dance makers endured to keep counting on my professional existence in the context where we live. Trying to build a non-judgmental, positive approach to the fragility of my choices, and to my ghostly presence as a dramaturg, I would repeat to myself: I am actually quite lucky to have the chance to think of a professional path outside the strongest mechanisms of capitalism or (if this thought is way too utopian) at least I could work outside the ‘production fever’ my friend-choreographers, for example, were obliged to work with. Not because I could work less, but because I could think of myself as an outsider to the system. Since then, I continue to think and act from a sort of bespoke professional perspective on the performing arts and their culture. Of course, all this came with questions of continuous self-interrogation: who am I? What can I do? What do I know? How do I deal with a system which treats me as a ghostly presence? How can I envisage the future?

Positioning dramaturgy as human labour of the future

Thinking of my practice – and therefore positioning – within the frame of contemporary performing arts, I realise that the identity of the dramaturg changes depending on situations, issues, problems, and timings. The dramaturg’s position is the result of a negotiation based on the timing of the collaboration, on its funds, and on the stage of the artistic process where the dramaturg is invited to join in. 

I think this is very important to highlight. There is a form of functioning which I find quite peculiar: jobs and performances in our field are increasingly fluid in terms of roles and functions, yet my impression is that the art system, while growing, is also structuring itself as a business and therefore implicitly looking for stronger, more defined and framed roles, missions, objectives, needs … useful, for example, when applying for EU funding and other forms of support.

We may experience the most trans-multi-pluri-disciplinary-experimental-and-free artistic process, but when it comes to organising and writing down the credits of a piece, time often goes back one hundred years, and everyone has to get a definite label.

I say this because I think that we cannot avoid the bigger picture of funding and commissioning while talking about dance dramaturgy which is, in a sense, a sort of collector of such questions. This professional role is, maybe, the one that is most affected by the way the system works. Or, to turn this thought into a question: is the dramaturg still an emerging profession if we can trace its history back to the 18th century, to Gotthold Lessing’s pioneering experience?

We may experience the most trans-multi-pluri-disciplinary-experimental-and-free artistic process, but when it comes to the credits, everyone has to get a label

Dramaturgical work is pioneering the functioning of our working system because it embodies all those features that we associate with a certain idea of the future, and with the future of human labour: fluidity of roles, readiness, resistance to emotional labour, constant adaptations, extreme flexibility, the predominancy of the so-called soft skills, and precarity. In this sense, dramaturgs embody past and future postures and practices.

Labels and the privilege to exist

My work, as with others in the same position, has been referred to in so many ways over the years: dramaturg, dramaturge, curator, external eye, dramaturgical consultant, dramaturgy advisor, critic, and so on. 

What do these labels refer to? When and where do they appear? Do they refer to some common practice or professional contribution? If not, to what extent have I been aware of these different positions while working?

I ended up thinking that having an identity, and having access to some spaces and other immaterial forms of belonging, are also forms of privilege in some parts of my own world, which are not so far away from me. 

So I can only continue by sharing another question: which forms of privilege and power do we encounter in our professional practice as dramaturgs? This question first appeared in my mind four years ago while working with disabled artist Chiara Bersani for her piece Gentle Unicorn and when I had the opportunity to work with other artists with both visible and invisible forms of disability.

I am going to be a bit radical, maybe. But I found that being a white, European woman and an able-bodied person who rarely had to face real limitations due to my physical condition, the encounters with disabled artists taught me that a higher level of listening and care must be carried in the practice of dramaturgy. 

My contribution to the discourse around dramaturgs and their visibility, discussed during the first day of this seminar comes in the echo of this awareness. Experiences with disabled people getting, in some cases, first-time access to the arts system have been revolutionary to me and my understanding of my own labour and position, and of course have been quite revolutionary for people and communities. However, I am aware that they are still quite rare and sporadic. It is, therefore, very important to share them because dance dramaturgy, to keep the plurality that is built up in its DNA, has to keep ‘real’ regarding its priorities. Professionals could use their position and engage themselves in taking care of other forms of invisibility which are, in my own opinion, more urgent than the supposed invisibility of dramaturgs themselves.

Another interesting debate regards the positioning of the dramaturg, who ideally sits in a space between the performance and the audience. I can relate an interesting experience from 2019, during the B.Motion festival in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. A group of Springback writers animated a format called Exploratorium, aimed at offering playful and thoughtful post-show experiences to audience members immediately after the performances. This project gave me the opportunity to understand that the fil rouge of dance dramaturgy, and therefore a dramaturg’s work, does not really end with the performance itself. The ideas that issued from the Exploratorium were directly connected with the core of the shows, and they somehow deepened the experience of the audience while recontacting and reconnecting to the dramaturgy of the piece in a positively critical way. Ideally, a dramaturg’s job reappears each time the performance encounters the audience. As this is not always possible, I like to imagine that someone else could be there to create, stimulate and nourish that link, triggering a different notion of authorship to the one dramaturgs usually refer to; that is to the authorship they virtually share with choreographers, performers, audience members and art makers in general.

Dance dramaturgy is a field where research meets bodies, their needs, wills, fears and desires. Considering all the overlapping layers of theory and practice that constitute the professional role of the dramaturg, I think of dramaturgy as a web of disciplines and a combination of hard and soft skills which are relevant within the cultural frame of the performing arts – a practice positioned before, during or even after the premiere of a new production. It is an exercise of care where different kinds of knowledge, activities and forms of attention are at work. A profession, a role and an approach based on pleasure in and the desire to deal with openness and ambiguity.