Directing scenes and senses

The thinking of Regie

Peter Boenisch

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784991739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As European theatre directors become a familiar presence on international stages and a new generation of theatre makers absorbs their impulses, this study develops fresh perspectives on Regie, the Continental European tradition of staging playtexts.

Part I

Mise en scène to mise en sens

Towards an aesthetic politics of Regie

1

Regie beyond representation: directing the ‘sensible’

Writing in the 1920s, Adolf Winds, an early historiographer of the art of Regie, was puzzled by the absence of discussions of directing from the most influential theatre writings of the eighteenth century, such as Diderot’s essays on theatre or, most importantly, Lessing’s seminal Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Winds 1925, 60). Still, the German theatre scholar set out to offer his readers a history of Regie that began with classical Greek theatre, at the very cradle of European theatre history. After all, Aristotle did mention opsis, the scenic presentation, in his Poetics. Yet, Winds’s account, which follows the development of Regie throughout antiquity, medieval pageants, the baroque theatre of the courts and the Jesuits, right into the early twentieth century, does not sit quite right with today’s reader. His narrative understands theatre directing in the broadest sense: as practice of arranging and managing the business of the stage. These are certainly efforts involved by necessity when- and wherever someone puts something on stage. Winds’s broad brush strokes, however, make today’s reader even more aware of the caesura that effectively separates Regie, personified by the emergent figure of the allegedly authorial and authoritarian theatre director, from other, earlier forms of ‘staging theatre’. There is a moment prior to which the idea of ‘directing’ a play could simply not be thought. Winds himself was aware of this qualitative leap. He describes the progression from an external Regie, which focuses on the ‘expressive design of the scenic environment’ (9), towards ‘interior Regie, implemented in the modern way’, which aimed at ‘saturating the word with spirit’ (39).¹ Accounts of the history of theatre directing, by Winds and others, suggest that, at some point, the emergence of a specialised profession and of a specific process that follows its own logic and categories had become a necessity, whereas before, no such need had emerged, not within the collectively organised modes of theatre creation in English Elizabethan playhouses, let alone at the Dionysian festivals of old Athens. If Regie were a catch-all phrase which signified any artistic method for arranging stage practice, if its idea were exhausted by any organisation of theatrical means, there would have been no need to invent it.

Most histories of theatre directing mark this inaugural moment of mise en scène proper with the new naturalist theatre aesthetics of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, founded in Paris in 1887, and its subsequent widespread followers, from Otto Brahm in Berlin to Konstantin Stanislavsky in Moscow.² Their naturalism (and likewise its obverse twin, symbolism) was in varying ways pitched against the predominant stage conventions of the time. It exploited, either in the name of truthfulness or of a ‘true art of the theatre’, the newly available technologies such as electric lighting, while also reflecting the new urban, cosmopolitan cultural situation, and the new conventions and expectations of ‘bourgeois perception’ that were triggered by the new medium of photography and, very soon, the moving images of film (see also Lowe 1982; Crary 2001). The accounts that follow this standard narrative about the emergence of directing are usually prefaced with nods to the internationally touring German Meininger troupe of the 1870s as influential pioneers, while not forgetting Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk idea either, including his Bayreuth innovation of the darkened auditorium. From this perspective, the advent of Regie heralds the modernist ‘retheatricalisation’ of theatre, as Georg Fuchs phrased it in his 1909 manifesto for the Munich Künstlertheater (Fuchs [1909] 1959). Or, following the influential take on modernism proposed by art critic Clement Greenberg, it could be seen as realising ultimate ‘medial specificity’ in the field of theatre (see Greenberg [1961] 1992 and Carroll 1996). Patrice Pavis also supports the association of mise en scène with an ‘epistemological break around 1880’, after which the notion ‘took on its modern meaning, still signifying the passage from the text to the stage … but increasingly doing so while enjoying the status of an autonomous art’ (Pavis 2013, 4):

We should reserve the term mise en scène and especially that of director (metteur en scène) for stage practices from the 1880s onwards, since the era of directors did not start before Zola and Antoine’s radical critique of theatre or before the counterpoint provided by symbolism (at least in the context of France).

(Pavis 2013, 3)

Or did it? While I am certainly mindful of Pavis’s explicit qualification entre parenthèses and also of the fact that my principal endeavour in this study is not a historiographic, but an aesthetic account of the idea of Regie and its cultural history, I propose to shift the usual perspective. What if what has become the default starting point, associated with the ground-breaking rupture of Pavis’s ‘epistemological break around 1880’, was, in fact, the answer to aesthetic issues and problems that had already preoccupied several generations of artists throughout the nineteenth century, and far beyond the realms of theatre? What if Regie was far more than theatre’s reaction to new media technologies, and to new modes of economic production as well as new approaches to the understanding of human behaviour from Darwinism to psychology and sociology? What if, instead, it was part and parcel of the same style of thinking that had propelled these significant developments in the first place – including Continental philosophy and above all Hegel’s paradigm-shifting speculative approach? And what could such a wider perspective on the history of the idea of Regie offer to our understanding of contemporary practices, and to comprehending the true potential of theatre direction today, as theatre and all arts across the Western hemisphere face the onslaught of their neoliberal marketisation and effective absorption, alongside other forms of human creativity and so-called ‘immaterial labour’, by communicative capitalism (Dean 2009)?

My wager here is, then, that current understandings of mise en scène, of the ‘rise of the director’ and of Regietheater throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be productively connected to a wider cultural shift. Regie emerged out of the very ‘time of birth and of transition to a new era’, which Hegel alluded to in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit. He describes it as a new era in which ‘the Spirit broke with the previous order of existence and of imagination’, which, arriving with the sudden force of a ‘flash, in a single stroke erected the outline of the new world’ (Hegel 1986a, 18, 19). I will here employ Jacques Rancière’s term for this emergent socio-cultural configuration already referred to in the Introduction, above: the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ (see Rancière 2013). Emphasising the transition from the previous ‘representative regime’ to this emerging ‘aesthetic regime’ of art in the nineteenth century, Rancière challenges narratives that foreground the modernist break around 1900. For him, the latter was no more than the fine tuning of the new aesthetic dispositif.³ I suggest that the advent of the director and, even more so, of Regie as a principally new technique of artistic mediation are also quintessential manifestations of this paradigm we can call the aesthetic regime.

Rancière connects this fundamental socio-cultural change to fundamental modifications within what he terms the ‘partition of the sensible’.⁴ Not unlike the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ of Rancière’s teacher Louis Althusser, and similar to his contemporary Michel Foucault’s notion of the disciplining function of ‘discourse’, the ‘partition of the sensible’ marks a socio-cultural horizon that defines the modes, conventions and limits of what is sayable, thinkable, visible and perceivable within a given society and culture. More clearly than Althusser, Foucault and others, Rancière outlines a perspective where apprehension itself, our perception and cognition, our very senses and experiences (all, of course, fundamental aspects of theatre) are seen as always already political, even before the traditional sites of ideology – discourse, the symbolic order, the networks of medial representation – come into play. A ‘partition’ of the sensible is the prerequisite for meaningfully accessing and participating, or, in another key Rancièrian term, for ‘par(t)-taking’ in culture, politics and society. It establishes, in the literal sense, ‘the common’ of a community: its norms and systems of allocating (and reallocating) places and identities through the ‘apportioning and reapportioning of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, and of noise and speech’ (Rancière 2009a, 24).

Rancière uses the term ‘sensible’, which in French signifies much more than the English word suggests, where sensible, essentially, means rational and making sense. Rancière extends the spectrum of meaning of ‘sensible’ to what makes sense and what is sense, what is perceived by our senses. This ambiguity inherent in the word ‘sense’ had already fascinated Hegel:

‘Sense’ … is this wonderful word, which itself is used with two contrary meanings. On the one hand it refers to the organs of immediate apprehension, on the other hand however we call sense the meaning, the thought, the universal of a matter. And thus the sense refers on the one hand to the immediate exteriority of existence, on the other hand to its very interior essence. A sensible reflection [sic! Hegel did have a sense of humour … PMB] of course will not separate the two sides, but in any one direction it will also contain the opposite one, grasping in the sensuous immediate perceiving both the essence and the notion.

(Hegel 1955, 160)

This is exactly what Rancière does. His perspective therefore productively speaks to this project of thinking Regie as a practice that directs scenes and senses. It also resonates well with the wider situation within our discipline at present, where we have finally begun to overcome the antagonistic confrontation that stifled theatre discourses during the 1990s and early 2000s, when the analysis of meaning (the semiotic ‘sense’ of interpretation) was irreconcilably pitted against attention to the experience (the Hegelian ‘sensuous appearing’ and the phenomenological sensuous experience).⁵

The development of Regie and mise en scène

Mise en scène was undoubtedly a ‘brand new notion’ (Pavis 2013, 6) revealing the assumed ‘epistemological break’. Yet, once we move beyond the walls of theatre and its dominant historiography, this rupture shifts from 1887 towards 1789. Indeed, not even the Meininger were the first to think of Regie. Some of the earliest signs of life even predate the French Revolution: The first documented Regisseur in German theatre was Herr Stephanie der Ältere, who was appointed under this title at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1771. He succeeded a Herr von Brahm (of all people!) when the latter took up an appointment as secretary to the Austrian embassy in Sweden.⁶ The new post of Stephanie’s predecessor reminds us that his job within the administrative machinery of the Habsburg Empire had no artistic remit. In line with the original meaning of régie within the administrative structures of (French-speaking) court bureaucracy which had spread across Europe over the course of the eighteenth century, he was the theatre’s administrative accountant, a ‘controller’ in today’s business terminology. Yet, at the same time, Louis-Sébastien Mercier very much outlined the job description of the future theatre Regisseur in his influential essay Du théâtre, written in 1773 and translated by Goethe into German in 1776. Mercier pondered the hierarchy between playwright and actor, and concluded: ‘One should therefore find a mediating power [une puissance intermédiaire] (even if this term should make us laugh) which privileges neither the concerns of the poet nor those of the actor’ (Mercier 1773, 363f.). That same year, in Germany, actor-manager Conrad Ekhof (1720–78) launched his rather short-lived Academy for Actors. His ideal was the ‘orchestration of the performance’ [Konzertierung des Spiels], for which purpose he began to define his own task as ‘the supervision of the actors in rehearsal, so that everyone knows their part and performs it well, and in new pieces takes their position well and not against the sense of the piece’ (Ekhof, in Frenzel 1984, 257). In a similar spirit to Ekhof’s ‘supervision’ (Aufsicht), the Theaterprotokolle, documenting the management of the Mannheim National Theatre between 1781 and 1789, reveal attempts to achieve the unity of the stage representation as well as early manifestations of Winds’s ‘innere Regie’. The régisseurs at Mannheim were the two elected representatives of the actors who served as technical-artistic directors to the company and represented the actors on the management board alongside Intendant D...