Dramaturgical Potential: Is It Necessary?

The essay’s title question (“Is it necessary?”) offers a kind of manifesto for thinking through the appeal of and to dramaturgy in performance making, exploring conditions of translation in which this question may be explored in its manifold potential. Informed by my own teaching experience, this concern is both practical and conceptual, reflecting on the translatability of the very word, dramaturgy, where the resonance of the Greek—in its vernacular assimilation—lends a canonical aura to its (being) thought. Distinct from the Greek philosophical resource in European languages, how might this resonance change when translation also concerns thinking through the theme of potential with a Chinese source such as the Tao Te Ching? It is in this context that the question of necessity in my title broaches that of its own potential in (and as) the work of translation.