Joshua Wicke works as dramaturg, curator and researcher in performance, dance, and theatre. Currently, he has been pursuing the question of how residues of structural and interpersonal violence operate within and against the aesthetic. Recent and long-term collaborations include artists and artist groups such as Moved by the Motion, caner teker, Carolina Mendonça, Alex Franz Zehetbauer, Simone Aughterlony amongst others. As a dramaturg, he held positions at Schauspielhaus and Gessnerallee in Zürich. Most recently he curated the conversation series “Poetics of Refusal”, co-curated the symposiums “Risking Repetition: Aesthetics of ‘Survival’” and “Beyond Repair”. He began a PhD project on an infrastructural critique of dramaturgy in 2025.
Dramaturgical practice and dramaturgical thought accompany the oft-described crisis of theatre. While recent years have seen extensive research on extra-institutional, production-dramaturgical practices, the role of the dramaturg as an agent within cultural institutions has scarcely been examined. Drawing on my own experience as a dramaturg, this dissertation project aims to close this gap by advancing an infrastructural critique of dramaturgy that considers the practice’s past material and discursive genealogy, as well as its contemporary institutional operations. Particular attention is paid to the residues of “aesthetic education” as an affect-political undertaking in the “formation of proper subjects for the state” and thus to dramaturgy’s entanglement in the “racial regime of aesthetics”. The thesis to be examined is that dramaturgy performs a policing function especifically in the temporal operations of the “reform” of the institution and in constant “improvement” of artworks, audiences, and artists. Finally, through an analysis of artistic works that intervene in the theatrical dispositif, the paper aims to outline an “end to dramaturgy” that breaks with this temporal regime.