dramaturgy
How a dramaturg can help you
A dramaturg can be a vital ‘outside eye’ for a writer or company offering sensitive, supportive and focused critical suggestions.
I’ll analyse how you want to tell your story and offer observations, questions and ideas.
I want to understand your intentions, and how you’re trying to serve those intentions through all of your writing choices.
Ours will be a relationship of discussion, understanding and collaboration – not one-way fixes. I want to help your work speak more clearly to your collaborators and audiences.
My new project’s an ocean away from my usual stuff in every sense. I trust David’s skills, sharp judgement and really enjoy working with him. Where David spots things I miss – plot, character, structure and more – I’m like a tree-clambering kid being shown the possible branches above, along, over there. I make the choices, do the reaching, change my mind – I’m the one in the tree. I’m not entirely sure whether he’s on the ground or on a cloud, but he’s got a great view. This work is far, far richer now; going where I always wanted it to. That would not have happened without David.
Working with David totally re-invigorated our company’s practice. In a few short days, he guided us through a number of exercises – drawn from his own experience as a playwright – to help us raise the stakes of our dramatic writing. Yet he was equally happy to sit, savour, examine and interrogate our music, puppetry or movement and consider how these crafts could come together to create a vivid world for our audience. This fluidity as a dramaturg is invaluable and fairly unique. The success of Dumbstruck (Fringe First and MTN Award for Innovation) owes him a lot.
When David came to me with his ideas for a writers’ forum, he set in motion a whole array of opportunities for playwrights which became one of the most effective, nurturing and imaginative programmes of writer development in the land. He facilitated the writer development programme at the Ustinov in a way which reflected his nature – balanced, open-minded and open-hearted, full of encouragement and passionate about not only the craft but also the people, giving the writers of the region a sense of self-worth, curiosity, inquisitiveness and passion to develop themselves and their craft.
Some things I can offer
I work with individual writers, companies and venues. This list will give you an idea of what I can do, but each project is unique. We will discuss your needs before we start.
- One-to-one feedback, support and mentoring for individual playwrights
- One-off script reports or script meetings
- Facilitation of research and development processes with writers or companies
- Creation of workshop programmes for venues
- Guiding writing and the use of text in devised work
- Exploring structure, form and intention in devised work
- Project consultation: what do you want to do, how can you best achieve it, and what might that process look like?
- Advice on Arts Council England Project Grants applications
Step One
First, drop me an email with an outline of what you’re looking for. I can then get in touch to arrange a time for us to talk.
Step Two - we talk
We will talk through your project and see where I can help. Not every project needs a dramaturg of course – but let’s find out if you’re not sure.
Step Three - we get started
We agree the initial scope of the engagement and the rate. My half day rate is £150 and a full day rate is £250, but we agree the fee before we start. I then come on board as your dramaturg.
In developing original material, our pieces have sometimes become oblique, ostracising the audience. At other times, we’ve ended up with something too linear, killing off the strange spark that brought the work to life in the first place. David visited rehearsals at such a delicate stage – close to opening, near the end of a development process when we were all so attached to the material – it would have been easy to derail or overwhelm us. But he keyed into where we were at and what we needed. He gave us such an objective ‘audiencing’, taking us on their journey, reflecting our piece back to us. It was really remarkable and, though he says, ‘I’m not here to fix your play’, I know his suggestions helped make it work.
We devise our work, build text through improvisation, and begin without any set idea of structure, so bringing David on board as a Dramaturg at such an early stage of R&D felt like a bit of a risk at the time. What on earth would he make of our chaos? He wasn’t going to try and make us write a proper play was he? Would he even get us? So it was such a joy to have any anxiety completely confounded by such a supportive, generous and intelligent and patience presence in the room. It worked because we felt from the beginning that David was open to learning as much from us as we were getting from him; the process and the work benefited hugely from such a relationship.