Interdisciplinarity

I've been working the past week on a job application letter, and a significant portion of this specific call deals interdisciplinarity. It's a topic that keeps coming up. ATHE, for example, is looking to heighten the stakes of the MD (multidisciplinary) panels, to make them so in form and content, and not solely in name. Flexibility of approach, thought, and communication, and the ability and determination to always look further than one's own comfort zone, so vital to the creation of theatre, finally has gained traction in the academy.

But it's always been there, right?

Certainly my own approach to theatre - both study and creation - involves interdisciplinarity, which to me is one of the key defining features of dramaturgy. And when I think of my practical work, I always consider myself first a dramaturg and second a director. This, of course, follows my exposure to theatre - I was literally, chronologically, FIRST a dramaturg, and only LATER a director. But titles shift and I know this, and I love directing (truly, I love directing as much as I love dramaturgy) and I know this. My view of myself as a dramaturg has to deal with the sensibility with which I approach any theatre piece. That is, in an interdisciplinary manner.

Dramaturgy requires looking for connections across difference - often different research subjects, different methodologies, or, as in my current work with Caltech, entirely different worlds:science/technology/engineering and the arts. (There shouldn't be such a discernible distance between the sciences and the arts, but it is palpable and undeniable). I am struck by how many of our group are drawn to the theatre - really drawn in that you see them sort of crave touching that artistic side of humanity - and yet how quickly they limit that artistry by making it something small and quantifiable, and also denigrate it by deeming it something inessential and unserious. It is my task to really try to connect with this audience and stress to them the absolute necessity and vitality of art. And this requires all the interdisciplinary muscle flexing I can muster, because I need to basically show them that their mode of thinking, with the different processes and values that entails, is as necessary as is ours as artists. And that our work, our research, our creation, is as needed as the next scientific or technological advancement that they create.