Dramaturgy as a more-than-human practice

This article is built with excerpts from the MA thesis written in the program Contemporary Theatre, Dance, and Dramaturgy at Utrecht University titled ‘More-ThanHuman Practices: Feminist Ecological Potentials of Working With More-Than-Humans in the Performing Arts.’ The thesis was finished in August 2021 under the supervision of Konstantina Georgelou. The theoretical framework takes feminist discourse on water from Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis’s article ‘Water and Gestationality: What Flows Beneath Ethics’ as a departure point to conceptualize more-than-human collaborations in the performing arts and to generate grounds for articulating ethics that enable responsivity to the entanglements with ‘natural others.’ This framework is intertwined with the discourse on dramaturgy to reapproach the practice of dramaturgy through collaborations and articulate it as a shared practice and collective thinking that emerges from the relations between diverse bodies. The text maps some of the main aspects and challenges posed by co-working with more-than-humans by drawing on the two longer artistic practices and researches, Rooted Hauntology Lab by Ingrid Vranken, potted plants, and ghosts, and Cosmologies of Attention and Spectatorship, practice-based research by Julia Willms and Andrea Božić in collaboration with the Moon.