# data[].attributes.body
“‘My training is to be a chameleon -- my professional training,’ Lester says. As a dramaturg, ’you have to put your own ego aside and become attuned to the person you're working with.’”

‘“It's interesting to become the writer and have to assert a very strong artistic identity,’ Lester says. '’It’s a muscle that I haven't exercised very much: to develop a very strong voice, to state something loudly and clearly, but at the same time be prepared to let everything go. Because we simply have no time to have a fight that's about ego.’"
#PutAwayYourEgo #TeamSport

Quotes from http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2005/06/17/discovering_amerika/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Discovering 'Amerika' - The Boston Globe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
That metamorphosis is appropriate -- and not just because it's Kafka. Both the novel and the play are replete with transformations, reinventions, and deconstructions of identity. Under Serrand, whose Theatre de la Jeune Lune won a Tony this year for its innovative movement-based work, the play is shaping up as a richly layered, complex exploration in multiple media of a world that can only be called Kafkaesque, full of bizarre characters and dreamlike images.

# data[].attributes.body
This video explains how Gideon Lester adapted Wings of Desire for the stage.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The American Repertory Theatre and Toneelgroep Amsterdam present a world premiere stage adaptation of Wim Wenders award-winning film. This 9 minute video features interviews with Associate Artistic Director Gideon Lester and Bernard White, who appears as Damiel. Wings of Desire runs through December 17, 2006 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA.

# data[].attributes.headline
An Interview with Former Dramaturg Oskar Eustis

# data[].attributes.subject
An Interview with Former Dramaturg Oskar Eustis

# data[].attributes.body
Oskar Eustis talks about the show he was the dramaturg for and the processes both he and the show with its people went through to get it to where it was.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Angels In America at 20 Years: Oskar Eustis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We continue our Angels in America at 20 Years Video Series with a video interview with Oskar Eustis, the current Artistic Director of the Public Theater in New York City. Mr. Eustis commissioned Angels In America and served as the dramaturg on the show while at the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco.

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains how dramaturgy is transitioning from a mostly drama-involved career into a widespread, multi-engaging job opportunity with plenty of branches that don’t just involve the theatre, but other, completely diverse fields of occupations as well.
#AllTheWorldsAStage #HowItAffectsRealLife

Info / Article at https://theconversation.com/terrorism-truth-and-trust-how-dramaturgy-informs-real-life-32106

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out.

Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit of their greater meaning and impact: if drama is the substance of those events, dramaturgy is about wrestling them into temporal shape, of ensuring they are dramatic. It doesn't stand outside the drama - but is part of it, invisible most of the time. Still, it plays a pivotal role.

It is important to acknowledge, for example, the Islamic State's beheading videos were art-directed and choreographed. These choices fed the construction of a larger cognitive pattern audiences recognise as a "story", the result of a particular dramaturgical strategy. The soft lighting. The English-language voice-over. The discrete portrayal of violence so that what we imagine is so much more shocking than what we actually see.

Dramaturgy is not confined to theatre and its ideas are often employed to organise the action of real life. The essence of these ideas is the creation of what animators call a "world", a frame of reference in which events are interpreted in a certain way by spectators who take this to be a "natural" point of view.

One of the tricky things to grasp about dramaturgy is that while it is neither true nor false in itself, it is the indispensable handmaiden of truth and falsehood. Its evidentiary implications aren't apparent at the start, though, when a "world" is being created.

Only with the drama underway is it possible to gauge the veracity of the apparently spontaneous acts it un-spontaneously brings into existence.

By then it is often too late to do anything about them, of course. You've bought your ticket and are trapped in your seat as the show proceeds to its dramaturgically-propelled conclusion.

All the world's a stage

The greatest theorist of dramaturgy, the deepest realiser of its fecund, disturbing possibilities, is undoubtedly the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life is an inspired analysis of social interaction using dramaturgical concepts: "role", "frame", "front", "backstage", "team" - and the crucial one, "performance".

Goffman applied this perspective to many areas of contemporary life: mental health (in Asylums - 1961), disability (in Stigma - 1963) and gender identity (in Gender Advertisements - 1979). What makes his writing so compelling is that he draws our attention to a type of communication that is at once complex, embarrassing and ubiquitous.

There is no life without dramaturgy. If you don't choose a "world" you'll get given one by someone else. We are all involved, from pan-handlers to presidents, in the dramaturgical task of constructing the story we want the world to believe we are telling.

AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts

One of Goffman's insights is that dramaturgy is not a matter of belief but of trust. When the Australian police force conducts large-scale, coordinated raids in a classic dramaturgical ploy, a "show" of force, it is not only a matter of making judgements about truthfulness. Dramaturgy structures our expectations.

Two of its common tools are tableaux of vivid action and exposition - symbolic deeds resonating beyond their ostensible purpose, and explanations that tease out those resonances for the benefit of the attending audience.

As a world gets underway, spectators move from action to exposition and back again trying to work out what's going on, "what the story is". And how it's going to end. Dramaturgical ideas are time-binding ones, and the organisation of action at the start of a drama is crucial in determining both the sense and the trustworthiness of the world being virtually woven around the information - inevitably more minimal - that is actually known.

Too many old stories

Dramaturgy also has some persistent problems it can call its own.

One relates to "characters", the human beings who inhabit a drama or are dragged into it willy-nilly. In drama, character is a doubled concept: there is the individual, the person who breaks the law; and then there is "the law breaker", the general category they supposedly represent.

Stereotyping is not an unfortunate side-effect of the dramaturgy of everyday behaviour: it is a central part of its use. Individuals who share the same traits as the central character get caught in the same interpretative rubric. A photograph of a woman wearing a burka and holding a gun becomes an image of the "villain of the piece".

There is little point arguing about what the photograph really means. It really means what it can be shown to mean, what dramaturgy can get it to mean in its quest for narrative shape.

Dramaturgical strategies can also fall apart at crucial times in a drama's unfolding. "Second act problems" as they are sometimes called assert themselves when audiences are familiar with a world and better able to ascertain the status of the action presented within it.

Trust can evaporate. When weapons of mass destruction were not discovered in the aftermath of the second Iraq War it was more than another news story: it was the end of a shared belief system - the failure of a dramaturgy which, to be sustainable, needed those weapons to be discovered.

Chief dramaturge

In one of those real-life coincidences that playwrights don't have the nerve to dream up, George Brandis is both Australia's Attorney General and our Minster for the Arts.

Marrying those roles he is ghosted by a third: Chief Dramaturge. New laws can be made but they must also be "sold". They must be rolled out, explained, demonstrated in situ, further explained, in a process designed both to embed them and show that they will be effective.

AAP Image/Lukas Coch

Whether they are effective or not depends on public trust being extended so the world they legislate for comes into interpretive existence. If it is extended then the laws may be effective - perhaps so effective they rarely have to be used.

But it can work the other way too. Dramaturgical strategies can loop back on themselves and become self-reinforcing, escalating the very behaviour they are designed to excise. Under the new laws a man who wasn't a suspect is named a suspect and interviewed by police. This event strengthens the impression that he is indeed a suspect and he reacts negatively - a response which is, of course, viewed suspiciously.

Right now the Minister needs to be as wary of bad dramaturgy as bad law-making. He needs to be conscious that Australians will be using the crap dramas of the past to determine the trustworthiness of the one being inaugurated.

Another important thing about dramaturgy: it is easy to stuff up. It looks simple but the skills it demands are delicate ones. What the dramaturge manages is nothing less than collective, ethical understanding.

"The more the individual is concerned with a reality that is not available to perception, the more must he concentrate on appearances," notes Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He continues:

It is here that communicative acts are translated into moral ones. The impressions that the [individual] gives tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral character.

Indeed they do. As the minister, the government and the country decide which world best represents the truth of the emergent reality, dramaturgy sounds a warning note. We need to be as careful how we do things as what we do.

Impressions matter when the truth is hard to discern, and the future looms like a dark cloud, and you are supposed to trust those who ask for your trust - and hope to hell they are worthy of it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Terrorism, truth and trust - how dramaturgy informs real life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out. Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit of their greater meaning and impact: if drama is the substance of those events, dramaturgy is about wrestling them into temporal shape, of ensuring they are dramatic.

# data[].attributes.body
Oskar Eustis, currently the Artistic Director of the Public Theatre in New York, was once the dramaturg for the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco. His best known work is Angels in America. He says of dramaturgy in general, “It’s really important that those two (historic events and now) are both under the same umbrella.”
#HeAlsoHelpedWithHamiltonAHHH

Information retrieved from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Eustis
Image of Oskar Eustis from NYU Tisch School of Arts

# data[].attributes.body
Gideon Lester was the Resident Dramaturg at the A.R.T. For five years. His stage translations include works such as Island of Slaves, La Dispute, Mother Courage, Woyzeck, King, Overload, and Amerika or the Disappearance, as well as Wings of Desire, Anne Frank, and Enter the Actress.

information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Lester

# data[].attributes.body
Gottholm Ephraim Lessing is said to be the “Father of Dramaturgy.” He first wrote about it in the 18th century Germany. Since then, American dramaturgy has put a new-found emphasis on play development.
#DadOfTheDramaturges #LessingStartedItAll

Article titled “A History Of Dramaturgy” and retrieved from http://www.theatermania.com/pittsburgh-theater/tmu/03-2012/a-history-of-dramaturgy_52365.html

# data[].attributes.body
A dramaturg is a “professional within a theatre or opera company who deals mainly with the research and development of plays or operas.” They are, generally, a historical consult who makes sure history-based productions are historically accurate.
#ThankGottholmEphraimLessing

Information retrieved from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturge. The introduction.

Image retrieved from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthold_Ephraim_Lessing

# data[].attributes.body
On a yearly average, most dramaturges make around $52,150 to $61,557. Their hourly wages are about $25.07. The low is about $30,759 and the high can be up to $123,192.
#FairlyDecentOdds

This information retrieved at https://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-dramaturg-jobs.html

# data[].attributes.body
The job outlook for dramaturges is stable with about 142,000 people in the workforce in 2014. From 2004 to 2014, the growth rate of people in the dramaturg industry has increased by 17.6 percent.
#DramaturgyIsOnTheRise

This information was retrieved from the CFNC website. https://www1.cfnc.org/Plan/For_A_Career/Career_Profile/Career_Profile.aspx?id=huxMMahDXAP2BPAXu4FK1nl7XAP2BPAXxXEwXAP3DPAXXAP3DPAX&screen=5

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
College advice, college admission applications, pay for college, financial aid, scholarships, apply online for admission, online applications at Xap.