Abstract

As dramaturg on Chloé Déchery’s recent performance work, A Duet Without You, I was invited to write a chapter which reflects, through writing, some of the ideas and concepts explored through the making and performing of the piece. This chapter provides direct insight into Déchery’s Practice-as-Research methodology, with examples of work undertaken in rehearsal. It weaves together research on dramaturgy in dialogue, combining that with ideas of 'dramaturgy in absence / dramaturgy in presence'. It arrives at the problematic and contested notion of how visible the dramaturgy might be. Taking Ranciere’s proposition (after Mallarmé): ‘Apart we are together, together we are apart’, the chapter proposes that the piece sits on a latent dialectic axis between togetherness and apartness, belonging and longing, love and loss.

Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance: A Duet Without You and Practice-as-Research will be published with Intellect in 2018/19, in the Playtext Series, which presents the text of a performance or devised show in companionship with other writing (performative texts, critical writing, theory etc.). The book revolves around the score of the performance text itself but also explores the making and unmaking of memory in A Duet Without You. The publication explores notions of devising, co-authorship and dramaturg-ing and/or performing collaboration onstage through the making of a solo piece.