Well, it has been a while since I blogged about blogs. Largely I have just been too busy to concern myself with the theory of ‘Theory vs. Praxis’ since everything has been all praxis all the time lately. This post by George caught my attention however.
I do not really see how or why one would bother to argue with the assessments made in the interview. Writing a play is an inherently private and solitary creative act. Collaborating on the producing of a play is a wholly different thing. Writing is a generative act. Everything else in the theatre is derivative.
This is not a bad thing. Further, there are aspects of every role in the theatre that are generative and creative. A playscript is not staging, it is dialog. I think this is the key issue at work here. A play is more than just dialog, it is staging and setting and costume and light and character. All of these make a play and all of these aspects begin in a private generative creative place.
The play is collaborative. The playscript is a generative creative thing.
They are two separate items. The lightplot is not the lighting for a play, nor is memorizing lines the character. In this same way the playscript is not the play.
I have heard an old adage that when a play is cast properly the work of the director is minimal. I think this applies to the whole creation of a work for the theatre. When everyone, actors, director, designers, writer, etc. are all in sync on a production it feel effortless. It is a lot of work, but not so much a lot of struggle. The writer offers changes based upon rehearsals and the director yields staging ideas to the designers. When the organism of the theatre is working together, the lines between all these roles are blurred.
The work of putting on a play is always collaborative, even if one player in the game remains resolute and unchanging, the others must negotiate through a field that is mixed with changing and the unchanging. An act of theatre is always a negotiation. Throughout the process certain aspects become fixed. At some point the text is fixed, sometimes before rehearsals begin, sometimes near to opening. At some point the lighting and costume gets fixed and the actors must realize that “discoveries” made “in the moment” may no longer be appropriate.
Large scale commercial shows become the most fixed. I think the height of this might be the Rockettes. They do something on the order of seven shows daily at the height of the holiday season. These shows vary in length by less than two or three seconds from show to show even with wholly different casts. Live performance scripted down to a tee, fixed and unwavering. There is not time for a “discovery” one must simply perform.
Sometimes, and quite often, this is the case for a director. Unless they choose a text in the public domain that they edit, at which point the director becomes writer, they can not choose what text will change and what will not. Often these texts will be fixed and the director must assume the difficult task of negotiating with that which is unnegotiable. Their creativity with the work comes not in the form of textual changes but in other, perhaps more subtle, modes of creative discourse.
No way of creation is inherently good or bad. And anyone can make good or bad of any situation. But to claim that someone ELSE must change their working style so that you can work the way you want to in a collaborative medium feels absurd. Far stronger work is created when one bends ones working style, like a piece of bamboo, deeply yielding to the wind yet tenaciously rooted in the ground.
Collaboration is not about forcing change in others. It is about working together to create something larger than any single individual.
