The terror of meaning in art

Why Do We Need Dance Dramaturges?

Although it’s not very fashionable to talk about the maker’s intention, the maker still has one. Moreover, now that the questions in regards to the maker’s intention seem irrelevant, and since we have become a part of an interpretive community who is free to direct the work anywhere we want according to our wants and wills - nowadays makers make sure they think carefully about the tools that’ll help them direct the audience towards the intended meaning, without having to admit it or point at a certain specific interpretation.

This is why some makers choose to work with a dramaturge, who will serve as their experimental audience and interpret their work during the creation process, and in doing that will supervise the construction of the makers’ preferred meaning.

Before we discuss the position of the dramaturge, I feel that first of all we have to decode what I term as the “terror of meaning”, due to the compulsive characteristics I recognize in the triangle between the maker, the audience and the meaning. This issue raises a number of questions: can an artwork have an entirely autonomous existence, or is it doomed to be dependent on the context in which it is created, and later on that in which it is being ‘consumed’? Is there a dance piece that can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime due to its intrinsic make up, or do dance pieces always stay reliant on the audience’s capacity to understand the work, to generate meaning from it?  Can a work generate meaning that isn’t reliant on the context in which it is viewed, one that an audience can interpret and make meaning of without having any prior knowledge? Is it possible to create a work that’s devoid of any meaning?

The Ignorant Spectator

One of the biggest revolutions in the academic discourse around dance is the perception of the dancing body as a body that carries prior knowledge, a body that is already conditioned in a certain way, that contains certain insights, constraints, circumstances. The audience, also flesh and blood, stopped perceiving the dancer’s body as a ‘clean’ entity. Having said that, sometimes a dance piece can be experienced by an audient outside of any contextualized discourse. For that person the work is unique, perhaps the first, or the last they will see in their lives. Lets assume an audience member, who saw one dance piece in his life, and that piece happened to be Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. He doesn’t know that the work is an adaptation of an existing work, he doesn’t know to view it in the historical context to which it refers, he doesn’t know the original story, which fed Nijinsky when he choreographed the ballet – about choosing a virgin to sacrifice, he doesn’t know anything about the dance-theatre genre, or German expressionism, or expressionism at all. He never saw a classical ballet and therefore will not recognize any classically derived movements in Bausch’s version, and won’t know the difference between classical and contemporary movements at all, or many other things literate viewers, armed with prior knowledge, would know about the work. For the sake of the discussion, in order to distinguish between the knowledgeable viewer, who watches the work with prior knowledge and context, I will use the term “the ignorant viewer” for those audience members who don’t posses great knowledge of the world of dance.

The relevant dramaturgical question for the discussion is – would the ignorant viewer be able to construct meaning from the work? Though I make no promises in regards to answering the question, the aim of asking it is to bring to the surface other questions worth discussing when trying to shed light on the role of the dramaturge.

Who takes responsibility?

Should the artist take responsibility on the potential ignorance of his audience? And what do we do with reference-less audience? Between ourselves, we call the part of our body that connects all our fingers together as ‘hand’. The hand is the context for our fingers, and we perceive it as one unit which can be put into a glove, but as far as the fingers go, the glove has no meaning, nor does the fact it’s easy for us to imagine them as part of this thing we termed ‘hand’. 

Similarly, the ignorant viewer who isn’t versed in the discourse around dance, for whom there is no separation of classical and contemporary dance, no abstract movements to familiar narrative, no politics of dance or many other variants, Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring is a context-less work, that doesn’t correspond with anything good. Well, that’s an overstatement. It doesn’t correspond with the history of dance or perhaps with other artistic phenomena, but it certainly corresponds with the audience member’s body, movement possibilities, own behaviors and personal tastes. Although the ignorant audience will miss all the other meanings; artistic, and context-related - and these are, sometimes, the most important ones for the understanding the essence of the work.
I mean, I can look at a sentence written in Chinese, understand it’s a language, made up of letters, that must represent the alphabet I know from my own language, but between understanding that, and understanding the meaning of the sentence itself, is a deep chasm.

When an audience member leaves the theatre saying “I didn’t get it” – who is in fact responsible for his/her understanding? Should I teach people Chinese since I want to make artwork in Chinese? In other words, is the responsibility for the making-of-meaning in the hands of the audience or the artist? Do we have the right as audience to hold any claims against an artist whose work we didn’t understand? What is the responsibility, if there is any, of an artist towards their audience? And is there a reversed responsibility, of the audience towards the artist?

“I didn’t get it”, “I didn’t like it”, “it didn’t communicate with me” are sayings which all reflect our need as an audience to relate to the artwork. We expect it to suit our taste, entertain us, lift our spirit, and mainly – that we understand it. We want to the work to “speak to us”, and assume the responsibility for it on the work itself. Perhaps this expectation seems logical due to the sums of money we are requested to pay for watching it. Although even in free shows this exact expectation exists. It is strongly tied with the “terror of meaning”: as a maker you have to make a work that has a meaning, you must provide your audience with meaning they can understand, interpret, decode, you have to give the work meaning so that it communicates with the audience, so they can enjoy it, connect with it. You also need to imbue the work with meaning so that stakeholders will find it valuable, include it in the academic discourse, so that you receive public funding for it, so that critics will write about it, and the audience will tell their friends about it, and they, in turn, will come and watch it for themselves. Here I beg to ask the question again: what will happen if the work, god forbid, will be devoid of meaning?

Dramaturgy: The Discourse Around Meaning

The conversation around dramaturgy interests me as it allows for the exposure of the importance of meaning and the reciprocal relationship between an artist and the meaning of their work. An interesting question is why does the maker wish to take the responsibility of meaning making off his/her back and lay it on someone else’s? I think the answer for this question is either: the artist wants to get rid of this particular role so it doesn’t interfere with the creation process. The second one is that he uses the help of someone else since he doesn’t believe he is able to do it well enough on his own, and believes that someone else can conjure up possibilities for the work he himself cannot.  

But what is essentially the role of the choreographer? Is his job merely to generate movements? To create shapes in space with a body that’s moving in a certain pace? And what happens when the choreograph chooses to assume the responsibility of generating the movement on the dancers – does that mean he will lose the right to define himself as a choreographer?

I would like to offer a way of thinking about the act of choreography as a set of practices, all relating back to creating a work where the performers in it work mainly from a physical place – from body movements; alongside the construction of movement compositions in time and space, one of the choreographer’s traditional roles is thinking about the work as a whole. That is, thinking about the work as a ritualized unit, as drama, in the Greek sense of the word: as an action. In short, dramaturgy, or the responsibility on the dramatic action (whether the ritualized act is narrative-based or purely form-based), is within the realm of responsibility of the choreographer, use often acts as the director of the drama or ritual, of his work.

The choreographer’s directorial work is in the construction of the movement elements into a dramatic, ritualized, action-based continuum, that generates a performance composition that carries unique meaning. Without an intelligent connective thread, or in other words without composition, they’d be arranged in a coincidental sequence, one we would be tempted to term meaningless. It’d be like letters placed next to each other without the intention of placing them in a way that will create a real word, one that we know how to decode. When the choreographer deals with the craft of composing he ponders over the placement of the ingredients, be it arbitrary or meaningful, next to each other in a unique, singular manner, while weaving of it all together into a fabric which contains a new meaning. You could argue, that a choreographer who assumes their traditional role as a dramaturge, takes responsibility over the creation of the meaning. But when a choreographer doesn’t take on this responsibility and hands it over to someone else, what does that actually mean?

What Do Dramaturges Do?

Since the role of the dramaturge cannot be defined in a way that will satisfy everyone, exactly in the same way the role of the choreographer cannot be agreed upon by everyone, and since the role definition is malleable and changes according to arbitrary choices of made by stakeholders, as well as the people manning the job, speaking about dramaturgy as type of practice isn’t entirely possible. Having said that, the use of dramaturges on dance projects isn’t something that can be ignored. They seem to play a role, and the makers seem to enjoy granting them the role. All that’s left to do is to talk about the various roles given to dramaturges.

Dramaturge as a partner for dialogue

Hiring a dramaturge (very much a privilege in our local arts scene) allows the maker to think about his piece in a way he may not have been able to alone. A dramaturge can offer the maker ideas, inspirations, and directions. The dramaturge is a partner for dialogue about the piece as it’s being created, someone I can, as a maker, trust that they understand what I’m looking for, understand the meaning I want to imbue the work with, but doesn’t have the (interfering) emotional involvement I have as the maker of the work. Someone who oversees the process and is a part of it, but doesn’t actually carry the responsibility for it. In fact, the dramaturge is requested to operate with complete honesty precisely for that reason – he doesn’t carry the responsibility for the making of the work, and thus can potentially find it easier to negate, to cancel, to rule out, and to judge. The materials aren’t sacred to him, as they are for the person who creates them, and his lesser emotional involvement gives him a seemingly objective appearance.

The dramaturge as an informed viewer

When reading Shir Hacham’s texts, it seems there isn’t enough awareness amongst Israeli makers to the fact that the choreographic text is already so loaded with and full of meaning, and the informed viewer, who is as knowledgeable in the field of dance as Hacham is, expects the viewer to address the preexisting knowledge. In other words, the informed viewer doesn’t feel like seeing time and again what the ignorant viewer wishes to see. The informed viewer, contrary to the ignorant viewer, wishes for extra layers of thought and meaning in the work, and that’s where the dramaturge comes in, put himself in the shoes of the informed audience, and makes sure the expectations are met. How does he do it? He can recognize clues within the piece where such potential exists, and point at them for the choreographer; the dramaturge can find a different context from the one the maker of the work intended; he can tell the choreographer of Little Red Riding Hood that the story is in fact The Pedophile Hunter.

The dramaturge as a guinea pig

I believe that every maker, in one way or another, deals with manipulation of the audience. In doing so, makers try and take the audience on an experiential journey, perhaps an emotional one. In this instance the dramaturge can be used as the maker’s guinea pig. The dramaturge can sense the stimulus and respond to it, to share their effect with the maker, including their reaction to it. As an experimental audience, the dramaturge feeds back to the maker and allows them to compare their actual experience of the work, with the desired one. The maker tends to consult the dramaturge when he/she wants to judge what works and what doesn’t. The maker basically asks the dramaturge for advice on the relationship between the platforms the maker offers and what the dramaturge understands the maker wants to say. In simple and simplistic words, the dramaturge will answer the question “does it work?” When the meaning of “work?” here is “is it doing what it’s meant to be doing? Does the manipulation work?”

The dramaturge as a signpost

How does one let go of the terror of meaning? One of the ways I think makers turn to, consciously or unconsciously, in order to rid themselves of the terror of meaning, is improvisation. Improvisation allows them to set themselves free from the commitment to order, knowledge, coherency, one that makers turn to in order to experience total freedom, automatism which is free of regimented thought processes, that allows them to act intuitively. As if (but only as if), in free improvisation there is no commitment to meaning, and we are less responsible to stay loyal to the dramaturgy, to the rules of the ritual.

The question that is being asked is why, as makers, we cannot take the same freedom in the composition itself? Why do we have to turn to improvisation in order to disengage from the terror of meaning? Why does the maker feel obligated to a beginning, middle and an end? To correct distances between performers? To a correct movement pace? To a correct number of steps?
What do we lose when we don’t commit to meaning? The audience won’t understand the maker? The maker won’t get public funding?

These questions come up all the more strongly when thinking about seminal artworks in the history of art. These artworks paved the way precisely because they broke through the boundaries artists abide by, that limit them to the common or known ‘meanings’. They took the liberty to define something new, that created a new meaning, that didn’t recycle an existing one. It’s safe to assume that the peers of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Mozart and Petipa, would find it hard to understand the meaning of the works of Pollock, Becket, Cage and Cunningham. Their avant-garde works never tried to fit into the mainstream, or generate meaning that’ll ensure the audiences’ understanding. In such cases, when the maker deviates from the known and the familiar, the dramaturge can serve the choreograph in the way of a signpost. The dramaturge can point at the path as well as at the deviation from it, but it’s the maker who needs to finally choose which road to take.

The dramaturge as a collaborator

One could ask then, why is the dramaturge not defined then as a co-maker, equal in status to the maker?
I believe the answer is in the field of practice itself. At the end of the day, someone has to make decisions, and perhaps here, democracy isn’t as useful. From a Marxist point of view, the dancers come up with the movements, the dramaturge is in charge of the conceptual work, and the maker takes all the credit, as well as the criticism. For that reason the dramaturge must remain a consultant. Once he becomes a collaborator, he’s no longer a dramaturge: Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Nir Ben-Gal and Liat Dror, Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, Yossi Berg and Oded Graf – who knows who does what when they work? On the other hand, even when the separation is supposedly clear, as in the case of Yasmeen Godder anf Itzik Giuli, even then we are not quite sure who does what…What we do know for sure is that when you separate the maker from the dramaturge, you create a hierarchy, you decide who’s at the top and who’s not. It may be that the actual separation of the work of the dramaturge from that of the maker cannot be taken for granted, and so the need to justify it arises.

Further questions

Imagine a painter working with a dramaturge. What will be the role of the dramaturge?
The question of the role of the dramaturge encourages us to ask what is the role of the maker? What is the work? Who created it? And especially – if the choreograph lets other people come up with movements, and if the choreograph lets other people direct, and if the choreograph places the responsibility of deciding what works and what doesn’t in the hands of another, then what does the choreograph actually do?
The role of the dramaturge isn’t new. What’s new is entrusting the role in someone else’s hands, other than the maker, and we are ought - as makers - to ask ourselves why.

What do makers mean when they say they have to make the right choices in their works? The existence of ‘right choices’ demands an assumption in regards to the auteur’s preexisting intentions. In other words, the right choices carry meaning, the auteur’s intention carries meaning, and that brings us back to the questions in regards to the terror of meaning, the audience’s ignorance, and the maker’s role and responsibility nowadays.

Instead of Conclusion

In the beginning of the 20th century, artists who belonged to the Dada movement took seemingly meaningless objects, and imbued them with new meaning when they positioned them in museums and galleries. That is not the meaninglessness I refer to, which is in effect reassuming a new meaning, rather than meaninglessness. My question is whether an artwork can exist without carrying any meaning at all? Can there be an artwork that is devoid of meaning for its makers, both the artwork itself as well as its ingredients? Should such an artwork have a right to exist? Dada artists taught us that each action we will try and create from, is nothing but an artistic expression, and even if we will try and create a meaningless work, the resulting artwork will be creative and full of meaning…there’s no running away from meaning, which is why I termed it ‘terror’. Dada brought us to an absurd intersection that prevents us from creating, and perhaps that’s also why so many makers today go back to the classics and search for their creative paths via historical means. That’s one way of explaining the hyper realist trend in the world of contemporary visual art, the minimalists trends in music, and the thriving of female choreographers who use the language of classical ballet in their works.
The questions set by Dada in relation to art embarrassed artists, who in turn, turn their back on it in an attempt to escape it. Going back today is synonymous with experiencing the work as if it has an absolute meaning that has never been questioned. Even today, nearly two hundred years after the romanticists, we still view work from a romantic point of view; we expect the artist to create “from within”, and if possible, then with great agony. The artist’s work must be strenuous, as well as the centre of his/her life.
Why?

From Hebrew: Sivan Gabrielovich - Gal