Philosophy of the Performing Arts

116 performance and the classical paradigm
there is also a director who has a particular vision of the kind of performance
to be produced. The resulting productions are very different, however, as we
can see if we consider three examples.
The first two productions begin with a meeting of the company where
scripts are distributed to the performers cast to play the different characters in
Ibsen’s play. In the most traditional production, Hedda-to-Hedda , the director
precedes rehearsals by informing the company that their interpretation will,
as far as possible, follow Ibsen’s text and his stage directions. A second pro-
duction, Gabler at a Distance , differs only in that the director’s interpretation
requires that the company incorporates a number of “Brechtian” devices:
[A]t times an actor may say another character’s lines, prefacing them with
either “And he said ...” or “And she said ...” As the company rehearses, addi-
tional line reading techniques are introduced. Occasionally a performer will
be called upon to preface her or his own character’s lines with “And I said ...”
The performers may be asked to state the stage directions Ibsen wrote in the
script and others of the director’s invention, so that each character sometimes
describes what she or he does as she or he is doing it. During the rehearsal
process, the company comes to employ other techniques that are consistent
with whatever effects are achieved by the techniques already mentioned.
(J. Hamilton 2007, 44–45)
One of the least traditional productions is Something to Tell You :
A company takes every line in Ibsen’s script and rewrites it as a sentence that
some member of the company could say truthfully in front of and to an audi-
ence. The company makes most of those sentences simple declarative sen-
tences. They write as conditionals sentences forming a certain number of key
passages. The company thinks of places in which the same sentence could be
repeated for interesting acoustic effect. The company decides who says what
sentences, bearing in mind that each sentence could be said by more than one
of them. The company now works on rhythmic and dynamic patterns, listen-
ing together to a lot of rock and roll and jazz, paying attention to rhythmic
patterns and opportunities for musical irony in their script. The company
organizes the resulting text for the performances using an explicitly musical
form – for example, the result could be a set of themes and variations. The
company rehearses and performs with the aim of creating the kind of sonic
experience one gets from music. (J. Hamilton 2007, 47)
On either of our models of what it is to aim at a performance that is true
to an independent theatrical work, Hedda-to-Hedda will qualify as a perform-
ance of Hedda Gabler and Something to Tell You will not. Gabler at a Distance
obviously does not aim to be true to Hedda Gabler in our first sense, nor is
it clear that it aims for truth to the work in our third sense, since the focus