New dramaturgy: a roundtable

In 1993 in Amsterdam a landmark symposium, ‘Context 01:Active Pooling, the New Theatre’s Word-Perfect’, took place focusing on the theory and practice of contemporary theatre. The initiators of this conference started out with the recognition of a fundamental shift in the dramaturgical landscape: that “in many countries a form of theatre is being produced which answers to paradigms other than the traditional (reflected significantly in the play’s dramaturgy), and the realisation that there is currently no terminology available to describe those paradigms in all their aspects“(Van Kerkhoven: 1995). This new paradigm, new dramaturgy, a process-oriented way of working, gained not only a name, but a growing terminology, case studies of its processes, and explorations of the questions it posed