A brief thought on directing

I love directing, being the one whose task it is to guide the storytelling of theatre. I love cultivating my vision, which all the time gets better and more refined through the input of my artistic team. But I want to resist the notion that directing is the pinnacle to which we should all strive. In fact, I want to resist the Director-as-God thing that dominates theatre production in our culture. Not that I think that there shouldn't, finally, be one person with the ultimate say in the room. I do, especially when that person is me. (Actually, to be completely honest, I think that even more when it isn't me and I wish it were me; I long for that authority most when I really wish my ideas were landing with (and really know that they are being dismissed by) the person who is in charge). It's just that, when I am the one at the helm of the ship, I really rely my collaborators.

Which is why I am so looking forward to participating in the NET (Network of Ensemble Theatres) Micro-Festival this December, and look forward to making connection with some of these theatres to join them in their collective endeavors. I really want to find new models of creation. Not that the prevailing system is bad or wrong - it can be great (I'm thinking especially of my work with Kamesha Jackson Khan) and it can produce amazing art. And, in my experience, it can also lead to really muddled and/or simple and/or boring work. It depends entirely on the director.

And THIS director wants to really take the risk to explore new ways of working, to see if maybe new forms of theatre might emerge.

Interdisciplinarity

I've been working the past week on a job application letter, and a significant portion of this specific call deals interdisciplinarity. It's a topic that keeps coming up. ATHE, for example, is looking to heighten the stakes of the MD (multidisciplinary) panels, to make them so in form and content, and not solely in name. Flexibility of approach, thought, and communication, and the ability and determination to always look further than one's own comfort zone, so vital to the creation of theatre, finally has gained traction in the academy.

But it's always been there, right?

Certainly my own approach to theatre - both study and creation - involves interdisciplinarity, which to me is one of the key defining features of dramaturgy. And when I think of my practical work, I always consider myself first a dramaturg and second a director. This, of course, follows my exposure to theatre - I was literally, chronologically, FIRST a dramaturg, and only LATER a director. But titles shift and I know this, and I love directing (truly, I love directing as much as I love dramaturgy) and I know this. My view of myself as a dramaturg has to deal with the sensibility with which I approach any theatre piece. That is, in an interdisciplinary manner.

Dramaturgy requires looking for connections across difference - often different research subjects, different methodologies, or, as in my current work with Caltech, entirely different worlds:science/technology/engineering and the arts. (There shouldn't be such a discernible distance between the sciences and the arts, but it is palpable and undeniable). I am struck by how many of our group are drawn to the theatre - really drawn in that you see them sort of crave touching that artistic side of humanity - and yet how quickly they limit that artistry by making it something small and quantifiable, and also denigrate it by deeming it something inessential and unserious. It is my task to really try to connect with this audience and stress to them the absolute necessity and vitality of art. And this requires all the interdisciplinary muscle flexing I can muster, because I need to basically show them that their mode of thinking, with the different processes and values that entails, is as necessary as is ours as artists. And that our work, our research, our creation, is as needed as the next scientific or technological advancement that they create.

Empty Space, pt. I

It's the end of September, and despite the blazing heat here in Los Angeles, the cycles of the academic year are kicking in and it is starting to feel like fall. After a rejuvenating eight days at Director's Lab West, I find myself refreshed and ready to dive into production work at Caltech, writing at home, and, of course, the job hunt across the nation.

Working on Big Love marks a new experience for me: this is the first show that I am repeating. I directed it several years ago at De LaSalle High School in Minneapolis (a production I still adore), and I am now dramaturging it at Caltech in Pasadena. This isn't my production, it's being performed with an entirely different set of actors in an entirely different context, and yet I was concerned that I might simply attempt to recreate what I had already done, and in that attempt, create something deadly.

Last night at auditions, reading as one of the sisters on stage (we are short of women right now), I looked out across the bare stage at the unpopulated auditorium and was struck by just how empty Brook's Empty Space is. The stage seemed immense and without structure. Which is always how it is, I realized, when we start on these creative journeys.

With my DLS ensemble, we had together constructed an edifice, an architecture in which our story was told. That building is gone (as it should be, since it was of that moment), and now a new one must be raised. Those collective handholds are gone, and maybe it is because they once existed so tangibly for me, and now do not, that I was able to notice their absence.

But this is always how it is: an empty, somewhat terrifying space that we come together to fill. We build so much through our doing theatre.