“Solos” with Sourdough and Drying, Cracking: Dramaturgy with Other-Than-Human Species

The interest guiding this text is: how to articulate an ethics of dramaturgy with other-than-human species on the basis of current theoretical developments within post-humanist thinking and experiences of dramaturging with sourdough? This research is in dialogue with post-humanist theorist Karen Barad (2003, 2007), dehumanist theorist Julietta Singh (2018), and recent post-humanist perspectives on dramaturgy from Bleeker (2020), Woynarski (2020), and Žeželj (2022).By understanding practical experiments, through reading post-humanist literature, ethical questions become condensed and articulated, not as a set of rules or points of evaluation/reflection, but as a “diffraction grating” to share with the research community. My practice research PhD, ”Dramaturgy with other-than-human species”, consists of live art projects that explore dramaturgy practice with sourdough, a microbiome of yeasts and bacteria which is commonly used in bread making. For the projects, I was guided by Robbrecht’s definition of dramaturgy as “the web of talks, thoughts, images and sensualities that brings us towards the conceptualization of what we are actually doing (‘the work’), and often resembles an ‘unidentifiable object’ during an artistic process”. Over two projects “Solos” with sourdough (“Solos”) and Drying, Cracking (Cracking) I attempted to do dramaturgical conversation with sourdough.