{"id":90,"date":"2020-09-23T18:16:06","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T18:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/?p=90"},"modified":"2026-06-22T10:16:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T10:16:52","slug":"rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director\u2019s Revised Role"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Avra Sidiropoulou<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The conversation about the director\u2019s changing identity, as our century gallops towards or stumbles through challenges that few could have anticipated even a few years\u2014let alone months\u2014ago is becoming all the more complex. Today, directing practice has crossed many disciplines, methodologies and ecologies of theatre-making. My article sets out to explore some emergent dynamics that reflect the director\u2019s role within the current performance landscape; a landscape in which directorial jurisdictions are no longer contained within the realm of pre-scripted dramatic plays and one which engages with unconventional performance environments framed by the proliferation of intermedial forms, intercultural collaborations and a variety of human and nonhuman (im)materialities<\/a>. In so doing, I will set out to locate the shift from perceiving the director commonly as the production\u2019s single uncontested authority to an agent of symbiotic meaning making.
Keywords: <\/strong>director, spectating, collectivity, textuality, performativity, presentness, Castellucci, Rau, Rimini Protokoll, Ruping<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u03a4oday, the concept of interpretation has acquired a much more accommodating meaning, as spectators have become quite accustomed to alternative, \u201cporous\u201d dramaturgies, namely art forms that allow \u201cfor new information, theories, and discoveries in science and technology to enter the domain of dramaticity\u201d (Sidiropoulou, Directions<\/em> 117). The \u201crebalancing of the text and performance hierarchy\u201d (Radosavljevi\u0107 150) has resulted in theatre textuality becoming multifarious and multi-authored, both unsettled and unsettling. \u201cNew\u201d dramaturgies\u2014categorically hyphenized or conflated and based on equally elusive textualities\u2014are  subject and vulnerable to the intrusion of the authentic experience, the est<\/a>ablishment of different normativities<\/a>, emergent or updated artistic and critical habitats. As such, they often operate as a bridge that connects writing with the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many artists in Europe and the West have been ready to position themselves with admirable flexibility to such an elaborate continuum of modes of creativity and reception, aiming for encounters and interactions, a kind of \u201cconciliatory\u201d theatre-making mode that Peter Boenisch calls \u201crelational dramaturgy\u201d (qtd.  in Trencs\u00e9nyi and Cochrane 232). Instead of settling\/locking interpretation firmly on a be-all-and-end-all idea, the director releases its constituent parts, individual threads of creativity, which, in interweaving freely with each other and with the audience, contribute both to the signification and the presentness<\/em> of performance. Interpretation\u2014which is always performative and never static\u2014is more than ever before centrifugal<\/em> rather than centripetal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Complex Textualities<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

If dramaturgy is about the process of collaboratively generating theatre texts, theatre textuality points to narrative composition and, in its more updated usage, the material presence of a story-telling component on stage. As such, it can refer to the playscript, but also to the actor\u2019s body, scenography, visual and digital forms\u2014as separate entities of interpretative focus or as an integrated whole where meaning is produced dialogically. Essentially, these combinatory textualities encourage the director to consider horizontal, non-hierarchical modes of analysis and synthesis. The director becomes a collector, a compiler and a connector, who juxtaposes\/contrasts\/mixes the different textualities in order for the uber-text<\/em> (a combination of the aesthetic idea, the essential story and the performed\/physical and perceptual\/affective experience) to emerge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Framing, the exegetic manipulation of verbal, visual-somatic, digital and aural configurations and elements of staging, therefore, becomes a rudiment of theatre composition. In fact, arranging these elements in non-serial fashion provides narratives that can work autonomously and not merely alongside the dialogue. Set and digital design notably inscribe their own narrative onto the performance from the outset of the creative process. One may for example refer to the productions of Romeo Castellucci, in which scenography is integral to the dramaturgy of the work. In On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(2011),<\/em> a piece about the vulnerability of aging in a Godless time, excremental icons are used to make a pessimistic statement about the lack or loss of Christian faith. An originally immaculate white space is gradually being soiled as a result of an old man\u2019s incontinence, while an early Renaissance portrait of Jesus looms over the excruciating repetition of the routine of the son changing his father\u2019s diapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Considering theatre a product of a literary mind and a collaboration of stage processes, one may regard theatre textuality as an operation that unites the discursive and the symbolic with the material and the embodied. And just as any dramatic text is in some form or other encrypted, so is non-dramatic textuality. When one analyzes a play, one ultimately decodes its performativity, unleashing connections between the abstract world of language on a page and its concrete realization onstage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a broader understanding of textuality, this two-way process (the dialogue between the dramatic play and its performance) is expanded ad infinitum<\/em>, given the wide array of compositional textualities. At the same time, decoding performativity is no longer a matter of entering the kernel of a singular meaning and prioritizing it in performance; rather, it calls for a way of determining how each of the individual languages\/textualities can connect. Deciding on the degree of connectivity and the nature of such connection is the director\u2019s responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, it is worth rethinking the function of preparatory \u201canalysis\u201d when the verbal text takes \u201csecond stage. Acknowledging this \u201cnew way of directing\u201d (which in fact is not really so \u201cnew\u201d as an artistic reality, but has received more thorough typological analysis in the recent years) as a practice of synchronously, rather than consequentially, selecting and composing different pivots of signification, we can potentially accept the methodological mechanisms of analysis and synthesis in rehearsal as essentially concurrent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director\u2019s Authority and Collaborative Connectivity<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Marianne Van Kerkhoven\u2019s stipulation, already back in 1994, that \u201cthe \u2018single\u2019 individual no longer has the structural means available to master reality\u2019s complexity\u201d (20) precociously suggests that not one single expert or authority could ever be enough in a theatre based on different disciplines, aesthetic departures and methodological trajectories. This understanding invites collaboration and openings, defies the notion of borders and calls for new coalitions. Essentially, theatre\u2019s collaborative extraversion necessitates the establishment of new authorial roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That being said, the director is, on the one hand, emancipated but, on the other, burdened with the overload of choice. Polyvalence and multiplicity require swift adjustments to the interpenetration of forms and bold crossing of aesthetic, structural and perceptual boundaries. Indeed, increasingly people from different fields enter the directing practice, which is de facto<\/em> interdisciplinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These scientists cum <\/em>writers cum <\/em>dancers cum<\/em> digital engineers-directors pit their expertise and research against experience and training. Their director identity is validated by the general acceptance of the fluidity of practices recently attaching themselves to the theatre. If digital interfaces can claim their function as theatre textuality, then, equally, the IT expert can also claim directorial role. Inevitably, the hybrid identities of the new director also signal the emergence of \u201cexpertise\u201d over talent, of craft over art.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
The Possible<\/em>\/Impossible House<\/em>. Conceived and devised by Forced Entertainment in collaboration with Vlatka Horvat. Directed by Tim Etchells. 2015. Barbican, London, UK. Photo: Tim Etchells<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The \u201ccrisis\u201d of the traditional \u201ctwentieth century role\u201d of the director in this domain of non-stratified theatre-making is clearly tied to the question whether, ultimately, in the open, highly egalitarian modes of creativity we are discussing we still need the director to \u201ctell us what to do.\u201d If so, what would the director\u2019s presence contribute to this landscape of textual indeterminacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In principle, directors lead by mobilizing an intricate, competitive and visceral exchange, where, ideally, the meaning (the essential \u201cwhy\u201d) of the work remains fluid, determined by individual criteria of cognition and value. Granted, the democratization of meaning (which goes as far back as post-structuralist notions of the \u201copen\u201d text)[1]<\/sup><\/a> establishes a non-hegemonic acknowledgment of authoring involvement: playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers and spectators are all similarly entitled to the performance\u2019s meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the valorization of ensemble practice and devised forms<\/a> over the empire of the director-auteur<\/em>, some have hinted at the director\u2019s weakened role in the theatre. However, although the network of individual readings and creative contributions is quite complex, directors hold strong, refusing to let go of the master key of interpretation. In the context of collaborative engagement, the individual insights of every group member will be adjusted, in varying degrees of compliance, to the director\u2019s overall vision. And unless the formal operational principle of the company is strictly defined as that of a collective, during the delicate stages of conceptualization, ordinarily the director is expected to provide the preliminary structure on which everyone can start building. He or she functions as a catalyst, who makes the interpretation happen, a guarantor and a facilitator of connectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the principles of collaborative theatre-making permeate the preparation stages\u2014which include collection of existing or production of new material, dramaturgical research, analysis of significant textual, imagistic and performative patterns and so forth\u2014the director still decides on how the gathered materials are to connect. Again, notwithstanding the palimpsest nature of any act of interpretation, the interest now lies not so much in layering these formal elements according to an evaluatory system of what comes first and what last, but in setting the rules of these layers\u2019 collegial co-existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this elaborate circuit of synergies, textuality becomes a manifestation of the \u201cGreat Idea\u201d (for luck of a better term) behind dramaturgical analysis and staging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, although companies that build performances collectively exploit more communal work principles, in many groups that still claim to function as ensembles, decisions will eventually gravitate toward one person assuming responsibility for the production\u2019s comprehensive form. In those cases, the artist-leader or artistic director is loosely \u201cenlisted\u201d to determine its signature style. Once again, directors carry upon them a fraction of the distinct properties of their collaborators, whom they represent. They are, in other words, the representatives of the ensemble, their authority endorsed in selecting and editing the team\u2019s individual chapters in the collective work of performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n