Directors Pathway

What To Expect In This Episode:

• Trajectory from actor training through stage management to directing.
• Finding creative freedom and fulfillment through the mode of Directing.
• Using the UK’s “Scratch” culture of creative development to platform Canadian work.
• Working through imposter syndrome - especially when returning to drama school to direct current students.
• Building relationships and keeping your director friends close.
• The process of articulating artistic essence and creative practice.
• Wearing many hats in fringe theatre - branching into sound design.
• Hacks you should know about the London Fringe scene.

About The Guest

Kay Brattan is a Canadian-born, London-based, multi-award-nominated director and theatre maker known for bold, playful productions driven by movement, music and ensemble storytelling. She is the Artistic Director of Little Lion Theatre Company, where she champions ambitious new writing, reimagined classics and Canadian artists working in the UK. Her directing credits include Witch Girl Summer, Mary’s Daughters, Portia’s Julius Caesar, Yaga, Much Ado About Nothing and Don’t Panic. In Toronto, she co-founded how.dare.collective and directed its five-star, award-nominated adaptation of Lysistrata, a hit at the Toronto Fringe. Her work has received multiple Fringe Theatre Award nominations, an Off West End Award nomination and Arts Council England funding. Kay is also a guest director at East 15 Acting School and Fourth Monkey. She creates theatrical worlds that are physically alive, emotionally fearless and rooted in a direct relationship with the audience.

https://www.kaybrattan.com/

Insta: @kay.brattan

⭐️ Kay’s Shared Resource ⭐️

“Look for opportunities to make new friends. Especially if those friends are also creatives. Don’t be afraid of just meeting new people who are as excited about theatre as you are, becasue you never know, you might have a beer one day and go ‘Lets make a show!’” → “Go find the good people.”

“You don’t need to have all the answers.” Just remember that.

London Fringe Theatre Hacks

*Look at venues where the people who run them are very active in programming and developing artists at their theatres.

- Pub Theatres who run scratch nights:

• Lion & Unicorn → Side Hustle Scratch
• Barons Court → Sunday Fix

Links

Little Lion Theatre Company - Bringing Canadian work to audiences in the UK

Directors Cut - "Director's Cut Theatre Company is the UK's leading artistic home for directors, writers and professional actors. We meet regularly to continue training, develop our practice, ideas and projects and build community."

What To Expect In This Episode:

• Be a sponge and absorb - using any position you have at a theatre to learn from directors, even from that perspective.
• Taking any chance to observe other directors in their work, even if informally, especially in early development.
• How just a few pieces of your own work can really show what you can do among a community of people who already know of you.
• The value of watching other work to fuel the director’s brain.
• The play is a box metaphor: getting the world of the play more and more specific by shrinking the box.
• The move from thinking project-to-project to thinking holistically as the artistic director of an organization.
• The in’s and out’s of being immersed in a smaller theatre community, particularly within a smaller region.
• Artistic development through fellowship with other directors in Directors Lab.

About The Guest

Leda Hoffmann (she/her) is the Producing Artistic Director of The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio where directing credits include Primary Trust, Ride the Cyclone, POTUS, Indecent, Head Over Heels, and Mr Burns: a post-electric play. She is passionate about new work and currently developing The Jack of Hearts Club by Jon Richardson and Northeast Corner by Katie Dahl. Leda’s directing work has been seen across the country at Milwaukee Rep, Provincetown Theater, American Shakespeare Center, Renaissance Theatreworks, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Texas Shakespeare Festival, Door Shakespeare, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Northbrook Theatre, Case Western, Ohio State, and University of Miami. Leda is a proud graduate of Grinnell College and the SDCF Observership program. She is a member of Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab as well as Chicago Directors Lab and Directors Lab North. Upcoming: Jagged Little Pill, John Proctor is the Villain (The Contemporary).

⭐️ Leda's Shared Resource ⭐️

1. Find a Directors Lab near you - see more details below.

2. “Curate your social media feeds, your inbox… just get the algorithm to help you think about the things you want to think about. Follow the things you think are cool:

• Theatre Companies
• Directors
• Designers
• Other Makers
• Join email lists!

Make your algorithm teach you more stuff about directing.”

Links

Leda’s Website

Insta: @ledahoffmann

Contemporary Theatre Of Ohio

Insta: @thecontemporaryohio

Directors Lab - A program originally running at Lincoln Theatre Center, NY from 1995 - 2019. Alumni of this lab created fellow Directors Labs in a number of locations (Chicago, Toronto, LA, Québec, even the Mediterranean!) attracting professional theatre directors from all over the world at early stages of their careers to gather and learn together typically over a week-long intensive. Sadly, many of these programs have not continued beyond 2019. Directors Lab North in Toronto, Canada is still active and is set to run a Lab in June 2027.

• Directors Lab North (Toronto) - Accepts around 30 participants from all over the world - by application only.

The Jack of Hearts Club (Original Cast Recording) - Listen on spotify

What To Expect In This Episode:

• Thinking about the concept of “a career” from a working class background.
• Having the audacity to apply for things you aren’t qualified for… and doing them anyway.
• Falling in love → getting your heart broken → pouring yourself into the work → repeat.
• Navigating gender politics in the theatre:

• The wonders and challenges of carving out spaces for women theatre artists– against all odds.
• Founding the Women’s Playhouse Trust.

• Tensions of the Artistic Director role: making bold moves and doing really good work, and the board still disliking you.
• The importance of cultivating a network of other artists around you.

About The Guest:

Sue Dunderdale is a director most known for fostering new talent and award winning writers. Her career in theatre has taken her from founding PENTABUS Theatre Company to the Cambridge Theatre Company, through the RSC to being Artistic Director of the Soho Theatre Company and of Greenwich Theatre.

She was selected for the BBC Film/TV Directors Course and has directed many episodic dramas (Eastenders, Coronation Street, London Bridge, The Bill, Casualty, Holby, Peak Practice, Rockface, etc), three Drama/Documentaries and two single Dramas. The latest was two episodes of HOLBY in 2015/16. She has also directed numerous short films.

She is in development for a feature film and a television series with Evolutionary Films. And has also written her own film script, BAD ENGLISH and co-written FOOD with Stephen Wyatt.

From 2004 until 2014 she was Head of MAs at RADA and Leader of the MA in Directing. In that time and since then, as a free-lance theatre director, she directed, new plays by Chris Katic, Simon Burt, Pam Gems, Jonathan Larkin, Chloe Moss, Juan Radrigán, Melissa Murray, Stephen Wyatt and Joshua Val Martin. Most recently she directed GIDEON by Daniel Mawson a play for actors and professional musicians for Bradford City of Culture and a northern tour.

Her book “Directing the Decades” was published by Routledge in February 2022.

⭐️ Sue’s Shared Resource ⭐️

“Create networks amongst yourselves. So you can support each other, so you can produce for each other… You need those colleagues you can work with… Create associations that can lobby for things to happen, as well as make things happen.”

More of Sue’s wisdom can be found in her book Directing The Decades (linked below.)

👀 And if you’re looking to connect with other like minded directors and creators… be sure to follow @directorspathway on Instagram and join the growing DP community on our Substack.

Links

Sue Dunderdale's Website

Check out Sue’s book: Directing The Decades - Lessons from Fifty Years of Becoming a Director

What To Expect In This Episode:

• The valuable impact real hands-on education has on transitioning into professional work.
• Connections between physics and directing.
• Thinking of a directors work as community engagement.
• Navigating a busy pandemic as an administrator in senior leadership at an arts organization.
• Dabbling in directing for screen– finding precision through thinking cinematically.
• Perspectives from a newly appointed Artistic Director

• Needing tried and true directors and acknowledging the lack of pipeline.
• Getting inside other director’s visions and processes.
• Agency of directors and playwrights when building relationships with producing organizations.

• The higherarchy of the directing landscape in the American Theatre.

About The Guest

Nabra Nelson is the Artistic Director of Golden Thread Productions located in San Francisco. She is a multi-disciplinary theater maker from Nubia, Egypt, and California, with over a decade of experience as a director, administrator, writer, consultant, dramaturg, and teaching artist. She leads the Nubian Foundation for Preserving a Cultural Heritage, is a founding company member of Dunya Productions, and Heard Space Arts Collective, Board Member of the MENA Theater Makers Alliance, co-founder of HERitage emBODYment, company member of Dancing Earth, and is the co-host of the Kunafa & Shay Theater Podcast. Awards and recognitions include the New England Foundation for the Arts National Theatre Project, Dramatists Guild Foundation National Playwriting Fellowship, New Arab American Theater Works’ Inaugural Playwriting Cohort, 4Culture Project Grant, Map Fund Artist Award, Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce Nonprofit Partner of the Year, and Agenda Communicating the Arts 30 Under 30. Her scholarship has been published by Routledge, Bloomsbury, Johns Hopkins University Press, The Gemsbok, and the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal. Her plays have been produced and developed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Milwaukee, Santa Barbara, Portland, and Minneapolis.

Nabra's Shared Resource

⭐️ Pages 136 - 142 of Augusto Boal’s Theatre Of The Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011. First Edition) Get The Book Here ⭐️

Links

Nabra Nelson’s Website

Learn more about Nabra’s playwrighting work: New Play Exchange

Listen to Nabra’s Podcast: Kunafa and Shay on HowlRound Theatre Commons

Golden Thread Productions [San Francisco, CA] is the first American theatre company devoted to producing passionate and provocative plays from or about the Middle East that celebrate the multiplicity of its perspectives and identities.

MENA Theater Makers Alliance: amplifies the voices of Middle Eastern and North African theater makers and expands how stories from and about those communities are told on U.S. stages.

What To Expect In This Episode:

• Jordan's pathway from performer to director
• The importance of adaptability in process
• Directing as a trust-based job
• Balancing multiple roles at once (director, intimacy director, resident director) through a heart-led approach
• The necessary role mentorship and connecting artists plays in creating a healthy theatre ecosystem
• The challenges of application processes and “climbing the career ladder” so-to-speak
• Networking as a constant movable thing - and viewing your peers as the future of the industry.

About The Guest:

Jordan Langford (he/him) is a UK based Director, Award-Winning Choreographer and Intimacy Professional working across theatre, film and television.

Directing credits include Loop (Leeds Playhouse), Build a Rocket (GMFringe Award Nominee - UK Tour and Edinburgh Festival Fringe), Flutter-Bye (Ironworks Studios, Brighton), Out of Time (Union Theatre), Riddles and Romance (Underbelly Boulevard Soho), Kerry Ellis Does Christmas (Leatherhead Theatre), and the development and workshops of the new play Happy at Sheffield Crucible and of the new musical At Last, It’s Summer, culminating in a concept album recorded at Abbey Road Studios and Capitol Records, Los Angeles.

Associate Director credits include the European premiere of If/Then (Savoy Theatre), The Tempest (Theatre Space North East, also Movement Director), At Last, It’s Summer (London Palladium, also Choreographer), The Passenger (Manchester Jewish Museum), and Who Killed Marlyn (Emerald Theatre, also Intimacy Director and Resident Director).

As an Intimacy Director and Coordinator, Jordan’s credits span theatre, television and film, including Thespians: Greece The Musical (Mischief Theatre - UK Tour), productions for Mercury Theatre Colchester, and screen projects for the BBC, Clerkenwell Films, Amazon Prime/NFTS and the BFI.

Originally from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, Jordan trained at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, completed an MA in Directing at Rose Bruford College, and was part of the first graduating cohort of Intimacy Coordinators from the National Film and Television School.

Jordan’s Shared Resource

“If you’re happy in your personal life– the professional life is tied in with that as a creative. Because you’re making stuff based on your experience…. Make sure you have other things that you’re exploring because that is what makes you a director. You’re able to facilitate life on stage– show life on stage. You have to be in life. You can’t not be in life, you have to be a part of— you can’t be a someone looking through a window at life. You have to be in life.”

Links

www.jordan-langford.com

Insta: @jordanlangford1

“Who Killed Marlyn” Emerald Theatre 15 August - 29 October https://www.whokilledmarilyn.uk/

Brick Lane Music Hall: https://www.bricklanemusichall.co.uk/

Mercury Theatre Creators Programs: (for artists based in East Anglia, UK)

Producers - https://www.mercurytheatre.co.uk/mercurycreatives/mercury-producers-development-programme/

Directors - https://www.mercurytheatre.co.uk/mercurycreatives/mercury-creatives-directors-programme/

Welcome to Directors Pathway!

In This Episode

• Teasers from upcoming Episode 1 with Jordan Langford & Episode 2 with Nabra Nelson.
• Who am I? Intro to Kira Gaudynski the creator and host.
• Why does this exist?
• What to expect.
• An invitation to join us!
• Important details at the end.

About Us

Directors Pathway is a podcast and growing collective challenging the industry's definition of how a directing career is made: making divergent paths visible and connecting directors across levels.

The industry implies there's a blueprint of straightforward career progression as a director, classing creatives as "emerging," "established," or "mid-career." But for many, that blueprint doesn't reflect the reality of how careers are actually built. The resulting gap leaves many qualified, experienced directors without a clear way forward.

Directors Pathway exists to excavate that gap by bringing working directors across levels into honest, open conversation about how they actually built their practice and what they'd pass on to others in the field. Through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, we aim to unveil the dysfunction within the system and break down the barriers that make artistic development and career progression harder than it needs to be — creating more access to pathways into directing at every stage.

Important Details

Episode 1 launches Monday August 17th. Season 1 will release bi-weekly on Mondays.

Music created by the wonderful Arthur Robijns.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram and Substack @DirectorsPathway

Thanks for listening!

xx

KG