Table Of ContentDramaturgies of Interweaving
Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave
performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance and other arts.
Merging strategies of audience engagement originating in different cultures,
dramaturgies of interweaving are creative methods of theater and art-making that
seek to address audiences across cultures, making them uniquely suitable for
shaping people’s experiences of our entangled world. Presenting in-depth case
studies from across the globe, spanning Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran,
Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, the US and the UK, this book investigates
how dramaturgies of interweaving are conceived, applied and received today.
Featuring critical analyses by scholars—as well as workshop reports and artworks
by renowned artists—this book examines dramaturgies of interweaving from
multiple locations and perspectives, thus revealing their distinct complexities and
immense potential.
Ideal for scholars, students and practitioners of theater, performance, dramaturgy
and devising, Dramaturgies of Interweaving opens up an innovative perspective
on today’s breathtaking plurality of dramaturgical practices of interweaving in
theater, performance, dance and other arts, such as curation and landscape design.
Erika Fischer-Lichte is Director of the International Research Center
“Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin.
Christel Weiler serves as Senior Adviser at the International Research Center
“Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin.
Torsten Jost is a researcher at the International Research Center “Interweaving
Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin.
Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Modernizing Costume Design, 1820–1920
Annie Holt
The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia
Mirroring the Master
Arjun Raina
Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score
A Critique of Performance
Josefine Wikström
The Problems of Viewing Performance
Epistemology and Other Minds
Michael Y. Bennett
Dramaturgies of Interweaving
Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World
Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christel Weiler, and Torsten Jost
Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures
Jennifer Holl
Actor Training in Anglophone Countries
Past, Present and Future
Peter Zazzali
Hellenic Common
Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era
Philip Zapkin
Surviving Theatre
The Living Archive of Spectatorship
Marco Pustianaz
Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen
Five Encounters with the Sages
Juliusz Tyszka
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Dramaturgies of Interweaving
Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World
Edited by
Erika Fischer-Lichte,
Christel Weiler, and Torsten Jost
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christel Weiler
and Torsten Jost; individual chapters, the contributors
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Contents
List of figures viii
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction
Dramaturgies of interweaving: Engaging audiences in an entangled world 1
ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE, CHRISTEL WEILER AND TORSTEN JOST
PART I
Sketching designs for unique encounters 27
1 The Tjunta Trail: Cross-cultural dramaturgy in Australian
place-making 29
PAUL CARTER
2 Diagrammatic dramaturgies: Navigations between theory,
disfiguration and movement 47
ANDREJ MIRČEV
PART II
Interlacing archival threads 61
3 No(h) to Trio A: Interweaving dramaturgies for a performative
exhibition of Yvonne Rainer’s work 63
NANAKO NAKAJIMA
4 Performance community in an age of reenactment: Takao
Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno and the conversation with ghosts 80
PETER ECKERSALL
vi Contents
PART III
Unraveling productions 95
5 Speaking Black: Tonya Pinkins’s Mother Courage 97
HANA WORTHEN
6 Catalyst and conduit: A call for the bicultural dramaturge 114
CATHERINE DIAMOND
INTERLUDE 133
A Durus Arabij/Arabic Lessons 135
MICHAEL ROES
B Arabic Lessons: Stämme/روذج/םישרוש 138
AMOS ELKANA
C Heiliger Franz/St. Francis: Notes from a playwright’s perspective 148
CLAUDIUS LÜNSTEDT
PART IV
Entangling diverse audiences 155
7 Encountering a “theater of (inter-)singularity”: Transformations
and rejections of shifting institutional dramaturgies in
contemporary German theater 157
PETER M. BOENISCH
8 Yael Ronen: Devising dramaturgy for an interwoven world 176
S. E. WILMER
PART V
Unfolding alternatives 197
9 Alternative dramaturgies informed by a
Deaf and disability perspective 199
KAITE O’REILLY
10 Dramaturgies of in-betweenness: Iranian theater and
performance art since the 1970s 216
NARGES HASHEMPOUR
Contents vii
PART VI
Tailoring textual material 235
11 Learning with broken words: Directing Plastic Rose by Shogo Ota
with collaborative dramaturgy 237
PETER LICHTENFELS
12 The emergence of co-dramaturgy: Arthur Miller, Satyajit Ray and
Thomas Ostermeier encounter Ibsen 250
KAMALUDDIN NILU
Coda
Performers and time: The five stages of waiting 267
DAVID MOSS
Index 281
Figures
2.1 Choreo_Drift project by Cristina Caprioli, Tanz im August,
Berlin, 2014. Source: photo by Andrej Mirčev. 51
2.2 Choreo_Drift project by Cristina Caprioli, Tensta Konsthall,
Stockholm, 2014. Source: photo by Andrej Mirčev. 54
3.1 Performative reconstruction of The Mind Is a Muscle and
Chair/Pillow, Kyoto Art Theater, Shunjuza. Source: photo by
Kai Maetani. 67
3.2 Trio A: Facing performed by Misako Terada and
Koji Takabayashi. Source: photo by Kai Maetani. 73
9.1 From the monologue “A Short History of Fear.” Sophie Stone
(on screen) and Stephanie Esther Fan. Source: photo by
William A.S. Tan. 205
9.2 From the monologue “What Not to Say to Someone Who Is
Depressed.” Left to right: Ramesh Meyyappan, Peter Sau,
Lee Lee Lim, Grace Lee Khoo and Sara Beer. Source: photo by
William A.S. Tan. 205
9.3 Visual language, spoken text and integrated audio description.
From the monologue “A Short History of Fear.” Sophie Stone (on
screen) and Stephanie Esther Fan. Source: photo by Kaite O’Reilly. 209
10.1 KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A Story about a
Family and Some People Changing, Haft Tan Mountain, Shiraz,
Iran, 1972. Directed by Robert Wilson, Andrew de Groat,
Cynthia Lubar, James Neu, Ann Wilson, Mel Andringa, S. K.
Dunn and others. Texts by Robert Wilson, Andrew de Groat,
Jessie Dunn Gilbert, Kikuo Saito, Cynthia Lubar, Susan Sheehy
and Ann Wilson. Source: photo by Bahman Djalali. 219
10.2 U-Turn (2010). Source: photo by Soroosh Milanizadeh. 223
10.3 Woyzeck (2013). Source: photo by Reza Mousavi. 226
Contributors
Peter M. Boenisch, born in Munich, Germany, is Professor of Dramaturgy at
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. His main research areas are theater direction,
dramaturgy and institutional contexts of theater-making, with a particular focus
on German- and Dutch-speaking countries. He has published on the theory and
practice of contemporary theater direction in Directing Scenes and Senses:
The Thinking of Regie (2015), the book The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier
(Routledge, 2016), which he coauthored with the German theater director, as
well as the edited projects Littlewood, Strehler, Planchon in the series Great
European Stage Directors (2018), the 30th-anniversary new edition of David
Bradby and David Williams’s Directors’ Theatre (2020) and The Schaubühne
Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier: Reinventing Realism (2021). Funded by the
Aarhus University Foundation, Boenisch has now embarked on the research
project “Reconfiguring Dramaturgy for a Global Culture: Changing Practices
in 21st Century European Theatre” (2020–2023). Its aim is to scope compara-
tive case studies of how theater institutions, mainly in the subsidized public
theater sector, reorient themselves in response to challenges such as globaliza-
tion and digitalization, but also migration and new political populisms.
Paul Carter is a writer and artist. His recent publications include Absolute
Rhythm: Works for Minor Radio (Performance Research Publications, 2020),
Amplifications: Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory (2019) and Decolonising
Governance: Archipelagic Thinking (Routledge, 2018). His design stu-
dio, Material Thinking, recently completed “Pipes” and “Transplantations,”
two major public art commissions in Melbourne. He is Professor of Design
(Urbanism), School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University.
Catherine Diamond is a professor of theater and environmental literature
at Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan. She is the director/playwright of
the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia and the author of
Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres (2012).
Peter Eckersall teaches in the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance
at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is a Professorial
Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His recent publications include
