Collaborating with Kate is a truly enriching experience. She asks those challenging questions that help clarify your thoughts and focus the work. Beyond questioning, she listens. She is attentive to your artistic needs and can observe the decisions - visible and hidden - informing the ideas, communicating insights in a way that can truly transform the work. A trusted and skilled dramaturg and advisor.
– Alice Canton, theatre maker

When I worked as an actor, I would find myself in rehearsal rooms focussing less on ‘creating a character’ and more on breaking down the script. Workshops were my favourite place to be. I was drawn to the deconstructive nature of criticism to understand a play and get it inside it. It was all dramaturgy. So in 2015, when the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne established a brand new Master of Dramaturgy (the first of its kind in Australasia) I was part of the first cohort.

Dramaturgy is both critical concept and practical process. As concept, it refers to the internal structure of a theatrical event; how all the parts of the composition come together to affect how it is read by an audience. Every live performance work has a dramaturgy, whether the starting point for that work is a scripted text with singular author, or a collaborative, devised process.

The word also encompasses the process by which a composition is constructed and deconstructed. A dramaturg is someone who engages in and helps facilitate this process. However the work of engaging in the process of dramaturgy is not exclusive to the dramaturg – any collaborator may take up a dramaturgical role.

My work as a dramaturg in theatre has spanned both devised processes and literary dramaturgy. No one process will be the same. While dramaturgy often purposely defies hard definitions, the role of the dramaturg is very simple – they are the ‘first audience’ to your work. They can help be a mirror to what you’re making, facilitate reflexivity in the process, and provoke and interrogate ideas that may have slowly calcified or gone unquestioned. They can help map where you’ve been, what is being presented, and where that may go.

Let me know if that sounds like something you need and we can discuss what might work best.