N: Nanako Nakajima
Today is April 19th, 2022. I am here together with Professor André Lepecki at his office in New York University. Thank you very much for accepting to do this interview. You have worked with many artists in Europe and the USA, many of whom are experimental. Could you briefly introduce your work?

A: André Lepecki
Sure. My work as a dramaturg started somewhat by chance. I did not train to be a dramaturg at all. I grew up in Portugal, and my generation in Portugal was the first generation to reach early adulthood or late teenagerhood after the revolution of 1974. Up until 1974, Portugal was governed by a fascist colonial regime, who were entangled in colonial wars in Africa from the early 1960s onwards. It was a very repressive regime, and the country remained very isolated from the rest of the world, even from the rest of Europe. What happened to my generation is that when we were 18 or 19 years old, not only did Portugal join the European Union, but there was also a big boom in the arts. Both gave our generation a sense of freedom and of possibility.

I was just finishing high school and starting to think about college. I wanted to be an anthropologist. Eventually, I did graduate in cultural anthropology from Lisbon’s New University. However, ever since my pre-university years, several close friends were dancers or choreographers or musicians or video-makers. We were all quite young at the time, but there was still this desire to mix these fields and to work together.

At that time, there was no such thing as government supports nor subsidies of any kind. But we would still get together, wherever and whenever we could, and imagine and create things. The musicians would improvise, the dancers would improvise. One of us was a video-maker, another created costumes. We would read and watch films together and go to shows together—everything from jazz to theater to dance. The interesting thing for me in this initial phase was the fact that I was not a dancer. I was not an artist. And I didn't want to be an artist. But when the choreographer Francisco Camacho invited me to be part of this group of dancers and artists, I was very surprised initially. I was like, “why do you want me to be part of this group”? And then he, along with Vera Mantero and João Fiadeiro, who today are all quite well established choreographers in Portugal said: “Well, precisely because you're not a dancer! You're interested in a bunch of things that you know and maybe you can help us think through our pieces. We're interested in the theoretical stuff that you read.”

That's the first thing that happened to me— to be invited by friends, who themselves were starting to become professional artists, to join them because I was not an artist! And in terms of thinking of dramaturgy as a method, the conditions for their invitation were very interesting. What I was learning in anthropology at that time was that those anthropologists and ethnographers working in the field in close proximity to the populations, or to social groups were invited into their [host] communities. And an anthropologist needs to learn how to maintain a critical distance within that proximity. As an anthropologist, you have an affective proximity to the group you're studying. But you cannot fall completely into that group. You have to create a kind of critical distance while yet remaining very close.
And, at the time, I found that balance, that quest for a proximal distance, or distant intimacy, very interesting in terms of being a dramaturg. I was a friend of those artists, but at the same time I had to maintain a kind of critical distance from what they were producing. So that was the first thing that I found very interesting in terms of dramaturgy as a method— not only for choreographic composition, but for social analysis as well. To learn that it is possible to be objective in proximity. Objective in intimacy.

But perhaps we should define the term itself before we continue, because the term “dramaturgy” comes from the German theatre tradition, particularly from Lessing in the late 18th century. Also, the word “dramaturg” sometimes designates a playwright in several languages, as, for instance, in Portuguese. But in the German tradition, the dramaturg is someone who keeps track of how meaning is formed when staging a play, making sure that the mise-en-scène has a kind of structure of meaning which honors the source play. Of course, I am being hasty here, and just pointing to a very traditional understanding of dramaturgy. I just want to point out that the dramaturgy I was doing with those Portuguese choreographers had nothing to do with that [conventional notion of dramaturgy], because there was no source play or text that preceded the production. So, everybody began discovering what the final work was going to be as we went along, creating it, almost out of nothing, or from very little.

In those early days, I was not referred to as a “dramaturg.” João Fiadeiro would call me a “researcher.” I also worked alongside Vera Mantero. I once even designed a set for one of her solo pieces even though many times my work with Vera was a “dramaturg’s work.” I don't remember ever using that designation back then until I met Meg Stuart in Lisbon in 1992. In 1990-91, she was working with Francisco Camacho and Carlota Lagido, both Portuguese dancers, in her important debut piece Disfigured Study. She initially invited me to design a set for her next group piece—even though set-design is also something I was never trained to do, though I had in fact created a set for a solo by Vera Mantero, which is still being danced today. As I already said, I’m not an artist. But while working with Meg on that piece, I soon found myself working as a dramaturg. However, neither Meg nor I knew what to call what I was doing. So, she called me an “aesthetic eye,” which is how I was described in the program notes for the first try-out of the work at PS122 in New York: set designer and aesthetic eye! For sure a very strange designation!

And it was only when we were rehearsing in Leuven for the final push in the production No Longer Readymade, which is a very important piece in Meg Stuart’s trajectory, that Bruno Verberg, director of the Klapstuk Festival, who had commissioned the work, enquired: “You know, we need to justify your salary. What do you do?” So I explained to him: I stay in the studio every day, for every rehearsal. I give my opinion, I bring along music and texts. I talk with Meg afterwards and say, maybe this part should go, or maybe this part should be at another moment of the piece, and whatever else was needed in terms of feedback. And Bruno then said, “Oh, you're the dramaturg!” That was a relief because I finally had the name for what I had been doing for so long already. So that’s when I found out that what I was doing was dramaturgy for dance—process dramaturgy.

It was only after I was given such a designation that I found out that Pina Bausch, for example, had already been working with the dramaturg Raimund Hoghe in the 80s— and under similar production conditions. That is to say, with the dancers generating material following the choreographer’s propositions, and then the choreographer selecting, fine-tuning, and tying it all together. Such a process usually generates a lot of raw material. And of course, the choreographer is not only responsible for organizing and refining the dancers’ movement itself. Choreographing involves much more than attending to the kinetic part of the piece in development, but also attending to the unfolding of the different “scenes,” or parts, in a way that coheres—even if “cohering” means to be incoherent! So, in that sense, Raimund Hoghe was akin to a confidant in the studio with whom Bausch could work in that process of selecting and composing the piece out of hundreds of hours of raw material created by the dancers. I find that role of dramaturg-as-confidant very interesting.

One last thing I found out regarding the task of the dramaturg is that whenever the dramaturg works in close collaboration with the choreographer—mostly, but also of course, with other artists such as the composers or light designers in the production— that this additional presence of a dramaturg in the dance studio alongside the choreographer shows how authorship is really a function, in that the author is not a single figure. Not at all—that figure is a function that can actually be partitioned out beyond the individual figure of the choreographer. And for some reason in the late 80s and early 90s in Europe, that figure, the dance dramaturg, became very important. I was fortunate to have had the chance to fuse my personal friendships with my academic training in anthropology with a historical moment of dance experimentation so that I could create a kind of practical approach to being in the studio. All of that happened in the 80s to early 90s.

N: You mentioned distancing. I would like to go dig further into that matter. How has your experience as a dramaturg influenced your research, or vice versa? You mentioned that there is a kind of entrepreneurship between the business of the studio and your work as a scholar. How does your work as a writer influence your work in the studio?

A: That’s super interesting, because that's why I wanted to emphasize that the first part of the answer relates to the 80s and the early 90s. But then, thanks to a lot of changes, encounters and so on, I discovered the field of performance studies, and specifically the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Initially, I wanted to do a PhD in anthropology and primatology. But given that Richard Schechner always had a strong relationship with anthropology, and because there was an anthropologist working in that program at the time —Michael Taussig— with whom I wanted to work and really liked, I discovered the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. I came here [to New York] still thinking that I was going to do something related to the anthropology of performance. But by the time I got here, Michael Taussig had already left NYU and gone to Columbia. So, I found myself without a supervisor and a little bit lost. But Mark Franko was here at the time, as was the dance scholar Marcia Siegel. Then, one or two years after I arrived as a student, Barbara Browning was hired by the faculty. There was, there still is, a very strong dance studies presence in that department.

Peggy Phelan was also here in 1993, and her first book had just come out. And that was very important for me, because with this group of professors, particularly Mark Franko who had worked with Derrida, Peggy Phelan was working with psychoanalysis and feminist theory, and also with Derrida in a certain way. Others such as May Joseph, who directed my MA thesis, was working in postcolonial studies, or José Muñoz and Fred Moten in critical race theory and Black studies, were all working on theory. All of a sudden, I discovered theory with this group of professors; it was not really my thing when I first arrived at Performance Studies, for I was working more in the social sciences. And with theory, I came to discover this whole world of philosophy of art and aesthetics.

At the same time, between '93 and '98, I was working with Meg Stuart almost every year on her dance productions as a dramaturg. And what I had discovered through performance studies, philosophy of art and critical theory was a different way to think about dramaturgy; it gave me the theoretical basis to really believe that the most important thing that happens to a work is how the work manifests itself in its full immanence. The immanence of the work means that the dramaturg has to get out of the way, not give too many opinions, not work for the choreographer or the dancer, but rather to work for the piece that is about to come into being. You work for some kind of horizon, right?

And that is already present in the theories of José Munoz, futurity as utopia. But, while working in process dance dramaturgy, you suddenly realize that this is actually concrete, it is not a metaphor. Co-composing a dance piece from nothing is like working for a futurity. Everybody's working for a futurity. Because the present, so normatively praised in dance, is actually a very fugitive thing, particularly when one is improvising. Nobody really knows exactly what’s just happened. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. Never, at any moment. That’s the point of improvisation—not to know and yet to act, together. No one knows exactly what's going to happen whenever you put things together in combination, in a kind of editing of the work. So that informed my scholarship a lot, because all of a sudden I think my scholarship exists because of my work in dramaturgy. If you read Exhausting Dance, or Singularities specifically, what you can see are exercises in how to pay close attention to specific works. Each work in itself is treated as a kind of microcosm of endless possibilities of re-combinations and extensions of the work – beyond its supposed boundaries.

I really believe that in writing chapters about Jérôme Bel or La Ribot or Mette Ingvartsen, or Ralph Lemon and others, I’m actually not interpreting or explaining their work—I'm extending or translating them, in the etymological sense of translating: setting them in motion otherwise. So, in my “theoretical” writings about dance and performance, and in my practice as a dramaturg, and even when I am curating exhibitions or festivals, it is a similar operation: co-imagining in close proximity with the work as to how to make it not only go beyond itself, but through itself.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze became a kind of instrument which first gave me the confidence to think about this idea that I'm not working for someone but rather for something: for the work, for something that's yet to come, that's not yet here. But then again, my interest in Deleuze was simply mirroring another movement that was happening in European dance at the time. In the year 2000, if you read the dance magazines from that period you can see how choreographers like Jérôme Bell, Xavier LeRoy, Vera Mantero were all giving interviews where they refer to philosophers. Whenever questioned about their influences, they did not necessarily refer to other artists, but to philosophers. And there was a really strong Deleuzian moment in the scene back then—sometimes it was explicit, sometimes implicit, but always there somehow. For instance, Xavier had this incredible self-interview where he acknowledged all kinds of philosophers, from Spinoza to Deleuze to Elizabeth Grosz, whose writings helped him compose and choreograph.

So the question is: if choreographers are using philosophy as a source of inspiration for non-philosophical objects in order to create these choreographies, then, as a dramaturg, you need to read those books to help the choreographers! But the thing is, you don't read those philosophical books for philosophy’s sake. Rather, you engage in a kind of outrageous reading, because you're not necessarily concerned with stuff that philosophers are interested in; instead, you‘re working with philosophy as a dramaturg because that's what the choreographers are doing. And that is methodologically very, very, very, very interesting. Usually, a lot of people might think that the dramaturg is over-intellectualizing the artistic process, but actually the artistic process is already intellectualized. That theoretical-philosophical-critical work is being done and promoted by the artists themselves. Thus, we all need to catch-up with them! Does this answer your question on method?

N: I'm also curious because you mentioned Raimund Hoghe earlier. His collaboration with Pina Bausch was probably very different from what you experience with other European and US choreographers, which is actually very interesting to me. The method or the approach of the dramaturg has not really been documented yet. The classical approach in European experimental dance theater is one thing, and then probably like a Pina Bausch type of artist. What do you think about the evolution of a former dramaturg, or even of any other artist, after they no longer work as a dramaturg? Can you still see traces of dramaturgical sensitivity, for example, in Raimund Hoghe’s pieces after he no longer collaborated with Bausch?

A: I think Hoghe’s artistic work is amazing and admirable. But I don’t know if his work as an author totally reflects his work as a dramaturg when working with Bausch. There’s a documentary in which you can see him sitting next to Pina Bausch at a working desk. And they have this kind of intense silence, which is already a dialogue. There's a kind of quietness and a kind of self-erasure in Hoghe’s presence as a dramaturg, and that's very important because ultimately, it's not his piece. That's the thing about being a dramaturg. He's not, she’s not, a co-author, though he or she is part of the author function. But neither he nor she is a co-author. Definitely not.

So, it's a very interesting ethical position: to work in order to help the work. Sometimes the dramaturg works almost like a chemical catalyst which speeds up the process. Sometimes the dramaturg functions as a mirror: it gives a good reflection of what is going on. And sometimes the dramaturg works as an idiot: he or she gives really bad ideas which the choreographer hates, or the dancers hate. But what matters is that the dramaturg is there as a friend. I think the figure of the friend is very, very important here.

So I feel that this sensitivity, especially in the case of Hoghe, when it's transposed to his own artistic creations, to his own authorial work… I don't know, if it's still the work of a dramaturg. In Hoghe’s case, I want to say that, on the one hand, it must be the work of a dramaturg in the sense that it is so detailed, so well-crafted, so intricate in weaving all aspects of performance. But, you know, there are other choreographers like him, who themselves were never dramaturgs and never even worked with dramaturgs. So I don't know exactly how to make the transposition, and answer your question. But, you know, the fact that dramaturgs do have afterlives is very important. You start out working as a dramaturg and later you become a director or a choreographer or a curator or a professor. I think that happens quite often. It is interesting how dramaturgy precedes these other steps, and how it may shape or direct these steps.

I know that when I first started curating exhibitions and festivals, I certainly deployed a kind of dramaturgical sensitivity. Attention to detail —maybe sometimes, for certain institutions, paying too much attention —to details and to context, from social contexts to lighting or architectural contexts. In other words, it's as if the curator sometimes approaches the institution as a kind of neutral support where he or she is going to hang a painting, or project a film, or present a performance. The dramaturg can't approach the architectural infrastructure of an institution without thinking that it's also an affective, aesthetic, political infrastructure, animated with all sorts of subtle and even blunt movements. Institutions have all these dimensions; these must certainly be taken into consideration whenever you're going to make your final decision as a curator. For me, that's dramaturgy: composing, with whatever is at hand, a future.

When I was first hired as a full-time faculty in Performance Studies, in the spring of 2001, I guess for the first 3 or 4 years teaching in the department, I taught a graduate course called “On Dramaturgy.” In it, every single student was obliged to participate in a production as a dramaturg—but that production did not have to be the usual format for dramaturgs, i.e., theater and dance. My students could work on a film, or an exhibition, performance art. One student worked in an architecture studio. And that was really interesting because the classroom became a place where everyone was sharing different modes which artists in different fields tackled the problem of composition. Together we tried to find solutions for those different problems emerging in each project. But we would also try to find common points between what it means to do dramaturgy for an exhibition and what it means for me to be a dramaturg for an architect. What does it mean to be a dramaturg for a play and what does it mean to be a dramaturg for a novelist or a choreographer? It was very cool kind of class.

N: That’s what studying dramaturgy was all about. When we studied in class in a cooperative atmosphere, it was a lot about working together with different approaches and with a lot of people with different backgrounds in the arts. So that kind of cooperative and collective work is what I would call a dramaturgical collaboration. That kind of cooperative and collective form is, I would say, the function of dramaturgy.

A: Maybe just to clarify, in my case I worked intensely with four choreographers: Francisco Camacho, Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, and Meg Stuart. These are the four choreographers with whom I worked the most, very intimately and for long periods of time in the 1980s and 1990s. Although it’s true for all of them that the dancers produced a lot of the choreographic material most of the time, they didn't have stable companies back then (and even today!). Meg Stuart was perhaps the closest one to having a stable company, but its structure was always changing in accordance with the needs of each specific piece. So even though the collaboration was friendly, improvisational and all that, these choreographers never presented themselves as being part of a stable collective. Thus, artistic and choreographic decisions were not taken in the same way as in an artistic collective where everybody has an equal say and the same kind of authorial voice. Because at the end of the day, in all four cases, even if robust conversations and debates took place between the choreographers, dancers, and other collaborators, the final decision was always very clearly up to the choreographer.

So, you see, just to clarify, this is not the same as, say, a collective like the Living Theater. I mean even in the Living Theater there was Julian Beck and Judith Malina, so I don't know how or if decisions were ever made on a collective basis with them. So, let’s say, it’s not like Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, it's not like a contact or jazz jam session, it’s not a process where everybody agrees and everybody's happy and everybody signs the work at the end. You know, it's not that kind of collective. Does that make any sense?

N: Yes, but there’s a kind of open space.

A: Yes. There’s an open space. There’s an invitation to make things. There’s a sense of trust. There’s a lot of intimacy. Let me give an example with Meg Stuart. She was commissioned at a one point by the Deutsche Oper in Berlin to create a piece for an evening featuring three female American choreographers. And even though Meg always worked by asking dancers to improvise and produce material, the relationship with those three dancers was so hierarchical. But that hierarchy was something which the dancers demanded! Most dancers were really like, “okay, if you’re the choreographer, just give me the movement.” And, of course, there is nothing wrong with such a demand, they have every right to ask for such instructions, because that is the compositional protocol expected in Ballet companies.

N: Among some dramaturgs in the British dramaturgs’ network, such as Katalin Trencsényi, there has been some discussion about how dance dramaturgy originally came about and when its starting point in dance was. I wonder if that moment was related to that historical period when dance was aiming for an alternative development. Because a new form of dance was being created together by including this democratic, collective format: What was the specific quality in this new form of dance that emerged after it was created together?

Perhaps in Postmodern dance and at the Judson Dance Theater (1962-64), artists were living and working together collectively. In an American context, it’s about this alternative working relationship, friendships, artist communities, and also alternative approaches to the question of sexuality. In contrast to the US, in Europe Raimund Hoghe, for example, was working with Pina Bausch in the state-funded Tanztheater. In his case, there was already an institutional framework into which a dance dramaturg could fit. Moreover, there was so much about philosophical discourse in Europe, and theoretical frameworks which challenged mainstream criticism and provided a discursive apparatus for US audiences surrounding dance-making to welcome dance dramaturgs. Still, Raimund Hoghe only started working as Bausch's dramaturg in 1980, much later than the Judson era. What do you think about that? Because you also work here in the USA as well as in Europe. So you know both communities of dance and dramaturgs, in the sense that American “postmodern” dance somehow provokes European “post dramatic” interpretations.

A: I think a few things. So it's interesting that the Judson tradition creates exactly what you describe, a kind of democratization of the artistic process, a kind of breaking down of the primacy of technique, particularly of the technique usually linked to the names of choreographers such as Cunningham, Graham, Limon, whoever... All of a sudden there's a plurality of techniques. It's not that there are many techniques at the same time out there in the broader dance scene, but rather that many techniques can be used within the same piece. And even non-techniques within that same piece! Some performers would know how to dance and be dancers in that piece, whilst others might not and still be dancers in that piece! So it's like a proliferation and assemblage of multi-techniques and non-techniques within each specific dance piece, with also this kind of soft hand of the author, the choreographer.

Still, within that Judson tradition, as far as I know, especially in the United States, or let's say in New York, there was no such thing as a dramaturg. I don't know if Rainer had a dramaturg or Steve Paxson or Trisha Brown had a dramaturg. But I never heard or read anywhere that designation attached to their work in the 1960s and 1970s. So it was still not quite that kind of environment and I don't think that even in European dance in the '60s that was the case. So, when I talk about dance dramaturgy and keep coming back to the Hoghe / Bausch collaborations in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, this is my genealogy. You might well prove me wrong, because I'm sure that somewhere in the world that someone did this kind of collaboration first—there’s always another origin to what we believe the original origin to be…

What I find interesting is that Pina Bausch started asking questions to the ballet-trained dancers of the Wuppertal Municipal Theater who had to do a 9:00 am-4:00 pm job. She began to ask them questions in order to create her pieces. And there's a beautiful moment in one of Raimund Hoghe's books about his collaboration with Bausch, where Hoghe talks about one of the iconic dancers in Pina Bausch’s company, who transitioned from being a ballet dancer in a municipal theater doing her day-job to being a Pina Bausch dancer who had to answer questions and would have to spend hours in the theater talking or improvising or creating scenes arising from the choreographer’s questions. And Raimund Hoghe recalls that after rehearsals this dancer would leave the theater and run in the woods around Wuppertal and cry, cry, cry, because she couldn't stand it—this total transformation of the task of dancer, from someone who executes the choreographer’s instructions to someone who co-creates the piece’s materials. I see this ritual of a dancer leaving the theater at the end of the day and running through the city and crying as a kind of exercise in mourning—mourning for a whole system of dance production that would soon vanish. Hoghe tells that she eventually became one of the most iconic and important dancers in Bausch’ iconic company of the late 1970s throughout the late 1980s.

I like this story because it shows how, with Bausch, a new protocol of composition was emerging in choreography, a hyper-complex one, in which dancers aren't just improvising; they're producing material that answers a specific question coming from the choreographer, and they must answer it with extreme rigor. It differs from the Judson tradition, which is the American tradition of happenings and events like Fluxus and all of that. There is a kind of joyful playfulness. And there's also chance procedures and a kind of Duchampian impetus and irreverence about what is art, what counts as art.

Bausch was after something else—there’s still humor but there’s an overabundant production of choreographic material by the dancers during the rehearsal process and that’s where things can get a bit overwhelming. The choreographer has to manage the complexity of composition within this proliferation of output. And that’s where I feel lies the difference: it is inherent to the specific creative process that another figure must enter the dance studio, this editor if you wish, this friend, this co-composer who is not the author, namely, the dramaturg.

Of course, the other big difference in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s is that the market, especially in the 90s, was well-funded, and in search of an identity for European contemporary dance, with producers and programmers looking for new markets within Europe. So there’s the “discovery” of New Portuguese dance, there’s the “discovery” of New Spanish dance, and a bit later, the “discovery” of New Eastern European dance, which became a big thing in the early 2000s. So they were always looking for these new markets which were connected to the geo-political expansion of the European Union. Within that movement of market expansion, the figure of the dramaturg became perversely something that some producers would promote. I say “perversely” because I know of cases back then when a programmer would say, “Okay, you're a new choreographer whom no one knows anything about, and from a peripheric country say, Slovenia, or Portugal, or Romania. We're going to produce you, but you need a dramaturg in order to make sure the final result has quality.”

I know that happened to Vera Mantero, for instance, but she is not the only case. And I've already written about this, but it is worthwhile repeating. In Vera’s case, she was explicitly told: “we will produce your new work, but you need to include a dramaturg from the North!” Thus the perversity—the figure of the dramaturg becomes a quality control stamp. In the case of Vera, “from the North,” meaning the north of Europe, is even more incredible in terms of the geo-politics of “quality control” in dance, but let’s not go there… Anyway, I’m telling you this story in order to show how the role of the dramaturg can be used perversely.

I think in the US, given the precariousness of the support [for the arts] is so extreme, that such an economic model has never really emerged. But, again, it’s interesting with a choreographer like Ralph Lemon; the moment he changes his compositional protocol and goes for a kind of aesthetic closer to dance theater, he also starts working with a dramaturg, Katherine Profeta.

And then eventually there was a moment in Europe when we started hearing people say: “Oh you know If you're actually a good choreographer, then you don't need a dramaturg. If you have your concept and know what you are doing, why would you need such a person?”

N: So this kind of European genealogy remains strong in contemporary dance, but it can be intense at different times. It is also interesting how German municipal Tanztheater has influenced dance-making in the US. So input from Germany, as with Raimund Hoghe working with Pina Bausch, but also identity politics bursting onto the scene after the pandemic or after the Black Lives Matter movement. There's probably a kind of multiplicity at work. So working together, maybe like inviting different forces together in the creative process.

A: That's a good point. I mean, it's so new that I don't know yet. It's a little bit more complex to think about because of all the reasons you mention. There's an interesting project that David Weber-Krebs did during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, as theaters everywhere were shutting down. David invited about 100 people, choreographers, dancers and also dramaturgs, to contribute to a book titled And Then The Doors Opened Again. It’s a very interesting book because the responses came from everywhere. From Greece to the US, people gave very different kinds of responses to the question: what should happen once the theatres re-open? I think that the book offers a kind of kaleidoscopic template for a future dramaturgy. One that would be based on a kind of collective thinking.

With the specific issue of Black Lives Matter, your question becomes more complicated. More complicated, but also much more simple, which is to say, it is impossible to think about artmaking today without thinking about structural and institutional racism, sexism, transphobia, classism, ageism, ableism, and anti-Blackness. It is impossible to think about artmaking today without thinking about ecocide and genocide. In other words, it is impossible for those involved in dance not to think about the political in very, very specific ways. Ways which have direct links to specific bodies and lives. And, of course, to their movements. So, if dramaturgy is to exist in the future (knowing that the future is now), it has to be hyper-attuned to the struggle of minorities, to politics, which includes identity politics as well as ecological politics. If you don't attend to that imperative of the struggle, you're not going to be a good dramaturg.

This is a speculative project for future dramaturgy. I think right now the so-called outside world, what lies supposedly beyond the walls of the theater, has precedence and prevalence over the way in which choreographers co-compose the intra-world of the work.

N: This is my last question. I know you are so busy organizing courses while teaching at university. But if you had time to work as a dramaturg in the future, would you prefer to do so?

A: Two steps to my answer! First, for many years, I've been doing undercover dramaturgy. I've been working with my life partner Eleonora Fabião on several of her performances and actions. Eleonora works in the streets, with large collectives; many people involved are non-artists, thus I've been helping out and thinking through exactly this question of the “outside.”

Second step. I recently got an invitation to revisit a work by Francisco Camacho which premiered in 1997, titled Gust for which I worked as dramaturg. It was a very big production for a big stage, with fourteen dancers. Now in 2023, the two big theaters in Lisbon and Porto which co-produced Gust 26 years ago, proposed a re-staging of the work.

So, and I'm making a comeback as a dramaturg, but for a re-staging. I’ll be openly a properly credited dramaturg, but as a re-enactment act! So it's very interesting— Francisco and I are older, the dancers are older, some of the original cast have quit dancing, one tragically passed away, So we will see how it goes. It's very interesting actually in relation to your work about dance and aging. It'd be super interesting to think about that: what makes a choreography age? Or how beautiful it is to be older. It will be very demanding to balance it with the teaching at the university, very intense because I like to be there in the studio even when the dancers are just warming up in the morning. I like to be there when there's supposed to be nothing happening. That’s when dramaturgy in dance really happens.

N: That’s super interesting! That's the beginning of the process. Thank you very much.

A: It is a pleasure.

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP21K00131 and a Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (Project number: 2024C-334).