Humanity 2009

Chris Baldwin, a devised theatre practitioner and co-editor of a practical guide to devising theatre, lists the devising director’s responsibilities as building a production and performance team, timetabling, compiling documentation of the rehearsal process and, crucially, fulfilling the role of spectator as the devised show is developed and rehearsed. Described by Baldwin as ‘at the centre of the rehearsal fulcrum’ (2002, 13), the director’s role is clearly assigned with an operation of power despite insistences that it is one of ‘enabling’ rather than ‘authority’, as in the case of text-based theatre. When compared to the tactics of discipline outlined by Michel Foucault (1977) – including spatial and temporal organization, partitioning, rank and analysis – the responsibilities of the devising director in Chris Baldwin’s account may be reconfigured as ‘enabling’ through discipline, with the persistent rhetoric of devising’s potential to democratize theatre practice masking complex operations of power that retain striking similarities to the practices of text-based theatre production that devising was initially intended to subvert. The primary holder of information concerning the devising group and the creative process (including preliminary research and rehearsal notes), the director thus fulfills an analytic role that is given added weight by its temporary function as ‘potential spectator’. In this paper I will examine devising theatre as a process of decision making, and the role of the director in presenting and ‘enabling’ the decisions that are made in the rehearsal room, and the implications for the final devised production. Devising theatre is a collaborative process of creating an original theatrical production. While some devised productions may originate with some form of pre-written text, in my research I concentrate on theatre that is not developed from any written text but instead produced by the interactions and creative explorations of a group of theatre practitioners. In this paper I will examine the role of one of these practitioners, the director, and how this role has been constructed in practical guides to contemporary devised theatre. First, I will briefly contextualise the emergence of the director in Western theatre as an aesthetic response to 19 Century theatre styles, and the later disruption of the director’s authority as a political strategy by 1960s/70s devising collectives. Next I shall consider how the recent restoration of the director’s function in contemporary devised theatre has been couched in the terms ‘facilitator’ and ‘outside eye’ in devising literature. I argue that the use of such rhetoric suggests that the director’s function may usefully be opened to analysis as disciplinarian, in a Foucauldian sense, rather than autocratic. Using Foucault’s (1977) techniques of discipline as a starting point to such an analysis, I will closely examine Chris Baldwin’s (2002) chapter ‘The Director’ – a how-to guide for directors of devised theatre – to suggest that the rhetoric of devised theatre as a democratic theatre practice masks more complex power operations than are currently considered in the literature.