The dramaturgy of Conversation

ingrid cogne

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. 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 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. The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge. Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025 Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW) Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709) Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

ITERATIONS expose a re/search field with Charlotta Ruth, performed in November 2024 – for 6 days.

“How I understood it yesterday, when you spoke, is that for you some places look like “seats” but they are not really functioning, at least not as relational sitting.” Charlotta – while walking on Tuesday the 12th of November 2024.

Movers... More than trained as dancers, we both have been initiating/working on projects that deal with knowledges' circulation combining or questioning the relation body - language with a particular attention to choreography and improvisation within various environments. We both have our respective agendas when it comes to spaces, perceptions, and languages. My invitation aimed at combining our respective knowledges to go beyond them.

ITERATION 1, ITERATION 2, ITERATION 3

compose a Triptych of videoworks created in Autumn 2024.

Concept: Ingrid Cogne

Content: Charlotta Ruth and Ingrid Cogne

Context: Vienna

Editing: Charlotta Ruth

Mixing: Gustavo Petek

MÛ au quotidien, May 2025, at Mz* Baltazar‘s Lab

Three ITERATIONS, three public/common places

Two of the contexts – a passage nearby Wien Mitte and the Czaszka Park – were proposed by Charlotta: located in her "hood", they are places she has been occupying privately but also explored in her work.

The third context is a place encountered on our way through Praterstern to pick up equipments at the ÆSR Lab in Vienna.

For this specific re/search* – based on improvised double circulations in both physical and mental spaces – it was essential for me to create a situation of reciprocal activations with a peer having the capacity to:

- understand and follow my practices,

- navigate and expand reciprocal knowledges without a defined protocol,

- think and move (with/in) languages and exposed environments.

*to be in the analysis of the doing while being in the doing (Cogne, Displacement(s) as Method(s), 2015)

I met Charlotta Ruth in Sweden, in 2006. Since then, our paths repeatedly met in choreographic projects, as invited artists / inviting each other.

Charlotta was one of the researchers I invited in my previous arts-based research project Six Formats (2015-18) – during which she proposed to create a "video tutorial" for The Object of Communication (2018). I highly estimate her ability to enhance others' works and to fully contribute with all her skills and knowledges.

ITERATIONS' setting: 2 persons, a bike – used as a carriage/stand for the filming mobile phone and a wireless microphone system.*

ITERATIONS: a 6-day process, a journey during which knowledges have been shared, collected, developed, challenged, reformulated. It is only for the latest ITERATION, nr. 3 that I proposed to focus on the notions “conversation” and “dramaturgy” to expand the filtering of the relation context - format to the content of the arts-based research project The dramaturgy of Conversation.

* kindly borrowed by the ÆSR Lab

My intention was to do not create a protocol – apart from the two of us deciding upon : specific environments for our iterations and the tools needed for us to document our improvised conversations (Charlotta's bike became the "portable" stand for our recording tools) – but to invite the two of us to challenge our respective conditioning when it comes to conversation, improvisation, and bodily languages.

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