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
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