Collaboration is at the heart of theatre and film. When you get the chance to work out a creative idea with another artist, magic can happen.
As a dramaturg, the best moments of collaboration happen when you are giving feedback to one of your fellow artists. Whether that is a director, a playwright, or a screenwriter, conversations about the script and the show can be exhilarating and a whole lot of fun!
In our last discussion, we talked about the first step in giving dramaturgy feedback: know the vision. If you haven’t had a chance to read through that, make sure you start there. It’s super important to do this first.
Once you feel like you understand the goals of your collaborators, the next step in the feedback process is observations. So what is an observation? Well, an observation is a non-judgmental statement of fact about what you understand to be true about the story based on either reading or watching it.
For example, after reading a script, I could make the following observations about the story to the writer:
- I observe that this story has two girls in it.
- I observe that they are teenagers.
- I observe that they are sisters.
Why would observations be helpful? Aren’t you just stating the obvious?
In some ways you are. But the truth of the matter is, observations are a chance for you to reflect back to the artist everything that you understood. On one hand, this is super helpful to a writer or director in making sure that certain elements or parts of the story are clear. This can really help make them feel good about the things that are being communicated without any problems.
On the other hand, it quickly lets them know what might be misunderstood by an audience.
Let’s take the observations above. The writer might be delighted by the fact that I picked up that the two characters are female and that they are teenagers. Then I might make the comment about them being sisters and the writer could be like, “What? They’re not sisters. What made you think that?”
“Well,” I might respond, “on page seven, the character Kim calls the character Claire ‘sis.’ So I thought that meant they were sisters.”
Talk about a light bulb moment! Maybe the writer didn’t realize she had written that line. Or maybe she just meant it as a term of endearment. Or maybe it was a typo! Who knows? But, by letting the writer know that simple line helped me determine the relationship between these two sisters, the writer can then fix it before it becomes a bigger issue. Especially if it’s very important to her that these characters are not sisters.
Want to try it out? Read a short scene from a play or watch a scene from a movie and write down everything you think you “understand” from the dialogue and the action. No piece of information is too small or too insignificant.
Want to share what you find? Submit your notes here (don’t forget to tell us what you read or watched!).
Next time we’ll check out step number three! You won’t want to miss it!