What’s the Story: Essays about Art, Theater and Storytelling by Anne Bogart (review)

Co-artistic director of SITI Company and renowned stage director Anne Bogart’s third book, What’s the Story, offers reflective, loosely connected essays on the nature of art and theatre. Starting with the introduction, she combines her own personal thoughts on the role of story in art and life with research from cognitive science on memory as a form of storytelling. From this blend, she postulates the centrality of story to both theatre and human experience. These reflections are heavily influenced by Bogart’s belief in an increasingly unstable society. As she remarks, “[d]uring the course of the past several years we have experienced a seismic shift in the way the world functions. Any notion of a certain, stable or inevitable future has vanished” (2). This opening statement presages the tone and structure of the book.

As in her previous essay collections A Director Prepares and And Then You Act, What’s the Story draws on Bogart’s experience as a prolific maker of contemporary performance. A number of these pieces originated in her monthly blog posts on the SITI website. Hence some of the thoughts and even sections of the writing will be familiar to close followers of her work.

The opening essay, “Narrative,” discusses the storytelling impulse, and focuses on how the stories we tell shape and transform societies. These transformations require passionate emotions, which she explores in “Heat” (chapter 2). Here, Bogart focuses on want and desire in the stories that guide an artist’s development. Making connections between passionate striving and mistakes in the next chapter, “Error,” Bogart tells stories from her life—most engagingly her time spent teaching at a halfway house for mental health patients—to discuss how error creates growth. She narrates her early career in more detail than in her previous writings, and explores the ways in which financial and creative limitations positively impacted her work in the essay on “Limits” (chapter 4). Chapter 5, “Opposition,” draws on the sense of challenge present in all the essays while focusing on dualities, such as impulse versus intuition, fast versus slow, and survival versus gift, to consider the value of tension between competing ideas in the artistic process.

Beginning the latter half of the book, “Arrest” (chapter 6) returns to a central theme in Bogart’s work: creating art that stops the viewer in his or her tracks. This “aesthetic arrest” underpins much of her beliefs about theatre-making: finding an immediate visceral connection with audiences and collaborators. The sense of empathy that drives this connection pervades the latter half of the book. For example, in chapter 7, “Spaciousness,” she uses the concept of Kairos, finding the appropriate moment/timing, to argue for the necessity of directors to craft an open space in which the members of the company can listen deeply to one another. Seeking to further connect science and art in chapter 8, “Empathy,” Bogart’s touching narrative of her rapprochement with her late mother, contextualized by research into mirror neurons, illuminates her personal engagement with her work while providing an unexpected context for understanding some of life’s hardest moments. This intimate view of Bogart’s process carries into her most artistically vulnerable essay, “Collaboration” (chapter 9). Taking an honest view of the rewards and challenges of artistic collaboration, she emphasizes that collaboration should be a struggle between equals and involves letting go of the need to be the sole arbiter of your own part of the creative process. Struggle for the greater good also underpins the next chapter, “Politics.” Here, Bogart touches on stories of Suzuki Tadashi’s theatre encampment at Toga, Occupy Wall Street, and SITI’s internal wrangling about artistic vision to explore how theatre allows communities to “think things through together.” The final chapter, “Sustenance” (chapter 11) offers reflections on six artists who have strongly influenced her: Virginia Woolf, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, and Charles L. Mee Jr. These vignettes are touching in their...