Tomaž Toporišič

Tomaž Toporišič (PhD) is a dramaturge, translator, theatre theoretician and critic. His primary research interests are the contemporary performing arts and literature, specifically the interaction between the two fields. From 1997 to 2003 he was the artistic director of The Mladinsko Theatre. In 1995 he co-founded Exodos Festival of Contemporary Performing arts, has published numerous papers and four books on contemporary plays, theatre and performing arts. Currently he is a dramaturg of the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana and a professor in Cultural Studies department at University of Primorska in Koper.

His paper under the title Being singular plural. For emancipated dramaturgy starts from the assumption that today the distinctions between theoretical and practical dramaturgy dissolve themselves and the dramaturgical functions (if we paraphrase the term by Michel Foucault: author’s function) merge. Dramaturg participates in processes that concern the artistic strategy, the developing of text, even understood as performance, but he is paradoxically never understood as the author, even in the sense of Foucault’s author function. The name of the dramaturg only sporadically "indicates the status of the discourse within a society and culture", but the words he utters at the press conferences or writes in the program booklets are nevertheless quite often used as an anchor for interpreting the text and the performance.  If, according to Roland Barthes, the audience is the true creator of the performance, than the dramaturg should act as an emancipated spectator (Jacques Rancière).  In which sense? Our thesis is that it is his function and task to persuade both the performers and the spectators that theatrical act or performance is primarily the dynamic tour de force of singularity and plurality, the incarnation of the fact that there is no being without "being-with," that "I" does not come before "we" (i.e., Dasein does not precede Mitsein), and that there is no existence without co-existence (Jean-Luc Nancy).