Dramaturgs in Asia: Struggles and Strategies | ADN Conference 2019

2 Hours 6 Minutes 13 Seconds

Description

This panel engages with how performing arts practitioners in Asia understand and approach the role of a dramaturg within a project, performance-oriented or otherwise. The panel examines how the dramaturg in Asia negotiates the very human process of creating art, including working with multiple collaborators, and dealing with tensions and conflicts. JANICE POON discusses the challenges of designing a dramaturgy course for the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. MARK PRITCHARD shares his vision of ensuring that the stage serves underrepresented communities in Australia. GEE IMAAN SEMMALAR posits that one cannot discuss dramaturgy and the human condition without considering the Social, illustrating with his experiences on projects as a trans artist and activist.

Transcript

RL : And a very good morning to everyone. Welcome to Asian Dramaturgs’ Network Symposium 2019 and welcome to the first panel. My name is Robin Loon and I am a proud member of ADN and also a founding member of Centre 42. So it gives me great pleasure to moderate this panel entitled Dramaturgs in Asia: Struggles and Strategies

I won't take up too much of the time with introduction. I will leave it to you to browse the various bios and CVs. Just to also just preface a few things. We've got a very diverse panel of educators, producers, practitioners who will be talking about various aspects of their practices. So we'll have the panelists present and then we'll leave the final about 30/20 minutes of the session for Q&As. So we just leave all the questions and your responses to the last final 30 minutes of today's presentation. 

So we're starting today with Janice from Hong Kong and who will talk to us about her experience as an educator and from the pedagogical perspective of where she is right now at Hong Kong APA with starting a new major on dramaturgy. Janice.

JP: I need to use mic, right? Okay.

Hello, I'm Janice Poon. I'm from Hong Kong. I teach playwriting and dramaturgy in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. This is I think the second time I joined ADN and thank you for having me here… aah third, sorry time flies. I just told my colleagues (hello) I just told my colleagues that this is the third time in the past two weeks that I'm the first one to speak in a panel, or in a like in like meetings, you know, that kind of thing and I don't know why. I hope I'm not going to let you fall asleep. Say, see, I'm now translating from my Cantonese. So it… any time when you see that I'm like stuck here it's because the Wi-Fi is like doing this (gestures with hand) in my head. It's quite early in the morning. So good morning! 

So, today I'm going to share my experience working Hong Kong as a dramaturg as a playwright and also I would like to share some of my thoughts or reflections that while I'm planning or setting up the new major in dramaturgy in our Academy, as Robin mentioned. So to start my presentation I would like to share with you the questions or thoughts that have been in my mind throughout the process when I'm preparing for today's presentation. Can dramaturgs be trained and how? To what extent this methodology relates to artistry? How to dramaturg a dramaturg? What is the specificity of training dramaturgs in Asia? 

Okay, as a teacher I will always ask students this questions. So now I would like to ask maybe all of you here you can vote, like among all these four questions which one do interests most? Take a moment.  (Audience shouting #3) Ok, ok,let's do it one by one. So who's interested in the first question, please put up their hand. Ok you quite, quite, yeah just like make one choice. Ok we'll do it again. Ok, thank you. All right the first question. Ok good,  good. Yes the first question. You know students are very naughty nowadays. Ok I ask them to vote one that they want to vote all of them. Ok that's good. And then the second question who's interested in second question? Ok. And the third one? how come it's all here? Ok, understand. And the fourth one? Ok, ok. Thank you very much. 

Ok and so so these questions have been in my mind while I'm preparing this presentation. So I just I have to say I started my teaching career quite recently. I've joined the Academy like less than two years and the very first mission that I was assigned, or no, is of course it's a discussion process between me and the faculty, and so this very first mission is that I'm going to establish a new dramaturgy major in the Academy and before that I have to share like as most of you here in the room we are practicing artists. Also I've been a playwright and a practicing dramaturg, for quite a long time almost 20 years now and to be honest I'm quite a private person. And so after I joined the Academy, like every day I saw like almost like more than hundred students walking along the corridor back and forth and then coming into my room and asking me questions and it's really overwhelming. But then like coming out of my closets, like my right-hand closet, seeing all those faces in the corridor every day and I can't help thinking like what can I give them beyond knowledge? Will these students be artists one day? What kind of an artists are they going to become? And like as the dramaturg, I always thought okay I can be a production dramaturg. Or ever since I started practicing dramaturgy, I've been an institution dramaturg. Can I be my students’ dramaturg?  That’s one of the question that I've been thinking in the past year and because I was given the mission to establish this new major and I started to think can dramaturgy be taught or how do I learn dramaturgy in my own way? And I remember I started encountering or learning dramaturgy when I established the first literary department for Theatre Company in Hong Kong. 

It was in 2006. Yes, so I was one man bank. So I established literary Department on my own. And back then, I learned from a master who was a very experienced dramaturg in China, in Beijing. His name is Lin Kehuan so I we all call him Mr. Lin or Master Lin. And I remember how he taught me dramaturgy - is that one day he invites, no he invited me to his home when I was in Beijing travelling and then he prepared a meal for me. So what he prepared it's very, very simple meal, that every Chinese in Beijing will eat like every day. So it's like marinated cucumber, steamed rice and some pork like with soya sauce. Very simple meal. But then, while during the process of his preparation, he introduced like the special kind of vinegar that he used to marinate the cucumber and the soya sauce is like from a special factory that that he ordered like from time to time, and he also told me how special that rice he used for this plain, steamed rice. And then during the meal, we talked, we didn't talk about theatre, we didn't talk about dramaturgy. We just talk about like anything that comes up like our concerns, how am I doing in the theater company. He told me about his recent writing, the books that he planned to write before he retired. And after that meal right, he sent me back to Hong Kong and honestly I didn't learn any methodology. I didn't learn how to become a dramaturg but that meal means a lot to me. It gives me a kind of like non-physical support and energy, thus became my role model of how I can become a dramaturg or while I’m dramaturging - whether I'm in the theatre production, whether I'm an institution and whether now I'm in an academy being a teacher. So that experience is like really, really important to me. And so recently a director, like a theatre director asked me because she was invited to be a dramaturg for a theatre production and then and she asked me like -  are there any methodology that you work as a dramaturg?  How can I, you know, I know how to be a director but I don't know how to be a dramaturg. So are there any methodology that you can teach me or show me? I don't know how and then I introduced like a whole bunch of books to her and I said okay, read this okay. And then she did like find those books in Amazon, in libraries and then she read some of them and then she said - oh that's very helpful and, but, how can I apply, you know, what was written in the books into my dramaturging in the upcoming production? And honestly, in Asia or in Hong Kong, we always, we've been talking like - dramaturgy it's a new thing, it's a kind of new thing. And not many people are practicing it and ever since people in the industry know that we are launching a new major in dramaturgy and the first question that people ask me is that-  well they're not going to get a job because there will not be any budget to you know include the dramaturg or if there isn't any budget, enough budget that dramaturg is the first one to be like delayed or cuts from the production team. Okay. And then I always like thought, I think back when does video artists inexpensible (Note from Transcriber: I think she meant, dispensable), becomes inexpensible in a production? Or when does the lighting designer or sound designer become inexpensible in the history of theatre? And I believe, if dramaturgs will become inexpensible in the history or in the development of theater productions or in the history of theatre, very soon. But by reading all these books, I to be honest I can't exactly tell how she can apply this methodology into her own production and I try to look for readings and words, like wisdom of words that can might be helpful to her and I found this. 

So maybe you can take a moment to read this. 

So when the director read this, so it's only one of the excerpts from the whole article written by Mary Ann and after reading that and then she came to me and then she said -  well it said nothing. And okay, I understand, because I know somehow she's looking for like a methodology, like a step-by-step methodology. And so from this particular excerpt, at the last sentence like inspires me on how I can share my dramaturgical process with her. And so I started to share with her my projects that I work as a dramaturg. So, this is one of the recent projects that I worked on is the dance-theater piece presented by City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong. To start sharing this production, I would like to share with you a video on. I need help… on the making of this production.

 [Video]

So this is one of the recent production that I'm involved. Like yesterday, I joined the very like inspiring workshop by Martin. I got a lot from it and then during the workshop I constantly recall my experience working in this production because this production started as a dance-theatre piece. So it stems from a novel that the choreographer, Sang Jijia, maybe Su Wen, knows him. So he started from a novel and we started the conversation by looking at the novel, reading the novel and then he asked - I am really interested in the situation that the protagonist in the novel is situated in and then he asked how can we, you know, do something out of it? But we are not thinking about adapting the novel into a dance-theater piece. He's just interested in the situation that the protagonist was trapped in and so after reading the novel and I keep thinking like how does this novel relate to contemporary audience, in what sense does it relate to them. And I take out the main theme or like the main point that I think it relates to contemporary audience - is about surveillance. Because the protagonist in the novel he's trapped in in the room and he forgot everything in the past and he don't know where he is. You know, that kind of situation. And so from surveillance and then we derived the whole dramaturgy in terms of space, in terms of audience participation and in terms of the choreography. And of course I'm not the choreographer and I can’t help him in that respect but then I wrote a dance script. So I wrote the whole script for the dance piece, where I have this structure in mind-  that there will be duo, there will be trio, there will be solo and group dance. So that's all I have in mind and I wrote of course in in the script it's written in terms of drama, yeah that I have that structure of dance piece in mind. So I hand in the script and then he derived the whole dance piece from that script. And so it during the performance there will be words written on the wall but those words transform during the course of the production and those words I so it's part of the script that I wrote. In terms of that surveillance, it's not only the choreography or the movement of the dancer showing the trapped situation of the protagonists but we involve the audience as well as the one who you know keep an eye on those dancers trapped in the room and so we have like monitors on the corridor and then there were there are joss sticks that the audience can control so that they can capture you know other audiences when they are watching the show. And so while you are looking at the dancers, you are being watched as well. And so at the end, we project all the images that we captured during the production and you can see there are people up there. So actually we transform the whole studio theatre and the audience were all standing above the performance area looking down at the room. So this is the like the whole dramaturgy that I worked out with the choreographer and from this experience and I shared that the dramaturgy process that I that we've been through is in terms of tasks, in terms of space, in terms…. when I say text is verbal and also movement text and is also contextualizing it with the pressing issue that Hong Kong and you know Chinese are facing at the moment. 

And so after this sharing and then I continue to develop, I mean after this production, and I continue to develop another piece on surveillance in my own academy performed by my students. And in this particular piece, I wrote the whole play so it's a like a traditional play. So when I wrote it, I have in mind that all the citizens in that particular city, the world of the play, they are being watched through like 24 hours CCTV. And so in this particular production I use some kind of journalist who's always interviewing citizens with his mobile phone and these two characters, one is the mayor of the city and then the other one is his assistant. And in Martin’s workshop, we mentioned about the big square behind a performance whenever we use technology and in this particular production I did use a big square as a projection screen to project like the videos or the interviews that the journalists did with the citizens ,in contrast with the real situation that the citizens are experiencing. And I keep thinking about all, so apart from the projects that I worked with other choreographers and directors, and I keep thinking about my own projects like this and like the dramaturgical process that I've been through and like this one. This is another production that I did. It's about the dying, the solitude of the dying in Hong Kong and the medical system, the modern medical system. So the spatial dramaturgy is like a pathway from life to death. So to us, this end where the colourful place on the floor -  the colours they are actually tablets or pills, medical pills that patients eat. And so we made like a mandala kind of thing using the pills on this end. It is like symbolizing the pathway of the patients from the medication. Towards the end, there's another place with water lily. Yeah, towards the other end. And there are musicians behind the screen and so this is like the spatial dramaturgy from this picture is about the scenography, but the directing and during the course of the play the performers first performed in this end and then, towards the end of the play they gradually moved to us the other end. So it's like the directing and use of the space is moving to the other end as well. 

And this is another work that I, another dance piece that I work with in terms of writing. So I was invited to be the writer of this dance piece but I dramaturg the whole piece with my writing. It's some images that I would like to show you. And okay. So from these projects that I've worked on and whether it’s working with other directors and whether it's my own project, I kept thinking how these experiences can transfer into my planning of the new major and into my pedagogy. And so I started a new program on interdisciplinary dramaturgy. And this is the one of the projects that my student did. So the project that I gave them is that I gave them some newspapers and then from the newspaper they find those news that capture them or they are interested in and then they develop a new project from the newspaper. And this group of students they captured one main page, like one news on the main page A1. So on the top of that page it says our governor is advertising or encouraging people to move to the Greater Bay Area in the mainland. And then below that news is an advertisement of people like inviting people to move to Osaka and buying flats in Osaka. And for the students is a very ironic situation. And so they invented a whole project experience for the audience by starting a questionnaire asking people like which flowers do you like. So one is the cherry blossom and then the other one is a Chinese flower. And the second question, which colour do you like? And so one symbolizes China and then one symbolize Japan. And you know all these questions, on the surface it's very suggestive -  that okay if you choose this one it must mean Japan. So at the end of the questionnaire you will be assigned to - okay you're suitable to emigrate to Japan or you're suitable to emigrate to a Greater Bay Area. And then they invite the audience to go to two rooms  - which like its insulation (Note from Transcriber: I think she meant simulation) of the situation in Japan or in Greater Bay Area. This is the room of Japan. They put a lot of mangas or animation on the floor and you know with the Japanese costume, but what's interesting at the back, in the video, it actually shows the interview of the family members of a man who committed suicide because he's overworked . And overworked is -  if there are Japanese here please correct me  - like it's quite a terrible situation in Japan and so by contrasting you know these kind of imaginative Japan with the real situation in Japan, and the student want to show like what kind of a place that you're imagining you're going to emigrate to. And this room is the room in Greater Bay Area and there are a lot of these kinds of slogans in the room and at the back, there are videos capturing people's daily life in China. 

And another project that another group of students did is they made this Monopoly game and the news that they chose is that the government is going to promote or advocate the teaching of virtue since primary school. So they are advocating it. And so they think of the Monopoly game. The audience is going to participate in it and if your virtue, grade of virtue, is low then you have to go to jail and you know you have all kinds of chance and everything. They create a whole game and I was so surprised on how they came up with from the course and how they think I mean the whole dramaturgical process they've been go through. And yeah, so these are images. They even videotaped like livestream the whole process during the game on Facebook but they said that it's private. So, I trust them. 

So from all these experiences and course that I conducted in the Academy and this is another project that my student did about Trojan women but I think time's up so I'm not going to share this in detail. 

And yeah, so going back to the very first questions that we talked about. And what those experiences and projects informed me is that - can dramaturgs be trained and how to play Monopoly? I learned it from my students. And to what extent this methodology relates to artistry? Be truthful. Like all the projects that I've experienced especially from the students, they've been so truthful to themselves and their own like worries about their daily lives. How to damaturg a dramaturg? Prepare a meal. And what is the specificity of training dramaturgs in Asia? Be bold and have fun. Thank you.

RL: Thank you, Janice. Thank you. Now we're going to move on to Mark. Yeah, so we have to do a bit of a round robin there. Right, Mark, all yours.

MP: Hi, my name is Mark Pritchard. I'm a dramaturg. I am the new work manager at Malthouse Theatre,  where I was formerly the resident dramaturg.  I've been working there for in my sixth year there now working full-time. And in approaching today's topic I was invited to focus specifically on diversity and multiculturalism, and as a white male dramaturg, I did just want to start by acknowledging the inherent problems of leading this kind of conversation, but also that it came about because it's an area that I'm particularly passionate about and for me it's one of the central struggles facing the contemporary dramaturg and want that by sharing our experiences and learning from each other and approaching the challenge dramaturgically, we can actually do some really transformative work. But I did want to acknowledge that my strategies that I'm going to talk about today are coming from a place of privilege and that there's sort of definitely things that I can't see but it's a perspective that I hope is useful, nonetheless. 

So to start from the beginning, one of the major struggles Australians experienced as dramaturgs in Asia is actually acknowledging that we're in Asia at all. Australia has a habit of forgetting the past and overlooking the long and complex history of engagement our country has had with Asia and the Asia-Pacific. It goes back before the British Invasion of Australia with moccasin fleets from what we now call Indonesia trading with indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and WA. And you can track the exchange of food and goods or through that region before colonialism began. Javanese and Indian merchants were trading with Australia in the early 1800s and the Gold Rush in the second half of the nineteenth century brought mass Chinese immigration to Victoria and New South Wales. So here's where we saw the roots of the White Australia Policy, that major piece of anti-immigration legislation that Australia passed as soon as Australia was federated. So now as long as there's been racism in Australia, there's been resistance to it by people who saw not only the injustice but also the opportunity that comes from being a multicultural country and being an active part of the Asian region. 

But the dominant result has been an identity crisis where despite its centrality to the Asia-Pacific, Australia has refused to integrate Asian identity into the major expressions of who we are as a country. So for the Australian dramaturg, this is one of the major frontiers, a long history of marginalization from the narrative. 

The second thing to articulate as a kind of context is, of course, that Asia does not exist. That what exists is a great variety of geographies, peoples, languages, cultures and political systems. When Australians talk about Asia they're talking about a monolithic identity, a generalized sense of the East, the Far East and a catch-all for a range of things that are fundamentally not here. But as Yorta Yorta musician Neil Morris aka DRMNGNOW sings, “Australia does not exist”. The idea of the nation-state comes with its implicit biases, its fixed notions of who we are and who we aren't. Who's Australian, who's new here, who's allowed in and the circumstances in which they can come in. Similarly, what exists is a great variety of indigenous settler diasporic cultural groups who each bring their own multiplicity. And so by understanding that Australia is a construct of our individual imaginings, we can begin to radically reimagine it - who it is and who it isn't, whose story sits at the centre and how many centres it can contain.  

One of the key struggles is identifying structural inequality and finding strategies to amplify a disenfranchised voices in our society. How do we make sure that the arts is for all? How do we make the arts not just an equal distribution but a counterbalance to who is being heard in the media, in the government, in public life? For the contemporary dramaturg, how do we make the margin the center? Australian theatre has largely been dominated by white artists but right now it feels like a kind of tipping point is going on with lots of young writers of colour and specifically writers from Asian backgrounds entering the scene and being more actively sought out and supported by organizations. So the projects I’m going to talk about sort of begin, they become a site of negotiation as emerging artists of colour attempt to which their practice within a white dominant institution and a white dominant industry. As a theater industry in a colonial country and something that connects us with a lot of local industries throughout Asia is the dominance of the European canon. Expectations about what makes good theater have been defined by the plays and aesthetics coming out of Britain and the United States and Australian playwriting has long struggled with the comparison. For myself as a white dramaturg, working in a major theatre company I need to find ways of centering those voices in the theatre making process and critically reflecting on the cultural dynamics at play in any project that we're making so the burden of navigating whiteness isn't placed solely on the artist. Whose dramaturgy is this? Whose dramaturgy are we looking at? 

As an institutional dramaturg, my role is not just about working within an artist specific project. I am directly engaged in setting up the structures within which the artist is able to work. So for me I'm quite interested in the role of dramaturgy in producing -  how do we design the frameworks through which new work is conceived, developed and produced? As many of us would know a lot of the creative decisions around a work have been made before we enter the rehearsal room. So who is in the room? What expectations have been set up? What type of room is it? Where is the room located? What else is in the room and, how long do we have here? Who was in control and where are we headed? My role is often about working as a champion for the lead artist -  advocating for their project, articulating it for various stakeholders and helping them take control of the available resources for themselves. And more broadly a lot of the work that I've been doing at Malthouse about changing the face of the artists who are walking through the door. 

For years we've been running open call-outs for writing programs but the applicants were predominantly white, able-bodied ,cis-gendered, middle-class, male. We weren't getting the applicants we needed. The door wasn't welcoming in the right voices. So I needed to find new ways to bring people in the side entrance or build a new door. The history of exclusion and under representation of certain communities in the theatre has meant that many people think the theatre is not for them. To change that, I've had to go out and find people in the spaces they are making work -  writing fiction, poetry, spoken word, working in activist circles or as actors, and invite them to come and make work with us. I've set up a number of kind of soft engagement programs where artists could be paid to do the basic - kind of the early meetings, the skills development and having their first exposure to mainstage work. 

The fundamental layer of my work is about relationship building, finding the space beyond the fixed programs and the power dynamics that come from working at an institution, and try and carve out a space for us to get to know each other and where I can get to know their dramaturgy. And it's here I want to make the distinction between programs for developing plays and those for developing playwrights. It's the latter that has brought the most success for me, where I can spend real time getting to know the artist and expanding their skills, as we slowly come to find the work that they want to make for our stage. And in every situation I want the new work that we're making at Malthouse Theatre to fundamentally change the building itself. Not for us to shape the artist but for the artist to change us. When I started at Malthouse Theatre five years ago, I was very much of the view of that playwriting as a pedagogy was fundamentally rooted in a British way of working that fetishized the idea of a player's literature. I started work on a thesis that said that this two-stage process whereby the playwright writes the play on the page and their director then take that document and interpret it onto the stage was fundamentally a flawed kind of way of working, that it ignored the embodied knowledge that's inherent in storytelling practices around the world and by focusing on the players literature, we were structurally excluding minority artists, indigenous artists, artists with disabilities and measuring everything against the great works of literature. I argued that the Australian dramaturgy or specifically the Melbourne dramaturgy was much more collaborative and the devised work where the play script was not a central document was leaving the playwright behind. But in driving the creation of you work at Malthouse with a focus on culturally diverse artists, playwriting has become a dominant way of working for me again. The idea of collaboratively making work being far more democratic and multiplicities wasn't reflected in the diversity of artists making that work. The work was still pretty wired, pretty privileged and in its post-modern critiques and deconstruction of the form or very well-meaning, we weren't seeing Asian artists, Asian stories, Asian performers taking center stage or being put into positions of leadership. So come back to writing, the practice of playwriting and championing the writer.

Writers that we're working with at the moment include – this is Ra Chapman who’s writing a domestic drama about the experiences of Korean adoptees in Australia. Raised by white families and assimilated in Anglo- Australian culture, Ra’s play looks at the process of waking up that the Korean adoptee goes through, realizing that you're an Asian woman in a white contexts with no connection to your Korean heritage and discovering all the internalized racism that kind of comes with growing up in Australia. So she talks about in the play she talks about the experience of trying to connect with her Korean identity and questioning how race has come to inform her life and sort of frames it as being like a Pandora's box that once opened can never be closed. So that became a kind of central metaphor in this play. 

This is Rajith Savanadasa who's developing a documentary piece centered on the stories of two Singhalese men living in Australia whose lives have been radically shaped by their associations with Sri Lanka's Socialist Movement, the JVP. One is a politician, a leader of the JVP who successfully gained refugee status straightaway when coming to Australia, and one who was wrongfully imprisoned over a major terrorist attack on Sri Lankan Parliament and his journey after that wasn't so easy. So Exposure  is about how the lives of the Sri Lankan diaspora and how the stories of refugees are consumed and ignored. 

The third writer I wanted to point to is Vidyan Rajan.  Vidyan is a writer and a lawyer and she's making work about the phenomena of the true-crime podcast. She's looking at the rise of this genre, how empathy becomes a strategy for fighting the failures of the justice system and its limits, the limits of empathy. She's particularly looking at the murders of migrant women in Australia asking -  who are victims the world marches in the streets for and who just becomes a statistic? So many of these writers are writing the plays, their first plays. Some have come through playwrighting courses, some from other disciplines like for fiction or poetry. Others are actors shifting to playwriting so they can play the lead role, to tell their own story at last and create opportunities for other Asian-Australian actors. 

So for the dramaturg and particularly as an institutional dramaturg, there's a second layer to the power dynamic going on in these projects, as emerging artists get paired up with more experienced directors and established companies that think they know what makes good theatre. The director holds a lot of power in the rehearsal room in Australia and companies often offset the risk of a new voice by enlisting a more seasoned director to render it into something that's kind of in line with the company's expectations or the audience expectations, which ultimately means that we end up leaning towards the directors dramaturgy, and many a radical rehearsal draft can lose its edges over the four weeks of rehearsal room edits, arriving on stage as something that neither the director nor the writer would say goes as far as they would like it to go in the direction they want to go in. 

There's a significant lack of mid-tier theatre companies in Australia or small to medium companies, making any kind of dramaturgical engagement with playwrights. So emerging artists are being pitted with established companies, large audiences and high risk opportunities. So amid a sea of good intentions, the risk of putting a play on too soon putting, a playwright out of their depths or taking the power away from an emerging writer when push comes to shove are huge. Race identity and a shiny new outsider voice can become fetishized, appropriated, thrown up on the poster but easily burnt by the experience of trying to navigate the machine and the production of their first play. 

To get us to the kind of nitty-gritty of some of the struggles, I guess, so they're kind of new writing projects that I'm talking about there, but now I wanted to shift to talking about some, I guess what we broadly might call intercultural projects, it can be a problematic term but the first project I wanted to speak about here is Little Emperors,  which is a new work that Malthouse Theatre commissioned as part of AsiaTOPA Festival 2017, which is the festival of performing arts from across the Asia-Pacific taking place in Melbourne every three years in venues right across the city. There are a number of international festivals like this cropping up right now where relationships between governments and arts funding bodies and major institutions manifests in significant opportunities for artists and audiences to experience the new. My company Malthouse took the opportunity to commission a new work directed by Beijing based director Wang Chong, teaming him up with Australian playwright Lachlan Philpot to make whatever they wanted, and while the cash may be there to get the artists on board and the goodwill of the stakeholders may be there to help push it down the tarmac, this bark we all know we need to make a successful creative project take flight can take a long time. And before you know it you're pushing that plane from one airport to the next rather than actually getting it off the ground. Meanwhile cabin fever has set in on board and the artists are quietly or quite vocally really wanting to get off. I'm painting a pretty brutal picture there of this experiment. Some of which is pretty accurate and there were some big wins in it too. We brought a major new work to the stage of our firsts genuinely bilingual new work performed in equal parts Mandarin and English. We brought new audiences into the venue because of that and gave work to three bilingual Chinese Australian actors who got their first main stage gigs. And for me it was a process fascinating project to work on, a huge dramaturgical experiment but my question is whose experiment is it? For the writer and the director, it was pretty difficult to work out whose project it was. Chong is an auteur-director making very post-dramatic work -  you can see the work is in all 20 centimeters of water, there's live video that's being kind of handled by the actors and so for him the text is just one layer to be chopped and rearranged at will, not served but engaged with, a dialectic between text and mise-en-scène, to open up unexpected associations. Lachlan is a realistic playwright. He is poetic and playful but also deeply considered and driven by story and language in the mimetic tradition. So the struggles in this context were a lot of them were about expectations and not just between those key collaborators, but between all the contributors, led by a director coming from a radically different context in how actually how the work is made. So expectations around roles and responsibilities and what to expect for that from the collaborators. Designers in Australia don't just deliver your set or the lights you asked for, they are active collaborators. They bring their own voice as artists and engage dramaturgically with the play as a whole. So I'm not just talking about conflicts here, I'm also talking about missed opportunities - offers that weren't picked up or listened to properly as everyone races towards the outcome. In this situation, my role as dramaturg became kind of like an interpreter. Not between languages, everyone in the room spoke fluent English, so English was kind of the working language for the most part so we saw no need to have an interpreter in the room. But my role became about trying to pick up on misunderstandings and miscommunications that came up between one version of English and another. A creative processes built upon short hands, we need to work quickly, deftly, with great specificity. It's easy for an actor to be totally thrown off guard by a confusing direction or a feeling that they don't quite know how what you're saying relates to what they're doing in the scene. So my role was often about sinking into the different vocabularies going on in the room and making sure that we're all talking about the same thing.

The second project I wanted to talk about is called Date Night. This is a new work currently in development by Deafferent Theatre. They are a small emerging deaf theatre company and making work in Auslan, Australian sign language. So Deafferent have made a few works so far, it's kind like of two or three, very lo-fi, mostly translations of English language plays into Auslan. So they're making deaf theatre but they're not yet telling deaf stories or speaking about deaf identity and Deaf culture. Date Night is their first attempt at a deaf drama, a realist play focused on two deaf characters whose relationship falls apart and comes back together over the course of an evening. The artists wanted to talk about deafness, not as lack, not as the inability to hear but as a culture, a culture of its own. Deaf culture in Australia is a really tight-knit community. Everyone knows everyone, everyone knows who you've dated and what you're up to. Dinner parties are loud and boisterous and it takes forever to say goodbye. Auslan is an incredibly expressive language. Not just a variant of English but a language in its own right. So they wanted to take the audience inside deaf culture and deaf relationships and use an Auslan first approach. The Auslan first approach is about starting with the nuance and idiosyncrasy of Auslan conversation and letting back that be the driver of the project and let the English translation catch-up. So the challenges on this project for me were numerous. These artists have never made a new work before. They translated existing plays and they'd staged them but they hadn't had to look at a story development, that hadn't had to talk about character development, structure, how to write dialogue. Second challenge is that there were really no deaf playwright or deaf dramaturg in Australia or at least no one that any of us knew. So there was no one that they could commission to help them write the play and structure the work. So we decided to bring on a hearing playwright who spoke no Auslan to help them in this process. But how do we make sure the content is being driven by the artists and the lived experience of deafness? Thirdly, there's no written form of Auslan. So the play can only be transcribed and structured in English. So we could maintain the rough syntax of Auslan as were in our annotations but always in the room there's this kind of cycling of languages from the devised material, to the interpreters, to the transcription, to the then way of kind of restructuring it and then going back through to the interpreters and back to the actors who then try and make sense of the changes, who then make the changes in their performance. And the actors and the director weren't super experienced or conventionally trained. One actor was a dancer -  that's Anna on the image there who had had done some acting recently but the other had never acted before and hadn't been able to access the kinds of training that are readily available to hearing actors. The director too had been mostly working in a community context, working with untrained actors and not getting the training or experience she needed to step up their skills and expectations, particularly now that she was working in a mainstage context. So as a dramaturg on this project I'm trying to negotiate a significant gap in training and experience while making sure that I'm centering the lived experience of the deaf artists in the room and centering their tastes too. It's easy to pursue what I think is interesting as a voyeur looking in but what did they want to see? What story do they want to tell? And how do I make sure that I understand them when they tell me? 

I can't say that we solved all of these problems in the development process but I want to share some of the learnings and moments of discovery we had so far. This project is still in development but in this initial process, it was our moment to really work out how we wanted to work. As you were sort of talking about before, about every project has its own approach to how we want to work. Malthouse approached different theatres and offered them a paid residency to kick-start the project and help them apply for some additional funding so they could have two interpreters in the room the whole time but the interpreters are of course for me, not for the artists, they're for me and the playwright because we don't speak Auslan. So as a non-Auslan speaker, I'm the one with the access needs here. 

One of the first moments, kind of aha moments I suppose, was when I was whiteboarding the character descriptions. Whenever I'm working cross-culturally, there's always this kind of trust being developed as we start to work out to work each other out. Minority communities are used to having their stories misunderstood, misrepresented and co-opted by people in positions of power for cultural capital and commercial gain. So for me I believe I can never really equip myself of these tensions of doing this kind of work, those tensions will always be there but I can be proactive in identifying the power dynamics going on in a transaction and working to counteract them. So this moment at the whiteboard, we're generating backstories for these two characters. She is 35. She comes from a big deaf family. Her parents are deaf, her four siblings are deaf. She's deep in the community and trying to find herself outside of the insularity of deaf culture. He is 32 and he comes from a non-deaf family and an actor put me up there -  oh fuck I thought, what had I said - and he said non-deaf, it's an interesting way to put it. Most people would say hearing but you've said non-deaf. And it was small moment moments like these when we started to feel the room shifting -  what we were centering there. There we were centering the deaf experience and that to be hearing was to have lack, you know. So there's a tension always in whose perspective was being centered and that was where it was being negotiated, where the specificity of language was tipping the balance in terms of who was leading the work. It's not a moment to kind of pat yourself on the back too much about or stop feeling so anxious about having such limited experience of deaf culture but for me as a dramaturg it's important to clock these moments, to see them, to name them and hold on to them as kind of talismans to guide us in the future creation of the work. 

The third project I wanted to talk about was going to be a kind of smaller part of my presentation today but having seen TNS’ new play,  Civilized on Thursday night, I thought it’s worth speaking directly about - working with First Nations artists in a country where the processes of colonization are ongoing. 

Australia, again, does not exist. It was first a composite of some 300 indigenous nations who'd been there for 60,000 years, each with their own culture, languages and storytelling practices. It was of course invaded by the British in 1788 leading to the attempted genocide of the indigenous population, first through frontier violence and through successive policies of assimilation and erasure. The impacts of colonization are horrific. The cultural trauma profound and the processes, as I said are ongoing and it's in this context that we're then trying to make some theatre. 

So I want to talk about decolonizing your practice and working with First Nations artists but it's particularly important to name that, of course, I'm not an indigenous person. I'm living and working on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people and I experience a lot of systemic privilege. So negotiating this is one of the key struggles for the non-indigenous dramaturg. So I didn't want to let that go unspoken today. So while I'm going to be offering my experience ,struggles and strategies today, I hold no authority on the subject and I invite anyone with more lived experience to speak up, challenge anything I'm putting out there.

The project I'm going to use as a jumping-off point is currently titled Repatriation and it's a work in development commissioned Malthouse Theatre. It's being led by producer Jason Tamiru, a Yorta Yorta man, you see there, so he’s from Northern Victoria, who worked in the field of repatriation for over ten years. For those who aren't familiar, many museums, universities and private individuals are currently in possession of the remains of indigenous people from across Australia and around the world. Indigenous bodies and skeletons were used as medical specimens to study dentistry, anthropology, anatomy or the culture of indigenous people and some still sit on display but many are stored in the archives of various major institutions and some private collections, where a farmer or a construction worker might have stumbled across a burial site and trophy a skull for themselves. And for indigenous people, this is a site of huge trauma and having been stolen off their sacred lands, the dead aren't at rest. Jason worked for ten years with a group of other traditional owners, trying to get the remains of people out of the archives and back to their traditional lands. Often the people holding them have only a vague idea of what where they came from and no vested interest in getting them back. We can look at these stolen goods individually and not think much about them but when you look at the scale of what's been done, you can map the history of colonial violence and the disregard for our First Nations people. And returning the ancestors to their land we can see on some level a path towards making things right. So this is a major commission for us as a company and there's a lot being negotiated as we're trying to tell this story. The first question is -  whose story is it? What story do we have the right to tell? And, how do we earn the right to tell it? It's a big project with stories connecting to stories so we're being led by our producer Jason who first approached us about telling the story. When we get lost trying to tell the story of the country that the country doesn't want to tell itself, we go back to it being about one man, the man who asked us to make help him make this work. The second is around trauma we need to acknowledge that we're dealing with inter-generational trauma that will flare up when we least expect it and demand space in our process. Things take time. They happen in due course and as a non-indigenous person, I have to listen to that. A history of broken relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people and we can't escape how that shapes our dynamic as collaborators. It's not just me as an individual speaking and doing but I'm echoing the white men who've gone before me who've wanted to tell indigenous people stories. But we also knew that we wanted this to be an intercultural project. Jason requested that my boss, Matthew Lutton, a white director be the director of this project. And his strategy was really about saying that we're all part of this story and we all need to bring ourselves personally to the making of it. We're also negotiating very much how to tell this story. It's not just happening in the rehearsal room, it's happening out in the world. It's happening as we meet with traditional owners as we speak with indigenous academics and museum workers with staff at the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council - Ancestral Remains unit who are now doing the frontline work of trying to reclaim remains and return them to country. The integrity of that process is constantly being tested and is fundamental to the integrity and impact of the work itself. This is one of the number of indigenous project I've worked in in my past kind of six years working at Malthouse and is itself a product of some long relationships and deep trust, primarily with the producer Jason and the writer Torres Strait islander playwright, John Harvey. 

I'm going to attempt to articulate some of the strategies that I found useful in making this work and I'm going to draw heavily on Clare Land’s incredible book on Decolonizing Solidarity, which has really helped me better articulate my methodology as a dramaturg. And although I'm talking about working with First Nations practice here in these kind of lists of strategies, it's a pretty extreme cultural context but many of these principles I find pretty useful when thinking about a range of intercultural projects where the power disparity is there. 

So the first is to say that, is to understand that history fundamentally informs your collaboration. In this instance, indigenous and non-indigenous lines are fundamentally informed by 200 plus years of colonialism. Despite the appearances or the illusions we tell ourselves, the rehearsal room is not separate from the world. We need to identify the ways in which whiteness informs my position. Resists those inclinations and the alliances that form between privileged people when they can feel themselves being challenged. Only undertaking actions that are initiated by indigenous artists. So this has been a big one for me when making mainstage work and often being the advocate or the intermediary on a project. Things happen slowly. Not every opportunity will be seized and maximized, but that's my inner white man talking. The integrity of the work is best served by parking my desire to be helpful, acting on other people's behalf and only undertaking actions indigenous initiated by indigenous artists. I need to place myself in situations where I can be easily challenged. It's hard to be aware of your own privilege. And to realize when no one's challenging you not because you shouldn't be challenged but because you're in the position of power and being challenged is the best way to learn. 

I'm going to try and move through this as quickly as possible. 

Allow spaces that you can't access. Sometimes indigenous artists will want a space that's exclusively for indigenous people and I've got to know how to step away but also hold space. Know that I'll never fully understand. Appreciate the ways in which race is constructed and made real. Take responsibility for educating my colleagues who share my privilege. There's limits to that approach obviously but it's important that we take some of that labour off the artists that we're working with. Don't get cocky. There's a dentist called Bill Roberts who says, ‘never trust a white fella, no matter who he is’ and it's this genuine distrust of one's self as a white person that makes you more trustworthy. Don't you stop being racist, be anti-racist. Find the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness and how excessive self-censorship can actually create dishonesty. Often we want to say, I don't want to do, I don’t want to act, I don’t want to do anything but that actually can be really un-valuable in a collaborative process as well, if you're checking your privilege too much and then it becomes a burden on the people you're working with to relieve that anxiety. Be aware of ritualized institutional practices of accusation and flagellation that are non- transformative. We can spend a lot of time beating ourselves up and actually not getting anywhere and it can be more for ourselves than for the actual goal. Reconstruct your interests with the knowledge that fighting structural injustice will improve all our lives. The struggles are always intersectional. And the issues are complex and successful supporters of indigenous struggles are able to manage that complexity. 

I want to talk about the complexity a little bit more when looking at kind of three factors that you have to balance that are competing factors. One is critical self-reflection. I need to be always engaged in a process of critical self-reflection to be thinking about - who I am and what I'm doing and how I'm working. But I need to maintain a commitment to action and then I need to do personal material work to actually create small actions of change. 

What's crucial across all these projects that I'm talking about is that we learn from them and dramaturgs are often best placed to be that institutional knowledge. We work between the key players -  spanning across conversations, witnessing and reflecting both the work and the process of making. I asked before about whose experiment is this. Perhaps there's no single answer, no puppet master kind of setting up the conditions, names for a project and evaluating its success but the dramaturg is someone who is fundamentally attuned to understanding systems. To look at the interplay of factors that go on in the creation of a work. So for me it's the dramaturg’s role to make it their experiment, knowing that each project is influenced by a mix of factors within and beyond our control and learning from each project helps us approach the next one better. Thank you.

RL: Thank you, Mark. So we will move on to Gee. Just give us a bit of time to for setup.

GIS: Good morning I think now would be a good time for me to ironically thank British colonialism because I find that even out of the four local languages that I speak most of my dreams are now in English and I have to translate you know into the four local languages I speak. I'd like to first thank my co-panelists Janice for telling us that dramaturgy, that with regard to dramaturgy there's really no way that you can take tuitions for it. It's best to rely on your intuition rather and to Mark, for giving us a highly critical version of whose dramaturgy is it anyway. I know that we are used to in the virtual world hearing a lot of trigger warnings and I personally don't believe that life gives us any trigger warnings in the way that we experience things but I will be talking about deaths in this presentation so if anybody does not in the mood to listen to that early in the morning, I would totally understand and take no offense if you left the room at this point. 

So I'll be first briefly touching upon the challenges of dramaturgy in Asia. One of the main issues that we have with defining a dramaturg in Asia is that there is no specific or distinct roles that you can give a dramaturg and the fact that even much before the 18th century in Germany when Lessing got hold, I know it's a bad pun on his name, got hold of dramaturgy there was the tradition of dramaturgy within Asian cultures I think dramaturgy in Asia is as long as our performance traditions and I differ from my co-panellist Janice when she said that it's a new thing in Asia. So I think that in that sense, it would be possible to eliminate a dramaturg but not eliminate dramaturgical functions because those functions are being performed by other people who we might or might not identify necessarily as a dramaturg. The second issue, something that has already been touched upon, it is the cost the cost of involving a dramaturg in the process. So often dramaturgy is thought of as an extraneous process to performance making and so it is thought of as a luxury and an additional cost and not as necessarily integral to the process of performance making. The third and one of the most crucial issues in India right now because we just elected a dictator back to power two days back, is the complete clamp down on artistic freedom. Artists are being imprisoned. There is a constant surveillance of what we are trying to communicate through pieces of art so I think that there is an overall, I think globally, you can say that there is a shift to right-wing politics and what does it mean to create the pieces of art in such a political time. 

So I think one of the issues that I would like to flag is really the fact that through many versions of the AND, we have been trying to define who a dramaturg is or what the function or the role of a dramaturg is and I think there are ways in which a dramaturg has been referred to as a fixer, a doer, a magician, a shrink maybe and also as a deconstructor and a visionary. And I think that we should perhaps abandon any desire to define a dramaturg at this point because like most things wonderful, and very much like gender, I think a dramaturg wonderfully defies any fixed definitions and I think that all of us are well aware that every dramaturg has their fingers in every pie and so we should probably think of it as a relationship, very much what Charlene said in the morning. A relationship between performative element and the text, and by text I don't mean just the logo centric version of the text, but also oral traditions, which Mark also touched upon. Between the audience and actors, between actors, between the interiority of an actor and the performative element and also between people and structures, because there is a certain sense in which dramaturgical functions have been defined not just theatrically but also cutting across disciplines, like Charlene said, one of which is social dramaturgy. So I think especially when you talk about the human condition, it is impossible to talk about the dramaturgy of theater as distinct from social dramaturgy. So this is also something that I will be looking at. 

So dramaturgy to me is a series of relationships of intimacy based on the human condition and the need to communicate which often also ends up in miscommunication or the complete refusal to communicate in some instances. And so when you look at social dramaturgy, there is one paper that I found particularly useful which was written by Les Back on Whiteness in the dramaturgy of racism in which he talks about the dramaturgy of racism being a patterns of actions, iterations and unfolding within context that involve the national and the local and the international context. So whiteness as basically a choreography of actions and inactions which is a distinct way of thinking of whiteness as not just a way of viewing, but also as a way of doing. That's essentially what whiteness is it is not an identity that is given it is a verb, whiteness is a verb, it's not just a noun right. So I think it's useful to think of gender also in the Backlarian sense, very much links to what the dramaturgy of racism has been conceptualized as in this paper. 

And so I would like to look at this particular performance that was done in the 2018 Kochi Biennale between me,  Raju Rage, who is a London-based performance artist and a trans brother, who's also an activist and Aryakrishnan, who is a queer artist, who was one of the invited artists of the Kochi Biennale, so I know that inclusion is the buzzword and you know everyone wants diversity including at very mainstream art festivals but this time I think that the curator had taken it quite seriously to include many marginalized voices and it moved beyond the dialogue of inclusivity. So there was a lot that was integrated well within the structure rather than being tacked on as add-ons from various communities. So this is basically Maria Sweet Maria. She was a trans activist in Kerala which is the state that I am from and she was quite flamboyant. If Aristotle thought of drama as mimesis of life, Maria thought of life itself as fiction and she really revelled in the fact that gender is really something that is constructed and she revealed that fiction to the public by bringing the performative element out on the streets at a time when it was very dangerous to do that and the sense of foreboding with which we would participate in her you know celebratory performances, ended with her being brutally murdered in 2012. That the case was ongoing until last year and all the four accused have been acquitted and so we have again found no justice in that sense. And so this performance was a tribute to her, in the sense that there is this one day, Trans Day of Remembrance. I don't know if you do it in Singapore, where everyone comes together and immemoralizes the people who we've lost and I didn't want the memorializing aspect to be on a designated day and I thought that it was important to bring it out given the kind of drama queen that she was in real life, I thought that it was important to bring it out theatrically in terms of her memorializing process. So in terms of scenography, it was an exhibition hall and this is some of the work that Arya did on charcoal. And this is one of the walls that was there and on the other side you would see the books on queer history and trans history. There was a panel, a TV panel there, where there were images of Maria being projected and this is a huge skirt that was made as a tribute to her because a lot of her radical activities used to happen under the skirt and so you know we wanted to retain the erotic and radical potential of that gigantic skirt which then became an installation after the performance. 

So the device of the skirt was also used as a strategy to talk about privacy and publicness where at some point in the presentation the three performers would get under the skirt and have conversations that were not audible to the audience and especially in Kerala when you know what tropical climate is like it got really hot inside the skirt and then we had to really come out and none of the things that we had done in this play was pre-decided, so in that sense the dramaturgical text can only be legible in hindsight so that was very interesting for me to do because I mean that's the potential of theatre and performance right, that you are given the space or you can take the space to do and to really push the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. And so the three actors had very different relationships to each other. Raju and I have known each other for several years. Arya and I have known each other for several years and I was really the middle person who brought this group together and our relationship to Maria was also very different because Maria was a close friend of mine and Arya whereas for Raju she was only someone who he had seen on the screen. So there were a lot of props that we had set up the room with. There was a dressing table, makeup set, a lot of books and there was a central table where there was a lot of archival material on queer histories which we had collected individually. And so the space of the exhibition, I mean there was always cops, you don't see them in this picture, but there were always cops watching what we were doing and the audience was seated around this room and some of them didn't find place to sit inside so they were kind of peeping from outside, through the window, which I found was a very interesting position to see this from. And so in terms of the performance itself, I would say it kind of followed a stream of consciousness methodology where we just use the props and whatever that was available, and the kinds of dialogues that we wanted to have with each other. And this is really possible only when there is a common minimum that is achieved between the performers. You need to have a shared history or you need to have some kind of shared vision or a long relationship of kinship or a very close friendship and intimacy that you should already be sharing for this to really work out and that's something that we had and used to our advantage. So in terms of props, we had, as I said, you know, the text that you see written there. So while the conversation was going on between Arya and Raju, I picked up the eyeliner that Maria would use and then I wrote,  “if I didn't define myself for myself I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for myself and eaten alive”, the quote by Audre Lorde on the wall. So for a community that does not have written histories in India, especially the trans community apart from a few autobiographies written by some of our trans sisters, we really don't have that kind of history writing. So it was interesting to use the lipstick and eyeliners to write that history on those empty walls and that continued to remain as part of the installation. And so the rehearsal in that sense was really an extended conversation between the three of us on what we wanted to show, to who, in what form and for what purpose. 

So we just had a conversation on these four aspects of what we really wanted to do and when it came to viewership, Raju and I being performance artists of who there is some expectation of some grand revelation we really didn't want to be viewed in that way, in that voyeuristic way. And Arya who was the invited artist by the Kochi Biennale obviously had some anxieties about doing a good show. So Arya was constantly like we have to do something, we can't  just you know do whatever we feel like, we have to decide to do some basic things and then you can have flexibility within that. And then we of course we didn't allow for that to happen and so Arya is also gender non-conforming but he does identify as mostly queer in terms of sexuality and not gender. So very much like the self-criticality that Marx showed in his presentation, Arya had to differ most of his decisions to us and we took complete advantage of him, I have to say. So like Rancier says in The Emancipated Spectator,  you know what is the role of a spectator? What does the spectator do? In the spectacle of pathos, the spectator remains in a passive immobilized optical relationship right, where the spectator is safe and is consuming in a very passive and immobilized way, as opposed to a relationship that is critical, emotional and intellectual that seeks from the audience a lot more than being just a person who views which seek an active, critical engagement, which allows the person to learn from as opposed to being seduced by the images that the audience sees. So the cause-and-effect relationship of the performance is broken. We don't want to spread awareness about violence against trans people, we don't want to show ourselves in a certain way but and it's really significant because one of the audience members asked me after the performance was over was that performance about the third gender you know that's what they call us these days in India after a very problematic Supreme Court judgement. And I said that was my only response I just shrugged it can be whatever you want to want it to be because we didn't say I was going to be about a specific thing. So gender as a fiction that is believed by cis men and women that's really what we wanted to kind of deconstruct and we didn't have any set script to deconstruct that. So in terms of an act of remembering, what would an act of remembering look like when who you are remembering is not an ‘I’ but a collective ‘we’? 

You know this performance was not just about Maria but about a community. And community in the way that Benedict Anderson has famously said is always imagined and not a given, right? So I think that it's also useful to think of Hannah Arendt’s conception of citizenship, collective citizenship, where she talks about the participatory aspect of how citizenship gets constructed and how the we gets constituted and constructed within that. So in terms of remembering and belonging, she also talks about how the Greeks valued poetry and history because those were the forms with which you would memorialize the glorious and not so inglorious deeds from the past. And I think that it's important that theatre also functions within that realm because like Sheldon Wolin says, “The audience is a metaphor for the political community, whose nature it is to be a community of remembrance”, and so for especially for people whose acts of memorializing is not inscribed as large phallic symbols as war monuments or you know as state-funded symbols, how do you create these spaces for memoralizing that has a life of its own and a life beyond the duration of the performance ,right? It's only in memory that we can create that and I think the audience has an important part to function within that. 

And in terms of the Indian performative aspect of grieving, there are a lot of local traditions steeped in of course the caste system. The Oppidi which is performed in Tamil Nadu and also by Tamils in the northeast of Sri Lanka, is one such grieving tradition where the only, the lowered casts people, lowered as a verb not as a noun lowered cast people perform a kind of grieving that is loud and in terms of rehearsal, they don't have any rehearsals either but they impromptu create the language of grieving by referring to kinship structures of the deceased. So they refer to what that was not necessarily who that person was but who that person was to others, right? And so this was a kind of performative grieving that didn't rely on outsourcing the grieving process to lowered cast people within the caste structure but took that on as a kind of kinship ritual for people who really function on chosen families rather than are given. So how do we really grieve in a world in which even mourning is virtual and viral? You know that was a question that we had because within the Indian context especially with student suicides, Rohith Vemula, a young bright man who committed suicide in Hyderabad, has really got caught the imagination of a lot of people because of a kind of letter he wrote, in which he didn't really talk specifically about caste but in a very beautiful way, he spoke about all the exclusions that he faced which ended in his death. And it's important for us to find ways of grieving you know in a world where grieving is virtual and you know tweetable or you know something that you can put on virtual display in that sense. 

So the Oppidi as a performance tradition is also used in different contexts and I think this is the only context in which it moves out of the caste context which is when trans people protest. so we had a bill a trans rights bill which ostensibly was for our rights but was actually designed to oppress us and which had quite draconian measures including the criminalization of begging and there was this particular protest where we had trans women from all over India converge in Delhi which is the seat of power and the bill was burnt and the trans women did a performance ritual on the streets during the protest which was very similar to the Oppidi, which is the removing of, the thrashing of the hair and the loud wailing and the kind of stream-of-consciousness words that you say in in terms of how the trans bill is going to affect your lives, right? So this is one of the ways in which we found that context being completely taken out of the caste system in terms of the performative element and being performed on the streets in terms of protest against the state. 

So how do we individuate a person from the endless logs of living and dying, was one of the central questions that we had to deal with. And if you have read The Gift of Death by Derrida, he talks about how death is the only moment where you are immortal. I know it's counterintuitive to think that but the irreproducibility of death and the moment of death really individuates you from the rest of society. And he says that it is the only experience that nobody else can undergo or confront in my place, right? So in that sense it is the unique individuality that death affords to the person that allows him to engage in a reflexive mourning and what does a reflexive mourning look like? It addresses the other within the self rather than talking about the person who is deceased, right? so in various texts of mourning, Derrida assumes the rhetorical stance of the survivor bearing witness and who acknowledges the impossibility of ever talking to the person who's deceased right now. So instead of speaking for or to the deceased, he speaks to the internalized other within himself and he thinks that that is the only ethical way of grieving for someone who you have lost. So it becomes simultaneously a personal recollection, a private introspection and a public performance of witnessing and scholarship. And that's really the conceptual framework in which I thought about this piece and of course there is a duty, a burden and a labor of love involved in grieving for someone and if you look at some of the images of this performance, you can see that Arya is inside the shroud. He jumps out of the window and goes around the ground, also as a strategy to collect more people but already people knew that queer people performing so I don't think we needed to collect more people and we had what we called a collective act of self-care where we had a lot of props like fruits and lotions which we used to really take care of ourselves and each other rather than performing to the audience what they wanted to see. So we had this was one way of kind of healing trying to heal communal wounds right, it's not individual wounds that we hold but communal wounds. And so self-care as a practice what does it say? How does the internalized other get translated in this performance text, right? And a lot of the images that they expected to see, they were frustrated by what we kind of did because how often do you see a man who looks longingly or desirably at a phallus, right, in Indian society. So there was a lot of ways in which there was a discomfort in the room. There was ways in which like… so for instance in most of my earlier performance pieces we have really played to the crowd, right, so we came from an activist tradition. So I have been a child actor since I was 14 but then I moved into performance theory and art history and film theory and I was trained in that and then I got sick of you know writing and talking and then I went back to doing. So I think it gives me a good perspective to look at the ways in which we could be critiqued and we could be like viewed and I think that as performers we have to be our worst critics. We can't wait for another person to do that job right and that's the only way that you're going to improve your own art. So in terms of the kind of performances that I've done before, there used to be some kind of revelation within the piece where I'm viewed in a certain way as a cis man up until that point and when there's this reveal and then there's this trans narrative that comes out. So that's something that I completely shy away from right now because I don't think that's useful because it feeds into the same kind of voyeurism that the audience is expecting. So the act of taking off my shirt or lying down on this bed, it was really influenced by the fact that it was just too hot under the skirt. So that was the only reason why I took off my shirt and changed my costume and then there's Arya who was performing an act of care while I'm lying there where he puts lotion on me and he's rubbing in and the audience is really uncomfortable throughout this because they're waiting for something sensational to happen and you know. And I think it really worked for the audience for the critical audience because we got a lot of good reviews because it frustrated their expectations but also it was the first time that they had seen queer people taking care of each other. You always hear stories of violence, you hear stories of how they are constantly victims but it was the most intimate and soft kind of display of affection that they have seen between queer people onstage or offstage right, and the kind of mystification of our identities I thought was empowering you know in a very strange way. And I think that we have to hold on to the opacity of our marginalised positions rather than the hyper visibility it constantly wanting to expose ourselves and our narratives. 

And if the gift of death is the individuation of the self, then the work of mourning consists of reading the texts or the work of the dead. And this is what Derrida puts down as the most ethical way of mourning, where you re-read or you will speak to the work of the dead rather than the person who's deceased. And he also says that we can get over our mourning of a person only by getting over ourselves and our own mourning, right. So it cannot be a cannibalistic process where your narcissistically thinking of your own loss but you have to go beyond yourself at that moment and that's really when the process of grieving can become liberatally if that's even possible. Antonio Gramsci talks about humanity as a point of arrival or departure, right, and I think it is useful to think of humanity as a point of arrival because it allows for the possibility of becoming human outside the realms of or, the expectations of 21st century liberalism of what it means to be human, right, it's a place to be imagined, a condition to be imagined human is not a given. It's a condition that we have to constantly work towards and imagine. I think that it's important to acknowledge that we have reached a time where except for the white supremacist and the caste supremacist and the Trumps and the Modis of the world, I think it would be safe to say, that it would be safe to question, who really wants to be white or black or man or woman when there is the possibility of being human. And I think that politically, artistically and creatively, that's the kind of dramaturgy that we should be working on, the dramaturgy of humanism.

Thank you.

[Applause]

RL: Thank you I have to say, for a 10:00 a.m. panel, this was really quite light and entertaining. So, education, ethics ,death, you know just yeah everyday breakfast. Right. So I'd like to finish today's first panel by opening the questions to the floor with anybody wanting to maybe just respond to any of the panellists, what they've said, iit's quite a bit. If you need a bit of a refresher, Janice spoke about developing a new major and was asked by people why would you do that because these people aren't gonna get a job. A nd then she talks about how problems and of actually training or educating or putting in syllabus into dramaturgy. Again, to summarize Marks presentation is mostly about ethics -  the role of the dramaturg ethically in intervening, in mediating and again to bring together people - what right has he got? Or as what Gee said, you know, whose dramaturgy is it. And of course you've just heard G. So yes I would ask you because we are documenting this on video and audio, if you have a question there is a mic that is floating about. Just please raise your hands and the mic will be brought to you and please speak through, it so that we can capture the audio clearly. 

LHN: Hi there, thank you so much for that three amazing presentations. Just a little bit of history, back in 2017 or 18 where we did a small satellite meeting in Adelaide and the theme for that particular meeting was dramaturgy of the social and the cultural and we dealt a lot with situating dramaturgy and the dramaturg in social, cultural, social, political context in relation to the works they were doing. One thing that strikes me from hearing all three of you again and just hacking back to that particular meeting was I kept thinking all three seemed to be negotiating a lot of social relationships actually, within the projects you were doing, within the community the artistic community you were dealing with, could the three of you perhaps say a little bit about this negotiating and navigating social relationships within your role as dramaturgs. Thank you.

JP: Maybe I speak first. What I'm going to say maybe in response to what Robin and what How Ngean just said. By introducing dramaturgy as the new major, deep down it's not only a subject that we are going to teach but ok I only speak for myself - is to bring back humanity into our education system. Because it's like a cultural, no an international trend that humanity subjects is being cut funding for like literature, cultural studies, you know all that kind of subject or even art, the funding is cutting down tremendously but if we are not going to include humanities into our curriculum, into our education like as I said at the beginning like when I look at our students like what kind of an artist or a person are they going to be after graduation? So that's one of the primary, like deep down, which why we introducing dramaturgy because as How Ngean just said as a dramaturg, we have to negotiate constantly in terms of social-political situation in terms of human condition, personal relationships and cultural and historical background, as well. And when I'm looking at the three speakers, I just realized that all three of us are babies of the British colony. I just realized that, so what a coincidence and how interesting it is, you know for the three of us to reflect you know, transcending in all our presentations that like you know how we negotiate in terms of social-political situation and also our homes are undergoing tremendous change politically, like you know, you, I believe all of you know a little bit about like each situation and I just can't imagine without these dramaturgical thinking, I'm talking about dramaturgical thinking not a job of being a dramaturg, how is it going to be in terms of our humanity, in terms of like our artistry in the future, so. 

GIS: I think in the beginning of the presentation I had covered some of these. In which I said that every dramaturg is essentially a shrink. So whether you admit it or not you are dealing with social relationships and you are sociologically dramaturging but I think that as Janice saidm there is a way in which the humanities is intrinsically linked to theatre. I mean if quantum physics can be used in theatre, then you know there's the possibilities are endless. And I think that there is a way in which the humanities pushes us to think of the stage collapsing, the distinction between what is fiction and what is real collapsing, and I think it's useful to really think about that through process. I don't think that social dramaturgy and theatrical dramaturgy are distinct or mutually exclusive. I think they're very intrinsically connected and I think we are all doing it whether we summon it into existence by calling it social dramaturgy or not. 

MP: For me, I think, we've often thought about or I feel like I was taught theater as being potentially kind of neutral, that we're really working from a black space or a kind of you know a place that sits outside of society but more and more I feel like we're really negotiating lived experience and talking about how lived experience informs the roles we can play, the stories we can tell, the work we can make and how we engage. And I think similarly with dramaturgy, I sort of was taught that it's sort of needed to be neutral or needed to be very like yeah needed to be neutral and kind of apolitical but actually it's not neutral and I am absolutely bringing my lived experience to it which I of course I then have to kind of critically reflect on and deconstruct but it's not there and to pretend it's not there is a kind of fallacy. So I think more and more we're all just having to kind of locate ourselves within the making of the work, like locate ourselves politically and negotiate those things and  in some ways the venture towards the black box or the kind of neutral space is an attempt to find some neutrality to renegotiate the dramaturgy of the world outside and see if we can create a radical space in here in which we can see things differently if only for a moment.

RL: Thank you very much for the responses. So, yes, please. Just hang on for the mic. Thank you 

A: Thank you. Thanks for the morning. I guess my question was in response specifically to Mark was saying but I think it's something that you can all generally respond to. My question was about how and when you decide that something is ready. Because I think to me, there's a suggestion of you know a wider audience and to be read in a way and I come from a place of improvising performances and there's a sense of - okay so we are inviting an audience to see things where nobody knows but in this case you know so I'm curious about how you decide it's done. S

RL: So, Mark? 

MP: Sorry just to clarify the question is that about like the moment where something goes from development into production or that what do you mean by the moment that's ready or maybe that is the question.

A: Because some I mean I see it as managing expectations, maybe where you say something is a work in progress, or something is like finished you know. So I'm just curious about when you decide that it's done! It’s a show now, it's almost a show. 

MP: I mean like in Malthouse Theater for example, we're generally developing a project over the course of about two years and there's a moment where we put something into productions so what we have to publish a brochure of 12 shows. So it's kind of like okay well that's got to be a moment where we know what the work is and we have a kind of confidence that it’s found its core, that it's found its right basis and that over the course of a rehearsal period it can grow into being a show. So it can be a kind of guessing game like really yeah. You're sort of balancing a range of factors around the experience of the artists or the clarity of the project or you know our ability to kind of, our capacity as a company to kind of go all hands on deck and let's get this show together. So there's a there's always a risk involved, I suppose, in terms of deciding something is ready. For the projects that I showed there, which were a mix of like production and then some things in development, is really about the time that they've been with the company. So they were really in order of like the furthest away project to the project like the Repatriation project I talked about which is in development at the moment. So yeah. They're not sort of in stasis, they're very much all those projects are growing or already produced yeah. Someone talked about the miracle like this sort of strangeness of theater that we say you know in twelve months on the 16th of June 2020 we will open this show and no other industry like if you talk to someone in construction they'll go oh yeah March but maybe June but you know maybe August. So this is it's quite fascinating to me that we say exactly at 8 o'clock we will open the doors and that show will be perfect. 

RL: Gee? 

GIS: I don't think the dramaturgical process is like maybe editing a book where once you edit and you publish and it's done. I mean it's very clear to see I mean look at the dramaturgs around in this room right, if you're asking when other dramaturg is done, we are never done. So I think every work is a work in progress and apart from the institutionalized ways in which you release a work of art, I think there is tremendous potential for change even after you have staged something especially, after you've staged something, I would say. Because that's when you get critical feedback and you can feel the pulse of how it is being received if that is important to you. So I think that every work is a work in progress and dramaturgs are never done. 

RL: Janice?

JP: I always think about like the during the dramaturgical process, I always think about affect instead of effect so like I am not creating a piece of work that’s like an extravaganza. But I'm looking forward to the affect of the audience like after show basically. And so, there are part of the performance that I'll leave it to the audience like - okay this is how I'm presenting to you and then the rest of it will be like give it to the audience, in the hope that there will be an affect in the like after they leave the theatre. So that optimum point sometimes it depends on the deadline, of course, and sometimes it also depends on the creative team as well. Like when the whole team like when I'm observing and engaging in the process and then I realized that okay the whole team has reached a certain optimum point, already as a team I mean. It is kind of abstract to say it this way. It is like a long-term process by you know working together, collectively, and then and then up until that point and okay as a team I think we should leave it to the audience and move forward. I think that’s what I am going to say. 

MP: I just want to say that I think it's one of the great challenges of working in an institution where we have lots of works in different phases of development and they're very much kind of phases and you've got a limited set of resources that you're trying to put to different projects and kind of that one needs that and that one needs this and this one's not ready and that one is and it's an often feel like some projects have a lifecycle, you know, like they are organic things they're not as you say they're not published piece of text that we can just edit you know a year later as much as a day later. So you're sort of trying to navigate that and navigate that spark within a creative team or within the idea of a project and sometimes, will take too long to get up butts into gear and program something and it'll lose the spark and the artist is ready to move on to the next thing or it will lose its kind of cultural currency or whatever that is but and we really rely on the artists to know that and to manage the spark like we could, you know set up the conditions and support things but ultimately it's yeah I keep going back to the artist’s sense of the vitality of a project that we're really relying on, relying on their sense of whether it's alive or not. 

RL: Janet.

J: Just taking off from there. If we leave the project behind, do you feel you have a larger transformative agenda while being a dramaturg in process -  that means you know you’re a long-term dramaturg right? So I'm just curious whether it's -  what is it driven by if there is and what is the larger effect that you're looking at?

JP: Very, very interesting question I like my immediate response in my head is yes but then I  started to think why yes because like most of the projects that I was engaged in it like social-political related and why I'm doing it or why you know, those choreographers or directors want me to be involved in the project, might also be like for this reason. And so when we are doing a project. I call them a project now because it's not only like a performance kind of thing but a project that's going to create like a ripple effect continuously, because of the thematic situation or the notion that we're going to take in too. So yeah that's partly related to the subject or the theme of the productions or the projects that I’m involved in. 

GIS: I think in terms of transformation, definitely, I think that there is a transformation that happens simply because every creative work that you put out there is an opportunity for learning, whether it's positive learning experience or salty one, you know you still learn from that. So I think there is a transformation that the entire team goes through in the way that they think about creative work. But I think personally for me, as also an activist who thinks I think a bit too much about cause and effect like I do something I speak at a college and I want my audience to be transformed and think about gender in a different way and you know as activists we are trained to be very functional. Like you do something it has to have that effect or you hope that it has that effect. And so for me the creative space is the space where I escape from that you know it is the space that allows you to be whoever you want to be where you can share your skin like a snake maybe when you don't have the privilege of shedding your skin and you can you know inhabit a magical space where you can be emotional and you can be absurd and you don't need to have a purpose or you don't need to think about a cause-effect relationship necessarily and I think that I want to hold on to the magical space that theatre gives people like me and because there's too much of the cause-and-effect and the political aspect of our work in the activist circles. Not to say that what we are doing even when we are doing nonsensical absurd actions is not political but it's not political in the way that we expect some kind of transformation in that sense. So I think that's empowering for me.

MP: I guess for me you know theatre is a niche art form. It's an ancient art form but it's a niche art form. It doesn't reach the kind of breath and you know that the KPIs and the sort of like impact that you're talking about but there's real power in that as well as a potentially radical space in which we can imagine new ways of being together and doing together. And I guess what that space is I'm really led by the artist that I'm working with and to just sort of to imagine what that is and what it'll take to get there. But for me there's a real depth of engagement that goes on when you're making theatre, that you actually get to deeply listen at and actually negotiate each other in real time and real space and use the kind of magical circle of the black box or the theater to try and envision new ways of being. So yeah radical social change. I guess that's the mission It's something simple.

RL: We have time for about one or two more questions floor. Charlene?

C: Thank you very much. I'm very curious as well as a little bit troubled by this question of -  whose story is it? And in all your presentations there is both the notion of the story as a container in which other stories then get refracted, reflected and kind of prismatically change in a way but there's also a sense, correct me  if I'm wrong, that there's a responsibility to a particular kind of storytelling, in asking the question whose story is it and in negotiating the power relationships that can be very problematic or can be very nurturing or you know a range of things in between as well. So if you could just say a little bit more about this question of  - whose story is it and how the dramaturgical processes that you take on attend to this question, not necessarily fix it but you know, attend to it. 

MP: Yeah it's a pretty defining question. And I think it's not a not always a question that has to be approached with reverence but needs to be a question that's asked because I think we have a great history of not asking that question and co-opting other people's stories into our own story or using them to kind of leverage or to imagine or to play. But there's a lot of problems that come with that. So for me it is a kind of foundational question even if you take a more kind of satirical approach or if you really playfully but you sort of have to negotiate that and for me and particularly talking from an Australian context obviously, that you do have to consider the sort of level of lived experience of people in the room with the things that you're talking about and when do stories become a kind of play thing or when do they reinforce the prejudices that you think you're trying to challenge and yeah I think our theatre in particular has a strong history of not doing that, of actually continuing to marginalize people while kind of fetishizing their stories so yeah the question of whose story is it and then the power structures that kind of flow out of that was what was power playing out in this room. Yeah they're pretty fundamental to me.

GIS: I think I kind of understand where the hesitation is coming from because if we say my response to the previous question was also that if we say that there is only one particular person who can tell a particular story and that person has to have some embodied experience, which tells that story, then where is the space that theatre affords to any of us right? And I think that in an ideal world, the choice of being whoever you want to be on that stage should be left completely open. You know,  theaters in the post-colonial sense would have arrived at that moment right? Unfortunately, I think that we live in a time when there is a particular way in which, especially Asian cultures, you know the kind of ethnography that has been done of our cultures, the kind of folk traditions that have been exhibited as exotic, there is a particular moment right now politically where auto-ethnography in terms of a self-telling, it has become very important and political. And I think that rather than closing the doors of the possibility, theatre is actually opening the doors because people whose stories were never heard or who never had the opportunity to be a centre stage or coming centre stage. And I think there are many doors that are being opened rather than shut at least that's the way I think about it. And as Adichie says there is the danger of the single story right and the single story has always been seen through a particular lens which is the white colonialist, cisgender, male lens, and so it is really a challenge to that and I think that where the danger of auto-ethnography is when the importance of who is telling the story overcomes all other concerns, like the quality, however you want to define quality or the amount of rehearsal that you put into it. You cannot be complacent because you are doing auto-ethnography, I think that is the danger of auto- ethnography because the audience also expects a lower standard from auto-ethnographic narratives. You know they are marginalized people. Not having access to resources is different from not putting in the work so I think that there is the duty of putting in the work even if you are telling from a place of experience and I think it's important to not forget also that the history of performances has the history of blackface, has the history of from Shakespearean theatre to Indian theatre, has the history of cis-men playing feminine roles because women were not allowed in theatre, has the history of a Dalit woman like PK Rosy who was the first Malayalam actor who was beaten and chased out of her village for playing the role of an upper caste woman. So these are the histories that the performance traditions or the histories of our countries have and it's important to push the boundaries in whatever ways possible at this political moment and I think the push has come very hard and I think that it is a very exciting moment to be part of these spaces and I think it would be really good if those of us who have access, can open up some ways in which the people who are telling their own stories can hone their skills more. I think that kind of intervention would really help make this an artistically and creatively engaged process rather than just maybe a political one. I think that's where your hesitation came from if I'm not mistaken.

JP: Usually I start to create to work with just the subject that I'm interested in or like the director or the choreographer is interested in. And a tremendous time is spent on research and interviews tremendous. Like now I'm working on a new project that I'm going to direct myself and then come back to the question that- how can dramaturg a dramaturg? So I decided to engage a dramaturg to work with me and so that I can like kind of mentor him and to grow during the process. And the first thing that we work together as a group is that to compile like to formulate an archive of research materials and then from those research materials, the whole group, the whole creative team collectively we decide on which aspect like the pressing issue that this show is going to work on. So that's basically my process. 

MP: I guess for me the question of whose story is it, is not about self-censorship. It's actually a challenge. It's an invitation to do better work. It's a gateway to making better work and seeing  more radical perspectives. It's actually a challenge to take responsibility that what for me might be fantasy or something that I've read about or googled, is for someone else it's real life and I think we should all be aware and people have lived experience in the room and be able to kind of take that on board that if we're gonna tell someone else's story, we'd better do it right and we better keep doing that work. It's not something you can just acquit yourself of so for me it's an exciting creative challenge rather than a piece of censorship.

RL: So we are running out of time. So I'm just going to sum up with a couple of observations as the moderator which is think that first of all I think this particular panel does at its best represent at the kind of diversity and different multiple perspective that dramaturgy or being a dramaturg should embrace. And I think what Mark and what draws a line across all three panelists is that they're very reflective. They always step back and asks why am I doing this? Am I right in doing this? What is the ethics? The ability to reflect. So as an educator, I'm really don't envy how Janice is going to put up an assessment/ assignment to assess how dramaturgs will be reflective. That’s going to be very difficult even though that's one of the biggest and most valued qualities that a dramaturg brings to the process, the ability to reflect. So, I would like to leave everyone here with a few thoughts about dramaturgs and dramaturgy. I'm going to read off.

A dramaturg questions. A drama is an in-house critic that is friendly to the production. Dramaturgy is generous honesty, rigorous curiosity and passion for thoughtful theatre and theatre-making. Shane Breaux who is the resident dramaturg from the New York Shakespeare Exchange says that, “Dramaturgs are a special breed of artists who must handle multiple tasks at once. We are tech analyzers, we are researchers, we are objective observers, we are expert question askers, we are a resource for the director and playwright and actors and designers, we are creative diplomats who liaise with all those involved. Dramaturgs serve as the memory of the process of theater making -  whatever that process may be. Finally the dramaturg is a critical thinker and provides a literary cultural and artistic insight before, during and sometimes, after the creation of a piece. Sometimes the role of the dramaturg involves serving as a form of translator, simply buffer between two artistic egos that of the playwright and that of the director. And like many translators sometimes dramaturgs are treated with suspicion from both sides”. So with that, I thank you for sharing your morning with us. Please help me thank our fantastic panellists. 

 [Music]

We begin again at 2:00 p.m. with a fantastic keynote address we'll see you there  at 2. Thank you very much.