Moderator: Siret Campbell

10.30 Introduction

10.45 Tim Crouch (UK), lecture-performance Dramaturgy and the Imagination

12.15 coffee break

12.45 Joachim Friedmann (Germany; live online presentation), Writers’ Room – Collaborative Creativity

13.30 Sandra Noeth (Germany), To Respond, When Called: Body-based Dramaturgy as Collective Learning

14.30 lunch

15.45 Nicolas Rosette (France; live online presentation), Digital technologies at the service of dramaturgy: the Chimères program experiment in France, 2018–2023

16.30 coffee break

16.50 Piotr Gruszczyński (Poland), The Dramatic State of Poland: Texts, Scripts, Devising

17.50 Hedda Krausz Sjögren (Sweden), Trajectory of a Play – from Local to Regional to International

18.50 Wrap-up

19.00 End of conference

Tim Crouch, Dramaturgy and the imagination

British playwright and theatre-maker Tim Crouch’s 2022 play, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel has been described as ‘an audacious act of collective imagining’. The play voices an explicit appeal to the audience: ‘See with your ears’. This appeal to the imagination runs as a thread through Crouch’s work in plays such as My Arm, An Oak Tree, The Author, Adler & Gibb and Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation. Crouch’s dramaturgy of imagination invites the audience to see what isn’t there, to transform what they do see into something else, to create illusions in bare spaces. He argues that realism is an attack on the imagination. Crouch says that all his work is site-specific and that the specific site is inside the audience’s head. In this Keynote, Crouch will draw on examples from his work and invite us to consider the audience’s imagination as theatre’s primary collaborator.

Tim Crouch is an internationally acclaimed, multi-award winning writer and theatre-maker based in Brighton, UK. His plays include My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND (a play for galleries), The Author, I, Malvolio, Beginners,Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation, Superglue, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel and (with Andy Smith) what happens to the hope at the end of the evening. Directing credits include House Mother Normal (New Perspectives/Brighton Festival), I, Cinna (the poet), The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear (RSC), PEAT (Ark, Dublin) Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore and Beginners (Unicorn Theatre) and The Complete Deaths (Spymonkey). Beginners won the 2019 Writers Guild of Great Britain Best Play for Young Audiences. Tim created and co-wrote Don’t Forget the Driver, a six-part series for BBC2 which won Best TV Comedy at the Venice TV awards, 2019. timcrouchtheatre.co.uk

Joachim Friedmann, Writers’ Room – Collaborative Creativity

The boom in TV-series in recent years has led to the development of new writing methods and creative techniques in Europe that were previously only known from the US series market. In particular, the Writers’ Room has been established as a working environment for the TV-series creators. Of course, collaborative work and creation also existed in Europe in industrialized series productions, but it was only with the boom of quality series that these were systematized and adapted to the European media industry. No easy undertaking, because in Europe in particular, the image of the individual creator still dominates, the muse-kissed genius who draws from his or her individuality to create the work. In addition, the challenge in a Writers’ Room is to systematize and verbalize creative, artistic processes in order to communicate a common creative and artistic vision to a team. In his presentation, Joachim Friedmann explains which techniques, processes and requirements are necessary for this.

Joachim Friedmann is a German screenwriter, comic book writer and video game author who completed his PhD on transmedia narrative in 2016. Friedmann has written numerous scripts for TV series. He works as a script developer and consultant for several media companies. He is regarded as a pioneer in the teaching of television writers. He works as a lecturer in dramaturgy and creative writing at several universities and institutes. Friedmann is also the author of textbooks on creative writing and storytelling.

Sandra Noeth, To Respond, When Called: Body-based Dramaturgy as Collective Learning

This talk explores dramaturgy as a practice of decision-making and problem-posing that navigates the complex interplay of physical, intellectual, political, and social movements. Focusing on body-based performing arts – dance, choreography, and performance – in which human and non-human bodies are exposed to each other both physically and symbolically, I examine how dramaturgy can function as a mode of embodied criticality. How can it reflect the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and politics that emerge in the encounters between bodies? In the second part of the presentation, I draw on strategies from collective learning, and more specifically on the idea of a community of practice, to explore dramaturgy as a form of shared and situated knowledge production.

Sandra Noeth is a professor at HZT Berlin/University of the Arts Berlin, where she specializes in the ethical and political dimensions of body-practice and theory, as well as dramaturgy in body-based performing arts. Her recent research and publications examine the role, status, and agency of bodies within processes of bordering; the embodiment of violence; the performativity of class dynamics in the arts; and the complex position of the body in international humanitarian law. From 2009 to 2014, Sandra served as Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien. She is the author of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: Borders and Collectivity from Lebanon and Palestine (transcript, 2019), and co-editor of Breathe: Critical Investigations into the Inequalities of Life (with J. Janša, 2023) and Shielding: Body-based Studies on Integrity and Protection (with S. Umathum and J. Janša, 2024).

Nicolas Rosette, Digital technologies at the service of dramaturgy: the Chimères program experiment in France, 2018–2023

In 2018, the French Ministry of Culture initiated an experimental program named “Chimères” (for “Chimeras”). This program aimed at the exploration of new approaches of theatre creation using cutting edge digital technologies. The goal was to address concrete questionings: What purpose does it fit and what are the real artistic potentials? How to include digital R&D in a rehearsal and residencies pattern? What are the new professions and working methods to be invented? Are the “new playwritings” really that new? How to bend technologies not designed for performing arts? And, most of all, how to keep technologies at the service of dramaturgy (and not the contrary)? All those questions (and more) were explored by a dozen artistic teams during the 6 years of the Chimères’ program. The results and recommendations were published in 2024 (currently only in French) and will be introduced during this talk.

For the last 10 years, Nicolas Rosette was a  project manager and artistic programmer in two major venues in France: Le Lieu Unique – Scène nationale de Nantes and Le Théâtre Nouvelle Génération – Centre dramatique national de Lyon.
Since 2018 he was also in charge of the Chimères’ programme experiment that was run by the French Ministry of Culture. He has previously been an exhibition curator and artistic director in various venues and festivals in France and beyond.

Piotr Gruszczyński, The Dramatic State of Poland: texts, scripts, devising

For many years, Polish artistic theatre has continued the path marked out by its great masters Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor, searching for paths leading to independence from literature. Despite the Great Theatre Reform, the discoveries of Peter Szondi and Hans-Thies Lehmann, dramatic text is still considered the beginning and foundation of theatre. However, the change that occurred in theatre after the political transformation, as well as the proximity and openness to German theatre at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries led to the creation and rapid strengthening of the role and position of the playwright in Polish theatre. I began my professional career in 1989, a year of great change, so I am a kind of living memory of the processes that have taken place in Polish theatre since then. Using the example of my own work and observations of the activities of other theatre makers, I will try to outline what the dramatic and dramaturgical landscape of Poland looks like today.

Piotr Gruszczyński graduated from Theater Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1989. He has written theater reviews and has collaborated with the Polish Radio Program 2 and the Dialog Theater Festival in Wrocław. In 2003 he published a series of essays and interviews and received a nomination to the prestigious Nike Literary Award. He was the dramaturgy director of TR Warszawa in the years 2005–2008. In 2007 he published a series of interviews with Krzysztof Warlikowski. He worked with Mariusz Treliński on the dramaturgy of his operas.
Piotr Gruszczyński has been the dramaturg in Nowy Teatr since 2008. He has worked with Krzysztof Warlikowski on the adaptation and dramaturgy for the stage of (A)pollonia, The End, The African Tales by Shakespeare, Kabaret Warszawski, The French, The Odysey, Elizabeth Costello. He also worked with Warlikowski in Odeon Theatre for the stage of Un Tramway Phedre(s). He is a professor  at the State Theatre Academy in Warsaw.

Hedda Krausz Sjörgen, Trajectory of a play – from local to regional to international

My presentation gives an overview of the infrastructure, trends, and qualities of writing that lie behind the international success of a play beyond a first local production.
Colombine Theatre Agency, founded in 1994, has overseen the international breakthrough of playwrights Jon Fosse and Sara Stridsberg and other. Colombine is also a leading conveyer of international drama to Scandinavian stages including writers like Sivan ben Yishai and Simon Stephens.
CEO Hedda Krausz Sjögren will share her views and experiences from inside a highly specialized industry.

Hedda Krausz Sjögren, CEO of Colombine Theatre Agency. Sjögren served as Sweden’s first counselor for cultural affairs on the African continent 2017 – 2021, stationed in Pretoria, SA. As a producer, writer and actor, she has worked at Royal Dramatic Theatre, The National Touring Theater of Sweden, Swedish Institute, Unga Klara and many more. Her production credits include Seven on Tour (producer, director, global tour), Unwomanly Face of War (stage adaptation of Svetlana Alexievitj’s novel, Royal Dramatic Theatre), Alcestis (actor, Unga Klara).
In recent years she has curated for Gothenburg Bookfair and the Nobel Prize Outreach. Hedda serves on the boards of the Swedish-Icelandic collaboration fund, Hiroshima Prize Foundation and the Albert Bonnier stipend board. She holds an MFA in acting from University of Washington and a BA from Bennington College, both USA.

Entrance to the conference is free, pre-registration is required HERE

Registration deadline: 2 March 2025

Conference organisers:
Senior lecturer Siret Campbell, siret.campbell@eamt.ee
Senior researcher Madli Pesti, madli.pesti@eamt.ee

For the press:
Head of Communications Evelin Värva, evelin.varva@eamt.ee