03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques

The IATC journal/Revue de l'AICT – December/Décembre 2020: Issue No 22

 SPECIAL TOPIC ESSAYS NATIONAL REPORTS INTERVIEWS PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

IN MEMORIAM BOOK REVIEWS

Search

CS Issue No 22 Section
Editors & Editorial
Board

Section Editors: Bios

Editorial Board

Essays
Editorial Note

Rethinking Authority, Creativity Editorial | Éditorial

and Authorship in Twenty-First-

THEATRE RECORD
Century Performance: The
Directorʼs Revised Role
 Avra Sidiropoulou

Avra Sidiropoulou*

T
Subscribe to THEATRE
he conversation about the directorʼs changing RECORD and get instant access
identity, as our century gallops towards or stumbles to FORTY YEARS OF BRITISH
through challenges that few could have anticipated THEATRE HISTORY. Full
reviews, credits and
even a few years—let alone months—ago is becoming
photographs Quickly
all the more complex. Today, directing practice has crossed many

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 1/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

disciplines, methodologies and ecologies of theatre-making. My searchable on line, updated

daily...
article sets out to explore some emergent dynamics that re ect the
directorʼs role within the current performance landscape; a
landscape in which directorial jurisdictions are no longer
contained within the realm of pre-scripted dramatic plays and one CS/Sc Newsletter
which engages with unconventional performance environments
Email address:
framed by the proliferation of intermedial forms, intercultural
Your email address
collaborations and a variety of human and nonhuman
(im)materialities. In so doing, I will set out to locate the shi from
perceiving the director commonly as the productionʼs single
Sign up
uncontested authority to an agent of symbiotic meaning making.
Keywords: director, spectating, collectivity, textuality,
performativity, presentness, Castellucci, Rau, Rimini Protokoll,
Ruping
Interview with Maria
Τoday, the concept of interpretation has acquired a much more
Shevtsova
accommodating meaning, as spectators have become quite
accustomed to alternative, “porous” dramaturgies, namely art forms
Interview with Ma…
Ma…
that allow “for new information, theories, and discoveries in science
and technology to enter the domain of dramaticity” (Sidiropoulou,
Directions 117). The “rebalancing of the text and performance
hierarchy” (Radosavljević 150) has resulted in theatre textuality
becoming multifarious and multi-authored, both unsettled and 00:00 01:06:39

unsettling. “New” dramaturgies—categorically hyphenized or

con ated and based on equally elusive textualities—are subject and
vulnerable to the intrusion of the authentic experience, the Contact CS/Sc
establishment of di erent normativities, emergent or updated artistic
and critical habitats. As such, they o en operate as a bridge that Click here for the CS/Sc contact
form
connects writing with the mise-en-scène.

Many artists in Europe and the West have been ready to position
Special Pages
themselves with admirable exibility to such an elaborate continuum
of modes of creativity and reception, aiming for encounters and
International Theatre and
interactions, a kind of “conciliatory” theatre-making mode that Peter
Performing Arts Festival
Boenisch calls “relational dramaturgy” (qtd. in Trencsényi and
Guide
Cochrane 232). Instead of settling/locking interpretation rmly on a
be-all-and-end-all idea, the director releases its constituent parts, Inter-Connecting: A
individual threads of creativity, which, in interweaving freely with Collection of Useful Links
each other and with the audience, contribute both to the signi cation
and the presentness of performance. Interpretation—which is always
performative and never static—is more than ever before centrifugal Notices
rather than centripetal.
CS Privacy Policy

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 2/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Submission Guidelines /
Soumission dʼarticles

Style Sheet / Protocole

abrégé

Archived Issues

REPLIEE S1 (an android) as Grégoire Samsa and Irène Jacob as The Mother.
Metamorphosis by Kafka. Directed by Oriza Hirata. 2014. Festival Automne en Normandie.
Photo: Seinendan Company

Complex Textualities

If dramaturgy is about the process of collaboratively generating

theatre texts, theatre textuality points to narrative composition and, in
its more updated usage, the material presence of a story-telling
component on stage. As such, it can refer to the playscript, but also to
the actorʼs body, scenography, visual and digital forms—as separate
entities of interpretative focus or as an integrated whole where
meaning is produced dialogically. Essentially, these combinatory
textualities encourage the director to consider horizontal, non-
hierarchical modes of analysis and synthesis. The director becomes a
collector, a compiler and a connector, who juxtaposes/contrasts/mixes
the di erent textualities in order for the uber-text (a combination of
the aesthetic idea, the essential story and the performed/physical and
perceptual/a ective experience) to emerge.

Framing, the exegetic manipulation of verbal, visual-somatic, digital

and aural con gurations and elements of staging, therefore, becomes
a rudiment of theatre composition. In fact, arranging these elements
in non-serial fashion provides narratives that can work autonomously
and not merely alongside the dialogue. Set and digital design notably
inscribe their own narrative onto the performance from the outset of
the creative process. One may for example refer to the productions of
Romeo Castellucci, in which scenography is integral to the
dramaturgy of the work. In On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the
Son of God (2011), a piece about the vulnerability of aging in a Godless
time, excremental icons are used to make a pessimistic statement

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 3/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

about the lack or loss of Christian faith. An originally immaculate

white space is gradually being soiled as a result of an old manʼs
incontinence, while an early Renaissance portrait of Jesus looms over
the excruciating repetition of the routine of the son changing his
fatherʼs diapers.

CS/Sc Supporters

Gianni Piazzi. On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the

Son of God by Romeo Castellucci. Directed by Romeo
Castelluci. 2011. Cesena, Italy. Photo: Klaus Lefebvre

Considering theatre a product of a literary mind and a collaboration

of stage processes, one may regard theatre textuality as an operation
that unites the discursive and the symbolic with the material and the
embodied. And just as any dramatic text is in some form or other
encrypted, so is non-dramatic textuality. When one analyzes a play, The views and opinions
one ultimately decodes its performativity, unleashing connections expressed in Critical
Stages/Scènes critiques are
between the abstract world of language on a page and its concrete
those of the authors and do
realization onstage.
not necessarily re ect the
o cial policy or position
Within a broader understanding of textuality, this two-way process
of the journal
(the dialogue between the dramatic play and its performance) is
expanded ad in nitum, given the wide array of compositional Limitation de
responsabilité : Les articles
textualities. At the same time, decoding performativity is no longer a
publiés dans Critical
matter of entering the kernel of a singular meaning and prioritizing it
Stages/Scènes critiques
in performance; rather, it calls for a way of determining how each of expriment lʼopinion de
the individual languages/textualities can connect. Deciding on the leurs auteurs et ne
degree of connectivity and the nature of such connection is the re ètent pas
nécessairement la
directorʼs responsibility.
politique o cielle ou la
Similarly, it is worth rethinking the function of preparatory “analysis” position de la revue

when the verbal text takes “second stage. Acknowledging this “new
way of directing” (which in fact is not really so “new” as an artistic
reality, but has received more thorough typological analysis in the
recent years) as a practice of synchronously, rather than
consequentially, selecting and composing di erent pivots of
signi cation, we can potentially accept the methodological

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 4/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

mechanisms of analysis and synthesis in rehearsal as essentially

concurrent.

Directorʼs Authority and Collaborative Connectivity

Marianne Van Kerkhovenʼs stipulation, already back in 1994, that “the

ʻsingleʼ individual no longer has the structural means available to
master realityʼs complexity” (20) precociously suggests that not one
single expert or authority could ever be enough in a theatre based on
di erent disciplines, aesthetic departures and methodological
trajectories. This understanding invites collaboration and openings,
de es the notion of borders and calls for new coalitions. Essentially,
theatreʼs collaborative extraversion necessitates the establishment of
new authorial roles.

That being said, the director is, on the one hand, emancipated but, on
the other, burdened with the overload of choice. Polyvalence and
multiplicity require swi adjustments to the interpenetration of forms
and bold crossing of aesthetic, structural and perceptual boundaries.
Indeed, increasingly people from di erent elds enter the directing
practice, which is de facto interdisciplinary.

These scientists cum writers cum dancers cum digital engineers-

directors pit their expertise and research against experience and
training. Their director identity is validated by the general acceptance
of the uidity of practices recently attaching themselves to the
theatre. If digital interfaces can claim their function as theatre
textuality, then, equally, the IT expert can also claim directorial role.
Inevitably, the hybrid identities of the new director also signal the
emergence of “expertise” over talent, of cra over art.

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 5/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

The Possible/Impossible House. Conceived and devised by Forced

Entertainment in collaboration with Vlatka Horvat. Directed by Tim
Etchells. 2015. Barbican, London, UK. Photo: Tim Etchells

The “crisis” of the traditional “twentieth century role” of the director

in this domain of non-strati ed theatre-making is clearly tied to the
question whether, ultimately, in the open, highly egalitarian modes of
creativity we are discussing we still need the director to “tell us what
to do.” If so, what would the directorʼs presence contribute to this
landscape of textual indeterminacy?

In principle, directors lead by mobilizing an intricate, competitive and

visceral exchange, where, ideally, the meaning (the essential “why”) of
the work remains uid, determined by individual criteria of cognition
and value. Granted, the democratization of meaning (which goes as
far back as post-structuralist notions of the “open” text)[1] establishes a
non-hegemonic acknowledgment of authoring involvement:
playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers and spectators
are all similarly entitled to the performanceʼs meaning.

Given the valorization of ensemble practice and devised forms over

the empire of the director-auteur, some have hinted at the directorʼs
weakened role in the theatre. However, although the network of
individual readings and creative contributions is quite complex,
directors hold strong, refusing to let go of the master key of
interpretation. In the context of collaborative engagement, the
individual insights of every group member will be adjusted, in varying
degrees of compliance, to the directorʼs overall vision. And unless the
formal operational principle of the company is strictly de ned as that
www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 6/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

of a collective, during the delicate stages of conceptualization,

ordinarily the director is expected to provide the preliminary
structure on which everyone can start building. He or she functions as
a catalyst, who makes the interpretation happen, a guarantor and a
facilitator of connectivity.

While the principles of collaborative theatre-making permeate the

preparation stages—which include collection of existing or production
of new material, dramaturgical research, analysis of signi cant
textual, imagistic and performative patterns and so forth—the director
still decides on how the gathered materials are to connect. Again,
notwithstanding the palimpsest nature of any act of interpretation,
the interest now lies not so much in layering these formal elements
according to an evaluatory system of what comes rst and what last,
but in setting the rules of these layersʼ collegial co-existence.

In this elaborate circuit of synergies, textuality becomes a

manifestation of the “Great Idea” (for luck of a better term) behind
dramaturgical analysis and staging.

Laurenz Laufenberg as Hofmiller. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. Directed by Simon

McBurney. 2015. Schaubuhne, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Jamie Williams

Indeed, although companies that build performances collectively

exploit more communal work principles, in many groups that still
www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 7/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

claim to function as ensembles, decisions will eventually gravitate

toward one person assuming responsibility for the productionʼs
comprehensive form. In those cases, the artist-leader or artistic
director is loosely “enlisted” to determine its signature style. Once
again, directors carry upon them a fraction of the distinct properties
of their collaborators, whom they represent. They are, in other words,
the representatives of the ensemble, their authority endorsed in
selecting and editing the teamʼs individual chapters in the collective
work of performance.

Complicite | Beware of Pity 2015-16 at Schau…

Schau…

Promotional trailer of Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. Directed by Simon McBurney. 2015.
Schaubuhne.

Directing and the Historiography of Experience

More than ever before, today, there is pressure for the director—and
for performance—to pose, if not answer, the question of what is “real”
and sustain the aporia of how reality can be represented. Theatre
assumes the function of a research machine, where new political
theories, social philosophies and scienti c discoveries are scrutinized
and analyzed critically.

Seen in this light, creating a theatre event is claiming part in the

making of history. If there is one thing that twenty- rst-century
performance has shown us is that it is more important to produce
reality than to represent it. Directors such as Milo Rau are like
historians who excavate the history of our globalized world; they
must, if not interpret, at least present the largely interconnected
stories of human beings in fragile societies today. Like
historiographers they probe into modern dystopias o en through a
transnational perspective.

In Orestes in Mosul (2019), Rau transports the themes and charactersʼ

of Aeschylusʼ trilogy The Oresteia—a foundational text of Western

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 8/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

civilization about civic justice—to modern day Mosul, a city in Iraq

that has been devastated by the crimes and atrocities of the Caliphate
of Isis, which held it captive until 2017. Part of Rauʼs research,
rehearsals and lming of the project took place in Mosul, where the
director and his NTGent theater company travelled. Rau worked with
Belgian actors (two of whom of Iraqi descent) as well as with local
professional and amateur actors from Mosul, to create a reading of
the play adjusted to the grim reality of modern-day Iraq. In the
production that opened in Ghent and retained only about 20 percent
of Aeschylusʼ text, the Belgian actors performed the main characters
of Aeschylusʼ trilogy against the individual stories of Mosul and its
citizens, projected as footage that had been recorded while the
company rehearsed in Iraq.

One might protest that Rauʼs production was more of a documentary—

a “making of” of Orestes in Mosul—than a comprehensive reading of
the tragedy. But that had never been among the directorʼs intentions,
anyway. Instead, Rau investigated the limits and possibilities of justice
and forgiveness, making the spectators witnesses to an open
“performative” wound, a collective trauma that only history will be
able (or not) to resolve in the depths of time. Here, theatre-making
built the circumstances of extensive research on an appalling twenty-
rst-century tragedy.

Involving local artists and focusing on extensive visual material and

personal stories and testimonies, Orestes in Mosul examined
important political issues that meant to bring the Western audiences
face-to-face with their moral responsibilities. The director operates as
a historian, a compiler and interpreter of moments of crisis, taking us
outside of the common spectatorial borders—geographical as well as
perceptual—outside our comfort zone. No doubt, this identity of
analyst-inquisitor is one of high risk, as one must remain consistent to
the existing but also open to new constituent lines of inquiry in the
course of creating the performance.

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEmj… 9/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Chorus, Johan Leysen, Elsie de Brauw, Bert Luppes; Susana AbdulMajid, band, and
production crew. Orestes in Mosul by Milo Rau. Directed by Milo Rau. 17 April 2019. Photo:
Stefan Bläske

And for that, the audience is crucial, since history, as it unfolds, needs
witnesses to record its frantic course. Artists no longer seem to ght
clearly de ned ideological battles. On the contrary, the obliteration of
clear-cut oppositional forces (such as, for example, the ri between
le and right or of enemy states pitted against each other) has resulted
in a philosophy of theatre that focuses more on “ethical
responsibilities” of both creator and viewer, what Lehmann sees as
the political vision of postdramatic theatre. He proposes a “politics of
perception,” what he calls “an aesthetic of responsibility (or response-
ability)” (186), which can “move the mutual implication of actors and
spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and
thus make visible the broken thread between personal experience and
perception” (186).

Orestes in Mosul

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 10/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Promotional trailer for Orestes in Mosul. Directed by Milo Rau. Festival dʼautumn. Paris, 2019

Audio-guided performances are a telling example of the audienceʼs co-

authoring part. Rimini Protokollʼs Remote Mitte—part of the global
project Remote X that took place in various cities all over the world—is
an audio-guided stroll through Berlinʼs historic Mitte, where the
audience is asked to follow instructions through a set of headphones.
The acoustic guide, acting as a director-God, informs us of the next
destination, controls our turns, the crossings, getting on and o trains
and into buildings and so forth. In this performance, spectators
become performers. They act and interact with the director-
apparatus, while also forming their own experience. The directing
agency is subsumed by an acoustic avatar that gives instructions to the
ear-phoned peripatetic audience. In e ect, the director orchestrates
the agency of the human, of the technology, but also of chance
(Schipper qtd. in Leeker and Schipper 200).

In this hybrid event-authorship, the voice of the machine is the voice

of the director, responsible for laying out the rules of the game, in
e ect, the rules of the performance. Even so, the director can
in uence the choices only to a certain degree; by allowing the
unpredictable to enter the largely pre-determined course of events,
the director yields a degree of authorship to the spectator: “the
actions that you decide to perform dictate what kind of experience
you have” (Schipper 200). One might in fact argue that the experience
of the spectator could be another form of textuality, its cognitive and
emotive uctuations being a fundamental base in the performative
interaction between audience and stage. Although functioning within
the operational framework of the director-machine, the audience is a
performer, a co-writer and a co-producer.

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcEm… 11/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Remote Mitte by Rimini Protokoll. Directed by Stefan Kaegi. 2015. Berlin,

Germany. Photo: Gorki Theatre

Encouraging the audienceʼs co-responsibility is fundamental in

artistic projects where mediation is a key structural element and
where the performerʼs carnality collides against the omni-presence of
the mediated voice or bodies. Con ating the virtual and the here and
now, the director functions both as a guide—utilizing the traditional
role of an agency who helps the actor ful ll a speci c vision of the
dramatic character—and a creator of new characters, new realities,
new texts.

Director, Spectator and Authorship

The elasticity of theatre textuality does not preclude the need for
narrative cohesion and stable points of reference acting as entryways
for the audience to access the world on stage. While the boundaries of
theatre innovation remain thankfully uncharted, directors may be the
second in order mediator between the auditorium and the stage, but,
ultimately, they are the one to in uence the degree of the audienceʼs
power to interpret. Yet here, interpretation, far from equaling
authorship of a xed, accident-proof aesthetic product, also
references the phase of creating circumstances that are favorable to
the collective ownership of the theatre event.

As postdramatic practice has shown, spectating develops on the

premise that the audience becomes its own viewer, resistant to being
manhandled into passivity. In this respect, being a director today also
involves the orchestration of an experiential event, in all its oating
www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 12/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

indeterminacy. In other words, it is not so much about producing a

performance whose air-tight semiology can be perceived and decoded
through intellectual stimulation, alone.

An interesting example to bring up is Münchner Kammerspieleʼs 10-

hour long, 4-part marathon, Dionysos Stadt. In 2018, Christopher
Rüping built this tetralogy in the spirit of the ancient Greek festival of
Great Dionysia. In addition to being a maximalist, fascinating
interpretation of the myth of Prometheus, the Trojan War and the
Oresteia, this work provided an exhilarating mode of composition that
pushed the boundaries of spectatorial experience. The director
created the conditions for a communal experience, in which the
kaleidoscopic retelling of important stories and themes of the
Western literary canon went hand-in-hand with an experimentation
with an eclectic array of theatre traditions and discourses, including
improvisation, slapstick comedy, formalist aesthetics and tragedy. The
disparate performance styles and genres o ered an unapologetic
spectacle that brings the audience members together.

Rüpingʼs talent lies both in creating the occasion for fun, emotional
and mental stimulation and for building a contemporary community
of solidarity, involvement and participation. More than its dramaturgy
or the mixture of styles that aptly come together, more than the
stories that reveal the nuanced content of the ancient Greek texts, we
leave the theatre with a sense of event-ness, of a give-and-take, and a
rewarding feeling of having added to the new community speci cally
created for and around the performance.

Dionysus Stadt approximates the ideal of Dionysia, the dramatic agon

in honor of the god Dionysus. Every aspect of the production caters to
the evocation of the festival spirit: fruit and nuts are served to the
audience during the intermission, and the production sta is clothed
in white long robes. Things really explode in the fourth and nal part
of the performance, which stages a football match, as the main actor,
Nils Kahnwald stands center-stage, o ering a treatise on the
melancholy of the French world-renowned football player Zinedine
Zidane. Critics and audiences alike talk about a vibrant, intoxicating
experience, a staging of a festival in the truest sense of the word. At
the end of this rollercoaster of lasting visual, acoustic and emotional
resonance, we are le wondering to whom Dionysos Stadt belongs:
the ingenious director, the alert performers, or the receptive, resilient
audience?

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 13/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Dionysus Stadt. Directed by Christopher Rüping. 6 October 2018. Münchner Kammerspiele,

Munich, Germany. Photo: Julian Baumann

Anne Ubersfeld identi es the spectatorʼs ludic pleasure to be “the

pleasure of a ʻgratuitousʼ acting-out, e ected by an actor and re-
enacted in the mind of the spectator” (132–33). She refers to “the
pleasure of a psychic coincidence between the actor and the
audience” (133), an intimate encounter that seems to exclude the
director. Here, the new director—as opposed to the director in more
traditional forms of theatre—di ers in that he or she encourages this
ludic pleasure even more. Indeed, while Ubersfeld speci cally refers
to the actorʼs ability to “invent signs that will create an e ect of
surprise” (132), the director is even more aware that “the pleasure of
the unexpected is a necessary stimulus to the jaded palate of the
regular theatre-goer” (132). This pleasure also relates to what Patrice
Pavis calls “destinerrancy:” “The moment authority over the text or
the performance is surrendered, the power of decision is transferred
to the actor, and in the nal analysis to the spectatorʼs gaze.
Performance reclaims its rights” (45).

As actors transform in every performance, letting the eye of the

audience a ect their performing body, the director eases the osmosis
between performer and spectator, which can shape a new textuality
each time. To put it simply, directors play with the law of chance to

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 14/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

which they are attracted and which they also fear. For Ubersfeld, there
is indeed pleasure in “aleatory occurrences . . . the results of the
chance happenings of the performance, of the materiality of the
stage,” which, she argues, are a “source of pleasure” (133), as “he
spectator takes delight in what is chance encounter, in what he alone
has chanced to see” (133). Allowing the chance element to in ltrate
the performance, directors empower both actors and spectators. They
may cede or retrieve their power at will by enabling performer and
spectator to form their own unpredictable relationship, which is ruled
by phenomenological contingency, and then intervene to ensure that
the exchange of gazes never becomes stale. That the Great Idea will
not get locked in any given gaze for too long but will continue to
circulate among actors, spectators and the world beyond the theatre.

£¥€$Lies by Ontroerend Goed [Script: Joeri Smet, Angelo Tijssens, Karolien De Bleser,
Alexander Devriendt.] Directed by Alexander Devriendt. 2017. Photo: Thomas Dhanens

In his analysis of the “emancipated spectator” (within or outside the

traditional theatre structures), Jacques Rancière argues that spectators
act by observing, selecting and interpreting as well as by linking what
they see to other things that they have seen on other stages; their way
of participating in the performance is by “refashioning it” in their
own way” (13). Indeed, spectators “see, feel and understand

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 15/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

something in as much as they compose their own poem, as, in their

way, do actors or playwrights, directors, dancers or performers” (13).

Boenisch adds to Rancièreʼs notion of emancipation—“the shaking up

the underlying spectating relations and its implicit hierarchies”—and
considers such emancipation an “essentially dramaturgic operation . .
. achieved where the individual intelligence of the spectator as
spectator in their irreducible distance as thinking interpreters is
a rmed without any reservations” (Boenisch qtd. in Trencsényi and
Cochrane 234). Needless to say, this observation heralds a more
mature and, in fact, more enjoyable operation not only for the
audience, but also for the director, regardless of the productionʼs
modes of expression. Το refer to Pavis again, “a mise-en-scène can
very well be structured in a rigorous manner; in the old-fashioned
way, and still be open towards a non-authoritarian [reading]
discourse, favouring otherness” (45).

£¥€$ (Lies) di ONTROEREND GOED (BE)

Promotional trailer of £¥€$Lies by Ontroerend Goed

Perpetual Paradoxes and Future Directors/ions

Today, directors are faced with the challenge of younger generation

“app” spectators, who grew up worshipping mediation and have little
tolerance for the kind of profound and slow contemplation that live
performance requires. Theatre-makers o en tread on quicksand,
trying to compete against their audienceʼs very private, safe rapport
with their screen; a rapport that has largely in ltrated the identity of
the new spectator.

Rüpingʼs Dionysus event manifests the kind of communication as

communion that is so vital to the theatre, especially as excessive
mediation threatens to numb the essential rapport between spectator
and performer and rob us of any opportunity to truly connect (to the
stage, to the other spectators around us). Especially in the pandemic-

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 16/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

de ned times, one needs to question the forced omnipotence of the

online expedient, which, overused, might jeopardize the essential
liveness of theatre.

Zoom theatre, theatre “on line,” “on demand,” “at home”—recently

o ered as a valuable alternative to the extensive lock-down measures
in a big part of the globe—may be a solution for temporarily satisfying
our need for artistic creation and consumption during times when
theatre production has su ered a terrible blow, but should be treated
as such: namely, an extreme measure for extreme times. If what is
currently viewed as an “alternative” establishes itself as the “new
normal,” theatre risks becoming disengaged from its vital organs, the
physically present communities of spectators. True, the director will
regain some of the earlier authority, being called upon to lter the
trajectory of interpretation through the eye of the camera, by focusing
the audienceʼs attention on speci c moments of performance, by
hierarchizing what deserves to be spotlighted at di erent times, by
making the face as opposed to the body the major carrier of
interpretative content (through close-ups); in short, by allowing video
editing and special e ects to replace moments of theatrical crisis, of
hesitation, of pause, of utter and profound silence.

Yet, this advantage is ultimately a form of regression, a return to those

conservative forms of spectating that contemporary performance is so
intensely struggling against. Empowered by means traditionally
assigned to lm-makers, directors may indeed be better equipped to
control the way something is perceived, but this control will cost
them, as it will, in the end, cost the theatre event; without the
independent gaze of the spectator, no interpretation and no act of
theatre authorship can ever be complete, no liminal experience can
occur. Without the spectator in the real room, the director may be
reduced to a controlling Big-Brother who is able to censor by
elimination anything that has gone “wrong” in the live performance
as well as decide for us but without us what and how the performance
means.

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 17/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Clockwise from top le : Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett, Sally Murphy, Laila Robins and
Stephen Kunken. What Do We Need to Talk About? By Richard Nelson. Filmed live on Zoom
by the Public Theatern. April 2020. Photo: the Public Theater

Ιn a more hopeful scenario, directors will continue to be the arbiters

of the performanceʼs structural, thematic, sensory and embodied
relationships, while the core of “meaning” remains open. Every
performance carries its own slippery nature, a challenge that the
director will inevitably hand down to the audience in order for the
cycle of interpretation to continue to run its course. The moment this
handing down of authorship (and ownership) of meaning occurs is
when the most sensitive and essential act of spectatorship begins, one
that is bound to in uence the experience of spectating. Erika Fischer-
Lichte places the notion of such transformation in the centre of
performativity, because theatre performances are “not only always
staged but are also principally capable of triggering liminal
experiences, even if the experiences a orded and methods used
di er” (195). In the same way, she argues, that “the mise en scène
aims at reenchanting the world, aesthetic experience as liminal
experience strives to transform the performanceʼs participants” (195).

Transformation happens when the director seals the main question

mark that the performance raises (what something means/how
something means), by acknowledging the vulnerability and

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 18/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

tumultuousness of interpretation as a necessary condition for

textuality to be artistically validated. In other words, the director can
bridge the performative anxieties of artists and the perceptual and
emotional needs of spectators, providing consolation and closure to
the unanswerable questions and debilitating what-ifs that are deeply
connected to the paradox of interpretation: the questions the
performance raises are its answers.

Given how in nite the possibilities and combinations of artistic

expression are, the director should make sure that no text or
textuality will ever be nite or shut down; accept that every new
interaction between audience, performer and the idea, in their
endless and unpredictable variations, will refresh and reposition the
text anew. Indeed, the director is the Big Other (per Lacan) in his/her
“radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness . . . the symbolic order
which mediates the relationship with that other subject” (Evans 133).
In performance, the director is a symbolic gure of synthesis and
arrival (rather than departure) of all the separate layers of textuality
that have been employed to create it. Ironically, the directorʼs newly
claimed power lies in being able to surrender it.

Works Cited

Boenisch, Peter. “Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the

Audienceʼs Experience in Contemporary Theatre.” New
Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice,
edited by Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane,
Bloomsbury,2014, pp. 225–42.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Routledge, 1996.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A

New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain, Routledge, 2008.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. 1999. Translated by

Karen Jurs-Munby, Routledge, 2006.

Pavis, Patrice. Contemporary Mise-en-scène: Staging Theatre Today.

Routledge, 2013.

Radosavljević, Duška. Theatre-Making: The Interplay Between Text

and Performance in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009.

Schipper, Imanuel. “From Flâneur to Co-producer: The Performative

Spectator.” Performing the Digital, edited byMartina Leeker and
www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 19/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Imanuel Schipper, Transcript-Verlag, 2017, pp. 191–209.

Sidiropoulou, Avra. Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method.

Routledge, 2018.

—. Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Ubersfeld, Anne. “The Pleasure of the Spectator.” Translated by Pierre

Bouillaguet and Charles Jose. Modern Drama, vol. 25, no. 1, 1982,
pp. 127–39.

Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “On Dramaturgy.” Theaterschri , vols. 5–6,

1994, pp. 8–34.

[1]
See Umberto Ecoʼs The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the
Semiotics of Texts (Indiana UP, 1984); also, Roland Barthesʼ “The
Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (Fontana, 1977).

*Avra Sidiropoulou is Associate Professor at the Μ.Α. Programme in

Theatre Studies of the Open University of Cyprus and Artistic Director
of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. She is the author of two
monographs: Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method
(Routledge, 2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in
Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and she has
contributed articles and chapters to several international peer-
reviewed journals and volumes. She is currently editing an
international collection on representations of twenty- rst-century
crisis on stage (Routledge, forthcoming).

Share this:

Share 51 Tweet Share Post

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 20/21
03/01/2021 Rethinking Authority, Creativity and Authorship in Twenty-First-Century Performance: The Director’s Revised Role – Critical Stages/Scènes crit…

Relaxed Performance: Tercera Llamada The Digital Sublime and

An Ethnography of #LiveOnlineNow: Notes Fragility in the Time of
Pedagogy in Praxis on a Virtual Theatre COVID-19 and the Eco-
Experience crisis: The Dynamics of
October 18, 2020 Becoming
In "Essays" December 8, 2020
In "Special Topic" December 6, 2020
In "Special Topic"

← What Is This Thing, Drama? Plays for Dialogue in a Rwandan College

Setting

Corps, voix, mémoire : Entretien avec Guy Régis Jr. →

Copyright © 2021 Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. All rights reserved.

No part of this issue may be reproduced or transmitted by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.
Each author holds individual copyright for his/her text and photographs.
Aucune partie de ce numéro ne peut être reproduite ou transmise de quelque façon que ce soit sans une permission
écrite préalable de lʼéditeur.
Chaque auteur.e détient les droits pour son texte et ses photos.

www.critical-stages.org/22/rethinking-authority-creativity-and-authorship-in-twenty-first-century-performance-the-directors-revised-role/?fbclid=IwAR1JcE… 21/21