The Director's Body : Directing from inside the world

This written reflection marks the end of my MA project. It deals with stage directing from an inside perspective: from the inside of artistic practice and from inside the world. Using Donna Haraway’s term ‘situated knowledge’ as a starting point, I set out to find language for an embodied and situated understanding of the director. By tracing the personal and professional history that led me to this understanding I aim to place the discussion in a wider (historical) context. It is also an opportunity to articulate some core elements of the Flemish-Dutch directing tradition in which I was trained and had my formative years. I propose the term generative structure as a tool for thinking about the work of the director independently of the kind of source material that is used (if any). My conception of the director is further developed through an encounter with ecological thinking. What happens to the kind of work one makes if one thinks through situatedness, especially in an ecological sense? I attempt to find out, and find language for this turn, by discussing two of my own ongoing projects: Landscape with Radioactive Dogs and witchmacbethforest. By discussing these projects, I hope to show how an ecological turn in directing a) opens up for interesting and unexpected perspectives, and b) challenges some basic assumptions about the relationship between the director, the work and the world.