The dramaturgy of Conversation

Can the hierarchy of knowledge and the power relationships it implies be challenged through the doing? Can situations of meeting on/around/with knowledge open up for alternative positions and functions for practical knowledge? The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW? How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself? The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations. Conversation is Knowledge. The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), in-between and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication. A conversation requires the reading of the different i) routes one can take, ii) turns one can choose. One is a filter combining different actions: speaking, listening, transcribing, reading, transporting, transforming, and displacing. The filtering of the situations, contents, and forms is done by the persons involved in the research, who encounter the research on political, physical, and perceptive levels. The dramaturgy of Conversation will result in, and make available, a methodology that focuses on how practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the doing. It is a methodology that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable. The research navigates between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. The dramaturgy of Conversation which is Cognes Habilitation research, is a continuation of her two previous arts-based research projects at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: a PhD in Practice research (2011-2015) titled Displacement(s) as Method(s) and a post-doctoral research (2015-2018) titled Six Formatsfunded by FWF/PEEK.

Within The dramaturgy of Conversation, "dramaturgy" (re-)presents the approach to the entire research-"dramaturgy" being as much 'choreographic dramaturgy' than 'dramaturgical choreography'-and "conversation" is the object of study. Conversation is a notion used to qualify live, formal, and/or informal communications based on the principle of articulation and circulation of information between individuals. Conversation is an everyday practice and situation, but also a notion that is overused as a title for events and/or publications to announce forms and formats of communication/presentation in the Arts. In TdoC, various "uses" of conversation in, between, and in-between expanded choreography and process oriented arts-based research are re/searched to underline, question and appreciate the complexity of communication: a conversation combines spoken and bodily languages, and it is supported by optic, acoustic, and energetic perceptions. The multi-layers of the solicited perceptions invite multiple possibilities of filtering (reading/understanding/interpreting/re-learning) the content circulating within a conversation, when the modalities of its appearance constantly change and have different temporalities. By studying the existing situations of conversation and analyzing through the "doing" the created situations of conversation, TdoC is the context in which a self-reflective process can be (re)articulated and a process in which CO- and reciprocal activation of hardly articulable knowledge can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of "conversation" to be practiced and considered as knowledge.