Associate Directing
Associate Directing is the act of taking a director’s book (in one of various stages of completion) and executing that vision with a cast and crew. These situations can arise in instances where a show is rented/purchased from another company and you receive a shipment of the owner’s costumes, props, scenic pieces, lighting plots, etc, to stage on your own. Or, in my experience, where the director lives out of town but has an image for the show developed and ready to deploy.
This process is fraught with possible pitfalls – having too many cooks in the kitchen is a real risk. Couple that with intermittent check-ins with the ‘primary’ director to confirm people are feeling good about the decisions made, not to mention having to adapt blocking and storytelling beats on the fly to match the space, performers, and needs of the show. But, with a director you can resonate with creatively, along with a healthy dose of trust and respect, this is a perfectly viable production method.
My experience as an associate director with the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company with Shane Valenzi has been a wonderful journey. In our first production, Patience, Shane’s existing book was well developed, but for a very different set, and containing a few numbers he wasn’t happy with. I took his notes, translated them into something I could deploy with the cast, and adapted his stage directions for the different performance venue and set. I also ended up staging a few scenes and songs from scratch, if he wasn’t satisfied with his first pass at staging. I ran rehearsals, communicated with the board, and Shane would arrive in town to lead rehearsals once every two weeks on the weekend, and then for tech to tie up any loose ends.
Our second endeavor, Merrie England, was a much different beast. There was no ‘original’ book for us to work off of, so we divvied up the choreography and blocking duties after discussing the show’s ethos and set to work. We allocated some longer dance moments to our choreographer, Emily Kleeman, and built the show together from the ground up. As in the previous year, I led rehearsals, relying on Emily to teach numbers she put together, and Shane again joined us for a few weekends to focus on some of his more complicated pieces.
The act of being a proxy for another artist is engaging, challenging, and can be fulfilling with the right collaborators. That being said, there will be times where it is not the best way to approach the show due to conflicting artistic visions, personalities, or storytelling styles. Working with or as an associate director must be handled on a case-by-case basis – it is a high-risk, high-reward setup.