In 2015 I collaborated with Katalin Trencsényi and choreographer Arrie Davidson on the creation of the performance lab “Dance Dramaturgy Research in Action” for the annual conference of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. We chose to base our lab on Mira Rafalowicz's four stages of collectively created work.Footnote ¹ Our intention was to familiarize our colleagues with the field of dance dramaturgy and to introduce them to working from an embodied perspective in order to expand possibilities for further dramaturgical practices.

The challenges and possibilities we began to unearth are richly explored in Pil Hansen and Darcey Callison's deftly structured Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement, written for the New World Choreographies series. The book is a dynamic and engaging “performance lab” for dramaturgs, dancers, and choreographers interested in the field of dance dramaturgy. Broken into three sections, “Agency,” “Awareness,” and “Engagement,” the book creates its own performance-generating systemFootnote ² —a matrixed series of dramaturgical approaches that reset notions of dramaturgy and allow dramaturgical relationships and conversations to rise, resonate, and modulate throughout the ten curated essays.

I am particularly struck by Hansen and Callison's choice of positioning “Agency” first in their sequence. A bold choice, it immediately ruptures ontological anxieties that have plagued our field and points to an explicit and inherent trust in our presence and function, asserting that dramaturgs already possess the capacity to perform in choreographic environments. This enables us to move directly into productive dialogues on process and explore how dramaturgs work and collaborate with choreographers and dancers. It also provides space for the dramaturg's body to exist; as Bauer's essay reminds us, the creative process is often “metaphorised as a body of which the dramaturg is part” (33). This dramaturgical embodiment unites our “analytical mind” with the “feeling body”: sensations and memory become of equal import as structure and mechanics.

A developing theme that comes forward in “Agency” is that dramaturgy exists on a temporal plane of emergence: that is, dramaturgy exists both in the moments of the dance's “becoming” and its “performing.” This plane gives new form and function for the dramaturg to engage with her collaborators in what Andre Lepecki terms “the work-to-come” (60). This shift in time opens up the field of dramaturgy, creating a shared space for both knowing and not knowing the choreography being developed. It dismantles the role of “expert” that has plagued our field and opens up more interesting opportunities for us to explore how dramaturgs function in collaboration with choreographers and dancers.

Examples of agency for dramaturgical-agents-in-process are: becoming “subject of aesthetic experience” (38), finding ways for “perceiving and feeling how material is produced” (41), bypassing “a subject-position of (fore)knowledge” to allow “the logic of the piece about-to-come” through the daring act of dancing your ignorance (62). In this temporal plane of emergence, the dramaturg is placed within the process instead of above or outside of it, thus drawing our attention to the potential of choreographic performances and requiring what Bleeker describes as “practices of thinking” between choreographer, dancer, and dramaturg. This gives rise to opportunities for everyone on the collaborative team as the labor of dramaturgical contribution defines itself not as “what something is now, or even about what it is not yet; it is about the process of becoming something that has not yet arrived” (72). This destabilization of time destabilizes the notion of expert and reveals the innumerable ways in which dramaturgs work with choreographers. In her chapter, “Propensity: Pragmatics and Functions,” Bauer offers glimpses into a few instances of such collaborations, including Andre Lepecki's work with Meg Stuart and Vera Mantero, dramaturg Bojana Cvejić’s work with choreographer Eszter Salomon, and her own relationship with choreographer Latifa Lâabissi (35).

“Awareness” implies an ability to perceive, to be cognizant of events, and to be able to articulate the qualities that emanate from them. Within this section of Dance Dramaturgy, awareness moves from intimate, individual, proximate modes of dramaturgical thinking to broader theoretical landscapes. Conversations of phenomenological and cognitive theory inspire. Here the respective contributions of Freya Vass-Rhee, Vida L. Midgelow, and Hansen focus on “dramaturgy as a distributed system” and draw attention to the relationships that dramaturgs have with the respective companies, choreographers, and dancers with whom they work (89). Dramaturgy is understood both as “the structural architecture of a work and as a collection of creative strategies and principles that can facilitate creation processes, composition, and audience perception” (124).

Within these structures, the dancer's body and how it too performs dramaturgy is keenly brought into focus. Vass-Rhee, who has worked with William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, locates the body and ensemble as dramaturgy “spread across the Marley floor” (94). She draws parallels to the world of devising, where material is developed and “distributed across different individuals, social contexts, forms, and time frames” (100). Of particular interest is the concept of boundary objects (abstract or concrete material that holds a variety of meanings, while remaining recognizable to more than one world) from which Forsythe and his dancers generate choreography.

From the more external to the more internal, Midgelow's chapter focuses on the potential for dramaturgs to work to embolden the dancer, allowing them to become self-aware and locate the “meaning, interaction, and perception” while in motion (109). Through a series of movement activities that enable the dancer to have both a critical and a reflexive awareness of her “body—its corporeality, knowings, and implicit memories” and recognize them as “the dramaturgical content that is simultaneously emerging and being performed” (110). Pil Hansen's chapter “The Dramaturgy of Performance Generating Systems” extends Midgelow's work into the field of cognitive theory, broadening our understanding and approach to task-oriented systems. Orienting the reader in Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, and William Forsythe's task-based choreographies, she takes us to the contemporary moment and her work with choreographer Ame Henderson, challenging us to think of how choreography can emerge without the external prompts form the choreographer and simply from hypothesis and embodied memory of dancers (131).

The final movement in Hansen and Callison's performance system, “Engagement,” allows the reader to focus on how dramaturgs connect, interlock, and affect relationships with the choreographer's work. Dramaturgy is relational, impressing equally on the mind of the dramaturg, collaborators, and audience. As Thomas F. DeFrantz notes, “We create pathways for the collaborators to recognize each other, and engage an audience (or participants, and so on) in ways that answer the encounters of the rehearsal process” (148). These pathways direct us to the continuous movement between makers and the creative and receptive energy that continues to inform our approaches to future trainings and practices. As Katherine Profeta so wonderfully poses: “I like to think that the democratization of the dramaturgical just causes more dramaturgy, and where there is more, it is valued” (146).

Hansen's introduction sets the landscape for readers who are new to entering the discourse of dance dramaturgy, locating the 1990s as a point of origin for new dramaturgy from which contemporary discourses on dance dramaturgy are set in motion.Footnote ³ During the 1990s (and into the early 2000s) the work of the dramaturg could be described as “an ever shifting, ever conflicting, always under suspicion, and yet always deemed necessary form of labor” (2003). Hansen uses Myriam van Imschoot's article “Anxious Dramaturgy” (Reference Imschoot2003) to diagnose and free contemporary dramaturgs and their choreographic collaborators from the “fear of an authoritarian mediator and keeper of predetermined models, ideas, or concept” (4). Through a tour of the work to come, she skillfully dismantles these anxieties and offers her readers an invitation to view dramaturgy as a shared consciousness, a “thinking between voices,” and an engagement of work that allows the dramaturg to contribute to the collective, creative process (24). There is little doubt that Hansen and Callison have curated an anthology that will be a touchstone for our field.