On Directing: Interviews with Directors - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312224834 ISBN 13: 9780312224837

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

The profession of directing is barely a century old. On Directing considers the position of the director in theater and performance today. What is a director? How do they begin work on a play or performance? What methods are used in rehearsal? Is the direct

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Edited by Gabriella Giannachi and Mary Luckhurst; Foreword by Peter Brook

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On Directing

Interviews with Directors

By Gabriella Giannachi, Mark Luckhurst

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1999 Gabriella Giannachi and Mary Luckhurst
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-22483-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by Peter Brook, 
Introduction, 
Pete Brooks, 
Annie Castledine, 
Peter Cheeseman, 
Declan Donnellan, 
Tim Etchells, 
John Fox, 
David Glass, 
Garry Hynes, 
Phyllida Lloyd, 
Ewan Marshall, 
Simon McBurney, 
Clifford McLucas and Mike Pearson, 
Jonathan Miller, 
Katie Mitchell, 
Gerry Mulgrew, 
Lloyd Newson, 
Julia Pascal, 
Ian Spink, 
Jatinder Verma, 
Deborah Warner, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Pete Brooks

Pete Brooks, who was born in Northern Ireland, is a writer and director. He studied English at Leeds University; after spending a year in France, he wrote an MA dissertation on Doris Lessing and the French existentialist novel at Leeds University. In the same year (1978) he was awarded the Buzz Goodbody Award for directing Barrie Keefe's Abide With Me. In 1979 he co-founded Impact Theatre Co-op. Impact toured nationally and internationally until 1986. From 1986 to 1992 he was a full-time lecturer in Theatre Studies at the universities of Lancaster and Manchester. During that time he formed Insomniac Productions and directed a number of highly successful and influential shows, including Utopia (1988), L'Ascensore (1992), Woyzeck (1993), Claire de Luz (1993), Peepshow (Paper Boat Award, Glasgow Mayfest, 1997), Carnivali (1998) and Natura Muerta con Insectos (Santiago de Chile, 1999). In 1993 he abandoned academic teaching and concentrated full-time on creative projects. He now divides his time between Insomniac Productions and freelance work, and is currently developing a number of film projects. He lives in London and spends much of his time in Chile.

What is your starting-point when making theatre?

I begin with an idea or a theme that I want to explore, usually something that I've had in my mind for years. Then there is a secondary starting- point, which is some kind of crystallizing idea, perhaps a narrative, or the idea for a character as performed by a particular actor, or an idea about staging. Still Life with Insects (1991), for example, was a narrative play that contained an idea I wanted to investigate. The situation was that two characters, twins, had been lied to by their father as a philosophical exercise. I'm fascinated by the idea of deliberately misleading an audience; in this piece I was also looking at the difficulties for all of us in negotiating a postmodern reality.

In L'Ascensore (1992), Claire de Luz (1993) and Sangre (1995), which were performance pieces, I was interested in their workings in relation to the gaze of the audience. I was playing with illusion in a filmic sense; I have a theory that as soon as we see an image framed cinematically we immediately think we will be entertained. One of my most insightful experiences lately was a production of Claire de Luz at the Riverside Festival in Stockton-on-Tees. This festival is for street theatre and Claire de Luz is really an art piece, languid and poetic, and I was warned that the audience was not accustomed to seeing work like this. In fact it was a great success and I think this was because of its framing; the way the shape of the frame could change and move. The audience felt as though they were watching a false film; they were used to film as a medium and felt they could understand it. Film is something people of all classes are familiar with and this is not true of theatre, which is still elitist and, I regret to say, a form that isn't necessarily associated with pleasure. I think if the audience had seen the piece on a stage in a theatre building they wouldn't have had the same relationship with it and perhaps wouldn't have enjoyed it.

How do you work in the rehearsal room?

Before I even reach the rehearsal room I have developed a close creative partnership with my designer. There are two designers who I've mainly worked with: Simon Vincenzi and Laura Hopkins. I develop the whole vocabulary of the piece with the designer and think out how the text, music, colours and staging work. I have a very strong sense of the language of a piece before I begin working with the actors.

What happens in the rehearsal room depends on the show. Unlike many other practitioners I don't have a strong methodology because one show is often quite different from another. I made a piece based on Georg Büchner's Woyzeck called A Cursed Place (1993), which was almost hyper-real in its appearance. I spent many hours in the rehearsals working on the characters and their interaction with each other in a conventional way, though the piece itself was not conventional. I am most concerned with the overall concept of a piece. So the lighting designer is just as important as the actors; by that I mean that the actors are simply part of a performance.

I think I probably work far more like a film director than a theatre director. To be honest, if directors cast well they should be able to solve a lot of their problems. If you work with a group of actors who are more or less an ensemble you can give them freedom and then edit what they do. I worked like this with Impact Theatre Company and now with Insomniac Productions.

Sometimes I have an incredibly specific idea of, say, a two minute sequence in a piece; I'll know because of a sense of rhythm akin to music. In other sections I'll think there are a number of alternatives and what matters is that the actors are comfortable with what they are doing. I remember a story someone once told me about Pina Bausch. She allegedly rehearsed a woman relentlessly for three days, saying only: 'Do it again.' The woman's sequence involved a rail of clothes, and at the end of this period the woman broke down, began to scream and shout and hurl all the clothes on the floor. At that point Pina said: 'That's perfect!' It's an apocryphal story and it paints an ambiguous picture of a director.

My background in devising meant that I didn't go into a rehearsal room with a script. I'm changing that now and going in with a more complete script; I'm more interested in writing than I used to be. Improvisation has always been part of the process of making theatre for me. There is also a great deal of discussion, and I'll talk myself out of a corner with the actors. In an ensemble you have to conceive of the show as fully as possible between yourselves; once everyone has understood what is required the piece has to be realized together. The real problem with devised work is that you don't reach the realization of a piece until a very late stage – if ever. There isn't the time for reflection or redrafting. Once everyone has the show in their heads, staging it is not immensely difficult; the problems come when there are holes in the thinking. Ideally I would like the following: a primary stage of imagining the piece through writing; a second stage of imagining the piece with actors; and a third stage of rehearsal and reflection. At present the middle stage is the part where everything happens, and I'm trying to change this by doing more work at the first stage and finding more time at the third stage.

Could you talk about this language of theatre...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312224834
• ISBN 13: 9780312224837
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Herausgeber: Giannachi Gabriella
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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