 up from the tree in a place need a break, there was a stage, and a red velvet curl. When he died after ten years of work with this company, I mean to me, we've been in Columbia for thirty years to see generations of my students kind of training the next generation. So I'm going to kind of hand it over to Tonika Tolerova who is there just a director of Silent Theater and Isaiah Washington is the director of the company, and Laura Fisher and Curtis Jackson are unsolvable members who have been with the company since the beginning. Hi you guys, thank you so much for coming out today, and thank you to all of you students for lending your talents to us, the crash scores of sound, your divisive work, the advising work. We actually started from college, we're old so that you're sitting on this panel today around the night, and our, well my last collegiate experience here was the show called Little of Black and White Sound, and when she saw an excerpt of the collegiate students performing, it started because Sheldon particularly gave us this play that seemed nebulous to me when I was reading it, it was very germinous, stilted, the language was difficult to handle, and we thought what if we just take this product and apply this very specific aesthetic to it, eliminate all the language and just calm all the action and see what the play has to say now. And it has taken so many different transformations, every single time there was a new cast member or a new addition, it would take shape because we were relying on this talent and the new performers would bring in to augment what we already have set base for. And ultimately the production got produced professionally here in Chicago, and we bought this big old school bus and we painted it and gutted it and left our jobs and our family and our friends and got on the bus and left for New York. But without anything, there was no financial support, we just kind of did the show to survive, to eat. And we went to New York and ended up in San Francisco and telling more about these stories, ran out of money and we had to do the show to survive in New York. So this is sort of this big adventure that started us off and created a family, we had to live together, we had to do laundry together and eat and it created this very much family bond between us. These are my brothers and sisters, I'm the only child that considers sound to be my family and I love these people. And when Tanya says we had the idea to do this, what she means is she, and then she had to fight with us here at Columbia and we, that's how we got started. I do have to say that Sheldon was a huge advocate for us. I think Sheldon always wanted to see new things come through and I know that there's certain institutional practices. I think back in my day, I graduated in 2002, you guys are a little bit older generation. Yeah, we were fresh in our good place here. Yeah, it was all new people, which is wonderful. This was back before the 24-hour play festival came along. There were certain rules that were put into place for institutions to really teach their students to apply theatrical skills in the outside world. Where we were coming from was pioneering a completely new different thing, and how do you take this and treat it as an ensemble-based performance and take it out into the real world as a new genre of performance, physical theater genre performance that wasn't necessarily playing to the orthodox style of how things go theatrically. You go out in the world, you audition for two minutes in a fluorescent room, you're talking to thin air and you get cast and you don't know if that person has the right chemistry with other people. You really want to turn it into a more workshop process and see how the two parties gel. I would also say for those of you who are not familiar with our program, and I've been here for a long time, that the inception of the program was a traditional Stanislavski-based second city training program. And in the last 10 years, particularly with our new chair, John Green, who you all have met, the bringing into the curriculum, devising different physical theater pedagogies, I think has really broadened and widened what the student is living with has in their skill set. So I'm really appreciative of that building on that John did. And these folks were really, as Taka said, pioneers of learning, taking a Vedic in play, taking a piece of Pandora's Box or Earth Spirit and creating it in this kind of way. And you have also been committed, as I said, new methodologies that are not ongoing, which is really wonderful. Yeah, I have to say that we stumbled around a lot trying to figure out how to figure out how to go about doing what we do. We actually, it's taken us a decade to really be able to explain how we approach our work and how we execute it. Because I feel like a lot of it is very unorthodox. We have this kind of rule now when people will say, well, what's the first thing you need to remember? And it's not about jumping into this process with your head or your heart. You're not feeling it, you're not really thinking about it. It's really about jumping in with your feet. If you don't know what you're doing, then you're thinking about what you're doing and that's not really interesting to watch on stage. So once we... I mean, I think you guys have all tested this. When we started working with the Columbia folks a few weeks ago, it was more about you need to get from point A to point B. Figure out how to get from point A to point B later, but we just know that you need to enter here and you have to execute this by the time you're gone. And also, of course, I'm going to let you speak a little bit about music because I have to say music is such an important factor. It's a backbone of what we do. Oftentimes in rehearsal before we can go back to figure out what we're doing with the band is we'll experiment with all these different types of music that will fuel the action and sometimes change the moon and sometimes change the plot of what's going on. And then Isaiah and the band will come in and they'll create music around that and add those little accents as canes are coming up and slaps are coming down. We used to didn't do that way. We used to be around in rehearsals all the time and you'd be sitting there going like, oh my God, you know what they did. No. It was, you know, in my opinion. Yeah, please take the time. You know, it's been a really, it's always an interesting process and it's never, it's never a waste of time to be there during the entire rehearsal process. As Tanaka said, each time we've done this show, there's been a new addition, a new cast member, you know. And the majority of the cast, you know, and any given incarnation of this show has been made up of a majority of people who have done it before, but perhaps in a different role. So, and what I do in a nutshell, what I do musically is I try to, with this show, I try to establish a musical theme for each character because there is no spoken dialogue, you know, we have to know that that's the father who's in, that's the drunken father who's entering, because although that's his music, you know, and he's coming in and his character and every, you know, and so on and so forth. So, each prominent character has, you know, has their own theme or each prominent happening has its, you know, these are musical cues, like a knock at the door, you know, which is something that I'm completely in control of. And, you know, if I forget there's a knock at the door, then someone's waiting offstage to enter, you know, and that's on me. But let me backtrack in terms of being there throughout the entire rehearsal process because each actor brings a different physicality to any character. So... Why don't you show us, like, show us, like, what an old man versus, like, the ingenue. Who was the ingenue? I don't know. Versus my big girl. Versus... I mean, and I had it, I wrote a lot of things like, you know, ten years ago, and I hadn't really played a lot of them in a long time. Versus... Okay, so, like, for instance, there's some... there's a perfect example, okay? There's a medic and there's a brother, okay? And every time we open a scene and the maid is there, and she's cleaning, and... And every time we've had a maid, she's been someone who's all, ah! Ah! Yes! Gotcha! My girl is big, and then there's a knock at the door. So there's a knock at the door, the butler who's always been played by Marvin, right? Yeah. And Marvin comes out and he does... Curtis, would you please? I'll try, yeah. So this is how we play, right? He's pressing, but, you know, that was Marvin's butler, you know? That was Jillian's maid theme, you know? I had a different maid theme for when Robin played the maid, and Dr. Shun has his own theme, but there have been, like, four different actors I've had to come up with a theme for for Dr. Shun, and it's always been different. Even today, just today, and this is the beautiful thing about it, because, you know, each actor brings a different aura to it, so it's all slightly different every time, and even though I have established themes, you know, in the head, they don't always come across, you know, the same way every time, and that is, I think, what makes this particular process unique. These actors can attest, just today, we ran it, we put together, what, three times, right? And every single, like, even when we did it now, it wasn't, every single time that we've done it today, it's been a completely different organism, because, because it just lives that way. I think it's that way for the action on the stage, too. I mean, some of us have done Lulu, like, almost 200 times, total, over, like, 10 of a lot of years, but we, to be able to maintain sanity, very, very quiet, controlled sanity, you have to play, and the play continues, while you're doing the same play every night, so, you know, there's none of the, must be here, unless it's something that's being accented, so, like, some of those things are kind of sad. The major events of the show, we get to color in the lines of different color every time. Well, nothing, why, besides the fact. You know? But you know what, actually, coming back to that, part of what sells, well, Lulu mostly, but I feel like a lot of our work is the fact that, since you have no text, there's no subtext. You can't really deal with exposition, or what's the flashback to the future, because you're like, wait a minute, what's going on? Don't be explained to me that we're now fast-forwarded time, or we're going back. We have to really pepper it. We can't really use those unless it's a big deal. So, because the play is always present, there is a self-awareness. So, the audience and the actors and the music allow themselves to breathe together and always respond to what's going on on stage. So, if anything goes not per plan, which always does every show, there's nothing ever per plan, then it's just going with it. There is no question, oh, we should have done this. I mean, today I saw you guys just, your wave fell out, and it's like things are falling apart, so if you go with it, what are you going to do? Stage 1, I was like, well, you dropped your wager. I think one of my favorite examples is One Night, I think you ran San Francisco, and there's a spoiler, there's a scene where the Countess gets murdered by Jack the Ripper. And one night, Lord decided, and a lot of these things would happen without a prior notification to one another. We would like to surprise one another on stage. Lord decided that she was not going to let Jack the Ripper kill her, she was going to take out her blood and shoot herself in the mouth. And that happened. Jack the Ripper was really surprised. Yes, we all were. I mean, and just like... Did I tell you? No. A lot of things that went on stage that I didn't know about, that went on stage the entire time, they were kind of all that big. But yeah, little things like that, and the fact that the actor, Jeremy Bartler, I think, was playing Jack the Ripper that time, he just, the look of, just the stunned look on his face was priceless. And then something happened, but honest, and then just, moving on to whatever happened next, and having to catch that, having to catch that moment in the music, and me being totally surprised, and the Antonica being totally surprised. What are you talking about? Do you ever work in that app? Do you ever make moves? Whatever. Little things like that happened in every performance. Marvin and Jillian would have a different bit every time for the maid and the butler. Every time they would do something different, and that would just have to be ready to play on whatever they decided to do. We would play tricks on, I mean one of my favorite ones, you guys see it's black and white, monochromatic, right? So everything is covered, our hair is dyed, our clothes are, the way they are, our nails are black, and one night, Maddie, who plays like the young, kind of fresh puppy dog, and love boy, who's following around Lulu, like in love with her, at one point in the middle of the scene, he hands her a handful of flaming hot cheetahs. She's like, he has to then do something. Which I thought was terrible. He didn't necessarily like, when we did stuff. You know, but we were, so we went on this tour, right, because it was 2006, and our tour was around, we had gotten into the New York French Festival, and it was a really exciting time, it's summer in New York, a lot of us had never been there, it was a lot of our first year out of school, we took the school bus, and what we did to get people to show up, was just walk around, like these guys are walking around, and sometimes we'd park the bus, and have an impromptu dance party on top of the bus, and I tell you what, there's no better marketing tool than having a bunch of freaks walking around with Lulu on the side of their bus, and people would say, and then we sold out that, you know, French Festival run, and got an award. Although I gotta say, I think it does depend on where you are, because some spots people were like, I've seen it before. Oh, the bus looks freaks on me. You know, going back to Columbia, when we came out of Columbia, we decided to do this professionally, and this is part of the ensemble power, I feel like, because we didn't, we opened up a theater company to do a show, and we were planning to close it right after. We knew that ten years later, we were like, oh, Silent Theater, we're stuck with the name Silent Theater, we're only gonna do silent shows, since we didn't have a base, we had no idea how to go about producing shows. We had nothing to lose, really, so we would dress up, and we walked right into the, sometimes, and the Tribune, like Silent Telegraphs, invited reviewers to come and see our productions, because we had no other way. Nobody would pay attention to this show that's playing late night in the city lit. Nobody cared. But then the Tribune came, and gave us a great review, and then it was an avalanche. By the time we got into New York, we had such good press that we were able to be like, hey, we're in the Chicago, we just played into it, we're in the Chicago, we got all these great accolades in Chicago, and come and see us here, and we just played off of the car, we faked it till we made it, basically. The other thing that we discovered is that, is we were going through our process, and little was just scratching the surface, a lot of all these epiphanies came throughout the past ten years, not sometimes, all the time. If you take language away, people seem to pay more attention, and our body language has to be more specific, more direct, it has to be, we have to cut away all the facts so people can understand what we're saying. In essence, when we're doing that, we were able to connect with people on a different level. One, that wasn't taking a label or a word and taking this conception that people had of it, and then trying to fit into it. We were really kind of saying more without speaking. That makes sense. Opening it up for greater accessibility, so someone who doesn't have English as their first language can come and see one of Simon Theeter's plays. Individuals who are hard of hearing or deaf can come and enjoy and understand and participate in the work. As a matter of fact, in the past couple of years, there's been a lot of collaboration with the deaf community because actually ASL is a great bridge. I think that there should be some kind of a universal language. I came from Bulgaria, so when I first came to the States, I actually had a very hard time, not only where I didn't speak the language and I was trying to adapt to new culture and I was coming of age and all that, some securities, but people have preconceived notions when you don't speak the language, so it's hard to have a sheer human experience. Even as I was experiencing their kind of things like baseball games and so forth, I really felt out of place. In Simon Theeter, in a way, it has a much broader universal feel. We always say we're creating a universal language when just your time. So we take what ASL has to offer. We take what the old silent film, chaplain films have to offer and creating this human experience where we know a smile is a smile in any language. We know a broken heart in any culture and we're pushing importance of that. Do you want to talk about... No, I was just going to ask if there were questions from the audience to engage in a dialogue, but before that, I just want to say as the aesthetic, of course the aesthetic is from D.W. Griffith and Lilly Engish and all of the silent images that we know from a long years ago, but I think it's also, we heard some talk about sustainability that a company is their 10-year anniversary and kind of we know from great American institutions that have kind of stopped producing after 10 years and I'm wondering if you could talk a little this was a company that has not had a board until this year has kind of created through moxie and swag the ability to create their stuff. So anything about that that might be of interest just a little bit. Yeah, we had a phantom board I think a lot of small theater companies start because they're just actors and they want to do work which I actually very much commend. I think it's important for performers and young directors to go up and do what they love to do do it the best they can in apartments if they have to practice public presentations and also practice in the art of making art because it's too wrong thing there's the art side of it and there's the business side of it and a lot of theater companies start because they're excited and they're talented but what happens is they don't think about the bigger picture it just happened to us, that's why I'm speaking of experience they don't think of the bigger picture like well what happens when you actually need to run a theater company it is a lot of hard work and a lot of it is administrative and it tends to kill your creativity you get to a point where you're like oh god I'm just going through the general operations motions but my art is suffering and so how to balance that is a very difficult thing this year luckily our board has expanded and has taken a huge chunk of that responsibility from the artistic ensemble so the artistic ensemble can actually concentrate on the art and less on the industry and also in terms of longevity I mean it's what you saw today where we want to bring younger, fresher hardworking, excited eager, hungry performers and start devising with them create pieces with them and give it new life because Curtis and Isaiah and I have been doing it for a really long time and we still love performing and doing this together but as you get older you have families you have children you can't pick up your life and go on a bus and leave without anything but that is that thing that happened is why we're still here today too because you have to be fearless and believe that you're going to just be able to exist and create and interest people or else we wouldn't have made it five years or ten years if we hadn't just thought well what else are we going to do we might as well take the show on the road we wouldn't have stayed I don't think performing if it hadn't been for that fearlessness and I don't think we'll stay another ten years unless we have new energy and new people to create with a new life in the company and in the work so we also feel like part of our genre because it's this physical theater and we deal with human issues but it allows because of our aesthetic it allows for our ensemble to be quite diverse we don't we have performers playing male or female roles it doesn't have to be gender specific or race specific it allows it to be pretty free because everybody in the ensemble is a human performer they're cast because they're women or they're cast because they're black or they're cast because they can speak sign it's all very malleable people can come in and out of roles and we don't have a traditional audition kind of thing when we're looking for people to perform with the way that we do that is inviting them to play with us and you know put on some music and devise a scene and say like okay let's take three minutes and we need this thing and this thing to happen go play silently and come back and we'll show each other so you know it's not so much as oh they can really move and oh they're really great at making faces it's like how do you get together and how can you respond to new things coming in because as we've said we're not like we do this and then we do this and we do this it has to be very interactive with one another so we've started this devising process and we invite people in and that's what these guys have been a part of as well as we're looking to remount this show Lulu after a million years again and others may have been in it before but a lot of them will be new, fresh and we learn who the right people are by playing together and generating many many works that might play into the final project I mean I think we've seen we've done what five, six workshops where we've invited people in over the last few months to do musician workshops and things like that and there's little nuggets that get created that I know when we get into the rehearsal room we'll be like I don't know unless we did that thing in that part that was great we should try to do something with that or it's just like little nuggets feed into the whole thing and then eventually it has to open and stop working at some point but you don't really because you keep working on it so just like the music punctuates when we're in a theater it's also the lights that punctuate things we've developed a way almost tricking people's eyes into understanding where the close up would be if it's a film you know so with light or with a gesture or with complete stillness we're tricking the audience where to put their focus a lot of cinema techniques I guess we apply in the theatrical world we treat it as what if this is a camera and how do we focus film is such a manipulative art form with theater it's a little bit different because you can see the lights and the sweat and all that but I feel like there's also power in the fact that if we just go along with it we're not relying to the audience and we're not putting on a show or as a matter of fact by the office and once you get lost yourself it will come and remind you like I got ya and then try to bring it back around I actually want to throw it back to you Curtis a little bit because I feel like actually Laura and me too it's very important for a long time we just worked with each other it was a nucleus of people and we didn't really put it out to other people to join us it was dumb but then as people broke off we realized that not only were when you guys go out and do other things I know you've done some cool stuff and so forth but when you return you come back with all that experience and new energy and also a light bringing new people where they also bring a set of tools that we can play with and being able to mix that all the bad reshuffling it and reimagining it all it's such an exciting process but maybe you guys can speak a little bit more about going out of this process and coming back into it I think part of the reason why the company has lasted for 10 years now does have to do a lot with the new people that we love to work with but it also has to do with the fact that we're able to leave we're able to like go off to Paris and study mine or something we're able to go to grad school which is what I did and go to New York and get a master's degree and learn more technique and more things that I personally am interested in when I come back to sign a theater company you say, hey guys, we got to put some workshops together for X, Y and Z because I want to see how it works with you all I want to see how it works with other people who might not experience a college class or a Camilla Del Arte class or even getting into different kinds of theatrical theory which you get into in grad school that's very very heady very intellectual I get to play and experiment with my company with these people and they're somewhat always available but they're always interested and that is always again, like Laura was saying we start to develop these little nuggets that might seem appropriate for whatever we want to do in the future for things that we are currently working on or things that we might want to bring back in the past you guys are starting to wear different hats you can't just stand the role of one thing if you're in sound theater you're never just a director you're never just a performer you're never just a musical director you're just constantly switching hats and putting out your techniques and skills for good use in some way it's been quite lovely coming back in and regrouping with the company and them wanting to know what other things are we capable of doing together or with people that we have met along the way I think that's kind of how that's the longevity for me there's always room for us to like go away and come back and teach so to speak in Curtis we're kind of more of the academic route I went more of what we call talkie route I know I do plays with words but you know like just jumping into Chicago French storefront theater too has been also if you can imagine a tight little nucleus of 12 people traveling together for 4 months we are siblings and we love each other and that also got pretty intense sometimes we were lovers and friends I mean it gets messy brings all of that life together and then go and do some things on our own but then come back and know this is our theatrical home these are our creative family and I mean not just creative family we're we're there when we get married we're there when people die we're there when babies are born I think that that is what an ensemble is and the exciting thing is building upon that you know Chicago has such an amazing history of ensemble theater and this is kind of a new way of being an ensemble just stripping it down but it's the same thing it's a bunch of scrappy young people or different types of people getting together and saying well we can do this just as good as someone else can and just throwing them out there but it is true every time we step away for a project for a couple years for whatever it is and come back we're stronger when we come back together because we've got more tools in our bag a little bit thoughts from you folks about training or work for the ongoing challenges and assets and liabilities of keeping people together and reinventing their work John I'd like to talk more about the trade you talk about device obviously as Jeff said there's that lovely reference point of silent theater and generally expressions so for example what process did you take to promote wonderful students and what's the fundamental trading process there's two different types but the ones that some of the Columbia students have recently experienced is training and going towards this world of the black and white silent film and prosthetic in which we would create different scenarios so people would there would be a movement exercise that would get all of their instincts going the right way so once so they're given a task so like here's a scene for you and you have to you're in an art studio and he's painting you and you wouldn't hold still and see where that goes so once we have gone through the walkings and the character work character development you can go away on your own and come back and develop device something and then you come back and give you a piece of music and so there's a different element to add every single step of the way so our job mine specifically is not so much telling people what to do this particular bit is a little bit of a different example because we have to do an excerpt but it's more about guiding people offering a six different set of hands that they can play about that experience I'm trying to think of a specific example because we've gone through so many workshops that I think is pretty specific where our task was three people on a scene so we got put together three people and you saw today the split scene which is the tango and the Vodvillian comedic moment and those are switched back and forth with a freeze like a tableau and then the movement goes to the other person so there was one actor who played both scenes and you had to put in I think it was five tableaus so it would switch from one to the other and we had like ten minutes three actors playing two one person playing two different scenes and then two other people are playing each one scene and just going back and forth and playing with what it's like when you freeze and then how does energy get handed over to the other people so also that idea of like training the eye like here's where you're looking while this is frozen and now here's where you're looking so so things like that just giving them um it's almost like physicalizing cinematic techniques for more of a general more general broad sense of it we're doing a high school institute which is more of a general workshop that we do so we would take it mostly works with people who have never done this before when you get people who are in really high training they start to apply all that training to this and a lot of it feels actually instinctually wrong to sign theater techniques but in this general training we give everybody the same nursery run so we Jack and Jill went up the hill that should fail with water I don't know if that is exactly but you know that's familiar with everybody the same and a lot of sign theater shows that have context the audience shares fairy tales for example everybody understands they work better because we don't have to get anybody all that exposition you hear Robin and Juliet you know what that's about so it helps to have action to have higher context already so in the case of Jack and Jill we break everybody up in groups of three and they will be given Jack and Jill same text and then a genre an explanation of what that genre is Grandigno they'll have like a little bit of explanation of what Grandigno was about and they would have to take Jack and Jill went up the hill and perform it as a Grandigno piece and then we'll come around and collaborate on what kind of music would make that more would work with their genre or it's the Vaudeville genre or it's German expressionism so everybody would have a breakdown of what that's about whether they use lights to make it happen whether it's a specific type of gesticulation and body language that makes that genre specific and then we would work through it and everybody would get the chance to present it How much do you actually reference girls to look at them? I'm sorry? How much do you actually study a chapter or a lot of party or a Nussra or even the silent women well so are some of our veterans have been doing this for so long they've developed a physical language of their own and they have honed their own skill I wouldn't even necessarily say that they're emulating Charlie Chaplin because it's a reference it's like we watch something together because there's an idea in it that's interesting that we might play with and in terms of emulating silent film in a black and white silent play like Lulu which isn't all of our work we use the idea of in a silent film where there's the necessary dialogue comes on stage so we do that as well so when there's that moment where we need to know like oh they're in London now there's physicality with a freeze and a blackout and then that person comes out of it and it's as though they just got stuck in the middle of a gesture and they're moving right on through it as soon as the lights come up so that's another technique we use also something that's fun with people that are newer and when you think about stripping away language some people think you can't move your mouth at all you know or some people are like talking the whole ball all the time so learning when is it natural to mouth words like he's a man or moments like that and actually we use a lot of the crutches to our help so let's say talking through the entire thing literally talking, verbalizing through rehearsals saying okay now I'm going to come over here and now I'm going to take this thing from you talking through it and using that as a crutch is a great tool we don't think it's like a bad thing we encourage it because then it gets everybody on the scene page and then certain actors also bring a certain palette we were saying like Matt and Marvin are very good mind people and Matt was standing there well I mean everybody, not just new people but veterans too and explained okay well it's about suspension you've got a balloon and the balloon is going up and all of a sudden you're pulling it down and what the tension is and all of a sudden you're flying around so he understands mind better than some people and then he'll impart it to the newer crowd so I was like I'm going to go over here and I'm going to pick you up I'm going to lift up this chair and I'm going to say hello hello it helps to get the expression the expression is a lot of the things are more about drilling listening with your bodies to other people who are also communicating with their bodies so it's more of a presence than a technique in the shitting way that the things are structured and that listening is more about kind of what Sound of Theater is rather than this is how you go about doing it because everybody comes in from a completely different perspective or set of skills they want to apply that so it's more about the chemistry between people and what we're trying to communicate with as a as a team as an ensemble and that kind of goes along with the training process that we have for anyone because this particular person right here is going to play a man in a dress completely differently than Ian or Carl sorry which is going to be different from Jeff and so trying to find out all your individual quirks and movements and how you would use that suspension on your own with the balloon is part of the fun that's part of the process, it's part of the reason why we're able to gel together so well because we're both trying to figure out how we do the same thing differently I think a thing we always do in Silent Theater work because we're really focusing in this conversation about this black and white silent thing that we do but we also do other types of work as well but a thing that I think Silent Theater is known for in their shows is setting up the rules here are the rules of the game for example like we don't talk and we do, you know I'm being madame concrete, you know the rules are the ensemble does not speak, there is one person who is our narrator who sings and speaks a little bit and interacts with the band so we set these rules up and everybody kind of once they figure out like okay here's the rules, here's how they do it then we break the rule you know and keep everybody under the toes all of a sudden maybe it'll be you know a loud noise or something like that but I think often or it's we've been playing together and like we're in this film and all of a sudden we're looking at you, you know and so I think that's another thing that we try to do to to keep it fun and keep it fresh and keep people not knowing what's going to happen and excited about it I was kicking the audience apart the audience are just as much part of the story as the story and the performers we always pay pretty close attention to you being on the journey with us Yeah Yes, Mr. Park One of the conversations that comes up a lot in our membership is about collaborative decision making and you've referenced a lot of that as you've been talking and I wondered if you might be able to just talk a little bit more specifically about what does that look like for you both artistically and then conversely, administratively is there a hierarchy in terms of roles, does that change project to project does it change rehearsal to rehearsal is it completely collaborative and so I'd love for you to talk administratively and then also artistically and I'm curious to see what that looks like for you I'll talk to you about the administrative side of it because for a long time I was like one woman orchestra I was trying to do it all and I think it was out of fear that if I engaged in artistic people into the administrative process there I wouldn't lose them artistically because I was overwhelming them with administrative tasks that is not the way to do things obviously I learned my lesson and about four years ago there was a team of four people that started doing a lot of these production tasks and that alleviated a lot I also have twins so after they were born it became very difficult for me to run a theater company but these four people came together and they started producing a lot more of the administrative tasks and I was able to concentrate more on artistic stuff artistically I always feel like it was a collaborative process there's different directors that go into you know people have ideas and they want to conceive a show once they agree that it's going to be produced by silent theater then those people become the rainholders they're the ones making decisions as far as this is what my marketing I want my marketing to look this way I want my space to look this way because we try to tailor everything to the show it's never the same from show to show so the selection of that show is a consensus process does everyone have to agree or does they're just a consumable folks it in it's not like one person making a decision so it's a consensus structure for which project we select correct anybody's allowed to bring ideas to the table you know some of the work we've done silent Christmas Carol we've done a Charlie Chaplin play Nosferatu was like a kind of cool thing that was spear cut by Brendan it was kind of completely separate from a lot of us from the artistic ensemble but it was very very much it was a silent theater show you know we just got some fresh young people in and some ideas and then we work together too and bring in you know we're at each other's outside eyes if we're not involved in the project Jackie's left in our outside eyes as well kind of helping us work out some camps and it's not like there are 12 people 15 people or 20 people who are in a company at any given moment they're not all banging down at the door saying I want to do this play, I want to do this play, I want to do this play there are some people who want to do a play and just have the thought of doing it and wanting silent theater company to produce it and we'll take the next three to five years just thinking about it just working out we will talk about it and I think everything that we've kind of done together has been talked about as I mentioned at parties, at weddings in the hospitals I'm still waiting for the silent theater western about it talking about this one it's like if I have an idea to do something we've probably talked about it for a few years before I actually try to get the vote you know what I mean and when I try to get the vote I'm like hey I think this is the year most likely everyone is like oh we already know everyone's kind of working on it already most the ensemble is we know each other's ideas for each other's projects and are working on it before we even pitch something yeah I mean I think that casual especially if you want to work with specific people we can casually mention things throughout the year but really there's in January you're just in the ensemble means and we do pitches so I'll get up and say okay I've started working on this play and everybody's got their own technique too Marvin comes in and he just re-enacts the entire play by himself and you've seen him do doing gentlemen chatting so he's incredibly animated and he's not necessarily a good scribe but he will act the whole thing for you and in his pitch and it's or some people have visual presentations or have a power point presentation the more that you put energy towards your pitch the more likely it's going to get produced within that year otherwise it might get shelved to be workshopped that year but not really produced until next year so it's all but there is a January month where we are like look at what new work is really growing right now and it's perfect to do it's also not, even if we have a show that we've wanted to do for a while if it's not the right time we can't push it we can't even announce our season and say we're going to do this and this this year we've tried this last year and it killed us because it sometimes it's just not the right time the times change politically things are different socially things are different so more about really feeling the trying to produce something in another way that we get to explore some of those things we do a quarterly variety hour at our space that we have and so that's also a time that if there's like an idea of something that you want to play with with another ensemble member it might be like oh let's do let's work on that thing for the variety hour and do a 10 minute piece and then see how people are responding to that and go into something bigger so there's always an opportunity to be playing together if the idea is strong even if it's not something that we've decided like yes, we're going to as a company do this thing, here's the next show I mean it just starts as fun little goofball moments and when we were on tour too you know another thing that we were doing while we were doing boo boo over and over and over again when we were off on Monday Tuesday nights, our only nights off in San Francisco, we were doing the variety show and working like brain new material and some stuff that was some of it was so bad and some of it was really good and like we resurrect the things from stuff that we made up in parking lots and re-noted songs it's not always silent too sometimes we are reading it pretty loud sometimes administratively it has to do with who we are and what resources we have so I mean in terms of like we're all Columbia alumni most of us are so sometimes we have the resources here to use a rehearsal room or to contact students who would like to be a part of you know devising something for what's happening today so I mean it's straight up in terms of who's executing what signature this check or what have you sometimes it also has to do with well who has better access to do that yeah we try to go for the role of the best man for the job is going to do that job because we've all been given the task before where we're like I got sent to Kinko's one time to do a program and I'm visually really bad with things I'm trying to figure out how to do it so you can fold it the right way it was just a disaster but then again it's like well I can throw a little event together no problem I can get a gazillion silent auction packages because that's what I my day job is in fundraising now too but that's because I had I had to learn how to fundraise and throw events so we could stay for like 10 years ago and then you know now I do that professionally which is pretty weird well when we were doing it I didn't know what I was doing at all just try to do the best you can and do it so well absolutely any last thoughts? what are you going to do? I think what they talked about and the greatest thing they offer after the room is is that sense of play and the sense that even though they have been doing this for 10 years and we're just jumping in the fact that we're as much there as they are and we're treated as equals it's great because we'll be working on that thing even like today they talk about things living and breathing changing and as we were rehearsing before this today they were just critique or fine tune make this gesture bigger as Curtis kept saying over and over and like not having as much experience as them it's great to to to get taught on a moment to moment basis and to take that and go I know to make it bigger so when I go do the next thing I don't have to learn that and on a technical level due to the fact that this is a very specific aesthetic you have to bring certain practices to it which you wouldn't typically bring to like a piece of theatre that is spoken one of the big things that they emphasized was in Silent Peter there are frame skips there are these moments where you can't exactly tell what's going on because that's just the way the camera is to work and trying to work through that problem on stage is a really interesting challenge for any other performer to go with so it's a great challenge and it also provides an interesting an interesting way to think about to think about just theatre as a whole not even, doesn't matter if it's silent doesn't matter if it's said anything at all but it really helped us learn how to like like Isaiah uses Vienna we use our bodies and as actors that's really helping to learn and even this early to learn that our bodies are our instruments and Silent Peter not only not only not only teaches teaches us that but it encapsulates it's what it is really just living in your body and just being able to to show the experiences that you're having without having to participate to kind of piggyback off of that I heard this very statistic a while back we get 75% communication from other people from our body language not necessarily the words and I think there's a lot of acting especially in other things when people are learning where they're saying these words but they're not telling that story they're telling their body and so here it's an isolated chance where you have to tell the story with your body and your whole being because that's the only route you have to tell actually that's a great that's a great point because I feel like with talking plays there's that contradiction happening all the time really be hoops even if you're doing something very very verbose even if you're doing Shakespeare the entire thing silently just so you can tell what your mind is thinking when your body is moving to try to communicate because it's so contradictory on stage sometimes I feel like in real life it's very hard to tell somebody's line because you can say oh I take it for true value whatever you say to me I take it why would I think that you're lying but on stage it's different on stage you have to convince this of your authenticity if you were saying one thing but your body is doing something entirely different so I feel like with Silent Theater we try to make it a lot more authentic by simply having the body language communicate what's true going back to what I was saying at the very beginning sometimes you're saying a lot more when you're not speaking at all and for those of us that have gone through like that Chinese into a lot of it it really does impact our work when we open our mouths to speak on stage as well it really tones that muscle so that you can bring that to the stage when you're even doing one of those silly talky plays that other people might don't know I love plays with text we do and we all actually do them yeah game Silent Theater it's not like oh let's just do it as a matter of fact every show I've ever done with Silent Theater records I'm kind of in the way one show we did a production at the wild party where I actually signed while we were at Iowa oh yeah we did it from the original I don't know who you're talking about Joseph Montier March we did a production where all the action was silent and I just kind of like wrote music to did we have to close the entire it was the whole audience it was really good you just have to go to the bathroom half way through the show it didn't happen one time one time during the wild party I didn't have to go to the bathroom and what was any other question how did you get to the bathroom I wasn't telling the bathroom I wasn't telling the wild party bathroom where I actually stopped wanting to do that with the bathroom during the show we lived in the moment very long yes we do if there are do you guys have any shows coming out we're going to do a movie though we were reimagining the story though in a kind of a big adventure way a big experience way we did this product 10 years ago it was a great experience for us obviously it was a great adventure and the quality became good because of the physical language by themselves and it was tight and sexy and visceral you felt so elicited in the audience we used to tell people we were going home and begging after this because it was just not on the way it was so emotionally alive also very sexy we didn't want to come back to this 10 years later we're now in our 30s and we're bad and slower and we got bad problems why even redo it what's the point of just redoing a show we did 10 years ago one of the elements that I kept bringing up is the fact that we told the story of Lulu and it was alive and visceral and raw and sexy and fun and energetic but we didn't really get into the psychology of why the story exists and every single time I've seen a re-increanation of Lulu whether it's the operetta or the Pandora's Box the film or other different Pandora Box stories they feel from this very male perspective that they were written as this female this male projection of this female and she's playing each role and that left Lulu living nowhere and really approaching it from that perspective why from this female and how the spirited female and why is society telling her this is wrong and this is right and she's kind of saying this is who I am and I'm never going to lie to you and this Patriarchal Society coming back to a constant call where you're the guilty, you're the person that this is happening because of so that was one aspect, the artistic aspect and the other thing is that the past 10 years we've done productions and we also run a space called HQ we try to create these experiences that have an immersive component to them so it wasn't just people watching a show and there's a four-quall and none of that so we wanted to take this adventure and turn it into a three aspect thing so we have the live presentation we also have a filmed production of the live presentation but it's filmed as a movie so it'll be a final product that's a film of the staged version and then when people come to see the live version there'll be a live taping of the audience while they're watching the show so when they go home they can download the movie we've already recorded with now these inserts of them as part of it which will encourage people to dress up there's a little interactive element that they can do before the show and during the show and hopefully create more of a part of this experience that's why we're not going to be calling it a little black and white silent play we're calling it a little light silver screen adventure light silver screen we did start hitting on this thing especially when we were in San Francisco because we were there for so long the people started participating in the work with us kind of really organically there was a photographer that just kind of kept hanging out on the bus and taking photos there was a painter that was really inspired by what we were doing was painting us and we were making films and doing things and people wanted to participate so they wanted to dress up they thought it was fun to be in black and white gear too so we're kind of taking that idea and seeing how far we can take it and we've actually played it back on stage because they don't have to remember his lines it's about being present and you just tell them the rules and put it in the aesthetic and they can experience it as nerve-wracking as it may be as the time is tapping on stage you have to go thank you so much thank you