”Situating the director in a theatre of the future” by Johannes Maria Schmit

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 artistic researcher cross reads contemporary models of consent with the psychoanalytic notion of transference.

The aim with the thesis is to offer a non-moralizing analysis 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 of 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 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 bypasses of asymmetrically distributed power namely the Eastern-European actor-based traditions (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”.

Start and end year for the research: 2019–2025.