Explorative versus directive directing
One of the more interesting lessons I'm observing in shadowing Philip's directorial process is an increased understanding in the subtle and overt differences in ways of maneuvering a cast from actors to performance-ready by way of directorial vision. Especially since the polishing he did on Frankenstein, I have been keenly aware of Philip's explorative approach, and the language of engagement he uses by which he walks a fine line between exploring ideas with his actors, and creating the vision he holds in his head (at least at the outset).
His invitational language is very much like the invitational language used by therapists with clients, ways of engaging and challenging, without putting down the hard lines of directive engagement: more "What I find interesting and would like to explore", and less "just do X and Y like This and This". This unspools in the overall rehearsal process by breaking the process into almost three acts of their own: in the first act, there is an introduction to the material through general read-throughs and explorational movements through the proposed space; in the second act, there is refinement and tightening of intents in speech and action; in the third act, including rehearsals in the built set, there are final changes and a locking in of the important cues and actions.
The first week of rehearsal, Act One as it were, has been educational in comparing how I have learned to approach directing to what I see through the mentor's process. This production is perhaps not the best product for this education for the sole reason that many of the cast and crew have been working with this material through workshops for somewhere between 2 and 5 years. One of the leads is the playwright himself (and I may have more thoughts later on the experience of working with playwrights as cast actors, and working with certain types of actors), so this is material that is already intensely familiar to many of these people, including Philip. So there are shortcuts in understanding that I am aware of being taken by others, which is a little frustrating as an outside, both in terms of not always understanding the general professional decisions P makes, and not having the same pre-existing familiarity with the script and the characters. It makes me think twice about asking or saying anything, even as I understand I'm not going to learn as much as I'd like if I *don't* ask in situ. But that aspect, at least, is my own issue to manage, and corollary to the topic of today's examination. (And in Philip's defense, when he recognizes that he and the cast are speaking in familiar short-hand, he does often back up and offer a tutorial glimpse into the parts of the process that would otherwise not be apparent to the auditors.)
It's a bit of a personal irony to grapple with seeing where and how my personal drive to clarify things early on is at odds with Philip's explorative approach. I had a mini-epiphany sometime on Friday that I know where some of the more controlling aspects of that need to be certain about things is rooted (ancient personality issues affect my directorial stance, who knew?? *facepalm*), and not all of it comes from the difference in default timing allowances and scheduling that separates professional rehearsal scheduling from some of the issues faced by amateur productions. There is a perception that we have less dedicated time, but P and I crunched some numbers after the Mackers polishing and came to the conslusion that hour-for-hour, there's probably as much rehearsal time alloted to pro shows as to a KWLT show; the big difference is that professional actors are *dedicated* to a production as contractual obligations, while volunteer actors are doing the show a favour, to some extent, but fitting rehearsals around a million other obligations.
This can lead to a sense of pressure on directors to "get it right" or get their directorial vision (assuming they have one) locked in as early as possible so they can spend the bulk of the rehearsal period refining it. I have seen some directors take a very directive approach in the sense of micro-managing actors and staff to attempt to guarantee as perfect a transmission of vision to stage as possible, minimizing the inherent uniqueness of the actors to come through in the process. I tried very hard to avoid this with my first couple of productions, but I know I've sometimes strayed into the directive realm in which I might as well have been shaping Claymation figures in shot-by-shot staging, rather than working with live actors, because I wanted something very specific and I wanted to "get it right" in very specific and detailed ways. I went into the R&GaD rehearsal process with a mostly-blocked playbook ready to go, and invested a large amount of my time and attention into transmitting through my actors what I wanted to see happen.
This isn't necessarily a bad approach; for a first production I am not displeased with R&GaD. But every subsequent show I've directed has gotten far more relaxed in approach to the point of having a few suggestions and ideas for Shadowlands, but mostly in terms of what set pieces I wanted on deck, and largely letting the cast figure out where they needed to be. Even then, not as much exploration up front as I think might have benefited the actors' own development of intentions and motivations; much to stage management's chagrin we did a lot of that work through the Act Two part of the process, devolving rehearsal time into protracted discussions about relationships and human foible as it manifests through enactable characteristics. Philip's explorative approach allows time for that to unfurl up front; he refers to this as "front-loading" the process with exploration to give the actors space to get grounded in the characters and the action, foundational work that really should happen before refinement, not during. Intent drives blocking, and if you directively block without establishing or clarifying intent you can inadvertently direct yourself and your actors into the proverbial corner as intentionality (hopefully) becomes clear later.
I am still unclear, because I haven't yet asked him this question, how *invested* P is in establishing his vision for a show. I *have* had the wonderful opportunity of seeing him completely recant something he wanted when his assistant director pointed out a logic flaw in something he'd requested in early blocking, and once he recognized the issue his directive was establishing, he let the idea go and there was some collaborative reworking of the blocking. Luckily, everyone involved in the collaboration was keeping established themes and motifs in mind so as to not introduce further issues, and the end result was something I think P likes enough to run with. It's a different thing in community theatre, where my observational experience has run to opposites: Big-Fish-In-Small-Pond directors who are extremely invested in their vision and reluctant to let it go (tend to be the directive sorts of directors), and something I once heard referred to as "soft directors" who tend less toward collaboration and more toward capitulation so as to not offend anyone (because we're all volunteers, right? We're all here for fun, and if someone's not having fun, we must be doing something wrong, right?)
"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em," is as much a valuable guideline in directing as it is in country-and-western songs about washed-up poker players. Sure, there's a difference when you're working with a cast you trust implicitly to know their craft well enough to cut them loose in exploration, versus a cast of well-intentioned folks who are on stage because it's fun and a social outlet and any one of a number of other reasons that may not actually have a damned thing to do with creating performative *art*. But in sitting through half of the first week's rehearsal process with Philip's cast, there is a definite short-changing that happens when you don't give sufficient time allowance for the explorative work to happen *up front*. Sure, I normally brain-dump a lot of the "vision" stuff for the show and the characters on my cast when we sit for the first read-through, but then we're into the mad agglomeration of Act One and Act Two rehearsal process and trying to do everything at once... which often leads to me being more directive than explorative up front, and pushing the explorations back to an ad-hoc thing that happens randomly at later dates. I begin to believe I am short-changing my actors rather a lot in doing so.
There are two advantages in being on approach to doing show #5: I'm still new enough to admit I don't often feel like I know what I'm doing (which buys me both some forgiveness AND some flexibility), and I've done enough shows with the local likely talent pool that I can start to actively stack the deck even in an open rehearsal process with actors I think are capable of taking up the challenge of changing up the production process with me. I'm skirting the edge of the neuro-linguistic programming aspect - local casts who have been through a polishing or workshop experience with Philip will have experienced his softer language approaching exploration of dialogue and character, but it's a bigger issue than I want to go into in this particular post - but for me, there is a lot of personal work I have to do around letting go of the expectations and investment in the concreteness of a particular vision, and find more flexible ways of both inviting the casts and crews of my production into exploration, then ensuring there is space *for* that exploration to happen. I don't yet feel I have a good idea of how that works, or how that can translate to an amateur level, but I have some ideas, largely procedural, that I plan to introduce for the next show... even if I wind up with some cheesy fluff in the shape of Saucy Jack. Philip keeps telling me, "Just because you're doing a campy musical, doesn't mean you can't still produce *good theatre*". I grok that intellectually, but wrangling an amateur company into treating the material and process as Good Theatre instead of "FASS-lite" remains something of a mystery to me. And I recognize that leadership is going to set a tone here, which just doubles the pressure on getting clear in my own head what I'm trying to do and why, so I don't confuse an entire production with mixed messages.
(FASS, for those not local to KW, is an annual cabaret-style song-and-dance show put on at the University of Waterloo by Faculty, Alumni, Staff & Students; one of their central tenets is that everyone who auditions gets a part regardless of talent, and it's more about having fun than making good theatre. Because KWLT membership has at times crossed-over heavily with FASS, there is a linking between the two that has not always been favourable to KWLT nor, IMO, fostered a consistently-clear distinction between how FASS approaches that thing that it does, and how even amateur theatre companies *CAN* do theatre. There's been a pair of running comments that have haunted me for years, one being that KWLT has sometimes been perceived by other regional theatre participants as "the place FASSies go to die", and "you can always tell which directors come from FASS", with the implication underlying both that KWLT can't therefore produce good theatre without first finding ways of disassociating ourselves from FASS. Those implications are something to dig into deeper at a later time as well.)
I think it's good for directors to be challenged on their directorial style; I'm not entirely sure how many amateur repeat-directors even have a way of identifying and articulating their personal approach to directing, let alone changing the expression as the style (hopefully) evolves over time. We're not trained with that kind of language, most of us, not having been trained in the process. And that's probably the single biggest thing I'm learning from shadowing Philip, is the language of the process, or at least of *his* process (and taking as a given that I'll have to adapt language for my own applications to my own folks later). Ironic, really, that someone whose professional and personal development work is so closely tied with explorative questions around meaning in common lexicon, is now having to expand that discovery process into yet another area of life and interaction, possibly dragging her casts kicking and screaming along for the ride...
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/6879023.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
His invitational language is very much like the invitational language used by therapists with clients, ways of engaging and challenging, without putting down the hard lines of directive engagement: more "What I find interesting and would like to explore", and less "just do X and Y like This and This". This unspools in the overall rehearsal process by breaking the process into almost three acts of their own: in the first act, there is an introduction to the material through general read-throughs and explorational movements through the proposed space; in the second act, there is refinement and tightening of intents in speech and action; in the third act, including rehearsals in the built set, there are final changes and a locking in of the important cues and actions.
The first week of rehearsal, Act One as it were, has been educational in comparing how I have learned to approach directing to what I see through the mentor's process. This production is perhaps not the best product for this education for the sole reason that many of the cast and crew have been working with this material through workshops for somewhere between 2 and 5 years. One of the leads is the playwright himself (and I may have more thoughts later on the experience of working with playwrights as cast actors, and working with certain types of actors), so this is material that is already intensely familiar to many of these people, including Philip. So there are shortcuts in understanding that I am aware of being taken by others, which is a little frustrating as an outside, both in terms of not always understanding the general professional decisions P makes, and not having the same pre-existing familiarity with the script and the characters. It makes me think twice about asking or saying anything, even as I understand I'm not going to learn as much as I'd like if I *don't* ask in situ. But that aspect, at least, is my own issue to manage, and corollary to the topic of today's examination. (And in Philip's defense, when he recognizes that he and the cast are speaking in familiar short-hand, he does often back up and offer a tutorial glimpse into the parts of the process that would otherwise not be apparent to the auditors.)
It's a bit of a personal irony to grapple with seeing where and how my personal drive to clarify things early on is at odds with Philip's explorative approach. I had a mini-epiphany sometime on Friday that I know where some of the more controlling aspects of that need to be certain about things is rooted (ancient personality issues affect my directorial stance, who knew?? *facepalm*), and not all of it comes from the difference in default timing allowances and scheduling that separates professional rehearsal scheduling from some of the issues faced by amateur productions. There is a perception that we have less dedicated time, but P and I crunched some numbers after the Mackers polishing and came to the conslusion that hour-for-hour, there's probably as much rehearsal time alloted to pro shows as to a KWLT show; the big difference is that professional actors are *dedicated* to a production as contractual obligations, while volunteer actors are doing the show a favour, to some extent, but fitting rehearsals around a million other obligations.
This can lead to a sense of pressure on directors to "get it right" or get their directorial vision (assuming they have one) locked in as early as possible so they can spend the bulk of the rehearsal period refining it. I have seen some directors take a very directive approach in the sense of micro-managing actors and staff to attempt to guarantee as perfect a transmission of vision to stage as possible, minimizing the inherent uniqueness of the actors to come through in the process. I tried very hard to avoid this with my first couple of productions, but I know I've sometimes strayed into the directive realm in which I might as well have been shaping Claymation figures in shot-by-shot staging, rather than working with live actors, because I wanted something very specific and I wanted to "get it right" in very specific and detailed ways. I went into the R&GaD rehearsal process with a mostly-blocked playbook ready to go, and invested a large amount of my time and attention into transmitting through my actors what I wanted to see happen.
This isn't necessarily a bad approach; for a first production I am not displeased with R&GaD. But every subsequent show I've directed has gotten far more relaxed in approach to the point of having a few suggestions and ideas for Shadowlands, but mostly in terms of what set pieces I wanted on deck, and largely letting the cast figure out where they needed to be. Even then, not as much exploration up front as I think might have benefited the actors' own development of intentions and motivations; much to stage management's chagrin we did a lot of that work through the Act Two part of the process, devolving rehearsal time into protracted discussions about relationships and human foible as it manifests through enactable characteristics. Philip's explorative approach allows time for that to unfurl up front; he refers to this as "front-loading" the process with exploration to give the actors space to get grounded in the characters and the action, foundational work that really should happen before refinement, not during. Intent drives blocking, and if you directively block without establishing or clarifying intent you can inadvertently direct yourself and your actors into the proverbial corner as intentionality (hopefully) becomes clear later.
I am still unclear, because I haven't yet asked him this question, how *invested* P is in establishing his vision for a show. I *have* had the wonderful opportunity of seeing him completely recant something he wanted when his assistant director pointed out a logic flaw in something he'd requested in early blocking, and once he recognized the issue his directive was establishing, he let the idea go and there was some collaborative reworking of the blocking. Luckily, everyone involved in the collaboration was keeping established themes and motifs in mind so as to not introduce further issues, and the end result was something I think P likes enough to run with. It's a different thing in community theatre, where my observational experience has run to opposites: Big-Fish-In-Small-Pond directors who are extremely invested in their vision and reluctant to let it go (tend to be the directive sorts of directors), and something I once heard referred to as "soft directors" who tend less toward collaboration and more toward capitulation so as to not offend anyone (because we're all volunteers, right? We're all here for fun, and if someone's not having fun, we must be doing something wrong, right?)
"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em," is as much a valuable guideline in directing as it is in country-and-western songs about washed-up poker players. Sure, there's a difference when you're working with a cast you trust implicitly to know their craft well enough to cut them loose in exploration, versus a cast of well-intentioned folks who are on stage because it's fun and a social outlet and any one of a number of other reasons that may not actually have a damned thing to do with creating performative *art*. But in sitting through half of the first week's rehearsal process with Philip's cast, there is a definite short-changing that happens when you don't give sufficient time allowance for the explorative work to happen *up front*. Sure, I normally brain-dump a lot of the "vision" stuff for the show and the characters on my cast when we sit for the first read-through, but then we're into the mad agglomeration of Act One and Act Two rehearsal process and trying to do everything at once... which often leads to me being more directive than explorative up front, and pushing the explorations back to an ad-hoc thing that happens randomly at later dates. I begin to believe I am short-changing my actors rather a lot in doing so.
There are two advantages in being on approach to doing show #5: I'm still new enough to admit I don't often feel like I know what I'm doing (which buys me both some forgiveness AND some flexibility), and I've done enough shows with the local likely talent pool that I can start to actively stack the deck even in an open rehearsal process with actors I think are capable of taking up the challenge of changing up the production process with me. I'm skirting the edge of the neuro-linguistic programming aspect - local casts who have been through a polishing or workshop experience with Philip will have experienced his softer language approaching exploration of dialogue and character, but it's a bigger issue than I want to go into in this particular post - but for me, there is a lot of personal work I have to do around letting go of the expectations and investment in the concreteness of a particular vision, and find more flexible ways of both inviting the casts and crews of my production into exploration, then ensuring there is space *for* that exploration to happen. I don't yet feel I have a good idea of how that works, or how that can translate to an amateur level, but I have some ideas, largely procedural, that I plan to introduce for the next show... even if I wind up with some cheesy fluff in the shape of Saucy Jack. Philip keeps telling me, "Just because you're doing a campy musical, doesn't mean you can't still produce *good theatre*". I grok that intellectually, but wrangling an amateur company into treating the material and process as Good Theatre instead of "FASS-lite" remains something of a mystery to me. And I recognize that leadership is going to set a tone here, which just doubles the pressure on getting clear in my own head what I'm trying to do and why, so I don't confuse an entire production with mixed messages.
(FASS, for those not local to KW, is an annual cabaret-style song-and-dance show put on at the University of Waterloo by Faculty, Alumni, Staff & Students; one of their central tenets is that everyone who auditions gets a part regardless of talent, and it's more about having fun than making good theatre. Because KWLT membership has at times crossed-over heavily with FASS, there is a linking between the two that has not always been favourable to KWLT nor, IMO, fostered a consistently-clear distinction between how FASS approaches that thing that it does, and how even amateur theatre companies *CAN* do theatre. There's been a pair of running comments that have haunted me for years, one being that KWLT has sometimes been perceived by other regional theatre participants as "the place FASSies go to die", and "you can always tell which directors come from FASS", with the implication underlying both that KWLT can't therefore produce good theatre without first finding ways of disassociating ourselves from FASS. Those implications are something to dig into deeper at a later time as well.)
I think it's good for directors to be challenged on their directorial style; I'm not entirely sure how many amateur repeat-directors even have a way of identifying and articulating their personal approach to directing, let alone changing the expression as the style (hopefully) evolves over time. We're not trained with that kind of language, most of us, not having been trained in the process. And that's probably the single biggest thing I'm learning from shadowing Philip, is the language of the process, or at least of *his* process (and taking as a given that I'll have to adapt language for my own applications to my own folks later). Ironic, really, that someone whose professional and personal development work is so closely tied with explorative questions around meaning in common lexicon, is now having to expand that discovery process into yet another area of life and interaction, possibly dragging her casts kicking and screaming along for the ride...
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/6879023.html. Please comment there using OpenID.