Reflective Practitioner: Director…Are you sure?

It seems odd to have a director in this type of performance making process, considering all of the aspects about devising that I was considering the other day; so why have a director and what is their role in this type of process?

The director is usually the first collaborator to encounter and approach the dramatic text with the intention of realising it into a performative entity. They are the first and most powerful ally of the playwright and the dramatic text, in many ways their role and function is similar to that of the playwright, so is their lack of presence in the actual live event of performance. The director, although, ‘largely a twentieth century phenomenon’[1], has been a figure and an ally to the playwright from when, ‘Aeschylus supervised the presentation of his tragedies at the Athenian Festivals of the fifth century BC’[2], to Gemma Bodinetz directing, Kia Corthrons’s, Breath, Boom[3] at the Royal Court in 2000. The director has a colourful and interesting history; however, the role and function of the director in relation to the dramatic text has mostly been ‘the co-ordination of expressive means based on interpretation of the play-text.’[4] Regardless of the various devices and strategies employed by the director in their realisation and interpretation of the play-text, a fidelity and commitment to its function remain central to their (the directors) artistic interventions.

The director’s intentions will indeed inflect any dramatic text that they undertake and a truthful or correct mounting of a dramatic text, with regards to the playwright’s original intentions is, I would suggest impossible; however, it is not the commitment and fidelity to reproduce a correct playing of the text that I refer to. More so I am asserting that the director’s fidelity is to communicating the presentational truth via illusion and representation; it is in this way that the director is faithful to the playwright and the dramatic text in turn. The various creative decisions that director makes in realising the dramatic text from page to stage are all underpinned by a need and desire to communicate the truth of the text, the meaning or message buried beneath the surface story. The director is responsible for how life will be given to the text to make it a performative entity rather than a literary one. It is the role and function of the director to decide the activity of the actors and designate how they will strive ‘tirelessly to suspend and subvert our knowledge’[5] of their presence in a visceral sense; the director will instruct or suggest ways in which the illusion will be manifest for the audience. As with the playwright, the director does not have an actual physical presence on the stage, their absence is essential in the building of the illusion but the directors presence is felt in the same way that the playwrights presence is: ghostly and spectral. Their presence is felt in the presentational truth that haunts the performance and we are aware as audience, to some extent the director’s part in the construction of the representation.[6]

I see my role as the director in this project as that of facilitator, producer and co-ordinator rather than as author and interpreter. Although we will indeed be working with text, I will not be looking to use them in the way that I have suggested is often the case above. I will be using the texts as spaces for exploration, as found objects (as I suggested yesterday in my blog entry). It is my responsibility to create the situation in which the exploration and devising process can take place. I have undertaken devising in both small and large groups and there is always the issue of editing and final decisions; there needs to be an overriding schema for the project and this needs to be marshalled by someone, in this case that is the director. I also have the added concern of keeping on task for my research aims, as well as my creative aims and this also needs to be coordinated and kept on track. There needs to a person who takes ultimate responsibility for the project and for this project it will be me; mainly because I am the person who will be initiating the project and so it should fall to me to keep that impetus going and in check. There also needs to be a responsibility for house keeping issues, as well as creative issues; space has to be booked, preparation for sessions has to be done and this will fall to me.

The figure of the director though, is not uncommon to devising most of the professional and successful devising groups have one: see Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, PunchDrunk and Welfare State International, to name but a few.
[1]Mario M. Delgado & Paul Heritage (Eds). In Contact With The Gods?: Directors Talk Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pg viiii
[2] Edward Braun. The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen Drama, 1982. Pg 7
[3] Kia Corthron, Breath, Boom, London: Methuen, 2002
[4] Edward Braun. The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen Drama, 1982. Pg 8
[5] John Freeman. ‘Performatised Secrets, Performatised Selves’ in Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 14(4), 2004. Pg 54
[6] This awareness is evident in the strength of the director commercially and their ability to pull in audiences to see their. Some people will say that they have ‘seen’ Wilson’s Woyzeck or Lepage’s A Mid Summer Nights Dream, they did not indeed write these texts but their part in the mounting of such texts are to some extent visible and carry weight with the audience.