Experience

Julie Taymor has become an iconic figure for the avant-garde in contemporary theatre, opera, and film. She’s known for her hybridised theatrical style of cross-breeding different forms into one performance often incorporating puppetry and masks into her work. She doesn’t do kitchen sink drama, she stays away from naturalism but she wants her audience to be moved. She grasps the center of each form, its essence and discovers how it will work in its home context and then considers how it will resonate everywhere else. Her work is strongly rooted in human psychology. She makes connections between the piece itself, the performers, the meaning, and the significance it could have. When approaching a new project she prefers not knowing how things are supposed to be done or what cannot be done and instead immerses herself in research, makes a plan, and jumps in head first. She’s had a broad range of “training”; in mime, filmmaking, ritual and masked dance, method acting, experimental ensemble creation, and puppetry technique. She’s been greatly influenced by Balinese theatre having spent four years in Indonesia. Taymor doesn’t consider herself to be a “trained” director because she sees all of her experiences as experiences. She learned to make puppets through trial and error, she learned to make movies after going to the cinema in Paris everyday while apprenticing there, and she learned to be a director by living and growing as an artist. She doesn't create universality predominantly through the use of the “everyman” or by simplifying her themes, but instead builds upon those themes and gives examples of their many implications. 

After graduating high school at 16 Taymor went to Paris, France to study at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq where she studied mime. It was here that she was first introduced to mask work and animating inanimate objects. While in Paris she went to the movies every day and was influenced by the styles of Kurosawa and Fellini. 

In 1970 Taymor went to Oberlin College in Ohio studying mythology and folklore and later took a few anthropology courses in Columbia University. During this time she continued to study with theatre companies in the area including Herbert Blau’s theatre company. She was the youngest member involved with Blau’s theatre troupe. Blau was an experimental theatre director who worked with the avant-garde and followed Jerzy Grotowski’s model of ferociously rigorous training, Taymor found it “immensely grueling, both physically and mentally-and challenging.” The rehearsal process was always very private and very intense. It was Blau that introduced Taymor to the concept of the Ideograph and the extremes of experience; she invents fanciful or grotesque worlds with created actors.

Taymor was greatly influenced by Indonesian theatre including practices seen in Bali. The three main types of performing arts are dance drama, gamelan (musical ensemble of 2-50 instruments), and shadow puppetry. The origin of performance was as a function for ritual, if not already part of a ritual. Main purpose is to please the deities and ancestral spirits. The performer strives to mesmerise both human and divine audiences. Balinese theatre consists of lavish costumes, and often darting eye movement. Costuming and makeup are a large part of performance and one would never perform without it. Especially makeup around the eyes as there is so much focus on the movement of the eyes. The Cundang is a dot between the eyebrows which represents the third eye, a symbol of strength and concentration. Headdresses and masks are the holiest part of costume and would often be blessed, as one’s head is considered the holiest part of the body.