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  • A Mutually Satisfying Pas de Deux:Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum
  • Clare Croft (bio)

Dramaturgy has begun to a gain a place in the North American dance community and, slowly, in university dance programs. For at least a decade, dance dramaturgy has been a regular topic of conversation at annual meetings of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), which gave a 2006 residency grant to Nichole Grantshar to work on Atlanta Ballet's 2007 production of The Great Gatsby. European contemporary dance choreographers have embraced dance dramaturgy for years. Andre Lepecki, who has dramaturged work by European choreographers like Meg Stuart, teaches dance dramaturgy as part of his dramaturgy course in New York University's Performance Studies graduate program. Beginning in 2008, Toronto's York University, a perennial leader in dance studies, began an MFA in dance, with a specialization in dramaturgy.

Dance dramaturgy shares much with theatrical dramaturgy, as it too raises questions of narrative structure and representation, yet dance dramaturgs rarely deal with text. The absence of textual language in most dance might explain dance dramaturgy's lag behind theatrical dramaturgy, since many theatre dramaturgs focus on analyzing and revising play text. Bodies in motion present a more amorphous site for study and bring logistical challenges, since ample studio time must be found for a choreographer, cast, and dramaturg to be together. Heidi Gilpin, scholar and dramaturg for choreographer William Forsythe, describes the dance dramaturg's job as confronting "the effervescent necessities of performing the multivalent and [making dance] resonate for audiences as a new form of perception" (87). The dance dramaturg asks questions about how dance creates worlds through the intersection of image, movement, space, and sound.

In this essay, I argue for the dramaturg as a needed addition in dance productions within undergraduate dance departments, because she can help forge connections between dance history and theory and the studio-based work that dominates undergraduate dance curriculums. Dance dramaturgy can bring narrative coherence to more than just the next performance. As Susan Foster has noted, dance departments frequently reify a mind/body binary, considering seminar classes separate from technique classes and rehearsals. Incorporating dramaturgy into dance history and dance production underscores how, as Foster says in "Dance Theory?": "Theorizing is instigated whenever one asks oneself, 'What am I doing and why am I doing it?'" (20). Dancers theorize and remake dance history all day long.

In most dance departments, the dancers theorizing and making dance are women. With their overwhelming majority of female students, these departments also present a rich site for considering the relationship between feminism and the body.1 Dance dramaturgy in undergraduate dance departments might allow a more explicit and constant questioning of dance's embodiment and disciplining of gender and sexuality. Through the dramaturg, feminist theory can explicitly enter the rehearsal room, as dramaturgy functions, in Brizzell and Lepecki's words, as a "generatively disruptive process" (15). Binding history and theory classes' emphasis on representational politics with rehearsal and performance creates even more space for a discussion of gender. [End Page 181]

The urgency of feminist intervention in dance programs, and dramaturgy's potential role in such an intervention, became apparent to me as I worked as a dramaturg on University of Texas at Austin MFA dance student Rachel Murray's thesis production in 2006, an evening-length narrative dance for young audiences titled Changuita Perla. The piece grew from Murray's explicitly feminist interest in a series of paintings by artist Pau Nubiola. In the paintings, Nubiola chronicles the adventures of a young male monkey named Ruben, who is accompanied by Perla, a girl monkey. Determined to tell the story of the female figure in the paintings, Murray created Changuita Perla, a coming-of-age story for girls. Since the production focused on a female character, my dramaturgical efforts centered on representations of gender. The interactions between the male theatre majors and the female dance majors in the cast intensified our feminist concerns, and dramaturgical and pedagogical questions frequently overlapped as we confronted how gender is and should be embodied.

Making a feminist intervention in dance requires the dramaturg to pay attention to representations of...

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