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.

This is everything from: How long has she been ill? Does she have friends? Is he religious? How did they meet one another? I want to create a space where there are daily artistic responses to the questions; videos, musical elements, diary writing from a defined perspective, performative or improvisational studies, video recordings, installations, object studies, poetry writing and many other approaches. We answer rather simple questions with what we do best – artistic practice - instead of having a pseudo-psychological discussion club.

I’m excited and so are the actors.

After this experience, I know that this is something I have to work with – I must share this with the students who are in the director programme.

“When it's interesting to address the phenomenon of leadership, this is due to the assumption that leadership plays a crucial role in the performance of the business. Developing leadership is thus about increasing the requirements for the business to appropriately and effectively identifying and fulfilling the objectives and tasks, which are its raison d'être. Leadership development is therefore not the development of leaders.

Leadership development is the development of the enterprise’s management processes. The enterprise’s management processes are thus the focal point and shall designate the vital link between the management and organisation.” Molin, Jan (2003) – Organisation og ledelse – i et udviklingsperspektiv "Leading capacity" Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen

‍Molin writes in the above quote about leadership and leadership development, I am in my position responsible for the director programme at the Danish Performing Arts School, where I organise both the directors education and teach students. I encountered Molin’s text during my diploma programme in arts and cultural management.

The gap between the leadership role and the role of the teacher is not great in my eyes.

The director programme has long been characterised by teaching methods where the director’s role is seen as the top of the hierarchy. This education has been based on the director’s selection of dramatic material, analysis and concept development (often in collaboration with the set designer) is conducted by the director alone; it has been particularly Stanislavski-based methods that have been applied to text-based material. Anne Bogart’s devising and viewpoints methods and other performative approaches have been used for non-text-based performances. Both methods are so far good and useful and should be retained in the programme. But the methods position themselves in relation to each other. In the sense that one method creates a certain kind of theatre (institutional text-based dramatic arts) and the other a different kind (site-specific theme-based dramatic arts).

When Molin writes that “it is critical to business performance that leadership development takes place”, this is for me essential development in teaching towards creating a new collaborative practice in the director programme.

Instead of thinking people in a hierarchy, one can adopt the perspective that it is important that there is no hierarchy in the theatre between the different processes and media materials when these need to change. We must move toward a place where the text is not seen as paramount, or the law. The only thing that matters is that all media, all theatrical means, lighting, the space, the play, the text, the sound – that all theatrical means are developed simultaneously and in this way simultaneously strengthen one another, and can be made strong by the performer. It is a process that is being carried forward by the team as a whole, in that each person is trying to strengthen his or her area. Maybe only then is it possible to bring all of these things together; everything that comes later has only an illustrative role. It can only have a structural role, if it is included from the start.

These thoughts have given impetus to developing new teaching methods that are based on the following thoughts of Molin:

‍"A major showdown with the formal management thought is the idea of refraining from substance control. An alternative management law can thus be described as a framework and process control. In such a principle is the managerial challenge in risking letting go of supervision and direct influence on decisions and solutions. The management task is instead to create framework conditions and to facilitate initiatives for the development processes that extend the range of action for co-workers. The rule of thumb here is that the more content is ‘open’; the more you have to manage frameworks and processes. The more leaders leave analysis of assessments and decisions to groups of co-workers; the more they must provide and maintain clear, well-structured and authorised framework conditions for the work.” Molin, Jan (2003) – Organisation og ledelse – i et udviklingsperspektiv "Leading capacity" Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen