Theatre Directing

In the last decade, theatre research has been marked by a growing interest in the documentation, reconstruction, and analysis of creative processes in the performing arts. 1 Theatre, dance, and performance scholars, often in collaboration with or in response to theatre makers and choreographers keen on exploring and sharing their own creative processes and working methods, have expanded their horizon from the 'final product'-the performanceto the varied and often complex activities that precede and eventually establish that performance. 2 One of the underlying ideas that fuel the interest in the analysis of what Josette Féral once termed the 'pre-performance', is the expectation that insight in the genesis of the performance will provide a more encompassing perspective on the work as a whole. 3 This 'genetic' perspective is especially fruitful when we consider the contemporary performing arts and, more specifically, 'postdramatic' theatre, which will be the subject of this article. Even a cursory glance reveals that the vast aesthetic diversity of theatrical languages in contemporary theatre is matched by an almost equally great variety of working methods and creative strategies. These methods are often specific to the theatre makers who use them, or even to individual projects-'[e]ach work creates its own method' the Belgian dramaturge Marianne Van Kerkhoven once stated. 4 But the relationship between the creative process and the final performance is complex, often elliptical, and without a predetermined, linear path that leads from inception to result. Gaining access to, and understanding this relationship, especially in theatre forms that rely more on performative and visual rather than textual elements can pose significant methodological challenges. In this article, we will focus on one crucial element of this creative process, namely the varied notes that are produced by the theatre director 1. This work was supported by FWO-Research Foundation [grant number G038513N]. Some notable publications in the growing list of publications on the genesis of theatre are

Članak opisuje malo poznato redateljsko djelovanje istaknute hrvatske glumice židovskog porijekla Grete Kraus - Aranicki (Osijek, 28. III. 1897 – Zagreb, 10. X. 1956) koja je prvi je put nastupila 1916. u zagrebačkome HNK-u u Straussovu Šišmišu. God. 1917–26. djelovala je u Osijeku, a od 1927. bila je članica Drame zagrebačkoga HNK-a.

Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production provides theatre students and emerging theatre artists with the tools, skills and a shared language to analyze play scripts, communicate about them, and collaborate with others on stage productions. Based largely on concepts derived from Stanislavski's system of acting and method acting, the book focuses on action - what characters do to each other in specific circumstances, times, and places - as the engine of every play. From this foundation, readers will learn to distinguish the big picture of a script, dissect and 'score' smaller units and moment-to-moment action, and create individualized blueprints from which to collaborate on shaping the action in production from their perspectives as actors, directors, and designers.

Script Analysis for Theatre offers a practical approach to script analysis for theatre production and is grounded in case studies of a range of the most studied plays, including Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, among others. Readers will develop the real-life skills professional theatre artists use to design, rehearse, and produce plays.

Reviews

“Script Analysis for Theatre provides excellent techniques developed over a lifetime of work with actors, directors, designers, in the classroom and on stage. The book is seasoned, smart and practical, equipping students with an essential toolbox for engaging with scripts.” –Jim Volz, Professor of Theatre History at California State University at Fullerton, USA

“I am deeply impressed by the precise way in which it fuses a broad theoretical understanding of drama with the practical analysis of texts, and have little but praise for it. I am very familiar with the range of existing script analysis texts, and this is one of the few I would consider assigning in full to an undergraduate script analysis class.” –Art Borreca, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa, USA

The following theatre directing essay focuses on the analysis of the ensemble, according to the Russian and European tradition. The text is mainly based on the theatre directing études experienced during the triennial period of study at the International Theatre Academy of the Adriatic, an Italian institute of theatre arts for actors and directors.
The dissertation is fully written in Italian.

Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method, a new textbook for directing methodology, by Avra Sidiropoulou, is now featured in the ground-breaking Routledge Performance Archive.

An integral part of Directions for Directing, this extensive web component contains interviews, master classes and video workshops by inspirational directors, actors, set and lighting designers, choreographers, and directing students, from the U.S., the U.K, Greece, Japan, Denmark, Spain and New Zealand.

With The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, the German director presents his directorial method for the first time. The book provides a toolkit for understanding and enacting the strategies of his advanced contemporary approach to staging dramatic texts. The book includes:
• Ostermeier’s seminal essays, lectures and manifestos translated into English for the first time.
• Over 140 photos from the archive of Arno Declair, who has documented Ostermeier’s work at the Schaubühne Berlin for many years, and by others.
• In-depth ‘casebook’ studies of two of his productions: Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2012) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (2015)
• Contributions from Ostermeier’s actors and his closest collaborators to show how his principles are put into practice.
An extraordinary, richly illustrated insight into Ostermeier’s working methods, this volume will be of interest to practitioners and scholars of contemporary European theatre alike.
‘Almost the only question we ask of any piece of theatre is: Is it alive? Thomas Ostermeier’s theatre absolutely is. Alongside his ‘social vision’ of the exterior world is also a profound musicality, which leaps past logic to another deeper human truth. The wordless, the un-sayable, the unreasonable and the instinctive and incidental is always there in his work. There is a poetic dimension which, by definition, cannot be defined by any book. So don’t look for answers. Here, perhaps, in this book is a description of a journey that is as much a kind of self-interrogation as the revelation of a “method” ’. (Simon McBurney OBE)

У нас в стране принято делить сегодняшнюю театральную культуру на представителей как бы трех временных слоев: те, кто начал свою деятельность в 1960-е годы и наполнил ее идеями надежды, связанными с тем временем, «хрущевской оттепелью»; те, кто начал свою деятельность в 1970-е годы; и те, кто начал свою деятельность в 1980-е годы. Эти три слоя существенно определяют сегодня театральную жизнь в этой стране.

The term ‘fragging’ originated during the Vietnam War to describe the killing of an incompetent or unpopular commanding officer. An equivalent phenomenon can occur when the cast of a production loses confidence in the director. The director is ‘fragged’ and the cast members either ignore, or explicitly refuse to obey her/him for the remainder of the process. This paper will examine the power dynamics that arise between actors and directors – in particular when they go wrong. How is authority assigned and accepted in the rehearsal process? What factors confirm or erode the actors’ trust in a director?
As Simon Shepherd puts it: “[the director] is under obligation to possess certain skills and to be able to relate to others in a particular way. […] By agreeing to be observed and led, the directed allow the director to have existence.”  Thus it is the actors who endow the director with her/his authority and are, therefore, in a position to withdraw it if necessary.

By exploring the actor/director power dynamic, this paper will shed light on the actor’s psychological journey through the process of rehearsal to performance.

[Originally presented at the Australasian Drama Studies Association Conference, Sydney, Australia, 2015]

This article focuses on a detailed analysis of Chekhov’s training schema as he developed it as part of his studio activity at Dartington using the scene study of the Fishers’ scene (1936–37), written by Paul Rogers. Described by Deirdre du Prey as the scene designed by Chekhov ‘to provide training and experience for the student-actors, directors, playwrights, musicians, technicians, designers etc.’, it is a training regime in microcosm and one which du Prey singled out as a teaching tool when she later trained actors in the Chekhov technique in the US. There is an entire box of unpublished materials dedicated to this scene in the Devon Records archive, including the actors’ own visualised performance scores and art works associated with Goethe’s colour psychology. These diverse sources are brought together here for the first time and related to Chekhov’s later publications. This paper addresses the themes of interdisciplinarity and of Chekhov, training and the archive, paying close attention to the archival records by reconstructing on paper what Deirdre Hurst du Prey later called ‘a truly classic example of the use of Chekhov’s method’ in Laurence Senelick’s book Wandering Stars (1992). Its conclusion moves to a wider consideration of progressive education in the inter-war period and positions Fishers’ as a key example of alternative pedagogy, alongside those of Black Mountain and Cornish colleges.

This is the edited text of the keynote speech given by Professor Vladimir Mirodan at 'The Makings of the Actor: Embodiment in Acting Practice' international conference, hosted by the Copenhagen International School of Performing Arts (CISPA), 23-24 October 2021.


Size Matters
The influence of Expressionism on modern acting or ‘How far can you go?’


I have been fascinated – it seems forever ¬– by a question that matters very little to academics but a great deal to actors and directors: ‘How big can I be’?  A question that often keeps actors awake, in particular when they are asked to embody characters that ¬– as Henry James said about Ibsen's – ‘have the brilliant property of becoming when represented at once more abstract and more living’?

How does ‘embodiment’ achieve a union between the idea and the body that is both shatterproof and vibrant enough that it may be ‘read’ by the spectator?  Struggling with this very question, Antony Sher once wrote:

I find the classics difficult to watch and to understand.  So I like them done by Brook or Adrian Noble or the Rustaveli Company; I need them to be made vivid, illustrated to some extent. 

Great!  But how do you ‘illustrate”?  How far does ‘to some extent’ go?  When does a gesture meant to be ‘flamboyant’ turn into ‘posturing’?

One of the answers seems to me to reside in what the Russian school of acting calls the ‘amplitude’ of movement.  How one deals with amplitude in the rehearsal room swings maddeningly between the ’believable’ and the ‘exaggerated’, with the ‘expressive’ as a ‘sweet point’ somewhere between the two.  My talk unpacks some of this process, tracing its roots to the influence of important teachers of movement for actors who introduced into British actor-training establishments the ideas and methodologies of Continental Expressionism:  Rudolf Laban, Litz Pisk, Yat Malmgren, etc.  The marriage of Continental and British acting traditions that followed gave rise to a particular style of acting I describe as ‘attenuated expressionism’.  And there are pictures from Expressionist art to bring this notion home!

In actor training, much effort is expended on developing a ‘sense of what feels right’ when it comes to amplitude.  My talk ends by outlining the role of ‘histrionic sensibility’ or ‘talent’ and the need for innate inclinations in this area to be recognised and developed in training. 

So that you may get a sense of the direction of travel, here is a thought from the great American designer Robert Edmund Jones:

Realism is something we practice when we aren’t feeling very well.  When we don’t feel up to making the extra effort.

Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method. Routledge, 2019.

Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method lays out contemporary concepts of directing practice and examines specific techniques of approaching scripts, actors, and the stage. Addressed to both young and experienced directors but also to the broader community of theatre practitioners, scholars, and dedicated theatre goers, the book sheds light on the director’s multiplicity of roles throughout the life of a play – from the moment of its conception to opening night – and explores the director’s processes of inspiration, interpretation, communication, and leadership. From organizing auditions and making casting choices to decoding complex dramaturgical texts and motivating actors, Directions for Directing offers practical advice and features detailed workbook sections on how to navigate such a fascinating discipline. A companion website explores the work of international practitioners of different backgrounds who operate within various institutions, companies, and budgets, providing readers with a wide range of perspectives and methodologies.

This is a manuscript version of the chapter on the Heterarchical Director, published in a new edition of Director's Theatre, edited by David Bradby, David Williams and Peter Boenisch.

Focusing on the case study of Improbable Theatre’s directing tandem Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson (and their 2017 production of Lost without Words at the National Theatre London), this essay traces a 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,  I 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.

> Context • The thoroughly second-order cybernetic underpinnings of naturalist theatre have gone almost entirely unremarked in the literature of both theatre studies and cybernetics itself. As a result, rich opportunities for the two fields to draw mutual benefit and break new ground through both theoretical and empirical investigations of these underpinnings have, thus far, gone untapped. > Problem • The field of cybernetics continues to remain academically marginalized for, among other things, its alleged lack of experimental rigor. At the same time, the field of theatre studies finds itself at an impasse between post-structuralist semioticians and embodied cognitivists regarding key onto-epistemological issues. A program of research framing and utilizing naturalist theatre as a second-order cybernetic/cybersemiotic laboratory holds much promise in addressing both matters and lending credence to Ross Ashby's assertion that " the discovery that two fields are related leads to each branch helping in the development of the other. " > method • After establishing the nature of the onto-epistemological deadlock within theatre studies, this article examines the application of cybernetic heuristics within naturalistic theatre, leading to a second-order cybernetic analysis of its processes of production and reception and the outline of an experimental program for exploring these processes further. > results • Foundations for a model of naturalist theatre as a cybersemiotic laboratory grounded in a novel operationalization of Gordon Pask's conversation theory. > implications • The proposed laboratory could result in the generation of quantitative and qualitative research pertaining to several dimensions of second-order cybernetics; particularly cybersemiotics, which, as a result, may end up better positioned to help dissolve onto-epistemological deadlocks between constructivists and realists of all stripes across the academy and beyond. > Constructivist content • I argue that an analysis of naturalistic theatre's processes of meaning-making filtered through the constructivist ontological agnosticism of second-order cybernetics offers a productive middle way forward for those on both sides of the social constructivist/embodied cognitive realist divide, within and beyond theatre studies. The article draws upon the works of Gregory Bateson, Søren Brier, Ranulph Glanville, Heinz von Foerster, and Niklas Luhmann. >

The article argues for a “textural” understanding of “theatricality,” across three fairly distinct models: the image – deep or shallow, as for Richard Wagner and Georg Fuchs; the platform – of skill or tension, as for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht; and the tightrope – this is Peter Brook’s metaphor for a kind of theatrical immediacy that navigates between the “holy” and “rough” aspirations of the above. Beyond such central authorities, authorship itself is seen as woven within the work; ‘texture,’ throughout, implies a dramaturgy of interweaving strands or processes, as opposed to the assemblage ofpre-existing parts or components. What marks each of the three models as specifically theatrical is how the very density or sparsity of their textures ostensibly deviates from some historically specific performative norm – be it operatic convention, stage naturalism, capitalist society, literary or “deadly” theatre.

Every artist who has reached the virtuosity stage has a unique distinction in the works that define the artist, which is explicit in his style and can be distinguished over the years. These features can be defined as a dynamic language that develops in every production of that artist. As a creative artist, theater directors also create a language of expression in terms of form and content over the years. Michael Thalheimer, one of the productive directors of the Contemporary German Theater, also has a staging language and style that distinguishes him from other contemporary directors as an artist. This article aims to make inferences about the style of the director, especially from the selection of text, space design and acting choices. Also, this article aims to reveal Michael Thalheimer’s staging approaches that show partnership in theater works, hence the style over the years as a director. This article, in which the analysis of the works that the director has put on the stage since 2000s and the samples selected from them will be used as the basic method, indirectly aims to form an opinion regarding the contemporary theater language through the approaches of a contemporary director.

Özet: Virtüözite aşamasına ulaşmış her sanatçının yapıtlarında o sanatçıyı tanımlayan, imzası olarak tanımlanabilecek ve yıllar içinde oluşan üslup özellikleri ayrıştırılabilir bir belirginlik gösterir. Bu özellikler o sanatçının her yapımında gelişim gösteren devinimli bir dil olarak tanımlanabilir. Bu tiyatro sanatı için de geçerlidir. Yaratıcı bir sanatçı olarak tiyatro yönetmenleri de yıllar içerisinde hem biçim hem de içerik bakımından bir anlatım dili oluştururlar. Çağdaş Alman Tiyatrosunun üretken yönetmenlerinden biri olan Michael Thalheimer da bir sanatçı olarak onu diğer çağdaş yönetmenlerden ayıran bir sahneleme diline, üslubuna sahiptir. Özellikle metin seçimi, uzam tasarımı ve oyunculuk tercihlerinden hareketle yönetmenin üslubuna ilişkin çıkarımda bulunmayı hedefleyen bu makale, Michael Thalheimer’ın tiyatro yapıtlarında ortaklık gösteren sahneleme yaklaşımlarını, dolayısıyla bir yönetmen olarak yıllar içinde oluşan üslubunu ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır. Yönetmenin 2000’li yıllardan itibaren sahneye koyduğu yapıtları ve bunlar içinden seçilen örneklemlerin analizinin temel yöntem olarak kullanılacağı bu makale dolaylı olarak çağdaş bir yönetmenin sahneleme yaklaşımları üzerinden günümüz tiyatro diline ilişkin fikir oluşturmayı da hedeflemektedir.

The purpose of this paper, which was presented in the international HASE conference "Rethinking Democracy in Language, Literature and Culture" (15-17 May 2015), is to discuss four of the latest productions by the internationally acclaimed Greek theatre director Theodoros Terzopoulos as a political tetralogy that represents the 20th century historic course of democracy in Europe as a chain of cultural traumas. More specifically, the performances of Mauser, Alarme, Amor and Endgame represent a diversity of historic and everyday (civil) wars in a theatre that becomes a critical vision machine which challenges spectators to look from the perpetrator’s point of view, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, lay equal criticism on both the perpetrator and the victim. The above political tetralogy coincides with the emergence and establishment of the Greek economic recession, which is but an aspect of the wider European crisis that unveils the deeper cultural crisis  of a civilization once founded on the humanistic ideals of Enlightenment. It seems that Terzopoulos’ performances not only exercise severe criticism against power, its techniques and practices, but against the citizens’ attitude and stance in a democracy in crisis.

Anatoly Efros (1925–1987) belongs to that special group of Russian artists
and intellectuals who contributed to the era between the early 1950s and
early 1960s known as ‘The Thaw’. The name came from Ilya Ehrenberg’s
eponymous novel of 1954, comparing the atmosphere of the era to climatic
change. Prompted by the succession of moderate leader Nikita Khrushchev
after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Thaw era witnessed a recovery of
cultural freedom after a prolonged period of chilling censorship. It awakened
a desire to rediscover authentic Russian imagination instead of its Sovietized
surrogate, to escape from Stalin’s wearisome ideas and stereotypes in art
and literature and to feel confident original creative work was possible once
again. Anatoly Efros was one of the leading creative figures of the Thaw era.
His life and work not only contributed to the hopes of that era but also left
an important legacy.

This thesis aims to recount the performance history of Euripides’ Bakkhai with special reference to nine eminent productions of the 20th century. First, I deal with methodological issues on how one gathers together the pieces of evidence from an ‘invisible’ performance. Given that the Bakkhai was only revived in the 20th century,
the review of its textual reception in Chapter 1 covers the gap between the textual and the theatrical re-usage of the play. Moreover, to review the literature would prove that
there is indeed a structural model already inbuilt in the text and subsequently applied to performance not necessarily as a footnote to classicist theories. Chapter 2 retells the
stage history of the Bakkhai through nine of the least documented productions of this ‘forgotten’ Euripidean tragedy. My Conclusions decipher the structural model of the Bakkhai and provide an explanation for its ‘otherness’ as a tragedy intended for the theatre of the mise-en-scène.

Synthesizing the pedagogy of acting with new findings in Neuroscience and archetypal understandings of human ways of learning and seeing. This book contains practical exercises for directors, actors, and teachers to use combining these three elements.

Given the changing nature of audiences, entertainment, and media, the role of theatre in twenty-first-century culture is changing. The WHAT IS THEATRE? series brings new and innovative work in literary, cultural, and dramatic criticism into conversation with established theatre texts and trends, in order to offer fresh interpretation and highlight new or undervalued artists, works, and trends.

Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türk Tiyatrosu'nun köklerinin yazar ve oyuncunun gelişimine dayayarak geliştiği, 20. Yüzyıl Tiyatrosu'nun aksine yönetmenin Türk Tiyatrosu'na oldukça geç bir zamanda kimliğini kabul ettirdiği gerçektir. Türk Tiyatrosu'nda yönetmen olgusunun seyirci tarafından fark edilişi gecikmiş bir hamle olabilir, ancak Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türk Tiyatrosu'nda kumpanya mantığının kırılması, Darülbedayi ve Devlet Tiyatroları'nın kurulmasıyla yönetmenlik kavramı biraz daha gelişmiştir. Yönetmenin kendi kimliğini tam olarak ortaya koyması 1960'lı yılları bulmuş olabilir, öte yandan Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine örneklerinde olduğu gibi, Türkiye'de bir Yönetmen Tiyatrosu'ndan zaten söz edilemez. Zira, Türkiye'de bir tiyatro ekibi ve salonu olan, çalışmalarını böyle bir ortamda tutarlı olarak geliştiren bir yönetmen'den söz bile edilemez. Cumhuriyet öncesi Türk Tiyatrosu oyunculara endeksli gelişmiş ve kumpanya mantığıyla ilerlemiştir. Cumhuriyet Dönemi'nde Carl Ebert gibi Batı'lı eğitmenlerden de destek alınarak, öncelikle oyuncu eğitimine geçilmiş , ardından çeşitli yarışmalar açılarak tiyatro yazarları desteklenmiştir. . Ödenekli tiyatrolarda halen yerli yazar kotası vardır, ancak yönetmen kotası yoktur. Ödenekli tiyatrolar kendi yönetmenlerini usta oyuncular ya da yönetmen kadroları arasından seçmekte, kendi kadrolarından oyun projesi beklemekte, nadiren konuk yönetmenlerin projelerini hayata geçirmektedirler.. Nilüfer Belediye Tiyatrosu geçen yıl yeni bir adım atarak, yönetmenlerin projelerinden yola çıkan bir repertuar anlayışı oluşturmuştur. Benzer bir uygulama İKSV Tiyatro Festivali'nde de vardır, ancak proje değerlendirmelerinde yönetmen kimliğinden öte, ekip başvurusu göze alınmaktadır.

It is customary in our country to divide the current theatre culture into
representatives of, as it were, three temporal layers: those who began their activities during the “Khrushchev Thaw” of the 1960s and filled it with ideas of hope associated with that time; those who began to work in the 1970s; and those who began in the 1980s. These three tiers essentially define theatre life in this country today.

This work examines directorial aesthetics and its value in stage production, it portrays how directing for the stage historical, societal, political plays and many other kind of plays  gives satisfaction and intellectual appeal in the mind of the readers of this work. In order to buttress the whole idea of this research, the play production Herbert Macaulay and the Spirit of Lagos by Akinwumi Isola will be explored to illuminate the directorial aesthetics and its impact in stage production.

We have decided to embark on this research because directing and theatre are phenomena that are highly inseparable, and aesthetics in directing helps in the dramatic communication of the plays that are being directed. Generally, we would look into the rudiments of play directing by studying the play performance Herbert Macaulay and the Spirit of Lagos by Akinwumi Isola as directed in the PFA 499(2014/15).

The descriptive/participant observer methods of research are employed for this work. Relevant information is sorted from relevant books and articles, journals, live performance and internet with focus on keywords such as directing, director, aesthetics, performance etc.
 
The study concludes by discussing the concept of culture and nationalism in Herbert Macaulay and the Spirit of Lagos by Akinwumi Isola and also the essence of the play to directing and other arts.

Method acting is a range of training and rehearsal techniques that seek to encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances, as formulated by several different theatre practitioners including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, while the Organic Creative Process is a conscious, intuitive process that goes beyond it.

Revisiting Greek Tragedy on the Modern Stage”
現代演劇におけるギリシャ悲劇への再訪

Venue: Meiji Gakuin University, Shirokane Campus, Main Building 10F, Conference Hall

1-2-37 Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8636

会場：明治学院大学　白金校舎本館10階大会議場（東京都港区白金台1－2－37）

ABSTRACT

For the past few decades, performances of Greek tragedy have become the locus of contention regarding the need for as well as future viability of ‘straight’ directorial readings. The heated debate raised annually at major international festivals on whether ‘solid’ versions of the Greek plays are in any way preferable to more adventurous adaptations is a reflection of artists’ and audiences’ broader ambivalence towards the “great narratives,” in general. While most directors staging Greek tragedy are always confronted with the ancient, fixed, and, in a sense no longer retrievable reality of antiquity, they also carry knowledge and experience of the plastic (to quote Roland Barthes) fragmentary present, which forces upon practitioners as well as spectators a different set of hermeneutic criteria.

This lectures investigates some of the major issues that relate to revisionist productions of Greek tragedy, with particular emphasis on the work of acclaimed Japanese auteur Tadashi Suzuki, whose interpretations of Euripides’ plays –capturing the post-traumatic contradictions of his native Japan—carry within them the paradox of a conflicting desire to remember and to change, to revive and to bury.

Resumo
Este trabalho discute as práticas pós-dramáticas de encenação por meio do conceito de instalação. Alguns aspectos desta noção, tais como imersão do espectador no trabalho artístico, capacitação do espectador enquanto leitor ativo e até interação do espectador com o dispositivo artístico, bem como a hegemonia das qualidades materiais e sensoriais dos objetos sobre sua dimensão simbólica, vem diretamente ao encontro das práticas teatrais pós-dramáticas. Nelas, percebemos o deslocamento do eixo comunicacional dominante, do eixo intra-ficcional para o eixo palco-platéia. Em outras palavras, produção e recepção do trabalho artístico (teatral ou escultural) são vistos, em primeiro lugar, como configuração de um acontecimento social. Um efeito dramatúrgico é o deslocamento do conflito dramático da seqüência temporal para as relações espaciais. O objetivo fundamental deste deslocamento é claramente uma tentativa de reintroduzir na prática teatral e em sua recepção uma discussão sobre as relações entre a prática teatral e a realidade social, especialmente no que concerne a construção do que chamamos de realidade, bem como uma tomada de consciência dos espectadores sobre seu posicionamento concreto nesse processo.
Palavras Chave: Instalação – teatro pós-dramático – representação – performativo

Abstract
This work discusses aspects of postdramatic ways of producing theatrical performances through the concept of installation. Some aspects of this installation, such as immersion of the viewer into the work of art, enabling the spectator to be an active reader or even an interactive user, as well as the dominant role of material and sensorial qualities of the objects over their symbolic dimension meets directly with practices of postdramatic ways of staging theatre. In these practices, one can perceive a shifting of the dominant communicational axis from the intra-fictional to the stage-theatron axis. In other words, production and reception of the artistic work (theatrical or sculptural) are seen in the first place as the configuration of a social happening. A dramaturgic effect is the transformation of the dramatic conflict from a temporal sequence into a series of spatial relations. The fundamental objective in this shift is clearly to find ways of reintroducing into the theatrical practice and its reception a discussion on the relations between theatrical practice and social reality, especially as regards possible modalities of constructing reality and ways how spectators can become aware of how they assume concrete positions in this process.
Keywords: Installation Art – Postdramatic Theatre – Representation - Performativity

En este trabajo describiremos los caminos tomados a la hora de realizar un estudio de la dirección teatral que espera dar con las concepciones teatrales que impulsan las prácticas directoriales del teatro independiente de la ciudad de Córdoba, Argentina. Nuestra perspectiva atiende a los procesos de creación de grupos de teatro: actores y actrices, iluminadoras e iluminadores, escenógrafos y escenógrafas, directores y directoras. Por ello, proponemos un diseño metodológico que se aparta del análisis de obras y se enfoca sobre el trabajo en el tiempo de los colectivos teatrales. Aquí, establecemos el problema de investigación y los derroteros teórico metodológicos que guían las opciones escogidas. Planteamos los criterios de selección de la muestra, el enfoque para la recolección de datos y la perspectiva de análisis. Los conceptos claves para la construcción de nuestra perspectiva son la retórica teatral, la etnografía, el análisis de discurso.

Avra Sidiropoulou. Review of Time’s Journey Through a Room dir. by Okada
Toshiki/chelfitsch.
ROHM Theatre, Kyoto, 17 March 2016 (world premiere).
Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 34, Number 2, Fall 2017, pp. 474-479 (Review). Published by University of Hawai'i Press.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1353/atj.2017.0033
https://muse.