 Testing 1-2. Okay, so I think we'll get started. My name's Sabrina Hamilton. I will introduce myself more thoroughly in a moment, but I wanted to read you the initial prompt for this session when I wrote up a session description. And so I think things that will come up may be in here, and I'm sure other things will come up that have bearing on conversations that have already happened today and yesterday as well. So what I wrote was, and it seems forever ago, is designing for ensemble theater, and in particular for devised ensemble works. So I'm going to conflate those two things in this session a little bit. Holds a unique set of challenges and rewards. Some ensembles have managed to do this extremely successfully, and other ensembles have slash artists, company members, who fill design needs while also performing, writing, or handling other ensemble tasks. Other ensembles wish they had designers as company members, but have talked about the difficulty of finding the right fit. Many designers are interested in ensemble and devised work, but are unable to make a career work centered around work within ensemble. Other challenges come from the values taught in many of our graduate training programs that are in opposition to the values of many ensemble practices and processes. Designers are taught that the hallmarks of the professional profession are efficiency, getting it right the first time, speed, the ability to juggle many projects concurrently, and to serve the vision of a single voice, the director. Hands on work where the technician designer divide is breached is deemed less worthy, less professional, as is sticking with an ensemble as they tour. In devised work, designers are asked to be generative artists rather than interpretive artists. Though increasingly part of undergraduate curriculum, this is not generally taught or given much weight in most graduate programs in the United States. There is much more the norm in scenographic training courses in other countries. Designers who are able to work in this way are in so much demand that they often find themselves called upon to serve multiple ensembles. So this session is a roundtable with company members, with designers, with educators, and with you all. And so we're going to do a little bit of self-introduction, and we'll start with you. My name is Leon Engelserud. I'm a member and one of three co-artistic directors of the city company. And my background and my training, such as it is, I left my undergraduate program at the University of Minnesota to join an ensemble called the Suzuki Company of Toga, which is a theater company in Japan that some of you might know about. And while I was with that company, some of us Americans who were involved with it became one of the kernels that formed the city company, which formed as a collaboration between the Suzuki Company's artistic director, Todashi Suzuki, and Anne Bogard. And in my transition from the Suzuki Company to the city company, I went to grad school just because I wanted to have some kind of degree. So I felt like I hadn't only run off and joined the circus. But essentially that is what I did. And so I've been working with the city company ever since. I'm spending a lot of time as an actor now, and it's really weird because I've never taken an acting class, which more and more this is seeming weird to me. But so all of my training has been training within ensembles, the internal training. And in the Suzuki Company, one of the things that really attracted me to it, and one of the reasons why I passionately sort of believed in the ethos of that company, was there was no division between the categories. Mr. Suzuki used to say, we're just making theater. On any given day, that might mean you're cleaning the toilet, or you're playing the lead role, or you're building the set, or you're hanging lights. We're just building theater, and we're all theater makers. Then you start quibbling about what it was. And so as a member of the company, you were expected to do whatever was necessary. And that created a very different relationship amongst the various sort of production departments. And it was actually a little bit hard in adjusting to working back here in the States where it is more siloed. And I can certainly see the advantages of that in terms of developing deeper expertise in each of those fields. But there is something that is lost in that as well, which we can maybe get into more, but that's who I am. Hi, I'm Darren West. I'm a sound designer for the city company and elsewhere. I graduated from a very small but very effective theater program at Western Kentucky University. And then right after that became the resident sound designer at the Williamstown Theater Festival. It was like the first big gig right after college. And from there, I ended up at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival for a season, spent some time there doing some Shakespeare, working with some composers, and then ended up at Actors Theater of Louisville, which I was the resident sound designer there for three seasons, three or four seasons, where I met Ann and did a couple of shows with her. And then one night after an opening in the bar, she goes, hey, I'm thinking about starting a theater company and we're going to do a play about Marshall McLuhan in Japan. Would you like to come? I had the summer off because we were regional theater. So I joined the city company circus and went to Japan and made this play, came back, premiered it in New York and said, you should move to New York. So I moved to New York in 1993 and here I sit with everyone today. Hi, I'm Bob Leonard. I teach in the Department of Theater and Cinema at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. I came into teaching after, I think of it in a sense as my retirement gig, after having started and run a theater ensemble in Johnson City, Tennessee called The Road Company. My own background and thinking about these stories and where we all come from. I left high school, which was in a private boy school, trying to escape from the constraints of a private boy school, and found myself washing dishes in a restaurant on Cape Cod, washing pots and pans. Coincidentally, the wait staff had all been hired from the Massachusetts Conservatory of Music and they were there to wait on tables and to put on a review in the evening. They opened it up and I became a member of that little group of people doing reviews and that was my start into the theater world, which was talking about washing dishes and doing the other thing and doing the other thing. That's where it was. I went to Wesleyan in the College of Letters program and I voiced a name that I haven't spoken publicly in honor very often at all, but my tutor there was Tommy T. Toshiro in the, what is essentially a comparative lit program. I made theater but it was outside the theater and that's been pretty much the way I've done. I went to Catholic University for a couple of years in graduate program, got a job, left the school and a trainer if you would, a fellow named Jeremy Rifkin, a thinker, intellectual provocateur who at the time was trying to celebrate the revolution prior to 1976 and asked for some theater that might do that and I found myself making a small project that turned into a career-long company. I met Joe Carson in Johnson City, Tennessee and she gave me insight and in a sense the whole community of Johnson City, Tennessee was my artistic home, my artistic birthplace and now I'm able to share some of that in the classroom. And once again I'm Sabrina Hamilton and I went to Hampshire College in its early days and when I graduated from there I came back to New York where I had grown up and got involved in a lot of, working with a lot of companies including many years of work with Mabel Mines. I learned my first lighting work by being the last of the manual board ops when the producer wouldn't get a computer board. I had a movement background so I could do a 10 count with my knee and a four count with my elbow and learned lighting by doing the rooftops, fire shapes and balconies on the Halloween parade and after years of working a lot in international theater particularly with ensembles not just American ensembles touring festivals. I took a two-year visiting design teaching job at Hampshire College back at my alma mater and then when the other faculty members went on sabbatical I replaced them and then there was no one left to be so then I went to grad school and I couldn't, I hadn't gone because I couldn't figure out what program to go to and I finally convinced them to let me be a grad student in both lighting and directing which is so weird at that point they had to kick it up to a dean's level but they finally agreed that I could do a double MFA in two years in lighting and directing by getting credit for all the courses I had taught on an undergrad level as having taken on a graduate level they could do that math and then I went on from there to teach at Williams College and then went start teaching graduate students at Towson now I consider myself a recovering academic and in the meantime I started the co-festival of performance which uses the facilities of Amherst College in the summer it's been going for 23 years it's a festival of all original devised work we teach six-day intensive workshops rehearsal residencies and have an internship an interdisciplinary internship each summer so that is sort of my background and so I think what we're going to do now is segue into maybe Leon talking about the company and then one other thing I think that I want to make sure that you know about Darren is I was on a panel for the NEA TCG design fellowship and in it the applicants had to propose what they would do if they got the fellowship who they wanted to go observe I cannot tell you how high the percentage of people who decided they wanted to go observe Darren whether or not they were sound designers there were costume designers deciding that he was the person they wanted to go observe because of the very special function and way that the city company works and maybe you can help us learn more about that well it's good luck yeah I actually did one of my MFA is in directing but I got permission to do one of my internships as Darren's assistant at the public so he asked me to get him coffee one time and I said Darren I'm not that kind of assistant I got him cocoa instead but the the city company is is and one way to talk about it is that it is an amalgamation of a number of different theater cultures in that you know Anne Bogart who you know comes out of performance studies and Richard Schekner comes out of making theater on the street here in New York and in other places and this very sort of downtown New York thing that culture combined with sort of of Suzuki's Japanese avant-garde theater making shows in a tiny village in the mountains in Japan very old school but kind of the classical avant-garde the 70s 80s let's let's all be Peter Brooke kind of thing that culture plus a lot of the actors and and Darren were coming out of to some degree the regional theater culture American culture and and these I think I think these three are very divergent cultures and and they had some some overlap between them but in a lot of ways in this the city company wasn't originally conceived of as a theater company the the acronym city is Saratoga International Theater Institute and the idea was this was going to be a summer program in Saratoga Springs New York that Anne and Suzuki had sort of dreamt up Suzuki was looking for a context in which to do work in the United States a context in which to work with some of the artists he'd been working with in the United States Anne was had just left Trinity rep where she had been artistic director for an entire half season and so she was looking for for a different a different attack in a sense that that just being an artistic director in a regional theater was clearly not the thing that was going to do it and so we came up with this idea of this summer institute and then who would be the you know there would be work presented there there would be conferences symposium who would be the people doing this work in the and obviously from Suzuki side it was Suzuki's company and some of the American actors who had been working with him and but Anne didn't have her own company and so in the first year there was sort of this hodgepodge of people that came together and and and directed Chuck Meese Orestes and it was this very wild and woolly production of it that didn't it didn't really fully crystallize as as a thing so even after that first production it was we still were not talking about there being a company and it was in this in the second year when we had to really pare down because there was less money and and so Anne really focused in and like it was six actors right six actors and and brought in Darren and was really focusing in what what is essentializing this around this production of the medium and it is impossible to underestimate the importance of Darren's designer role in that process crystallizing the company coming into being so I I think you know and even in how you said it it was you were invited to join the company in a sense the company didn't really exist yet and and it's sort of like cornstarch you know got mixed in and then it started cornstarch and it and that starts gelling it and this this has this sense has continued so for from the standpoint of the city company to think about our work absent the designers in the company is very strange and this goes to another thing that we've been working very hard on in the company which is to try to maintain a horizontal sort of structure where we we try to make decisions by consensus which is just shooting yourself in the head and the foot alternately you're going bang and then you're bang and you're bang of it bang it's just like that's that's how you move through the world but you eventually you're all hitting yourself in the head at the same time and you're all shooting yourself in the foot at the same time and you can call that agreement and everybody goes wow but part of that what that means when you flatten out the hierarchy and you're saying everybody in the room has the same voice everybody in the room can express an opinion it means that a designer particularly a sound designer who sound designer is in incredibly powerful position in especially if they're in rehearsal all the time and if you're then creating a situation where you're saying anybody can talk about it it it it cultivates an atmosphere in which that person's aesthetic that person's ideas that person's take at any given moment has a lot of sway if you want to piss off a city company member tell us that our work is an bogarts i'm including her in city company member in that sentence it's one of the reasons why we've gone to talking about co-artistic leadership is because we're sick and tired of being and bogarts a city company we have never been that if you come i'd say this i've you know said this for years and years and years and if any of you have ever come and observed our rehearsals you know it's true i get more acting notes from this guy than i get from an you come into a watch a city company rehearsal you will think that darin is directing the show because on the moment by moment basis he has a lot more to say and that doesn't mean sometimes it means and doesn't have anything to say but oftentimes it means he's got a more practical track and he's going on that more following that then and will have something to say about that and other people will have something to say about that but the idea i think it's really important and i'm saying this as a director because i know this feeling too and and we've worked as director and designer as well in other contexts you know darin said to me once you should always listen to your designer for the simple fact that they do more shows than you do they see more things than you do they've solved this problem probably seven times already and you're maybe hitting it for the first time so you should always at least listen to that and it's really true it's and it's just practical it doesn't mean you have to do what they say but you should always take their input and it means you know the cultural shift i think that you know that's part of what is implied by maybe ensemble theaters are important duh um the cultural shift that's implied behind that is a reevaluating of the hierarchy and the rehearsal process and and getting away from this what i think was a historical aberration of the auteur um and so you know we have all of our designers in the companies we have a a um darin bryan scott who's our lighting designer sometimes set neil patel who does sets and um james shudy who does costumes and sometimes set they each have a very different relationship with the company and when they work they don't always all work with us with the company on every production each one of them has a very very uh different kind of role but that role is not dictated to them by a hierarchical structure it emerges out of their own way of approaching their work their own attitude towards the company their own personal relationship to us and it's an organic hopefully thing it's not here is the designer's role in the process and it's you know we have we have this gesture that we do in the company which is in one form or another you pump a shotgun and what it means when you when you do this is it means i'm about to say something and y'all are welcome to shoot it down which it's it's actually a really really useful thing because you have to create an environment and i and this goes to you know it's the hardest thing i think to do in educational situations because you have to you have to somehow teach this to young artists that you have to when theater making create a situation in which anybody can say anything they want but some of what you say is going to be stupid and we're going to shoot it down being able to say anything and everybody having the right to speak doesn't mean everything everybody says is worthwhile collaboration is not about getting along or agreeing collaboration is about making something together we fight like cats and dogs sometimes and i remember once we were working on a production and and we were just at logger heads about it and this was with we were working with graduate students and professional actors and and undergraduates it was this really mixed situation and i had you know i'm going to talk to the grad student to the undergrads who were like confused because dad and mom were fighting and it was like you know it's we still love each other you know it's like because dare not go at it about a about a moment and it's not necessarily a sound moment it might be an acting moment and then we go out and you know have a beer and some oysters it's you know it's it's part of the process and we and we knew that and i said to them what you're hearing in that argument is a multi-decade relationship you know just going through something and it's valuable you should fight when there's a fight and just and valuing consensus and valuing agreement and valuing collaboration doesn't mean bending all the time you know it's it's a lot more complicated than that and that's that's a tricky thing to teach i think it's a and and i don't know i may be wrong but i don't think there's a way to teach it outside of an example you just have to put it and put people into that situation but it's really really powerful when you let somebody say something that you think is really stupid and then you say great that's good and get your own show if you want to do that make your own company and make that show because that's not what we're going to do here as opposed to you don't have a right to talk wait until you're older you know so daren how does how is this different from the other models that you've worked in what what draws you to this why why are you in this room again and again well i actually ended up there completely by accident i mean you know i had done a lot of regional theater work a lot of shakespeare work a lot of typical theater with a capital t and but the thing at actors did avoidable because of the humanifestival there was a lot of exposure to brand new plays that had never been done before that we were looking at black and white on a on a page and and bringing that to life and something in me even from college a little bit i thought i don't want to do the plays that have been done before i want to help make new plays so that was always sort of where my head was oriented and it was a very simple thing like at at at the time that i came along sound designers were sort of just beginning to figure out how exactly we do our jobs and everybody came at it from from different points of view you know if you had this conversation with john gromata he was a composer first that decided that a way to get his music heard was to to do it in in the context of theater i came from a theater background via a recording engineer kind of happening simultaneously and a professor in college at western said oh we're doing this very complicated sound show and uh we think you should be the sound designer on it and at that point in 1986 or whenever that was i didn't know what a sound designer was frankly but i was the only guy in the theater department that understood how all the sound worked how the how the console worked even more than the professors did just because that was what my life was up to that point and so in the process of doing that show i thought oh this brings two things together for me in a really amazing way that i've always had a really deep love for the theater and the collaboration of a group of people in making something and this other technical side of sound and music having the ability to be dramaturgical and i think if there was anything that i sort of started uh or can say i i helped start is the idea of thinking about sound not as an icing that's put on the cake after the cake is made i'm actually in the kitchen going oh what if we put a little more sugar here you know that that the the sound design is a part of the dna of the piece that's being made so it was really simple i was in rehearsals at actors theater and i would find that i would go to watch a run through because there's a typical way that it's done they do a designer run the designers come they sit at the table they take their notes the director leans over and whispers things we all know how that's how that works so i would go back to my studio and the other side of the building and create what i thought might be the perfect sound cue for this particular sequence when i got back to the rehearsal hall the next day or later that afternoon the dna of the scene had changed and i just thought this is crazy why don't i just oh and this was sort of the dawn of sound actually becoming portable um so it was a simple thing i called my assistant and said let's for humana we're moving my entire my entire system from the studio into the rehearsal halls and we're just going to schlep it back and forth show between show so the way i started designing was really practical and i also had very limited time so this so it was efficient too just as a designer that i'm making something i know it's going to work if it if i need to tweak it a little bit i'm in the room with it to tweak it while they're working on it rather than making something and then having to spend time at home working so for me i got so much more sleep um because i wasn't sitting up all night doing notes after tech the when i arrived at the tech rehearsals the show was done because the the transitions were were worked on the musically in the way the music worked in the scene when they opened the door on the on that cello phrase it had all been sort of worked out so it was a continuous composition which is how i've always sort of thought about the theater so then one afternoon this woman and bogart came to humana and a friend of mine was the stage manager on the show and he called me in the office it was for production of edward o machado's eye of the hurricane called me and said you have to come over to the rehearsal hall right now to see what this woman is doing with sound and at that point and came in with stacks of records and cds and she was having the stage manager pointing out things and they had posted notes on them and and they were playing things in the room but the way she was integrating how music was working was exactly the way my brain was working at the time and i was you know you walk in a room with john jewelry and try to do that that you're a little bit trying to put a square peg into a round hole but god bless him he put up with me and let me do it um but then to stand in that room with an i thought oh my god i want to work with this woman and so we i i ended up getting into rehearsal as much as i can on that first humana show and then we did a number of shows later and something just clicked and the day that i she didn't come in with all of her cds and her albums i thought okay i'm getting somewhere here so for this production of picnic i was was in rehearsal the entire part of the process then there was a band you know in picnic there's ernie and his band that play over the top of the hill that you hear every once in a while so i was referred to as ernie um right down to them by the costume designer buying me a pair of two-tone shoes to wear old 50s two-tone shoes to wear but you know i was sitting in the room with samplers and reel to reels and and making the play um you know as we went so my process even to this day doesn't really change from if i'm working with city or if i'm doing punk rock which i'm in tech for now down at the lord tell it's all the same process so the only difference for me is how i deal with the director and sort of how the bedside manner works from one thing to the other but if it's a Broadway show if it's uh if it's some off-broadway thing at the cherry lake like my process is my process um but i do think you know the the advantage that you have working inside an ensemble more often than not is just the shorthand that that you have between between one another and you get more time to really try your really extreme ideas you know in a safe environment you know i can do things in the room with and in the company that i can't do in a room with joe mantello you know i have to have a certain sort of preparation and it's basically just sort of about figuring out what piece of the pie you have in the creative process because i think you know most of the time so many young especially young designers sound designers i can only speak for sound designers but they they come into a room thinking they have to prove that they have to be there you know this thing that that every cue has to be right and perfect and and and a part of the process and my whole thing is about integrating in such a way into the room that i learn what the director is looking at i learn what the actors are working on and i figure out what my job needs to be in a particular circumstance so sometimes it's about coming up with an underscoring to help uh an actor figure out a scene and sometimes i'm looking ahead for the director to go oh i think this transition needs to be this tempo so it the role that i have in a room every single day changes which is part of the reason i love it you know i love that job so much but i don't know if that explained anything but this is a real quick tag on that i i did a production of samuel beckett's endgame one time and i wasn't sure if i wanted any sound in it and so i asked darin if there was going to be sound and it would he design it and it was like yeah and so we we had a little meeting and came to the conclusion that it shouldn't have any sound in it and he talked me out of him working on the show essentially by by us agreeing artistically that it didn't need a sound i wasn't allowed to credit lack of sound design by darin west but i wanted my favorite lighting design was doing a piece by natural light and i said begin at five minutes earlier and it'll time out perfectly that's good design i think yeah um so this is not a new conversation to net but it's it's growing but there was a a very beginning seat of this conversation up in main at a net gathering underneath the tree bob lennard was there and he said a key thing that just comes up because of what you said darin which is what about stage managers and you would just been named as head of teaching stage management in your university and you were talking about that person sitting next to and with all the sticky notes on the stuff um can you talk a little bit about um about the whole stage management interface in this well yeah um i was just thinking what but darin just said is interesting to me from the point of view of stage manager my process is the same whether i'm here or there well that's a really interesting reality because here or there are very different processes and i have just a little background and before i found myself able to direct plays i was stage managing and i thought that there was a natural progression you stage manage for a while and then someone comes along and says okay now you're ready to direct that's i did believe that when i found out that wasn't the case i stopped stage managing because i was headed in my mind towards directing so when virginia tech finally came to me to fill in behind a couple of folks before me who had been teaching stage managing i had had some association with stage management but a long gap i had as i thought about stage management oftentimes thought that stage management is fundamentally personnel management um and that's what i was thinking under that tree uh but having taken on this matter of teaching stage managers um out of my own experience in a wild you know random uh kind of career uh i've come to a place where i think now that the stage manager is the manager of the creative process um and i think that is much more challenging much more interesting to really get into uh than the than the apparent uh interest in one personnel management or you know getting in between people who are fighting um uh or being the the resident documentarian making sure everybody does according to the way the director said you're supposed to do and carrying on with the reports and getting stuff out to the management and all that stuff um so the curious dynamic that will happen and does happen inside of ensembles and outside of ensembles is that each project begins to develop its own culture how the how the ensemble in itself is different from from the last project why choices have been made to make this project this way that all colors and shapes the nature of the of the creative process and the stage manager is asked to manage that blind right you don't know what you're going to get and how do you allow yourself to be open to listen is probably one of the most important stage management jobs that you could list um how you can hear in an ensemble when you're when you know people well how can you hear the difference between this time and last time what's going on in the actual exchange whether it's great fellowship or terrible fights what's happening here is a stage manager's province listening and then becoming able to help that process to work on that process so um at tech this is what i bring to the students i work with there's not an easy answer i'm not going to present a textbook approach to how you do rehearsal reports um it is about that asking that question all the time with whatever process may be in place inside the university's production schedule that's that's where i'm coming from that's what i think about this the matter um and to a large degree in a sense this is going to be the same as you say whether i'm working on an ensemble or working with uh you know a job in a production unit yet the stage manager's job is to suss that all out which makes everyone different i'll just leave it at that i think that's really interesting because we've gotten to the point where finally the academy is recognizing first i think the actor creator as opposed to the actor interpreter we've gotten to that point now now there's this other step of maybe the designer creator and what's i think probably quite radical for most of your departments is the stage manager creator are you invoking that model um so what i'd like to do now is to open it up to you all and to talk a little bit about the situations you find yourselves in what are the successes in this what are the obstacles to this what do you want the collective wisdom in the room to brainstorm on what problems can we solve and take this conversation a step further yes we're going to give you a mic because we're live streaming and there are a number of people who are following this we want to make sure that you get mics is there that that extra mic there is not that extra mic there are where oh okay we're going to pass these around wow it's just like opera so i would love to listen to you all talk um i work in a collaborative theater company as well we've been together for 10 years we have that shorthand language we're starting to get that language with designers but we're also starting to try and implement it um in professional training programs with and i'm going to say this because i know we're all family the american repertory theater is dead but everybody's still training designers that way so the big problem that we have with student designers is they're intrigued by this process but what's what's given to them educationally is about their portfolio is about their book is about falling on this four week or four week or six week process or sometimes two week two and a half weeks three weeks process how can we get designers in your opinion young designers especially to start thinking in a different way about that problem and what can we do at a university level to try and make those innovations to try and say okay let's look at the theater of today and tomorrow and not what has been well i think you have to get designers in the room you know that you have to rejigger the schedule in such a way that you can intellectually design all you want to on on paper but the real job like 80 i'd say 89 percent of the job is is bedside manner and learning how to actually know when you should say something and and and know when you shouldn't you know and and how you know we interact together you know i i find that the way we talk about what we're doing while we're doing it is really really super important that it's a it's a there's a big difference between me walking into a room and having a conversation with the director about what i think this piece of music might be under this monologue rather than coming in and saying i had this great idea here's this thing that i want to try rather than walking in going hey been thinking about the scene what if we dot dot dot dot like for me the syntax of inclusion is huge especially for designers and if we can figure out a way that designers in the room feel confident enough that they're not having to prove why they're there for the job i tell this to designers all the time i don't think i actually said this one i was thinking about it earlier but most of the time especially with young designers or with my assistants i frequently go relax sit back stay in the gray area for a little while it's okay that you don't know the answer to the to the question if somebody asks you hey do you have a great idea for this transition you say not yet but i'm going to that you you've already got the job so the thing about it is for me and rehearsals are really really hard work especially for a sound designer because eight hours a day you're listening and and and you're listening in such a way that that you're that you're trying to help storytelling and sometimes something that you design on a given day doesn't work the next day or you get to tech and you go that um on the show i just got done doing there was um a day that we were rehearsing that the gigantic storm was going on outside in the room and we rehearsed the whole show and everything was influenced by the the dark clouds of that day and the storm and then we got over to the theater and something wasn't right and i was like hold on a second whipped up a storm put it in the scene set it with the music and then all of a sudden things seem to make sense and then we could look at that and then evaluate okay now is this an issue just from rehearsal or does this phenomenon actually help us tell the story of this particular scene in the play you know i i think the the thing about it is is that designers feel like once they make a decision that they have to stick to that decision and what i've constantly said is make the decision like put it out there sit in the hot seat and go this is my bold idea for the opening of richard you know of whatever show that you might be working on and then after you've made it the hard job is to then sit back in the room play that thing pull yourself away from it and go does this really work you know that the and and if it doesn't make something else you know that's the that is the thing about being able to work in an ensemble situation and having a having a given time you can talk about it all you want in a classroom but until you put designers in a room with a director learning how with all of the egos and all the personalities you know i i have to interface with the director differently depending on who the director is and that is a skill it's probably one of the more important skills you have to have as a designer you know anybody can make an awesome sound cue especially now i mean you guys could go home with garage band and make a top 10 record you know um so the the thing about it is is what you're designing or being a designer especially sound for the theater is not necessarily about the product itself that's coming out of the speakers it's a lot about what you've done to shepherd that thing through the play to help tell the story to get it into the room it's it's a different way of thinking about what your job is rather than coming in a room thinking about i have to solve all these problems that's you know to sit back and see what the show was telling you to do and then do that it's interesting because i think that's something that we put into our accurate training and one of the things that i think is an advantage to a lot of programs is that everybody has to do a certain amount of of everything so one of the things strategies that i think is interesting is to remind designers or sometimes reminding actors of the way that the other folks think so that moment of being present the idea of yes and is not just for improvisational actors no perhaps it is for designers just as much that moment of waiting and listening that creative listening you know when we and designers often think that the director should sort of know how to tell them that that sound cue is wrong you know and i always say it's not their job that is your job then you know if you have a disagreement you know leon talks about how how many you know that we have had our share of disagreement but the thing about it is is that you have to put the thing out and if leon disagrees with it you're talking about the thing that's out there and so then the your the designer's job is is you know the there's a thing that happens is that when you have a disagreement with a director or with an actor or any sort of situation when you're collaborating that a door sort of opens a little bit you can either as a sound designer go oh my god i stayed up eight hours and built this thing it is the most genius sound cue in the american theater and they don't understand me or my work and you can close the door or you can go i wonder what it is about that particular sequence that they don't like and you walk through the door and you play the thing and you stand together and go is it the sound of the wind is it the fact is it the tempo of the music you know sometimes the the interpretive job of getting notes from a director is simply oh that was just too loud i had a 15 minute conversation with trip colman last night about a ghost sequence in punk rock going yeah i just did the tonality of it i i think i and the only thing we did was we turned it down literally to db and slowed the whole sequence down he just didn't want to hear the bright part of the cue right as the ghost was raising up but it so you know as a designer your job is to interpret what that note means not necessarily to do what they've asked you to do because you i could have gone down the road having to redo that entire sequence because trip didn't like it but the thing about it was was i loved the cue so now my job is to is to collaborate and figure out how my idea of what this moment is meets with his idea and it was simple as turning it down to db and slowing it down and then when i showed him when we redid the scene he goes that's great i just didn't want that thing there when he when he raised when he raised up i'm like okay and in my head i'm thinking god i wish you could have told me that two hours ago but he can't he doesn't have the tools he's not a sound designer he's a director it's also though sorry that that in this idea of what are you doing to tell the story what are you doing to help move the thing along leads you inevitably to integrating with the other things that are going on that as as the sound designer you're you're not just dealing with the sound design you're looking at what are the lights also doing what is the costume doing is if that's already telling the story maybe i don't have to do as much there big time or if there's lights if you know there's a situation and the light just isn't doing something it was trying to do and i and you hear this happen all the time where darin oh god i think i can solve that problem for you let me try or vice versa where ryan oh god i think i can get that with the lights and and but we're all trying to tell a story and it's they the various elements need to be integrated one of the ways that bevel minds always articulated that in their process was thinking about the show as having tracks multiple tracks and sometimes the job of a certain element be it sound or light or text can be to be telling the story the other tracks then maybe counterpoint it may be harmony it may be distance it so thinking it through that way as having parallel tracks and nothing at the outset being presumed to be hierarchical as opposed to the standard play where you have that fixed text is something that often if presented in a in a classroom situation i think opens up the room for people who who may have very different kinds of talents or sensibilities to react to the word that was used earlier in a session was the prompt that initial prompt for the piece and said there there's there's space created that way and that it's not just the weight of the actors have to do all the work and everybody else will support or the playwright has to do all the work and everybody else will help realize that that that it can bounce around i think that sometimes when that's brought into training can be a way to get to that so i wanted to just respond quickly to this virginia tech is struggling with this massively and the question has to do with changing and in the university in my experience there are a lot of things that are fairly set and one of them has to do with the autonomy of the classroom that the teacher is the teacher in the classroom there's a culture about that well if that translates also into making theater that the designer is the designer or the stage manager the stage manager and that there is a kind of siloing if you will of the body that doesn't mean that we're not collaborating we're making work together so we're we're struggling with this matter of how do we collaborate which gets at some much more deeply rooted ways of doing that are difficult to change very difficult to change you got to confront one another about things that have been established and assumed in order to for all of us to get along moderately well and for a lot for people to be in it for the long haul a lot of systems particularly in educational institutions and regional theaters have evolved so that people do not burn out right so you brought up earlier in the conversation Sabrina one of the big matters that we're struggling with at tech is making the stuff the shop the sequencing of getting it all done because oddly the training in a in a usual environment of the university is mixed between producing the work and teaching so in some ways we're always producing on the extra on the on the borrowed time after we've done the day's work which is a hell of a bad way to go about it but it means that we set up mechanisms so that we can accomplish that without killing ourselves and there is in the shop a certain sequence of stuff and you're working on this one then you're going to work on the next one you've got to forget about the one you just done no time for a reflection because we're going to move right on so all those questions come into play when we start talking about actually investigating new ways of doing I just need to get that into the because I think it's part of your question you know there's a there's something that's happening now for me anyway but only in much larger theater situations like Lincoln Center or the public that say I'm doing a new Sarah rule play that in the summer you know they always do the state's readings they always do workshops especially if the play has a puppet with the actors and the stage manager but the thing that was different about this last process at Lincoln Center was the workshop that happened for the play included every single designer and we were six months out so we had a very good time to take a whack at what the set might be to help make this story sort of work and I was in the middle of it thinking we should do this every single show that the first time the group of people gets together with the playwright and the acting company everybody sat around the table for a week and did table work and then on the weekends we had designer only sort of sit downs where we chatted about well what if the floor was this and we'd looked through Tibetan art books and we that it was um you know it's it's it's backing the process up because we definitely understand you know that a certain point in time a set's got to be designed it's got to be built even when you're collaborating on something new ensemble based whatever but you know in the situation where it's a where it's a play that's being created from nothing the designer be it scenic be it costumes still has to take in the account that you know you've got to have some flexibility in the design you know it if you know if you're a designer that's doing us a show that's going to be self-created and you want to build this monstrosity of a three level set that all the sudden doesn't work later you know that that has some of that falls on the designer themselves you know not not creating for this not designing for the situation that makes sense so that calls for a bunch of time it does commitment of time on the part of the designer and what i'm learning is in this conversation just here this weekend is the degree to which the designer is being trained to be doing five projects or seven projects at the same time and never mind about being in rehearsal well it's it's obviously impossible to imagine that casting an actor and saying and the actor saying well i've got several other things i'll be doing so i won't be in rehearsal until opening night or until tech rehearsal that's unthinkable but you know what that used to be done there was a time in the theater where the principles would show up two days before the show opera let's go to lisa and then we're going to go it there thank you i wanted to say first one thing is that it's actually much easier on it i'm a director i have a company and i run a program for performance creation at the university of minnesota and i can tell you my my sound designer is viny oliveri who you probably know who you worked with yes and we work together he's in the room the whole time whenever i can afford it right and all my designers are so i know for a fact and it's because i'm lazy as a director why would i want to have to have nine conversations to catch you up on everything we figured out over the three weeks you were gone it's so much easier yeah so at the university level this is my question and i want to hear from anybody it's for me it's a question about how do you help risk happen when you're under particularly for stage managers it seems that american theater has gotten terrified of anyone hurting themselves or doing something dangerous and i'm acting facetious and obnoxious because we just had um ludko ripka was here from contours original company and she did a piece on our students and because she's who she is and she's polish i went to see her little showing and there's like unsteady ladders that lead to nowhere and actors balancing on them and glasses being thrown right because she's polish and that's how they do it and it was in the little x theater where no one has to worry about rules and i went across the hall to my tech for a huge musical i asked for a child actor or i think it was actually a student actor to carry a lamp that was already plugged in and on so we could see it move into the stage and suddenly nine managers got up and had to make sure that it was safe and because the actor might be an idiot and electrocute themselves and i just found it very strange you can't take a step without somebody talking about all the rules that go around it we had a thousand dollars in cash on stage and they literally had to treat it as a weapon they had to lock it up in a weapons box every night you know it's this kind of paranoia about safety and i just wondered if anybody and i understand the need for it i don't want people getting hurt but i i work in russia a lot and geez louise i mean there's no one you know they really want to risk their bodies and their souls they don't want to be safe all the time and i'm just wondering if any of you has anything to say on that and how we can help train designers stage managers actors who are not fitting into a system that is trying to keep them all cushioned the one thing that i would say is there's in there's two kinds of risk that come to mind one is is literally risking their physical harm but the other is sort of aesthetic risk or ego risk and thinking in in listening to both of what you were saying i had a conversation with robin wagner once and and he said you know if you're really really lucky you understand a show during previews and and he said usually it happens a couple nights after opening and he said almost everything that he's done with a couple of exceptions including chorus line he said but just about everything else he's felt like after it's open when he goes back to see it it's like now i get it now i'm ready to design it i want to throw it all away because it's about that one thing there that's the one thing that we were right about the rest of this is actually unnecessary it cost us 12 million dollars to get to that point but now i want to turn around to the producers and say thank you very much could we put it in the dumpster i now know what it is so what's that's that's you know that's a form of danger and he's what he said was this will stop being an art form when people stop risking that conversation what's interesting is that regional theaters are now starting to maybe think about and beginning to bring in ensembles to devise work in a slot where they used to have a playwright come in and the first thing they discover is that they need more than an outlet and an internet signal in their laptop they actually need a space and they need stuff well you know i completely here thrown away i completely hear you about that but i think it's on the ensembles head to interface with that building i think it's arrogant of us to feel like the city company can walk into actors theater of Louisville and it operate the way we inherently or yeah or any place you know what that they inherently operate the way we need them to operate there's a certain learning curve that has to happen you know i do these location shows with liz lerman and her company a lot and they make great demands on the local crews and believe me i've worked with a lot of local crews i a guys you know and when you are at your babuana and you walk in and go okay there's a dumpster of dirt coming you know the local crew just looks at you like you're a lunatic because they know they're going to be shoveling dirt but the thing that she does that's so genius is she gathers everyone together from the first day everybody in the room and downloads what this event we're going to be doing here at your babuana or in chicago with everybody the technicians and she has a way and our jobs are is to bring them into our story we don't and and what we have found or what i find frequently are most of the people that are working in these house situations it's a rote thing if you come in and shake it up and shake it up with generosity with them they will totally go on the ride with you you know they will do the crazy fly thing that you that you need to to do in a particular sequence with the guys up on the fly rail if they know who they're doing it for what it means in the show and how important it is i get and they'll do it better than you ever dreamed better than you've ever imagined i think i think one of the things that came up for me when you asked that question has to do with at the training end of this we're listening to stories in the full-blown practice is how do young people manage to get through the process of actually learning what they can do so one of the things that i noticed is that oh we got a smoke machine so for the next five productions we had smoke didn't make an evidence we needed smoke or not but but we had smoke and and it had to do with technicians who didn't know how to run it and give them the opportunity and and where what's the timing of it what do you do with the smoke when you get when you're done with it and all those questions that come up but that's also true for stage managers i don't necessarily know as a stage manager particularly young stage manager what it is i'm supposed to do so if you give me oh i mean i'm in charge of safety so now i'm going to be in charge of safety whether it's needed or not for a while yeah right so so part of the part of the challenge to the to the teacher has to do with how do you allow for the investigation to happen and also to temper it with with the reality of the need of that overall view of the that whole thing of looking at the whole ecology i think that word and that that idea of ecosystem is becoming more and more interesting because the other thing i observe a lot is the resource grab that happens in production processes all the time whether it's going to be time in the space or is it going to be i need this much of the budget or how many can i have and where can i hang them all um or cover your butt lights you know let's put some cover your butt lights into the plot and and uh you know uh i'm trying to join acolytes you know i'll i'll ask her five nudities so that i can you know give up three and have two um which is all i really need but that whole way of of of protecting one's domain so that one does not look bad or perhaps looks better than the rest of the production at the production tanks um how do we get people out of that mentality and i think that idea of investing in the whole project that you're you sign on to the project and then within the and that's your primary thing and then you have that other role or roles within that one thing i'm thinking of at time when i was it was on the faculty at lsu um in baton rouge for a while and we had a series of fairly common thing of student produced works that were curated by the department that we gave them some resources but it was it was sort of their their show and they would they would make proposals and then there was a committee on the faculty that i was a member of and we would pick okay here are the here are the eight shows we're gonna do this year and one year after we made the selection it is well it happened every year but the students who had not been picked would come into my office and they'd be upset and wanted to do the show and i got really frustrated with the ones and i said well if you wanted to do this show why on earth would you let us stop you the only thing that's been told to you was some faculty members at a land grant university said you can't do your show you are not a theater artist if that's going to stop you so go out and make the show if you really want to do it otherwise what were you doing were you just what did you is your life dream to be in that series of student creative work no you if you want to make the show make the show what i started to find was that those productions because a couple of them did do it they ended up like the their relationship with their because then they had to go to their to the the lighting designer and say like where could we do this and you know they had to figure things out on a fundamental level that was so much more holistic and healthy and they got i think they got so much more out of it and and i've sort of been paying attention the people who did that are actually some of them are still working you know they're still actually making because they had to solve some fundamental problems that we were actually not making them solve when we took them on and supported them like huh it's all about a an investigation and inquiry and practice of power it really comes down to that almost every time and how we bring young folks into the negotiation of power if it's not thought about can be the most wicked of constant repetition of the way we think it ought to be and and it results in a huge amount of disempowerment absolutely yes um this question of resources really interesting because for me as an ensemble practitioner and a really early career practitioner um i'm often um in situations where i'm i'm expecting something to be like as threadbare as possible basically and that's where i find the challenge with bringing designers in the room because as others have mentioned um you know designers that are used to working freelance are used to working several shows in different contexts are used to working in a specific way and so to say you know oh no we don't really have access to the space more than a couple hours you know beforehand or we only have access to these instruments or you know um what have you that's kind of a difficult way and i'm wondering how you all managed to work in these ensemble contexts to sort of bridge those conversations that might be different than for example if you're working in a regional house or so on and you're actually having a more concerted you know budget conversation with the production manager and kind of that process which is completely separate you know it was funny as you were speaking i thought uh stop thinking about your designer like a technician don't go to your lighting designer and go hey can you do my show but i only have eight lecos like go to your designer and go i'm going to make the most awesome piece of theater from my soul and i want you to work on it with me it is well what you want but what what you want to find are people with a like mind of aesthetic to do something with you it doesn't make any difference whether we're doing it here or we're going to do it in the stairwell you know like what what what you're look what you're looking at is somebody to put in your toolbox that you can stand in the room with and that will think about the other parts of the thing that you're working on for you and with you it's a very different it's a very different thing and i'm telling you designers will do it they're dying to do it if you let them do it but sometimes there's a little translation time that is needed because we're not learning each other's languages that that's very true you know i have gotten in situations it doesn't happen so much anymore but but i used to find myself in situations with directors who did not know how to speak to me because i was working in the rehearsal hall and i just always said to them talk to me as if i was an actor and suddenly put them at ease you could talk about the intentions of the thing i think they thought that that they needed to be smarter and were scared of me and and and i'm thinking i'm thinking about the show like an actor i'm just not standing up there but i'm dealing with the same motivational issues dealing with the same storytelling issues and so talk to me like an actor and then we can communicate that way it also depended on me to understand how an actor works which goes back to being in a room with a whole bunch of actors all the time and watching them work and learning from them you know it's it's a two-way conversation you know and i think it's it's too it's too easy to put people in boxes you know it's a it's a really simple thing you know i'm fascinated about you know the situation when you get into tech like i love watching ensemble groups work i do some work with fiasco theater company too and you get in it is just collaboration full-on pedal to the metal when you're in rehearsal everybody sits and watch everyone works and they round robin themselves it's thrilling to be in a room with and the pace that which they go is extraordinary then strangely when we were doing into the woods at the mccarder all the sudden it started it started breaking down because now we had tech tables and now we were 20 feet away from the edge of the stage and we were in the dark and they were in the light and we so the thing i mentioned at the first production meeting like anybody's got a note anybody want to talk about something take your headset off and if i have an idea for lights i walk over to the lighting table if chris ackerelin has an idea he comes over to my table and if we want to talk to the actors on stage i still do this as a designer to this day is if there's something i need to communicate to an actor in the in the tech situation i get up from the table i take my damn headset off and i walk down and talk to the actor at the edge of the stage and turn around to my assistant or whoever is running sound and go hey play me this and talk the actor through the thing that i would love to try like it is a lot about interface and how you talk to people and and and the conversations that you have and you have to work at it it's hard to do you know another interface that training is quite different in other parts of the world um in a lot of places the performers and the designers are not trained in the same academies so the way that they're training designers is they're making work with it it's more like performance art so they're creating original pieces all the times for them that's natural um there's another way of um not having a stage manager which is where everybody on the crew watches the show and does their cues that if some leadership is needed that it's figured out and that can rotate but it isn't people being able to read a book and hit a go button and not being invested that way but keeping that alive and present in the room sorry going back to what you're saying before because i just came out of uh my thesis production where i've realized afterwards so my set designer was not in the room and but i had a composer who was and what ended up happening is my set designer turned into my projection designer because the set got created in rehearsal and it was a really hard conversation as a colleague of mine who have worked with forever but i'm curious to hear like how to get the designers in the room i mean we worked together for we rehearsed for 10 months so getting my set designer and my sound designer in the room like my sound designer never even saw the show um he was not your sound designer she she was not your sound was but well and actually what happened is my composer who was in the room ended up being the sound designer that's your sound designer my sound designer ended up giving me a playlist for but but just how to actually do that because you know my set designer my projection designer was working on five other shows so like i don't know how to get those people in the room i think it actually goes back to what you were saying about we would never put up with that with actors and just and just changing of an expectation which which is a long process and and and it's difficult but to but to have the expectation to start with that to to make it normal and and and then when they are in the room to make sure that that that they're empowered that that's really important that that once the designer is in the room the job is not finished that you don't just let the designer be there there's a whole set of things that need to be learned about how the group in the room is working and that becomes the project happening you know with my composer like yeah yeah of course i mean because they were such a part of the process and i felt like my two designers out of the room well i would never do that again but but then i face like potentially doing it myself because if i can't find those designers i mean that's just yeah and to be fair you know we're we're in a closed system right now what what we're talking about there's a lot of different designers who do a lot of things differently and to me it sounds like that might not have been the perfect set designer for your show or like if you're having you know that if they can't be in the room no matter how much you love them if you need them in the room they may not be the designer and you might be better off going with someone who can be in the room to make the show you know there's i'm a very particular kind of designer and some directors don't want me in the room making noise and i don't work with those directors dan sullivan and i have a very interesting relationship because of that you know um that that that i you know we we have we do it the old fashioned way much to my chagrin but i love being i love watching his shows and being in tech with him so much i love doing the shows because i get a particular thing out of it too you know that that's the other side of this too is for me as a designer on top of uh what the job that you're doing at hand you often get in situations that you think oh this is not an ideal design situation and then your job is to figure out why you're in the room and there is some reason why you're in the room it's either an actor's performance it's or integrating with you have to find something to keep you in the room and keep you active inside that inside that process but that's more of a conversation with designers i am a designer and i do dream of a process where i'm in the seat next to the director every night and and as was said earlier that often is impossible uh when i go into a shop uh into my office and i start drafting at seven thirty in the morning and then staying through rehearsal that evening and keeping that kind of schedule throughout a six-week period it becomes very problematic uh so that frustrates me as well i think another thing that came up that um rang very true with me was the language of inclusion and i think because i uh pressed this issue with my students at the University of New Orleans uh daily it's uh it's not my show it's the show it's our it's the show it's the design uh then so when i hear language from directors that says my show my sound designer my uh lighting designer my you know uh it does it kind of slaps me in the face and i think that that's one thing that we can do to keep designers and invite designers in the room it's when they are included and they feel part of the process and and it's simple things it's just the way you say it that can that can make all the difference in the world to an individual and and the investment just increases exponentially it is a huge thing that kind of inclusion is also i mean was talking with someone who is that another session but who's uh at a college where he was worried about this problem and he has a fantastic uh resident lighting designer there and he's invited him to provide the first uh prompt for the production is to let the designer start sometime and to honor that um as as a creative generative artist and that is something that i think is not so hard to model in a in a university setting let's try to what do you want and ask them well you're in on this too it's i mean the the language of inclusion goes both ways saying to the designer you're part of this but also when young designers who think they're your servant right they're in that mode so they say to me what do you want for this moment and i say well i don't know what do you propose what should we figure out they go only you know suddenly they have the artistic license so it's helping them get out of that servantile habit oh yeah you know i i have this i i have this rule and i've talked to my assistants about this a lot that anytime i've ever been in a situation since the beginning of my career was that thing where a director will ask me so what are you listening to and what are you thinking about for the show can you give me a cd and i'm like absolutely not why am i going to give you a cd that is filled with music for you to take home and listen to possibly while you're working or possibly while you're making dinner after getting home from rehearsal that's not even in uh in context of how i'm thinking about it inside the show but you know what i will do is if you want to come in a little bit early tomorrow we can play through some things and talk about it in the rehearsal hall not at a coffee shop not it you know that you you have to um that you have to establish sort of sort of rules in my case sometimes to actually provoke the the conversations that you really that you really really want to have you know it definitely is a you know i've said this before i'll say it again it's a two way street you know there will be some designers that won't that want to be servants that's totally fine i know tons of them those aren't the people that any of us in this room are interested in working with and let that happen at another panel about designers just sitting down and doing their jobs and coming to the but that's not what we're talking about here but those people exist and they can i just happen to choose not to want to do that and boogert has this thing that she says about that question what do you want because this is when somebody asks her that she wants to go home right and she says what what i want is frankly a little perverse and has nothing to do with the show right so this is if we're going to work on the show it's about something else but but it's also you know it's this idea of i i think a real important part of it and and we we are kind of circling around it in various ways is is how do we start these relationships how do we start these processes and i mean even you know like the thing of let's start a conversation about the sound design that doesn't assume there's going to be one i i worked with a costume designer i worked with a costume designer who i really really enjoyed working with because she started every process that we would work on with the assumption that everyone's naked my shows are in the dark until there's a reason there and then you've got to have a reason and and it's a it's just as a way of talking as like we're trying to make a play it's not assumed that any of us are it's not here about me executing my agenda this happened with assistants who are sitting at the tech table and they get their new script to the next thing that they're working on the first thing they do on first page it goes q1 and inevitably i always go how do you know you haven't even been in rehearsal and this is your first read of this thing there may be no q at all you know don't make presumptions like get in the room with the thing that you're making and working on and let it communicate what it wants but you were talking about some very real strategies about how hard it can be to get in the room like money and time money and time one of the things i've started to do is like bring i still hand draft because i trained physically so i put it in the body but i bring the drafting table into the room i think it's really cool when i see people working with color and paint and swatches in the room and it's not that hard to drag what i would be doing in my office into the room and then you know in those breaks you know i think more important stuff and where making work happens on the breaks and real breaks very often than what happens in rehearsal right so being able to have that kind of not loaded interface that can happen in the break when somebody sort of casually like what what you doing or just looks over and sees that sort of you know the your research materials you know getting them up on the wall in in the room is i think so important so you so but there is a thing that that is part of the professional reality now which i think is i think we have to name it which is that a lot of people who are performers and directors do something else in addition to make money and a lot of designers can kind of manage a career whereby doing seven gazillion shows a year that's all they do okay and especially in some of the younger ensemble world we're in the middle of that i actually have something to say about this that is entirely true but you can buck the system and i will tell you how is that the first three or four years i lived in new york i was poor as a doormouse like pulling change out of the milk jar to make sure i had enough money to get a token to get on the subway to get to a rehearsal but if you do that one show with that director at the public or at new york theater workshop or wherever it may be and you're in that rehearsal every single day or when you need to be there and you are an integral part to creating this thing the next time they go to do a show they're going to want you there most likely if you have hit it off and you've you know so when that theater calls the next time you go yeah okay that's great you got a freebie but this time you can't pay me the same amount of money you're paying the the sound designer who comes in on the design day and you have a negotiation and now you have the director on your side as well who in many cases for me has called the theater and went i don't care what you have to do i want him in the room every single day i don't want to have this conversation anymore and they hang the phone up and you know what somebody figures it out so it's also up to the designer to change how that system works and for me that that's the that is the way that i the challenges that many young ensembles are self-presenting totally that and it's that air right yes people are recognizing yeah all right and so it's that that little hub you know getting not little hub that huge hub yeah within the attraction to doing that show because i have done plenty of those is the is the love of the thing that you're i mean but we still work for free all the time just because we're working for free definitely means that you need a certain kind of collaborator in that room with you even i do shows for free all the time still you know but i am attracted to it for a very particular reason and so usually that's about i get to make something with someone that's new like the the the potentials are still there i think so we're back to buy in which i think is a really good place for us to leave because we are at time and so i leave you with buy in