Fear, Feedback & Dramaturgy
Generating productive feedback for dramatists and other theatre artists is an essential function of a dramaturg, my profession for over three decades now. Feedback is a dynamic – often slippery – phenomenon, involving content expertise, process awareness, and psychological sensitivity. Giving feedback is an art. For most people, getting it is a special kind of torture.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
When Garrett approached me in 2020 with an idea to develop a workshop about collaboration, I hesitated. With so much out there on the subject, it was difficult for me to imagine how we could add value. But when our conversation pivoted toward feedback, I leaned in.
As a new music/opera composer, Garrett had been unusually open to collaboration and feedback over our many years and projects working together. Almost all his scores incorporated ample opportunities for musicians to interpret, even improvise. Most composers are like, “Here, play or sing the notes on this page, exactly as I wrote them.” But not Garrett. Even in conceiving and writing his pieces, he invited feedback every step of the way. Why was that? Where was his fear? Perhaps there were creative-process diamonds here to excavate, sort, unpack, absorb, and share with our community.
With the pandemic shutting down live performance for the foreseeable future, we suddenly had all the time in the world to investigate feedback’s unmined potential for art creation and its application to all kinds of work. Coincidentally, I had recently wrapped my 16-year tenure developing musicals for a global entertainment company, during which I had become well acquainted with the benefits and terrors of corporate “annual performance reviews.” I sensed synergy…
For many people, evaluations and assessments of professional work trigger negative and unproductive perceptions of “judgment” of personal worth. In the absence of healthy objectivity, constructive criticism of one’s performance or product can reflect – fun-house-mirror-style – a painful inventory of personal failings. Not helpful.
But where did our widespread fear of feedback originate? Memories of grades and school came to mind – such a big part of childhood. How often was “being a good kid” tied to “doing well in school”… as if academic success were accessible to everyone, simply the result of attendance, attention, and effort? Of course, we now know about structural inequities in education – how language, culture, and neurological differences impact academic achievement far beyond one’s individual desire to succeed. But without context and essential accommodations, deep psychological wounds can be inflicted, with long-lasting scars. Could embedded educational traumas be a root of fight-or-flight responses when we sense feedback near?
As Garrett and I have developed CULTIVATING FEEDBACK over the past few years, I’ve been able to deepen and improve my dramaturgical process with new sensitivity to individual, collective, and often subconscious fear of feedback. I now “flip the script” on traditional unidirectional, judgment-based script evaluations with collaborative, creator-centered conversations. I begin “dramaturgical engagements” by interviewing the creators before I ever crack a script. Analysis in a vacuum helps no one.
I ask: What are you trying to do? What do you love about it? What’s in the way? By giving artists the reins of the dramaturgical conversation, I gain essential context for the feedback I’ll generate in response to their work. As much as possible, I try to posit my observations as questions about the underlying dramatic, thematic, musical, and theatrical structures they’re employing to tell their story. With what they’re trying to do already on the table, we now discuss: Is it working? Finally, I encourage all stakeholders to take a step back and ask the big existential question: Is it worth doing? If the answer is yes, then plow ahead, my friends!
In these brief dramaturgical engagements, as well as in my work dramaturging new musicals over many years, I call myself a “suggester,” who aims to support and facilitate the creative work of my collaborating “deciders” (dramatists, directors, producers). After earning their trust and confidence in me as an ally — in their corner, on their team — I’m free to enlist the full breadth and depth of my skills to help our project become its best self, replacing any residual feedback fear with feedback love.
