Before taking this module I had never even heard of the word dramaturgy, let alone know what the term meant. Obviously because of this I had also never actually heard of the position of being a dramaturg within a theatre/production company and what exactly they are meant to do. Throughout the past several weeks however I have been able to build up my knowledge on this particular subject through working together with my group and doing my own individual research.
My research onto what exactly is a dramaturg and the many jobs and roles they can do can be found here but as a quick recap:
It appears to me that a dramaturg can adjust their position to suit each individual performance or company. They can be a type of mentor to some productions giving their own ideas and input throughout the rehearsals process, a type of critic in which they see a ‘work-in-progress’ and share their thoughts and advice for the finished article or even a writer who works on new material for a production or helps with adapting an original piece.
The dramaturg can also be anyone within a theatre/production company. They can be hired specifically with the job of being a dramaturg towards the performance or they can be someone already associated with the production such as the director or literary manager who takes on extra responsibilities. While a dramaturg can be just one person, I believe that everyone in the Leonce and Lena group has had a go at being a dramaturg in one way or another and we have all worked together as joint dramaturgs.
Our group came together by a random chance after reading and listening to information on the three plays the whole class had a choice of performing. I think we were all slightly more intrigued by the story of Leonce and Lena which herded us each towards it. We were a slight mis-match of people however and hardly any of us had worked with one other person in the group, let alone all of us working together before. By the end of the session however it appeared that we had happily fallen into the group and were buzzing with how exactly we could do this play and put our own stamp on it.
Over the course of the next few weeks we set about assigning different people to different areas of the production but it soon became apparent that the play actually moved along better when we all worked and contributed together. While James did create the initial idea and did a fantastic job of writing pretty much 95% of the script we all eventually used these as stepping stones to get on board with the ideas and help with some input such as when we worked together to improvise the first scene which would later become the actual first scene.
While the James and Tom sorted out their characters themselves, myself, Ashton, Hayley and Jenn literally wrote down the names of the 4 female parts we had created on pieces of paper and each picked one blindly. In all honesty I was a little disheartened when I got the character of Lena simply because it looked like she was going to be one of those character’s that I would feel uncomfortable playing. However after mulling it over for the following few days I started to change my thoughts about playing the character and tried to see it as a positive challenge and think of ways that I could maybe add my own twist on the character so I wouldn’t feel as uncomfortable playing her.
I believe at the very end of this module, after working together for around 5 weeks we have gelled together very well and are starting to understand how we each individually work. We are also very encouraging and motivating towards each other. Personally I think that our work-in-progress performance went almost as good as we could have hoped for in terms of acting, staging, etc. Obviously no work-in-progress goes by smoothly and there were a few issued that we addressed with each other and had mentioned to us that we’ve took on board and are now looking towards fixing, changing or creating for when we continue this performance in Theatre Company.
Overall I have enjoyed this performance and module and I think a lot of that is down to the group/people I was with.