 Other co-curators, David Dower who's there, Rob Orchard, Mark Russell, who's not here yet from under the radar, and Mayin Wang who's also not here yet from under the radar. We hope this is going to be just one of many events that you attend through the course of the week. We started the TNT Festival with Mike Daisy last weekend and a number of films. And it's really a week, 10 days of workshops like this about process and how work gets made, films that interact with this kind of process and how work get made and then performances. And there's music. Am I missing something? Did I get them all? No, it's just that our other curators on this part of it are the New England Foundation. And yes, I was editing there. I was editing there. I was editing there. New England Foundation for the Arts, I worked with us to put these workshops together and we're extremely grateful. And then to note that we usually try to make what we do at Hollaround, which is where I work, we try to make everything accessible to as many people as possible all the time. So we are live streaming this on New Play TV so you can either watch it with us or you could watch it later in archive form but everybody can get access who can't actually be physically present in Boston. So the way it's gonna work today, I'm gonna introduce our first group of couple of artists. They're gonna do what they do for about 45 minutes. Then I'm gonna introduce our second couple of artists and they're gonna do what they do for 45 minutes and then we're gonna leave 20 or so minutes for questions from the audience. And so I'm ready to kick us off. So I have Nick Sly who's co-artistic director of Mondo Bizarro and I have Jeff Becker and I didn't get an official title but from our spot productions. They regularly work together. They're working together on this new project and they're gonna share some process and everybody gave me a sentence that they wanted articulated about themselves. They are fascinated with creating large scale projects that reflect a sincere blend of disciplines and deeply engage the community where they take place. So to have that. Hello. Hello. How y'all doing? Good. You're not gonna be sitting for long but I'm Nick, this is Jeff. We're always amazed at the howl round people. Y'all are awesome so thank you for doing what you're doing and we're really honored to be here. We're here because the New England Foundation for the Arts has made this opportunity so we're grateful for that as well. We are gonna share a little bit of our process with you today and a project that is called Cry You One. It's a new performance project that's being co-created by Mondo Bazzaro and Arts by Productions in Southeast Louisiana on land that is pretty rapidly disappearing. So we want to share with you a little bit of how we create work today and we wanna do so by illustrating that and then we wanna talk to you a little bit and show you some images about the work we've been doing and then we just wanna open the space for questions and then we'll jump into the debate society. So just really briefly, Arts by Productions and Mondo Bazzaro two companies who make ensemble theater or device theater, we work in a way that some of you are probably very familiar with which about a 12 to 18 month gestation period, we go into rooms together where all of the people that make the work are present, the designers, the musicians, the performers, the actors, we usually have some central theme or concept and we go exploring and I like to think of it as the process is very similar to that of which how nature works. You think about the ways in which plants can flower seed, right? And they just release seeds and seeds and seeds and how many seeds are released before one of those plants takes, right? So we make and make and make and throw away and throw away and throw away and make and make and make and then when something lands, we usually we move pretty swiftly towards it. Right now we're in the process of having left a performance that is really cooking and it was a very hard thing. The Friday's rehearsal was amazing and Monday's rehearsal was amazing and we feel like we're right at the edge of a story and Jeff and I left. So it was a real... We're like, we believe that we're continuing the work but our colleagues are at home right amidst just about to find what we feel like is the seed of what's gonna become our work. So to start, Jeff's gonna lead you through a little exercise. It's not a bondage workshop today. I know when you saw the robe you were thinking, sorry, but I do think for earned income we should really start to consider bondage and those types of work. Jeff's gonna lead you through the robe exercise and we're gonna talk to you for a minute. Something just to add about our work is that we predominantly work outdoors. We do site-specific or environmental responsive work and sometimes we do shows that are inside but we generally like to work outside so we work in the rehearsal room but we also work in the space outside and the visual world kind of comes in at the same time and say any kind of text. So it's all kind of has equal weight and I like to look at it as kind of a visual dramaturgy that helps steer the show. So we're gonna kind of show you kind of some of the things that we do, some of the work, but instead of talking about I wanna do something. So could you all stand up and I would like you all to come and take one piece of rope, please. I thought you said it wasn't a bondage. Why don't you, once you've got your rope, I want you to form two lines facing each other along the space, try to equal lines. Yeah, the space is a little small but I think we can do this. I'm gonna have to go up the aisle and try to even out the sides. We're gonna have to actually go out this way a little bit. Like I'm gonna move you all down all the way to here. Just to be able to bring it out the hallway. Yeah, just come down this way. Yeah, those pictures. The real thing. Okay, so now what I want you to do is to take your rope and hold it in your right hand and let the bottom dangle, okay. Now I want you to take your left hand and take the free end of the rope next to it. So you can take your left hand. I wonder what you're gonna do. I'm just gonna take it as if I'm like filling it in. Okay, got it. Might even need to move down a little bit more. We'll see. You'll decide when you do that. Okay, so what I want you to do is I want you to make a river. Make a what? So make a river. So each side of you is a bank. Now you're gonna lay it down on the floor. That's good, that's a good answer. You wanna lay this down on the floor. You wanna connect it as a river. You're gonna be as close. I mean, think of rivers having a source and a mouth. You wanna connect all the sides. You want the water leaking out. You can take your time. Oh, we should not. The strategy you need to go, if you need to go out of the hallway, just go for it. Do whatever you need to do to make the river. You don't want it leaking. You're not gonna be able to see it. Are you sure? So guys, from wherever you are in the space right now, we want you just to consider one thing. Looking at your little section of rope, which is your little piece of river that you're responsible for. Just think for a minute about a river you know, a body of water you know. If some of you grew up in the desert, think about a river that you visited. But a river you know or a body of water that you are familiar with that you've been on. And I want you to think about the experiences or the experience you have of that body of water. Take a second just to reflect on that. And then turning to the person on your left. So how will we do it? Just turn to the person. Yeah, how will we do that? Turn to the person nearest you and just find a pair. Find somebody, pick someone. It could be three as well if you need to. And just for about two minutes guys, briefly share the first impression that came of the experience of the river that you just thought of in your head. Briefly share with your neighbor really quick here. So. Hi, you're saying? What did you get to do with your guys? You know, to be honest, I get to do it with my friends. Really? I wanted to be jealous of my whole life. Just to kind of be giant. Oh my god, did I just get that wrong? That's just like, like, three times. No, there's guys who say it's like, you need to. You know what I'm saying? It's not like, you have to be jealous of them. I mean, it's so much better. You don't have to be jealous of them. You don't have to be jealous of them. I'm not like, you don't have to be jealous of them. I'm just like, you don't have to be jealous of them. So how do you feel about this song? Yeah, I feel cool. Yeah. You have more followers. You are going to find out about the song. Oh, lots of people. You're cool. You have Sonic, right? No way. How do they know? I have to go to the Times Show. Whoa. How do you feel about this song? All right, guys. So If you can just listen to what we're going to do. OK. Now what we want to do is we are going to flood this river, okay, and it's a slow flood. It's not a fast flood. It's going to be really, really slow. So Nick is going to play the violin, and when you hear the violin start, I want you to do what you need to do to disassemble your river and make it slowly rise and flood, okay? And then when he stops playing the violin, I want you to reform the river again, okay? And reform it slowly. You're thinking of the water slowly rising, the water slowly receding, okay? So is that clear? So you're going to reform the river. We don't have a lot of space, so in a bigger room we could move around more, but here you're just going to rise and just I want you to look at how it reforms, okay? That's clear? Go for it. Slowly. Reverse change, Jenny, and observe if you've had to do anything else, but take a look at the river post flood, look at its banks, look at the way it's shifted, did it get wider or narrower, and take a moment to consider a time when wherever you live, a natural process, nature took its course, or nature was in charge, or nature took over in a way that we were not in control of, take a minute to think about that. And when you're ready, turn to your same partner and share that story of a time where nature took over in a place where you live. Yeah, it's amazing. It took me a while to be like, I am very, okay, wait a minute, I'm not in control right now. Yeah. But I see what you're referring to. It's like that in my life. No, it's amazing. Yeah, it's a very, it's such a big deal. What was that when you were in New York City? I was, yeah. My house, my apartment was just the outside of the big plus zone, so like I didn't get prepared, we were going to cancel a couple of those. It actually worked out okay. It was just like, I don't think it was a show or anything like that. We were like, oh my God, there's a gas station. Yeah, he tried, but it was okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The city didn't try that. He took away people's gas. It's like, it didn't work. Oh. Yeah. It gets like, without a police force, it gets like that. And if you don't have water, it's like people without water and power, it's like, it's so fast. Like we are like, you know, we are always like three days away from like fat facts. But yeah, that's all right. All right. Listen up. Here's the next challenge here. There are slow floods and there are breaches, which we know a lot about in Louisiana. So this time, when Nick plays, he's going to play in a different tempo, but I want a really fast break apart. And you're going to break apart and when we reform the river, we're going to reform it very quickly. And your challenge is to change its course. Don't just set it down where you were before. Change its course. Okay. That's it. Move around. Be afraid. Hello. He changed drowning. You need to find a spot. Do you each need to be on one end of your rope? your rope and end on somebody else's rope. Okay. Make your time fast as you can. You're still going to form the river. No holes. There's holes. Water comes out. You're still going to form the river. Remember, we're making a river, not a lake. They go in a circle, but it's got to have an opening in the end. I mean, you could go underground, of course, for our river. I don't know what this is. Close it up. So look at the river. So now, if you look at this, notice how it's reformed. When you have less time to reform it, how it's changed, look how it's bigger, look at what it looks like. So now, your last challenge here, you need to make this river straight, a straight line. And I mean straight. See these lines? Straight. Do whatever you need to do. We are not leaving here until it's straight. No curves, nothing. Straight. I want to put a laser on it and it needs to be straight. Straight, straight, straight. You're going to put this on the ground, too. Straight. It's not quite as straight. It's straight. I got to remember where I am. Get in there. Straighter, straighter. Pull it tight. That's okay. You can do whatever you want to do. So guys, this last little part real quick. Take a moment to reflect upon the semi-straightness of your canal. You guys are pretty good engineers. Take a moment to reflect about a time where nature has been manipulated by human, by the built world, where a place where you live, where some natural process has been interrupted, where it's not happening the same as it used to, where water used to flow, or anything as such. Think about that for a second and when you're ready, share that last little story with your partner. About a time where the natural process where you live has been interrupted. If it has been, by nature and or by humans, but we're thinking about the built world mainly, the human built world, where humans have interfered with the natural process. Great question, Eric. Think about that and reflect, if you can. Yeah. Yeah. There's a change in the course of the river. It's just sort of where friends don't know it. Right. Right. It's true. Right, guys. In the interest of times that we're going, we're going to have to cut out. So I just want you to note a couple of things before we go on that how difficult it is to make a river straight. And during the around the early 1800s up through the Civil War, that's kind of what happened with the Mississippi. It was the age of the engineers and they did everything they could do to control the river. So this was an illustration of the city of controlling the river using this. And this will lead us into the next part of our presentation. But I would like you, this rope here was sitting yesterday was sitting in lows and rolls in a bag and it's been cut and turned into art by you. So I would like you each to take this rope as a gift and at least keep it for an hour. Think about this and think about our river, the Mississippi and your river. Thank you And we'd ask you to swiftly take a seat and we're going to, we're going to move to the next room. I have two pieces. Oh. Now where do we get to souvenir? We're sitting down. Cheers. What are you supposed to do? One more act. Or take your scenes. So guys, we asked, um, we wanted to, uh, we're, we understand that the natural, uh, the process that's happening in nature in our own home is not unique. And in so far as it's dealing with the Mississippi River, it's a very unique process to us. But I think we all understand and we are all seeing over and over, uh, the northeast has become the new, uh, front page headline for climate change or there's hurricanes now in New York, three of the last four years or however many. Um, and we really wanted to get you talking about what's happening in the natural world where you are, because I feel like that can be fodder for the conversation we want to have with your questions to us. We want to explain the specifics a little bit of what's happening to our home and what we're doing in response and in collaboration with nature. Uh, this is the historical distributaries of the Mississippi River. That means that's every place that the Mississippi River went for 5,000 years to build Louisiana. Rivers build land, right? They drop sediment everywhere. The thicker lines are the lines that took the course for the longest, right? So you can see this major thick line above here that comes down to what is Venice right here. Um, that's the, that's the Mississippi River now, but that's what Louisiana. Yeah. And this is Louisiana. Yeah. That's what, uh, that's where we're from. And that's what the Mississippi River did for about 5,000 years, right? It was a very recent process, very, very recent process. We saw less than 100 years where we decided to do this to the river. This is the infrastructure currently in the 20th century. As you can see with all of the red, uh, that marks levy protection systems, right? So what we did, because of a variety of reasons, not just because we wanted to, but because there was a lot of good things that were coming from us, uh, putting levies around the river, or at least we thought at the time, industry, right? The Port of New Orleans, people getting jobs. It's an economic indicator, right? Where we're from. There's a lot of reasons why they put levies around the river and attempt to control it. If you see over here, this is the Achaplaya Basin, which somebody you might have heard of. You can see how wide the levies are on the opposite side of the river. And when it comes down, they allow the historical distributaries to continue to flow. That's the only place in South Louisiana making land since 1978. It's making land. It's actively pushing sediment. So this area here is making land. Everything else, if you can see from the infrastructure of the levies, and you can go to the next slide, that's the land loss that's currently losing. Every place that's red is actively losing land. Now, the number that they use, which is kind of not an actively good number in some ways, is a football field every half hour, okay? That's not like you walk out of your backyard and a football field of land just drops into the ocean. That's a football field every half hour for most of the coasts. But every place that has red right now since 1950s has been losing land, right? We lose about 40 square miles of land a year. Now, this is exasperated by hurricanes. It's been exasperated by rising sea levels, and it's also been exasperated by the fact that the land, while it is eroding, is also subsiding, right? So there's this major, major land loss, okay? And the ocean's arriving. And the ocean's arriving, right? Now, the cultural amalgam that came from this land, just like the land in the Mississippi River Delta system is one of the most diverse in the world. And over those 5,000 years, all of that water built that sediment. The cultural amalgam that made Louisiana and continues to make Louisiana is just as diverse, right? So that culture came to the delta of Louisiana because it's one of the richest places in the world. So we're talking about the Akkadian people, Cajuns, the indigenous people who were already on the land, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, fishermen, islanos from the descendants of the Canary Islands, people who came from all over the country to come to the Port of New Orleans. It's always been sort of this transient place and this blend of all of these cultures together. So the natural process and the diversity that the river delta gave us was also reflected in the people that have continued to come to Louisiana. Right now, one of the biggest questions that we're facing and it's kind of one of the central thesis of our work is what happens to cultural traditions when the land that sustains them disappears? Because all of these cultural traditions that we share come from a real direct connection to the land. This is what our project Crying One is about. And really briefly, this is what we're doing. We go to a lot of these places in southeast Louisiana on these expeditions. We're witnessing in these places. We're listening to scientists. We're listening to stories of experts, of culture bearers, of people who work the land, of fishermen, of anyone who has been around that land who has seen the land disappear. In some cases in one lifetime, where they've seen in 70 years an entire place that it's in open water now. We're talking to those people. We're participating in direct action in those places whether it be a rehearsal, whether it be planting trees, whether it be working the land. And then we're taking what we see in those images, like if Jeff, could you move to the next slide? This is a healthy cypress forest. It's in the Achaplia basin, right? In PR part Louisiana. This is what it looks like. If you've ever been in a swamp, it's pretty amazing. It's a floating forest. That's a Piro. It's a flat bottom boat. And if you go to the next slide, this is the Bayou Bienvenue platform. Crying One, this project, we had our first public sharing at the network of ensemble theaters, Microfest USA. We went out and we decided to do a witnessing at this platform because if you go to the next slide, it's an example of a dead cypress forest, right? That for a variety of reasons, the dredging of canals, the saltwater intrusion, the industry and the oil companies have dredged canals, have created the conditions where the natural cypress that you just saw before can't work anymore. So the thing that we're doing is we held a performance here. It was a short sharing. This is an example of one of our performers who was playing the fiddle in the tree. If you go to the next slide, we have people in boats. That's the backside of New Orleans, but this is kind of the example of the landscape now as it stands, right? Where you no longer have what is one of the natural buffers, the cypress forest, things that are holding together the land, right? So, go to the next slide. We had, these were all of the people. Some of you may even recognize yourself. I think that's Jamie right there. I think Sabrina was in this. Before the raspberry hair. Before the raspberry hair, you see it here. We shared a really small section of our performance. We shared a song. Moving to the next slide. And then we possessed people away with music. One of the unique things about the culture where we're from is that even though this may seem like a lot of gloom and doom, the people of Louisiana persist on celebrating loss, right? They say we put the fun and funeral on Louisiana, right? There's a persistence on the belief that impermanence is a part of life and that the use of the culture is the use of joy and celebration as a way. And the idea of processing people, whether it be for a funeral or for a dirge or something is a big part of that. And if we go to the next slide. This is us in the phase that we're in now. We're researching sites and locations for May, and this is the most recent location that we're out in. This is called the central wetlands. It's kind of like walking on the moon. It's a little mix between like the bronze age and the future. All of that underneath that very springy, almost trampoline land is two feet of water. And this is the proposed site for what we're going to do in May, right? The idea is to bring people in South Louisiana who have never even seen some of this, to witness it, to encounter it, to share work, performance, music, to share food, to share song, right? To share and to give people a little bit of a framework and understanding of what's happening in these places. The idea for CryoOne is that, and you can leave that up Jeff, we're going to go to three dislocation in May. We're working in conjunction with this Laño Center, which is people who have been in Louisiana for about 300 years. We'll be performing in conjunction with that center. We'll go to two other sites in South Louisiana. We'll do that little mini part of a tour. We'll present some in New Orleans. And then in the spring we'll get ready for a tour that's going to happen in what will go from Austin up to Nova Scotia. And sort of retrace the line of some of the places where our ancestors came from. So I want to invite Jeff to talk about, just for a minute, what happens when we go out to do these visits and how it affects our process when we go back into our space and into our room and on the land. As I said earlier, our work is, I mean there's so many names, site specific doesn't really talk about what we do. It's more this response to the environment. Other than saying I'm a designer or a set designer, I say I'm an environmental enhancer. You go to places like this and you're like, what do you need to do? It's all there. I think of environment as another character in the show. It speaks. It's the neediest and loudest character in the show. It's like somebody who's yelling all the time, but it's a great actor. You work with it. And it's so great to work in places like this because it's beyond the beauty of the work itself in the space, the development of the work. Being in that space, creating work about a space while you're in it it brings so much to our process. It makes us feel so good while we're doing it. It makes us so good when we leave. And it's just really regenerative for us. And bringing art into the landscape is in some ways, it spiritually is regenerative for the landscape too. So I mean there's many challenges with it. There's how you enter communities, how you go into these places, how you gain agency into these areas, but it's an ongoing conversation that we've been having for 20 years. And it's just bringing the environment into our work as a central character is probably one of the core elements of the work. I think we're going to leave you with a bit. We have low time. Yeah, you've got all kind of time. Nine minutes. Moving a little bit into the logistics of some of the things that happen. Jeff and I are part of a collective that owns and operates a space called Catapult. It's a 4,000 square foot warehouse that's a performance laboratory design studio. It's where we do our work in our offices. So a lot of times just in the straight process thing when we're outdoors, we don't always stay outdoors. There's a lot of problems with being outdoors. There's rain, there's cold, there's mosquitoes, there's snakes. In the springtime this thing will be teaming with all kinds of critters maybe we don't want to deal with. Some of our performances don't like the idea of being by alligators and stuff like that. So we have to be real about that. So a lot of times what we do is when we're visiting sites say we'll have a rehearsal on Monday, we'll have an expedition on Thursday. We're all in the studio on Friday. And then Jeff is bringing in things that he wants to do to interpret that landscape. On last Friday we were making rivers. Two nights ago we're dealing with these huge trees falling down, balancing sticks working on our feet, using texts, singing songs, making music together. So it's not all outside. A lot of it occurs in a way that we take what is inspired from outside, sometimes we bring it inside, we generate material, we bring that back and see how it is responsive to the land, etc. In our workshop the catapult is basically a big rehearsal floor, a big sprung floor, and the design studio is right next to it. There's no wall or anything like that. So the design world and the rehearsal room are right there. So there's things that we constantly will make things right there and then, but it's not separate. And as we develop a space more the sound system, the lighting, is all there. Even our offices are raised with our glass offices. So where we write grants, like the NIFA grant is right in view of our rehearsal space. So it's all together. When you come into our workshop, this is the heart and soul of how we make theater. There's nothing, you see it. Walls are painted black, they're blackboards there, and it's a real sharing. The other thing to mention about the process, it's not director, actor, designer. We have four people in this process that's at the top. I work with the actors in rehearsals and direct rehearsals, independent of the director, and develop material with them because my work is interactive. I make a lot of machines, I make things that are all interactive. So it's really important that I'm able to as a designer work directly with actors and not go through the director all the time. And that's really developed in our process and I think it's really great. And then that work is given back to the director and there's more material for her or him to work with. And the last thing I would say is that we do not land in places that we do not have some sort of invitation into. We've toured an outdoor performance called Lou Garou to the co-festival where like when we go, we work with Sabrina at the co-festival. We work with partners who are already doing the work in the places that they're doing it. And we're there to lift up, to shine a little light, to bring some energy to get people there. But we don't also try to do direct action environmental work. We work with partners and people who are already doing that type of policy work. Or we're working with scientists who are doing the type of scientific work. We see ourselves very specifically as an art and culture component of this whole idea of getting the word out. So we don't try to plop ourselves down and assume that art is the end. Art is the means, right? And it's got the ability to tell story and to make connection. But it is not some sort of saving grace that's going to make these wetlands come back. Some ways these wetlands that you just saw probably come back. They're probably going to road into the ocean. But there's other parts of this thing that are still savable, right? There's still ideas about how you know, such things can be fixed. I mean also another example like last week for our rehearsal we went and planted cypress trees in a forest that's being overtaken by Chinese tallow. That's just an invasive species that's like destroying or taking over an area. So we went there and we spent a day and a hundred trees and we all worked, we all kind of in our own world doing that. But the movements did not, were catalogued in the head and when we went back into space we took those movements of digging and planting trees and now it's become a score in the piece. So it kind of there's ways to have that creative process come from really doing some real meaningful action. So and we weren't thinking about it when we did it. Like we didn't say let's go plant some trees and steal some ideas for movement. It just kind of happened organically and that's what happens a lot when you make this part of your practice. So we're going to just about turn it over to the debate society who's going to come up give you some time. We want to leave you with some words that were written by our writer Moose Jackson just to share with you a little bit of the images that come from the landscape where we're from. I'll pull them up about the swamp that I'll share with you. Yeah, that's all we'll say. Now at first I leaned back half hit in those hairy cypress of almost human warmth and width. I take in the clicks and the grinding cherubs, surface sploosh and zydeco rhythms drifting across that slew. The swamp don't just incorporate you, it becomes you. It breathes you, it spooks you, unlocks and unfetters, loves your baser needs, your demise and your decay feed it. The Mo Rotten the Mo Better baby. Yeah, I love that little Piro how she sits so close to the water gliding like a gator going for a baby deer. The swamp is a creed a purgatory of water, a pilgrimage of land, a holy immaculate afterbirth from a stillborn river. The swamp is near my best running wild through cypress and Tupelo, neutral rat and armadillo crawfish and crabs man, I live like a king. You let them fools tremble when they hear me sing. It's getting close to feeding time. We're about to take this boat down river. Tonight we party down in New Orleans. Thank you for your time. Nick curated a week of HowlRound article, HowlRound.com for those of you who don't know it, about the activities and things that are happening in New Orleans. It was really one of the, I don't know, it was one of the most sort of energized weeks on HowlRound we've had and in fact it created a kind of moment in my staff where everyone decided that we should move our offices to New Orleans. There was a kind of revolt and so anyway we had to quell that revolt after what was happening. So thanks you guys for that I really appreciate it. David had a question about the audience make up. So yeah about who's here. So maybe just like how many people are here are students of Emerson? We're just trying to get over all. Alright awesome. Right. How many people here because they make theater in some way that they thought it would be so cool to know how this is going to be and how many people just love theater so much they come in. That's awesome. Great. Alright. Great. I just want to just have a sense of like who's in the room. So next up. How many staff? Oh and staff, I'm sorry David I didn't get them all staff. Oh yeah well you know very collaborative. So next up Oliver Butler Paul Thoreen from the Debate Society you know I've known these guys for a little while. We've hung out on various golf courses in various other places. It's true it's actually true we play golf together. Anyway I just feel lucky to have these artists here in the different ways they work and so normally Hannah is with them but Hannah is coming in tonight and so she is you know as most women are they're really the core so they've decided that they're going to try to do the workshop without her and I guess she's consented to letting some secrets be shared in her absence. So super enthusiastic to have you guys here. We're the Debate Society Yeah Hannah is not with us today but she is the most fun. She is the shortest of the three of us and you're really missing out not having her but she has full permission to share all of our deep dirty secrets. We want to start by saying thank you to NEPA for having us. Thank you to ArtsEmerson David and Polly. Literally everyone that we've got here Monday evening every single person that we've come into contact with has been super helpful, really welcoming. There's notes everywhere about you know how we should feel welcome. There's snacks in every room It is literally has just been like the nicest experience so far and we just got started. Yeah and also I just want to say it's such like an honor and a pleasure to be paired up with Manda Bizarro. We just met and we sort of felt this kinship with each other and the way that you were speaking about your work. I looked over, I was nodding, I looked over and all was nodding and this will get a little into what we're going to be doing today that a lot of what we do is sort of this intuitive collection and generating of a bunch of material, these little tiny moments until we find those little things that really hit and then like stripping away the other things. So that's a lot of what we're going to do. And then also I just wanted to say that I grew up very close to the headwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota so every year that would be our family vacation walking across the headwaters of the Mississippi so I feel like we also have this interesting geographic connection in history. When we make work it's Hannah Paul and I are the core members of the company and then Paul are actors and writers. I'm a director and the authorial work I do in the process I call developing but really when we start the work the three of us don't have roles. We're all researchers and co-collaborators who all interact in the rehearsal room to try and figure out what it is we want to spend two years making a play on. And as Paul said it starts very intuitively. You're sort of in a dark room together and you're bringing things that move you and you're trying to find connections between those things until eventually what we do is when we find that one thing that we want to focus in we try and then populate that one thing with what we call the world of the play. So we sort of build out everything about what the theater piece might be. It could be the characters, it can be language, it can be music it's sort of this entire world of play that doesn't really have a structure yet. It's very late in the process that then we take this mass saturation of material and we say you know what we're going to focus on this here's the story. And it's at that point that Hannah and Paul sort of separate out more as writers and I become more of a director but it's always coming on the heels of like a lot of this experiential work in rehearsal. So blood play is the play that we're doing here as part of the festival so I hope everybody can come and see that. And if you do or if you have something that people really always comment about are the cocktails and the games that are in the play. So the play takes place in a basement in Skokie in the 1950s and there's all these cocktails and games that we came up with doing a bunch of research in Fiera and then coming up with our own invented versions of those and sort of creating that mythology those very early lists and games that we do to create that. That's what really flavors the piece. And so that's what we're going to be doing with you guys today. So everybody needs a pen and page. So if anybody has paper and writing materials that's great. We also have some extra ones. Just put your hand. What? No liquor. No cocktail. Sorry. You'll be keeping it. Well come on by. Yeah that's a good question. You'll be keeping this you're not going to turn it in so if you have a journal or a notebook you can write in that. Yeah. Just put your hand up there. They'll be coming around. Why don't you raise your hand if you need a pen and paper? There's more pens. More pens? Anyone pens? I'm not texting. I'm just trying to find my stopwatch. If anybody was on the tweet up last night you'll know that technology is in our forte. We are sort of known as like an analog theater company because we do focus in creating worlds out of these historical times that seem familiar but are always sort of our invented versions of those places and times. Stopwatch. So we're going to take you through a few of the phases of the work we do and realize this usually happens over like two years so we're going to fast track it. But we're going to try and like touch on a number of these things because when you're making something, when you don't know what it is, a lot of it is about sort of like tricking yourself to be creative and populate the world and eventually look at things you've created, throw out most of it, but be able to like isolate the things of value quickly that are sometimes tiny. You know, a lot of times we're looking for these tiny little moments. Hannah and Paul will write early in the process like three words or like one line which invariably become part of the piece in the end. Somehow the earliest stuff ends up at least we end up like noticing how it's like there in the end. So we're going to take you through some of like the tricks we use to sort of generate when you know nothing and be able to like stay productive and move forward when you don't know exactly where you're going. So we'll call this section lists. So we love making lists at the beginning. So you're going to make a bunch of lists. So it's going to be really quick so don't think too much. We'll tell you what you're going to make a list of names each time you have and then we'll sort of build you through it. Right now you're going to start you're going to be making a list of five invented island names. So the names of five invented islands that you think of and you're going to have we'll give you a minute and a half. You're going to have a minute and a half. Five invented island names go. You're halfway so you should have two point five island names done. Are these supposed to be made up? Yeah, these are your own invented island you're going to over create and then just isolate five. Okay so look over your list of island names and you're going to pick your favorite one. This is going to be your island but everything else we do today is going to take place on that island of yours. For whatever reason it's the one that like immediately sort of evokes the most thoughts for you. You know that you're most drawn to for whatever reason. Just give a second to look at them and isolate that one. So if you have your island our next list. Our next list. Okay so now thinking of yourself on this island we want you to come up with a list of the five most important indigenous plants on that island. Invented or real. I would say there has to be at least one invented plant and at least one real plant. Five plant names you have one minute. Go. You should have said we hope people at home are also doing this. Feel free to tweet in any of your lists to hashtag TNT Fest. We just got into Twitter last night so that's all we're talking about. Okay great so now you have your plants. Okay this next one is a list of one and you're going to have 30 seconds to come up with the island's most popular dog breed and this is invented. You're inventing the island's most popular dog breed. You're going to have 30 seconds to make it. And really look at what you've created so far and let that sort of inspire this. Hopefully you have your dog. Now what you're going to do is you're going to write down the three most important dates on the island. These are not holiday names. These are just dates. This is my favorite one. Just three dates. Three dates. You need three dates. January 13th, 1972. Hey. Is that yours? Okay three important dates 30 seconds. January 13th. Go. This is a list. We told Polly that we really we made this workshop aimed at her. So now this is perhaps the most important list. What you're going to come up with is the three most popular sports on the island. Now these are invented sports. You don't have to know how to play the sport. You don't have to know what the sport is. Just the name of the three most popular sports played on the island. You have a minute and 40 seconds for this. 30 seconds. 2.1 sports done. Cool. Just take one second. Now when we're making a piece it's not like everything we create we keep it's all gold. A lot of times you get to take a look at things you create and you've got to be like okay what jumps out at me now? What's the most interesting? What am I most drawn to? Because we might take any bit of something that we create and we might then spend like two weeks researching that or we might go on a trip to sort of accentuate why we're drawn to it. We're constantly asking ourselves why are we drawn to this thing? Or what unites these disparate ideas? Just take a second and star anything on what you've written down that is the most interesting for you. Just like 15 seconds. Just quickly the things that jump out at you the most. If anyone, I'm not going to force anybody to share but if anyone wouldn't mind just sharing some of their it's hard in a room to just be like this is what I think is good that I wrote. But something that just for you you're like you know what I like this for some reason. If you can put your sort of self-consciousness aside and just like share, share something that like jumped out at you from what you created. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so my dog is Blue Bark Terrier. Blue Bark Terrier. Dance of computer death which I think involves throwing broken computers at people. We don't know exactly what it was. The most popular sport on Palm Wine Island is sand rowing in which canoes are placed side by side on the beach with the object of rowing them through the sand away from the ocean. Very strong. On the island of Cooley there's lots and lots of shoo-shoes rowing. I love that. Period. Yeah, that is fantastic. Anybody else? On the island of Burina which is covered with succulatious a sport is played underwater on the island of Lading which was brought to the island on May 6th, 1636 which also brought the favorite dog which is the miniature red snuffer. Two things. It's a very sexy sounding island and also interesting how the stories are already emerging. I mean these connections from these lists are already happening. Two more. Theater people in a row. We have Cee and Ciarce Diabini. The forge is fat, mitten, real fat. On the island of Palm Terrace there are Herba Iguanas and plants and pleur anemones. The most popular dog breed is the Palm Rat dog ball and palm throw. One more, one more, yeah. On the island of Impunity the most prevalent plant is the Willowy Willow algae and the dogs running around are Plutonia Scaramouche and the game they play is Bebop or Rubop Marshmallow Flush. Okay, we're going to transition to another section but first we've got one more is to wrap up this list section. Look at your sports names and pick the juiciest sport, the one that you think has the most creative potential to work on a little bit. So pick your sport. It's like 10 seconds. This is what you're going to focus on for the rest of the time. You have to make up how to play it? Not yet. No. That was like a year of... No, we don't sit around doing a year of lists. Really what you're doing is you're like, we're all bringing these things like for blood plate, we literally came up with a list of cocktails inspired by real cocktails but none of them are invented and then we decided how they were made. It's a part of how we build out the world into it. We know a little bit more of what we're creating. We do something called the bad plays and this is just something that it's another way in which when we've gotten far enough into creating a lot of what we think the play is or what the world is, you get sort of stuck trying to be brilliant all the time. It's a lot more interesting for us and easier for us to think what is the worst way to do what we're doing. It's more apparent and sometimes that leads us to more free form, interesting and exciting options. This is also going to be a writing exercise. What you're going to do is you are going to write and I want this to be like a pen never leaves the paper kind of writing exercise. You are going to write a pre-game pep talk as a coach for this sport. I realize we don't know yet exactly how the sport works. We don't have to explain to us how the sport works. You are basically in the locker room, if there is a locker room of the sport, you are there with the team giving them the pre-game pep talk is the worst pre-game pep talk that you can muster. We have more paper? Anyone need more paper? Alright, stream of consciousness. Worst possible pre-game pep talk to the players of your sport begin. Is anybody brave enough to share your bad pep talk? It's not all done though. The game had to start. Here it is, gentlemen and ladies of the Wildland Nation Court. It's today and the sun is shining as doomed as it did on January 1st, 1000 when our forefathers and foremothers first found it hard as the initial overheld pact and rode them into the dark green sea in search of the deep crevice in which the stringiest brain tree could be found. I send you out and that's as far as I got. That's a good end. The dogs are fed, right? All y'all ate? Uh-huh? Okay. Go out there and play. Well, play well and clean. Remember your skate should be on your feet, the correct feet. Look at your competitors, teams from other counties. This is to a single player for the game and guess. This very high chance you're going to die out there, kid. But don't worry about it because there's nothing you can really do to prepare yourself. It's called Lieber's guess, kid. Not Lieber's no. I can say I was proud of you but honestly you've been slacking off a lot lately and it's been pissing me off. Good morning. Oh, me? Oh, okay. Guys, it's easy. There's no wrong way. Can't be a fool. I mean, you start with hugs and you cheer each other and you really have fun and you help each other. How do I do? Okay, guys, as you know, we suck at the team. We don't hold that against each other. Nobody on this team is going to blame anybody else on this team for the fact that we lose today. We will lose because our gene pool is depleted. We can't force other people to come to Boyd, that's the name of the island, to live. And why would they? What we can do is play. We can play our asses up. We can kick that sand and eat that sand and fake injuries if we have to. Okay, folks. Well, we all know what we're here to do and for those of you who may be hearing this for the last time, well, yeah, I don't really know what to say. I mean, I guess it was nice knowing you. And you may know the Fondacius are especially spiny this year. All that rain that helped your flowers grow, Marge, also gave them especially long and sharp spines. So I hope you reinforced your shin guards and they are really fast this year. I mean, really fast. Like that miniature red snuffler of Jacks with only three legs. Well, it wandered to the edge of the patch and, yeah, okay, so run fast, I guess. Yeah. Totally, totally inspired to play these sports. Very awfully, very awfully. Okay, one more. Okay, man. This is it. Everything depends on you. On here. On now. You only get one shot. You hit the mark or you don't. And if you don't, well, you know what that means. Ignominity. A return to a dark time. A return to you. Walter, what are you doing? Stop that. Character in there. That's great. That's great. Yeah. And it's just to like check in. None of these things would become the play for us. Like, you know what I mean? No, I mean, yours are great. All of yours are the play. All of yours are the play. But like really, you're not as talented though, so it's you know, you might isolate like one thing in that that is of interest. If like all three of us are like, you know, it's really interesting to like call out the unseen character at the end of the piece, you know, you assume it's a whole room or find out it's just one person. It's like the little secrets and the little switches that sort of reveal themselves to us as we talk about those things. Then we focus in on that like rarely does like the bad play then become like, now we do that thing, or that the list like now we're just going to like read this list. It ends up just sort of infusing other research and other focuses as we move forward. And if we were if we had a challenge like in a play if we had to write a really good pregame pep talk the end of that would be writing the bad pregame pep talk because there's always something in rooted in that that's the key to finding the good things. If you sit down you're like I gotta write something really awesome. You sit there for a long time. And now we're going to shift we're going to shift out of bad plays and we're going to shift into something called Atoods. And this is the more like active part of the more like physically active part. I mean we are we are a super nerdy theater company so we do a lot of reading a lot of talking a lot of sharing so that is a lot of crying a lot of crying I cannot deny that like we do spend a lot of time doing that but we are also like physically active in the room. Hennepauler actors who create I get involved in this as well. We have something called Atoods which are very sort of small theatrical experiments or challenges that we like set for each other based on the research that we've done based on the things that we've created to try and like physically figure out how some of this stuff works. All of which does not become the play either. Again trying to isolate the little things that we're going to hold on to and make a part of the world. So what we'd like is we'd like all of you to pair off. I would like you to pair off with someone who are not sitting directly next to and someone you don't like work with all the time. So I wonder if it would be easier to. Is there anybody going to be able to do that? It might be easier if we make you do it somehow. Yeah yeah introduce yourself. You're going to go to a different part of the room. Don't be scared so let's start with that pair up and find a spot in the room. Find a spot in the room. Raise your hand if you don't have a partner right now. Yeah come out of the dark. Yeah come out of the dark. Raise your hand if you're not paired off. I know it's awkward to be like yeah go find your pair and you're like sort of not paired. Would you guys do it together? Yeah? Great. Anyone else? Who's not paired off? Find your partner. Anyone? Okay find yourself like a spot in the room. Alright give yourself a little bit of space. Give yourself some space. They'll get all up on each other. There's a lot of room in here. Okay Okay so first you're going to work together eventually but first I want you each to take a minute and you are going to design a drill for the beginning of the sport that you picked. A drill that you would lead a team through. So you want to design the drill that is specifically designed to like warm up and make a team better at the sport that you invented. Okay don't spend a whole lot of time trying to make it brilliant. Just decide what the drill is for yourself on your own and then eventually you'll be sharing with each other but start by just working on your own and think through the specific elements of the drill. Make a drill, you've got two and a half minutes, feel it in your body, try it out for yourself. Try it out a little bit yourself and then you'll be working together. Go! Mwah! What's your sport? Okay. No skill required. Whatever you want. No roll. Right cool. So what you're going to do now with your partner is you're going to take turns what you're going to do is you're going to be the coach. You're going to tell your partner the name of the sport and then you're going to lead them through a minute of that warm up. Show them how they're going to do it. So just pick who's going to go first real quick just like someone decided who's going to go first. And the first person has a minute. Go ahead. Legs open then you're going to point. Right toe and bend your knee like you're lunging and it's toe knee, toe knee, but make sure your elbows are sticking out. Toe knee, toe knee, toe knee. And then you put your arms out. Put your elbows back in your area. And then you do the same thing. Toe knee, toe knee. So you just keep doing that. Like you're going to be there. And then you're going to be on the ball. And it's like around this area. So the drill is you don't have to prepare your elbows. And you have to have them switch. So the way they'll do that. Yeah, the way they'll do that is try to get your pelvis in front of your head. Try to get your pelvis in front of your head. No, no, never. No, no, never. Yes. And you can practice also on your sides. Yes. No, no, never. No, no, never. No, no, never. No, no, never. No, no, never. Good. No, no, never. Everybody come down here. Everybody in this area here. I was going to say if you wanted to use your rope. I actually do. Yeah, everybody come in here. Come in here, sort of face this way. Now, preferably someone who hasn't shared yet, hopefully a brave soul. They'll go through their drill. Yeah, take it. You need all the space, do it here or go up there and do it there. Get some space, get some space. So the name of my fourth called the wall of the ball junk flam. And do I want to explain for it? Take us through the drill. Okay, so the drill is all about getting your pelvis in front of your head. In as many directions and turns as possible. So that's the most important thing. And the best way is for me since I have broken foot I can't do it. But to jump and then just like get it in front of you or if you want you can do it on the ground and just go. Alright, lead us through it. You guys can all do it standing, I'll do it on the floor. Okay, I'll do it. So. And now on the right. Turn it. And then do that three times. And now do the other side. One more time forward. Nice. It's actually more fun not knowing what the sport is. I love the idea of seeing the coach explain the drill in front of your head. To me I want to know what that sport is. I'm so happy that you're not telling us what that sport is. From a theatrical standpoint, I'm in. Take it through it. This is for the game, bachi bells. You're holding your bachi bells in each hand. You're holding your bachi bells by hitting them together as hard as you can in the following drill. So you're going to go up right, down left, up left, down right, behind you, down low, and then once in front of you. You want to do it all together one more time? Okay. Down right, behind you, below, and one. You're going to see the name because they would ruin it. So put your arms in front of you. Imagine there's bat. And we're going to find the best bat for this game by shaking vigorously. Okay. Did it break? If it's broken, you can't use it. Okay. Okay. Now let's make our balls. Pick them up and shape them. Add a little fit. Now you're ready to play hot dog baseball. That would be another thing. Just out of nowhere, I'm not going to tell you the name because if I did it would ruin it. Everyone, take a seat. Thank you. Hold on. Get some water, yeah. I'm calm dancing. And above. So when we're making plays, a lot of what we do is figuring out how to make each play. each play. So part of the exercises for routines and creation methods that we use they're tweaked for the specific place or always inventing them. But there's certain things that we always come back to because we like them, making lists, imagining the worst possible version of things and then doing these atude works, giving each other physical assignments to do, have sort of over time some building block that always come back to us. So as we said to sort of like debrief this, what we're doing at this point is sort of creating the mythology of the world. So things that we think are interesting, little moments, little nuggets, little words, little ideas. That's sort of like the way to get out of your own way to sort of create these things. And we, because we don't start out looking for the narrative, we tend to be, you know, a narrative emerges in most of our plays. Like we do end up tending towards some sort of a narrative. But we spent a lot of time trying to figure out moods and figure out like how something feels, which is why a lot of our plays are set in like our version of sometimes very real places, because like we may go there, we may research it, and we're trying to figure out like what evokes that like special feeling. And that's what we're looking for when we like do these experiments, we throw most of the step away. But the little moments that evoke some sort of like a mood that feels right for the world is the kind of thing that we're going to focus in on. We're going to keep trying to do that more and more. And just, I guess to end, just to talk about like the stuff that we're doing beyond blood play we opened in October, and we just did at the under the radar festival. We're super excited to be here with blood play. There's another piece we're working on called the light years that David saw an early, early version of it's about the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and 1933. And Polly saw a second version of when so David was at the first Sundance we were at Polly was at the second one as a creative advisor. And so that play is a play that now is we've done a full development on it's not finished, but it's near complete. And we're working to find a theater to present that in addition to touring blood play. And yeah, yeah, that's it. Thank you so much for for being with us. Why don't you guys come on up and then they'll be like, you know, we can sort of stand here and look attractive in the camera. So thanks so much. Thank you. And the sports is right, right in my wheel. Yeah, I love some migration ping pong and golf. That's right. She did kick her ass in both ping pong kick my ass in both ping pong and golf. So this is a I'd love to do I'll just you know, a quick Q&A for people. And I'm happy to kind of moderate that. So but I'll let the audience, you know, jump in. Does anybody have any questions for either? Yeah, please. Yeah, we one thing we do is we've kept the collaborative core very small for us. But we do. I mean, I should say like we involve designers very early in the process, but not at the very beginning. And we involve act other actors early in the process, but not at the very beginning. So one step we took is by keeping the collaborative, the initial collaborative group small, and develop our trust, like within the three of us. But when we start adding new people, we've realized we think it's like it feels like such a comfortable process for us. But every new person that we've added, there is like a learning curve there. I think it just it goes along with that person being able to trust them being able to trust that the process will lead somewhere, and that they won't look silly in the end. So it really has to, for me, it has to do with one working with people you work with a lot. And when you find good people, you click with making sure you continue to work with them. And then when you involve new people, helping to guide those new people through a really painful time that will end in them being like, totally bought in. But I think every new person I can't say that there's never been a new person who's worked with us, because where there's been no friction leading up to that place where they're like, Ah, I feel so comfortable in this. So much energy is given in a good way to figuring out how to make that work to make people trust what you're what you're doing. And they have to trust that that we know what we're doing. And we trust them to get there. You know, but but the other thing that you said that I just want to touch on is sort of like having that, you know, that yes, this is right moment. And for us, it's really helpful with the three of us who sort of found each other because of a shared, you know, aesthetic interest and shared values. But we've spent so much time together just figuring out how stories work. And often, we know that we will be arguing a lot about what's the right thing, knowing that the right thing, we'll know it when we see it, and that the three of us will will find that. But that it's not voting, it's never voting. It's never us saying like, Well, the two of us like this idea. And it's never convincing the other, but we go through the action and the act of convincing each other because we know we have to do that to then go home, dream about it, and then come in. And usually one of us will have that thing that's like, Oh, I know what it is. And I know when I go in, that I'm going to say, Hey, Oliver and Hannah, this is what we were looking for. And then we got that our process a little bit different in the sense that in probably the last several products we've done, we have what we call the instigator, there's somebody who brings a project to the table, like like cry you one brings to the table. And in almost that that person is almost never the director, which um, which has a lot of challenges. But it's really interesting, because the person who brings the idea at the table says, This is an idea. This is what I want to do. And we're fundraising for and we see, you know, what what we have funding to do, because we're always trying to find funds for different projects. And that person releases to the group, which has usually a small collaborative team of like, you know, usually three to four people, which is usually designer, writer and instigator and the director. And through that, we work. But there's it's really interesting from, from my point, if I'm not the instigator or the director of the project, how that balancing act that goes between the director and the instigator. And it's only successful because of a deep love and trust in the collaboration. And it's a it's a it's a difficult road, but it's really beautiful when it when it happens. But it's it's interesting in the sense that you have to kind of release your idea to the ether. So here it is. And I am okay with where the group takes it. One, I think one thing too is that we I learned the hard way, which is that people are quite likely to want to go on a journey where they don't know what the end is going to be. But you have to invite them into that journey, and maybe agree that we're going to go on that journey together. I think people are much better, much more difficult when they don't know what's going on. And they haven't been explained like how we're not going to know what this play is for six months. But when you say, I'm inviting you into a process where you're going to have to trust us. And you're going to have to understand that we might not know something for a long time. And it's still going to be difficult. When they consent to that, I feel like they do a lot better. I've been in rooms where we didn't make that invitation. And the stock of Harry. Well, you know, I'll say, Michael Cyril Creighton, who's in blood play. He was the first actor to work with us that wasn't Hannah and Paul, Hannah Paul, their first three plays were just Hannah and Paul plays. He was the first person he went through sort of a process of like getting to know us. Now he's been in most of our plays. He's the one who we sort of sick on new people. Like, I mean, we try and provide a safe space for people to like engage in the process. But it's actually even stronger to have sort of like, he's sort of like a good virus in the room, sort of like going up to someone privately and being like, trust it. I promise you trust it. You know, I'm living proof, trust it. And so we use we use him. He's our mole. He's our mole. In that vein, when is a what you guys you're generating work, you're working with, you know, the environment, you guys are working with these lists, and you know, you make a million of them and you hit on one thing. When's the play done for a project? How do you how do you identify that moment? We consciously don't close out plays unless I can't think of one. We bottom is our doesn't do any work that we did before Katrina. Everything else is alive. And at any moment could be toured could come back to be worked on. I got notes we in Luga rule, I think at our 75th performance, my director Kathy Randall's gate gave me notes after every performance. I hope to get notes every time I ever perform. I mean, that's one of the reasons I feel like I've chosen to work this way. It's like, I don't want to stop working on the show. And I hope that the show gets worked on every, every day, you know, that we work on it. So I think that's to the purview of the company a lot in a lot of ways. But I think personally, that's the way I feel. It's done to a certain extent. But aren't you always seeing things where you're like, God, like when you do 50 performances of a show, then you're like, Oh, now I see what we have. Oh, all this stuff is garbage. We need to change this or work this you know, so I feel like it's a moment of discovery. And we keep adjusting our shows every time we get the chance to mount them. And it has everything to do with how much resource and time you have to put towards it. I'm at nearly every performance. And I tend to give notes after every performance. You know, we pretend the show is locked once we've like, you know, once it's mounted, we're not bringing designers back into re tech things unless we really have to. But in general, we just keep working. I think it's like my history, you know, the there's recurring themes like the shows that I worked on 15 years ago, and then something comes up that's really related to the research to that. And then there's these kind of one off shows that kind of go you do them and they don't, they don't really have a life anymore. You know, like the themes don't connect and like this show that we're doing connects to two other shows. So it's kind of like, it's continued research, you know, because our work is very much about trying to learn more about something. This is the vehicle we use. So it's just we're still interested in why Louisiana is disappearing, you know, sort of, sort of, we're continually making work to better understand and better understand what we can do. In your respective companies, how long was your trial and error period? When you started to decide, Oh, these are the building blocks that we're going to absolutely or not absolutely, that we're going to try and use every single time. Well, well, I think it's we had an interesting situation. Hannah and I went to college together and created a play together. So when we first started working with Oliver, it was sort of, it was sort of us figuring out how to work together and something new. And we didn't start a company, we started with doing a show. And I think that I think that sort of the way we work in our aesthetic and our building blocks has very much slowly developed over eight or nine years. But it is interesting to me if you looked at our very first play, which is based on this Russian avant garde poet named Daniel Karnes, it looks and feels very different than our plays now. But there's sort of core core values in that a big thing was collisions that this is a writer who would write stories that had sort of that didn't have an ending or were smashed up, it would end, it would be a story about a beautiful day and then it would end. And then a small child fell off a park bench and broke both his jaw bones. And then I went home. And it was just these collisions that didn't have an arc to it. And these surprising, a surprising different way of thinking about stories. That was something that was in our very first day of collaboration. You know, so there's certain things that are just values because of who we are, that have always been there. But I think the techniques of bad plays and lists and attitudes, that's sort of something that each play, when we're like, how do we do this, figuring it out each time, each play, we add something at something new. Yeah, it's like, I think less about the techniques that we use for every show and more about the ethos that we carry when we walk into the room, that it's my responsibility to be my best every day working. And then to get out of the way of the techniques we usually use when we need to, and to use them for efficiency sake when we don't. When I first started working with Jeff, I kept like, I was like, you you're saying all these ideas, but I don't understand how you're going to do them. And Jeff was like, Well, you know, I don't mean to like, offend you, but your how questions are really starting to piss me off. And he said, he said, we put a man on the moon, I can figure out how to hang some stuff like and rig some stuff. And that's why I was like, he invited me into to like, like, let's dream big and bring like a really big work ethic and ethos in the room. And then we'll figure out how to do it. We can figure out how to do it. You know, so I think of like cleaning our feet before we walk into space and really being ready to work for the three to seven hours we get a day, rather than like, are we going to use that same sequence of actions that we used to make the last show? Maybe we will. But maybe that's not making it easy. You know, just to react to that. Our answer for like the first year and a half of how we're going to do stuff is real magic, magic. And I just like, figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, how are we going to do that? We're like, real magic, real magic. I learned a great phrase, we were in Serbia doing this Lucaro show, we had to do something. And I said, well, somebody said, that's gonna be impossible to do. And the guy who was helping me said, impossible will take one day longer. That's great. How do people, how do people watch your work? So one of the questions I always have when you come to a festival like the next thing, we all know, we have a better sense of how to watch a story, you know, we sort of know the elements of story. But how should we watch your work? In your case, we are going to actually be watching it in yours, we're going to go wherever we can to watch it, but we won't see it this week. But how do we watch? We for our work, it's like, your experience of our work starts when you get out of your car or get off your bicycle, like it's always a journey. Our audience almost always moves from from one place to another. But there's a just front for me at theater is a journey, you know, from beginning to end. So I want as soon as they get there, to start experiencing it long before an actor or they see anything. So there's always a walk or something that leads you or over a levy or something that brings you into a new place. I don't I don't know if it's a really good question, like how to how to watch our work. We do think about it a lot because we've, we've come up in sort of the downtown New York experimental theater community. But some of our more recent plays structurally tended to resemble sort of scripted work, like single off single author work. So we I've spent like every play that we've ever made being like, is this to this is there's always that moment at the end. It's always at the end. It's like, you know, we did snow hand that had no words, near almost no words. And we went into that play, we were like, Is this a play? I don't even know if this is a play. What do we make, you know, and then the next play we did at the ontological, which is is like Richard, Richard Forman's theater for people who don't know that. And I was like, Is this not, you know, right for this, like is the audience here? Like, are is it too conventional? Is this play too conventional? It's always at the end, where you start getting like nerve, I get nervous about like, where do we fit in with like how people are going to view this. But that's like a very sort of like small period of time at the very end. So I think like, how should people come to the work? I just always hope they come just come to the work, just come to the work. Open enough to be surprised in in subtle ways. I would say I think that we do have like a trust and a love for the audience. And that we do sort of that the audience does sort of feel and you know, when we're talking about the the idea of like not knowing what the sport is, but wondering what the sport is that you have to put your hips in front of your head. Like I think that we like that's what we that what we how we want the audience to work is to be, you know, to be like filling in that part of the story for them for themselves, you know, and a lot of people, it's never in a, in a fuck the audience sort of way, it's sort of bringing them into this world, but trusting the audience to sort of fill in the other parts of the story. I imagine that it's also it would be fun to know like, I'm not going to see you guys work for two years. So I'm hoping that when I go see a debate society show that I might hate it, but at least I know they're going to kind of take care of my experience. Right. Like they they've been working to take care of my experience. And I love I think the most valuable conversations that ones where people really don't like your work. And then that's where we're getting somewhere, you know, the man was pretty good, you know, and so if you work for two years, the real nerve wracking thing that gets on my mind is like people haven't seen our work in two years that basically forgotten about us. And are they going to like this or not? But like, we're trying to guard and take care of their experience and nurture their experience and try to show them something and give them something that they haven't seen. And if they don't like it, great, you know, but like, I think that's what's really nice about knowing that a company's worked for two years. It's like, I know they're going to do something for me, you know, whether it's my type of wine. I don't know. I love that idea about something that they'd never seen before. You know, it's always it's always rooted in the story and what we want to do. But that thought does come in there. Like if I was sitting in an audience, how how would I want to play a star that would blow my mind or be interesting or challenging to me? Like what what happened I've seen? What would I like to see? Additional questions? Yeah, David. So all of you have picked this way of working. Or you can pick you or whatever. I think for a lot of people here, the gulf between thinking about work and performing work is huge. And how do you how have you crossed the idea? How do you stay in it and be able to make work in this way? And how did you get going? What's what's kept you going? Now you have these NIFA grants and you have there's different kind of support now, but you didn't have those. You didn't start from we have the money. You didn't start from we have the theater. You didn't start from we have an audience. How have you stayed here? I something that these guys said, just talking about your space and having like the offices, as I imagine it, tell me if I'm wrong for this, but your office is sort of there where you do the work reminded me of something that we started with early on, which was embracing the business side of the company as an extension of the artistic work, not just because it had to happen because no one else is going to do it for free. But because we imagined that you know, we wanted every bit of the company to be embedded with the feel and the mood of the work. So we would just use our artistic our artistic skills and focus to guide everything about the company, but the postcards look like with the website looks like how the grants are written, how our emails are written. I mean, if any of you have received an email from us, it has probably, you know, see top secret is probably actually passed around all three of them to make sure it captures the exact tone that like how we want to treat people how we want to treat people. So it slows things down quite a bit. And it makes us a little bit sluggish sometimes. But I think that that the early decision to just embrace to make the art in the business one was something that I think kept us going. Yeah, I think right now we're we're getting all these conversations about about how work is how work is made and they're really exciting conversations and and and and sometimes confusing conversations. And that's being a devised theater group that now people have done some licensed productions of our play. So what that means when somebody else is taking one of our scripts and in doing it. And they're sort of, you know, strange, confusing conversations sometimes, you know, but bottom line, it maybe sounds a little cheesy, but we just love making stuff together. You know what I mean? And so if there's no support, if there's nothing, we still make stuff together. And God bless, you know, Nifa and ArtsEmerson for like for like supporting the work and in making things easier and helping us do more things. But we love working with each other, even if it's, you know, in our, you know, in Oliver's house, which is like where we do a lot of the work. It's just like we get together and we make we make plays. Yeah. Yeah. And the money will go away and we'll be right where we were. And there'll be abs and flows and good times and bad times. For me, singularly, the moment that kept me in it was Katrina. It was like I was young artists, very impressionable, didn't know anything about what I was doing really. I felt like and just seeing all like having elders and mentors and people like Jeff, like when I enter that work elder. No, but like, but Jeff had been doing the work for 15 years before I even thought about what I was doing, you know, and listening to that way of thinking. And then like the Katrina moment was like the social function was clear. This is why we're doing our work. This is what's going on. It's about our home. And for right now, that's what it is. And it became real easy to feel that that sense of community and empowered to do the work. And it still feels that way. And that might go away. You know, I mean, the big question in New Orleans we have is like how is it not become a hobby for people who are now getting into their 40s and how are raising kids and trying to do that thing? I mean, that's real. That is real. It's not like so. So what do what do we what do we do there? What keeps us in it? And for me, it's like when I watch like the musicians in Louisiana, they got a pretty clear understanding what their social function is. They like get you together. They move you around in space. They usually feed you and they create a lot of joy. And they don't ever get on the mic and say this is community engaged I to go dance. Just do what they do because that's part of how they, you know, and for a little bit now, it's been how we breathe. I don't know if that'll last, but right now that's what it feels like. It's I mean, it's about for me, just creating meaningful actions. And I've been doing it for so long, I surround myself with passionate people, you know, not just artists, but anything they do that through our research. And it's just I love how I spend my days, you know, my days are deep. They're rich. boredom is something I, you know, something I've never experienced or haven't experienced in my adult life, because every moment of my day is really geared around making art or doing something creative. Like I tell my children, I have two children, one 10 and 12, I said, never miss the opportunity to do something creative. You never miss the opportunity because it's always there and whatever you do. And I love what you say about the, you know, embracing the business of art because it's so important. It's like you, you have a certain value of how you live your life and there's stuff you don't enjoy as much, but you have to embrace it with the same, you know, same passion. Otherwise it, it, your life is unbalanced, you know, like I'm struggling something with with our theater company about there's a value about being on time and early for rehearsals that doesn't transfer to being on time for company meetings. I'm like, you can't, you can't have two values. You're either on time or you're not. That's that's my value, but it's not everybody's value, but it's just, you know, having, I just love the people I spend my time with and I love the people I haven't met yet who are also passionate. You guys can't get you to know so much fun. Thank you all for coming. The stage and in the Paramount at three o'clock with two more companies. Similar tomorrow. I've lost the LAPDN in New Jersey players. Yeah. So hopefully we'll see some of you tomorrow at three o'clock. All right. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you so much.