Research
Dissertation | Facilitauteur: Agency, Ethics, and Feminist Ideologies in the Rehearsal Room
Anticipated Completion Date | Spring 2023
Directing is a discipline that demands flexibility. Directors must be visionaries who collaborate well; organized administrators who readily adjust to chaos; and, empathetic responders who know when to push actors past their comfort level. Within this highly selective, adaptive, and demanding discipline the ways in which a director works with her cast can vary wildly. While most directors are considerate collaborators, there are documented dangers that come when one person wields total executive control over a rehearsal room. In 2016, a Chicago Reader article exposed the abusive practices of a local theater director who required his actors to engage in real physical combat onstage in the name of “authenticity” and, as described by a former actor, “would systematically break people.” Additionally, with the #MeToo movement theatre staff and performers have come forward to discuss systematic sexual harassment perpetuated by artistic leadership. Although these examples serve as extreme cases of director misconduct, they speak to larger issues in a discipline that serves to perpetuate the director’s artistic supremacy and encourages the director to achieve their vision by any means necessary. Within a field that wields substantial executive control over other artists, how are directors ethically prepared to work with actors?
My dissertation, Facilitauteur: Agency, Ethics, and Feminist Ideologies in the Rehearsal Room, sits at the center of this changing discipline in which educators and practitioners are coming together to create ethical methodologies for working with actors. With the rise of intimacy directors and discussions of more expansive and nontraditional director training appearing prominently in journals such as American Theatre Magazine, HowlRound, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC) Society Journal, directors must adapt to and consider the specific identity, lived experience, and cultural background of the actor. “Facilitauteur” is my term for a director who seeks to create what director Leigh Fondakowski calls “an egalitarian society” within the rehearsal room. Merging the community-based term “facilitator” with a word often used to describe a singular visionary, “auteur,” I disrupt and expand on Eurocentric masculinist directing methodologies in an effort to create a practical blueprint for approaching directing work from the position of promoting artistic agency. Over the last three years, I have interviewed and observed over a dozen women directors. Together, these directors have made visible longstanding abuses of power, have drawn attention to the lack of gender and racial diversity within the discipline, and are working in the margins to disrupt the traditional hierarchical approach to directing.
My dissertation, Facilitauteur: Agency, Ethics, and Feminist Ideologies in the Rehearsal Room, sits at the center of this changing discipline in which educators and practitioners are coming together to create ethical methodologies for working with actors. With the rise of intimacy directors and discussions of more expansive and nontraditional director training appearing prominently in journals such as American Theatre Magazine, HowlRound, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC) Society Journal, directors must adapt to and consider the specific identity, lived experience, and cultural background of the actor. “Facilitauteur” is my term for a director who seeks to create what director Leigh Fondakowski calls “an egalitarian society” within the rehearsal room. Merging the community-based term “facilitator” with a word often used to describe a singular visionary, “auteur,” I disrupt and expand on Eurocentric masculinist directing methodologies in an effort to create a practical blueprint for approaching directing work from the position of promoting artistic agency. Over the last three years, I have interviewed and observed over a dozen women directors. Together, these directors have made visible longstanding abuses of power, have drawn attention to the lack of gender and racial diversity within the discipline, and are working in the margins to disrupt the traditional hierarchical approach to directing.
Conference Curation
2020: Working Group Organizer; Resilient Rehearsal Rooms: Feminist Directors Driving Pedagogical Change
Women and Theatre Program and Directing Focus Group, ATHE
2019: Symposium Organizer; Feminist Directions: Performance, Power, and Leadership (click here for photos)
Cornell University's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts
Featuring: Tisa Chang, Leigh Fondakowski, Holly Hughes, Rhodessa Jones, Peggy Shaw,
Lois Weaver
2019: Working Group Organizer; Changing Directions: Developing Feminist Leadership in the Rehearsal Room
Women and Theatre Program and Directing Focus Group, ATHE
Women and Theatre Program and Directing Focus Group, ATHE
2019: Symposium Organizer; Feminist Directions: Performance, Power, and Leadership (click here for photos)
Cornell University's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts
Featuring: Tisa Chang, Leigh Fondakowski, Holly Hughes, Rhodessa Jones, Peggy Shaw,
Lois Weaver
2019: Working Group Organizer; Changing Directions: Developing Feminist Leadership in the Rehearsal Room
Women and Theatre Program and Directing Focus Group, ATHE