ABSTRACT
The expansion from text-based conventions and approaches to the diverse and multiplying sets of practices regularly referred to as “New Dramaturgies” 1 is a response to a broad range of intersecting yet rarely complementary factors. Multiple efforts, many of them comprising multiple perspectives, have attempted to articulate the scope, parameters, and significance of this development. In particular, recent (post 2009) issues focusing on dramaturgy from Performance Research and Contemporary Theatre Review have rallied an impressive range of reflections and manifestos related to this dramaturgical sea change. And while both issues include articles addressing more conventional text-based performance, the dominant impetus behind the drive to reimagine dramaturgical process relates to the transition from hierarchically organized theatre-making to collaborative performance creation – what is generally referred to as “devising” – with the attendant emphases on physicality and multiplicity (of source material, of form, of discipline, of medium) that accompanies this shift. A number of recently published volumes directly address the elusive dramaturgical implications of devising processes (see Barton; Govan, Nicholson and Normington; Mermikides and Smart; Milling and Heddon; Mederos Syssoyeva and Proudfit). The most articulate of these voices emphasize the inability to confidently or fully articulate these implications and the necessity to not merely entertain but actually engage with this explanatory shortfall as a strategic point of departure in any given dramaturgical process. As David Williams proposes, “Perhaps above all, the dramaturg asks how to be a juggler of paradoxes in an uncertain, unpredictable, and ultimately unmasterable terrain.” 2
