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International Theatre Conference: Directing and Authorship in Western Drama Panel
One Larry
Zappia, U of Toronto |
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The strictness of copyright laws in Western theatre seldom helps the freedom (and the right) of the director's interpretation. The fear of an infringement reduces considerably the range of possible directorial concepts. By the time the "contemporary classics" are finally released from the unyielding legislative clutch, they run a risk of seeming already old and artistically not challenging enough. One of the illegal, but present solutions to this problem, is the "Wild East" (meaning Eastern Europe) with its too lax approach to intellectual property. Removed from the mechanisms of direct control, the "Wild East" serves as the perfect ground for prohibited experimentation. In the presentation entitled The Creative Freedoms of the "Wild East", I would like to explore the artistic and non-artistic benefits and damages that such fundamentally permissive copyright law enforcement policies do to the creative process. I would like to support the presentation with a brief case study of one of my own earlier productions - a highly controversial and intertextual reading of a "contemporary classic": Samuel Beckett's "untouchable" Waiting for Godot (staged in 1996 in Rijeka, Croatia) - providing both the scholarly and analytical framework, as well as the audio-visual material associated with the production. |