31st July, IFTR Warwick – The Director’s Laboratory: Probing the Genesis of Theatre

THURSDAY 31 JULY 2014
14:15 – 15:45
Curated Panel – The Director’s Laboratory: Probing the Genesis of Theatre 

GP 6.12 : Meeting Room 9, Scarman House, University of Warwick
Chair Frederik Le Roy

Research tracing the genesis of the creation processes in contemporary director’s theatre, make visible a great variety of working methods – “each work creates its own method” the Belgian theatre and dance dramaturge Marianne Van Kerkhoven once noted – that hardly ever follow a predetermined, linear path from inception to result. Collaboration between the director and different collaborators (performers, sound and image designers, dramaturges or technicians), as well as the interdisciplinary and intermedial nature of many of these works make for far more diffuse and complex creation processes than preset models of production make lead us to believe. Even the staging of a classical playtext becomes far more than its transposition ‘from page to stage’; the working methods of contemporary Regietheater likewise suggest an interweaving of strata and strategies. For this panel, three presenters, each using different methods of access, will focus on the creation process of a different contemporary theatre director to probe and unravel the strata of theatrical creation. Luk Van den Dries will investigate Romeo Castellucci’s ‘director’s notebooks’, Peter Boenisch will undertake a dialectical analysis of the rehearsal process of a play by Thomas Ostermeier and Clarisse Bardiot will discuss a digital conservation platform used to document the technological theatre of Jean-François Peyret.

Luk Van den Dries Universiteit Antwerpen
The Director’s Notebook: Romeo Castellucci

Peter Boenisch University of Kent
The Dialectical Layering of Contemporary Regie: A Case Study on the Theatre Work of Thomas Ostermeier

Clarisse Bardiot Université de Valenciennes
Theater Research and Big Data: Using Rekall to Document Re-Walden, a Digital Performance by Jean-François Peyret