 Thank you everybody, thanks for staying, we'll speak briefly and then we'll remind you that there's a party starting at 10 for the festival and I'm going to tell you the address at the end. Hi everybody, I'm Kristen Burding, I'm your security director here at the director of the prototype festival and you guys just saw the work of these three interesting artists who are all working in really different ways and I'm trying to find the thematic connection to have a discussion with the group of you. So I mean one thing just an obvious thing to talk about is that a lot of you have careers as individual artists and you've made this choice to work in a company context in an ensemble context and maybe you can talk a little bit about what brought you to that place as a creator. I started writing as a frustrated performer to perform in and then I I did a bunch of writing for like on commission for a company or other people and it was great and then I started to realize that I was like not liable because the play is usually only half written and then there's all these unanswered questions and I was like expecting these people other people to answer those questions when really it was like they were still writer of questions and so I decided at the urging of two or three people that I trusted other artists who were very close to me that kept saying you have to you're gonna have to start your own company it was the last thing that I wanted to do or felt like doing but then as soon as I did I felt like it is it's the right thing. Yeah um company I guess I guess a company for me formed out of necessity I'm better when I'm working with other people and I I like I always say I like to be the dumbest person in the world because I think I'm I'm pretty good at what everybody else is like way better than the work will be way better and it's true and I and like though the better I get out of the less I want to have to do with everything I want to get really amazing people um from original company members like Abigail Brownie to I asked um but I was like if you surround yourself with amazing people your work is way way better so why would I have only my ideas one could have the amazing ideas and abilities of like 10 people I was just going to say that we three of us live disagree a lot so what you do is really on something that makes it more valuable right if it like passes all three of the thresholds of our standards then we know it's an okay idea or not just okay it's like fine so there was a lot of different representations of gender tonight and talk about that in the pieces and also representation of gender and the way that your people were moving do you guys want to talk a little bit about your thinking about that maybe you guys want to start out with some folks. Sure um oh I think we were thinking of uh the musical My Fair Lady and obviously it's deeply problematic and but we love it so fun it's great um and then you we were remembering watching it as little girls and then we watched it and we're like especially sad because Rex Harrison was like so sexy to me when I was a kid I really thought he was he played Henry again and then you go back and you watch and it's like he's such a misogynist he's such a jerk um so that was hard to grapple with and then I think ultimately like this the song is in the musical it's sung by a man but it's just sort of like more fun it's a more fun song and so that's why we chose to do it does that feel right it's a beautiful song we had long conversations about our own personal gender identity and that didn't find a way to um use much of that and it became more about the musical than our personal experiences yeah but I think we are just at the beginning of trying to think about gender and how we represented it and how like that has to do with appearance and language which all might sound really obvious yeah but that's what we're thinking about about about gender I don't have a good answer right now you don't no no I mean there's a couple of things I mean I think the way we generate movement is and like the physical vocabulary is everybody's making stuff and then it gets put on all these different bodies so you already have a uh like there's all there's already like stuff's already spliced from the very beginning that's one way I don't know it's it's a it's a long involved question that I could babble about for a long time but I think that's the answer I want to give Matt in terms of what we looked at tonight mothering and sons yeah elder women and the disrespect of our elders yeah yeah yeah I think women particularly it wasn't all elders it was older women okay okay yes no that is true that is true I didn't realize I was thinking about that so specifically but I have been a lot and um life stages that we don't do a lot of life stage honoring in our culture and so I'm trying to do some of that in the rituals that we're doing to sort of bring it back and so that we um look at ourselves in our different groups and all that we offer and the various roles that we play um honoring that especially especially with the elders I feel like it's so don't you really rarely do that enough and um and with all all genders and um anyway that's in the project in the larger project I guess in this monologue yeah there's it just was based on one story of something that happened when I was a kid but then um thinking about all of you because it was a ceramics class with all of these older women and it was great I loved going I learned so much from them it wasn't all bad stuff and that I'm so glad that my mother took me to that because they were really really great and um I don't know I just feel really lucky to have had that experience I guess but um I guess just writing about it from personal from personal perspective yeah it's nice to hear something that um is talking about elders it's actually not talked about very much yeah they're like the most silenced group of people and they're the ones with all the wisdom and they have all this experience that is not brought into the conversation a lot especially older women yeah yeah I mean they really know so much and we don't I don't know we don't it's it's there's a channel of communication I don't know how to open it because there are all these difficulties also because maybe because our world is changing so quickly that by the time you get to like your mother's generation then the generation before that there's so much of a like the world is completely different so you know and our um tradition there's no tradition anymore or they're very flimsy if they are and like commercialized now um so so it's hard I feel like maybe the traditions and the rituals of a traditional culture is what like it gets handed down even more of a consciousness of who came before and who comes in the generation after we don't really have that so much and there's all these difficulties because well look at she's dressed like a slut you know and we're because our generation is different all the generations do all this changing and it's not like when you grow up then you do this and you do you know we move in through these so we don't there's all this stuff getting in the way of our connection with other generations probably what are the when you start making a work um is what's the creative spark like for this piece what was the thing that got you started was it that particular recording that album yeah this one was um my friend hobby who's a DJ who's actually supplying a bunch of music for this piece uh we were at a party of his house and the Catskills had about three in the morning and he put on this loon record this is autobahn society recording of loon sounds and this guy talking about them and it's the most especially it's the most incredible uh recording and he would put different music underneath it um and we're like oh my god play it again and it was getting obsessed with it and then I began using it when I was teaching and I would have people improvise to it and I was like there's something there's something to this that's capturing a lot and then thinking about like watching humans interact with this and actually none of the text Rob was doing was from that recording that's also Rob wrote but the recording comes in later though in the piece and it just sort of blew out and become about so many things I've been teaching with it for about a year and just getting more and more obsessed with it and I thought like this has to turn into the vein Rob would you talk about how you came to yeah I mean we developed everything separately because I was abroad for the past two months and Dan was here and we started with this this loon text and then it kind of followed my own train of thought as I was sitting there writing for two months and became much more personal and to like me kind of exploring these scientific ideas and then it goes into more personal things about memory that I'm dealing with at the moment and I think for me it was I wanted to make something more personal I think Dan and I both wanted to make something more personal after you know I've done a bunch of stuff but I haven't done something so personal in a while I mean one of the things I worked on with Wayne I had a little bit of this personal in it but but this is going further in that direction yeah I'm talking about passage of time yeah passage of time I mean I think it's like things I'm thinking about now you know as I get older and I'm past this stage you know this is in this company for 10 years and I'm in this kind of period after that so it's it's a lot of reflection and and thought and wanting to move forward in a different way too so it's like can I take those thoughts that I'm having and somehow put them on stage where it means something to other people and I don't know if it does but I always feel like if you say something that in the moment means something very strongly to you then it does come across to other people yeah I mean I think memory perhaps is the thing that really is the three pieces the most time in terms of what you were talking about yeah because Sybil was also talking about this and then you guys talking about my great lady yeah yeah which is kind of a bad thing it's like good and bad yeah and it's not but they can lead to such terrible things this one also yeah this one this one also we've been with witness relocation we the last seven years most of the shows we've done have been written by Chuck me and before that we were always making we were always like going from zero in the room and this is the first time we've really gone from there's just like an idea and it feels really uncomfortably personal and with these people as well as my thermometer I was like if I if I'm nervous for people to see this and they're going to learn something about me that I don't want the public to know I was like okay this is working and this finally again really I'm just like oh you're really like people they want some shit and that's like that's exciting and that's the so that was also I think the driving force behind it was and both of us agreed on that was the direction we wanted to go in and I think also as an artist you always have to constantly re-examine why you're doing this thing because there's so many things that will tell you it's not worth it so a part of it I guess is this re-examination how do I find again what it means to do this stuff and why why like what good does it do like who's getting something do you guys have something you would want to add you talked about the life of a lady but I don't know if there's something yet so Maggie mentioned watching the movie I see a young girl which I did as well with my mom and then re-watched it recently and was like sort of horrifying because you know it's like it's a good man in it but it's also the Cinderella like Rags to Riches story and the man is like you're trash but if I clean you up and make you look good in time then you can be a princess but really you're still trashed and I do whatever I want with you and so I've just been thinking a lot about like how how deeply seated the Rags to Riches myth is in me and like how it affects me and how I think about myself as a woman or at this idea that like someday I'll have money which like probably is not true um and like and like this like kind of sunday myth um and also we've been really interested in like I've been working on a musical as like my day jobs like the musical form and my colleague is a movie musical and there's actually that intermission in the movie which is amazing because you have to go the intermission music um and so we're kind of interested in like you know a play that became a musical that became a movie musical like back to a play but maybe just with three people and like musicals are all about making money and scenes or they do that really well um and so that was like kind of where this like commerce element came in selling the candy and counting the money while the like showy things happening and and there's something of um in pick me on the end of in my fair lady Eliza at the end says to me and she's she's like you have made me so that the only thing that I can sell now she's like he said that if I could talk like a lady I could work in a flower shop but now I'm too high class to work in a flower shop so not the only thing I can sell is myself he's like you can marry well and she's like you can turn me into a prostitute but just um yeah so I think that was the sort of commoditization of the human the female body I'm just trying to objectify something else and also I think also sort of like thinking of your question also about how it started how the process started was like prior to this we've been working for about three years on it on a check off adaptation and that feels so like feelings and emotions and people's doing and and text and the musical is not that and I think it was sort of like it it felt like um sort of a palette cleanser to try and do that my life seemed like it was um also I think uh thinking about aspirational you already spoke of this aspirationalism and the performance of self and the language you use and that that your performance of self is um money or is uh working in a restaurant and going to restaurants using language and some circumstances and others um that that was another uh telling you now that the party starts at 10 at the liberty at 29 west 35th just one short block from here so thanks everyone for enjoying whatever else