 I mean that's a pretty broad spectrum too, so I'll just briefly describe two very different projects. One is a project that I'm working on right now called Milton with my company Pearl D'Amour. My name's Lisa D'Amour and I'm a playwright and my collaborator Katie Pearl is a director and we've been making a lot of interdisciplinary site-specific work in big cities for many years and we decided that we wanted to challenge ourselves to go outside our comfort zone and we decided to start visiting five towns named Milton throughout the United States and interviewing people about their towns, their lives, and their world views. So we've been visiting Milton, North Carolina, Milton, Massachusetts, Milton, Wisconsin, Milton, Louisiana and Milton Freewater, Oregon for about a year and a half now and we kind of think of them as five points in a constellation that stretches out across the United States. And so we've been having all sorts of experiences as you can imagine because many of these towns are quite small and we're making a performance that's really a reflection of the complexity we found in these towns that pulls from both the interviews and our experiences and also includes videos that we've been taking of the skies over each Milton. And we're pulling all of this together into this performance that we're going to bring back to each town and we're premiering it in Milton, North Carolina which has about 200 residents in August in their women's club. Perfect. So that's one kind of a vast and then the other project that I'll say which is just shorter and a little more idiosyncratic is there's a mini musical that I've been working on with my husband who's a composer that's based on and pulls from the poetry of Dufu who was an eighth century Chinese poet and I kind of fell in love with his writing which was about natural disasters and writing and drinking and caring for your family and I started just on a lark reading the poetry out loud in a southern accent and it weirdly made the poetry very contemporary and so we have this little musical called Dufu Mississippi which is a bunch of people who live on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi talking and singing about floods, families, natural disasters, poetry and drinking. Like you do. Yes. So that's just like the opposite ends of the spectrum. Okay. Josh? Well, so two projects that I might briefly describe is one I made with a performance artist named Bradford Lorick about seven or eight years ago called Christine Jorgensen Reveals and Bradford had discovered in a record store in Lower Manhattan that's now closed like all the others, a record that said Christine Jorgensen Reveals and had this photo of Christine and she was the first sort of famous transsexual who had her surgeries in 1952. And so he purchased the record, it was like $100 and thought it would be a great piece to do somehow and we worked with a sound designer named Rob Kaplowitz and a dramaturg named Christine Angelisto and we basically presented that record as a live slash non-live theater piece. And so Bradford, so we worked with Rob Kaplowitz to rearrange the questions into what felt like maybe a more satisfying arc as an audio piece and then we filmed an actor named Rob Grace to lip-syncing to all of the interviewer's questions and Bradford would lip-sync to all of Christine's answers and we presented that as this sort of live theater piece. But it was live and yet not live, right? Because it was all lip-synced to this recording from 1958. And that piece sort of played in New York for about six months and then toured a bunch. So that was one piece made of source material and then more recently, maybe two years ago or so, I was asked by this Spanish company called Ayeni to work with them devising a piece that was somehow based on Lorca's 1928 collection of poems, Poet in New York. And so we talked a bunch about what we wanted to do with that. And what we wound up doing was using that collection as a springboard to explore what it means to move to New York now as an artist and try to make work here. Because the entire company were Spanish nationals living in New York. And so we devised these pieces, much of which was textless and also incorporated some of his poetry, a lot of his letters that he wrote back home which were filled with lies. And then also some stuff that was sort of created about the experience of the individuals in the company and made this sort of five act piece that involved dance and live music and image and text and presented it at the Duke on 42nd Street. Great. Jodi? I guess I remember this. I had written about Ted Kaczynski some years ago in a book called Crimes of Art and Terror and was very interested in the relationship between Kaczynski and Joseph Cornell had to do with the way that Kaczynski built his bombs and also what his cabin looked like. And so I was sort of, Kaczynski was some, I don't know if I should say this or not, was somewhere in my head. And then I almost was going to work with Neil Bell on an adaptation of Drizers the Financier and this was right after the financial collapse in 08. But then some time passed and Neil was unavailable and then I was going to adapt it. And I read the novel and I had read the novel and then I went to read the novel again and I thought, oh, the time for this is over, it's gone. And so I knew I needed another project and I happened to meet a Duke, a filmmaker named James Benning who is a very interesting person who also shared a peculiar obsession with Mr. Kaczynski and he had made a film called Two Cabins and he had rebuilt Kaczynski's cabin and Thorough's cabin and done, he does sort of very stable camera long shots of the cabins in various weather situations for long periods of time. And in the cabin he put, we now know what Kaczynski's favorite books were and he put all of Kaczynski's books in the cabin and he also put his own favorite books in the cabin that he rebuilt. And so I started thinking about Kaczynski again and what did I want to do with him and at first I was thinking I'm going to write a book about Kaczynski and then I thought, well, I'm going to, so I'm going to read Kaczynski's favorite book which was The Secret Agent or is, he's not dead, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. And Heart of Darkness is another book I've written about because of Apocalypse Now and so I love Joseph Conrad but I hadn't read this book and I read it and I loved it and I thought, okay, this is going to be, I'm going to make a piece and I have a script and I'm going to do it this fall but I've adapted The Secret Agent and it's really the idea is that Ted Kaczynski reads The Secret Agent. So Ted is, the poll play will probably come out of Ted's cabin and Ted will play various roles including for those of you who know the novel The Professor who is in the novel and is a bomb expert and bears some chilling similarities to not only Kaczynski himself but also to Mr. Kurtz with his attitude toward humanity and the book is a, I've spent some great time reading Conrad's letters about the book and what he was trying to do and that was also very inspiring and challenging because of course I faced the same challenges in trying to make a play out of it that he faced using an historical event which was the Greenwich Observatory, well the Observatory didn't get bombed but they called the Greenwich Observatory bombing which happened in the late 19th century and Conrad wrote the book in 2005 and he invented a lot of the details. I mean it's interesting his own process about creating the novel which involved a degree of invention and also a very concrete use of history in his adaptation and I kind of faced the same thing and with Kaczynski's materials I now have access to the psychiatric report and a lot of materials and probably this summer I'll go to University of Michigan to look at his papers which are all in the Labadi collection there and my husband said to me well you think you're really going to see something that you don't already know and I said well I was reminded of when I was a student and I went to look at O'Neill's papers in the Rare Book Library at Yale and how deeply affecting it was to actually see the documents. I have gotten really into documentary work lately and I really appreciate seeing the object and so there's I'm really looking forward to seeing the actual documents that Kaczynski handled and so it's going to be you know probably a disturbing and no doubt somewhat dangerous piece I hope and I'm really excited about it. Great now with each of you and actually Josh you made reference to Lorca's lies so this kind of comes into that a little bit anytime you're working with material from another source there's that whole question of like how much are you really going to utilize that how much are you gonna you know invent for yourself so especially thinking I think Lisa for you thinking in terms of the Milton piece since you're dealing with real people real situations I'd be I'd be really curious about that and also too I'm wondering about like how you sort of approached these towns and sort of set yourself up like how aware were they going into the situation yes yes let's see those are two really big questions so I'll start with one and see we we very much know that this piece is about seeing these towns through our eyes me and Katie who are artists in their early 40s who are white women who have spent most of their time in big cities and that's actually acknowledged in the piece that it's our point of view we did many many different kinds of interviews and we really try and I think we've done a pretty good job of getting a cross-section of ages and races in terms of the each town and genders and and we we kind of developed a format where we loosely would base these these interviews and casual conversations around four questions how did you get to Milton if there was one thing you could change about the world what would it be what is your advice for future generations and why do you think we are here on this earth and so those were the kind of questions that framed these rambling conversations and we actually because we didn't want to we actually didn't want to rely heavily that this isn't a piece like an adivir Smith where we're portraying individuals from each town and so but what we wanted to convey was the complexity of opinions and diversity of experience in each town so the piece actually feels like a performed list of everything from foods that we've eaten to objects that we witness to places that we've gone and then there are moments when it's almost like within the complexity of this list we focus in on one object or one person and then you begin to hear that person's actual voice a recording of their voice and so for those people whose voices were using were of course in conversation with them about getting permission to portray them in this way but we've been because there's there's so many there's so much to try and convey about these towns we've sort of steered clear around trying to make people in the town characters in the performance so there's also other ways within the performance to look through photos of the town and see objects and artifacts from the towns so I'll hold off right there so we have time for other people and then we can that's great yeah and Josh come back okay if you want to maybe I know you talked a little bit about sort of this this process of exploring you know Larkas life and Larkas work and I think it's interesting too because especially for theater makers here I'm thinking for most of us we know Larkas plays but maybe not much beyond that so do you want to talk a little bit more about that and sort of how you approached it and how you all made decisions about what to include and whatnot you know I will be frank it's I find Larkas poetry very opaque and I really like and respond to several of his plays but the but the poems are very abstract very heightened and and for me was sort of difficult to access that said within the Spanish-speaking world sort of across the globe Lorka is like you know and and the respect that that he holds is you know it's like Shakespeare for us right but we we sort of quickly felt that like some attempt to dramatize the poems or you know didn't feel satisfying to us and instead we did a lot of talking about our own relationship to Lorka as an as a figure and and did a lot of sort of devising around that and what we came to was using Lorka as a as a cipher really for our own aspects of self that he seemed to hold and so for me I was very interested in lonesomeness and the sort of peculiar thing that I think exists in New York which is that you're surrounded by like you know eight million people in this very dense you know small bit of geography and yet it can feel incredibly lonesome and he wrote in his diaries a lot about that feeling of alienation and that seemed to strike a chord with a lot of the Spanish nationals in the company in terms of how they moved so we started working with like images of Lorka as images of ourselves but but we were very we tried to be very frank that it was not about Lorka so much as it was about us via the lens of Lorka with Christine Jorgensen we had a very opposite experience which is to say that we thought we we didn't change anything from the recording except we moved some of the questions around but we didn't delete anything we didn't move any of the answers from the questions and we we really wanted to respect and investigate that time capsule into and to try and explore what she what sort of lives below the words in trying to inhabit this sort of very stilted recording so we didn't change anything and that that was very much an historical artifact Jody any any are you feeling as you're working on this project are you feeling this is going to sound odd are you feeling it a need to feel faithful to Kaczynski and his world or do you feel free to sort of break free from it I guess well it's really an invention you know it's it's it's it has to find what when you adapt something you have your own point of view and I mean I'm using actual text from the manifesto and finding ways to incorporate some of his writing but the whole idea is you know an invention you know the idea that Conrad I mean Kaczynski is gonna be in his cabin and and the secret agent is gonna come alive and he's gonna be part of it you know so I don't feel hampered no that's what you're asking yeah no constructed no how well and I guess kind of related to that too then is is what about the secret agent itself for those who you know who are special fans of that are they gonna be well you know I'm the I'm one of those people that when I adapt something and I translate to and even I mean like I translated Gogol's inspector general and made it the special prosecutor so I said it was very contemporary but you know I always try to hear the original work from my point of view if that makes sense set those mixing two senses but maybe it makes sense no absolutely yeah absolutely one other thing that I was there was a moment in the Lorca piece where we did do this sort of sleight of hand and Lorca was in New York in and witnessed the stock market crash in 1929 and and when he returned to Madrid he gave a speech about about his experience witnessing that and he says he would you know like went down to Wall Street and saw the people falling and all this stuff right anyway he spoke very movingly and impassioned passionately about about that experience and while we were making the piece in 2011 or 2012 it was right at the height of the Occupy Wall Street sort of takeover at Zucati Park and we worked with two playwrights in the group a Spanish playwright in Margo meth Glev and a Dutch playwright in Judith Gouchman and Judith took Lorca's speech and combined it with a speech that Gizek gave down in Zucati Park but we didn't acknowledge that shift at all we just sort of let let it merge together and and and until the very end when when the term Zucati Park was mentioned and we felt that that in in sort of hiding the authorship of that that we could make the point more strongly than we would if we simply sort of held the two pieces up next to each other or something because in fact Lorca could have said all of the words that Gizek said with the exception the proper amount right so that was a place where actual we're deceit on our part felt important somehow it was like part of the perception shift of that moment yeah right exactly that's great yeah well and since you had already determined that he lied in his letters you know I think free right you Lisa do you want to address the the question a little bit about approaching the towns and dealing with that and then we'll kind of open it up to questions sure yeah I was thinking a little one thing I want to make clear is that the performance is Katie and I aren't performing it we have performed in our work in the past but it's being performed by three actors from who are casting out of New York an older African-American woman a middle-aged white man and a young Hispanic woman to try and start to reflect the again the range of people and you know there there this is a bit of an impossible project because there's no way that we can you know accurately reflect all of these people that we've talked to and in some ways the project is about what does it mean to live in America in your own town when you have all of these assumptions about who else is out there which is kind of what drove us to create the piece so so we we've learned we've learned a lot about how to interact with the towns and in some ways our premier in Milton North Carolina is a real test case on the engagement audience engagement community engagement part of the project because what we realized once we start we started going like oh we'll visit these towns we'll meet a few people we'll make our peace and be done with it and then as we started to get into these towns many of whom are smaller towns that are trying to reinvent themselves you know suddenly we are artists who can be catalysts potential catalysts for a lot of the things that these towns are already talking about so in Milton North Carolina when we were discussing with a group of the community about how to prepare for our performance the town decided they wanted to have a street fair which is happening in about two weeks which would allow local artists to give demonstrations and to kind of sell their wares and there's going to be food and Pearl D'Amore is going to have our table out and we're going to be teaching a cloud making workshop which is going to help make props for our performance later and so it's this kind of collaboration with the town in that we're going to be creating some context for our show meeting more people in the town and also getting a little bit of the work done for our show when we go back in August so it's been a real learning experience for me and Katie about what it means to fully engage with a new community and a lot of our assumptions have been shattered about the people who live in these towns and we're kind of hoping when we do have the chance to bring the piece to back to like our home cities that will be able to shatter some city people's assumptions about who lives in these towns so it's been wild it's been wild and awesome. Well let's open it up to the floor a little bit for questions because I could just talk to these people for hours wait for the mic Connie. The young lady in the back hang on one second Scott is giving you a mic. I think it died before. The translation of the doofoo? But more important to me is to say that this reminds me particularly your work with Pearl de Moor reminds me of what the Federal Theatre wanted to do before it was shut down for being communist because you know it was such a pinco communist. Right. Yeah they were doing Pinocchio. Quite a communist thing, so I just think it's really exciting and really really wonderful all of these projects contemporary going right into things that are happening now things that are being written about now in responses that are very very now so that's a comment and a question. Go for it. The manifesto is not under copyright. With Lorca we we did have to negotiate with the estate there were only and and with that negotiation there was the you know the royalty depends on the actual amount of his of words of his that are that appear in the piece and in fact a very small amount his actual words appeared in the piece because we were really talking more about the figure of Lorca. With Christine Jorgensen that the the pressing of that record was the rights were owned by the record company that produced it which had gone out of business so we took advantage of that and made a piece about it. And with the with the doofu piece that at some we at this point we've only presented the piece once in the New Orleans French Festival and we we actually know the two translators that we we did use their actual translations mixed in with my words and and so we know that if we ever presented in a more formal context we'll have to talk to the translators but we kind of wanted to figure the piece out first so we looked like we knew what we were doing. Other questions? So this is a question for all of you because you brought it up. I'm interested in the way that you talk about and would consider translating if not artists work a three-dimensional physical object. The weirdest object. Well I did a piece I was approached about doing a piece about the gulag which of course is something that everyone wants to do right and I said and sort of right on the spot I said you know it has to be gulag follies because for some reason right into my brain came titty-cut follies and Fred Wiseman's film about the you know the Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane this is now you know how my mind works okay and I had to look for I needed some literature I knew I was gonna have music and dance but and I got some colleagues to work on that with me but I found this writer and the reason why I thought of this because you said object but Varlam Shalamoff was actually in the gulag and he his he considered his work photographic in nature his writing he considered photographic and he actually put it in the floor of the room where he had been interned and and so that actually became something that was in the play they had to get it out of the floor and and also using documents there there was a marvelous I had 10 young people and there was a marvelous photo that I came across of a company that did living newspapers and again it was sort of an object how do you it's a human being but it's an object and what what there's nothing that makes a person more of an object than the gulag itself and so these 10 I'd used to photograph as an image both for costuming and even for an idea of how a company could approach this material and perform songs the same way in titty-cut follies they do the prisoners the weirdest that when I hadn't seen the film in probably 20 years and I went back and looked at it and and the opening scene is just ghastly I mean it's all the guards performing this insane thing with with you know spinning whatever you call those things you know like I can't remember the word they they you know like twirly objects right with hats on their heads and in this ghastly footlights and I thought oh yeah you know I'm in the right planet and but so I think of literature it's like you say it's it's my interest in the document of the printed word those are objects yeah so with with the with the lorca piece you know we worked a lot with image and movement and textlessness though there were also some sections of it that were very sort of densely texted but but you know one of the things that I'm interested in is one of the things that I so I teach in the in the playwriting MFA program at Fordham and one of the things that I teach there that I really enjoy is a course that's in part about trying to expand the notion of text for writers right and what what text can be because there's a way that I think image can communicate a certain density in an instant in a way that language is time-based right I mean that great Gertrude Stein quote sentences don't have meaning paragraphs do right that it takes it takes time to to accrue meaning with words so we worked a lot with with that in the lorca piece and because it was so live we were really able to do that with with Christine Jorgensen so we we set the piece in a film studio in a TV studio because she had her surgeries in 1952 and the recording was pressed in 1958 and so it was at the dawn of this sort of technological revolution cultural revolution it sounds Maoist but anyway and that that mirrors in some way is the the technology of gender transformation we thought and so and it was our way of trying to to acknowledge the recording itself the actual LP so the interviewer was record was videotaped lip-syncing to to the interviewers recording questions and that and that played through sort of old 1950s looking television and Christine and Bradford was the only sort of live actor who was on the stage lip-syncing Christine's words and the piece began before Christine enters the studio with the TV just turning on and some footage of the actual Christine and sort of what what was happening with her and it ends with you know at the very end of the of the interview the lights faded on Bradford and the monitor and the monitor sort of faded to black and then it just clicked off and and I hoped that that mirrored what I imagined to be Bradford's experience putting the needle on the record and this voice of emanating out right and that ending when the needle came off so we tried to put the artifact in some other way on the stage itself I thought of like three or four examples I'm gonna give you one but you can you can see me after what I was thinking about a piece which was eventually called bird-eye blueprint where I was very obsessed with the mechanics of sight how sight works and I had seen this diagram of basically kind of explaining how like an image kind of comes in I'm gonna get all the technical terms wrong through the retina and gets turned up turned upside down when it lands on the cornea and then pulled apart into many different part you know sections that goes through these parts of the brain and that there's this gap when scientists aren't quite sure how it all turns into a coherent whole that the brain can understand and so Katie and I actually decided to structure the whole piece after this process and essentially this visual image and so literally the performance was structured as a tour given by this kind of odd woman that you know is the blue dress lady who was me and she kind of leads you through her odd house in this tour disintegrates and ends with her literally getting turned upside down against her will and then the second part of the piece the audience has to divide into groups so they're pulled apart and they kind of re-see a lot of the stops along the tour and interact with them and then a very quick pace frantic pace and they're pulled together into a more traditional theater setting where they see a kind of quiet almost dance performance version of her story at the end so really I just kind of used that picture and model as a structure for the whole show there's video of it on the Pearl DeMore website that's pretty pretty decent so that's a really great question because we it took a couple of a lot of trial runs and one thing that we the structure that we realized is like the first interview we tried to do with a group of people at a Unitarian Church I think the first question we asked them is do you think you can ever truly know another person and they were like they were completely shut down because we didn't know that you know to us that seemed like a pretty simple interesting question but it was just not yet so it's part of why and then and then actually in that interview we said okay okay let's back up how did you guys move here and actually asking that simple question started started them talking and it almost started to get to some of these other questions that we wanted to ask so we started to realize that the first thing is just to get people talking about what they really know the other strategy we've been using is we we have we we meet the people we have maybe an initial five minute chat telling them about who we are and the kind of work we do and then we say out front we usually structure these interviews with four questions do you want to hear them we say they range from the practical to the esoteric would you like to hear them and no one they've all said yes and then we lay out the four questions and there's always this moment where they're go whoa or they kind of laugh or they're like I don't know about that and inevitably within five or ten minutes they're like go back to that question about the one thing I would change and and then they start to talk about that so that we often don't get to all the questions but we kind of leave it open as an invitation for them to answer whichever one they would like so other questions oh so the four questions are how did you get to Milton if there was one thing you could change about the world what would it be what is your advice for future generations and why do you think we are here on this earth are the four questions and they kind of sometimes the answer to one is related to the answer to another so yeah we we tell them that none of their words will be used unless we ask them and well interestingly enough yes they knew it was a play but then inevitably no matter how carefully we just would describe it when they would introduce us to someone else they would tell them that we're making a documentary even though we don't film or anything it's it's very we've actually found in a lot a lot of places that it's just hard to kind of get across that we're actually bringing a live performance to them it's just not usually people are doing a book or an article or a documentary so I still I'm curious what in fact when I called the woman who runs the women's club last week I said so can we you know we're gonna use the club for this week and she was like oh good and then you're gonna show the film and I said no it's not it's all gonna be fine because I think they're gonna be really interested in what we have I've got a quick one I'm just curious because I've done works from other material and adaptations and that type of thing is there anything where you've considered creating a piece and then found out somebody else got there first or or was working on something at the same time because that's always a concern because there are things that do come up for us especially on themes my ideas are always way too obscure what everybody's not doing boo-hoo I just discarded the financier because I felt that it had lost its friction for me you know I mean certainly Lorca is someone that that is done in many different ways and sort of all over the place and has inspired many other works but we but I don't know in a way that was sort of freeing because we felt like well we're not we're not you know it's not it's not about Lorca it's about us and the only us is our us so 30 seconds everybody's saying I think we'll call it good there thank you to all the panelists