Dance Dramaturgy in Theory and Practice

Distinctions among theatre, performance, and dance studies are a matter of perennial debate. These distinctions are determined in part by the disciplinary structure of academia, as well as by the attendant, perpetual need to justify the individual training systems of the performing arts; at the same time, an ever-evolving field of performance-making is largely uninterested in upholding these distinctions. Dramaturgy has emerged as one site through which we might study and deepen the intradisciplinarity of our field. As contemporary creative practices erode divisions among artists working primarily in text and those working primarily in movement, a critical engagement with dance dramaturgy becomes increasingly relevant. The 2011 annual meeting of the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) was dedicated to "Dance Dramaturgy: Catalyst, Perspective, and Memory," and degree programs in dance and devised dramaturgy are being introduced by institutions around the world, evidence of the necessity of understanding the history, theory, and practices of this growing field inside and outside of the academy. ¹New histories and theorizations of dance dramaturgy provide scholars, educators, and artists with sharply focused lenses through which to understand the meaning-making that happens in movement-based practice and performance. The new crop of dance dramaturgy publications has much to offer, primarily in its vast yet precise toolkit of language for describing the body in motion, itself a critical element of performance regardless of genre and one that can often receive cursory treatment outside of dance studies. Operating in an overlap among theatre, performance, and dance studies, dance dramaturgs theorize rigorous models for understanding movement—models that are not necessarily bound to vocabularies specific to dance studies that could otherwise inhibit interdisciplinary thought about movement. The three volumes reviewed here share an aim of exploring the whatof dance dramaturgy, often indistinct from the how, consistently asking whatthe dance dramaturg does and howthe dance dramaturg does their work, whomight do dance dramaturgy, and, engaging with a perennial concern regarding the role of the dramaturg, what the dance dramaturg's status, power, or authority might be on a given project. In reviewing these texts, two additional questions arise: Why does dance dramaturgy matter, and what tools can it offer us as those engaged with performance's many meanings?

In this review essay I will consider three significant contributions to dance dramaturgy: Pil Hansen and Darcey Callison's Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement, Katherine Profeta's Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance, and Raimund Hoghe's Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch. Hansen and Callison organized the landmark 2011 SDHS event, and their Dance Dramaturgyanthology developed out of the conference's conversations. The collection includes nine compelling essays and an overview from Hansen that serves to outline the (fuzzy, porous, kinetic) contours of dance dramaturgy in the twenty-first century. The essays describe the dance dramaturg using various theoretical and practical models practiced by the authors. Dance Dramaturgy, like most essay collections, necessarily offers breadth, touching down rather than diving deep into its subject, as Profeta does in her remarkable Dramaturgy in Motion, which recounts her career as dramaturg for the choreographer Ralph Lemon. This study offers much to consider for scholars, practitioners, and educators alike. I found myself frequently earmarking, underlining, and scribbling in the margins throughout the volume, inspired by Profeta's rigorous theorization of dance dramaturgy in, as, and through practice. Where she offers intense self-reflection on practices developed through years of collaboration, Hoghe's Bandoneonprovides an archive of a single work that tells us as much, if not more, about Bausch as it does about Hoghe, whose role—the earliest official dance dramaturg on record—retains an aura of mystery despite it being the supposed focus...