Radosavljevic The Heterarchical Director - DR manuscript

The Heterarchical Director: A model of authorship for the twenty-first century Duška Radosavljević David Bradby and David Williams explore a range of functions emblematic of the twentieth century theatre director. Besides the authorial function of ‘scenic writing’, they list those of curator (1988, 6 ), ‘privileged spectator’ (1988, 14), but also ‘prophet, teacher and founder of schools; the revolutionary agitator working for a change in the whole society; even the priest and organiser of sacred mysteries’ (1988, 22). They further emphasise the directorial ability to ‘establish a working relationship […] in which the actors believe that they can grow, emotionally and spiritually’, which they frame as a personality trait characteristic of the ‘director as a guru’ (1988, 11). Brook and Grotowski are explicitly designated as examples of guru figures. Repeatedly, Bradby and Williams foreground the authorial function of the director as a strained one, as it brings into focus the contested relationship between director and playwright. Similarly, most of the directors profiled in their study are presented as figureheads at the helm of their respective ensembles rather than mere enablers of the actors’ emotional and spiritual growth. Both of these gestures highlight the historical prevalence of the directors’ pursuit of authority. Significantly, Bradby and Williams’s inadvertent canonisation of seven mostly Western European directors occurred in the aftermath of 1968 but in advance of 1989. The oldest (Littlewood) was born in 1914, the youngest (Wilson) in the early 1940s. By the time of the book’s inception in the 1980s, all were well established in terms of their international stature, and some had entered the late stages of their careers. Given David Bradby’s specialism in French theatre, the book’s promotion of the concept of ‘scenic writing’ (via Roger Planchon) could be seen as an extension of the 1950s film auteur theory to the theatrical sphere. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’s respective essays on authorship (‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘What is an Author’), published in the aftermath of the turbulent events of 1968, ushered in a poststructuralist view of authorship as a relative category, further extending the questioning of authority in both art and society in the wake of the political protests of the 1960s. This had an effect on theatre-making practice, too. In his book Direction (2012), Simon Shepherd records a move in the 1970s towards political theatre and collective creation; by 1989, directing had become a ‘dirty word’ – ‘bad, right-wing, authoritarian’ (Declan Donellan quoted in Shepherd 2012, 97). Thirty years on from the publication of Directors’ Theatre, the landscape has evolved further. Today, we are confronted with a broader variety of directorial functions and processes. Focusing on the case study of Improbable Theatre’s directing tandem Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, this essay will trace another lineage of the contemporary director, rooted in the paradigm of live improvisation and facilitative directing associated with the practice of Keith Johnstone. Drawing on the notion of heterarchy as a principle of self-organisation, The notion of heterarchy has been deployed in a number of scientific fields including neurophysiology and cybernetics (McCulloch 1945), archaeology and anthropology (Crumley 1995) and governance and international relations (Hedlund 1986). The latter perspective – originally applied to multinational corporations – has been particularly useful in problematising globalisation. I shall suggest that the twenty-first century director can be characterised not only by an altered approach to authorship, but also to leadership and interpersonal relationships. Directors’ theatre and leadership: From authority to heterarchy The heritage of critical theories of postmodernism and deconstruction, which have emerged in the aftermath of 1968, and which have been widely exploited across the humanities, including the analysis of theatre direction, have more recently been critically reviewed. Exemplarily, French social constructivist philosopher of science Bruno Latour even questioned his entire life’s work in an article titled ‘Why has critique ran out of steam?’ (2004), and followed it up by revising his methodological approach in his book Reassembling the Social (2005). Reiterating the relevance of his previously proposed actor-network theory (ANT), he further highlighted the notion of a ‘network’ as a dynamic analytical tool. Elsewhere, he pointed towards Tomás Saraceno’s 2008 artwork Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider's Web as a visual illustration of the concept of network, further augmented by Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of a ‘sphere’ (Latour 2011; see Fig. 1). Visually, the order of this artwork is a heterarchy as the orderings of local spheres defy hierarchical order. Latour sees the two concepts of networks and spheres as being in ‘contradistinction’ with each other: while networks are good at describing long-distance connections, ‘spheres are good for describing local, fragile and complex “atmospheric conditions”’. However, both are essential for ‘registering the originality of […] “globalization”’ (ibid.). Saraceno’s work therefore brings together a number of perspectives, scientific and philosophical in order to address problems of our time. The main point of its heterarchy is that it has the potential ‘to complicate the hierarchy of voices [making] the conversation between disciplines move ahead in a way that is more representative of the twenty-first century’ (ibid.). From a twenty-first century perspective, the ‘second generation’ directors profiled in Bradby and Williams’s book may be characterised as a liminal generation which saw the appeal of challenging hierarchical power structures but which found it hard to resist personally embodying traditional notions of ‘authority’ and leadership. Interestingly, Shepherd notes that ‘[i]n the narratives by directors about their own developing technique from Stanislavski onwards, there is a repeated statement that directors learn not to be autocratic’ and that ‘[l]earning not to be autocratic is to do with growing up as a director’ (2012, 99). A twist to this is provided, according to Shepherd, when a director undertakes the role of a trainer. We should not exclude the possibility that some ‘third generation’ directors of the present, such as those featured in this chapter’s case study, may assume a directorial style that is analogous to a pedagogical one. The twenty-first century director is likely to assume a relationship to her or his cast that is more often reminiscent of a coach or enabler rather than an imparter of expertise, in the spirit of Jacques Rancière’s ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ (1991) – thereby seeking to create a heterarchical rather than hierarchical relationship. In this respect it is important to note that even though the notion of heterarchy privileges horizontal organisation over the hierarchical verticality, it still does not function as an exact antonym to ‘hierarchy’. Instead, it is often associated with the notion of ‘complexity’. Heterarchy can consist of a network of hierarchies, as in Saraceno’s artwork. Carole Crumley describes ‘heterarchy’ as ‘the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways’ (1995, 3). It is a system by which power is dispersed, ‘shared’ or ‘counterpoised’, rather than ‘permanently ranked relative to one another’ (ibid.). According to Crumley, heterarchy as a principle is particularly observable within the study of self-organising systems, from snowflakes to human beings; as such it ‘has set the stage for renewed collaboration among physical, biological, and social scientists’ (ibid.). Both Crumley and Latour thus share an ecological perspective characterising the notion of heterarchy. In the context of this argument, a notion of so-called ‘eco-leadership’ will eventually emerge as a particularly relevant alternative to the twentieth-century idea of ‘director as a guru’ that Bradby and Williams pointed out. Echoing their list of attributes, Shepherd (2012, 100-102) identifies a number of further roles that contemporary directors undertake (or self-identify as). These include facilitator (Robert Lepage, Marianne Weems), conductor (Robert Lepage, John Fox), impresario/creative producer (John Fox), agent in ‘dispersed directing’ (collectives such as Shunt), custodian of an atmosphere / manager of the process of imagination (Chris Goode), and agent in ‘parallel directing’ (Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle of Punchdrunk). Parallel directing as opposed to co-directing, means that two directors ‘research and cast together but then each tackle different aspects of the production’ (Shepherd 2012,104). ‘Facilitation’, according to Shepherd, is about establishing a framework within which the actors will ‘engage with the material and have their ideas’; for him, this notion has the potential to ‘efface the word and the concept of “director”’ (2012, 100). In his discussion of the director as ‘conductor’, he arrives at the roles of ‘workshop leader’, ‘community project leader’ and ‘teacher’ as variations of the ‘conductor’ on the basis that a conductor ‘elicits’, ‘reveals’ and ‘draws out’ material ‘which is already in the person’. In these cases, often found in pedagogical or applied theatre contexts, the emphasis is on the process rather than the outcome: ‘[w]hen directing modulates, via its interest in facilitation, into leading, The implied distinction between the terms ‘directing’ and ‘leading’ is interesting here although I think Shepherd is using the term ‘leading’ not in the sense of ‘leadership’ that the present text takes up, but in the sense of ‘workshop leading’. the importance of the finished artwork diminishes’ (2012, 101). This is an attractively neat definition, though one that I would not wholly agree with. For a start, it dismisses the substantial evidence to the contrary of its own example of Robert Lepage. Secondly, it appears to prioritise (manifest) authorship of the mise en scène over the (latent) authorship of a working structure. Shepherd’s ‘director’ is implied as the ultimate author of the aesthetic content of performance, whereas the ‘facilitator’ only provides a creative framework to encourage the participants’ creativities. I suggest that this intrinsic understanding of what a director/theatre-maker is, is based on premises that remain as yet unquestioned – such as that the aesthetic value of an artwork is necessarily commensurate with assertion of individual authority. I find it striking that successful directors are seldom really believed when they appear not interested in claiming individual authorship. Helen Freshwater exemplarily analyses Simon McBurney’s repeated relinquishing of personal authority in favour of his collaborators, and attributes it variously to ‘individual disposition’ and his primary self-definition as an actor rather than a director (2008, 189). These factors remain; McBurney’s name has certainly emerged as more prominent in relation to Complicite than any of the other co-founders. I worry that the scholars’ tendency to dismiss a director’s renunciation of sole authority as a kind of false modesty deflects attention from the intricacies of theatrical authorship which is by its nature more often polyvalent, and concerned with collaborative or non-literary creative processes. Freshwater takes a different perspective in her rehearsal-based analysis of Theatre O’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in Mermikides and Smart’s collection Devising in Process (2010). Interestingly for us, Mermikides and Smart highlight within their study an emerging model of artistic leadership consisting of a ‘core of two’. Half of the companies featured in their book happen to favour this model, which the editors interpret as ‘the desire on the one hand for group structures that enable collaboration and to some degree resist sole directorial authority, and on the other, the economic difficulty of continuously sustaining a large group of people. (2010, 17). Elsewhere, Mermikides (2010) provides us with another pertinent investigation into the nature of directorial authority. I use the term ‘authority’ for convenience here as a useful conflation of the notions of ‘authorship’ and ‘leadership’ although this article in principle wishes to challenge hierarchical connotations of the term ‘authority’. In her case study of Forced Entertainment, she argues that despite its resolute rejection of theatricality and implicit exemplification of live art, this particular company still manifests features of the post-war ‘directors’ theatre’ as charted by Bradby and Williams. Here we detect a customary binary between ‘directors’ theatre’ and the performance/live art model of authorship: The former is characterised by ‘calculated intentionality’, ‘individual authorship’ and ‘artistic virtuosity’ (2010, 105) as well as an imposition of the directorial vision and authorial agency in the fixing of the performance text, while the latter is characterised by a rejection of hierarchy and adoption of a system of compositional rules which facilitates a devolved – as opposed to centralised – model of authorship. While her observations of Forced Entertainment’s creative process reveal a non-hierarchical mode of working, there is still the significant editorial role of Tim Etchells to account for. Hence, Mermikides concludes that Forced Entertainment ‘operates a hybrid model of theatre-making’ (2010, 118), a pairing of ‘anti-hierarchical group creation with the precision and rigour […] of an individual vision’ (ibid, 119). But is it not possible that the twenty-first century director might have begun to leave precisely this Romantic pursuit of individual authorship behind? Whereas their role might still involve using text as a departure point (as in the case of McBurney) or fixing the text generated in rehearsal (as in the case of Etchells), could we not suppose that the textual aspect of their work, and the associated model of authority, can at times be secondary to these directors’ interest in the ensemble-related notions of complicity, collective authority or ‘pragmatic socialism’ (Forced Entertainment’s Robin Arthur quoted in Mermikides 2010, 118)? In my ensemble research (2013a), I encountered examples of directorless ensembles, devolved artistic directorship and reluctant leaders. Subsequently in Theatre-Making (2013), I investigated director-, actor-, playwright- and document-led models of authorship, as well as the increasingly prevalent trend of audiences participating in processes of co-creation. Whether we call the latter form of performance ‘participatory’, ‘socially engaged’, ‘one-to-one’ or ‘immersive’, one could argue that these works share a primary concern with the inner structure of the artwork, such that the audience’s role can be meaningfully accommodated into its fabric. In other words, what we are witnessing is a growing interest in dramaturgical construction, where dramaturgy is understood as a spectrum of potential systems neither restricted to dramatic theatre nor performance art per se. This foregrounds a type of director whose genealogy might still be traceable back to the heritage of directors’ theatre: dedicated to the idea of ensemble, though not the idea of hierarchy. I will call this director ‘the heterarchical director’. The heterarchical director, as the following case study seeks to demonstrate, predicates the success of the creative process on the quality of interpersonal relationships and is comfortable sharing their authority with other collaborators and members of the ensemble. In the case of Improbable’s directing duo Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, this particular form of collective authority is drawn from Keith Johnston’s approach to improvisation, in combination with a number of other techniques that all aim towards fostering collective creative authority. Although potentially relevant insights into this topic can be gained from considerations of socio-economic context both in philosophical and political terms, For example, Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds: Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More than the Sum of the Parts, Palgrave, 2018 offers valuable insights into various conceptions and unique values of artistic collaboration when viewed through the lens of economic theory. The writing of this chapter predated both the publication of Savage and Symonds’ book and the #Metoo moment both of which might have influenced the writing of the chapter in different ways. this case study will be restricted to considerations of creative process and organisational behaviour in rehearsal. Collective Authority: Improbable Theatre Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson met in 1985 during a workshop led by Keith Johnstone. Simpson had trained at the Webber Douglas school in London with Viola Spolin’s student Andy Harmon, and has been one of the Comedy Store Players since the late 1980s. McDermott had studied Drama, Dance and Music at Middlesex University and worked as an actor and director, most notably with Julia Bardsley as Dereck and Dereck. Following this first encounter, they continued working together and then founded Improbable in 1996 with designer Julian Crouch and producer Nick Sweeting. Simpson’s 1996 production of McDermott’s fantastical memoir 70 Hill Lane won major fringe awards in the UK, USA and Egypt. Following the international success of their Shockheaded Peter in 2002, McDermott also directed his and Simpson’s stage adaptation of Douglas Hickox’ film Theatre of Blood at the National Theatre in 2005, as well as Philip Glass’s Satyagraha for the ENO and Metropolitan Theatre, New York (2007/8), and The Addams Family on Broadway (2009). The company has used a variety of theatre-making approaches including puppetry, adaptation, storytelling and even classical text – as in their 2015 The Tempest, but Improbable’s name in itself carries the suggestion that improvisation is the fundamental aspect of their identity. Their production of Keith Johnstone's Lifegame has remained in its repertoire since its first run in 1998. Julian Crouch’s departure from Improbable in 2012 has inevitably had an effect on the company’s aesthetic, however their values and political commitment remain consistent. According to McDermott (in Radosavljevic 2013a), a more all-encompassing aspect of the company’s philosophy – which also explains their significant cultural activism through the annual Devoted and Disgruntled conferences – is an interest in ensemble. Devoted and Disgruntled is founded on the self-organising principles of Harrison Owen’s Open Space system of conferencing. Its key principles, which are often posted on Improbable’s rehearsal room walls, are: ‘whenever it starts is the right time’, ‘whoever comes are the right people’, ‘whatever happens is the only thing that could have’, ‘when it’s over, it’s over’ and ‘the law of two feet’ – ‘which means you don’t stay anywhere if you are not learning or contributing or if you are not happy where you are’ (ibid, 202). Other influences on their directorial approach include Michael Chekhov’s actor-training technique and Arnold Mindell’s form of Jungian transpersonal psychology known as ‘Process Work’. Their 2017 project Lost Without Words was aimed at giving visibility to actors aged 70 and above. Although it was not Improbable’s debut at the National Theatre, it was the first fully improvised show programmed by the venue. The project had been prompted by a mostly neglected lived experience problem of diminishing working opportunities for older actors. Intended to enable a group of actors in their 70s and 80s to go on stage again without a script, Lost Without Words had been in preparation for two and a half years in which two fortnight-long workshops had taken place with the company. In January 2017, Improbable commenced working towards their production with six actors: Georgine Anderson (89), Caroline Blakiston (84), Anna Calder-Marshall (70), Lynn Farleigh (74), Charles Kay (86) and Tim Preece (78), as well as their regular collaborators, musician Steven Edis, lighting designer Colin Grenfell and stage manager Fana Cioban. Assistant Director Caroline Williams, allocated to the production by the National Theatre, had worked with Improbable before. The first week of rehearsal took place at the New Diorama Theatre in London and culminated with public showings, designed to let the actors practice their newly acquired improvisation skills in front of semi-invited audiences. Following a three-week break, rehearsals recommenced at Jerwood studios before transferring to the National in late February. Each week of rehearsals ended in public performances at the New Diorama; the show then opened on 4 March 2017 at the Dorfman Theatre, running continuously until 15 March. The performances took place on the set of another National production, My Country: A Work in Progress (designed by Katrina Lindsay), although additional props and furniture were brought in and made available for the needs of improvisation. I watched ten rehearsals in this period, and five performances, three at the New Diorama and two at the National, including the final one. I also wrote a blog in the run up to the second week of rehearsal (http://weareimprobable.tumblr.com/post/157275103618/lost-without-words-an-observers-experience-of), and conducted an interview with McDermott and Simpson in a lunch break on 20 February. My rehearsal observation was initially focused on McDermott and Simpson’s mode of directorial leadership. I was interested in how they would share their job between them and how they would work on creating an ensemble. I had not anticipated the extent to which the answers to these questions would in fact be implicit in the company’s own methodology of improvisation. Consequently, it seems important to delve a little deeper into this topic in order to demonstrate how the values of heterarchical leadership are reflected in their deployment of improvisation. Improvisation: beyond the binary of directing vs devising Despite its rich history as a performance genre in its own right, ranging from Italian Commedia dell’ arte to Chicago’s Second City and London’s Showstoppers!, from the perspective of theatre studies, improvisation is most often considered as a form of popular entertainment or as an auxiliary and pedagogical technique at best. In the twentieth century, improvisation as a rehearsal method has most often been linked to Stanislavsky. The practice of devising is sometimes associated with, and sometimes strongly disassociated from improvisation. Govan, Nicholson and Normington note that ‘devised theatre is often characterised by its emphasis on improvisation’ (2007, 47), whereas Heddon and Milling trace one possible genealogy of devising as a reaction against Stanislavskian improvisation (2006, 33). According to Mermikides, Forced Entertainment have even ditched the term ‘improvisation’ in favour of the less theatrical ‘trial’, although they do use the methodology in rehearsal (2010, 118). Improvisation in performance can be seen to have much in common with live and performance art such as the emphasis on liveness and presence, or the blurring of the boundary between character and performer. In this way improvisation can be seen to belong in the very space between the tradition of ‘directors’ theatre’ and live/performance art and therefore problematises this apparent binary. We encounter improvisation within Bradby and Williams’s study, too. Alongside movement, improvisation is noted as ‘the key to Littlewood’s working method’ (1988, 31), and as a ‘working method [that] distinguishes Mnouchkine from most other directors (1988, 88-9). Grotowski is reported to have preferred the terms ‘study’ or ‘sketch’ to ‘improvisation’, ‘which he feels to have been denuded of meaning by an American avant-garde’ (1988, 265). Improvisation is further seen as a ‘fundamental principle of Peter Brook’s experimental practice’ (1988, 161) particularly at his Centre International de Recherches Theatrales (CIRT) during the early 1970s. His research, specifically while travelling through West Africa in the second year of CIRT, was concerned with exploring the nature of ritual, spontaneity, ‘the sense of the present’, the question of what has to be prepared and what cannot be prepared, and how to appropriately support the ‘free play of the actor’s creative energy’ without imposing ideas (1988, 160-61). Contrary to external perception of Brook as an authoritative director, he is here reported to have recognised ‘that an actor who brings an openness and conviction to his work can penetrate much deeper towards a position of truth than is ever attainable through directorial imposition’ (1988, 165). Even if Brook’s own research was purposefully informed by a variety of cultural traditions, most of these practices of improvisation are rooted within a Western (i.e. Stanislavskian) paradigm of theatre-making by virtue of being concerned with a ‘pursuit of truth’ in performance. Another important lineage of contemporary improvisatory practice can be linked to the evolving interest in the significance of play within developmental psychology, education theory, sociology and theatre. In Europe, the work of Russian social psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Austrian-American psychologist and founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno (1889-1974) were particularly influential. In Britain, the key figures were Peter Slade (1912-2004), the founder of dramatherapy as a discipline, Brian Way (1923-2006), the pioneer of Young People’s Theatre, and actor-teacher Dorothy Heathcote (1926-2011). In the United States, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey (1859-1952) is often referenced, and, in the context of improvisation specifically, sociologist and social worker Neva Boyd (1876-1963) emerges as direct influence on the American acting coach Viola Spolin (1906-1994). Within theatre studies, Spolin and the British-born writer, director and teacher Keith Johnstone (1933-) are particularly distinguished twentieth century advocates of improvisation as a working method, albeit in different contexts. Spolin’s methodology emerged from her community work with children rooted in the progressive idea of the value of child’s play in education. It was further developed and applied to professional theatre by her son Paul Sills, the founder (in 1959) of the Chicago improvisation troupe Second City, and formulated in her 1963 book Improvisation for the Theater. Keith Johnstone’s work developed out of a genuine interest in fostering creativity by tapping into the unconscious mind and by deploying a self-made dialectical approach to learning which he called ‘contrariness’ (Johnstone 1979/89, 14). He was an integral figure within George Devine’s Royal Court, performing a pedagogical, intellectual and advisory role that would today be described as the company dramaturg. His 1979 book Impro (which also references Spolin) remains a key text on the subject; his troupes the Theatre Machine and the Loose Moose have entered the annals of (alternative) theatre history, and his particular system of improvisation has gained followers around the world. In 1971, Johnstone and the Theatre Machine were invited by Eugenio Barba to teach his students at Odin Teatret. His legacy would certainly qualify Johnstone as a ‘guru’, if only this designation would fit the principles of his working ethos. His biographer Theresa Robbins Dudeck in fact designates him a ‘reluctant guru’ instead (2013, 1969-70). He was a writer and teacher who discovered theatre when he saw the premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in London in 1954. Equally by accident he became a script reader for the newly founded Royal Court in 1956 and quickly progressed to the position of the head of the literary department. George Devine, the Court’s founding Artistic Director, was strongly influenced, via his teacher and collaborator Michel St Denis, by the continental view of theatre as a tool for social enlightenment. As a result, Johnstone’s pedagogical impulses found a fertile ground in Devine’s theatre. The Writers’ Group, founded by Devine and run by his associate Bill Gaskill, soon took on the format of a laboratory in which classes in mime, mask and improvisation were taught and dramaturgical problems were being solved by practical enactment of scenes. This was mostly a result of Johnstone’s suggestion of a ‘no-discussion policy’ (Robbins Dudeck 2013,42), a rule that subsequently characterised his teaching too. Though he also directed new works at the Court, Johnstone certainly excelled as a pedagogue and was one of the key teachers in the Royal Court Theatre Studio when it was founded in 1963. As his classes in improvisation were usually much more successful than his public work, Johnstone was keen to take improvisation out of the classroom into the public sphere as a theatre form in its own right. Improvised performances were, however, prohibited in the UK until the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office in 1968; nevertheless, in 1965, the Lord Chamberlain approved a children’s show by Johnstone called Clowning, described as ‘a lecture with an introduction, audience participation and […] status exercises for clowns’ (Robbins Dudeck 2013, 66). Following this breakthrough, The Theatre Machine, an improvisation troupe that emerged out of Johnstone’s pedagogical work at the Royal Court, pioneered its own form of live performance. This usually consisted of public demonstrations of games, exercises and spontaneous narrative construction of material from scratch, with Johnstone coaching from the wings or from the side of the stage. Unlike some other forms of improvisation in performance, Johnstone’s method precludes use of pre-existing narrative formulas and stock characters. Following a period of teaching at RADA and significant international touring with the troupe, Johnstone eventually moved to Canada in the mid-1970s; based at the University of Calgary, he developed his system of working further and continued to influence new generations of theatre-makers. In the opening pages of Impro, Johnstone outlined his response to seeing Stanislavskian realism in the Moscow Art Theatre’s Cherry Orchard in 1963. Everyone had chosen the ‘strongest possible motives’ for their actions; the effect was theatrical but not lifelike. In the spirit of ‘contrariness’, Johnstone wondered what would be the weakest possible motives, and this led him to devise his first status exercises. ‘Status’ is the subject of the first of four chapters of Impro, followed by Spontaneity, Narrative Skills and Masks and Trance. According to his biographer Robbins Dudeck, however, Johnstone did use ‘everything by Stanislavsky’ on his reading lists at Calgary (2013, 102) as well as The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art (1950) by Nikolai Gorchakov and Zen and the Art of Archery (1953) by Eugen Herrigel. Taoism had also been influential on Johnstone as a young teacher, especially the ideas on invisible leadership contained in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. This echoes Brook’s interests within roughly the same period: ‘Brook suggests that, now that the shared possibility of ritual has been lost to us, the only alternative is through “a more intense search moment by moment for a quality that is the sense of the present, of each moment, in the Zen sense”.’ (Bradby and Williams 1988, 160-61) Robbins Dudeck traces interesting connections between some of these texts and Johnstone’s own improvisation system, such as his techniques for silencing ‘the verbal mind’ – ‘the judgmental intellect, the censor, the voice in the head’ (2013, 103) – drawn from Herrigel, and his form of ‘fantastic realism’ resonant of Vakhtangov. Finally, it is perhaps also worth noting that Johnstone’s legacy includes internationally renowned Theatresports TM, and by extension the TV show Whose Line is it Anyway. A model of ‘Eco Leadership’: Rehearsing Lost Without Words Improbable’s working methodology takes Johnstone’s system of improvisation as its basis which is further augmented by other strategies for cultivating individual and group creativity in the rehearsal room. As mentioned, McDermott and Simpson feel strongly about the importance of ensemble work. Simpson believes his primary job as a director is attention to interpersonal relationships: ‘when one works on the company, the piece takes care of itself’. Similarly, McDermott suggests that what the audience responds to in a piece from, say, Moscow Arts Theatre, is the community feeling engendered by the company – ‘the story of them as an ensemble’ (Interview, 2017). Improbable’s rehearsal process therefore entails two interlinked spheres of activity: a) ensemble-building and b) work towards performance. Inspired by Owen’s Open Space technology, the daily ritual of a ‘check in’ and ‘check out circle’ discloses key principles of their ensemble-building (see Fig. 2). At the beginning of each day of Lost Without Words rehearsals, everyone present in the room (including myself) was invited to sit in a circle, and say as much or as little as they liked about what they felt or thought at the time while passing around a specific object chosen by the directors. When the round was completed, the object was placed in the middle of the circle and picked up again by each person wanting to speak in turn. This was important as it stopped people speaking over each other, and at the same time removed the tension of not speaking at all. The same process was repeated at the end of the day; if time was short, the ‘check out circle’ would feature everyone sharing just one word to express how they felt. This formation which placed everyone at an equidistant position to the centre seemed particularly important to the directors. It also facilitated an open and honest discussion of any challenges that arose. Although it seems at odds with Johnstone’s ‘no discussion’ principle, the structured nature of the circle had the benefit of clearing the air when needed, without ever replacing the proactive element of the creative work itself, or descending into mere gossip. It also allowed the directors to place themselves in an equitable relationship with everyone else in the room while preserving a professional – and, if needed, compassionate – demeanour. It seems vital that the project itself was consistently billed as a ‘theatrical experiment’, and the directors referred to the rehearsals as ‘research’. This choice of vocabulary, in keeping with Johnstone’s improvisation system, aimed to legitimise the notion of ‘failure’ as part of the process. The generation of actors involved had not been exposed to improvisation in their formative years, and some cast members confessed that they still contended with a strong negative bias against the form coming from their peers. In this respect the directors assumed the role of teachers, although as Simpson remarked in the interview, this was no different to any other directorial process he has been involved in; for him, directing is equivalent to teaching. In the process McDermott occasionally brought up and conspicuously assumed the role of the ‘bossy director’, as he called it, when he felt he needed to make a deliberate intervention. He explained that the ‘cartoon bossy director’ usually comes out when he feels ‘passionate about something’, while Simpson noted that the strategy is useful when the director needs the actors to ‘take something on trust’, and the only way something can be understood is through experiencing it (Interview, 2017). Subsequently I realised that this was part of another interpersonal process between the ensemble members. Occasionally, within the check in circle, the actors would bring up issues in a performative way, as if they were quoting themselves. Just like McDermott’s drawing attention to his actions in a self-ironical way, some actors were voicing their concerns ‘in role’ or speaking of themselves in the third person. This process of naming, voicing and underlining potential roles in the room (‘the person offended by a particular representation of old age’, ‘the actor misunderstanding the director’ etc.) was in fact directly drawn from Mindell’s Process Work. It became a useful technique for acknowledging the group dynamics and removing potential tensions from the creative process. Indeed, the rehearsal process was frequently perceived as ‘therapeutic’ by participants. One actress further noted that McDermott and Simpson came across as ‘director-healers’, albeit in different ways: for Simpson the need to be kind seemed at the forefront of his relationship with the actors, and for McDermott ‘the need to say the truth (which can hurt, in a good way)’ (Rehearsal Diary). By extension, the ability to articulate oneself became a significant aspect of the artistic process. McDermott explained the way in which he combines the work of Michael Chekhov on creating atmosphere with Mindell’s Process Work (and its variation ‘World Work’), concerning groups: Let’s say the atmosphere is what exists in the space between us (and the atmospheres of different places have a profound effect on us). [...] Something that I learnt from World Work is that the atmosphere of a space in relation to people and organisations is created by the roles that are in the space. (2013a, 207) This particular explanation – with its emphasis on atmospheres and relationality – brings to mind Saraceno’s ‘Galaxies’ again, though in this case, it is not necessarily the artwork that represents a ‘network’ but the process by which the artwork is arrived at. The atmosphere, as McDermott explains further, can be created by those present and also by the ‘ghost roles’ of those absent but frequently mentioned. For example, in a rehearsal room, the audience or the critics would be the ‘ghost roles’: ‘So if an atmosphere becomes difficult or oppressive, one of the ways to shift or relieve that is to embody those roles and […] say “OK, what does this role want to say?”’ (ibid, 208). The check in and check out circles thus became a place in which the opportunity was created to name fears, problems and ghost roles. Rather than imposing this on the group, an atmosphere was created – by example of the directors themselves and their regular collaborators – in which this became the norm. Another important aspect of Mindell’s approach apparent in the process was becoming attuned to the subconscious of the others. This was achieved by a gentle invitation to the group to share their dreams as part of the check in, and sometimes a dream would be used as a springboard for something in rehearsal. For example, an actor shared his dream about being on stage and wondering how long he could go without speaking a word; this was turned into an exercise in rehearsal. Within this established working atmosphere, the main focus of the performance-related rehearsal work was to instil the key technical principles of improvisation: the ideas of ‘saying yes’ to offers, becoming comfortable with ‘failure’, and fostering spontaneity by practicing ‘being awake in the moment’. The vocabulary used by the company was drawn from Johnstone’s work, and very often the simple mantra of ‘slow down’ or ‘take your time’ was particularly effective for the actors otherwise afraid of boring an audience by being silent onstage. The actors’ vocal and physical competence was certainly a strength not possessed by many improvisers; however, their habitual relationship to the dramatic tradition was seen as something that needed addressing. For example, the actors’ impulse was to say ‘no’ in order to facilitate a dramatic notion of conflict in a scene, or they would get bogged down in what a character needed to know in order to be plausible. Ultimately, their tendency would be to execute a scene verbally where physical action would in fact be more appropriate. Instead of consciously creating conflict, the actors were encouraged to embrace each other’s offers as a means of getting themselves ‘in trouble’. Instead of ‘cancelling’ each other’s offers, ‘hedging’ (delaying commitment to any specifics) or just engaging in ‘gossip’, they were encouraged to be brave and leap into situations that would seem unsafe or counter-intuitive in life. All these and the following are examples of Johnstone’s terminology applied in rehearsal. Working in pairs, the actors were to recognise ‘routines’ that set in and interrupt them in order to get the scene going. When the musician was present, he would often mark those moments of interruption or dramaturgical ‘tilts’ to note a change of atmosphere or help the action along. The actors were further required to ‘be obvious’ in their choice of character and situation rather than attempting to be too original and clever; it is axiomatic for Johnstone that ‘the more obvious [the improviser] is, the more original he appears’ (1979/81, 87). The actors were also frequently concerned with questions of character: the absence of character to hide behind; the blurred distinction between acting and performing or character and self in an improvisation (Rehearsal Diary). The directors explained that the improviser operates from within a liminal space between self and character – starting from the self, but that one’s own character can sometimes be suggested or defined by a fellow improviser rather than self. An actress proposed that the resolution to this dilemma was contained in the idea of ‘being’ – and of ‘being present’ in the scene – as opposed to performing or acting. The directors’ original intention was to use the rehearsals and interim showings as a means of letting the actors practice the skills of improvisation and internalising the directorial coaching in preparation for the run at the National. They decided on a framework whereby the actors would sit on the sides of the stage in chairs throughout and the directors would randomly select and arrange pieces of furniture on the stage and set a task to get a scene going. Each evening’s performance would last about an hour and often consist of five scenes. Most scenes were set to be improvised in pairs, although some were set up as solos or full ensemble tasks. In the early showings, the directors would sometimes stop a scene that wasn’t going anywhere and interject with helpful suggestions (instruction to ‘say yes’, or a line of dialogue would be fed in; once or twice the actors were asked to start again). Initially, during the public showings, the directors sat or hovered in the space between the stage and the auditorium, however they eventually yielded to the actors’ request to join them on the sides of the stage. The directors were concerned that their presence might be interpreted as interfering, or that the audience might side with either the actors or the directors, which they wished to avoid. On the other hand, their role as onstage directors often fulfilled a number of dramaturgical functions in shaping the individual scenes or rounding off the evening as a whole. McDermott in particular had the flair for spotting opportunities to provide a thematic structure to the evening’s proceedings by applying the narrative structuring technique Johnstone calls ‘reincorporation’ (1979/81,112), whereby a previously introduced incidental idea or a theme, acquires significance through reincorporation into the piece at an opportune moment. The actors noted this outside input coming from the directors as particularly helpful, repeatedly reiterating their own difficulty in being able to spot such narrative opportunities from the inside. Being a directorial tandem, McDermott and Simpson could individually take it in turns to provide the outside perspective, though in principle they saw this as a role available to anyone in the ensemble. As the directors made the decision to stay on stage with the actors, the outside perspective became a role increasingly taken by the assistant director Caroline Williams. Authorially, the process of shifting directorial perspective could be seen as at least decentralised if not directly heterarchical. However, it could also be argued that the mere presence of more than one director indicated a heterarchical as opposed to a hierarchical structure. Joint directing is common in Improbable’s work; their 1998 co-production of Cinderella with the Lyric Hammersmith even featured four directors: Neil Bartlett, Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson. The absence of an ultimate authority figure at the top of the hierarchy – bolstered by McDermott and Simpson’s willingness to defer to their assistant too – meant that it was harder for anyone in the group to relinquish or deflect their own responsibility for the authorship of the work being created. In addition to the largely overt nature of authorship in improvisation, the paradigmatic rejection of forward planning characteristic of the form and McDermott and Simpson’s unanimity about the system they were using, rendered any potential disagreements between the directors irrelevant and invisible. Ultimately, the principles of the system (of improvisation) were placed at the top of the hierarchy instead of the directors’ personalities or individual agendas. Such emphasis on systemic rather than individual leadership is characteristic of what is, within contemporary leadership studies, termed ‘eco-leadership’. It is associated with the move away from the control/command concept of earlier leadership approaches, towards a paradigm more concerned with natural systems (see Davis 2010; Redekop 2010; Western 2013; Wheatley 2007). Heather Davis (2007) proposes a continuum of ego- to eco-centeredness, towards a leadership model focused on the ‘other’ and concerned with a sustainable use of our energies. Similarly, Simon Western (2013) charts leadership styles, starting with the industrialist controller, via the therapist leader of the 1960s, the messiah of the 1980s to the present-day principle of eco-leadership. Notwithstanding a potentially esoteric provenance of some of their ideas, these writers’ interest in systemic ‘self-organisation’ aligns them with ideas of heterarchy, and one must note a parallel to changing directing styles and approaches in this respect too. Crucial to these writers’ conception of leadership are notions of the network, connectivity and interdependence as well as the all-encompassing ecology. Similarly, Margaret Wheatley’s (2007) notion of ‘self-organisation’, derived from the science of living systems and complexity theory in a manner not dissimilar to Crumley’s, holds that the ‘”basic building blocks” of life are relationships, not individuals’ (2007, 60). Conclusion: Towards new forms of directorial authorship In practice, the heterarchical direction of Lost Without Words, despite its emphasis on democratically and creatively empowering structures, did of course produce some conflicts and challenges. For a start, the actors’ physical limitations were not necessarily superseded by improvisation. Hearing difficulties made it difficult for some to respond ad hoc; frailty and illness got in the way of personal commitment at times. The actors were not all picking up the new skills as quickly and easily as the directors might have hoped at the outset. One of the actors, Charles Kay, decided to leave the project in the last week of rehearsal; in the words of the company, ‘he used the law of two feet’. However, as noted, grievances, doubts and fears were mostly voiced openly within the ‘circle’. The main strength of the process could be seen in the ability of all members within the company to articulate effectively and constructively what was going on in the group at any moment in time. On one occasion, an actress speculated whether the audience might come to ‘laugh at the old people’, which provoked a passionate response from McDermott. On another, a different actress protested against the silent and unsettling arrival of chairs from an old people’s home in the rehearsal room as potential part of the set. On the final day of rehearsal, the mood was clouded as the actors stopped listening to each other within improvisations, possibly because of rising anxiety, leading to the directors’ dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, the situation was effectively resolved within the check out at the end of the day. McDermott and Simpson have considerable clarity about their roles as directors; creating the conditions to empower others to author and self-organise feature strongly in their conception of directorial leadership. However, it is striking that on this occasion they struggled with finding the appropriate way to present this to the audience. Possibly they had overestimated what would be achievable within such a short period of time; additionally, the piece being on at the National Theatre inevitably raised the stakes for everyone involved. Despite their emphasis on ‘being in the here and now’, ‘spontaneity’ and ‘embracing failure’, they eventually decided on a short scripted text that they would present as introduction to each performance. The issue of the directors’ particular decisions around (non)-involvement in the performance raises questions in relation to the known models of ‘sidecoaching’ (Johnstone) or ‘teacher in role’ (Heathcote). Despite their supremely honed skills in improvised performance, McDermott and Simpson opted for their own model of non-involved facilitation. Lee Simpson has commented on this saying that this was ultimately in keeping with their ethos of ‘following rather than directing the flow’. On the one hand, the directors felt confronted with the unique creative challenge to take on this new role of ‘onstage directing’, and in the spirit of their practice they felt compelled to say ‘yes’ to it. On the other hand, in keeping with the title of the piece, the directors wished to display moments of getting lost: From inside the scenes, me and Phelim could have covered over the cracks or made virtues out of the difficulties in such a way that the audience might not have known that anything was ‘wrong’ at all. But we wanted the inner workings of improvisation to be laid bare, we wanted the vulnerability of the actors to be apparent (without being painful). We wanted the mechanisms of improvisation to be exposed to the audience so they could experience both how a scene was put together and, simultaneously, the emotions provoked by the characters in it. (Lee Simpson, email dated 21 April 2017).  As noted by Shepherd, relinquishing authority is a mark of a director’s growing maturity. Thirty years after the original publication of Bradby and Williams’s book, ‘directors’ theatre’ itself may have matured enough to be ready to embrace the kinds of director that do not fit the moulds of neither auteur-controller nor trainer-guru. Due in part to his lack of commercial success as a director and his commitment to an alternative theatre form as well as theatre pedagogy, Keith Johnstone could never have made it into their book even at the zenith of his international popularity, which coincided with the book’s publication in the 1980s. However, the changing values around the idea of leadership in the twenty-first century might have opened up possibilities for new forms of direction that confront and challenge the previously unquestioned conception of ‘directorial authority’ that remained at the core of Bradby and Williams’s inherently hierarchical notion of the director as ‘scenic writer’. The heterarchical director, offered here as a potential twenty-first century alternative, renounces sole authority in favour of nurturing multiple authorities within the rehearsal room. The heterarchical director is interested in systemic rather than individual leadership. As such, she or he cultivates self-sustaining processes of communication and creation in the rehearsal room and is interested to discover outcomes of such processes rather than predict or influence them. The heterarchical director does not feel artistically and authorially diminished by the idea of coaching/ facilitation/ enabling. If they assume the role of a teacher, their pedagogy is based on empowerment rather than instruction or training. The heterarchical director is not afraid of failure. The heterarchical director functions as only one sphere of a network of multiples spheres of influence within the artwork they are creating. Taking this paradigm even further, in the live improvised show Lost Without Words, the process of working became the performance and the audience was able to witness the show’s creation every night anew. In the case of such theatrical authorship the line is blurred between author, director and performer, however, there is much to be gained from this particular example of director(s) at work. For Improbable, their use of improvisation is always a form of theatre-making with a considered mise en scène and strong production values. By injecting improvised performance through their own model of eco-leadership into the repertoire of the National Theatre, Improbable not only challenged the binary between directors’ theatre and performance but also between the mainstream and alternative. In addition, the political gesture contained within this act is a promotion of a particular idea of sustainability – the self-organising principles of improvisation – within an eco-system where traditional hierarchical forms of behaviour have prevailed. Most importantly, this process that privileges inner networking of relationships as a means of overwriting hardwired habits, producing shared dreaming and ultimately changing the world does not leave anyone out, least of all the audience. 22