 So I would like that and I like the crossings between the different ways of making things. And I guess it's also from, I think the theater reminds me a lot of church and we were talking about community yesterday and just thinking of live events and there's a liveness in music that I think is fully emotional when someone, they always say when someone can't speak anymore they just break into song and there's a guy who teaches a lot of composer librettist workshops in Minneapolis. It's called Nautilus and his name is Ben Crywatts and I think a lot of us have taken his workshops through New Dramatists and he says, talks about emotional expansion and I think that that's really useful in theater because I don't really like the sound of actors projecting. I think that's what I hear when I hear a play that's a cappello most of the time. But I think that there are plays that don't have music that are very operatic to the ear like more stately mansions at New York Theater Workshop. Didn't have accompaniment at all but when I saw it I really felt that it was an opera because of its emotions and the way it was scored. So I think you can do that with theater and you can also something that I've done a lot is to work on something with music and with a composer and then later take the music away and it then has the print of the musicality and the language so I hope I answered the question. Very good. Kim, what about you? I started acting, dancing, singing very young at age 12 and was part of a theater company that did original musicals commissioned by Liz Swaydos and Steven Schwartz and had a ball doing that and then went into college and studied and always knew that acting was my favorite and expressing and dealing with the people and their intentions and their desires and their conflicts was my favorite thing so I thought I'm just gonna concentrate on the acting and I studied acting for four years and then upon getting out it wasn't as multi-culty aging myself in 1988 and so all ethnicities were encouraged to audition that said on the notices but we were barely ever cast and I was considered ethnic and they knew I sang so my advisor was pushing me to go into musicals, go into musicals and so I found myself working with an agent and he just kept sending me out for Anita in West Side Story all over the place and then I managed on my own to get cast and hear the musical which is a really fun musical and I did the European tour of that and fun songs to do and blah, blah, blah but it really I kind of suffered by the end and I felt like it really hurt my acting chops because it was all about fun song and then poignant ballad and then blah, blah, blah and so after that I thought I don't wanna keep on going out for these musicals I wanna do theater and luckily I got connected with Ruth and in the whole downtown theater scene and started doing what is still one of my favorite things to do is theater with music and it often means that the whole play is driven by the characters and their desires and their stories and their conflicts and exactly like Ruth said that they burst into song because they can't speak anymore and they have to sing it out and I just love that because the songs then really further the intentions and the conflicts and the story of the character so I got to play these crazy ass great characters that Ruth wrote and got to sing and got to do a little dancing and yeah and so that's what I still long for I love in theater pieces with music I love feeling the audience when suddenly the character does have to sing you feel the audience just kind of oh, oh and they listen even more intently and it really furthers the script along and serves the script and the text and the story and the characters so that's how I got into it. Mark? It's interesting, I have somewhat of a similar background to Ruth in that I think about my early influences last minute what are your two early influences or earliest memories of music and one is chant in the church and then the other was I grew up here but I can remember when I was gosh maybe four or five going to a pow wow up towards Naya Brera and this was the not the Ogallala Sioux tribe but maybe one of the Omaha tribes and I can remember getting out of the car and hearing the sound of drums in the distance and then getting closer and closer and closer and just feeling the energy of that the sound of the drums and how where is that and I want to see that and so from a very early age I wanted to be a drummer and really to play these big pow wow drums but growing up in the Midwest before you can study any other instrument at least where I grew up in Lincoln you had to study piano for at least a year and so I studied piano and I continued I started about the same age well maybe a little older than you but maybe you know like second grade and then I continued with that my musical studies threw out all the way to high school and then became initially a music major and an English major at the same time started in college really exploring the connection and I did by the way a lot of musical theater in high school like you do and so as frightening as it is to Mary Beth I did act at one point and so but then I became really fascinated but then I became really fascinated with a continuing use of percussion and voice so I was influenced by John Cage, Harry Parch, Meredith Mung, people like this were I was listening to as well as a lot of avant-garde jazz when I got to graduate studies at University of Iowa as a composition student that was the time when I tell say this is the like Tom Waits said at one point I went down the black hole of percussion and I never came out again so I was doing I started building all of these percussion instruments and from found objects and creating sound sculptures and then I wanted to combine that with these kind of extended vocal techniques, and forms but I was finding I was also at that time to support myself I was teaching ear training what I called ear straining and sight swinging to the theory students but I was finding that there was this resistance among music sort of classically trained music students to doing these extended vocal techniques and just experimenting and improvising and so I thought well gosh where I know that people in theater you know at least this is my experience when I was in theater have this sort of yes and mentality so I went to the theater department University of Iowa and took some pieces over there and began experimenting and that's how I began to start doing a lot of work in theater and then when people found out that I could accompany live I could add music as a percussionist as a pianist then I went down to black hole of theater and stayed there and so that's my impulse really came out of you know out of a practical search to find collaborators who were willing to take risks in the music that they were doing and then I just became fascinated with the process of how music and sound can propel storytelling in a kinetic way. Very good, if Ruth and Kim could talk a little bit they've collaborated together so if you guys could talk a little bit about a project that you worked on and how music was used in there that would be great. Yeah, what was so cool about working with Ruth and director Tim Maynard producer Kristen Marding and part of Tiny Mythic theater company composer Matthew Pierce Tiny Mythic went on to start here Art Center in New York City which some of you may know. With the exciting thing about working with Ruth is often day one of rehearsal she'd come in with her script with no music written yet and she'd say I kind of hear this part as a song and this part here and why don't we just run through it and Kim see what you think, see what you can do and that sounds pretty nerve wracking but she'd give me a little guidance and sometimes she'd point out a phrase or a word and said this word here is really important to me so maybe elongate it or da da da da da. So again it was like totally character intention and conflict driven and oftentimes when you do something like that it was freeing, it's scary but freeing in a way cause it's not about I gotta make this sound really good. It's about what is this character going through right now and what does she need to say and what does she need to express and what does she want and so we'd often play around with that and one show in particular I did a little piece of it infringed the other night, Centaur Battle of Saña Sinto. The composer was Nicos Briscoe and we were he, when it came to those little monologues and songs that he had some ideas for chords and he'd say I'm kind of hearing maybe these chords here and these chords there and da da da da and then I'd look at the piece and see what was going on with the character and then we would just riff with it and even by the time it opened at Dixon Place a lot of it wasn't set, we would maybe set okay we're gonna switch then to these chords here and this will be like the chorus and then we'd sometimes just set certain lines to help the other cast members too to give them some kind of guidelines of where we were in the song and it was very, very freeing and a little terrifying times I often tell the story of when I did the show Night Vision, which was a vampire opera and it was about a Iraqi vampire rock star woman and the music was composed by avant-garde saxophonist Fred Ho Rest in Peace Fred, brilliant, brilliant man and so I think the first thing we did with it is we had a staged reading at the public and it was packed and what was I, 26, 27, 28, like, yeah I was like 28, 29 and so again none of the music was written maybe one song but the rest not and here I was playing this Iraqi vampire rock star who had to sing Ruth's words which if you know Ruth's words are pretty wild sometimes while Fred improvised on tenor saxophone in front of the huge public theater so and I just went over to Fred's one day and he was like I don't know, I'm gonna play around and do something like and you just come in whenever you want and la, la, la so I remember sitting in the green room backstage like oh my god, I'm just gonna make a huge fool out of myself but then to bring myself back down I said no Kim, again it's about the character it's not about how great I'm gonna sound or how sweet that part's gonna sound or how meaty or whatever it's about the character and the words and what she's going through in that moment and about especially just being completely open and ears open, heart open, mind open and just connect the character and the words and trust and if I didn't hear anything I would just wait and then yeah super scary but super rewarding in the end and freeing yeah, ooh, I just got on a long story there Ruth, do you have anything to add to that? But you forgot about the two hearts that you had swallowed in your throat yeah, so not only did I just say I had two hearts in my throat, ultimately she was supposed to sing in two tones so when we went to production there was a second voice on the side of the stage singing with her so she sounded like she had two tones and I had to keep in mind sorry, tube enchanting, right? yeah and I had to keep in mind the Iraqi flair so I was listening to all this Iraqi music so I could somehow sound Iraqi when I was doing all this it was a lot of components but very freeing and again about the words and the characters and the story and the hearts were a third world and a first world heart and so they were, the vampire was transfusing and she was a metaphor for capitalism so that was, Kim and I worked together mostly during my cry pitch phase I would call it, my cry pitch years I was obsessed with this idea of a cry pitch and so it was, someone told me that the voice you can tell where your voice breaks as to where you've had trauma and so I was very interested in that and also there was a time when I was making a video when I was in grad school and I had always sung alto in church and so I was always singing under the melody and always had been told I was an alto and when I was just performing for myself in the video camera I started to experiment and my voice went everywhere it went away all over the place and I was really inspired by that breaking open and I wanted to, I wanted other actors to be able to feel that and to explore it and a lot of singers won't do that to their voice because they're afraid they're gonna hurt their vocal cords and I think there's ways of doing it without damaging yourself and so the cry pitch carols was another piece that Kim did and she played the Bible smuggler's wife and there was a small, small Christus who would explode his manger and so it was basically a nativity operetta set in a nostalgic nuclear cold winter. And so the cry pitch was kind of if you can imagine a rupture through Christmas carols so I was using Christmas carols to inspire the way I wrote the songs and the sounds Matthew Pierce is a, now he's working for the ballet but a classically trained violinist and so he was writing things that could sound like Christmas carols and then there would be this rupture that would cry out through it and that came also from working with punk bands where punk singers are not worried about their vocal cords at all so. Or there it is. But a couple punk bands that I worked with in Austin and I wanted to have older women singing the vocals and so we had punk bands with like 70 year old women. It was very hard to find actors willing to hear all the noise in the background of their beautiful vocals. So, but the cry pitch lasted for a long time and in fact when I think about music I have a couple drawings that I've worked on over the years and I return to them sometimes and try to think of like what is the architecture of the kind of voice that I'm interested in and I've written a couple blogs for TCG one of which is called toward a neo-cubist Alamkara vocal art for playwriting and so I think of the voice as cubist and as language and theater as a cubist kind of art form and I'm very interested in showing something that is has a flatness like theater does but also has multiple points of view within it and I think that's also feminist and anti-capitalist I guess you could say because capitalism is all about a single message and one person dominating. So to have multi-vocals and multi-linearity to have that kind of multiplicity is really political to me and also feminist and interesting. So I'm interested in this idea of the voice as cubist and so the cry pitch is a part of that and I would say that's the most foregrounded kind of voice because when you meet someone who is in that kind of emotional poverty they are very desperate and they sound broken and so they're usually very close to you but then as you go into the kind of horizontal linearity of the space those are everyday events and could be even realistic events but then in the background there would be affluence and people that are doing really well and don't really need you so they've gone off into the distance. So a couple other things I'm working on are locket areas. It's another piece that came out of this opera project time that Kim was a part of and when I look back on that time I really feel that we were fortunate to be bold enough to just make what we were making and we didn't have a 501C3, we didn't have a commission, we didn't have really anything but our own bravery and it lasted until everybody started getting scared because the reviews were like, what the hell are you doing? And my parents were like, what the hell is that? Yeah. So then everybody scattered into more commercial things except for Kim and I really and Kristen. But during that time I wrote these pieces with Kristen Martin for a piece that she brought me into called the courtesan and I had written them as locket areas and now I've returned to them and by accident a composer in Minneapolis, I sent them to him as a reference for something he was working on and he started scoring them and he just worked for three months straight and just scored them for opera singers and so I'm really excited about seeing them this way and I heard all of them for the first time in April with six beautiful Minneapolis opera singers and I can't wait to keep working on it and finding maybe a little interstitial kind of scenes between them and then I'm working on Previously Blue which is more of an acoustic acapella kind of piece but I'm actually performing in it and thinking of it as spoken singing so it goes between speaking and singing and it's very percussive in the background but minimalist I think as well and I'm working with Da Theater who they're, as I was mentioning yesterday, my sister's in Belgrade, Serbia and they're very physical and they actually have inspired me a lot to think about the voice, they talk about it as resonators, like they take this from Grotowski and Eugenia Barba and they have trained themselves physically so that they can resonate their voice from different parts of their body and so it's wonderful to work with them even though they aren't singers, they're very understanding of all the ranges of the voice and then another piece that is, we're just trying to get it off the ground, it's called The Passion of Layla and I'm thinking of it as a Tassier opera inspired by the form of Tassier but won't be traditional Tassier at all but I'm working on that with Richard Marriott in San Francisco, so those are some things I'm working on now but it really comes from that work that Kim and I did and I'm so lucky to have the honor of working with a performer like Kim because she's just like a genius. Oh my, I love this conference. I wanted to move this, and I'll let Mark lead with this because Mark and Ruth have both done work using music as a tool or a means to begin an intercultural collaboration with artists from other cultures so Mark, could you begin by talking a little bit about your experience interculturally? You know, and I would lead that by saying that the fascinating thing to me always in working on a new place or a established place is the opportunity to explore an entirely different musical world than I know and opening up and learning about a different world so an example of that was when I did Kentucky Cycle at Iowa before it transferred to the Kennedy Center and to Broadway and interestingly we have somebody in the house who was in that, Levy Lee Simon was in that production but it really led me down the path of exploring the music of Appalachia and then that whole, you know, what imagining what the sound of America was before the industrialization happened and so I explored that, learned a lot of songs, learned new instruments, a hammer dulcimer, lap dulcimer and so that was, that's one of the fascinating things for me in doing theater is it takes me down different musical journeys. One of my favorite projects that we did that was an intercultural exchange also started at the University of Iowa with Cambodian poet Usam Orr and poet Ken McCullough. Usam Orr had a book of poetry called Sacred Vows but when I met Sam and his friend Ken McCullough he had just come back sort of on a grant from Cambodia. His friend Ken McCullough met him during, when they were at the International Writing Workshop in 1968 and then Sam went back and was in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over. So he actually survived by, he had to burn all his poetry. He broke his glasses. He broke his glasses, buried actually all of his poetry as the Khmer Rouge was descending on Phnom Penh and his friend Ken, where they were very close, didn't, hadn't heard from him in years and had a beautiful poem about, they used to joke about people eating dog meat in Cambodia and he had this beautiful poem about, thinking about Usam Orr, you know, whether he was still alive or whether he was dog meat in the Khmer sun and then they got this letter out of the blue. Somebody requesting their thesis in Cambodia. So Sam came and if you know, if anybody's heard Khmer poetry, it's sung, all sung and Sam had a grant to come to University of Iowa and I did the first, Ken knew me because of work we had done together in settings of his poetry and Ken said, well, Usam said, I need accompaniment, you know, and I'm like, I don't know if play any Khmer instruments and he says, oh, well, we'll just come, he came over to my basement and I said, well, I have like these transmission gears that sort of sound like the kong-tum and he says, oh, those are great. So I play those and I have these flutes that sound a little bit like a Kemodian instrument, a pipak and so we did a reading of his sacred vows and well, fascinated me at that time when we first did that reading, we practiced and I had a synthesizer as well which was, so not an instrument except for with the mod wheel that I could sort of change pitch but we're doing this reading and all of a sudden his pitch starts shifting up as he's singing and I'm like, oh, I can't go there because I don't have like a trombone, they can slide, don't have a violin, you know and so I was kind of moving the mod wheel slightly and I come to find out in Khmer singing that it's a little bit like you talk about with the cry pitch but that their voices, part of the aesthetic is their voices slightly ascend so as they're ascending towards infinity so there's always this slightly tuning up and after we did that initial reading, Sam said, you know, I really see this as a theater piece or we talked about that, Mary Beth and I and then so we began a collaboration on well, how do we turn this piece into something, how do we take this to the stage and we created this chamber opera called Crissan Tree and Mary Beth can talk a little bit more about it but the beautiful thing of that was when we first did it at Iowa as a workshop, we put out a call for all Asian American students, we didn't care, there was some among community in Iowa, there was no Cambodians other than it was Sam Moore there at that time but it was a beautiful experience in Iowa to begin with because all of the Asian American students were in the room together and they said, this is the first time we've ever been in a room together creating a piece of theater that is about our culture. Not even just creating a piece of theater, they said it was the first time they'd been in a room together with just other people like them and we had one young woman that came to us and she said, I can't sing or I can't dance but I was in a refugee camp and I need to be a part of this. We then took the piece to, I'm gonna move quickly. A shorter amount of words than Mark. We moved the piece quickly to Minneapolis, St. Paul which we had funding from the St. Paul Company and various other organizations and Theater de la Jume Lune invited us to be able to work on the piece there and present it because it was very important because Minneapolis St. Paul has one of the largest Cambodian communities in the nation and full of a lot of refugees and there's a lot of problems, intergenerational communication problems between the parents who were, and grandparents who were refugees here and the young people who were going to school. So we also made it our focus to be able to work with an all Cambodian cast and we had people that were from the Royal Ballet which I saw our dancers who had taken refugee here. We had musicians who had worked their entire life as musicians, they're in fact survived by playing to entertain. And then we had young people who really didn't know what had happened. And it became a remarkable cross collaboration in which I think the music because we used found objects for the music considering everything was destroyed. So we had no true instruments, all the instruments we had were things that we could find that could sound like those instruments. And to me, I think it was one of the greatest ways of using music because I personally love theater that transforms and transports. And I think music gets us out of our heads and gets us into a place of listening and being that awakens our spirit. And so to me, that's my main purpose because I am a music whore for my theater and a sound whore from a technical point of view because I think that viscerally takes people somewhere else. And I think that's what it did with Grissongdry. It was really beautiful to see grandparents performing with their grandchildren and the grandchildren learning traditional dance, but mixing it with what they did contemporary. And that's kind of, I made it short because we don't have a lot of time. Yeah, and the beautiful thing was that it opened this dialogue because there were several intergenerational, it was arranged from 11, I think, to Bun Lung, who was a renowned musician. And as Mary Beth said, he survived the Khmer Rouge because he could play Vietnamese music and they loved Vietnamese music. I mean, think about the parallels of that, right? And that's their Holocaust, right? So, but some of it, it opened a dialogue because many parents were afraid to even talk about. Well, we had some people that wouldn't participate because they were afraid of being retribution against them from the Khmer Rouge that lived in Minneapolis, St. Paul. So, they were afraid to participate because of that. But Ushemur's whole ethos in writing his poetry is to talk about this and the experience. And it was really critical to him. He said, because we don't bring this to the light of day, if we don't go through this, if we don't tell this piece, then he talks a lot about the cycles of history and the wheel of history will turn again on us. So, that, I think, was one of the most amazing things. In addition to having an opportunity to partner with these amazing musicians and dancers, but that this dialogue, an intergenerational dialogue opened up and it really accomplished what I think Ushemur was thinking about in a broader sense, not just in creating a piece of theater that was beautiful, but in his mission as a poet and an artist. Kim has to say one more small thing. A small thing, and feel free to approach me if you wanna hear more about it. But I also worked a lot with the Talking Band Theatre Company and composer Ellen Maddow in New York City. And she's very much inspired by Meredith Monk, who, for those of you who don't know her, is avant-garde vocalist, came up in the 60s and does a lot of acapella vocal stuff. So, that's a way to incorporate music into your play that will help forward the scenes along, whether you want lyrics or no. So, just for a quick example, say you have a rainy scene and you would like a little music that would help serve that scene. In Meredith Monk, Ellen Maddow's style, you would have vocals, someone going, blip, blop, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip. That kind of thing. So, if anyone wants to hear more about that, feel free to approach me. We only have a few minutes left. So, does anyone have any questions that they would like to come up and ask? You have to take, I was told, the long walk up to the mic. Oh, we're quiet today. Ruth, is there anything else you would like to say? Well, I guess I would say, in terms of cross-cultural projects, there have been a lot in my experience, but I would talk about Fred, the work that I've done with Fred Ho, because he really brought together martial artists from all different schools of Kung Fu, and Kapoeira, and all kinds. They actually would have their own schools, and they would come and work together and do theater, and it was amazing to see them on stage together because they were trained to fight, and so they had to learn how to do theater and not hurt each other, and, you know. So, it was an amazing thing to watch their styles influence each other and come together as a whole piece, and there's a kind of parallel in one of the storylines that Fred and I wrote, which is the five martial artists of Shaolin Temple, who all have different fighting styles, you know, whether it's Panther or Snake Style, or their different styles, and then when they go to fight the evil Gar Man Zhang, who has stolen the Shaolin secret scrolls, and absorbed all of the fighting styles into her body, they have to improvise. So, I really love that idea of for cross-cultural collaboration that I think Mark is speaking to too, because I think when you think of culture, you think of traditions and conventions of music or theater, and I think that's really wonderful, but at one time those conventions were also improvisational, and so to keep that spirit, which comes also from the avant-garde and the edge that continues to move wherever it will, is to just keep exploring and to not be bound by the conventions of the past, because I think we're always working towards a new future, with also respect for the traditions that you are working with, and I always think of that as, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday, but I think of myself as taking off my shoes when I walk in the room, like it's sort of wholly ground in a way, and if I think of community, and another thing that I didn't get to say yesterday is that there's a song at the end of Three Graces, a piece that I wrote where it's talking about, it's a tavern song, and it's sit down at my table, have the drink the same old wine, there's a palace we can plunder, there's a life that should be mine, but this is my tavern, this is my table, and they're singing this as the to the Turk and the Greek rebels are fighting to the death, and I think in collaboration you have to sometimes say, this is not my table, this is not my play, this is not mine, it belongs to all of us, and I think that's sort of something I'm always trying to learn and also teach, so that's maybe something to think about. Yeah. If there are no questions, I think we've reached the end of our time, so thank you everyone for listening to us. And go out and make some wild music. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.