Director\'s Vision - Lecture notes 1 PDF

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Professor Peter Sampieri
Lecture on the directors vision from class powerpoint...

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Director’s Vision Examining the stage director’s pre-production process What does a young director need to start directing? ● Material ○ The material you work on is an essential ingredient for a successful and positive directing experience ○ It is the drive to be curious about good plays and good material that separates a great artist from a mediocre one ○ Have a passion to communicate your unique point of view ● Read more plays ○ Don’t think of it as a chore, enjoy the experience ○ Keep a list of plays you want to direct, read, watch, etc ● Attend more productions ○ Don’t limit what you see ○ There are affordable options ○ Not everything has to be broadway to be worthwhile ● Build your tribe ○ Who is in your community? ○ Who do you share artistic values with? ○ Try and list all the people you would like to work with in the next 6 months, 1 year, and see if you can motivate them to work on something with you ○ Can you think of 4 people you’d like to create with right now? ● Talk about theatre ○ Always be talking about what plays excite you with everyone. Talking passionately about what you love about theatre is good practice for communication Suppose you’ve found the right material - a play you care about passionately… now what? ● Scratching ○ FIrst you must generate  an idea ○ Then you have to retain  it ○ Then you have to inspect  it ○ Finally, you have to transform  it ● Read the play, again ○ Read the play between 10 and 30 times ○ Before you start rehearsing, read the play at least 7-10 times ○ Read it for enjoyment first, as if you were an audience seeing it for the first time ● Start with a box ○ You are looking for the right container as a director, some call this a concept ○ The tricky part is that it’s a misleading word. A play is already full of concepts and ideas ○ What you need is a context ○ If you think of it as a context, that can hold the ideas of the play together, that would be more useful

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Don’t subordinate what the play is trying to say, it’s original purpose and message ○ Don’t lose the play all together ● Begin filling the box ○ Whatever reminds you of the play can end up in the box, provided you stay aware and sensitive to the play’s core messages ○ Whatever the play doesn’t tell you outright can end up in the box, such as dramaturgy ○ Dramaturgy ■ The craft or techniques of dramatic composition ■ Research or evidence into the social, historical, and political context of a play’s given circumstances ● Types of Director’s research ○ Become familiar with the entire body of the playwright’s work ○ Conduct research into the period to determine the socio-economic-political outlook of the time ○ Read up on the biography of the playwright and critical response to the play ○ Look into a play’s production history ○ Conduct field research or “interviews” ● Keep Filling the Box ○ Don’t stop merely with the analytical information you can gather ○ Start to free associate on the themes and ideas of the play by collecting images and media Script analysis and tablework ● First rehearsal speech ○ Elevator pitch ○ Communicate your love of the play and invite people into the process ● Finding the dramatic action ○ Action is not stage business/movement or physical activity ○ Action is not the plot ○ Difference between plot and narrative ■ Plot is “the queen died, the king died” ■ Narrative is “the queen died, the king died from a broken heart” ■ Has a how and why ■ Has Causation ○ In the Poetics, described as the fundamental “movement of the spirit” ○ Dramatic action is fundamentally concerned with change ○ AS directors we need to identify the moments in story which great change happens ○ And we must develop, like always, a point of view about that change ○ Sometimes, it helps to use what directors call “an action sentence” ■ Faced with _____ [character, probably the protagonist] chooses ________ and discovers _______.

■ Try using this action sentence with your grimms fairytale There is usually a discovery right before the climax, this is the most important part How does this idea begin to translate into breaking down a text? ○ Examine the most basic guts of any play ■ Given circumstances ○ Given Circumstances ■ Environmental Facts ■ Past action ■ Polar attitudes ● How the character believes in the beginning of the story vs. how they do at the end ■ Dialogue is the only viable source of given circumstances in a play ○ Dramatic Action ■ IS not activity ■ IS reciprocal ■ Is divided into acts and scenes ■ Is subdivided into units and beats ■ Is further subdivided into lines and moments ○ Characters in a play ■ Are the embodiment of action ■ Are simple and/or complex ■ Are revealed by the action ■ We are what we do ○ Characters are defined: ■ By desire ■ By will ■ By moral stance ■ By decorum ■ By mood-intensity ○

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