ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by sharing a few introductory notions of dance dramaturgy. It addresses some common concerns about dance dramaturgical agency by situating the field historically. The chapter draws upon the voices of a range of practitioner-scholars' writing about dance dramaturgy to establish a contemporary conceptualization of and space for this field. It examines mostly specific to dance, but it does also facilitate interdisciplinary transfer of adaptable strategies. The chapter presents concept of agency that captures what something or someone does, what it affects, and how new possibilities are brought into the world. It shows that dance dramaturgical approaches, derive from facilitating roles in dance that predate the first designation of the title 'dance dramaturg'. The kinds of awareness that enable artists contributing to a distributed dramaturgy to attend to emerging composition while improvising is in direct conflict with the notion of presence in discourses of dance improvisation.
