Doing Dramaturgy by Maaike Bleeker

Author:Maaike Bleeker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031083037
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7.3 Thinking Through Practice

Salinas compares the ways of working of Jr.cE.sA.r and the logic of their creations to contemporary city life in the cosmopolitan urban settings that they are living in. The realities of these cities are fragmentary and hybrid, bringing together people, traditions, and histories from different places and times. Big cities are complex organisms kept together by energies and drives that do not work along the lines of linear logic or conveniently arranged structures. This is reflected how Jr.cE.sA.r’s performances freely combine elements of a great number of different traditions and contexts and lack the kind of logic that brings everything together in a coherent narrative. Instead, their creations have a kind of rhizomatic logic with various narrative lines branching out in different directions while being held together by a shared energy that gives the performance a sense of coherence and direction. This energy is the result of the combination of the actions of the performers, the music and soundscape, the text (as well as how this text is performed) and the scenography (the machines, the falling clothes) and how this apparatus that is the performance brings everything together in a dynamic flow or “rhythm.”

Salinas points out how Mhtombeni, El Azzouzi, and Janssens are all rooted in contemporary urban culture. None of them has a conventional theatre background or training. All three are self-made theatre makers. They found their way into theatre via music (Mthombeni and Janssens) and literature (El Azzouzi). They worked in different contexts, in different roles and with many different people before, and next to, their work as a collective. Their collaborative work does not start from a shared plan or concept as that what they all three relate to, but from what above is described as a shared bubble of thinking. Salinas observes how with other artists that he works with there usually is a text, or a drawing as a collective starting point whereas with them there is a shared energy and what he refers to as two “abstract forces” that give direction to their creative process, one being “thrills” (an interest in things and moments that excite, trigger, stand out, and in doing so bring something about) and the other lunacy, that he understands as having to do with the hybridity and complexity of their cosmopolitan urban reality.

El Azzouzi explains that indeed they do not set out to tell one single story by means of text, performance, music, and scenography. Rather, each of them develops their own story that then is woven into each other. This happens in an organic and non-planned way. Janssens recalls that during their time in Harlem to prepare for Malcolm X he noticed that, when the three of them were walking in the streets, there was a constant shifting of who walked in the middle. It was like a constant rebalancing that happened organically and without conscious choice or intention. For him this experience provides an image of how each of them has these little antennae that

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