According the Oxford English Dictionary, an advocate is someone who acts in someone else’s behalf. In terms of the performing arts, the dramaturg is sometimes presented as the audience’s advocate. However, this concept is highly debated as critics wonder whether the dramaturg is truly the advocate as then cannot really know thoroughly the people for whom they are acting . Nevertheless, the dramaturg is closest to the audience as they take the place of an audience before performance viewing the piece as an external perspective and is held responsible for invoking ‘questions of audience’.
In Dramaturgy in Motion, Profeta elaborates on the fact that an advocate should be working for a “well known, irreducibly diverse, impromptu future collective”. Therefore, the dramaturg is not really able to do this. However, she also argues that understanding the eventual audience and how they can define the space and time of the performance can be in some way a form of advocacy. In this way, as a member of the team that still holds some external influence, often being placed in the location of the audience, the dramaturg can preempt audience response and as such act ‘on behalf of the audience’. This then according to the dictionary definition of the advocate makes the dramaturg eligible to fill this role.
The concept of the advocate interested me as often there are plays, commercials and other forms of art that come off as controversial and sometimes down right offensive. The question is often asked whether no one on the creative team thought of the repercussions of these art pieces before opening for public display. The thought of the dramaturg fulfilling this role, even if not in the traditional form of the advocate appeals to me as I believe it to be essential in creating good art. A good dramaturg in my opinion should be able to allow the performers to push themselves creating something avant-garde that can still be appreciated within the social constraints of current society. Profeta, goes on to talk about how various pieces can address certain tricky, personal and social topics such as race and religion. With the dramaturg acting as the audience’s advocate can ensure that the messages of these pieces can be well received minimizing malice and defense that may be adopted by the audience.
Oxford Dictionaries Accessed 6 Jan 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/advocate.
Hi Gabi,
First I am going to address some formatting issues in your post and then I will speak to the content. Did you actually to to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up the definition of the word “advocate?” If you did, your reference says you accessed it in 1970. You have to properly add in the bibliographic entry – and then in the text put in the page or in a parenthetical aside add (online). Or did you find the definition in Katherine Profeta’s book – if you did you have to write that it was the OED definition as quoted in Profeta. When you reference a whole book – like Dramaturgy in Motion – in a response, the book title should be in italics. And as I showed you in class today, the citations in the post should only have page numbers because you need to highlight the quote and link it to the bibliographic reference – which you have done but then repeated in the parenthetical cite. Please see Sebastian during his office hours. He can show you how to properly cite a reference. Your sentence ” However, this concept is highly debated as critics wonder whether the dramaturg is truly the advocate as then cannot really know thoroughly the people for whom they are acting” does not make sense. I think you meant to write “they” — meaning the dramaturg — instead of then. But I’m not sure.
My best guess is that you meant to highlight that a task of the dramaturg is to advocate for the people who will eventually come see the work and yet one can never truly anticipate an audience. When you write that “critics” find this role of the dramaturg an impossible task — who are those “critics?” What I’d like you to do when you read is not just to rephrase, as it seems you do here, but to find the heart of the argument. You do write that a dramaturg is often “outside” of the action happening on stage — and that gives her some critical distance right?
I’m wondering what, for you, is the difference between a dramaturg and someone more like a censor or mediator of social mores — one who purports to understand community standards. If the dramaturg finds that a work challenges community standards — and that is the intent of the artist – is it her job to make the artist conform to the current standards society sets? What about the argument put forth by Profeta that the artist is there not to just please the audience but to make work that an audience may not yet understand – but will when those aesthetics or ideas gain traction and get repeated in other works of art. Is it really the task of the dramaturg to enforce community standards? Is that being a good advocate for the audience – who presumably comes to art to expand the realm of how they perceive the world?