Monday, October 10, 2016
Enter, Stage Left: A Theater Director's Advice for Remodelers
Remodeling | Management: My wife, Nina, and I heard an interview with an actor, Cindy Im, who is part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year. These interviews with members of the company range all over the place. The insights provided are often remarkable.
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6 comments:
This article offers some good advice. Advice that transcends just the theater and moves into all business, and in an even bigger picture... all relationships. The term "remodeler" is broad, and left me questioning who the article was addressing. Did he mean people in the home renovation business? Corporation? People who come in and restructure business models? Aside from the authors direct audience being unclear, the interview was not. It offered some clear and concise advice that related back to a rehearsal room. The parallels drawn between a theater director and business owner make a lot of sense. They are both in charge of having and seeing their vision all the way through. If the article is directed at renovations then I could see where the parallels fall there too. The only part of the article that I disagreed with was the section where he talked about mending employee relationships. In theater, I could (maybe) understand a director wanting to work things out between two people on his or her production team. Theater is a very emotional business, and sometimes calls for personal conversations in the workplace. However, in a more stereotypical workplace environment I would see it as inappropriate if an employer or manager approached two employees about their relationship, unless it was hindering the work of the business.
I found this article very enlightening. I thought all of the ideas that were discussed play integral parts in theatre. My favorite of them was the idea of "clear vision" I believe that is very important to have, not just for directors. It goes with the saying "wrong and strong" and "loud and proud" I was often taught in high school musical theatre class. How I believe it relates is the fact that coming in having made distinct choices gives you a place to start and asserts leadership. If you come in wishy-washy, that is what you will get from the company, and often will result in less than ideal work. Even if you come in with the worst idea in the world, at least you brought something to the table. Sometimes it takes a million bad ideas to mush together a good one. I believe having that clear vision does not make a director bossy or one-sided, rather it gives them a springboard to dive off from and make new discoveries in. It takes bravery to make choices and to stick with them. I think that is what makes some of the most talented directors around is being able to fully commit and go for it.
I really appreciate this author’s ability to find pieces of advice and inspiration in an unconventional source like theatre. It reminds me of something I’ve heard about and started to notice as our class gets closer to declaring, that is the trend that people who are going the PTM route tend to start to check out of the design classes and the designers start to stop caring about the management classes. Now, of course, on the one hand this is a reasonable prioritization of your time because there is simply too much to do this semester to give everything 100%. But on the other hand, I think it’s really important that CMU gives us three undeclared semesters and I think we should take advantage of them. I’m still learning lessons in my design classes that will be really useful later on. Like this author, you never know where you might find the most powerful piece of advice for your work.
As someone who comes from a home of folks who spend most free hours watching HGTV, I completely agree with the author that theatre is a good model for companies that do remodeling work. The collaboration, the design, and the execution of rebuilding a space is very similar to what takes place in a theatre, and the person in charge of remodeling really is a director. They have to evaluate the new designs for both aesthetics and feasibility, and have to answer for the finished product. No one ever goes up to a carpenter after a show and talks about how good the set worked with the show, they go and speak to the director. That kind of audience/company relationship is really the key here. The one thing that I don't necessarily agree with the author about is not focusing on the little issues, especially as directors. On the one hand, directors shouldn't be up critiquing a shutter cut, but they need to have their eyes on both the big picture and the small stuff so that what the audience sees is as effective and cohesive as it can be. The point the author is making more pertains to little squabbles between employees, which is typically the charge of the stage manager, but if a director has real issues with cast and crew, then they need to facilitate the resolution of those conflicts in a smooth and easy fashion. I don't see myself going into remodeling, but I agree that there is merit in evaluating the two disciplines together.
A lot of this advice really boils down to be focused on the project, not yourself. It isn’t about the leadership’s ideas, it is about how to team can contribute to an overall vision that is good for the project. And yes, that vision should be clear to give people direction, but the director shouldn’t be too controlling of it. I suppose it comes down to a balance between taking responsibility for leading a project and feeling like it is “your project” to the point where you don’t fully listen to your team. It is obviously ineffective for a director to have no sense of personal stake in a production, but if they have too much of a sense of ownership, they can end up being a puppet master rather than a facilitator, and making your team into puppets just prevents that from coming up with good ideas and contributing, and will lead to an under-performing team. Even though all of this advice is about specific actions that leaders of a project can take, and being able to know specific things you can do is helpful, I think the core of these suggestions are about the leader’s mindset.
I really like the way this article is structured and presented. I think that so many of the things mentioned in this, once read, are very intuitive and obvious, but the actual practice of a lot of these gets overlooked as the process continues. Often at the outset of a project, there is a clear vision and direction and everyone is rallied together behind those, but as the process continues and things start focusing, sometimes people lose sight of the project and instead focus on the people. I think that the comments about remodeling relationships are especially important. People, and their relationships with other, do change, and one of the most important pieces of working with the same people for longer periods of time is understanding how to accept and adapt to those changes. Someone who used to be constantly supportive and there for anyone and everyone, may now have a factor in their life that makes them unable to dedicate the time to do that, and expecting them to continue everything that they used to do is both unrealistic, and will eventually put a large strain on their relationship with those they feel are forcing them to continue sometime that they can no longer handle. The other most important section, to me, is the not worrying about every little detail. Often, as a process continues, the little things work themselves out because what was once a problem becomes a nonissue when something changes in a scene, and then the ones that do persist simply need to be dealt with one at a time in a methodical and orderly manner. I think is everyone who works in a collaborative environment could really benefit from reading this article.
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