 I actually haven't prepared anything, I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. I'm a tape recorder to play it, I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. I'm just a tape recorder to play it, I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. I'm just a tape recorder to play it, I'm just a tape recorder to play it, it's going to be a Worcester group that we're both looking at. A big welcome from me as well, so we're really happy that all of you are here. Yeah, this is a very special evening for us because Pig Iron I think inhabits a very unique place in the theatrical landscape of this country but also abroad. So we're really honored to have the 20, the New York edition of the 20-year celebration of Pig Iron here at the Seagull Theatre Center. So you already had a bunch of activities in Philadelphia, your hometown, where you're from. So 20 years of continued excellent work, that's a big achievement for any company. And Pig Iron was really able over the course of the years to keep their curiosity and develop their craft and their aesthetic. So we all know that a theater company is a living organism. People come and people go, they leave their imprint and they take something with them. And I really think it speaks to or for the artistic leadership and artistic vision of Dan Rothenberg and Dieter van Rijkersberg, that so many people that have worked with the company went on and started their own company taking part of that aesthetic with them. So without a lot more to say, I want to hand over the microphone to Dan, Dito and also Rebecca Rock who will moderate the evening. And you have been affiliated with the company for many years as well, so we will hear about that. Hi everyone, that one's Dan, this one's Dito, I'm Rebecca. My affiliation with Pig Iron theater company is mostly as like number one fan. So I feel really honored to be up here tonight to lead a discussion with these guys. So I became a fan when I was working at the Public Theater and I saw other work for the first time in the Wax factory festival. Ice factory? Ice factory festival? Wax factory is a whole different thing. Anyway, and I just fell in love with them and was able to bring them to the public for residency and then have been friends ever since and have been a big admirer. So I think that's enough to say about me with relation to them. I think what we really want to hear tonight is just about the 20 years of this company. So when Ancho was just saying 20 years of continued excellence, Dan leaned over to me and said some of it was really spotty. And I feel like that's actually part of the story that we need to hear about. Not just that, you know, like some of the work is good and some of the work is not as good and that's part of what happens over 20 years. But also, you know, their kind of ability to be funny and rye in thinking about their own, you know, history. I think that is like a helpful thing to know that we're going to hear about. So I'd like to just kick it to you and have you guys tell us the origin story of Pig Iron theater company. How'd you start? So there's actually a third of us who have been doing this together for 21-ish years now. So Dito, myself, and Quinn Baradell were students together at Swarthmore College, which is a little small college outside of Philadelphia. And I think it's safe to say that it is a pretty nerdy college with a real focus on... There's an alum with a focus on book learning. And we started the company in 1995. Very soon after Quinn Baradell, Quinn and I went to the Lecoq School in Paris, the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, where we met people from 40 different countries. And we brought back a few Europeans and some Americans that we met there. And that became the core of the company in like 97, 98, and that was our ensemble for a while. I guess I'm curious what you would say. I feel like the things that we were thinking about, I was very inspired by the work of Joseph Chakit. I was talking earlier today about the fact that I had the strange good fortune to have a high school teacher who had been, I guess they didn't have the word intern then, but he was an intern with Joe Chakin's theater company. Joe Chakin started a theater called the Open Theater from 63 to 73. And then when we arrived at Swarthmore, one of our professors Alan Kuharski had also made work with Joe in the 80s. So we were pretty steeped in Joe's book, The Presence of the Actor, and his focus on the ensemble. So I didn't know that that was such a strange thing, but that was something that I cared about a lot. And then I guess the other thing that was happening was I'd worked even in high school with some people who were part of the new vaudeville movement of the 90s. So Bill Irwin was a real hero of mine, and this idea of theater clowning, which LeCocque is also connected to, was an inspiration. So I guess we were, I sort of can't believe how young we were. We were 21 years old, and we were looking at the Open Theater and Tatra du Soleil and Manishkin's company in Paris and saying, oh yeah, we're just going to do that. We're just going to work on making our own ensemble-created pieces, and that's what we'll do. And at first, we were only in the summer times. We were, speaking of Swarthmore College, Swarthmore College allowed us to rehearse and live in the summer times and make a piece. Yeah, the way I like to talk about that is it was such a nerdy place that they had just built a performing arts center that they really didn't have any staff or use for. Eugene Lang is sort of the biggest philanthropist of that place, and he said, I want to build a performing arts center, and the administration said we'd really love anything but that. And then he said, you're not going to get any more money from me until we do that. So that happened, and then quickly they built a theater program around that. And then in the summer, it was sitting there empty with the air conditioning on and the lights on. And they would rent it out for two weeks for little kids to do ballet competitions, but otherwise this gorgeous black box was sitting there. So after my ballet competitions were done, then I was very good. I could spin a lot. And then- He really dominated those little kids. I knocked them physically over. But so we rehearsed in the summertime, and then for the first two summers of pig iron, we would rehearse six weeks maybe, and then we would go to Edinburgh and perform as a company there, speaking of highs and lows. So we didn't know about Edinburgh, how it worked, but we heard it was like the largest arts festival in the world. So we were like, let's go. If I've won all these ballet competitions, I can surely go to Edinburgh. And so we went. We didn't know many important things, but one thing is that you don't usually have an intermission in a show at the Edinburgh Friends, because everyone's like going from show to show, and it's like maybe an hour they'll give you their attention, and then they have to go to the next show. So we made a show that had an intermission. It was two hours long. And speaking of nerds, the first show we ever made was called The Odyssey, Colin. A new work of theatre and dance. So we did this show. Often the group that went after us would often threaten us with bodily harm, because they were like, you went over again. Because you had like two hour slots, including get in and get out. And the first time we performed in Edinburgh, well, just getting the show up, we also had a case of food poisoning that traveled through the entire company. So we're all throwing up. And then we were like, okay, this is it, the first show. And five people came. Sure. That's about normal for Edinburgh. And then maybe three. And then we got this five star review. That was the miracle of all miracles. So that launched us in our tiny... I am sort of surprised thinking about how narrow our horizons were, heading out to Edinburgh, really not knowing anything about producing or much about the professional theatre at all. And I guess Edinburgh was sort of the perfect place, especially at that time in the 90s, for upstarts to do that. Because it really was a mix. First of all, there was this international festival, which we got to see over the years that we were there, which brought us in contact with people like Pina Bausch and Netherlands Dance Theatre and people in this dance theatre world that we were looking at. And then also, I guess I'm thinking back to that time, realizing that Diane Paulus had just started her one show, The Donkey Show, was happening in 1996 or 1997. Around then. And there were a couple that Shunt was doing, one of their first or second shows. They're a pretty big site-specific company in London. I'm trying to think who else was in those days. I mean, the Edinburgh Festival has kind of corporatized, or the Edinburgh Fringe has kind of corporatized in the 20 years since then. There's a much bigger focus on comedy and on branding, and there's big sort of beer gardens. But at that time, it was the... I think we were there really at a sweet spot moment where, first of all, for Americans going abroad, the exchange rate worked in our favor so that we could bring over this $200 show and see a bunch of stuff for $5 here and $5 there. And really that every cafe and basement turned into a theater. But I just thought, I think having sort of touched... You were there actually just recently. Do you agree that it's pretty different? Oh, it's gotten very different. And there's these gigantic... The Gilda Balloon is like a whole world of small theaters. They were much more kind of independent. Every venue was its own independent thing. And then I think larger venues started to grab whole theaters. I mean, whole groups of venues. So can I jump in and say... I mean, it's pretty interesting to hear kind of who else was there at that time. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about... I don't know how you started to come to think of your style or lack of style as a company or what you were about. I mean, Dan, you just said you really were drawn to theater clowning. And I'm interested between theater clowning and the things that you were seeing while you were there, what you started to make of yourselves and what you wanted to make in relation to those things you were seeing. What are your compass points, I guess, in aesthetic? So when we started the company, we called ourselves a dance clown theater company. And the work was the performers and creators that we were drawing together. We wanted to get folks who had different points of view on that. So we were... I don't know, I want to talk about clown a little more later. So I guess we thought about clown not as circus, but as specifically this style of performance where the performer can see the audience. And that really that that was this muscle that you could work. And I think that came somewhat from LeCoc and somewhat from some of the other New vaudeville people in the 90s. But that was how we made a distinction between this performance style of clown and this performance style of theater. And basically we were thinking about the study of the contact with the audience as clown, the study of character starting from a physical basis for theater. And taking some of the... being willing to dip into another kind of performance, which was more, I guess I'll say musical or geometric when we were thinking about dance. But I think we, I don't know, I think we were also just wanting people who were interested in that kind of physical training to work with us. And so the early work that we made was really like collages, like this Odyssey, a new work of theater and dance. Kind of shifted from mode to mode. And with a lot of like silhouette style character. Yeah, again, yes. Silhouette style large approach to character pretty influenced by LeCoc's teaching. And at some point over those like early five years, we started to talk about let's not make collages, let's make a complete world. On stage and a kind of internal piece of vocabulary that we would use. I don't know where we picked this up is that we would go to the regular theater and say, well, that person isn't in the same play as that person. These two people are in different plays. And that one of the things that we prided ourselves on was that everybody was in the same play. And that the way to do that was to not start with a script, but to let the script be born from the performers and have the performers being a constant dialogue with the director, the writer and the designers. So that people had a, I guess I'll say an intellectual understanding of what the style was and what the world was that everybody could keep working on and keep investing in. And I would say that because we improvise a lot in order to make what we're making, I think that's also a moment where the wrestling over what the style is gets worked out because there's a sort of like, some values start getting articulated in terms of like, what was successful about this, what wasn't successful about this, how are these characters now in the same play together and how are those working together? And there's, in Pig Iron shows, I'm going to say 99% of the time, there's no improvisation. On stage. On stage. There's no set. I mean, there's no, there's nothing that's not set. But a lot of what you see has come to be after a lot of improvisation has happened in the rehearsal room. So I feel like that's a way in which, so different than picking up a script and trying to figure out what the player was thinking. It's really like, okay, what were we all thinking in the space and how can we put a finer and finer point on the world that we're creating? Is there a time where you feel like you did that the best? Like, is there a most proud of whole world that you created? Well, we just showed Check of Lizard Brain, which I think we were, we were pretty, I'm pretty proud of as a whole world. There's a very strange world. That's a piece which takes place, I mean, it takes place inside somebody's head. It was kind of inspired by, I mean, it was inspired by a bunch of different things, but we started getting pretty interested in outsider artists, visual artists, like around 2003. So I guess really famous at that time was Henry Darger. A lot of people know that somebody who made art just for themselves, you know, alone in his room, and there was this other guy named A.G. Rizzoli. And A.G. Rizzoli trained as a draftsman, and then he would make, he had a whole cosmology in his head, and he would make really intricate, fantastical drawings of people he knew imagined as buildings. And he would do drafting of them as buildings, and then he would do a show in his garage, where he would just put them up in his garage and sell them for five dollars. And if someone came in and said something nice to him from the neighborhood, the next year there would be a drawing of that person who said something nice to him as a person, as a building with, it was this weird mix of sort of art deco, world's fair with spotlights and banners on it. And I guess we were interested in these artists who are obsessed and make their own elaborate fictions. So I feel like a bunch of the plays were about that, really were about this characters making elaborate fictions which then get pulled away at the end. In that kind of Wizard of Oz, You Were the Scarecrow kind of way, or usual suspects, I guess we talked about also, this movie, the usual witch, I hope I'm not giving away the ending. But it's not real. I don't know, the one that came to mind was Cafeteria. Cafeteria is a show that we did after, everyone finally came back from France. Everyone came back from Le Coq. And so Quinn had been there two years, and he was really like excited to talk about American culture. What is American culture? Because he had been in France for two years. So we started talking about how can we talk about American culture and what's a performative constraint that we're excited about. And this was, I guess this was a time we were very spry, but we wanted to make something that was all movement, no speaking. So we made this piece called Cafeteria, which takes place in a junior high cafeteria, and then a corporate cafeteria, and finally in a retirement home cafeteria. So it sort of takes you through a life cycle of an American human, but it has no words. So speaking of acting states, we're like figuring out how we express ourselves without language, but are able to give a sense of a plot or something happening non-verbally. That was one of the exciting challenges of that piece. And that was another one where character became really important. And there were really funny constraints that I don't feel like you would necessarily know when you came in, but it allowed there to be this unity of style. So we made really specific constraints for that piece that it was going to have no words, but it wasn't going to be dance. So there really wasn't... So there were two things that we didn't allow. There wasn't any movement that was just decoration. That was just there to show that it was pretty. But we also didn't allow any speech substitute. So there was no, like... And there was no, hey, over here, you know, that we had to find other ways to get around that, which created a kind of streamlined style. I mean, recently I've heard... Elevator Repair Service was starting in the 90s down at PS122, and we saw their early work as well. And I've heard them talk about formal dares. And I said, oh, yeah, that was our thing as well. We wanted there to be these formal dares. And I think, like Elevator Repair Service, we tried not to have a house style. You know, we really didn't want... We wanted to create a world with each play that required us to train in a slightly different way. And it was almost like... We felt like if you're an experimental theater company, you can't keep doing the same experiment over and over again. I'm kind of in a funny place with that in my 40s now. I mean, first of all, I sort of don't know if that's true, because I think there are some people who... You know, we've built an audience in Philadelphia, and they do start... I just don't know if there isn't something that runs through all of Pig Iron's work, even though we tried so hard to reinvent ourselves each time. Well, I know for me I often have the sense of the formal... Of there being some rules that I don't know what they are when I'm watching, and I am sometimes trying really hard to decode them, and I'm happy when I'm unsuccessful, actually. Like, that code is never broken, which I think is kind of an interesting way to think about it that I never have before. But I guess I would say I find that to be less and less so in the more recent work, and I wonder if there are ways that you've moved away from that, or are there new influences on you that have changed your... I don't know, weigh-in. Has your DNA continued... Have you continued to have a new genealogy of influences as you've moved out of that first set of people that you saw at the Edinburgh Fringe over your time? I guess particularly I'm thinking of Toshiki Okada, but I mean, I think there are other new people as well in your universe. I think there was a really important moment where Mimi was involved. So there was a piece called Love Unpunished, which was a piece set on a... It's hard to describe this piece, but it's a piece basically set on... Escape stairs. Escape stairs in a corporate building, the skyscraper. But then there's also an L-shaped platform that surrounds that staircase that also gets used in terms of movement. And there was a piece that we created with a choreographer named David Brick. And I would say... Can I say just a little bit more about the piece, though? So it was five years after 9-11, and Katrina had just happened. And I guess this will speak a little bit of just about a whole process too. We were trying to make a play that actually came back eventually, Yuba City, I think in some ways. We wanted to return to this level of play, and it was going to be about love. And we started training in masks, and a guy who came and trained us in masks had us all wear these black hoods before we were going to work with these fun character masks. And something about seeing all the black hoods just made me think about a sea of humanity. And Katrina happened, and we just started talking about... Another thing we talk about in the company is saying what isn't said, saying what can't be said. That that's another thing that we think about is our role of saying what hasn't been said or there isn't room. And sometimes that means something quiet, like it's too quiet to be said. And I guess I was thinking about, in conversations with Dito and Quinn and this choreographer, David Brick, I was thinking about how there was this moment right after 9-11 that I was really haunted by thinking about the people coming down the stairs and not knowing if it was an emergency, like the people on the 60th floor, and then the firemen coming up, thinking about firemen going up 50 or 60 stairs, and I just kept thinking about that and not being able to digest it, really. And that by 2006, 2005, 2006, we were in the war with Iraq, and at that point 9-11 became this banner, and so either you were for the war or you were against the war. And I felt like there was this huge disconnect between that feeling that I had, that which David Brick called grief, and that feeling also that that grief connected me to all kinds of people. I really remember going to West Africa like a couple years or right after that, I guess it was 2003, and seeing like a memorial calendar about the World Trade Center and just trying to comprehend how people in West Africa with so many fewer resources than the people in New York could have this feeling of grief around these people thousands of miles away, that something about those towers coming down had really seized the imagination of so many millions of people. So the piece is, and Mimi's here, that was our first time working together, so we worked in an abandoned movie theater, and we built this 25-foot steel and... it was wood, but it looked like concrete. It looked like steel and concrete escape stair, and then really the whole piece was kind of this meditative piece about going down the stairs, seeing firemen come up, and then starting to panic and think, I really better get down. And you wanted to say something about that piece and how that changed our... It just changed our style, I think, and I might have to back up, too. So I feel like one of the big values in Lakak training is what is the audience receiving, and is it clear? And those are sort of values that you get, and that's sort of an easy thing to test, sort of. You show an audience something and then you're like, did you understand what happened? Can you tell me what you saw? So that becomes a value for a while. You're like, oh, I really want to make something that's clear. Something about David Brick coming in, he's this choreographer, he was like... I felt like he kind of pushed the trajectory of the company a little bit less, a little bit away from clarity, maybe brought us back to a land of dance a little bit more, but he was like, but what is the idiosyncratic thing that you want to express through this kind of bizarre dreamscape that you're creating in this vision that's sort of related to 9-11 and the people going down the stairs and the firemen going up, but it sort of explodes and is more than that. And so the feeling of the value of clarity seemed to go by the wayside a little bit and that there was more of a sense of what is the idiosyncratic, what is the personally valuable or personally the personal poetics that... and how can those be expressed in a way that's both clear but also maybe vivid or maybe... So yeah, I definitely see that trajectory too and I don't know if it's about to turn back... the pendulum's about to swing back, but it's hard to make something clear in the theater, actually. That takes a lot of work. I think it's a really good thing for young theater makers to do and hammer themselves about. But I feel like by about 10 years in, both in the people we were working with and ourselves that we started to be interested in, things that vibrate and you say, I know what that is, but I can't name it. I can't quite put a name on exactly what that is. But I still am looking for states on stage that made people go, oh, I really want to keep watching, but not because I know exactly what's happening. And yes, so Toshiki Okada is this Japanese playwright and director and he... there's a company here in New York called The Play Company that asked me to direct the English language premiere of one of his works. And I got so excited about his writing and his crazy movement style, which was very much this, that we invited him to come make a work with Pig Iron and tried to coax out of him what his training was in this movement style. Because, you know, once you've seen a lot, it's hard to find something that you really think is genuinely new, that you think, wow, I really haven't seen what this is. And Toshiki's movement in particular had this feeling of, I really don't... I know there's a code going on here and I don't know what it is. And so I think we got a little, in our collision with him, the railroad cost house, which was, yeah, it was an incredible learning experience, but I don't think it fully succeeded. I don't think it reached out to the audience enough. And actually, in order to make this a little bit less academic, we were gonna do a bit of a lecture demonstration. And I was gonna invite up Jen Kidwell, who's a company member who actually has done very little of this work. So she's a real newbie to this, and to do some of the exercises that we took from Toshiki Okada. So I thought we would take just 20 minutes or so to show you some of that. And, yeah, these guys are going... As Dito said, typically in a pig iron, typically we do not show our improvisations to outside of the... We just don't do it. But here we go doing it. Because now we're in our third decade, so we're gonna break some rules. But can I just say also, so we'll do this for like a while, and then there will be a chance for questions from you guys too. So I didn't say that at the top, but if you're like burning to have them clarify anything, there's a chance for that too. This is some performance research that we've been playing with in the past few years. I'm gonna be right here. I gotta look at you, right? Maybe I can... Where can I go? Yeah, I'll be here off to the side, but just a little bit. Cool. So, little lecture demonstration. To my real surprise, working with Toshiki Okada, he seems to only have two exercises, which go on forever. Infinite, but I just sort of want to... So we'll just have one of you guys. No, why don't you let it be you, Jen, just to start, if that's cool. So super straightforward. All I'm gonna ask you to do... Where do I begin? So I'll just quickly explain that... You've heard about this play, Cafeteria, which had no words and no dance. It was all actions. I thought that was the best thing to do. And I banned all narrators from all of our shows. And then I got handed the script by Toshiki Okada, which is only narration. There's no action. People just come out and they describe things. And I was offended and turned inside out and excited because it was obsessive in a way that I could relate to. So in order to prepare to do his scripts, I would have people come out and just talk. And then it turned out that Toshiki did some of the similar things as well. So Toshiki would say, come out and describe your house to people and make it vivid for us. And so I'm gonna ask you to describe your high school. And so you just describe your high school to us. That's it. My high school was a K-12 progressive school just outside of Baltimore. It was a school that was started by Jews in 1912 because Jews weren't allowed to go to other private schools, but it wasn't integrated until long after that. My graduating class had 56 people. I have a twin brother. I'm gonna pause for one sec just because I'm so distracted by the microphone, which is so weird. Oh, hello. Do you mind if we take out her lav mic? Is that easy? I can just turn it off. Hello? No, it's off. Great. Hit it. So, keep going. Right. There were 56 people in my graduating class. It was very small. And one of those people was my twin brother, so there were fewer families represented. The buildings where there was... Okay. So, there was a road called Old Court Road off of which you turned to go to my school, and you would go up this rise and there was a fence. On one side, there was like a pasture, I guess. On the other side, there was like a forest or woods, but there were horses. So, you would drive past horses and like the little mini parking lot by the athletic field and barn. And then you would go... And then there was like a playground for what they called the lower school. They really tried to not use valueative terms. So, we didn't have high school. We were in upper school. There was lower school. I was like... As I say this, I was like, where did I spend my time? There were no rules in the school except that you had to wear shoes. There was no detention. There's no reciting of any kind of, you know, any separating, you know, talk matter, like a pledge of allegiance, for instance. Okay, so I'll pause you for a second. So, thank you so much. So, Jen is our super guinea pig and I just sort of wanted to share the things that Toshiki was looking at and the things... Toshiki writes about himself in Zero Cost House to play that he's a savant and doesn't know what he's doing. I don't know if this is just my lens on it, but so... Dance and giving notes. No, actually. No, no, there's no notes on this one. So, I feel like Toshiki heard this one anecdote about Brecht and just took it really seriously about... that he really used to talk about this anecdote where Brecht talked about reenacting the accident you were in and then describing an accident that you saw with your own eyes and then describing an accident that you heard about from somebody else and these sort of different degrees of remove. And then actually that in description, people move between all of these different states seamlessly and I feel like Brecht wanted that in his theater that he wanted the actor to be able to step out and comment and so I guess I just sort of wanted to sort of track Jen's moves as a describer to us. So, first she puts herself in kind of a 3D... she's got a model, and she's inside the model. So, she draws the road and then the barn is there and then her stuff over there. And... but then she can also make little... she can step out totally seamlessly like that moment where you stepped out and said now I'm laughing, right? You did a little... version of yourself, you're like this is what I'm like. You said I'm like a totally lost person and isn't that funny and I share that with you. Also then she does things where she draws a... you said there was no and you were trying to separating and you drew this line, you drew like your body leaked to help you, basically. And I guess the other thing that I'm quite interested in in this world of describing which connects back to this... this concept of clown as a separate discipline in which you see the audience is all of the complicity, which is a real look awkward, complicity that she has with us, the way she looks at us and says you really gave us a feeling of the school that the school had an ethos that was really wonderful. I bet you would all agree that it's wonderful but a little precious. And all of that... and all of that was shared with us as you were... as you were doing the description was this I see you and I bet you feel you have this judgment of it. We're sharing this. Yes, and I bet you would like... I'm a little embarrassed to tell you about this thing. I do like it but I also know that it's a little precious. And that coloring to me is related to this problem of the clown to actually be in the theater with the people, to see them. Cool. Alright, awesome. Cool. So I'll throw a ditto up there. And I'll have him just do a quick solo and then we'll do a duet. Cool. So Toshiki Okada's... I'm going to just take you through this sort of year of research really quickly. So Toshiki Okada has this movement style that I could not decipher. And this is the best that I could get out of him, basically. And I guess I'll give all... I'll lay all the cards on the table in terms of... basically as people are talking and doing this description in his work and in his company, Chelfish's work, they're moving at the same time as talking in this way that's sort of a gestural, fractal way of moving. And I couldn't quite understand it and when you ask Toshiki about it, he's like a... he's very cagey, I think. Because he acts like it's totally clear. He says, well, that way of... to me it's not an obscuring of what's being said, but it's running, he said, a jumper cable directly from my brain to the brain of the audience, from the brain of the actor. So we asked him about these gestures and one of the things he said, and I think you saw it with Jen, is that when you have a really rich image in your mind, the body leaps to help. And that the image... that the words are last, the image happens, the body comes to help, and then the words come last. And this became even something that then I started thinking about when working on Shakespeare, when you have to do these monologues in Shakespeare, that we feel it instinctively if the person says, my heart, and then... and then they touch their heart second, as opposed to this moment where you could... you wanted to talk about this concept, about the dividing, and you were like, the body's just there, I see it, the body tries to help, and then eventually dividers the closest word I have. So Toshiki said, well, if there are some of these gestures, can you catch them and repeat them and sort of turn them into their own gestural song? And he called it catch... well, no. We told him it was called catching the fish and he said, what the hell is that? That's what we called what you said, because one day he said, well, in order to hold on to those gestures and hold it with a loose grip, like a fish. If you squeeze too tight and hold on to the image, or the gesture too tight, the fish will die, but if you don't hold it enough, it'll... yeah, scamper away, I guess fish don't scamper, but you know what I mean. So why don't I ask you to describe your high school, and then when you can catch the fish, catch it. So I went to a high school, I went to a high school, it's a very ugly high school, so you drive down this road and there's a sign that says, Langley High School, home of the Saxons. But then, there was a rumor that the school was designed by a prison designer and I believe that to be true, because there's something about it that's very, like, sad, it's very like it's downhill and it's just all, like, rick and nothing very exciting and it's a very, like, boxy building. The parking lot is huge, it's where I learned to drive over here in circles with my dad. Um, and then I used to bike to my school, sometimes I would bike and, uh, you lock your bike up here, you go into the school, go to your various classes, uh, I'll describe it. So there's, like, a little courtyard and then there's the drama classroom, which is actually the place where I spent most of my time. Um, and the drama teacher was awesome. Ms. Jaffee. And Ms. Jaffee, um, she liked me. Start catching fish. She liked me so I liked her, we liked each other. Um, you know, I don't want to date myself, but this is, this is the 80s. Uh, so I was not entirely out in my high school. I was very comfortable to be in the drama room because that was what we call these days the safe space. Uh, so there was, uh, with Ms. Jaffee and, uh, let's see, there's a, in her room, there were lots of posters from all these shows. She went to London in the summer times and in the, and Edinburgh, all these, there was posters all, like, all the way to the top of the ceilings and, um, she had a stage in the room. She'd go up and, like, actually be on a stage and do your scenes and, um, or improvisations. Those things where you like it to tag in, freeze, improv tag. Um, that was sort of a home. Um, and then around the corner to, there's a room where her desk is there and then you come out and, so the rest of the school is all, like, that way. And I remember feeling like, that's not my school. This is my part of the school. And, uh, and then you turn left and a little left again and then you're in that auditorium. Very vivid. Any fish? Any fish. I'm going to try to do some fish now. Okay. Uh, so you go to the right and then you're in the auditorium. The auditorium is humongous. The auditorium, I think, sat 800 people maybe. And, uh, so you walk in and it's like, it's very daunting kind of humongous space. Um, and that's where you would audition for the plays. I remember being super scared the first time I auditioned for Animal Farm. It played based on the George Brown level. Novel, I guess. Of the same name. Um, and it, uh, so she was sitting at the very back sort of the, there was a Madame LeFarge kind of feeling. She would, she would, there was a thing that the students were talking about. They were like, Miss Jackie will be knitting and she'll be looking down. And if your audition is good she'll look up. So, that was the scary test. I was like, okay, is my audition good enough that she'll look up. And I remember the first time she was knitting and I don't remember my Animal Farm have no memory of that audition at all. Um, there was a musical for the musical. I was auditioning and I came out to see my song. It was from Man of La Mancha. I took my spot at the center of the stage and I remember thinking, I hope she looks up. I was getting a sweater and I was singing my heart out and giving it all and I felt like she was a mile away. I'll pause you. Clipping. Well, I'm only looking at style. I'm not listening at content. Very few fish, yeah? Yeah. It's hard to figure out which ones to grab. I did a little one. Yeah, that's just a weird thing I know. Yeah. This is why we don't improv in front of people. Um, but um, the, uh... No, it's not like that. Well, just because it's hard to it's just hard to know when it can happen, exactly. I do feel like you showed like somebody shouted out knitting which is to me a fascinating thing about this style of performance because this is basically what Lakak would have hated, I think. Tons of fidgeting, tons of extra movement. He... The person is often in contact with your memory, really. So you're kind of, your eyes are up and away from us, but I feel like there's still this contact with the audience that can happen that is really different from any other performance territory that we've we encountered before. So, on the one hand I think if you're looking for theater it can be kind of irritating, but if you lock into whatever this state is, what happened with whoever yelled knitting has happened before. Uh... Technical, when we were warming up to do zero cost house techies who would never shout out like Union techies in Florida are like, okay, we're done. I did exactly the same thing. And the techies went, wait, what happens? Like, I have to talk. I'll show a couple more things and then we can do some questions and stuff. I'll throw you up there. We're going to take away catching the fish. I might throw it in. But I thought this was also this very strange... Somebody told me that in Japan stand that comedy is actually done in duos much more frequently than solos. So, but I actually feel like this is something which almost never happens in the American theater that two people come out and tell us about one thing. And we started talking a little bit about full brain, what it means to throw something at somebody that is like, okay, I really have to think hard about this. Like, at the very beginning of Dito's discourse on his high school there was this pause and I found, I find that pause full that is like its own kind of acting training that almost what's happened with me just now as I'm trying I've got ten different concepts in my head and I'm trying to pick one and bring it forward to you that in that pause is a certain kind of timing that happens. So, some of these questions are these, I throw impossible questions at two people who have to talk to us about them. So, my question is, will there always be poverty? That's a poor answer. You have to go for it. Yeah, poor answer means many things. That's part of it, I think. Part of it is that's such a multi there's so many ways for somebody to be or for a situation to be impoverished and like so much interest in keeping things or people impoverished or keeping things or people in excess. It's one of those things where you're like oh, if you just stop with yes then it feels like a very lame answer, right? It's like, well, what about the activation of how that shouldn't be so and now how do I I don't know. I don't like that I'm just answering. It's a question that's I think most people would answer yes to that question, but it's predicated on a certain kind of hope that in answering the affirmative there's actually a huge negative feeling that gets released into the room. Now we all feel like, well, perhaps I'll feel like down. So it's a really tough affirmation to think about the election. That makes me think it's hard to imagine it. I'm trying to imagine like I mean I guess there have been communes or like communities where people all were like but I feel like I've never it doesn't seem like it travels outward in terms of size it feels like maybe that works on a small scale for a short period of time. I mean because it's not even like this could be pretty simple on a way to end poverty for talking about economic poverty is like like Bert and Ernie did it with the cherries you know you have a scale one side of the scale is one cherry the other side of the scale has a whole bunch of cherries which moves some of the cherries up to the other side and then it balances everything out because we don't do that so we must not be interested in doing that that has been for forever Bert or Ernie what's the little one that's like tall today I feel like I used to my spirit in it Ernie? hey Bert Bert's like the yeah he's got the 20 are you describing me? I guess so Toshiki makes dances and I'm just sort of starting to figure out how to make dances out of all of those body gestures that aren't describing systems like the way you describe the feeling right the hope that got that negative that then got released into the room you know and you just did a big one with the hands as well and then I got really interested in this really strange relationship which you don't get to see in drama very often where status keeps changing between you two when she says the Bert and Ernie thing you look out to everyone I don't know if I'm going to do that I don't know if I'm going to do that and the way that they check in with each other all the time about morality is this okay to say is it morally right to say is it too much of a bummer to say yeah do we have time for one last one or what should we do this goes on too long isn't it alright so here's an impossible one and this like I said was a year and you've never done this so this actually reminds me of some of these constraints that I did for cafeteria so we started talking to Toshiki about the idea of extra and he had written this play called are we the undamaged others where a dude shows up in the middle of the play and says I'm not happy you're happy but I'm not happy and then he sits there for the whole time and we just sort of love that idea that there would be this extra stuff again it's kind of the rebellion against Lakak and Clarity so we started talking about extra movement and this is really like raw research that we have not figured out how to put into a play yet so again I'm going to lay out the rules right now which I think would be very different if you didn't know the rules but I'm going to throw it out there so I'm going to hit you guys with a full brain problem again one person when the other person is talking like everybody noticed how Dito did all kinds of fidgeting while Jen was talking big big fidgeting but that's part of part of how you're there right and part of how you're thinking about what you're going to say and listening and then in front in that world of fidgeting you're going to create waste movement in extra movement and so this movement does not illustrate what Jen says it does not erase what Jen says and it's not just a fun dance so this is this strange formal obsession we found three years ago that we still don't know what to do with so now I got to give you guys an impossible question great so what do you owe your parents every I I don't know I feel like I'm in a very I know so many stories of bad parents but I happen to have pretty good parents so I feel pretty lucky that like I can fully I mean not always I can pretty fully embrace owing them and feeling the gratitude however my mother had a mother who kind of tortured her and was really mean to her partly because she was an alcoholic and so I don't know that got very serious but I feel like oh sometimes you can feel that debt and you want to pay it and you find ways to do that and there are other ways where you have to sort of say thank you and now we're done yeah I mean it's different for everybody it's like I owe my parents I owe my parents I shouldn't say you but I owe my parents a lot of time and I feel really grateful for that because that's the one thing that you can't get back and they put a lot of time into me and that was very nice of them um I mean other stuff too but like I guess at some point I could like tally it all up and give it back a bunch of food and money and clothes just sort of like just fall from a big bat and land but uh I can't take I can't give them back time and regard and um and like support like beyond support it's weird how in the United States in particular when people get really old you send them away to a place where they get taken care of by strangers I don't know if you always do that I mean that's the cultural norm and uh I don't know I guess there is some thought that like oh the in fact I have a friend who's going back to India to take care of his parents because he's the youngest child and there's a tradition there of like if you're the youngest child that's your when they get too old they they need care that's your job whereas here I think it's much more um just throw money at the problem what positive answer cool um lovely um the uh so I'm still trying to figure out what that is it's like it's sort of an impossible it's both an impossible problem that I created you to think about and an impossible formal problem like like if I was in the rehearsal room for two hours I would be like oh there's there's illustrations that happen right like he went like that right when she said something about throwing that time is gone or something but it's almost haphazard right and then there's uh but there was sort of oh yeah but it feels like I don't know I wonder if it feels like that's okay if it doesn't feel too one to one yeah yeah I think so and you can also hold on to it a little bit so and what happens when you start really like if you're really like together with somebody and this thing you're talking about before the image comes before you start anticipating what they're going to say in your body like you know yeah exactly yeah that can happen too so uh I think we're to wrap up our evening we're going to thank you guys so much see you away um but uh Becca why don't we we'll all sit up here now yeah we'll all sit up here so yeah thank you I'll I'll swim for a minute and then take questions from you guys um so Jen you just saw working and Mimi Dan referenced before as a long-time collaborator but I guess um she just quickly introduced me to Ian she's a scenic designer and I think I introduced Jen Kidwell and uh yeah I guess that's all well maybe we could start by this is also most of the current company that is Pig Iron so I think it might be interesting for you guys to know how Mimi and Jen came to be a part of it or what their origin story with Pig Iron kind of how it started before so maybe you can tell how you got here with these guys so I first met Dan in and you were the first person I met of the company I believe and it was in 2005 and um I had worked in Philadelphia for the first time uh designed play at the Wilma Theater I think the year before that and uh and I think Quinn saw the show and knew that you guys were looking for a designer for this new project Love Unpunished and so we uh had coffee and we met and we uh I think we talked about Rube Goldberg and like a few different uh I don't know point common points of reference um I I guess partly you know because you told me the story about you know how you've been thinking about what it feels like to just continuously go down to physically what it must feel like physically for people to walk down 60 flight of stairs um and this was something that you had been wrestling with and uh I guess maybe I don't know my background is in architecture so I you know think a lot about the kind of emotional and psychological implications of space and moving through space so that problem that you threw out and this question of like you know how does that space affect the psychology and the physicality you know how does that physicality in turn affect their emotional and psychological state and I was super excited about that um so we ended up working on that project and uh and I guess I'll just mention I can talk more about this later but it was the first time that I had worked with an ensemble company that created device work together I had only been really working as a set designer for about three years I had no previous experience in theater I hadn't studied theater in college I had studied architecture I didn't know that that was something I wanted to do um and so I hadn't had a lot of experience in different ways of making theater and my encounter with pig iron was the first time that I had encountered making theater in this way and it's totally I feel like it was a it totally changed the trajectory of all of my work I feel like the crazy thing that happened is Mimi made tons of models of these stairs I mean a lot of models like at least seven main models and we kept obsessing about should the stairs exit with the people facing front and should they descend the stairs exit with the people facing away from us and then we grabbed some stairs at the Wilma theater and we rented the Wilma for a day or we took the stairs and went to the this was actually at the Yale we had a workshop at the Yale and that was actually the first workshop that you invited us to and we sat on the stairs there were all those weird stairs in that building you had no you had borrowed a stair unit from the theater department a huge like aha moment for me actually like I think about this moment all the time I remember being in this rehearsal room and you had this set of rehearsal stairs and I remember you Dito actually like you had asked everyone to do this exercise right so first we had placed the stairs going sideways and so people would walk up and down it in profile and I think we knew that the structure of the piece was going to be very much like a loop to descend the stairs and then they would descend the stairs again and we would have this feeling that we were watching them and following them descend the stairs of the building so you had everyone kind of cycle through and walk down the stairs and do something and I remember feeling like the profile was kind of disappointing and kind of blah like if it felt very normal like the way you normally see stairs on a theater stage right it's often like in profile so then we turned the stairs and had the stairs coming towards the audience as the performer was descending them and I remember vividly Dito descending and as he was descending you know they were all just making proposals, physical proposals and I feel like you did this thing where you padded your heart as you were descending and somehow like that in combination with the orientation of the stairs it just was hugely impactful like it felt completely different from the stairs going sideways and then we also tried it again with the stairs going facing away from the audience and that was the first time that I as a designer got to play in full scale with live performer right because you know we build models and we can look at the model piece facing this way and that way but to be in on the process with the performers and performer creators and everyone kind of making this thing together that was the first for me so I think about that day like all the time Jen I, oh we were just talking about this earlier I I was living here and saw a piece called Machines, Machines, Machines, Machines that is a pig iron I guess like affiliated piece Quinn was in it and Jeff Sobel and Trey Leifert and I really liked it and because I saw that piece I got put on Pig Iron's mailing list haha and then I saw Check Off Lizard Brain which I also really liked and they were very different pieces oh this is so crazy the work these people are making and you should turn on your mic is that what the gestures that have meaning are saying over there, yeah, you should turn it on hello so then I was here and I felt like I was really spinning my wheels like I wasn't really able to live off of performing and I wanted to be making stuff and I didn't know how and then I ended up taking this trip with my brother and we ended up at whatever, I ended up seeing all this theater in Europe and I was like man it seems like people are making really great stuff in Germany I think I'm gonna move to Germany haha haha haha I found this theater company online and like wrote this letter that was like I literally was like I don't speak German but I promise I'll learn I don't work with you people I don't know we'll figure it out and in the meantime I kept getting these emails from pig iron saying we're starting a school we're starting a school and I was like that's really nice those people make really great work I wish I could afford to go to their school and then I was like okay I'm gonna apply and if I get in I will go to Philly and figure this out and if I don't I'll move to Berlin the part of the application process haha haha part of the application process involves a conversation with one Quinn Bowardill who is not here right now and on the phone this man told me I was like he was like yeah you know what's going on and I was like yeah well I was thinking about moving to Berlin I just really want to learn how to make my own work and I think I saw some things coming out of that country that I found really inspiring and Quinn Bowardill no he didn't look me in the face we were on the phone right so he said with no irony oh well that's interesting because I like to think Philadelphia is the Berlin of North America haha and I was like oh haha I was like really? and he was like oh yeah haha haha I ended up getting in the school and then I was taught by these people and Mimi came for a day but I already missed her um and uh uh yeah um hook tweet so I think I'm a little unclear on when we need to end I feel like I should be the person watching that so I think we should open to audience questions pretty soon um but I I think I want to just throw one question to you guys that I was interested in and thinking about what I wanted to hear you talk about which is um I guess because I feel like it's really hard for me to draw a through line through mysterious things like how when you go to their show you just figure out what this one's going to be like and it's not going to be like the other ones I have a question for you guys which is what do you have in common? the shows or what do we have in common you all of you because I think that maybe if you can name it it will help us understand what pig iron is in my school we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day it's not that it's just not that I am teaching nerds all four of these people are nerds actually I don't know that's part of it definitely all of these people are folks that I can talk about ideas with for sure um and there is this other feeling of it feels cliche to me now and I guess I don't know if it is really a spirit of play which is something LeCocke used to talk about but I feel like you're not really going to be part of pig iron if you don't have a spirit of play so I guess there is this feeling of ideas matter this isn't just this funny thing also right I mean it's a little bit of a place for refugee intellectuals right like intellectuals that became artists like people I do feel like all of you guys care about ideas maybe more than me even though I think of myself as someone who's like well at the same time it's a we're doing a Mimi and I are artists and residents at UPenn and we just met for this year in the program in environmental humanities and we were working with Andrew is from the public and he has a sheet for how devising companies could work like let's talk and let's talk about our internal language and I said you know, oh people at UPenn we say that's just an idea we say that's academic not that ideas are not important but there are some ideas that only exist in an essay and then there are ideas that are right for the theater and I guess I feel like to put words in your mouth I don't know that I've heard you guys say this but I know that I could I feel like we could all talk about that we could say that's an idea that's an important idea and then this is how do you how do you turn that into theater that would be my answer we are like dumplings yeah maybe picking up on that I feel like like the idea of doing research I feel like that's maybe really important to all of us and I feel like the process in which the work is made feels like a kind of ongoing just kind of elaborate you know like we went to when we worked on Xericoste house with Toshiki Okada we all went to Japan on this research trip and I don't know I personally feel like I love like that's my favorite part of working on any project it's kind of like soaking up as much of the unknown of things that I don't know as possible and I feel like that is a big part of that rehearsal process of like of kind of not knowing of allowing yourself to be in a place of not knowing and absorbing and then kind of creating this world together I think we should open it for questions from the people I think someone's going to have a mic we are live streaming so since we are live streaming and millions of people are tuned in right now online we need it all on the mic so I remember Swarthmore in the 90s being there and a lot of what you guys are talking about and have persisted in is a lot of what was engendered there at the time and around and Philly and even around the country there was a paucity of that mindset and I was just wondering what has allowed you guys to persist to kind of keep that the ensemble and the theater of the ideas overall this time period because 20 years is quite an achievement considering how far away that seems now well this is one of my favorite anecdotes there was a moment where what year did we hit like maybe 15, 14, 15 and a Romanian man who teaches at Colgate University was like let's see if you last much longer he was like what? he was like you know theater company life of a dog you were like what? can you explain that? he was like yes ensemble last maybe plus minus life of dog maybe 15 years maybe 16 you were about to end he was really like and I told him that he said that because there was a way in which like with anything that lasts a long time you have to keep sort of reinventing and I think already built into the DNA of us working project to project and delving deep into new things that we don't know how yet to do there's already a kind of continual renovation rediscovery but then there was a moment for us also to really think about how we wanted the company to continue and that was maybe the moment when there was talk of us starting a school and it's one of those things where it is hard to keep a group of people together and especially with an ensemble where you want people to feel empowered but also to take a this empowered group also takes projects in a real direction rather than like continually discussing so I don't know if I answered the question but the feeling the sort of way of making projects I think helped us last for 20 years and then also getting these wake up calls and like you have to just keep changing up the formula a little bit so that it remains exciting and it remains new part of our formula is to bring in these outside wild cards like Toshiki Okada and just make sure that we're not always having the same group of folks driving each other crazy I think we were really lucky that we landed in Philadelphia just at that moment where the city was sort of at the end of 25 years of population loss and so little was happening that we could be a big fish in a small pond and Philly is now even then I think it's very hard to keep an ensemble together in New York City because of the cost of real estate, cost of living for both the artists and for the theater itself and I guess Philly is changing, we're in the middle of the first construction boom and I don't know, 50 years and there's a lot of economic migrants from New York City people that I thought would be connected to downtown New York theater forever are moving to Philadelphia in their 30s and 40s because it's a quarter of the cost but that's changing yeah, I mean there's so yeah I guess I'm a Philly booster anyway Dan in 2009 I heard you say something along the lines of you wanted to know how much you needed to make the audience laugh before you could slap them in the face and they would stay put that may not be something you still believe or still interested in but I see your work deals with a lot of difficult questions for the audience and this is a question for everybody and not shying away from the hard questions of life and finding humor as a way in and I was wondering if you could expand on that or reject it entirely sure I guess, I don't remember saying that although I guess so so we really were also lucky to we pulled Joe Chake in out of retirement, post-stroke to make a piece with us when we were 25 years old ish and he had aphasia and he spoke in haikus because aphasia is he had a kind of brain damage where he understood everything but he couldn't make syntax work so he spoke in these haikus and one of our favorite things he said to us was me, 95% funny right? 95% funny prefer 95% funny and I think we really felt like well we just got a permission slip to make it 95% funny and yeah I mean it's mostly just a question of I feel like the artists that I've really connected to really thought about the function of what we're doing is waking people up from Joe's fascination with Beckett and then Toshiki's fascination with Beckett also he has a play where everybody's falling asleep on a train and what if nobody woke up and so I think the job of trying to wake people up you got laughing is the quickest way I think to wake people up so so yeah I think I still care about that for sure yeah where do you guys it was a question forever oh sorry I was moving along no you laugh a lot too I mean I certainly there's always the danger of theater becoming pretentious so I feel like humor is one of the best ways to just be like hey we're all here we're not taking it too too seriously now we can delve into something without feeling like we're being very precious about it sometimes humor allows you to take something actually like more seriously I think my big question for humor now is it doesn't allow us to actually really say the truth and then we have a physical reaction to the truth but like laughing is the same muscles as crying so we're doing the same thing it's just the provocation maybe feels a little bit different but it just allows I definitely don't think of it as less valuable I think that can be really sublime my own experience as an audience member is like I'm in a sublime moment when I'm really really laughing that can happen as well let me take you and then you oh yeah let's start over here I have a question about the catching fish game that you guys played were you turning up the fidgeting was that part of the idea was that you were moving more or were you trying to catch movements that came up out of this problem of trying to say something with your body before the idea came out of your mouth probably both but what I'm really trying to do is I think the second which is to I don't know that I did it particularly well but that an unplanned movement that comes out of what I'm trying to express verbally then starts to either repeat or I'm trying to do it right now a little bit and then I'm continuing it's a little bit like the game of patting my head and rubbing my stomach that there's like my body is almost choreographically is doing something with more repetitions than would be normal it's a little uncanny but it feels a little bit like a surrealist moment where it's based on something an impulse that is real so that the yeah so the idea is to capture something and then repeat it as part of the research while the mind keeps moving and while the words keep moving one of my favorite things that I've heard Toshiki Okada say and you said like it's a little bit surrealist so he said to me once sometimes people call me a surrealist it seems like these two things that are unrelated are juxtaposed and the first time I saw Toshiki's work it was like two office workers having a conversation at a water cooler and they were doing this movement which had been generated through a process like that but it seems like it was its own separate score that was like on a different track from the very banal conversation that they were having and so he said to me yeah some people call me a surrealist because these two things that have no relationship are juxtaposed but actually what I'm doing is I'm putting a black box over the connection so it's like the two things are connected at this junction box but I'm putting a black box over it so like somehow I love that yeah I wanted to ask you guys sort of actually related to the theme of the Prairie Leaf Festival this year because you guys often go into questions that you don't know how to answer there's inevitably failure and I wondered if you could talk about like favorite failures or how failure has come into your process as something that you like roll with and work with and can get excited by because it's something I remember from working with you I didn't say I mean I won't speak about the company but the school is you know that's there's like so many failures that you there's so many failures happen there's so many different registers like oh man that improv is really too bad too I just spent two weeks working on this piece and you told me it's not it's no good it's not doing what I thought it was going to do and so personally what that's opened up in me is you stop feeling defeated by failure it doesn't feel better necessarily but it's not a defeat I'm thinking about the election I'm like that's not a defeat it's just a stumbling block but there's like more permission to do more things that may go horribly horribly awry and in that breath of trying then maybe something you weren't expecting gets to creep in and the skin is certainly thicker there's definitely projects that didn't work but that collaborations were born out of it like I think you might have worked on canker blossom which was a puppet piece that just didn't come together that we worked on really hard and Rosie Langabeer had showed up on a crazy whim like she shouldn't have even been in this country this composer who then composed became really central to our 12th night with a live Balkan band became like one of the most special parts of it we just finished a piece we we three called I Promised Myself to Live Faster where I had this amazing team of artists and an amazing idea that really works as a joke but may not work as a play somebody over there really likes to play I think it's really good about a planet of pregnant nuns it was a gay sci-fi fantasy a planet of pregnant nuns who only give birth to homosexuals and their search for the holy gay flame which sounds like it's going to be really fun but somehow I think that project got really overburdened in a way we had too many geniuses on board getting off a secret project with just these two guys that's trying to be a return to Charles Ludlum who was the inspiration for that project and right now the project is only the name of the exercise we've done which is called Quick Change Dumb Dumb and really all it is is these two people improvising quick changes and being as dumb as possible and try and have sex with each other that is the whole project which is improvised we've only worked on it for three days and we're going to throw it we're going to throw it together we're going to perform it at a gay club that also does drag golden girls called Taboo in Philly for 50 people and it's a big departure for me and us in that it's going to be improvised it's not going to be tightened on the screws it's going to be a failure that we're like trying to turn into I know there's lots of life in all that there's a failure that I particularly love which is Check Out Blizzard Brain Version 1 so I don't know if people saw Check Out Blizzard Brain but it was so it was this piece where we created various activists say what that guy said what did you see after Check Out Blizzard Brain and somebody said with full earnestness raise their hand from the back like maybe this was what we were going for uh Beckett performed by retard which really maybe that could be our tagline that's what he said I wasn't thinking of that that was the first showing that was very funny so there was a version we showed that was too it's too hard to go into but it was too there were too many there were too many elements it was a little bit overburdened this version of Check Out Blizzard Brain we showed it Cynthia Hopkins really liked this version but other than that people were like it's so complicated I don't know what it is and then James who played Check Out Blizzard Brain and Quill and you went off and kind of woodshed it and like kind of speaking of clarity they went back to sort of like what is the clarity of what happens to this one person through the telling of the story of this play and then we it was like we had all the like elements that could obfuscate what what the story is but then we also had the clear line of what is the what is the story itself so that was the moment the version that is now the version came to be so that it actually took ensemble working together all five of us a lot of designers putting in their their many sense and then like and then a version premiering and then more time so there was a failure but there was there was enough of a success that we were like there's a there's one more turn of the wheel and that's what they did on their own and then we came back and worked out a little bit more and then we were able to kind of like finally put the make it into the show that they wanted to be maybe one last question or comment maybe Richard if you're with us if you want to if you want to if you want to I'm happy to happy listening one last I have a last question since this is the 20th anniversary and we've talked a lot about origins and where you guys came from I think it might be interesting to hear about what's next what comes next are there 20 more years what comes next right now what are you imagining for the future well we're making this crazy piece we're going to talk about it the one that you just talked about and and we're making a piece with this composer named Troy Harian which is going to have a children's choir an elder choir a chamber orchestra in it and it's called a period of animate existence it's in five movements like a classical symphony and it's going to really it's going to be the first piece we've ever done that really brings together through composed music with classically trained musicians and it is about children, elders and machines contemplating the future which is a roundabout way of saying that it's about climate change and about a period of animate existence is in the Wikipedia definition of life is what that is and it is definitely this attempt to look for something which you know what it is but you can't name it and a wondering about very elemental forces like the force of life as a total force the force of gravity as a total force it's a real dare in terms of this thing about well that's a good idea I've read some wonderful essays about poems about that but can we turn that into something that vibrates theatrically so we're aiming to premiere that in September but it's a heavy lift but we'll see well I would like to say thank you Rebecca thank you for picking our encounter for coming and for putting it together I just little pluck for the single we actually brought Toshiki Okada over here when he was a very young unknown player we did not do the first thing I double checked the first one didn't work I'll let the play company ask you so in some way this legal centre also is connected which makes us very happy that he had such a big influence as far as I know we also often copy some movement someone doesn't exercise the other actor has to memorise what the actor did and uses it with own words but in a psychological way so it's a fantastic approach he has but again thank you and our congratulations on 20 years of work as an ensemble hopefully live over tour toys and not over time and you have all a respectful we'd love to see your work and I hope you will continue and again thank you all for coming and for being here and let's have a little glass of wine to celebrate that really remarkable achievement of a company that has been together for over 20 years and also thank you and thank you Richard for being your class