Day Eleven at LCT Directors Lab - Afternoon/Evening

This afternoon I attended a discussion led by Anne regarding religious plays and how they might translate or be received in different countries and cultures. The participants each discussed a play and a possible country to produce it in. This process will continue next week with the addition of a number of established directors from around the world.

In the evening, our "Directors on Directors" series continued. I attended sessions on the contemporary French director Arthur Nauzyciel and the early 20th century German groundbreaker Max Reinhardt.

I knew nothing about Nauzyciel before the session. His aesthetic insterests me greatly as it begins non-psychologically based acting, and is audience inclusive (sometimes even site-specific), and artistically intuitive. So much of our acting, staging and design in America is about demonstrating the psychology of character for a voyeuristic audience. Larger theatrical and human metaphors are often lost in the projection of character. In fact, it is quite difficult for many actors to think of acting as anything but the imitation or projection of character, which much somehow pre-exist action. But just as a dancer or a musician is without a character in a fictional sense, but allows the audience to go on a freely imaginative journey, so an actor can be a kind of vessel or blank slate for an audience's creativity.

Nauzyciel apparently works from a place of theater as shared experience and shared artistic object, which puts actors into a different relationship with an audience, even to the extent of direct address, as in Shakespeare. His process--in the instance described to us--began with table work for two weeks, the sole purpose of which seemed to be the neutral, "stripped down", but deliberate speaking of text for its overt clarity, and the development of a way of being which could bring the actor himself or herself directly in contact with the the text, rather than through the filter of character. From there, new, more open questions can be considered while staging.

It was interesting then to hear about Reinhardt's obsession with "bringing the actor and the audience together" much earlier in the last century. To me, the most intriguing idea of his was "the bigger the audience, the better its quality," meaning, I presume, that the contact an audience has with performers is enhanced by a larger number of spectators. He obsessively redesigned and renovated theaters to accommodate large-scale productions, in effect making each project site-specific within each theater. Football, anyone?