What if we understand text as a multi-faceted, dynamic object in which design and embodiment already lurk?
The definition of dramaturgy is in constant flux, often dependent on the person or people who name it as their practice. Sometimes the dramaturg operates like an in-house academic, presenting a compendium of research to a director and standing ready to answer any questions on textual interpretation or production history. Artists and designers often find that work frustrating; they can experience dramaturgy as something meant to “keep them faithful” to an unmoveable text, something that affronts their creative interpretations with a definitive “yes” or “no.” Many dramaturgs, however, describe the practice as a more capacious, collective art: whether defined by a “questioning spirit” (Mark Bly), a “quality of motion” among artists, text and performance (Katherine Profeta), or an “awareness of the limits and potential of knowledge” (Geoffrey Prohl). Rather than residing within the expertise of a single individual, these dramaturgies are ongoing and shared–things that may begin with, but are certainly not exclusive to, the text.
I first encountered dramaturgy when working as Assistant Dramaturg for Court Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. While working on the show, however, I wondered what a shared dramaturgical method might look like in a classroom. Moving between the early production meetings and the literary seminar, I noticed parallels in these spaces’ pedagogies. Whether encountered as a professional creative team in the former setting or a group of students and professors in the latter, people sit around a table reading a text, drawing on their own expertise and areas of study to develop interpretations. But there was a critical difference. In my seminars as an English literature major, most of the conversation involved close reading, unpacking linguistic nuances in the text and searching for connections across different scenes. But in the production room, the text was only one aspect of the discussion. The artists were engaging with questions of theatrical design, thinking not only what the play signifies on paper, but also what the play might signify on stage.
How might the “questioning spirit” of the dramaturg enrich our analyses of text, extending our thinking into the multiplicity of languages – visual, aural, gestural – that are embedded within text, whether a play script, a novel, or a poem? What if we understand text as a multi-faceted, dynamic object in which design and embodiment already lurk? If a three-dimensional world loiters within text, then dramaturgy, as a practice of excavating this world, provides a collaborative and imaginative method of interpretation that grounds new artistic thought. While reading dramaturgically is, of course, a set of practices we use in the theater classroom, it can also be understood as a broader practice of textual analysis. Beyond close reading for what a text says, dramaturgical questioning investigates a text as a system that works across bodies, spaces, temporalities – it is invested in what a text creates.
Inspired by my experience on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I set out to experiment with the relationship between text and design in the classroom. In collaboration with Dr. Marissa Fenley, I developed and presented our project in her two sections of Text & Performance, a general-education introductory theater course at The University of Chicago, which I myself took as her student. I called the activity Dramaturgical Design.
The premise of Dramaturgical Design is that design lurks within, and is a way of understanding, text. Apart from bringing outside elements into the text to present creative interpretations, we can also bring something from the penumbras of the text (hidden, but still there) to the forefront, and then ask, “what changes?” Which is to say, by shifting our focus, we can transform text and build design from the inside out, thereby encouraging students to develop a different kind of analysis: to read visually, aurally and gesturally.
I called this penumbral element of the text the “back idea.” While not the main point per se, the “back idea” seems nevertheless to be carrying a certain weight, performing a certain function, doing certain work. When I sampled this exercise in Text & Performance, I used Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which culminates in Nora deciding to leave her husband Helmer after it becomes clear that he loves her as an object, not a partner. I selected “songbird” as my “back idea.” Helmer has plenty of pet names for Nora; doll, of course, being a “front” or central imagination of Nora as something other-than-human. “Songbird” appears only a few times in the text, but often enough for the moniker to pique my interest.
With a “back idea” in mind, the next task was to bring it to the “front.” If we redefine it as a center of gravity around which the text revolves, what do we notice? What pops? What other ideas collect around this shifted center of gravity? What new understandings about, interpretations of, or tensions within the text come to bear?
We can also start with some context about our “back idea,” and this research can prompt the idea to take on new meanings. I was surprised to learn from a commentary in my class copy of A Doll’s House that songbirds are not just fluttering creatures. Known less commonly as ortolans, they are also delicacies that, controversially, and particularly in France, people eat. Traditionally, you cover your head with a napkin while doing so. Eating a songbird is no quotidian affair: you’re meant to immerse yourself fully (and privately) in the rarities of the culinary experience.
What can we see in A Doll’s House with this “back idea” as our center of gravity? What other objects and ideas in Ibsen’s text collect around it? I started to notice that Helmer calls Nora a “songbird” in and around moments where Nora nibbles on the central delicacy of A Doll’s House: the macaroon. In other words, while “songbird” does not explicitly signify delicacy in the Ibsen, it appears alongside something that is explicitly understood as a delicacy. “Songbird” now invites us to think about Nora herself as a delicacy—and Helmer as her fanciful, voyeuristic consumer. We might then say Helmer “nibbles” on Nora, a gesture capturing the particular valence of his regard for her as a prized possession to gradually, privately consume rather than an equal partner to respect.
Next, I made a word-association map: songbird, consumption, nickname, delicacy, napkin, macaroon, nibble. These words became the initial search queries that I used for visual dramaturgy. Just as we can research with encyclopedias and scholarship, I wanted to try doing research with images. How could looking (and going down image rabbit holes) teach me—and then inspire a design? When I presented the exercise to students, I invited them to take their burgeoning set of terms to image search engines, follow image-paths that interested and inspired them, and to finally select three or four visuals which were particularly evocative. I named image search engines such as Pinterest, as well as the digital archives from the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. I challenged students to look not just for literal representations of what we might put onstage but also for abstract, artistic, and associative images. The goal here was to deepen understanding and discover new connections through image research, rather than arriving with pre-conceived ideas of what any one of us wanted to find. Once again, it was a matter of transformation from the inside out.
With three or four favorite images, the final task was to select some moments in the text, and then develop a staging that used specific theatrical languages (set, costume, gesture, sound, etc.). Inspired by those images, how might we represent what we discovered by bringing our “back idea” to the “front”? My images included an ornately set dining room table (featuring a napkin fanned out on the table and a stuffed bird at the center), a group of people sitting around a table and eating songbirds, their heads each covered with napkins, and a video of President Biden approaching a toddler at a Halloween event and purporting to (affectionately, but also-probably creepily) nibble at her leg. Indeed, these make an eclectic set of images that wouldn’t have arisen from a surface read or from attention only to the most “front” ideas. But they are nevertheless grounded in my specific reading of the text.
With these theatrical languages, it’s possible to expand our design to those elements that emerged from our word-associations. We might thus be able to tell a broader story—to track an arc of the text—through our design. What if we looked at several moments of consumption in the play, literal and otherwise: when Nora consumes macaroons, when Helmer condemns Nora’s spending habits, when Helmer speaks of his wife as “my little Nora.” Using the newfound theatrical languages—a bird-like napkin on a table, a napkin-cover for eating delicacies (accentuated perhaps into something like a beak), an infantilizing nibble, money as feathers of a bird—I wanted to track the arc of Nora’s resistance through songbird/macaroon/Nora as delicacy.
And so, I introduced some new choreography not originally present in the Ibsen text. Nora covered herself in a napkin (first folded on a side-table as it was in the image, bird-like) as she nibbled at a macaroon. She brought Rank into her napkin-eating-hut when she asked him to share a macaroon, so as to ignore Helmer’s commands and “dash it—for once.” And she rejected Helmer’s attempt to bring her into his napkin-eating-hut at the end of the play as he claims (nibble-like) that she’s “mine, mine alone, all mine.”
After students worked through the exercise, they presented to one another the following week. Their projects were impressive and wide-ranging, imagining a multiplicity of meanings for a single “back” word in the text and applying their visual research to inspire nuanced readings of the play. No two projects were the same. The most exciting interpretations were the ones that selected the same “back” word as their genesis but went in different directions, showing both the project’s many possibilities and inviting direct comparisons between the two interpretations. The play’s script had become a blueprint for a multitude of available worlds rather than a definitive record of a single, pre-existing one. Success on this assignment, therefore, was not merely the arrival to these imaginative places, but each group convincingly tracking the maneuvers through the text and visual libraries that led them there.
In broad strokes, Visual Dramaturgies followed a three-step arc: text to design to text. Which is to say, it used a particular focus on the text as the inspiration for the design and then brought that design language back to “the text” to tell a multivalent story. Here, the text was not something “locked in” if anything, it unlocked other meanings, other interpretations.
When bringing this exercise to life in a classroom setting, collaboration is key. This exercise is not meant for the dramaturg to do by themselves and then present to the design room, or for one student to complete and present to their seminar. Rather, it invites individuals with different modes of approaching the text to think together. Some students might be keener about unravelling the textual associations of a given “back idea” while others might be more invested in thinking visually, gesturally, or aurally. Just as the exercise works at the intersection of text and design, it works best at the intersection of multiple minds. I was delighted to workshop and expand my “songbird” interpretation with Dr. Fenley.
Ultimately, Dramaturgical Design does remain “faithful” to the text, while still recognizing its imaginative possibilities. The exercise shows that faithfulness can take on many forms—forms which can challenge how we approach canonical works, and which can inspire novel and exciting designs that are built alongside a rigorous reading of the text. This dramaturgy invites thinking “radically” in both senses of the word: a creative departure that is simultaneously rooted in its source of origin.
Rather than practicing a mode of textual analysis which derives significance primarily from reading words on a page, this dramaturgy constructs a shared practice that re-orients centers of meaning, engages different senses, then asks: “What changes?”
Alec Abramson graduated in 2024 with a BA in English and now works for an education non-profit in London. After five, he addresses his altitude sickness through exposure therapy to the theater scene’s array of nose-bleed seats.
Article photo: The Five Senses and the Four Elements (1627) by Jacques Linard via Public Review Domain