Description Peter Lichtenfels was born in Germany in 1949. His family emigrated to Canada in the mid-1950s where he completed his education, seeing his first ever play while at university in Montreal. Within a year he had become a theatre director and from that moment on dedicated his life to theatre and performance of all kinds. Peter relocated to the UK in the early 1970s where he contributed substantially to the UK theatre ecology, including during his tenures as Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, before moving on to the United States and other international work. Defying easy categorization, Peter’s work has focused on exploring the links between making and writing, between process and product, during a journey that took him from directing into producing, to writing about performance and to dramaturgy and editing (both plays and books) in ways that drew on his own experience but also that of the artists that he engaged in dialogue A generous and honest collaborator, this collection of Peter’s essays sits side by side with reflections and tributes by a selection of Peter’s co-labourers, some of whom have been his students and all of whom he would consider his teachers. They offer a series of approaches to the ongoing change that his kind of directing attempts to generate and a series of lenses onto what the essays attempt His own writing reveals an approach to directing embedded in international engagement. He wrote essays on directors he admired, from Peter Sellars to Tadeusz Kantor. Other essays feature his fascination with craft, technique and preparation and the ways in which he engaged with the craft of directing. This volume is for any collaborator in theatre work, the actor, the director, the theatre maker and the audience member or critic. CONTENTS Introduction Lynette Hunter Prologue: Making noises quietly Maria M. Delgado ON SHAKESPEARE Negotiations Between Text and Stage Peter Lichtenfels with Lynette Hunter Interval Peter Lichtenfels with Dylan Bolles Directing Realism Peter Lichtenfels What Actors Can Do with and through Texts W. B. Worthen Directing as a Full-Body Listening Practice John Zibell ON ARTISTIC DIRECTING Artistic Direction at its Experimental and Generous Best David Gothard Becoming a Musical Accompanist to Theatre Performance Gavin Bryars Designers and Directors in Rehearsal Collaboration Dermot Hayes ON DIRECTING: PETER SELLARS & TADEUZ KANTOR Peter Sellars’s Changing Conceptions of the Audience Peter Lichtenfels Engaging Local Communities Peter Lichtenfels Peter Sellars’s Work in Theatre Directing Peter Lichtenfels Kantor’s DIRECTOR: ‘I Will Be Myself but I Will Be with the Actors’ Peter Lichtenfels Directing to Welcome the Work of the Actor Kevin Whately Director’s Only Note: ‘Act better’ Dahlak Brathwaite Collaborative and Relational Approaches to Staging Keith Hennessy ON LANGUAGE Learning with Broken Words Peter Lichtenfels From Form to Body Peter Lichtenfels Where Does Directing Take Place in the Process of Making Theatre? Álvaro Iván Hernández Rodríguez ON TRAINING Exploring Pedagogy in Manchester Niamh Dowling and Bill Hopkinson Voices from a Transcultural Production Shi Fei Text as What Happens in the Actor’s Body Regina María Gutiérrez Bermúdez Epilogue Janelle Reinelt Peter Lichtenfels — Life Chronology References Illustrations Biographies
