Re: Direction

A Theoretical and Practical Guide

Gabrielle Cody, Rebecca Schneider, Gabrielle Cody, Rebecca Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136348648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Re: Direction is an extraordinary resource for practitioners and students on directing. It provides a collection of ground-breaking interviews, primary sources and essays on 20th century directing theories and practices around the world.
Helpfully organized into four key areas of the subject, the book explores:
* theories of directing
* the boundaries of the director's role
* the limits of categorization
* the history of the theatre and performance art.
Exceptionally useful and thought-provoking introductory essays by editors Schneider and Cody guide you through the wealth of materials included here. Re: Direction is the kind of book anyone interested in theatre history should own, and which will prove an indispensable toolkit for a lifetime of study.

Part I

Directors Of Classical Revolt

1

Introduction to Part I

Rebecca Schneider

The ‘reign of the theatrical director,’ as Bettina L. Knapp refers to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occurred in a contested field. The split in focus between the material detail of the naturalists and the abstract dreamscape of the symbolists at the last turning century would fracture into the thousand ‘isms’ that would compose twentieth-century modernism. Meyerhold, for example, included here in one of his incarnations, was responsible across a single career for the deployment of numerous stylistic ‘isms’ ranging from symbolism to stylization to the grotesque to constructivism.

Using the spine of ‘revolt,’ as explicated in depth in the General Introduction, this section moves in and around naturalism and its discontents and ultimately explores the movement off the stage and into the house with the 1960s complication between art, life, ritual, and politics that groups like the Living Theatre provoked. To end the section with Augusto Boal’s ‘Invisible Theatre,’ an early strategy in his Theatre of the Oppressed, has a certain ironic appropriateness -almost a full circle revolution – when read in a lineage with Antoine’s decision to hang real carcasses of sheep in his 1888 production of Icres’ Les Bouchers (The Butchers). If Antoine and Stanislavsky worked to have their actors and props be so realistic as to become invisible as theatre, one of the ironies of the twentieth-century move out of the theatre and into ‘real’ life was the discovery of the theatrical bases, the performativity, of real life at all times. The lineage of 1960s performative actions in the theatre is most often linked to the theatrical avant-garde, stemming from futurism and dada and resulting in Happenings and Fluxus. Without denying that lineage, the force of this first section is to suggest other alliances as well, such as the link with early naturalist environmental theatre.

In the 1870s Zola’s agenda was, in some ways, the first theatre anthropology. He insisted that by observing ourselves as we exist ‘naturally’ in our social environments we could come to know ourselves, and to know ourselves would be, presumably, to better ourselves (1963). Audiences began, like anthropologists on boats to the ‘wilds,’ to travel to the theatre to view private lives (often conceived as our own ‘primitivity’) in public, to observe domesticity reproduced in detail – our parlors, our kitchens, servants’ quarters, master bedrooms. The plan for the naturalist theatre was, together with modern science generally, to improve the world through observation and deduction. We can chart this effort to take on the affect of real life in order to effect real life from Zola and Antoine to Stanislavsky’s work, to his student Okhlopkov’s move off the stage in early environmentalism, through the life/art work of much 1960s and 1970s work and on to Boal’s melding of the divide between spectator/actor into his ‘spectactor.’ The result of drawing such a set of alliances is to watch the ‘a’ of affect slip and slide into the ‘e’ of effect, ultimately questioning the grounds for distinguishing between the two words at all.

One aim of naturalism, then, to affect real life in order to effect real life, swings on a pendulum between visibility and invisibility in complex and fascinating ways throughout the century. The move onto the streets or across the magic gulf, disappearing the boundaries between performative action and ‘real’ political action, can be read alongside fourth-wall theatre and the naturalist director’s aim to have the actor, through methodological skill at focusing his own attention (Stanislavsky 1989: 72–94), disappear as an actor and meet or find the truth of his character. At the Moscow Art Theatre, audiences were encouraged to blind themselves to the performative bases of the display (or at least momentarily forget or ‘suspend’), allowing those bases to become invisible. With Paradise Now! or with Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in ‘69, however, we might not have been able to discern which were actors, which characters, and which were ‘real’ people as spectators, beckoned to join the action, took their clothes off, danced with, and caressed the cast and each other in the playing space. Both the MAT and Living Theatre, then, blurred the line between stage and house – one, ironically, through buttressing the fourth wall, the other through literally dismantling it.

It seems odd that Brecht’s alienated performer might fit into this mix, but the connection with naturalism can be drawn from another angle. Brecht’s directing practice, like Meyerhold’s before him, privileged visible theatricality. Brechtian performers wield the ‘natural’ detail (such as Courage’s belt buckle) in order to underscore it or make it appear as performance, or as performative, social and conscious act. Here we have the effort to make the performative bases of action visible, in order to bring to visibility the political consequences of choices in everyday life. Brecht thus shares with early naturalism the faith in observation and the effort to make the familiar visible, even if the end product aims to insure that that ‘natural’ or familiar is denaturalized, made strange. That is, Brecht worked to foreground that which we forget about the familiar – its strangeness. Showing the unnatural side of the ‘naturalized’ is linked to bringing the invisible to visibility – showing that the invisible-through-habit is in fact right before our eyes. So, while it may seem odd to suggest that theatre which privileges acute observation (Brecht’s ‘uncongealed eye’) might be linked to a theatre which disappears as theatre, or which blurs the boundary between stage and house, nevertheless the tangle of visibility and invisibility of the seeming natural binds the practices together.

As we made clear in the General Introduction, directing arose relative to the perspectival, or pictorial stage, and flowered alongside the birth and development of cinema. The need to orchestrate vision – to provide an ‘angle of viewing’ as Lee Strasberg has written (1948: 119) - thus seems to be endemic to the job of director, be the production naturalist, symbolist, constructivist, etc. Given this, can there be such a thing as a director of invisible theatre? In Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, the director becomes a ‘joker’ whose focus is not on an end product in terms of an observable show, but on a never-ending ‘rehearsal for revolution’ (Boal 1985). Still, the links between director in production, joker in rehearsal, or performance artist in life/art installations may not be entirely bogus. Our opening section offers a genealogy that takes us from Antoine’s external naturalism to Stanislavsky’s radical inward move toward the subconscious life of the character/actor, through to a theatre which becomes invisible, at least to the degree that it troubles the distinction between performativity and actuality, or theatricality and everyday life.¹ The ‘angle of viewing’ became, early on, intimately bound to the ‘angle of veiling.’ As early as Stanislavsky, the director’s attempt to angle vision had gained in complexity to ‘angle’ the invisible as well as the given to be seen.

Throughout this section the question of whether reality is ‘enough’ - as Alan Schneider puts it here – is key, as is the drive toward political change that splits naturalist theatres between a Stanislavskian effort simply to show life as it is or a more Meyerholdian effort to incite political activism (see Braun 1986: 22–8 on the apolitical aims of Stanislavsky as compared with Meyerhold). The conflicts between the dreamscapes of symbolism and the everyday life-scapes of naturalism at the ‘revolutionary’ beginnings of director’s theater are never quite resolved, as we think these essays articulate. The push and pull between articulating utopian dream (the Living Theatre’s ‘paradise’) or quotidian life is very evident in the Living Theatre notes for Paradise Now! (Chapter 11), for example.

And finally, throughout this section, the question of ‘basics’ in theatre is quite important to the artists – even when the ‘basic’ is not the naturalistic detail of everyday life but something far more basic (even natural) to the theatre itself – a basic theatricality, almost in the sense of Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre.’ Consider the following excerpt from Nick Worrall’s essay on Meyerhold included in this collection. According to Worrall, Meyerhold was concerned to offer what he saw as natural to the creative process of exchange in the theatre:

a new kind of stage acting [that] was not, in the terms of someone like Artaud, a signaling through the flames of a destructive universe, but a communication of basics now that the inessentials, the accumulation of centuries, had been cleared from the stage, together with the canvas and the costumes, the scenery, the drapery, the masking, the footlights, the cyclorama, the borders, the whole paraphernalia that had served to frame the flow of history as it passed in steady sequence across the enclosed proscenium arch stage during the previous 300 years or so. What was being signaled was a basic-ness about a human condition and a setting as starting points from which meanings could be jointly created by actors and audience through means which acknowledged the creative powers of each.

The issue of the creative powers of exchange between actors and audience, important to Meyerhold’s ‘theatre of the straight line’ positions the director as conduit to this exchange, not as sole coordinator of a primarily visual event (Meyerhold 1969: 50). Other essays in this section show very clearly that the issue of exchange between playwright and director is one that can ‘acknowledge the creative powers of each,’ as the interview by Richard Schechner with Alan Schneider about Schneider’s choices as director of Beckett’s plays suggests. Schneider interestingly finds himself in somewhat of a ‘middle’ between the ‘basic’ naturalism of Stanislavsky and the ‘basic’ theatricality of Meyerhold: ‘my whole position, philosophical or aesthetic, if I have any – is that, to the theatricalist guys, I tend to be a realistic director, a Stanislavski-oriented director; to the Stanislavski guys, I’m a theatricalist director.’ Schechner then asks him: ‘Who are you to you?’ To this Schneider replies: ‘I think I’m in the middle. I think that’s a weakness and a virtue.’ While Schneider does not seem to be precisely in revolt, one can read his choices relative to the creative ferment of revolution that produced the category of ‘director’ which he fulfills.

Note

1On the meaning of ‘performativity’ and its relation to performance see J. L. Austin (1959) and Sedgwick and Parker (1995).

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. (1959) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Boal, Augusto (1985) Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Routledge.

Braun, Edward (1986) The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. London: Methuen.

Meyerhold, Vsevlod (1969) Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. Edward Braun. New York: Hill and Wang.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Andrew Parker, eds. (1995) Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge.

Stanislavsky, Constantin (1986) An Actor Prepares. New York: Routledge.

Strasberg, Lee (1948) ‘The director.’ In The Theatre Handbook, ed. Bernard Sobel. New York: Crown Publishers.

Zola, Emile (1963) ‘Naturalism in the theatre.’ In Documents in Modern Literary Realism, ed. George Joseph Becker. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2

The Reign of the Theatrical Director

Antoine and Lugné-Pöe

Bettina L. Knapp

The French Review,¹ 1988

1887: the founding of the Theatre Libre by Antoine; 1893: the birth of Aurelien Lugné-Pöe’s Theatre de l’Oeuvre. Two memorable dates in the history of the performing arts. Two noteworthy theatres on whose stages France and the world were to witness not only innovative theatrical performances, but also the beginnings of the reign of the theatrical director. There had been, to be sure, directors of all types throughout the centuries in France. Molière, for example, was the greatest of them all. But since his time, few French directors had captured the attention of dramatists, performers, and the tout Paris; still fewer had created styles of their own, bringing fresh insights into the performance of multiple genres of international scope. Antoine enlarged the ideals, mission, and function of the theatrical director; so, too, did Lugné-Pöe.

A memorable date in French theatre was 30 March 1887. It marked the opening performance of Antoine’s newly founded Theatre Libre. On that momentous night, Antoine offered spectators a new brand of realism/naturalism: a slice of life production that brought audiences face to face with themselves and with their environment. Decors followed the patterns of reality. A revolutionary acting technique was also instituted on that night: actors and actresses no longer declaimed in stiff and studied ways, as was the style in state-subsidized and boulevard theatres. They walked and talked, comported themselves on stage as they did in shops, on the streets, and in their homes. […] Nor did performers upstage each other. Antoine had abolished the star system. His company worked as a unit – a cohesive whole.

Not exclusively one-sided, Antoine’s tastes were eclectic. He invited Parnassians, Symbolists, Decadents, and Humorists to contribute their ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part I Directors of Classical Revolt
• Part II Auteur Theatre
• Part III Theatres of Community and Transculturation
• Part IV Montage, Reiteration, Revision
• Index