Artistry in a New Century

Plenary: Visions of Tomorrow’s Theatre

Moderated by Kristin Marting: with
Sean San Jose, Dan Rothenberg, Clove Galilee, Ruben Polendo, and Joseph Haj

June 9, 2007

Tim Shields:
Good morning, good morning. [applause] Not for me thank you, no, no, no. I’m Tim Shields. I’m the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and vice president of the TCG board. Welcome to the final day of the conference. It’s been a great couple of days so far and it’s going to be a great day today.

The moderator for the next session is Kristin Marting. She’s a co-founder and artistic director of the HERE Arts Center in New York City, where she cultivates artists, programs, and all the events for two performance spaces and her productions have included—my intro said 8—and in the green room she scratched it out and wrote 11 Obie award winners for an annual audience of 50,000. She’s constructed 20 works for the stage over the past 20 years including 8 original dance theatre pieces, 8 new adaptations for novels and short stories and 4 classic plays. For the past 10 years she’s been developing a unique hybrid directorial choreographic form that features a gestural vocabulary used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element. This vocabulary, although it’s specific to each project, is in a state of constant development with an ever growing set of permanent gestures being added to the repertory. She created and curates HARP, HERE’s Artist in Residency Program, the American Living Room, a summer festival featuring over 30 new works by emerging artists and for 8 years she’s curated Queer at HERE, a festival of gay and lesbian work. Please welcome Kristin Marting.

[applause]

Kristin Marting: We have a very eclectic group of artists up here. We have writers, performers, directors, choreographers, producers and sometimes all those things combined. We have people who are making new plays, ensemble work, dance theatre, hybrid performance, devised work and classical work. So, it’s a really eclectic and interesting and challenging group of artists who are making work in very different ways. Rather than me doing an introduction of each of them, I wanted them to talk for about two minutes about what they do, and what’s most interesting and what they do at the moment.

SSJ: Hi.. hello? [laughter] Alright, good. My name is Sean San Jose I work for Intersection for the Arts which is San Francisco’s oldest alternative art space -42 years old, a multi-disciplinary space and I also work specifically with the resident theatre company there, Campo Santo. And what we do is basically what the whole building does, in all the different mediums, is create relationships to create new work. And I think what is the most exciting, I guess unique about us is the way we develop outreach simultaneously with each projects. So it’s you know, I guess in grant speak it’s very much ‘process oriented’. But in a truer sense day to day, it’s very much relationship oriented which keeps the building alive and keeps all these new works being created. Under two minutes.

[laughter]

DR: Uh hey. My name’s Dan Rothenberg, co-founder and co-artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia. We are an ensemble based physical theatre, for want of better words. We’ve been around about 12 years and we make approximately one new work per year in Philadelphia and then tour. We don’t start with a script but we do collaborate with writers as well as composers, choreographers, sculptors depending on the project. We don’t have a house style but are really motivated by a kind of curiosity and desire to continue our training and our research as an ensemble. In terms of what wakes us up, what’s most interesting, I think we’re most interested in rhythm. And about taking an approach to character as rhythm, breath as rhythm and then also investigating the rhythm that happens between audience and the work and specifically changing that rhythm up and breaking it. Which is why we don’t have that house style.

CG: Hi everybody my name is Clove Galilee. And I grew up in the theatre. I’ve been performing since I was about 5 years old, and I don’t know… some of you have known me since I was 3? [laughs] My parents Ruth Maleczech and Lee Brewer started one of the oldest experimental theatre companies in the U.S., Mabou Mines, based in New York City. And my training as an actor and as a dancer in various art forms informs my practice as a generative artist. In 2003 I formed a new theatre company based in New York City with my partner Jenny Rogers who’s a visual artist - a photographer and videographer with a strong successful gallery practice here and abroad. And together we have collaborated on two projects so far since 2003. Our first, Trick Saddle, which is the name of our company as well at PS 122 and our second piece created in part through HARP with Kirsten called Wickets is an adaptation of Maria Ines Fornes Fefu and Her Friends set in an airplane at 30,000 feet and performed by 1970s stewardesses, [laughter] with the audience as the passengers and that should be going up at Three Legged Dog in NYC in January 2008.

RP: Hi my name is Ruben Polendo. I am a founder and artistic director of Theatre Mitu. We are based in New York and in Bankok, Thailand. Theatre Mitu is a permanent ensemble of artists. The work that we create really investigates the question of our emotional landscape and how that’s manifested textually, visually, aurally and spiritually which is a huge part of our work. Our focus is to look at world traditions and investigate the creative and training tools of those traditions—particularly ancient traditions. And to try to manifest them in a contemporary vocabulary. The company, much like Pig Iron, doesn’t really function in a particular way in terms of how we create work, we tend to exist in cycles of creation. Last year we finished our Myth Cycle which was looking at the question of mythology and how to theatricalize it both narratively and non-narratively. This year we move into a three year cycle on the question of form, where we’re investigating what we’ve termed loosely as forms in the theatre. We started with something called the Shakespeare project. Then we’ll be investigating the question of Butoh, and then the question of acting which is driving all the actors in our company insane. [laughter] It’s really the goal. We produce in New York and we tour some work, and we’re currently a theatre in residence at New York Theatre Workshop. And we are thrilled at the next three years which is daunting as I say it out loud in front of this many people! As we continue to explore this question of the theatre, as a tool as a lens, by which to explore the question of emotion.

JH: Hi everybody, my name is Joseph Haj. I am an actor and a director and for the last 11 months, the producing artistic director of Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I started my professional career with this organization in Joanne Akalaitas’s amazing 5 and a half hour production of The Screens. And I was invited back the following year by Charlie Newel and Garland Wright to do the history plays and stayed and did several other things here. By the time I left I was an actor, and I was invited into the regional theatres and nobody’s thrown me out since so that’s where that started. I’ve worked around the country and abroad for many years as an actor and as a director. I’ve found it important to stop periodically and take theatre to communities that have been under exposed to the theatre. Maximum security prisons, to the West Bank in Gaza, rural South Carolina and others because it’s there that I’m reminded that I keep forgetting again and again of the awesome power of the art form and I’ve learned so much in those experiences.

Yes, and so before I took the job in Chapel Hill I’d been living in LA the last 14 years having succumbed to the twin evils of food and shelter. [laughter] And umm I’ve worked as theatre artist from there and made some money there. For the last 11 months been in Chapel Hill where we’re going under a big expansion from being a regular 5 show mainstage season we’ll do 9 shows next year 6 mainstage and 3 second stage and we’re working hard to gather the community in a way that is new and different for us.

KM: We had a talk on the phone before we came out here and I asked people to give me adjectives to describe what their work looked and felt like and here’s what some of them said. Process-driven, organic, rigorous, daring, aesthetic, retarded [laughter] risk-taking, undignified and artistic report. Could you guys give us a feeling of what your work looks and feels like and how you define it? Anybody, jump in.

[laughter]

JH: I mean I think it depends on the thing. I think sometimes I like messy and broken work, but I suppose most of all I life craft, I like precision, I like things that are rigorously made. I guess if I were to put it in a basket like that, that is my preference for the sort of work I like.

RP: I think for the work that we do, we have a mantra that we function around and regardless of the shape the thematics of the work we really seek out to find great work that is rigorously visual, that is aural that is emotional that’s intellectual and that’s spiritual. And that’s a huge bill to fill that covers everything! But the notion of really driving ourselves to ask the questions are those things present in the work and if not then the work actually is not ready. And that really becomes a mantra for us. Charles Mee, I head him speak a while back, he said this great thing and someone asked him what litmus test he uses for his work and he said, himself. [laughter] I love that notion, and he said, ‘Knowing that I’m not from Mars I assume someone else will find the same things I find in my work,” and so in a way we use ourselves as a litmus for that. Is the work at the visual place it needs to be? Is it at the emotional, spiritual place it needs to be? And more than a description that philosophy seems to drive the core of our work.

SSJ: I think for us, too, it’s all new work, so it’s a hard question, if not impossible to answer. It’s new work so the point is the create the best, most impactful dialogue. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. We know what the question is when we start with the writer, whether it’s 3 years or 5 years in advance and then you talk about it with the community—with the actual people which the actual issues are happening to, and then you try to push that into one of these things but I don’t know what it looks like. It depends on the writer and the writers are always looking for the newest form, the newest freeway, or direct access to the audience. So I don’t know what they look like but hopefully they feel more than look like something. Why we do it: to commune, to dialogue, and hopefully they all look new. And alive. Cause it’s all new work and it’s all live theatre, right?

CG: I think Jenny and I approach our work conceptually. We’re really interested in the initial concept behind what we’re tying to say. A lot of our work involves very strong roles for women, which is important to us and we come at it from a visual art perspective as well as a performer perspective with a really strong base in the whatever text it is that we end up using, whether it’s an original or adapted. So I would say we really approach things conceptually first. And that can take a long time.

DR: Like I said, our work can look really different. From large scale 30 actor installations where the audience has to wear booties and press buttons, to cabarets with mumbling rock bands, to more, like, plays on proscenium stages. I was just talking with someone from Jeune Lune and he said, “Multidisciplinary, that’s a label. But isn’t all theatre multidisciplinary?” and one thing, which we’ve been developing a process as much as we’ve been developing work. And we’re trying to let that process reflect the multidisciplinary nature of theatre. We’re doing experiments in order to make it better and the multidisciplinary isn’t just to be interesting to ourselves or indulgent to ourselves but because we think this is what theatre is and what makes sense. Specifically that process is a 7-10 week creation process over a year or two years and trying to let things evolve in tandem from the actors, the collaborating writer and the designers. So, a lot of the theatre I hear about the designers don’t talk to the actors it’s not efficient and its not necessary. In our process the actors and designers work really closely together and I think our the goal is that the set and the lights and the sound and the acting style and the things that get said and the things that happen, they all work together and our way of doing that is to make sure that they all evolve together. So we start without a script and then we generate a script. At the same time, there is a fair amount of improvisation. The actors are trained as co-authors of the piece. That’s an ongoing process but at the same time, the work is choreographed down to the breath by the time we reach the end—by the time we reach the performance. I guess the other thing is—the other way we try to disrupt the way some economic pressures force us to focus on product is to… we keep talking. Some of our works remain in our repertory for 3 years, 5 years and if you saw it two years ago it’s not going to be the same as it is today because we have notes and rehearsals throughout those 3 years and throughout the run of the piece—to allow for that feeling of aliveness, investment and surprise to run through the work all the time.

KM: I’m gonna jump forward to something else we talked about—the logistical challenges to making the kind of work you’re talking about. Could you guys address that a bit? How you might find your scope limited by logistical concerns, whether those are the number of actors, number of rehearsal weeks, or the level of design that’s required to make what you’re making. Could you guys talk about if there is a different development process than can be found in a lot of places? Anybody? Not everybody at once. [laughter]

CG: Specifically with the building of the airplane for Wickets Jenny and I think really big. We sort of refuse to think small. Kristen knows [laughs] we’ve had many conversations about, “well no it has to be really an airplane.” [laughter] And that has its draw backs and also for us what pushes the work and what makes it exciting to be here everyday and to come in everyday and make it. With that said, when I mention that we work conceptually, we will work for a very long time before we get to that point and then once we get to that point, its very fast. We get the money, we make the airplane, we see if it works, we put the people in it, we see if that works and then we want to have it done. So the rehearsal process can be brought down although it often if has to be done in stages because our work is so visually based. For example our first piece Trick Saddle started with an underwater cowboy ballet that was a spaghetti western underwater film that Jenny made with a synchronized swim team in a dive well in Penn State. [laughter] So that was the beginning of that piece and then the actual piece grew out of it. We also have original music in all of our work and live music is very important to us so we always have a band onstage which brings up a lot of issues with money and things like that, because musicians work differently. So, I guess there seems to be about a three year gap between each piece. Raising money and making the work.

RP: I think for us, and this is something that I’d mentioned this in our pre-conversation, for us what’s challenging about not only the way that we create work and the scope of our work is that often times in the question of money, which simply equates with time and of course resources, but the question of time, is particularly that we approach our work with this notion of asking a question, of a bigger question, and really we don’t know that the work is going to in fact work—we actually don’t know what’s going to come out. When it becomes necessary, either to producing entities or to funding entities, to speak of the work, there’s a way in which, and I completely understand why, but there’s a way in which it becomes necessary to speak of the work as an answer which is: the work is going to be A B and it’s going to equal C. And C’s going to be amazing so can we therefore have whatever finance or resource? And in fact the process is more like we’re going to have A plus B and a little bit of water and a little bit of salt and we don’t know what’s going to happen but will you still give us money for that? [laughter] The answer tends to be… not until there’s an answer and in fact the work tends to be the road to that answer. Which is utterly philosophical but that plus the question of scope… we did a piece investigating the question of musical and we did and adaptation of Hair, so the idea of having 40 bald actors on set and this ginormous stage where we abstracted color and we had 25 electronic musicians onstage was really hard to postulate as ‘we don’t know if this will work.’ And that’s what makes it exciting to us. [laughter] So give us money for that exploration. And at the end of the day, we were thrilled with what moved forward and for us it was successful in terms of the piece and the goals, but certainly it’s that risk that was of interest. And that risk cannot be created in a workshop or a reading. The risk is the production itself. For us it’s a step in the development of us as artists, of the form, of our engagement with the audience and all of those things.

KM: Yeah I mean, I think that there has to be real flexibility to build the kind of work that we’re talking about here. In our resident artist program we have choreographers, composers, actors, people, puppeteers and each of those types of artists, have different ways of making that work and trying to create a structure that is flexible enough to permit that work to develop to the strength—to the best that it can possibly be. And for our organization to be flexible enough to support an artist like Clove who’s building an airplane or Young Jean Lee who’s doing this Korean-American politics play like nothing you’ve ever seen, you have to be very nimble at allowing the work to develop on the time frame that it’s going to develop on and with the resources with your limited budget at the same time. On Young Jean Lee, she also sends her regrets. Something happened at LaGuardia, they shut down the airport, so she tried to fly out last night and her flight was canceled and she tried to fly out this morning but the flight was canceled so she sends her regrets that she’s not here. On that front also about the funding, something that I think is really challenging is the loss of general operating funding for artists who are making a body of work today and an investment in the way work’s being made. Can you guys talk about that in terms of the way money creates challenges. You’ve talked about that a bit, but maybe some others have some thoughts? [laughter]

DR: Yeah I guess our company arrived after the general operating support had gone away completely, so we don’t remember that golden era. [laughter and applause] But I certainly, making our kind of work, if that were going to reemerge I think that would be great because I think it would deal with something that you’re saying. Because we work that way too, cause then it would allow you to raise funds on a questions and how the work exists in the community, be that an intellectual community or a physical community. Certainly, companies like ours are sometimes squeezed to make up a project when it comes to the administration to make up a project as opposed to saying, well, we’re trying to keep doing what we were doing. Yeah. Let’s have more general operating support. [laughter]

KM: And also this idea of process-driven work, and this idea of having the opportunity Ruben’s talking about to try something. I think that when there was investment in ensembles of artists who were creating work there was a lot more space for experimentation and for the field to get enriched by that experimentation and a lot of the problems that are coming are people thinking there’s not enough invention and not enough variation there isn’t as much trust that these are serious artists and they’re going to take their time to make this work. And there’s going to be something that comes out of that and if its not this project it’s in the next project. And then that fuels the whole field in terms of the way work continues to grow.

SSJ: I mean, I agree with that too but I also think that we have to, that the challenge is on ourselves to articulate the values in it along the way. We all, we all in this room here understand the value of a long process but how does that translate to actual community, how does that translate to actual audiences, how are we actually interfacing with human beings when we’re creating a process that means a lot but we don’t actually know where the interface with real life is yet. I mean I think there’s great value in starting from the beginning with those questions for ourselves and then having that as a goal. I mean, whether we achieve it or not is a whole other thing but you understand a little of what I mean? We have to have a sort of bigger goal in mind always or else we ourselves force ourselves back into project to project to project ways unless we don’t have a sort of over all, philosophical goal to reach people, to communicate with people, to cultivate relationships, to be a part of our actual community to address actual issues in the actual community. And I think we’ve been lucky—our executive director Deborah Cullinan, we think about the questions for maybe a year or for the questions for the over arching thing—so what we’re articulating in a grant is actually in line with what the writer wants to do or has thought about as opposed to doing that 11th hour thing that everyone’s been forced into. Let’s do something—is it about science? About science… and people… in our neighborhood.. [laughter] And you know obviously I think that comes out in the work too, but if you’re sort of grounded in a thing that you actually believe in, and if it’s about real life then sure that’s gonna cover a lot of different grant requirements. But we also have to stop for a minute too and articulate the actual values of it are, or else no one’s ever gonna know. I mean we sit in these rooms and go, yeah! That’s jibe, they won’t give us funding and then we kind of don’t stop and take the time and go, “well it’s because we haven’t interfaced with our neighbors. Literally our neighbors. Huuuh, I wonder if there’s value in that and I wonder if the city government will see that,” and things like that.

JH: I think that’s so right Sean, I completely agree and I think it’s amazing how ill-equipped we find ourselves as theatre artists to make any more sophisticated arguments for our work than we think you should fund it because we really dig making it. And we’re not good at it. As a field we’re not good at it. We’re not good at articulating the value of our of our work and this idea of reaching and touching communities and giving them ownership of the work that we do we handle this cynically and I don’t think we believe that the communities are the bright sensitive people that we believe ourselves to be and I think they know when they’re being played! [laughter, applause] I think our communities know when they’re being played and I think if we’re going to ask them to participate then they have to know that they own the place. I was talking to Joe Dowling about this last night, he was saying, this building needs to belong to people, so if someone wants to come at 8:30 in the morning and have a coffee and read the paper in this building then it’s theirs and I think there’s a lot to that. You know as the Economist once said, nobody in the history of the world has ever taken a rental car through a car wash. [laughter] If we want them to take care of our institutions they have to know that it belongs to them and I think, that’s right. I just think that’s right. [laughter, applause]

CG: But I also think that there’s a really important question that we all need to start to answer which is how has the definition theatre changed over the last 10, 15 years and how is the funding changing with it? And what is an original piece of work and what is a generative artist? I think right now, the goal and a question for all of us I think is what is the goal right now? It seems like a lot of funding right now is geared toward new plays and this playwright’s relationship to the making of the work and I don’t think that’s the only kind of theatre that’s being made right now. And I believe that an adaptation of something can also be an original piece of work, depending on what kind of artists are making that work. And it’s a question. And I think the funding community hasn’t really grappled with that question to the extent that it needs to, especially with multidisciplinary work that’s being made today by young artists.

KM: Can you guys talk about the “lead artist” and how the definition of lead artist has changed in the work that you guys make and observations across the field in terms of that?

JH: There used to be a time when the people who were making some of the bravest work in the field were making them under the aegis of our institutions. I mean I worked with Joanne Akalaitas, Robert Woodruff and Peter Sellars, Anne Bogart all of them under the aegis of major institutions in this country. When Joanne did The Screens here we rehearsed it for 10 and a half weeks I think with 36 equity actors and I don’t know how many extras, I mean this is an impossibility in today’s world. And obviously I’m looking from my own narrow prism but how we can include this kind of work in places where there is support, significant support, where there is time or where time can be made. This becomes a big questions in the field how are our institutions taking care of people who are making work in—for lack of a better term—non-traditional methodologies as we understand them in these institutions. There used to be room for that, it felt to me, and I guess in some cases there still is. But it’s very hard to figure out how we do that here. And I think there should be a way for that to be true.

CG: Well, I think what’s happening is that there’s been a lot of support for like a new plays festival or something like that and what Kristen was talking about earlier this making multidisciplinary work on a large scale over a long period of time I don’t think is really understood yet how that can happen because they don’t know what’s going to happen because they don’t know what they’re going to see. How do we explain what you’re going to see eventually? We built the airplane last August just so that we’d be able to show it. Because describing it means nothing to people. I mean that’s one way to approach it.

DR: I’m still thinking back to what you said about including people and letting people into the work and then that other word that you used bravery. Hmmm. Sometimes I feel that the body of theatre in general is a little too—presented a little too earnestly and friendly-ly. Like someone with a big smile and arms like that. [laughter] And as we all know I think that’s the reaction. [laughter .. applause] And even to the place where the word theatre lives in our culture is starting to get associate with that grimace and frozen embrace and sometimes in our work we try to not even use the word theatre to try to bring other kinds of people in. There’s just ways in which—and I’m someone who has a lot of naiveté and sweetness in a lot of the work we create but at the same time it’s really important to me –what feels to me is the difference between art and entertainment is being willing not to give people exactly what they want. So that seems like a real challenge. And I wish there was room in the larger institutions to do both. And I certainly see my role, the reason that I’m taking more time is to be you know, avant-garde, before that word also attracted a set of ossified connotations in the sense of doing it before. You know what you’re saying Ruben about taking a risk and see if it's gonna work and I see it in our community as working on artists as we take risk with artists who don’t have the right resume to get into the regional theatres and after they’ve worked with us for three years they become the award-winning sound designer, set designer at the regional theatres but partially that’s because we take that risk on them to reinvent the wheel. Umm. Yeah.

RP: Jumping in on that, I think part of the question or dilemma that we find, takes me back to something that you said Sean, which is that I feel that there’s this attempt to find out how theatres with a capital T works. And again, I don’t know that there is an answer and I don’t know if I want and answer for that. And there’s a way that your theatre, Sean, works so differently than ours in terms of its engagement. Mostly because you’re in an engagement with the community while we have a much more fluid community and we don’t know who our community will be for certain pieces and are often so surprised when we realize: why is this an intellectual piece? That’s not how it was billed. So it speaks to an intellectual—often theatre-makers, and I think we’ve come to a point where that is thrilling. And another piece, we find our audience and the people interested in that conversation are 18-25 and it’s a completely different room. And I think along that line, trying to answer why we make theatre, and I think there’s a million answers. I always joke, going back to what you’re saying, we are a really selfish company, we make theatre not because we want to but because we need to and that’s a really… I have obsessions with-my mother cooks a lot. And I draw all metaphors to her. And it’s the way I see her cooking; she doesn’t sit there and ask you: Do you like salty things? She actually makes something that blows her mind and she wants to share it with you desperately and will sit there seeing what happens with it. [laughter] And some people won’t like it, it’ll be too spicy, it’ll be a million things but I think the minute she asks what do I make to make everybody happy that begins to reduce that equation. However, has that notion that sharing that food is essential to her. This is why she makes it, this is why she’s been so affected by it and has this need is the only way I can explain it, and it speaks in certain situations to our work, and the way to do that. So I love hearing the different predicaments of how to engage with community, or the work that you make or the timeline. But I think what gets difficult is when there’s an expectation that we can all answer the same question in the same way. So that when we are asked as a company in NY, what is the socio-political relevance of this particular project? There are times when a particular project doesn’t have that, that’s actually not the reason that exists, while other times the question is incredibly germane to the conversation.

KM: Yeah on that front, could other people talk about how they develop the audiences they want to see the work that they’re making.

SSJ: Yeah just to touch back on that point about engagement. I think sometimes theater people get a little precious about, that engagement means like I have to have an audience tell me what they want and I think engagement also means dialogue which is ultimately what you do with the production part of it and I think that’s important to establish as early on and as on-goingly as possible. Otherwise its just theater people coming because they know what theatre is but where is that initial point of engagement come for the people that are outside of this theatre here? And why do we always come to a conference and ask, “What’s the future audience? How do we develop new audiences?” If we ask it in the same paradigm over and over and we never sort of talk about what does the door look like and how do you open the door to new people and how do we sort of redefine that point and I think they’re not necessarily seperatee issues. If you engage with a community your work is gonna get all funky and not the way you want it. I think it’s gonna ground you more—I think it will help you define the why it, and everyone has a why. And I think if we can articulate that at the beginning and let a person know when they’re coming to the theatre know that I’m not watching footlights and someone do what they do—that’s my experience. We thought theatre was a downtown thing. There’s opera, ballet and theatre. You never knew it was about life—until someone showed you the thing where you hear someone talk like an August Wilson play and you go, “Oh, they talk like people talk. I get it, it’s a totally different thing.” Not everyone got Shakespeare in high school, and I think that that’s sad but it’s also true. So where do we continue that point and where do you also get to the point where there are people in their 30s and in their 40s and they just don’t mess with theatre. And you have to engage them at a certain point. I think everyone does theatre because it comes back to the mirror part—but it we can sort of remember that every now and then, or maybe start with that, or always have that as a sort of dialogue point or over riding point, then everyone comes to the theater and goes, “Ohh, this is that thing about memory. I have memory, I have a family history, I understand this.” The writer, as great as they are, is not going to have to adjust, necessarily, but be informed by that. I think there can be two things going on the same track, and you know feed each other at the same time.

JH: I think for me, we’ve done a hundred things different since I came on a year ago at Playmakers and almost all of the things we’ve done differently are tethered to a single observation, which is we had to quit pretending that there was some enormous existing need for our work in our community because there wasn’t. [laughter] I mean, there simple wasn’t. And so it has meant… it has meant getting out and articulating what it is to belong to a theatre. We had to get out of the building. And to put a finer point on it, I had to get out of the building. I had to go out, and I will talk to anyone who will listen to me about why belonging to this theatre can be meaningful to them and how they are meaningful to us and I think through TCG and friends, I got to go around the country. I won’t say anything that’s new to any of you. Oskar Eustis and Paul Nicolson and Marc Masterson and Blake Robinson and many, many others have opened their institution and their hearts and minds to me so I can sort of go and study and look around and learn. I think too many of our theatres—none belonging to the people I just described—[laughter] I think too many of our theatres are operating in a 1970s paradigm when there was significant individual and governmental and corporate support of the art form and I think the sector has fairly well agreed that those days are gone and that they’re not coming back. So this idea of, “we make our work, your job is to come in, appreciate it and get the hell out of the building” those days are gone. They’re just gone. And it goes back to this other question. If we want people to take care of the place, then they have to know that it belongs to them. We’ve seen the results of that, whether it’s sustainable is an open question, but just getting out and talking to people and meeting them half way. Am I interested in them programming for me? No, I’m not. But I’m interested when they say, “I wish you guys did something that we could bring our families to.” You know, this is good information for me. There are ways we can include the audience in the work that we do. When they say, “You know, we feel it’s been a little relentless… it’s kinda like taking ourmedicine. We like the hard stuff but once in a while we just kinda wanna see a play, you know, have a good time and go home.” And so [laughter] to create a kind of balance—to please the audience in an uncomplicated way and combine that with stuff that is rigorous or hard either thematically or formally. I think there’s something to that. You know, when Garland Wright did a play here The Screens, we programmed Harvey in the same season. [laughter] You know, I think this idea of some of this and some of that and meeting an audience half way—I don’t feel my art is sullied by the conversation I just don’t, you know. I think there’s a way to sort of include all of that.

KM: Anyone else want to say something else?

RP: Yeah—the other side of the coin, which again, hearing these theatres that function are so engrained in a community—I just think its such a different predicament, I don’t know if you agree in terms of your work, but what we encounter. But what’s difficult is when we are expected to do that as a theatre company, which is not really our place, there’s a certain way that we make work and there’s a certain type of work that we make, and so we fit one of those – you know, what you’re saying, the sort of difficult work to encounter so we are that. There is no….it isn’t part of our conversation to engage our community in that way. However, hearing you articulate it seems incredibly relevant for a theatre that is placed amidst a community, so again it’s that equation that’s really tricky. You said the question of dialogue but there’s a piece we do that is actually an argument—it’s actually not a dialogue, and it’s not grinning, “let’s talk about it friendly” but I sort of want to wrestle down to the ground and get really messy. But that’s not always desirable, agreed… so there’s other work that audience can see—not necessarily of ours, but of other artists. But I often hear, part of the problem for me is that having been fortunate enough—having been in residency at New York Theatre Workshop for three years, we were at the Public for a bit and certainly have had certain relationships at the McCarter and at various other theatres and I’ve seen the concerns of those institutions. And the difficulty, and the disconnect, is that I can sit here and say, “I want unlimited funds because I want to make my art and I want 10 years to develop it.” But I understand the reality of what does it mean to have to really be responsible to a community that you are presenting work to and I think it’s bridging that that becomes really difficult. How do you contextualize? I mean I hesitate to use the word, but how do you as a producer justify this risk to your audience? How do you engage them in a conversation that is not only about the work but about how work is made which non-theatre audiences couldn’t give a shit about. Why should they? And certainly at the end of the day I hope that our work is relevant and impactful just by itself without all those questions. That’s what’s dangerous. Oftentimes we just spend so much time on the backside of it, as Sean was saying that then what the hell is the work? It’s such a messy conversation I get even lost in trying to find that balance. But I think that we each hold different questions and different ways of having conversations about audience. So.

KM: Go ahead.

CG: Umm actually, I would be interested in what Kristin had to say about this because I think also it has a relationship to space and running a theatre… an actual theatre space, umm, and having to be responsible to your audience because you’re actually supporting a building in order to make the work.

KM: Yeah I mean, some of the stuff that we talked about that isn’t coming up just now is about inviting the audience into the process along the way whether it’s through creating the questions you’re asking like Sean was talking about or the workshop presentations that happen along the way, or it’s in the partnerships you make with organizations related to the subject you’re doing whether it’s the NAACP or the John J. College Criminal Justice Dept or whatever it is that extends the subject and the meaning and the content of what you’re doing and also about the post performance panel discussions that happen or the context settings that happens at our place…we do a lot of those conversations, but the conversations are always structured around the issues of the work as opposed to, “I liked that because…” or “Why did you do that?” or “How long did it take you to learn those lines and around those kind of questions, so and I think it also has to do—this was coming up, Jason Neulander was talking about architecture and its relation in one of the things this morning and I think architecture has a really big impact on how people feel when they enter a space and how they feel and how they’re welcomed into the space and whether they feel like they can be a participant in the space that they’ve ventured into. Or if they feel like there’s an institution that they’re facing that they don’t feel like their opinion is going to have a relationship to the actions of the institution. So I do think that space is a really big part of the experience, that starts the moment they walk in the door, the door that you’re opening, whether not just into the theatrical space but of course the theatrical space too. What about labels that are placed on work? And you’re all people that work outside the box—so what about those labels and how they affect the way you think about your work or you work against them. Whether you’re doing an identity-driven work or you’re doing hybrid work or you’re doing political work. Can you talk about the impact that that might have on your thinking or positioning of your work?

DR: Well, we called our selves Pig Iron Theatre Company when we first started and said this thing that has probably been said by folks in their twenties for at least 100 years, “Well, I’m going to change what that definition of theatre is”—which I don’t really know that we can do—anymore. We hear a lot about this word ‘podcast’ which is a word that didn’t exist, I guess, three or four years ago and now is everywhere. And it seems like people are excited about it, I’m excited about it. But there’s not a set of people that have already coagulated around it. I’m looking for a word to describe these live performance things that happen that will reach out and intrigue people enough without saying, ‘well I don’t participate in that because I’m not that kind of person.’ So, yeah, I’m actually trying to deal with this label of theatre right now and trying to figure that out.

KM: Anybody else?

RP: I mean, I think that’s right. There’s a way in which we’re forced—not-forced—we have to describe our work in terms of language, but we have now started to have a playful relationship to it really. I sat in on the classical work conversation yesterday—and even that word… what are we really saying through these words? Classical has a sense of academic-ness to it and when you hear experimental, people actually just think it’s weird. “It’s weird, I’m not gonna get it and it’s gonna be long.” [laughter] These are actually the expectations. And so, and it is true, what does it mean to use that? I think it you start circumnavigating those words in a strange way if you start saying classical and experimental, what does that actually mean? So I think for us it’s really been about trying to describe our work outside of that a bit and to truly convey that. And the word theatre I wrestle with. I try to hear how people use it. Like, I love how it’s actually a pejorative in terms of human interaction. Someone goes, “Ohh you’re just being so theatre,” you know, there’s a way in which that’s not desired. And when I hear that I think, “What does it mean that that’s what I do?” Or “dramatic”… “You’re being very dramatic.” That’s such a negative thing so, I mean, I have an obsession about the question of language—so to try to speak of it outside of that. It becomes important but it gets so lofty once one starts doing that so, much like you’re saying, I covet words that are coming up, that don’t yet have this baggage and history. Like podcast or things that I hear my students use in terms of technological ways of conveying information that I envy but I think we have a bit to wrestle with there.

KM: I have to interject. We did a piece once that was out of a Dostoyevsky adaptation and the marketing campaign that was, “It’s really long, it’s very heavy, it’ll leave you feeling sad and empty.” And umm. [laughter] So I thought of it when you said that. We actually had people call and be like, “How long is it??” [laughter] So it was like a selling point. [laughter]

KM: Just on the technology front, since that got raised a bit, can you guys talk about technology and what impact that might be having on your work—whether it’s the integration of video or pod cast or it’s youtube. Can you guys talk a bit about any impact that’s having on the work you’re making.

CG: Jenny and I work with technology all the time in our work. She’s a videographer/video artist. And it’s in every piece. What’s interesting to me about what’s happened—usually there’s a seminal art piece inside the theatre piece that then has a life of its own and can then travel all over the world, which is a really exciting thing that happened with Trick Saddle and continues to happen. So that’s something that we’ve sort of been experimenting with. I was thinking about the word—this in-betweeness of multidisciplinary artists and sort of being between dance and visual art and the word theatre and how that could be developed into something of its own. Kristin uses the word hybrid a lot, which seems to be catching on. But in terms of technology, it dictates money, it dictates where we can do work—especially with video you have to have the technology to run it, and you have to have enough space to throw, which was even an issue at HERE, so I think that that’s sort of a main thing. But it also interestingly attracts a whole new crowd of people, which we’re very excited about. So it does sort of bridge the gap like you were saying, bridge those areas of what is theatre and what is other forms.

KM: How about we take some questions from you guys out there. If you’ll just stand up someone will bring a microphone to you, otherwise we won’t hear you.

Jenny Rodgers: Hi, I’m Jenny Rodgers by the way. I’m not sure I’m allowed to ask a question. My question is: Now that you have the idea of experimental theatre and that form as sort of ossified as what is a deconstructed text, I think it’s a very interesting place as a future generation artist and I wonder how you guys deal with that. Because what is experimental now that you have the Wooster Group’s experimental work, you have Mabou’s experimental work and so the idea of what is a deconstruction is almost now traditional theatre.

[laughter and murmuring among panelists]

[laughter from audience]

JH: Ok, I’ll jump in. You know I think sometimes we run around like so many Treplef’s going “New forms, new forms, we need new forms.” [laughter] I don’t think we can just decide and then go make that. I think it belongs to—it’s linked to what Mr. Soyinka was talking about yesterday, and ritual, and how we all—I’ve never been more conscious than I have this last year of being an apprenticeship-gain. Everything I know I know from others and what came before and so we’re taking that bucket of information and then applying it in this incredibly new and incredibly different world that we live in now, that’s wildly different than how it was just a few years ago. So, where Mabou and SITI Company and others are somewhat more towards the center than how they were 15 years ago. I don’t think we can just—I don’t know. I can’t point to what the new place is, what’s the new edge now. I think it will happen naturally and strangely and we’ll all look to something and say “My God, that’s it. That’s what’s interesting now,” and it will frighten people half to death and everybody will hate it except for the three people who love it until slowly it becomes the thing that works its way towards the center.

RP: I would just add to that, speaking for ourselves, that can’t be the goal. I just have to believe that, you know I always say our company works like a big individual artist, I think it has its personality it can be sad and pouty and funny and it does all those things because of who it is, again because the minute you try to be anything I think it looses some of what, some of its nature and I think—I always say, “We never meant to become an experimental company, it’s something that became necessary.” And what’s interesting is that our work is actually incredibly classical. It’s just viewed now, because of our space or who we are through a certain prism but we’re extrapolating traditions that are hundreds of years old. You know for us there’s a way of pushing the form but not necessarily setting out to create experimental work. I just sort of have visions of when I was a kid and you’d hear that word and just think black turtle necks [laughter] and you know that’s certainly not what we’re interested in.

KM: Other questions?

Sarah Bellamy: Hi, I’m Sarah Bellamy from Penumbra Theatre Company. I’m curious as to how we have a responsibility—those of us who aren’t necessarily creating new work—to advocate to the worth of that creation of work you’re doing to the form. You know, we’re not necessarily producing it, so, and sometimes it is just to answer those essential questions you need to ask. So, how do we create a culture where the larger theatre companies with the time and the resources who are not necessarily willing to produce the work but value it in terms of its contribution to theatre in general? How do we begin to do that? So that you can focus not necessarily on saying, “Well it’s helping this community or, what do you guys need?” and trying to be all things for all people—that we are now jumping in the game not to do the work necessarily, because we don’t have the resources or because some people just don’t have the interest. It’s just not part of their mission statement. How can we, the larger community, support that and advocate on your behalf… amongst funders?

DR: I think it’s a great question and there’s actually a lot of nitty gritty structural things about that weird, contrived theatre economy and the relation of regional theatres to funders, and how we relate to funders—I mean actually how Equity functions. You know, I mean, I just wonder if there can be more space for that. I mean, our relationship to our actors seems to be quite different from the relationship that a regional theatre has to its actors, typically. Cause what you were saying I was like sounds exciting—maybe we could come in and talk about our values to the actors of the regional theatres but it seems like there are less and less repertory acting companies doing even playwright driven works. So, who would those theatres bring in? I mean, there are usual suspects much of the time. Umm, yeah, I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

CG: Are you asking I guess how large theatres can be supportive just through talking about it or through education? Or are you saying, you said specifically “not producing it.”
I guess what I would say about that is, one of things we’ve talked about up here today is, the longer process of making it and being aware that it’s not always just a reading of a play that we’re trying to—that we’re starting with. So I think that would be one place to start. That if there’s part or some sort of aspect of the year in view that you guys are organizing, that there’s a place and a part to develop something that’s completely different that isn’t just text driven or come from… the playwright comes and we get a couple of actors and we read it. That I think would really help.

Kathy Randels: Yeah, I’d love to hear from each of you how much you pay yourselves and your collaborators and ummm. [laughter] How many hours a week or a day or a month do you work? And how you find a way to pay yourselves and your collaborators for their process time as well as the presentation time? And my name is Kathy Randels and I try to do the same thing in New Orleans with ArtSpot Productions.

SSJ: I mean, that’s the biggest question that we should be asking if we’re going to continue doing this stuff, sustaining is the biggest thing and that’s where I think relationships come into it. I mean, me personally I’m fortunate because I’m part of a place, Intersection for the Arts, that creates the structure pieces to sustain relationships so it’s pretty holistic in that sense. So, I become part of the staff, which has focus on theatre and we all work interactive. And the work is really about the people that want to do it—unfortunately and fortunately. I mean, that’s its greatest strength and that’s its greatest challenge at this point. We’re just fortunate that people are committed and our executive director is committed to presenting the things that people are asking for—writers, community etc. It’s created an ongoing sustainable model and I think that has everything to do with relationships and—I keep using a phrase “being part of the community”—and I actually really mean being part of the community. Because those are the people that are going to come to the thing and those are the people that it’s going to be about. So, I think we all have a lot of work to do in breaking down the old models in order to sustain a new model.

DR: Ok numbers then. [laughter] So uh, yeah after 12 years. People in our organization, we have 6 full time staff people that are making between 26 and 31… a year, which is enough for a twenty something to live on... damnit! Now we’re in our thirties. [laughter] And a twenty something with no college loans. And you know actors, we try to pay people between, I guess we’re going to bump up to around $500 a week now, for actors. Actually one of our biggest issues is designers. I think we pay pretty comparable fees of like 2,500 and 3000 for a designer but we actually want them for 12 weeks all the time. So they kind of shake my hand and go “Yeah! No, no, he must not mean that.” So yeah, that’s where we’re at. And when I talk to theatre people about that they’re like, “Wow, that’s great! That’s better than Equity negotiated in your city for a theatre your size.” And when I talk to anyone in any other industry they kind of have to go lie down. [laughter] And say “Whhhaaaa? I don’t understand. How’s that gonna work.” But umm, so yeah.

CG: We raise money piece to piece Jenny and I. For Trick Saddle we paid our actors $250 a week to rehearse, which was an amazing amount of money at the time and $500 a week to perform--$400 a week to perform, sorry. When we did Wickets there’s 10 performers, eight women and two singers and everyone got $100 a week to rehearse and we paid people $250 a week to perform. So, hopefully that will be increased but we rely heavily—we’re not general opp, it’s just Jenny and I. We rely heavily on raising money from individuals and foundations.

KM: Go ahead and then I think we’re supposed to stop, I’m being waved at.

RP: You know in terms of hours, how many hours, I think that question is in this room clear. I am constantly working. I think we all are. We have three people on staff that are considered full time. The pay’s not full time we’re paying about $15,000 for the year and the projects that go with it. We really, it depends on how much we raise. There’s times when people receive in honorarium $200 a week. We’ve gone up to $400 a week, which I envy desperately. And when we do collaborations with larger theatres it goes up and we feel like we’ve hit the jackpot. We’re getting $500 a week or something like that. I think we all made a choice a long time ago, intentionally or unintentionally that we were going to go into something that was not going to be lucrative. Though, now in our thirties, it’s something we want to reinvestigate and continue to do so. [laughter] But I think the big question is the question that was asked is: how do institutions and otherwise create space for this kind of work and support it.

CG: I just forgot to say we haven’t paid ourselves yet.

KM: Thank you so much for joining us and I think there’s something else immediately. You’re not supposed to get up. [laughter/applause]