 Welcome everybody back here at Seagull Talks. This time combined with Office Hours from NYU Scurble. And we have with us, I think, one of the extraordinary artists of our time of Europe. But I think in the global sense of world theater, they are invited to come to NYU Scurble, the Improbable Theater and Phelan McDermott is with us. Phelan, welcome. Hello everybody, nice to be with you. Nice to be with you. How are you today? I'm good. I'm excited and a little bit nervous. You know, we're about to do the show in New York, Dow of Glass and it's a show that I really care about a lot. And so it's got that good mixture of excitement of really wanting to share the show and nervousness about our opening on Thursday. Incredible, it just came from North Carolina, where you have, I think, one show only, and now you're going to be for two weeks with us at NYU. Nice, yeah. Fantastic, yeah, Jay Weckman invited you and the great JD Leon also connected us. And I would like to say thank you for collaborating with us. The show, if I understand why, it's an exploration of life, loss and the question, where does inspiration come from? What happens when we dream? Because Jung once said, the dreams are the only things that hasn't happened yet. Look at cities, someone built them. Even when we see someone passing by till the eye puts it into our brain, there's a delay, a leopard runs faster. But in our dreams, everything comes together and you together was the Philip Glass, the great master of contemporary music, a grandmaster, a classic already, you know, you worked together a lot. And it's a very personal work, the Tower of Glass. So tell us a little bit, what was the inspiration for the play about inspiration and theatre? You know, it is an interesting piece because it's, and I say this in the show itself, it's a piece about what happens when something else doesn't happen. So as part of the story, there is a show that was going to happen that Philip and I were going to do and it was an adaptation of a Maurice Sendak story book in the Night Kitchen. And that fell through and didn't happen. So I was working with the Manchester Festival, John McGrath at the Manchester Festival. And he said, well, you know, this show isn't going to happen as we thought. What would you really like to do with Philip Glass? And I thought about that and I had a dream about it. And in a way, at the time, the dream was like a sort of crazy dream of me and him collaborating together, devising together. And I never really knew whether it would happen, but now I can look back and go, yes, the show did happen, but it did write a lot of wonderful music for the show. So on some levels, it's about the dreaming level of reality and how that can manifest into something that really exists here in consensus reality and is a show that has some dates and some lines that I have to try and remember and so on and so on. So it is about creativity in that sense, about the relationship of dreaming and dreams and dreamland and how they get manifested and also across time as well. So it also traces my first initial dreams about becoming a theater maker right from being a young boy. And then at college, when I was first interested in Philip's music and was slightly obsessed by it and actually there is this rather wonderful, for me, very precious journey of how Philip's music has been part of my life and sometimes that's been as an admirer and a listener. But then I was very lucky to actually get to a point where I was working with his operas, directing his operas and then a dream about collaborating with him I had and then it eventually ended up with me thinking, what would he be like? What was it like when Philip first made shows when he was doing stuff in downtown New York and in rehearsal rooms and he talks about writing music for Beckett, and these early days and I had a fantasy about, can I get Philip's last back into a rehearsal room and not just the big operas where he sits on his own and he writes the music but can I get him into a room and collaborate with him? And so that it's kind of, if there's any kind of jeopardy in this show, in its narrative, it's like, will I manage to get Philip Glass into the La Mama rehearsal space and muck about like, we do it improbable. And I imagine muck about like he did when he was first making his first extraordinary pieces of theater. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, people forget. I think Philip Glass worked as a app driver and did some plumbing, I think for a friend of mine, Bonnie Meranca, from PHA and while studying also in Paris. Did he join you in the rehearsal space? He, well, you know, I don't want to spoiler alert. Yes, yeah, because if he hadn't, the show would never have happened. So it is the story of how it almost didn't happen, but it did in the end. What did you dream? Can you tell us, what was the dream? What did you see? You know, it was a fantasy that I had, and again, I talk about this in the show, in the flotation tank. So one of the places that when you get really busy, it's quite hard to find space to dream and hard to find space for waking dreams. And I go and float in a flotation tank for many reasons. It really helps my pelvis. So those of you who have any kind of pelvic and muscular troubles, it really helps floating in a flotation tank. But it's one of the best places for me to dream. And it's like meditation for free. It takes you down to these deeper levels. And whilst I was in the tank, I've had a couple of Philip Glass dreams in the tank. The first was the juggling balls in a gnatin. And this was a dream I had when I saw myself doing puppetry. And those of you who know some of our shows know that we use materials, animating materials in our puppetry shows. And in Sacha Graha, the opera about Gandhi, we use newspaper and whatever. And I got an image of the puppetry, me doing puppetry on stage using kind of paper or tissue paper. And it was like these kind of wispy images. And then the next bit of a dream was, I heard, I saw this piano and it was playing and it was me and a piano on stage. And then I realized it was Philip Glass music. And then I realized it was actually Philip Glass at the piano. So my dream was actually me and him on stage together. And I, you know, when we first started doing our improvised puppetry shows, we would do them in small fringe spaces and it was kind of a dream about being in it. And I guess what in New York would be an off Broadway space, me and Philip Glass hanging out in an off Broadway space whilst I did some puppetry and he played the piano. So that was the dream I had. And that was all I had about the show, just that one fantasy, that kind of waking dream. So John McGrath dared me to go and say, well, go and ask Philip. So I went and asked Philip, and that's the kind of the dare to see if that would actually manifest as a real show. So it's there, it happens, the show's there and there is some puppetry in the show with beautiful newspapers and animation tissue paper. Actually, it's tissue paper with the score of the show printed on it. So it looks like very beautiful manuscript, music manuscript. And there are moments where Philip is on stage with me in a very magical way that Philip came up with as a solution. So I'm not gonna share that. No. So it doesn't spoil how it happens, but that dream of me and Philip on stage together did happen in a certain way. So. Fantastic. So it's a stage meditation one could say. I understand also 10 meditations on life and death kind of connected to a Taoist wisdom part concert part performance for everybody who does not know. Phelan is a great actor. He's a great puppet player and he's the director. He's on stage. He's in his own dream. And it's interesting. So much of the contemporary theater is inspired by our outside world, the kind of hyper social realism like the great play love we just saw at the Armory. But he goes into the dream world to the inside in a way like the great kung ju operas of China where people have dreams and dreams while they dream because the outside world, who wants to look at it? They think art has to connect to that. It is our most inner self and the most human one can be as an expression of an artist. So it is quite great for everybody to come and see what do you have? An artist has a dream. Now you can see what he did with it. I think it is so fantastic, so worth to spend time. Phelan is a master of theater. We know him, of course, of what he called the junk opera, the shock-headed Peter with the Tiger Lilies. It was a sensation that went around the world of fantastic work. And he did so many operas, Mozart operas, the servants, also the two masters, the gold donies. So this idea of juggling, commedia is in the great Akhnaten at the Met Opera that was here and of course the Sacha Krah. He's a great master of theater. He's just worked on my neighbor's tutorial, the Miyazaki adaptation. So let's maybe before we talk about your great theater company, all the improbable theater, when did it all start? Where was it? You say you were like a kid or you listened to him. When did you start thinking this is what I want to do and why do you do theater? You know, I think I'm probably very lucky. My mom nurtured a love in theater in me at a very early age. And again, it's interesting kind of being asked these questions because I answer them all in the show. If people have to leave, don't worry, just come and see the show and you'll hear these answers to these questions. You know, there was never a point I can remember where I didn't know that I was going to do theater. I always knew I was gonna be a performer. I think the way that I make theater I didn't know about, I thought I was gonna be like a Shakespearean actor. And because I was taken to the theater by my mom and I was taken to see, you know, some shows with, you know, I saw Lawrence Olivier early age performing on stage and I saw as growing up a kid in Manchester, I saw all these shows at the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester and I knew that that was what I was going to do. And my parents, there's a kind of interesting thing there. I wanted to go to drama school and my parents said, no, don't go to drama school. Maybe think about doing that later. You should get a degree. And so I ended up going to Manchester, sorry, to Middlesex Polytechnic. And it was a performing arts degree and it didn't exist, it doesn't exist anymore. And it was actually a place where I learned not just to become an actor, but to learn how to collaborate and how to devise and how to make it up really. So I came out of Middlesex, then Polytechnic, now a university, kind of going, oh, I'm going to make theater. I'll just, I don't know how to get a job or how to get auditions. I'll just make theater. So in my last year, I made a show and we used Philip Glass' music for that show. And so that track of Philip's music goes right back to when I first left college. But I was lucky, I think, in that I didn't ever go and be an actor and I have to sit by the phone and wait for whether I get a job. I just made shows. So when I was not kind of in a show, I thought, well, I'll make another show and I'll think about what that dream was. And early on, I didn't have access to playwrights. So we adapted stuff, you know, so I went, well, let's adapt this, this Ian McEwen story. We adapted a great narrative poem by Ted Hughes called Gaudete that happened at the Almeida Theater. And Pierre Audi, who's at the armory, let us do this crazy three and a half hour adaptation of this Ted Hughes poem. And then I just kept making, you know. So I didn't ever, luckily, didn't ever break stride. I'm not sure whether it would be possible nowadays to do the kind of route that I did when I first started in the 80s. So I always knew I was gonna be a performer and I'm still doing it. I then started directing quite a lot. I do miss performing when I'm directing. I like, I love storytelling. I love being on stage. So this show is kind of like, it's a catch up with me sharing some of the ideas about how you make things, how creativity happens. There's a thing that you mentioned, Jung, and one of the teachers that I mentioned in this show is this extraordinary guy, now a friend called Arnold Mindell. And I don't know if you know about Arnold Mindell. He's based in Portland, Oregon. And Arnold Mindell was a Jungian. He was actually a quantum physicist who became a Jungian therapist. And he created this school of work around the thing he called dream body work. And dream body work was the study of dreams and their relationship to body symptoms and how there is a dreaming process within the body that often comes through symptoms or body symptoms. And I got interested in his work. Yeah, he has these three levels of existence, right? It's this beautiful model that actually our set is based on. So Arnie's work, he's continued to develop his work. He's connected the psychology to quantum physics in a way that's actually, I think, really extraordinary. And because he really is a quantum physicist, it's not like, it's very scientific actually, process work, the work that he does. He talks signals and feedback and whatever. It's very scientific in its way. Yes, you're going to say. He talks about the conscious reality, the dream world, but then what he calls the essence. What's the essence? So there's a kind of, there's these three, his model of consciousness is these three levels of reality. I'm going to do a quick picture. Yes, please. Well, good that we are in Jay Wegman's office. Well, you can't see that. So can you see this? It's like a cone. Yeah? Yeah. And then at the top is consensus reality. I'll probably spell this wrong, consensus, reality. And then there's dreamland and then down at the bottom is essence level. And this, I do think, can you hear me? Yes. I do think for me this is, it's a brilliant sort of. Speak to the camera. Maybe that might be better. Yeah. It's a brilliant kind of psychology model. And it's actually a model for what he calls deep democracy. So it relates to the kind of social activism where the Arnie and Amy Mendel do. And that works called world work. So if you Google deep democracy and world work, you'll find out about that. But this cone, it's a fantastic model for how one looks at issues and important kind of world issues and conflicts and so on. So at the top of that cone there is consensus reality, see? And that's like a surface layer. And that's like everyday life. It's what we agree, reality is it. And it's where kind of everyday problems, conflicts happen. And it's the kind of diverse world. It's the world of where we're separate. So we have our separate identities, we have our separate issues, and the polarities of the world happen. And in the show I say that it's actually what the Buddhists call the realm of 10,000 things. So it's the world of difference. And then lower down here is dreamland. And dreamland is a world where that's the world, the kind of Jungian dream world. Of course it's dreaming at night, but it's also dreamland as a presence now, like our waking dreams and our fantasies, our sense of atmospheres and emotions that we often marginalize. So consensus reality works hard to marginalize dreamland, but dreamland tries to communicate with us through different signals. So Arnie talks about how it might come through a kind of double signal in our body. So it might be that we say we're happy, but actually we've got a feeling in our face that's different or we say that we get on with someone really well, but actually there's a kind of another double signal there. So dreamland communicates up there, but also it's the world of dream figures, mythic stories, histories. So in terms of an issue, it would be like the histories behind that issue. So the ghost roles that are around a certain issue is you talked about, you were talking to me earlier about Martin Siegel. He was mentioned earlier and he's like a ghost role in your organization. He's no longer with us, that's right, yeah? Yeah, yeah. But he is actually still a ghost role. So he's a ghost role. And then down at the bottom of the cone is essence level and that's where everything is connected. So that's like the Dow that can't be said. It's in quantum physics, it's David Bohm's unbroken wholeness. It's this sense of when we are disconnected. Now in dreamland, things are more fluid. So in dreamland, in like in my dreams and my fantasies, I have a fantasy about being on stage with Philip Glass. And I go, oh, maybe that's, but it's not really, it's not consensus reality. And then at essence level, everything is connected. Essence level and dreamland communicate up to us in consensus reality all the time. And these three levels are present. All the time. So deep democracy says, yes, deal with that issue in consensus reality, but also deal with that issue in dreamland and its histories and in the accidents and the strange fantasies that you have in relationship to people. And then down at essence level, you get these moments where you might need, you might sense that everybody's connected. So it's no longer the 10,000 things, it's the totality of everything is one, oneness. So if you're gonna do world work and you're gonna work on these big world issues, you have to kind of address the issues on all three of these levels. Now I did this opera, Satya Graha about Gandhi and about Gandhi's concept of Satya Graha about social activism and how you work on yourself in order to work on these outer world issues. And it became very clear to me that in this opera, Philip, he does include the consensus reality story of Gandhi, the historical moments that happened. But he also includes this bit from the Bhagavad Gita that Gandhi was obsessed by, who carried the Bhagavad Gita. And the mythic stories of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita is on stage at the same time. And then there are these moments in the show where it connects to essence level in the music where you go, there's this moment of silence and everyone has been taken to this other realm where everything is connected. So I thought, I know, I think this opera is extraordinary because it really deals with this subject on all three of these levels. So that's why I kind of, for me, that's where Philip's work and Arnie's work connects because what I know is that Philip's work, if you give over to it and if you sort of surrender to it, it takes you to these dreamland landscapes. And he can do an opera that's about a historical figure like Einstein or Gandhi or Ecknaton, but he will include these other levels. And the way that people connect to these lower levels and the way, and this is also interesting at the moment, we need theater, we need music, we need things like opera in order to be able to navigate these realms. We can't connect to them and we can't include them unless we use theater and unless we use music. So at these moments, and especially in the UK at the moment where we find ourselves like embattled up in consensus reality about the arts, about funding for the arts, about whether music, whether opera, whether theater is important and whether the arts are important. And it's easy to find oneself going, why am I, how can I say that the arts are important when there are these big things going on in the world that are important like conflicts about the national health service? But I know in this model, it says, these big elements of issues like the dreamland issues and the essence level issues, if shift and change is ever gonna happen, if awareness, it's an awareness model around these issues, we need these lower levels. And that's why actually theater and opera and music is even more important that we fight for it and we support it. And I say more important because in consensus reality it's easy for it to get marginalized and for the world to tell us it's not important but it is important. And that's why there's this thing when people in Ukraine or during the Second World War when people were in these extreme tortured situations music becomes incredibly meaningful and important at these moments. And it's because of that. It's because sense of meaning and sense of importance and our place in the world and place in this crazy world that we're living in is given to us by these deeper things. So there's a question about what this show is about. It's about those crazy things going on in my mind and those obsessions and there's a question I think I had when making this show was there are some ideas there that I think are really important ideas. Can you put them into a theater show? On some levels that's quite an intellectual idea there but can you communicate it to people in theater? So at the end of the show can they understand what this con feels like? Not just understand it in their head. Sorry Frank, I do ramble sometimes. Not at all. It was a very lucid, important and significant statement of the art and the world and the place of the artist and they were very powerful actually advocacy and I have to really think about it. And for the audience listening in now there's an artist who has worked since I think 1984, 40 years and this is the piece where he says this is what we need now. This is I think is worth your time and he's sharing something of significance and this is one of the great functions of theater and I truly believe that you are right in the time also after Corona in the time where big metropolis is like New York or London, Berlin, Paris they are struggling to make sense to create meaningful life. Where are we going to? Where are we now? Where do we come from? And I think the portals that open through music or theater or opera that combines it and of course all these things they play in a shamanistic way, the old fashioned way where theater perhaps performance started the first person where he was buried and someone put a deer skin over it and had an idea of an afterlife and put something with him and created something for a moment and this is what you're doing and I think this is what we need and we need more of this and we also have to see how can we connect it to life. I think you talk also about this Japanese idea of a Kintsuji, you know, if something is broken embrace it. Tell us a bit, you know, is that part of that? Do you feel this is the gold we put in and the broken fragments of our lives, of our world? I think so, you know, I talked to, I mean, one it's a different kind of narrative I would say. So the more linear narrative that is I guess one could stereotypically say it's a more Western narrative this linear narrative it's exciting, you know, and it's powerful but at the same time I guess that there are there are different kinds of narratives and I would say, you know, the broken part is a different kind of narrative and the broken part that's put back together in Kintsuji where it's glued together with the gold and then it becomes more beautiful and more precious. That's a wonderful, for me, that's a wonderful healing story for, you know, we talked about one's career. There's no way I have had any kind of linear logical come out of drama school and have a career, career. I've had a very strange broken up career that's but there is a meaning to that and there is a story to that that might be a little bit different. There's an essay that's a big inspiration to us in improbable and certainly to my wife who's a writer, Matilda Leiser and it's an Ursula Le Guin essay. I don't know if you know it Frank, it's called It's So Good, you should read it, it's brilliant and Ursula Le Guin, she's so wonderful. She wrote this essay called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and I think it was written in the 80s, this essay and she talks about the this western narrative. She says that there is a theory, you know, there is a more common theory that the first object was a weapon and you know like in the Stanley Kubrick film it's the bone, it's the bone that becomes the cudgel and she says actually anthropologists say the first tool, the first object was not a weapon, it was a bag and it was a bag to gather things in so the hunter-gatherer now reverses the gatherer hunter that's the first thing so this concept of gathering things together and putting them together and see what they make together is a different kind of story and in her book she argues, she gives it a kind of gender narrative that the male arrow, the male weapon sort of linear narrative is different from the the more female narrative of the gathering collection of stories a collection of things and how do these things fit together like they were in a dream you know when we dream, our dream world places these things together in a way we go I don't know why that thing is with that now or why that person has been combined with the other person or why they're in a place that they're not understanding of the world which is a more collage like way I think is important to us now because it's an invitation to different kinds of connections and we need these connections more so than this, we're going to solve it all in one way and there's going to be a hero who solves it all for us but actually there's a different kind of mindset which puts these things together I love that essay and I think the Kinsugi idea of a vase that's a collection of pieces that get put together again and the thing that's broken the accident that happened has come up from Dreamland, this accident that happens in Dreamland to us, you know that thing that interrupts your day because you had a plan of how it was going to go that accident stops your plan but it's actually a gift if we can open ourselves to it so Kinsugi obviously is an invitation to go, that terrible thing that happened, that beautiful vase that you dropped could even be more beautiful if you embraced the cracks and I know that my life is full of cracks and full of breakages and there's even one I mentioned in the show about this, I got asked to direct a Broadway show that didn't happen the way I thought it was going to happen but it's actually one of the cracks and Leonard Cohen it's the weather light comes in all those things I know that it was one of the most painful things that happened to me in my career being fired from a show that actually was one of the biggest gifts ever it took me down to essence level at that point and what do you really care about what do you want to really make theatre about what kind of shows do you really want to make and I think that little model that idea of Kinsugi where you go it's gold, it doesn't get any easier it's not like, now I understand there's plenty more vases to break in our lives plenty more shows, plenty more mistakes that unfolding process is there for us but I'm trying to learn how to do it I'm in about to be 60, I'll be in my 60th year still don't know how to make theatre still don't know how to do it but that's why I still want to do it amazing we can just come and look at the work and take some time out I also would like to talk about the improbable theatre where you come out from I think Julian Crouch Lee Simpson you started it in a way one could almost describe it as an octopus we know octopus feel, their brains is distributed and all the arms and all of it so it's a company produced incredible work a product sticky, it's 250,000 people the tempest, the animo, the time of the blood the great Philip Glass operas, Mozart operas but you have initiatives icing which is of significance also from US audience or any audience in the world of what a theatre company is or could be about these tentacles and I'm just going to read through them and then maybe we talk of some of them there's something called through the door which is kind of an inclusive outreach movement for you know binary LGBT I don't know I understand right how can we connect the communities, mothers who make what about mothers who are artists how do they make their work, how can we support them it's not even just in London or nationally you do something called open space open space events and you do one in New York if I understand right you'd have conversations they're called devoted and disgruntled about the state of the theatres in London the UK you get people together like I don't know conversations I mentioned like Joseph Boyce did who I knew and he did these great conversations and he was in the middle and it works after an hour or two you have something called hire us we say the business you want to hire us you want to learn how artists work we don't know what comes out but we don't make fake plans we pretend to stick to it if they don't work because we recruit you and then you have something called play Bambino it's a young kids who are 6 to 18 months old you know it's not as an operatic it's like a adventure and for them you create something it's called the gathering if I understand right you want to have a 500 acre farm part of an organic farm but also a gathering where people come come researching the big question what is home it's called a bore a place in Kent so it's just incredible what you have all around you is on stage like here at the screwball what you didn't do at Broadway or what Broadway did not allow you to do we can see so but how is that all connected tell us a little bit that's a big question really I mean I think you know what connects it is improvisation I think and you know I here's one narrative which is that you know in the early shows I made they were like let's make a show and let's make it the best show ever you know let's really and I did that for a few years and on certain level that is like a plan and I kind of knew the shows were going to be good and you would go let's do this and we'll plan out what the show was going to be like and weirdly it was almost like it was going to be before it happened so I thought well what's the point of making it I know already and then I had this life changing moment where I saw a small advert in the back of the stage newspaper and it was literally it was only this big it was tiny little advert and it said improvisation workshop endorse it with Keith Johnston and I knew of Keith Johnston because I had read his wonderful book Impro and Keith Johnston started the writer's group of the raw court in the 50s 60s and he also had a connection to Beckett as well and Keith started researching narrative and playwriting and he worked with playwrights and he started doing improvisation with them to study how narrative works and then he had a company called Theatre Machine which were the first in the UK what we would call Impro in America it's kind of called Improv and the lineage there is through Svala Spolin and Second City in the UK it was through Keith and Impro and Theatre Machine and the groups like Omla Broadcasting who grew out of that now on that workshop I was there for 10 days and I was completely in a shamanic way Keith kind of reorganised my brain he disassembled my brain and I was like the world is different from how I think it is because I went from working on shows and thinking let's make this work and I was then suddenly in a scenario through having got introduced to Impro making 5, 6 shows a week every night and some of them were good some of them were absolutely really terrible but I also discovered that if you did a really terrible show you give up then the next night would be brilliant really brilliant so I got like schooled and trained in improvisation and because I always saw improvisation not as comedy necessarily you know I love comedy but I saw it as theatre and that as Keith does or did because he's just died literally like 2 weeks ago he wanted to reshape and change what theatre was like he wanted it to be live wanted to be in the moment and he wanted to be as exciting as sport or as he saw it in those early days working class theatre wrestling you know he why is theatre not as exciting as wrestling and so that the skills and the meta skills the feeling skills that come from improvisation absolutely connect all our shows so that's also about curiosity and research but how can and this is what Keith would do how can I find out whether the audience are bored or not and he would literally try and create exercises in order to do that and he was like a strange maverick scientist like Arnie Mindell is wonderful people who are really researching theatre experiential research that's happening every time it goes in front of an audience and I think that's what I learned from Keith is to keep curious and to keep trying things so when you get a crazy idea like could you really put juggling in an opera all the way through it and you go oh my god that's crazy and then you go oh that's so crazy it's so stupid that idea maybe it's really good I didn't even like juggling very much at that point but I thought no no there's something there I can feel it in my body trust that intuition but really find out what works go into an R&D and play with juggling and play the music and see if there are connections and so on so one aspect of improvisation is research another aspect of improvisation is that it's a conversation I've got a really good story I want to tell you we did this show called Spirit at the New York Theatre Workshop and it was a divine show it was about conflict and three performers it was about conflicts so we would do the show at the beginning of the show was improvised and the end of the show was improvised and so we would pick up on the audience what was happening in the audience at the beginning then we'd do the show and at the end we'd kind of pick up on things that happened in the show mistakes that happened in the show things that had gone wrong things in the audience and on press night this enormous fly at the beginning of the show was in the New York Theatre Workshop and it flew around and the stage was a big slope with these holes in that we popped out of the three of us and it landed right next to Lee and we all looked at this fly and it flew off and we talked about the fly for a bit and every now and again throughout the show that evening the fly would fly by and it became part of the conversation the improvised conversation and at the end of the show the fly came back and we talked about the fly at the end of the show and our lighting designer who's here lighting down a glass said he was sitting between his two old ladies in the show and after the show one of them said I hated that show and the other one looked slightly disappointed and turned and said oh what about the bit with the fly and said that was a mechanical fly so there was a person in the audience who thought it was more likely that we'd built a radio controlled mechanical fly to be part of our show to improvise and include a fly into your show and you know improvisation it's actually just a conversation in the moment one of the hardest things to do is stay relaxed and have a conversation on stage in front of an audience of course and to tell a story but that's also part of improvisation and a conversation about this an authentic conversation is something which changes you so at the beginning of the conversation you start out at a certain place you interact and by the end of it you are changed if you just talk to each other and you're not sure that's not a conversation so I feel like theatre should be a conversation between all the elements and great performers know that it's an interaction but I also feel that conversation is what we need in the world so this brings in open space technology and another extraordinary elder that I found through reading one of his books Harrison Owen who created open space technology and on a very simple level open space technology is a way of collaborating and what it is is you gather in a big circle you agree that you're going to self-organise for two days or a different period of time but ideally you do it over two days and you get all the things you want to work on declare them in the middle put them on the wall like a timetable self-organise and work on them all and then get back in a circle and find out where you got to that's basically one great big diverse connected conversation like an incredible creative artistic if it's an artistic theme beehive everybody's working together and the system is being connected up and people having real conversations and in the moment are going ah talk to that person they know talk to that person and I read Harrison's book about open space and how he created it and the principles that it works it's basically one massive creative improvisation game and I went I know this already it's what I've been trying to do in my rehearsal rooms for years but this is to deal with all these issues that I get scared and don't know how to deal with in consensus reality because I think I can't deal with that I'm too busy making shows I'll just do the art I'm so 18 years ago I think I wrote this invitation I'm devoted and disgruntled about theatre I love it I'm so frustrated that we don't really behave like a community can we be a community better and the thing I wrote send that invitation out and I think the first time we did it about 250 people came and now we've been doing it annually as a big annual event all over the world in different ways we do get invited into businesses to do it as a way of businesses collaborating and working on issues but it's basically improvisation improvisation improvisation so it may look like the product at the end of the day when you look at the Met Acton art and there's an extraordinary thing with an orchestra and jugglers and amazing singers and the technical design and so on and then you look at a kind of smaller show like Down of Glass, a big show but it's or even one of our improvised shows that's totally improvised like Lee's just directed an improvised musical totally improvised with a band that they come from the same source so their input is down there in the essence and they come up here and as they get closer to consensus reality they are but they come from the same source material so in our Philip Glass operas I go Sacha Graha, Acton Artin they look so different from each other you know Acton Artin's the biggest most over the top, like spectacle Sacha Graha is this kind of simple materials you know the newspaper, the sticky tape frugal in its kind of like humble materials that then get bigger look so different but actually the essence and the kind of ethos of each of those shows absolutely the same thing and on a certain level there's simple things like at the beginning of our day in our collaborative kind of process we'll get in a circle and we'll do a check-in and anything that's alive in people can be raised and it might be about the show, it might be about something that's what's going on in their life at the moment that they're worried about that they have a relative who's ill or that something happened to them on the subway where they got shouted at you know by this you know a horrible incident or something that they're concerned about they're excited about, they all go in the pot we don't say leave it outside the room it all goes in the pot and it becomes part of the show and it's also how you look after the show so we first made it eight years ago many of the performers are the same but there's a whole group of performers who are new and you need to take care of the ethos of that and we use things like open space to do that I'm trying to test the threads of the things that you mentioned the other thing that you mentioned is the gathering so it feels like we've been a kind of itinerant company we've travelled around a lot, we've been very lucky we've toured the world, we've done shows in different places we very often go into places you know organisations and bring a certain way of working in sometimes that's embraced by those organisations and it's a nurturing thing and it's been really appreciative I think they thought we were a bit crazy when we first worked there but they know, they're so supportive of how we work and they know that it creates a great atmosphere around our shows and in the rest of the building so that's important we feel like we're arriving at an eldership moment as a company and as ourselves as I say I'm 60 this year how can one pass those things on how can one pass on the ways of working so we thought to ourselves actually we do want a space, we do want what might become a building but that building needs to be a creative space not a venue, but like what in Europe would be called a creation centre so there's a model as you probably know Frank in things like circus and in outdoor arts where they talk about a creation centre and even someone like LaPage he has his fire station and someone was mentioning Walter Miller by Robert Wilson yes exactly these spaces that are like they're kind of you know the kind of dream works kind of creative hubs the Pixar labs where you explore the creature shop where things get tried out that feeling so there's a dream of a building that might happen and a space that might happen and it's actually quite a big vision bringing it home as it were but also a place that people might come to and you might hold open spaces you might hold world work forums the deep democracy world work forums but you might engage with the local people and bring them in and connect to them and teach in pro and teach circus skills all those things how do you create a legacy project and we thought what's it going to be called let's call it the gathering because it needs to be to start from the people and also there is a feeling of wanting it to connect to nature and that we thought where will this happen we went on a little myself and Matilda Liza my wife associate director in improbable she and I we found the UK and we'd put an invitation out maybe we'll find a place and we ended up coming right full circle back to Kent and we got introduced to this place called Ball Place in Kent which is an extraordinary place which has a little conference centre and it has a regenerative farm and ethos founded by this wonderful couple in the 70s and it was an alternative place to look at how we might live with nature differently and learn from it and how that might help the world and there was an arts programme there that started at the beginning but now no longer exists and they said Jennifer wants the arts programme to happen again maybe this is a good fit so we've gone there and there's a footprint which is what you need in that part of the world you need a building to have already existed so there's like a potential for two buildings to be built so we have this big dream and the dream is going to manifest from here into consensus reality and that dream is going to happen through conversation and holding open space events and then starting to teach that we will use collaborators to help us build them and through that we'll find out how the building is designed so there's also a kind of alternative emergent architectural process then that can happen and the two things we want to happen in kind of parallel worlds so that when the building has been built it will be something that has been built built in conversation with the artists and the people who are going to end up using it and it may be a finished building or it may be a building that stays flexible and changes but it will have been from in conversation with people and in conversation with the landscape that's there so it feels like an exciting new kind of third act story to create this place that people will come and we talked about it being an arc for the arts at this time where all these freelancers who were lost especially during the pandemic all these people who don't necessarily belong to an organisation who don't have a home will be able to come and connect and find a space where they do feel and we know many of those people already through our devoted and disgruntled events and we know them internationally they could come internationally and connect with us and there's a network of people who also feel like they live in this parallel world where they don't quite fit in where they are but they know that they've got a global connection to other outsiders and that network that we want to become a little hub for a focused strong hub for feels like a good dream for the last act of improbable What is home? What do you think how would you define it? You know I think one definition of home is a place that two things Matilda my wife will remember the quote it's in that wonderful book about spaces home is a space which allows the person in it to dream so it's a place you feel safe enough and you feel like you belong enough in order to feel able to dream in that space so when you don't feel at home you don't necessarily feel able to dream because your too consensus reality is maybe too dangerous so I would say home is a place where you feel that you belong home is a process so I know from an early age I didn't feel like I belonged in the everyday ordinary world but I did feel like I belonged when I was on stage and I know that home is theatre to me so it's always different things so in a way homes are process it's a process of connection so you may not have a house but you may be able to feel at home if you feel connected to people and you feel supported and nurtured by people so home is important I think maybe one test bit of research here one of the tests for whether people do feel at home is whether they feel able to make art whether they feel able to dream incredible this is a really such important and significant insights and I do feel this is kind of a changing conversation it has an impact I think hopefully also for our viewers and I think we all are wrestling with questions now you know how do we change also up to the experience of Covid and Corona how do we get closer to nature how do we represent it, animals, nature, flies we're going to have three upcoming talks we call them whole earth talks Thomas Oberender from Berlin who ran the Festspieler came up with that idea and we're going to talk with him and I'm going to talk with Hans and Andreas Weber how do we represent that new world that is really also in danger through the climate change it's all very serious and so far on stages over centuries theater has presented inter human conflicts and how do we include the nature, the home, the elderly, the children but also the plants and the animals and I think it is an important conversation we're going to have and you found one answer how to integrate it or make it as an essence base of your work so I'm really interested how this will go and pan out so people could come one day and visit you as theater artists from around the world and see you working this is really a stunning so it was a fantastic conversation we had, we said it's about an hour so really film thank you so much for sharing and so insightful and honest also and a lot of wisdom in their stuff you don't really get taught in the theater classes acting and directing is very important again I think Tau of class was co-directed by Christy Housley it was commissioned by the Manchester International Festival the Improbable Perth Festival Hong Kong new vision arts festival and Carolina performing arts university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in association with Naomi Milgram Manchester International Festival the great festival actually the Improbable and the Royal Theater Exchange that also gives everybody an idea of your network how you are connected to the world you know the consensus world I think on the Buddha statues you see these little twirls thousands or 10,000 on the head of Buddha that represent that outside that's very good I didn't know that you zoom in on that stage for that moment in time where you open a gate and the space changes we listen differently and we are open to that game you are presenting is fantastic so thank you for sharing the things that J. Wegman gave his office if you want to be an executive artistic director this is the great office you get by the way great that you are there and I think it important that university which is brilliant so we know a bit more