“I’m not someone who believes in waiting for the unexpected to yield or generate something. We had one uniquely unexpected moment in this workshop which was: someone who works in the admin put on a pink outfit in the corridor before we were doing a showing for kids. I jokingly invited him in to introduce the show to the kids in his outfit and this became a character in the piece. But that is so rare, you couldn’t rely on it for a split second as a way of generating material.”
Quotes from the movie: Katie Mitchell devising Beauty and the Beast
“I wanted to become a painter at 15, but realized I wasn’t cut out for it. Now I paint with people.”
“I don’t find pieces that interesting. I enjoy the pictures, the ideas, the physicality – and in what ways the reality behind the story can be put forward, aside from just performing the usual theater gestures.”
She did not what is fundamentally great about theater though: the marvel of suddenly meeting people in a room and sharing experiences with them and telling each other stories – and by that process, possibly going home “a little more sensitive, considerate and empathetic”. Katie Mitchell considers going to the theater, and regarding another’s story with respect, important for the health of our society. This rare space must be protected.
Performances of the piece «Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino» on the 25th and 26th November at Schiffbau-Halle Zürich.
Katie Mitchell devising Beauty and the Beast
Katie Mitchell, born in 1964, is an English theatre director. She is an associate of the Royal National Theatre.
Mitchell, who turns 50 this September, has been hailed as the closest thing British theatre has to a genuine auteur: a director with a strong, uncompromising vision of how theatre should be. But over the past four years, she has quietly slipped off the UK’s radar. She first emerged as a director who did things differently with her 2007 multimedia adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. This was the beginning of what she now calls “live cinema”: performances that come alive somewhere between the chaotic scramble on stage and the smooth, cinema-quality output on the screen.
Sources
Quote English: National Theatre Discover 6.5.2011
Quotes German and picture: Tages-Anzeiger 18.11.2015, S. 35
Biography: Wikipedia and The Guardian