JWCP 2 (2) pp. 209–216 © Intellect Ltd 2009 209
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice Volume 2 Number 2 © 2009 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcp.2.2.209/1
Keywords
writing process
dramaturge as
midwife
community theatre
metaphor and
empowerment
Dramaturge as midwife: the writing
process within a New Zealand
community theatre project
Fiona Graham Auckland University
Political empowerment, and the enlargement of the multiculturalist cause,
come from posing questions of solidarity and community from the interstitial
perspective.
(Bhabha 1994: 4)
Abstract
This article examines the different writing processes within a New Zealand
intra-cultural community theatre project. Drawing on a practitioner perspec-
tive I explore how marginalized minority community groups were able to write
their own stories and discover a collective identity. In analysing this process I
develop the metaphor of the midwife to conceptualize and theorize the role
of the dramaturge. I use this case study to interrogate Barthes’s notion (1977)
of the ‘death of the author’ and Bhabha’s argument (1994) about how some
forms of multiculturalism can lead to political empowerment. In conclusion,
I suggest that this multi-authored community project exemplifies the kind of
empowerment that Bhabha describes.
In January 2008 Auckland City Council commissioned a group of artists to
create a community theatre performance Our Street which involved three
city suburbs where more than half the inhabitants have been born over-
seas. This intra-cultural project bought together young people in Aotearoa
who are first- and second-generation migrants from India, Tonga, China,
Rwanda, Fiji, Australia, Samoa, Niue, Somalia, the Cook Islands and
Burma. In the past there had been many negative media portrayals of
young people within these neighbourhoods; stories had been written about
them rather than by them. Despite shared histories of deprivation and dis-
crimination there had been fights between different youth groups, little
positive interaction and much suspicion. This project aimed to create new
connections, celebrate cultural diversity and encourage community pride.
Commercial New Zealand theatre has been dominated by Pakeha
(European New Zealand) writing with a steady growth in Maori representa-
tion (including Hone Kouka, Apirana Taylor, Briar Grace-Smith and Riwia
Brown). Only since 1996 have playwrights from the Pacific region, Asia
and India found a significant voice (including Oscar Kightley, David Fane,
Toa Fraser, Dianna Fuemana, Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Jacob Rajan).
According to Bhabha (1994), hybridity and ‘linguistic multivocality’ have
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the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization
through the reinterpretation of political discourse. Our Street provided new
relationships for a changing community and challenged what it means to
be a New Zealander in the twenty-first century. This article will examine the
writing processes within this devising project where there was no conven-
tional author. The participants were what Roland Barthes described as
‘modern scriptors’, they collaborated ‘here and now’ to create a text ‘made
of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual
relations of dialogue, parody and contestation’ (Barthes 1977: 148). This
community project employed a dramaturge rather than a writer, so when
and how did the ‘writing’ take place? This article highlights the agency of
the dramaturge within this process and explores the utility of the ‘midwife’
metaphor for understanding the way that successful dramaturgy can guide
the writing process from conception to birth.
The creative team on Our Street was led by the Samoan director and
film-maker Justine Simei-Barton; there was also a Fijian musician, an
American composer, several Polynesian choreographers, a Tongan visual
artist and me, a British dramaturge. All of these artists are also first- or
second-generation New Zealanders who are very close to the experience of
migration. At Auckland City Council the two community arts officers who
chose the team and managed the project were Australian. Their choice of
personnel reflected the importance of striking a balance between ‘insider’
and ‘outsider’ perspectives, what in anthropological writing is often termed
the ‘emic’ (insider)/etic (observer) dualism (Geertz 1973). This distinction
is important as it draws analytical attention to the contrasting perceptions
or world-views of those who are inside and those who are outside a particu-
lar cultural framework. Oscillating between these different points of view
enables a hermeneutic understanding or holistic framing of subjective views
and experience. Justine Simei-Barton lives within the neighbourhood and
has been an activist for Pacific Islanders for many years. She had the rela-
tionships, contacts and connections to bring the Pacific Island community
‘inside’ the project but she also had an active political commitment to new
immigrant and refugee stories. As a British dramaturge who has worked in
New Zealand for the last ten years I was very conscious of my role within a
history of colonization. Where possible, it was important to exist as the
‘outsider’; I aimed to work with all the groups but not ‘belong’ to any of
them. Throughout the project I described my role as midwife rather than
parent and I was engaged in the process of development rather than the
provision of source material. The dramaturge/ midwife guides the text in the
journey from ‘inside’ to ‘outside’, through the different development transi-
tions and stages of labour.
The collective brief was that the artists should work through their
multimedia with the different cultural groups to build a ‘community’ per-
formance which would ‘bring everyone together’. The project began with
introductory sessions led by the Council community arts officers enabling
the artists to establish a common language and vision. We had not worked
together before and began very simply with ideas of meeting, greeting and
food such as asking who are we and ‘how do we come together?’ To echo
Bhabha (1994: 4) these were the questions ‘of solidarity and community’
which we asked of ourselves and the different groups. There were ten
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Dramaturge as midwife
workshop weeks where the artists established relationships and intro-
duced their media to the different communities. There were Polynesian
and hip hop dance sessions, drama workshops, a reggae band was set up,
art classes created a visual arts magazine and a short film was made. The
director and dramaturge moved between these groups and began to doc-
ument their stories. Justine worked with a mainly Polynesian drama group
who began to improvise around the ideas of meeting, greeting and food.
At this point the dialogue did not exist on the page, but remained inside
the heads of the participants to be reinvented in each sharing.
As dramaturge I worked with an Indian theatre company ‘Prayas’ to
develop their stories. They created a short written text titled Sticky Fingers,
which was informed by their first impressions of New Zealand and experi-
ences of immigration. My role was to ask questions and facilitate discus-
sion, developing their ideas and stories. Open-ended questions enabled
the development of a performance language and a shared group vision.
What are you showing? What are you telling? What do you leave the audi-
ence to guess? This kind of questioning established characters and a sto-
ryline, which the members of Prayas scored, improvised and shaped into
scenes. Sometimes one person would scribe as they worked quickly on
their feet, occasionally using a tape recorder, or they would work more
slowly in pairs to describe and enact the scene as they wrote together. In
improvisation the writing process emerges from instant negotiation and
the continuous spontaneous creation of text between actors. It is an
authorless process in the conventional sense, involving a polyphony of
participants or ‘multiple scriptors’.
According to Barthes (1977), writing begins as soon as the text stands
outside the author, once the symbol stands on the page. As he puts it,
‘the disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters
into his own death, writing begins’ (Barthes 1977: 142). In this process the
script is an amalgamation of different voices but once they are inscribed
on the page they acquire a degree of unity. As dramaturge I made offers
regarding form, structure and character development but the group made
collective choices, editing and negotiating rewrites on their feet before
writing it down. The dramaturge is both a ‘mirror’ and a mediator within
this process: that is, she describes what she is seeing on the rehearsal
floor and what is happening within the group. The dramaturge De Vuyst,
in an interview with Turner and Behrndt (2008: 157), also uses this ‘mir-
ror’ metaphor when working in dance with a choreographer: ‘A drama-
turge is a mirror: you reflect – literally mirror – what you see […] the
challenge is to be intellectual without being guilty of intellectualism’. I
was frequently reminded of this challenge while working with the different
groups involved in this project. It was important to judge the timing of
interventions so that they moved the writing forward and sustained the
collaboration. Just as expectant parents have to trust the midwife with the
delivery of their baby, so the midwife must honour their wishes for deliv-
ery, as she assists in the process of birth.
In order to access more stories and introduce other young people to
the project I led a series of writing workshops with 16-year-olds in two local
secondary schools. We began by mapping their neighbourhood and sharing
stories of how they came to live in their houses. This neighbourhood has
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more than twenty different languages and most of the streets have different
‘worlds’ side by side. Over one week the students did a ‘neighbourhood
watch’ exercise where they kept a journal of stories from their street. This
observational form of writing developed in practice and is illustrated by
Jeronimo Ponifasio from Papua New Guinea, as he writes:
I found a bullet here
not in violent Papua New Guinea
But in Mount Albert Road in New Zealand.
The road where mothers
Push their babies gently in prams
And joggers float by
Almost led by the music in their iPods.
Do bullets drop here from somewhere else?
From another violent place?
Danger is trivial when you are a child
Parents will always be there for you.
Danger is more alive when you grow up
Now on your own.
But I heard the gun shots early at three
I know where the blue house is.
This became an important source of writing for story development, setting
and character construction. The students were invited to a one-week inten-
sive workshop where all of the work would be shared.
Another target group was the Somali women who are the most recent
refugees in the neighbourhood. As director and dramaturge we developed
relationships with the women by spending time attending sewing work-
shops, nursery sessions and a wedding celebration. Slowly they shared
their stories of escape from Somalia and arrival in New Zealand but they
were not ready to integrate within a large performance group so we
decided to record the descriptions of their experiences through a short
film. This choice empowered one woman in particular, who had been a
midwife in Somalia, to mediate the experience of the group. In this story-
telling process I asked the questions while the director did the filming. It
seemed to offer a safer environment operating outside the pressures of
performing live, and more importantly, an opportunity for the women to
edit the material before sharing.
In the intensive-workshop week every group shared work in progress:
there were drama scenes, monologues from the schools, Polynesian
dances, songs from the reggae band, the first visual arts magazine, Sticky
Fingers from Prayas and a short film. The director experimented with differ-
ent performance possibilities and explored the cultural juxtapositions
through film, drama, music and dance. As dramaturge I was searching for
story connections, documenting key lines, reactions, observations and
images. My aim was to find a central metaphor and ‘bridge’ (to use another
dramaturgical metaphor) that could hold the material inside one cohesive
structure. Shunt company member Heather Uprichard describes the dram-
aturge as ‘a compass’ helping the company to find direction (Turner and
Behrndt 2008: 176). She argues that the director ‘takes snapshots on the
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Dramaturge as midwife
ground’ but the dramaturge ‘holds the map of the process’. In one of the
school workshops a girl had told a story about a neighbour who built a
fence over the summer, each day the neighbours would stand beside him
and chat. As the fence got higher and higher the neighbours spent more
time together until one day it was finished and they all went back inside
their own houses. The girl longed for another event that would bring them
all together again. This was a powerful metaphor for the project and offered
a structure for development.
At the end of the residency the artists collected their thoughts and
feedback. This information suggested that the different communities had
enjoyed working together and were now keen to build a much larger per-
formance. At this point I made the most important dramaturgical inter-
vention and pitched a multimedia storyline about a street where everyone
stayed inside their own worlds – an Indian house, a Pacific Island house,
a Somali house, a ‘gangster’ house and a Chinese house. The catalyst for
change would be two mothers from the Pacific Island and Indian houses
who would accidentally build a friendship through jogging together very
early in the morning and meeting to chat on a bridge where their paths
crossed. Their relationship would also create a bridge between the differ-
ent worlds. All of the groups had been interested in wedding stories and
the inciting incident, catalyst or ‘fence’ would be two weddings happening
Figure 1.
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