Laura Ginters
Glimpsing the “Hidden World”: Australian Directors on Rehearsal

Jane Ahlquist
Director Dreaming: Ferment and symbol as keys to directing traditional tales

Steve Matthews
Relevance and Irreverence: the emergence of an Australian directing style

Chris Willems
Theatre and beyond: the application of theatre directing to other contexts

Geoffrey Borny
Reviving the distinction between directorial interpretation and directorial misinterpretation

Jill Brown
Collaborative theatre and the role of deep listening

Stephen Chinna
From facilitator to dictator: Directing in a university context.

Stuart Young
The Relationship between the writer and the director in the contemporary British theatre

Miranda Heckenberg
Director and Designer: case-studies of collaboration and communication

Michael Beh
Bright young things: visions of arcadia challenging creativity by changing direction

Laura Ginters
Glimpsing the “Hidden World”: Australian Directors on Rehearsal

Academic studies of theatre and drama nearly always focus on performance, rather than the processes and practices which lead to it, and yet rehearsal and other forms of performance preparation clearly play a key role in determining the ensuing performance. The rehearsal room remains, in Susan Letzler Cole’s evocative phrase, “a hidden world” (Directors in Rehearsal. A Hidden World, 1992). In my current work I am interviewing a series of prominent Australian theatre directors about their approach, philosophies, practices and indeed wishlists for rehearsal. In this paper I will concentrate on two directors, Simon Phillips and Michael Kantor, who – perhaps surprisingly – share some common goals and aspirations in creating their quite different kinds of theatre.

Laura Ginters is a lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney and has a doctorate in Germanic Studies and Performance Studies. She worked previously for three years at Playworks, the national women performance writers’ network, developing new women’s writing for theatre and performance. She has also been the Associate Director of the International Theatre Institute and has worked for Opera Australia. She translates for the stage from German and her translations have been both published and performed: most recently she translated Brecht’s Threepenny Opera for adaptation by Company B Belvoir (2003). Laura has worked as a dramaturg for companies such as Harlos Productions, Pact Youth Theatre, the Australian National Playwrights’ Centre and on independent projects, and has assessed scripts for Playworks and Griffin Theatre Company. She has had book chapters and articles published locally and internationally in the areas of rehearsal, women’s writing for performance, feminism and theatre, translation, radio drama, performance analysis and Indigenous theatre, as well as performance reviews for the arts journals Post/West and RealTime.

Jane Ahlquist
Director Dreaming: Ferment and symbol as keys to directing traditional tales

Traditional tales are often overlooked by the various funding bodies and are rarely performed, as the word “traditional” is, at least on the surface, seen to be opposed to the much-worshipped word “innovative”. However, traditional tales are houses for traditional knowledge and directing them uncovers many surprises for the director, should he or she approach the task with openness and respect. The surprises are “vertical” and necessitate a mining of symbol-shafts in the process of directorial decision making.

Jane Ahlquist was educated at Flinders University and began her career as an actress and singer before starting to develop her own work in the early 80s, probably in response to an obsession with theatre coupled with the facts of cyclical unemployment. In another life, she has performed at Belvoir Street, The Stables, Kinselas, assorted cabarets and the usual round of television gigs, before setting up Bathhouse Arts with the painter Marion van den Dreisschen to explore the regenerative and ritualistic aspect of traditional theatre. As a result of their body of work, Jane was invited to the Sydney Opera House’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, where she spoke on the panel The Spirit in Performance.

Steve Matthews
Relevance and Irreverence: the emergence of an Australian directing style

Are we finally growing beyond the reverence of an anglocentric theatre tradition and allowing ourselves to create theatre that reflects the cultural diversity and the unique perspective of contemporary Australia? What are the current influences on our work as directors? What is unique about our approach to directing and our directing style? These and other questions are explored in this presentation, which will focus on the directing process for a recent production of A Midsummer Nights Dream, set in India and directed by the presenter.

Steve Matthews has been working professionally for the last thirty years as an actor, director, acting teacher, lecturer in theatre and performance consultant in Australia, New Zealand, US and France. He has been on the staff of NIDA, VCA, University of Western Sydney (Nepean), ActWorldWide (Paris), Charles Sturt University and The Actors Centre. His book Getting into The Act was nominated in NZ for The Adams Prize for Literature (non fiction). Productions he has directed include The Threepenny Opera, The Places We Go and A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Chris Willems
Theatre and beyond: the application of theatre directing to other contexts

At a time when many theatre practitioners and companies are concerned with dwindling audience numbers, funding and interest, what I wish to discuss is less about theatre ‘changing direction’, and more about ‘changing theatre Direction’. The application of theatre skills and direction to other, apparently unrelated contexts is not new. However, it bears re-examining.

Chris Willems stage work has been seen from the outback to the Sydney Opera House, La Boite, Adelaide Festival Centre, and QPAC, whilst his work in television includes BBC, ABC, SBS, commercial and independent productions. He has also worked in various international Festivals - including the Adelaide Festival and Fringe; Montreux, Banff and New York Video Festivals; Melbourne Film Festival; Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, Commonwealth Games Festival and the Out Of The Box Festival. He is currently lecturer in Performance & Design for Stage & Screen at the University of Southern Queensland.

Geoffrey Borny
Reviving the distinction between directorial interpretation and directorial misinterpretation

Since the advent of postmodernism and deconstruction, it has become fashionable to deny the validity of the distinction between valid and invalid directorial interpretations of plays. Indeed, the very idea of misinterpretation is seen as an outmoded concept. Without suggesting that there can ever be a single or definitive stage interpretation of any given play, I wish to argue that, in order for the concept of directorial interpretation to be meaningful at all, it must be possible for misinterpretations to exist. Using a number of concepts derived from the critic Roger Gross, I outline what are the acceptable and necessary “parameters” and “tolerances” involved in directorial interpretation. In the course of this paper I attempt to outline some of the criteria that a critic might use to distinguish between a valid or invalid interpretation. In addition I endeavour to outline ways in which a critic might distinguish between productions that are either successful or unsuccessful interpretations and productions which, while possibly being highly creative theatrical events, are not interpretations at all.

Geoffrey Borny is currently a Visiting Fellow and member of the Emeritus faculty at the Australian National University having recently retired from the position of Reader and Head of Theatre Studies. His publications include a monograph entitled Modern American Drama and a verse translation into English of Racine’s comedy Les Plaideurs entitled Petty Sessions. His latest book, Interpreting Chekhov, is being published later this year. His research interests include the study of Shakespearean acting and staging conventions and the works of Tennessee Williams. Besides being an academic, he is both an actor and director and has received a number of awards for his work in these areas.

Jill Brown
Collaborative theatre and the role of deep listening

The collaborative theatre making process can sometimes feel like creative chaos as ideas collide and sometimes dance with each other. Deep cellular listening is vital for this fertile starting point to evolve beyond dramaturgy to the embodied processes of making performance. Collaboration involves the making and receiving of creative offers. Perhaps we have at times undervalued the art of receivership? This paper will address collaborative processes relevant to training actors. It will examine a small number of ways theatre makers might allow information to ‘land in the bones’, to dwell in possibilities, and remain in a heightened listening state, so we might acknowledge and access the happy accidents that invariably arise through being ‘in relationship’.

Jill graduated with Theatre Nepean’s first BA Performing Arts class in 1987. She studied singing with Grant Dickson at the NSW Conservatorium of Music, and has a Masters in Theatre Studies from UNSW. Over the past thirty years Jill has worked as a professional singer and actor. She has worked as a freelance theatre director for twelve years. Jill is currently a lecturer in Theatre with the School of Communication Arts at University of Western Sydney and has been the Head of Voice Studies in the Performance degrees since 1999. She has directed a number of productions with the Actor training programme including Howard Barker’s The Possibilities and a collaboratively devised work – Posession. She recently co-directed Henry VI with UWS colleague Glen McGillivray. In September 2004 Jill was a guest artist with playwright Howard Barker’s London based theatre company - The Wrestling School. Jill was observing Barker’s directorial processes and offering voice/dramaturgical support for the company’s production Dead Hands. In October/November 2004 Jill studied and performed with Roy Hart Theatre in the south of France. In July 2006 Jill directed a project Wood – Metal – Fire – Earth – Water for TTRP (Theatre Training and Research Programme) in Singapore.

Stephen Chinna
From facilitator to dictator: Directing in a university context.

This paper will address directing theatre in a university context and how various factors, such as the exigencies of time and the variations in student actor talent and experience, have caused me to redirect my energies away from a collaborative devising process into a more structured directing and training role. While previous explorations in collaborative devising were always variations on the amount of overt and covert control imposed on the process, my control is now more overt, and signalled as such at the start of the process. Presenting public productions to a paying audience in a minimal amount of dispersed and intermittent rehearsal time (sixty or so hours over a period of ten weeks) has instigated the need for a shorthand approach that I shall describe in relation to planning, plotting, casting, and characterisation. I will also discuss how production roles are handled in relation to these exigencies. I do take into account that in this university context I utilise unpaid student actors and crew, subsidised venues, and am granted a licence to experiment without fear of financial loss (within reason).

Dr Steve Chinna is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. After actor training in Perth, Western Australia, workshops and a production in the UK, and acting in over twenty acting school productions, among other things, he entered academia as a mature-age student. His principal area of teaching and research is theatre and performance studies. He coordinates and teaches in praxis-based theatre units and has directed over twenty public productions with tertiary students. His productions have included collaboratively devised productions, plays he has written himself, and scripted plays – from the Elizabethan/Jacobean period through to modernist and postmodernist works. He is the editor of John Kinsella’s Divinations: Four Plays, and author of Performance: Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond.

Stuart Young
The Relationship between the writer and the director in the contemporary British theatre

In Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, when an actor presumes to question the interpretation of text and character, Ralph Clark asserts his supreme authority with the simple statement, ‘I’m the director’. His power is underlined by the social relations in Wertenbaker’s play: he is a gaoler-officer, while his cast are convict-prisoners. It is interesting that Director Clark emerges as a much more positive and sympathetic figure in Our Country’s Good than he appears in either the historical records or Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker (on which Wertenbaker’s play is based). Perhaps this is politic of the modern playwright, who depends so heavily on the commissioning director for patronage? After all, as has been well noted, directors may easily choose to deal with compliant, dead writers instead of querulous, live ones. In examining this ‘change in direction’ in the British theatre, this paper looks at the fascination with dead foreign writers and also at the work of Max Stafford-Clark, who is regarded as Britain’s most important director of new writing of the last 25-30 years. His projects at the Royal Court and for Out of Joint offer an alternative model to the auteur director.

Stuart is Associate Professor and Head of the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. He has an MA (Hons) in Russian and French (Victoria University, Wellington) and a PhD (Cambridge).

Miranda Heckenberg
Director and Designer: case-studies of collaboration and communication

This conference paper allows me to draw together the threads directly concerning the director - designer relationship I have repeatedly come across in the interviews and case-studies I have undertaken as part of my PhD research. The aim of that project is to analytically describe the creative process of working theatre designers. I believe that a close examination of the practice of contemporary Australian theatre designers is an important task in its own right, but I also believe that it can lead to the generation of tools (tools that go beyond simple semiotics or aesthetics) to critically engage with the actual designs activated in performance. The first fundamental question I am asking is what language and process do designers use to develop and communicate their designs in the collaborative theatre process? Clearly, the collaboration between director and designer is central to this research. This paper will look at the ways designers and directors develop ideas and communicate together about the visual. It will also focus on the implications of the standard production / rehearsal timetable in Australian main-stage theatre. It is generally expected that the design will be substantially completed before the first day of rehearsals, I will look at the implications this has for the design process as well as some of the strategies that some directors and designers have found to circumvent the limitations of this approach.

Miranda Heckenberg is a graduate of the NIDA design course (2000) and currently a PhD student in the Performance Studies Department at the University of Sydney.

Michael Beh
Bright young things: ‘visions of Arcadia’ challenging creativity by changing direction

In January 2005 Michael Beh began his position as Head of The Arts, St Thomas More College after a career spanning university, professional and high school theatre. His brief was to help bring about a change of direction of the College through the Arts. By December this year the College will have staged over 20 major Arts events; introduced a new pre-university acting and performance course (PIETA) and have begun plans for the implementation of a new community arts project: COCA (Centre of Creative Achievement), commencing 2007. With a committed staff and the work of supportive parents, Michael has led the students and their families into an investigation of their sense of self and their aesthetic understanding of the world. With a theatrical philosophy based on Evgeny Vakhtangov’s Fantastic Realism, Michael has applied his directing methodology to challenge students, staff and community with stylistically heightened theatre productions that have evoked performances above the standards expected of high school students. The stylistic interpretation of the current production, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, will be the focus of this discussion. For they indeed are “bright young things” with their future at their creative feet.

Following an undergraduate career studying drama at University of Qld, QUT and with a First Class Honours Degree in Drama from UQ, Michael was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study theatre directing at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), where he also worked with the Moscow Art Theatre School (as Assistant Director of Three Sisters), and directed Love Child, Requiem and Diving for Pearls. Since his return to Brisbane he created the independent theatre company, Gyre Theatre, where he directed The Beekeepers Daughter, The Cenci, Scenes from an Execution and The Master Builder. As Qld Theatre Industry Alliance Vice President he co-founded and edited Ignite Theatre Journal which he ran for 4 years. Whilst teaching directing & acting at QUT during doctoral studies he directed Uncle Vanya and The Love of the Nightingale. He has also worked as assistant director on QTC production’s Diving for Pearls, Summer Rain and worked as outreach director for La Boite Theatre. In Secondary Colleges Michael has directed Heartland, Pippin, Macbeth, Shadowlands, Marat/Sade, The Greeks, Our Country’s Good, The Living Room, The World Goes Round, Hamlet, The Mountain Giants, The Pitchfork Disney, Arabian Nights, Metamorphoses, Red, Hot and Cole and Tempest. He is currently working on productions of Arcadia and The Marriage of Figaro with students whilst preparing a bold first season of professional productions for the new theatre company, Illyria Playhouse.