 Good morning. Good morning, welcome back. Welcome back out there. I'm Todd London. I'm Marc Valdes. And we are holding the art part today. Two person theater conference today. If you were with us the last half hour, we were talking about art and love, particularly our own love for the art of theater. We're now going to talk about ensemble practice and group art and start getting into it. I want to say thank you again to HowlRound for live streaming us. Thanks, HowlRound. And we are in art changes. Roberta Uno, amazing program. Check it out. And we're here at NYU in the Cooper Square. And also to let you know that to reconfirm that we have a May Day art part challenge. And we are hoping that this conversation, our conversation, is merely catalytic for other conversations like it. So let us know through HowlRound, Twitter, or HowlRound Facebook, or the art part at HowlRound.com if you're willing to or eager to have a conversation of your own in private or public. And I would just add on to that just the reminder that this is a private conversation that we're having publicly. And it only represents our passions and our love and our interests. And we're not positioning ourselves as any kind of experts other than people who care about this field and this work, who love it deeply and who just want to spend more time talking about art. Yeah. And with each other, which sort of brings us into the next part of this because I feel like Mark and I have begun these conversations together many times because we do, as he said last hour, we find ourselves on panels together and in rooms together. And the conversations about the art we love happen so interstitially that we just wanted to give ourselves time and create a structure for ourselves and to encourage other people to do the same thing. This is never meant to be a two-person lecture. Totally. Not at all. So Mr. Expert, yes. So this section is really about group work. And in a way, it was the genesis for our discussion. Mark and I were in a room talking about supporting works of ensemble. And he asked a question about how do you maintain artistic practice over time and develop that practice? And we both were aware that the questions or the follow-up, the answers to that question, were very much about survival and not about the work itself, the practice, the generations of practice, and so on. So we want to dig into that a little bit. So I'm going to start a little bit didactically here just to ask you to define some terms if you would. And I ask you in the role for like two seconds, I just ask you to be the expert that you are having spent how many years as executive director of the Network of Ensembles Theater? Six or seven. Six or seven. During which you had to really come to terms with what is an ensemble, what is group creation, what is practice, aesthetic practice. So can you talk us through a little bit like first, what is an ensemble? Sure, I guess it's really important to say, especially since we're talking about group work, that group work happens in groups. And so even things like the definition of ensemble or these definitions of practice, so much of it had been done by the membership before I even got there. And so there was a groundwork that was already well in place that included definitions and a value statement and vision statement and manifestos. Because as ensembles I want, just think really big and ambitiously. And so what I'm repeating is not of my making, but that was created by a lot of other people and groups. So for NET, we defined ensemble as a group of two or more people who create over time, who pursue a specific practice over time to build a body of work. So it's a pretty broad definition. It's numbers, practice, and time. So that's good. I think we can just leave it at that for now. So tell me about what drew you to that particular work. In the last hour, you were talking about seeing an Eric N piece at Undermain Theater and it being an ensemble piece, but also that's a very voicy playwright. So what led you to ensemble work? And this is really meant to lead us into a conversation about what is particular and unique and powerful about ensemble practice. Yeah, and to the practice piece, I guess for me, it's more than just a methodology. Like it has to do with values, it has to do with a vision. It's a bit more, it's a bit bigger than just a how-to or just the steps that you take in making work. So I think practice, for me, has bigger implications because it kind of a bigger impact occupies more space than just a methodology. And there's nothing wrong with methodologies. Right. Can you describe the contours of that bigger space a little? Yeah, and I guess to that, the attraction to ensembles is there's something for me about working with a group of people that share some core values and principles and interests, but are each individuals in their own right with their own preferences and tastes and ideas and opinions. And there's something when you have to put it together. And I think that's where the larger those contours really start to matter in that there's a process, a methodology, that might be in place. But the contours and what gets shaped, developed by these specific people who work together over time so you can get places quicker, you can start to build on what came before in ways that are often really useful, but acknowledging that in ways sometimes it can be a little dysfunctional or difficult because you know how to push someone's buttons in ways that, because it's family. And so there's something about that practice, that way of working, that commitment to working towards something. And it's not just a finished product, but it's going back to that love piece, like why are we doing this at all? Like why are we doing this to begin with? That you always kind of inevitably end up circling back to by virtue of we have to reaffirm why this group of people is here this time and why we're going to do it again. And we don't want to do it just again, but why this now and how? So it's not enough to have individual commitments. You have to reaffirm and clarify and allow to evolve your shared commitment. So just to stay with this notion, I mean, we're talking about art, but also process around art. Can you, while I'm asking you questions, can you talk about maybe two different ensembles in the way they might create something? So I guess what I'm asking about is this notion of different commitments to different ways of working also create different fruit, right? Yeah. So like Cornerstone, and maybe is there another company that you know that different ways make different ends? Yeah, I mean, something that you and I've talked about before, and it's like that connection between process and aesthetics and how the project, for me, the process yields the aesthetic. And if you make something in a certain way, it's bound to be reflected in what the finished thing is and what it looks like and what it feels like. And so I think about the Cornerstone example of a company that works in with communities to create plays for and about the community with an ongoing ensemble of actors. But in a lot of ways, it's a very playwright-driven company. And so the stories get filtered through this one voice with questions in input and support from the ensemble and definitely with agency and input from the community, but always filtered through the singular voice. And so the plays have this wonderful, I don't know if you've seen a Cornerstone play, but there's a great mix of what is familiar playwright-driven theater at the same time as a joy, an agency ownership, something that just feels really specific to the place and the people in the community in a way that feels highly collaborative even though it was filtered through a single voice. And so there's something about that practice, that process that yields a very specific experience. Right. And can't be replicated by another group that just decides to go into community or work with a playwright. And other people do, you know what I mean? Like other people work in communities, Cornerstone's not the only one. And it's, but the thing that makes a Cornerstone play feel like a Cornerstone play is that combination of these individuals who've been working together for 30 years, some of them, you know, kind of pushing the limits of this methodology, this way of working and inviting new people to come in. And so it's highly dynamic and in some ways gets reinvented every time. And then I think about a theater like Double Edge, which you referred to earlier. So this is a company in rural Western Massachusetts. Live on a farm. The theater is headquartered on this farm. And here's a company that is committed to living together, to working together, and most importantly, to training together. And this training piece feels so key and central. Like you've seen their work. Like I'm curious, like I'm aware that I'm talking a lot. So like, how do you pick up on that? You know what I mean? Well, no, it's very interesting. I mean, in a way it's a good, the double example is good, because Cornerstone, I have experienced that sort of joy and discovery and jangle of having community actors with the professional actors of the kind of hyper locality that this is about our place, or this is about our issues, or this is about our mosque, or whatever. And also the playwright's voice in it. Double edge. Such a beautiful theater. And you can feel, in a way, in their work the whole history of their training. So you can feel this kind of Grotowski physical theater impulse. And then you can also feel, and this is where your description of ensemble as a collection of individuals actually really comes in, I feel in their work in a way the impact of every individual who's part of making it. So Stacey Klein, who is the visionary artistic director of the company. But then Matthew Glassman, who joined later, though still 17 years ago or something, who brings a kind of philosophical questioning to the work. Carlos, who brings both the stories of his Latin American upbringing, but also a whole different kind of presentational style. The circus work that they've done and continue to do. So there's a way in which when you see a double edge play, it's almost in, even though it's deeply rooted in their community in Ashefield, Massachusetts, and they work with communities, it's also steeped in this virtuosity of multiple influences that they have trained and developed together over 36 years or however long. And in that way, they run me like a city company. There's these companies that just commit the training piece. Del Art. Totally. And it's something about the rigor of practice, the rigor of just getting back into a studio and just trying again and pushing further and testing limits and deepening, the deepening connection and execution that really, in some ways, is technical and beautifully like, please, let us pay attention to the technical. And yet it's to commit to that. So Stacy, for 30 years, to commit to living on a farm in rural Massachusetts and train every day, talk about love. I mean, there's like deep, like you don't do that for anything other than just love. Well, the money. Oh, yes, all sense of that. Well, it's interesting. So I'm thinking about what are the edges of ensemble in a way, because every time you create a play, you put together a company. Absolutely. But even those with longer bodies of work, like a Steppenwolf or a Bloomsburg, we heard from Laurie McCants before, companies that essentially do plays, they do seasons, are they still part? I mean, what makes them ensembles? What is the through line of artistic practice? And do they have the same, this is too many questions, but I'm going to throw them out, do they have the same kind of ongoing methodology, or are they simply, or simply, and complicatedly, a group of artists committed to each other? So where does artistic practice come from? I think that there's as many practices as there are ensembles, right? And so just to kind of acknowledge that. But I think for a lot of the companies that the ensembles who take on existing publish can work, I think a lot of it is the commitment to one another, and what that does to aesthetics, and what that does to practice, of when you know I'm going to be back in the room with this person on this next project. There's also a part of it that is the agency to self-determine of artists who so who can, it's easy to feel that somebody else controls your fate. Somebody else decides the season. Somebody else decides who's in it. And you're just kind of, you're just auditioning, right? And there's something about the commitment to say we're going to commit to one another and we will make these decisions together. And we have a love for this way of making work, which is taking a script that exists and bringing that to life. And so that is its own practice and its own way of making that is different. And I think, you know, I'm glad you brought that up because I think that way of working doesn't always get called up in when we think about ensembles, we often think about devised work or original work, but I think that's part of the practice. And that does feel, in my mind it's connected, but it's a different way of working than say like a fully devised company. Yeah, it's interesting when I was at New Dramatis, which is a seven year residency program for playwrights and a laboratory theater. And we always, over the 18 years I was there, it felt like we were always trying to find better language to describe what it was. And at some point I realized that in my mind, at least, this was a playwright ensemble. Yes. Because for seven years that each was there, they weren't committed, the body of work that they were committed to was everybody's within that community. Their practices were distinct, their voices were distinct, though there were shared structures and procedures and processes within the organization. But maybe that's wrong to call it an ensemble. I tend to want to be as generous with the term ensemble than not. Because I think about like the definition of like two more people. And I think I can give a couple of people who are two people with formal ensembles. I can think of people who come together. So one of the things that we've often talked about is there's this commitment to like the challenge of keeping a company together in an ongoing way. And there are also ensembles who can't, like it's just too much, you can't sustain an everyday year round employment or kind of project that people go, they come together, kind of reconstitute the ensemble, make a project, then disband while everybody goes and does their thing. And then they'll come together for their next project. And there's something in that, as we think about aesthetics and sustainability, like how sustainable is that? And what does that do to practice? How aesthetically sustainable. Correct. As opposed to the organization. Correct. Well, I mean, I think it comes out of a financial organizational sustainability if you don't have to pay for everybody every week. If you're not providing 52 weeks of employment. But I think one of the questions of what kind of got us here in this first place is what happens to practice? What happens to aesthetics? If you can't sustain it regularly. If you're, and is that okay? Like maybe, I don't know. But it does make me wonder, like has to at some level have some kind of impact and what is that? Right. And what is the kind of working rhythm of the company? I mean, I guess I think about it in two ways, this notion of sustaining, because now I'm thinking about aging ensembles. Yes. Whether we're talking about John O'Neill retiring from Junebug or carpet bag players or Dell Art or Talking Band. These are companies with a commitment of sans glass within the family of sans glass. These are companies that have a commitment to carrying on and passing on. But each generation has a different commitment to the longevity of the work and the body of work. So what I've witnessed from more from afar than you is a sense of a moment in the aging of the company where the founders decide they need to groom and bring in new people. And sometimes it's from within a family. And sometimes it's from within an artistic community. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't because it's, again, the genetic code and the need and the want of the people who founded the company in the first place and they're staying together, the commitment is in them and you can't necessarily transmit that or can you? I think you can. I mean, I think that's where that's where practice comes in, that's where practice comes in, methodology comes in, like there's a way of working. And of course any new person is going to add something new to it and I think that's one way that ensembles sustain or sustain practice and sustain interest is that you shake it up just a little bit. I think I was talking to Jerry Stropnicki. So all wise things come from Jerry Stropnicki of Loomsburg Theater Ensemble. And I think it was him who said like, or maybe it's Terry Grease from Irondale here in Brooklyn. But he was one of these very wise guys. Really wise, great people who just said that there's a moment where you just wanted to work together. Right, like the emphasis is like, how do we just deepen this in this immediate circle? And you really want to explore and push that as much as you can. And then there comes a moment where like, you need to look out. Like you need to then go outside yourselves and think about like, who can we, now that we've deepened this and we've made this, how do we, what happens when it intersects with another community, another artist, another place, another way of working? And that's when the work really, you start to discover what the work is. Oh yeah, I see, I thought you were talking about something else, which is the desire to move away from the collaborative. So I had a conversation with a very dear colleague who I won't out here last week. And this is somebody who has committed a life to collaboration, teaching, study, work of collaboration. And in this person's older years, they want to basically return to visual art alone. It's like I don't want to collaborate anymore. And so there's that turning out in a way, which also as a person who's both worked with ensembles and worked with independent artists, individual artists, playwrights specifically, I can really sort of like the idea of collaborating and doing everything as a group or doing everything in a democracy or doing everything in a community for the rest of my life, I just want to lie down and let the train run over me. It's really hard. And yet, when you do it, you become so much more distinct and bigger at the same time. Yes. I don't know what the point of that is, except it's like something that you can really see. Like I think about a ensemble of kind of two, Pearl DeMor. Pearl DeMor, Katie Pearl and Lisa DeMor. It's a really good example because they're both independent artists of their own, both playwrights, both directors, sometimes performers. And yet their work together is so distinctive that it calls up things that they each have that don't appear as fully or in the same way in their own work. And so in a way, it's easier with just the two to see what collaboration brings. Do you know then with the cornerstone ensemble or something like, I mean, Mabu Mines is an example of a company that in some ways collaborated to allow each other to do whatever the fuck they pleased as much as in the early days they collaborated to make theater. Do you know? Yeah, and I think that's definitely part of it. It's like, that's how you can get to, it lets you branch out and try something new. It lets you, like you don't have to just be the actor, you can be the director, you can be the writer, you can be the lighting designer, you know? And then you can try new things, you can push yourself. And it's that thing of like you know, it's the agency that you have when you, it's self-determination, it's a big part of it. But I also wonder about like aesthetics, like what does this work look like? What does it feel like? And there's something about when you can take that kind of risk, because you know, you know that there's a group of people that have got your back, like they will keep you from falling, or if you fall they're there to pick you up. Or they're there to say like, man that's just crap, like no, no. Well I would think especially for certain roles in the theater, like I would think as an actor, there would, despite being a great sort of joy in playing lots of different things in lots of different contexts, there would be nothing as great as growing with a company of others who knew you, who you could speak several languages at once, because you share an absolute language. I mean when you see companies that have been together for a long time, and you see the way actors play together, it's more exciting than anything really. Absolutely. And they know that they can go out there and they can catch each other. Whereas, you know, I mean I'm always interested in Kirk Lynn's relationship with the Rude Max in Austin because it's such a dynamic ensemble and their work is so particular and joyful and crazy and wild, and Kirk is credited in most cases as the playwright and seems to thrive on being an ensemble member, an artistic director, as well as a playwright, and yet how different than going to your room and writing a play even based on what you witness in rehearsal. I mean thinking about it like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life is the method gun that the Rude Max created. Yeah, talk about that way. And so like they kept, as I understand the story, and can you please Rude Max correct me if I'm wrong, is that they kept getting questions about their methodology and their practice. And they didn't really have, they didn't really feel like they had one, they just kind of, they got in a room together and did what they do. And so, who they are. Yeah, and so they created this piece about a fictitious guru acting teacher and it's about a group of people who devote themselves to the methodology, the practice that she has created. And the whole thing is that they're doing, they're working on a production of Streetcar Named Desire without Stella, Blanche, Mitch, and Stanley. So like it turns out that you can do the entire play twice in like the span of like 90 minutes, you know? Yeah. When you take out those four characters. But it's brilliant, but it gets to me, like it gets to that, like they wrestle with legacy and practice and methodology and what is your commitment to like maintaining a way of working, where does the individual come in to push against that? When is it, when does it, does it just become artificial at a certain point of now you're just checking boxes of this is how we do it and this is the moment where, this is the moment where we all do this and this is the moment where we all do that. And how, and it gets to the personal lives of like what it means to commit to a group of people and. Well what it means to commit to keeping each other alive too and awake and to new possibilities. Yeah. To challenge. And it's beautiful and it's brilliant and it's like seriously like one of the best, like one of my like things that I just hold on as like amazing. And it has that amazing audience thing. The ending, oh yes. Where you have to fill out something and then it shows up on the screen at the end, yeah. No it's interesting because I think about, working with playwrights I think about voice and uniqueness a lot and yet for me my life changed when I got to college, I went to a small college in Iowa and I had a teacher there, a guy named Sandy Moffitt who had spent the prior summer studying with the Manhattan Project, Andre Gregory and the Manhattan Project who were their famous Alice in Wonderland among other things. And he gave me a book on the open theater, a book about the living theater. He gave me a Yale theater magazine, that drama review, all things. I mean I came out of the musical theater and did like TV commercials for car sales and then Chicago. And suddenly, and then I went and studied with the performance group and it was a really interesting moment. It was Richard Schekner and Jerry Rojo was the designer. They had been working on Mother Courage. We're starting this Maryland project about Maryland in Roe. We saw their Tooth of Crime and amazing work and then I subsequently saw several projects that they did. As Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray who incidentally I thought Spalding Gray was like the greatest transformational actor I had seen to date at that time before he started doing the monologues, they were starting to branch out into their performance work that became the Worcester Group. But to see that sort of moment and to see, I mean the work of the performance group which was so kind of like audience, environmental, rough, we're all there together, you feel the textures of the work and then to see the clean technological diffracted or refracted work of the Worcester Group develop over years of that kind of like intimate heady play between the participants and the kind of extraordinary, I mean there was a kind of almost a mess, a natural mess to the stage craft of Richard Schechner and then Elizabeth LeCompte, I mean has any American director ever mastered the stage and designed more than she has, but with those actors which started out as the guys you know and then over time like Kate Valk becomes the heart of that company and Peyton Smith for that long period of time, but that each of those performance, and now I'm getting all excited and my heart's pounding, is like they are all so great individually and together they astonish and yet it's very rarefied, do you know? Yeah and that like when you go back before we started like why ensembles, it's that, like you can get that in a way that I don't, I don't see it in other ways of making theater and there's beautiful things in other ways of making theater, like don't get me, I mean not dichotomies, you know. And we'll talk about some. Yeah, but that it's mind blowing, it's beautiful, it's kind of like because it's so hard to do. And so there's a, and I hope we can keep talking as we kind of get further into this, I think about like virtuosity. And especially with ensembles and like, what does virtuosity look like in the collective? Is it's been a long time kind of question in my mind and I don't think we have time that really. Well when we get to I think community work and civic engagement, I think that becomes a real big question too, yes? What is the role of virtuosity? Yes, but I'm thinking about it specifically when we start to talk about solo, because I think about like how we can see virtuosity in the individual versus virtuosity in the collective and maybe we can kind of as a teaser for what's coming up next is a conversation about solo, individual creators, playwrights and the art and aesthetics of working that way. Great, cool. But finish your thought though about virtuosity now. We have five minutes. We have, I mean, no questions. If you have questions, throw them at us, please. Yeah. We'll take them all. I think it's the, I worry. I worry that virtuosity is harder to, I feel like there is a collective virtuosity that is only as good as it's weakest part. That because it's a collective you adjust and you adapt to the other things around you. And so it's harder to, it's harder to step out because the whole idea is that you are together, that you're one. And so it makes me, I often, you know, like when I was at NET, a common critique as well, it's just not as good or the ensembles work just, it's a lot of mediocre, mediocre work and- Of specific ensembles or generally? Of the four. This way of working leads to mediocrity, not to excellence because it's not always about the individual stepping out and excelling, like it's about the collective. No, I mean, this is like, as I say this, I'm aware that- It is a sometimes criticism. It is sometimes criticism. And there's so many examples of other things, right? But just in trying to get to a deeper conversation of aesthetics and virtuosity, like how do we look at virtuosity in this context? And what does that look like? Is it about, it's not necessarily about the individual. And so how does the whole rise up? And you actually pointed like, with our two examples of like Method Gun and the work of Whisperer, like clearly you can and we can point to a lot of other ensembles, but does it look different? Well, I think it does. I mean, I think it looks and it feels different and part of that is the challenge that is posed in the moment from one ensemble member to another, yes? So, you know, I mean, I think about, so when you think about speed, acceleration and precision and I think about the Worcester group, I'm like, who can keep up with them except each other? Or I think there's this moment in a piece of double edge that I remember once a blue moon, that piece where we're in like their, I don't know, is it the barn? It's a very close barn structure and you're up on wooden bleachers and some little balcony and there are people swinging through the air, you know, on these things that people swing on and then there's this singing happening that I can only kind of, I can't even describe it except to say it's like living inside the Bulgarian women's choir or something like that. And this moment where this activity is happening and this singing is surrounding you and I'm like, I could see this every night of my life but nobody could do this just in a four week rehearsal period. You can't. It's like that ending where there's this pendulum swinging. And they're avoiding, what's happening? They're dancing. And you realize that everything that they'd been creating throughout the whole piece suddenly gets done in this moment and it's transcendent. Yes. And it's like, it is like virtuosity. And there are years of work that go into it in some way. Completely. And you can only do that, like that could never happen at least not with that degree of grace and skill and beauty. And daring. Yes. And that you get that in the collective and you get that. And I will say like there's as many times where it doesn't work where the experiments are like they're fine. Yeah. And it's maddening. Exactly. But then you have these moments that are just incredible and of course you just have to do that some more because you have to go see more. More and more. Hey Janice, thank you so much for your comment. Thank you for watching. OK. So we are now going to break for lunch. For lunch. And come back at 1 and we're going to be talking about solo voice, the art of the playwright. And we want to remind you of our May Day Challenge. So if you are eager to have a conversation of your own, which we hope this will encourage you to do, let us know at theartpart at howround.com or through hashtag howround or on the howround Facebook page that you are signing up to take our Art Part May Day Challenge because we're feeling a little vulnerable out here and we need some ensemble. Other people. Yes, yes. OK. Awesome. Thanks, Mark. See you in a little.