 Okay, good morning. We are going to start. Hello. Welcome to our early first of the day session. My name is Christine Young. I use She, Her, Hers pronouns, and I'm an associate professor at the University of San Francisco and a freelance director and dramaturg specializing in new plays about the social issues affecting women's lives. My name is Natalie Green. I use She, Her, Hers pronouns. I also teach at the University of San Francisco as an adjunct in the dance program, which is a part of the Department of Performing Arts and Social Justice. Outside of USF, I am the artistic director of a San Francisco-based device theater ensemble Mug One Bin. And we had the opportunity to collaborate on two shows, a device ensemble created pieces of theater in the same year. And that's part of why we're here because we finished that whirlwind year and thought, we learned some things. Let's share those. Great. So what we're going to share with you today is a kind of structural model that we sort of invented in our own minds that came from working on these two shows back to back. They had many similarities. They had many differences. Both were really successful in two ways. One, because they allowed the artistic ensemble members to have a high degree of artistic decision-making for quite a long time throughout the process. And then also they were both really aesthetically strong works that had coherence, legibility and vitality on stage. So we were sort of struck by that. How do we sort of magically balance our process and product goals in these two projects? So we're going to share some of the discoveries we made with you. And we want to also claim that this model is a feminist directing model or really a model of feminist directing and feminist dramaturgy. And we'll tell you more about how we define those terms. So we all know that it's a balancing act. I think probably everyone at this conference understands multiple ways that what we do is a balancing act. And a challenge that we've witnessed and that we've faced is that some collaborations that emphasize the inclusion of multiple voices and viewpoints may result in a performance product that seems like everybody got a turn and everybody's ideas are on stage and maybe it's way too long or maybe the audience feels excluded or doesn't understand what's going on. And we want to find practices that take that part out of ensemble theater and still allow us to end with a cohesive final product. The approach that we're proposing decentralizes decision making, prioritizes consent, supports collaborators as they navigate creative differences. It's a really holistic collaborative approach while at the same time, advocating for the experience of the audience, unifying ideas and elements into a single cohesive legible quality piece of theater. And those processes that we've developed over the course of two shows is what we're going to share with you today. And we also want to talk about why does this matter. So we imagine that you like us are attracted to making ensemble theater because we have some objections to the conventional power structures that are embedded in traditional theater-making practices. And so we sort of consciously know that but a question that we pose to ourselves is how do we unconsciously or even consciously reproduce those hierarchical power structures in our processes because of fear, because of lack of time, because there's always sort of a rock and a hard place and we fall back into the ways that we were trained instead of being able to embrace and embody our more conscious ideals. So part of the reason we think it's important to kind of theorize about the structure of our processes is how we make our work is really key in terms of expressing our social justice values and also creating access for diverse artistic voices. So I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with various versions of this cartoon where, oh, I think this fell away. So the cartoon shows three children trying to look at a baseball game. And this cartoon is used to explain the difference between equity and equality. So in the cartoon, in the first panel, you see their three kids and they all have exactly the same support, this one cube box. And some kids can see the baseball game really well and others can't see it at all. In the second panel, so that's an example of equality, right? We give everybody equal treatment, equal support. And the second panel shows three kids who have what we would describe as equitable distribution of resources. They have the resources they need to allow them to access the baseball game. And then, and so that's an example of the idea that equity is maybe a more useful concept than equality because equity really evens the playing field for everyone. The third panel, you can see the fence is gone. And so the third panel is also a way to think about the structural systemic barriers that some groups face to being able to access baseball or any other kind of activity. And I think this is really interesting. It's sort of, for me, it maps into a lot of interesting concepts that come from the realm of universal design, which is that we can design our processes so that they're actually useful for all kinds of people. Excuse me? Oh, thank you very much for the tech support. Okay, so that's equity as a core concept in the processes and structures we're going to describe to you. So next we want to tell you just a little bit about who we are so you know where we're coming from. I'm an Arizona native. I'm so excited to be here. I've been based in the Bay Area for the past 15 years, but I'm a fifth generation Tucsonan. I was a working child actor in Tucson in the 80s and came to ASU, studied dance with a minor in Spanish and a lot of sketch comedy mixed in somehow. When I went to the Bay Area, it was to do dance theater and I worked quite a bit in many dance companies as a theater person in the dance world. Discovered devising and devised theater became a dance person in the theater world. With Mugwumpin, I've been able to choreograph, teach, perform, collaborate, direct and two years ago when the founder stepped away, I became the artistic director. Mugwumpin has been a home and a family and so many things and I'm really happy just to be able to stand on this stage where I went to college and share with you what I've been doing in the years since then. It's really a pleasure and I'd love to connect with Arizona artists in the room because what I've been reflecting on the last few days is that I don't have new friends in Arizona that I didn't grow up with and I've made my art life in California so I'm really happy to meet so many people here. Thanks. Okay and I am an educator and a director and I trained as a director. I started directing in high school and went to an MFA program for new prolet direction at the University of Iowa. So I learned to direct text-based works, primarily new plays, collaborate with playwrights, but then I also kind of always had the secret devising life and even before I knew what that was, I was sort of making things from scratch and usually because I wanted to make feminist work and I couldn't find content that I wanted to put on stage so I would sort of direct a lot of work with playwrights and then I would sort of go off in the corner and try to figure out how to make my own things. I've been teaching at the University of San Francisco for about 10 years in the Performing Arts and Social Justice program and that has also been a space where I really developed my interests and skills as the divisor because we have a really eclectic population, a lot of first generation college students, a lot of women and even though we are the Performing Arts and Social Justice program, we weren't creating enough opportunities for all of our students to be on stage and so I turned to devising as a way to not only deal with content that was relevant and meaningful specifically to our campus but also as a way to work with the talent that I had instead of trying to cram them into the container of an existing work. Okay and so now we're going to define our terms for you. So what do we mean when we say dramaturgy? We mean it in a pretty expansive way. We think of dramaturgy as the act of meaning making and we recognize that in a theatrical process there are a lot of people doing dramaturgy all throughout the process. Sometimes one of them is actually called the dramaturg, sometimes the director is doing a lot of dramaturgy, sometimes the ensemble creators are doing a lot of dramaturgy but especially when you're creating devised work and you have just tons of source material and tons of generated material you need people to help sift through that to lay structures and meanings on top of it and to think through how to present that in a coherent way for an audience. I also by dramaturgy I mean effective storytelling. As a director I train students in theatrical composition and I ask them to think about what makes a compelling minute on stage and identify three values, legibility, how clearly an artistic choice is drawn on stage, is expressed, vitality, how much energy or life force a moment has on stage and then coherence, how the moment connects to the moment before it and the moment after. And that doesn't have to be in a narrative way, it can be in a rhythmic way or in an energetic way but in order for an audience to have a coherent experience that they can make meaning out of there has to be care and attention to how the moments are sequenced, how they're part of some kind of whole. And then finally I think a really important role for a dramaturg, a person who's called dramaturg or for any person who can play this role in a process is to be an advocate for the audience, to hold the audience perspective and point of view as you go through a process so that that doesn't get lost. We talk about the idea that the performers have the micro view of the work and the directors or the people who are you know the off stage who are creators have the macro view but we also need to remember the audience point of view because the audience members don't have the privilege of being in the process with us, they don't have access to our source material, they only have one time-based experience of the work and so we always always have to keep that perspective present in the process. So we consider this dramaturgy three-dimensional for a few different reasons, we nerd it out in a meeting all the ways it could be three-dimensional but the one we'd like to share with you today is the three dimensions in this image, the flat plane being the artistic agency who gets to make the decisions and that is often influx in relation to time and as Christine said we also need to consider the audience experience. So these are the the three dimensions that we're proposing today that are in conversation with each other that impact and affect each other and shift and navigate and negotiate with each other throughout a creative process. I think that most of us have the most experience with time because we have been situating ourselves in relation to time for most of our lives, we're used to looking at schedules or making schedules, many of us in this room have the experience of building a rehearsal schedule where we navigate people's availability and the resources and all kinds of other factors so we're not going to talk that much about navigating the the dimension of time because we are assuming that's where many of us have quite a bit of experience and have already developed our personal preferences around how to do that. The audience experience is also something many of us have some training in, those of us that have studied composition. We have some skills and tools for thinking about how what happens here affects what happens out there and we've got more language and vocabulary for that but many of us who have some traditional training which is a hierarchical training in in many artistic disciplines have less experience creating structures and organizations for artistic agency in a rehearsal process in a creative process especially artistic agency as it relates to audience experience and as it relates to time. The main thing that we are proposing today is that we all consider these three dimensions and build our own organizational structures around each one so if I was a really good animator for the PowerPoint I'd put a box around each one and then a lot of arrows between saying you know how do these things how are they contained in and of themselves how do they relate to each other impact and affect each other and then I'd make this graphic like move in many ways so you can just imagine that part. We're going to offer you some of the organizational structures that we created within and around these three dimensions however beyond this slide some of the structures that we're offering our examples please don't feel that we're imposing anything we're saying these are some of the organizational structures that work for us our main point today is encouraging you to consider these three dimensions and so before we go on we're going to to ask you to consider that so as you think about artistic agency in your creative process audience experience and time take a moment to reflect for yourself an area that that you're really good at something that you feel comfortable navigating or that is conscious and an area where you feel that you are guiding others potentially through a process with confidence take a moment to reflect on a place where you feel like it's tricky or complicated or sometimes it feels out of control or out of your awareness as you're working whereas something can kind of get run away and go how did we get here and then just rank them a little bit for yourself and maybe it does change in relation to time maybe at the beginning of a process you feel one way and in the middle or the end of a process different priorities come to the forefront and take just a moment we'd love you to reflect briefly with a partner someone who's sitting near you if you can find somebody and say in relation to to these three dimensions this is one I'm good at this is one I'm working on etc just have a moment of reflection before we go deeper in here so find someone next to you take just a moment thank you if both people haven't shared yet please switch now okay take 10 seconds to wrap up your conversation and I'm going to call your attention back to me if you're just coming into the room hi I'm Christine Young from the University of San Francisco Natalie Green mugwumpin and today we're presenting a model that we developed from working on two shows together in the same year that we are suggesting might offer some thoughts about how to embed equity and also attention to audience experience and artistic agency as you progress through theatrical processes so now we're going to show you one of the structural models we came up with do you want to go the next slide so we call this the funnel of artistic agency and we're going to describe it to you we developed this actually consciously in the first show high anxiety which will tell you more about a minute as a way to think about how we are going to progress through the time-based process that we were experiencing when you go the next one so time is the access right the funnel narrows as we go forward in time and I'm going to let Natalie tell you about the segments of the time so we have the very enjoyable open top of the funnel where we have so many skills and tools for generating material and many many people are involved in that in many ensemble processes and as we narrow in we're building a show putting it together starting to edit and refine this is where things people often experience a feeling of tightening and it's often where people's values come through because we have this open enjoyable collaborative process at the top and as it narrows there's the idea in this model that we have maybe fewer people when we're editing and refining at the end and then oftentimes what happens is we get to tech and dress and it's like no please be quiet find your light and that's that so we think about who is inside this funnel when and oftentimes the director is is one of the few people that are straight through the middle always involved in the decision making the agency and figuring out what happens in a traditional process the performers sometimes get to spend a little bit of time contributing their ideas but pretty quickly we find them outside of the place where their their voices have an impact in the creative process and in the eventual production in a devised process we find the performer collaborators are often inside the funnel for longer this is just a really base intro what we're going to do is we're going to talk about how complicated it gets sometimes we're in sometimes we're out so we know that it's not linear and as opposed to further explaining the model now we're going to tell you about these two shows and then come back to this model and show you how this model was used in both productions so the funnel of artistic agency in action here we go okay so i'm going to tell you about the first show high anxiety so high anxiety was an original evening length work that was developed at the university of san francisco over an 18 month period there were 24 student artists and seven professional artists involved in creating work it had a narrative structure with five protagonists we had an in the theater first act a site specific second act and an interactive third act so we like to call it our kitchen sink show it would just sort of have every possible theatrical option and trick and another sort of sort of elder i want to call out is john shrilly from delarte who talks about theater of place theater that is deeply rooted both in terms of its content and its form in the place in which it is being experienced and so that was very much on our minds as we made the show so the show was about anxiety and addiction in college students and how how those things affect them and the the seed for the show came from an article in our student newspaper about students abusing Adderall to stay up all night on our campus so that they could get their work done and so I started thinking about that and talking to students and had noticed that they've been a huge uptick in five years of students reporting crippling anxiety on our campus which is true across the nation and so we started thinking you know what what effect does anxiety having on us and our on our population and and and how can we make that visible and then also thinking about the stigma of mental health and what are the barriers that prevent people from asking for help and support so those were some of the really place-based concerns that went into the making of this work okay so Natalie's going to show you some images while I talk a little bit more so we knew that this there was danger in going into this territory with students because we're talking about mental health and in fact of the 24 students who were attracted to the project two-thirds three-quarters were open about their perception that anxiety was having a negative effect on their lives and some of them had clinical diagnoses and some of them were on medication and some of them were in therapy and so this was an active issue for a lot of the students so Natalie and I were very conscious in designing our production process we did not want to put students in a space where they were going to be continually traumatized by examining the subjects we're like how do we sort of safely or safely as we can go on this journey together when we don't know what we're going to make we don't know what we're going to find we did all kinds of research interviews and other kinds of research so we had a couple of strategies for how to go through the process in a conscious way the first that I will share with you which I really recommend when you're dealing with sensitive material is a ritualized beginning and ending to rehearsal we began rehearsal in the same way every day with a 10 minute warm-up set to a single piece of music it always happened in exactly the same way if you were late you know exactly where to jump in we ended every rehearsal with a closing circle that had a physical component it had a very short check-in for each individual and then a physical sort of cheer that we all did together as we walked back out we knew it wouldn't necessarily be possible for students to completely leave their experience at the rehearsal room door but we wanted to give them that sense of safety and bookends and that the rehearsal space was a container for safely exploring these topics but that they could leave them behind the second thing we embedded in the process is what we call process talks and we actually put it on the rehearsal schedule so periodically about once a week we would have a chunk of time set aside first to check in with each other how's it going do you perceive an impact in your life outside the rehearsal room because of working on this material just sidebar in the end the answer was yes and it was largely positive and that's a whole other talk about how we can collectively process trauma through creating devised work together so process talks were also a chance to talk about our aesthetic goals and to help students recognize when we were shifting from one level of the funnel to the other so we were extremely explicit and transparent about that and said this is the point where you can contribute these kinds of artistic ideas and choices and now we're shifting to the next phase and this is what's possible in this phase and this is how our roles are going to shift a final thing that I think we did that was fruitful for this process is we allowed the dramaturgical phase the sort of middle part to go on a lot longer than we thought it should I had done devised work with students before and I'd done this thing that I call a dramaturgical showdown where the people who want to be part of the artistic decision making basically get in a room together for three days hash through it we have sequence it decide what's going to be kept and what's going to be jettisoned and then we go forward into editing and polishing that work turned out not to take three days it took three weeks and it was a little terrifying because we had a deadline we actually went up canceling our first weekend of shows but we felt it was so critical that students who were working on material that was about the subject of their lives and to which they had contributed so much how it was much artistic agency as possible as we collectively agreed about what content we wanted to be in the show what stories we wanted to tell what perspectives we need to tell and there was a lot of wrestling and wrangling because like idiots we created a five character narrative show with all these other goofy parts so it took a long time to sort out what was going to stay and what was going to go and then finally when we kind of reached that last phase of the funnel and we said okay great now you get to step into performer role and Natalie and I have it and we're going to we're going to whip this show into beautiful shape and we did but our willingness to kind of let that middle phase last as long as it needed to last was one of the sort of most terrifying but also most rewarding directing experiences that I've had one of the brilliant things that Christine created for this process was a three semester model and I want to offer this to anybody who works in schools and colleges and universities because it made ensemble created true collaboration devised theater happened in a university setting in a way that felt safe and healthy for everyone it was three semesters long semester number one Christine taught documentary theater she interviewed her students interviewed they did all kinds of academic research and really ended up with a body of work research source materials many things that were then handed over semester two I taught devised theater and my students and I took all of that information and we got to play without the pressure of a performance in that play time we explored the idea should the show be site specific if so you know if we start in the theater then where on campus do we go and how far is too far and how real is too real and where can audiences be and we got to play without feeling the pressure of performance in the devised theater class see what would rise to the top take a go away on break and then we got to come back and say okay let's look at those videos let's remember what we loved let's let go of what we didn't love and then the students started the rehearsal process in semester number three when we co-directed the show some students did all three semesters some did just one or two but either way the rehearsal process that we got into was really supported by two semesters of work leading up to it and that's how I believe we were able to feel that so many voices were included in the process and now oh and here we are end of the process very happy large group of collaborators the funnel as it was used in high anxiety had Christine and I as directors in there the whole time and I'm referring to this as the rehearsal process funnel I'm not taking the documentary theater course and the devised theater course into account here in the rehearsal process the performer collaborators were inside of the funnel for more than half of the time but there there was a really clear shift when we said thank you so much for your contributions we're going to direct these scenes now you might have written the scene you might have composed this song or choreographed half of this dance but I'm going to clean that dance and we are going to make sure that the show is legible and coherent for our audience the dramaturg came in in the middle of the process to give Christine and I support and feedback to do a little bit of writing as necessary to reflect back to us what some of the words meant especially when they were written by multiple people with multiple influences and our designers in this case had a fairly traditional role although we were in conversation with a student composition class that we're writing some songs for us and our set designer was in early meetings for the most part we had a traditional role with our designers that they had a lot to respond to they came in late in the process we all hustled through tech and had a show we'll come back to the funnel later but we wanted to offer that example as how it worked in high anxiety and now we're getting to the mugwumpin show so a few months I think I will yeah thank you sure in the mugwumpin show which was just a few months later actually the processes were overlapping because mugwumpin spent about two years in the research and development process for an event of moon disaster which is the name of a speech a William Sapphire speech which is the speech that President Nixon would have read if the astronauts died when they went to the moon and I'll read a tiny bit fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace it's this whole contingency plan of what he would have said to the nation had they died so when we went into early investigations we had the themes of contingency planning and we had all of the moon lore and history and science and magic and started to figure out how those converged please wait it is important to say that this moon man here Sorin Santos had this speech and this show in his back pocket for years and a part of the process that we went through was Sorin saying I'd like this company to do this show he's a company member who had only been with mugwumpin for a few years at that point and I was new to my role as artistic director and I said are you sure because I love this idea and I will run with it but we will kill all of the babies involved in you holding this letter in this speech and are you okay with that that we're gonna beat it up and regurgitate it and it might be unrecognizable and we talked a lot about it he was okay with it this is a photo from the very first workshop and I'm gonna show you all more process photos you'll see a few production photos but this is the first workshop he just showed up one day with a moon head and he said I think this is a character in the show and it turns out it was and we this is one of our next work in progress showing site specific at the battery in San Francisco Sorin was still playing the moon head next time we came to a work in progress showing a theme that we had come to at that point was that again feminist director we thought NASA and science is traditionally male and masculine moon lore and mythology and magic is moon is a female deity and so why did man want to go and conquer the moon and stick his pole in it and claim it for his own and race with other men to get there and conquer it so when that became a theme we realized that the moon mask shouldn't be worn by a man and we wanted the moon moon to always be portrayed by a woman so this was the final production and our moon was a wonderful modern dancer who was actually blind and learned the show with her body and we just didn't figure out the technology for her to see through it so she just memorized the show with her body and did it blind which we also thought was really beautiful and poetic that's an example of the easy part I want to talk about the hard parts part T is an organizing principle again in three-dimensional dramaturgy we advocate for you to use your own organizing principles as they relate to your processes your artists your audiences and the themes and subjects that you're working with part T has worked for mugwumpin in the past so part T is an organizing thought or decision behind an architects design presented in the form of a basic diagram or a simple statement the first time mugwumpin used part T was at ZSpace in 2012 and the show had a giant three-story set that started with 16 Tyvek rooms that the audience was inside of an immersive environment then that set lifted up and the audience was in five rooms and then that set lifted up and there was only one room that most of the audience was outside of and then that lifted up above our heads and the audience is there on the outside so that set inspired the part T for that show and it really worked in that show this part T helped us to not only understand where the audience would be but the shape and flow of it also dictated certain parts of the artistic development process when we started Moon Disaster we sketched our part T's and we thought what should the part T be for this show so there we are with some of our early sketches and it became clear early on that the moon itself would be a major influence here the actual moon phases so we dissected the speech into eight main lines and themes and we paired those eight main lines and themes with the eight phases of the moon to go how does the contingency plan and idea of this lost history lost non-existent history exist in relation to the moon themes and the moon phases and there were many many post-it notes when we dug in deeper we created this mega document that said okay what phase of the moon what part of the speech what else do we need to include what is the science and what does the moon look like in that phase and what do the witches say what is the magic and then we tried to create everything within one of those eight phases so everything we created had to have the look or feel so we were going deep into our part T at that point in the process and it was not easy because we created a really rigid system and structure and many of us work really well with those constraints but it got a little tricky we also decided somehow the eight phases need to happen twice because it was about life or death and we had a certain way of working with the space we were using a theater in a site specific way we flipped where the audience went it was a seven projector show that had video all around the audience and for this in many reasons we had this figure eight moon phase part T and we all felt like we were being strangled by it every time we had one of these dramaturgical showdowns we were like this made so much sense the reasons we developed this made so much sense but when we put it all together for an audience it doesn't work they're so distinct and so I called Christine and now I'm gonna have Christine talk about the role of the dramaturg in this process so the show was going up in December Natalie called me in September and I was actually two or nothing would have been January I was too busy to get involved until like November and she said it's not working and you know we have all these great we have all this great material and all these great ideas but it's dead it doesn't have life like I need help and so I said great I want to come play with you I love collaborating with you but I was very nervous about stepping into this process because mugwump is a super tight ensemble they've been working together for years and here I am a stranger walking into the room so at first I just sort of walked in and I observed and I sifted through the material and I had conversations outside of the rehearsal room with Natalie and one of the things I said to her is I said you know your your central idea which is this letter which is about these two possibilities these two different time-based outcomes can only be perceived by the audience if you have characters and if we have some stake in their survival I was like without characters and caring whether they live or die you cannot actually activate the essence of this letter and so we went back through the material and we pulled out these two figures of these two astronauts who were the people who were sort of stranded in space who were communicating back to you know sort of base station and we sort of pulled them out and it became a narrative show which was not really mugwump's thing they don't really do narrative shows but it became clear as we started working in that way that the the the vitality there was a huge uptick in the vitality and the show became more coherent and you know when Natalie said to me she said I don't want the audience to just walk out and go wow that was pretty and oh you know I like that moment I like that moment but not be able to connect the dots between things again not only through story but through some sort of sense of being able to perceive the whole being able to perceive the energy and the forward momentum through the show so I worked mostly with Natalie sort of drawing circles around material that I thought connected they worked in rehearsal that was the stuff they leaned into and edited and we kind of introduced the funnel idea sort of mid-process to the ensemble members and said hey we think this is what's needed here because we need you to step into character and speak from inside character I'm going to disagree a tiny bit Mugwumpin had been operating with a funnel idea for a while but it hadn't been clarified to the performer collaborators when they even if the show was their idea when they needed to step out of the decision making process so that we could pull it into form right so I think that was the thing that happened sort of midway through the process as we said okay we're making explicit how the roles are going to shift do you want to say anything else I wanted to offer one more funny anecdote in relation to time because when we started working with the moon landing we knew we didn't want the piece to take place in the 60s or 70s we wanted it to be either ambiguous in relation to time or modern day and we I really I work a lot with with youth and elders in my work at USF and through non-profits in San Francisco and I thought we can't be all young and middle-aged people telling this story we need to have at least one cast member who remembers the moon landing and we need to have at least one cast member that embodies the innocence and joy that that event evoked for people historically and so we wanted a kid and we wanted an older adult in the cast and just to say this in relation to time in the works in progress the child performer did embody the hope and innocence and in the two-year development process of the show she became a teenager and so one other thing that was shifting and she looked different and I had to kept stepping back and say okay she's only six months older but she's way taller so to an audience who doesn't know how old she is she reads like a teenager and so that also late in the game really had to change some of what we'd created again it's all got to be in relation to time because nearing the end of the process we thought she used to say that same sentence and it would read differently because now she's got attitude and now she's taller and now it's a whole different thing so she became the sort of digital manager character she was the tech nerd because she was always on her phone in her gadgets and it worked but it was a late in the game shift and it was because of a dramaturgical process that forced us to reflect on what was actually happening on stage versus what we had wanted to happen or what we had happened in an earlier draft of the show the last thing I want to say about this piece was that we were particularly proud of having had the designers in the process early on because it allowed us to create images like this one and because we're theater people I'll give you I'll give this away there was a scrim in front of what used to be the seats in the audience and it was all booby trapped back there the audience sat where the performers traditionally are in the stage space and the scrim seemed like a wall for most of the show and then near the near the end when the astronauts were dead or lost in space they went back behind the scrim and we projected their faces on the scrim and then the lights rigged back there it was a collaboration between video lighting choreography performers writers and we're not going to be able to show video today but I'm about to upload this on the mugwumpin website so check it out if you're curious okay so now we want to apply the funnel of artistic agency to this process so again Natalie as the director of the piece had sort of a clear line of artistic decision-making all the way through the time based process so her performers and collaborators because this is the nature of their ensemble they also had a high degree of artistic decision-making pretty late pretty much all the way up to that last phase which is like the get it ready for the audience polishing phase and the designers also were as Natalie said involved from the very beginning and were making lots of artistic decisions I came in as the dramaturg kind of in the middle towards the end right so there we all are and then one of the things that is this where we're showing the other negative space oh no not yet okay okay so commonalities between the shows that we wanted to point out so one of them is that we use dramaturgs right so we were thumbs up for dramaturgs and devised processes we think they're really awesome because they help recognize what's actually happening versus what we again would like to happen or might have fooled ourselves into thinking is happening and they can they can stand in the shoes of the audience and speak from the point of view of the audience deep personal investment of collaborators another reason why having a codified structure is so important we did shows about sensitive subjects and subjects that were so dear aesthetically and so there was a high degree of emotional stakes in all of our artistic decision-making so we needed this clear structure so that we could all stay friends and future collaborators with each other expansive subject matter it matters when you're working on such vast topics to have organizing principles that help you sift through your material and and organize your thinking about your process because otherwise it's so easy to get lost and go down rabbit holes and then I think you know this is probably true in many many devising processes but commonalities between these two projects where that we have this really broad and rich idea generation phase with research and images and lots of people contributing to our collective source material bucket and then we had really a bigger challenge with the editing part right how do we sift through this how do we impose coherence on it and how do we you know how do we shift gears from this wonderful generation phase to the like winnowing and sort of clarifying phase and then I guess a final thing that these pieces shared is that we wanted to put strong work on stage that was that was our mission we were committed to pursuing equity in the process but we were super committed to putting outstanding work on stage that was so refined and aesthetically complex and satisfying for an audience so that was a value that we held very dear in both processes so now we want to look at these two funnels next to each other because we notice in the high anxiety the University of San Francisco piece that the performers had artistic agency in the process for the first half and then we're outside of the funnel in the second half of the process there's positives and negatives to that but I want to point out here in the in event of moon disaster the mugwumpin funnel how crowded it looks at the end so many people with so much artistic agency really close to showtime and I want to point out now that the negative space what is outside of the funnel is really really important for people as well so what happens out there people memorize their lines and they're blocking they find the motivation and intention for the moments inside the show they find momentum and stamina for the piece as a whole they make discoveries with each other that all of that traditional stuff that actors do is still really important in our work and so we will also need to ensure that our ensemble members have the time and the space and the support that they need to do that work even if it's hard for them to let go of a certain amount of agency when they do they get to drop into their roles in a different way that's important to them as performers and important to us that want to put really quality work on stage so I just want to point out that what happened in moon disaster when we had so many people contributing so many ideas so long for so long in the end they were bummed that you know in our last design run people had scripts in hand and we're coming to tech still working on memorizing their lines because we were making some script changes because we had been trying to include everyone's voices for so long and even though I didn't want to take for example the person who offered this show idea to this company and say I actually don't want to have you be a part of this decision right now because as hard as it was to sort of make that distinction he also needed to memorize his lines and learn his role and so we want to advocate for everything that happens outside of the funnel being highly highly important as well and that one of our main jobs is helping people transition inside and outside can I ask one thing and I actually just want to make one other note about how my role changed in an event of moon disaster because we were so tight on time when we got down to that last phase of the performer stepping to the roles I actually and this happened kind of organically jumped into a directorial role at the very very end with a couple performers who said hey can I talk to you for a minute I have to make a transition from this piece to that piece and I don't have a way to think about that because they don't used to be next to each other so can you help me figure out like emotionally how can I get from one piece to the next this one is over here that one's over there and so we like went off in a corner we work together and so you know because we like kind of needed all hands on deck I shifted out of drama checked in with Natalie checked in with everybody it's like do you want me to step into this role now okay great I can do this I can help you I can support you as you build a scaffold for yourself as a performer and that was great because I had seven projectors and seven designers to do how is this work feminist Christine okay I forgot that's my part okay so why do we call it feminist and not humanist or collaborative so a couple things so one of the things one of the ways in which we're defining it as feminist is the checks and balances that we employed we employed it because we were co-directors so we had checks and balances with each other or director and dramaturg likewise toggling between perspectives and recognizing that in some ways it takes more than one brain in the room to be conscious of when we are overemphasizing one perspective over another and so I think that's really helpful is when you have someone else to share that job with of trying to be sure that you are looking at the piece and the process from multiple perspectives so yeah that's our favorite image so I love Diana Mosovic who's the artistic director of Dachtheater in Serbia says that as artists we ride two horses one is the horse of technique and the other is the horse of inspiration and when one gets tired we can ride on the other for a while so likewise I'd say with feminist directing and dramaturgy we ride two horses we ride the horse of creating an environment where all the artists in the room can do their best work and being supportive and connective and recognizing and validating others artistic agency and then we also ride the horse of craft of being able to do the work of making artistic decisions and figuring out how to best use our resources and figuring out you know what actually we need to shift gears now this is what we need now so I sort of argue that as a feminist director that I have to have traditional directing tools and I also have to have this much more sort of lateral I think horizontal leadership was a phrase that was used yesterday this this willingness and desire to share that power laterally as often as I possibly can so we wanted to return to this image one last time and remind you that the organizational structures that we've used might not be the right ones for you but we want to encourage you to consider that all of the structures we have around time are things that we've practiced or that we've been forced to get good at audience experience also something perhaps that that we're in a explicit conversation with however artistic agency and deciding when what who and how long your artists are involved in the creative decision-making process is something that might need more shape and that that shape should be responsive to the subject matter and the identities of the artist and audience and many other factors so we want to encourage you to have your organizational structures and lastly a mugwump in our values we're all about questions we value questions more than answers so we wanted to end with a few questions is three-dimensional dramaturgy performance process design to put it into other language how does time-based craft meet equity-based principles and how do we operationalize equity diversity and inclusion in our creative processes we are so lucky today to be joined by two women who are going to be talking with us we want to take one minute first to see if there's questions specifically about this work we're going to take just a few minutes and then we will actually have a panel open it up to further questions and conversation with our wonderful colleagues so are there any curiosities specifically about what we've shared so far or anything we can explain better or go back sure so he has questions about the party model and for anybody who came in late or just to review a party as a concept from architecture whereas opposed to all the complicated drafts and plans it's one simple image that you could sketch on a napkin that represents the building or the creation and what mugwumpin has often used as a party model for our shows so we have found that that helps us in our decision-making processes because we can easily know if something won't fit within our party even if it's related even if it's one great way of investigating the source material because we know that we can be inspired by whatever source material we're working with and there's so many directions we can go with that inspiration with that source material and if you have a party which is a larger organizing structure one of these shapes that we say no we've committed to this as the shape of our show then as you're working with your source material you can also have the larger concept of the show in mind actually I want to say something about that because I think it sounds more mysterious than it is I think actually we had a party in high anxiety and the party wasn't a shape it was a phrase I would say hi this is before we had cast it before we had any like concept I said high anxiety is a show about five protagonists who are dealing with anxiety in their daily lives it has a site in the theater first act the site specific second act and interactive third act it's called high anxiety so as we worked we're like well what do we need more of we're like well we have enough high we need more anxiety or well we've got a three act structure so we need to work in act two what is act two we only had act one you know so it was kind of arbitrary but I kept going back to it I was like okay well I'm building the show in relation to this statement that I made I think that parties are often found intuitively and then you can use it as a tool to give shape and coherence to your work and you know you also can abandon it if it doesn't work but it I think for me it helps it helps me wrap my brain on what's happening because you look at material that you've made beautiful material and you could organize it in multiple ways you can make multiple shows out of it so why this show and not that show the party is sort of your it's your your lens that you're looking at your material through yeah yeah probably I mean that you could certainly think of it that way I mean it depends a little bit on on on how you communicate and perceive the world right I'm actually a language based person which is why my party is a statement Natalie is really into imagery and I think it makes sense that she likes shapes I would offer my personal experience with mission statement and say yes as a party because with mugwumpin I was involved in redrafting a mission statement when I was a company member without knowing that I would later become the artistic director and be in charge of enacting that mission and I'm so grateful that I was able to draft that mission statement before I knew I would have the responsibility of carrying it out in the world because I know it really reflects my values and now I go back to that so often in this role okay we're going to take one more question before we invite our colleagues sure so the question was can we repeat the our definition of the time part of three-dimensional dramaturgy we talked today a lot about artistic agency and how that relates to audience experience the third dimension that we're proposing is time and I skipped over it quickly but I will add to that that our rehearsal schedule is an organizational structure for time but how does our rehearsal schedule relate to the creative process and the product that we aspire to have an example of that is people who work site specifically how often do you work on site or off site and how does that impact the work another example of that is that the agency the funnel model that we proposed is directly in relation to time because people's artistic agency changes as we get closer to inviting the audience in for the experience actually I'll mention one other tool that we used in high anxiety which I'm a huge fan of especially the university context when devising and that is the work in progress showing so we used a process in high anxiety that I used in another show I created at USF which is we had a work in progress showing every week and we said actually maybe that wasn't quite true but that was the name I think it didn't turn out that way but it was private private work in progress showing it was pretty frequently and I would say to the students so this is a show this is the show we can make today because we all have these sort of fantasies of like our ideal process but in fact time is the fundamental boundary of all processes you book the theater you paid the deposit like the audience is coming on this date and so I wanted to teach the students that there's no future ideal there's only now there's what coherent vital legible work can we put on stage based on the source material today knowing what you know and having what we have today and then oh gosh we're so lucky we now we have more time we have another audience coming in another week now we can go back in we can edit more and so I would say that's another way to think about time is you know time is actually our most precious resource so as you think about your processes don't assume you know how you'll use time you may have there may be alternative ways you can think about your time based on your goals for your project I thought of one more thing one of my mentors always says that time is the enemy of the theater and if you think about the other saying keep your friends close but your enemies closer I think that we can all use more skills to translate the experience a time-based making and time-based models in relation to our values and our goals and desires as artists okay so we would like to bring up our wonderful colleagues to can we get a little more light we're going to move downstage and it's hard to see you all is there any way we can get some house lights up this is it that's okay some of you are in the spotlight so prep some questions cool yeah first of all I'd just like to say thank you for sharing this presentation with us as someone who is really interested in artistic process design it's really exciting to have a session focused on that so it's casual so my name is Joya Scott I'm a faculty member here at ASU school of film dance and theater my artistic home outside of my work as an instructor Ben with a company called Orange Theater which is based here in Phoenix contemporary performance ensemble I'm a director dramaturg producer and I'm really excited to respond to some of the issues you brought up turn it over hi I'm Kerry J. Cole I teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana Pennsylvania Homo Jimmy Stewart it's a wonderful life starting first of November through the new year and now we don't worry about the fact that it's a town named after a stage or vice versa so I wear several hats and I'm so excited about having some new language to talk about how I do what I do so thank you so much for that I am a dramaturg director fight choreographer production manager and some of those are sometimes dissonant with each other so looking at that funnel I began thinking in more than three dimensions and in orbits and how these ideas orbit each other so I think I'll just stop there but unless you what why don't I just jump in with a question for you because I'm struck because both of these examples are both different kinds of processes and different kinds of institutions for lack of a better word and as somebody who works in devising both in an educational institution and outside of it I find that those structures are really sometimes constraining in the educational institution so thank you for giving me tools to advocate for a three semester process that's so exciting but one of the things that you said Christine really struck me in terms of when we get to those moments of pinch points and tensions we fall back on our training and given those two things I just wonder if you can articulate a little bit of how you may see the model that you're putting forward students in your classes as an opportunity to reframe what the next generation of performance makers are falling back on sorry for your toes so as I mentioned I teach theatrical composition and I also direct main stage plays on campus and the whole 10 years that I've been there I've really reflected a lot about how how much it matters to bring my feminist principles into the directing room and not just because of the kind of work I choose and not just because I like to power share but I need to make explicit and visible to students the fact that the way we make the work completely influences what the work is and how it's received as well as influences what kind of relationships we can have creatively and so little by little I've been trying to figure out how to explain this to students because every student comes to us from training in a hierarchical model every student thinks that leadership means having all the answers and having the artistic vision and being more important than other people in the room and as an educator I know that when students are afraid when they're like lizard brain and you know migtlis triggered they don't learn as well so there's this interesting balance between making it visible to them what's happening and then also you know not telling them more than they need to know in certain moments so they don't freak out so I'm still thinking about that I've only actually devised two full-length shows in 10 years one of the reasons is because it takes a lot of resources it's kind of exhausting I'm not sure if I've answered your question but I think to me the other thing I want to tell students and I believe this and this sort of is the question at the end I believe that we create our processes and new for every project we make we may not realize that we may have habits and patterns that we repeat over and over again but every project has a unique series of goals resources and limitations and so also because I help students with their capstones where they create their own work I say to them listen it's all about project design what do you want this experience to be if you're the instigator the leader you are basically building the ship and inviting everybody else to get on it with you so what kind of journey do you want to have what kind of experience do you want to have and if you don't think about that consciously then you're in for some rough you're all going to be thrown up over the side of the boat nobody really wants that so it's your obligation as an artistic leader to think consciously about your process and to share that with the people that you're working with now I'm thinking about what you just said and not my question I'm having trouble choosing a question because I have both conceptual questions and nuts and bolts questions so we'll see what we have time for yeah I think I want to start with a conceptual question I it might be a two-part question but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what your definition of artistic agency is because I think that's so core to what you're describing and I know that those that term probably has a lot of different possible interpretations I agree it has many possible interpretations and so I'm going to build a short an incomplete list so I think it's about decision-making I think it's about who gets to ask critical questions potentially specifically questions that might have big impact in the project questions that can can affect change that can dismantle things that were already created flip things upside down and and that's coming from my experience in Mugwampan where we're all about finding the right questions to ask and and the feeling of occasionally feeling wounded because maybe we've gone on building something to a certain point and a question gets asked that just makes everything all of that work go away so who gets to ask critical questions when is big for me and and contributing new ideas and and advocating for those ideas I think we don't want artistic agency to be whoever has the loudest voice oh this person's going to fight for their idea the hardest so that's how the show is going to go because that energy is not necessarily useful for every process or production so how do we allow for people's voices preferences aesthetics desires and questions to come forth in relation to all those other things and I think that agency also partners with investment so back to high anxiety you know there was no show we said it was a three-act show so we spent act one developing our character journeys that was great act two everybody sort of like Fafu and her friends got to follow a character out of the theater and track their journey in a site specific environment and then we're like and what the what the heck is act three like what happens right we want there to be some sort of a climax payoff we've created stakes for the character so we know we need to have some way of seeing what changes or doesn't for the characters in act three but what's the structure we'll use we knew we didn't want to return to the theater and have it be the same as it was in act one something has to transform or it's going to feel disappointing so we tried a couple different contexts we're like okay well maybe act three is a funeral for one of the characters maybe one of them committed suicide because of their inability to deal with the anxiety they're experiencing we tried that on for a while some people liked it some people hated it one of the students involved in the show had a brotherhood committed suicide we scrapped it we said we can't possibly use this and then there was this moment where like nobody has an idea and we said you know what we cannot go forward unless we can all find an idea we can all live with and agree with like Natalie and I could come up with something we came up with a couple other ideas we got lukewarm reception we're like if you are not invested in act three this show is going to suck so we that was sort of part of what made the dramaturgy take three weeks we're like we had to test drive a whole bunch of ideas and then we didn't think our way into act three we felt our way into act three and when we landed on it it happened pretty spontaneous we're like oh act three is a party the audience comes back and there's a party in progress and over the course of the party there's going to be sort of a mild overdose issue and there's also going to be an opportunity to see how the different characters anxiety is triggered by the party and then there's going to be a fight and you know that sort of got us to our climax and the audience is on stage so they come and they get handed a plastic cup so they when they re-enter the theater they're entering the party and their party guests and then the show unfolds with them as a part of it for quite a bit of act three so I wouldn't say we forced them to have artistic agency but we sort of strongly demanded we're like you can't you can't step out of the decision-making process yet until everyone has contributed to deciding that this is the story we want to tell in act three and then once we got to that point and we knew that we had investment then it was actually possible to shift and to say okay now you can step into your roles more and you don't have to participate or you know you can slip away from from having the artistic decision-making obligation but without that investment we knew we weren't going to be able to get to a point where we had a really coherent show Joy is there part two to the question Well it's more of a thought that's not fully formed yet but I'll give it a shot I'm wondering you know obviously this the division of labor that at some point in your funnel is strongly implied right or maybe required I'm wondering if I mean it seems like it's a matter of scale that artistic agency changes in certain roles at certain times in different ways so the definition of artistic agency for a collaborator performer at the beginning involves you know as you described right having a greater say in the big questions of the show perhaps right having some decision-making say in in what the piece how the piece is structured perhaps but then as the funnel shifts in it's not that the to me it's interesting it's not like the artistic agency of that performer goes away but that it it zooms in on there in what you described as the negative space I think you have another way of framing that which is that it kind of zooms in on the moment-to-moment micro of the performance which is equally in my mind full of agency but in a in a yeah and so it's not necessarily that they are outside of the cone of agency maybe but that they are are focusing on the micro moment-to-moment construction of a performance which is a different sort of and I'm wondering if our definitions of artistic agency could be expanded and could be could be maybe because I'm thinking about how we distribute power and how we perceive power as distributed these are the thoughts that that you've provoked right it's not a fully formed concept yet but I think I'm wondering if maybe that leads into a nuts and bolts question which is how you explain this process to your different populations you're working with if there's a difference between how you explain the funnel with with students versus professionals and how you create buy-in to that those those different phases of your process so one of the things I think that is kind of revolutionary for me thinking about this is this idea that rules and the theater change over time right the director at the beginning of the process has different tasks to do than at the end as do the performers and so I think that's something that really you can share and teach students and say you know directors at the beginning of the process your job may be to create the most disputable working environment possible so that you build trust with everyone in the room everyone feels like they can speak up and share their points of view that's your most important job and then later your most important job is to make sure that this performer has everything they need to do their best work in this particular moment on stage so I think that is really and I think we all know that but then again to make it explicit and to teach it to students and I think your point is really well taken it's not that you lose artistic agency it's that the the scope of it or the the focus of it changes and so you could also look at that funnel as like a lens right a lens makes an image legible and actually my son is actually taking physics conceptual physics right now so I know a lot about lenses because I'm his physics buddy he has to explain it to me and then he gets his homework checked off so I know this that when you focus the light through a very narrow aperture it produces a very strong clear image and if the light gets to go through quite a wide aperture it's very diffuse and fuzzy so this goes right back to legibility this is why we have the funnel we have to focus our energy so that our image is very strong and clear for the audience and so artistic agency again isn't about exclusion it's about contributing to that focus and so you could say in a sense that everybody's getting more focused as we go through the process the actors are getting more focused from the whole show to their specific role in the show and the directors getting more focused from their conceiving of the whole process to thinking from the point of view of the audience to respond to the nuts and bolts question how this is presented with different ensembles I think students are used to being told the way it is and so there's something that's a little bit easier about saying all right this is what your role will be here and it's like looking at a syllabus in this week this is how this will shift and then we get here it's like the end of a semester so it's easier in some ways and working with professional ensembles I find that it is appreciated because when people are clear what is expected of them and what is allowed of them it allows them to bring their best selves forward and when we're all working with our best selves we're better collaborators and we end up with a better product at the end of that lens I get the groan occasionally of like Natalie brought out the post-its again right like I've got the big post-its with the little post-its and all the maps and all these models and saying right what week are we gonna do this and when are we gonna shift from that to that and I find that that's valuable time to spend in rehearsal and I understand that some actors are resistant to process being made visible or to their roles being made explicit however it creates boundaries that are really helpful for collaboration Just want to follow up a little bit more nuts and bolts we've been talking a lot about directors, dramaturgs and performer collaborators but one of the things that I find is often particularly challenging is the where and when and how context of integrating your collaboration with designers particularly designers who may be more used to working in a non-divising model and for me then and I can't tell if this is gonna be a question or a comment yeah we'll find out but for me the idea of agency then has to be coupled with trust and we've talked about trust and that lovely moment yesterday where we were talking about collaboration builds at the speed of trust and so particularly with seven projections going on I guess the nuts and bolts question is how and when did that get integrated and in terms of content development when did that happen in the process because I think that that's something that can be so challenging when you're leaving things open-ended if you're making decisions very late in the game that fundamentally affect tangible design choices and keeping the designers agency and trust in that so now I should respond to this but I think one of the things we might be talking about is what decisions need to be made when and I think it's very astute to point out that a seven projector show doesn't happen well unless you have those designers involved from a very early point we had the benefit of our McGwampan's former managing director Wolfgang Wachalowski had been the technical director of the theater and for the years that he was a technical director of Z below in San Francisco he had been looking at the space and dreaming of using it in a certain way and so we knew when we decided we wanted to do the show there we sat with Wolfgang in the theater and he said what about putting the audience on stage putting a scrim in front of the seating then you feel like you're in a really small black box and you have the space beyond the scrim to play with whenever you're ready but otherwise we can project on all four walls and the audience can be in the center because the question had been how do we make people feel like they're in outer space when they're in a very small space and so to create that expansive sensation and that was a lot of feedback that we got from the piece that people were like I had no idea where I was it was disorienting in a good way and that was because of that early involvement and investment of the designer saying and me saying in the budget really how many projectors are you crazy but we figured it out and I think that his continual it made so many of the decisions clear and possible because we knew where we wanted the audience in relation to the work in relation to the space and how we wanted to use projection even if we didn't know what would be projected we knew that we were going to be using video to create an immersive environment I will say if I was a proper academic I would study mugwumpin and write some kind of treatise about dramaturgy for physical theater because one of the things that came up for me watching them work it was like being on a film set there was no one person who could possibly imagine what the audience would experience would be we sort of like had to like lean our heads together and try to like collectively feel that and so what I was curious about back to this idea of negative space I was like huh what are the aesthetic and emotional impact of a theatrical moment that's being realized with seven video coming from seven projectors plus live performance plus live music plus the audience insight specific space and there are multiple vantage points I no one can imagine that so what parts of it can be imagined and decided and what parts have to be left open sort of are have to be known to be in that negative space and so I started thinking about that and I think the sort of aesthetic tools from the choreographic realm are so useful because we think about layering right and we think about juxtaposition and how that creates meaning and sensation but as a dramaturk who mostly works with text and narrative I was like wow this is mind-blowing like how do you predict and think about when you have to make certain decisions given how the design is so central and how so much of it cannot be anticipated until it actually exists in the space with the people and lastly it is about trust thank you for bringing that up that we didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out or come together but we knew that the people that we invited into the room were all trusted artists and and we put our faith that when our ideas came together within these structures and organizational models that they would come together for aesthetic quality I'm wondering yeah I mean I thought we should open it up perhaps to sure see if the audience had any other questions that have come up yeah yes where's we have to think about how to tell the story in a way that is going to be legible to others I mean this was the this is the first time we've done that we've been talking to each other about it for a while so yeah hopefully and I would be thank you and I would be happy to share some of these materials with people who are in the room if you feel comfortable with that so please come and find us sure yeah thank you other questions or comments so a brief wrap up of the question has to do with designers agency time and interaction yeah thank you I also just have to give a shout out because our designers are up for three theater bay area awards on Monday so that investment and that trust in those designers has some recognition now oh Wolfgang Wachalowski for video projection Ray Oppenheimer on lighting design and Teddy Hulsger on sound design and I would say interestingly in relation to this question each of those three designers had a different level of involvement and length of involvement with the process as I mentioned Wolfgang had been the technical director of the theater so the entire structure of how the show would incorporate video in relation to the audience and how the performers would be in relation to video and audience was known or at least thought about from the beginning of the process and considered in every decision that we made so we knew that video would be deep and important and we we rolled with that however he was not we we were on a scrappy budget and we were in many different rehearsal spaces we weren't setting up projectors and rehearsals on a regular basis so there was a lot of trust he watched many more rehearsals we also had live feed in there so there was sometimes pre-created images and there was also live feed video there were tons of Google docs but the performers didn't work with video until really very close to tech rehearsal and we canceled a preview because we weren't ready because of that that how we needed the performers to understand how the video worked the 14 year old the 13 year old was operating the live feed camera also I don't know if you remember but in the high anxiety process the designers were really involved more traditionally because they had less time to contribute they were most of them were guests who were coming on contract I think I go back actually to investment so we showed you these models that we reverse engineered we're like oh we think this is what happened but then how was it determined where people started in the funnel and I think it has a lot to do with investment the amount of time each of those collaborators had to invest in the project so for Wolfgang and Ray who are core company members of Mugwumpin who were there from the very beginning when the company first decided they would do the show you know their investment is high and therefore they are all the way through the funnel for our designers who were being jobbed in who were lovely and who maybe came to more rehearsals and work in Prokka showings than they might have and I made that clear when I hired them they still had less to invest so they less time to invest so they were able to have a more traditional relationship with the material and so I'm thinking about that too it's not one is better than the other it's that you have to again look at your resources you're like well these three people can go down the whole road with this project but these two people who are awesome can only come in for this part so then let's just be explicit about that well that's awesome so you're going to come in at this part so then this is the zone where you can contribute and these folks who are here for the whole journey we're going to be contributing these other ways because we're able to invest that much of our time and energy I know we're quickly running out of time but one of the things that I've been thinking about as we've been talking and being able to see your model that works so well with all of these things is that you can then plug and play different models in here so for instance a great example of the investment trust and interaction with designers is when if suddenly you end up collapsing the time I devised a piece where we had 21 days of rehearsal before an audience so our designers were in the rehearsal all of the time I gave up our I didn't give up I collaborated with our designers on our biggest our longest stretches of time so as a director I was outside of watching their process to have that integrate into the development of the narrative structure they were creating we had a student designer creating masks based on the movement of the actors time shifting her build process so she was sitting watching rehearsal building the masks and that was what gave her agency and that's that's why I go back to this orbiting so thank you so much for offering this this model thank you to the net staff for giving you this time and space and and asking us to be part of it yeah thank you so much I think so many projects and processes live or die based on the ability to talk about people's investment about the process about what each person is contributing each role so I think this framework is really helpful thank you thank you to howl around shout out to everyone on howl around and please we'd love to continue this conversation obviously we love talking about this and nerding out so please find the mugwumpin website if you're here in person come and talk to us we love to have a break now we're we're skilled at using time thank you Joya Carrie thank you everybody for being here