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  • Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process by Gay McAuley
  • D. Ohlandt
Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process. By Gay McAuley. Theatre: Theory–Practice–Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012; pp. 256.

Riffing on Tolstoy’s famous opening line, a colleague once quipped that rehearsals with mediocre directors were all alike, but rehearsals with extraordinary directors were each extraordinary in their own way. At the time, I could not help but wonder: How would we even know? Rehearsals—mediocre or extraordinary—are notoriously closed to “outsiders,” so the only comparisons that most theatre artists, students, and scholars can make are among rehearsal processes in which they have participated, which is an extremely limited sample set for even the most prolific artists.

Not Magic but Work is the capstone on more than three decades of Gay McAuley’s efforts to answer the question of how theatre scholars, students, and artists could know what happens in rehearsals they are not attending. For three months in 2007, McAuley was granted nearly unrestricted access to observe, document, analyze, and write about the rehearsal and production process for Company B at Belvoir Street Theatre’s production of Michael Gow’s play Toy Symphony, a new Australian play being premiered by one of Sydney’s major professional theatre companies, directed by Neil Armfield and starring Richard Roxburgh. Her having that kind of access to rehearsals with this company speaks not only to her career of building relationships and trust with theatre artists in Australia, but also to the integrity of the process, and the ethics, of rehearsal ethnography that McAuley has pioneered. Not Magic but Work is subtitled an “ethnographic account,” and McAuley does not use the term lightly, positioning herself as a participant observer and frequently referencing ethnographic and anthropological theory to frame her analysis. The book is not, however, a primer on rehearsal ethnography; only the first half of the introduction introduces ethnographic theory (in particular, Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description”) or the history of rehearsal studies. It is also not a big-picture survey of rehearsal or even a case study used to support broad assertions of how rehearsal works or how theatre is made; it is, rather, a study of rehearsal as a culturally embedded and frequently ritualized set of social interactions by which meaning is negotiated and significance is assigned.

McAuley divides her account into two sections, the better “to achieve an appropriate balance between detailed description of the daily work processes and commentary on the larger social and cultural processes within which they are located and to which they contribute” (28). The first, longer section is a chronological description of one company’s rehearsal process of one play from the first read through to opening night, presenting McAuley’s detached, yet sophisticated observations about the participants, the processes, and the physical and ideological context of the work that the artists are doing at various stages of rehearsal. Her own academic training in languages and literature (French and German) grounds the literary-analytic approach of her analysis. Semiotics is a clear influence in many of McAuley’s previous articles, as well as in her 2000 book Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre in which she uses data from rehearsal observations to track and analyze how gestures, objects, and spaces in theatre become meaningful.

Her fluency with semiotics strongly influences which incidents she highlights and how she organizes the details in this book. She titles her chapter on days 15–19 of rehearsal “The Sign Systems Come Together” and departs from a day-by-day account to discuss instead how the props, costumes, entrance and exit points, and sound and music cues were incorporated during these days. Her use of thick description often transforms what could become a tedious amount of detail into analysis that can offer new insight to even a seasoned rehearsal participant. In her chapter titled “Runs and Notes (Days 20–27),” for example, McAuley muses on the many different uses of the word run—“both a verb and a noun”—in theatre rehearsals. A run done during scene work is “qualitatively different...

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