Three Words I Keep in Mind When Directing Events

Every text on this blog comes from a mixture of emotion and what we have learned through theatre and dance. The same is true of the projects we take under our wing. The emotions can be intense, but they are also fuel — something that helps us carry a project from point A all the way to its final moment.

The road towards that final result is rarely effortless. It can be difficult, painstaking and, sometimes, exhausting. But all of those elements come together in the creative process. Eventually, something emerges that did not exist before.

During my acting studies at PWST, in classes devoted to elementary acting tasks, Professor Jerzy Święch used to warn us not to kill our “children”. Those children were our performances and short theatrical forms prepared for examinations.

There is something surprisingly accurate in that metaphor. When you create a performance, you carry an idea for a long time before anybody else gets to see the finished work. After experiencing the birth of our own son, we used to joke that he was the most important premiere of our lives.

But that is another story.

If somebody asked me for a recipe for a successful event, I would probably begin with a very deep breath. Mainly because there is no sensible way to answer that question in one sentence.

Perhaps after several more decades in the industry I will try. For now, there are three words that stay with me whenever I direct an event.

1. Preparation.

There are people who leave everything until the last possible moment, and people who prefer to work ahead.

Theatre school taught me rather quickly which approach works when other people depend on you. You cannot realistically prepare a choreography one day before an examination and expect your stage partners to feel comfortable. Technically, perhaps you can learn the steps. But you immediately place everybody around you in an unnecessarily difficult and unprofessional situation.

Work on a performance began with the first rehearsal — whether we were preparing an acting diploma or a third-year examination.

I carried that lesson into event production and direction.

If you want people to feel secure throughout a project, prepare the ground for them. Give the producer the information they need. Give the technical team a clear plan. Give performers enough rehearsal time. Make responsibilities understandable before the pressure of the event day arrives.

In Polish I sometimes describe it with a very ordinary metaphor: make the bed properly so everyone can sleep well.

Preparation does not eliminate every surprise. Live events would be suspiciously easy if it did. It simply gives the team enough structure to deal with the surprises that inevitably arrive.

2. Caring.

During workshops, while talking with Marjon van Grunsven, I often heard that I should not worry so much.

Eventually I began to understand why I did.

Concern was visible on my face during almost every project. My collaborators could see it. After one of those projects, when I finally had enough distance to think about it calmly, I realised something important: I do not want to stop caring.

That does not mean I want to live in permanent anxiety. There is a difference between worrying destructively and caring deeply about the result.

For me, that second meaning matters.

I want to care because the quality of the event matters to me. The people working on it matter to me. What the audience eventually experiences matters to me.

It reminds me of an anecdote about a director asking actors what they felt physically just before walking onto the stage. Sweaty hands. Tension. A nervous stomach. Everyone had something.

The director told them to remember those states, because if absolutely nothing remained one day, some of the passion might have disappeared with them.

As a trained actor, I both agree and disagree.

I agree with the underlying idea because it resembles what I call caring. There should be some mobilisation before entering the stage. Something should still matter.

But there is also such a thing as professional hygiene for actors, dancers and creative teams. Stress cannot be allowed to consume the body every single day. You cannot approach every performance as though you were taking your driving test for the first time.

So I do not romanticise stress. I do, however, want to preserve involvement.

3. Taking care.

This is the most practical of the three.

When you organise and direct an event, take care of things.

Make sure everyone knows what they are doing. Take care of the participants. Take care of the performers. If there are too many things for one person to manage properly, delegate them to somebody who can.

Negligence is one of the fastest ways to damage both an event and the atmosphere around it.

Make sure artists have what they need. Make sure the cleaning team has the tools required to do its job. Talk to people. Notice them. Treat the person cleaning the venue with the same basic human respect you give the person standing in the spotlight.

And do not do it because somebody told you that smiling at the crew is a clever management technique.

Do it because you are responsible for the environment in which everybody is working.

Take care of that environment and, more often than not, the quality comes back to the project in ways that cannot be written into a production spreadsheet.

A director’s credo

This text was originally supposed to be about my experience organising and coordinating the first International Dance and Movement Workshops in Rybnik. In a way, it still is.

What remained after that experience was something broader — a small credo I could carry into the next projects:

Prepare. Care. Take care.

None of these words is spectacular. There is no revolutionary event-industry secret hidden inside them. But directing live experiences is often exactly that: hundreds of ordinary decisions made carefully enough that, for the audience, the final result feels effortless.

If you want to see how this approach translates into our current work, explore event direction at MOVYTZA or browse our selected projects.