Systems of Rehearsal (Shomit Mitter)

I didn’t quite finish today’s book- I have another thirty pages which will have to wait until tomorrow, and while I think I may still attain greater knowledge of the subject of the book (which I swear I will get to after this preamble), I don’t know how much my feelings towards to subject of the study will change and so that’s what I’ll focus on now.

Systems of Rehearsal purports to be the first book which examines the theatrical philosophies of three luminary directors (Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Jerry Grotowski, a man I didn’t know), how they sought to bring out those philosophies in their actors through rehearsal techniques, how both their techniques and their philosophies changed over their careers, and the influence they had on director Peter Brook.

It’s a clear idea with a lot of work needed to bring it home, and the part of the reason the book is taking so long is the meticulous, I might say over-burdened, way that Mitter explains the philosophies and techniques of these directors. I’m not an anti-intellectual by any means, and I think art requires making sense of difficult and often contradictory thought but if these philosophies cannot be articulated simply, or if they rely on pushing through to their logical conclusions until you end up on the complete opposite side of where you started (which has happened to all three of the focus directors for each chapter,) then perhaps the director is stretching, or hasn’t though things out clearly enough.

In theatre circles I am kindly ignored for my views of the modern director, a position that I think has been warped past what its true use is and contorted into something much more all-encompassing to everyone’s detriment, much like the US president.

In Western thought (maybe all thought, but I don’t want to speak for other cultures) we’re taught to exalt the individual: so when we study history we don’t look at the broader arcs, we look at the actions of a few choice people; in civics we don’t look at our systems of government, but only at the people at the top; and in theatre we’re trained to ignore the collaborative aspect, the single most distinguishing characteristic of it, and are told to instead hold up someone as the auteur of the work, and that person is usually the director.

In my mind the director ought to be a facilitator, the eyes of the audience, who is there to hone what the team is doing, clarify it, and help everyone pull in the same direction. It’s not hard to go from that idea, to the one that the director ought to be the person who sets the tone for the group instead of the person who finds the tone the group already is doing, and unfortunately we’ve gone past that to the point where what people care about, flock to, and wait for, is the “director’s vision.” All people working in theatre should serve the play, but too often we want the play to serve the director and everyone else to follow.

All that being said, I think directing is the weakest tool in my toolbox, and one I’m called on to use quite frequently, so I picked the book up to find ways to use rehearsal better, ways to help hone and guide the actors. I didn’t find that.

What I did find was an interesting book full of people who thought deeply about theater and then ruthlessly hammered that idea into every production they did. They became a brand. But Mitter does a great job of showing how the zenith left by one director became the foundation of the next: Stanislavsky demands truth in performance and the blending of performer and character; Brecht says that alienating the performer from the character is the proper path towards art, but that to alienate one must first master the blending that Stanislavsky demanded as the end point of the work; Grotowski suggests that it is only by finding the performer’s true self that belief can be earned from the audience, and that we must use Brecht’s alienation techniques in order to find the negative space between performer and character.

All terribly interesting and not at all practical. Mitter assumes a greater familiarity with these director’s published work than I have (and so I assume more than the average person would have.)

When we raise people up to think for us I think we start twisting in knots, and when we assume that all work must always have a deeper connective tissue across our whole careers I think we limit what we can find in each individual project.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ends (and the Peter Brook of it all.)