Working in theatre is different from working in an office – and thank god! As a friend of mine said, the difference is that in theatre, you know exactly what everyone else you’re working with does. Each person’s duties and responsibilities are quite clearly defined and titled. Carpenters build things. Electricians light things. Costumers costume things. If any one element fails or needs to be changed, you know exactly who to talk to. Or at least, which department any way. Each theatre breaks its institutional roles down differently.
But one thing they all have in common is a chain of command. This person reports to this person reports to this person, etc. Very hierarchical. As Ed Leedskalnin wrote, there’s no equality in the army. Before you can pilot the ship, you have to swab the decks – again and again and again.
The ship metaphor applied to theatre holds up for a couple different reasons. Historically, there was a great deal of cross-over in the labor pools. Sailors, with their expert rigging knowledge, were often employed as crew at theatres. The superstitious prohibition against whistling backstage, in fact, comes from the traditionally whistled commands given on ships to raise and lower sails. Whistling backstage in an old-timey theatre was a good way to get a sandbag or a piece of scenery dropped onto your head.
Beyond just that though, both a ship on the ocean and a theatre as an enterprise are a self-contained world unto themselves. They are a cosmos, an ordered system of how things get, by whom and in what order. Learning stagecraft successfully is largely a matter of making oneself pliant to the “way things work” (or, alternately, the way things work at *this* theatre!) As a modern holdover of traditional master-apprentice craft education, this method makes a lot of sense – but only up to a point.
As long the ship stays afloat and reaches its destination, the institutionalized compliance is able to perpetuate itself. But what if the ship is sinking – or, even worse, the ocean drying up?
Though I’ve since lost the link to the Google Books result which yielded it, I found a gem the other day: a book online from the 1930’s of advice for running a Vaudeville house. It was written for the producers or impresarios who would be putting up the money and/or managing the day-to-day operations of the house. In the section about stage management, they basically said that stagehands aren’t very smart. Because if they were smart, they would become something else besides a stagehand. They would, in effect, buck the chain of command, jump outside of “the way things have always worked here” and claw out a position for themselves somewhere higher up the ladder.
But what if the ladder is broken in the first place? What if the system needs to be dismantled and re-built from the ground up? An excellent blog called Theatre TACT, aimed at re-designing theatrical curriculums in colleges and universities suggest that this is exactly the case, in a piece entitled, If It’s Broke, Fix it. The suggestion that the author makes is that it’s exactly the “culture of compliance” within theatre which has lead to its own unraveling:
[...] most education is about compliance. Teachers try to mold compliant students who do what they’re told the way they’re told to do it. And that, my friends, is how the theatre became what it is today: boring, unimaginative, cautious, and conservative. Everybody is still trying to please Daddy! Even the rebels are that way – their idea of rebellion is to simply reverse whatever the status quo is, which is as mechanical and boring as just following the mold. [...]
There are actual techniques that can make collaboration work effectively and powerfully, but nobody teaches them. Instead, we pretend that a hierarchical system where the director allows everybody to share a few ideas before telling them how it’s really going to be done is collaboration. It’s not; it’s just more compliance training.
One great example of what’s being described above is known as devised theatre:
A number of theatre practitioners, including Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook started experimenting and developing the idea of the actor as a creative artist in their own right, as opposed to a functional worker there to carry out the wishes of the writer and director. However, whilst the actor was being encouraged to make creative decisions about how they perform, they were not being encouraged to make decisions about what they perform. Etienne Decroux, a mime artist and educator, broke this mould and started encouraging his students to create their own work, and for this reason, some refer to him as the father of modern devised performance.
The most interesting thing, to me, about these “modern” and “alternative” systems of approaching theatrical productions is that they are actually quite traditional (look at, for example, the Commedia). That is, they function through stripping away “the way things have always been here” and replace it with “what actually works” in the here-and-now. But when you start drilling down to the essence of the actual work of the theatre, what you find is that it rests upon a bedrock of human universals which recur across time, place and culture. And there are innumerable ways to uncover these essential characteristics at the core of theatre: but all of them are experience-based. You have to do it. You have to try things out. You have to make mistakes, take risks and fail. But you have to do it consciously, actively and not merely as a matter of repetition, of copying what someone else is doing blindly simply because that’s how it’s always been and that’s how it ended up and that’s how we’re doing it, goddammit!
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT BY TIM BOUCHER (Auto-Generated)
- It begins with the box office…
- Caritas, The Great Chain of Being
- Small Town Theatre Restoration Project
- Mantra Command Line Sequence Vocable Cymatic Interface
- Do Demons Have Free Will?
