The Director as Collaborator

Robert Knopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317326564
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Direction et production théâtrale

The Director as Collaborator teaches essential directing skills while emphasizing how directors and theater productions benefit from collaboration. Good collaboration occurs when the director shares responsibility for the artistic creation with the entire production team, including actors, designers, stage managers, and technical staff. Leadership does not preclude collaboration; in theater, these concepts can and should be complementary. Students will develop their abilities by directing short scenes and plays and by participating in group exercises.

New to the second edition:

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• updated interviews, exercises, forms, and appendices

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• new chapter on technology including digital research, previsualization and drafting programs, and web-sharing sites

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• new chapter on devised and ensemble-based works

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• new chapter on immersive theater, including material and exercises on environmental staging and audience–performer interaction

Chapter 1
Collaboration and Leadership

The collaborative director is, as Robert Cohen and John Harrop put it in their book Creative Play Direction, “first among equals.” In essence, the director seeks to lead the ensemble through a constructive process toward a product (the production) that realizes his or her overall interpretation of the script. To do so, the director tries to create the type of collaboration that works best for each production and ensemble. The director must use his or her judgment and appraisal of the ensemble members’ skills and personalities to find the best collaborative process, which will vary from show to show. It is not my purpose to dictate a specific collaborative process or relationship, but to help you develop the range and depth of your collaborative skills. Once you have begun to acquire these skills, your challenge will be to find a working balance between collaboration and leadership—a valuable skill in theater, equally applicable to most other workplaces. Collaboration without leadership tends to degenerate into chaos, unless the ensemble already embraces a shared aesthetic, social, or political aim. Most people like to feel that they are accomplishing something, and someone must define that “something.” In theater, the director defines where the play or production is going. This involves interpreting the script—the raw material of most productions.¹ Whether the playwright is dead or alive, absent or present, the director’s interpretation starts with the script—the playwright’s words. The director might collaborate with some or all of the ensemble members in defining the core of the production and bringing it to fruition, but ultimately the director makes the final decision as to the overall aim of the production.

Directors must set the boundaries of their jobs for each production. Clearly defining your responsibilities and those of your ensemble at the start of the process will help guide you through the rehearsal process. Let’s start with the idea that the director is responsible for the “big picture” of the production. No matter how much artistic input you solicit from the ensemble, ultimately you must absorb and integrate each individual’s contribution so that it works with the rest of the ensemble and the big picture. By keeping your eyes on the big picture of the production, you may allow actors and designers much greater latitude to create within your overall interpretation of the script. Once you open the directing process to collaboration, though, how do you balance collaboration with leadership so as to achieve your aims?

Balancing Leadership and Collaboration

Perhaps the most frightening part of becoming a collaborative director is the loss of control that this approach appears to require. After all, many theater artists, particularly directors, see their productions as an extension of themselves, and they want their work to look a certain way—the way they have envisioned it. The artistic control that a director enjoys (or imagines) can be heady stuff. If we view one of the primary jobs of the director as creating a world, then the director can be seen as the creator of this world, albeit based loosely or closely on the words of the playwright. That is exactly why the director needs to share responsibility for the production with his or her collaborators. No director knows the best way to achieve every detail within this world. The best directors welcome and encourage constructive contributions. Yet many people find it difficult at first to direct in a collaborative way, as it requires the director to sacrifice a certain amount of artistic control.

To work in this manner, the director must develop a particular set of skills. Verbal and written communication, script analysis, visual aesthetics, and some knowledge of how each member of the total ensemble works serve as the foundation for collaboration. The first three enable the director to understand and interpret the script and communicate this vision to the ensemble. The fourth, understanding how everyone else in the ensemble works, might take a while to acquire. To be truly effective, a director must understand how actors, designers, writers, dramaturgs, stage managers, and technical directors and staff communicate with other ensemble members so that the director might evaluate their ideas knowledgeably. If you become serious about directing, you will need to acquire basic skills in each of these areas. As a developing director, you should first acquire or expand your knowledge of acting, given the centrality of the actors’ performances to almost every production. As you direct more, always try to supplement your work with actors by continuing to study and work in each area of theater.

To grow as a director requires continual study and experimentation, not only as a director, but also in other areas of theater and other disciplines. Push yourself to go beyond your perceived limits and expand your range; direct plays outside your favorite periods and styles; take classes or workshops in acting, design, playwriting, music, and art history, particularly if these are weak points for you; see theater created in every imaginable style, theater space, and type of ensemble. Otherwise you risk repeating yourself and becoming bored. In the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character, Alvey Singer, talks to Annie about why their relationship isn’t working out, and his words are easily applied to the relationship between directors and their craft: “I think a relationship is like a shark—it must be constantly moving to stay alive. And what we’ve got here is a dead shark.” Point taken: as a director, grow or die.

The goal, therefore, is not only to help you acquire collaborative directing techniques but to expand your capacity for growth as a director, for embracing the knowledge and differing aesthetics of your collaborators will influence you and your future productions greatly. By learning to collaborate well, directors develop their interpersonal skills, make themselves more desirable and marketable, and expand their artistic range. By accepting the ideas of collaborators, the director opens the door to new ideas for the current production and acquires new techniques for future productions.

What does it mean for a collaborative director to be a good leader? If the director wants to work collaboratively and avoid telling everyone what to do, how can he or she lead a production effectively? One way to begin to understand how you can lead and collaborate effectively is to look at the approaches available to you as a director and explore how they further leadership and/or collaboration.

Exercise

Examine the following skills and functions that a director might serve. Working on your own, divide the list under two headings: leadership and collaboration. Put the items into whichever category you think they further most. If you find that the item fits both categories equally, include it in both lists. In smaller groups of two to four, discuss your choices and try to come to a consensus. Provide an example of each of your top three skills. Finally, discuss your group’s answers with the class as a whole.

• Balancing idealism and pragmatism
• Projecting confidence and dependability
• Defining and reaching goals
• Energizing the ensemble
• Keeping order
• Listening to others’ ideas
• Making choices
• Mediating conflict
• Redirecting focus
• Respecting others

Some of you might be able to place these skills and qualities neatly into the two categories of leadership and collaboration. Others might find that many of these terms integrate the two categories. There is no single correct answer to this exercise, as it depends upon how you employ these skills as much as how you define and understand them.

Now that you have discussed these terms, I will provide you with my interpretation of what the terms mean and why they are important to directors. I will start with the terms that tend to emphasize collaboration:

• Energizing the ensemble. The director fuels the energies of ensemble members so they give their utmost to the production. To do this, you should be willing to try everyone’s ideas, as time permits, to say “yes” and give credit when other people pitch ideas and they work, and to say “no” even to your own ideas when they don’t work. By rejecting your own ideas and showing a willingness to fail boldly, you can set an example for others. Try to offer one outlandish idea early in the rehearsal process and let it fail, so that you can shrug it off without embarrassment. It’s a way of giving permission to the cast and to you to fail, with the knowledge that failure is a small price for the knowledge that bold risk-taking might help you discover.
• Balancing idealism and pragmatism. Directors are, by nature, idealists. To direct is to wish to create a world on stage perfectly. But perfect worlds don’t exist on stage for very long; we’re lucky if we create a few perfect moments within an imaginative, if occasionally flawed, world. We strive for the ideal, and the director must inspire the ensemble’s hunger for the ideal, but eventually reality hits. The director must learn to balance the ideal with the pragmatic.
• Respecting others. It is in the best interests of the ensemble and the production for the director to set an example by showing respect for everyone’s work. This means that the director should listen to new ideas, try them whenever practical, and strive to treat everyone with respect, even under the most stressful circumstances. Because so many people give so much time and energy to a production, everyone in the ensemble deserves respect. In the heat of the moment, this principle might accidentally be sacrificed, but it is your responsibility to create an atmosphere of respect and to help re-establish it when it is broken.
• Listening to others’ ideas. Listening to the ideas of others not only helps the director create an atmosphere of respect, but also demonstrates confidence in the director’s own ideas. If your idea is truly the best solution, an open discussion of the alternatives should only reinforce the strength of your decision. At the same time, you might discover new things about the play or scene through discussing or trying alternatives. You have the final decision-making power, so you can afford to be open to other ideas.

Some of the other terms tend to emphasize leadership, but these leadership qualities are necessary to support strong collaboration. The director’s leadership in certain areas of the production process helps create the environment for collaboration in other areas. Your collaborators need to know that you will eventually evaluate the possibilities the ensemble has generated and make choices. These decisions help develop the ensemble’s focus, fine-tuning their shared vision of the production:

• Making choices. The director must be willing and able to make choices about all aspects of the production, from the artistic (acting, design, dramaturgy) to the practical (rehearsal schedules, production meetings). Regardless of how much input the director encourages the ensemble to provide, the director eventually makes decisions about most elements of the production. Indecisive directing is not collaboration. To the contrary, collaborative directing usually requires the director to make many strong decisions. The more ideas your ensemble develops, the more decisions you will have to make. Through preparation, analysis, and judgment, the director should be prepared to make these choices. The better prepared the director is going into the rehearsal and design process, the easier it will be to explain these choices rationally. Rational explanations of choices promote respect and confidence among the ensemble members.
• Defining and reaching goals. The director must define the goals of the production and of each rehearsal or meeting clearly. No other person in the ensemble has this power, and if the director doesn’t perform this function, then the process will drift. Setting periodic goals helps ensemble members trust the director’s vision; reaching goals gives everyone a feeling of confidence about how the production is progressing. Yet some of your collaborators might respond to different approaches than others. Some theater artists need space to experiment, whereas others need step-by-step guidance. Reaching goals can and should involve collaboration as well: the ability to adjust your approach to each artist with whom you are working and respond to their ideas as well as their needs.
• Keeping order. The director keeps the total ensemble working productively and on schedule. Some members of the ensemble will naturally be more meticulous about deadlines than others. The single most important factor in encouraging all members of the ensemble to contribute creatively in a timely manner is your own behavior. Lead by example; your discipline will encourage others to follow. If you provide a sloppy example, the production will follow a far riskier course.
• Redirecting focus. There are many times when the rehearsal or design process drifts from its primary purpose: when an idea takes the production away from the core action or common goal; when ensemble members become overly concerned with product too early in the process; when a cast gets giddy during rehearsal. The director’s responsibility is to redirect the focus of the ensemble in these circumstances, so that its members return to constructive work without any loss in confidence or self-esteem.
• Mediating conflict. All directors wish for the creative process to go without a hitch, but this rarely occurs. We all bring outside baggage into rehearsal, we don’t always like each other, and sometimes we’re simply tired. As a member of the ensemble, the director is as prone to these pitfalls as anyone else. But the director has a special responsibility to monitor the process and to mediate conflicts when they arise. This means checking in with your ensemble members periodically, watching ensemble interactions for signs of conflict, and keeping an eye on your own behavior. Never get so wrapped up in the moment that you lose track of the atmosphere of the process.
• Confidence and dependability. A good director is confident, inspires confidence, and encourages it in others. A confident ensemble performs to the best of its abilities. The same goes for dependability. You must be meticulous in your work habits if you expect the same from your ensemble. Come to rehearsal early, be prepared for all meetings and rehearsals, and follow through on all promises. If you set this kind of example, the ensemble is much more likely to follow your lead and do the same.

Discussion Questions on Leadership

In small groups of two to four, discuss some or all of the following questions. Reach a consensus on the most important aspects of the group’s answer to each question. When each group has reached a consensus, reassemble as a large group to share and discuss the answers.

1. What choices is a director responsible for? What circumstances change the answer to this question?
2. How does a director know when to continue to strive for the ideal and when to compromise?
3. How can a director inspire his or her ensemble to do their best work?
4. What strategies should a director employ in mediating conflict? What strategies should be avoided?
5. What are your strongest personal qualities as a director? What areas do you need to work on?

Note

1 Devised productions frequently start without a script, favoring the development of the script by the ensemble in rehearsal (see Chapter 8 for more on this type of work). Improvised productions may start with a structure or several scenarios, but change nightly in response to the cast’s interaction with the audience and among themselves.

Supplemental Reading

Cohen, Robert and John Harrup. Creative Play Direction. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.

Daniels, Rebecca. Women Stage Directors Speak: Exploring the Influence of Gender on Their Work. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.

Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. 2nd ed. London: Penguin,...