Dramaturgies of Emergence: Decentralized Collaboration of Participatory Theatre
Authors: Hutchison-Poyntz Hamish 
Published: May 2022

adrienne maree brown (Emergent Strategy) says that “relationships are everything.” The recent popularity of participatory theatre shows in Canada demonstrates just how true that is. These performances make direct audience interaction an essential feature of their dramaturgical design, with audience actions fundamental to propelling the performance experience. As these dramaturgies proliferate, they have given rise to a specific form of participatory theatre focused on decentralized collaboration and democratic audience agency, which I call dramaturgies of emergence. In emergent participatory performances, relationships manifest as networks of people – audience and artists – working together in a decentralized mode of iterative collaboration. With algorithmic dramaturgies to guide them, this autopoietic participant network generates the aesthetic and experiential aspects of the performance, and distinguishes emergent dramaturgies from other forms. By distributing the act of generating performance, it decentralizes agency over that creative process, distributing it throughout the networked participants to create outcomes no single member could generate alone.
These dramaturgies of emergence embrace both relational modes of the established scientific process of emergence, and the political values of decentralization, playfulness, adaptability and collective leadership associated with the form by brown and others. By embracing these processes and values as their core mode of making meaning in a social setting, dramaturgies of emergence embrace the fundamental relationality of theatre, and ask us to playfully engage in those relationships. They allow audiences to authentically represent themselves in art while still creating something that is fundamentally collective, and provide a democratic mode of collaborative creation much needed in the often highly individualistic society we find ourselves in today.

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