 We are going to be talking with Robert Repertory in theater here, and you have your own culture bot in the end of the day. We are going to be talking with Robert Repertory, who is chewing the fat while you guys talk. Waffles on this special Easter edition. If you have not received an Easter egg, we will have an Easter egg hunt at the end of the discussion. But first I would just like to give a little bit of an introduction if you are unfamiliar with our artists here today. I moved to Austin five years ago from New York City. I was getting very tired of living there, and I sat down one day with Lisa D. Amorich. She said, when you move to Austin, get to know Ron Barry. You'll like him a lot. And she said, yeah, she did. And she said, check out the root mechanicals, and I said, great. When I got here, I started sitting down with a lot of theater artists and a lot of artists around town. One by one, people would read over to me and say, have you heard of Rebels? As if we're running guns to Rebels, or something like that. And I thought maybe Rebels is not exactly the worst label we could probably come up with the work that you do. They have absolutely no regard for the fourth wall. They absolutely, as far as I can tell, have no respect for reality. They are among the most excited theater companies I have ever come across. You might share theater companies. Today we are going to be talking primarily about their latest work, the biography of physical sensation. But to start us off, before we get there, we need to go back to their last show, The Casket of Passing Fancy. Josh, would you like to talk just a little bit about it? I would love to, yeah. So The Casket of Passing Fancy was probably by far the biggest and most logistically complex thing we've ever done. Maybe that we ever will do. So the way the show worked is you went into this kind of elaborately decorated parlor room where you were greeted by this grand Duchess. And it was an audience of 30 who would come to the show each night. And then the Duchess would offer these audience members their choice of these 500 offers. And she'd read them one by one off of these ornate playing cards. They were things like, who wants to watch a Lincoln Douglas debate performed by two homeschool sisters? Who wants a ride to the border leaving now? Who wants a leeching? Who wants their wallet's worth of cash in pennies? Any favorites you want to throw? Who wants to quit smoking, extinguishing your last cigarette on a man's hand? Who wants to get in a car accident? We were trying to kind of find anything someone could possibly want and kind of all of life contained in these 500 offers. And so as an audience member, during the show you got to choose one of these offers when one appealed to you and it was what you wanted. You raised your hand and you were escorted out of the space. And then one of the Duchess's 10 household domestics would give you this experience in one of kind of seven themed rooms that were in the same building or maybe somewhere off premises entirely. And another important thing is that each of these 500 offers could only be taken one time during the run of the entire show. So once it was accepted by an audience member it was eliminated from the show forever. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, so just the logistical complexity of preparing to have all 500 of these performative experiences ready to go on the first night. I think we figured out at one time if we would perform each of these 500 things in front of an audience in one sitting it would take over 100 hours. It was that much material. And so by the end of the run there were like 76 offers that were not taken at all, that were just left over and will never be performed. But I think that we really liked about the show and that the people gave us great feedback about is that despite being a show kind of about individual experiences it ended up bringing people together in a really collective way because people would stay afterwards and they really felt the need to share with each other what they'd experienced. Yeah, so that was a really wonderful deployment to it. And this show like spread like what I was doing someone I was officeing at this multimedia education company and like IT guys would come up to me and be like you heard about this thing that's gone they had these experiences they'd go do like these are people that would never go see theater and no idea what's going on in that sort of realm but they were completely floored by this I think that really spoke to the power of this piece. And so I guess, you know the creative situation where people kind of had to stay and talk about it to each other afterwards is one of the things that led us into this next show we wanted to see if there was a way we could give people an individual experience but make something that was a little more self-contained and so with this show Biography of Physical Sensation that we're doing right now we decided to take a kind of alternative approach to biography which is you know it can be such a kind of cliche form in books and movies and theater so we thought what's a totally different way to experience someone's life so we said you know let's do let's experience someone's life entirely through sensory elements taste touches smell sounds and let's perform these things on audience members so this show the audience sits in a circle it's still a very limited audience like 35 or 40 and there's three sizes of chairs you can choose from small meeting and large and small chairs are people who want the least intense experiences and then large chairs are people who want the most intense experiences and then the show is kind of a montage of hundreds of sensations from one woman's life Jamie Dain, a 57 year old woman we chose during the interviews of Two's Blacks last year How many people did you interview before this? How many people did you settle before you settled on Jamie's part? Yeah Yeah I was roughly like 50 people I think you showed up over like three days of interviews last year And was she just clear that you were going to go here immediately or was it a debate on your story that you should go to? It was a very hard decision like we thought it would be much more clear than it was so many like almost everyone who came to the interviews was fascinating enough to have a show about their life we asked them to the first interviews we asked them to bring their oldest article of clothing something that smelled like them and one or two other things and we kind of had them tell their life story in like two minutes or less and just a series of questions and then we narrowed it down to three people or four people and went to their homes for like a two and a half hour much more intensive interview and kind of went through some other things but what really tipped us over with Jamie other than being an absolutely fascinating person who's had a huge range of life experiences and she's just so in touch with her sensory side was that she's archived her life so well like she said you know if you choose me tomorrow morning I will go to the storage unit and I will bring to your house like ten giant boxes of diaries, letters, journals, photos, artwork video recordings, audio recordings and this was extra touching because she did not know us or our work at all and I mean she literally turned over everything you know Polaroids of her giving birth being born and her like baby book from the hospital from the fifties and you know The night that I saw it was the opening night and she was there saying it for the first time I wasn't sure who she was but I sort of picked her out and kind of identified her and it was wonderful watching just this, it was like watching her life in front of her eyes it was really powerful seeing that as well I think she loved it, it was like a great blue light but that was also really interesting experiencing the subject, watching watching her own sort of life in this very particular unusual way and I like having her come she's come a few times now and she's very tough on us to look out for the video cameras and be like no, no, no, no, no at one point we have someone listening to a recording that has them move their head back and forth slowly and say we're going to Nana's house and that's like Jamie's mantra that she uses for relaxation since she was like seven years old until now and we had the pronunciation of Nana slightly wrong so that was a big thing and you don't know how important that is to me I saw the show last October and then a couple of nights ago again and I am curious how has it changed from your first run to what's happening to you as well today? We have two new technicians that have been swapped out and a handful of sensations have been revamped or exchanged for new sensations that we figured out since then things that were kind of failure sensations last time Like what? Bug in underpants is gone Yeah, being scared by Doverman's sensation Wait, what's the big story? Being scared by Doverman's sensation It was something that we never got to work the first round We even changed a few nights before we opened back in October and it was still just not quite there It was initially just being scared by these large booty boxes with the dogs barking out What's the story behind it? The actual lunch story She was walking and the heat dialed the side of a highway and she was in her twenties or something kind of in the country Yeah, there was something like a pack of Doverman's wild dogs behind her and so she had this sort of long period of like walking down the road and this heat, sort of walking like Frankenstein to try to not incite these dogs But we've replaced that sensation with a party at the garlic farm sensation which seems to work better What is the party at the garlic farm? Well, the way the sensation is created is you're giving a realistically weighted baby doll the whole and a mask with garlic is over your face like garlic smell, fresh garlic smell and then there's about your blindfolded there's the sound and smell of like sizzling campfire and a live fiddle tune displayed also at the same time kind of just recreating these Jamie kind of lived at this communal place in Arizona in the 70s and they just had these big outdoor parties with the on a garlic farm babies and the music and campfire Any question about the structure of the piece? How do you find about the structure and how do you assemble these sensations? It's largely random There's no it's not linear through her life at all There's you know there's some a little bit of a like sound kind of shaping the original randomness to certain things happen at the same time it seems to kind of like complement each other or make sense and then I think in general it kind of it starts out brighter and then gets a little more intense and darker as it goes on a little bit I thought it was fascinating I had never looked at someone's life that way it was like this fractal image of their life 100 articles like being collided in this room you weren't sure what chapter of their life but creating these new sort of connections I just thought that was really fun glad it wasn't like a chronological yeah some people have said you know each audience member probably gets three to five individual sensations performed on them during the 75-minute show and a lot of people tend to take all the sensations they've received and think those are a narrative that are connected totally I was kidnapped and then I was tied up and then that sensation this piece is so reliant you have 35 chairs it's reliant on audience participation you have trouble filling chairs people what happens when you don't have 35 people there do you cut anything the last minutes or do you ask people to do other things yeah we have a system of you know where we can go down to like 29 people without kind of messing up the way we do it at all like we just if there's 29 people and you go to a chair and it's empty you go to the chair right to the left of it and that'll work out with the size of the chairs and everything and that person will be available but if it gets below that it gets a little trickier so we really have to push to have audience there but we're used to doing it like when we rehearse we'll do it for like five or six people and they'll get all the sensations since we're used to working with less people we kind of work with it as long as you make sure that you know who has some food allergies in the room and who definitely wants the large chair experiences and wants the small chair experiences and it's almost like those shows where we would do it for five or six people or even our earlier rehearsals where we'd have one person come and receive like three hours of sensations it was kind of unbearably intense for some of those people giving just one thing after another sometimes they should have like an option to sit back otherwise it's just constant surprises and things being done to you and you can kind of it's overwhelming Have you had problems with audience members saying I won't do this or surprisingly rarely I think since it's kind of self-selective and we make it pretty clear with a small meeting in the large chair night tail people want to do a good job in the show I think they also see this kind of like an air the largest chair people are less likely to say no if anything we've had a few people come back afterwards after the show so you know that was a little I didn't appreciate that you know and sometimes sensations that have been received in a pretty benign way on most nights but it will just trigger something very personal from someone's life that might not have anything to do with what the sensation was from Joan's life and I think that that's an interesting thing about the show is it does become as much about your own life when you're experiencing it as Jamie's now I've seen it twice the first time I've fully volumized the whole time and it ultimately ended with water being poured down my pants and when I saw it a couple of nights ago I decided to go for the smaller chairs and watch more people look at the audience for the action and I'm wondering if has anybody said you do tie up a person if you don't take at one point in time you do smear peanut butter on a person and have a dog come on the stage and lick them which if I could see it again I could all make that a chair and I thought that I was going to have a better idea does anybody say I felt that you guys crossed a line has anybody said that or how do you react to it to disagree there have been you know as Josh said very few instances of people were like after the show but it's so few and I think you have to get close to that line for this kind of show to work again because you can't capture someone's life it's delightful some sections necessarily and I think you know we really did test them a lot it was a long development period and there were a group of maybe three guys and five women bringing these things in and testing them on each other vigorously debating whether you know we could do these on audience members and then we brought in people who didn't know us who know the show and tried it on them it's been this whole process and we feel pretty pretty good about what's in there even though it is fairly transgressive for what you would expect to do with theater performance and just you know any kind of hurting audience members seems kind of crazy getting audience members having them naked in the room is very surreal to be seeing during the show generally I think people embrace it and really go along for the ride and approach it with a great sense of humor they like to be kind of surprised about all this stuff this is sort of a maybe a larger more general question what excites you about theater or performance why are you working in this small question making specific kind of performance yeah yeah why are you choosing that or were like feeling what excites you about the live experience well I mean we're not the most socially comfortable men theater is a good way for us to get close to people and I think that's kind of why we do our shows the way we do we like to like really meet our audience and get to know them and make connections with them and you know most of our shows will run our own box office and greet people at the door and talk about the show it's just that kind of experience otherwise it's just us hanging out together yeah are there other like influences or artists that you're especially excited by or who like to work with or who like to see I'm fascinated by that I don't know how to pronounce their name I think they're Dutch they're two words the first word starts with oh and the second word starts with is going on to row go it does anyone know so they did this show called the smile they have a trilogy of kind of participatory shows they did this show called the smile author phase where you went through it individually in a wheelchair all these absurd things happen to you but their most recent show is kind of gets rid a lot of the props and everything and operates with the audience on a totally like psychological talking with them level it kind of uses speed dating as a launching point and each performer starts individually with an audience member and I guess makes these really strong connections with them but then everyone comes together in a circle and things are revealed and audience members are betrayed and it kind of gets at like what we're willing to tell the complete strangers and it's cause very strong reactions has it been performed in the US? I don't think so, not yet and now they're doing at some festivals they're doing all three of their shows and this kind of trilogy so I'd love them to see them at these bucks done it's like a mom call okay you've been working on the show for a long time and I'm wondering what's next? you have such a wide range of things that interest you guys and so many things that you've done in the past while Sean played and you've been on a cruise ship what's next for you guys? do you have any ideas on where you're going? we don't know what the next big project is going to be we know we're both going to take some time this next year work on solo shows Matt's going to do a one person opera he's already started on that's all we know you know I want there to at least be a third show in this kind of biography with the station cast something else I'll only say that I don't really know how to read or write music but that's my starting point I don't really read or write music or play any instruments and he's not allowed to have any help yeah I'm not allowed to get like coaching so I'm just locking myself away I just wanted to do an opera for a long time he did this one man he did this solo dance that he's going to do tomorrow night which was 20 minutes solo dance he had dance training when I was a little little boy I feel like the opera will go with his style I've said it before and I'll say it again Austin is the second coolest town in the country the first coolest always depends on what's happening politically or artistically but Austin will always be the second coolest town number one is always changing I think that you guys are definitely she has said to why Austin will always be the second always be number one who cares what I'm going to do is open it up to the audience do you guys have any questions or comments are you ever scared or on edge so much that you know what the question was whether we're ever scared during our performances and I definitely am during a biography physical sensation because it's just a sense of having to take care of the 35 people in the room and so many unpredictable variables so you know it can be pretty stressful there's like that general sense and then also there are like a couple sensations that at this point haven't run the show for you know 15 or 17 times that we just sort of know or maybe have more potential to cause responses in people like I have a couple things like that where I get a little bit of there is before I am what are those the popcorn counter incident mainly popcorn yeah there's a sensation in the show that we've gotten some negative response to and it's from Jamie's life she was working at this juvenile detention center and she worked in for some reason this center had like a concessions counter like a glass booth and she was selling candy and popcorn there and someone reached through the glass like the whole slot and grabbed her hair and like pulled her head against the counter like that so we have a sensation in the show that that's what we create so that complete the smell of popcorn and uh it's one of the most just directly violent yeah and it's one where you really just don't know there's not a chance to say no really it's like happening before you so and like depending on who is in that seat too and Kirk Lynn from the group X you see the sensation and what he thought was interesting about it was that it happened so quickly that none of the other audience members even noticed it's happened to you so you don't even get any kind of recognition for going through do you do remember what that sensation was where it is? yeah well that's the pop yeah I do feel like this sense of danger is like a wonderful and essential component to the work at least as I have experienced and I feel like it's so rare to experience a sense of danger when you go to the theater not that in this case sometimes it's actual danger but I mean just you just feel like in terms of storytelling I feel like often the theater going experience is very safe you know and so I feel like just in terms of storytellers whether it's abstract nonlinear stories or more linear stories it's I feel like often the form the way the form is being considered is getting in the way of creating an exciting, active sort of place you know and I feel like that's something that you guys really, really succeed at you know it's creating a sense of danger and electricity in a room it's very it's very line it's very something you could not do in any other art form it's very much a kind of experience but I'd be curious now I'm really questioning why do we keep wanting to throw danger in our theater these days and why not do a show that is extraordinarily pleasant extraordinarily blissful beyond maybe this is my next show but so amazingly wonderful that sort of heartbeat danger feeling that you get their kind of shows you know I'm very curious to see the other we're talking about that with Kirk I just showed Kirk said you know I really want you to do a show where I get hugs and $5 bills yeah that's what I've been thinking about this a lot there's something like I think that we're in this era of making theater where it's like it's gotta be edgy, it's gotta be dangerous, it's gotta punch you and hit you and slap you and that's how you feel and I'm like let's do something different I guess I should clarify when I use the word danger I'm really talking about the rules are unclear you don't know what's going to happen it doesn't have to be the most lovely experience in the world I'm just saying I feel like often when you go everyone understands what's happening and it's boring and the space is dead because of that I guess that's dangerous is a tricky word yeah to me it's about creating an active space that is alive activating the space can you talk a little bit about how your process and how your partnership works it's so like deeply ingrained and codependent now where do we start well how do you start like a how do you meet and generate ideas or just have one you're hanging out for I mean we're even when we're not working on a show we're together a lot of the time a lot of things begin in our favorite swimming pool in Austin yeah things just bubble up we ask a lot of sort of like what if certain sorts of questions there's also a division of labor things we each take a year off the unfortunate task that he took on doing the props for the show laundry and groceries and tended to the frozen laundry in the show what my life is about anyway other questions I have a question like do you guys talk a little about your background it's like how you got to developing this kind of show where did you guys come from did you guys go to school for theater did you start out in other theater companies other places and then just end up here and start working together or like I guess what are your origins yeah where did we come from Matt comes from Michigan I come from Kansas but we both went to school together at the University of Kansas started making some shows together there I was a year ahead of him so I moved down here and said oh it's great down here as you come down and we've been here since and you guys were studying theater at school theater we met on a production of Oklahoma which we want to do someday you guys do it would be awesome any other questions any other questions the biography of physical sensation how many shows do you have? it's Thursday, Friday, Saturday and it's playing in the offshoot right now if you haven't seen it check it out go to his Vox Festival website and get tickets there do you want me to thank you for coming Matt's doing a solo on Monday as well it's part of this catch series which is a five monthly performance series in Brooklyn and Jeff Larson put together and this is a special version of Catch that's combining Austin Artists with New York Artists I think there's one or two from Minneapolis as well so the format is sort of short format it's often short works or works in progress people are free to drink beer it's very casual, fun, sort of rowdy environment and it should be a really really crazy fun time we'll be posting the line online and there's some surprises and things that we can't actually thanks for coming and be sure to check out the website for a lot of the other programming that's going on there's some amazing artists that are here visiting to see the work and talk to the artists that are here