BRIEF HISTORY OF DIRECTING


BRIEF HISTORY OF DIRECTING
THE 18TH CENTURY
The 18th century brought interest in directing or acting and interpretation of characters. Production was only considered good with the performer’s leading roles at presentation. At that time it also advances in technology which means that the audiences came to the theatre for a visual experience rather than a strictly literary one. Spectators were awed and excited by the lighting system on stage design the rediscovery of the Roman city of Pompeii in something approaching the modern director emerged.

THE 19TH CENTURY
The first step towards defining the role a modern director were taken by German poet, Wolfgang von Goethe who in 1790 took charge private theatre in the city of Weimar. He applied to acting and stage practice the same thorough approach that he used in scientific. Goethe lorded over his unruly actors making rehearsal resemble actual productions and forcing his performers to behave naturally without affections on stage.

In 1874 Duke George II of the German principality Saxe-Meiingen brought his private theatre troupe to Berlin and caused a critical stir. The duke followed Goethe’s strict regiment in process. The Meiingen players performed in an environment of absolute historical accuracy and actual costumes, properties and set piece of the period. Instead of using fake swords and armors for example the duke actors used or wore the actual object. This production re-create in detail the sight and sound of ancient Rome or Renaissance. The duke’s emphasis on realism further established the essential role of the director in shaping the play’s atmosphere on stage.

Konstantin Stanislavski of Russia experimented with realistic style of production. He shocked spectators with an acting and aesthetic design that watch with everyday reality, down to the minute details. Stanislavski went further in the early 1900s as he extracted truthful feelings and sustains from the actors of his Moscow Art Theatre.
            From 1807 until his demise, Stanislavski devoted himself to developing a revolutionary system of actor training. He made his actors to use their personal experience as a tool to getting their acting across to the audience.
            Stanislavski experimented with a formula that once again gave the director total intellectual control over the rehearsals process. He called this “THE THEORY OF PHYSICAL ACTION.”
            Moscow Art Theatre was most influential theatre group of the 20th century located in Moscow Russia. The Moscow Art Theatre is the birth place of highly influential theories on modern acting and directing developed by actor-director or Konstantin Stanislavski.

Vsevolod Meyer hold (1874-1840) innovative Russia director of the 1920s and 1930s whose work inspired many revolutionary artist and filmmakers of his era. He was born in Penza, Russia. He was a member of the Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavski but he broke out at the turn of the century.
            Meyer hold rebelled against Stanislavski imitative techniques of emotion on stage and realistic drama.  He believed that theatre should be something different from everyday reality.
In 1905, he headed his own studio that promoted symbolic plays where there actors moved like stylized puppet under the control and authoritarians of the director.
            By the time of the Russia revolution of 1917 Meyer hold was considered the leading  avant-garde  director in Russia. A mental and physical exercise called Blomechanics. This gave his actors a sense of emotional and body control not seen before in modern stage acting.
            Meyer hold faced many attacks because the Stalinist regime insisted on a military program of socialist reality.     

            Brecht Bertolt (1898 – 1956) The most influential German dramatist and theoretician of theatre in the 20th century. He published many productive plays in Berlin in the 1920s which made him a formidable director.
            He wrote and directed plays around the Nazi regime Adolf Hitler. Brecht and his family spent 14 years in exile in Scandinavia and the United State. Brecht fail to make a breakthrough either as a scriptwriter in Hollywood California or as a  playwright in Broadway. He returned to Europe in 1947. Two years later he moved to east Berlin and remained there until his death.
            Brecht ‘s first mayor play, BAAL 1922, translated in 1964 features a materialistic and promiscuous  poet, who is  the direct opposite of the view then  in vogue of the artist as a visionary. He turns the maxims result in plays that indicated capitalism.

By:
Eguriase S. M. Okaka





                

   

Comments

Efua Sutherland: The Marriage of Anansewa,The Wedlock of the gods By Zulu Sofola, The gods Are Not

The Song of the Women of My Land By Oumar Farouk Sesay

Raider of the Treasure Trove By Lade Worsonu

Let Me Die Alone By John K. Kargbo (Thematic Preoccupation)