 The counteraction is what controls the length of the scene, the intensity of the scene, whether it's a negotiation or a conflict, whether it is collaborative or it's not collaborative, and it even controls much, not all, but much of the style of the piece, which is why this works with non-realism as well. So that's my two cents on the history, because it is and it has become my mission since writing Stanislaus' new focus, and I've been doing much more work on this last studio in recent years and on active analysis, because for my money, active analysis is what's going to take us into the future. So I want to respond, if I may, just to a couple of things that happened here. First thing is, you said that there was a history and your history was right there in the images, and I love the suffragettes. I have to do it. I love the suffragettes. That's why we can't kind of bury them. OK, but I want to just react to that a little bit, because in my own work with active analysis, I have had the great good fortune to work with scientists. In fact, sometimes scientists are a lot more fun to play with. And I just wanted to say one thing about the past leading to the future in that regard, because the first time a group of scientists came to me and said, we're building intellectual virtual agents. It's called IVA. We're building IVAs. They have a very rich emotional environment that they live in. But what we can't figure out is how to make them more interactively emotional, and we want you to help us, because acting can help us. So can you teach our IVAs to act? That was the first question, and I went, this is very interesting, because the standard with a Stanislavski approach to an actor is saying, well, what would you do if you were in these circumstances? And I don't think I can ask that of an intelligent virtual agent, because they don't have a past, really. They're sort of just built. So we actually found that the first thing we did was go to the past and started working with Del Sartre, which is another aspect that took me into the laboratory. So going to Del Sartre with the laboratory, speaking to you and your history of the laboratory, his laboratory for art, of course, and some of you probably know the history of Del Sartre, a singer who lost his voice, who wanted to figure out better ways to train. And so his laboratory were the Parisian morgues, because what he was looking to was to understand the gestures of the dead as expressions of emotion. And it starts with that, and he developed this very complicated system. And I told this to the scientists on impulse. The next week they came back, they had read everything they could find in Del Sartre. And they go, we like it. And we started to experiment with gestures coming out of Del Sartre to see how people would read them. So I wanted to link past to future, because what I loved about that moment is how the past will often take us to the future. And then the second time, and this was actually the great good fortune of being sponsored by a National Science Foundation, a group of engineers came to me and said, well, we want to study how actors create emotion. And of course, we all know that the last thing you say to an actor is no out there to be angry. So I said, no, no, no. We're not going to do that. But what we did is we created under this grant a company of 12 actors who worked exclusively through active analysis, all in motion capture. So what we did were scenes from check up Shakespeare and contemporary scenarios that we devised a series of things for two years just in a motion capture studio. And so that was the other path to the future. I mean, I really love the fact that what I found was that the work that I had been playing with for so long with active analysis was so amenable to technology, because it worked seamlessly in this technology. And it was really a fascinating piece for me as an actor to discover that presence is not grounded. It is grounded to the body, yes. But it's not necessarily grounded to photographic image, because the aspect of seeing actors working in motion capture technology as just dots on the screen. We're not talking about coming in and bringing animators to give them new bodies. But to just see the dots on the screen moving through space using active analysis to work in scenes, it was utterly legible what their emotional information was with the hierarchy was within the scenes, whether there was a power struggle was clear. And we knew who every actor was. The rhythms were so specific to the actors that it really became a sense of presence. And I thought that that was something that in terms of having the ability to work experimentally, melding science to art at this point, using a technique that was developed in the late 1930s. And this is the last thing I'm going to say, I promise, because I want the conversation. But this is the last thing I'm going to say. In working with the scientists, I discovered something very interesting about Stanislavski in return, because that's what I love about the scientists. And then it was like, oh, what, John and Brittany and I, we were talking this morning, right? One of the things that I loved most about working with the scientists is none of us knew what the hell we were doing. We got into a room, we were talking different languages. We knew what we wanted to study. We had ideas, but it really, it was the first time I can honestly say I had no idea what was going to happen. Because when you write a book or when you go in with a group of actors, you do have a goal. You do come in with some sense of what you want to see. And you do adjust it, and you do change it, but rarely are we totally in waters that we cannot guess. And what I loved about working with them was that being off balance and searching together with different vocabularies. And they did teach me things. One of the, OK, so the last thing is that I really did discover scientists who had been studying actors and finding that the cognitive scientists who found that the brains of actors really are following the paths that active analysis works. So that's the last thing that I would say. It seems that he was prescient in the sense that he had laid out something. Yes. He was in the laboratory of human beings, and he was watching them, and he spent his life doing it. And there is some actuality there. Yeah. Yes. Wow. Sorry, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. To plug into this, Sharon will also be expanding on this work in a workshop setting tomorrow morning for about 90 minutes. So again, just plug in the workshops in the morning. Shall we move on to Jose? Yeah. Hello. How are you? The introduction? Yes. So please, so we're going to move on to the terminology and begin the ensemble roundtable discussion by introducing Jose Luis Valenzuela, and his company. Yes. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's interesting to me, I'm a professor at UCLA, but I'm an academic. I'm the head of the directing program for the MFA directors. And, you know, and I don't hear that much. I have an ensemble theater company, and I talk about it, and I have a friend who just hired from the city company who's living with us. And I say, you know, what is an ensemble and where is the collective? My company's been together for 30 years. The same actors, two of them died already, so we don't have the entire company, and one has to be a film star. So, but we are still together. So, I just show some photographs that you can just play in the paper, so they're great. It's nothing very specific, but I'm trying to figure out how we, as a company, coming from the tradition of Chicano theater, and of Chicano, you know, so we exist for by being, not necessarily, or theater company exists as a response to a need to have our history or issues or just as in our politics to talk about as Mexicans and the United States. You know, our exploration is how we are going to reform our history and what images of how we are going to create pieces of work that are not created by playwrights in the United States because they're usually on the tradition of, you know, even the American playwrights, but Latino playwrights, they're still in the traditional psychological drama, which really doesn't serve many times our purpose as trying to show our history or the images that we want to show, or the social justice issues that we want to show, because the American theater, unfortunately, you know, after the 80s, it turns out to be, you know, it's not what they're talking about. So all our theaters, not necessarily in the way you guys are searching for form and style to create something is really much more in order to say something than to talk about our community in our opinion, what it needs to be talked about. So usually start with research about what are the, this is about AIDS, which is an act, you know, we don't talk about homosexuality, we don't talk about AIDS in the Latino community, you know, so it's important to us to deal with issues much more important than with the form. And so we start usually with research, with lots of research, and usually business will take from two to four years to be created, because it takes us for a very, very long process. So sometimes when you see these photographs, you see photographs that are, you know, are the same play in three or four different generations because we do workshops and we do more workshops. And the way we work, the actors propose the idea of what the story or the scenery or whatever is going to happen and how that would push, you know, what the issue is going to be and what's the most effective way for us to talk to our own community about this impression. So it's interesting to me because, you know, I work in the academia at UCLF, I listen a lot of these conversations, and but what our company does is not necessarily, we don't discuss it in the same way that you do because in a way, our basic is politics, our basic is the community and what the issues are. And yet the forms are so potent. So at what point and in what way do the forms begin to emerge out of the deep research into the issues and the effective ways of communicating them? Of course, meaning the form. But is it, we don't go from the form, we say the content determines the form and the style. And this comes from a very important Latin American, from the Latin American theater during the dictatorships in Colombia, especially in Colombia, in Uruguay, or in Belgrade, or in the African experimentally or all these companies who could not speak openly about the political issues. They created a methodology, which is called collective creation in the context that was given to us in the 1970s as when they began to have a relationship in the African experimentality, you know? And we did that as how to arrive to the image that he had a lot more power for in the other side. So in the process if you want to solve the stories, the first time we tell the story of what the idea is is a total silence. There is no text. So the entire way the work is done for the first part of the content because it's all research, political research of text from journals or, you know, so it has to be told silently before any text come in. And the text doesn't mean words, it can just be music, it can just be a piece of poetry, and then how we got all this semi-on, which is a shallow player, you know, who came and contextualized an entire piece for us because we worked together for months and months and months. It's not like something is created in four weeks, like I think Solitude took us around three years, which is Solitude comes from the Library of Solitude, which is a Nobel Prize book, which is really a second essay about Mexican psychic in Mexico with the chapter in Mexican psychic in the United States, very controversial and in the United States Mexican community because the way he thought the psychic of this, of who we are. And there's really a book up of essays that it took us a very long time to try to figure out how do we talk about and contextualize the work? As I said, that's a Nobel Prize book, you know, of what the psychic of Mexican and the United States is. We gave a very clear audience, in a way, which is the Mexican American, the Latino audience of the United States, which is really big for us. If I do a Latino play, I'm the artistic director of the Los Angeles Theater Center. So we produce not only Latino work, but we produce African American, you know, Asian, you know, white, all kinds of play. And when we do the Latino work, it's, you know, we have huge differences. And you also do large outdoor spectacles where you were before, yes? Don't you do an annual pageant? We do labirque, which is a pageant, which is all as long with the community. That has many months of earth, so we begin now in different community centers and in parts to bring families to participate in the castes of around 125, 150 people. And the company, the ensemble, which is kind of us now, play the main roles. And we presented two days only inside the cathedral and there's 4,000 people at night that come to see us. And it's inspiring, and it's, I just came back from Norway, I did PRG outside too with a cast of around 100 people. Kind of using the same, yeah, the same methodology that we do for labirque. Would you talk a little bit to the kind of collective creating aspect of pageantry, because obviously you need your territorial strategies and at the same time you're dealing with huge numbers of people, or would you talk about it? Well, I had the right to enter Scandinavia a lot. And I did PRG in 1995 inside the building. But this time they asked me to propose a writing coming word. Ibsen was born in Sien, you know, which is two hours north of Oslo. So the city of Sien is where the Ibsen theater of Norway is, because they own Ibsen. All right. But they, it's like a county, it's called a county. And they were, they're having elections now about, you know, and the conservative group that's very strong trying to take over culture. Now in Norway, the arts are 100% subsidized. So they don't understand fundraising or anything like that. So the art is that the people are very interested in fighting against the election, government or money. So they had proposed to me to come, they came and saw labirque, even though I have worked in Norway before, and they wanted me to do something like that with Pierre Ging, which is like their Bible. This is like, we play it for them. And they wanted me to see if I can work with the entire county because they needed, they needed the people in the county to support their theater. Because as they did the resident theater in that county, as the theater, they used it. So we went to the military and we went to the military and the military has an orchestra, you know. But we talked to them about how they can be part of the production and maybe the orchestra, scan through the music, and maybe we can perform it in the Navy base, which he was outside. There are photos in there you can put about Pierre Ging. So with the art, and then they had what is called the amateur companies, you know, which are the amateur theater companies that are around. So we met with the amateur companies to see if they wanted to participate. And we started with those three things. So we got 60 amateurs, you know, 30 people in the orchestra, and 20 professionals. So we're 18 professional artists. And we decided to do it in the middle of the county, not necessarily in Enoslo or anywhere. So the rehearsals, I had to rehearse with the orchestra, you know. Military orchestra, same with music, it's always good. It's not necessarily the same as trying to get it to move. You know, you have to be playing and you're gonna be moving and you're gonna have to be part of the scenes and you have to, you know, be part of the people. Because I have to conceptualize this particular gig as a Mario gig in this county, you know, with this people, and this play was for this particular county, not necessarily for the one, yes, for the day. And so we rehearsed the orchestra for three hours and then we rehearsed with the principal and then we rehearsed at night with the amateur, so. We rehearsed for 12 weeks, around three and a half months. And it's fantastic, meaning now that we're going to go back every other year and we created this tradition the same way we do in America every year, now they might have to do it every other year. I'm not sure that I can do it every other year. Not your mention. Not your mention. So, but it's a very interesting process being that for us as a theater company, it's very, very important to do it. But again, this is historic, and why? Because the association outside of Norway with Ibsen is the father of realism, he was so very much more, and obviously pure ninja's nothing in that realist tradition, we know that. But so the idea of this kind of big sort of world hall of forms and concerns and ways of making a theater and this work of the Chicano theater then being brought into the world with Ibsen is again this kind of story of histories going round and round and round and talking to each other. I think it's very, very, and it's only three books written about Chicano theater and unfortunately, and because we haven't done the research, we just got a grant to, my wife, I got a grant to be a fellowship in the city in order to document the research for her own purpose, we've been doing it for three years and get on the document, then to square book about the magicology of what we have been doing for the last three years. That's a very good question. But it's an amazing history here of your ensemble as well from starting on, you've gone through different permutations of the kind of responsibilities of your ensemble, yes, like as a small company and then into the repertory of the theater. We were actually born at the L.A. to see as a laboratory and you were talking about laboratory. Yes, yes. And it was really a very important laboratory in 19, when Milba Schnell and Diane White who created the essentially theater center came to me because we have that play in a kind of successful, and they came and said, what do you need, and this is really important I think for theater makers, I say, I only want a room eight hours to create a laboratory to experiment how you can build a room with that. And that was in 1985. And you know, really, it's how you have it. He gave me a room every Tuesday and Tuesday night for four hours. And I wanted money because I was married and I had a son and I said, I need a job and you have a job in accounting and I said, I'm a great accountant. That's how it goes. But it went from the laboratory where we were creating stories and it was, we created the first collective creation. And during the time, we went outside, what are the issues affecting our community and such and we created a first collective creation. Inside what it was, a regional theater, where I always found it fascinating to see if it was possible to do it. And we went from being a laboratory, then we did the first collective creation and then it was very successful. And for them, and the VARC said that we continue. We went, when the LITC closed down in 1991 and declared bankruptcy, our company lack of self inside the theater. To tell the city and the county that this was a public building for theater that should not disappear, you know. And they were able to open it up but we moved to the music, to the theater. They said, came to us. Gordon Davis came to us and moved the company to the theater. And we created something called the Latino Theater initiative in there, which was another idea of creating an ensemble inside the theater and taking over the main stage. Yeah. We left, we come back to the LITC in 2003 and now it's our theater. And yes, meaning we were now the audience, we hope an ensemble in the company has financial responsibilities, you know. Yeah. Because that's something we haven't really thought we could move into. We kind of need to move into the next thing but I mean I definitely want to hear it and we could maybe fold it into how John's going to moderate and just, and we've got some new people moving in. I just need to get the hangouts up. So if anybody needs to grab drinks, do you feel free to grab some food, some drink? We're going to take a lunch break in about an hour and a half. So we're just going to move into like an ensemble round table. And I'm going to pass off to John and I'll get some people up on Hangouts. So maybe we take a minute or two breaks. Yeah. I can't hear a word this day, it's noisy in this room, so I'll hear your magnificent voice soon. I want the book to send you right across the world. I hope you're less jet-packed than I am. We're just taking a quick script, so you can get a little bit of what's going on on the live scene. Great, and there's going to be, you know, we'll just move it around and see how this goes. You guys are our first real guests, so we'll see what happens. Oh, it's Scott! Oh, it's Scott! Scott, I miss you, I'm sorry, you're not here. I miss you. You want me to say hi to Scott Coffin? Get her out. So you can see him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hello Scott. There you go. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Hello Adam. I need to try twoElige. Hi Katherine. Nice to meet you. Strange way to do it. This is wild. It is very bending. It's very kind of thrilling and funky and strange. I love the way they powder your face. Oh, well, that's good. Yep, yep. And then, Rachel, are you there? It said she was. Rachel, a picture of you appeared. You just joined the chat. You can hear us, Rachel. Shout. Or type in something. So right now we're setting this up. Yeah, so we're bringing people into, virtually into the space. Hey, Rachel, there we go. Rachel! So. You were asking about a room tour, Yeah, we're all gonna show you guys. I can't hear you, Rachel, but I can see everything. Yeah, I mean, at least I like your pose. If you have a studio, everybody will be able to see it. First, first, first. And so you guys can go in now, and we'll put the microphones first. Yeah, but we're... So I'm going to get that back, perfect thank you. It does not disappear, that's what I said. It's extremely important to have an idea of the impulse and the answer to all the impulses and the counteractions right into an almost modern abstract space. And so what I would like to do in this situation is to explore the energy of the earnings of the earnings in terms of the identical investigation between different human terms. You know, some same structures. It's weird. It's what I always hear when I hear it. I can hear you quietly now. Quiet. No, I'm not going to say it. It brings me back to my roots. It brings me back to my roots. How are you? This is Adam Levy, DCMG, right? Hi Rachel. Hi Rachel. Where abouts all you Rachel? I'm in New York, Connecticut. Okay. And you? I'm in Birmingham in New York, New York State. Okay. I don't quite know what's going on. I mean it was spiritual for him too. It was spiritual. Have you been watching the live feed? For a bit, for about half an hour. Oh good, so you did. So you got to hear that whole lot. Could you see the images? No, because we didn't have the sharing. Who was sharing? Oh, who is after sharing? That was Luisa Teachers at UCLA, and I'm going to mangle the name of his company, but he runs a major Chicago theater company, and he's been doing this for 30 years. And the images were stunning. And so he began by talking about how all of this was driven by the research into the issues first and the forms afterward. But then he talked about the importance of tech in the Theater de Cali in the seven days in giving them a way of working where they would start first from, they would start first from telling the story purely visually before they would bring in the language. And that's what drove the imagery. But there was never the discussion about form because it was always rooted into the deep research in the politics. And the images that he, yeah, the Theater de Cali, which is really tech. So this is the stuff that we just started to touch on at the end. And then did you get to hear what Sharon was talking about? So you know, and did you hear the beginning? Good. Because she was talking about Stanislavsky's devising work at the end. And then also, this would have been Adam, I don't, did you get to hear Sharon a little bit, Adam? OK, so because at the end she was talking about, and this is what I give to you about, the Russian tradition of devising off of literary text, the adaptation tradition. And it's beneath that that a lot of the collective creation work is hidden because you still have strong authoritarian leadership in many companies. And yet it is deeply collaboratively devised work in terms of rehearsal processes. So there's a lot to explore there about these sort of hidden working relationships of group work. Great. Yeah. So you get to hear that, that was good to hear. No. And there was some talk yesterday about the magazine. OK, apparently things are happening. I'm going to go away. I just wanted to introduce our virtual guests since we finally have them. So it's a big leap for us in bringing in some virtual participation and seeing how this all goes. We have one on the bottom of the screen at the bar there, starting from left to right. We've got Adam Ledger. Adam Ledger is in the UK. There's a lovely echo. And he just put out a wonderful book on the Odin Chapter. Absolutely. Adam just put out a wonderful book on the Odin Chapter. And he's doing some. And he's doing something on some book. So he's been very busy mind. And then that's us, obviously. And then we have Rachel Rayburn Anderson. And Rachel Devazes. Rachel teaches collaborative creation. And Rachel writes on collective creation. And among other writings, she has a chapter in the second of these two books. And she'll be contributing a chapter on women and devising in New York to a new piece of work that leads to Scott Prophet. That Scott Prophet and I are developing on women and collective creation. Yes. And Scott Prophet is the last little window there. And Scott is a wonderful collaborator. Many of you may remember him. He's been the associate editor for these two books as well. And many of you may remember him or I have known him before when he was a staple of the LA theater community. And he's written wonderful work on the CT company, among other things, based on a personal experience of historical investigation. And one final just quick comment I wanted to take is if anybody feels like they want to be on stage and doesn't have a chair, just do let us know. I'm sure we can rustle up some more chairs somewhere. Yeah, because we don't have enough chairs on stage. Yes. OK. And so I'm going to hand it over to Mr. Britten, who is aiming to be willing to moderate this conversation. Well, I see I don't know what moderate means. So I don't know. I'm just going to. You still go to extremes. I'm just going to say nothing controversial, possibly. Those of us who are here, those of us who are here, virtually, I'm going to talk for a few minutes. And then I really just encourage you, if you've prepared a presentation and you'd like to say, hold on, me now, I want to talk. Just shout me now, I want to talk. I kind of just like us to let things flow. But there is also a number of prepared preparations that we'll try to get to in the course of about an hour, we have, don't we? Yeah, we've got about an hour. We can go a little bit longer if we need to. Also, on a very quick side note, we've got the most amazing cheesecake. I'm going to bring them here because it's still warm. And I've never had anything like that. I remember not having a cheesecake. Cheese and cherry. They're here. Okay, and those of you who are joining us virtually, I'm really sorry you can't access the cheesecake. Yeah, it's cruel. But that was fun. Okay, so I'm going to just try to kick this off a little bit by... We've been talking about terminology and I want to play with the word ensemble because one of the things that's been really interesting and putting together this book, Encountering Ensemble, is it forced me to encounter the word ensemble and to realise that I really had no idea what it meant. And as I went through the process of writing the book and getting contributions from people like Brian and Mark Beldas, who's here in Scotland, so on and so forth, realising that none of us know what it meant and that either we can come to a decision that it means nothing and therefore we should stop using it or that it's a beautiful, complex, wonderful word that means many, many things and that to attempt to impose some kind of this is ensemble, this is art is entirely against the spirit of what ensemble is supposed to represent. This is one of my passions, I believe, in the meeting of irreconcilable differences and how we negotiate those differences aesthetically, politically, culturally, historically. So I want to just pick out a couple of things about the difficulty of the word ensemble and it will talk already to some of the presentations that we've had this morning. I won't particularly make links to those presentations because you can make a link yourselves already we're talking into something that exists in this room. So when I started to work with, okay, what do people mean when they talk about ensemble? It came across a few definitions that people were very definite about. Equity and the director's guild of Great Britain put together a conference on ensemble and they said, what is ensemble? And they said basically ensemble is when a group of people work together for a long time. Cool, so all West End and Broadway shows are ensembles, really, or soap operas as ensembles. I have a problem, what happens if somebody leaves? What happens if somebody's new joy? Does it stop being an ensemble? Because they haven't been working together for a long time or somebody's left? Yeah, longevity, it's important but it's not enough to define ensemble. It's an element but it's not a definition. Some people talk about ensemble as they're being a shared creative team. One of the definitions is they're being a knotted director and a designer and a writer and a state manager who work together and they're bringing actors on a project by project basis and somehow this is an ensemble. Yeah, I'm comfortable with that as an element of ensemble. It talks about continuity of style. It talks about continuity of aesthetic and development of aesthetic. Again, it doesn't work for me because I've got my own approaches to ensemble but I'm perfectly happy with it as a set of understandings. Katie Mitchell who was referenced earlier who's a director of enormous intelligence and intelligence and skill but she uses the word ensemble in her book The Director's Handbook in a really interesting way and she says when you're rehearsing try to call the ensemble together for at least one hour a week. Hold on, you're using the word ensemble to suggest a group of people who only meet up to one hour a week during a whole rehearsal process and we could just dismiss that but no, Katie Mitchell's a really intelligent woman she references inspiration from Garciniccia and Femina Bausch she's talking about an aspiration she's talking about even under commercial pressure and box office pressure make sure people all end up in the same room at the same time so that you have a shared purpose even if you don't have the working structures that enabled you all to be in the same room at the same time. For God's sake remember we are in a common endeavor even if we don't get to talk to each other very much. Some people talk about an ensemble absolutely as a non-hierarchical structure I ran this in most of the few years ago from which this book was actually generated and the dancer said oh we dancers are years ahead of you we got rid of directors years ago which is neither true nor I think relevant Okay, I'm correct, okay, back off because my understandings of ensemble are not directly related to questions of hierarchy and company structure but okay this may be where I divulge from some other area but let's sit with this divergence a little bit so I'd like to suggest for a suggest I also think that there is a marketing different use of the word ensemble in America, the use of the word in Europe and England and I want to just sort of talk about a little bit so I'd like to suggest that we might think that when we use the word ensemble there are really two quite different things that have been talked about which ultimately combine to form one thing but there's two different things and when Brian in your presentation talked about science as moving from a knowledge to an activity I think this talks to something quite interesting one way that we can talk about ensemble is ensemble as a psychophysical act okay what do I mean by that I mean ensemble as this sense that you get when you watch something of shared breath of people really swinging together Lee Worley from the Ropa talk about ensemble as a jazz band not only do they play great music but there's the indefinable swinging in there Joan Little would also talk about ensemble as a jazz, not as a psychophysical but as a jazz combo which is really very interesting in England you know it's kind of this thing ensemble is something that happens between actors on stage that thing where we go yeah I see the performance I see what you're doing but there's something in there that makes me go wow that's a lie it's a psychophysical action by which I mean it is something that actors do live in front of the performers every single time they perform and as a director of ensemble it happens in every bloody production you do all this work building the ensemble and then about a week before you do a run and everything's great and in place and it's just not ensemble it's just not there they're not doing it they're doing everything except it and so you get this sense that ensemble you can build it and build it but if the actors don't do it it ain't there so we have this idea of ensemble as something that you can train something that you can develop which is a series of ways of being with each other relationships what you might call psychophysical action because it's about the relationship between the mind and the body and how the body and the mind are on stage in relationship with other actors and that can happen within strictly hierarchical structures it can happen in all sorts of places or it can happen in democratic structures so we have the possibility of talking about ensemble as a psychophysical thing what do people do on stage and then we have another discussion of ensemble which is ensemble as an ethical question by ethics I need to be clear what I'm saying I'm not saying that I think it's a better choice if you've done an ethical buying I don't mean that I mean ensemble which is based on an agreed shared set of behaviors an agreed shared set of moralities perhaps an agreed shared set of politics ways that people choose to be together and some things are acceptable in the rehearsal space and some things are not acceptable in the rehearsal space sometimes some people are acceptable in the rehearsal space and some not if you're working in a single gender company men can't be in a female a female company women can't be in a male company there's certain things that are acceptable and not acceptable because those things are considered necessary for the creative process that the team want to make to happen one of some of the great feminist work in the 70s I was talking to one of the founders of Monsters Regiment in England a few months ago and she was saying quite clearly for us a group of women to make this work we needed to be in a room without men absolutely that was the heart of their ethics it needed to happen that way and so it continues we need to find spaces where we are free to tell our own stories and free to work with the people we need to work with and those are really ethical questions now I think and I'm very happy to be told that I'm wrong but I think that over the last 20 years the ethical dimension of ensemble has become more important in American thinking than the psychophysical dimension of ensemble I'm happy to be told I'm wrong I also think that in a lot of European understandings of ensemble the psychophysical dimension has become stronger than the ethical dimension I this is intended to be slightly contentious and I'm very happy to be told I'm wrong however I'm going to quote a magnificent and important source a wonderful and intelligent man by the name of Mark Valdez who is the director of the network of ensemble theaters who do not get a greater authority I'm told and also the things you were saying about the topic coming first and the need to tell certain stories coming first in the form following I think also talks to some of this Mark says as defined by the network of ensemble theaters and I won't quote the next bit Mark says more than aesthetics or structures our focus is on values collaboration, inclusion and multiple perspectives for many companies this might manifest in a commitment to social justice and human rights for others it merely reflects their own organisational practice where all artists have a stake in the same these are for me all ethical concerns now I'm not for a moment suggesting I wouldn't want to suggest thinking of ensemble as a psychophysical set of psychophysical actions or ensemble as a set of ethical choices are somehow in any way contradictory to each other absolutely not in all the work that I think is really that I know that it's really extraordinary there is a coming together of what we do in other words how we are on stage with the ethics of how we do it Lev Dodin from the Mali Theater and Peter's Note talked about the Moscow Art Theater as I'll misquote him it's something like a spiritual environment in which theatrical production was an occasional byproduct I love that they're on the process of spiritual enquiry manifesting in theater Grotowski clearly bringing together ethical dimensions and psychophysical dimensions Koppo, Brecht bringing together clearly political psychophysical because he did have a whole training process and on and on and on and I don't know enough about the Americans seem to know how that's manifesting here but I'm damn sure it's manifesting extraordinarily partly because of the quality of work that I see I'm here of coming out of America and also because there is of course the whole history in America that you all know way better than I do which for me in some ways is encapsulated and I think the most exciting company I know which is the open theater extraordinary bringing together politics ethics and psychophysical enquiry where form followed exploration of theme and theme form and ethics and politics and leadership questions and all of those things so I'll be quiet because I want to try to encourage guests and others to speak it may be useful for us to think as we talk about ensemble aren't we talking about decisions about how we organize and what is and is not acceptable behavior in the rehearsal room and I don't mean acceptable as in some kind of imposition of morality but a brief example in my work as a director all of my work in training through a process of positive feedback entirely because I don't believe in the efficacy and power of destructive negative feedback I know other people who work very strongly from quite kind of no no no I absolutely respect that but I don't work through that and in my rehearsal space is what I'm training I don't want my performers to say this was terrible this was awful I wasn't always to work from the place of going this is what I like and this is how we develop it so that's an ethics I'm not saying it's a better ethics it's simply saying these are some things that we do in the spaces that I have responsibility for we talk about what we like we develop it not about what we didn't like in my space I don't expect actors to tell other actors how to perform I expect actors to take responsibility for their own work not to try this in other spaces it's entirely acceptable for an actor to go you should try this, you should do it like that I don't work like that I'm not saying I'm better I'm saying it's effective for me and it achieves the results that I'm looking for in the ensembles I train so people enjoy me that's what I'm looking for so it may be useful for us to think are we talking about an ethical choice are we talking about a political choice and so on which is all within the domain of ethics or are we talking about the actions and the training of those actions about what performers actually do when they are in relationship on stage with one another in front of an audience how do you keep it live of course they lead to the same thing one second John Adam and Scott can you hear me fine yes we can hear you, can you hear us yep but you can't hear John no we can hear it, it comes in and out the quality isn't great we can hear it but it's it really looks right I'm sorry about that and we've lost Rachel it looks like I think the people in the back just when you do speak for the virtual participants if you just speak up that would be good and one at a time okay so let me throw this open I don't know whether Scott or Adam looks like Rachel's not there I don't know whether Scott or Adam want to jump in immediately whether anyone else who's prepared something wants to jump in or whether we want to just respond where do we want to go you've been doing some very you said you have some stuff about the new kind of bridge devising work and some new strategies yeah I was asked to around the latest work of the Odeon which is coming out quite very closely a lot of assumptions around that group really or ways of working in that group change it's their 50th anniversary next year which it was me who paused the thought but I'll get back to them I think later on but in my reflective research in the Odeon I was trying to compare it with what was going on in the UK the second speaks to what John was saying but it seems to me that too often the word ensemble is used as a kind of short term and a kind of taxonomy behind that word needs greater exposure so there is an ethics there but what do you actually mean maybe when you use the word ensemble let me give you very quickly some British examples it tends to happen when it's in the book job when the RIC created our ensemble previous to that national beef created our ensemble it usually means bringing together a group of actors over a set of planes that's it what it means so there is no lack of physical training there is no ethics it's just simply I suppose in a German tradition an older German tradition how do we keep bringing the actors together over a set of planes Peter Mitchell has brought me that out a little bit she now keeps together typically I would say like a designer to sound designer even when she works abroad so what do you call creative now I don't really like the word but because everybody is creative you know what I mean I've kept together even when she works abroad slightly oddly the Lyric Hammersmith which is a fantastic theatre in London has gotten our season of what they call secret theatre I don't know if you can even count this this is what you book or play you don't know what you're looking for it was fine to give you time out the show happens now in order to produce the secret theatre the Lyric Hammersmith has created an ensemble now why do you need an ensemble you want it to work secretly I don't know this seems to be a different again that's short and we have a set of actors more positively is Simon Stevens someone mentioned Chicago they're in the play on the edge of a major town it's the grammar for this the secret the Lyric Hammersmith he said that usually what it means is you can behave not poorly but you can behave brave and you can still come back tomorrow morning that's very very free and you don't get that operating more special I don't know if too often it's you because our exposure so can we just interrupt a moment because you actually we just missed the house I just missed the house you can behave and then come back the next morning I lost a word what was it one of the things that the Lyric Hammersmith said was the advantage of the ensemble is that you can behave bravely you can perhaps annoy somebody else but you can still come back tomorrow it's good about you thank you we have Stephen Nemours here today hi Stephen hi Scott, how are you? how are you? I'm Stephen and walk on strange way to me Rimi I have a in doing the question of why here there may be the shift that you're perceiving I this is from a program I'm afraid the reason is maybe more banal than creative this is from a play I saw last night which is the opening of radar LA actually it was the center theater group but this is just from the page and I'll just read it it says center theater group has been awarded a four year one million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation the grant will make possible a program focusing on collaboratively created contemporary work from ensembles and writers supporting the creative arc from commissioning through development and production wow we got money that's not the only because the James Irvine foundation the Doris Duke charitable fund this is what's really changing the landscape on these shores and the reasons for it I can only speculate is that the model that's being replaced is just from so thread there the company together have them rehearse for six weeks and then they disband that is the antithesis of the ensemble you're talking about at the same time I don't really know what they're talking about here that was a reason I didn't know anything and it was before show that opened radar LA which is the this is our local ensemble generated productions and it's a one man show by Lewis Alfaro one of three solo performances and I guess as a critic I'm just perplexed by what unearth is going on or what they think they're talking about you know may I invite Scott Proudfoot to maybe intersect with this because Scott I know can you hear me okay yes so Scott I know that one of the things that when you were thinking about the shift away from the collectively creating groups of the 60's and the 70's and the 80's was the rise of performance art and solo performance art and some of the economics which drove that and some of the commodification which drove that and I won't keep going because I'd like you to speak to that if that's of interest because I think it directly intersects you know with what we just heard if I'm not putting you in the spot we brought up in our books is this idea of a core and pool which is going on in the UK as well as in the US but this idea certainly even when I was in LA and there are probably people in the audience that might even talk to this idea that you have a core of people who are truly your ensemble and then you have this pool of people that you continue to draw on who are members of the ensemble for a certain period of time and so that seems to be primarily economically driven though you can see it straight back certainly into the what we have Catherine and I have been calling the sort of second and first wave of collective creations so if it is economically driven it's certainly going on for a long time it's not a new situation and you have to think about that one other thought about just this is speaking as a critic and I'm speaking among, I realize a group of practitioners and you people create work in the light and the critics create their work in the dark we, I think our job is to speak well sometimes our job is to say I don't understand that which is really annoying for the people who created it or our job is to say I did understand when in fact we didn't and that's even more annoying but from what I can see I really cannot I can't wrap my head around what ensemble actually means, it seems to me Molière's itinerant company was creating work under ensemble conditions as there seem to be defined now Shakespeare's company certainly did yes, yes so I find this all quite the only thing I can notice about the work that's being defined is devised in ensemble this is just from the outside looking in is that there seems to be a different relationship between the text as being a source of the the primary purpose of the creation whereas in ensemble work it seems the text is almost more of a decoration it's an accompaniment, it's a musical accompaniment that doesn't carry as much meaning as in the other model that ensembles have replaced or that makes any sense can I speak to that? Hi, I'm Vinnie Allum I think there's two things that you brought up that are very interesting to me one, this question of where the text fits in and the question of the relationship to Molière, Shakespeare, those models those companies were ensembles to a large extent led however they were but for the last years in America we haven't had them for the most part as main screen companies most regional theaters are not run that way there's an administrative, visionary or visioning structure of salary people and then itinerant actors coming in and out many of whom remain for larger periods of time hence the type of companies that we were just talking about when ACT in San Francisco has a pool of actors or has a number of actors who are on staff all year round is that an ensemble? I don't think it is in the terminology that we're using it here but in the terminology that we're using here that at least my understanding is the question as you know I just thought the question that's on the table and the way that I think of ensemble in the current American landscape I think this question of where text fits in it often is the way you're describing it but I don't think it by any chance by any means has to be so there are many ensembles who will work with existing scripts my company Fool's Fury does both the so-called devised work and scripted work I think of the ensemble as being a group of people who've committed to working together on the creative and the administrative aspects over time and so to that end we'll have a very couple of years coming up soon Fury Factory and we're really interested in the question of what is a solo show in an ensemble context and I think that I don't think there's a contradiction there in principle in reality perhaps there often is but it is certainly possible to collaboratively work with a group of people you have been in partnership for a long time on what this show is for people performing how do most one-person shows happen while it's one person maybe a director so I don't think being a one-person show makes you an ensemble in any way but I think it is possible to be an ensemble creating a one-person show and I'd like to get back to Adam in a moment just to talk about Odin but picking up on that and maybe Adam you might want to contribute to this can you hear me okay Dan I can yeah do you want me to I'll just lead into something here because just picking up on what you were just saying my sense from my position as someone who trains ensembles which therefore by definition means what I'm doing is I'm training performers it's a psychophysical thing it's about how you use your body in space I don't train structures I train bodies but my sense in training in ensemble you are also training to be an extraordinary solo performer because you learn about relationship you learn about relationship audience you learn about relationship to space to music to imaginary characters on stage and so on and I'm very aware that coming out of Odin where for 50 years some of them have been training together Julia Valley in my book writes a short section on what it's like to have worked with people for 50 years wow it's extraordinary thing there's two things that seem to me really interesting there one they have followed their individual trajectories together and including many solo shows emerging from that and secondly I've forgotten the second really interesting thing that emerged it wasn't quite as interesting as I thought secondly and again Adam you may want to talk to this the individual dramaturgy the individual dramaturgy we may well want to go there but I also just want to see if you might bring up I was chatting with Tim actuals the artistic director of not francis forced entertainment, thank you I was chatting with Tim a little while ago and Tim was saying not a hope in hell that a group could do what forced entertainers have done now in England they got together in the early 80s and they've been hanging out together for 30 years like a lot of us my art subsidy for the first 10 years was unemployment benefit the economic situation has changed it's not possible now I don't know whether a company like Odin is possible now so what might those organisational structures how might they without saying we knowing that we can't necessarily do that now how might what Julia and people like Tim and some of the really long lasting companies that exist in America how can they tell us today about how we might organise I don't know whether you have things you might want to throw in there out of the audience I have a funny question as we go forward and it's back here on the board and it's I think we need to unpack it slowly over time but I'm hearing a conflation of terms in a way that may not be productive for us and it's not that any of these terms have fixed meanings but we may want to come to some ethical agreements about usage repertory companies ensemble companies collectives devising just the word company I hear a blending starting to happen that may be producing more confusion than clarity what is the network of ensemble theatres definition of ensemble a group of artists who work over a long period of time to create a unique body of work for artists and administrators have direction in the future of the organization I remember being very important that we added administrators into that definition can you say that again through your work go ahead sorry I didn't hear let me try and address that through this lens I think you're absolutely right Catherine I think there's a very big question of taxonomy in mind as well and sometimes it's kind of too casual appreciation without thinking through the ideas of those taxonomists specifically in terms of what you have to remember there are two things that define that group one is its training and they would walk together specifically to train together that group now doesn't continue they don't train together anymore they're old and they're so deeply psychophysical it's up to say to that one to the reach they don't do it anymore I'll come back to that point the second point of course is that there are laboratory and specifically from Topsky a definition of the laboratory now what that means is that there are a face of investigation but also of wide range of business as well but underpinning that in some way whilst it draws the question in order to do that today there has to be a willingness to stay together and do your body seizes on that term ensembles meaning together you have to be willing to stay together there is a danger in that because what will they have to do outside of that ensemble they can't do anything in a way that they're caught in this world of their own religion but there is a wide definition of an ensemble I think where it's easy to have here as well the ensemble for the opening simply means a full cast show but the group which is in terms of preference has to be seen as part of a network so throughout the tradition of the model for their always meetings such as we're having Zathler in his night in my world and then with but going back to what Catherine said there is a huge tension at the heart and that is how can you be part of the group but how can you be individual as well so I'll talk about self but others how can you be yourself but how can you be with others as well and that's really something which drives that group they can't stay together in the time that they're driving for the mad so periodically there are certain points of the year where they dissipate and they can make that so that we can go and train and so on so that's how they've managed to kind of continually almost not being an ensemble but trying to stay together you can go and make this ever work but it's a real tension which drives that work remember as well that group is run by a very very strong charismatic director who keeps that group together financially and ethically everything and this is the something we might come back to actually is how the work with an ensemble that we agree on with the circumstances but I've sat in rehearsals with but nobody questions him if he makes a one part in a certain way that's who it is but he's absolutely reliant on his incredibly well trained actors bringing him to the source of material if they don't bring him that he's stuck so the way really to answer your own question the way that group functions still in the 21st century the group that runs the networks which is what Julia talks about in the book which means a very strong director and a group of actors who are incredibly well trained yes they've been doing 50 years but really the four of that group bring together certain sentences so it's more like it's not quite 50 years, it's more like 40 but very interestingly I think each of that group's in the 21st century is a sense of looking out to networks and how they hang on those divisions for the younger people and that's my criticism of the UK ensemble but there's no speaking out for a wider context but that's where they're at at the moment they're doing increasingly working with the community with the young people that really are walking out and that's how they survive but it's a very long way around what those questions are about but I think it's about tensions there's just an interesting add something go sculpt so when we were working on this of these books on public creation we started a long time struggling with the definition and you know in this same situation we're having a room right now we wanted to make sure that we kept the definition we brought it up to account for the unbelievable multiplicity we were finding in practices that were defined as public creation but sort of limited enough so that we didn't just collapse and we'd go to them and say well all theaters collaborate with them or everything is called a creation of one type or another and that's sort of the same danger we have with ensemble but I liked sort of John's he's two ideas of the psychophysical act and also ethical choices as ways to start mapping types of ensemble activity you know can we find things that draw continuities across for example which a company has been assembled by producer and the director that perhaps never worked together will not work together again with a script in which no word has changed if you see that production and there's some sort of shared moment I think there's sort of a shared breath something that happens between actors on stage is ensemble occurring even if there's no ethical element at all on the other hand if you know another end of the spectrum you know the collective that divides productions together with lives together create with no set schedule perhaps that way presents finished work you know can you say that there's something in common across these things is that ensemble in multiple situations and I think of what I would propose from recent research I'm doing as we work on this next book out there on women's corporate creation is that one of the ways to start getting at what ensemble is is that I'm finding that ensemble often occurs when there is a true opportunity in the preparation or presentation for play and an encouragement to play and then this idea of play is specifically for me in this context coming out of the women who worked in the social work movement in the settlement houses in the U.S. in the 10th century in the 1920s the idea of play and I won't go into detail in terms of research but I think what it raises is a bunch of questions about how this goes back to Stephen and Daniel I think we're talking about what a text can be present but not what that does to a situation in terms of ensemble among theater makers and within theater companies what conditions are elements needing to exist for play to occur to be a possibility and I think you find that those things that prevent play can also facilitate play things like time, hierarchies economics, texts cultural climate, training space all of these things can prevent play from happening and therefore perhaps prevent ensemble but they can also facilitate it depending on the specific situation there's a lot of talking from virtual gentlemen I'm Johnny Horn and as I said last night I was part of that movement back in the 60s and 70s with that collective way of approaching that's what we have to say I'm also a 20 year member plus of Antias which began like your group was at the taper when the taper said we want Kenneth Branagh's style ensemble theater here and we and Gordon put together a remarkable group of actors in which I was extremely fortunate because I came in and did a community workshop and they said we need that and so I was suddenly a member of the company and it was a group of professionals who wanted to work a lab create an ensemble for Gordon and do new work with classical theater and we did one play The Wood Demon and it was not financially successful and we did something else we pioneered double casting which is another thing I wanted to address about your idea of the cycle side of things because when you double cast you not only are collaborating with a cast but you're also collaborating with a partner who's doing the same role you're doing and they're not going to do it exactly the same way but you still have to honor the text and you all have to be unified and that's been our exploration ever since and we're less that now but that dynamic is still there we've gone through lots of permeations of structure, survival we had Dakin Matthews who sort of kept us together we had Lillian Garrett Grove in the early days but now we decided we needed a more traditional structure and we've been moving through variations on that but the core thing of this today is an actor will say I want to deal with the text and they'll put together a group of members and they'll do a reading and then they'll develop to a workshop and that might turn out to be one of the shows we do that's the drive so the ethics side of it is not as in fact that's one of my big things I keep trying to bring in from the old days is that kind of ethical sense of why are we doing this why which has been my thing drives me nuts all the time why bother you know and I think ensembles which is a huge open pit of trying to define what it is but I think ensembles are often people who say I want to do something I want to do something and then they begin to explore it and if they can hold together for a while it'll be there but the other element here is that like the Beatles you know things change and this is an art that is alive and it's not going to stay together necessarily the O didn't stay together for 50 years remarkable you know but it's gone through its changes hasn't it and all of them will and that's part of the other process of how ensemble is addressed at different stages of the development of a group John Collins the director of the Albedo Repair Service writes a chapter on this one and he ends it I think really interesting he said the most successful ensembles are always falling apart for me there's something profoundly important about that as soon as the ensemble in any form whether it's organisational, psychophysical political whatever as soon as the ensemble reaches stasis it's dead because as Christian Murti the Indian thinker says everything flows it's got to flow and so it's got to be falling apart and from the falling apart there is the new evolution and the new genesis so this sense of somehow we that's why in the end I reject the idea of ensemble as a thing we are an ensemble I kind of think of ensemble as a process and it's a process that happens second by second on stage because it's continually in the state of crisis and it's a magnificent way because that's what makes it life you're constantly negotiating beyond expecting constantly having to go you just did what I didn't expect and I have both the training and the ethical framework to know how appropriately to react to you not just any reaction but the reaction that serves this ensemble making this work of art here now for this audience so it is that sense of continual decay and the strength in a performer and I would suggest the strength in directors and writers and everybody else who's involved in the collaborative process to say you know this great thing what I made it's falling apart magnificent hallelujah now we have new life and new birth and when the writer goes no hold on this is my play or when the designer goes this is my sonography then we kind of get to what for me moves away from the notion of ensemble and I'm really trying not to be prescriptive here but it seems to me there is this need for continual genesis and evolution yeah well then like I said we've been together for almost 30 years it changes it moves and you know we came from the collective when the collective is nobody has ownership of anything it was like yeah we had the same power we ate together I set a line and that line became owned by the company you know or whatever to become an ensemble what we call an ensemble which means there's a lot more responsibilities than there's been a collective by the way that now you as an individual inside this ensemble we have a lot of responsibility to the company you know to the ensemble and we've worked with a lot and it's hurting in a way because people say you never cast anybody out you always cast the same people we're not a production company we're an ensemble you know or ensemble is created in order understanding that we're coming from the sixties when there were no playwrights there were no individual playwrights in Chicano Theater except Luis Valdez so it was a need to create pieces of work to talk about the community because nobody else was writing you know and the eighties when the playwrights started coming out of the from the master schools they were talking about not the needs of the community but it was something else so it didn't fit our ensemble that you know and we're still together and now the process of the ensemble I'm the artistic director because it's the structure of American theater work and you have to have this type of idea but most decisions even though it's a bigger it's a bigger group of people are made by the ensemble but this means we have to get together this is what the season is going to be this is what we are going to everybody has a different responsibility as an individual like somebody who's an actor but he's a very good producer and somebody who's an actor you know what I mean so everybody takes our responsibility and the ensemble and yes we work with a lot of other people but they all train together you know what I mean we were talking about the paper and I was going to because we just got commissioned by them as one of the ensembles to do one of the projects you know and of course the way the original theaters work they do the contract usually with the playwright or the director and we have to go to the lawyers to say you're doing a contract with the company and not necessarily with the playwright and the director because the company in a way casts an unread ownership of the of the work that is going to happen and we don't have to go into the who's going to cast on the main stage and how many people is this Jose? how many people is your company at that time? right now? at that time how many people is your company? when you made this contract right now for these ensembles many that they've done this is new in 1992 when they closed the LATC we moved it when all this idea was created and you know we were there but we didn't fit so even today you're struggling to inform the taper that you're a company their models are still looking at you but the original tier models it really hard to fit and the problem is you're brilliant and I should get you coming here and because of the economics you say you're right my ensemble I'm leaving it's harder to say no no no no we have worked together for 30 years contracts with the ensemble and not with the individual you want me to talk to everybody I would like to add something to the conversation this is just for me personally I think that the 20 year we get about what ensemble is the more we turn not only each other I'll put other people from outside oh no no no ensemble is this when it first started in the world I'm just creating and then it's like you start to move in deeper and then all of a sudden people try to define what it is for you what you're doing isn't what we do is or oh actually I'm sorry when you start to get into that world I think that starts to get really tricky and turn people off a bunch of people are working together and they are moving forward to create and tell a story or whatever that is and they have a functioning model that works for them whether they have someone who is in charge of it or it's all collaborative completely I think that's an amazing thing that's a beautiful thing to move forward and to acknowledge that from other people that's just like I said a personal thing for a while I was kind of turned off by speaking to certain ensemble people because they were very much like very precious about what ensemble was and what other people do is not we're one of the only LA Peter companies that are ensemble it's like oh my goodness gracious and the other thing that I want to add to it is you were saying I don't know if Odin would be able to stick around or a company would be able to start like that I'm not extremely familiar with Odin but I kind of feel like on some what we're right now is in such a beautiful place in the United States because we are the sticker routers we're the people who are committed to what we are doing we're creating these amazing stories and we are sticking together we didn't have a space to begin with because we didn't have money for one so we don't have the overhead and we don't have to deal with the same things and that's not everybody but some people do still have overhead and whatnot but I think that it's this exciting time and there's this regional model that's kind of a little bit not crumbling but it's wearing and now all of a sudden they don't have the money so they're like we would like to do a cold production we would like to bring you in if possible for our season we're in a really fantastic, exciting time right now in the States I can't speak to other places for ensemble work right now I'm so excited about what we're going to do right now in the crisis I think the opportunities for those of us who are working outside the mainstream and trying to find new ways are enormous I can't remember who I was chatting with this morning but somebody left saying this is when Mark who I want to bring in next it is the time where my feeling, okay this is based on nothing but my feeling is that we will look oh I won't, I'll be dead but people will look back 60 years from now and realize that the work that was being done now was the foundation of what revolutionized things 10 years from now in the same way as I would people look at the 1960s and go amazing work that work started in the 40s and 50s and the 30s actually and then there was our work and back in the living theatre comes from 1948 is it 47, 48 something like that who had their roots in Miskolter who was going before so yes now is the time when we go hallelujah do the work because it's great to be doing and we are laying in place the things that will alter our culture for years from now I've been dead before but great I'm having a great time now I do think absolutely that there is this need as we work through things unconditionally to celebrate our ability to survive and to make and on that score just to try to get diversity of voices can I bring in Mark from the network ensemble theatres who can maybe talk a little bit about some of that stuff that I understand the title of the session this was called ensemble made in the 21st century and I think I took a very different take of that question my thoughts on the question were not about definitions but more about relevance like what is it it's significance it's use and I think that's the part of the conversation that I'm particularly interested in I kind of share Crystal's feelings the definitions that the minute we start to define it by next definition we've often been criticizing because it's so broad it is very intentionally broad if we could make it broader I would be happy to do that because it's just the minute you start to define it you can't limit aesthetics you can't limit form you start to take away the various impulses that lead to its creation that lead to its being so the definitions are for me less interesting but what I get excited about is the implications of the form of this practice of this thing that we've been trying to wrestle with the I don't know where this is we're in a moment of movements that there's something about the agency that allows that is very the ensembles allow something that Adam was talking about the individual and the ensemble the ensemble the group allows for the development of the individual and in developing the individual you're developing the group and it's that symbiosis like you can't you can't separate those two and I think there's something in this moment of participation of voice of agency that is especially alluring and it draws people to this way of making art there's also the very practicality of it's it's easier to do it with somebody than to do it by yourself absolutely and it's more like life and so there's something in this something about that that just allows it to even happen that relies on the body of that group and the last thing I will say is the individual group I agree that somebody said like can a company be around for 50 years in my sense I really love what John was talking about in that you're always in the state of falling apart that increasingly you're seeing there's not a purity in the five people and these five people are the ensemble like that I see that less and less and less and less the model that I think there's a core that is constantly bringing in people is constantly figuring out how they go in and out whether it's just life realities, economic realities aesthetic interests, personal interests whatever the reasons I think that this it's evolving and there's something in the livingness of these bodies that gives us interest so I don't know I just want to get back to the thorny question an interesting question I think you have a productive question definitions because I think that what it does is it brings us to precisely where we just went with us that when we keep pushing it we move from definitions to articulations so that the terms themselves are slippery because they mean different things to different people and they also become ways that people raise money they become things we try to teach they become things that we use for self promotion to get jobs so the definitions are loaded and complicated and they have a kind of social life to them which is why they're worth picking at and at the same time they're picking up can become a competition of no my ensemble's more ensemble than your ensemble right but it leads to starting to clear the words away and saying this is where the passion is so it can be a very productive conversation that we can keep returning to I don't have the broadness of it with what I was saying I wasn't saying we should define it I was saying like if you try to define it narrowly I think that's very scary may I just stretch this out a little bit we're running a little bit towards the end of time there's a lot of people who perhaps are working in younger companies developing work whose voices we haven't heard in this particular discussion yet is there anyone who is listening in who's going yeah hold on there's this is why I talk about ensemble this is why I come to something about ensemble this is what it means to me I don't really care what's an ensemble you said some really things that spoke to me very directly just like what I had to say and what's the form for me to say for me that's been like a totally hermetic monastic theater you're also a rock band of two or a lot now it's like an evolving ensemble of people from different countries that work in different places and none of that had anything to do with I care about this particular thing because I think it's the right political choice from a point of view of like setting outside it's like what is my problem what are the problems of the people that are working with the problems of the communities that we're working in and how can we deal with that okay this board will solve this set of problems you know we can I mean a lot of it's economic Michael under was I was just thinking a lot about this definition that you gave us a proposed definition of thinking about the psychophysical relationships on the stage and I keep thinking that that might offer a more robust language actually for spectators and critics to think about what they see in ensemble because it's placing the emphasis on how those relationships behind the scenes are manifested in the work itself and I don't know if anybody's read Claire Bishop's book on participatory art it's called participatory health but she's from the perspective of an art critic where she's basically talking about a lot of like a sort of recent vote for participatory art and that if art critics are reifying which they have been recently from her perspective the sort of ethical makeup of the work itself the behind the scenes like a lack of hierarchy being the model of the best then what is evacuated from that is an impossibility of actually talking about the work itself and what it does and any way of measuring quality that one piece may be better than another because it actually does more and there's something I'm really interested in this in this definition because we're not just saying well ensemble is about this set of hierarchical relationships but saying if you work in a certain way which is along the lines of what Catherine was talking about this morning a long counter tradition you see something deeper on stage and then you can start to talk about how it looks in particular productions I think we should just pause it right there a little Sassura thank our virtual guests Scott and Adam and unfortunately Rachel we lost but I've been hopefully watching our live stream thank you for both joining us and we'll catch up with you later and great and then I just wanted to this has been an excellent point because Catherine has kind of thrown out a provocation here Michael has just thrown out a provocation Ace has thrown out a very different provocation about why are we even care and so before we take a break for lunch we just want to open up the beginning for the next round after so the next round afterwards we are implementing something that I'm only an expert as a participant I never actually want to facilitate this and I'm scared absolutely scared I don't know how I'm going to do this but I can just give you the idea of what open space technology did for me when I went to devote to disgruntled theatre gatherings in London that now are happening all over the UK and what it is is basically opportunity for everyone in the room who has something that they really want to raise as a question or as a point or as a concern or anything that they can actually come in the circle in the middle state that and there's going to be a wall we will transform it over lunch and they will have the chance to go and pick the spot the place and the time which we have so limited because usually this event takes three days and of course over 400 people show up there and it's three days and it's one and a half hour long sessions and it's huge halls we have everything much smaller in much smaller ways we may have hopefully we'll have so many questions we will not have enough ways to divide the group all of a sudden we're all going to be in our little spots we will figure it out because I think I'll come up with something brilliant over lunch I know all of this but what I would like to encourage all of you is when you go over lunch you talk to friends whatever you do when you come back please don't hesitate to raise a point that you're willing them to hold the space with you will go to the wall you'll pick the spot and you'll pick the time we'll have two sessions we'll have the time that usually open space technology wants to give so it's 45 minutes that you will have a chance to explore with whoever is going to come to your space and that may be just you because somebody else has something that all of a sudden the whole group goes there that normally doesn't happen usually if we have at least six, seven spaces that we're going to have here today you will find that he's one person coming but if it's you, just you because you can actually really ask yourself these questions and write down what your answers are so these are the principles whoever comes are the right people whenever it starts is the right time as well because sometimes what happens to me is that I was sitting by myself I'm sitting by myself and I'm sitting by myself and I was writing myself and just doing things and people started to trickle in trickle in, trickle in and then the conversation flare up and it was fantastic and then about 15, 20 minutes later it was over and I felt like yeah, it's been accomplished I actually closed my station and I went to other stations to hear what people are talking about so whenever it starts is the right time wherever it happens is the right place because all of a sudden having those questions answered by the teapot or by having by having cookies and the conversation ensues so it's not necessarily always at the station it kind of has this open space technology means you may just go to lunch and that whatever it really matters to you you're talking to a waiter and that somehow happens to be the answer to your question or your concern whatever happens is the only thing that could happen and when it's over it's over and we know it so a couple of things when you come back we'll initiate you just a little bit more into this because it has kind of this freedom that people can be butterflies you can you can go and peek into conversation it doesn't quite jar with you you can just move to another conversation some people can be bumblebees they hear something here and then they go to another station oh they're talking about oh guys I have to tell you because those people actually covered this topic so there is that type of event that we would like to experiment with in its really kind of gestation stages in the afternoon that will lead to the practical then sessions in the later part of the evening with Rafael Volkis-Burantes on vocal training and with Mora on vocal training we can really then speak and voice our concerns in a beautiful way then going into the Putanani session where all of our backgrounds can start mixing and to end the day I do so before you guys go quickly just think of something that most matters to you to talk this afternoon and you may want to hold that spot or somebody else just ask that question and you know you're going to go and talk there with them so where can you have lunch my highest recommendation is right across the street here is eat this 10% discount so when you go there say it's around the teapot 10% discount they have fantastic food really really good food if you are on a slightly more budget that the place is they're not terribly expensive I can tell you that if you get side orders side salads you can get amazing tuna salad, heat salad, whatever those are really cheap those are like between sandwiches they come huge and you can share by the way those sandwiches are huge those are 12 bucks if you want to be in a budget