Collaboration

         So dramaturgy.  Weird term right? What is that?  We know that for any piece that isn't super recent, dramaturgy encompasses the act of fact checking.  So the length of the skirt, the colors of the clothes, the set.  IF you wanna make it period in some way, or if you just wanna do the time period of the playwright or the play some sort of visual, sonic or idealistic justice.
         I just saw Persephone last night.  It is interesting for a few reasons.  First off the music was gorgeous and not just because I'm a sucker for electronica and digitally harmonized voices.  Björk is my homegirl BUT it was good.  Lots of aspects were fantastic.  What made it interesting and what really landed the idea of collaboration was the dramaturgical aspects.  Modern and classical.
        So there's the idea of the dramaturg for new work.  For this the dramaturg seems to be sort of the body guard for the heart of the work, the person who listens allot and then hits you in the face with a one sentence idea and/or the person who makes sure everyone is on the same page.  In all these aspects the play was... intriguing.
       You don't always have a dramaturg.  Allot of the things they do can easily be done by the playwright and the director.  But sometimes its too much and two heads are always better than one.  But the idea of the piece needs one head.  If it doesn't things can go awry.  As it seems happened in this piece.
       But before I get on that train.  I wanna say the piece had the potential to be stunning.  The set design was off the chain.  Giant 19th century metal frames, a rotating green stone-ish piece in the center with a spring and winter side.  The set was made to shift.  You saw a backstage and proscenium from the front.  The piece was about a 19th century company on the cusp of "modern" theater performing the myth of persephone.  It was an odd take given the electronic music but buy-able.  You saw the backstage drama and the piece from the front.  The orchestra was filled with the tables and props and dressings of the "actors".  Interesting.
        Back to the piece itself.  So the first thing to be conceived in this piece was the music.  It wasn't written with the intent of being made into a performance piece necessarily.  The musicians in the company just felt inspired to write this music.  The music tended to center on the ideas of motherhood.  A dramaturg heard the stuff in passing and said that the idea of Persephone would fit the music quite well.  I think this is where things might have started to go funky.  So the core form is music.  The core theme is motherhood.  Now we introduce a narrative; Persephone.  The company has two projectionists, a director, a playwright, a set designer, and we'll call the two musicians a composer and a librettist/vocalist.
        So you have aaaaall these people working on the same project.  They all have to communicate and follow the same core idea.  I feel like they also need to cater to the core form, the music.  The styles clashed.  This was part of the problem.  There wasn't communication between the projectionists as far as a uniform style or idea to adhere to. It seemed like they jumped in with their styles and ran headlong with them.  But the bigger problem seemed to happen before that.  The core form was the music.  To that we fit the myth of Persephone.  Obviously music not directly concerned with Persephone won't fit and communicate perfectly, so we introduce the play within a play aspect.  The issue comes after this.  I wonder if it is a blessing and a curse in western theater that we place a great deal of weight on the narrative.  What may have happened here is that once persephone was introduced, it then became the concentration of the piece.  The core music, which still held the piece together had its weight removed and the piece collapsed in meaning.
       Just a thought.  So then what is the lesson?  Don't lose the idea of collaboration yes, but also don't lose the core theme, the core ideal.  The two are intertwined the collaboration and the ideal.  We need to agree on one ideal and pursue that together with full knowledge of one another in the process.