Issue
In the existing industry, a director who is well versed in his or her craft, and who has relevant stories to offer and good abilities to lead these visions into practice, is often enough.
For a long time, to interpret and develop the classic, as well as the new repertoire, formally and substantively, has been where the challenge lies. This approach is embedded in a hierarchical pattern where the playwright/director/and partly set designer have been the concept-developing artists. The task of the other artists has been to contribute to the already developed concept.
The collective art, the artistic collective – as for example seen in modern dance and the former Red Room at the Royal Danish Theatre – helps to point in new directions. So how to create directors who are good at facilitating processes where art/work are co-created and all involved parties’ skills and creative participation can take place?
INTRO: The background for artistic response
One summer day in August 2009, I stood once again facing a bunch of actors who were waiting for what I might have to say about the new play we were going to do together: “Colder than here” by Laura Wade. It is a play about a fractured family coping with the mother’s cancer diagnosis.
As a director, it is expected that one has an interpretation and response to the entire universe that one is dealing with.
The reading takes place in the audience foyer at Team Teatret in Herning and the only lighting, apart from the light above from a pair of rounded domes, is just fluorescent lights that create almost the same chilly atmosphere as the hospital that the play’s main character has visited all too often. On the table there is coffee and pastries from the nearest bakery.
I’m looking at the four expectant actors; the theatre manager who will play the father, two young girls who will play the daughters; someone I know from the school and a new one without an acting background, and an actress whom I have only heard about but never seen act, who will play the mother with cancer. So it is a collection of actors who have not previously met. I can already feel the recognizable lines being drawn. I bear a truth about the story, which at any time can be challenged. One becomes an invisible puppet-master where the strings can go haywire very easily.
Although the play is interesting to me and I really want to tell this story, I feel a dislike for the inevitable discussions about the appropriate interpretations.
I do not know where it is coming from, but in the middle of the presentation, I say that I want them contribute to the development of the inner life and relationships between characters, and that it could be interesting if they contributed improvisational ideas. From day one, I want us to drain ourselves of all questions about the material. I have covered the walls with paper and we read scenes through one by one. Every time we are finished reading, we walk in silence up to the wall and write the questions we might have. We put them together – emptying us of the questions we may have about the script. Large or small – from faith and morning rituals to social circles and relationships to music preferences and life after death.