Ecologies of Dramaturgy

Ecologies of Dramaturgy Beth Blickers (bio) and Brian Quirt (bio) Brian Quirt is the artistic director of Nightswimming, a Toronto-based dramaturgical company, and director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Colony. Beth Blickers is an agent at Abrams Artists Agency. They first met on Brian’s home turf when he was serving as president of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) and hosted its 2007 annual conference. He continues to serve on the board of the organization where Beth has just started a two-year term as president. As LMDA embarks on its thirtieth year as the preeminent organization in North America working to cultivate, develop, and promote the function of dramaturgy and literary management, it seemed an opportune time for the Torontonian and the New Yorker, the artistic director and the agent, the past president and current president to discuss the state of the nation for dramaturgs and dramaturgy. There are age-old questions about career paths and the roles that dramaturgs can, and should, play in their theatrical communities; there is ever increasing scrutiny on issues of diversity and inclusion, which extend beyond the plays and playwrights to the entire creative team; and the definition of theatre itself is leaping beyond the traditional, narrative, single-author play performed within four walls. With the ever shifting world in which dramaturgs work, what are questions they are asking themselves in shaping their careers within a rapidly altering landscape? Beth: Hi, Brian. So we have this task to talk about the evolution of dramaturgy. Now that we aren’t spending time trying to define it, what are the questions engaging us? I can say south of the Canadian/United States border I’m regularly in conversation about how the traditional rules of dramaturgy can’t be applied to nontraditional theatre projects. I’ll admit I struggle with whether there are different rules/questions for different kinds of theatre. Should the theatre be using different dramaturgs for different kinds of projects, or should every dramaturg be prepared to work with a range of artistic impulses? Brian: Hi, Beth. I vote for being prepared to work with a range of artistic impulses. Sure, dramaturgs can specialize, and some of us do over time, which is not a bad thing. But one of the powers of dramaturgy and dramaturgs is the ability to synthesize ideas, information, and impulses from a breadth of knowledge and experience and put it to work at the service of the project(s) at hand. I’m leading the Banff Centre Playwrights Colony at the moment and one of our guest artists is dramaturg Ruth Little, whose current job is associate director of Cape Farewell in the UK. She trained as a biologist, was literary manager of a slew of important UK theatres, including the Royal Court, and now works as a dance dramaturg for Akram Khan, as well as with an environmental organization that develops artistic responses to climate change. Now, that’s a dramaturgical worldview that I think is a fantastic example of someone absorbing and applying a range of artistic impulses. I’d vote for more of us incorporating such breadth into our working worlds. On a related topic, theatre-makers submitting applications to my company in Toronto strike me as increasingly uninterested in writing plays (a form that can seem very quaint these days) and very uninterested in working their way up and into the mainstream theatres (large and medium-sized) that for forty years have made up the fabric of the Canadian new-play-development system. I think this is a great shift, though it doesn’t really matter what I think about it. It’s happening, and my take is that a generation of smart, talented theatre-makers is coming of age that will largely bypass the existing system. It is likely that system will suffer very much for that loss. [End Page 249] Beth: I think it might be a good thing for that system to suffer. I’m starting to see some heartening crossover where our regional theatre system hosts, and even commissions, nontraditional companies to build works for their seasons. That’s been a longstanding...

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