{"id":708,"date":"2023-12-13T11:10:39","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T11:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?p=708"},"modified":"2023-12-27T17:54:28","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T17:54:28","slug":"co-conspiracy-an-intergenerational-dialogue-on-queer-ing-dramaturgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/co-conspiracy-an-intergenerational-dialogue-on-queer-ing-dramaturgy\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-conspiracy: An Intergenerational Dialogue on Queer\/ing Dramaturgy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alyson Campbell<\/strong>*<\/a> and Meta Cohen<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article explores an intergenerational collaboration between two Naarm\/Melbourne-based queer artist-researchers or \u201cco-conspirators\u201d (Halberstam, In a Queer Time<\/font> 162\u201363): director-dramaturg Alyson Campbell and composer-dramaturg Meta Cohen. Structured as a dialogue between the two of us, with interspersed analysis, critical framing, photographs and diagrams, we consider how our collaborative work generates new queer dramaturgical practices and offers new ways of thinking about queer(ing) dramaturgies. We realised that for both of us the process begins with the corporeality of text but that each offered \u201cknow-how\u201d (Nelson 114) the other did not have. We conspired together to examine what this means in creating a performance dramaturgy and, further, what it might mean for a project of queering performance.

Keywords<\/strong>: affect, musicality, queer performance, queer dramaturgies, collaboration, scoring, Gertrude Stein, \u201cco-conspirators,\u201d intergenerational<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The discussion is based around the project that formed the genesis of our collaboration: a production of <\/em>Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, or <\/em>DFLTLX, by Gertrude Stein (2019). This was a student production at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Alyson was directing and Meta was formally the dramaturg as part of their Master of Dramaturgy program at the VCA, but their role soon expanded to include composing. What emerged was a synergy around the meeting of a (queer) director who thinks musically and a (queer) composer who thinks dramaturgically, which has led to an ongoing lively collaboration that we like to think of as our queering \u201cco-conspiracy\u201d (Halberstam, <\/em>In a Queer Time and Place 162\u201363).<\/em> The intergenerational nature of our work together chimes with Jack Halberstam\u2019s exhortation that \u201c[a] queer pedagogy must also try to break with the oedipal deadlock that creates and sustains intergenerational conflict\u201d (\u201cReflections\u201d 363). We understand that coming from different generations adds to the vitality of our collaboration; and indeed, in our work we seek to conspire with artists across a wide generational span.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our collaboration entails exploring new ways to articulate and map what is happening in the processes of making and rehearsal. In this article, we examine how this investigation has led us to new dramaturgical practices, notably acts of scoring: for Cohen, a form of dramaturgical scoring (Murray, Campbell and Cohen), and for Campbell, a more explicit use of musical vocabulary to describe her scoring of the performance. The two areas of expertise now do this cross-fertilisation dance where we work towards specificity and openness in the work itself and the making process. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We both see ourselves as hybrid in our identities: Alyson is Irish or U.K.\/Australian (already uncertainty born of colonisation in there) and Meta is Austrian\/Australian. We are drawn to making work in Naarm, as it is a place full of queer performance and full of potential for queering performance, given the number of self-identified queer artists working in the city and region. There are far too many to name, and that is a dangerous exercise that risks exclusion, but, for example, at Melbourne Fringe 2023 more than 50% of the 400+ shows identified themselves as belonging under the LGBTQ+ strand (Abrahams; Boehme et al.). As such, Naarm is a particularly exciting place to be undertaking the project of trying to see, understand and make queer work, surrounded by a vibrant community of practice.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting the Dialogue<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: Meta, who are you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC<\/strong>: I am a composer who is also a dramaturg and a sound designer, and I work across music, theatre and other mixed media. I’m particularly interested in musical thinking and dramaturgy, and how that might intersect with queer performance. Who are you, Alyson?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I am mostly a director; one with a dramaturgical bent or a very dramaturgically focussed director. I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s helpful\u2014in one sense obviously all directors are, aren\u2019t they? Maybe it\u2019s something about my love of texts that I don\u2019t understand quickly, or which resist ease of understanding. So, I like the dramaturgical challenge of \u201cdifficult\u201d work that makes my synapses fire in working them out. And I really do that collaboratively. I\u2019m not someone who sits with the text and tries to figure it out on my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In seeking ways to articulate our various roles and collaborative modes, we are attracted to thinking around \u201cco-conspiracy\u201d and how this relates to queerness and our work on queer performance. Gender theorist Jack Halberstam writes:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Queer subcultures in particular are often marked by a lack of distinction between the archivist and the cultural worker . . . The queer archivist or theorist and the cultural worker may also coexist in the same friendship networks, and they may function as coconspirators [sic] . . . Finally, the academic and the cultural producer may see themselves in a complementary relationship.<\/p>\nHalberstam, In a Queer Time <\/em>162\u201363<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In short, in the spirit of Halberstam, we are queer, intergenerational \u201cco-conspirators\u201d who are making interventions into queer performance, focusing particularly on affect and musicality.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: Meta, you are the one who proposed the idea of co-conspiracy. Do you want to talk a bit about how you arrived there, and we can think through why it appeals to us so much as queer collaborators who think dramaturgically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC<\/strong>: While delving into ideas of performance-as-archive, I went to a lot of Halberstam\u2019s writing on queer archives (In a Queer Time<\/em>). I was particularly interested in the role of the artist-researcher and the relationships between queer archiving and queer practice. I was struck by the division between them not being as stark as I had assumed; how they are entwined, and how that complicates their function. I’ve been thinking about our collaboration and how that works\u2014its different layers. So, I was interested in bringing it to our conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I love it as a term and Halberstam\u2019s definition. That blurring of the academic and the artistic resonates: we’re dramaturgical thinkers! And co-conspiring is a way of thinking, I guess, about a particular approach to composition, or making, that is also somehow connected to queer\/ness\/ing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Queering Dramaturgy Through Composition and Orchestration<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

One thing we were to think about for this edited collection is: how do dramaturgical practices and ideas encounter or interact with, resist and challenge, or reform the wider social, cultural and political structures in which they are embedded? Both of us are thinking about what makes dramaturgies queer and what is queering dramaturgy and why would we do it? To what end? What is it doing in the world? We’ve been discussing how queering dramaturgy gives us a particular philosophical angle or a positioning that has something to offer in resisting normative social, cultural and political structures.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I’ve been trying for a long time to think through how that works through affect and how affect is political (Campbell, Experiencing Kane: An Affective Analysis; Experiencing Kane: An \u201cAffective Approach\u201d<\/em>). And if it’s political, how does that work as a queering strategy? What is the relationship between \u201cdoing theatre in a political way,\u201d as Nikolaus M\u00fcller-Sch\u00f6ll puts it (qtd. in Campbell and Farrier 15), and what Stephen Farrier and I have called \u201cdoing theatre in a queer way\u201d (15). How, exactly, does that work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For both of us, one of the starting places is form.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, crucially, the political potential of form. While we know that realist theatre has been important for LGBTQI++ communities over time and through crises and the ongoing need for representation and visibility, we think that queer performance does its politics in a different way. It\u2019s less based on a character- or plot-driven teleology that remains stuck to ideas of consistency of character. Queerness wants to resist fixity (Busby and Farrier 156). So, that brings us inevitably to form, which is perhaps the crux of our co-conspiracy: our attempts towards specificity in how we think about form and how it works. To a surprising degree, we\u2019re queer formalists!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This formal precision requires specific techniques in order to articulate and shape it. Two vocabularies we have found useful for this shaping are those of affect (for instance, Gilbert; Epstein; and see Campbell, <\/em>Experiencing Kane: An Affective Analysis) and musicality in theatre making (Rebstock and Roesner; Roesner), which we regard as tools for dramaturgical queering.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: For me, part of the excitement of our co-conspiracy is the specificity of language you bring through your specialist knowledge of musicality\u2014your \u201cknow-how\u201d (Nelson 114)\u2014and then your work looking at how that’s queering, or how you can think about queering, through musicality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC<\/strong>: As with any lens, though, it can only be delivered with collaborators who want to share that language. I think the reason we find so much resonance is through your thinking around affect and the way that elements are arranged\u2014and then, of course, the interest in bringing those aesthetic considerations towards queerness, and all of the social and political implications of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I do know that, for a long time, people have written about my directing as a type of choreography, or something that lends itself to thinking of it as something other than, for instance, psychology-led types of realist directing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC:<\/strong> There\u2019s also that thing your former colleague Paul Monaghan said about your directing: that it\u2019s a \u201cdramaturgy of punctuation.\u201d That is musical. It\u2019s the first thing that really struck me when I started working with you: you\u2019re not necessarily using musicological language, but it’s a musical understanding. For example, the way that you organise bodies in space looks, to me, like layers of melody or harmony, or like instruments; it\u2019s orchestration.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Trouble with Harry<\/em>, by Lachlan Philpott, dir. Alyson Campbell. Melbourne International Arts Festival, Northcote Town Hall, 2014. L to R: Dion Mills, Elizabeth Nabben, Emma Palmer, Maude Davey. Photo: Sarah Walker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: Is orchestration where we meet? Composition, but more precisely orchestration? Is that right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC:<\/strong> I\u2019m not sure! I suppose, in general, composition is more involved with generating and orchestration more with arranging. But then it also depends on how you define what it is to compose\u2014orchestration can be part of composition, and arrangement is compositional if you look at the etymology: compose\u2014from componere<\/em>\u2014to put together.[1]<\/sup><\/a> It\u2019s an interesting question. Do you see yourself more as composer or conductor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I love this question! Mainly because I don\u2019t know how to answer it. What belongs where?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC<\/strong>: Perhaps that’s where we get back to the idea of co-conspirators, where the divisions aren’t as clear as one thinks. Because when you think about it, conducting can be quite a compositional act,<\/em> depending on the collaboration. And then there\u2019s text composition and stage composition; two different compositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: And there are two (of the other kind of) stages because, in the first stage, I\u2019m doing something we could call composition, and then the conducting for me is really when I\u2019m in those last stages. That\u2019s a particularly affective realm when it’s about dynamics, pace, transitions and atmosphere. Those difficult open texts I like so much allow, and require even, a lot of this shaping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings us to Gertrude <\/em>Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights or, as we named it, <\/em>DFLTLX, which offers an example for us to talk about openness, difficulty, affect, musicality and queerness.<\/em> We found the openness of that text an invitation to take the base materials and arrange them in a particular way, or \u201ccom-pose\u201d them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Musicality of Open Texts: DFLTLX<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

MC:<\/strong> What drew you towards working on Stein?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: I think partly because in my PhD writing, trying to understand Sarah Kane’s idea of \u201cexperiential theatre\u201d through working on her very open text 4.48 Psychosis<\/em> (Campbell, Experiencing Kane: An Affective Analysis; Experiencing Kane: An \u201cAffective Approach\u201d<\/em>), I was really struggling to find theatre writing about working with this sort of text. And I landed on phenomenology, and from there to affect, and then to what the cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert calls \u201caffective specificity.\u201d In theatre scholarship, it was the writing of Jane Palatini-Bowers on Stein about \u201clang-scape\u201d (25) that really opened this up for me: how do you put that lang-scape onto the three-dimensional stage and populate it with bodies in some way that is responding to the lang-scape that the writer has given us? But it was through music writing and musicology that I stumbled towards a specificity of language with this. It was the musicologist David Epstein\u2019s idea of \u201cshaping affect\u201d (148) that really opened a new process up for me. So, I came to Stein through Kane, and then, inevitably, it had to get back to Stein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did you think when you first got the Doctor Faustus<\/em> script?                                    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC<\/strong>: Well, I had a version of it that was very closely typeset and, when it\u2019s not spaced out, it\u2019s quite stressful to look at! There\u2019s this overwhelming wash of text, with very little punctuation. So, I did feel a little panicked when I first saw it! <\/p>\n\n\n

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An excerpt of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights<\/em> by Gertrude Stein (100\u2013101)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

AC:<\/strong> I know. The actors did too. That\u2019s not to say I didn\u2019t either! You have to figure out exactly how to get the words off the page and into actual mouths and bodies, and work out how many people are speaking at a time and with what kind of force and energy; all of those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC:<\/strong> Yes! But actually, for me, it was a pretty quick and early change towards \u201cokay, I can\u2019t try and understand this like I\u2019ve been taught to understand theatre,\u201d so my default then is to slip back into my \u201cnative language,\u201d which is music, because that\u2019s my first practice. Once I made that shift, it just opened up, really, because you look at it like a score instead\u2014or an invitation. I\u2019m a composer who particularly loves to work with vocal and choral music, so I\u2019m quite used to reading texts with the lens of \u201cis this settable? How does the musicality of it work? What are its patterns? How might you do something else with it?\u201d That text has so many invitations\u2014as we\u2019ve discussed: who says what? With what orchestration? How many voices? What is the punctuation? What are the emphases? Do you resist its rhythm, or do you lean into what the text is doing, and does that approach change over time? How do you design sound that doesn\u2019t overshadow the rhythmic qualities of the text? Also just knowing that the text is the libretto to an opera without an original score or scenography (Rae 139) made me excited because, actually, the whole thing is settable and full of potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That doesn\u2019t mean the whole thing is necessarily easily<\/em> settable, however!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AC<\/strong>: That’s such a great example of how you\u2019ve been talking recently about \u201cdoing dramaturgy like a composer\u201d and \u201ccomposing like a dramaturg\u201d (Cohen). And that’s it in action really, in that the challenge of the work takes you back to language that you know. But also, of course, it is the musicality in there, which is so crucial in terms of thinking about the way performance works as an experience<\/em>, and not just this meaning-making machine to transfer ideas; we can feel<\/em> something, and we know it differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I think that’s what I loved about the text. I certainly had my moments of panic too, but what you were bringing in terms of your dramaturgical thinking via composition, the patterns you were finding and the different documents you were making to identify and track those patterns was so helpful, and often the first time anyone had given me materials like that. For example, your pitch extractions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MC:<\/strong> Those pitch extractions I made assigned specific pitches to certain repeated syllables to illustrate the word-music Stein was making. This helped me understand how that repetitive language, which at first glance seems like merely a wash of words, can build to sonic climaxes and contains a powerful affective drive. It\u2019s about patterns, repetitions and accumulations\u2014familiar terrain for a composer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can see\/hear how these extractions worked in the example below, with text, Meta\u2019s musical key for the pitch extractions and how this sounds when sung:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Excerpt of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights<\/em> by Gertrude Stein (98\u201399)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Pitch<\/a> extraction key for a passage of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. <\/em>Notated and designed by Meta Cohen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

And Meta\u2019s sing-through, applying the pitch key above:<\/p>\n\n\n\n