I am running the Siegel Center. It's a nice sunny day here in Manhattan today, and we are still in the middle of a reality that seems so much stranger than fiction. The corona numbers are up. Humult in the White House was rejecting of election results and meetings this morning and in the White House that so many of us think they're unconstitutional and we're real jeopardy to democracy. But in this atrial time we do need to talk about also what we think is essential, what's important, even so society tells us theater is not essential. We believe it is, art is important, it's significant and the voices of the artists are what we perhaps have to listen to even closer now than ever. We at the Siegel Center always thought that next to the directors or the playwrights also the voices of the dramaturgs, the producers, the curators are of equal importance. It's a collective work in theater. We are understanding that more and more like a sports team there might be the ones who do the goals and our cap keep the penalty kicks, but it's a team effort and in this idea of the expanded understanding of theater, of dramaturgy, we have with us here a great thinker and also worker in the field and the vineyards. Moff Theater is my colleague, Professor Peter Ackersala, one of the leading thinkers in theater and also a great, great teacher. Here at the Siegel Talk since March we talked to theater artists and to capture the moment, archive the moment of this time of corona, what is changing, what perhaps already has changed and after a little break in September we went back to think about themes like Theta of the Real, which we had a series with Carol Martin where we will have a second week and now this is the focus on dramaturgy. We had the inspiring Sebastian Kaiser from the folk screener Berlin who talked about to us what it meant to have that great theater after the opening of the wall, the work of Frank Kastor, what it meant to the city, how much it was part of a reinvention of the city that had focused energy and attention and also understood that next to place that also part of a transformation are activities, discussions, thoughts, people occupying a theater with their feet around the clock and how much that has changed and also represented something new after also an event that is as significant as the shutdown here, it was the opening of the wall. In a way we see ourselves in the work of the great Svetlana Alexievich who created these great body of work of interviews, she said perhaps it's not a moment also to create fiction or a theory, she recorded testimonies of witnesses and participants in the history and in great great work at the end of the Red Yeelman, the Red Man, the Red Person and the Holocaust diaries and the same I think we are doing here, we really are creating an archive, a monument to the courage but also the suffering and the thoughts the field is going through. Yesterday we have Anne Catanio and Sidney Mahon who are talking about the time in the 80s when dramaturgy took hold for the first time in the Americas when it became a significant part of it, it's still not as much in the center as it is in Europe but it was the beginning of the change and Anne who is still at the Lincoln Center Theatre and Sidney who was the Vice-Theor, Horizon Theatre in New Brunswick, you really made a tremendous pioneering contribution, the founders, co-founders of Lambda, the Association of Dramaturgs, I'm sure some are listening today and so today in that journey, this multi-faceted journey of dramaturgy, we are now coming to Peter Akasol who represents an international, European, Asian way of thinking. Let me tell you a few words about him, he is a teacher or professor we say but he is a teacher of the PhD program in Theatre and Performance at the Guadi Center CUNY, the City University of New York where this dramaturgy also is in the center of his teachings and he's a fellow at the University of Melbourne, his publications include Machine-Made Silence, there's Christoph van Baal in 2020, Justice Year, The Rutledge Companion to Theatre and Politics with Helena Graham, New Media Dramaturgy, which he co-authored with Helena Graham again and at Shear and a Performativity and Events in the 60s. Japan also work is most known for as an Asian theater specialist, Japanese theater specialist and a very deep insight into dramaturgy and he has worked a lot. He was also running a company, a co-founder of a highly respected Australian company, the name was Not Yet, It's Difficult and so he was a practitioner for I think almost a decade and also he worked as a dramaturge for pieces that appeared at La Mama and in the Riga Biennial pieces. So Peter, welcome and I hope you're forgiving my long introduction. We always say it's about listening and then I go on and on but I think it is important to have some context. Where are you at the moment? Thanks Frank. I'm in New York in my apartment where I've been since March. Pretty much just being located in a very tiny part of the city and navigating that part of the city every day with my walks and in my work. So you know it's a kind of thing, a dramaturgy of smallness I guess you could say. But as you said it's a nice day here so it's a very nice time of the year in New York.  How does it feel to be in a small enclosed space? Well in some ways I guess it's a relief not to be traveling so much and because we're always aware of the impact on the environment of that but also on our time and on our work because we have to keep up our teaching and our research and so in some ways it's once one stops one sort of sees a different sense of space and time which I think is is good to experience again. But I must say also it's been challenging to run a program and work with people in classrooms and on their projects at this time because it's not just my work that stopped it's a lot of theater work that stopped and it's a lot of the research that students are doing in their PhDs that stopped and so we're you know we're I think after a long time now we're pretty much in a moment of waiting for you know it's a it's a perverse time because we have probably some of the highest rates of infection in the country now of any time during the pandemic and yet at the same time it feels like people are waiting for the vaccines to arrive and for some sense of there being a time after the end of the pandemic so time stretched I guess in that way so we yeah it's it's it's interesting time to contemplate that kind of that kind of thinking perhaps. Yeah yeah well it's it's it's quite something and we all deal differently with it we read we listen people dance in their apartments every evening some people write annual who was here yesterday she's working on a class book you decided to use this time next to your ongoing project on dramaturgy tell us why and what is the book about? Well you know essentially we we have a long summer break where normally we would be going to conferences or or doing you know I do a lot of international research projects and artistic projects and they were all put on hold and for a long time now I've been wanting to work on a book on dramaturgy that I think you know I was thinking a lot about the way in which performance contemporary performance had really changed its relationship to text that was dealing with new political issues and new trends within society and culture and thinking about the way in which performance itself had adapted and responded to you know not so much representing these kind of activities in a in a didactic or Brechtian sense but but as you said in your introduction you know a moment where these things are being recorded and documented so there is an extension here from the the topic of last week and the kind of so-called theater of the real or documentary theater in that I was thinking a lot about that trend in performance after post-traumatic theater where playwrights are sometimes dealing with a sense of crisis in the form they're no longer trusting the words that they use they're no longer trusting the impact of poetry or of no longer trusting the the idea of a kind of classical notion of representation and moving into a more interdisciplinary and hybrid performance framework that often includes moments of the play form transforming into something else so something that might include some kind of visual arts references so moving from theater into performance with an installation component or mixing the performance of of a drama with with some of our now understanding of how dance is contributed to the work and then parallel to this is the is the great rise of interest in performance in visual arts context so I was thinking about how do we try and theorize that and try and account for that in a book form and I began with the idea of of the theater of image in some respects the way in which playwrights were typically not and now here I'm talking about you know certain trend in theater I'm not necessarily talking about that continuing project of mainstream theater where essentially theater hasn't changed for a long time and I'm not particularly concerned about that I'm not really concerned in the book about whether that kind of theater should change or not that's not my argument my argument is about the way in which this contemporary performance world is developing new vocabularies of performance that are taking us to a different understanding of what performance is and what it does and how it communicates its its meanings to audiences so a couple of years ago I read a short text for the hundredth issue of the journal performance research and where I was asked to write a short text on dramaturgy that was a project that the the editor of performance research Richard Goff commissioned 99 essays each on each on a single word or keyword of each of the 99 previous themes of those issues of the journal so anybody who knows performance research knows that it has it's a theme-based journal that has a key word usually after the word on so on politics or on climate or on dramaturgy and I was given the task to write an essay on dramaturgy and I started to think about the way in which you know after but all brec dramaturgy was really a practice of making things visible was making things that in the political world in the social world in the cultural world visible in a way that was opening it up to some kind of inquiry from an audience and then mapping on to that the my interest in visuality and media and non-text-based performance so this concept of making visible is both a I guess an older more established understanding of what dramaturgy does in the theater that is you know an understanding of of a brektion dramaturgy with a more contemporary setting for dramaturgy which is thinking about the challenge of thinking about the dramaturgy of sound or vision or music or presence or smoke or atmosphere very much a so-called new dramaturgy approach and so I read that as a short text and then when I was over the summer this year I was thinking that I should use this time productively and and try and put down these thoughts for a book and so I wrote a book proposal and I came back to the essay the dramaturgy to make visible and put it together with my interest in the presentation of themes political themes cultural themes in contemporary theater and so the book is proposals dramaturgy to make visible remaking politics in contemporary performance so and it's you know I'm started writing this book now and I'm hoping to write the book over the next 12 months so I'm really making a very concerted effort to start a writing practice that I'll try and do every day at the beginning of the day before I do my other work so yeah I guess one of the interesting things for me is that this this this is a way in which I can reflect on some of the disparate parts of my work both as a dramaturge and as a as an academic I've worked in both fields for a very long time now and as you mentioned I you know I come from Australia I was a performance maker in Australia with NYID and with other companies and working as a dramaturge with artists as a freelance dramaturge always in a field of what I would call performance dramaturgy rather than working with playwrights that's an expertise that people like Ann Katten you know you'll speak yesterday have or other text-based dramaturges I guess but I grew up in the performance dramaturgy tradition and I wanted to write about that not only in terms of my connections to Australian work but also you know a lot of our work has been in Asia again combining my academic expertise on Japanese theatre I did a PhD in the Department of Japanese Studies wrote about the 60s in Japan and its relationship to theatre and have worked on contemporary performance as a researcher ever since and done a lot of projects in the region too so I was wanting to bring that kind of understanding of dramaturgy that is perhaps not this is centrally focused on the US or the UK or the European contexts and thinking about how dramaturgy is is working in the world across the world in different locations yeah I feel it's about that on the dramaturgy of dramaturgy yeah you are right and your research is about the construction of the presentation of work the reception of work and and you have that term of the transformation in the 60s so let me tell us about that idea well to me the the important thing about dramaturgy and the reason why I think it is you know why why I work in that field and and why I think it's important to theatre is that it really makes us focus on the question of what happens when we translate an idea into practice so there's a transformation from a kind of theoretical cultural political world into some kind of artistic representation artistic production or maybe even some presentation and so how do we take ideas that are you know hugely important ideas that address really some of the enduring and important problems of our time that are usually discussed in in other fields in science or in the humanities and yet you know we now have an understanding that artistic practice is also an important way of addressing these ideas and dramaturgy for me is a way of thinking about that transformational process from the kind of research that one does from the kind of political perspectives or cultural perspectives and voices that we want to you know the things that we want to say in in in and through our artistic practice but you know dramaturgy charts the process of getting from A to B in a sense from the idea its conception into some embodied spatialized dramaturgical representation or presentation on the stage or in indeed or in in some public forum and the crucial thing is that dramaturgy for me in you know this reflects my training in the contemporary performance world of dramaturgy it makes that conversation visible so it doesn't hide the kind of explicit use of techniques or strategies or artistic creations to present those ideas it makes them visible as a part of the creative process so when we then go and watch our work we engage in a conversation about our response to the work and our feelings about the work but also we can see the construction of the work in a certain kind of way we can see the way we can see the artist's thinking in the way that the work is signaling to to that thinking through the visibility of the form through the visibility of the conversation about the form so naturalistic theater typically historically hides its its form and naturalizes it and pretends that the form is you know that we're simply just watching something that is happening in the world whereas I think this this other end of the spectrum makes the form itself very visible and part of the conversation of the work itself that is inherently dramaturgical so that's you know very much where I'm coming from in in relation to thinking about that question of transformation you know and if we go back to the 60s I think we're talking about a historical era that thought about these kinds of forms differently to the way we think about them now you know it's an interesting exercise to think about going into the time machine and going back and perhaps seeing some of these iconic performances from the 1960s that you know we have some record of through video or film or photography or people's diaries and so on but they you know they were very much premised on a different understanding of transformation they were very much premised on a different understanding of the politics of dramaturgy and in many cases around the world we had this moment of eruption of of a thinking about the politics of experience of a thinking about sensation as being political as a connecting almost symbolically of the kind of presence of bodies on the street in these kind of evolving protest movements that were really a kind of moment in the 60s and the kind of highly explicit presentation of bodies in the theatre and there's points of commonality between what was going on in Japan and say New York at that time but there's also quite specific differences and you could say that largely I think it's a theatre of bodies in the 60s that is being kind of explored here and by that I mean it's the body as an expressive political medium not just as a kind of aesthetic medium and you know it's a very contrasting time to now I think because you know the way that performance has evolved since that time and the way that politics have evolved in since that time have meant that we now relate to the body differently we relate to the text differently we relate to the understanding of what a radical politics might be differently because you know the times demand something new as you as you so rightly say yeah you quote Marianne from Kerkhofen as one of your main witnesses perhaps next to Brecht she's not so well known why is she central what did she tell us well so when I started work as a dramaturg in in essentially I started drama work as a dramaturg without really knowing what a dramaturg was there was no training of dramaturgs this is when we founded our company not yet it's difficult and we knew that we wanted to do something that was research-based and that was not play-based as a form but something that drew on plays as one of the texts in the kind of production of a new kind of work we knew that we wanted to work with some of our training that we'd experienced as a company through our connections to colleagues in Asia so this was a political move for us we were you know we were of a generation who decided that we didn't need to go to London or New York to learn how to be theatre artists instead we were very much committed to the idea of working in a region and and also you know as in reference to our own culture that was dramatically transforming in relation to questions of immigration and diversity so Australia is a is you know to a large not to a whole degree I mean it has a British heritage and indigenous heritage but it's it's also quite mobile in its Asian-ness I would say so but you know we didn't really know what what a dramaturg was so we kind of made it up as we went along but then I was introduced to Marianne van Kierkhoven who is a dramaturg and or was a dramaturg one of the great dramaturgs of the French or Flemish the Flemish new wave and Marianne was a pioneering figure in European new dramaturgy she was the person who coined the term new dramaturgy and a part of that was was her relationship to back to the 60s she was as she always said a 68 generation she was part of a group of artists in in Europe and also a part of philosophers and scholars who experienced I guess the possibilities of the 60s and then also the collapse of those possibilities so when people refer to 68 they're always referring to a kind of moment of crisis a moment when you know what was a possible way forward for a political movement was no longer possible and so that I think haunted that generation of not just theater artists but also philosophers and we can think of Deleuze and Guattari is 68 generation we can think of many people from field artistic fields and philosophical and political fields so it's trying to think through in a way what what was the possibility for politics now after 68 and by 68 we're talking broadly a latitude of years from 68 to 72 maybe and it includes signature events such as the the end of the Paris 68 revolution the rise of ultra leftist political organizations like the red brigade and and the beta mine and their eventual collapse the the the the ridiculous potential suicide of Mishima you know where he you know from the right wing tried to lead a military coup in Japan all of these kind of events and and of course the the end of the Vietnam War and the and the sense that what was promised was not quite realized so Marianne taking that thinking into her theater practice also became a dramaturge and she was one of the the founders of the Kai theater in Brussels which was founded in the 1980s as a theater where there were a lot of interdisciplinary practitioners so what went on to become the very famous Belgian new or Flemish new wave began in those times with a group of artists that included people like young Fabra, Marianne, those and Theresa de Kiersmacher and a little bit after that company Settler Bay and so on and so on so you have this conversation between theater and dance this theater and visual arts this conversation between theater and philosophy and theater and politics and so Marianne's idea was that this you know this is a new kind of theater it needs a new kind of dramaturgy and so in a series of texts that she published in the 1980s and she started to theorize this idea of a new kind of dramaturgy and on the one hand she always said it was a dramaturgy that was about learning to handle complexity and that was a complexity of aesthetic conditions but it was also a complexity of politics for her so you know things were no longer to be seen in in diametrically opposed terms or in terms that were simply black and white but there was a complexity and a kind of movement of politics that was in motion and in flow and the theater the performance world needed to engage with that idea much more than it had done in the past she also proposed a dramaturgy of you know she wrote a text where she said you know is there a dramaturgy what is the dramaturgy of light what is the dramaturgy of space and design what is the dramaturgy of an actor so she gave us a proposition for dramaturgy that was no longer simply concerned with story arcs or constructions of the play script or a kind of narrative practice or a storytelling practice if you want to call it that it was concerned about form and about the way in which form itself was also structural and it became a medium through which you could create a new kind of performance a medium that you could have these conversations between forms and you could start to explore the experiences of life differently and present those experiences to audiences in different ways and therefore give rise to new conversations about society culture politics and so on do you think that perhaps this is one of the changes that instead of simplifying the world that we understand it in fashion fabled for example at the ambiguity that the complexity actually is what it is all about to reflect how life what's real how life really is how what meaning really represents I well I think this is crucial and I think it's a it's her major political contribution in a way or artistic contribution as well but you know you know in a world that is being surrounded in the you know by the turn of the 21st century where politics have become banal in a certain kind of sense where media and and especially the rise of right wing politics but also left wing politics have become much more hardened in their perspectives on what is good and bad what is acceptable and not and where you have the rise of a kind of a new form of authoritarianism that we're living through you know time the response always has to be complexity the always response always has to be things and ever that simple let's let's think through the complexities of this and allow for the complexities of this let's develop artistic and and models but also thinking models ways of thinking that that enable us to think about the complexity of things and to think in a way that is much more inclusive as a result and then when you come at the other end of that you start to see a new role for theatre because if theatre has to embrace complexity well then it has to be something that engages in different forms multi forms it has to do different things theaters themselves are no longer just sites for the presentation of the latest season or the you know the latest new play by a star playwright or the presentation of the new performance with the star actor they are places for the debate and exchange of ideas and so you have you know people turning theaters into universities or theatre suddenly starts to operate in a in a much more rich and diverse and complex terrain and so I think that complexity is not should never be seen as a criticism it should be seen as a virtue. What are places or what are artists you think they represent that that idea? Well you know we we do you know we do use the shorthand contemporary performance to describe this kind of work and that's I mean in a way it's it's not helpful because contemporary performance is such a vague term that it could be possibly anything but it is a term that I think has meaning to artists in in different places around the work around the world who are drawn to again we come back to the question of what dramaturgy is who are drawn to dramaturgical strategies that make visible their understanding of theatre as a site of information, knowledge, activism, rupture and perhaps you know to use Chantelmuth's term agonism so theatre that is resisting in that way we can come back to Sebastian Kaiser's conversation you know for him I think I don't want to mean to speak on behalf of him but you know that theatre that Volkswagen that and his work is always on the side of resisting it's always on the side of critical response it's always on the side of looking at the things in a more complex way. So you can think of artists who are doing that across the globe who I think now you know we could say that playwrights are also doing this and my my argument is never with playwrights it's just that I'm talking about a different I'm talking about contemporary performance. There are you know really remarkable plays that address complex themes and ideas and issues and teach us something about the state of the world but I think what defines these practices is their openness to interdisciplinarity they're very often collaborative works they're produced out of a sense of artistic collaboration they're very often produced out of a different relationship to audience and they're very often produced with a dramaturge in the room who has a perhaps a more active role not just as a person who's a kind of show doctor but somebody who is present to curate a series of engagements with the themes and issues so that can have influence on the work. Yeah, talk about an artist like Toshiki Okada, Christopher Donk in Belgium, Ustamaya on the Shalbuna in Tantarant. Why what do they stand for in their work? Well I mean here where this is very much what I'm going to write about in the book it's in it it's obviously something that I'm interpreting and these are all great artists who I think their work speaks to what they stand for and they all make they're all very good at talking about their work too and making statements about that but so my response is an engagement with what they're doing or what I think they're doing. Okada for example I think is really interesting because a contemporary Japanese playwright and director who began working as a young artist in the late 1990s but really grew up in the 21st century and has written two or three I think of I'm biased because I'm a Japanese theatre specialist but two or three of the most important plays of the 21st century shall we say. Now his work is phenomenally interesting because first of all one of his primary orientations is Brecht. He's acknowledged that you know when he was a young man he came across the writings on Brecht. He was actually studying business or economy at university and he initially thought he might be a filmmaker but then he ended up in theatre after reading Brecht's work and also reading texts by Hirata Oizawa the very well-known playwright and director who is famous for inventing the again Daikou Goengeki or the colloquial theatre of Japan you know this the critics have dubbed this quiet theatre. Now people are probably familiar with Hirata's work because it's been produced in international forums very often most recently his work has been the famous robot plays where he's produced plays with humans and non-humans on the stage and robots performing in a very realistic kind of theatre quote unquote. Okada is the next generation on somebody who has an interest in everyday life and the experience of everyday people but his early work was very much about the subcultural people living in Japan after the end of the bubble economy so living in a time of precarity living in a time when you know living in a kind of malaise of the 21st century which and here we you know I think we have to be very careful about distinguishing the differences of people's lives around the globe but many people in so advanced post-modern economies or neoliberal economies experience a certain kind of comfort in the discomfort of it you know there's a sense that they can't move forward they can't move back but they're not they're not in you know this is precarity rather than extreme deprivation and there's something about that experience that is very it's an alien it's actually an experience of alienation but an experience that is of alienation that is very different to the way we would have thought about it in Marxist terms or in Brechtian terms where the alienation was always in relation to something else I'm alienated from my work I'm alienated from my parents I'm alienated from what you know whatever your cutter's work really sees us all alienated in all the time but the object of what we're alienated from is not so clear we're simply in a world that is kind of stuck we're in a world that is a certain kind of quiet authoritarian politics and I think he depicts these states very well his signature and and remarkable groundbreaking play was a work called Five Days in March written in 2003 in which two young hipsters from Shibuya speaking very subcultural Japanese language very hard to understand unless you were part of that milieu go to a love hotel a pay-by-the-hour hotel it's a kind of East Asian thing where there's little privacy in those cultures so young people often go to a hotel that is specifically for having sex and they go they spend five days in the love hotel in a kind of sex marathon and it's the same five days as the outbreak of the Gulf War and you know so the play draws us into a kind of set of circles you know concentric circles about disaffected youth about this kind of ambient durational sexuality that is ultimately lacking any kind of emotional intensity it's certainly the play is obsessed with naming locations and places so it's dealing with the kind of transformation of the urban world of Shibuya it's it's cool it's got a cool factor in that these are hipster young people and then it's referencing the fact that we have this concentric circle of the post-war situation of Japan where because of the American author post-war constitution Japan has foregone the right to declare war and yet has to be in this war in this coalition of the willing way back in this is the Bush era but you know they're there in the Middle East but they're not allowed to shoot anybody so the play puts together these kind of concentric circles of the personal and the national and the global and and really gives us a sense of this being not just a particular condition but a kind of a kind of endless moment of and you know he's he's a playwright and director and so there's a very pioneering use of the physicality of the actors in his technique of staging his this play and his many other plays that is disrupting the text and and changing our understanding of what it means to hear a story and the story becomes very fragmented and we have a kind of contrast between the the level of the of the of the story that's being narrated and the physicality of the bodies and you know creating these very ambient qualities of disturbance and so moving forward that question of creating ambient qualities of disturbance I find really fascinating because it's not like you know when we go into the streets and I mean if in some places you do if you're living in Hong Kong or in in Brazil or in the Philippines you know the the visibility of authoritarianism is is is is there you know repetition of history the references you know to the famous famous film and I think I mean you also talk about it and I think also what about the idea of the atmosphere right what yeah so I'm fascinated with this idea of the presence of atmosphere and performance and it's become almost a way of communicating something that you know is beyond communication so you know if we're talking about cataclysmic events they're very often beyond representation there's this question of how do we represent something as traumatic as the Fukushima disaster or you know as the but you know we're not just talking about the magnitude of large events but also small events you know what is what is what do we gain from simply just sort of translating them into a kind of narrative based story of that event and you know the question is well perhaps not much we have to create these because very often the intensity of these events is communicated not through the kind of narrative structures but through the feelingness of them through the ways in which we are aware of things that are slightly beyond our comprehension or apprehension shall we say and yet they are the kind of dark forces that are that are coming into our world the atmosphere of authoritarianism in politics the darkness of that kind of experience than what it feels like to be living in a society that is in that stage of existence alternatively the atmosphere of a kind of you know endless kind of consumption of you know the sensationalism and emptiness of that and these are things that we can uh write about or you know and speak about but in order to convey the the the sensibility of that what it how it feels in the body well then I think we're seeing artists use these techniques of atmospheric production much more than than in the past you know I'm thinking of the way in which Okada's work transforms literally out of a play frame into some kind of other experience of it's a performance but it's it's it's the the the texture and the the the the the structure of the players broken down and it's transformed into something that we feel and we respond to with a series of questions about that in New York Richard Maxwell has has done several works that have been extremely uncanny in the way that they resolve or don't resolve and I think that that's another really good example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about um um uh Christopher Donk you mentioned or Chris is a is is you know he's never worked in realist theater he's a he's a performance maker with a strong connection to visual arts practice and you know he has many uncanny objects on his stage performing um performing in a way that is communicating a real sense of crisis about the existence of the planet his work is very strongly connected to themes of the end you know this kind of moment of necro capitalism where capitalism is is eating the very sustainability of the planet it's eating itself and it's going to take us with it and I think Chris's work is trying to explain will give us a sense of the you know of the fact that that is what's happening um and so you know if you want to talk about the unrepresented ability of of of something well then you talk about this um this kind of excessive necro capitalist event that is taking place in world now um you can't encapsulate it in a single play but you can express some sensibilities of loss and of transformation and of and of passing and of and of apocalypse um you worked with him also as a dramaturg so how is this approach to these kind of doom or this apocalyptic thinking he works on Kafka or other how does he how does he do it as a theater of well how does he approach work i i i work with chris as a as a scholar of his work i'm not formally his dramaturg that that honor goes to originally mary and van kirkhoven um but now christoph van baal and younger dramaturg working in brussel in in in belgium but you know we i do have a lot of connection to that practice and so i do have an understanding ironically chris always begins with a close reading of the text and the text is the departure point for performances which very often when you see the performances there's no text left but there is a process of taking the kind of sensibility of that text into the into the ultimate outcome or production so as you said chris's work is very concerned with a concentration of authors around the mid 20th century kafka becket um daniel heim's the russian surrealist poet but also another point of reference for chris is always jg ballard the science fiction writer and i mean what what defines these texts i think in many respects is this sense of identifying the the crisis of living um uh the difficulty of living the the the forces that are aligned against one living the the but also the sense of just living in living living in that moment you know in a kind of classic beckety in sense um you know nobody dies nobody does anything they just live in this kind of endless and present of um uh of of of the horror of living um and so typically chris begins with a text um uh recently he's also been very concerned with nor plays and that's where i have done a lot more work with chris uh taking the because a nor play is by definition a ghost play a nor play yeah a japanese nor play so a nor play is always a play in which ghosts appear on the stage to tell about something that has happened that has led to their death and so it's a it's a beautiful form to think about in relation to staging the kind of um uh crisis of apocalypse in in relation to climate change um because we can talk about it as if it's already happened um and this close reading of of of a text is is is a it's i mean it's very dramaturgical and it's the kind of dramaturgical work that one might do when one is working with a playwright ironically um you look at the the the the the the the the combination of the words and the structure of the words and the way that they resonate with other themes and the way that they give life to certain kinds of um imagination and it's it's what they give life to that then chris takes into um uh typically although not always a non-verbal uh presentation and um so you know there are chris's work is pretty much in maybe in three broad areas there's the works that are object-based installation arts that happen in gallery spaces there's the works that have a strong emphasis on um the the materiality of the stage and the performance of objects and machines and um and then you know he's done throughout his career but more recently a number of works that are in fact theater you know most recently he's done a work that very much is is um working with the text of becket and the very famous actor European actor Johan Laysum um in a solo performance is is is working with that text as an actor and that's an ongoing project um where the actor is immersed in a space of of things and so it's uh it's a way of exploring the the kind of you know the darkness of becket uh but also the humor of becket but the actor is is an environment is in an environment where there is also other um other transformations taking place and um and so we we're again watching this complexity I think of things unfold um um his you know his something out of nothing by contrast was a piece that featured uncanny objects that would descend from the heavens and almost like mutant trifid flowers would would proliferate and open and very very beautiful but also very uh dystopian and meanwhile there was a collection of um dancers in perhaps non-human form with um very strange costumes and head head dresses that made them look somewhat plant-like or some like anim you know this is there's a vast range of interpretations of this and then uh uh a celloist who provides the live soundtrack which um increasingly invades the sensorium of of the audience to the point of a kind of nightmarish experience and it's such an intense and unrelenting and um invasive uh soundscape that uh that it it literally transforms the body because your your senses your you you know you're being given earplugs but your body's kind of vibrating with the sound it's it's terrifying yeah we hope that this work in a way will come to New York one day a word that actually lots of seagull talks came up by the way Christopher Donga also was here one day uh as was Okada and Ostermeyer from the Chalbine but um you talk about slow trauma torch it's a word that we heard about that we have to slow down we're going too much that this movement is slowing down what we do um I think and Bogart very clearly almost screamed in the time slow the fuck down she said slow down so what is what is how where does that idea of your slow dramaturgy you wrote what where does that come in is that something it's involved in or is it something fast no I have to well it's something that I'm still working with I acknowledge also my my colleague an Australian uh poet and academic Eddie Patterson because together about a decade ago now we wrote an essay called you know on slow dramaturgy and I think it was the early days of my thinking and Eddie's thinking about this um this this presence of atmospheres working on the stage and the the breaking into the the the the hermetics of the text and it's also drawing our attention to ecological or ecocritical theory and so it's a term that I think is is I'm using this term very much to connect uh thinking or dramaturgical thinking in in theater and performance to the wider question of ecology and ecocritical practices so this is something we look explored in the new media dramaturgy book where we're working with new materialism and the the decentering of the human in the theatrical landscape we see this in so many works now chris the donk but also many great makers are creating installation projects that have humans doing some things it's also I think a recognition of the way in which the temporality of theater has changed and you know if I reflect on the works that we made in the 90s for example and in the early 2000s with MYID not yet it's difficult they were really intense fast physicalized you know extreme physical states kind of relentless kind of overwhelming and that was a response I think to the decades you know of those times yeah to dashi Suzuki and you know many artists were working in that way we don't that work just would not sit well with our age where we we need a much more contemplative we need a much slower uh a kind of sensibility in the theater and so I think the performance space has become much more like a visual art space a space for the contemplation of ideas and it's also something that needs to respond to a much more diversely situated kind of politics something that is more inclusive something that is more you know in the in the vein of echo critical thinkers who who talk about the need to sit with the the the environmental world and the need to sit with the experience of being with other people and the need to be less actively intervening and more perhaps responding to so we see a lot of works now that are asking us to respond to rather than intervene in and and slow dramaturgy I think is is the way that I've tried to use I've tried to use that term to define that kind of work and that kind of strategy that artists are using in the theater now so a slow dramaturgy is one where we sit with rather than overwhelm a slow dramaturgy is one where we are very attenuated to space and time and very often we bring in experiences from you know the quote unquote natural world into into the theater so what Timothy Morton calls the dark ecology you know we we bring sounds of water or we bring video scapes of trees or you know is spectacular kind of not spectacular anti-spectacular but beautiful meditations on on forces that are in the now world that are that are disappearing so the you know work that I most recently worked on as a dramatur with Alexi de Souf was actually a film work and an installation work that was based on the documentation of the changing life of people in the Arctic Circle with the melting of the ice and that you know there's huge impacts on people's lives but also the the the haunting of that space from from the Cold War still and from you know the kind of radioactive sites that are still bubbling away up there it's a very complex but ultimately very slow environment because it's freezing cold people move slowly the wind moves it moves hard but it's harsh but it's ships move slowly the landscape is kind of beautifully slow and vast but at the same time it's full of all of these tensions and undercurrents and and feelings of of of of change quite disturbing feelings so so do you feel the ecological crisis the in the eco criticism is that at the center that what theater should engage with is or and the idea of the class struggle racism well entity and all that what and of course there's lots about that but from you as from your engagement what do you think theater has to engage if it's that area that creates well to me the the the question of the survival of the planet is the preeminent question of our time the the question of the the species extinction the the the necro capitalist plot that is project which is you know destroying the very sustainability of the planet as we speak is something that we need to I think deal with in our work as as much as possible I'm not suggesting that we only work on that thing there are many many issues and very many many questions and theater should always be about questions and the only thing I would say is that I reject a theater that is without questions sorry I don't think that that that is a worthwhile theater at all but a theater that is dealing with with with issues of of class disparity racism is is is is valid but I think the new media kind of dramaturgy and the new dramaturgy that we're talking about here the way in which we're talking about this expanded understanding of what performance is is a way in which we can very meaningfully engage with these questions and you know I'm stuck by the way in which philosophers and activists and people who write about climate are constantly saying well we need the arts we need the arts to to to draw attention to this we need the arts to imagine this because in some ways it's unimaginable yes we can talk about the destruction of you know the fact that so many species have become extinct in in the last two decades but really we we to really understand that I think we need to we need to think of different ways to to communicate or show that kind of reality yes we can you know that there's a great comment by a nuclear scientist who's talking in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima and he's on a panel where he's talking to artists and and scientists about how to respond to the disaster and he says well I'm paraphrasing but he says well basically I can tell you what happens in a nuclear meltdown but actually that doesn't really explain what you know what the crisis is for that you need the imagination of artists because in technical terms it's it's quite clear but it's but the the mendacity the extreme nature of that event is not communicated enough so I do think it's an important very important aspect and in some ways so many of these other questions of course dovetail with this because you know we do have a western economic or not just western but a global economic paradigm that is about the kind of intense exploitation of resources and those resources include human resources and within that you have divisions of labor and you have class and you'll have exploitation of different classes and you have institutional racism and and so many other things so you know but you know we can't put everything in the you know we can't you know it's in the 1980s there was a trend to you know you could go to the bookshop and you know these books that were about this thick and they would be called something like Einstein Buddha and Jesus and they were trying to solve all you know there was this sort of unifying theory of everything I kind of reject that notion I don't think arts are about specific things in particularities I'm very suspicious of the unification model when you go to a new york theater let's say you go to a new york theater workshop the mama the churn ps1 with your background of asian theater your peons cross your pain there what what do you see what do you think of the new york scene um well I'm probably going to get a bit into trouble here because then you know I came to the united states to work in the graduate center as a as a professor of asian theater and dramaturgy so I'm I'm not proposing that I have any unique insight um the first thing I noticed is that the actors here are fantastic you know I'm I'm in awe at the level of the technical quality of actors they they can do anything and they can do it really quickly and they um you know I remember I was here for about I've been here for eight years now so it's it's not new but quite soon after I arrived here I went to see a work a play reading or a workshop of a reading and and the director got up and said oh well we've only had a week to work on this and so people might be on book there wasn't a single actor on book and you know you do these play readings and these um presentations of plays at the seagull and you know typically they get a day to work on them with a director and actor that level of performance that they manage to realize is is phenomenal they're really hard workers and they're really good at it um I find that that the you know there is I've certainly seen some really great theater New York based theater but I must say I'm usually drawn to venues that are using uh bringing attention to theaters that have come from elsewhere coming into New York you know the St. Anne's Warehouse for example has some really extraordinary programming um I find directors often risk averse here with with few exceptions um and partly that's to do with the the kind of economic structures of theater here um um but then you know there are a couple of people that I really think are exceptionally you know I think Richard Maxwell is a great visionary I think he's one of the great artists playwrights of our time um I saw you know this I often appreciate the the smaller work that doesn't get uh so much attention um but you know a lot of it I I don't see some I don't go to Broadway that much um um I because I'm looking for theater that is um at the center of some kind of debate for something um rather than just telling us something about who they are um and you know and a lot of New York theaters about that um and you know it's we could we could shake things up a bit with there's a sort of way in which the older generation of great success in New York is still you know they they have can they have these spaces that they don't give up that they don't let other people use that they so there's this way in which um uh we could expect a little bit more attention given to the new generation for example um then then perhaps um and um they don't really teach performance dramaturgy in the United States as far as I'm aware they have really good literary dramaturgs um but you know if if if there could be some performance dramaturgy um as a viable um way of working here well I think that would that would improve things someone like Daniel Fish right Daniel Fish is you know I think he's his direction of Oklahoma was just it was revelatory I mean to take a really you know kind of embarrassing work that is so overloaded with with problematic history and and turn it into that was just an extraordinary moment that's what happens when you have a director who makes an intelligent intervention um his his production of the Skirball of um of Don DeLillo's underworld or I might remember the title correctly um also incredibly brilliant but you know where does Daniel work he works mainly in Europe you know he his work is not nearly as well supported as it should be he should be running a major institution here he should be given all of the support that he needs to make work because he is you know one of the few really outstanding directors I think of his generation uh currently working out of the United States and you can see I'm a big fan but but it's a market yeah it is that level of dramaturgical intelligence that he brings to the work that I find very compelling and and what perhaps is not you know not not not uh so for present in many works we're often also even based on a play the words are not as significant as they should be you know sometimes there's a is something um that uh uh you know with the dramaturgical thinking performance geometry would be a better climbing of a mountain you know of an artistic work and one wonders why is it not part of everybody's toolbox we're coming closer to the end and so two questions one would be you know you also are a teacher so you are kind of as young students but also artists but to the people who are listening now want to engage in dramaturgy that time of corona what what what advice do you have for them and then at the end maybe what what are you listening to what are you reading what what's keeping your motor warm but first you what are you saying how should we use this time and is is it a time of change or not I don't know if it's a time of change um I think it will be things will change yes um but I don't know that there'll be any sense of us being in control of that um I think that we're in a very reactive moment at the moment and we have to react with um our best abilities so in you know for example in working in a university which is dealing with this we we have to do our best to respond to an impossible situation where our students you know have to attend class online where um and so in a sense we have to bring our best game to that even though it's not never going to be good enough because the situation itself is overwhelming um I don't know what's going to happen to theater and you know I'm sure it'll return um personally you know maybe that there'll be some you know some something new that'll come and that will be good but you know the important thing also is that we we don't lose the resources that we need to um to you know maybe maybe rebuild is the wrong word because I you know to to move forward to to create the kind of work that we need to create once we're through the coronavirus um so we have to protect things in a certain kind of way and not in a conservative way but you know there is a tendency for people to you know the dark forces to use the coronavirus to um to introduce economic austerity or you know there's been a lot of examples of theater courses being cut from universities because they cost money or because you know there's a perception that they're no longer training people for the job market or you know we have to let's do our best to try and protect those kind of um those those things from from this moment of of of risk of cuts um I mean the coronavirus is you know we we also have to think about how how do you know the situation we're in and and how how we got there which is very much a kind of it's an it's an echo critical perspective it's a perspective about the intensification of globalization it's in the perspective about the the mobility of bodies it's a perspective around the the kind of a kind of strange lack of willingness to you know let's do something as simple as wear a mask um we have to think about that we have to theorize that and we have to identify what what's wrong with that situation I think and and make that much more explicit um so there's there has to be a certain kind of reckoning I guess um and the reckoning in artistic terms I think is is is going to be a good one um what what I think the we we we we rely on our students to to to continue to do the research that they do um in order to to make sense of of at this moment and to move forward into whatever comes next um not out of a sense of this kind of inevitable progressive narrative but in a sense of critical reflection um intelligent thinking and creative practice being the kind of components that we need to um to move from where we are now into something else um you know it won't be a return um but you know it'll be something um and there there may there there may be possibilities within that to to reflect more carefully about the mistakes that got us into this situation in the first place yeah yeah so to continue that research whether that's artistic or at a university so what and what do you read now what you listen to what is there's something new that that gave you insight so I've been listening to idiot prayer by nick cave and the bad you know nick cave alone at alexandra palace it's a performance that he did in the middle of the summer where he alexandra palace is a big palace in england somewhere and he installed a grand piano and in a vast empty space and he staged this initially as a concert paid by you know an online concert and and now he's just released the recording of it and he takes several of his really iconic songs from his um from his mid career period from after you know after the punk period and after the kind of uh but into the ballots you know the kind of really heart wrenching ballots and he he reimagines them on this cd or this streaming platform um and they're very pure and they're very simple and uh because it's just him and and the piano um there's there's no bad seeds um uh I watched david lynch's weather reports on youtube I recommend them to everybody the man is genius and um daily ones daily reports where he always um introduces the weather in LA which is you know meaningless to us in new york but um but then he has a little sort of reflection on some usually kind of really awful 1960s pop song that he's has obsessions for yeah and in the park with kennis goldsmith yeah um and I've been reading a book by sabu kosho who's a Japanese academic and critic and and and and it's called radiation and revolution and it's a it's a book that reflects broadly on the history of activism in japan the anti-nuclear activism that um that was revived after the Fukushima disaster uh it's probably it's eventual closing down and the rise of the kind of um uh techno nuclear economic uh uh governance that that has you know evolved in japan that you know against all best evidence insists on having nuclear power plants on on fault on fault you know and on the the fault zones of earthquake prone landscape in japan you know any criminal to even think about it and why and and he is a you know he is somebody who's using you know he's a delusional he's using kind of the theory of assemblage to describe what's happening here so it's very it's a very interesting and and important take on um um trying to understand the the countervailing forces it's it's not it's an you know in some ways it's an optimistic book in some ways it's a very dark book so I think that one day you make a performance work out of it on radiation revolution to perform the knowledge as stuff that we do at the at the grad center also in programs peter willies thank you so very much for sharing and of course we don't have enough time to go on the work of the return to rams and so many many many other works we should be talking about but I think it gave us an insight into into your thinking your work it's also a work in progress as we show work in progress at prelude festival this is a work in progress on your book so really thank you for sharing and we all can't wait till it's done I hope we will have a seagull evening about it thanks to howl round for for hosting us again the thea and vj andy from the seagull it's Thanksgiving week next week and it's good to really also to take that week into account to appreciate what we have to notice but also think about what is missing and how we can be part of a change we want to to see but this reminder from peter that theater is a place where complexity is exhibited where you can participate and understand perhaps something that an agonist will never will be solved but with some kind of referee rules it is a place where we will come together in a good way we discuss it we understand life and it's something really unique that theater can offer that perhaps the film and the editorial or sculpture you know will be have a harder time or has a different place but this is something that we need and my guess is it will be so important once we come back and I will be a new approach but the ideas that's coming out of that long history of dramaturgy that was so close to the very beginning of you know theater and the Enlightenment and this is perhaps something we all have to pay attention to that it has to be a dramaturgical thinking behind theater performance work that it's an engagement with ideas that it's thinking by doing and when we see a play we see actually with kind of a sinking on a stage and it's an argument it invites us to participate and so really thank you peter and thanks for everybody for listening I know how much now also is out there we're going to take a break for next week and then we're going to be back in the week later so thank you for listening and and I hope it was as inspiring and meaningful as it was for me to also hear that in the spoken form so such a short time so peter thank you and thank you thank you very much writing for the book is it behind you or you already did this morning or are you going to start I I did some writing this morning so I have meetings this afternoon but um yeah still will good luck okay peter thank you so much thank you everybody bye bye okay