 This is a really, I know it looks very formal, but it's not. Feel free to get up and get more toast. Leave, do whatever you need to do. Laugh, cry, wail. My name is Madeline Oldham. I am the director of the Ground Floor here at Berkeley Rep, which is our center for the creation and development of new work. Thank you for being with us on this afternoon. I would like to say a huge thank you to people that I would like to actually read their names. The Ground Floor is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Artworks Time Warner Foundation, the Tarnassal Project, Bank of America, and individual supporters of Berkeley Rep's Create campaign. We want to say a huge thank you to them for making this all possible. And thank you to literary managers and dramaturgs of the Americas for being here in this audience today. We are broadcasting live on HowlRound right now, so you are all being watched by Who Knows Who. Hello, HowlRound. And okay, so I'm gonna sit down, and I also will say to our lovely group of artists up here, we don't have enough microphones individually for everybody, so we're gonna do a little passing thing, but if you could, whoever's near one could grab one and then share amongst the people next to you, that would be great. So we are here at the Ground Floor Summer Residency Lab, and this is a month-long program that happens every summer, usually in June, and we bring in artists from all over the country. We have a very robust application process, and these lovely people are the people who we have invited to come this summer and make work for us under this roof. There'll be a new crop of artists in two weeks, so these most people here are for two weeks. Jonathan, I think you're the only one-weeker up here. I think that's true. And then, so we kind of stagger and people come for varying lengths of time. So that gives you a little bit about who we are, why we're here, and I would love for everyone to just tell us who you are, perhaps a bit about where you come from and what project you are working on while you're here with us. Okay. When you say where we come from, do you mean like artistically? However you'd like to answer that question. Logistically. Hi, my name is Sylvan Oswald. Can you hear me okay? Okay, and I am here today from Los Angeles where I now live, but I more identify as an East Coast person. I grew up in Philadelphia and I lived for many, many years in New York. So the kind of world of theater in New York, mostly downtown theater is sort of where I feel like my community is. Although there's a lot of exciting things happening in LA now and I'm excited to be sort of, I wanted to stay on the ground floor of that, but I just, just too. I'm a bit cringy, sorry, but yeah. But yeah, so I feel like there's something starting up there that's really exciting. And I'm working here right now on a piece called Trainers, which is a theatrical essay about falling off a horse. And it's also sort of an adaptation of a Montaigne essay combined with some elements of his biography. In particular, his loss of his intellectual partner and how that spurred him to write like over 100 essays. And what else is it combined? Also weightlifting. Also pamphlets and calisthenics. So there's a lot of things in the mix. I'm working on it right now. I came with eight pages and today I have 12. So thank you, ground floor. Anyway, that's enough. Hi, hello everyone. My name is Christina Anderson. I'm here, oh, thank you. I got a whoo, nice, thank you, hi. I'm working on a commission with Berkeley Rep. It's a, I don't know what it is right now. I'm interested in water politics and conflicts over water. I've written a play about environmental racism. So I'm also looking at like environmental injustice and oppression. So the past couple of days I got here Tuesday, I've just been consuming a lot of research and material. Just like reading about different international conflicts over water, the scarcity of it. Also being fully aware of what's happening here in California. I was just down in LA for a week and I realized that I did not see a single cloud while I was there last week. So then I was like, oh, and I had to go back to, you know, grade school science and be like, what makes a cloud? And then it's all about water. So I've also been looking at Rene Magritte artwork because he does a lot of clouds in his artwork. So that's how I spent today. And I listened to an hour long, very lovely lecture. I think it was based in London. I can't think of a woman's name, but if she's watching, hello. I don't know if she's watching. What she talks about why Magritte matters in his artwork. So that's what I spent my morning doing. And I don't know what the subsequent days are gonna be, but I'm planning on starting pages on Monday. Good evening, everyone. I'm Jerome. I live in New York, but I'm originally from Virginia Beach and I'm working with James and Sean on a project called Museum, which has two main parts, one of which is right now just called tour, which is a musically scored guide to tour that you would take in an art museum. And that would be the idea is that we would tailor it to a certain gallery and a certain art museum. And then the second half is lecture, which is what we're mainly working on here, which is a musically scored art lecture and personal essay and musical composition on one. And I'm very happy to be here. I'm James Monaco, one half of James and Jerome. And I'm here working with Jerome on the same project with Sean. I'm from New York, I have nothing else to say. Oh, also from Virginia Beach, Virginia, Jerome and I grew up down the road from each other. Aw. Hi, I'm Sean. I'm working on Museum with James and Jerome. I'm working on the projections and media elements of it and kind of figuring out with them how to integrate that into the show and how it kind of affects pacing and how I think all three elements, music, text and the video go together in a cohesive and organic way. I think that's it. Oh, I'm from New York. Hi, I'm Jonathan Spector. I'm from the DC area originally, but now based here in the Bay Area. And I'm working on a play about decision-making heuristics and about sort of all of these concepts that I feel like you hear talked a lot, talked about more especially in context of the election, like motivated reasoning and loss aversion and implicit bias. And they all sort of come out of the research of a couple of psychologists. And a lot of this stuff sort of comes down to sort of what we tend to make cognitive errors about things based on kind of the thing that makes the easier story to tell, even though that story is often not true. And so that leads us to make a lot of mistakes about a lot of things. And then the other thing I'm thinking about right now is that we, as part of this is also that we're very bad at judging our own ability to predict things. And we live, we're kind of in this moment that's kind of like epistemic black hole right now. Where I feel like we, like our village didn't know what's going to happen next in the world is far worse than it normally is. And then I feel like that, I don't know, that is paralyzing in a way. So trying to, I had no pages when I show up and now I have 10, maybe of which five are, you know, I will show to anyone. What do I do? Sorry, Kate. Hi, I'm Lila Neugebauer. I'm a director, I'm from and live in New York. I'm here working with Sarah DeLapp and Max Posner on separate plays that each of them are writing, which I'll let them tell you about. They're both in very early stages of that writing if that feels accurate. So I'm here mostly in a dramaturgical capacity and in a sounding board capacity and a talking and listening and hanging out capacity. Hi, I'm Kate. I'm Kate Ryan. I live in the Bay Area. I've been here for about six years and before that I lived in New York for a long time, doing a lot of new play work and mainly in the downtown kind of sphere. And I'm here working on a play that takes place in the Bay Area and is kind of about the political bubble that we live in here and what it would be like if we, particularly around focusing on a group of women in the Bay Area who might identify as progressive, what might happen if somebody comes into that group who has really different core beliefs about gender and politics, how that encounter might go and what's kind of possible in terms of political discussions today. And I'm working with Lisa Steinler and C-Space on this project as well. My name's Lisa Steinler, I'm working with Kate. A couple of things just kind of to tell a little bit about the process is that we've been meeting for the past couple of years with women, an eclectic group of women that we bring together for a couple of hours and have prompts and questions that we ask them and from that kind of culling out certain information that will probably frame Kate's process and we had an incredibly wonderful meeting today with a group of women who are here as fellows and who work at Berkeley Rep, so it was a really inspiring conversation that we had. And that's kind of that and we'll hand it over. I'm Sarah DeLapp and I'm from New York but I'm originally from Reno, Nevada and I came here to work on a play that I've since abandoned on day three. And I'm now working on a new project that's a little too early in its stage of development to talk about publicly at such a forum as this one that I've found myself in. So I'll just leave it at that. I'm Max Posner and I'm working towards a play. It feels like working on a play, it's too slippery at this point to maybe know exactly what the play itself is but it's about having a chronic illness and the process of diagnosis and also the sort of nonsensical symptoms that can come with that and also the nonsensical healthcare system that we find ourselves in. And I think it's sort of trying to look at that system in our sort of Western medicine but also reaching out into more Eastern medicine and the different ways that disease is really thought about just in that the Western medicine approach is to find the roots of the thing it's all about causation and the Eastern approach is much more about sort of understanding a system and not worrying about what started it. So I guess I'm sort of dealing with those concepts and in some ways trying to deal with those concepts formally in addition to the play literally being about that. So yeah, but truly to be determined. I'm Martina Mayok, I am born in Poland I grew up in Jersey and Chicago and I'm coming from New York. I'm working on a play called Queens that I came with 150 pages and learned that that's half the play. So in like a week and a half I'll have the other 150, I hope. And it's a play about seven immigrant women in Queens from different places from and it follows them from the year 2001 to present day. I think it is about the relationship that you have with your family back home and what surrogate families you tend to make here when you have to go through the process of immigration, a personal play and they're all low income working class women. So and it's funny, I swear. Bye. My name's Ken Powers. I live in Los Angeles, I'm originally from New York but I've been in LA 15 years now so that makes me an Angelina and I'm here working on a play called The Two Reds. It's, I guess it's, I keep on trying to avoid history plays but I'm so drawn into history and it's kind of a prequel to another play that I wrote. I had a draft when I came in here that was about 90 pages. I think the first couple of days here I got rid of about 30 pages of that draft because there were things that weren't working in it. The play is set in 1943 in Harlem and it's about the friendship between Detroit and Chicago Red who would become Malcolm X and Red Fox. They were dishwashers together in Cotton Club Harlem but it's kind of like seeing the prism of segregation, segregated clubs coming down pre-civil rights so it's not as much about them as it is about this environment. History plays, there's something about the 1940s that the more I read about it I always kind of viewed it as almost like science fiction. This idea that you could work in an establishment that you couldn't visit because of your race and there were all these rules that people never really thought about because that's just the way it was and the civil rights era wasn't gonna be happening for a few decades so I kind of wanted to explore what it was like for these guys to live in this environment and it's been, like I said, I had a draft that really, really wasn't working and I couldn't figure out why and I've only been here a couple of days but on day two I kind of cracked it open and figured out what was wrong with the piece so at this point I'm just trying to type as fast as I can so that I can get to the end of the draft while I'm still here. I'm pretty slow, I'm like 38 words a minute and I kind of cramp up every 45 minutes or so so I'm pretty much just sitting in an office with the door closed, writing as much as I can. Awesome, this moment in our summer lab always makes me very happy listening to all of these brains next to each other it is so delightful and I wanna, oh I wanna just take a moment and say hi to Mayen back there. Mayen Wong is Sylvan's director and co-collaborator in this adventure and was going to sit here but now I'm going to move back over so there's not an awkward empty chair. So I wanna ask everybody, some of you have sort of touched on this already but is what you, so everybody's been here they arrived Monday, started working on Tuesday and it is now Friday. Is what you have been doing what you thought you would be doing? I say yes. Is it important that I elaborate on that? It is desired. Great, I can fulfill your desire. Yeah, so basically this project was mainly came from the lecture portion came from these videos that Jerome made while he was on a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil though they have no direct connection to Brazil but there are these series of art lectures that Jerome made in video form kind of through a PowerPoint presentation Jerome's a remarkable electronic and acoustic music composer so with lots of layers of music and himself kind of making these art lectures that he sent to me and this residency has kind of been about us pulling them apart with a media designer and with the musical equipment and Jerome performing just to figure out how all of these pieces that were originally made to be on a computer screen that I watched by myself and he watched by himself how those exist in a room and that's what we've been doing is I think just the three of us going through it real slowly tweaking knobs and adjusting timing and Jerome tackling language and so yes, it is what I thought we would be doing and I'm so pleased that we are. It's not as much for me because I knew when I applied I'm not used to residencies that are structured quite this way. You guys said that there's no real obligation for us to present anything coming in but I didn't really believe that. So I kind of had put this pressure on myself that like, all right, no matter what I'm doing I'm gonna have to stop and prepare to do a reading to share what I'm working on with people but I think it was after kind of finding out that Christina was sitting in the office doing research and reading books I was like, oh, I really don't have to do it. So because the time, I don't know, you are working. I am working. No, I know. I'm working. But as everyone already knows to prepare for a reading is can take days, a few days to a week. And so I realized that again, I just needed to get this writing done. So I could spend that time. I could either spend like stop and my play has a cast of six people and try to figure out where we could find actors and then have the actors read it and go like, oh, this is wrong and go through all the stress of preparing a reading or I could just spend all that time working on the script and share it with the staff members here and just try to get some notes before the end. And that ended up being, I think so far, it's proving to be a much better use of my time because that pressure just like suddenly came off of me because I wasn't sleeping all the first couple of nights because I was thinking, when am I gonna do the reading? When am I gonna, when do I need to start the process? What pages? Is it gonna be a scene? Am I gonna let him do the whole play? Oh my God, how long is it play? Is there an intermission? Like you just go through, you know? So I was kind of working myself into a little bit of a panic. So last night, I spoke to Madeline yesterday and last night I didn't take a Xanax. So obviously I'm a lot calmer. My work here is done. I'm just gonna echo that, same exact thing. Also inspired by Christina when she came in. No, it was a good thing. It's a good thing. No, it was good because I also did not believe you when you said we wouldn't because we were like, yeah, but then some donors are gonna come and like you want us to do something, right? But yeah, it's so much of a better use of time to just actually work on the thing than have to worry about the presentation. And Christina, it's good, you're a good inspiration. I'm gonna be getting so much more work. So thank you so much. Everything the same except no Xanax. Why? Yeah, why exactly? I'm just gonna say right here that thank you for such lovely illustrations of why we do this this way. And I think there are a lot of programs who require some sort of sharing at the end for good reasons. And it was important to us that people didn't have to have that kind of pressure if their play wasn't ready for that kind of pressure. And plays at some point in their process have to become ready for that kind of pressure. And when it is, it's good pressure, audience comes, things are learned and it's awesome. And some of that will happen during this month, but not for everybody. And we wanted to make sure we were just meeting people where they are. So thank you for illustrating that so beautifully. Other people just, you know, is what you've ended up doing, what you expected to be doing. Well, actually, did you say the thing about how you don't need scripts for applications? Did you already say that? I feel like that's important, right? Because I mean, in some ways, I mean, Madeline was sort of one of your things about introducing the ground floor is that the ground floor accepts projects in an idea stage. And they don't require there to be a script. So that's why you also get some of us being like five pages. You know, because we were able, we had the freedom. I think that's one of the beautiful things about this lab is that it's probably the only one I even know of where you can show up and be like, I have a seed. You know, and this question of the kind of the sausage machine that the play goes through over time in the whole business of this industry. You know, it's like strange island outside of that. So in fact, we are living on a peninsula over at the Marina, which is really cool, actually really love staying there because I feel distant, but like from city life. But yeah, I came here expecting, I actually did have a task of made myself the task of doing a presentation, partly because I did want to light that fire under myself, although I am permitted by myself to cancel it at any time. But I wanted to do it partly because actually I was originally going to be working with a performer. So there was a shift in that. And when my performer schedule became complicated and made the money available, I decided that I would read it because I'm writing about Montaigne, I'm writing about this writer, and said that it might be perhaps interesting, and I'm working with the essay form, that it might be interesting to make myself vulnerable in that way. So there's also a lot of physical culture aspects in my piece. So I actually thought I'd be, Mayen would be making me do push-ups all the time. Okay, when the designer comes. So I'm splitting it up, I have like this week of sort of like conversations and generating, and then my designer is coming next week to join the conversation and we're gonna make a little something. So in some ways it's what I expect to be doing and in other ways it's a little bit of an adaptation from the original idea. I was gonna say to segue that as a designer we rarely get to come to these residencies and even be involved this early in the creative process. So for me this was when Jerome and James approached me initially about this show. I was very excited and we met and we chatted and I think we were all kind of on the same wavelength about what we wanted to explore and how we wanted to approach this collaboration. So I would say that this has been a very rewarding experience so far and I feel like if given the opportunity it would be I think really beneficial to have more designers involved. I don't think in every project, but definitely having I think people that think about the show the same way you do but just a different facet of it can bring about interesting surprises and discoveries and I think would really help kind of give it more breadth. Yeah and on that same note I think I was here a couple of years ago working on a project and in the room we had a sound designer actually. So what I think is amazing about this program is that they ask what are your needs and we're gonna do everything we can to fulfill them and having the ability to ask for those things when I think many of us are used to working in a room of scarcity and to have that kind of abundant platter brought to us is just an incredible gift and also to be surrounded by other people who are so ignited in the moment of creation is kind of it just gets into your kind of skin cells and it's an incredible opportunity and it's an incredible program that you've created. Thanks Lisa. And I'll just say too that for me I kind of didn't have clear expectations because I felt like I wanted to look at something that I didn't have time or space to really even kind of approach in my day to day life and so I just kind of knew that there was this pocket of time that I would and I just sort of kept throwing different thoughts in this sort of future thing and in a way I feel like I'm just kind of opening that up here because it seems like something that I couldn't quite have the just time and kind of clarity to do that prior to this. So yes and no. And I feel very similarly where I had this like notes document for a really long time where I just throw tons of stuff for this project in there and I'm opening it up now and I'm like what do we have here and when do I have to start actually writing it? But it's been really great to know that was coming. I feel like it's mostly like what I expect that I went into was just saying to Sarah like I'm aware enough of my process that I know I need to kind of stew in a cocktail of boredom and shame long enough to start writing but you all sort of like repress the actual memory of how painful it is and when you remember working on a first draft it feels much more straightforward. But I feel like I'm kind of like in a college dorm here like I'm writing a term paper like I go off into my room in the corner and then wanna you know wander out into the hall and get coffee and have snacks and chat with people and then you sort of go back in for more. For me I think like Max I didn't have a lot of expectations before I came. I was not expecting to be surrounded by so much love and time and food and like intelligence and openness and that has really been very it set me at such ease and I feel just like I'm in like a bubble floating around thinking and like I can actually think and I haven't been on a subway in six days which also helps a lot. So I was simply not expecting there it just to be such a nurturing environment. Once again you have all sort of touched on something that is so gratifying to hear because when we started the program we asked people okay what do you want? What do you need? And the answer resoundingly was time and space and I'm seeing lots of nodding here and that is something that is not actually that hard to provide for people and so we really just took that and ran with it and really wanted to make a space where people had time to let their imagination run in ways that when you're living your everyday life you don't so thank you again. You all are wonderful spokespeople. So I'm curious to know just a show of hands it does anybody up here has anyone had a moment so far this week where you've been stuck or felt stuck? All right. And can you talk to us a little bit about that moment and what you have done to unstick yourself or if you still feel stuck? I think I always feel stuck but I think for me it's about it feels very violent to make decisions and I feel like there's something about I mean obviously we all have to make decisions to write a play but I've made decisions too early before and so there's something about trying to really pay attention to when the decision sort of presents itself and is there and trying to do work that is somehow bringing you closer to that space but it's very frustrating I think and until you make a decision you are stuck and then once you make one you usually have to make another and so for me at this point in a process it's not unusual to feel kind of lost but so yes I feel that. But it's really nice to have time to actually feel that because I feel like it's a really ugly bad feeling and when you're walking around in your life you can kind of replace it with just like other things you have to do or seeing a friend or whatever and you actually don't have to kind of marinate in it for the amount of time that it takes to get to the other side. Martina I saw you nodding. Thank you. Actually violence is the same word that I think about with making a decision especially like halfway through the play because until a half of a play when you give it to somebody to look at they have already written the most perfect, beautiful, fantastic play in their brain and it sucks to change that when you actually write the rest of it so there is a pressure and an anxiety about the violence of making a decision that it's about this when we're going in this direction and oh no what if along the way halfway through that we realize it's the wrong one and we're gonna have to start all over again and will there be enough time because it's always time is always limited it's very aware of that. I think in New York there's something about the pace of life and or just your everyday life that sometimes when I'm writing a play I'm like okay eight is the fastest route to just get to the end which it's not always the most poetic and truthful you're just trying to get to the end of it and so this is what that sort of is something that happened with the play it's I thought it was two thirds done I realized it's halfway done more needs to be written and then because it's going from it's going through 17 years of history and it's nonlinear like yesterday I think I realized that I'm doing it backwards and I flipped the time times around and that for some reason flipping the time around cracked open more possibility for me for what the rest of the play could be and so I've been inside someone's office because this is my rehearsal room this giant amazing one is where I saw a solitary writer sits in this huge room that is asking me to make something great to fill it and have been moving forward so it's been great. It is very interesting that people have resistance to talking about their stuckness because there were more hands than people have spoken. I've already talked about the boredom and shame but I also a big proponent of the program freedom that turns off the internet on your computer and so I will play with different increments of time that I will sort of one day set it for four hours trying to have a sort of whole morning or then today I was just setting it for increments of like 20 minutes and just saying so you can sort of like hold your breath for that long and just like try and write before you can catch up with yourself for that amount of time and I feel like I keep changing it up I can kind of throw myself off balance enough to get past something. Well I came here thinking I would write one thing and have quickly realized that I wanted to write something else all together so I have been feeling very stuck but I think there's also something about being here in the ground floor and the sort of radical degree of agency I feel as an artist inside of this program that is encouraging me to feel like that being stuck is necessary and a really important part of the process and something that I have this time to work through for the next two weeks until I find whatever it is or find the reason that I am stuck and perhaps I'm supposed to be stuck right now and hopefully we'll move past that. I'm a little stuck because my play has taken me to a place that I know nothing about so I'm a little like uh-oh like I'm now I'm writing about all these like political resistance groups and I'm just like now you really have to get into it you know and it's like you know you can walk around avoiding that so you know certain areas you're like oh I'll research that when it's time to research that and now it's sort of knocking on the door and I'm like shit I guess I gotta go to the library there's something like that yeah so I'm just hitting some places where I'm having a hard time proceeding like I can write the love story on and on and on but I can't root it in the world without more knowledge of these dynamics of these kinds of groups or I mean I'm making a sort of fictional civil war futuristic civil second civil war thing so I'm like what is that I don't have the background for that so I'm having to kind of like hustle to like scavenge right now so I'm curious about for those of you who are working with collaborators it's really early in most of your processes if not all of them and how did you know you wanted to work with somebody instead of alone and conversely for those of you who are writing alone in an office how did you know you needed just time by yourself and you know is this sort of the natural rhythm of how you work or is it project to project so the play that Kate and I are working on together is a commission from C-Space which is where I work I don't know if this is on but and the way we framed it here when we said this is what we want is we're here this week and Kate's primarily writing and we just had our women's group conversation today and then we get two weeks off and then we get to come back for a week and so during that two weeks Kate's gonna go right we've got a lot of material we've gathered over the last couple of years and she's continuing to do research so we're taking that time and then we'll come back here with actors on the fourth week or our second week and start reading some of the work at that point just to be transparent you're very lovely and generous to say that but in my initial conversation with Kate that came out of a space issue so I wanna be totally upfront so that was... So it worked. Thank you. See what comes from mistakes. Well and what's great about it is you know we as a program try and be as flexible and nimble and responsive as we can possibly be but that works both ways and everybody up here has been really awesome and flexible about working with us in return and so when I talked with Kate we were talking about a sort of schedule that would work and I couldn't find two weeks together and then Kate said well yeah a week and then a break and then a week sounds great and I was like great that worked out well so... I actually I have to say I like constraints and I think that having this kind of so we have a huge space this week like almost as big as this that's really beautiful and I am spending a couple of days just writing in there and that's kind of amazing and bringing you know framing the piece from in a different way than I would be if I were in a small office which we'll be in in week four yeah I can like imagine and then we're having yeah and then we're having some people come in for part of it too but I just I want to say I really do like that I was you know we have a huge space the first week I have two weeks off we have actors a couple of days a second week and that's a lot of constraints and I have to really work within that and it's super exciting to me and then if I had two weeks just to kind of work on this I would have a lot maybe more anxiety in some ways so thank you what I think is interesting is I'm assuming this is the case for everyone who's a playwright but the first time the first time you have a produced play it's usually something that no one asked you for it's just an idea that you had that you were passionate about and if that play does well I didn't realize how long it could take before you actually have time to just work on an idea you have and that's something that is a commitment that someone has either commissioned you for or I mean in my case I live in Los Angeles and there might be some exceptions but pretty much every playwright I know is either teaching or writing for Hollywood and I don't know a single exception so it's a very your responsibilities I'm shocked by how much I just needed quiet and I mean like real quiet like no meetings, no generals no agents calling I'm a single dad my 13 year old son is like gone and he became like a teenager like that you know what I mean and it's just the constant distractions and I realized a couple of days into it that the first two days I was in the office I left the door open because I never closed doors and it took like day three when I said oh I can actually close this door no one's gonna get pissed so I like closed the door and for the first time just like turned on my music and opened the window and it's a quiet moment that I had to work on my own thing that I haven't had for about four years so again, if you're a playwright it's such a strange thing it's this thing where it starts off with you just having passion about an idea and if anyone sees any promise in you the next thing you know you've got commitment after commitment after commitment and people tell you you have a year you have two years to write this but it's amazing how much that piles up and how quickly you can find yourself unable to make any time just like oh I found out this interesting fact what I'd love to write a play about that and it's just never gonna happen and then with the Hollywood element of it depending on how much you decide to work in that business that can make it so that you can never write another play again I mean I'm personally committed like I love theater so much that I'm in a situation where I won't work on I have to spend six months of the year just working on my theater stuff which means I have to do some pretty fantastic budgeting to make my year work since I'm only working on a show for six months at a time but there's constant responsibility and it's just been less than a week and I found myself just kind of starting my morning going I don't have to call anyone back I don't have to respond to anyone's emails and I'm not stuck because within 48 hours this thing that had been maddening and frustrating me for the past year just kind of broke right open Yeah So the thing I want to say is you know at the ground floor I think it was the first year yeah for the food project and how many writers was it? It was like 17, 18 or something It was 17 other playwrights and that whole week was a really brilliantly curated research event where we talked to all these different food people and went to an organic strawberry farm and went to an organic farm we had awesome food that was heavily curated for research so it was like a great experience so that being said you know we had a lot of like awesome things happening and we come back to this very room and sit in a huge circle and talk about it so the thing that's tricky with this time is that I'm reading a lot of heavy stuff that's making me very terrified and scared and angry and I have no one to talk to about it other than the poor soul to sit across from me at dinner every evening so you know even in these few days I'm just you know on the phone with my partner like screaming about some documentary I saw and how scared and terrified I am so that's the difference between yeah I guess like being alone in this process and also like if I were to have a collaborator here sort of having conversations about all that research on my end James and I have been working together as long as we've been friends since 2007 so in some ways it's like an obvious choice that I would work with him on this project and the project was conceived together our friend and our friend friend and one of the two one of the two co-directors on the project our friend Rachel in back in New York she she came with us to an exhibit at the MoMA about Matisse and we were just like wandering it through her and just hanging out and she said like we have she was like this is a show right here just you two are so fun to walk through an art exhibit with and so when Rachel says something we just follow but then like two months later I left for Brazil and I was there for nine months alone and so lecture was it was born in Solitude as James said that I would make these videos in Brazil and send them to him and so it was made in like intense solitude and the lecture is largely it's largely about it's it's largely largely about my stutter and the fact that in foreign languages it's more intense so Brazil is like really intense and so lectures like a lot about that but I knew that James and I had this seed planted that's still been said that we had this art museum product so I was like making kind of a personal essay about stuttering and speech in general and simultaneously from the other end playing with art museum images and the Met in New York the art museum is a key site and James and my friendship were there all the time and so and but there's no Met in Brazil and so I was on the website a lot just like walking down like the same hallway as we would go down so sorry sorry but not like that not in like a sad way in a happy way in a happy way but so then I would start making images and like start to make these slideshows but all I have to say is that the piece was born in solitude and the stutter is like is the most internal aspect of myself but it's also the most external because I have to speak in order to move through the world so the dialogue from the beginning between James and I across many miles was important from the start so and there's a tension at all times in there's a tension in the fact that for me it was made in a very in one place and being alone and now and now we are together and work on it and then Sean we early on on the piece we realized that the music and the writing was so specific but as James said I was just using PowerPoint to make the the visual side of it and so we felt that Sean and Rachel once again said that we needed to get someone who could make the that side of the project as specific and fluent as a word you said the other day as the music and the text and Sean has done that in a astounding way so I want to just respect everyone's time and know that we're approaching the time we said we would end we did start a little bit late and normally we open it up for questions so I think if you have to leave please feel free to do that but does anyone have a burning question that they would like to ask this beautiful group of people partially process based sounds like when you apply it's a good question for the how-round people I will do my best to paraphrase but the question was about finding your collaborators and do you apply with your collaborators already in mind and name them or does Ground Floor as a program help you find your collaborators and if so how does that work I think that me and I are working together for the first time I think when I had the thing where my actor couldn't make it Madeline was like I know this person I was like yay but I think I actually don't want to have a translation moment with a new person totally like more than one new person and so I felt like one new person was about all I could handle and I think that if we had asked for some support around the building of the relationship they would have provided it but I think we're doing good we like each other but also we had known each other for many many years so it's been sort of like I've been curious about knowing you better working with you for many years so it sort of feels like it's sort of clicking in and I will say interestingly I think most of the people here either applied with their collaborator but next session in the second two weeks of the program we had a bunch of people who said I'd like a director I don't know who that person is and so we would do a little conversation matchmaking about what that person was looking for and reach out and make some phone calls and it usually ends up being a sort of nice mind meld of who we know and like and who that person knows it I mean it always starts with the artist so if they have somebody in mind if they don't then we help Other questions? Anyone? Yes That's a great question so the question is and please tell me if I'm not getting this right are there things you know everybody has sort of their habits that they fall into and are there things that you have picked up here or learned during your time here that you will take back with you that are a little bit different than the way you normally do things but I don't think I'd be able to we're here from ten to six and dinner is made which is a big help and the travel time not being on the train is really helpful but I'm not answering my emails at all so when I'm done it's going to be rough I'm just going to have to sit for three days and answer the emails and have a relationship with my husband things like that I'm realizing it could be easier to kind of set up a nine to five or things like that where you went to a space if you rented a space or if a theater would give you a space to do the same kind of work but I think all these other things going to the general meetings doing all that sort of stuff perhaps you have another project that's in a different state of development like in production or whatever that it's hard to juggle and so this is especially sacred opportunity to get to just be away I wish I could change to bring that but I don't know if it's possible I have something that I think I hope to bring back which is simply I think when I make work in my day to day life in New York part of what here being able to trust that I don't have to finish the project and make it perfect but also having an enormous amount of time which I feel it's usually either or either I have tons of time on working on it because I'm racing to the finish or I have little bits of time because it's early a little bit different than what a lot of people have said about having so much time to kind of be free and explore many things it's given me time or us time I think to really just zoom in on like three minutes of the show and just make it precise as hell and not worry about the rest of the show but do this like incredible detail work on certain moments that I normally would never do and I'm realizing it's so much better and I learned things about the whole so what I hope to take back is a trust that it is often worth it to spend a week on three minutes or two weeks on a page sometimes and that sometimes you can solve the whole play from that okay we have time for one last question and we will go right here so yeah that's a great question so the question is is there a way to follow people after they leave here how do we know what happens to things beyond life at the ground floor that is a thing that I to be perfectly honest wish we were better at it's been I feel like the ground floor is so just the spirit of openness and hello wonderful that like process is not a thing that like I mean you know we're great with like shuttles and dinner like that process is good but once you sort of expand beyond that it's a little sort of and you know it's but it's it's very much you know I will tell you all again because I'm telling you now but when you leave here the hope is that this is not the end of the relationship you know the hope is that we keep in communication that we keep in contact that we can be a resource for you in the future of your work and whether it's this particular project or something else and so it's pretty porous in terms of what that looks like we don't have any sort of official tracking of it or you know we've actually thought about you know can we do this on a website can we do this it is something that people can access and see and we've had people ask about it before and it's sort of on the wish list for the future we would love to do something like that and we just haven't quite developed the capacity to do that yet so that's a vague answer for you but it is a real one so I want to say hold your applause till the end please but I want to say a huge thank you to these wonderful artists for giving your time and talking with us a big thank you to everybody who's here today and for LMDA people if you are interested in a tour of kind of where we are and what we're doing let's meet over when you came in there was sort of a couchy area over there and let's meet let's gather there in about five minutes and we can wander around the building for a little bit now we can applaud thank you everyone so much