 It's academic, and it's theater, the place where they both meet. You have to be audience and participant for each other. Intellectual practice is historical practice, it's cultural practice. Everyone? Everybody please? Examples of women sharing what it is that you do, sharing how you do that. There's no way you can ignore Latinos anymore. Work from all around the world you can come and see and talk about it. What time is it now in Kenya? It started out about different people and about different things. A whole sea of phenomena. Theater for everybody. Yes, everybody. That's just what should be done. And indeed my understanding of life, relationships, that has already changed. So, good afternoon and welcome to the very first event of the 2016 Prelude Festival. Thank you for coming. I'm Tom Seller, and this is... Is I a curator? We are the co-curators of the 2016 edition of this year's festival, and we will also be co-moderating this afternoon's conversation. Our title for the themed portion of this year's festival is Welcome Failure. And it's an attempt to ask what spaces for failure exist in New York City Theater, dance and performance today, what spaces for failure could exist, and what values our artists use to understand failure. So our conversation today is with three artists and centers around the practice side of that question. And our conversation will be streaming live on howlround.org, and there will also be time for you all to ask questions and join the discussion at the... Our three guests today are here not because they somehow embody failure, which was something that we learned about in making the invitations this year. But actually just the opposite. It's a very tricky thing. Quite the opposite because they've actually sustained experimental practices over time in a very challenging environment and have become very important creative forces in our New York City performance community. So because of their commitment to experimentation, that's exactly why we wanted to ask them about failure today. Now over to Antio to introduce our panel. Yeah, well, this is also the first of five conversations that will take place over the course of the next three days. Yeah, it is really our great pleasure to kick off the festival with Sybil Kempzen, Brian Rogers and John Collins. And as Tom said, exactly. So when we were thinking about the topic of the festival failure, this was really the first idea for a panel that came to mind because we are very curious what does that mean to incorporate failure in artistic practice? Question mark, how important is it and what does it mean to artists that are making successfully theater and performance in New York City today? And that's basically our first question to you. So what is artistic failure? What does it mean to you? I would say maybe this is kind of a provocation, but I think there's a degree to which it's true for me. Both in my own work and in the work that I do as a curator, I think there's nothing that isn't a failure. I mean, especially I think from my own work, I never consider it to be successful, which is mainly to say that I'm just always conscious of what I could do differently and better in sort of every aspect of everything that I do. And to me that's interesting. I don't think of that really as negative, but I feel like thinking of, I guess in some ways the word success is not that productive or useful in some ways. I feel that in going into any practice of art making, that it's especially in our culture in this country that you are setting yourself up for failure from the get-go. And I feel like the whole, if you're doing your job, then the entire process is steeped in failure, is directed toward failure, and originates from some kind of failure. And I don't think that that's always been true or that there aren't some, like I think of ancient Greek art or something like classicism where everything was about perfection and the perfection of the human form and the perfection of the universe. But I feel we are in a different place than that now. And that there's really no other choice. If you're going to go into it, then you are stepping into failure all of the time and that you never have it figured out. There's never a point where you're sitting back and putting your feet up and saying, I got it, I've mastered it, and I've achieved mastery. And this is it, that it's a constant shedding of ideas of what is good and what is bad and what is right and what is wrong and what is success and what is failure, that it's a constant state of flux and shift. And that is the practice and that it never strays from that. I think that whenever you hear that idea put forward about failure, there's something, and the reason why people sometimes giggle when they hear about that title of panel like this, is because they think of the failure immediately means, oh, you, that a lack of success or that failure means you didn't, you lost, you know, nobody thinks you're any good. But I got a very different idea about failure in relationship to my work through what Sarah Jane Bales wrote in her book, which was called Performance Theater and the Politics of Failure. And that, the way she looked at it and the way I kind of came to understand it and relate to it, was that failure was more to do with like, had more to do with intention and with did the thing you intended to happen happen. And in the work that we do in live theater, the thing that I fell in love with early on about live theater was that the thing that you intended to happen almost never happened. I mean, that's, and that's why you love it, you know, is you get up on stage every night and try to do the exact same show again and you have to fail to do the same thing because it's live, because it's real. And then, you know, then I started to understand that as a really beautiful thing. And in our early work we even staged fake failures, you know, in the, we would want the audience to think something had gone wrong just because that was always a thrilling thing to experience in the audience. You know, then you're really there, it's really happening, it's really live. So failure to me has always been, yeah, a starting point. And I completely relate to what you said, Sybil, about, you know, that you never master it and that you're always working at it. So in a way it's about always setting your goal a little farther than you can actually reach and that's what keeps you moving. Sounds a little depressing though. I mean, you're saying there's always... It's very depressing. There's always this gap between the idea and its realization and you're never hitting the mark and every night you're going out to work. That's not depressing at all to me. That's really exciting. I mean, that's, if it weren't for that, we may as well, you know, work in a different medium for those of us who work in live theater. You know, because if it's, you know, if it's perfect every time, then you're not likely to have a unique experience watching it. So, but if you understand that to be true and to be a defining aspect of the form that you're working in, what do you deal with external expectations, the expectations that are attached to projects around your work? I mean, I'm sure you've all faced that in some sense. The marketing machine gets started early around your work. There are reviews, there are pressures that come from grants and from peer expectations and from the expectations of the institution, maybe the presenting or the producing institution. How do you reconcile your understanding as an artist of that inevitable failure with those external expectations? I think it's important to be able to have different hats. Like, now I'm going to drive the bus, so I'm putting my bus driver hat on. I'm driving the bus and then I pull over and then I'm going to get off and put on a different hat to do a different job. And so I think it's important to keep those as separate as possible. And I do feel that there's a lot of room for creativity in grant writing and in marketing and that that's part of our responsibility is to keep questioning those structures and those institutional machines all the time. I think for me the only recourse is that when I'm going in and doing what I need to do in terms of writing or making something that I have to completely ignore all of that stuff and especially because I'm not deciding ahead of time what the thing that I'm making is going to be, I'm going into a process, so I won't know until way later. Sometimes after the project is long over what it is going to be and so all of those attempts have to be, have to receive a certain amount of failure and sustain a certain amount of failure also. For me, I think it's really kind of a gnarly thing for me because I largely as an artist function inside an organization that I co-founded and still run. So those things all kind of collapse together. So when there's institutional pressure on me in terms of my work in certain ways that pressure is coming from myself wearing a different hat. And so the way that that's sort of fallen down for me over the course of 10 plus years is that in a sort of, it's both interesting and terrible, I've gotten to this place where I don't really think of any of these things as separate activities anymore. So going into the room and making a piece and writing a grant or planning a fundraising dinner or thinking about the payroll are all kind of similar practices for me now. They're all the same thing. So it's all in a weird sort of way just about showing up and that to me is the way in which I think worry less about things like marketing and reviews and that kind of thing. I mean part of it is also because I work on it quite small. I mean I've chosen to construct a scale around my work that's very, very manageable. And so the potential negative impact of certain things like bad reviews are, I think it's quite different for me than it might be for say ERS depending on where the work is happening and who's maybe reading a review and making a decision to buy a ticket or not buy a ticket based on the content of that review. That doesn't really happen so much at the chocolate factory. It's more or less going to be sold out regardless of what the reviews have to say because we're only selling a certain, and that's because the size of the house is small and the people that are coming are interested for other reasons. They tend to be more intensely interested in the thing that we're doing. They're not necessarily passive or casual cultural shoppers. But there are lots and lots of challenges I think around the systems that we all have to interact with in terms of writing grants and deciding how we're going to talk about something that we're going to make before we've made it. But I think there are ways to flip that into a place where it's actually useful. I think to go to your point, I've started to see writing grant applications from my work to be a really interesting exercise of, I guess, interrogating the thing that I think I'm going to do. Knowing full well that what I ultimately will do will probably bear very little resemblance to the thing that I say. It's still interesting. I think for experimental artists or avant-garde artists or anybody who's doing anything that is trying to be new in some way, it's useful to distinguish between two different kinds of failure that I think we're already risking conflating. And one is what we started talking about, which is their process failure, which is how we look at the way we make things and a certain kind of excitement and imaginative potential of things going wrong, of things not going the way you intended them to and therefore discovering something. And so when I think about failure on that side of this line, the process side, you know, it's always an exciting, you know, it's not just a thing to tolerate, it's something to strive for, you know, is to always make sure I'm open to things going differently than what I had imagined or intended. But then there's, on the other side of that line is a different failure, which I think what this question is a little bit more about, which is really the failure that's connected to risk. It's the thing you are risking when you do something risky. And that means, and that is more about people's expectations, but it's about the thing you make when it gets out of your hands, you know, is it, you know, and I think that, again, doing something, you know, I'm always thinking about people's expectations and how to work through them or over them or around them and surprise an audience with something they were not expecting. And that comes with a risk built in that in that other way it is going to fail. They're not going to like it, you know, and there are a whole bunch of measures of this, you know, and then they're sort of on a spectrum, you know, there's, will we get the grant, you know, will we get a good review, will we get invited to tour the show to somewhere, or just, you know, all the way down to is each individual person going to have a good experience? And, you know, you can, and there's always going to be some success there and some failure, but I think that's, that kind of failure is very real and is the really negative kind, because that's, you know, when we do something experimental or, you know, risky in some way, we still want it to work, but we know it won't always. So that's something that just, I guess, comes with the territory. Yeah, well, so that's right, and I mean, all three of you have been doing work for a long time now, so you have built, created a voice, so people that place again in the expectation question, but has failure compared to when you started, so are the stakes are higher now, so is it easier, actually, to deal with failure, or is it, you know, because people also know you, maybe they trust you, like, well, maybe that piece, you know, was not, that people's capability, but they come back because they love your work, and so is it easier now or harder to deal with that? I don't feel any different about it, weirdly. I guess there's more, I do feel more pressure, but I think it's the same, I think it's the same problem if that is a problem, from beginning to end, while the problems within the work itself change all the time, those problems of worrying about getting support for your work, which I guess is what we're talking about, right? It's like external support for your work that never changes, that worry, if you're going to accept it as a worry or a concern is always going to be there, I think no matter what, we have no control over that, really. I can't manage what people are going to think of what I'm doing at all, and if I think that I can, then I'm in big trouble, or if I think that I should try, right, to do that, to make sure of how people are going to receive anything, but I think those pressures are always there before you start making work until after you're not making work anymore. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is a total cliche, but I think that for me, I think when I came, when I started doing, when I decided that I was going to try to have this certain kind of life when I was in my 20s, I think there was, I think I did have maybe this sort of ridiculous fantasy that at a certain point it would become less difficult, and it definitely hasn't become less difficult, it's become more interesting, and I feel like it's not about, it's not about overcoming failures, it's about failing differently, or failing larger, or failing better, and those are all things that I think I've just come to accept more as I get older, but I don't think that it's, nothing, literally nothing, has changed, except that I, you know, now I do this for a living, and then I have to sort of every day reinvest in the process of trying to be able to continue to do this for a living, and that just never ever ever stops, but I do think one of the things that I think has become, it has been coming into my head a lot more lately, and it has to do with my own work, but it also has to do with the work that I present in my venue, is that I think there's actually a really interesting danger of failing at failing, that in a sense that, you know, I think that there's been the kind of, you know, all of the words that we use around experimentation, and I think all the words we use around supporting the creation of work, I think there's lots of sort of cliched phrases, like, you know, room to fail, freedom to fail, that I think have actually kind of been co-opted in an institutional sense, and it's actually now possible, and it's kind of related to what each of you was saying a minute ago, that it's actually quite possible to fail in a way that's expected, if that makes any sense. So, can you maybe give an example of that, what that might look like or mean, and also, you mentioned trying to fail bigger or fail harder, which I think was where the title for this conversation came from Samuel Beckett's famous declaration that the artist's job is to fail big and hard and nobly. Can you give us an example of maybe something you did in your practice to fail harder or bigger, or also an example of what it means to fail in a safe way or an expected known way? Could be from your own practice or something you've witnessed anonymously? I do, I keep thinking of this exercise I do with my students where, and I teach performance writing, and so I'll say, oh, the first day I make everybody say what is the greatest play in the world, or what is your favorite play, and you can only pick one, and then there's a bunch of other super annoying questions that Mack Welman did to us at Brooklyn College when I was there, and so I make them say what is the greatest play of all time, and then a few weeks later, in fact, I'm gonna be doing this with them on Friday, so I hope they're not watching, but I will, none of them are here, better not be here, you little brats. But I'll say what is, what makes a great play great? Think of the play that you said the first day, and what elements does that contain? We make this list of all the things, and everyone's a little bit stumped because it's like, well, it just should be, isn't that obvious, and so we make the list, and then I say what makes a really bad play? Think of the worst play that you've ever experienced, either reading it or seeing it, and then we list those, and it's always way more fun of a list to make, and then we do a writing exercise where they have 10 minutes and they have to write a play using all that has all, you know, the great elements, and they only have 10 minutes, so it's an impossible task, they're going to fail at it, so some of them really love it, but mostly this very heavy energy comes into the room because they're thinking about death of a salesman or Hamlet, and how they'll never, how am I ever gonna measure up to that, and all the things that I said about the structure, I'm not really going to do that in this playwriting class, but I feel like I have to, and like, so then we do that, and then I give them 10 minutes to write the worst play, and all of a sudden, like, everyone's little devil horns come up at their desk, and the energy of the room completely changes, and people are like, they just can't, like, write it out fast enough, and there's all this joy and craziness and a sense of defiance or rebellion, or, like, whatever, like, all of a sudden, everyone's creative engine, whatever it is, is, like, revving up really fast, and because they're being given total permission to go headlong into failure, and it's always very moving to watch because suddenly everybody's juices are flowing, whereas before it was like, oh, God, you know, it's so heavy and so depressing, I can't now remember what the question was, but okay, yeah. But I don't know, that makes me think of something that I was going to say, which is that, you know, those students at that moment are getting to enjoy the privilege of beginning and doing something wrong, and I think that that's where, you know, a lot of work, maybe like that we all make, sometimes starts from a kind of contrarian impulse where I don't want to do it that way. I'm going to do it, you know, I'm going to break all the rules, I'm going to make something that doesn't look at all like it's supposed to, and that is a wonderful privilege of just starting out, of doing something, but what I thought of in your previous question, though, it does begin to make a difference if when, you know, when you first greet your audience and they don't know who you are and they've never seen your work, then you get to do that. You get to show them the worst play and build with it, you know, and they can't believe you did that and it's all fun and exciting, but then after a while you do that successfully a few times, say, and you have, you know, let's say one of the trappings of success is an audience that continues to come back and see your work and tell you how much they like it. Then you're in a very different position where you have to fail not against some, you know, other objective model but against yourself, and that's something that I think we found because, you know, for a while we had this idea that we would just not do what we were supposed to and then after a while the thing that we got used to being, we became familiar with a new set of rules which was how we did things and then we needed to not do that and that's a lot harder. So by we you mean ERS as an ensemble. And are you talking about a specific moment in the ensemble's evolution maybe around gats for example when you had a kind of breakout? Yes, it was actually before that. It was after about six years of making work and we had actually tried to figure out what the right way to make an ERS show was and that seemed to be, and you know we'd had one show that we thought was better than all the other ones and we got to just keep repeating that and it was a deadly exercise. It worked out terribly and mostly because we just didn't feel good doing it. There was no fun in that. And then we started to ask ourselves just as an exercise well let's do the thing we would never do. And so that was a way of trying to orchestrate I'll try to keep this in the language of failure but it was trying to orchestrate a sort of failure to do to be ERS and to fail to do an ERS show at least according to some sort of simplified model of it that we thought up and that became really helpful. That was a big revelation. So that's really interesting and I wonder what kinds of changes to your process you would make in order to open up new room. We basically just decided we did not have a process and that having a process a thing that, you know, a series of steps was a bad idea for us and we just needed to make sure we didn't ever do that. Even though we do it by accident all the time, you know, repeat ourselves. You just started your own company Before that you worked, you collaborated with a lot of artists and starting your own company did that was there the difference or was there a shift in how you... Yeah, it really was the last thing that I felt like doing to be honest and now I'm really paying like I'm doing all the budgets and like it's so horrible and I'm hardly writing at all but I did I just there were some people in my life that I trusted other artists who kept telling me over and over you have to start your own company for years and I was not listening because I did not feel like doing that. It was so much easier just to write just lock myself up and write and write and write and write and I had a great period when I was able to do so many different projects all over the place but I I just started to listen to these people I mean I knew that I trusted them and I guess the impulse to start writing came from being a frustrated performer and so I started writing stuff for myself to perform in and so I feel like it's not that I was becoming frustrated but I felt like I needed to put my money where my mouth was or something because the writing was so crazy and then I didn't always know how to answer the questions that came up about it and so I it's almost like the general who sends their troops out into the war and then stays back at the camp and has a beer and I felt like I wasn't really getting in there and I I was like drinking a lot of beer I was drinking so much beer and it got lonely and tanked and the soldiers came back and no one wanted to party with me because they had been fighting all day so I decided I just would start I would just see what happened and I really just started mentioning it to people at first just talking about that I was going to do it and I just felt this energy behind it which was similar to the energy that I felt from people when I started performing my own writing and so I sort of felt like okay this is the right track it's not what I feel like doing but it's the right path and so now I'm in there and I think my writing is changing a lot and I feel like I have way less control over the actual writing now because I'm doing all this other stuff that I feel the effects of what it has to serve or something I'm not sure what's happening but I'm doing it I got a budget in the oven right now almost done with it it will deepen over time it will deepen over time so you mentioned writing and that's interesting to me because in science for example where experimentation has a certain methodological rhythm where each experiment is then evaluated systematically in order to determine how to move forward with the next steps etc and there is an evaluation process that's extremely important whether the experiment succeeds or fails is determined in the evaluation so what kind of evaluation process do you do for yourselves about the success or failure of a given project? it must be different for solo artists or for writers or if you're a solo filmmaker then if you're an ensemble then I imagine it's a more collaborative evaluation but I'd be curious to hear how you determine and evaluate your work for yourselves I have two answers I'll speak as wearing my curator hat and organizing seasons and putting all of this energy into the work of other people for me it really is quite simple at the end of the year if I feel like it's really, it sounds counter-intuitive maybe but for me it's really important that looking back at a season that's happened that the work not all feel good I mean I feel like if I programmed a season that was really successful then I wouldn't, that would just be a message to myself that I wasn't working hard enough to identify people, to identify artists who were really pushing on something because if the artists are really pushing on something they're not all going to make pieces that feel and it's so subjective I know but that feel successful in some way and so it's really important to me that there be a really interesting balance between just different the response to the work in that way in terms of my own stuff the stuff that I'm making there's something that you've said in your very first answer at the beginning of this conversation that I think choosing to work in this to do this kind of work in this country in this culture is such a ridiculous an impossible undertaking that for me it really does come down to at the end of the day it was did all of the effort and the money and the time that I invested into something did it feel worth it to me and I don't mean did it pay off just sorry, did I feel like it was not a complete waste of my time because virtually almost anything else would be less stressful to do so for me for me to feel satisfied with just even the labor of doing it it just has to somehow feel worth it and that means a lot of different things but it mainly is sort of just do I feel do I it's really kind of a gut response situation for me I guess I would I relate to that but I this is a question you get asked when you grant sometimes how will you evaluate the success of this project and that always strikes me as like I don't feel like I'm really the right one to ask that question to what I'm making is do I have to it feels like the only real measure of the project's success is like something that happens inside the mind of someone watching it that I can't get at I don't have any way of reading that I can have people come up to me and say this great experience or have people come up to me and say I didn't get that at all what's wrong with you guys but that's it's hard to measure that and I don't and in a way I mean when I see that question on those forms sometimes I draw a complete blank I really don't know it actually feels like that kind of the success of it is so out of my hands I mean I know I know a feeling working on something a certain kind of excitement that I get there's sort of drive that gets ignited to keep doing it and to keep pursuing something that I guess is the closest thing I can imagine to knowing success in a way is that I am still feeling determined to do it so how do you know what to do next is it purely impulsive well that's the other I don't know I mean maybe I mean the one thing that I do try to make sure of is that I don't do the same thing twice or that if even if I am doing you know we did a novel we're doing another novel at least it has to feel like a completely different thing you know in the early days one of those things I thought we'd get good at is you know knowing from the beginning how it was going to go and not having to sort of face off with the void you know and but you do you have to do it every single time and the sort of terror of failure the terror of not being able to think of anything is a necessary starting point every time so I don't know and I guess I shouldn't I think that I'm so glad that you brought up science because I think about science all the time and I love science and I also hate it so much and but I think the one thing that I hate about it the most is the is this patently false commitment to being objective and that's even possible and that we must remain objective at all times and I feel like from like 1850 to 1950 and now you know I feel like it kind of petered out somewhere really recently but when science came to rule the way we look at reality and that we have to keep our own feelings totally out of the picture and that's how we'll evaluate you know and I so I think about science so much because I feel like it has to really balance art one of the jobs of making artwork is to balance that kind of tyranny that happened during that 100 year span and so I feel like it has to be subjective and I answer that grant question in the same way I listen to what people say and I have a feeling about it deep inside myself that's feeling with a capital F but I listen to what people say and how varied it is and that's how I evaluate it and I really like when I hear from someone I don't really understand what happened I had a good time is always to me a great response or I didn't really get it it wasn't my cup of tea but I had some laughs or something like that you know that they're going to take it and chew on it later it's not just going to be like I got it that was great good night and then they're on to the next thing it's like yeah I don't know sorry I just didn't have very much else to offer then I'm like okay or that was awful and when there's all different responses that always feels like okay that's a positive evaluation yeah well it's interesting so the responses it's sort of similar right? every project is different and responses are different and I wanted to quickly come back also to Brian what you were saying like wearing your producer head it's a really wonderful position because of your work like really building a wonderful audience that trusts your taste and your curation and probably also a board that is behind you and you know goes into fire for you that might be the same for you John and Iris so are you doing that board and all of that stuff? one of these days I'm going to I think there's the support system take your time with that there's the support system that you know you rely on I mean it's all I run the chocolate factory with Sheila with my partner Sheila we do have there are there are structures of support that we've managed to build up over the years and we do have a great board at the moment it's so much work to develop those things and it's work that doesn't really stop and it never feels and this is not a complaint it's like feel quite blessed actually to be in the place where I am but it's not a thing that ever for me has achieved any kind of any feeling of solid ever felt like it's not just going to disappear tomorrow and that's just I think part of what it means to do it and I'm always having we're always having to think about who who else we might bring on to our board and how we're going to you know in this kind of chess game kind of way like make them like us over the next 18 months and like help them to understand what it is that we do and then all of those things really do go into it I think but I am really lucky and I think we do have again the scale of my place is quite small so I don't want to make it seem as if I'm some kind of great impresario but we do have a really beautiful audience I don't know that they come because they trust me or my taste they're just we're just very tied to a community of artists and other kinds of people in New York who have just kind of coalesced around this kind of work I mean I do think that my work as a curator makes it it does contribute to something but I don't think that I definitely don't think I sit in this position where like people are coming to see all these shows because I chose them it's not really the but to your point yeah I feel very lucky that I have those things and I don't and on the scale that we're working I don't really have to worry I don't worry maybe I should worry I don't really worry about what the members of my board or the audience are going to think about the work that's happening I mean I think the main reason that I do what I do I think the strongest impulse always from the time I was you know a kid was that I wanted to be inside a sort of social situation I wanted to be among people that I liked and trusted in and could play with and where a kind of chaos could be going on and everybody was happy about it and so I think that's been my impulse from the beginning is to sort of I mean I can't I've been asked to direct things outside of my company a few times and I can't and I don't know where to begin to imagine myself in a vacuum and then starting to put something together around me I can't think creatively unless I'm inside that group of people so and that you know and as we've gotten bigger you know 25 years ago that was like five other people in somebody's apartment you know and now we have an office and we have a staff and we have a pretty big board but we try to build all of that the same way we don't think of just the actors as being an ensemble the people who work people who only work in the office or some people work in the office sometimes you know it's all one thing or at least we try to make it that way and so that kind of it's in a way like those people are not just they're not support they are what I'm doing they're the place where I'm doing it so this is interesting in terms of the values that you have as makers but I'm interested maybe to not think about the audience and to go back into the studio and the rehearsal situation a little bit in situation to get it exactly what John just said about that sense of play and holding on to it maintaining it what kinds of things do you do in the creative act in rehearsal in the studio to cultivate that chaos that you say you love I mean if you watch ERS in rehearsal one of the things that you've just enjoy so much is the kind of freewheeling myths of the ensemble everywhere they go basically and it's great trail of destruction but on the other hand the process of rehearsal is so often about smoothing things out or making them cohere or something like that how do you guard against that how do you maintain that sense of play that cultivated chaos how do you bring imperfection into the process can you talk about some imperfections that happened that you maybe decided to go with or incorporate or build into a project gosh I think most of what we I don't know I'm thinking about when Sybil and I were working together on her play and you know the way I think I think part of it I'm for some reason I'm thinking about Susie crawling across the floor yeah I'm sitting here like Susie soco Susie crawling across the floor which you know we were working on that one scene and it seemed to be getting a little bit serious maybe or something but there's a kind of I think everyone's familiarity gives everybody permission to you know be mischievous and in this case you know Susie just I think in order to kind of mock the seriousness of the scene did some sort of interpretive dance crawl across the floor and that became a character this is Sybil's play fondly Colette Richland in New York Theatre Workshop last year and she tells more about that scene and what what was supposed to happen and what did happen it's like a household scene and it's very you know everybody's Lorena's here she could probably do some of it for us and they're really talking in enormous detail and everything is really like so pulled together almost like the whole scene is in a corset or something and then Mike's music on top of that everything's happening very painfully slowly and Susie was just sort of getting into the music and just started to sort of molesting Mike a little bit over here and everyone has known each other for tens of thousands of years so everyone knows how to you know there's only a few of them so everyone knows how to sort of turn the knife into one another in performance so it was really fun to write for that group having performed with them also know where all their buttons are and how to do this and I could make them say stuff and give them stuff that I knew they would love to say so that was really fun but I think I always thought about John and Susie that Susie always brings like the chaos like the Dionysian chaos to John's Apollonian sense of order and balance and and it's generative and sort of knocking things off kilter all of the time no matter what and it's a beautiful working relationship to watch and be a part of and I think on some level we all do that with ourselves there's a certain amount of order and there's a certain amount of chaos and everyone has and I find that every project has a place where okay now it's time I got to get this I got to pull this together and you know, neaten it up somehow and then there's times where you can't do that anymore I have to just let something happen that is out of my control and it depends on what kind of work you're talking about that what am I talking about a ratio it's like that ratio and the time you're going to bring order into the equation or some people start out with a very orderly situation and then unravel from there and then bring it back into order at some other point but I think that that seems to be something that is really important and that you have to figure out a new for each piece I feel like it's not always the same I think it's a willingness to be completely irreverent with whatever we have in the room even if the writer's in the room with us but in that and in that respect that's a kind of unspoken acknowledgement that we all have just to bring it back around to the fact that what we want is a kind of messy failure that what we want is something that isn't some piece of perfection that very clearly communicates exactly one point you know I don't think we trust that and also you know we it's just where we're comfortable you know and so we've learned that not taking ourselves too seriously is probably the best way to get out of our own heads and so there's a kind of work that we believe in which is always kind of falling apart and it's a big mess and that I get the job of trying to put it back together but that's fun I was going to say poor John I asked for it maybe stepping back for a second and thinking about the ecology of New York performance how many places are there for that kind of experience of kind of chaotic performance where you don't know where it's going or that's going to veer out of control I'm always thinking back to the 80s when I started seeing performance work as a teenager actually and seeing so many wild performances that really did fail often but also were very exciting in the way that they were breaking through into new artistic aesthetic territory now it seems partly because of the changes that are taking place in our city that there are fewer spaces for that kind of that kind of wild experiment can you talk about that as artists what does that mean to you? Do you feel like you are hemmed in in some way? How do you find a place within this urban economy shall we say to allow yourself that space to play? I mean for me I'm sorry to jump in for me when I came to New York in the 90s I think New York always begins for everyone at the moment that they arrive here but when I came to New York in the mid 90s I was actually I think the first time I ever saw an ERS show I may have been when there were all these places on Ledlow Street there was a little kind of theater district and there were all these venues and I felt like the venues what the venues were and where they were and who was sort of running them that was constantly shifting there was this kind of sense that spaces might be short lived but there would always be some new one popping up and that went on for a while and then it kind of stopped like it sort of went away very quickly and I think that I don't if that's happening in New York now I don't see it so as soon as possible there's this new underground that I'm just not aware of but I think the conditions are such now that it's not so easy I think it might not be really be possible to find to find a storefront somewhere and then negotiate a rent that you can actually pay and then have it long enough to even make anything happen but that kind of real low to the ground ecosystem was super super important to me as a kid coming here and being able to see all of this stuff that was clearly being done by artists without resources and it was being sometimes being put together very quickly and there was something very ramshackle about all of it but the energy that came the energy that that the immediacy that that provided was really really incredible to me and I think that it's I wanted to try to preserve when I started my own place with some version of that but it's never it can never be once you start to um any degree of institutionalization kind of works works against that kind of um freewheelingness to me and I think that's I think it's probably to the detriment of sort of the younger you know the new turnip truck comes in they all fall off of it and where those kids go to to make things I don't know where those kids are going to make things um and I don't think that the opera there's sort of not this kind of low to the ground series of opportunities that that are sort of accessible to almost anyone who just wants to put the effort in it's kind of like everything a certain kind of thing gets noticed more maybe than it did 25 or 30 years ago where there was a kind of freedom to you know operating those storefront theaters and I'm sure everybody had some kind of dream of success or being able to you know pay their rent with with their art but and maybe I'm just romanticizing this because this is the way I saw it when I was 20 you know was that everything was so gritty and nobody gave a shit you know and it was you know and you could just you know people were making big mess on stage and the nobody uh you know nobody had an equity card and this kind of thing and so but that maybe that was I mean I always wonder if I'm just kind of you know if I'm seeing it through this window that has you know what I first saw here and what I'm now seeing here but then you know I suppose hopefully they're they're younger people out there now who are to whatever extent they know about what I do they're going like I don't want to do that I want to do something completely different I don't want to you know I'm going to risk I want to take a risk of doing something that nobody's tried before and I have to believe that still happens on some level but I don't know I mean you have your kids yeah I watch what happens with them it's it's disheartening because you know New York used to be a really great place to come if you wanted to be an artist because it was so cheap to live here which is hard to imagine now and so everybody came and so undesirable city at some point yeah yeah it was bankrupt in the 70s yeah and the whole nobody wanted to live in the east village and nobody wanted to live on the lower east it was like a last place you wanted to go and so it's harder to come here and live an artist's life unless you have support from your parents from home and I see them all struggling when they when they come here it's it's it's hard to watch but then there are some of them who I mean a lot of them just end up going to grad school and then I'm not sure what happens or some a lot of them they teach are in grad school and then they're like they don't know what to do after maybe go back to grad school and so but there's some of them who were doing stuff like in their bedrooms like they would invite people at like this this this one woman I had as a student just would invite people into her bedroom and they would sit on the bed and she would stand in the space next to the bed and do these beautiful little performances and so I guess there's always there's always some place and I often have wondered if public performance won't make a comeback in in some way but it really seems like there's not even that much public space anymore where you might be able to get away with doing a performance without you know somebody calling the cops I mean it's it's like even the performance of self in this city has I feel seen it become so much more constrained and homogenized during the time that I have lived here there used to be you know even just to live here was it was a performance and you had a complete creative agency and you could go as far as you wanted to go and I see that so rarely now and when I do I'm like oh my god she's on roller skates and oh my god I remember you know and I remember and I remember and it's so it's devastating in a lot of ways and I don't feel that I've even lived here all all that long but it's the changes have been swift and I don't know what I don't know I don't know where it will end I don't know what will happen well I think it might be time to open up to the audience if there are any questions from you before we go down that road of lament and remember you guys remember anybody wants to ask a question hold on we are recording so we will have a mic yeah I really don't know why we have these terms success and failure because the parameters have changed so much in every field and success and failures are not diametric opposites and I just very uncomfortable because I've never understood what failure is we learn so much from failure and you know everybody is so attuned to monetary success so they measure everything in terms of profit but if it nourishes your soul in whatever capacity then it's got to be you know rewarding and worthwhile agreed I guess there's always some tension there you know I mean there's always going to be some sense of what is success and if it's whether it's fame or money or whatever it is we won't be able to banish that completely but maybe pushing back against it as hard as we can is healthy it's interesting what Sibyl says about the professionalization of the arts also everybody going to graduate school and getting an degree everybody incorporating their ensemble into a 501 C3 and a little kind of corporate unit and one wonders what the relationship is between that and experimental possibilities for the form hi you're talking about like yourself as artists and also as curators and I'm just wondering how the idea of failure affects you personally you know like as human beings which you are as artists and curators but that sense of value and how to get challenged at a personal level with those kind of things I mean I feel like I am a failure in every other way in my life that there's nothing else and I'm saying it jokingly but I'm totally serious it's something I've been thinking about lately I don't have anything else in my life I have a dog who's great but that's it and so it saved me and I think like I came from a place of failure my whole family situation was of failure from I was born into a failing marriage and it was just like constant and and it's fine I found something to do but I feel very very lucky that I did find an artistic practice because it really did save me I really don't know what would have happened to me otherwise so yeah I think for me that's just about being able to contend with the unknown constantly because I think when you when you sort of set yourself on a course like this where whatever success you can identify is the result of something unexpected or is the result of taking a risk or thinking you are going to fail somehow really you it's a constant struggle to just accept a lot of unknown I don't know what my company will be doing in three or four years I don't feel like it's the right thing to do to make a plan either because when it does work when it is when it does give me some feeling of success it's because I stumbled on it because I found it not because I thought it up and planned it out and there are other kinds of lives where that works and that's what you should do so it just is about constantly you know working to develop a good relationship with this dark unknown yeah I I relate to that so much I feel like I have gotten really accustomed to just going through my life with this kind of low hum of anxiety that's just sort of there and it's always been there and I think it will always be there and I've just gotten more comfortable with or more used to the notion that everything in my life is just like on a razor wire from but then you know and this is kind of very bouquetian or something but like I feel like one of the things that I sort of repeat myself as a monitor is that well I've I survived doing this yesterday so maybe tomorrow I'll survive doing this again kind of thing but I mean but you know it's like when I look at where I've you know I'm in my 40s I'm I don't have any you know it's not like I have a retirement fund you know I'm I started a venue with a woman that I was married to and now I'm not married to her anymore and that's all and there's all of these things that have just kind of gone but it's like but neither would I change it I don't know that I had in a I sort of don't know that I had any choice in the matter I feel too David we've as you've been talking there seems to be a pretty generous orientation toward the audience or maybe they like it maybe they won't I'm curious if you see as artists that the audiences do have a task could we apply a metric of success or failure to audiences can an audience fail to participate in a certain way or on the flip side could the audience fail in a productive way well I don't know I mean I always I I think about how I won't how I want to feel as an audience member and I don't want to have any responsibility when I'm sitting in the audience I do not want to be dragged up on stage I don't want the house lights to come on I want to be totally anonymous so I think when I think about the audience I'm thinking about lots of me's out there who who I don't who don't who are just there to receive and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with this and I think a lot of people probably have very different ideas about what an audience is but my very personal feeling about it is that it's all on me as the artist and I may you know and I may succeed with them in some ways that I wasn't expecting and it may not be all about what I intended but I you know I feel like I have to that's just part of what I bought into I have to accept as my responsibility whatever doesn't work for them and it doesn't mean I'm going to have to fix that doesn't mean that you know I absolutely owe a great personal experience to every single person but I feel like it's on me as the artist I sort of feel like if an audience member comes makes it to the place gets the butt in the seat success for the audience because theater is an event that unfolds in a shared moment of time in a shared space and if you make it there and you spend the time you can leave halfway through it's fine but you have to be there the only failure is not showing up I think I have a question about something that you guys were talking about about New York City being sort of impossible and America being a terrible place to be an artist being one myself I get a little bit emotional when that is the response because I'm doing it and I think there is an importance and a value in the impossibility of it that has always been there and I hear it a lot so I guess my question is do you see like what is the for you what remains the same back then and now can you pinpoint some things that feel that way sources of resilience among other things I feel it's really important to be comfortable with the sense of uncertainty and to try to see things more as a mystery instead because that makes it a little more engaging and really I feel that the human relationships are something that do not change and that John said it and I feel the same my first community theater project at age 12 was like I love all these people everybody is so much fun I love all these jokes everyone is making I just loved all of these people being together and that to me is what doesn't change and it alters and you know you have different configurations but for me that's what keeps me buoyant within it I mean I think that we haven't said this explicitly but maybe implicitly there's a criticism of the you know culture or we live in a country where there's not a lot of government support of the arts compared to other places and but when I think about that and it's connected to just the difficulty of doing theater in New York City which crazily is maybe one of the hardest places in the world to do this because this is a medium that depends on real estate and you know we could probably only do worse by trying to all go to San Francisco but it's the hardest place to do what we're doing but that's I don't think that's a coincidence I think that's what actually gives it all this life and I'm not just romanticizing the struggle of it but some of that impossibility and some of the just ridiculousness of you know doing it here is actually what gives it all this life and I don't think I would want to be now I mean I've been lucky been very lucky because I'm able to support myself doing what I do and that's and you know almost anybody who comes here to do it has to go through some time of not being able to do that for a long time and that's not to be taken lightly you know there is great injustice in that but I don't think I'd having said that I don't think I'd want to be in a place where the government gives my company a gigantic grant every year and we can make a show or not everybody's going to get paid I mean I remember hearing about what happened in Ireland when in Dublin when the arts council there suddenly cut everybody's funding because of the financial crisis and we knew what to do and I would never want to be in a position like that you know we're always having to scrap around and dig a thousand dollars here a thousand dollars here a hundred dollars here to make what we do and I think that keeps us alive I think there's something really I mean I don't know I travel to Europe I mean not as much as Tom does but I travel to Europe a lot to see work and I have relationships with a lot of artists and colleagues in Europe and there is still something about the energy of New York in particular that everyone is drawn to despite the really stark imbalances in support that happen everyone's still in one way or the other wants to be seen here and there's a reason for that I think that this is still the place where the weird people can find the other weird people and this is the place where and this is maybe one of the things that I think you know the the changes in New York I think have made this much more they may have accelerated this but I think New York has always been a place where I think New York teaches you that you're meant to do this by how much you have to do it I think there's always been a kind of winnowing I mean Sybil and I came to New York at basically the same time and how many people did we know in the 90s that were identifying as artists who were not doing that I don't know there's lots and lots of them it's winnowed and winnowed and winnowed over time and maybe that happens more quickly now but the people don't want to do it because they can't do anything else they're still going to do it and they'll figure out a way to do it and that's I think more to John's point more possible here than any place else I mean I also spent a lot of time all of these sort of second cities I haven't yet been to another city in the United States where there's a kind of homegrown scene that has achieved coalesced in the same way that it has here added something though and I don't want to take for granted that and I can only speak for myself but I come from privilege to some extent that what Sybil was saying before you have to have some help to be able to do this and I don't ever want to take for granted that even though I was temping and doing some theater tech work to get by and not making a lot of money or making a lot of debt I still had help and I think that maybe that is maybe that's objectively becoming a problem with how expensive the city is getting that it does sort of subtly some of the people that are getting weeded out we should acknowledge it's not just because they couldn't hack it it's because they didn't have parents in some other state to you know if not bail them out always make them feel like they were never going to fall through the floor if they couldn't get a job doing what they loved so I mean that's something I feel like we shouldn't glaze over that yeah thanks maybe one last question this sort of relates to something you alluded to earlier the funneling of people the encouragement of funneling people into the MFA program really in their life such that I was looking over this book that's called something like how I made it or how I got into playwriting it came out maybe a couple years ago and it talked about how the guy kept asking each of these playwrights that had they heard this thing if they hadn't made it as a playwright by 30 to forget about it has this affected experimental people taking going to school for stuff and not having real life experiences doing I don't know just other things and then possibly being encouraged to follow a particular track or pander to people with a particular kind of experimenting thanks I just would have to wonder like what because there's the playwright the model of the playwright who writes a play and then sends it out and somebody comes and like a theater is like we love this play we're going to produce it and then they produce it and then you know there's that model which I would not be sitting here if I had tried to follow that model I always just did it myself and I was if not over 30 like close I don't I mean is it yeah I don't know I think that you can write a play no matter what age and that like making it I don't know what I'm not sure what that means I don't know where that yeah you know and then all the theaters I was just looking at Abington no longer takes unsolicited submissions and the vineyard stopped doing it this year and suddenly there's only like two places in all of New York City that will look at a whole thing you know and I know the people's department is going to cut you know you just can't keep you know it's just this tremendous like tsunami but it just seems like this is just not the greatest situation I think it's very hard to write plays and just send them out into the world and hope for the best it just seems kind of tough that's very tough tough way to go I think this is probably an inspiring and productive place to end which I didn't actually think we were going to get to but hearing your examples of what sustains you and nourishes you has been really really helpful thank you all for your candor today I know this is not an easy subject to talk about in some ways and thank you for sharing your perspectives and your career trajectories with us for this conversation there is a 6 o'clock event called Pieces We Never Did in which participants in this year's Prelude Festival will be sharing also along a kind of personal lines about projects that they aspired to make but for one reason or another did not or which they were attached to but which never came to fruition for one reason or another so we'll take a short break and then return for that 8 o'clock event and also stick around for 7 o'clock and 8 o'clock when our special guest Matthew Ghoulish will be talking about the Institute of Failure and will also be offering us an original made for Prelude performance at 8 o'clock called Broken Red Balloon Dog New York Edition with a fabulous group of contributing artists and writers so a lot going on today will continue this conversation in the lobby and also this evening at 9.30, 10 o'clock the opening night party of Prelude will be at the archive bar on 36th Street really just up and around the corner so this is a conversation that could easily spill over into that opening night party as we all share our sorrows and failures together and also revel in the success of the opening day of Prelude coming. Thank you all.