Stage Directors in the Rehearsal Room: Degendered Bodies in a Degendered Workplace

The directing profession worldwide is a relatively new trend. Its current conceptualization is roughly a hundred years old. It started at the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of modern naturalism and then became a form of art at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially after the explosion of different directing practices and methods, namely methods advocated by Antonin Artaud, Constantine Stanislavski, and Bretolt Brecht, among others. Rehearsals, or the practice sessions in preparation for the performance, obtained a fundamental role in theater-making and the director was placed at the top of the theater hierarchy.