RELATED TERMS: Theatre; Epic Theatre; Tragic Theatre – Aristotle; Theatre of Cruelty
“The tension between the endless desire that is the source of human motivations and the hopeless demands that fail to appease it is the very heart of the human tragedy, according to Lacan.”
Mansfield, 2000: 46)
In as far as designs intervene in existing entanglements of socio-cultural situations embedded in techno-natural situations, and vice versa, design practices may engage with processes of dramatisation and narrativisation. This is in line with the conception that techno-genesis and socio-genesis are mutually entwined through the processes of exosomatisation. While narrative and drama are most often woven together in practice through plot – narratives involve dramatic incidents while dramas involve narrative sequences – they may be distinguished for analytical reasons.
The designer may therefore consider how the design enters into the drama of the situation, heightening, extending or resolving a dramatic tension, or takes part in the movement of events as part of a narrative progression. Designing, in other words, may be considered as part of dramatisation, as part of (story) telling; or as part of the dramatisation of story telling through the arrangement of plot. This may affect decisions as to which modes and media of communication are drawn upon in the design, impacting the balance between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’.
References
Mansfield, N. (2000) Subjectivity: theories of the self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonard’s, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Resources
Sorkin, A. and Wilson, J. (2022) Aaron Sorkin. [Interview with John Wilson in This Cultural Life series on the BBC Sounds platform]. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00161mc [Accessed 13 July 2022]
Aaron Sorkin discusses the distinctions that exist under the umbrella term ‘writer’. He focuses on the differences between being a playwright and being a screenwriter, but implicitly he also distinguishes those two roles and that of the novelist. All three writerly roles deal with ‘dramatisation’ but in different ways. Although having worked on stage plays, television dramas and cinema films, Sorkin sees himself primarily as a writer of radio plays because, for him, it is the rhythm and flow of the verbal dialogue which holds his interest.
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