 khe ma dul ka, Hi ma dul ka. Hi ma dul ka, jhe jhe mai sea h-e-ma-duten duty h-e-ma-duten duty h-e-ma-duten duty हे मा दूगा चे जे मा चे जे मा चे जे मा चे जे मा चे जे मा Okay, we're gonna put it all together, and since I brought my phone in, I'm gonna try this one, I felt guilty because I didn't use the duty bike system this morning, but I couldn't figure it out. Že žpenscreams Že žpenaves Že žpenaves Že žpenaves So I let them know that 20,000 subsequent leaks under the sea was originally not just a science fiction episodic piece that was te kisi? but that originally it was a political piece and that Jules Verne was responding to the oppression that he saw in the world then with colonialism but the publisher didn't think that they could sell any magazines with that so he pulled that out but then at the end of his life he wrote one final story the mysterious island and if you get through to the end of that there's this little cave and the venturers go into the cave and they find this old hermit and the hermit turns around and it's Captain Nemo and they ask Nemo where you been he says well I've been hiding here he said well we've all wondered who you are and he explained well I was an Indian king and my family and I led the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and they were all lost I spent my life trying to create a world that I didn't see on the surface, an egalitarian world, a world where everybody would be treated as an equal so I got excited about that being from an ensemble theatre company and I also got excited about that because now I understood the wants and needs of my protagonist and I could work to create a piece that is episodic in its original form but try to apply a dramatic arc and so that is in a nutshell the exact same thing that folks at Looking Glass have been doing since we started taking works that are forgotten, pulling them off the shelf, dusting them off and seeing how those works can speak to us today how do we bring out why this story must be told in the here and now and there's a wonderful cross section there because early on we found that by doing that we could bring audience in because often times the books that we were really interested in were on the reading lists of the local schools so our first paid gigs were bringing in students during the day to see our work they weren't necessarily stylistically something the students were expecting to see but I think ultimately that was a good thing and it shocked them and made them come see the jungle or the other works that we were doing we were awful waiters at Looking Glass, we were horrible at it so we had to figure out how to fund our art and many of us came from educational backgrounds and it was a natural way to fund our art but also we found it was a natural place to put our artistry out into the world and it felt like a good match so really from the beginning Looking Glass has been fully gained purchase in a university setting we really never left many of us were from all over the planet but we came here to Chicago to go to school together up at Northwestern University and it's up in Evanston which is without traffic 30 minutes again that way unless you're studying law or medicine then it's 10 minutes that way no that way still so for me as a company member of a ensemble that is about to push 30 trying to figure out how to remain an ensemble and grow as individuals and help other artists grow their ensembles and hand over core values and principles and styles and our fetishes over to a new generation has been the crux right now for all of us we feel ourselves becoming the large institutions that we were railing against when we first fell in Chicago change charged and empowered and so that is we're firmly sitting in that place right now and trying to figure out what to do so in a way I'm talking about sitting in a university and what that means for ensemble but I'm also right now about to take the findings from what we did up at Lake Forest and bring it back to my ensemble we have our artistic retreat coming up in August and they're going to be wondering you're seeing this stuff before they are many of them because everyone flies in in August and we sit in a room for a week and lock the doors and when the black and white smoke comes up we have a season and so and we still do this quixotic process but the pressures are immense and so we're trying to find different ways of creating our art remaining an ensemble but that has different definitions for different members of the ensemble not just different definitions for other ensembles but even within our ensemble what it means to be ensemble is vastly disputed so that's kind of what we're talking about today all those things I couldn't figure out how to put that in a byline so that's what we're doing here today okay so once again I'm David Kozner I am a founding ensemble member of Looking Glass I was the first artistic director I direct, I act, I write, I teach all that good stuff like all of you do here's my core values and our company's core values we start with invention whenever you see a Looking Glass show there is something invented or reinvented the joke about Looking Glass is we're really good at reinventing the wheel but you could go down the street and buy one used and it works really well but we like to figure out a way to reinvent roundness we still believe in collaboration collaboration with fellow ensemble members collaboration with invited artists collaboration with our design team collaboration with our community parents in our education programs we even collaborate with our board it was easier before when we were the board and so it was no big deal to have the board in the room but now that we have community members coming in as our board they're finding that relationship and getting them excited and finding the buy-in in the inventing that we're trying to do is a big part of who we are our goal has always been to figure out why this story must be told and often times if we go back to our third core value of transformation that's usually where we find it how can telling this story how can putting this story into the world heal somebody bring new populations into the theater to feel the healing power of theater to feel the catharsis to feel the purge and to invent going back to the first word new ways of making that happen we were last night at dinner talking about has Aristotle is that still it is that still the way that we need to make things happen can we mix it up or is it look mixed up but then when you put the Rubik's Cube back is it still that same dramatic arc and that's what we continue to grapple with okay so this is normally this is the story that we tell people this is a show that I directed 2001 the Luna Mooda was conceived and directed by moi inspired by Tolo Calvino's the distance of the moon now I do get the credit as the conceiver but I conceived it with those five folks these are company members Laura Easton, David Catlin Laura Di Stasi, Tony Hernandez and down below Heidi Stillman our current artistic director and more often than not this is how we create we have company members and we're working together and we had three months of workshops and some illegal rehearsals that Union didn't know about and we had our three weeks of rehearsals everybody had to maintain the same weight during that entire time because as you can see that they are counter balancing each other so we all ate together and made sure that everybody was and this is this probably you probably recognize this this is the best idea in the room was coming from this group and when I would see someone try something like taking that straight ladder and sticking it upright 90 degrees into the middle of that curved ladder and it suddenly looked like a ship we wanted to make that happen we didn't know how we could make it balance but we knew that that was a really great idea and so suddenly we knew what we were doing for the next eight hours coming out of that play coming out of the trust that any one of those people could direct the show but they had in the previous artistic retreat given me the reins and so I was the guide I was the side coach I was the mentor for all of these folks that most likely have higher IQs than myself and so I knew how to use them and they trusted me to be used 90% of the time right there's that 10% where everybody is frustrated it's usually doing tech we can't get this thing to balance well you're the director you tell us whether we're going to cut it or not try it one more time then you got that so what behind them was a two dimensional image of the moon and I don't know if you can see from this picture there's rods coming out of it so we're not spending a lot of time on this show but they climb up on the moon and they do lots of circus tricks on that moon and that moon is that this was before we had our theater with the water tower pumping station this is at the roof page theater which is an old moose lodge so it's 80 feet deep so we can't deliver the moon all the way from the backstage and it came at the audience 40 feet towards them so you got the fun of the moon getting bigger and bigger and the moon was also an ensemble member in the show it was it had its wants and needs there was things it was willing to do and there was things that it did not give consent so that's that is how we work but it is also the story of how we work it's not always the way we work because we don't all live in Chicago anymore or we do but we all have kids and we have careers we're moving out as a universe and expanding and so we're trying to figure out how to maintain the ensemble aesthetic within the creation process so part of that also happens to be the other way we work which is because we were all educators as many of you are we spend time in universities now this isn't this is going to be the no-dumb moment where you probably all walk over to the next one because like well we all develop in universities that's why we're here is does that help us as an ensemble we've been doing it since the beginning the first show we did was through the looking glass I directed it it was in the Shanley shack which was where they kept the gardening equipment at Northwestern and so you would at that time I think it's now permanently cleared out but you used to have to clear it out put it around the back and do a show and then put it back in and that was there's young versions of all the looking glass folks in their skivvies and that's of course our namesake production it happened because Richard Christensen went to see the production and then there was a typographical error where they put the looking glass together and that's why our name is looking glass that's it we also did Stephen Brookoff's West at Northwestern University in 1988 and then brought it to what used to be the theater building which is now stage 773 lots of back flips and the wall flips the we were getting really excited about doing it ourselves and figuring out how we don't need flying by foil we're going to just fly through the air we're going to teach ourselves to fly Mary Siriman was getting her doing her graduate work at Northwestern at the same time so we were watching her shows and this is where we really started getting into the thing that theater people do we're a band of thieves we steal from other art forms so we just flat out said to Mary we want to steal your show will you come direct the odyssey with us of course that show there's many critics who claim that they saw that show I guarantee they didn't because usually there are about five people in the audience and two of them were boyfriends and girlfriends so I don't think they saw that but they went on to have another life what did get a lot of notice was Mary Siriman's six myths which started at Northwestern University we were as usual in 1997 having some financial difficulties and we were going to vote whether we would take the fall off I didn't think that was going to be a good idea so I asked Mary to expand metamorphosis and turn it into a big old show and she did it was supposed to run for five weeks she wanted to have water on stage they had flooded the barber theater at Northwestern so we had to figure out how to do it better I tried to hire a production manager who could do it better she couldn't so she stepped out of the way and I learned how to design pool and filtration systems and pumping systems and it ran for nine months and then went on to all the way to New York City second stage and then to Broadway from there and it was a joy to see something like that was the dream we saw her playing with it at Northwestern University brought it continued to grow it and then it had another life and then there it is playing in New York City in 2001 and doing that thing it was a theater to do it was playing there and it was there for those that needed healing and it spoke it spoke to them at that time Christine Dunford who spoke at the opening keynote directed the Jan Pataki manuscript found at Saragosa the picture doesn't do it justice it kind of looks like a skateboard ramp on one side that's outside of the picture there's lots of things that fly in and so this was originally done at Northwestern I think there was a dirt floor in that and so the great thing about testing things out in universities is you could try some really bad ideas and then pretend they didn't happen my problem is well where does that leave the university is that experimentation serving them or are they getting the short end of the stick are you truly present when you are developing a university or are you focused in one area script development and trying out some other things with student designers but are you really trying to get the ship to port that's my question are we fully treating this as if this is big girl art this is adult stuff we are really trying to make something that is going to change the world that's my question how do we make sure that we stay present that this isn't a means to an end but this is it we're making art right now I remember Bruce Norris when we first did Arabian Nights 92 and it was the audiences were coming we was no longer our boyfriends and our girlfriends the people were coming to see the show and we moved it to the old Remains Theater which is now the bed bath and beyond parking lot that I was telling some folks last night I can give you a tour if you want it was a gorgeous amazing theater with couches and an amazing bar and we got to move it there and we were doing eight shows a week and I remember we were absolutely exhausted and had never experienced what it meant to do four shows in a weekend and Bruce Norris who was playing music in the cast he was playing that harmonium he said what are you guys bitching about this is it this is what we are all trying to do right why are you and it just made me think about you never know when the moment is that moment could happen in Remains Theater that moment could happen in a black box theater or a classroom in the university why not treat every artistic moment as the moment because it might be them you are not in control whether it is the moment that might be the moment that might have been my moment right back in 92 I still look like this ever bar has been working on this if you know ever bar she runs a CSA farm up there she is completely off the grid she is Athena absolute goddess and she comes here to do shows with her company so she has been working on independent people this Icelandic epic she did a version of it at Carlton College shadow puppetry helping tell this story of a family imploding over decades what I am sad about is very few of our ensemble got to experience the realized version they didn't get to see this well they saw this picture but they didn't get to see what this picture is trying to capture so is it serving the ensemble to say go experiment over there and then come back with something finished is that serving ever is that is that keeping her respected within the ensemble I see some heads going like this so I must be hitting something so David Catelyn probably I imagine is maybe where all of you may have connected with looking glass cause he directed our looking glass Alice which has toured a lot and two as well it's five people but it looks like 25 people and so he's done some other work he did a version of Little Prince that originally was at Northwestern 2012 I believe I got that slide right very physical using this this page that was drawn on as the aviator does in the story and then was brought to down to looking glass at the water tower pumping station very I would say in a way this production looked the most like it's original realization at Northwestern I would say that we brought in there's a strong design program at MFA design program at Northwestern and David his thing is the people in the room are the ensemble so he we tend to have this loyalty thing going on at looking glass and that so whoever is in the room that's who we're loyal to so he tends to bring artists into the fold MFA students that I've been able to teach text analysis and he's working within collaboration classes and then he's inviting them to design for him and then they're coming to looking glass so that that's interesting right cause the good news about that is we get new blood new excitement, new experimentation the interesting news about that is well what about the designers that have been keeping the home fires burning at looking glass without that I say that question without it's a non rhetorical question I'm curious about that David recently did Moby Dick we received a grant to three companies did Blair Thomas the house theater and looking glass received a grant to each do their take on Moby Dick and so this was his take on Moby Dick that he originally did at Northwestern to our theater looking glass tends to because we only do three shows a year maybe we usually do a fourth bring back like a dance company we originally I was because our audiences were so small no one saw the original runs we bring it back I still feel that often times what happens is we will perform it here we take it on tour or co-production with other companies such as your companies out there last act of Luka Cattison was a original piece that I co-wrote there was some toy theater sequences that I developed while at Northwestern doing my graduate work and then also since Rebecca Gilliman was teaching in the the MFA writing program I snuck into class over there and she helped me with a script so then we come to 20,000 Leagues under the sea this is a show that we just finished doing at Lake Forest the goal was to create an immersive world where the audience felt like they were on the ship for those that know their work we did not depict the ship and we did not depict the final denouement leaving the ship on the deserted island everything occurred on the ship we were playing around with interactive technologies what the school didn't have in terms of season performers for whatever reason they had invested in a lot of equipment for anybody who's been up to Lake Forest College they actually don't have a theater it's an old cafeteria Hickson Hall so it feels like you're performing in Harry Potter except a small version of it so the shop is the old kitchen and the theater is the old hall so what we did was we turned that hall into a ship with back projections and front projections and interactive audio equipment so you can see here the audience is in and around and that is the footprint of the entire theater including the house we created a focal point but there was also action on ladders right next to the audience in the audience in the aisles even though that it has a quasi thrust design everyone is able to see the same images and that's something when you're obviously dealing with two dimensional art that you need to make sure you take into account so the idea was to again make the audience feel like they were on the ship and that they had to say that they had some agency and how the story would progress and so we would have screens that would come in that would change place when we were outside under the water but then it would open up to to pick the ship we also were playing with clock punk technology and playing around with that Jules Verne created a world that was colonial Victorian times but also in the future so we incorporated that clock punk style into the costume design the underwater one of the issues is when you put on a diving suit it's really hard to see people's mouths moving so we were playing around with how do we communicate physically in and around that so we played around with interactive video in using connex technology the famous organ on the ship it ended up being cut so we got into the performances but it was really cool and it was one of those moments where in a university setting where you only have three hours with your students and limited tech time some decisions had to be made and so that's an interesting the culture of creating art in a university setting there's just a different buy-in these are students that you're gonna be grading their papers later that night can you truly ask them to to put in the kind of hours that are required to get something like this to happen so for those not familiar with connex technology the woman playing aeronax and we'll talk about the fact that she's a woman in a second she walks up to the organ and the actor happens to be an accomplished pianist and so she was able to walk up and play at a certain point it just wasn't reliable someday in order to immerse ourselves in the water you could see that the screen that was pulled in front was actually scrim so we could front project put people in the water do images with the back projection so you can, the actors can emerge in the water either in front or behind the screens here Captain Nemo is attacking a very blurry sea spider made up by two ensemble members who are wearing LED lighting with that squiggles through I should have shown you a picture of sea spiders they actually look just like that except not blurry now here's what we did with the interactive audio that was soups interesting for any geeks like me in the audience we had, you can see in front of her there's a calculator pad so a calculator can take samples it can send MIDI information you can hook it up with lights you can hook it up with video it is an instrument it's just a digitally rendered instrument and you can what was interesting was in order to do that piano image before we had someone playing different, they were playing a keyboard on a chaosilator but a chaosilator is set up like a grid it's kind of like the chess that game that Spock plays it's a keyboard but you're doing this weird stuff to make it so we deconstructed a keyboard in order to she basically played Bach on the organ so it was interesting that part of me just wanted to go get a hammered organ and just put it back up there and just do it that way what happened was and I can't capture this in pictures the audience got to see one ensemble member creating the sound in a way that was live it wasn't just hitting a sample they were doing something that was amazing but they were supporting through a foley effect what was happening on the image so in a way this one moment to me was a success of the entire production of what we were trying to do in terms of ensemble aesthetic in terms of pushing the envelope we also the one thing that in terms of training that I'm most proud of is we spent a lot of time with fight choreography they do not have any kind of certification at Lake Forest College normally if you're working with a BFA program you get to work some students basically prerequisite training and they had none so that was the one area where just for the sake of safety that's where we spent a majority of our time on the fight choreography on the action choreography making sure that it was safe and in a way that also felt like a check in the positive side towards ensemble training then working together people without cuts and bruises and all their fingers and toes at the end of a show is the best outcome evaluation that one can have they worked together they're alive so this is the part where I feel the most guilty because I feel like are we using our students as guinea pigs are are they I think we thank them in the thank you part in the programs but what what are we saying to them that we are taking their work and we're putting it up on our theater it's something I think about it's something that I want to create I'm looking to create a writer to our bylaws in terms of how we treat our collaborators and what so that there's full disclosure in terms of what's going to happen I think a young 19 year old 20 year old is of course they're thrilled when they come and see it open and they feel a sense of connection I just feel that there's something that we need to do as ensembles to just voice that this is occurring ensembles are circles we look in and we turn the circle we look out what does that mean what does that mean when we're saying hey thank you for helping make our circle stronger and stay where you are so one of those things where stay where you are is we develop scripts within a university setting in order to in my mind bring 20,000 leagues from the 19th century into the 21st century we have to take a look at what is truly an egalitarian society what does it mean to be equal and when we're depicting a world where there's a single gender in that world and we're depicting that it just it feels disingenuous to me so I was reading I was reading some of George Elliott's work and I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until a few years ago that I knew that George Elliott was not George Elliott I just I keep a lot of stuff up here but that's just not something that it just somehow that got past me so luckily I learned about it in the I went to grad school and I learned about it and it stuck with me decade later that wait a minute if can Aaron axe be dealing with the same problem can Aaron axe in order to function as a marine biologist within the academy can she also be cloaking and so that's that's a a bit of violence that we added to the original that we put upon the original source text that she is in order to function within a greater society she had to hide her identity but then not only is she grappling with wanting to leave the imprisonment of the ship she's grappling with the fact that when she's found out that she is in fact biological woman by the others that she's accepted on the ship that it's no big deal that she's actually able to do what she does best and discover who she really is the issue with that is how do we make that not just a I don't know a little feel good dart that you're putting on there how do you really connect that to the entire dramatic arc how do you stretch that through the original source text I was uncomfortable if you know the story that Aaron axe kept a a cabin boy a servant an indentured servant a slave it's a Flemish boy so at least there was it's a different kind of slave than we're used to hearing about but it was a slave man the last so I excised that from this script but then I realized that I had taken away my and I consider Aaron axe the protagonist in more recent versions I had taken away the protagonists flaw there was she was she was perfect in every way so having her discover the sociopolitical rightness or wrongness of her choices in how she's able to function now was able to protect her in the world but then on the ship he took on a different function and he became her equal and so that was another revision of the original source text we brought Conce back and it became a very moving when Conce decides to stay on the ship at the end where Aaron axe leaves relationships in dramatic arc were very much applied within this episodic tale I cannot stress this enough the storytelling has to function as a theatrical piece and so using the university setting to make sure that it that it works despite mace into beginning acting despite limited virtuosic skills it has to work in the university production you have to make it with the building blocks that you have there you have to make it work and so because of that I would put that on the I would put another check on the success column in terms of trying to tell the story with what you have and making sure that the script is doing that for you okay so I want to make sure that we have time for some questions and one more demonstration so here's what's worked for looking glass we got to get started on the audio visual development but I feel like we since we were depicting tips of icebergs I get to use this over use this metaphor we literally were just seeing the start of what we can do I very much believe and I got myself in trouble in a panel discussion that happened here a year ago where I very much believe that for those that are looking for affordable theatrical venues we're all carrying one that and this isn't just giving up that there is a time and a place for the use of social technologies and because of current interactive functionality that it is a live space and I just call on us as ensembles to invent and grow and bring in this ensemble member that just like me and Moon this is an ensemble member and this is something that I tried to advocate for in our production I feel like the best ideas in the room from our living ensemble members may have overwhelmed this ensemble member at this point I think there's a lot more inventing and that needs to happen and hopefully will happen we were able to on a limited level work on choreographic style creation but because we're dealing because we don't have the physical trust in the room that's an area that I feel we need to develop we need to have an understanding with the universities that we're working with in terms of what what is the training what are the prerequisites what are those student bodies those cohorts bringing into the room and how can you as a leader as a guide make those limited abilities right make those limited abilities help you tell your story we talked about script development I'm back writing now I learned some things but we're doing some serious rewrites from this so the I would have to say this production is going to is going to be in the category of it's going to look very different from the university production at least it's going to sound different I actually think it might look very similar the design was successful and felt interactive the audience felt like they were on the ship now here's that positive thing we got the exposure to new artists Nathan Rohrer is a fantastic costume designer Brian Healy just is new to Chicago amazing designer they created some amazing stuff and I would love to work with them and so I'm going to be faced with the sort of moral dilemma of am I going to honor the work that Brian did or am I going to honor the fact that I smoked pot with John Muse in 1987 you know which which are we going to honor I think that the students obviously were thrilled to work in a professional manner to work with professional artists to try on what it feels like to be within a tried and true production process creation process and see that I am not going to give them all the answers and I am going to treat them as if I trust them to make choices and that took a long time that's a tough one because we if we are if we are training artists to fulfill visions outside of themselves because that's sometime your job that's one kind of software and it requires a different kind of software to ask them to be creating artists I don't know if human beings are are we naturally our own leaders or are we naturally followers the games we play say both and so it's it is our job as guides to let them know which game we're playing we're playing the leading game or the following game all the exercises I did with the students we do with our our own group I didn't adjust that in any way I treated the room of adults young adults like adults in order to do that this is where we have to be advocates and I know you all know this because when you're asked to go off and do your professional work in your universities and the fact that you say I'm going to go off and do my scholar research which is grading art you often say I need I need six to eight weeks right the people from the music department say hey two days in and out going to go play the Chicago Symphony and then I'm back got it done all right we have to advocate for the time that it takes to get this stuff done we have to advocate that in order to do this kind of work in a university setting three hours a night seven to ten ain't going to cut it it's actually it's not mirroring the professional experience that you're trying to get students ready for it becomes false creation I had to be more of an authoritative director to get this ship to port than I'm comfortable with we got a lot done I told you about some great successes but that's a part that even I've done this process over and over and over and over again and we still find ourselves because the prime directive is necessity being the mother invention and we got to get this show up but what did we miss because we skipped the process I was missing my posse I was missing all those people that are willing to keep their weight and their head shaved and all that other stuff for the show right that they had buy-in I was missing them when I'm when it ain't working and I'm out of ideas now with my own coming out of ideas and say hey let's stop we'll start again tomorrow morning well I didn't have that luxury there because there was no tomorrow morning there was just the three hours there there was just the here and now and so I I believe in myself I trusted myself but I wanted to be able to trust others in the room to get something done and that for me was I feel a failure on my part as a mentor and that's something that I want to continue to grow I think we all know what it means to work with young actors and I actually don't see this as a negative it's just is and I want us to accept that and again as I said before find what is right about them find what is their virtue and grab that and use that instrument so once again luckily some of my company members did brave traffic and came up and saw the show but now we what we discovered there is lost to the ethers we have these depictions but they are we are we all know what it's like to watch a show and video hi everybody back there my mom's watching from Santa Cruz, California so here's what I just want to leave you with know your girls and speak them loudly write them on a piece of paper in the rehearsal room so everyone knows why you're there including administrators from the moment that you get the opportunity to develop in a university setting and and you may need to state this time around what comes first the art or the ensemble ideals and if you have to say the ensemble ideals figure out what is the culminating event then because it's going to look different how can you make that a success a showing bits and pieces but if the university has a season and you're part of their season it's real it's art it can't be half-assed and you got to get that ship to port I just want to find new ways of getting the ship to port in the way the very reason that we started looking glass because we wanted to get it there with everyone there we wanted everyone to get there and say yay we did it and why is that important because we are showing an example of the very why must this story be told in our ensemble that we are expressing a group of people that are changed, charged and empowered and the characters they are playing if we get the dramatic arc right are changed, charged and empowered and then the ensemble that the audience that you invite in to be part of that ensemble I would never stage this here where there's a railing are you guys going to rush the stage at the end of this yeah don't do theater like this and yes you mean to how can make the audience feel like they are part of the ensemble make sure there's tons of communication not just with the person that hired you or if you are of that university your chair but make sure that the provost the dean understand what you are trying to do that this isn't same old same old this is a different experience and then finally be open to and respond to what's in front of you there are no caveats stop with the what should have those that football player who is a offensive and he played my Nemo his gift is he's used to getting pounded and getting back up and I got to I got to use that superhero quality that was his thing right I was able to appropriate that and say this is what we need in the theater as I said she's in the stem program there she's brilliant and she was able to bring that brilliance to her character that was right that was her virtue and how can we make that that's why she gets to be in the hall as super friends so what are you guys feeling like you want to do another demonstration thing you want to talk you want to get up and move or you want to talk I'm game for it either okay get up let me show you one thing we did anybody can do this we're done with a video I'll just need audio okay so I'm going to do an exercise with you and this is one way we dealt with the fact that you can't talk to people under water so this is a game this is a combination of exercises that our company stole from Pilabalus and then just stuff that the students made up so I need at least eight people to come up here but it can be more yeah come up on stage okay okay so has anyone ever done Pilabalus is flocking you done flocking oh good I'm going to show you how we take flocking and we take it to the next step so for those that haven't seen flocking do you want to do it over here or you got it so flocking for those that haven't seen it is there anybody that hasn't seen flocking if not very good so just once again this is how we use it so flocking thank you can I get three people so once you flocking the idea is that so imagine a mirror in front of us and so if I start in a neutral position and I move a bit they all move with me just trust that they're following right and if I welcome out they will welcome out with me but if I pivot more than 90 degrees we have a new lead this can be pivoted you can pivot with more force and pivot 180 degrees 207 degrees even people that do a 360 it's just the right path can I have four let's do let's do groups of three so 16 degrees so can I have a triangle here triangle here and a triangle here perfect okay great and the leaders are facing towards me pivot okay great you won't do leaders for long so what I want you to imagine that we are all under water just right now in the place just imagine the viscosity of the water feel that you can have your own agency that feels like you have to move through okay great this is one being this is a second being this is a third being so you are three different creatures meaning to communicate to each other so you would need to communicate to this group you would need to communicate to this group you are all exploring the water together we have three different characters nine people playing three different characters you need stuff is going to happen you are going to respond to each other you might enjoy each other's company you might be terrified of each other's company you might want to warn one person at the other one person use physical communication to get that done so when you switch that the new leader will be the new communicator we are going to start with silence and then I am going to add some music great so starting in neutral position first just explore the space the space and as you are exploring the space when you naturally feel that an interaction can occur you can acknowledge the existence of the other characters in this underwater world so the other group of three start to communicate with them how can you give them specific information what do you want to say to them how do you feel about what is occurring right now when the fireflies are for this profane country of silver and taverns and bars they glide out all the stars all we hear the seas will rise with these I am going to hand you this because my mom is old sorry it is just that anytime I ever try to talk about it even in this setting I find myself not really wanting to name it or say what it is because I feel weird about it I feel like oh I am trying to say oh I was part of that so if the artists at the time or in the publishing of the first edition or at any point could have just said in collaboration created in collaboration with I would be totally satisfied I don't need money or anything I am just very proud to have been part of a process that I never those of us that were there in the workshops at NYU that created something we never got that acknowledgement so just on that level it reminded me I was like oh yeah I had this feeling and that would be really all I would love to just have that yeah can you just say in terms of how you work this out with the students you guys are going to do this with looking last now are you going to did you script it do you take authorship when you guys do it I did come in with a script that I had been working on for two years there were at least there was visual text there was physical text that the students helped create with this one process there was less spoken text that they helped create but that's my issue text is text and I don't think we figure I don't think we as artists have figured out a way to honor those other text visual text graphical text we haven't figured out how to honor those that help us create that in the beginning looking glass used to say whoever was the writer and the ensemble credit we don't do that anymore I maybe it just doesn't look good on the on the marketing I don't know yeah it's one of the things that I was going to say we're working with our ensemble we have kind of like frantic assembly we direct in different capacities and we do devise with our ensemble and the thing that we've started to approach is because my ties to technology is like when you go see a movie there's so many people that are involved in just the look of Iron Man and they acknowledge that at the end of the movie and so every person who programmed one line of code is mentioned or thanked but the problem is that when you go to publicist or to put out a thing you can't say this 15 page thing is worried about number of letters and how many words so it always comes back to there's one of us that has to be this head person who gets all of that press and everything but it is such a collaborative thing it's still hard for us to navigate and I think that breaking it down and just doing this in collaboration with either physical collaboration or technological collaboration that's at least how we've been starting to approach it and I think that helps we experimented at Looking Glass with actually with the show that I directed the last act of Look at Catasem where I really needed I'd been writing it for some time and I needed to switch to being a director I had been co-writing with and the co-writer before we produced it she died and so we brought even more names so by the time we were done there were five writers on the byline well we felt good about doing that but then had to spend so much time communicating to Chris Jones and everyone else that this wasn't a nothing bad occurred right it's not that someone couldn't get the job done it's that this is how we created this time around and so it's interesting how the outside world views that kind of acknowledgement thanks I thought to add a thought and a question so I have a device theater company here in Chicago and we haven't had the opportunity yet to work with a university residency but we audition and we have many workshop phases to the creative process most of those people are coming out just out of undergrad or very very young and because some of those shows now have started to tour we have just come up with a blanket probably similar to what you guys did early days originally devised by and anybody who is a part of the workshop process from a designer to a movement director to an actual actor on the stage type of deviser is just listed and we just we just go to bat for that and we go on tour with whoever we go we say this 20 person list has to be on the program originally devised by and everybody has to be in there so I can't really speak because I don't know in what way that would be useful to list all the university and everyone who wrote a piece of code I don't know for us so we can sort of manage that but I think that that's and that's written into the contract and we sort of stole this from Cirque du Soleil that if anything that's created the company owns and the company will receive the financial benefits essentially of tours other than if you go on the tour and the company is paying you for your time and your work on tour and that way it's really hopefully resolving that situation for us that and actually it's because I had read about Superman and for years the two guys who created two kids from Cleveland from high school that created Superman were rob blind because of the rules in those days so they're not only were they not paid for their work but their names were never listed as the original creators of Superman which has made trillions of money dollars right so anyway that was my thought my question just is with this August retreat and the black and white smoke I was curious to know how many, I mean you guys have such a large ensemble and I just work so differently I really am the lead person who just brings in one idea every two years and we just work on that how many of these types of processes either with universities or not with universities or occur roughly each year and are brought to the table and then are sort of tabled if you could give us a rough estimate of how that number works sure and I'm also mindful that it's lunchtime so I'll stop it's a great question we are a company of creator artists so everybody comes to the table to do something and we used to have three week we used to spend a month doing this now we have five, six days and we also have to deal with membership and approve the budget and there's a lot of other stuff so we have given agency to our artistic leadership to pair down all the proposals to six to nine top top we also are this year possibly moving to deciding two seasons at a time at the very least we are deciding the opening show of the following season because we were just finding we just weren't able to raise the dollars for sponsorship and just weren't able to do the design process and the collaboration that we needed to get that opening show of the following season so we are about to experiment with that the good news about that is more people get a yes the bad news is those that get a no have to wait even longer and we do have a we are now 25 members and so that's that's a tough one and half of our company are our directors and so there's the way that we participate now more often is to direct and so there's less of an opportunity to be part of the ensemble so we're looking for new ways to function and collaborate I'll be around and happy to talk to any of you please contact me my information is just Google me and you can contact me find me I am would love to hear how you're getting all getting this done and figuring out how we're still trying to figure it out and remain an ensemble based company and not give not just become an institution like seems to be happening yay everybody yay