1 For example, Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota, Robert Wilson's Civil Wars and Peter Sellars's I was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky.

2 The pre-text, one of the concepts that Almuth Grésillon advances, seems to be very useful as it designates ‘the whole of a work's preserved genetic evidence, organized according to the chronology of the successive stages’. By analogy, I will designate all of the textual and scenic drafts left by the preparation of a show as ‘pre-performance’. See Grésillon, A., Éléments de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modernes (Paris: PUF, 1994), p. 241.Google Scholar

3 See Féral, Josette, ‘Pour une analyse génétique de la mise en scène’, Théâtre/Public, 144 (1998), pp. 54–9.Google Scholar A first version of this article was published in English as ‘For a Genetic Approach to Performance Analysis’, Assaph, 13 (1997) pp. 41–54.

4 A recent issue of Genesis, Théâtre. No 26 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2006), edited by Nathalie Léger and Almuth Grésillon, proposes, for the very first time in France, a basis for ‘theatrical genetics’. See Grésillon, A. and Thomasseau's, J.-M. article ‘Scènes de genèses théâtrales’, Revue internationale de critique génétique, 26 (2006), pp. 19–34.Google Scholar With regard to pure genetic analysis, it has precursors as early as 1968 in Louis Hay, who was the first to investigate the creative process, most notably in the manuscripts of Heine that were discovered in a trunk. Hay was followed by Almuth Grésillon, who established textual genetics in France with her book Éléments de Critique Génétique see note 2 above.

5 Grésillon, Éléments de critique génétique, p. 161.

6 See Sophie Proust, La Direction d'acteurs dans la mise en scène théâtrale contemporaine (Vic la Gardiole: L'Entretemps, 2006).

7 Here again, one can explore the reflections of artists offered spontaneously or collected through interviews following the rehearsal period, so long as the artists speak about the details of their work: the way they direct actors; the theories, concepts and references that they use; the major and minor discoveries that they made over the course of their stage work; the laws that, according to Ariane Mnouchkine, repeatedly ‘emerge from their work in the evening to disappear again the next day’. These rare reflections by artists on their own practice expose elements at the heart of their creative work and it is essential that these observations – in spite of their discontinuous nature – be given the place they deserve in theatre criticism, as they reveal the aspects that determine the final form of the productions presented to the public; the fertile context from which certain choices, gestures and mistakes emerge; and the very axes on which the finished work is based. Ignoring these reflections in favour of a specialization in the signs visible onstage would mean cutting the play off from its roots in order to make it an abstract object of study. One will also find in the following pages Gay McAuley's text summing up the observations she made during the rehearsal work of Brink Productions for their 2004 production of Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis.

8 There is also the question of the status accorded to other documents that were not mentioned above, although many of them punctuate the artists' approaches: interviews, manifestos and artists' declarations that illuminate the director's work. Often created after the event, they nevertheless elucidate everything from the preliminary stages to the final performance and, for various reasons, are fundamental to the comprehension of the work. They allow a perspective on the creation of the work: the creation of the staging, of a role, of a character, and of the space. These traces are of considerable importance in that they allow one to reconstruct the method of a given artist within a larger perspective that touches on theatre as a whole. Thus the trajectory of Claude Régy or of Vitez is illuminated by their writings. As useful as they are, these documents relating to the a posteriori reflections of artists on their own work will not be considered in the pages that follow. They remain nonetheless important. It is simply that we are interested in the traces that directly relate to the gestation period of a given production.

9 The working journals of Vitez were made public thanks to the efforts of Nathalie Léger of the IMEC (Institut mémoire de l'édition contemporaine) and the publisher POL. These writings open a window onto Vitez's creative process (cf. Ecrits sur le théâtre, I, II, III, IV, and V. PAR: POL, 1994-1995-1996-1997–1998). For example, one might read Vitez's notes on his 1975 Comédie-Française production of Partage de Midi, which include the following passages: ‘December 19 1974 (To Yannis Kokkos): I am obsessed by the idea of a Claudel museum. When it comes down to it, it is not so much a museum of Claudel, as of the workings of his mind at the moment of his death. Every phase of his life since 1905 would coexist there: portraits of women, the Ernest-Simons (a superb ship), saved letters, furniture from different periods, crucifixes, a devotional-chair, a rosary, a portrait of his sister Camille, one of her sculptures, desk lamps, pieces of furniture, curtains, double curtains.

‘The other direction would be your idea of light. Figurative art at the limit of abstraction, since very little about the real decor should be indicated: only the light.

‘March 10, 1975 (To Yannis Kokkos): Here is the tree. But it should be something more Chinese, more Hokusai.

‘Generally, I would like the clear and fragile image to be similar to Hokusai and Japanese drawing. What you said is true: if we put the stage on an angle, it will look like a device. We will have to choose the signs we use on it – the shoes, for example.

‘August 15, 1975 The rake of the stage. It must be practicable. It is essential that the furniture sit solidly in place, because the objects should be what transforms the stage into a real theatre – otherwise the decor will be figurative and stylized (and not the least bit abstract)’.

Following Vitez's observations, from which I have quoted only a few short passages, the space that Yannis Kokkos created for Partage de Midi comprised ‘a vast, white semi-circle on an angle, divided from front to rear with a line of pale parquet, and closed off upstage with white cloth. A few objects gave rhythm to the performance: a model of the Ernest-Simons steamer descended from the flies; rattan furniture: a coffee table, chairs, a rocking chair; a massive stone chair; a tree stylized like a Chinese ideogram’. (Écrits sur le théâtre III, pp. 7–27).

10 See Proust, La Direction d'acteurs, note 7, and her article in this issue.

11 On this subject see the film Au Soleil, même la nuit, in which Eric Darmon and Catherine Vilpoux have filmed several improvisational versions of the Valère character.

12 See Andreas Yandl's master thesis entitled ‘En Quête d'une vérité: Analyse herméneutique de la genèse d'Urfaust, tragédie subjective; mise en scène de Denis Marleau, Théâtre UBU, Montréal’ (Université de Québec à Montréal, UQAM, 2001). See also the journal About Performance (University of Sydney) edited by Gay McAuley and her article here. Gay McAuley is among those who pioneered in the 1990s the application of ethnographic methodologies to the study of the rehearsal process. Other publications are also devoted to the study of rehearsals, though sometimes in a less systematic way. Among these are Mitter, Shommit, Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Letzercole, Susan, Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Banu, G., ed., Les Répétitions: Un Siècle de mise en scène. De Stanislavski à Bob Wilson (Bruxelles: Alternatives théâtrales 52–53-54, 1997)Google Scholar; Toporkov, Vasili, Stanislavski in Rehearsal (London: Methuen, 2001).Google Scholar

13 For this I refer the reader to the issue of Genesis mentioned above. In particular see Anne-Françoise Benhamou's excellent article ‘Genèse d'un combat: Une Rencontre “derrière les mots”’, pp. 51–69), which offers a concise and illuminating analysis of the documents containing Chéreau's annotations on Koltès's texts and, more specifically, on Combat de nègres et de chiens.