Initial Thoughts on Directing by Facilitation and Improvisation.

[danieldwilliam]

Ever since I first met Fiona Watt I’ve been thinking about Directing. This was going to be a post outlining my theory of directing (1). My initial theory of directing which I would use as a provisional template to accept, reject or modify as I gained some practical experience.  Then the improviser in me kicked in.   I remembered how the five folk I was working with during Fiona’s session at the Residency weekend created Birnam Wood and understood the symbolism of the words and our interpretation of the words.  I’m an improviser.  We don’t Direct. We co-create. (2)

So, this is not a post about how I might Direct my first play. It’s a post about how I might help actors and technical crew access our play, hold a common vision of the play between them and share that common vision with an audience.

What I’ve got is a synthesis of Fiona Watt’s production design method and Improv.

I think we start with the text.

Fiona’s method for accessing the text is to start by asking three questions.

What do we know? (What are the facts? What is explicitly mentioned in the text? What does the playwright tell us is on stage?)

What would we like to know? (What information do we not have that we need to put the story on stage? What do we need to discover and share with the audience in order for us all to understand the story?)

What can we guess at? (What is implied by the text? What can we deduce from the text about what is going on in the souls of the characters?)

These questions cover the whole staging of the play.  Take Hamlet for example. We know, because the text says, that Hamlet has a mother, a step-father and a dead father. We know there is a Ghost.  We’d like to know if Hamlet is mad, or cunning; playing a long game or a coward.  We can guess at the former relationship of Hamlet, Rozencrantz and Guilderstern, were they good friends or just drinking buddies. The Three Questions give me the beginnings of a decision process about what goes up on stage. Not only what physically happens but what is meant by it.

When I was workshoping Birnam Wood we were guessing at the effect that Birham Wood coming to Dunisnane would have on MacBeth and on Malcolm, and on each set of their supporters. From this we decided that the wood was a symbol of legitimate kingship. It surrounds and supports Malcolm and by the consent of a mass of individuals it gives him legitimacy.  By rejecting en masse MacBeth it demonstrates that his rule is tyrannical.  Beyond this, we decided that he wood is Real for Malcolm. He really is standing surrounded by many citizens holding branches to be used as camouflage.  For MacBeth, the wood is Fantastical. It is a symbol of his failure as a king and the souls of the those he has damned come to claim him. He is haunted by dreams of the wood. How do we put this on stage?

We ask the same questions for the whole text and then for each smaller part of it. Part of the aim is practical.  We compile a list of everyone who is in the play, everything they touch and everything they do.  There will be no guns left unfired. What are the dependencies we create by our choices.  If we wish to present Hamlet as cunning rather than mad what does this say about his relationship with Ophelia? Has he tried to safe her but failed or has he used her as a decoy? How do you light Hamlet’s regret at Ophelia’s death if he tried to prevent it? How do you light his regret if his regret is that someone he liked became collateral damage in his own scheme?

The aim is to break the text down into beats. Each beat is a significant change in mood, personnel or the status of a major character. There could be more than one beat in each scene. From a production design view point a useful question to ask about a beat would be “How would I change the lights or sound to enhance the effect of this beat?”

Each beat can then be storyboarded and the storyboard becomes a way to record and hold in common the shared vision of the play.

I think it is important to do this with the entire cast and as many of the technical crew as possible. I want to get as much input as possible. I want diverse input.  I’m quite happy for a lighting technique to be the main thing that happens in a particular beat. My aim is to facilitate the creation of a shared vision for the piece. Shared between actors and technicians.

I think the process is to start with the known, widen our understanding to all the possibilities, and then consciously narrow down our options to the story and the meaning we want to put on stage.  

In parallel with this I’d like to take actors through some workshops where we analysis the text for changes in status.(3)

Whose status is going up or down?

Who is changing the status of the changee?

Is the changee accepting or resisting the status change?

Is this status transaction on-going or closed; singular or one of a series?

How do you convey these changes of status?

How do observers react to the change in status?

Status is the ebb and flow of prestige and focus. People are constantly engaging in status transactions with everyone around them. They are perhaps the soul of a comedy of manners. Status transactions can also be textually ambiguous.  Take the way Jeeves says “Very good, sir.”  This can be a code that Jeeves utterly disagrees with Wooster, or for Jeeves acceptance that Wooster has agreed with him and politely accepting Wooster’s deferral, or it can be an acknowledgement that, rarely, Wooster has asserted his own high status through wealth and that this has trumped Jeeves status through intelligence.

A piece of dialogue won’t work if one actor thinks he is lowering the status of the other’s character and the other actor thinks it is being raised. The reactions won’t ring true.  I think status transactions and the reactions of the participants and the on-stage observers is one of the things that takes a play from being some people saying things on stage to being an immersive experience that simulates real life.

So, for me creating a shared understanding of the status transactions is a key part of understanding the ebb and flow of the potency of the characters.

So far nobody has learnt their lines, or knows where to stand.(4)

Enter some workshop time.  If the actors understand their characters, they understand the way status will change over each beat and they understand the mood, theme and point of each beat my hope is that they can be left to their own devices to find their own movement and diction.  

At some point what they come up with needs to become solid. I think we can start with great fluidity and let what works emerge. Perhaps the final role of the director is to prune back straggling or self-contradictory elements from the offers made during a workshop.

I don’t need to own this. I want to create it with others.

(1) Which I need because I understand things by understanding the theory and principles and then exploring them in action. 

(2) and if you don’t like the way we do things then you can fuck off make an alternative Offer and we’ll say Yes. 

(3) I am very interested in status and the work of Keith Johnstone, not just in theatre but in real life. 

(4) I think I expect actors to learn their lines at home or on the bus to work.  How realistic this expectation is I will discover.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, and potentially workable.
Does it lead to the cliche that if a shotgun is shown above the fireplace in Act One, someone will be getting both barrels in Act Two?

One of the perils of writing is that the characters only exist in the confines of the story - is there anything you can do to bring in non-essential items without them looking like window-dressing? One writer I know writes something for each character in a novel which he then rips up and doesn't use. He might refer to it, but he doesn't use it in the story. This ranges from a short story for the lead, to a few lines for minor characters. I'm not suggesting that you would want to use this technique, only that there has to be something suggesting that the characters aren't just characters, the location not just a stage set, the story not the entire world. Hopefully the writer will suggest this (what DID Hamlet get up to with Rosen'stern back at college?) but there are so many things a director can do... costumes, music, framing, set design and decoration...

I really appreciate the way you talk about collaboration, from front of house to back. If you can get a hold of William Goldman's "Adventures In The Screen Trade" read it (if you can't, let me know and I'll dig out a copy for you). He demolishes the auteur theory, and also suggests ways in which a good director can improve a movie by working with writer, actors, cameramen, lighters, musicians and editors, in what he makes sound like a glorious relay race.

Status: how often in a Jeeves and Wooster story do you think Wooster misreads the status? The reader doesn't, but Bertie cheerfully deludes himself to his heart's content. You seen something like that done every time The Star is given a dressing down by his boss in a movie - the boss is convinced he has status, the audience that The Star has just had his status enhanced. So if "A piece of dialogue won’t work if one actor thinks he is lowering the status of the other’s character and the other actor thinks it is being raised." refers to the actors, rather than the characters, I think we're in agreement.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Does it lead to the cliché that someone gets both barrels in Act 2?

I hope not. Either you are working towards someone using a shotgun in which case you need to make it believable that they would have access to one. Hanging one above the mantel piece would be an obvious way of doing this. One would hope one could come up with some more subtle ways of getting to the point where the audience say “He’s got a shotgun? Well, of course he’s got a shotgun. He’s the kind of person who would have a shotgun. I already knew that.”

Not just being characters.

I think one of the things I’ve learned from improv is about the next logical thing. A story flows from one thing to the next logical thing. You can’t go from Woman Standing Outside Farmhouse to Woman Kidnapped by Aliens. You have to have Mysterious Lights in the Sky in between. But you also have to present the story as if it is the culmination of believable choices made by the characters. This requires that they could have made different choices and also that the choices they did make arise naturally from their character. For the choices to be real, to be the next logical thing, they must be grounded in the character but there must have been an alternative

So I think exploring the back story and the side story to the characters is important to presenting them making the choices that they make as if they were real choices.

Writing and Theatre

I think one difference that you’ve reminded me of here, is that writing is (usually) a solitary act of creation and delivery whereas theatre is a group act of creation and delivery. I think a lot of theatre is about getting everyone to be trying to do the right thing.

Adventures in the Screen Trade.

I’ll keep an eye out for it. Thanks very much for the tip.

I find collaboration works for me. I don’t have the ego to think I know the entire answer. Also, and, perhaps, more truthfully, that feels like hard work and not much fun. And I’m all about things that don’t feel like hard work at the moment.

I’ve seen theatre where the backstage crew were making a real contribution to the experience and I’m sure I’ve seen theatre where I haven’t seen the contribution they are making. One of my favourite ideas at the Birnam Wood workshop was to drop dry ice from the ceiling as the wood changed from Real and Supportive for Malcolm to Fantastic and Threating for MacBeth. Not for the visual effect, but in order to cool the air that the audience was sitting in. I think if theatre is going to be a useful artform it has to offer something that other art forms don’t. One of those things is that the physical presence of audience and cast in the same space makes the audience react to the story as if they were in it.

Jeeves and Wooster

Utterly agree. The story is definitely told from the point of view of Jeeves. At least he’s the hero and we tune into what status signals he is sending. In some other ways, he is a comment on class as he’s potentially invisible to Wooster’s class.

Actors need to agree. Characters don’t necessarily need to. Or even be aware of what is going on.