Quote of the day

Meyerhold's view on directing is very much at the core of what I seek to explore in my book, it seems:
"If you asked me today where the difficulty lies in the art of the director, I would say: 'It lies in the fact that he needs to contain the in-containable'. The challenge of the art of directing is that the director needs to be a musician most of all. He in particular has to deal with on of the most difficult aspects of the art of music, he develops the scenic movements always contrapuntally. That is a very difficult matter. […] If you'd ask me: 'Which core course in a faculty of a future theatre-university, which core course should form part of its curriculum?' – I would say: 'Naturally music'. If a director isn't a musician, then he isn't capable of developing a real production. Because a real production (I don't mean the opera, the theatre of the music-drama and the musical comedy –, I even mean such dramatic theatre, where the whole performance proceeds without any musical accompaniment) can only be devised by a musician as a director."

Workshop in Norway

I have just returned from giving a workshop for Master students at the Universitetet i Agder: Institutt for visuelle og sceniske fag within a module on Interdisciplinarity. Through theoretical debate and practical exercises we explored a range of interplays between music, performance, and visual art, taking inspiration from practitioners ranging from Adolphe Appia, Vassily Kandinsky, John Cage to Heiner Goebbels, Carola Bauckholt or Robert Wilson.

It was particularly interesting to work with students whose background was largely not in theatre, not music (with a few exceptions), but in visual art and photography. This allowed us to question and compare notions of "composition", "rhythm" or "score" between different art forms and attempt translations and transformations between the disciplines. Almost as a by-product, we also stumbled upon questions of acting and not-acting and the theatricality of executing musical instructions in a theatrical environment.

One notion that we kept returning to was that of the 'frame' within which we place an artistic practice and how influential this frame (as a mindset, a training background, an institutional set of parameters, or as a predisposition of the spectator/audience) is for how we 'read' interdisciplinary art.