Dear Tibor,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts so freely and clearly. Here are a few ideas that come to mind on reading your recent post.
Regarding the person who offended by describing actors as ‘their’ actors: I worry that this was me, except that I was in rehearsal at the time and did not attend that conference! Nevertheless, this is absolutely the sort of thing I’d say, but not because I feel that my collaborators are enfeoffed to me like so many tutelary spirits!
My preoccupation as an artist, one that I have always shared with my collaborators, is with developing performances that fall outside the known. I don’t see the point of making things we already know how to make; our orchestras and ballet companies bang out Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the Nutcracker annually, along with various renditions of Shakespeare-in-bizarre-historical-contexts. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but we do know, as a culture, how to do them and we also have, as a culture, more challenging and nuanced works that we ought to engage with if we want to keep our edges sharp. The majority of my collaborators have been interested in being kept sharp, in being brave and curious and disciplined and determined, and this has allowed us to discover and innovate together. If I refer to them using the possessive, it is because of the long croisées we undertook together. Of course they will crew other ships, but the grand traversé we undertook together has defined us all; I have former collaborators who refer to me as ‘their’ director, although they routinely work with other people. It is respect, admiration and affection that leads me to say ‘my’ of them and they of me...
In our conversation the other day, you suggested that actors and directors who have worked in the signature style of a single director or ensemble cannot easily see things from different perspectives. This may be true, but I’d suggest that in Canada and Québec we simply can’t know, the density of theatrical production and the breadth of aesthetic diversity are too thin and too narrow to say. My experience with European troupes is that they are very polyvalent, even when they have worked with a single, powerful director. The performers of the Odin Teatret, of Peter Brook’s ensemble and of Anatoli Vassiliev’s group seem to appreciate and welcome works not made in their own way, even if they choose to only work with a particular director and approach.
In Québec, we find examples of performers doing great work under different artist with very particular signature styles: Marc Bélan for example, working with both Édouard Lock and Brigitte Haentjens... But even in Québec, where a large amount of high quality theatre is produced and the level of aesthetic diversity almost approaches cosmopolitan and European norms, there are not enough long term actor-director relationships for us to really say anything conclusive.
In Canada, the situation is much leaner. There are no troupes or even serious long-term collaborations to speak of; they appear from time to time, but wink out due to the pressures of the cultural industry almost immediately. Likewise, there is no real aesthetic diversity; with few exceptions normative aesthetics make every English Canadian production appears to have been directed by the same person. It is hard to talk about actual directing under these circumstances. So I’d suggest that if we want ‘sharper’, more current, examined and well-made theatre, that longer term collaborations between artists are an important idea, for both English and French theatre.
This brings me to your comments about actors and directors. I’m afraid I’m very suspicious of the idea that actors, without a director (whether or not he or she uses videos for transitions!), can create something nuanced and satisfying. I think that this may well be possible in a European context, where actors have stronger technical training, work far more often and exhibit a level of professionalism that is present to a certain extent in Québec and almost totally absent in Canada. An ‘actor’s show’ is usually for me a tedious trip down memory lane to the unexamined art of yesteryear.
(As a parenthesis, my great-great grandfather, Charles Mathews, and my great-grand-uncle, Charles James Mathews both participated, even created, the ‘actors’ theatre’ of 19th century Britain and America. They are now best remembered because Shaw hated and excoriated their populist styles in his letters. The world has come a long way from the kind of stand-up and melodrama they respectively shared, which I believe reappears every time we are treated to le théâtre de l’acteur. My mother recently explained to me that she took me to see Emlyn Williams perform works by Dylan Thomas in an evening of solo recitations in Toronto in the late 1970s not merely because it recalled for her the delights of her childhood, but in order to show me the only thing that still looked like how we ‘used to do things’ in the family! I was about 10 at the time, and I did love it, but I can also see how it was a sticky-sweet remainder of another era, disconnected and unexamined by contemporary standards.)
Clearly, unexamined directing happens all the time: I know we’ve both been bored by the immature and incompetent stylings of Ostermeyer’s puerile Ibsen and that ostentatious foolishness created by Warlikowski, but we must recall the brilliance of Marleau’s Nous Étions Assis and the two spectacular work director by Galin Stoev, Oxygène and Genèse #2. All of these presented skilled actors bringing life to sophisticated and stimulating directorial designs.
We must however, be consistent with our critical standards. It is easy to be critical of the kind of gross incompetence demonstrated by Warlikowski and at the same time tolerate similarly unexamined directing in more modest repertory productions. A friend of mine put it very well: “If Western Medicine fails, everyone accepts that it was a single case, if one accupuncturist fails to deliver, all of Alternative Medicine is dismissed – the same goes for contemporary theatre in comparison to normative theatre”.
I think the bottom line is that you can have a lot of things without a director who creates with his or her ensemble a signature style, but none of them are contemporary, examined, cosmopolitan theatre!
Finally, I think perhaps your comments about funding need to be nuanced. When one opera company (the Frankfurt Opera I recall) has a larger budget for a single season than the entire country of Canada devotes to opera, it is no longer possible to credibly say:
“On sait que les théâtres d’Europe centrale sont subventionnés. Les nôtres aussi. C’est une question de répartition des fonds dont on dispose qui, dans tous les cas, sont forcément limités. Chacun fait ses choix.”
The budgets sustaining the middel-european and Asian theatres you mention exceed ours by a factor of one thousand times. (Well, Japanese theatres are well funded, China killed off most of the audiences who appreciated its traditions and their theatres are dying and are only supported with token state funding). I’m not sure it is fruitful to compare them in a way that does not acknowledge the important fiscal and contextual differences between them. We may not see large groups of actors on Canadian stages due to artistic decisions, but their absence is more likely explained by the fact that we’re broke and that only really trained and skilled people have a shot at making something good in the paltry 120 hours given by the institution, so smaller casts yield better work. Finally, while Québec is an exception to this, we are still a long way from maturity in our practice of theatre as a nation and until we acknowledge the paucity of our actor and director training and naivety of our directorial discourses, we won’t be making good work no matter how many actors appear on stage!
Looking forward to your next post,
All the best,
Daniel
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