I.

Introduction

Directing, the artistic organization and supervision of a theater production, motion picture, or television program. This task, which belongs to the director, typically involves the preparation and placement of actors, sets, and stage properties and the use of lighting, sound, choreography, and music. Working behind the scenes, the director coordinates the many separate aspects of the production into an artistically unified presentation.

II.

The Director’s Role

In most theater and film projects, the director is at the center of all creative decisions. He or she often selects the script and the key members of the cast and artistic staff. The director also approves the artistic design and leads the rehearsal work of the performers. As the project develops, the director, consciously or not, creates a style that ensures the integrity of the dramatic product. Although the director is rarely seen on stage or before the camera, the director's spirit imbues the performance with a characteristic sense of rhythm, color, vivaciousness, and artistic balance.

The wide-ranging authority of the director is sometimes limited by external conditions. Executive producers or a theater’s board members may impose their artistic visions on the director for personal or financial reasons. Playwrights, composers, celebrity performers, or other creative figures occasionally are able to overturn the director's decisions. In television especially, scriptwriters and producers often have a greater voice in determining the outcome of a production. Normally, the powers of the director are well defined at the beginning of a project, however. Among some experimental theater groups, actors and other members of the cast share directorial responsibilities. When the script, direction, and performance work are developed by the entire troupe, the result is called collective creation.

III.

History of Directing

Although the work of the playwright and actor has been acknowledged and celebrated in the West for 2500 years, artistic recognition of the director's role is relatively recent. Aeschylus, the first great tragedian of ancient Greece, wrote, designed, staged, and acted in his own plays. But during Aeschylus's lifetime (525?-456 bc), the usual practice was to separate each of these activities and assign them to different people. Little is known about the directors of ancient Greece and Rome because no accounts of their work have survived.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—from about the 5th century to the 17th century—elaborate performances were assembled and coordinated by directorial specialists called magister ludi (Latin for leader or director of a play). Yet honor and recognition were reserved for the writers, architects, leading actors, and titled patrons of the presentations. Even in the 17th century, when the complex, many-layered plays of William Shakespeare and Molière dominated British and French stages, the director's position was negligible. A production’s artistic unity revolved around the intelligible transmission of a play’s text. For the audiences and artists of the time, a successful performance required only the most basic management of a stage.

The 18th century brought a new interest in acting and interpretation of character. Productions were considered only as good as the leading performer's presentation. At the same time advances in technology meant that audiences came to the theater for a visual experience, rather than a strictly literary one. Spectators were awed and excited by stupendous innovations in lighting and stage design—the rediscovery of the Roman city of Pompeii in 1748, for example, inspired more authentic classical settings—although the theatrical inventions greatly impeded the mobility of the performers. Despite the pressing need for an artistic figure to coordinate the many intersecting scenic elements, the stage manager—today, usually a crucial assistant to the director—remained an invisible and lowly presence. Finally, in the early 19th century something approaching the modern director emerged.

A.

The 19th Century

The first steps toward defining the role of the modern director were taken by German poet, playwright, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1791 took charge of a small private theater in the city of Weimar. Applying to acting and stage practice the same thorough approach that he used in scientific research, Goethe lorded over his unruly actors, making rehearsals resemble actual productions and forcing his performers to behave naturally, without affectation, on stage. Goethe understood that actors needed direction: Because they were unable to view themselves objectively on stage, they often harbored false impressions of how their acting was perceived. More important, the individual actor was only one aspect of Goethe's larger stage design, which was built on exacting aesthetic standards for pictorial composition. For Goethe, the director's chief responsibility was the creation and maintenance of a unified theatrical style.

In 1874 Duke George II of the German principality of Saxe-Meiningen brought his private theater troupe to Berlin and caused a critical stir. The duke followed Goethe's strict regimen in regard to actors and the rehearsal process. But the Meiningen players performed in an environment of absolute historical accuracy. Actual costumes, properties, and set pieces of the period (or perfect facsimilies of them) filled the Berlin stage. Instead of using fake swords and armor, for example, the duke's actors manipulated or wore the actual objects. These productions re-created in detail the sights and sounds of ancient Rome or Renaissance Verona as well as the words and characters of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. The duke’s emphasis on realism further established the essential role of the director in shaping the play’s atmosphere on stage.

During the 1880s and 1890s André Antoine of France and Konstantin Stanislavsky of Russia both experimented with realistic styles of production. For Antoine, the skillful replication of lower-class life proved to be a primary attraction for Parisian audiences. Like the duke of Saxe-Meiningen, he shocked spectators with an acting and design aesthetic that matched everyday reality, down to minute details. Stanislavsky went further in the early 1900s as he extracted truthful feelings and sustained moods from the actors of his Moscow Art Theater for performances of plays by fellow Russians Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky.

B.

The 20th Century

In the early 20th century, some playwrights began writing antirealistic dramas in reaction against the prevailing realistic style, and these dramas required new scenic and acting styles. In On the Art of the Theatre (1911), British actor and theoretician Gordon Craig proposed a virtually mechanical theater where the director controlled every aspect of the performance, much as a puppet-master. Craig's extreme and novel vision, which diminished the actor's previously exalted role, greatly appealed to avant-garde directors of the 1920s, such as Max Reinhardt of Germany and Vsevolod Meyerhold of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The notion that the stage director, and not the writer or leading performers, was the creative source of theatrical entertainment grew throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as audiences and critics came to recognize the artistic authority of the director in motion-picture making. Ensemble theater companies were newly defined by the imaginative and stylistic precision of their directors. During this time, pioneering directors, inspired by Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Reinhardt, dominated the stages of Europe and North America. These directors included Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Aleksandr Tairov, and Nikolay Okhlopkov in Moscow (USSR); in Berlin (Germany); Jacques Copeau and Antonin Artaud in Paris (France); and George Abbott, Lee Strasberg, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, and Rouben Mamoulian in New York City (United States).

A new generation of theater directors arose after the end of World War II in 1945. Among the best-known and innovative of these directors are Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook of Britain; Roger Blin and Ariane Mnouchkine of France; Bertolt Brecht and Peter Stein of Germany; Jerzy Grotowski of Poland; Andrei Serban of Romania; Yuri Lyubimov of Russia; and Harold Clurman, Harold Prince, Julian Beck (see Living Theatre), Joseph Chaikin, José Quintero, and Julie Taymor of the United States.