Preparing a Show the Way You Prepare a Meal

With some shows, something happens between the stage and the people present; with others, just as carefully made, nothing does. That difference rests, to my mind, on an enabling frame (*cadre*) to be built at every level of the work: the creation, the stage, the welcome. I set out what is at stake and offer some practical leads.

Something happens, or it doesn’t

Live performance is part of my original training. I was an actor in the 1990s, trained in mask work and in the art of the bouffon, and I spent a great deal of time on stages. I go to the theatre less often today, but I still go now and then, and my theatre training remains present in everything I do, as one part of a larger whole. That is no doubt what gives me a certain distance: I am not caught up in the logics of the milieu, and I can look at what plays out there with a kind of freedom.

From that position, I have made the same observation for a long time. With some shows, something happens between the stage and the people present, and with others, just as worked-through, nothing does. We often put that difference down to the budget, to the performers’ talent, to the technical means the production had at its disposal. Those factors matter, but they do not explain everything, and they are not the most decisive. What I want to examine are the criteria that strike me as the most operative, and that have to do with something other than means.

One clarification before going further. What I describe holds for every kind of show: text-based theatre and image theatre, performance art and boulevard comedy, abstract theatre and music theatre. I am not describing one genre in particular, and certainly not improvisation alone. I am describing a condition that seems to me common to every form, whatever the rigour of its writing.

The image that seems most accurate to me is that of a meal. A show is prepared the way you prepare a meal for guests. You compose it with care, you choose, you measure, you start again, and all that care is turned towards a moment you will not control, the moment when guests take hold of it, with their appetites, their conversations, their way of transforming what you offer them. The care of the preparation does not freeze the meal; you prepare it precisely so that it will be alive at the moment of sharing. Some artists take this image literally, in shows where the audience cooks and eats together. I am not saying every show should become a banquet; I am saying that every show gains from being prepared in that disposition, the disposition of demanding work turned towards its guests.

What “to authorise” means

The word frame first calls to mind what contains and what limits. In creative work as in cultural mediation, I understand it otherwise: the frame (*cadre*) is what authorises. It names the set of conditions, material, spatial, relational, that make a person feel safe enough to take a risk. To risk creating is to expose oneself to judgement, because you show something of yourself that you do not fully master, and you do not know how others will receive it. That exposure is unsettling for everyone, on a stage as in a workshop. A reliable frame signals to the person that their risk-taking will not be punished, that the place, the group, those leading the work are there to welcome whatever comes out, whatever it may be. It is that guarantee, more than any encouraging words, that makes risk-taking possible.

I have developed this notion elsewhere, in relation to cultural mediation and to workshops. I want to carry it over here to the theatre, because it seems to me the cornerstone of what makes a show work. For a performance to exist fully, the enabling frame has to be present at every level of the work: in the creation, on the stage during the performance, and in the way the audience is welcomed. A frame that constrains instead of authorising, what I would call a straitjacket, can settle in at any one of these levels and be enough to prevent the encounter.

In creation: the built and the open

The first level is creation. The whole difficulty lies in an articulation, between what must be built with great precision and what must stay open. A show needs both. It needs meticulous work, where choices are settled, paths set, intentions sought and found; and it needs, at the same time, to leave room for a part that this evening’s performance will fill. To build a frame is to distinguish these two orders, the essential, that without which the show would no longer be itself, and the open, what stays available to whatever comes.

A fully fixed score (*partition*), where every move, every inflection, every glance is set in advance, guarantees that the work will conform to the intention, and at the same stroke closes the door on what this evening’s singular situation might produce. This does not mean working less, or giving up precision. The built part can, and must, be built with extreme care. What is at stake is knowing where to place the open, and owning it as a part of the work rather than as a failure of mastery. This articulation between the built and the open is, to my eyes, what asks the most of the work of directing.

The theatre has long worked out ways of holding the built and the open together, and they are not limited to improvised performance. The mask, in which I was trained, is one: a very strict constraint placed on the face, which hides, and which by that very fact authorises a playing one would not have allowed oneself bare-faced. The canovaccio of the commedia dell’arte fixes situations and entrusts the detail to the playing. A rigorously learned text score can also become the stable ground from which an actor truly addresses, tonight, these particular people. Keith Johnstone, who devoted his life to improvisation from the Royal Court Theatre of the 1950s, shows in *Impro* (1979) that spontaneity breaks first on the fear of judgement, and that his exercises are frames built to suspend that fear. Mary Overlie, then Anne Bogart and Tina Landau with the Viewpoints, formalised precise structures that give performers a shared grammar and entrust them with responsibility, instead of deciding everything in their place.

Artists know that creation is often born of constraints more than of total freedom. The blank page paralyses; a constraint of time, of place or of material sometimes releases an energy their absence would not have produced. Donald Winnicott described, with the transitional space, that zone between what one knows and what one discovers, where play becomes possible because the environment is reliable enough. The frame of creation builds that space for the company.

In the training sessions I lead, whether for working professionals from every artistic field or for film students, I devote the first stretches not to preparing what we are going to do, but to preparing ourselves to do: getting into the disposition that will make it possible to seize the unforeseen and fold it into the work. Seen from outside, this can look like a lack of mastery, when in fact it is about building the conditions for mastery to serve the encounter rather than replace it.

On stage: who the show is addressed to

The second level is the performance itself. I take an example, whose full account I have given in another article. One evening, in a national drama centre, the actors were working with application, the lighting was careful, the moves set, and none of it was addressed to us. What was happening on stage could have happened in front of anyone, or in front of no one. We were there, in our seats, necessary to the apparatus and yet kept at the edge of the experience. That evening the show did not work, in the sense I mean here, and the failing had nothing to do with the text or the quality of the acting. It came from the fact that the work done beforehand had left no place where we, the people present, could enter.

We often speak of “the house”, and the word says something of this forgetting. A house receives nothing; it is people who receive, each with their history, their mood, their tiredness, their expectation. When every second of a show is locked down, those people have nothing left to do but perform their own score, the score of the “good audience”: arrive on time, keep quiet, stay still, applaud at the end. I could take the example of a show whose subject was emancipation, and yet whose every instant was ruled to the millimetre. It would state one thing and make another be felt, and that contradiction would register, even without anyone being able to name it.

A frame built with care produces the opposite effect, and it is worth following how, step by step. It begins by protecting the actors. The one who clearly knows what is essential, what must not be touched, feels confident, and that confidence lets them venture inside the frame. It lets them, above all, be touched by the energy of the people present that evening. For an actor, on stage, always feels that energy. They know, without needing to tell themselves, whether the audience is carrying them or not. A solid frame does not suppress that perception, it makes it usable: instead of enduring the audience’s energy or defending against it, the performer can take it into account, play with it, welcome it into their playing. That is where the sensation comes from, for the spectators, that something is happening tonight, for them. The safety the frame gives is what makes that freedom possible, and that freedom is perceptible from the seats. It is what makes a show take place for the people present that evening, and not merely in front of them.

At the welcome: the show has already begun

The third level begins before the house goes dark, on the pavement. Serge Saada opens Et si on partageait la culture ? (2011) with a phrase he often hears: “It’s not for me.” Many people perceive cultural venues as impenetrable sanctuaries, and those who cross the threshold feel they are entering by trespass. The enabling frame, or its absence, is therefore at play from the street on: the façade, the signage, the box office, the way one is looked at on entering, the programme note (*feuille de salle*) one is handed. In an article titled What artistic discourse reveals about itself, I analysed how a simple show-presentation text can programme the audience’s position and prepare them for respectful admiration rather than for encounter.

All this the theatre knows, and has known for a long time. Jean Vilar, at the Théâtre National Populaire of the 1950s, thought of the welcome as part of the show. He opened the doors at half past six, with an aperitif-concert in the great foyer, so that those coming from work could come without going home first; he set the performance at eight o’clock sharp so that suburban audiences could get home by metro; he charged a single, very low price, even at the cost of cutting salaries, his own included; he handed out a questionnaire on the way out, where the public gave its opinion on the welcome as much as on the staging. Ariane Mnouchkine, at the Cartoucherie, opens the doors of the house herself, tears the tickets at the entrance, lets the audience see the actors’ make-up, has soup served to the public. For both of them, the welcome is not a logistical preliminary to the show; it is part of it.

Here is the paradox. These ways of doing are known, theorised, celebrated, taught, and they remain the exception. We admire them without taking them up. Understanding why seems to me more useful than recalling them one more time. The division of labour has much to do with it, since the welcome is entrusted to a team distinct from the artistic team, recruited, trained and assessed separately. The assessment criteria have much to do with it too, since we measure the occupancy rate far more than the quality of the entrance. The calendar, finally, since the welcome gets settled in the last few days, once the creation is finished, when it conditions what the creation will be able to produce. As long as these mechanisms stay in place, the best intentions of hospitality are absorbed into them.

Theatre lies in the way a place stages itself

We have to go further, because there is a stake here that is not only professional. Entering a theatre, for a person who has no habits there, is an ordeal. They step into a place whose codes they do not master, under the gaze of other people who seem to master them, and what they risk is judgement, that is, at bottom, symbolic exclusion. Anthropology and clinical experience meet on this point: being rejected by the group is experienced by the organism as a vital threat. The fear that holds so many people at the door of theatres, or freezes them once seated, is in no way a shyness to be corrected; it answers a real social risk.

For that fear not to block the encounter, an enabling frame has to be built at the very moment of entry, and not only on stage. What Donald Winnicott called holding, that capacity of the environment to carry a person so that they can exist, holds for the foyer of a theatre as much as for a workshop. And what John Dewey establishes in Art as Experience (1934), namely that art lies less in the object produced than in the experience it makes possible, shifts attention from the stage towards everything that surrounds the moment of performance.

This is where an obvious idea has to be turned around. We believe that theatre is what is played on stage. Theatre lies first in the way a place stages itself. The way one welcomes, lays out the space, orders the relations, all of that is already theatre, whether what follows is a show, a film, an exhibition or a talk. When people enter a place, their way of arriving, of sitting down, of being received, of eating there perhaps, is already part of the performance. If one offers a show on stage, then, one must not forget that theatre does not begin when the curtain rises, and that the spectators are already, on entering, inside something being played.

Ariane Mnouchkine works this dimension fully, and that is one of the reasons she remains a reference. I am not saying one should do as she does, all the more so as her public stances during the Covid period were sharply contested, and as no one is free of blind spots. I am saying that there is, in her way of thinking the place as a stage before the stage, something to draw on. Concretely, this comes down to tending the space of the welcome the way one tends a scenography: the layout, the path by which one enters, what one has before one’s eyes and at hand on arriving, the way one is greeted. These gestures do not belong to the set; they build the place each person will be able to take in what is about to happen.

Workshops and cultural outreach around the show

Around shows there often unfolds a body of workshop and cultural-outreach work, with school groups, residents, audiences said to be hard to reach. This work follows the same logic of the frame, and it shows its stakes with particular sharpness. The difference between an activity and a genuinely open workshop comes down to this point: do the participants know what they have to produce, or are they given a territory to explore and the tools to do it? In the first case, they are led towards an already-known result, and participation is only an appearance. In the second, one defines the conditions of exploration without prescribing its outcome.

This openness is uncomfortable, because one has one’s own objectives and accounts to give. During a training session with a company, some artists put it well: you do have to deliver the little films promised to the funders, and when the young people want to do it differently, that is destabilising. That destabilising, to my mind, is the sign that something is happening. The question becomes that of letting go of one’s criteria advisedly, which means accepting that the workshop does not go as planned, and that it sometimes goes better than if one had fully controlled it. I have seen very old people with impaired faculties succeed at making animated films, autistic children film things I would never have imagined, seasoned actors find something alive out of unexpected constraints. The condition was each time the same: they had been given a frame, tools and trust, without being told exactly how to do it.

One last thing touches the very value of this work. When a workshop takes an unforeseen direction, its result alone says nothing of what happened, for what took place is a path travelled. I come back below to the concrete way of accounting for it, because it is that account which makes the path visible and defensible.

A few ways of going about it

What precedes may seem abstract. Here, to close, is another way into the same subject, through directly applicable ways of doing.

• Keep two lists, the essential and the open. In creation, distinguish what cannot move without the show ceasing to be itself, the essential, from what stays available to each evening’s performance, the open. Keep that distinction alive throughout the work. The form hardly matters, a posted note, a shared document, a notebook; what counts is that it be a place where one deposits and discusses, neither sacralised nor imposed from above.
• Walk the spectator’s route. Just as one sits in different seats to check what can be seen, walk the audience’s arrival route, from the metro exit to the house, and walk it in small groups so as to talk about it afterwards. Walk too the route of those who come by car, down to the question of parking. What one feels along the way can nourish the rehearsal as much as the work on stage.
• Make the programme note a subject in its own right. Ask who writes it, and why. Make it an object of collective work. One can, for instance, produce several deliberately opposed programme notes, one learned, one accessible to the point of demagogy, one addressed to children, one trying to speak to everyone, submit them to a close-reading exercise where each person takes up one version, then debate them. This detour brings out what a programme note decides, unbeknownst to us, about the audience’s place.
• Give the moments of sharing criteria the weight of a rehearsal. Bring together, very early and ideally several times over, all the people mobilised by the show, from the artistic team to front-of-house, administration and communications, to say what one is seeking and how one will know it has succeeded. This may seem incidental, and it is what weaves links between the show and the world in which it takes place. It is not about making a documentary show, nor about importing the city into the fiction; one can stage a Molière play and do this work. It is about the place each person gradually takes in the whole, and that will mean that, on the night, facing the spectators, the energy will settle on the side of the link and of address, deep down.
• Bring in a third term. In situations of relation with the audience, set out objects and materials anyone can take hold of without depending on anyone, a lounge corner to settle into, something to draw with, instruments to play. As in what is offered to children, what matters is that people know they have the right to touch them and make something of them, there, in the moment, for pleasure. This third term defuses the relation in which someone tells others what they must do.
• Tell the story of the path travelled. When a workshop or an encounter escapes what one had planned, it first takes work on oneself to welcome that gap rather than close it. What makes that gap legitimate is the account one gives of it, for oneself and then for others: telling that it went otherwise, saying why, including it in the communication. The value of what took place lies in the path travelled, and that path exists for others only if one tells it. Without an account, only the result remains, and it is normal that one should then judge only the result.

What none of these proposals asks for is extra means. They ask that one shift where the care is placed, from controlling the result to founding the frame.