2024 Digital Conference
Dramaturgy Crossroads

Karen Jean Martinson, Dan Smith

In this short asynchronous session, Dan Smith and I will feature the NPX Recommend-a-Thon, rolled out by the
Advocacy Committee this fall. We will give an overview of the event, share some information about the
participation
we have had/the reviews we have written in our first two events, solicit comments from some participants, and
advertise the March event!

Yejia Sun

This proposal introduces a case study on The Rasa Project, a interdisciplinary and intercultural initiative that
unites artists, software engineers, and thinkers to confront the urgent challenges of our era: the climate crisis
and the role of artificial intelligence by incorporating the rasa aesthetics from India and John Cage’s music.
This
multimedia experience transcends traditional performance boundaries, fusing music, visual art, technology, and
narrative to create an innovative and thought-provoking exploration of these critical issues. The presentation
will
delve into the unique dramaturgical strategies employed in The Rasa Project, demonstrating how it challenges
conventional norms to inspire reflection and action.

Mark Fossen

While the past years have seen dramaturgy move online, we need to be careful to keep the doors open and
accessible
to individuals with disabilities. Web design includes the clear storytelling and conceptual organization at the
core
of dramaturgical work, but there is also a wealth of technical information which is often outside our training.
One
of the places where this knowledge gap lies is in the area of online accessibility and knowledge both of standards
like WCAG 2.0 and the coding practices to achieve them. As a dramaturg who has also been working in web design and
development for almost 30 years (including accessibility training), I will share some of the basics of online
accessibility and how to implement them regardless of the platform you are using. These don’t require advanced
coding techniques as much as they require a knowledge of how browsers and screen readers present information to
users. With knowledge and awareness, we can improve our online resources to be available for all.

John Michael DiResta

Unlike a playscript, a directing portfolio, an acting reel or a design website, the work of a developmental
dramaturg leaves no obvious artifact. This absence makes the work of new play dramaturg notoriously difficult to
succinctly catalogue and disseminate, since the work often happens in conversations with playwrights, not in
writing. Sometimes these conversations happen in formal scenarios over many meetings; sometimes they happen at a
bar
over cocktails; sometimes they are text messages sent between other meetings. In this presentation, I offer models
for documenting new play dramaturgy. Though largely focused on the ways in which this work can be packaged within
the settings of higher education, especially tenure, promotion, or reappointment files, this approach to packaging
also applies to grant proposals, residency applications, and job applications. I offer as case studies my
experience
documenting my developmental dramaturgy of Charlie O’Leary’s full-length play Basically Children, which debuted at
the Iowa New Play Festival in 2022 before a workshop at the Tank in New York City before becoming a 2023 O’Neill
Finalist.

Sarah Bedwell

The dramaturgy of disability has steadily evolved alongside the models of disability, reflecting contemporary
stereotypes. Approaching disability from a dramaturgical lens offers an opportunity to reconsider how disability
functions literarily in the theatre, and how this works with or in opposition to the disability rights movement.
This paper explores historically stigmatizing narratives of disability in the theatre and offers dramaturgical
possibilities for recategorizing the treatments of disabled people in dramatic literature and in rehearsal spaces.

Ethan Persyko

This paper starts with a historical overview of what intimacy is, in an entertainment and international context,
split into four categories: Intimacy as Traditional, Intimacy as Change, Intimacy as Actors, and Intimacy as
Policy.
Only then is it warranted to have a closer look into the three main proponents of the certification topic —
Chelsea
Pace, Jessica Steinrock, and Ann James — and evaluate what arguments each brings forth for being either against,
for, or conditional to certification. Finally, after all this is considered, a few suggestions are offered on what
steps SAG-AFRTA, intimacy training programs, and the greater society should take in order to solve ‘The
Certification Problem’ in the eventual future, or at least to speed up the process.

Karen Jean Martinson, Sarah Hoover

Intercultural approaches to dramaturgy have been idealised, colonised, and dismissed. Yet at their best,
intercultural methods of influencing an audience’s journey through the performance can: “change the
power dynamics at play by dismantling historical us-them hierarchies, by simultaneously embodying us, them and
phases in-between,” (Royona Mitra, Akram Khan, 15). Indeed, dramaturgy carries significant opportunity to
reveal power dynamics and thoughtfully dismantle them, yet runs the risk of re-inscribing divisions between
“us” and “them.” How does a responsible dramaturg negotiate the tensions inherent in such
a
role? Particularly when, as is often the case, the themes of the performance engage with intergenerational trauma
and tragedy? This asynchronous presentation is a recording of a live interview of Karen Jean Martinson, Assistant
Professor of Dramaturgy at Arizona State University by Sarah Hoover, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of
Galway. The performance at the center of the discussion is Yaqui & Béal: Yoeme and Irish in
Conversation,
an intercultural performance of healing through storytelling in the Galway Theatre Festival 2024. As it walks,
dances and sings through the discoveries made by playwright Esther Almazán about the intergenerational
traumas suffered through the Indian Schools and Industrial Schools, this play grounds its interculturalism in a
sense of discovery. Karen Jean’s history as the dramaturg of its first iteration in Arizona and
Sarah’s
history as its current dramaturg inform the conversation about how to dramaturg intercultural theatre as an act of
solidarity.

samar saif, mango Gwen

mirrored fatality is an underground and interdependent Kapampangan and South Asian xenotrans experimental and
healing noise punk duo. From May 11 to June 16, 2022, mirrored fatality completed a national United Kingdom tour
with Tour de Moon’s Moon Arkestra: a collective of 9 multidisciplinary musicians aged 23-27 and performed
“COCOON WEBS”, screened their short film, EARTHBODY(S)_BIOME(TRICS) featuring their Tour de Moon Moon
Bounce single “BIOME(TRICS)” on Tour de Moon’s programmes: Moon Cinema and Moon Experiences in
Bletchley, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Grimsby, Huddersfield, Blackburn, Barrow-in-Furness, Newcastle, Plymouth,
Southampton, Farnborough, Crawley, and London. At Tour de Moon, mirrored fatality utilized radical imagination and
truth seeking to cross-pollinate their DIT (Do-It-Together) framework “cocoon webs.” mirrored
fatality’s “cocoon webs” combines care work, rituals, altars, holistic medicine, dance,
performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments and fashion,
anti-imperialist education, healing justice counter-spaces, and decolonial and trans queer of color collective
ethos. mirrored fatality’s intention for “cocoon webs” is for QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black,
Indigenous, and People of Color) to embody their rage and holistic healing to disrupt the isolation from existing
in
a white supremacist capitalistic apocalyptic world to fight towards QTBIPOC-centered liberation. Through mirrored
fatality’s autoethnographic, participatory-action research, and community-based learning research,
literature
and media analyses, qualitative interviews, feedback surveys, song lyrics, documentation and footage of their
interdisciplinary performances, and Queer, Transfeminist, Cyborg, Xenofuturist, and Performance Studies theory as
praxis; mirrored fatality weaponizes “cocoon webs” as sites of protest. At Tour De Moon, mirrored
fatality’s “cocoon webs” whisteblow against white supremacy, transphobia, and fascist
imperialism
in the United Kingdom, United States of America, South Asia, and Philippines to mobilize an international warrior
network responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition.

Jen Shook, Heidi Wiren Bartlett

If a crossroads is a liminal space, a space of encounter, exchange, and change—a place between and a place
of convergence—then grief is a crossroads. No wonder such a place often hosts the altars, the memorials, a
place both sacred and so everyday, a place both of pause and of passing through, What then is the dramaturgy of
grief at the crossroads? The boxes that we move repeatedly before finally unpacking them. The clothes that passed
on become costumes in their new contexts. The unlabeled photographs and scraps of writing to be rearranged or set
afloat. The memory of trees mapped but now missing. Compass flowers point the way forward, backward, North, South.
This performance presentation offers a ritual for the crossroads of grief, a meeting place where we learn how to
connect through grief rather than letting it divide us from the world and each other.

David Quang Pham, Abby Bender, Dimitar Uzunov

In November 2023, the Theatre About Science International Conference held its second year at the University of
Coimbra, Portugal. Scientists, theatre artists, and science theatre artists from around the world flocked to share
how they practice the intersection of science communication with the performing arts. Some of the presenters for
this international conference hope to also be presenters in the 2024 LMDA Digital Conference. Their intentions are
to share how scientific literacy supports artistic sustainability and vice versa. The proposed “Theatre About
Science” presentation discusses how dramaturgy can be the crossroad between science and theatre. The speakers are
Abby Bender, David Quang Pham, and Dimitar Uzunov. Pham is an LMDA member and connected with Uzunov during the
International Dramaturgy Lab. The presentation is set for 50 minutes. It starts with a 5-minute introduction
describing science dramaturgy. Then, it features presenters: 10 minutes for Pham to detail his freelance
dramaturgy
alongside his experience in writing science plays, 10 minutes for Bender to details her science communication
graduate program at Stony Brook University, and 10 minutes for Uzunov to discuss science storytelling from the
Eastern Hemisphere. The final 15 minutes will be a recorded discussion amongst the presenters about their
collective
experiences and insights during the Theatre About Science International Conference.

Ally Varitek

The road from education to employment for emerging dramaturgs is currently muddy, the path in some ways unclear
and
in others uncertain that those steps will be supportive enough. This presentation will shed light on the current
early career opportunity landscape for dramaturgy. This will be accomplished through a curation of perspectives by
surveying the ECD Affinity space for anecdotes and/or questions they feel strongly about in the current landscape.
This qualitative data will be accompanied by quantitative data of opportunities available. My hope is that this initial research about the current early career
opportunity landscape can serve as a grounded and actionable place for crossroads to emerge and grow to an
accessible and supportive education to employment path in literary management, dramaturgy, and related practices.
I
hope it will also allow us to have a common understanding and vocabulary to begin to take action to repair this
crossroad for early career dramaturgs for years to come. While this research will give us a collected
understanding
of what the early career crossroads currently looks like from an ECD lens, my hope is that conversations between
mid-to-later career dramaturgs will build off of this session either during the digital conference and/or inspire
a
session or conversation for the in-person conference. This is more of the contemplation; action is next.

• ECD Opportunity Research Sign-Up
• ECD Opportunity Input/Update Form
• Early Career Dramaturgy Opportunities