Diffractive Dramaturgy: A Performance Practice for Complicated Times

In this essay, I offer, as a theatre-maker an exploration of how aspects of posthuman theory, and in particular diffraction as theorised by Donna Haraway (2004) and Karen Barad (2007), can be used as maps, templates, prisms, to develop a diffractive dramaturgy, a way of making and audiencing work in direct response to the challenges emerging in our time. A diffracted perspective speaks to current critical frameworks; it is part of a new materialist world-view. As theatre-makers, we are involved in the business of working together to consciously create collective experiences in response to the personal, political turmoil and ecological crises of our age, therefore finding new ways to be within nature (including our own and others) has become not only an essential part of that activity, but the act itself.