Once Dramaturgy
During my Junior spring, I served as the production dramaturg on Once the Musical directed by Dr. Kelly Howe with dramaturgy mentorship from Dr. DeRon S. Williams. Once was the second production I dramaturged at Loyola University. As this product was the second time I came in with an idea of what I was doing, this provided me the groundwork to build and polish my dramaturgy skills. In the following paragraphs, I will highlight specific moments of learning and growth.
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While working on Once, I learned how dramaturgical work can be tailored to support the director's vision and the needs of the rehearsal room as a whole. During this second experience with dramaturgy, I worked more closely with the director and thus had the guidance to tailor my research, writing assets, and feedback to what was needed in the room and what was talked about during the process. It was helpful to find a way to narrow down the wide lens where dramaturgy starts to what is actually helpful to the people in the room. I’m still working on how to intuit what is needed in the room but now I’ve identified a clear place to start, the director's vision.
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By focusing my lens, I also learned how to consolidate my research in a way that is clear and easy to navigate for the actors. The website I created for this production is leaps and bounds more professional, clear, and navigable than the one from my dramaturgy on Somewhere. I structured the page like a landing site with buttons and links to more information if the actors needed more. I also found the table of contents helpful for navigation and a way to have a clear overview of the assets available. With this, I learned and developed tangible skills in website development figuring out how to use Squarespace, a website program I hadn’t used before.
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Also, one of my goals in this process was to get better at asking for guidance and help from my mentors. I’m historically great at faking it till I make it, stressing myself out and hurting my work. The structure of my dramaturgical role, with my weekly mentor meeting, provides a great framework for me to get to ask questions regularly. This structure motivated me to identify and note the questions I had during the process and create a routine in which asking for help was encouraged. This spilled over into my work with the director and overall helped normalize and encourage asking for help when it is needed.
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During the run, I learned about the impact of my outward-facing dramaturgy. Key things I have noted for next time: I saw very few people watching my lobby display. Videos helped engagement yet some of them were too long to keep viewership. I still have not figured out how to use our lobby to successfully engage patrons. I’m wondering if having dramaturgy work outside of the hallway by the front desk could be more successful because people generally spend more time there and then rush through the hallway. Also, I’m unsure of how much interaction my dramaturgy note received and am wondering if something could be put on the handbill to encourage people to scan the QR code to read it. On the other hand, I found the post-show discussion to be a successful way to engage the audience with the internal process of building the show. This highlighted for me the audience's desire for interaction with the artists. This is making me think of ways I can focus on artist spotlights in future dramaturgy.
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Beyond learning about the craft of dramaturgy, working on Once affects my development across my intellectual, civic, and professional life. Intellectually this was my second time doing dramaturgy. This second attempt allowed me to grow my previous dramaturgy skills and gave me the experience of doing dramaturgy on a very different play. I also expanded my knowledge of Irish and Czech communities and larger migration topics, expanding my understanding of the world around me. Lastly, this experience developed my writing, research, and discussion skills. In terms of civic development, this process gave me opportunities to engage with social issues facing my community, Chicago, and figure out ways to use art as a form of activism even when it's not explicit in the piece. Furthermore, Once aided my professional development by getting to work with two different mentors giving me the chance to learn from both their styles which I will take into my professional work.
connecting to Loyola's mission
Dramaturgy as a practice feels intrinsically tied to Loyola’s mission. A huge component of a dramaturg’s purpose is to expand knowledge within the internal team and external viewers all to create just art and promote justice in the world outside the piece. This was central to my work on Once. I did a lot of research and writing to connect the immigration themes hinted at in Once to the immigration situation in Chicago at this present moment. Providing context for the internal team to treat these themes appropriately and giving the audience grounding points to talk about the empathy fostered onstage in their own communities. In this way I worked to expand knowledge, learning, and justice in service of humanity, tying my work on Once to Loyola’s mission.
lobby display
The research from my dramaturgy website was then refigured into a PowerPoint that played in the lobby of each performance giving context to support the audience's understanding of the story. This presentation also helped support the fundraiser efforts tied to this production. During Once performances, we collected donations for a local Chicago non-profit Nuevos Vecinos, who work to support immigrants in Chicago. We collected around $500 worth of donations!
post-show dicussion
After one of the performances I led a post-show discussion with cast members and the assistant director. This 15-minute conversation focused on topics of artistic community and interdisciplinary arts; central focuses of the musical.
program note
The last piece of forward-facing dramaturgy I created for this production was my program note. I worked closely with both Dr. Williams and Dr. Howe to create the following piece of writing:
Art as a Refuge? Once’s Guide to Community
Once is a love letter to the artistic community. It captures the power of being surrounded by people who believe in your art and create with you. In this piece, the characters find refuge within music, as it offers a temporary and partial asylum from complicated pasts, cultural differences, complex relationships, and economic hardships–all components at the forefront of many of these characters' lives as they navigate migration.
Set around 2007, this musical takes place roughly three years after the Czech Republic joined the European Union (EU) as part of the EU enlargement in May 2004, sparking high levels of immigration from new member EU states like the Czech Republic to older EU countries like Ireland. This trend was partly due to comparatively higher income levels and living standards in existing EU states, realities that arguably are reflected in the journey of the six principal immigrant characters in Once–Girl, Andrej, Reza, Baruska, Švec, and Ivonka–from the Czech Republic to Dublin. Their stories give us a (fictional) glimpse into what living in the diaspora might be like for some people. Many immigrants tend to leave where they are either because they have no choice but to do so or because they have a hope of tangibly increasing their quality of life, whether in terms of safety, opportunities, a better standard of living, improved income levels, or access to education and other forms of infrastructure. To hold onto those hopes can be difficult, especially given the segregation, discrimination, and other barriers (legal, linguistic, and economic) often faced when entering a country–all alongside the grief they may carry as a result of leaving one world behind and starting anew. We meet our Czech characters as they fight to build these new kinds of lives, balancing between the hope and opportunity found in Dublin and the barriers and loss they face in this new place. We can see some of these dynamics unfolding in Chicago now, as our sanctuary city has been welcoming many immigrants in recent years.
Chicago has been a sanctuary city since March 1985, when an executive order issued by Mayor Harold Washington established city benefits could not be denied based on citizenship status (Cherone). Recently, Republican lawmakers have worked to target sanctuary cities by busing large quantities of immigrants to them to overwhelm their infrastructure. In April 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began ordering that immigrants be moved out of Texas into sanctuary cities like Chicago (García). Since then, more than 35,000 asylum seekers and other migrants have arrived in Chicago (Goudie). Many arrivals have been forced to sleep on the streets, in O’Hare International Airport, in public transport spaces, and in police stations around the city, as they wait for work permits and housing. The immigrant community in Chicago is growing, and, while these families attempt to adjust to their new environment, they face countless struggles and much prejudice. When they arrive in Chicago, they are also entering a context in which various forms of long-term structural oppression have already generated immense suffering for many precarious people in the city. This context only compounds the difficulties that recent arrivals face as they navigate life in Chicago. The vast majority of these arrivals are families and individuals who aren’t moving merely for the sake of moving (though that would be their right); they are coming here as a way to survive. I hope this play helps us all reflect on the power of community, artistic and otherwise. We can learn how to be a welcoming community from these characters: how to support each other, in whatever ways we can, whether through a connection at the bank, a vacuum repair, a nice suit, or a song.