There’s an old directing textbook called Fundamentals of Play Directing by a couple of guys named Dean and Carra. It’s standard reading in most directing courses, and it’s about as dull as a book can be. It lays out a series of aesthetically pleasing ways to arrange people on the stage (most of which involve triangles), and explains that successful directors should use these positions only.
My classmates and I all read this book holding gigantic grains of salt. After all, it was over sixty years old. Contemporary theatre was loose, free, natural, postmodern; people could turn their backs to the audience and roll around on the floor and move in sinuous curves and do anything they wanted! It wasn’t all this triangle mumble-jumble and these series of strict positions.
Due to a combination of the language barrier and the fact that my students don’t have a lot of experience moving around on a stage (I had to convince them that it was okay to “cheat;” that the audience would still understand that they were talking to their scene partner, and even still I’m not sure they all believe me), I found myself blocking very simply. In… a lot of triangles. Position-cross-position.
About halfway through I realized that I was using Dean and Carra’s rules and then I began to apply them specifically. Get the person in power to the position of power, and don’t try to postmodernally “trick” the audience by placing them somewhere else.
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