A theatre director or stage
director is a director/instructor in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a
theatre production (a play, an opera, a musical, or a devised piece of work) by unifying various endeavours
and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and
completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team
into realising their artistic vision for it. The director therefore
collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff, coordinating
research, stagecraft,
costume design,
props,
lighting design,
acting, set design,
stage
combat, and sound
design for the production. If the
production he or she is mounting is a new piece of writing or a (new)
translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or
translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright, the director is generally the primary visionary, making
decisions on the artistic concept and interpretation of the play and its
staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and
responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre
companies. Directors utilize a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and
levels of collaboration.
The
director in theatre history
In ancient
Greece, the birthplace of European drama,
the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors
were generally semi-professionals, and the director oversaw the mounting of
plays from the writing process all the way through to their performance, often
acting in them too, as Aeschylus
for example did. The author-director would also train the chorus, sometimes compose the music, and supervise every aspect of
production. The fact that the director was called didaskalos, the Greek
word for "teacher," indicates that the work of these early directors
combined instructing their performers with staging their work.
In medieval times, the complexity of vernacular religious drama, with
its large scale mystery plays
that often included crowd scenes, processions and elaborate effects, gave the
role of director (or stage manager or pageant master)
considerable importance. A miniature by Jean
Fouquet from 1460 (pictured) bares one of
the earliest depictions of a director at work. Holding a prompt book, the
central figure directs, with the aid of a long stick, the proceedings of the
staging of a dramatization of the Martyrdom of Saint
Apollonia. According to Fouquet, the
director's tasks included overseeing the erecting of a stage and scenery (there
were no permanent, purpose-built theatre structures at this time, and
performances of vernacular drama mostly took place in the open air), casting
and directing the actors (which included fining them for those that infringed
rules), and addressing the audience at the beginning of each performance and
after each intermission.
A portrait of Constantin Stanislavski by Valentin
Serov
The modern theatre director can be
said to have originated in the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger
Company under George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The management of large numbers of extras and complex
stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on the role of overall
coordinator. This gave rise to the role of the director in modern
theatre, and Germany
would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre
directors, such as Erwin Piscator
and Max Reinhardt.
Simultaneously, Constantin Stanislavski, principally an actor-manager, would set up the Moscow Art Theatre
in Russia and similarly emancipate the role of the director as
artistic visionary.
The French regisseur is also
sometimes used to mean a stage director, most commonly in ballet. A more common term for theatre director in French is metteur
en scène.
Post World
War II, the actor-manager slowly started to disappear, and directing become a fully
fledged artistic activity within the theatre profession. The director
originating artistic vision and concept, and realizing the staging of a
production, became the norm rather than the exception. Great forces in the
emancipation of theatre directing as a profession were notable 20th century
theatre directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold,
Yevgeny Vakhtangov,
Michael Chekhov,
Yuri Lyubimov
(Russia), Peter Brook,
Peter Hall (Britain), Bertolt
Brecht (Germany) and Giorgio
Strehler (Italy).
A cautionary note was introduced by
the famed director Sir Tyrone
Guthrie who said "the only way to
learn how to direct a play, is ... to get a group of actors simple enough to
allow you to let you direct them, and direct"
A number of seminal works on
directing and directors include Toby Cole and Helen Krich's 1972 Directors
on Directing: A Sourcebook of the Modern Theatre, Edward Braun's 1982 book The
Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Growtowski and Will's The
Director in a Changing Theatre (1976).
Directing
education
Because of the relatively late
emergence of theatre directing as a performing arts profession when compared
with for instance acting or musicianship, a rise of professional vocational
training programmes in directing can be seen mostly in the second half of the
20th century. Most European countries nowadays know some form of professional
directing training, usually at drama
schools or conservatoires, or at universities. In Britain, the tradition that theatre
directors emerge from degree courses (usually in English literature) at the Oxbridge universities has meant that for a long time, professional
vocational training did not take place at drama schools or performing arts
colleges, although an increase in training programmes for theatre directors can
be witnessed since the 1970s and 1980s. In American universities, the seminal
directing program at the Yale School of Drama produced a number of pioneering directors with D.F.A.
(Doctor of Fine Arts) and M.F.A. degrees in Drama (rather than English) who
contributed to the expansion of professional resident theaters in the 1960s and
1970s. In the early days such programmes typically led to the staging of one
major thesis production in the third (final) year. At the University of
California, Irvine, Keith
Fowler (a Yale D.F.A.) led for many years
a graduate programme based on the premise that directors are autodidacts who
need as many opportunities to direct as possible. Under Fowler, graduate
student directors would stage between five and ten productions during their
three-year residencies, with each production receiving detailed critiques.
As with many other professions in
the performing arts, theatre directors would often learn their skills "on
the job"; to this purpose, theatres often employ trainee assistant
directors or have in-house education schemes to train young theatre directors.
Examples are the Royal National Theatre in London,
which frequently organizes short directing courses, or the Orange Tree Theatre
and the Donmar Warehouse
on London's West End,
which both employ resident assistant directors on a one-year basis for training
purposes.
Styles
of directing
Directing is an artform that has
grown with the development of theatre theory and theatre practice. With the
emergence of new trends in theatre, so too have directors adopted new methodologies
and engaged in new practices.
Once a show has opened (premiered
before a regular audience), theatre directors are generally considered to have
fulfilled their function. From that point forward the stage
manager is left in charge of all essential production areas.
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