Week 12 - Dramaturgies by Eddie Ladd

This week the question was asked, how is dramaturgy working?

We watched back the ten minute improvisation that we had set ourselves. The score was to bring objects into the empty space, which had a grey dance floor, white walls and grey curtains. We were to do it one at a time, straight away one after the other, but there seemed to be an overlap as it went on. When we had finished, the time set by the length of three sound clips, the floor was filled with cables, a rope, a chair or a few chairs, two fans, a coat on one of them, two potted plants from the kitchen in the building and more.

After watching, I said, at too high a speed and volume, to the others that we looked GLUM. We looked like three unhappy, self-possessed women listlessly arranging things, women who have TOO MUCH stuff and money to waste and that people who do not have enough look after their stuff and that, maybe, was the point of the activity, except that this is art world in which everything is a choice about meaning, maybe there is and maybe not, we just ask the questions, there are no answers. It’s three women working with special art rules, going about an ARCANE procedure, from which the audience is kept at a distance because they will be forever guessing how to watch what we’re doing - is this about life? Is it special art world? Maybe it is, because we’re in a special art place.

I was enraged. My two colleagues had grace and patience. We have known each other for at least a decade, are friends, and will never fall out. I would never have said this otherwise. Apart from some spectaculars, I mostly yell in my head. Thank goodness for the arts. We tried it again, taking more care with the objects, and looking more cheerful. I thought it was better.