READING #2 Directors and Designers

- Designer and director have to merge to become a successful team in order to produce exciting work

- There are two different views:
1. Directors think there was a good 'shorthand'
2. Designers are scared to voice their opinion
- Designer feels like a wife; must be supportive at all times
-"Designer speak" is created:
"Do YOU think it would be a good idea if.."

- Phillip Prowse- designer & director
- He was revolutionary within the European theater
- Was very successful because he was able to elaborate on his own viewpoint; never had to compromise his ideas
- He was success in creating a team of interpreters who understood his visual vocabulary

- Josef Svoboda- Czech architect and scenographer
- He believed in the mutual collaboration between the author and the director
- His most noteworthy productions were done by himself.

- Robert Edmund Jones:
- " the best thing that could happen to our theater...would be for playwrights and actors and directors to be handed a bare stage on which no scenery would be placed..."
- the author brings to light the evolution of the two distinctive pathways- director and designer

- Designers or visual theater artists could only work though the directors
- The designers cannot choose the play they really want to do and then hire the director they would like to work with
- Some designers are in tuned to the directors, they could interpret the directors vision on stage without prolonged discussion.

- The theater hierarchy replicates the architectural structures in which they operate
- Producers and management offices are on upper floors; theater artisans are located in the basement
- As the playhouse has developed in the twentieth century, the degrees of separation have intensified

- To end once and for all the master servant relationship, euphemisim for collaboration and to develop real working practices.
- Even the greatest partnerships have their flaws; perfection in unattainable

- Designers become architects of the space and the space becomes a major player in the production
- Yet designers must also be architects of the imagination
- All that matters is that a harmonious creative language is invented for the production
- Latteral collaboration, rather than vertical management structure is created

- Ultimately author suggests that we "move away from the labels, stereotypes, and definitions and focus on what we can do individually on the ground"