Dramaturgy at Work

Bojana Cvejić is dramaturg, researcher, and professor of dance theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway.

• Introduction 1. We work with the material that resists us 2. “What do you do when you get in the studio?” On searching, having, and letting go of methods… 3. “Ideas are one thing, what happens is another” On dramaturgical operations 4. Dramatizing Relations and Positions: ‘We’s, ‘I’s, and ‘You’s at Work, Inside Out Conclusion: Empty Hands: For a Poetics of the Ongoing List of performances

"This book is an invitation to reflect upon the many ways you might recognise and disentangle the questions, images, atmospheres, problems, narratives, memories, relations, physicalities and presences that emerge in the process of making a performance, drawn from the long experience and practice of experimental dance and theatre dramaturge, theorist and performer Bojana Cvejić. It offers an essential resource for anyone interested in creating live performance."Jonathan Burrows, choreographer, Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK"Dramaturgy, for Bojana Cvejić, is not a craft but a skilful mode of thinking and acting that initiates and sustains an ever-ongoing process of creative inquiry—one that produces and resolves problems within the contexts of dance, performance, and theatre, and that never ends completely. In a distinctly Arendtian manner, she develops the concept of collaborative friendship as a genuinely political relationship, based on mutual trust and respect among equally responsible, independent yet connected individuals who, by sharing the world, continue to create community. With this book, Cvejić performs a practice-based theory that can be read as an experimental textbook or an unconventional lexicon, but also as a beautifully written story about dramaturgy at work."Agata Juniku, theatrologist, Associate Professor at the Department of Dramaturgy, Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb, Croatia