Session 8: 6/10/14; and, announcing summer break

Hello friends of The Dramaturgy Open Office Hour Project,

I’ve decided to put this project on hiatus for the summer. I’m going to be working out of town in July; also, there have been fewer visitors since Memorial Day. Whether that’s because we’re entering summer, or simply because this experiment has played itself out, I’m not sure. But it seems smart to take a pause, while I evaluate whether to resume the open office hours in the fall; or to take what I’ve gathered from it and incorporate it into some other project, or simply into the way I go about my work in the future.

I welcome any thoughts from people who would be interested in seeing this or some other kind of open dramaturgical forum continue, about what your specific interests would be, venues/times that are convenient for you, etc.

Which is all to say: the project is not finished. I’m still interested in exploring the role of dramaturgy in collaboration.

Some stats about this experiment are below; I know there are many ways to evaluate this beyond these numbers, but part of what I set out to do was share my discoveries along the way, and so I want to include this information, not to claim any success or lack thereof, but simply to document:

Number of weekly open office hour sessions: 8

Number of open office hours total: 24

Number of venues: 2

Number of visitors: 21 (3 of the 21 returned for a second visit)

Number of participating dramaturgs: 5

Breakdown of visitors’ theatrical disciplines (there were numerous multi-disciplinary artists):

- 20 writers

- 5 actors

- 3 dramaturgs

- 2 producers

Average number of blog readers per post (as of the publication of this entry): 40

Number of Facebook likes (as of the publication of this entry): 251

(from a quick look, about 80% of those are from strangers, or at least, people whom I didn’t know before launching this project)

I’d loosely promised myself I would give the project at least six weeks, and we’ve passed that, so I’d like to say that I’m letting it go for the moment without any feelings that it is less successful for having lasted two months as opposed to continuing indefinitely without pause. In a business where long runs mean greater success, I’m reminding myself that this is an experiment and not a production; and the goal was not so much to build a product as to see what is on people’s minds.

This project has forced me to think about my work in ways I hadn’t before; some of those have been put into the previous blog entries, but many more aren’t fully formed yet in my head. I’m hopeful that this project has been useful to others as well—the theater artists who visited, and perhaps beyond that in some way I can’t recognize now.

I look forward to further interactions with you all, and am wishing you a great summer.

Best wishes,

Jeremy