DIRECTOR

Impressionist Maurice Denis famously wrote more than a century ago that a “picture—before being a war horse, a nude, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.”  In the United States, since the arrival of the “new stagecraft” and the mid-century realist/expressionist hybrids that defined American theatre, the presumption has been that abstract techniques can only follow realistic ones.  Though the work of Eleni Papaleonardos runs often to the antirealistic, the abstract, the impressionistic, and the physical, it is no less grounded in the real world than is the work of a follower of Harold Clurman or Sanford Meisner or George Devine.  But Eleni seeks to understand the material circumstances of theatre-making from the perspective that a performance—before it is the dissolution of an Ohio family after a revelation about shoddy airplane parts, before it is the resolution of years of conflict with the wedding of Perdita and Florizel, before it is the tragedy of a child torn between vengeance and parental love in ancient Argos—is essentially a collection of actions and sounds and moments, created by a company of artists, and arranged in a certain order by the director.   

Eleni Papaleonardos’s work as a director is deeply influenced by her research and writing on theorist Edward Gordon Craig, her experiences as an actor and student with Moisés Kaufman and Leigh Fondakowski (Tectonic Theatre Project), Ellen Lauren and Barney O’Hanlon (SITI Co.), Wendell Beavers and Barbara Dilley (Naropa University), and Jeanine Thompson (the Ohio State University), and, perhaps most deeply, by her experiences simultaneously as a teacher and learner of and with her own students.  She began her journey as a director helming the premiere production of indie playwright Chris Dickman’s A Light in the Night, a poetic follow-up to his and…and…and (rev. Theatre Journal 54.3 [2002], p. 494-96).  A fairy-tale dream layered over wry-slacker-apartment-drama, A Light in the Night was characterized by simultaneous action and bursts of lyric language. The rehearsal process combined the ideas and creativity of the playwright, acting company, and designers, laying a foundation for the kind of work that Eleni does as a director today, re-imagining the “box” of traditional American theatre production, whether in creating an entirely new work (as in her students’ creation and production of En-Sem-Ble at Denison University in the spring of 2009) or in the rehearsal and production of the quintessentially traditional (as in her direction of AVL[t]’s community-theatre-partnership for charity, The Odd Couple, in the summer of 2009). Eleni’s work focuses on the director as a creative artist and guide for a company of other creative, rather than interpretive, artists, working as an ensemble to create new and exciting theatre. We’ve been successful in recent decades at reimagining the box that contains the director and the (often absent) playwright and, to a lesser but growing extent, the actors, but we’ve only just begun, in American theatre, to engage fully the design-partners, stage technicians, musicians, other artists, and the audience in the creation of new works and the reinvigoration of old ones.

Eleni’s training in mime and physical theatre certainly influences her work as a director and explorations of bodies and the relationship of bodies in space characterizes the composition and choreography of the shape of Eleni’s productions.  As a director, she is particularly interested in exploring intersecting geographies.  In The Space Between (Naropa), she focused on the history of a space, utilizing emptiness and also the way space holds meaning after the actor has abandoned it.  In God’s Ear (AVL[t]), the literal worlds of the play overlapped in space, but so too did the interior worlds of the characters.

An educational director as well (for college and university students, for community theatre actors, and for children), Eleni’s work in academic and instructional settings integrates actor coaching, institutional values, and, when appropriate, regular individual evaluations with student-artists of their process, research & analysis, skill development, collaboration, and participation.