Research and Preparation
Kate Chisholm, the director of Heartfield, explains: "The director is often the main resource for the understanding of a show. Actors, designers and other people working on the show turn to the director with questions about the piece-- everything from the pronunciation of a word to a historical reference-- and the director needs to be prepared to answer these questions. If there is a dramaturg working on a production, he or she does much of the background research to aid the director in the understanding and conceptualization of the piece."
"In addition to the obvious tasks like looking up definitions of unfamiliar words, the director often does research on related historical events, social trends and art to deepen his or her understanding and to broaden the context of the piece."
Research for Heartfield
"For Heartfield, I specifically read about John Heartfield's life and work, and became fully familiar with his body of artwork. This helped me to understand the purpose, content and aesthetic of his work, and especially to know the specific historical events which inspired each of the photomontages which appear in the show. Delving into Heartfield's photomontages also helped me to understand the way that much of Heartfield is structured like a montage, with fragments of scenes and songs which, when juxtaposed, add up to something intriguing and more suggestive of a larger idea than if the scenes remained in the realm of the personal and realistic. The metaphor of photomontage runs throughout the piece--every day in rehearsal we discover a new place where this technique is being used."
"The idea of creating a montage, in which unexpected elements are introduced to upset and challenge what has previously been seen (and assumed to be true), is akin to what Bertolt Brecht was doing in theater. Ken Vega clearly had this relationship in mind when writing the piece, and worked the character of Brecht into the show to help translate what Heartfield was doing into the language of theater."
"I therefore supplemented my general knowledge of Brecht and his plays with reading more about his life and work, his theories, and accounts of his directing process. I also took a class with Heinz Uwe-Haus, who was an original member of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, which helped me understand, in a hands-on way, the essence of what Brecht was trying to do and how he did it. I was also fortunate to have seen Uwe-Haus's productions of Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui and Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera at the University of Delaware. I saw Brechtian techniques at work in a completely engaging and entertaining way. Observation is often the best way to see exactly how a technique works."
"As I boned up on my World War I and World War II history (which I hadn't formally studied since high school), I was fascinated to learn more about the political upheaval in German between the wars and to see how that led to the rise of Nazism. Filling in this gap in my knowledge helped me understand Heartfield's progression from being an anti-war, anti-bourgeois Dadaist into fervently supporting communism, then committing himself to an all-out war against fascism and the Third Reich through his art."
For visual research, I poured through books about the period and about the lives of the people who are characters in the show. I watched documentaries about Heartfield, Brecht and Dietrich, as well as films such as The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) and Open City (Rossellini). I was particularly interested in gestures and postures of different periods and countries to help convey to the actors how a person's stance or gesture conveys their character and social position or relationship.
The Director's Process