The Director and Directing

Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre

Adam J. Ledger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781137407672
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book criticallyassesses the artistry of contemporary directors. Its discussion includes the work of Declan Donnellan, Thomas Ostermeier, Deborah Warner, Simon Stone and Krzysztof Warlikowski. Alongside the work of wider theorists (Patrice Pavis and Erika Fischer-Lichte), it uses neuroaesthetic theory (Semir Zeki) and cognitive and creative process models to offer an original means to discuss the performance event, emotion, brain structures and concepts, and the actor's body in performance. It offers first-hand observation of rehearsals led by Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, Carrie Cracknell and the Steppenwolf Theatre. It also explores devising in relation to the work of Simon McBurney and contemporary groups, and scenography in relation to the work of Dmitry Krymov, Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage. The Director and Directing argues that the director creates a type of knowledge, 'reward' and 'resonant experience' (G. Gabrielle Starr) through instinctive and expert choices.

© The Author(s) 2019

Adam J. LedgerThe Director and Directinghttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Director

Adam J. Ledger¹

(1)

Reader in Theatre and Performance, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Adam J. Ledger

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

Anecdotes

At the curtain call for Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth (on tour to London’s Barbican Theatre in October 2017), the image of the director appeared. Ninagawa had died in 2016, but through the inclusion of his photograph the company visibly and publicly acknowledged that he was still its leader and that this production should be understood overwhelmingly as Ninagawa’s work. ¹ The image, depicting the deceased director in front of Macbeth’s backdrop of the sun, made palpable both his presence in, and ownership of a production that had outlived him.

In Moscow, in November 2017, Boris Yukhananov, the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, was working with a large group of young people as part of his ‘Golden Ass’ project, in a former industrial unit appropriated for rehearsal ² (see Fig. 1.1). Yukhananov was in full flow, addressing the group with the help of a radio microphone. This was no directorial declamation, but, like the image of Ninagawa, still an authoritative presence offering a pedagogical rhetoric about the personal and professional spheres of the theatre-maker’s life. Yukhananov reflected upon the different dramatic ‘worlds’ at play in the group’s encounter with the Orpheus and Eurydice story, the latest exploration of the mythic to appear in Yukhananov’s work, despite its usually contemporary, even brutalist chic. But on this occasion, Yukhananov elaborated upon his preferences and more personal intellectual ‘worlds’. This casually delivered yet lengthy amplified address (part of the evening’s work scheduled from 4 p.m. to midnight) recalled Eugenio Barba’s ‘oral improvisations’, delivered at the outset of a new performance project at Odin Teatret as a kind of extended discourse of the imagination, which, as in Yukhananov’s case, shapes a territory or sphere of thought that enfolds the practice. ³

Fig. 1.1

Boris Yukhananov, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow

(Photo Olympia Orlova)

In Yukhananov’s case, directing seems to concern a collective mindset or an ethics of work in which the artist must be personally invested. But my colleagues in Russia also referred to him as an ‘aristocratic director’, implying an authoritative individual in the lineage of Stanislavski through to Anatoly Vasiliev. ⁴ Yet Yukhananov clearly relished his extended theatrical family—he knew each of them by name and, on a previous evening, had asked after the welfare of an absentee. And in displaying Ninagawa’s image, his company revealed how it also felt him to be part of a family still and wished to present him as such to an audience (see Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Yukio Ninagawa

(Photo The Ninagawa Production Company)

Both these directors, despite their different theatrical cultures and their entirely different working practices, are placed inside a creative and operative tension. They are both part of, but always separate from their ensembles. They position themselves as instigators and arbiters of their actors’ choices, yet ultimately embrace the absolute authorship of their respective productions. This book, then, seeks to centralise and consider the craft behind that authorship, both in the sense of creative process and artistic vision.

Director?

Historically, the director emerges as an artistic force via four strands: as a progression from the ‘stage manager’ (or, in the early modern period, the ‘keeper of the book’); as a figure distinct from the writer; as a controlling force for emergent stage technologies (gas lighting in the 1860s, electric some twenty years later, and now digital multimedia); and as a theatre theoretician or pedagogue in her/his own right. In The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Maria Shevtsova and Christopher Innes suggest that, in Western European terms at least, the director as an individuated figure can be clearly detected in the nineteenth-century actor-manager; we can certainly see directorial tendencies in figures such as Henry Irving (1838–1905 ) and, especially given his concern with acting, David Garrick (1717–1779). It is interesting to note the contemporary re-emergence of the actor-manager, as in the case of Kevin Spacey at London’s Old Vic (2003–2015), and Kenneth Branagh’s company. ⁵

In his Contemporary Mise en Scène (2013), Patrice Pavis points out that the rise of theatrical naturalism is a key factor in determining the emergence of the modern director. This theatre practitioner had a clear task, that of integrating the ‘world’ of the play with its highly credible, realist presentation and, crucially, the apparently quotidian behaviour of the actor. Modern acting practices called for a new praxis of acting too, most famously introduced by Konstantin Stanislavski of course, a figure also able to shift the role of actor-manager to actor-director, and onwards to pedagogue and theoretician.

For Pavis, it is the director who elaborates the scenographic circumstances of the production, in which the actors are better able to function credibly. In the call for a detailed mise en scène that could house a new, naturalistic acting style, Pavis writes that in André Antoine’s (1858–1943) naturalism (following Émile Zola, 1840–1902), ‘the milieu determines the identity and the movement of the actor, and not vice versa. The materiality of the performance is thus subject to the interpretation of the work by the director’. ⁶ The imperative to make meaning is, here, embodied in actors’ behaviour within a hyper-accurate, detailed stage setting; this particularly recalls Stanislavski’s early productions, the photos of which are startling in their realism , almost denying their theatrical origins . ⁷ But faced with inexperienced actors and working prior to the emergence of his ‘system’ of acting and rehearsal, Stanislavski initially tended to dictate moves , interpretation and even intonation. ⁸

The renewed relationship to the playtext as the root of this photorealist world paradoxically both reinstates it as the primary theatrical material, but also empowers directorial interpretation; the text must be analysed, questioned and digested as both the repository of meaning and the definitive source of the actors’ actions, within the director’s schema. The contemporary iterations of Stanislavski’s ‘system’ foreground how text might be treated through various director’s idiosyncratic methods. In the work of Katie Mitchell especially, the playwright’s words are fundamental, yet rewrought via a definitive process, and shaped too with a firmly scenographic hand.

Shevtsova and Innes trace the emergence of the director forwards through naturalism, the era of Gordon Craig, and Bertolt Brecht’s theatricality and theoretical influence. Amid these new movements, the legacy of Stanislavski develops, on the one hand, with the Russian ‘school’ of Lev Dodin and Vasiliev and, on the other, through the lineage of Jerzy Grotowski , Barba and the new companies of Eastern Europe. This is not just a pedagogical tradition, but forward-moving lineages of praxis that combine training, theatre-making and the sociocultural aspect of what it is to be an actor in the ‘group’ tradition. In response to the modern concern with the actor’s training and performance process, Helen Krich Chinoy sees the director’s role shift to that of ‘the producer-instructor, who located the heart of theater [sic] in the actor ’. ⁹ As will be seen, one contemporary director who continues to fit this definition is Declan Donnellan.

To these strands above, I would add two more artistic forces that the director may embody: the director of electronic and digitised technologies, which shape contemporary scenographies, and the contemporary theatre-maker not harnessed to the dramatic text. For Hans-Thies Lehmann, the apparently ‘postdramatic’ tendencies of contemporary performance still suggest a politics and aes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Director
• 2. The Director and Stanislavski
• 3. The Director and the Actor
• 4. ‘In the Room’: The Director and Rehearsal
• 5. ‘Making Something from Within’: The Director and Devising
• 6. Design and the Director
• 7. Conclusion(s): The Director and Choice
• Back Matter