Bozic, A. (2009) On Dramturgy. Performance Research, 14(3) 1-2.

• “A dramaturg in my process is a kind of a ‘Turk’, someone who is somewhat alien, who maintains his or her otherness and distance from the process in order to be able to ask questions about it.” (1)
• “And it is also someone who makes a lot of drama, someone who asks questions about things that might otherwise slip by unnoticed or be taken for granted.” (1)
• “dramaturgy of space, which renders both the content and the manners in which that content is produced visible at the same time.” (1) – Dramaturgy renders the thing and the process by which the thing was produced visible at once
• “Once this generator is clear to all of us, we use it as an anchor to hold the rest of the elements together, a red thread that runs through the process and the performance and to which everyone can relate. A good dramaturg for my process is someone who manages never to lose sight of this red thread.” (1)
• “attitudes that can help make dramaturgies of real-life events transparent” (2)
• “They may include: a dramaturgy of one’s of life (how I fictionalize my own life to give it a grand narrative); a dramaturgy of community life (that makes visible the strategies of staging, fictionalizing and performing day-to-day life); a dramaturgy of virtual life (that makes visible the strategies of fictionalizing, staging and performing political and other events through the mass media of TV, film and the Internet).” (2)
• “this kind of dramaturgy would be capable of underlining the network-like relationship between these three threads and could incorporate them into the art-making process, where not only life is a generator of art but art is a generator of life in a transparent way.” (2)

My notes:

• Both plays make dramaturgies of real-life events transparent.
• Am I Dead Yet? makes dramaturgies esp. narratives of death apparent through traditional storytelling, the CPR demonstration and (most interestingly) the writing in of how audience members think they’ll die for the ‘I think I’ll die / I know I’ll die’ song at the end.
• In An Oak Tree this is made apparent using a narrative of a mourning father and a life event, giving it to a new performer who lives it anew on stage each time – even though it’s based in a fictional text or narrative it identifies dramaturgies of real-life events and the new actor lives the text in as real a way as possible each night.
• Both tackle the life event that is death.