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Oberlin grad is creator of the spectacle that is unusual stage version of Disney's 'Lion King'
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin American-Statesman
Published on Thursday, Aug 02, 2007
It seemed an unlikely match: mega-mainstream Disney choosing avant-garde theater director Julie Taymor to bring the entertainment giant's hit movie musical The Lion King to Broadway.
After all, the Oberlin College graduate built her reputation by combining the most disparate elements to make theatrical spectacles. In the 1980s, for Shakespeare's The Tempest, she used Kabuki-style makeup on some characters, commedia dell'arte half-masks on others and body makeup and stylized head masks on others that derived from indigenous New Guinea tribes.
She reimagined German writer Thomas Mann's ironic philosophical novella The Transposed Heads, which is set in India, using myriad South Asian dance traditions and Japanese Bunraku puppets.
And for the dark musical Juan Darien, she created an imaginative world of oversize bas-relief sculptures that seemed ripped directly from a Diego Rivera mural. Actors donned full-bodied masks, interacting with shadow and hand puppets.
Taymor gained critical kudos and awards for her imaginative work. She netted a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Obie Awards and the MacArthur ''Genius'' Fellowship.
Still, while opera and theater producers from around the world sought her talents, Taymor didn't seem the type for a large-scale, family-friendly, Disney-financed musical on Broadway. And for that matter, in 1995, those in charge of the then-new Disney Theatrical Productions didn't think The Lion King was suitable for the stage.
But Disney chief Michael Eisner insisted. And so the unlikely Taymor was picked.
For all its smashing success, The Lion King (which opens tonight at the State Theatre in Cleveland's Playhouse Square), traces its roots to offbeat experimental theater. And for all its African imagery, there's actually a myriad of world cultures percolating through its vivid pageantry.
Born in Boston in 1952, Taymor formed an early love for and seriousness about theater. That precociousness was only matched by a then-untraditional global curiosity.
By 10, she was attending the rigorous Boston Children's Theater. By 15, she was spending a summer in India and Sri Lanka with a youth exchange program. After graduating from high school early at age 16, Taymor headed to Paris for a year of study at L'Ecole de Mime Jacques Lecoq, one of France's leading schools of mime. Her intent? To learn how to make the body convey character.
Back in the United States, she entered Oberlin College, opting for a program that allowed her to earn college credit while apprenticing with theater companies in New York. This was the early 1970s, an intensely fertile period for experimental theater that emphasized a conceptual, frequently nonverbal approach. And Taymor absorbed it all, augmenting her theater work with anthropology courses at Columbia University, including one with Margaret Mead.
Taymor graduated from Oberlin with a major in mythology and folklore in 1974.
That passion for theater and world culture took Taymor to Indonesia after college.
Although she headed for Japan to study the ancient art of Bunraku puppetry, a side trip to Indonesia turned into four years of intense, unconventional and adventurous and at times outright dangerous theater-making.
Taymor immersed herself in the complex and varied cultures of Indonesia, fascinated by the public and highly theatrical rituals that were a part of indigenous beliefs.
She climbed a mountaintop in Bali to witness a rare initiation ceremony, an adventure that resulted in hot lava from an active volcano burning a hole in her leg. She learned the techniques of Javanese rod puppeteering and mask making and of ritualistic Balinese dance.
Most importantly, she realized how central theater could be to community, and how it could directly and immediately tap into a people's shared beliefs. Indigenous performances such as the kind in which Taymor immersed herself in Indonesia are primarily spiritual ceremonies with little of the formal distance between performers and audiences found in Western, secular contemporary theater.
The intimacy of spiritual performance would have a lasting effect on Taymor.
Back in New York in the 1980s, Taymor had no trouble establishing herself as a theatrical designer on the avant-garde scene, while she continued her research into traditional forms of puppetry and mask making.
''If you can put on another face, you can hide your own persona and other parts that are locked away will be able to gain expression,'' Taymor told one interviewer. ''That's why masks are liberating for the actor.''
(Taymor declines to give interviews these days in conjunction with current tours of The Lion King.)
By the time Taymor signed on for The Lion King, her particular style was honed. First, no hiding. Stage mechanics would be visible. ''Showing the mechanics, revealing the rods, ropes and wires that make it all happen is something that the theater can do that film and television cannot,'' she said. ''Magic can exist in blatantly showing how theater is created rather than hiding the 'how.' . . . Audiences relish the artifice behind theater.''
Thus actors portraying the giraffes, cheetah, gazelles, wildebeests and other savannah animals are hardly hidden by their elaborate costumes. Instead, the human bodies are essential parts of the animal bodies and in some cases one dancer will sport an elaborate contraption of several animal puppets.
''I wanted the audience to marvel at what a human being can do through true technical prowess,'' Taymor said.
Ditto with the scenery. When Pride Rock the magical gathering place for the lions and one of the signature scene elements of The Lion King transforms into being right on the stage, the audience becomes a part of that transformation. Indeed, none of the scenery is fixed: it's a mobile, constantly morphing event, not a series of static images.
Something else happens with all the transparent theatrics and continual movement and scenic morphing: Audiences can't help but be swept in and taken along on the journey.
''Hidden special effects lack humanity,'' Taymor stated. ''But when the human spirit visibly animates an object, we experience a special, almost life-giving connection.
''The Lion King aspires to speak to the experience of anyone, any family or any tribe.''
It seemed an unlikely match: mega-mainstream Disney choosing avant-garde theater director Julie Taymor to bring the entertainment giant's hit movie musical The Lion King to Broadway.
Get the full article here.
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