INVITATION: We invite artists and scholars attending the PSi29 conference in person to participate in our open Dramaturgy & Performance Working Group meeting. This year, the group will focus on DRAMATURGY AND ETHICS. During our meeting, we will discuss the ethical dimensions and responsibilities of dramaturgy in facilitated groups, while drawing on the participants’ optional submission of written responses to the questions raised below. Our objective is to map positions, generate possible answers, and articulate new questions.
CONTEXT: Engagement with ethics has increased as attention has shifted from artwork to artistic process; boundaries between creation and research have become porous; the precariousness of creative labour has become visible; artistic and educational organizations have committed to equity, diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, and decolonization (EDIAD); and our awareness of interdependent relationships, care, and consent between humans and more than humans has grown. These attempts to reduce the harm of practices and change or disrupt oppressive norms take place at a time where global warming, unsustainable growth, and political polarization compete to conclude the Anthropocene era, making our work on imagining futures both harder and more urgent. Despite increased awareness, current responses to these complex and interconnected crises (societal, economic, climate) by the cultural and educational organisations that dramaturgy often operates within remain systemically constrained by the same forces that have caused the crises.
QUESTIONS: In this situation, what are the ethical responsibilities and potentials of dramaturgy? How can dramaturgy and dramaturgs be the agent(s) of ethical consideration? How do research ethics (considering harm, benefits, and consent), EDIAD, and relational ethics inform dramaturgical principles, practices, and choices? What are some of the challenges and dilemmas ethical thinking brings to dramaturgy and vice versa? In what ways do ethics affect how we create, whom/what we create with, and the relationships we build and steward? Who or what are at the centre and margin of our dramaturgical principles? What are useful ways to re- or de-centre? Whose knowledge are we recycling and what are the resources we use? How is that honoured and what do we offer in return? Are the dramaturgical ethics of activist, avant-garde, and traditional practices different? What kinds of ethical dramaturgical practices and forms of inquiry do we (hope to) advance? How can dramaturgy help change or care for the operating systems (and the languages of) performance? Can dramaturgy question, disrupt, resist, make (us) pause, or even force change to harmful practices and systems … ethically? In what ways can dramaturgy hold the space needed to imagine futures?
INSTRUCTIONS: If you would like to participate in the working group at PSi29, then please consider submitting discussion prompts, provocations, and/or reflections in response to the theme of “dramaturgy and ethics” and the associated questions. Your written response should be maximum 500 words and submitted to pil.hansen@ucalgary.ca by May 1, 2024 (with a “DRAMATURGY WG” subject line). Contributors of written responses will be invited to offer a brief summary of their prompt/reflection at the beginning of our session. Drop-in participation without writing is also welcome.
This working group is the third in a series engaging with the following topics: how we respond to the ways in which new research paradigms have expanded dramaturgy; the forms of emergent and embodied thinking that dramaturgical awareness facilitates; and the ethical dimensions of the choices that dramaturgy enables.
Warm regards,
Pil Hansen (working group Chair and Co-Convenor; UCalgary, Canada)
Katalin Trencsényi (working group Co-Convenor, 2024; Uniarts, Finland)
Links to two short articles by the conveners that provide additional context on ethics in dramaturgy and research (Trencsényi 2022; Hansen 2023). Photo credit: Lights Out @ UCalgary 2024. Photo by Tim Nguyen.
Pil