Reiterated empathy in BA director training

In 2019, the University of Plymouth started the only current BA Directing degree program in the United Kingdom. As programme creator/lead and curriculum designer, I was interviewed in 2021 by The Stage to discuss whether the craft of directing can be taught in a classroom. While some may argue the ‘director’s eye (that is – the mental ability to coherently visualise the whole production) cannot be taught, I argue that directing skills, specifically collaboration skills through reiterated empathy, can both be taught and should also be the basis of director training. Therefore, I created a series of exercises based on Boalian techniques to assist trainee-directors in developing skills that would enhance their (cap)abilities as an ensemble/collaborative director. These exercises were then embedded into a module whose core theoretical underpinning was reiterated empathy, which Stein suggests is where ‘one sees oneself from the perspective of another and thereby grasps oneself as one individual participant in an intersubjective world’ (Stein in Thompson Citation2007, 399). Thompson notes that while some phenomenologists argue that the ‘experience of the self comes first and serves as a basis for developing understanding of the other’ (Thompson Citation2007, 397), others ‘propose that self-understanding and other-understanding develop together out of a prior experience of intentional relations that does not differentiate between first-person and third-person sources of information’ (ibid).