The Lion King: Julie Taymor-Lion King

Julie Taymor, director and designer of the Broadway production of The Lion King, gives the following account of casting procedure and rehearsals for that production.

PRINCIPAL REHEARSALS

During the first rehearsal days I worked improvisation ally with the principal actors. We would move back and forth between reading and analyzing the text and getting up on our feet and improvising with both the text and physical relationships of the characters. The masks and puppets were built, if not completely painted, by the time we went into rehearsal, and I urged the performers to wear or use them as much as possible. It is misleading for an actor to think he can find his or her character without the puppet or mask, especially in the case of Timon or Zazu, _44567296_lion_zazu

where the character is actually a complete puppet that is manipulated by the actor. Quite often, though, in discovering the natural flow of a scene or the more human gestures and inner nuances that might arise from the unencumbered performer, I would ask the actors to play the scenes without their “extended parts.” The fun began when they then had to find the corresponding animal gestures through the vocabulary of the puppets and masks.

At this early stage I asked performers to find “ideographs” for their characters. And ideograph is a concept that I was firt exposed to during the late 1960s, while I was studying mime with Jacques LeCoq at his L’Ecole de Mime in Paris. The concept was applied again during the 1970s, when I was a member of The Oberlin Group in Ohio, an experimental theater troupe led by avant-garde director Herbert Blau. In the visual arts, an example of an ideograph would be a Japanese brush painting of a bamboo forest: Just three or four quick brush strokes capture the whole. In the theater, an ideograph is also a pared-down form—a kinetic, abstract essence of an emotion, and action, or a character. At L’Ecole de Mime, LeCoq enjoined us to create ideographs of colors and materials, to “do red,” “do blue,” “be ice,” or “be steel.” We used our bodies to create ideographic images of the sun setting or of melting snow fields. We also explored ideographs of emotions. The ideas was not to imitate ice or steel or joy bu t to reveal the essential kernel of the subject without the distracting details A haiku.

I use ideographs in various ways in all aspects of my theater work. Once in rehearsal, I use the technique to help an actor find and express the essence of a character. The actor playing Pumbaa suggested during rehearsal that the ideograph for that fat, waddling warthog was “contentment,” and he expressed this physically by just standing in one spot and breathing in a full, relaxed way. Timon, on the other hand, is a nervous, street-wise meerkat, and so his ideograph might be related to canniness or toughness. Again, the performer would not act out toughness, but rather find an essential, abstract series of movements which embody that character trait. These exercises lead the actor toward finding a physical, spatial, and rhythmic score for his character.

I often use ideographs to open up a text’s visual motifs and themes. For my staging of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s most graphically bloody tragedy, actors explored ideographs for violence, racism, the meaning of the sacred and profane. In any theater piece requiring heightened style, ideographs can be used to find the physical vocabulary that matches the language, or in the case of The Lion King, that matches the style of the music and the overall nature of the production.

The dialogue in The Lion King is conversational, but from the design to the score, the piece is highly stylized. Each actor had to find the duality of the animal and the human within their performance. An actress cannot put on Nala’s mask and costume and talk with Simba s though she had just run into him on the street. _44567304_lion8_simba_nala

As lioness/young woman she has to find a way of standing, walking and gesturing that fulfills the demands of the production’s conceit. The tension inherent in the juxtaposition of the highly stylized gestural moves with the more naturalistic ones was my main thrust in the direction of the actors. Complete stylization would have been too formal and distancing for the audience, and would not service the script. The audience needs to identify with the characters, to recognize in them their selves, and therefore the familiar landscapes of emotion, dialogue, and interaction needed to be partially expressed in a familiar way. If the entire piece were performed naturalistically these moments would not stand out. In fact, the audience would take the most recognizable gestures for granted. What makes these simple human moments powerful is the selected isolation of them and the contrast and interplay with the heighted or stylized forms of expression.

Once the actors have their masks, they use their bodies to complete the sculpture. The architectural flow of the mask is the map of guide. Scar’s mask is twisted and angular. _44567302_lion61

John Vickery had to continue that angularity with his body. The stylized costume I designed obviously helps, but the actor must find his own rhythmic and spatial complement. When wearing a mask, an actor’s head movements must be precise, strong, and clean as the mask has no interior facial expression it is the way the actor isolates the head and body that gives the illusion of change.

One of the keys to puppetry is stillness. Too much movement from a puppet forces the physicality to become general and unfocused. The actor must learn to make quick, small moves that contrast with long, luxurious ones, and to alternate motion with stasis. The individual movements become the pauses, the commas and the exclamation points in the character’s phrasing. At the same time, energy levels must remain high and consistent. If an actor’s kinetic intensity drops, the puppet loses energy. As the puppet Timon was explored we found that we needed to develop different mechanisms to keep every limb vital. While Max Cassela had his right hand articulating the mouth of the puppet and his left hand manipulating the left arm of the puppet, a holder was strapped to his right thigh which, when moved, allowed him to animate the right arm of the pUppet. The challenge for the actor was to bring this puppet to life—to get “blood” flowing into every digit, into the legs, into the head, so that the audience sees and feels the life force inside this inanimate object. _44567297_lion1

When a figure made of wood or fabric moves like a living thing, the visual and emotional impact is magical. Watching puppetry at its best is a cubist event, because an audience experiences the art from several perspectives as once. One can either focus solely on the puppet or enjoy the direct and transparent art of the actor motivating that puppet. At rest, a puppet is just a facsimile of a human being or an animal But when Zazu’s wings flutter excitedly or Timon cocks his head at a quizzical angle, the pleasure of watching that facsimile turn into a being with recognizable emotions is the pinnacle of this type of theater experience.