Dodging Traps: Avoiding Pitfalls that Limit Creativity
Making theatre is making decisions. Decisions naturally exclude other options. If the office chair is preset stage left at the top of Scene 1, therefore it cannot be set anywhere else onstage. Will the actor wear a blue shirt or a white shirt when entering Scene 4? There can only be one and then the other is no longer possible. Anne Bogart has a brilliant essay on Violence that dives deep into this point.
The director is usually the person to make those decisions or more likely to break the tie when faced with options.
Our goal with theatre-making is to tell an engaging story that inspires the audience to make change. Making decisions can get the work done, but how can our decisions as directors contribute to making the story more engaging?
For me, creating an environment where all team members feel safe and open to give ideas, test, fail, laugh, and have ownership over the project is the key to generating options in the rehearsal process.
If we need to make a decision eventually, how can we make the rehearsal process about fostering as many choices as possible? You will not know the most engaging option for the storytelling unless you and the other artists have experienced it.
As directors, we can easily fall into traps that inhibit creativity and thereby limit the productions’s potential options. These traps come from our natural wish for the project to be a success. They are safeguards out of a fear of failure.
To avoid these traps we must be willing to model vulnerability, risk our comfort, and draw on the talent of the other artists in the room. This work engenders an environment that sparks a series of creative options, that as a team, we can decide on by opening night.
Here are some potential traps to avoid during the rehearsal process.
Find Collaborators
Be mindful of the the trap: Filling roles.
Theatre is a team sport by design. It takes the efforts of many talented artists to tell a cohesive story. And part of the director’s job is to find those artists.
The beauty of theatre as well is that decisions must be made that naturally exclude all other choices. The chair is preset stage right behind the desk. It can no longer be preset anywhere else on stage. The power of collaboration comes from discovering that the preset position is the best possible choice for the storytelling. And that comes from experimenting with options.
The other reason that the theatre is a team sport is because it requires a lot of work. Rehearsals occur for weeks, budgets have to be drafted and maintained, someone has to get the desk chair from the rehearsal space to the performance space. From this amount of labor and only so much time, we can fall into the trap of asking for a set designer, but what we really want is someone to get the chair to the theatre so that we don’t have to think about it.
We can fall into the trap of casting someone because they were available rather than wanting someone to work with someone who shares in our artistic goals and has a unique access to the play.
We can fall into the trap of having a vision so specific and that we believe in so much that we want to surround ourselves with people who we execute that vision as opposed to finding collaborators who will challenge, enhance, and shape a vision that only could have come from the group.
The production literally has roles to fill and a limited amount of time. We can fill the role of the designer and preset that desk there and never think about it again. And we might strike gold, but most likely you will be left a chair onstage in which the actor has no relationship to and a design choice that does not enhance the storytelling.
We can find a collaborator in a set designer and discuss the intention of the scene and what his office chair would be here. We can find a collaborator in the actor who uses the chair and experiment with how they use it to accomplish their actions. We can experiment. We can test.
Without options, we run the risk of missing something truly great.
Find the right people is the key to achieving success. If you fill your email inbox and meetings with people who strive to create the same vision as you and believe in it so much that they are willing to disagree with you, you are on the step of something great.
Lead the Team
Be mindful of the trap: Be the boss.
The director will be the person to interact with the most amount of people. The director runs the rehearsal room, leads the design team meetings, attends fittings in the costume shop, chooses which notepad makes it into the play, works with producers, among other interactions.
The director leads multiple teams of people in an effort to tell the best story. And there is fine line between being a leader and being a boss.
A leader is someone who encourages and inspires the team to innovate, think creativity, and strive for the best outcome. A boss is someone who manages their employees.
Take staring at the scene for example. A boss may ask the actor to start sitting down. What just happened was that the actor has learned early that you will give them their blocking.
A leader may ask the actor, “where do you think you are when the scene begins?” The answer now comes from the actor and the actor has built confidence in their decision making. Later they may build confidence to suggest their own idea. And more ideas are the key to generating engaging work.
If we need to set the chair the director may speak to the set designer, a Boss may say “place it stage right next to the desk, he’s a person that is always ready to work.” A Leader may ask “can you come to rehearsal and watch this scene as we work it?”
Stronger performance comes from building trust.
Bosses and Leaders of directors come into the room with the same goal -- to get the production ready and sustainable by opening night. Bosses and Leaders go about this task in different ways.
Bosses tend to want to work done quickly and done in a way that does not make them look badly. Leaders tend to invest time inspiring those around them because they want to the team to look good.
Come in with a Informed Starting Point
Be mindful of the trap: Have everything solved on day one.
There is limited time in an art making process. I can hear the anxiety about not having days to figure out where the chair goes. The desire is to decide and move on, there are just too many things.
The truth is that the theatre process will always have something else. You can be working on this production for years and still find something else. Plus if we inspire and empower those around us, then the director is not making all of the decisions. You may not care where the chair is placed but maybe the actor does. Then you can spend your time strengthening their belief in themself so that they can confidently place and use that chair.
The trap to creativity is having everything solved on the first day of rehearsal. I hear wanting to be efficient. To want to use the time well. And I think the biggest trap of all is wanting to prove that your idea works before trying anything else. You worked hard on your idea. You want to see your idea in action. And the truth is, you don’t have to do it. The actor needs to say the line. The technician needs to set the chair. So if the person doing it is not comfortable or does not understand where it is coming from, then it will not be a natural performance.
Have a starting point based on research and your instincts and it’s a draft for yourself. And you needed to do that work for yourself to make sense of the play. And maybe you will need to pull it out of your pocket as an option when the room is totally stuck. But at the end of the day, you do not have to be the one on the stage.
Inspire and encourage the actors to test, experiment, and discover what it is that works best for them because they have to do it on opening night.
It’s even better to come in with your thoughts around how you arrived at your idea. Instead of saying “he’s a ladies man, he wants to fuck everything that moves and he always gets what he wants.” Ask your actors the same questions that you asked yourself when you arrived at that conclusion “what does he do differently when there is a woman in the room? How do you think he handles rejection? Where is that in play?” The actor may come up with something even better or even worse, it really doesn’t matter, because it was their thought and it will be true to them.
