Directors, leadership and integrated theatre

What does a theatre director do exactly?

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Theatre director (noun); A creative collaborator, guide and conduit between a writer*, production team and performers and an audience.

*or not if the work is devised.

Who the director is informs the outcome to an extent, just as any other creative and production team member influences a show.

How the director works, who they cast, how they communicate, how they brief, manage people, run rehearsals, steer marketing and shape the final production for people is perhaps more important than who.

The role is as important as the person.

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Joe Sproulle and Lisa Howard in Sing Something Simple (Dark Horse, national tour 2)

There’s a highly positive drive for change in UK theatre to recruit theatre directors from under-represented demographics.

Disability-led work is thriving but actors with moderate learning disabilities struggle to lead and manage projects- and many trained actors don’t want to, they want to focus on acting as the hard-learned theatre craft it is-  and this is where integrated theatre (= casts and companies of creatives with and without learning disabilities) offers genuine equality for these performers.

People with moderate learning disabilities without literacy or verbal skills are barred from leadership roles in theatre.

But…

Actors with moderate learning disabilities aren’t barred from playing leading roles in general audience facing work when working in integrated casts with the Silent Approach.

 

The Silent Approach is a non-verbal rehearsal room method which supports actors with and without learning disabilities, in integrated general audience facing productions. Its proven, tried and tested in national touring, TV and film and its being shared widely via the Separate Doors project.

Separate Doors 3 aims to encourage theatre directors to increase the representation of people with learning disabilities in general audience, text based and venue theatre.

The project offers key tools for directors to make working with actors with learning disabilities as desirable and creatively expanding as it can be including casting/working with creative enablers and supporters/financial considerations, rehearsal room processes/ ensemble development/communication tips, management during the run and language and targets for marketing and promotion.

Get in touch and be a part of Separate Doors 3 at www.separatedoors.org

(We’re working with theatre makers and playwrights too…More soon…)

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Vanessa Brooks and Dark Horse actors- Young Vic Silent Approach master class

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Its all about the work.

Theatre venues in the UK have made progress in widening the representation of diverse people on stages, in high quality work with impact which plays out to general audiences.

Black, gay, transgender, deaf and disabled and mental health focused work has been commissioned and supported by venues and by Arts Council England initiatives.

Intersectionality informs a thirst to break traditional silos and open doors to dramatic experiences of all of the human condition.

New stories, new voices and new experiences are being heard on main stages but one group continues to be unseen and unheard…

 

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Separate Doors 1 and 2 highlighted the experiences of leading actors with learning disabilities, the integrated companies they train with, casting, representation and the wider landscape.

Separate Doors 3 will explore the work itself.

How do you approach writing drama featuring learning disabled characters? How do you effectively direct actors with moderate learning disabilities? How do you manage an integrated rehearsal room? Is devising or writing best or a mixture of both forms? What are the creative pitfalls and bonuses? How can vocational actors with learning disabilities be included in standard programmes and processes?

I’ll be looking at my own and others’ artistic processes, directorial choices, rehearsal room practice and playwriting craft in the development of new high quality integrated work featuring actors with moderate learning disabilities.

Key participants will be leading actors with learning disabilities, established playwrights, Artistic and Associate Directors of producing venues, theatre makers and practitioners, devising companies and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Master classes in my Silent Approach, rehearsal room analysis, interviews with leading creatives and the outcome of a forum event in London in Summer 2019 will form the backbone of the third Separate Doors report.

There’ll be regular updates here and you can follow the progress of the project- and read reports 1 and 2-  by clicking this link to the Separate Doors website.

There’s never been a greater will to include exceptional actors with learning disabilities in general audience facing work.

Separate Doors 3 will go beyond the will, and find the creative way….

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Master class at the Young Vic

Participation is a bugle call, excellence is dynamite

 

director 5Gifted actors with learning learning disabilities have a right to access acting and rehearsal craft and audiences benefit from the characters and stories trained actors with learning disabilities bring to general audience work.

Sue Emmas, Associate Artistic Director at the Young Vic Theatre in London asked me to deliver a day long Silent Approach master class for up to 60 directors and theatre makers.

I accepted the challenge and approached the work with three objectives in mind:

  • To offer a hands on ‘doing it’ experience of Silent Approach ensemble, physical and vocal exercises.
  • To showcase Silent Approach non verbal directing technique
  • To inspire interest in and commitment to this kind of inclusive approach and integrated theatre and casting.

 

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Dark Horse actors Toby Meredith and Rebekah Hill (Me in the middle)

The Silent Approach is an equaliser.

It unlocks standard rehearsal process by removing the need for speech (Apart from the play text) and it allows vocational actors with and without learning disabilities to work together with equality.

The foundation of the approach is Stanislavsky’s system.

Actors with and without learning disabilities trained in this way can readily access the technique.

It gives directors a non verbal map to get scenes up and work them and run them to production readiness.

No actor is excluded from the rehearsal process on the grounds of verbal or cognitive ability.

It works for text based, standard ‘written’ plays as well as working for physical and devised work.

I chose to work on the day with Dark Horse actors Toby Meredith and Rebekah Hill, both trained and experienced actors with Downs Syndrome.  I also cast non-disabled actor Johnny Vivash who I worked with on two national tours of my play HYPOTHERMIA.

 

 

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The Silent Approach is dynamic.

Asking a large roomful of people who you’ve never met before to trust, follow and go with you on a silent journey is a big ask.

Thankfully, they came with me.

I score the days activity. Music and sound effects shape a narrative and emotional pathway we can all follow.

I started the warm up by communicating physically with Toby Meredith then gathered up and collected everyone in the studio, working through the kinesphere and at different paces, returning many times to breath, inhabiting the space, working with its energy.

We then moved on to a vocal warm up, working with breath, sound, laughter, tuts and shushes, vowels and lamentations.

An hour and a half later, no one had a said a word but a lot of information had been exchanged.

We had a shared vocabulary and shared knowledge.

We were an ensemble.

 

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Directors, Johnny Vivash and Toby Meredith

 

The Silent Approach is effective.

I moved into scene direction, establishing given circumstances and character with video files I’d edited together for the purpose, sound cues established place.

Actors understood where they were, a little of what they wanted from their scene partner and then played off each other.

Lines were fed in.

Three lengthy scenes were directed and on their feet within an hour and fifteen minutes.

Its possible to direct a two act, two hour fifteen minute production in two weeks using the Silent Approach.

I’ve done it. Several times.

 

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Joy

 

The Silent Approach is for everyone.

After lunch six directors stepped up and directed a further three scenes.

We used the same given circumstances and the same cues and the action took place in the same location as the morning scenes but the dialogue and the activity was new.

In each of the scenes an actor without learning disabilities and actors with learning disabilities delivered the kind of theatrically realistic performances you’d expect to see on a main stage.

All the directors did brilliantly.  They said they’d picked up some tools which will hopefully have influence moving forwards and perhaps create some change too. And change any perception about work featuring learning disability having to happen at participatory level…It can happen at all levels, and should.

Job done.

 

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Have a word theatre

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A really interesting diagram about words

 

Pressed at an event, a well known theatre director isolated ‘class’ as a possible driver behind his premature departure from a high profile post.

An inability to understand a Latin word used during a board meeting marked his card, denoted his rank and, he suggested, may have started a process which led to the door.

A producer, known for excellent work in promoting diversity and with a desire to represent people with learning disabilities, posited casting actors with mild learning disabilities .

‘Learning disability lite’ as she put it, meant minimal or no adjustments to text or issues with on set communication but meant she was still ‘ticking the box’ by ‘cheating a bit’.

An award winning actor with a non R.P. accent, waits for a resurgence in Irish writing on the London stage to secure employment, knowing that casting directors won’t see her for roles unless they are specific to her dialect.

Is it time to break the tyranny of words and language in theatre?

 

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

Samuel Beckett

 

The Silent Approach offers a route into accessible, universal theatre for playwrights, directors and actors,  making work which includes the talents of actors who aren’t verbal or cognitively usual and mines a rich seam of story telling offered by exploring characters and worlds invisible.

If words create hierarchies of sound and language then why not leave them at the door?

No theatre maker I know works to a process where one collaborator is afforded more artistic value than another but we let the language we use and the way it sounds determine status.

A highly accomplished verbal athlete working the most complex of text needs another actor to listen to him, both actors are in the scene, one can’t exist without the other.

 

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

Aldous Huxley

 

For many years Arts Council England has encouraged board diversification for theatre companies and although progress has been made there’s still some way to go.

Formal language can act as a major barrier to the advancement of individuals not versed in the (usually archaic) lingo of the board.

How about re-thinking governance, aiming for accessible language and removing linguistic signifiers constructed to seek out and define social status?

 

“Silence is so accurate.” 

Mark Rothko

 

And finally, must all roles be cast according to an idea of acceptable accent?

We’re all accustomed to bumping into people from all over the UK and all over the world in many different contexts.

Its dramatically unnecessary to explain why the guy running the corner shop is Welsh when the soap is set in Newcastle or why a character in the Cherry Orchard has a Ghanaian accent (Does everyone else sound like Putin? No).

Can we give actors a break and move our imaginations in tandem with their talents?

The world may suddenly look a lot more interesting, and realistic, on stage.

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Some languages and how long on average it takes to learn them (as a non native speaker)