Blueprints, Informatics, Predictive Analytics: Tools of the Twenty-first-Century Dramaturg as Performance Geneticist

ID: Investigation Dramaturgy

For the past decade, I have been studying the Janus face of forensic science as it manifests on mainstream crime television shows. Of particular interest has been the way these programs dramatize the shift from data to story by the infusion of circumstantial evidence that appears to logically supply the why and how for the what and who. In this way, twenty-first-century crime television enacts two interdependent definitions of the forensic: physical matter subjected to scientific scrutiny that results in its designation as admissible in a court of law; and the very processes of legal argumentation that transform such physical evidence into the judge- and jury-validated version of events that will convict or exonerate a defendant (Odendahl-James 637). Despite their protagonists’ pronouncements that “people lie, evidence doesn’t,”¹ forensic television confirms that data without context are just informational strands. They require story to manifest as knowledge.

I had been laboring under the impression that my research on the forensic existed separately from my dramaturgical practice until I found myself in discussions with colleagues in Digital Humanities. Sitting at a similar juncture point between data and story, collection and interpretation, these scholars spoke about heated resistance to digital platforms and computational processes expressed by some disciplinary vanguards who tended to cast such tools and approaches as threats to always-already under-valued traditional interpretive research methods in the arts and humanities. These conversations echoed concerns that I heard from theatre faculty at other institutions, who described how a new wave of assessment protocols were influencing administrative decisions from funding to hiring to curriculum in the twenty-first-century university’s increasingly operational mission. Both of these constituencies gnawed a similar bone of contention: the concern that quantitative systems flatten, stratify, and commodify the dynamic, collaborative, and transformative processes of performing arts’ creative research and practice into number-models focused almost exclusively on which students obtain (or not) so-called good jobs and whether tuition costs are offset by graduates’ future economic successes.

As these debates about Big Data’s surveilling eyes, quantitative drives, and consumerist agendas were playing out in the higher education public sphere,² at academic conferences, and within the pages of commissioned reports,³ I began noticing what might be called a “little Big Data” insurgency. In July 2012, I was asked to participate in a public panel of women theatre artists and educators to talk about our experiences in local theatre.⁴ Our gathering was spurred by the outcry over the Guthrie Theater’s fiftieth anniversary season announcement, notable for its absences more than its features: not one woman playwright or writer of color and only one female co-director across two stages with twelve theatrical offerings.⁵ It was also one of many events taking place in mid- to large-scale theatre cities across the United States as women and artists of color began their own programs of data collection and analysis, sharing their findings through online platforms and social media with the goal of connecting hard numbers to anecdotal evidence describing the lack of gender and racial parity in American theatre.

I began to collect data: basic statistics about the past year’s season, how many plays written by women had been produced, how many women had been hired to direct, and what companies had women serving in executive capacities in their artistic and management structures. It was material I had already started collecting through indirect means by maintaining my own “master” season calendar. That document’s impetus was twofold: first, to direct students to off-campus productions that would broaden their experience of local theatre; and second, to identify the emerging narrative of that year’s tri-city theatre offerings with which our theatre studies season at Duke would be in conversation. It was this second, specifically dramaturgical purpose that allowed me to contribute more than just stark percentages at the public meeting. I could see the ways in which this data could be articulated as information, a more refined and contextualized understanding of how...