How does an actor become the creator of his own art, rather than an interpreter of the stage director’s instructions? What are the creative sources at her/his disposal? And what can be the tools of a stage director willing to lead her/his actors to an autonomous creative process? These questions feature among the most important ones that Thomas Ostermeier, one of Germany’s leading artistic figures, has been developing throughout his work in various genres and repertoires. It is indeed in this perspective that he developed a specific working process that derives its fundamentals from the Brechtian inductive method, but also contains a variation of many elements of Stanislavsky’s system and the legacy of Vsevolod Meyerhold. While employing this method, the stage director’s objective is, in his own words, “not to direct at all, not to dictate, not to order, prescribe, tell or instruct” but, on the contrary, to “delegate [his] work to the actors, to their art, to their imagination and their expertise”.
The paper will draw upon my long-term experience with Ostermeier’s theatre and on a critical reflection of his own writings, in which he describes his method and some of which I have translated and edited. The paper will aim not only at describing this method, but also at an appraisal of the attention paid to the communication between the stage director and the actors and of the “double bind” of Stanislavsky / Brecht, which underlies this process.
Jitka Goriaux Pelechová, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer and a research fellow at the Drama Departement of DAMU. She authored a monograph on Thomas Ostermeier’s theatre published by Études théâtrales (n°58/2013) in French and by Disk Editions, KANT, in Czech (2014 – awarded Best Book on Theatre by the Theatre Journal). Since 2006, she has been teaching in the departments of Theatre Studies at the universities of Paris West Nanterre, Poitiers and Lille 3. Her research focuses in particular, but not exclusively, on contemporary European stage directing and its major figures (Thomas Ostermeier, Luc Bondy, Antoine Vitez, Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef…). Along with her research activities, Jitka Goriaux Pelechová is also dramaturgist and translator. The collection of texts by Thomas Ostermeier, Le Théâtre et la peur (Actes Sud, 2016), which she has edited together with Georges Banu, and translated, was awarded Best Book on Theatre by the Association of Art Critics in France.