Directing a show is a complex journey.
Each production is unique. Yet there are recurrent stages.
Most frequent — getting stuck: standing in a room of people looking to me for guidance and inspiration, feeling dried up, stale, repetitive and dull.
I directed scores of shows over the decades. Starting from scripts, stories, ideas or images. Some were my vision, some involved me shaping the vision of participants. Some ‘realistic’, many highly, wonderfully weird.
The first rehearsals are an unsettling process of finding a way through darkness. Searching for a spark. An energy. A reason to exist.
If we survive that early time of being lost, a spark would ignite. One thing connects to another. Ideas take on practical, shared reality.
That was a thrilling time.
Then, growth. Momentum. One day’s rehearsal becomes fertile ground for the next. If there’s a decent-length rehearsal process, whole weeks evaporate in exploration, discovery and construction.
Then, suddenly, I’m stuck.
Some simple, often technical, problem would pop up, and seem intractable.
Forward momentum halts and in the silence, I’d hear doubt — about myself, the production, the point of the whole damn thing.
One thing I learned was this:
When stuck, the problem was seldom what I thought it was.
The problem was seldom WHERE I thought it was.
The problem was seldom WHO I thought it was.
Facing a problem, I’d step away and ask what caused this moment to be a problem.
If I couldn’t find a way to make a scene work, it was because, earlier, I’d not put an essential element in place.
If an actor was stuck, we’d not, earlier, created a secure enough foundation for her work.
Rather than battering my head against stuck-ness, I’d ask myself what I’d done, or failed to do, that created the conditions for the stuck-ness.
The problem is seldom the problem.
The problem is the symptom of some deeper flaw.
Identify the deeper flaw, and the problem disappears.
As in directing, so in life.
To tackle a ‘problem’ head-on, is to ignore whatever you, or someone else is doing, or experiencing, that causes that problem to exist (and to manifest as problematic).
Directing, when stuck, I’d avoid the temptation to work on what was troubling me. I’d step away, laugh, and let my mind run back on what we’d made across those weeks that caused a problem to appear.
The process and progress of the show needed, throughout, to be coherent and suffused with the integrity of what we were trying to make.
To solve ‘the problem’ (which is not so hard, technically — usually you can batter a scene into submission and ‘make it work’), is to ignore what it’s telling you about fundamental processual flaws.
Problems are not problems. They’re symptoms of causes.
If you’d like to know more about how I use a lifetime of creating performances to offer Coaching and Artistic Mentorship, please visit my website: https://johnbritton.co/momentum-coaching/