Nikolay Iordanov
Papers of BAS, Humanities and Social Sciences
Vol. 2, No 3-4, 2015
THEATRE
FROM WRITTEN DRAMA TOWARDS A DRAMATURGY OF PERFORMANCE
Nikolay Iordanov
Abstract: As the Prague structuralists put it as early as in the 1930s and 1940s, the drama is a literary text of its own but there are “gaps” in it, which the future staging is called upon to fill. This theoretical view that attempts to see drama as an intermediate state between literary and script essence, in fact vindicates the stage performance and anticipates the revolutionary changes that were to happen in theatre. With the appearance of the post-dramatic theater forms, figuratively speaking, the pendulum that swings above the text-performance opposition gradually gets to the other extreme: in many cases the theatrical performance is the essence of the creative act while the text for theatre is a mere occasion for it or is created especially because of its happening. Now, we are speaking about the dramaturgy of the performance and not about the dramaturgical composition of classical or modern drama.
Today in theatrical practice coexist principles of dramaturgical construction from different temporal strata. Whether there is something new, a completely new trend that sneaks behind the hybridity of our age, behind the quotations and parodies of genres and discourses from the past? For in the beginning of 21st century we can see how the dramaturgy begins to realize itself again as a value on its own, however it no longer claims to be the founding substance of the entire theatre practice The new texts for theatre could also be thought of as a continuation of the logic of autonomous development of drama outside the postmodern stage experience. But also as a turn of the already post-dramatic stage to some extant ready dramaturgical forms in literature, cinema, documentary chronicles, etc.
Key words: drama, text for theatre, dramaturgy of performance, classical drama, modern drama, post-dramatic theatre, performative dramaturgy