Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Deterritorializing Directing

When I first began directing, I spent a lot of time looking for the right way to do it. I directed my first full length show before ever taking a directing class, so my sheer bewilderment about the job description wasn't that surprising. For a long time I thought that somewhere, somehow, there was a right way to do this strange task that I'd suddenly fallen in love with. If only someone could tell me how!

I've been feeling the pain of Platonism a lot lately. About 2500 years ago, Plato spread a nasty rumor that ideal, perfect forms existed somewhere out there and that we should live our lives in their pursuit. In his vision, every material thing is ghosted by an ideal version of that thing. In the Platonic model, failure is basically guaranteed, because shorn of the responsibility of actual existence, the imaginary, ideal thing is always superior. The material manifestation of it, striving towards but never reaching the ideal, is always inferior.

If I were the "ideal" director, I would come to every rehearsal with a perfect vision of the scene and have an impeccable structure for getting us to that result. I would know exactly how to communicate with my actors and designers. I would rarely be lost or despairing, but even if I was, I'd have the ideal method for dealing with that anxiety.

Oh Plato. What have you wrought?

Deleuze and Guattari's vision of the world is perhaps more useful for the theatre director. For D&G, "Forms and subjects, organs and functions are 'strata' or relationships between strata" (1KP, 297). Our interpretation of the world builds up in layers like the layers of rock you can see in a cliff wall. These interpretations harden into stratified systems that seem so real they can trap us inside them. We believe in these systems, and suddenly the maps that we've drawn to help us understand the utter un-mapability of the world become more real than the territory they attempt to contain.

Directing is a messy art form. Each time I do it, I go in with a plan: a certain relationship between forms and subjects that I hope might produce the play I want to see. And each time I find myself re-inventing the wheel. Deleuze and Guattari describe deterritorialization as the process that breaks up stratification. It's a movement in an unexpected direction that disregards existing strata. Deterritorializing forces scratch out and re-write the map, not based on a destructive urge, but out of desire and necessity. They make new forms and new modes as they move in a new way through the old territory.

"Flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new" (1KP, 60).

Everytime I direct, my core notion of what it is to be a director - what it means to make art collaboratively yet in pursuit of a specific vision - changes. This constant flux is the pleasure and the challenge of this work.

So Plato - I hope you're listening! I'm releasing the notion of the ideal directoral technique! If you're looking for me, you'll find me bumbling about in the rehearsal room half-lost, half-inspired, trying to hold on to the reins of these Deleuzian forces of deterritorialization.