Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

12-10-2014

Faculty Advisor(s)

Jocelyn Buckner

Abstract

While the director’s role in theatre is longstanding and well established, it is a position that can be approached from a variety of different angles, depending on the nature of the project. In an effort to discover and articulate a directorial philosophy that spans across my work, the first section of this thesis is a literature review discussing and analyzing the directorial beliefs, practices, and philosophies of two revolutionary directors in English-speaking theatre: Anne Bogart and Peter Brook. The second segment will be a reflection and analysis of my own performance as a director on three diverse projects in scale, style, and range this semester: directing a staged reading of John Patrick Shanely’s Doubt: A Parable; staging a piece devised by one of my peer theatre students entitled Trojan Whores; and assistant directing Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics for the Chapman mainstage. In this second section, I will draw connections between the role of the director in such distinctly varied types of productions, discuss the differences in my approach, and relate my work to philosophies of Bogart and Brook. Finally, I will compose my own directing manifesto resulting from both my research and my practical experience as a director in these three contexts. Ultimately, my objective in pursuing this thesis is to discover whether there might be constant directorial truths that stand true over a range of different styles and types of theatre, and to identify and articulate these truths in a manifesto-style piece.

Comments

Presented at the Fall 2014 Undergraduate Student Research Day at Chapman University.

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