{"id":216,"date":"2019-05-04T13:49:25","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T13:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/?p=216"},"modified":"2022-02-06T19:44:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T19:44:07","slug":"directions-for-directing-theatre-and-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/directions-for-directing-theatre-and-method\/","title":{"rendered":"Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Avra Sidiropoulou<\/strong>
204 pp.  Routledge<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Amy S. Green<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Directing\na play is no small feat. A director will choose, inherit or devise the script;\nresearch the context, content, style and themes; conceptualize the translation\nto the stage; communicate that initial concept to the playwright(s), designers,\nproducers and actors; and inspire and collaborate closely with the artistic\nteam to bring the evolving production to fruition. The director must lead and\nlisten, teach and learn, and cheerlead and critique with courage, tact and\nlove. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No\nwonder aspiring and even accomplished directors seek guidance, mentorship and\nsupport at every stage of the staging. The directing shelf is already rich in classic\nvolumes like Stanislavski Directs, <\/em>Peter\nBrook\u2019s The Empty Space<\/em>, Jerzy\nGrotowski\u2019s Towards a Poor Theatre<\/em>\nand Anne Bogart\u2019s A Director Prepares<\/em>,\nas well as directors\u2019 memoirs, anthologies (for example, In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre<\/em>, Delgado and\nHeritage, 1996), scholarly monographs and directing textbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Directions for Directing: Theatre and\nMethod<\/em> is Avra\nSidiropoulou\u2019s contribution to the catalogue. It begins, pragmatically, with\nthe premise that directing is \u201can aspect of theatre that relies on a series of practical\nskills and strategies that can be taught\u201d (2). She takes a comprehensive\napproach and breaks down the director\u2019s task into six chapters: Inspiration;\nInterpretation; Method, Leadership and Collaboration; and working with\nText(uality), the Stage and the Actor. It is a wide lens, and the author packs\nin a trove of information gleaned from published, archival and primary sources,\nincluding interviews with directors based in New York, Athens and Japan. Her\npoints of reference span the history of Western theatre, from Aristotle to Kerkhoven,\nfrom Oedipus Rex<\/em> to Death of a Salesman<\/em>, from Tadashi Suzuki\nto Thomas Ostermeier, and beyond. There are also practical exercises and a web\ncompanion (to which, unfortunately, I did not have access).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sidiropoulou bares her ambitions in the Introduction: the book is \u201cnot just for the director (young, amateur, or experienced), but also very much to the broader community of actors, dramaturgs, set, costume, lighting, video, and sound designers, and choreographers; in fact, to anyone directly or indirectly involved in the theatre\u201d (2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s\na lot of folks, with a lot of divergent backgrounds, knowledge bases, needs and\ninterests; the author tries to meet everyone where they are with an\nencyclopedic database of the history, theory and practice of directing as the\ncentral engine of the theatre-making process. It reads like an MFA thesis but\nat 201 pages, that is both its virtue and its flaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nsheer quantity of information about theatre here is impressive.  The minimally theatre-literate reader will be\nintroduced not only to the scope of the director\u2019s craft and the names and\nideas of some of its major practitioners, but also to those of allied theatre artists.\nThere\u2019s a section on the history of acting and actor training, and there are others\non playwriting and each of the design fields. A student or novice director will\nappreciate the survey of directorial challenges and responsibilities as well as\nthe practical exercises that punctuate each chapter and transpose theoretical\nnotions into concrete actions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the working director, there are insights gleaned from the perspectives and working processes of such luminaries as Vsevelod Myerhold, Arianne Mnouchkine (Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Soleil), John Collins (Elevator Repair Service), Peter Sellars and Declan Donovan (Cheek by Jowl), some of whom Sidiropoulou interviewed for the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ncomprehensive approach raises interesting questions about directing in the twenty-first\ncentury. For example, is directing a single project when applied to such\ndiverse genres, settings and media as devising a play with an ensemble,\nbuilding a work of \u201cphysical . . . site-specific and immersive theatre\u201d (34), assembling\na virtual performance with \u201ccyborg, android and robot\u201d characters (34), and\nputting on a Shakespeare play? Each would seem to require significantly\ndifferent skills and training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or,\nwhat are best practices in eliciting or portraying emotions on stage? The\nauthor reminds us that Stanislavski called for emotional memory, but, today,\nthe actor should focus on physical activity (169).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\nall these merits, I would love to say that as a teacher, scholar and working\ndirector, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. But that\u2019s not true. In trying to be\nall things to all readers, the volume takes on a rather confused identity. In\nsome areas, it is overly intellectualized; in others, too basic. So, is it a\ntextbook or a monograph? A handbook or a critical history? I\u2019m still not sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nstruggled to figure out who would find themselves welcome in its pages and\nfound myself trying on different reader perspectives. I probably couldn\u2019t\nassign it to my undergraduate students for fear that they would be frustrated\nand confused by the jargon-filled language. Could I really expect them to make\nsense of \u201cexigently teleological\u201d (94), \u201cdiegetic (stage directions)\u201d (100), or\n\u201cpolysemus lines of narrative\u201d (141)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graduate\nstudents might be more comfortable with the terminology and, perhaps, not be put\noff by \u201cpictorial and multimodal metaphors\u201d (45) or the assertion that\n\u201ccharacterization has taken a turn for the abstract, leading us to\nnon-human\/a-human\/post-human dramaturgies, in which the materiality of the\nperformer\u2019s body is no longer relevant\u201d (100), but left unsatisfied by the\nwhirlwind survey of everything directing instead of a deeper dive into each\nsubtopic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\na scholar-practitioner, I experienced those disappointments as well as\nimpatience at having to wade through the primer on the history of actor\ntraining (166-67), the recap of The\nPoetics <\/em>(92-94), the ABCs of blocking (139-40), and instructions for\nbreaking down scenes into actions, units and beats (96-98). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No doubt Sidiropoulou genuinely set out to inform and inspire, yet, despite (or because of) her reverence for the complexities of the art form, her extensive research and dense narrative ultimately make the book daunting and a bit of a chore. I don’t know that I’d have had the courage to stage my first play if this had been my introduction. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\"\"\n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Amy S. Green<\/strong> <\/em>is an Associate Professor\u00a0of Applied Theatre and Interdisciplinary Studies\u00a0at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York School of Professional Studies. She is Associate Artistic Director of\u00a0Nora’s Playhouse in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2019 Amy S. Green
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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