How Do We Make It? Directors and the New Theater Landscape

HowlRound: Theater is an intrinsically collaborative form in which work is often made in siloed divisions of labor. The word “collaboration” seems to have lost all meaning even as it pops up on grant applications, mission statements, résumés, and in the mouths of hip administrators. Yet it has always been true that in the theater we make meaning together as a group. We make meaning as a production team, as an ensemble of performers, and as an audience. The theater requires dialogue both written and spoken, observed, and shown. A performance is a sum of its parts, it is an articulation of the vision and desire and curiosity of a large group of people. In essence that’s what we want to talk about, making meaning together, and how we might shift our practices to invoke this core idea.