phD Seminar: Dramaturgy as an approach to crafting method, collaboration and material thinking

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, in his recent book And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

How do you set up conditions for the work (or research) to come about? How do you create a shared ground for exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense? Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in research or creation.

This seminar takes Peeters’s book as a point of departure to reflect on dramaturgy as an approach to crafting method and collaboration across disciplines. It is not an expert seminar on performance-making, but rather aims to explore in a collective setting how dramaturgical methods may contribute to disciplines such as participatory design, adaptive reuse, jewellery design or documentary filmmaking.

Dance-making and dramaturgy thrive on embodied knowledge, oral transmission and a culture of commoning – and so does research in architecture and the arts. This spirit should guide the seminar too: Peeters will lay out a field of conversation with an introductory lecture on dramaturgy; then all participants are invited to join the conversation by speaking from their own practice and its particular ‘languages of making’. For this, we’ll work with ‘oral annotations’: responses depart from specific passages of the book (a paragraph, a sentence, a word). How would you look at your own research questions with a dramaturgical eye?

Selected chapters from And then it got legs are provided as a PDF for preparatory reading. If you’d like to read more or purchase the book, you’ll find more information on the website of Varamo Press.

About Jeroen Peeters

Jeroen Peeters is an essayist, dramaturg and performer working across the media of writing, not-writing, performance and publication. He writes about art and matters such as ecologies of attention, material literacy, readership, commoning and sustainable development. Publications include a book on Meg Stuart’s work, Are we here yet? (2010), the essay collection on spectatorship Through the Back: Situating Vision between Moving Bodies (2014), the essays on readership Reseeding the library, gleaning readership (2018) and Bookmarks of sorts (2021) and And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy (2022). Peeters is a research fellow at Hasselt University, Faculty of Architecture and Arts, and PXL-MAD School of Arts, where he prepares a PhD in the arts on ‘Conceptual Landscapes: Readership in the Expanded Field’.

Information:

• Thursday May 25th, 14h00 - 17h00
• PXL MAD, Campus Elfde Liniestraat, Building B / EB124, 3500 Hasselt
• Only open for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers
• Limited to maximum 16 participants
• Participation is free, but registration obligatory
• Only physical participation possible, no streaming

For UHasselt Fac ARK PhD researchers attending the session, participation counts towards the Doctoral School requirement of Advanced discipline-specific knowledge.

For PhDs and postdocs, we would like to draw your attention to the cancellation and no-show policy of UHasselt: