INVITATION: We invite artists and scholars attending the PSi29 conference in person to participate in our open Working Group meeting on Sunday June 23. The working group is designed for participants with experience/interest in dramaturgy to drop in!
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 prompts we received from the PSi community.
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.[i] 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?
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)
Pil