The
Dramaturgies of Performance
International Conference
takes place ten years after the
Portuguese Performance Art Symposium: 2
cycles for an archive, held at the CCB in Lisbon. Over the past
decade, as performance art has gained
historical recognition within peripheral
contexts, performance has become a central
category for contemporary culture at an
international level — a phenomenon described
as the “age of performance” by authors such
as McKenzie (2001), Lepecki (2016), and
Sennett (2025). This centrality has
expanded, establishing a relationship
between traceable creative procedures in
performance art and the dynamics of meaning
generated through dramaturgical relations
with diverse disciplinary or thematic
contexts.
We think of performance dramaturgies as
starting from the forward slash, /. This
oblique bar serves as a symbol to emphasise
the extensions and, at the same time,
hybridisations of the areas that performance
has encompassed. The oblique meaning also
serves to account for the ambiguities
intrinsic to performance dramaturgies.
What are, or what could be, performance
dramaturgies? How are these dramaturgies
constructed across the various fields that
invoke the word "performance"? What
differences and similarities do they
exhibit? Is the term "dramaturgy" the most
appropriate for all performative creations?
Enquiring into the nature of dramaturgy is
an increasingly frequent endeavour, yet the
answer remains ever more elusive and
imprecise at a time when the term has gained
significant "appeal". As Anne Hamilton and
Walter Chon observe in
Dramaturgy: The Basics (Routledge,
2023), in the contemporary era, rather than
being merely a text or even a practice,
dramaturgy is a wide-ranging activity that
allows for a subjective investment in a
theme and its consideration across a 360º
axis. These authors further state that “what
lies at the heart of dramaturgy is the heart
itself”, allowing us to pose vital questions
such as “what matters and why?” and “what
does it mean to be human?”
Therefore, rather than a science, dramaturgy
— or the role of the dramaturg — presents
itself as a creative, speculative, and
catalytic sensibility; it is simultaneously
investigative, laboratory-based, and
problematising. As Georgelou, Protopapa, and
Theodoridou suggest in
The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on
Actions in Performance
(Valiz, 2016), whether “with dramaturgs” or
“without dramaturgs”, dramaturgy involves
all those who participate in the conception
of an artistic process. Consequently, the
foundation of dramaturgy lies in
questioning, often collectively. It involves
adopting the role of the "ignorant
dramaturg" when faced with a problem or
issue, as highlighted by Bojana Cvejić in
The Ignorant Dramaturg (Sarma,
2010), and through collaborative and
participatory means, asking questions that
engage with the contemporary world,
embracing what she terms “uncertainty”,
“risk”, and “daring”.
Today, this process involves not only
dynamics of interweaving, weaving, and
interconnection among different cultures,
techniques, and media — as noted by
Fischer-Lichte, Weiler, and Jost in
Dramaturgies of Interweaving: Engaging
Audiences in an Entangled World
(Routledge, 2022) — but also concepts such
as citizenship, radical and agonistic
democracy, stance-taking and responsibility,
amongst others. Indeed, at the intersection
with performance and all its conflicting and
oblique meanings, performance re-inscribes
itself between life and art as an
Agora, in the continuous
performative rewriting of the
body-archive-world.
The International Conference on Dramaturgies
of Performance is organised by the
Performance & Cognition Group of the
Institute of Communication at NOVA
University Lisbon (ICNOVA-FCSH-UNL), in
partnership with the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty of Arts,
University of Coimbra (FLUC-CEIS20).
The Conference will be a meeting place for
Keynotes, Workshops, Performances and
Communications or Conference-Performances
from different oblique vectors of
Performance Dramaturgy.
December 2nd will be dedicated solely to
workshops, some of which will be spread
across the conference days from December 3rd
to 5th.
