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Framing Any event that takes place before an audience bears the potential of being meaningful if it is framed by the notion of “taking place within a given period of time”. Thus, during every step of the artistic process, the function of dramaturgy is to take potential and existing framing procedures into consideration.

Translation Staged events are bound to the “sense making” of and by the audience, who through their acts of interpretation become authors of the performance. Thus dramaturgy deals with three issues of translation: 1. How does the artist transform his/her concept into working practice? (translate thinking to doing) 2. Which aesthetic strategies does the artist make use of in the art work? (codification) 3. How does the art work communicate to the audience? (translation of codes)

Sense Meaning is created by paradigmatic substitution of events, with the audience conributing content from off-stage. For example, the spectator reads; this gesture is meant as a salutation, a waving hand, an intentional movement, or the actor's involuntary tick . Sense is a selective concatenation of units in the process of time, the logic of the linkage (enchaînement) or sequence of movements. Sense is not expressed by one single unit, but rather through thesuccession (ordering on a timeline) of these units. Without a unit that follows it, the singular “preceding” unit makes no sense.

Temporality Dramaturgy creates the inherent logic of a (dance) performance by focusing on temporal structures. Whereas choreography produces space, creating it with bodies moving towards and with each other, (dance) dramaturgy organizes the temporality of events in space, their temporal relation to each other, the succession and duration of events that order and hierarchize events in order to become scenes.

Codification The artistic process is the visible result of a double translation from the concept to the rehearsal, and from the rehearsal to the art work. Neither concept, rehearsal process, art work, nor the process of translation reside outside cultural modes. Since the logic of a given artistic practice is conditioned by cultural habits (codes), the process necessarily exceeds authorial intention and is always already effectuated by pretextual acts, incorporated knowledge, and embodied habits. This “double-bind” secures cultural accessibility for the audience if, for example, they share a a similar cultural background and are thus able to follow the codes laid out in the work. Dramaturgy takes on a “binocular perspective” that keeps an eye on both encoding (the inherent structuring of the work) and decoding (the cultural reading of work). If for the sake of artistic innovation, intact codes are violated (as is the case in the avant-garde) or if decoding within the given cultural contract is arbitrarily rendered impossible, dramaturgy has to mark the act of artistic violation “as the act of artistic violation” within the given codes and to frame the aesthetic aberration as being part of the codification. If not, every intended violation of cultural codes is in danger of failing, becoming simply white noise to the audience.

Ideology If dramaturgy temporalizes events, a process that leads to a structure that orders sense and thus enables encoding/decoding of meaning, then dramaturgy can’t help but bring forth ideology. Dramaturgy is not simply establishing a neutral container of content; rather, it creates content that affirms or defies power structures. the dramaturgy of contemporary dance, for example, often opts for a parataxis of theatrical events in order to refrain from affirming the power of cultural representation.

Practice The work of dramaturgy is a practice as opposed to the analytical theory of performance analysis or reviews. Dramaturgy is emphatically inherent to the artistic process, and occurs in the same time and space as the process. It is never too early (like books) or too late (like analytical reviews); it doesn’t just superimpose preceding academic research or scientific knowledge onto the process. For dramaturgy does not structure established meaning and apply it to the work; it rather creates sense that has not yet been revealed. Let’s call it “performative dramaturgy” from now on.

Visualization Performative dramaturgy doesn’t start with the rehearsal process, since the process of rehearsing is already informed by earlier artistic decisions; these decisions have been informed by a pre-selection that is subject to inclusions and exclusions. So the artistic process starts when the concept is communicated to a third party. What is to be said? How will words be used? How is the concept conveyed? What hasn’t been said? What stays in the dark? Where is discourse precise? Where is it metaphorical, even rhetorical? The dramaturgical take on the process – this is decisive – should visualize the concept and give it a “body”, materialize it. Which objects are considered to be useful? What kinds of objects are used? More importantly, how are these objects arranged in the space? And what is their temporal relation to each other, the surrounding space, and the users? And later on in the process, if these objects are replaced by bodies, dancers, performers in the given set-up, how would they experience this structural arrangement?

Physicality The role of the classic dramaturge as it is understood by classic theatre is to be half in and half out; s/he looks from outside, from the perspective of an established text, from a pre-existing thought, for the text material is “already-existing”, the sense of which must ”simply’” be transformed into another media, into another container of meaning. The dramaturge in this understanding is like the literary text - off stage. The classic dramaturge thus acts like a defender of the Holy Grail a.k.a the dramatic text. He speaks in favour of the text, the document; his silence is the silence of the text. Therefore, text-based dramaturgy is the work of literature. Performative dramaturgy does not administrate sense that is to be applied from outside the artistic process; it is creative and physical, making form from within. The act of dramaturgy does not simulate a process on a piece of paper; instead it executes form in time and space, and gives a body to thought. A body that literally walks through what can be called a “structure of events” – a layout of scenes, of events on the floor that create a landscape of thoughts in space; a structural constellation of bodies that represent scenes, units, events and their relation to each other. Dramaturgy is visualizing and embodying by performing the structure itself; it emancipates itself from an idea on paper by placing the idea into time and space, giving it a body. It is sharing creative power, thus sharing responsibility rather than thinking around the process. Developing dramaturgy in a visible group process rather than empowering one single person from outside ‚who knows’. Performative dramaturgy takes the experience and the bodies involved as specific, as singular sites of physical knowledge; instead of merely delivering text books, photos, concepts, or relying on documents, this act is enmeshed in the art process, in its monumentality, in its unsurmountable corpus, and the experience thereof.

Experience Performative dramaturgy is both experimental and experiential. It’s an art form, not a science.