“Directors & Designers"

Is There A Different Direction? --Alison Oddey

NOTES!

By: Marissa Siegel

• Visionary architect Aldolphe Appia→ ‘creation’ = synthesis of space, light, and performance achieved by one total vision.
• Diaghilev- painter to theater and artisan
• Robert Edmond Jones observed
• Realistically the collaboration between designers and directors is often uneasy
• Designers refused to be panel because voicing to directors might allow them to never work again.
• Sometimes when a director felt that there was a good ‘shorthand’ with the designer, the designer took the easy way out to avoid problems.
• When designers saw that space could be better used, they had to question it to the director.
• Designer= played the part of a wife → supportive, friend, and partner.
• Hardly any designers who were directors except Philip Prowse at Glasgow Citizens Theatre.
• Glasgow- did not do elaborate drawings, he was more interested in staging plays and choosing his own way in which to present on stage (took responsibility of his successes and failures)
• Josef Svaboda = Czech architect and scenographer = self- authored productions…combined direction and design in one creative statement
• ‘Theatrical’ = description of expression and individualistic dressing and decoration and the concept of ‘stage décor’ was born.
• Producers went/turned into stage directors
• Designers/ visual artists worked through directors.
• Turn of the century normal for visual artists to initiate productions & theater work, writing, graphics, interior design, and architecture. (Vladimir, Mayakovsky, Frantisek Zelenka)
• Designer- hardworking worms- servant of play & director (Joe Mielziner)
• Harmonious creative language invented for the production matter the most
• Director has to work in partnership with the movement director who becomes almost a co-director and the scenographer-the writer of the stage space- becomes visual director.
• Lateral collaboration is needed because it helps people rethink their methods of working and their “custom and practice”… helps them branch out and accept new ideas.
• “Bring together people who want inspiration to think more imaginatively, to cultivate their emotions through practice of the arts, to understand the past better and to have a clearer vision of the future.”- Dr. Theodore Zeldin
• Whole idea is to move away from the stereotypes and definitions that were once focused on directors and designers and focus attention on new theater creations that aim in a different direction.