 So I'll just, I'll do this silly thing and just say hi, howl around or whoever's watching this. This is a series of interviews that I'm doing. My name is Taylor Mack, we have a bunch of harp artists so that you all can get to know them so I can get to know them and also we can get to know their work. And if you don't know anything about the harp program, it's, they offer up space and sometimes co-produce, sometimes produce, sometimes offer skills and crafts and abilities for people to self-produce and you get a number of years, however long really you want to take to work on a project in New York City and I'm here with Mrs. Chowdhury to talk to you about your project. So why don't we just start off, what's the name, what's it about, I'm really, I loved all the different meanings in the title. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the project that I'm working on, my harp project is actually a piece called Reology that hasn't, I'm not sure if that's the piece that you're talking about or I was going to share this in previous, there's like, there's two different projects I'm juggling here, one of which is, one of the serial projects called Vigitra that I've been working on during the pandemic and one of the episodes premiered here in August, I want to say. So that was certainly under the auspices of my harp residency and... It gets really confusing, but or not confusing because you're an artist so whatever you're working on, you're working on and I'm looking at your bio, I see, oh, this is a queen who knows how to apply for things as I'm the queen who knows how to apply for things and you have to juggle five million different things. Totally. Yeah. Well, I'm putting that in my bio from now on, a queen who knows how to apply for things. Taylor Mack. Well, it just means you have agency, you know, you're doing it yourself, which is I think impressive in this culture where we always are asking for permission to be creative. It's just nice to meet artists who are doing it. Yeah. I mean, I guess I can talk a little bit about Vigitra, the project that isn't my official like in-person live harp project, which I am at the very early stages of developing. That's a project I can talk about as well. But during the last I've been working on this audio visual experiment called Vigitra, that sort of broadly has been an opportunity to dig into various different collaboration under the umbrella of queer South Asian imagination, which for me is just like a very sneaky way of saying whatever the fuck I want because I am queer and South Asian. Is that is that grant language or is that totally that's grant language. But it's also sort of allowed for for a kind of, you know, by by articulating the project as such, I have self permission to dig into four back to back, you know, we've done four episodes between June and December with different theaters. I did one in the criminal queerness festival in June, one here in August, one at Ars Nova in October, and then most recently one at the Bushwick Star in December. And without having called the project and experiment in queer South Asian imagination, I don't know that I would have been allowed myself to be as sort of audacious and prolific in doing like in developing these collaborations with other queer South Asian artists like so robustly, so back to back. I think I tend to like have, I don't know. So it feels as branding language actually sort of like allowed for a particular kind of like I'm like, oh, OK, I've been wanting to collaborate with these queer Carnatic musicians forever. Here's an opportunity to do so under the umbrella of this project. Yeah. And by branding it that as you say, do you feel like you rally the troops as a, you know, like what if you just had a project without that brand, maybe the the artists that you're interested in working with wouldn't respond or would they respond anyway? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's something about I think that the branding allows for folks that because I tend to work because theater is so insular I think like it's been a helpful way by which I've been able to reach out to queer South Asian artists who don't necessarily or I haven't done that necessarily yet, but I feel as though the hope is to reach out to artists who don't like know who I am or work explicitly in the theater may not know what your art center is or the Bushwick Star. And probably don't. Right. Absolutely. But they do. But like, oh, queer South Asian collaboration is something that interests them. And so there's a pull by virtue of that language. Right. You find your tribe. Yeah. Lee Brewer told me that every project he makes, he just he just says, well, what do I want to learn about? What am I curious about? Exactly. And so so he like says, I want to I'm really curious about gospel music, so I'm going to make a piece called Gospel at Colonies, right? Then then he gets to work with the Blind Boys of Alabama and then they become lifelong friends. And so I guess I'm curious about that in terms of your collaboration and who you're pulling into your various works. It's been an opportunity to like dig into these very granular questions like the the most recent episode was a collaboration with Queer South Indian classical musicians and because this is an ongoing series and I don't have to cram like my whole manifesto about, you know, what it might mean to be queer and South Asian into one project. It's like, oh, this piece is about a this piece is an opportunity for us to look at, you know, a legend about an ancient thermal poet who as a young girl prayed to be transformed into an old woman so she wouldn't have to marry, right? So like this tiny little story, we've been able to sort of lean into these really sort of microscopic source materials or questions and and those questions are emerging out of these conversations with new collaborators, which is really exciting to me. It's more about like it's in some ways it's a kind of curatorial practice to just to be like, okay, I want to engage with these other Queer South Asian artists and what we make need not necessarily be like about like have any thesis statement about queerness or South Asianness. It's like, oh, no, no, here we are, it's Queer and South Asian because we are and now we can talk about whatever we want. So I get that a lot too, like I'll write something and be like, where was the Queer and that I was like, did you not look at me? I was on stage for totally exactly like, did I have to talk Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer, Queer. Right, right, right. Yeah. So we did this one, we did that episode, which was a collaboration with Garnada classical musicians. The third episode was an interview based piece that I worked on co-created with my partner, Ken Neal, who is Black. And it was a question, the question sort of guiding that piece was, we were asking all kinds of different Black and South Asian folks, like, what is your first memory of a Black person or what is your first memory of a South Asian person? And it was a way by which we like got these really crazy stories about that I don't think we would have been able to elicit. Otherwise, you know, I was talking to a 84 year old Bengali woman who was talking about like, as a six year old in during World War Two in Eastern India, seeing Black American soldiers drive tanks through their town and throw butterfinger chocolates out the window. And these like really unexpected stories were the sort of fuel for that. Third, and yeah, the second episode that I have a clip from that we can show at some point during our chat today was a piece about that I wrote about a diasporic Bengali kid who imagines that he is reincarnated as this Bengali freedom, freedom fighter who was killed in the early 20th century. And yeah, it's just been a fun opportunity to explore all these different nooks and crannies. These like ideas that I've had in the back of my mind and that needed dusting off. So yeah, let's let's watch it right now that we can talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Here's a little three minute clip from the middle of and this is a collab. The two core collaborators on this project are my partner, Cameron Neil, who is the video artist and Jeremy Bloom, who is the sound designer. So the three of us have been coming together, bringing our different skills to the table. When you say partner, do you mean artistic partner? Oh, man, partner and artist partner. Yes. Oh, that's yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been doing a lot of. We're doing a lot of work together. I'm proud. All right, I'm going to share my screen. I love that image. Is this working now? Great. Nobody's been back to Bangladesh in my family since prior to partition. And my grandmother, the last time she had been in Dhaka was in 1938. That's when she left. She had these sort of ridiculous, vague instructions. She was like, you know, when you shot the show, like the hotel body, she looked like a car, she looked like the she'd wanted to. And so I like was like rickshawing around old Dhaka asking random people on the street, like, sorry. Do you know where I'm looking for a house in 1938? There was like a haunted house and like, and eventually that just kept being like Hindu Manushri Adikit Hake. So I went over there and I went into this abandoned looking building. And there was this old woman in the corner of one of the like balconies. I don't know. It feels like I'm trying to remember a dream or something. The image is super vague. She was wearing like a white shari, like she was a widow. And I remember I bent down to Dupronam, which is the sign of respect to elders, where we bent down and like touch, touch their two feet and then touch her foreheads. But she like stopped me. And she was like, absolutely not. You don't. You're a Brahmin. You're a Brahmin. You're higher caste than I am. It's wrong for you to touch my feet to pay me those respects. And then this very strange look came over her. And this I remember super clearly. She like she was looking right at me. And she started to sing this song. And then this very strange look came over her. And then this very strange look came over her. And she was like, absolutely not. She was looking right at me. And she was like, absolutely not. She was looking right at me. And then this very strange look came over her. And then this very strange look came over her. And then this very strange look came over her. And then this very strange look came over her. And then this very strange look came over her. England she means Englander Okay, I'll pause it there. Oh, God. Me too. Thanks. I wish I could show you more of it, but it's available. That's what I love about this work in this moment is people could, it's just, it's up there. It's free. People can go watch. Yeah. Yeah. And is there any, so what's the, this, this is the work or is there a plan to add an alive element to it or that's just totally different work that you're making? This project is, you know, like, I can imagine that, who knows, these episodes are, are video pieces. I can certainly imagine, I mean, this, this story that inspired the, the episode that you just watched is a piece that I have been, you know, wanting to, like, I've been writing a, like a full-fledged play about it forever. So, you know, there may be, I think that these may serve as off points for larger live ideas, but I think that now this project very much lives in this form. They're these 30-minute audio-visual things. And was that you speaking and singing? Yeah, that was me. Oh, my God, your voice is so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks. But not all of them are. Some of them are, you've asked a lot of, oh, nice to be non-professional actors to tell stories of their dreams, or are they actors? Like in the one video that you sent me. Or your internet was funky for just a second, but yeah, I think I got your question. Yeah, yeah, the second episode was much more explicitly like a thing that I wrote that I performed. The first and third episode were a little bit more sort of documentary in their approach, like what we did with that raw material was certainly theatrical, but the voices were these real sound bites from submissions of dreams in the first episode and interviews in the third episode. So yeah, we haven't asked anyone to sort of like, it's been a gathering and editing kind of process for those other episodes. There hasn't been none of these episodes have featured like an actor enacting something pre-planned in that way. Yeah, yeah. And do you find yourself drawn to that style of collaboration or are you more just like hybrid, like whatever works for the moment, whatever works for the content? I think this is a very different, this, that project is sort of exercising a whole different set of muscles in me than what I'm used to. Most of my, I tend to be, you know, prior to this project, I really am like a live theater person. I'm like a very performer driven actor driven kind of director and writer. But in this moment, I felt as though if I was going to be working in this medium, I wanted to be drawing upon what makes for me as a consumer, those media so compelling. Like I wanted to, you know, Jeremy, the sound designer is a sound designer for Radio Lab and Nancy and you know, I'm like, okay, what is it about a podcast like Love and Radio, for example, that like is so compelling to me, can I steal some of those tools as a theater maker to create a certain kind of intimacy in the space between, you know, as long as we are engaging in material that is between the screen and us, I'm like, oh, maybe there's a different set of skills that I need to investigate to like write a ghost story for someone's laptop screen rather than out in the world. But yes, I mean, I'm excited about how much new, I'm excited about having learned all of this new stuff. I'm like a video editor and audio editor now, but I'm also very like hungry to return to making work in three dimensions. Yeah. So then talk to me about pace and tone because these are just my impressions from just seeing this video work because I haven't seen your live work. But the video work or films, I would call them are, you know, they're not made on film, right? But there's a certain kind of pace to them, which it's a meditative pace. It's an intimate pace, I guess. And is that because of it depends on the piece? Because I found it, I found it very, I don't know, just refreshing, maybe because all my work is like, you know, but I found it just so calming. And just to listen to people tell me the stories of dreams that they had while watching this rice dissolve. Totally. Yeah, that's really interesting. I actually hadn't thought about the fact that that is maybe one sort of through line between my usual work in the theater and these pieces like I think I tend to not always necessarily in a meditative way, but I do think like I think I try to slow the heartbeat down a little bit and like how do I, I don't know. I think that, I mean, I think it's not as if this is something radical and new that I'm doing, but I think that the work that I've always gone to, you know, I've always been drawn to dance as of you, for example. And I think that there's like a willingness, there's a patience sometimes in dance or in, even as like a consumer of film and my favorite theater, like I think I'm always like attracted to like the stuff that I love to watch, I could watch for a very long time. And so I think that sense of like duration is something that I've always been interested in like pushing to its limit. But in the service of like, I think, like a payoff at the end, right? I think it's like, I think it's like, how do you pull time like taffy such that it, or like pull the rubber band so that it snaps back or whatever. There has to be some like, yeah, that's sort of like legato staccato. But yeah, time signature is something that I'm always thinking about in my work, whether it's like consciously or not. Well, there's this wonderful thing at the end of the Queer Dreams piece, which I don't know the title of it, but it's a where a series of people are telling their dreams that they've had. And normally when somebody tells you your dream, you're like, I'm checking out. But there's something about, maybe it was about earbuds in my ears, and I feel like they're, I'm in bed with them. And they're all kind of, some of them have stuffed up noses. And so they're a little sleepy. And so I was curious, A, about the prompt that you gave them. But also, there's a moment at the end where she says, I've just arrived here. And this one, and you're talking about kind of a payoff. And it just hit me that we were all, that dreams kind of never have beginnings or endings really. And that is, of course, life. And we're waking up in the middle of a lot of other people's stories. And so I guess, I really just wanted you to speak about those two things. Totally, yeah. What does it mean to wake up in the middle of somebody else's story? Multiple people's stories, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think like, that's the, like it's been really wonderful to try and find, like, my, how do I say this, like, I think like, turn and event, and like, that like, those little payoffs that we are always sort of like, seeking to create as theater makers. I've registered that like, even in collecting material, like these dreams, and the question for those, I don't even know if there was an explicit question, it was simply like, we were like, record, wake up and record a voicemail of like, literally right then what you remember of what you dreamed. So there were all of these submissions, and in crafting a piece out of them, a patchwork out of them, it was so fascinating to like, do that same kind of storytelling work around like, oh, that's where the like, I've just arrived here, I like, in hearing that dream, I was, I was like, oh, of course, that's the end. There's a like, that same experience that you had that you sort of like described physically as the experience that I had in hearing that sort of like raw material, the first round, and then it's simply about like, how do we build the runway that gets us to that point? So the listener hears that same experience, has that same experience that I had, or some experience of unexpected payoff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm working on a piece that nothing is 70 minutes of nothing but entrances and exits, because I said, I kind of want to just cut out the middle, you know, but it felt like when I was listening to your piece, I was like, oh, this is cutting out the entrance and the exit, and we're getting the middle, you know, in a way, because if in some ways, when you listen to people talk on the radio, you've got all that stuff in between that gets you to the core, and what the what you were able to do is cut away all of that, all that stuff and just give us the the root of who these people are in that moment. And I found it very beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So we probably got over our time, but what, but why don't you like, what do you need? What do you need right now? What do you need from the larger community to help you make your work? And and also, what are you when are you hoping to share the piece that you're working at the Herod Center with the larger community? And yeah, all of that. Yeah, I mean, I am just embarking on my journey with here. And I feel that I haven't really even I I am then I am then in the new crop of artists. And my residency started in April, right at the beginning of the pandemic. So I haven't even met much of the sort of much of the cohort in person. And so I think there's a long runway to developing this piece, rheology that I'm working on with my mom, actually, my mom's a physicist. So the piece that like to grow up with is that what the pieces about? Parents are both physicists. Yeah, I'm an only child of two physicists. And that is part of what I'm tackling in this work. It's called rheology. And we really are at the beginning stages of it. So I don't imagine that, I mean, it's crazy to think so far down the line. But because everything is sort of slowed down. And, you know, I kind of imagine that this piece won't see the light of day until 2023 2024. But what's it's, I, you know, I was talking about patience and time signature. And I think that you were asking what I need. I sort of feel like what I need is what I'm when I'm getting in some feel like there's the world has slowed down inevitably. And because of that, I'm being able to like lean into the sort of longer form work that I've been wanting to or like work that requires a longer runway that I don't usually have the opportunity to take the time to make. And I want to shout out also, I'm one of like, I'm one of Soho Rep's project number one artist this year, which means that I have this salary that is allowing me to just like sit magical thing that I have that I've never had the opportunity. I'm like, Oh, great. Sure. I will, you know, every two weeks, I will share pages of this. I'm, you know, I'm being able to be a writer in a way that I haven't necessarily been able, you know, usually it's like one, one sort of right early or create early project a year, because as a director, it's like, I'm working on seven things at once. And like, actually, no, maybe I don't have to work on seven things at once right now. And I can just write for three months. And I need that. And I'm kind of getting that, which is glorious thanks to, you know, you know, thanks to institutions like here and Soho Rep that are like giving me the breathing room to slow down a little bit. Amazing. Yeah. Well, good. I'm glad. I mean, I told Kristin I was going to do the little revenge. It was, you know, at the most it was going to be two years and ended up being four years of workshopping at the Herod Center. And I told her, I told her it was going to have three people in it and ended up having 36 people in it. I said it was going to be 90 minutes. It was five hours, you know, like take the time you need. Yeah. Well, thanks. Is there anything else you want to share with the how round? I mean, no, I mostly was just like, Oh, great. I get to chat with this is like an opportunity for us to just have a half an hour chat. And um, yeah, I mean, vichitra.media v i c h i t r a dot media is the website for the the ongoing sort of audio visual project and all those episodes are we'll get the how round people to put it up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are things that you can watch right now. And if you, you know, it's like so weird in this moment to not have that kind of live feedback. So, you know, if people watch it, feel free to like, reach out to me and be like, this is what I thought. I didn't like it. I liked it just because I missed that kind of like that. Do you like, do you actually like it when people tell you they don't like things? I mean, not if they just say they don't like it, but I do actually appreciate like, you know, like a friend, you know, like a piece that I did under the radar in January, somebody was like, I think I didn't, like I lost you after that moment. And I was like, oh, like, you know, like, it made, you know, it hurts the ego for a second. But if there is a very specific like experience that someone articulates, I'm like, Oh, wow, you're probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like being told, yeah, the things I like that kind of feedback. I don't I don't like being told when I don't like the thumbs up, thumbs down, it just exhausts me. Praise and blame. I find very exhausting. But when somebody actually engages in the ideas of a work, I'm like, oh, okay, all right, I know what's communicating now because they didn't talk at all about what I wanted them to talk about. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Okay, well, thanks for talking. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks for taking the time to do these interviews. I'm so glad I got to like, learn a little bit about your work and get to know it a little bit. I can't wait to learn more. Likewise. Yeah. And hopefully work together. Oh my god.