Spatial Dramaturgy

Definition

Spatial dramaturgy is Dorita Hannah's name for the time-based composition of spatial events — dramaturgy ("as time-based dramatic composition in the performing arts") adapted to space. Her program statement (note 1): dramaturgy "was adapted to sociology in order to observe sociocultural interaction as performances of everyday life" — Goffman's dramaturgy of the everyday — and her chapter "considers the dramatic and social in order to develop a notion of spatial dramaturgy." The concept's first appearance frames the discipline: interior architecture "could be approached as a kind of scenography that structures experience and interaction through open-ended spatial dramaturgies orchestrating material and immaterial elements as temporal, interconnected, and mutable phenomena." Three properties define it: open-endedness (the dramaturgy is not a script; it structures without concluding — "always as a dynamic organism that defies calculation"), orchestration (material and immaterial elements — bodies, objects, technologies, atmospheres — composed as temporal phenomena), and multiplicity ("enacting multiple narratives" — the places and things of Austin's speech acts "are not mimetic (copies) but authentic elements inherent to the event").

The concept inherits dramaturgy's two careers: the theatre's (the composition of dramatic action in time) and the everyday's (Goffman's sociology of interaction as performance, extended by McKenzie's "perform or else!"). Spatial dramaturgy is their architectural compound: the interior as a composition of events whose parts — encounters, rituals, catastrophes, daily rounds — are sequenced but never closed. Its unit of analysis is not the room but the event's unfolding in and through it; its temporal signature is the event-space's (historic, aesthetic, quotidian modalities overlapping "manifold, fragmented, overlapping, and mobile").

Key Thinkers

• Dorita Hannah — the concept's author: "open-ended spatial dramaturgies"; the dramatic-and-social program (2018).
• Erving Goffman — the sociological source: interaction as performance, the everyday's dramaturgy (via Hannah and McKenzie; not yet paged — see log).
• Antonin Artaud — the chapter's epigraph source and dramaturgical ancestor: "Our petrified idea of the theatre is connected with our petrified idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our mind (esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space is full" (Theatre and Its Double) — the shadow-filled space against petrified culture (not yet paged — see log).
• Jon McKenzie — the contemporary imperative: the global-performance environment in which dramaturgies unfold (not yet paged — see log).
• Michel de Certeau — the everyday-practice cognate: space as "the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it… in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities" (the chapter's epigraph; see practiced-place).

Related Concepts

• scenography — the concept's spatial medium: dramaturgy is what scenography composes in time; scenography structures, dramaturgy sequences.
• event-space — the concept's object: spatial dramaturgy is the event-space's compositional logic.
• everyday-life — the concept's social register: Goffman's line — "our banal everyday environments can be perceived and utilized as continually fluctuating performances."
• narrative-space — the storytelling cognate: de Certeau's "stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces" — narrative as another temporal art of space.
• temporality — the concept's axis: the dramaturgy is the evental time Kwinter's "temporalization of space" names.
• spatial-performativity — the condition the dramaturgy stages: doing and thing done in reciprocal action.
• play — the concept's mode: the aleatory and temporal "found in the theatrical event" that weak architecture must admit.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's statement: "open-ended spatial dramaturgies orchestrating material and immaterial elements as temporal, interconnected, and mutable phenomena"; note 1's program ("This chapter considers the dramatic and social in order to develop a notion of spatial dramaturgy"); the Artaud epigraph; the manifold-fragmented-overlapping temporality of daily performances.
• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the concept's everyday-practice ancestor: walks as "space of enunciation," stories as the labor that transforms places into spaces — spatial composition without a script. See practiced-place.

Open Questions

• Goffman's dramaturgy has roles, fronts, and teams; Hannah's is "open-ended." Can a spatial dramaturgy be authored at all — or is the designer's product the capacity for dramaturgies (a brief for events) rather than any composition? Cf. occupant-as-designer.
• The chapter's dramaturgy includes catastrophe ("the slow performance of a seemingly eternal architectural object collides with the dynamic and destructive nature of the catastrophic event"). Is 9/11 a scene in a dramaturgy — and what does it mean ethically to compose (rather than merely suffer) such events? See truth-and-illusion, power-and-space.
• If spatial dramaturgy "defies calculation," what is its relationship to the measurable disciplines of the wiki (gamma-analysis, time-geography) — complement, refusal, or the unquantifiable remainder?
• Does the concept have a built canon (the theatre buildings of Hannah's monograph; the Watershed Theatre; performance installations) that the wiki's installation cluster could absorb — or is spatial dramaturgy strictly theoretical?