 Thank you, I appreciate it, I'm very nervous. Thank you, I appreciate it, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate it. Hello everyone, welcome to the making home contemporary and devised performance and Pittsburgh session, you're so happy to have you here with us today. My name is Chanel Lynchette, I am the programming manager at Kelly Strayport Theatre as well as the most interdisciplinary theatre artist, and I am so so excited to be here today talking to you at the end of the story, I'm going to be gabled. Before we get into what I'm sure will be a very very cool discussion with these wonderful artists, I am going to pass it over to Representative TCG to talk about a little housekeeping. Hello, and thank you for joining us all today. My name is Austrian Lee Cabrera, I am the office and technical support coordinator for TCG. My pronouns are he, him. I'm here to say welcome on behalf of TCG and to just go over a quick few housekeeping items. Thanks for joining us, this session has been captioning and we will be dropping instructions for how to take advantage of these resources in the chat for Zoom. I'm here to help support today, so if you're having any Zoom trouble issues or having any questions feel free to message me privately. I'll also keep an eye on chat and can answer questions from there. I also want to let everyone know that TCG is recording the full group parts of this session and with that, thank you. Back to you. Thank you, Auster. So during this session we will talk about device contemporary performance through the lens of the work of these two wonderful artists. And before we do that, I would like to talk a little bit about where the title of the session came from. And also I want to acknowledge that this session, this talk, this conference is happening on the land of the Seneca people and no safe nation. But I also do want to name the fact that land acknowledgments don't hold the way they need to hold without active actions follow them up. So, it's over there. So, a little bit about Kelly Strayhorn. Our mission is to be a home for creative experimentation, community dialogue and collective action rooted in the liberation of Black and queer people. And we take inspiration from the cultural tradition of Black homemaking and we believe that the work we do is rooted in intersectional and anti-oppression and that that's of the utmost importance. And so, this idea of taking inspiration from the cultural tradition of Black homemaking pulls a little bit from Bell Hook's work, Home Place. Well, the idea of Home Place is where home is the opportunity, a place where you have the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits and to make home is to make a community of resistance, especially for people with whole marginalized identities. And so that's a little bit of where the idea for the title of the session came from. This idea that through art, through work, through the work of these two artists we're really creating a new definition of home and a space for people to grow and learn and express themselves in their identities. But I also want to name that for some, home is a really complicated concept. It can be a site of deep-seated and repressive conditions. But, like all the culture of Black and Latinx parent trans people, we persist by making a home that upholds and affirms the expansive definitions of identity and artistic forms. So, enough for me. I want to pass it over to the artists to talk about themselves. So, first up is Liam B. Gable. Liam, can we tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah. Hi. Hi. I'll first say that I'm coming, like, straight to you from tech for the production that's happening this evening. Oh my God. And so, forgive me for any sort of, like, haze that's in my mind. That's the use to me. But yeah, I'm Liam and disclosure is complicated, but I'm a trans theater maker. I say that because it's really important in my practice and the aesthetics and the way that I work. And I lived in New Orleans for eight years before coming to Pittsburgh. I feel really artistically baked in New Orleans. I grew up in Maryland. And after coming, or I moved to Pittsburgh for grad school and so I've been here for four years, I make a lot of work about archives. I do long processes where I do oral histories and then create performance from those oral histories. Although it's not strict documentary performance, it's kind of docu-fiction or docu-faculation. It's a hybrid between narrative and documentary work. And in that work, it's really important to me to build collectives around it, communities and all of their complication. And so I was really excited by the name of this and thinking about home and community and how those things, how those networks of care can get built inside of a rehearsal room have been really important to my practice and also my livelihood as an artist making performance. That's what I'll say. Awesome. And the information for Liam's show, which is tonight at Kelly's Reward, so everyone should come, is up on the screen here. There's also a link that I'll show at the end of the presentation that I'll have a way for you to buy tickets for both of these performances. And for anyone who's joining us via Zoom, there's a PDF of the slides that will be popped into the chat where you can click on those links. Next up is The Deal. Hi, folks. My name is The Deal. Like, let's make a deal. Hi. My name is... That's Logan. Hi, Logan. I use he, him, his pronouns. Come in. Come in. Join us. Thank you. I use he, him, his pronouns. I'm a theater director who is pretty obsessed with the dramaturgical process. I direct new contemporary plays and I make my own work. I was raised outside of Chicago. I moved to Pittsburgh 12 years ago. And I fell in love with this town. A lot I could say about it. Good and hard and bad and beautiful. And I kind of came through the museum world here in Pittsburgh. And I work a lot with queer and trans teens here in Pittsburgh. I'm really grateful to them for all that they have taught me. And I am now making my own work. I feel like myself more and more, which I'm really grateful for. The show that's happening tomorrow night at the Warhol is called Amikon. It's an adaptation of Antigone as an apology from my mom. It's forced queerness, the afterlife, obligation, faith, and family through the lens of Antigone with reference to the text with me learning about being a teacher and audio conversations with my mom and I. It is trying to perform dramaturgy. We talk about the play, which means we talk about hardship. And then all of a sudden we learn about each other, which we all know as theater makers that happens when you're doing a dramaturgical process. And I, as a maker, got really excited about presenting that process on stage. How do I actually capture that essence when I'm making the work I'm making? And so that's a little bit about me. As someone who's seen both of these works, I'm so excited to see Liam's for the first time live tonight, but I've seen a recording and I've seen Adil's many times live. Like, this is so good. Tears each time. I highly, highly, highly encourage everyone to see one of these amazing pieces. And so what I want to do now is really segue into giving Liam and Adil a chance to talk a little bit more about their process, about their experiences in the Pittsburgh arts community and a little bit about the shows themselves. So I wanted to start off by asking the two of you if you could talk a little bit about your devising processes and how maybe that intersects or even diverges from the way you create if you're working with canonical or descriptive work. I'll start with the work I was doing with Dreams of Hope, which is a queer and trans youth arts organization here. And I feel like they taught me devising more than anybody else ever has. I got to work with about 30 queer young folks every year and we would devise an original piece of theater. And it was based on queer theory, queer history, queer lived experience, and they would make what they wanted to make. What I learned in that process that's become pretty faked in, I'm obsessed with folks looking at art. It was always in looking at something, witnessing a painting, witnessing a poem that like the most dynamic conversations erupted. And then my process has become trying to capture that, trying to understand that as the material that we've made. And so a lot of my devising and generative work comes out of looking at something. And that is where it comes, that's why I'm thinking about scripted practice. They're deeply related for me. I love working on plays, I love working on scripts, I was like a script, I was like one of the script nerds in my hardware, which was super-generated, like most, a lot of devisors. I see them as really integral to each other. I feel like for a lot of my career I was asked or I felt like I had a pressure to pick between a devising director or a scripted director as if they're two very separate jobs. I do not feel that way. I feel like they feed each other. I get really excited to, like I can say it, I'm excited to look at Chekhov and understand the art. I think a climax is relevant. I'm happy to know beginning, middle, and end. And then when I look at devise or contemporary performance and thinking about space, time, action, audience, all those ways of looking at work also get me excited. Or looking at sculptor, or looking at painting, all of those things. So I feel like my devising process is. And right now I've become a little bit upset. This is the last thing I'll share. I've become obsessed with looking at canonical work. I used to kind of be like, ideally you have to get a girl out of that. But I can admit to you that that's what's raised me. Like the sitcom Friends raised me, Tennessee Williams raised me, and I need to contend with those realities and a way to become who I want to become. And so I'm trying to connect those with things that raise my parents, which are very, very different things. And so, you know, I have a dream about working on the tempest as much as I want to, like, hate that play. I also recognize that there's a lot about colonialism in that text. That's worth mining and exploring, and how can I dig into it, specifically, like when Caliban is cursing the English that he's been taught as a way to understand my own relationship to English and what English has done to my body and what English has done to my family. Like I dreamed it would do first, and I don't know how to speak it now. So that means I'm, or I can't really know how to speak it now. So that's where the can, I know where it works, what it works. I'm down for this exploration of the tempest. It's like my mom's favorite Shakespeare, named after it, so I'm down for this exploration, like first in line and for a second. Liam, what about you? I mean so much, so much similarity I feel like in like specifically the way that I feel like devising practice, working in river performance practice and new work development and new script development like feeds each other in my practice. I've always had these two streams. I've made my own work, usually with big groups of people, but lately more and more kind of spearheading those processes. I come out of ensemble work. I come out of DIY theater and moving more into a space of like creating work that I feel like I'm offering, but still creating it in this devised process. But I also work with playwrights to make new plays. And to me, those two processes feed each other because when I'm working on devised work or contemporary performance, I get to really nerd out about all the tools of the theater, the mechanisms and like how they fit together and how the visual dramaturgy functions and the way that like lights can be storytelling, the way that like, yeah, that sound and all of those things kind of work together to create, to time travel us, to like place travel us. And so I'm working with those elements in this like really complicated, messy way and those feel like my primary ingredients. And then when I'm working with playwrights on new text, all of a sudden it's like words and I'm thinking about story and I'm thinking about art and I'm thinking about beats. And those things become dominant. So then like I just kind of try to let those two things feed each other. And that's been really, yeah, recognizing that and making it dominant has been transformative. Yeah, like I said, I come out of kind of DIY theater and ensemble practice. In New Orleans, a lot of my devising practice comes out of the fact that I felt like the stories of my communities and the stories that I wanted to tell weren't out there inscripted for, which is like true and not true, I know now. You know, there are also amazing playwrights working on things, but I felt like, okay, where are these sorts of stories that I want to be telling? And the way that I knew how to do it was like find a bunch of weirdos who wanted to mess around for a while and figure out how to find some resource in order to do that. And just like having a practice of like getting together in a room mucking up out with like tech in our bodies and failing. I feel like that is actually the process that I'm engaged in. Yeah, yeah. And being obsessed with and infused by my own body has made me like obsessed with and infused by like body in space and body in relationship to history and those things have become a part of my practice as well. I tend to do really large projects and so like I worked on a musical that was being activities. That was about the closing of Dyke Bar and New Orleans. That project had like 50 or less people who were involved in it. And so I really like those big collaborations because I feel like, again, like theater has this really incredible ability to create networks of care that can help to sustain us. I think it has to, unfortunately, because it does not sustain us in other ways sometimes financially, which is something that I know a lot of people are working to remedy. Yeah, but there is something that I have relied on it to do since a very early age, which is like make home and like literally sustaining me through those networks. And so that's a part now of the active process that I'm engaged in when I'm making work. So it's not just about like what we're making, but also about the connections that we're making with one another as we're making it and being really intentional about how those things that help to sustain the process. Thank you. I'm thinking a lot about the importance of home and the creation of home and also community that I see of both your work and hearing both of your responses and so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your experience has been creating within the Pittsburgh community making sort of this specific work within the Pittsburgh community and even maybe what that's like creating network with the specific artistic teams that you have because I know that you two have been collaborators on things, you've built friends and networks through who you've worked with and so how does that sort of fit within making work within Pittsburgh an iTunes device? Yeah, so I can be transparent and say that I haven't been in Pittsburgh that long and so my response is really colored by the fact that I came here four years ago, I came here for graduate school, and then I've stayed really engaged in the Pittsburgh community but I've also started teaching at the university level so I teach at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. So I'm going back and forth between Allentown but I've gotten to spend all spring in Pittsburgh making work so that's been really amazing. Something that's really incredible to me about the Pittsburgh arts community is that there is resource here for artists making work which is not true everywhere and so getting to experience that has been really transformative for my practice. Not that I did not have any access to resources but in New Orleans a lot of the access to resource comes from national funding organizations and in Pittsburgh there's a robust local funding and production network and so that is something that feels really unique to the ecosystem of here. Yeah, so interesting the question about artistic teams I was just talking this morning about like oh I just basically do theater so I can hang out with my friends That's very fun and I wish I had something more eloquent to say right now maybe I will later but just that like yeah what it is to like there's something transformative about finding a question like for the dance floor the hospital room and the kitchen table I was just like what does it mean to take care of ourselves each other how do we do that when it feels like the world is falling apart who might know something about that and I started talking to people about the 80s especially in the queer community and that question was really activating for me and I found it be activating for other people and that process of sharing that question together and like looking for sort of collectively has been really transformative so I guess that's not about Pittsburgh it's about community I think community and creation is important it's what can ground us in the work that we do and help us find how we want to create and what we want to say so I think it can be local but it can also be emotional across distance and time and all of those things I have to plus one it's about resource and support coming from Chicago there was a sense of access that felt different here there's still all kinds of barriers of course but I specifically think about in terms of the resource I specifically want to name the Calisthenics Theater and New Hazlet and they're both traditionally more presenting organizations that were even veering towards rental organizations before I moved here and in the last decade they both were very emerging creators across disciplines in Pittsburgh so the Calisthenics programs across all kinds of programs and the one I really want to honor is Fresh Works where every year I think six different artists have the opportunity to have a month long residency money, technicians, folks behind the work and curatorial help thinking there's this thing Ben is amazing at that is Ben's over there he's our program director I was so fortunate to get to work with Ben early in my project with the Omigun where he was able to send me other work to look at to think about form and it was never like work that was about the exact thing I was talking about it was work that spurred my imagination in ways that I didn't know was even possible and that's something I think Kelly's story does really well and it's like getting people to collide ideas and it's an entry level artist program that is ready to support being a teen folks that are new to a discipline folks that are new to a collaboration or folks that have been doing whatever they're doing for decades it really does the jam and then the new Hazlet has a program called Fresh Works that also thank you CSA called CSA that supports again six emerging artists or emerging projects and it comes with a couple month residency the ability to have a two evening performance and a lot of those projects keep moving forward so that I think is huge when I think about what Pittsburgh does and I think it's worth noting at TCG that both of those are more contemporary performance or presenting theaters they're not producing theaters in the same way and I bring that up because when I move to Pittsburgh if I'm totally honest I'm like nervous to say it out loud but it is just true the barrier to access but it came to entering the theater community here was high I didn't know how to enter a theater I didn't study at an undergrad I wasn't an actor I couldn't afford a free internship I couldn't apply for the job I was like how the fuck do I do this and so the people that welcomed me were dancers and sub-screen printers and museum workers and so my practice was developed in other disciplines I knew theaters where I felt the most alive that kept being true and I'm really grateful there was a theater in Pittsburgh on some that like respond and I sent 100 emails when I moved here and one person responds and that was Carla and she's like been a mentor since that moment but I grew up in other disciplines in Pittsburgh and so at that point in my life that felt hard it didn't feel good I was like the one place I want to be I'm super close and I don't know what to do here and now 10 years later thank god I'm so grateful that that's where I learned I'm so it's like totally to have DJs as your sound designers and architects as your set designers teaches you a lot you really figure out what you're trying to do so because of that I am really grateful to Pittsburgh and now I can be transparent I feel like I'm starting to understand the theater world a lot more and I'm starting to be able to I mean I have an MFA directing and that's real privilege and that's real access I can understand all those I understand what that means and in that position to like think about teams you all know this I think about this, our budgets and who we hire is our mission and it's like deeply embedded in our mission so the folks on our team is me evoking my mission if my mission is to make queer work for queer folks and people of color and that makes the work feel amazing to have a room full of weirdos who are all crying about our moms when I'm crying about my mom that's golden great but it also meant Liam co-directed the show and Liam was like one of my best friends in the world so like but Liam and I were really strategic about bringing on as many emerging folks as we could and pairing them with super experienced folks and figuring out and Liam was really great about being like the channel needs to be really great three people working on media but one in projections, one in the video and one on the system design with very different levels of experience strategically, the whole point was to get more folks more experience and to like try to be a part of fueling the theater community we want to be a part of and we want to see and that strategy happens at every level so that's another thing I'm like grateful I got to talk about I'm just so struck listening to the two of you talk about not only your process but the way you build community within that process and hearing about the different ways in which you sort of pull from different disciplines, different areas in the creation of this work you were talking about finding community and like people who worked in museums and screen printing and Liam I was hearing you talk about how this big network of people that are friends just what they work with and take advantage and learn from their talents so I noticed having seen both of these shows that they both intertwined the physical and the ephemeral and the analog and the digital and all of these different forms in order to tell these stories that are about identity and memory and legacy and so how has this intersection of form helped you shape those discussions within the work so both of our shows but my show was this also just made through quarantine I started the project before quarantine and here I am working on the other side of it and we kept making and I was really lucky because it was about how I talked to my mom and a lot of the way I talked to my mom is text messages and emails and she discovered my queerness on Google so like the internet and the computer is intrinsically a part of the thing we were talking about so when it came time to try to make work in quarantine it wasn't a huge departure and there were questions we could ask on the screen that felt embedded in the show and that has taught us a lot about the show and the one thing I'll share I think because of making in quarantine because we're making with digital tools and analog tools for me it's real even though my show is about memory and it's about being five years old of my mom it's about me as a kid the show feels of right now it was made in the now it was made with the tools of right now including quarantine and it's so present at this moment and even I've now performed it 12 times in three different places and it's not it's less scripted and more lesson planned which means I'm able to react to the news that morning I'm able to react to the person sitting in front of me I'm able to react to like the fight my boyfriend and I had that afternoon or whatever is happening in my life that can get fed into the show in a way that I'm really grateful for so all those tools for me to make it super present is what I'm thinking about in some ways out of physical theater and like fan pieces as a performer and when I started working on like more community based work when I was like okay the important thing is that I'm in a room with a multi-generational room with people who are new performers and people who are more seasoned performers not actors and non-actors because everybody they're acting they're acting but like newer actors and more experienced actors so if I want to make these mixed rooms then I can't do the things that I was doing before which is like making people do really difficult physical exercises in order to make work and especially like in these non-artificial warehouses like how do I start to think about and I got really bored with the homogeneity of bodies that I was seeing in a lot of physical theater so I was like okay what happens here and so I started changing the practice and one of the things that started to become really interesting to me was okay what if the focus is still on the body but the processes that the body is going through aren't like doing six flips but are like tasks and how does like a focus on task and a focus on the mechanisms of the theater create the ability for a performer to be present and how can that start to drive narrative and storytelling so that's what I've become interested in now so that's kind of like the analog and the digital start to combine because right now the mechanisms of the theater are analog and digital and the tasks can be analog and digital and so I've gotten really interested in like machine shows or shows that like we build with everybody in the room all together all of the designers and the performers for the first week and build it that way and then rehearse with just the performers to be like okay now that you know your task what's your action what's the story what's the emotion but now you have the art the physical art that can help you get through it because that was the helpful thing as a performer and then do an actual tech week after that so it's a different way of making work that has become really exciting to me yeah so that's like the way it's constructed and then on a kind of like more kind of maybe not a physical level and just like so nerdy about archives right now the digital is where we're archiving and like what are we going to do with all this these recorded zoom calls y'all there's so much of us floating around the internet it's this very conversation it's while we're like building the archive all the time digitally but also like the archive that I'm interested in is so material and so this collision of the material world that I'm still so connected to and almost nostalgic for being like a millennial that feels like just the soup that we're swimming in right now yeah it's invigorating to me as an artist and it's especially like in Dance Floor is something that we were really interested in you're both thinking a lot to think about I almost wish that I was like not leaving stuff like this but I think something that really strikes me about the work that the two of you have done is and are doing because you're so creating the works are um there's a sense of using I guess what you're both interested in personally to also have something to say something to share with a community that you care about with the community that you care about and so I wonder if you can speak a little bit about what the importance is of telling these specific stories that you're telling with these two pieces in the specific way you're telling them for the community that you want to share it with whether that be Pittsburgh whether that be you're very specifically talking to your family or your friends or the queer community that you care about why do you how do you feel that it's important to tell it in this specific way for the two of you the amazing thing to me about performance whatever this is something that we all know I'll just say because when I ask this question it means that people have to come together in a room not always I do I'm here for the ways in which we connect digitally and remotely and I'm really excited about the access to that gives especially as somebody who has lived my life outside of New York I'm like I'm really pumped for everything that the digital world is giving to performance but wait repeat your question I was like I don't remember the question that I asked because I can't remember what's the importance of telling the story of the dance for the hospital room the kitchen table in a specific way you're telling it form and idea for the community that you care about oh yeah so the reason I'm interested in making queer history plays queer history performances is because it's a way to get queer community in a room gathering and like processing through our bodies this history in some way like witnesses process through the body performers process through the body and so we're all like figuring out these stories together and because the stories on stage tends to spark more stories in the audience and there are conversations that happen afterwards so I think performance has this transformative ability to again make those networks those connections yeah and then there's something so interesting to me again about activating a question and then gathering a group of people around it and usually something happens like something transformative happens in these processes I've done a few of them so far that have been these like deeply researched pieces like dance floor has 32 oral histories that I did as a part of it and a bunch of archival research and when I was researching I read the Lou Sullivan Diaries for the first time in the GLBT archives and have this really transformative experience in my life and so now that's on stage that's kind of my way of like inviting those sorts of connections with the material is to just invent them in the work and then hopefully with the audience I remember I used to like get really nervous about the question who is your work for? it's for everyone isn't it? and with this project for the first one I was like oh this place for my mom if there's a person that I can really think about that I want to make every decision around so when we have an aesthetic question of like even if it's like this right or this right it's like which one would my mom like it's like part of the decision making and when I'm thinking about the language in the play so earlier earlier iterations so much I was explaining so much of it in English I was like well this isn't to play for Urdu speakers at all is it like? Urdu speakers don't need all this explanation and so our team worked really hard to figure out what we need to translate for legibility because my audience won't be 100% Urdu speakers but what are the ways I can also choose to not translate or be really elegant and strategic and embrace that I hope Urdu speakers will come to the show and that they should have their own version of the experience and they don't need to filter every word my mom says in her mother tongue and so sing singling out an audience member revolutionary for me and it's helped me be like okay I'm not going to change the world I'm not trying to but maybe my mom and I can nerd out of a theater for like an hour and have a good time and that is like worth it and then like the circles of community kind of you know ripple out of my mom so of course I want the show to be seen by queer Muslim folks and their family members and both theaters I've gotten to present with were so such gave me such gifts then work really hard to host an if-thar party as a part of our presentation at the county's drink garden so my show happened during Ramadan this year and when we realized that scheduling reality and there's a do we move the thing I was like hey actually let's just embrace the moment Ramadan is the feast breaking time and so we worked with Pittsburgh leaders and Muslim leaders and curated in the evening we're 50 Muslim folks many coming from South Asia communities, Muslim communities queer communities got together broke fast together outside and rented us a tent and figured out all the city or an agent because of COVID and then I got to pray namaz for the first time in 20 years with other queer Muslims I was like what's happening to my body and then when as a kid I would have gone to the mosque and had two hours of prayer I put my plate on I was like well this is it this is the thing and getting to do it in Boston the queer Muslims of Boston like showed up in full force and so getting to work with that body I mean that's just transformative for my body to be like oh that that experience is shared and divergent like in a room with 10 queer Muslims we have 10 very different queer Muslim experiences that being said that I'm taking the show right now and there's this wonderful person who doesn't share any of those lived experiences with me and they like missed a major cue today and then they were smoothly like I just see myself in your show like I get, I'm not gay or any of those things but I just see myself in this thing and now I know and I'll get the cue so you know we all have people we love with different beliefs we all experience what that means and so I don't know if that's been heard about your question I think I could listen to both of you nerd out all day every week so no worries but I'm really curious as you both keep developing these pieces and your practice and whatever amazing things you go on to do in our what are the ideas and questions that you want to keep sparking conversations about? I'll do two one content one industry content wise I just been thinking a lot about this is what I've been thinking about where did I learn about sex and when I think about it most of the sex conversations I learned was from television health class and white folks and so of course I grew up separating my sexuality completely from my immigrant reality my parent had desire their ancestors desired things like of course we did and of course we do so I'm desperate to know about they seem desire I want to know like I'm trying to I really want these dads to give me the sex talk my dad passed away 7 years ago so he can't anymore I wish he could even at 36 I would welcome it so he can and so I'm curious if fathers that make me think about my dad if they wouldn't talk to me about it is what I'm thinking about so that was really honest and that's what that is I can't I can't all just come from that's not working in terms of in terms of our field and the industry something I'm just I think we're all thinking about it I'm thinking about it is how tired we are and how gray it feels often and the exhaust is a lot and my peers are talking to them it's like heartbreaking because the last 2 and a half years have been a lot in all kinds of ways and it's accumulated from across time and our systems are so broken that I'm watching my friends break it can't keep happening like I just burn it down if that's the only thing that's going to happen so I as a field I'm just desperate to figure out what can we do to instigate joy even if it's just tomorrow or next week or next year like it feels like a really big puzzle and it's like such a cheesy question maybe but I want to keep making this work I want to keep making it with you all I would really like to have joy while we do this very very hard job and so whatever are the ways to center joy and care without shifting away from rigor I don't think those words are the opposite of rigor at all ever I think they're intrinsically the same or connected and so as a field how do we find joyful rigor in care thank you for that for sharing that honesty I'm interested in I feel like often when I talk about being a trans artist and not being really integral to my practice often people are like content that means you want to do plays about trans things and that is true and also I'm really interested in what it means to think about trans aesthetics and think about queerness as aesthetics and think about what we're actually bringing to the table when we talk about identity that isn't just like a checkbox but is like okay what is the fullness of that thing and how does it show up in the work even when the work isn't really explicitly talking about that so that I'm also on the joy train yeah I'm interested in a lot of my work kind of ping-pongs between thinking about cycles of trauma and thinking about how we break those things and then thinking about how we create containers for radical celebration so the next piece that is coming down the pipe is a sound walk with stories of trans and queer euphoria that happen in nature so like kind of planting those stories in natural spaces via geolocation technology and letting people experience them because of naturalness and those things those questions also rigorous care joy rigorous care I want to hold that for a second because I do have rigorous care thank you both for speaking about that especially I think now in art making it is hard to think about what joy looks like I meant strigger the things that we want to say about our life and our experiences and so to hear both of you frame the question in that way is really invigorating so thank you I'm going to look to us or ask do we have time for a few questions do so if anyone would like to ask any questions of Adeel or Liam please raise your hand if you're in the 3D room the 3D space I stole that from Elena from TCG she was saying that earlier because everyone's in the room whether you're joining us virtually or here in the physical space but if you have a question in the 3D space please raise your hand call out and if you are joining us virtually via Zoom just type it in the chat or maybe raise your hand with the raise your hand function and ask a lot of support to make that so any questions or thoughts hello I have a question for you when you were writing your play sorry I'm missing them so it's your own words right how many times did you go over that script and then like think about here's another memory maybe and then how do I put this in there what fits in here and what doesn't and then to have that memorized in a way because it's your words so you can play with it all over so what was that process like for you to write your story and then present I'm so grateful for that question and the two people that have really shaped it are in this room right now which is really great so the first time I did the show my first iteration was 15 minutes and I was scripted and super memorized and I was trying to push buttons and do the thing and Ben watched it but you're an amazing teacher like how can the performance you have when you teach that is the performance how can that really filter through this thing and he really opened my eyes to thinking about that so then I started doing a deep dive into lecture performance and in the classroom is where I feel the most alive but I also know that if I'm not making art while I'm teaching I become a bad teacher so those two things are just so deeply rooted and connected to each other I really need to think about this as a lesson plan and that gives me this like space to breathe where I know what my objectives are I know the arc of the thing and after I've taught intro to directing seven times now and that's just let me look at that those are so many of the conversations and what that's filtered through is now I have a script that's, I don't know, 85% pretty consistent maybe even 90% but little pieces have changed every day every time I perform it and even just like two performances ago there's this moment where I talk about me getting a job and paying rent which didn't account for the there's a much more context to it but I realized and saying it that I was dismissing five years later that yeah, there was a time where she was unemployed because it was 2001 but five years down the line she navigated the human services so well in Illinois that she became a social worker and that hadn't entered the show I was like I'm not, that's wrong so I'm able to just put it in the show or like we did six performances of the Kelly Strayhorn on the fifth one I had a specific audience member response that affected me in a certain way and I was like okay I actually need one more element for my mom back in the work I rethought about why that audience member said what they said and it was out of love for me, not love for my mom I was like okay I actually want to shift I wanted to do love for us and so I added a thing back into the play that we had taken out for really smart reasons and it was because of what was it so I kept changing it because of like I'm sure it's someday like a lot of plays about my mom and my boyfriend don't really know each other someday I hope they will really know each other and then I don't know what happens to the play and we have a new play Thank you for your advice in a group and say you're the lead artist of the idea and you come in with it how much do you hold on to that or how much do you let sway move for Liam because it appears you work in groups primarily how do you dismantle that power structure that is there when you are a lead artist It's so interesting because I feel like my relationship to the idea of hierarchy changes a lot right now I'm really interested in the way that hierarchy is present even if I don't want it to be and then sometimes I feel like the obdication of like the in trying to be like there's no hierarchy I can sometimes sometimes that can be a way of avoiding responsibility so that's an interesting thing that I feel like I've been wrestling with and it's been different project to project how much I've kept and how much I've released these queer history projects they've all been different like how much one of them was very much like alleged lesbian activities was not created by me it was created by a group of people of which I was one of them and then I was really explicitly co-directed it with somebody and also had multiple writers on the project and then there were two composers on the project and so it was really a co-created project that like a couple of people walked in with the initial instigation of which I was one even the first one and then we all shared the question and made it together and that was hard but really worth it and then this project I was like what happens if I hold on a little bit more and it's been really interesting because so I did the interviews myself as opposed to having like a whole team of people doing them and then like wrote a text after a number of devising sessions and after interviewing all of the performers about their connection to the material and having a lot of conversations with them then I like made a text and it's been really interesting to see how much the performers and everybody in the room still feels like a ton of ownership over the thing yeah so it's it's interesting to me to feel that push and pull of how much like if everybody's letting go, nobody's holding it I think is one of the things that I'm learning and so if I'm holding it tightly and saying like I have it securely but still saying like everybody else can hold it too then that creates an opportunity for us to like have many hands-on things and feel really dict and lifting it in a way that feels really dynamic in this process anyway and I feel like the ability for the work to change over time actually that you were talking about is one of the things that's been transformative and important in this project as well like we've been working on it for a while and I'm like still I'm still changing the text just little bits to fit more where the performers are at this moment in time in their bodies right now and we've been working it over a couple of years and so that it's grown with them and it's been really responsive to their current emotional context which even though it's like held by me and written by me makes it also held by them well, Priscilla, thanks so much for this conversation it's been so joyfully rigorous I wanted to ask about more about the way you engage with designers sort of in the process I'm curious more Liam and kind of hearing about what it's like to bring in designers early in a process and then kind of give some time to step back and then a deal you've spoken about coming from sort of the museum world or learning through design from folks in DJ music in that music world what's been your process of designing with collaborating with designers and their responses to your way of working so specifically when I think about what I learned in a museum that I'll never let go of is visual thinking strategies teaching artists nerd, nerd time it's friggin great and as simple as when folks look at a painting you ask what do you see and you ask them again what do you see that makes you say that so someone might look at a painting and say I see an ocean but what do you see that makes you see that I see blue, I see lines I see darker and lighter colors and really acknowledging that we, our brains are so amazing we jumped big ideas really fast and that it is valid to also go back and then I see blue actually I see purple, I'm going to see green and that there's a lot to be talked about just at that level and for teaching it's such a joy and that way everyone gets to their truth is always right you cannot take away the fact that I see blue it's mine but then we can talk about so why is that there what does it do for you emotionally how does your truth collide with the artist's truth with the context and it just lets a piece like symphony in the way we talk about it and so the museum talk about plays like that also and so when I'm working with designers it's like go back to the script what do we see so we see these two people fighting what tells us that they're fighting oh well this line says this and this line says this how do we really dig into the thing that's right on the page and then what do we need our design to do for us in that moment does the design and I learned that I think from one of our teachers one way they talked about design is like perpendicular and parallel right so there's parallel design where you're trying to support the thing that's happening and then there's perpendicular we're trying to vibrate against it or push against it or do a thing that's a secondary way to think about design so that is a question I have learned recently that like just genre and form is like so essential I didn't totally understand how essential it is for me as a director to understand the genres that are available in a play and then which one am I embracing and what am I doing to it and how am I holding it and pushing against it so if I'm looking at a murder mystery we've worked in a great way like how much of a clue are we evoking when we do that and how much of a clue are we like pushing against and that's not everyone in the room will know the signifiers but it gives us a language to speak from and I just took this like filmmaking for directors class but I've never done this before but I learned about lookbooks in the film world so different and I learned how much their films reference each other filmmakers are constantly in reference to one another and in the book they'll like you can see the storyboarding of a whole movie based on a ton of other movies this lighting is coming from this filmmaker and even sound design I've learned is that they'll use someone else's score as a score in place to like edit the movie too and then a sound designer gets that thing that's edited so then their sound designer of course is gonna be reflective of the thing it's referencing it's super referential and in early directing classes I had been taught to kind of go against that a lot of the images which are helpful and great but I did like straight up lookbook for my last show because it was Will Arbery's Plano which genre wise it's like all over the place like what is the genre here and so I just it was like I'm like it's Thelma and Louise Neat, book smart, Neat and looking at those images really helped the designers have some shared language and gave us a movie night excuse and those are some of the things I'm thinking about haha me too yeah it's so interesting because I feel like this actually relates to the last question a little bit for me I'm thinking about what I learned from Urban Bush Women which is like shared leadership is not no leadership it's like everybody being a leader in their thing and so really thinking about designers as the leading each in their own element really like knowing that they are experts has been really fun yeah and then inside of that expertise leaving a lot of space for iteration which means like time to be together and talking whether that's just me and a designer or the whole team in these like machine shows like really kind of discussing and throwing ideas at the wall and then getting folks in the room which is such a privilege like that's a thing that can't always happen but it's been really transformative to me even before this these past couple processes where I've done it really intentionally for a week to have designers in the room from an early point like it actually inside of the rehearsal room because then they can be like oh I want to try this thing and they can whisper to me or say it out loud depending on what the type of environment is and then we can just like mock it up you know like trying to figure out ways to like prototype something like there are lots of cameras in Dan's floor and early on we were working with like an app on phones where you can get like a camera feed, not just you can get a camera feed going to your computer from this API app on phones, you're cool and I don't know all the things about it, the media designer is way smarter than that, again expert, leader but we had like these phones kind of that we were just messing around with and putting in different positions and trying to think of how many cameras are there and how do they work yeah doing that sort of like helping it to get playful and if there's not time which I feel like a lot of times you don't have the privilege of time because we don't have the privilege of money but when there is enough time then you can fail and when there's space for failure then like also the really transformative things can happen so trying to really like take advantage of that in a spacious way when it's available to us for your responses and thank you for the questions we've had in the room, are there any zoom questions maybe we can have one more question in the 3D space before we close it out if anyone has a question or what are these major experiences happening you don't have dreams but there's no premier yet I can let you know follow follow these two on the social media stop their work it's great maybe there's a question back here I live and work here in Pittsburgh I had a pleasure sitting on the ground at Kelly's show record it was amazing but I do work at one of the bigger institutions I work at Pittsburgh Opera and I've loved how you're talking about the community I've not been here that long either I was just kind of curious what you would like to see from some of the bigger institutions in support of contemporary work devised work that kind of stuff I don't know my background is more in theater I'm learning about opera I don't know what kind of collaborations you could see or what kind of support an institution with more resources might be able to give I would be excited for these with super low stakes expectations in terms of the deliverable at the end that's the thing that I was talking about that's real time and privileged to fail and experiment and iterate still rigorous the mercury store in Brooklyn is an example of this that I'm really excited about and jazzed about they are they're a generative space for directors and they have these week to three week long residencies and they're the way the founder talks about I'm really like I like to limit it to one week residency because you can't finish you cannot finish an idea and that is specific to the objective of the project so that you're not trying because like directors are like in two weeks you're like okay I gotta get a show up so we're usually you give us two weeks and we'll have the opera done because we have to sometimes so that kind of what kind of generative is really do that and then also I'd be super excited for Pittsburgh theaters to think about how can we engage our Pittsburgh artists and our Pittsburgh audiences in more and more national conversations and in more and more conversations about form and criticality and some of that's like about connecting like theater audiences and Warhol audiences right there's like some intersection there and like we can talk through each other and learn things that's about connecting Stacy Pearl's audience to the Bellaise audience which is already happening in the coolest way and that's doing like really neat stuff and would love like if institutions could support can we take five emerging opera directors in Pittsburgh to see five other operas in five other places in Philly and New York wherever and just to know that every locality is going to have a way we do the thing and there are different things happening in different places like when I go to New York I'm like oh everyone got that like see the tube light this is a thing here and what can we do with the tube light and so those kinds of patterns are fun to witness and I think they're really important and I think Pittsburgh has a lot of amazing people here and I want us to be engaged with conversations all over the place I feel like being engaged in both like new play development and more institutional theater or producing instead of presenting theater or helping contemporary performance and ensemble theater it seems to me that the difference is actually the economy that goes around those things like sometimes we're doing literally the same exact processes but they're shaped a little bit by the economy that's around it so the resource of space that like theaters that have space have where they're used to making something in that space and the way that like that shapes the resource that they're bringing in is the people and that they're using a text and so they want that sort of a no anyway there's just like a different versus like you make a show and you bring it to different places with the same people you need less time but you don't have it you know it's not the text that's leading that so that's interesting to me that it's the economies around them that makes them different and not necessarily like the actual practice or the economies that shape the practice so anyway I say that to say it seems to me that they're not that different actually and that what has happened some historically is that theaters have like commissioned ensembles to like make a piece and then the ensemble does that piece there and I don't feel like I've seen it happening a lot recently but what I have seen is like solo performances starting to tour to larger theaters so that seems exciting so what I feel like could be exciting in Pittsburgh is if somebody would commission a piece now but I think that a residency smaller scale residencies are really exciting I guess I think there's something really interesting about being in a smaller place which New Orleans is, which Pittsburgh is which is that it kind of feels like a lot of times in order to get credibility you have to leave somewhere else and then it's credible and I feel like it's really transformative when arts leaders start looking in their own backyard and being like who's here who's doing something interesting and maybe they haven't shown something in New York but that doesn't actually mean that especially with the right support that they couldn't be making really amazing things that it's not just because somebody's coming from a different place doesn't always mean that they have more skill they could have had more access but what they can do to bring those leaders in that are right outside the back door that is something I feel like Kelly Strayward is really figuring out I really believe how to do that with us it's like there's so many different levels of entrance for artists at KST and supporting folks through time I've been with them as an audience member community leader renter for 12 years and then they are they are so much of why my work went too lost I have so much to do with it so how can institutions be critical of that and then support all those thank you so much for that question thank you both for your answers to that question to all of these questions my questions thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedules this week so participate in this talk and share your insight with everyone here I just wanted to put back out into the space that Liam's show is tonight at 9pm at Kelly Strayhorn which is at 5941 Pena and there are actually if you're going to the party later today tonight at the mattress factory there will be buses going from that party to Kelly Strayhorn so hop on the bus come on and enjoy the show and our deal show is tomorrow at the Andy Warhol Museum it's at 7pm and I will click back because I know that address is not at the top of my head since I don't work there 1-7 to Dusky Street so if you would like to or just tickets to both of these shows learn more about the work and also see both of these artists bios you can go on Kelly Strayhorn's website kelly-strayhorn.org and we have both of these shows listed under our upcoming events so we really hope that we'll see you there thank you both for your time your consideration for your vulnerability and your wisdom and I am really excited to see what you continue to do and contribute to your field and the free space under our table today thank you so much thank you