Julie Taymor research

Julia Taymor, a great theater, opera and film director, famous for that she is the first female broadway musical director awarded by Tony Awards, talks about her theater experience and idea.

She told a story when she was in Indonesia when she was in her early 20s. She was impressed by some old people dancing in night only for showing faith to their god.Then a young man walked out hanged a lantern on the tree that it turn out to be a all night performance with hundreds people watching. She saw this night as a seminal moment of her theater life that she should seek for the original idea of herself but also aware that audiences are in presence every seconds and they need the light. Then she used her production musical the Lion King as an example to show how she work through that idea. She mentioned the use of circle as a symbol throughout the whole story. She left the space of imagination to her audience, that is how she do what she mean by be true to your production also give the audience the space to appreciate.

At this point, she pointed out that the mechanics and the methods have the same importance as the story itself. She took the Tempest as the example this time. The focus for her when she made that script into movie was its ideograph--the nurture versus nature. She first introduced how she did that in the theater, she asked 2 stagehands to pour water on the sand castle and let the light focused on the water which gives the audiences the space to imagine a tempest going on. Then she explained how different she did to make it a film. She used the flexiblility of camera to zoom in and out to create the theme. That is how she play with the medium--as long as she don't lost her objective.

After she played the clips of the Spider Man, she told another story of herself. When she was stuck on the volcano, she took a new way down--throw off her camera and thongs and crawl for survival. Here, I think she has double-meaning. One is that she wanted to encourage people to break traditions and the other one is to encourage people stay going forward. She was daring in the production of the Spider Man in broadway that she mixed different elements and build the world from Parker's view for the audiences.

As I went over the open scene of the Lion King and the "behind the scenes"--a video of how she direct the Tempest, I discovered that she is a person that sticks to her principles. She keeps stressing her ideas that mentioned in her TED talk in the "behind the scenes". I really like her attitude of her philosophy of theater life of being true and help the audiences to understand, but the most important thing I learnt from her is that good mechanics and methods make good stories.