HOW THE DOING IS DONE

Interactuality in Physical Dramaturgies (2009 – 2014)

SSHRC Standard Research Grant

“Physically-based” and “devising” are sufficiently broad terms as to incorporate a wide range of very different objectives, techniques, and styles. However, in general, the terms identify an approach to theatrical creation and performance for which text is not accorded primary or “sacred” status—indeed, one in which text may be secondary in terms of its authority within the developmental process and secondary in terms of the order in which the performance elements may be selected and incorporated into the final production. Rather, in devised theatre the elements of visual and aural presentation, as well as the work’s engagement with narrative, equally emerge out of a set of often collaborative processes that are based in movement, song, and collage and that employ improvisation and collective composition with systematic discipline.

As I discussed in my introduction to my edited essay collection Developing Nation (2009), and as is repeatedly observed throughout the articles collected in it, several decades of scholarship in Canada have argued that the development of professional theatre in this country generally adopted an early and defining preoccupation with text-based, largely realistic theatrical forms and conventions. According to this interpretation, all alternative stylistics were thus measured against these conventions in terms of social relevance, commercial viability, and aesthetic value. Ironically, however, the aesthetic priorities of many of devising companies reflect and extend this literary bias through a paradoxical relationship to writing and written text.