Practitioner focus: Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor is most celebrated for her award-winning direction and design on Disney's stage adaptation of The Lion King, however her work extends across theatre, opera and film. Strongly influenced by the theatrical traditions of Indonesia, where she lived and developed a mask-dance company for four years, her work often incorporates puppets, and she is renowned for her ability to blend the lines between the actor, the puppet, and the costume.

Influences

Taymor is cited as having had a strong interest in theatre from a young age, putting on shows at home as a young child, and later taking on roles with the Boston Children's Theatre. In her mid-teens a cultural exchange programme took her to Sri Lanka and India, and she spent time after high school in Paris, training in mime at the Jacques Lecoq school. After completing studies in folklore and mythology at Oberlin College (one of the U.S.’ top liberal arts colleges), a grant offered her the opportunity to travel and study theatre. She chose Indonesia, alongside Eastern Europe and Japan, and though she had intended to stay there for only a few months, she stayed for several years.

The Indonesian influence in Taymor's work is strong: the blend of actors, masks, puppets and shadow theatre is a direct reflection of her time there, which she often alludes to as having been hugely significant in forming her approach to theatre. ‘I have never seen theatre as potent, powerful, and overwhelmingly theatrical as I have in Indonesia,’ said Taymor. ‘It's part of the everyday fabric of society.’

Taymor includes many other art forms and theatre traditions in her list of influences, and as Robert Brustein in the New York Times said, her work is ‘famous for cross pollinating across cultures.’ However, Taymor is quick to point out that she never applies the traditions from another culture literally.

Methodology

Taymor believes that ‘the telling of the story… is equal to the story itself’, and one of her key creative approaches is to start with an ideograph. She explains that ‘an ideograph is a Japanese brush painting; three strokes and you get the whole bamboo forest.’ As she considers the story she has to tell, she is looking for the essence, the ‘abstraction’. She seeks to be able to reduce the entire story to one image, and that image will be key to the storytelling and overall aesthetic of the piece. She has shared that the ideograph for The Lion King was a circle, and for The Tempest it was a sandcastle. ‘When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said we have to do what theatre does best [which is] to be abstract and not do literal reality,’ said Taymor.

Key works include:

• Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (two Tony award nominations)
• The Lion King (two Tony award wins)
• The Green Bird
• Spider-Man (on Broadway, from which she was fired, to some degree of scandal)
• Titus (film, starring Anthony Hopkins)
• Frida (film, starring Salma Hayek)
• The Tempest (film, starring Helen Mirren)

Exercise 1: Exploring the use of the ideograph

Invite students to consider a story through Julie Taymor's lens, by asking them to find a story's ideograph.

Working in small groups, ask students to consider a story they know well. This could be a text they are studying, or indeed this exercise could work through considering a well-known classic fairy tale. It is important that the students understand the work and are able to dissect its meaning. This story will be used throughout all three of these exercises.

Challenge them to propose an ideograph for the story, and to explain why they chose it.

Exercise 2: incorporating Indonesian shadow puppetry

Ask students to research and explore Indonesian shadow puppetry, which has a strong influence on Julie Taymor's work.

Now, ask them to submit a proposal as to how this style of puppetry, or a version of it, could be incorporated into a theatrical telling of their story. Which key moments could be told using puppets such as these, and how might they work alongside the actors in the piece?

Exercise 3: Blending the lines between actor, puppet and costume

Using Julie Taymor's highly visual work as inspiration, invite students to undertake a costume design exercise.

Taking a key character from their story, students should work together to propose a design for this character's costume, and indeed should be able to elaborate as to how this might fit with the overall aesthetic of the piece.

• How might the costume contribute to the storytelling of the piece?
• What would the costume be made out of and why?
• How might the costume incorporate mask and puppetry work?
• How might the costume encourage and/or require the audience to suspend their disbelief?