 So, welcome back to the opening day of Prelude 2016. My name is Antje Ödel. I'm co-curator of the festival, together with Tom Sellers. So the event, this event is a very special event, actually, well, actually very early on in the process of putting together a list of artists that we were interested in. We were looking over the work in progress that they were working on. We were thinking, well, it would be really interesting to ask them about projects that, you know, they dream projects that they had in mind that they were working on, that they were trying to realize. But for some reason, they never really came about, never came to fruition. And so we asked, once the list program was made, we asked every participant if there was a project, that got away, basically, and if there are stories that they wanted to share with an audience and everyone. So that is how we have decided to do this event today. So we titled the event, we were kind of riffing on this video that David Critchley made, where he looked into the camera in his studio and talked about all of these projects that he wanted to make, but didn't make. So we invited everyone to kind of similarly riff, that was our idea for this hour. And this hour is the biggest experiment in our festival. We don't know exactly how this is going to go. We didn't know how many artists would want to talk about this or sign up, and we were really pleased that we got a nice handful of people who wanted to share. So they have the floor for something like three to six minutes each. So we'll do it sort of open mic style, except there is actually a set running order. And we will ask each artist to come up, and if you could introduce yourselves, so that we don't have to keep getting up to introduce you. But if you can just say who you are before you share. Some artists have images to share, which would be protected onto the screen, some don't. So we'll just kind of take it as it comes, but that's the format, one at a time. And we were just hoping that this would be a kind of amusing and possibly therapeutic hour of hearing about performances that could have taken place, but for one reason or another did not. And as Auntie said, when we were formulating this idea, who knows how many great performances, even masterpieces, died on the page or somewhere between the artist's conception and the stage that they never reached. So let's hear about them. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Collins. I'm the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service. I feel like I was just here. Real quick, I don't have any pictures to show because we abandoned this project twice and never took any pictures of it. But sort of in a funny way, the thing that I thought to talk about did actually happen eventually and it became GATS, which was this show of ours that was seen probably by more people than anything else we've done. But it did start out as a project that didn't happen. First, in 1999, we put together just a little piece of the great GAT speed to perform and it had lots of puppets in it, like lots of found objects with eyes stuck on them, like a copper bowl with eyes on it and a shoe with sunglasses on it. And these were going to play all of the parts. And James Hanahan played Tom wearing a ski mask. Some cast members survived, but that project, we tried it, we were excited about it. And then we thought, well, maybe we should ask for the rights. And they said, no, absolutely not. So we threw it away, but they told us the people at the Fitzgerald estate said, but we'd be happy for you to do this other novel, Fitzgerald's last unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. And that was the one that really did become the project that didn't happen because we spent about six weeks trying to make that. We watched the movie version. We made a dance. Somebody brought in something called the Ronald McDonald dance. This thing that never saw the light of day and probably for the best. We tried doing the last tycoon in the same way we had thought we were going to do the Great Gatsby with lots of little stupid puppets and things. And then that was the one where we said, no, this is just absolutely not working. And that's really the one piece we threw away and never picked back up again. At that point, we said, this is not working. We'll do the Bacchae instead. Later on, we did do the Great Gatsby and it did work out. But not until it had become the piece we didn't do twice. Hi, I'm Sunaz and I run a theater company called Built for Collapse. And I want to say, I think we had a picture, but I don't know if it, yeah. So it exists in a form, sort of. So four years ago, we were on tour with a show. And we started working on another show. And then I had an idea for a different show. And suddenly there were all these ideas for shows coming up. And one night, one late night in London, after a lovely time at a lovely bar, we had me, Vince and Ben, the sort of the triumvirate that runs the company, had this really good idea that we were going to have another show. And this show was going to be like where we could put all of our ideas for all of the shows that we were thinking about doing. And it'll come together somehow. And you may actually be familiar with it. And I think you were in a version of it called We Were Wild Once. And I had just seen Nature Theater of Oklahoma. So I was like, well, we'll do it in episodes, because that's a thing we could do. And we had lots of great formalistic ideas. And the idea, I think, overall was to, I don't even know why I brought this with me. The idea overall, the idea was we had all these one-off opportunities. But instead of trying to make the one-off opportunities just as little spurts, we were going to have it all build towards something. So each time we were given 15 minutes at Dixon Place or whatever it was going to be, we were going to show a new, further developed version of this show that eventually would come together all the episodes and it would all make sense together. But over the four years that we worked on it, our ideas changed. And what was important to us changed. And so every time we did an episode, it was completely different. I think that Tennessee Williams and Fitzgerald and T.S. Elliot, Sylvia Plath, like these all show up in different versions. Zeus, some woman named Gilda, the dance epidemic. I had a brain injury, so we put that in it at some point. So all of these things happened. And now we have seven episodes. And they don't go together at all. I put them all and we have another one coming up. And so ultimately what we decided about a week ago was that we are going to have as many episodes of this as we want for the next 20 years. And it's going to be that unfinished thing that we do forever. And that maybe the one thing that has and will continue to keep them somehow connected is that they're all sort of an experiment in process. So when I have a question about how to choreograph chaos, episode eight will be about that. And I think it's a fun thing. So, yeah. Oh, I'm supposed to plug my prelude. We're doing a prelude thing. It's Friday, 7.30, different show. Thank you. So Niles, can you just tell us what this is? Because I'm so intrigued by this image. Oh, this is episode four, which Blaze was in. I think you're somewhere in. Yeah, he's the one holding the corn flakes. And it was a night at Dixon Place, 7.30 show, I think it was. And he's learning how to eat cereal again. OK. My name is Brad Burgess. I'm the artistic director of the Living Theater. I'm going to let Judith speak for a couple of minutes first before I say anything and explain what this is. I'll let her lead us off with where her head was at. When we grow older, not only do we lose some of our faculty, we lose some faculty. But what we gain, a positive view, an optimistic view of growing older, because at the same time as we lose our physical strength, we gain a certain mental capacity. If we want to call it growing wiser, we can. Or we can call it growing more compassionate, or more understanding of what life is about, or all different kinds of things that people feel that they've gained at the same time as they're losing something, so that there's this balance. And I think that's a very important thing for people to realize that we keep growing and changing. Because I say in the play, we know that a five-year-old child is different from a 10-year-old child, and a 10-year-old is very different from a 15-year-old. And a 15-year-old person is different from a 20-year-old. But we don't realize that a 70-year-old person is not as wise as a 75-year-old. And a 75-year-old gets wiser when they become an 80-year-old. We don't think of that as growing. We think of that as, well, you have to pass the time. It's a tough time. And of course, it is a tough time. On the other hand, there is this change. And society is missing a big resource in not using that, especially American society. In Italy, older people stay with the family and are used to counsel, through advice, and are taken care of because they're useful in the family. And I think older people could be much more useful in society if we didn't have the social prejudice of, ah, she's just an old lady. Or dumb as an enemy, an old man. That's detrimental to a real possible contribution to society with our knowledge and our wisdom. What would you say to a 98-year-old woman? I would say, when you're 99, you'll be even smarter. Because that's where I am, 98. Wow. Yes, I am 98. You are 98? Yes. My goodness, you look like 68. Can you imagine that? I would have never guessed. I would never guess you were a day over 70. That's marvelous. You must be very good to yourself, keep yourself looking so good. That's wonderful. So I understand all that you're talking about. Good. What I want to do. So this was for a play. I'm not sure what that music is, but it's appropriately sad, I guess. This was for a play that Judith had called The Triumph of Time. And it was about the life of the residents at the actor's home that's run by the Actors Fund out in New Jersey. And we tried to work on it. We did some interviews. There are several interviews like this. And this 98-year-old woman goes on to tell her life story and how she wound up at the actor's home out in New Jersey. And I would say it was a societal failure. I was able to go see Judith two or three times a week because Frank has given me a job here at the Segal Center. That's flexible. So I could go out there and see her. And most of the people that lived out there would get one or two visitors every few months. And so to coordinate anything with them was very difficult. The resources weren't there. It wasn't something our culture could handle. And also there was a little bit, because of that lack of will on behalf of the other people that were not visited as much, they just were more or less content to sit and go to dinner at five o'clock and then go to sleep at six o'clock. So trying to organize a rehearsal after dinner was impossible. And they had activities or physical therapy during the day. And so the idea of the play was this wonderful idea, but the just practicality of it and the financial reality of it, it just couldn't ever happen. And I think that was a profound failure for us. It wasn't that Judith died and we didn't do it. We actually moved on from the project about a year and a half before she died because we just realized it's easier to bring her into New York and find a group of 20-somethings who are willing to do anything else. So that's the story of the triumph of time. I'm gonna try to use this. I hope it's okay. Hmm? I think that works. Yep, seems to be. Okay, thank you. I'm Norman Frisch. I'm a dramaturge and curator. I'll be talking on Friday afternoon as part of the Builders Association about a piece that we made about 20 years ago. Today, I'm going to talk about a production that was jogged in my memory a couple of weeks ago when Edward Albee died. People were posting lots of beautiful photographs and video clips of various productions of his plays. And I remembered about nearly 25 years ago now in 1992. I was living in Los Angeles. I was working on a series of arts festivals out there. And the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, MOCA, was doing a program of artists responding to AIDS. And in this program, Ron Vodder was visiting Los Angeles and performing his show Roy Cone Jack Smith. Ron Vodder was a wonderful actor who was a longtime member of the Worcester Group. And towards the end of his life, he separated himself from the Worcester Group long enough to do a series of other projects. And one of them was the beautiful show Roy Cone Jack Smith. And at the same time, Karen Finley, the performance artist and writer was at MOCA, performing one of her pieces. And Ron and Karen had some time to hang out together in Los Angeles and they were drinking. And they came up with the idea of a production for themselves of all these Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They weren't entirely sure who would play Martha and who would play George, but or that they even necessarily had to decide. But it was an idea that really tickled them. And they continued to talk about it and bat it back and forth for a while. My friend, the director Peter Sellers was living in Los Angeles, working on these festivals and Ron enlisted Peter as a prospective director on the project. And Peter talked to me about it. We had worked on things together. And during that winter of 1992, 1993, back here in New York, Peter and Karen continued to get together. They would read the play. Ron felt fairly confident because he knew Albie that he might be able to persuade him to give them the rights, to do some kind of version of the play. And they decided to enlist two other actors to play Nick and Honey. They asked Wally, Sean to play Nick and Lola Paschalinsky, a wonderful actor to play Honey. And they began getting together periodically to read the play act by act. And during that winter of early, early 1993, Peter and I were back in New York and we met at Ron Potter and Greg Merton's apartment on Bleaker Street and did a read through of the play. I was skeptical coming into it. I tend not to like stunt casting. And I thought, oh, this was stunt casting. And yet, the play was absolutely illuminated. It was gorgeous. At some point, Ron and Karen, Ron is George and Karen is Martha, simply switched roles in the middle of an act. They had obviously pre-arranged it, but we were completely shocked. It went on for a while and then they swapped back. And one could see that there was tremendous possibility in this project. And at the end of the day, we agreed that, well, the next step was to invite Edward Albee and do a reading for him. And either we would schlep out to his place or sometime when he was going to be in the city. It was hard to coordinate these people. Karen was a very busy performer. Ron had a lot of projects on. In 1993, Peter was not often in New York. And so it became clear that somehow scheduling this visit with Albee and this reading was going to be difficult. And the talks went back and forth and dates for some time. And finally, towards the end of 1993, Ron was getting ready to go off to Europe. He had a couple of projects lined up. And the plan was that in the spring when he got back, we would do a trip out and we would spend a day with Albee and we would do a reading for him. And people who know Ron know that he went off that winter. He undertook these projects in Europe and he died there of AIDS in the early 1994. So this was a production that never came to be. I think it would have been legendary and probably unique. I'm Stephanie Abel Horwitz representing Tiny Little Band. We have a show that we abandoned, but it's way less of a failure than everybody else because we abandoned it very quickly. So we had this idea to make a whisper tube show. I think because I was at a playground and I played with a whisper tube and I thought, this is so fun. Let's make theater about it. And so we had this idea to have whisper tubes on two sides of a wall and the audience would come in on either side and some of the whisper tubes would go to the other side and some of them wouldn't and there'd be writing in some of them or sounds in some of them. And we wanted to try to sort of encourage people to maybe tell secrets through the whisper tubes. Like maybe you'd just be talking to another audience member and then we were like, oh, that's too hard. Like, what are we gonna do, get a lot of whisper tubes? And so we thought, okay, what if we tried this? No whisper tubes. And it was a room with a lot of tables and people came in and there were performers at some of them and you would sit down and activate the performer. I'm not sure how this would have worked. But again, it was something about getting people to maybe accidentally interact or have a kind of intimate thing in a public space. And we never made it. We never even tried to make it. I think, and maybe Senaz agrees with this, that sometimes we have ideas that are really a way for us to work out our bigger idea. And I think at the time we were making another show, we probably were. And somehow this is in that show. I have no idea how. And I asked Jerry if he thought, and we don't remember. But sometimes that helps you figure something else out or I think also in some way that show feels like our aesthetic in a deep way that we're interested in this intimacy in a public forum, like right here. So that was the Whisper Tube project. We're showing some of our new show, Your Hair Looked Great, tomorrow at 5 p.m., right here. Please come. Little taller. Hello. My name is Chris DeVita. I am a founding member and the choreographer of a group called I Am A Boy's Choir. And we have a performance on Friday at 8 p.m. that everybody should see. And I wrote notes because I'm a little nervous. But this is a project that started out as an amazing application called, this is a play by Jane Austen working title. And it was going to be a glitter storm of everything that Jane Austen is or was in movies and in the books and in like the zeitgeist, like all that stuff, but through a subversive, mischievous, really queer lens and then performed in drag. And we were like, yes. And we made this amazing application in my living room on a day that it was really, really snowy. And we were like really feeling the spirit and all this amazing stuff was coming out. And we were like, we're gonna do this theater of the ridiculous thing. And we were trying to get people interested in giving us some like time and space to like work on this thing. And we did it, we convinced them. We got six months of like free rehearsal space. And we were like, yes. And we got into the room and then we were like, oh, so we just, all of our ideas are actually like scenes and none of us are actors. And we don't work with actors. I am a voice choirs made up of a choreographer, a designer, a composer and a dramaturg playwright. So we sort of were doing our best with that of sort of acting out these like scenes. And we were like, oh, crap. This isn't that explosive glitter storm that we were so excited about. This is like a really bad SNL moment where we were kind of like just making fun of Jane Austen and we weren't actually making a show about like class and gender performance and like what that was, which is what we were actually interested in. Typically our shows are like, we're just us being us sort of in the jungle gym of an idea or in the jungle gym of a structure and we sort of navigate our shows that way. So we thought, okay, let's just completely switch gears and let's try it out that way. And so we did that. And then what we made it ended up being like really kind of bad and like super boring. And so I think like at the end of the six months we had a really solid idea of what we needed to do to fix it. Like if we were really gonna like do the show like who we needed to hire and how we were gonna do it. And it was like song cycle and stuff. But like through the whole process. No, it was gonna be amazing. And through the whole process we never actually answered the question of why are we doing this? And actually moreover, why are we doing it now? And that was really, really important because as I'm sure everybody knows like it takes a lot of work to kind of get that ball rolling and to get people excited about your work, to wanna present it, to fund it, to show up, to tell their friends or like post about it on Facebook. And we weren't even convinced ourselves. And I think that's ultimately why we kind of ended up not necessarily abandoning the project. It's like sitting on a shelf in case we ever do find an answer to why are we doing this and when are we doing this? And yeah, yeah, that's it. I'm the last one. So we have some extra time. If anyone would like to spontaneously come to the stage and take this microphone or stand at this microphone or stand at the podium and share their own two minute story. We have like 15 minutes, which we could use for that if anyone is so moved. If you might be, raise your hand. All right, well, if not, thank you to the artists for sharing these stories. It's really very moving to me to think about what happens to an idea over time. And I think we see so many in all these stories in a way that's the underlying thread is what happens to an idea when it's tested against the vicissitudes of life and also of the process. Six months can be an incredibly long time to expose an idea. On the other hand, people grow old, people even die in the course of the lifespan of these projects. And it's just interesting in our form to think about how important time is as a commodity and as a factor. Thank you, I've learned a lot from this. Thank you for participating in our experiment and sharing your stories. So we have Matthew Ghoulish coming at seven o'clock to share the results of his or the history of his artistic research project called the Institute of Failure. And that will be followed at eight o'clock by an original performance, broken red balloon dog, the New York edition, which is an experiment conceived just for prelude with a group of artists and writers and performers who will be participating in this experiment. Recording failure also. So please come back to those events and please feel free to join us at 9.30 this evening when we will go over to the archive bar on 36th Street and celebrate together the opening night of prelude. Thanks.