Dramaturgy

I looked up the word "dramaturge" on dictionary.com and the defintion posted was this:

A writer or adapter of plays; a playwright.

I've been working on my own definition of dramaturgy all year, but I can say without any reservation that the definition on dictionary.com is woefully inadequate and pretty much just wrong.

For those of you who don't know, I've been acting as the dramaturge for the last couple months on the final Mainstage show at the University of Minnesota, which is the 1966 musical, Cabaret. The experience has been educational and I'm not going to go into the details here, but I do want to talk about what dramaturgy means to me and I want to do this because I've realized that this is what I've wanted to do for a long time.

Let me just begin by saying that another definition for a dramaturge - another one lacking umpf - is a person who loves the theatre. Because that is incredibly vague, we can look past it, but it does start to get at what I believe to be the core of dramaturgy. I have had to do various tasks and research assignments for my role in this musical and the hardest one was to create informational packets for high school students who were coming to see the show. The thoughts that were running through my mind and making my job difficult were 1.) What the hell do high school kids think about musical theatre? 2.) What do these people know about World War II and all that surrounds that historical monument? 3.) What do I say about all the sexual content in a show that is suppose to be taking place during the upsurge of Nazi power and the onset of enforced anti-Semetism that lead to the murder of millions of people?

I decided to make an informational packet that dealt with the idea that images used by the theatre, the cinema, television, magazines, and other media are always masking a series of other pictures that wouldn't help to "sell" the product. A light example of this would be to think of the ads for Minoxidil in which a man is seen monitoring the progress of miraculous hair re-growth. What we don't see here is that the guy has to apply it everyday for the rest of his life because to stop the applications would actually have a strange side effect, and what we certainly don't get from the ad on TV is the smell of the product. The smell of a cream that you can't live without but that smells like moose urine [sic]. A heavier example, and one more pertinent to my work, is that Cabaret bombards the audience with pelvis-thrusting, lascivious prostitutes/dancers and fails to present the pictures of the Jews with their heads bashed in that German soldiers found having sex with the prostitutes in the brothel above the club. We don't get to see the concentration camps, and the only swastika-clad Nazi that we see in the show is actually the most charismatic and likable character guy in all of faux-Berlin.

So I made a packet that picked away at the idea of advertising and the idea that everyone is trying to sell somebody something, but that if we want to interact with Life in any in-depth way that we would have to learn how to decode those images presented to us and look beyond them to see the other "truths". My point is that while making these packets I realized that dramaturgy basically consists of every skill I have or that I wish to cultivate. Dramaturgy requires historical research, a grasp of sociological and psychoanalytical theories, a solid grasp on the workings of the theatre and theatrical conventions, an ability to see the world from different points of view, a desire to teach, a desire to be taught, and the ability to stick with a process in which you have to make something for a group of puberty-fueled, Axe body-sprayed, academic neophytes that deals with musical theatre and suffering, two things that high schoolers probably don't care to think to much about.

But I did stick with it and I loved doing it. I love it even though it's nearly impossible to do ith without getting soul-tired. I talk with friends a lot about whether or not it's worth the effort to engage in Life's most frustrating fields of action, despite the aggrivation, and I'm usually the only one that admits outloud that we HAVE to do this becuase, if for no other reason, we are the people who CAN do this. I can feel the tacit agreement from my friends, but we need to find a way to pool resources and start fighting back against all the shit that people are eating up out there. We can change the ways things work through art and by acting on our ideas. The kind of change we can effect is not a global enlightnemnt of any sort. What we have the power to do is to influence the individuals that we come in contact with. I learned all of this from Cabaret, which is far more than I was expecting to get out of the process.

So, I've basically come up with the idea that a dramaturge is a philosopher specializing in theatre who works with both theory and practice in order to expand the consciousness of other people. That's the new dramaturgy, and I've officially thrown my hat into the ring and have committed the next 80 years of my life to it. After the 80 years are up, I'm switching to Crossword Editor.