Concerning the "wisdom" of dramaturgy

The potential of dramaturgy is, perhaps, to be found in modes of attention rather than intention, particularly when reconceiving the sense of event(s) distinct from action(s). In distinguishing between a walk and walking, for instance, the dramaturg (like Deleuze’s “oriental Stoic” (1990 [1969]: 146)) might look to construe a possible “body” for which “it is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us” (148). In this presentation, I wish to develop Barthes’ allusion to what one could call the Tao of dramaturgy, or its “ergography” (1991: 152), distinct from the prescriptive poetics of European traditions in writing both for and about theatre making. To cite Patti Smith – reading dramaturgy as the reference for “it” here – “You can’t just ask for it, you can’t buy it, you can’t take drugs for it to be authentic; it just has to happen, you have to be chosen as well as choose” (2022: 20). That is to say, “it” is a question of practising a practice before theorising it; of holding to the verbs that dramaturgy entails before abstracting it as a noun. Engaging with the temporality of incompletion, of working with rather than working on material, the presentation will explore the resources of what François Jullien evokes as “interspace” (metaxu) distinct from the identities forged by and for a meta-discourse (2021 [2016]: 29), especially as this admits questions of “propensity” (1999) distinct from those in which finished “productions” have already been supposed.