Julie Taymor, Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film

Julie Taymor’s work is highly visual, lush even, saturated with color, pulsing with rhythmic movement. This large-format book shows Taymor as a visual theatre artist. Fifteen performances, from Way of Snow (1974) through Titus Andronicus (1994), are presented in photographs, drawings—often enough Taymor’s working sketches—and brief processual and descriptive texts in which Taymor explains the why and how of each work. Preceding this chronological march through Taymor’s oeuvre is a 46-page biographical and analytic essay by Eileen Blumenthal. What the material reveals is the consistency of Taymor’s vision. Some artists, like Picasso, change their styles and modes of presentation radically as they move through life; others, like Richard Foreman, remain very fixed. Taymor falls between these extremes. She varies her texts, media, and place in the production hierarchy—sometimes working as director-designer-adapter, sometimes just being in charge of the visuals, and often serving as both director and designer. She constructs her puppets, masks, and performing objects. But for all the changes, her basic style remains recognizably her own throughout.

Blumenthal points out that Taymor’s work:

is not so much eclectic as it is cross-bred. She draws on an enormous pool of forms, genres, traditions. [...] Usually she assimilates disparate elements rather than leaving them in native dress. Only historians of European theater might notice how closely the stage arrangement in Taymor’s design for a Passover Haggadah pageant resembles that of medieval Christian Passion plays. Only viewers familiar with Chinese theater would be likely to realize that the show’s Red Sea of billowing cloth derives from a Peking Opera convention. Taymor’s Juan Darién incorporates techniques from Japan, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, and Western fairgrounds [...].

(7–8)

Taymor is a theatre artist who emerges from a rigorous academic and adventurous intercultural background. As a teenager she trained in mime with Jacques Lecoq; as a college student at Oberlin she joined Herbert Blau’s experimental group, Kraken. I saw Kraken perform The Donner Party at the Performing Garage in the early 1970s. Taymor played various roles, human and animal, with a great physical intensity drawing fully on her mime training. But Blau’s work was not only artistic. He demanded from his actors intellectual commitment. Taymor was well-prepared for her experiences in Indonesia later in the 1970s. Half a world away from the USA she learned first-hand how to form a theatre company; she experimented deeply with masks and puppets.

Because of her great gifts as a costume designer and mask and puppet maker, Taymor found herself slotted as a “visual artist” in the theatre. But her ambitions were much broader. As success in one area opened up opportunities in others, Taymor was able to direct more often and to work across genres in theatre, television, opera, and film. Blumenthal’s introduction follows Taymor’s progression. There is not much deep analysis or attempt to locate Taymor within the whole spectrum of modern American theatre. Taymor’s enormous success in The Lion King takes place a few years after this book was published. But the seeds of that success are well noted. Taymor’s own writing in the book sticks fairly close to the various grounds she stands on—narratively, theatrically, technically. Taymor is not given to theorizing or comparing herself to others. To some degree Taymor is unique. Peter Schumann has kept strictly to his origins in the counter-culture. The Muppets are popular puppetry par excellence. Taymor has emerged from the avantgarde into the mainstream. What this excellent book shows most clearly is how Taymor has happily realized her ambition to be a director: the person who conceives and executes what happens onstage, whatever the medium.