DC Theatre Chapter 6 PowerPoint
Chapter 6
T H E D I R E C T O R
Directing
Directing is an art whose product is the most ambiguous, perhaps the most mysterious, in the theatre.
The person who organizes the production.
The director inspires creation of theatre with each production.
A Historical Overview
Playwrights from the time of Aeschylus have been known to direct their own plays.
The idea of an independent director did not exist until the 19 th century.
Teacher- Directors
Didaskalos- the Greeks called teacher
A teacher had already mastered his art and they then were required to teach.
Reached its pinnacle in the late Enlightenment and
Victorian eras.
Directors of Realism
Began during the end of the 19 th century
Wanted to make their plays more lifelike than those of past eras.
Duke of Saxe-Meiningen was the first “modern” director.
Dazzled the German public with carefully harmonized acting, staging and scenery.
Historically correct designs
Created a true acting ensemble.
Directors of Realism
Andre Antoine- Paris- Theatre Libre
Stanislavsky- Moscow Art Theater
They both developed innovative staging techniques in acting and actor coaching based on the duke’s staging.
Sought to make the theatre a powerful social and artistic instrument for the expression of truth.
Directors become part analyst, part therapist, and even part mystic.
Directors of Antirealism
Aimed primarily at the creation of originality, theatricality and style, and be unrestrained by rigid formulas with respect to realistic theater.
The goal was to create sheer theatrical brilliance, beauty and excitement.
Paul Fort- Theatre d’Art in Paris
Vsevolod Meyerhold- biomechanical constructivisman acting method characterized by bold gestures and rapid, near acrobatic movement
The Directing Process
The director may spend a year or more preparing and staging a production and then more years restaging it in different theaters.
Preparation period
Implementation period
Preparation Period
The play is selected
The text may be translated or adapted
A producer is found the director begins to conceptualize the play’s production.
Preparation Period
A director guides the production
Dramaturgically- the story we want to tell
Intellectually- why we want to tell it
Aesthetically- how we want it to look, sound and feel
A director assembles a team of designers, technicians and actors.
Producer
Finances the production
Producers can be invited to help stage a play
Producers can hire the director
Can be part of a producing entity (groups, corporations or partnerships)
Producers in Academia
Primary goal is to safeguard the ling term interests of the institution that hosts the production
Producer
Hire (and fire) the director
Provides financial resources
Creating and managing the budget
Choosing and acquiring the theater facility
Establish the play’s rehearsal and performance dates
Handle legal and business aspects of the production.
Choosing the Play
This may come from the director or producer
Considerations:
Eagerness to mount the production
Confidence that it can be successfully cast, conceptualized, budgeted and staged
Belief that the production will engender genuine enthusiasm among the artistic team, cast and audience.
Adapting the Play
The most common adaptation is “cutting” or deleting lines to compress the play’s action and limit its duration.
American copyright law currently covers an author’s work until 70 years after his or her death
Adapting the Play
Adaptation may change the fundamental aspects of a play’s dramaturgy (history, context or theme)
Adapted productions are meant to be controversial
Core Concept
The director’s determination of the most important of the many images, ideas, and emotions that should emerge from the play.
A director that tried to give equal weight to all of a play’s themes would create a “mess”- a production that is unfocused and “all over the place.”
Core Concept
The highest priority image, idea, style or emotion becomes the play’s core organizing principal
It is what the play is “about” or what it “means”
It ensures that the play signifies something.
High Concept
Introducing highly unexpected insights into character, story or style
May mean nothing more than moving a play out of the period in which it is set and placing it in another.
Modern audiences have come to expect high concepts
High Concept
Aim for unique and revelatory rethinking of major works
Transcending their plays’ original conventions and presenting profound, moving, new and uniquely illuminating theatricalizations that make telling references to current issues.
High Concept
Must work for the entire play
Heavy duty research and comprehensive thinking through the entire script
Dramaturg
Literary advisor or research assistant or both
A specialist in dramatic analysis who serves as a bridge between the director and the playwright
Help the director with research, conceptualizing, and understanding the play’s structure, meanings and historical context.
Implementation Period
Selecting the designers.
Casting the actors.
Casting the Actors
“casting is 90% of directing”
Casting directors
Auditions
Callbacks
Rehearsals
The play will be read aloud, memorized, staged, and rehearsed- often in rooms with makeshift “rehearsal furniture” and the walls taped on the floor.
Director should maintain both leadership and creative inspiration.
Staging
Goals of staging
Create focus
Lend credibility to the characters
Generate interest
Impart an aesthetic
Provoke suspense
Stimulate a fulfilling theatricality
Blocking
The timing and placement of a character’s entrances, exits, rises, crosses, embraces and other major movement
This is the framework of all staging
Pre-Blocking- preplanning the movements on paper
Some blocking may be specialized and then a director may wish to bring in a choreographer or other specialist.
Business- small scale movements that a character performs within the larger pattern of blocking.
Actor Coaching
The director is the actor’s coach and leads the various activities- discussions, improvisations, games, exercises, lectures, research, blocking, polishing
Must provide an atmosphere where the actor can feel free to liberate their powers of sensitivity and creativity.
Good directors lead their casts; great directors inspire them.
Pacing
“well paced” “well directed”
“slow” or “dragging”
It is not just the rate at which the lines are said
Created on the basis of a complex and composite time structure that incorporates many variables: credibility, suspense, mood, style and the natural rhythms of life such as heartbeat, respiration, sob, laugh
Pacing
Faster tempos tend to excite, bedazzle and sharpen audience attention
Slower tempos allow the audience to consider and to augment the play’s actions and ideas with their own reflections.
Coordinating
In the final rehearsals the director’s responsibility become more of one of bringing together the concept and design, the acting and the staging, the pace and the performance.
May have to modify or eliminate those parts of the production that aren’t communicating to the audience effectively.
Technical rehearsals
Dress rehearsals
Presenting
No one is more useless on opening night than the director.
Director Training
Most directors have brought to their art a comprehensive knowledge of the theatre in its various aspects.
Entering the profession today are directors who have been trained in a dramatic graduate program or conservatory and often have supplemental training with an apprenticeship at a theater.
