Maaike Bleeker - Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice

This series explores new dramaturgies within contemporary performance practice and deploys dramaturgical thinking as a productive analytical and practical approach to both performance analysis and performance-making. Designed to inspire students, scholars and practitioners, the series extends the understanding of the complex contexts of dramaturgy and embraces its diversity and scope.

All Inclusive. Photographer: Rolf Arnold. Courtsey of Ism & Heit

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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This eloquently written book by Maaike Bleeker is a must read for anyone interested in dramaturgy and contemporary performance. It includes an exceptionally precise description of the developments of the field of dramaturgy until now, including new contemporary methods. But more importantly this seminal book answers the question: what does contemporary theatre do? It thinks. In a world torn between easy-fix opinions and oppressive categorizations, theatre is a space for deep thinking, thinking with others, thinking through practice, and performative thinking that goes beyond language and definitions. Read this book: think with theatre.

Sodja Zupanc Lotker, Professor of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at DAMU (Prague Academy of the Performing Arts), Czech Republic, and former director of the Prague Quadrennial PQ

In her new book Doing Dramaturgy, Maaike Bleeker accomplishes the unimaginable: she embraces the inheritance of the field of dramaturgy, traces practices across different times, places and theatre makers, and unlocks its radical potential, without determining what the future of dramaturgy might be. If this book bares a risk, it is the risk of infecting practitionersin academic, creative or educational contextsto resist generalities and to never stop thinking-doing forward together.

Marijke Hoogenboom, Director of the Department for Performing Arts & Film, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland

In this wonderful book, Bleeker demonstrates how doing dramaturgy is always a process of thinking through practice. This is an important argument for conceptualizing dramaturgy as a means of making-thinking. With deep historical insights, critical acumen, and well-chosen case studies, Bleeker shows how dramaturgy is an apparatus of creative thinking and doing that is interwoven and interdisciplinary in ways that put performance at the center of an expanding politics and activism. Generously referenced and wide-ranging, Bleekers text helps us work with the complexity of dramaturgy to understand its central place in the contemporary arts.

Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

Bleeker deftly brings late 20th century conversations about new and expanded dramaturgies up to our 21st century moment, illuminating dramaturgy as a site where theory and practice cannot be separated, and arguing beautifully for a dramaturgy of care. Collaborative artists of all sorts will find fodder in Bleekers generous tool-box of dramaturgical questions and modes of engagement, as well as her detailed case studies from a range of contemporary European performances.

Katherine Profeta, Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Yale University, USA

This book expands on my essays Dramaturgy as a Mode of Looking (2003) and Thinking No-ones Thought (2015). These texts presented first explorations of ideas that are central to the approach to dramaturgy elaborated in this book. Like these articles, this volume is single-authored. Yet the ideas elaborated in it were developed together.

This book is the outcome of an ongoing dialogue with Janine Brogt. We both know the developments in dramaturgical practice that this book is about from the inside, yet from different positions, different journeys through time, and different trajectories through theatre and dance practice. We both attended the Context 01: Active Pooling New Theatres WordPerfect conference in 1993. Janine as one of the most established dramaturgs in the Netherlands and co-founder of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the company that is now called Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) under the direction of Ivo van Hove. I as a student and a beginning dramaturg. The year 1993 was also the year that Janine became the chair of the board of theatre company Het Oranjehotel, co-founded by directors Ivar van Urk and Jeroen van den Berg and myself. It was there and then that our dialogue about doing dramaturgy started. Over the years, our paths kept crossing and from our thinking together sprang the idea for this book. Throughout the writing Janine was my sparring partner and she was an important voice in many of the conversations with makers that inform this book. Being in this together has been a very special experience.

This book is informed by our personal experience with doing dramaturgy and by many exchanges with other dramaturgs during symposia, public discussions, and after-talks, as well as in more informal settings, including meetings of various dramaturgy networks. Prominently present in this context was Marianne van Kerkhoven. She is dearly missed. Her work and writings, as well as her profound commitment to theatre, to people, to the world, continue to be a source of inspiration for many, including me.