Directing as Analysis of Situation

Abstract

Directing as Analysis of Situation Richard Trousdell What Do Directors Do? For most of us, directing is an unmapped art or an academic discipline with almost no fixed landmarks. Unlike acting, where we have many theories and methods to guide us, directing offers few schools of thought about its nature, preparation, or technique. Most directors learn their art through practice, often serving as an assistant director before developing their own craft by trial and error. Even in formal classes, directing is taught mostly in critiqued workshop and fleshed out by methods borrowed from the visual arts, acting, or literary criticism. The earliest American attempts to teach directing stressed visual composition through the physical translation of text into patterns of movement. Given almost formulaic authority by Alexander Dean at Yale,1 the physical approach had its roots in 19th century stage practice whose diverse conventions included Goethe's neoclassical rules, the compositional verisimilitude of Saxe Meiningen, the scenic naturalism of Zola and Antoine, and Wagner's aesthetic ideals as developed by Appia and Craig. In all these models, the placement of the human figure in space, commonly called "blocking," is seen as a key to theatrical expression and therefore the primary focus of a director's craft. As Helen Chinoy suggests, the idea of directing as a physical function has roots that reach back in Western theatre as far as the choric dancing patterns taught by Aeschylus and Sopocles.2 A rich tradition of practical knowledge gives the physical approach to directing the advantages of clear content with predictable results. That the process and its results may also be manipulative and mechanical accounts for the low status the method of physical composition currently enjoys. Meanwhile, some of the most expressive contemporary directors, including Ingmar Bergman, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman, begin their rehearsal work with blocking. Stanislavski's early directing career also began with prearranged movement in imitation of Saxe Meiningen's example. However, as his conviction grew that 25 26 Richard Trousdell truthful acting was the essence of theatre, Stanislavski began to search for a psychological technique that would bring the actor into spontaneous contact with text and audience. As Stanislavski moved away from the preplanned mise en scene of production and into the improvisational world of the acting studio, he redefined the director's role from physical composer to teacher of acting. In the process, he provided directors with analytical tools to uncover the motivational impulses that propel dramatic action, that respond to the contextual details of the play's given circumstances, and that point toward the motivational spine connecting the units of action. The advantages of Stanislavski's acting system, beyond making the director the actor's collaborator, include its detailed vocabulary, its history of producing animated and engaged stage behavior, and its nearly Aristotelian analysis of dramatic structure through motivational units.3 Despite persistent conjecture that a psychological approach necessarily reduces all theatrical styles to naturalism, and miscasts the director as therapistguru , most contemporary directing curricula use some form of Stanislavski's acting system to teach technical vocabulary, textual analysis, and approach to production.4 A third borrowed technique is literary analysis, which has been widely used to teach directors textual interpretation. From the close readings of the New Critics to the Marxist analyses of social and economic forces at play upon the text, and the deconstructed readings of post-Freudians and Feminists, directors have been systematically schooled in the analysis of idea, image, and structural pattern. Just as the physical approach assumes that the director is a hybrid sculptor-architect-choreographer, or the psychological approach assumes that the director is a proto-actor, so does the literary approach assume that the director is an analogue of the playwright-critic, while the function itself might be described as a secondary form of interpretive writing—what the French call écriture scenique.5 From a literary perspective, the director is a rhetorician of the stage who must master genre, period style, historical context, and the extensive vocabulary of conventional devices that playwrights employ. In its most articulated form, the literary approach to directing produces the auteur director whose personal "reading" or "concept" of a text forms an independent thesis...