Collaborative directing is an idea proposed by Feminist Scholar/Performers who became uncomfortable with the way that the traditional director/actor relationship replicated oppressive patriarchal hierarchies. The goal of collaborative directing is to create an environment for creative decision making in which all participants have equal voice.  Ideally in such projects, all participants share responsibility in determining the final product.

Despite the obvious potential for education and empowerment that such an approach offers, there are several impediments that tend to prevent academic directors from implementing collaborative projects with students.  I think the most significant barrier is the power differential between teacher and student.  Whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, a faculty member is an authority figure and has a different stake in the production than students do.

A lot of our students have lived the majority of their lives under the careful supervision of adult authority figures.  Parents, teachers, soccer coaches, and math tutors have controlled and protected them.  They may look on a situation where an adult authority figure chooses to give up power with suspicion and distaste.

The power differential is not a problem that is going to go away.  I think the academic director wishing to try a collaborative project must simply accept that s/he is not going to be able to achieve the type of truly democratic directing project that is the ideal.  One partner is going to be more equal than the others.  However, you can still create an experience that is more participatory and empowering than conventional approaches to directing.

For me, the key to moving towards a more collaborative approach has been to shift my definition of my role from director to facilitator.  My training as a director predisposed me to see this role as being the creative genius who instructs the cast and crew in the best method to embody his/her vision of the performance text.  A facilitator, by contrast, has the job of creating an environment for discovering the creative genius of her cast and crew.

This is my third time attempt at directing a performance in collaboration with my student/actors.  Previously I have experimented with integrating improvisation and popular culture interruptions into performances of theatre “classics” like “My Fair Lady” and a “The Voluptuous Man.”  My casts were satisfactorily engaged and empowered by the experiences, but the resulting shows tended to be a little “ugly” in terms of achieving aesthetically pleasing stage pictures.

In this production, I wanted to see if creating a more controlled collaborative environment could result in a less anarchical end result and a cast that felt more at ease with contributing ideas sooner in the process.  To this end, I framed the blocking and adapting stages of the production as a series of games and exercises. 

            I conducted the auditions in this same manner.  For females who auditioned, I divided them into pairs and gave them an excerpt from a poem by Frida Kahlo and a copy of Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas.”  Men were paired with women and given a letter by Kahlo and the painting “Diego and Frida.”  I asked the pairs to divide the lines of their text between them and come up with staging that ended up in a pose replicating the painting.

After they completed this task, I switched the pairs and added another painting to their assignment.  The problem was now for the actors to find a way to transition for a pose that suggested the first painting to a pose that suggested the second painting while speaking the words of the text.  Finally I reorganized the students into groups of three and had them work with the two paintings again – despite the fact that there were only two human figures depicted in each piece of art.  The student responded with great creativity.  The third person became the bird holding the banner in “Frida and Diego,” the veins connecting “The Two Fridas,” or the memory of the woman being discussed in the letter from Frida they spoke.

I told the students who auditioned that this was going to be collaborative directing project and that my directing style would be very similar to the audition process. The students seemed to find the audition fun and exciting.  I know that they were pleased that they did not have to present a memorized monologue as an audition piece.

Since I intended “Frida Kahlo in Love” to be a metaphorical rather than an literal adaptation of the source material and planned on casting four women as Frida -and liberally use masks in the show- I felt under little obligation to cast performers who looked like Frida or Diego.  Therefore I was able to cast on the basis of the performers’ stage presence and ability to think in terms of stage pictures and soundscapes.

The first assignment for my cast was the same as the first assignment in the auditions.  I gave the cast the poem that would open and close the show and the image that is perhaps the most well known of all Kahlo’s works, the portrait of her surrounded by monkeys.   The last piece we blocked was the reprise of this poem that ended the show.  However we did not work on the text in the order we would eventually perform it.  I chose the shortest and what I anticipated would be the easiest combinations of text and paintings to stage and worked our way towards the longer texts and more abstract paintings.

Setting the agenda was a job I reserved for myself to provide continuity and structure for this project.  However, on another project, a collaborative director may wish to determine the schedule more democratically.

 The other primary job I claimed was that of editor.  At rehearsals, each cast member would present their own ideas for blocking and line division for the assignment I had given them the previous week. Although there were five cast members, we usually only saw two or three different stagings because the performers had separately come up with very similar ideas or simply liked other cast members’ ideas better than they liked their own.  I did not present blocking. Instead I served as an “outside eye” who made suggestions to improve or combine compositions.  I also encouraged participation and made sure we had consensus on the blocking and line division we ended up with.  My assistant director and I would step in and perform if a cast member was absent or wished to step out and look at the blocking.

As we progressed through the script and my cast gained a stronger sense of each other’s strengths as performers and directors, I gave them more open-ended assignments.  For some texts I asked them to pick which paintings and how many paintings we would use for each text. 

We quickly developed a strong, co-operative, working relationship.  My favorite example of this coordination was demonstrated while we were working on the blocking for the painting “Wounded Deer”.  I had not given an assignment to use this painting at all, but had in between rehearsals had started work on my copy of it.  Without much hope of coming up with anything useable, I asked Tomomi and Alyssa to play around with using images of the deer to go with the excerpt from Frida’s autobiography while the rest of the cast was off buying Mountain Dew Slushies at the 7/11.  While I went downstairs to buy some pretzels, Alyssa came up with a great idea for dividing up the lines.  Tomomi patiently held a series of uncomfortable “deer” poses while Alyssa and I played with various ways to simulate sticking arrows through her using hands and even feet at one point.  Just when I was beginning to think the painting was too surrealistic to replicate, Gigi came in.  She and Alyssa experimented with using two people to represent the arrows. We settled on having Tomomi stand up instead of trying to take a “deer-like” pose.  Although this looked better, it still wasn’t right.  Gigi’s arms are shorter than Alyssa’s. This made the “arrows” different sizes.  We also didn’t have the timing quite right.  Andrea came in and replaced Gigi who stepped out and joined Nkechi and me as another “outside eye.”  We were all calling out suggestions and comments until finally we had blocking that made the observers all joyfully shout,  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The reproductions of Kahlo’s paintings became another, initially unplanned venue for collaboration.  I grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take me to complete reproductions of the twelve paintings we used in the show.  Andrea suggested that I have the cast help by painting in the areas of solid color.  This was an excellent idea.  Not only did it cut the time I had to spend painting by at least half, it gave the cast, most of whom hadn’t painted since primary school, personal experience with being an artist.  They had the opportunity to interact with Kahlo’s images in a very intimate way. 

By the time we started painting as a group, the cast had already done a significant amount of research on Kahlo and her work.  However, once they had brushes in their hands, our discussions of technique, color, image, and detail took on a whole new layer of significance.  Even the way they touched the paintings onstage became prouder and more emotional.  More than anything else we did, I think that painting brought the cast closer to the painter. 

Now our only problem is to find some way to decide who gets which canvas…

All in all, I would have to say that “Frida Kahlo in Love” was my most successful collaborative project thus far.   My cast feels a high degree of ownership in the final project.  They became more confident and more mutually supportive as the rehearsal progressed.  I think that my “games and exercises” approach to creating blocking and line assignments created an atmosphere in which we could use the teacher/student power differential as a structure for organization, comfort, and clarity, not as a constrictive force that limited our mutual creativity.