Talk, Online event

Ana Vujanović / Landscape dramaturgy: spaces outside the perspective

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Dramaturgy as the art of composition of the story in European theatre has fundamentally changed over the 20th century. What is the ‘story’? Who is ‘the storyteller’? are basic but far-reaching questions, whose answering has required not only an expansion of already existing categories but ontological intervention into the anthropocentric agency of meaning making. Who produces it, how, where, who owns it, who is expropriated from it, became new questions to research. Along these changes, dramaturgy lost its culturally well-rooted thought, the linguistic, logocentric thought, and started regarding performance first of all as an affective and meaningful event, an expressive social situation, a shared experience, a here-and-now of human coexistence. Over recent decades dramaturgical thought thus became a spatial category – it 'spaced out' and moved from a depth of logocentrism over inter-textual plateaus to a surface of environment. At that slippery terrain I identify a tendency in contemporary performing arts that I name 'landscape dramaturgy' – it plays a prominent role in contemporary slow cinema, performance in the museum, and contemporary dance. Here we cannot speak of traditional western idea of landscape, which has human inhabitation as its purpose and which involves humans' interventions into the Earth's surface as the integral element. In an artistic sense, we thus cannot speak of the traditional landscape oil on canvas, where the land is staged for the viewer as 'scenery'. To carefully approach landscape dramaturgy, apart from the changed conception of dramaturgy, I propose a notion of landscape as the morphology of the Earth's surface, which is not a 'shoveled land'. It invites for abandoning ‘one point perspective’ at the first place. Landscape dramaturgy is therefore a metaphor that has an epistemic and political rationale, grounded in rethinking the position of human mind and human agency in the world.

Ana Vujanović is a cultural worker in the fields of contemporary performing arts and culture: researcher, dramaturge, writer, lecturer. She holds Ph.D. in Humanities (Theatre Studies) and post-graduate diploma in Culture and Gender Studies. She has lectured at various universities and was a guest professor at the Performance Studies Dpt. of the University Hamburg. Since 2016 she is a team member and mentor at SNDO – School for New Dance Development, University of the Arts Amsterdam and since 2022 – a guest professor at HZT, University of the Arts Berlin. She was a member of the editorial collective of TkH [Walking Theory], a Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and editor-in-chief of the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory, 2000-17. For several years a particular commitment of hers was to empower independent cultural scenes in Belgrade and former Yugoslavia. She participates in artworks (performance, theatre, dance, and video/film), as a dramaturge and co-author, most recently documentary film Landscapes of Resistance dir. by M. Popivoda. She has published a number of articles in journals and collections and several books, most recently A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, ed. with L. Piazza (Berlin, 2019) and Toward a Transindividual Self, A study in social dramaturgy, with B. Cvejic (Oslo, 2022; Berlin, 2023).

The talk is part of the cross-disciplinary course Spatial Narration conducted with students and professors from the departments of Fine Art, Design and Choreography.