Words of advice…

Sometimes, like last night, I see theatre that has not really been directed. I feel it is wise to be actually trained and skilled when one accepts the leadership role of the director; a little honesty or self-reflection is important when accepting work outside of one’s area of competence. Here is my running list of the basic ‘amateur’ errors. Why I’m so cross is that only 1 in 10 so called professionals avoids these kind of traps; just because you can crack your own knuckles doesn’t make you a chiropractor! 

Directing involves the creation of coherent rules for the management of time, space and change. It requires one examine alternation (time), differentiation (space) and causality (change). 

Here are the errors:

1. Turning off all the lights at the end of a scene while people bumble around in the dark covered by a recorded sound cue. This loses the audience’s attention and adds unnecessary length to the performance.

2. Allowing performers to enter and exit along the same trajectory. Appearance and disappearance is equal in weight to what gets said or done; trivializing them with a cuckoo-clock in/out movement makes the entire fragment pointless.

3. Actors need to have pauses of different lengths before they speak; one needs to create the illusion that the lines are spontaneous, not recited and a moment of suspension creates an impulse to speak. Sometimes lines need to be spoke over top of one another, likewise creating credible impulses. If there is no temporal and tonal variation in delivery, time both literally and subjectively slows downs as the work becomes more and more predictable.

4. There are often short fragments in a script that do not need to be performed; a character who comes on only once to do a little exposition is best cut and the semantic information transmitted by the text exchanged for visceral information given elsewhere.

5. Failing the identify the principal event of the performance and building towards and away from it creates a ‘dial-tone’ continuity in the performance that subdues rather than captivates the audience.

6. Failing in the details above leads to the performance being literally too long, requiring the insertion of an intermission; if your play needs an intermission for non-aesthetic reasons (i.e. people sitting down for too long, a need to sell drinks) it is very likely too long by at least 1/3. A poorly placed intermission makes the movement towards and away from the principal event even harder to manage. You can do pretty much anything written in 1.5 hours, unless of course you are attempting to stage the Mahabharata, the Iliad or a cycle of linked or history plays.

In any endeavor where you don’t actually know what you are doing, things take a long time. Directing is no exception. 

While there are lots of excellent artistic testimonies out there, there are almost no decent ‘how-to’ books on directing. Katie Mitchell’s is actually the only ‘in general’ directing book I’ve read that does not make matters worse.

While being able to operate a deep-fryer and flip a piece of meat from side to side might make one a professional short-order cook, it does not make one a chef!

Grr…

~ by Daniel Mroz on November 7, 2009.