Re-inventing Regie-Theater – Consent and Asymmetry in the Actor Director-Relation

Johannes Maria Schmit’s PhD-project prefigures possibilities of a re-invented director’s theater in a post-disciplinary performing arts field. Working through ethical questions sparked by the asymmetric relation between actor and director, the project cross reads contemporary models of consent with the psychoanalytic notion of transference. 

The aim with the thesis is to offer a non-moralizing, critical genealogy of the politics that put the director (as auteur) into crisis – and to complement it by a concrete method for consent-based rehearsals. This method insists on intuitive, monopolized authorship as well as the disciplinary division between actor and director in the same radicality as did the tradition of so-called “Regie-Theater” (directors’ theater); all the while applying strategies of “Verfremdung” to the social relations within the rehearsal space by means of consent-making. In that vein, the project aims at contributing to an ethics as well as a politics of theater directing that transcends the prohibitive protocols necessary for industrial modes of production, as for instance Intimacy Coordination on the film set. Searching for formulations of the actor director-relation that exceed the metaphors of organizational management and cybernetic epistemology, the research stresses the political potential of the director figure instead; as a possible resistance to relational optimization.

In contrast to what Schmit intuits to be “post-disciplinary quick fixes” to asymmetrically distributed power the actor-based traditions of Eastern Europe (Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Grotowskis’s Teaterlaboratorium) get to serve as a blueprint when re-figuring today’s director’s position. In particular the hauntology instituted by Frank Castorf’s Volksbühne is used as a way to analyze the unconscious longings that inform any ambition to “re-invent Regie-Theater”.

Jon Refsdal Moe

Josefine Wikström

2019-2025