Podcasts about The Wooster Group

Here is the new podcast episode with Casey Spooner, our first live podcast at Fotografiska in Berlin! Casey, a multifaceted artist renowned for his innovative blend of music, performance, and visual arts shares his personal, emotional story and very non - linear healing story. Spooner was born in Athens, Georgia and attended the University of Georgia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has contributed to performances with the Doorika collective and joined the experimental Wooster Group ensemble in 2007. He released solo work starting in 2010, including the album "Adult Contemporary." Spooner opened for Scissor Sisters in 2011 and released a single "I Love My Problems" in 2020. Spooner co-founded the musical duo Fischerspooner with Warren Fischer in 1998. The group released several albums and was known for their performance art and immersive enterprises. Spooner primarily wrote songs and performed vocals. In our conversation Casey takes us through his plant medicine journey and his way to search for new healing modalities. @Caseysponner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Best of LIGHT TALK (Originally broadcast on April 14, 2023), The Lumen Brothers and Sister welcome "Legend of Light" Jennifer Tipton to the show!    Join Jennifer, Ellen, Steve, Stan, and David, as they pontificate about: Jennifer's most vital career moments; White light and LED; Falling in love with the photon; Discovering moonlight; The "mystique" of being Jennifer; Light and music; Starting a career in Dance; Working with great directors and choreographers; The challenges of Dance lighting; Directing The Tempest; Designing with new technology; Working with The Wooster Group; Discovering bounce-light; Teaching students not to become clones; and Advice for young lighting designers.   Nothing is Taboo, Nothing is Sacred, and Very Little Makes Sense.

Send your questions or provocations to Adam or Budi here!In this episode, Adam and Budi kick off their new series, Theatre as a way of Life', looking at how theatre can be a powerful, transformative experience for exploring the actor and the audience. They start by diving into what it means to be an audience member - how watching theatre can shift our awareness and make us more conscious of our own 'audienceness' in the space. Support the showIf you enjoyed this week´s podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. To submit a question: Voice- http://www.speakpipe.com/theatreofothers Email- podcast@theatreofothers.com Show Credits Co-Hosts: Adam Marple & Budi MillerProducer: Jack BurmeisterMusic: (Intro) Jack Burmeister, (Outro) https://www.purple-planet.comAdditional compositions by @jack_burmeister

Sam Gold has directed five Shakespeare tragedies, but his latest, “Romeo + Juliet,” is something different—a loud, clubby production designed to attract audiences the age of its protagonists. “It's as if the teens from ‘Euphoria' decided that they had to do Shakespeare,” Vinson Cunningham said, “and this is what they came up with.” The production stars Rachel Zegler, who starred in Steven Spielberg's remake of “West Side Story,” and Kit Connor, of the Gen Z Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” and features music by Jack Antonoff. Gold, who cut his teeth doing experimental theatre with the venerable downtown company the Wooster Group, bristles at the view that his production is unfaithful to the original. “A lot of people falsely sort of label me as a deconstructionist or something, because they're wearing street clothes,” he tells Cunningham. “I'm not deconstructing these plays. I'm doing the play. . . . I think it's a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.” Gold aspires to excite kids to get off their phones. “We are in a mental-health crisis [of] teen suicide. I'm doing a play about teen suicide, and all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them.”

The cover photograph for the second and final Richard Hell and the Voidoids album, Destiny Street features a woman standing in the background. For years, this woman was unfairly credited as "unknown woman." However, the truth is that the woman is Anne Militello, who would go on to become an accomplished lighting designer and professor and CalArts. Anne's journey began while working for the now infamous rapist Harvey Weinstein back when Weinstein and his brother were concert promoters in metro Buffalo. Seeking to leave The Nickel City but not yet prepared for New York City, she embarked on a five-day bus trip to San Francisco, packing a tin of pot brownies, which were completely consumed along the way. Upon arriving on the west coast, Anne leveraged her experience working with lights in college to gain work at a music venue. The manager who hired her was Sylvester, who later became a disco legend. One night outside the Magic Theater, she encountered a man dressed like a trucker who seemed to be out of place and ignored by her cohort of punker rockers. Feeling sympathetic, she struck up a conversation with him.  The man told her he was a playwright and wanted her to read his new play, which she and really liked. The trucker turned out to be Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard and they became great friends. With Shepard's encouragement, she relocated to New York City and immersed herself in the theater scene. Over time, Anne established herself as a world-renowned lighting designer, working with luminaries such as David Lynch, Tom Waits, The Wooster Group, and Lou Reed. Today, Anne resides in Los Angeles, where she operates Vortex Lighting.

A new show from The Wooster Group adapts Toasts, an historic Black American oral storytelling technique, for the stage. "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me" stars Eric Berryman, and is inspired by a folklore record of the same name from the 1970s. Berryman plays a late-night radio DJ, who tells stories alongside live drumming from Jharis Yokley. The show is running at The Performing Garage through February 3. Berryman and director Kate Valk join to discuss their production.

Willem Dafoe has built a career out of shapeshifting. His latest role in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things demonstrates exactly that. Today, he joins us to discuss his compelling performance in the imaginative tale (7:00), the elaborate details he discovered on set (9:20), and the three-hour physical transformation he underwent each day of filming (12:38). Then, Dafoe describes his upbringing in Wisconsin (15:15), his early love of B-movies (20:04), and his formative years in the theater as part of The Wooster Group in New York City (26:45). On the back-half, we dive into his task-based approach to acting (35:55) and how it guided his memorable performances in the late William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (41:10), Oliver Stone's Platoon (43:52), and Sean Baker's The Florida Project (49:44). To close, Dafoe reflects on the joy of collaboration (53:30), his search for truth as an actor (57:25), and his desire to continue creating in years to come (1:00:50). For questions, comments, or to join our mailing list, drop me a line at sf@talkeasypod.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"I grew up in New York City. And when I was like 13, I'd sneak downtown on the subway and I'd go see shows at like La MaMa and Wooster Group and all of these sort of heavy-hitting, really alternative theaters. And theater was, for me, my first love. And I feel like in some ways, we've lost touch with that because we exist in a world that has become so fast moving. And I'm not sure that's a gain, a bonus, but there always has to be a check-in, and I find working with Kate, I've always felt that I never had to fear that my process was taking a long time.There was never a sense of like, what have you got? Show it right now. Do it, show it, show it! What have you got? Okay. Oh, you haven't got it. It's like there's a sense of, with Kate, it's like you're being wrapped in this enormous teddy bear of artistic freedom and care. Because I do do enough TV and film. Sometimes the bigger the budget, you know, sometimes... (gestures as though to say 'the quality doesn't always increase'). So, I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun." -Catherine CurtinWhy do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division?Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe.www.imdb.com/name/nm0193160/www.npcowgirls.orgwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division?Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe."I grew up in New York City. And when I was like 13, I'd sneak downtown on the subway and I'd go see shows at like La MaMa and Wooster Group and all of these sort of heavy-hitting, really alternative theaters. And theater was, for me, my first love. And I feel like in some ways, we've lost touch with that because we exist in a world that has become so fast moving. And I'm not sure that's a gain, a bonus, but there always has to be a check-in, and I find working with Kate, I've always felt that I never had to fear that my process was taking a long time.There was never a sense of like, what have you got? Show it right now. Do it, show it, show it! What have you got? Okay. Oh, you haven't got it. It's like there's a sense of, with Kate, it's like you're being wrapped in this enormous teddy bear of artistic freedom and care. Because I do do enough TV and film. Sometimes the bigger the budget, you know, sometimes... (gestures as though to say 'the quality doesn't always increase'). So, I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun." -Catherine Curtinwww.imdb.com/name/nm0193160/www.npcowgirls.orgwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of LIGHT TALK, The Lumen Brothers (and Sister!) welcome "Legend of Light" Jennifer Tipton to the show!   Join Jennifer, Ellen, Steve, Stan, and David, as they pontificate about: Jennifer's most vital career moments; White light and LED; Falling in love with the photon; Discovering moonlight; The "mystique" of being Jennifer; Light and music; Starting a career in Dance; Working with great directors and choreographers; The challenges of Dance lighting; Directing The Tempest; Designing with new technology; Working with The Wooster Group; Discovering bounce-light; Teaching students not to become clones; and Advice for young lighting designers.   Nothing is Taboo, Nothing is Sacred, and Very Little Makes Sense.

We all know about Willem's sensational work on screen, but what you might not have realised is that he dedicated nearly 30 years of his life to the The Wooster Group - a legendary experimental theatre company in New York. Willem was kind enough to invite Jonny to his farm outside Rome, where he had only just morphed from movie star to animal midwife. They discuss how a white middle class boy from Milwaukee discovered the creative avant-garde, what it was like to experience loft performances in the golden age of punk, and how he once blanked his lines during an audition for Edward Albee, before being asked to show the great playwright more than just his audition piece. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ever wondered what Willem is thinking about when he throws his yoga mat out every morning? Well, wonder no more, as we bring you the second part of Jonny's conversation with him on his farm outside Rome. We also find out how his time with The Wooster Group has informed his work as a screen actor, what he still craves from the theatre, and why actors should maybe sometimes just let the work do the talking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The SLC Performance Lab is produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program. During the course, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Grad Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Grad Lab is one of the core components of the program where graduate students work with guest artists and develop group-generated performance experiments. Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based artist working in theater, opera, and film. Schaal was named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and received a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Joyce Award, 2018 Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, 2017 MAP Fund Award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and was an Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. Her project GO FORTH, premiered at Performance Space 122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Her work JACK & showed in BAM's 2018 Next Wave Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and with its co-commissioners Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Schaal's piece CARTOGRAPHY premiered at The Kennedy Center and toured to The New Victory Theater, Abu Dhabi Arts Center and Playhouse Square, OH. Her dance work, MAZE, created with FLEXN NYC, premiered at The Shed. Most recently, she directed Triptych composed by Bryce Dessner with libretto by Korde Arrington Tuttle, which premiered at LA Philharmonic, The Power Center in Ann Arbor, MI, BAM Opera House and Holland Festival. Her newest original work KLII, was co-commissioned as part of the Eureka Commissions program by the Onassis Foundation and is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center in partnership with Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and REDCAT. Schaal will develop and direct a number of upcoming works including SPLIT TOOTH with Tanya Tagaq (Luminato Festival, Canada), HUSH ARBOR (The Opera) with Imani Uzuri (The Momentary, AZ) and BLUE at Michigan Opera Theater. Schaal's work has also been supported by New England Foundation for The Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, FACE Foundation Contemporary Theater grant, Theater Communications Group, and a Princess Grace George C. Wolfe Award. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.

Welcome to the FuturePerfect Podcast where we talk with compelling people breaking new ground in art, media, and entertainment. This podcast is produced by FuturePerfect Studio, an extended reality studio creating immersive experiences for global audiences. Episodes are released every two weeks, visit our website futureperfect.studio for more details.The text version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity. Find the full audio version above or in your favorite podcast app.For episode 005, Wayne Ashley interviews Nick Fortugno, co-founder of the New York-based game studio Playmatics and designer of numerous digital and non-digital projects, including board games, collectible card games, large-scale social games, and theater.INTRODUCTION AND ROLEPLAYINGHey Nick, thanks for joining us. I'm really excited to dig into some of your background, ideas, projects, and particularly your alternative vision for a future of theater. I see you as a catalyst, a kind of cultural interlocutor making links across different forms of knowledge and practice, and the work you've done really attests to this. You've designed video and board games as well as outdoor public games. You're the co-founder of Playmatics, a New York game studio and the lead designer on many theater works, including Frankenstein AI and The Raven. And of course, one of the lead creators of the blockbuster mobile game Diner Dash. But first I want to go back a bit. Your cousin introduced you to roleplaying when you were quite young and you ran your first game of Dungeons and Dragons at six years old. Is it too much to assume that roleplaying is one of the most critical activities for you, if not a central organizing practice leaking into everything you do? Give us a sense of how roleplaying has activated much of your thinking and practice.Nick Fortugno: I think a central organizing principle is like a good way of thinking about it. It doesn't inform all of my work in a literal sense, but it's the heart of how I think about aesthetics. In Dungeons and Dragons, essentially what you do is you tell stories with other people and you use a rule system to adjudicate disagreement. You have a lot of “I hit you”—“no you didn't” stuff in roleplaying so you need rules to deal with that. When you're storytelling in that system and you're the person responsible for making the story, you don't story-tell the way you do in other forms where you have an idea of the story in your head and you're figuring out how to implement it in a way that will affect the audience. Instead, the players or the protagonists are interacting with you and they're changing it constantly. And so you don't know where the story is going. You have ideas of where you could go, you have ideas of what you might want to happen, but you're really in this collaborative process. And so this idea of improvising and using systems to generate things and being responsive to the interactions of other people is very much at the heart of my work. It's how I teach, how I think about storytelling centrally, and it informs a lot of my aesthetics. So yeah I would not be the person I was today if my cousin Joey didn't teach me D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.DESIGN THINKINGYou're also a prolific researcher, not only of games, but of literature, theme parks, new technologies, and performance. I'm thinking about a previous discussion we had where in one breath you mentioned cultural forms that most people would never bring together in the same conversation. The list is long, but indulge me here: the British theater company Gob Squad, Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland, Harry Potter hotel, the theater collective The Wooster Group, the blockbuster event Sleep No More, the novels of Joyce and Pynchon, Evermore Park in Utah, and the epic video game Elden Ring. This cluster excites me because it's how we think as well, across these kinds of groupings. You also use this concept of affordances to enable you to think systematically across all these activities. Can you say more about that?NF: Affordance is a concept from design thinking, Donald Norman really popularized it. It's the idea that a form has features about it that lead to certain kinds of use. There are things that are intuitive in a way, or natural in a way, that come from a form. If I put a handle in a certain place, you hold the handle and that changes your use of the device. That idea that the forms start speaking to certain kinds of use cases is very central to thinking about interactive design. Because when you're a designer in those spaces you make the affordances. You don't tell users what to do. You give them something and you have them do it. That's why it's interactive. It's not like a roller coaster where I strap myself in and I just ride the rails that were put out in front of me. It's more like a theme park where there's just a bunch of stuff. But I don't go wandering off into the most boring part of the theme park. I go towards the lights, I go towards the sound, I go towards the interactive things. The design of those things that attract me, the things that challenge me, the obstacles and the rewards, all of that stuff moves me around in those spaces. This is central to the way I think about my practice.LITERATURE, PLAY AND AMBIGUITYYou have a BA in graduate study and literature. In our previous conversation, you noted an overlapping relationship between post-war American literature and the kinds of interactive narratives found in gaming. Do I have that right?In our other podcasts I've been really interested in what brings disparate people to these emerging hybrid media spaces. They come from film, dance, theater, visual art, and gaming. I think you're the first person in our podcast series making connections between Pynchon and James Joyce with interactive gaming structures. I'm curious about how you came to make these connections.NF: When I got interested in literature I was drawn to postwar postmodernist approaches to writing, like I'm thinking fifties, sixties, and seventies. But really you could stretch it from a Borgesian and Joycean and Steinean space up through the modern day. There's still authors like Ali Smith doing stuff like this. But when you look at like things like Pynchon and Nabokov in particular, their works start becoming a little bit obsessed with interpretation. Interpretation becomes the center of the novel. The novels become games about interpretations. There are other authors in that space who are really breaking down the sense of what you're supposed to consume from the story because they are, in a meta way, thinking about the fact that you're interpreting them. Whether it's Crying of Lot 49 asking you to think about what communication systems are and then challenging you on how we interpret conspiracies. And that's also all over Foucault's Pendulum. Or a book like Lolita, which is basically laughing in your face about your attempts to understand it. Or Pale Fire for that matter, which I think is an even deeper experiment. What you see over and over again is this idea that the novel is a game that the reader is playing with the novelist. It's not a puzzle. You're not going to get the answer out of it. That's not the point. And certainly postmodern poetry and people like Asbury would argue that if you got one meaning out of a poem, you didn't really read the poem anyway. The work becomes something that you as the audience have some ownership of because it is open to you and because it's an ambiguous object that you have to work with. That's what got me. I was already, just from roleplaying, very used to the idea that I participate in stories and that they come from this relationship with me and the text.So I don't like talking about interactive narrative. I think that's a bad phrase because I I'm always interacting with story. That's not new, what's new is the types of affordances of interaction that I get from stories, and what the possibilities for changing those stories are, and how much the story is a fixed thing that I encounter, and how much the story is flexible to my input. To me, the literature study was partly just giving me an outlet for stories and a place where stories can actually be quite experimental because when you just write it's cheap to make crazy worlds. It's the same amount of ink to write a crazy world as it is to write a realistic one. You can go very far with literature in a way that would be harder to do in film because you have to shoot all that stuff. The drive of novels from the modernist period on has been a drive towards more and more stylistic experimentation and that has been really engaging to me because you start seeing it as almost a formal thing. You can look at it like a structure and then you can see that the structure is doing something. Joyce's Ulysses is an excellent example of that. Each chapter is written stylistically and formally different. There are chapters that are dialogues, there are chapters where the stream of consciousness changes radically, there are chapters that drift, and that's part of the narrative. If you go back to the Oulipo experimentation that Calvino and other French and Italian authors were doing, they were literally creating that whole idea of branching trees. You start to see that there are patterns of structures of story that we can start to establish.That's the approach I take to this question of rhetoric. Exploration is a set of tropes, and branching is a set of tropes. It's similar, whether you're branching in a YouTube video or branching in a choose your own adventure, or branching in a game like Until Dawn. The branching is similar, it has similar tropes. So we can look at it structurally and say, well, what does the structure do? How do the choices in the design of the structure change things independent of content. And then what is the intersection between the content and the structure?DYNAMIC STRUCTURES AND GAMESIt's interesting to note how the strategies found in avant-garde and experimental literature have leaked into, or have become one of the dominant ways of constructing narrative within popular culture, video games, and even marketing. What was on the periphery has, in a sense, moved to the center and become part of the entertainment industry.NF: I think so because as you start moving into more dynamic and particularly digitally dynamic work it starts to have to be structural. Although that spills back into the analog, especially as internet of things (IOT) becomes very reduced in size and cost and technology starts coming back into the real world. You start seeing this there too.I'm riffing a lot on arguments in a book called Expressive Processing by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. If I make a piece of work that changes with every user and produces a different outcome, then the output of that work is not really an analysis of that work. If the work has a hundred thousand possibilities, one possibility is such a small segment of what it could be. That it gives me information as a user, but I can't really critique the work from that perspective. I have to look at the structure because it's procedural, it's not predetermined. And I think as we start moving into works that are like that, and since computers enable us to do that, that's what computers are good at is that kind of dynamic procedural, then we start to see that structural analysis and system design become more and more important. As it does, and we see the affordances that has, we can start pulling those affordances into other forms where we see similar audience relationships. So I don't think: does theater need this? Does film need this? Does installation need this? No, It doesn't need it. You can make good art without it, and obviously we have made thousands of years of good art without it, but the possibilities of the art change when you start seeing those things. That's why I think it's starting to permeate. Digital games are a very big industry and there's been a lot of really interesting storytelling in them. I don't think all people who study this stuff know that because it's locked a bit behind barriers of picking up a PlayStation 4 controller and trying to get through it. Shadow of Colossus, for example, is one of the most important digital works ever made. But not many people experience it because it's a really hard digital game. And it has to be hard. That's part of its aesthetic. But I think that the people who have bridged this are starting to see that you can inherit things from those forms into these other spaces. That's just changing the way we think and then you start to see work in the world that is just more procedural. Work that does just become more dynamic in its nature. Then you end up with stuff like LARP (Live action role-playing) where, you can't make LARP the way you make theater because I don't know what the players are gonna do. So my scripts in LARP can't be like a theater script, it doesn't make sense. I need a structure that will support 40 people running around doing random things.PARTICIPATORY EXPERIENCES DRIVEN BY TECHNOLOGYThis brings me to theater, particularly two participatory theatrical installations that you co-created. First, Frankenstein AI: a monster made by many which was an AI powered immersive experience that premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. And The Raven, which was performed as part of the Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival in 2019. Tell us what audiences might have experienced when they participated in Frankenstein AI and what was the genesis of that work?NF: Frankenstein AI has had a couple of different forms. Its original form was a small audience immersive experience where you came into a room and you interacted with another audience member at a surface computer that was like built into a table. It was formulated as an artificial intelligence asking you questions about what it was like to be human and you're sort of marking values on the table using a physical computing device that looked like an ouija board. That information was sent to an actual AI that was in a cloud which was used as the seed to determine a mood that the AI had. And then when you finished that exercise, you were brought into a room that was mapped with projections and IOT procedurally played drums and you would have a chance to talk to the artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence would generate a question and then it would be delivered in text to speech to the audience in the room. And then the audience in the room would direct the docent to type a question into a typewriter and that would be sent back to the AI. This was all formulated where there's this AI that's been created, it has escaped into the internet and it is trying to understand what it is and what humanity is. And it's using the narrative of Frankenstein as this thing that was created that doesn't understand its role as a seed to understand where it's going. The whole thing was essentially a meditation on two things. One is this question of what is AI and what should we be worried about AI? These were the conversations that I had with Lance Weiler and Rachel Eve Ginsburg who were the co-creators of that project. My big argument was that everyone worries about Terminator, but what we should really be worried about is Kafka. AI is not a monster that takes us over. AI is a thing that doesn't understand us and then just acts procedurally in ways we don't understand.This is around the time that Microsoft had released an AI that became wildly racist and we were thinking about what it meant that we're teaching AI and how could we make a piece that gets people to reflect on the idea that we're engaged with artificial intelligence in the world? We are training it and we are going to teach the AI what it does. So if that's the case, what is our responsibility? The whole piece was kind of a meditation on that process. I did the creative technology design on that and some of the interactive narrative design of the sequencing of it. I'm very proud of that piece personally, because it was the first piece of creative technology that I ever actually showed in an exhibit. I worked on the technology that connected all of devices. So it meant that when the AI changed mood, the projections changed, and the drums changed and it pulled the AI's response and then fed that into the speech to text and delivered it into the room. So I basically did the technology that connected the surface tables to the AI, to the projectors, and to the drums. This was a topic of research I've had for a long time about how technology could be used to create these like kind of seamless connections between things. You didn't see anything happen, you just asked a question and suddenly the projections and drums changed. I call that seamless technology—technology that doesn't have clear lines where it connects. I think that could be a kind of magic and that was important to me. What did you learn from producing Frankenstein AI that changed your approaches when you then began to develop The Raven? How does The Raven work as an experience that grew from or built upon your previous work?NF: The Raven was an immersive performance where we allowed an audience into The American Irish Historical Society where they experienced a magically real story of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. The center of the technology of the piece was that every user had a lantern that they carried around with them. The lantern was an IOT device that was reading beacons in the space and connected to a central system. The audience also had a set of headphones that were playing audio for them. So most of the audio that was present in the piece came from the headset that was being played based on where they were and based on a character they picked at the beginning of the piece. Everyone was sort of playing a performer in the piece. The performer Ava Lee Scott, who was playing Poe and co-wrote the piece, was moving through the space as Poe meditating with these characters. But you, as the audience, were one of the people that Poe knew from his life or his creations. What Lance Weiler and I carried from Frankenstein AI was this idea that we could create a central technology system that was guiding all these users without having to have actors on top of those users moving them around. And that the storytelling could really be based on their decisions, because it was in part based on where you went and what you encountered. The other thing that Frankenstein AI taught me, in a real sense, was that these technologies could be stable. The work had a server system, that's how it ran, it was a server that was running on a small piece of technology called the Raspberry Pi. We turned it on and on the first day when we were running it we just didn't turn it off. We wanted to see if it would stay up overnight. And then we didn't turn it off for two full weeks. It just ran nonstop for two weeks and it never broke. We never had to restart it. So that taught me these things can be made battle ready. We brought a similar kind of technology to The Raven. There were obviously different technical constraints to The Raven and there were different bugs we were facing, but we went through a similar process of creating a central system that guided the narrative. If we do that right and we have the right affordances to connect to the audience that can take the place of a bunch of docents, a bunch of rules, a bunch of structures, and people can just explore. Then through that exploration they can find story. I should say that we worked with pretty robust technologies on that project. We were in partnership with Microsoft and we were using pretty heavy Azure servers and things like that, but it was not for heavy lifting stuff. It was for reliability of the delivery of the material. And then we built this gigantic XML file that was the branching script of the entire piece so that we knew where people were. We could time lights and sound cues and things like that.THE LIMITS OF THEATERWhat I find compelling about both of these projects is their capacity to posit alternative models for theater's future. They either directly or implicitly suggest that theater needs to be remediated or fixed. For the purposes of this discussion, can I make that assertion?NF: Yeah, I will also defend traditional theater, but… [laughs]That's good [laughs], but what is it about certain kinds of theater that need to be remediated and how are your explorations accomplishing this? I'm very careful to say alternative models and I'm not asking you to generalize. I think from our audience's perspective, people are going to ask: what's wrong with the kind of theater that I do? And why do I need these other systems? Why do I need to even consider these technologies? All these kinds of questions are implied, for better or worse, in the kind of work that you're proposing and the kind of exciting research that you're carrying out.NF: First of all, there's just aesthetic possibilities that are very hard to create in a linear format like theater. Guilt is hard to create in an audience. Triumph is hard to create in an audience because they don't do anything. You can get to shame, but there's types of shame you can't get to. So there's aesthetics that become possible just when someone is culpable and when someone has the ability to achieve. That becomes kind of interesting. Games have lots of emotions attached to victory and failure that can be leveraged in all sorts of interesting and weird ways. There are pieces like The Privilege of Escape, which was an escape room that was a meditation on systemic bias. That's an interesting example of a piece where the designer was trying to use the affordances of games to demonstrate a problem in the world. And games typically do that. There's just pure emotions that are inaccessible to linear media. I think because there aren't affordances for the audience to access them, despite the diversity of emotions that these forms can create. The second possibility is, it's a question of how you want to engage with your audience. As an artist, I don't really like telling people stories, that doesn't really engage me.You're the second person we've interviewed who has talked disparagingly about stories and storytelling. Say more about that.NF: I don't mind being blunt about this. I'm not that interested in my biology. I'm not that interested in my history. I don't find those things that interesting. I don't think I have a vision of storytelling that's so powerful that some muse came to me uniquely and now the word of heaven is coming through my body or something. And this isn't to knock people who do that, there are geniuses who make that work, but that's not how I create and that's not what I do. What I want is to play with you. I want to be able to engage with you and you know, catch the ball you throw and throw it back. And this isn't altruistic just to be really clear, I mean I like doing that with people, but it's also really fun to catch a bunch of balls coming at you in crazy directions and keep the whole thing on track. There's an artistry to that. That's what running an RPG is, it's like throwing track in front of a moving train. So I think that's really powerful and you get things that you would never get otherwise. Similarly, if you jam you get something that you would never get when you compose. The improvisation and the participation of other people leads you to create something new and you can do that with audiences. And you can do that with audiences in ways that don't make crappy, thin, gray, over-democratized work. Because I'm not saying that's not a problem, if you just let everybody come in and cook in the kitchen then you get no food or you get bland food or inedible stuff. Structures make it possible for people to participate in ways that are meaningful, but controlled, that fit within the aesthetic. So people understand what kinds of creations are possible in this space. And that is a whole set of techniques that then allows audiences to come in completely ignorant of what you're doing and then tell a story that they helped make that is still in the aesthetic you wanted. There's a magic to that that I think is really powerful. It opens up whole new kinds of forms and it's a different way of engaging with the world for the audience and I think that's powerful because we haven't really seen it before. There are some experiences like that, but they tend to be very high demand on the creativity or they tend to be gate-kept or they're high skill-based. And what immersive theater can do that I think is unique and independent of digital games and LARPs, is that they can be approachable. I can show up and not really know much and still participate. And I think that's a space that's really powerful. And then the third beat that I just have to mention all the time is that tickets are very expensive to these things. They charge a lot of money to get people into those things. I think that there's opportunity, from a business perspective, if you can figure out the scaling. You're seeing pieces like Particle Ink in Las Vegas which is a piece with projection mapping and dance where they're starting to figure out how to grow the audiences in ways that don't hurt the piece. You start looking at genuine business models for keeping those things up. What are other business models that can keep dancers, actors, and set designers involved? Because none of those people are going away in immersive theater, we need all of those people. We need them the same way we need them in other forms. It's a parallel skill if not an identical skill right. So we're not telling actors they're out of work. We had actors in The Raven, the actor was the center of The Raven in a lot of ways, but the actor was supplemented by all of these other things to create a new form where people can explore and make choices and feel directly engaged.NEW FORMS OF PEDAGOGYGiven this technologically seamless environment within which performance might take place, do you see the training of actors taking a different path? Or different ways for how writers produce scripts? Do we need new kinds of training for scenographers, sound and lighting designers that will accommodate and respond to these ideas and new approaches to performance? NF: Well acting, for example, in these kinds of cases, has a lot more improvisation in it. It's much more deeply based in that kind of improvisation, but it's also a lot about vulnerability. This is something that I'm just going to riff off of a writer and actor that I know Char Simpson would talk about. Char was part of the Blackout Haunted House for many years and talks very much about how they created vulnerability and that the creation of vulnerability was really important. That becomes a different way of thinking about acting. But also the idea that an audience member might ask you your favorite color and you need an answer that seems natural. That's a more roleplaying kind of acting than I think some actors are trained in, of course some actors are good at that. You don't know what's going to happen so you can't write a script the way you would normally write a script. It has to have some variation in it. You have to think about it more like story, like world building. I think directing changes because I don't know when we're gonna hit a specific moment or I don't know what perspective I'm gonna be coming from in a specific moment. So I have to think differently about that too. And you see that in digital games which will sometimes have cut scenes that are very film-like, but they'll also have scenes where users can walk around and watch what's happening. Which is why when we talk about VR we talk more about immersive theater because the viewpoint is not singular, it is a multiple viewpoint environment. So I'm thinking about it more from that perspective. Theater in the round is also relevant here. Again, that's not a new form, but it solved this problem. So maybe VR should look at theater in the round and then learn some lessons for how you keep an audience's attention in a broad space. And in fact, we're getting that big, we could think about station-based theater where people are really just drifting over a whole plaza and engaged in an experience. Are these forms going to change acting, writing, directing and set design? Sure, of course they are because the affordances of the audience are going be different and that's going to lead to different outputs. But it's not like we made up all this stuff just because the technology came along. We had happenings, we had station-based theater, we had rituals.I'm thinking about the Ramlila which I participated in India many decades ago in Varanasi. This is a month-long event that is played out over the entire city in which the inhabitants take on all the various roles. The city performs and becomes an immersive ritual and religious space. So there are absolutely precedences that are centuries old that we can draw upon. I'm thinking about how the pedagogical needs of theater will continue to change in response to these new forms that are becoming more and more central to our lives.NF: Yeah I teach immersive and dynamic narrative and I teach it in the way that we've been talking about. I teach it in this very broad, cut-across-media way. Media does not matter for the purpose of the class, that's not what it's about. It's about the tropes that the media use and how those things relate. And then you see this in disciplines like narratology where people are really coming at narrative from lots of different directions and trying to figure out how stories get told.Another point that's just very important to me is in the intersection of these forms. Because you're not going to get immersive theater from theater alone. There's a bunch of pieces that theater doesn't really know about like interaction design and a sort of multiple viewpoint about the pacing for that kind of stuff. Games understand that, but games don't understand what theater's good at. Games don't understand how you create scenes or understand how you create dramatic power, and games don't understand the value of liveness, frankly. Some of that we can get from LARPs, but LARPs aren't theater either. So it really is in the intersection of all of these fields.I think more of this is happening. You're seeing escape rooms get more theatrical. I think it's too slow, like way too slow. We could have gotten to where we are five years ago and we could be five years ahead of where we are right now. But you're starting to see some of that thinking happen. You're starting to see immersive pieces that are bringing some game elements into them. You can have conversations with people about VR where you talk about digital games and they don't scoff. This focuses again on the ideas of interaction and affordance and how those relate to storytelling that changes the orbit of everything. And then the skills that people have been learning, like the acting, writing, directing, set design, costuming, they all have a place. They're all going to be there, they're just going to circle around a different sun. And that sun is this audience member who can change what you do. That's different.Nick, thanks for all of the conversations we've had. I look forward to working with you. I think you're a really important thinker and maker, and your experiments and research bring a lot of insight into the future of performance.NF: Thank you, I appreciate that there are people like you that are thinking about these problems and working in these problems. Like with your own wonderful work and that podcasts like this exist to have these conversations. I look forward to a really bright future because there's other people like you in it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit futureperfect.substack.com

Kaneza Schaal, recipient of the 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater, joins a conversation with CNP Producing Artist Daniel Alexander Jones. Schaal's performance works function as profound acts of invitation, presented in a wide range of contexts. The two artists, whose friendship has been furthered by their professional collaborations, discuss Schaal's many fluencies—of language, history, form, cultures, and aesthetics—that have served to build her lexicon as a maker of theater. Hosted by Marissa Chibás, this podcast was produced by CalArts Center for New Performance, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, Travis Preston Artistic Director and Dean of CalArts School of Theater. Produced by George Lugg and Rory James Leech. Editing and sound engineering by Duncan Woodbury. Podcast theme music by Cristian Amigo. Special thanks to Ravi Rajan, President of CalArts. For more information on these artists and their work, as well as other CNP projects visit centerfornewperformance.org.Subscribe to upcoming episodes by clicking on the podcast name and hitting the subscribe button! 

Intro: teenage hackersLet Me Run This By You: setting limits with KanyeInterview: We talk to Josh Sobel about Cal Arts, Travis Preston, Yale School of Drama, Robert Brustein, Fig and the Wasp, Oberlin College, The O'Neill Theater Center, Michael Cadman, Royal Shakespeare Company, Chicago ensemble theatre, Strawdog Theatre Company, Ianesco's Rhinoceros, Rochester NY, Brighton High School, A Chorus Line, Cabaret, horizontal hierarchies, The Wooster Group, change talk vs. change action, Chris Ackerlind, Light in the Piazza, Paula Vogel's Indecent, Samantha Behr, Haven Chicago, The Den Theater, Rochester Philharmonic, Lorenzo Palomo, Ian Martin, Hal Prince, Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches, John de Lancie, Rochester Academy of Medicine, radiation oncology, The Xylophone West by Alex Lubischer, Isaac Gomez's The Displaced, Center Theatre Group, Jeremy O'Harris' Slave Play, Rashaad Hall, Chris Jones' review of Ms. Blakk for President.FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited):3 (10s):And I'm Gina Pulice.1 (11s):We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand it.3 (15s):20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all.1 (21s):We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet?2 (32s):I think, I think my son has fig he's gotten into sort of like the hacking side of things and he always wants to get around all of the restrictions we put on him. Like we have content restrictions, we have time limits. And I think he's just made it his mission. I mean, this is like the theme of his life. He has made it his mission to subvert the paradigm as my husband would say. And it's exhausting because all I can do is try to be like 10 steps behind them and learn like what's a VPN. That's what I, I think what he did. I think he installed a VPN to bypass the internet control that I have.2 (1m 20s):Oh1 (1m 20s):My God.2 (1m 22s):And it somehow how that relates to, I can watch, I couldn't tell you. I can tell you that if I turn off the wifi, I can watch it on my cellular data.4 (1m 33s):It's insane.2 (1m 35s):Yeah. It's, it's beyond insane. I, and you know, I like, I'm always on this thing where I'm vacillating between letting it go and just trying harder to, you know, impose the limit. I mean, you, I wouldn't, before I had kids, I would not have imagined it was this hard to impose limits on people, you know, because you don't want them to not have what they want. Right.4 (2m 6s):Right.2 (2m 7s):And, and it's a real battle to like, make myself, give myself and my children limits. It's really hard.4 (2m 17s):My God. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I'm stuck on, it's like maybe there was okay. I think I'm like trying to figure out the thing, which is like, I know what I think I know what happened. So you have restrictions on content. Like, and I think a genius, the Kanye trilogy, like completely has all those triggers in it. Like all the things are in it. There's sex, suicide. There's, there's, it's all the things you, I wouldn't want a susceptible teenager to watch. Right. Like just for various reasons, not, not for anything other than triggers. Right. So like my nieces and nephew, the same thing, so, okay.4 (2m 57s):So then you set that right? And you're like, no, no, but then the kid or anyone can get a VPN, which then resets, I think the con, but I think you're still on the, you're still, you're still on the content warning site, which is blocking genius. You from watching genius. That is fucking, I mean, it's kind of genius in a way, but it's also so infuriating. It's like, come on, dude. I'm just trying to watch my fucking Kanye west bullshit.2 (3m 26s):It's literally just this race of like today I'm on top. And then the next day it's like, oh my God, they, they, they run the show. I'll never forget. There was a scene in the first season of the Sopranos where Tony and Carmel are having a problem with Anthony, or maybe it was with the daughter, a meadow and they're in their bedroom. And he goes, if she finds out, we have no power. We're screwed. And I laughed. It was the time I had watched it after I had teenagers. Yeah. Like that's what it is. We actually have no power. And yet the, the, the con that we're forced to do is pretend like we have all the power.2 (4m 12s):It's4 (4m 13s):Like2 (4m 13s):Covering4 (4m 14s):A metaphor also for life about like my mom's friend sent me something that said, you know, I forget it was like her friend had passed away and it's not fair and it's not fair. And I, and it isn't, and that's the thing. Like it, the truth is not fair. Like it sucks. But like, and, and we pretend that things are fair because if we don't, it's absolute chaos. Like if we didn't pretend really that red means stop and green means go, we'd have a real fucking problem. If we all rebelled and said, you know what, fuck you, green means go. And red means stop. And we all sent a mass media thing around.4 (4m 56s):There would be chaos. It would be2 (5m 13s):The bus. And I guess that's just the headline right there. That's like the headline in the story. Like you took the bus from LA to San Fran, Fran, because gas is so expensive.4 (5m 22s):Well, many things. Okay. So driving, it's really a grind on the five coming home, especially it's like, so rough, like, it can be a nine hour instead of five, six hours situation. It's crazy. Cause the five sucks. So, so that was the first like, and then gas. So I wasn't gonna drive cause I did the drive Thanksgiving and it was like, oh God. And then, so I was like, okay, well I'll, I'll just, I I'll fly. But then I'm afraid to fly. Even though the flight is literally 45 minutes. And then I was like, okay, but then because of gas, I said, okay, I'm going to just get my balls into it. I'm going to build up my balls and I'm going to fly. But then because of gas, you know, does jets use gas fuel though?4 (6m 6s):The flights really went up six San Francisco. You shouldn't even get a flight for a hundred bucks on Southwest round trip, like 120. No, no, two 20. So I'm like, oh no. So then I say, okay, well I'll take my Amtrak. Of course, which is actually what I, what I looked at first. But the track of it, it's a beautiful ride. It takes forever, but it goes up the coast and it's gorgeous. And you can like bid to get a fancy room,2 (6m 28s):Right? Yeah.4 (6m 29s):Well, okay. Well the tracks being repaired, so then you'd have to take a Greyhound. I'm not taking a Greyhound. So then I was like, okay, what would it take a fancy bus? And it's a flick2 (6m 38s):Of a fancy4 (6m 39s):Flex bus flicks. And Flix is big in Europe and they're charter buses and they have bathrooms and it's like assigned seating. And I bought two seats because I was like, fuck you. And it's so inexpensive, but still listen. I just, you know, and I worked, my dad was an addict. I have food addict issues. I get addicts. So don't come. People don't come at me for saying this. But the bus is a place where heroin, heroin, addicts thrive. Like that2 (7m 9s):Is the heroin addict doing on the4 (7m 11s):Bus nodding out. So there's two, there was a couple and I was like, oh, these are heroin addicts. They just looked so like, their luggage was all fucked up. They couldn't barely get on the bus. They were fighting young people, LA style tattoos. Fine. I am tattoos. It's not that they, but it was like this very specific look thin bedraggled, but not, not, not a curated look like more like, I'm just fucked up inappropriate clothing for the weather. Like big. Although in San Francisco is cold. Maybe they need something. I didn't know. They had like heavy coats on it's like 90 degree, all their shit. Right? Like they're, you know, I've got one little carrier. They've got like bags, like big things.4 (7m 52s):Okay. And that you can check, but you have to pay more for it. And their suitcases are falling apart. Okay. Fine. But they have cell phones, which is so, but a lot of people have cell phones. I mean, I I'm always shocked when people have cell phones that look like they shouldn't, I'm like, what? How do you maintain that? But anyway, so they get on an immediate, they sit in the, they got the seats in the way back, which is like a little bigger, but also your brother bathroom's gross, but they just not out immediately. They get on and like midfoot, mid fighting. They just like pass out and I'm like, oh my God. Like not out like out. And then don't wake up until we get there. Like literally it's an eight hour ride.4 (8m 32s):They don't get up at all.2 (8m 35s):Wow. They'd probably been awake. Yeah. Or I guess maybe not4 (8m 41s):How2 (8m 42s):It works with the4 (8m 42s):Heroin. Well, it depends like, I mean,2 (8m 44s):Not the heroin.4 (8m 46s):That's my new band name. That's our new band name. The heroin's got mics on two levels.2 (8m 51s):Yeah,4 (8m 53s):That was good. Gina. Okay. So no for me and my, my, my clients were a lot of them on heroin. And what would happen is like, you can't always get heroin. Right. Because it's expensive. And because I mean, it's cheaper than whatever, but it's expensive. And then, so you go without it and you start to detox and then you're up, you can't sleep. You're a mess. And then when you finally score again or whatever, get your heroin, then you just feel great for about half an hour. Then you pass out. It's just so it's such a waste, but okay. It's a process.2 (9m 25s):You know, although I would never want to be a heroin addict. I will say something like what's occurring to me. As you're talking about this couple is like, you know how with addicts, their life is very focused around just scoring or whatever. So to be able to have your life goals in these little chunks is really appealing to me.4 (9m 47s):Yeah. Well, it's a very, very, very specified job2 (9m 52s):World. Right? You make, I think when you're a heroin addict, you must have a really small world and your objectives are like, get score. That's at a place to4 (10m 1s):Sleep and don't get arrested and don't2 (10m 3s):Get, don't get arrested. Like there's something and I, I'm sorry to be cheeky about it. Cause people have really suffered with heroin addiction. I, I'm not suggesting that people, anybody should be an addict. I'm just saying like the idea4 (10m 14s):Yeah. To you. It's like, yeah, me too.2 (10m 17s):Actually even just the other day I was thinking I was watching somebody who had, what I imagined was probably a minimum wage job. And I don't remember what the job was now, but I just, I was looking at the person doing their tasks and I was thinking, yeah, maybe I should get a job like that. You know? And then 30 seconds in, I'm really trying to imagine myself. And I'm like, what am I talking about? Oh, people don't love working at McDonald's. Don't love, you know, whatever the4 (10m 47s):Jobs. And I will in, in adulthood in 30 dumb, in 40 dumb, like the last one I had at that fucking donut shop, I was like, oh, this seemed quaint. The chef was a jerk. I got in like a fight with the chef was so rude. Like here I am 42, right. Or 43 or something. And I was working at this place in Rogers park for like cash only under the table owned by these two young SIRS. They, whatever their business was working. But like the fucking chef was like talking shit about me. Like,2 (11m 23s):Is that a doughnut chef? No,4 (11m 28s):I should have said that. No, they also serve sandwiches. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. I was2 (11m 33s):Just thinking to myself, like, do you have to be a chef?4 (11m 36s):No, that's hilarious. But she was like, or they were, they were talking shit about me. And I was like, oh no, no, no. And I was basically volunteering there. I was so outraged. I was like This person that2 (11m 51s):To read an essay about that, you've got, write an essay about your donut shop stint.4 (11m 55s):Oh, I will. And I want to name names. They were fucking assholes. And also they, like, when I went to confront the PR, like I was like, I like when you walk behind someone you're supposed to stay behind. Right. But if you've never worked in the restaurant industry that does not come naturally. And also I'm really fast moving. So like I just met, she goes, you have to stay behind. And I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna fucking kill you. And then she would under her breath talk shit to me about to the other people. And so, and so I finally, you get them, you get them every time, this way. So I pulled the owner aside and I was really upset, like crying because she was treating me like shit. And I said, listen, what the fuck is this? And then the next, the person wanted to then that the owner was like, look, this lady is doing as a favor by working here basically because we have no one and she's working on under the table.4 (12m 42s):So then the, the, the person wanted to talk to me, the chef and I talked to her, I'm like what? She goes, I'm sorry. If I come off a little, I go, oh no, no, you don't come off. You are. And I said, I don't know what's happening here. I'm like, just try to do my job and go the fuck home and make my money to pay my cell phone bill, bitch. Like I wrote that and then I just quit. I was like, fuck all. Y'all. So, no, it sounds really quaint, which is why I fucking get those jobs. And then you get in there and you're like, oh, this is how on earth.2 (13m 11s):Oh God, I am sure it was, I4 (13m 15s):Don't do2 (13m 15s):It. Yeah, no, no, I won't. I will not do it. It just, it just periodically, it just occurred to me4 (13m 20s):Because there's a set skill set set of tasks that no one eat you ma I imagine that no one is like on their high horse. No, no. People are still on their fucking high horse in minimum wage jobs. There's a hierarchy of fucking assholes anywhere you've.2 (13m 37s):But then I did get to watch the third episode of the Kanye documentary and then, okay, well, I didn't finish it though. I'm only like 20 minutes into it. It's so sad. Right? It's going to go on. It's going to turn4 (13m 50s):It. It does. But in also in an unexpected way, what I will say, I think we should talk about the third episode next time. Okay.2 (13m 58s):But4 (13m 59s):The first two, for me, fucking amazing in the storytelling, whether, regardless of how I feel about Kanye west, which I don't feel any kind of way other than, I mean, I just, I I'm talking about the, since we're about to make a documentary, right? Like I'm looking at, I love the first two. I love cooties filmmaking. And the first two episodes, it then takes a turn on the third, but like the first two are so packed with information and visuals and, and storytelling.4 (14m 39s):Like, I loved it. You and you also get a S he such a great job of like showing a slice of time, you know, and, and, and all the characters in it and real life people we know and get glimpses of. And I just thought, and for me, the most moving part of it, I mean, I have real lot of feelings about Donda and Connie's relationship and Donda herself. I have a lot of diagnoses for both of them, but I'm not, you know, like, I feel like she's got bipolar. Like, I think there's a whole thing going on there, but what I found, I have never, I have never been so moved for, for the hustle and the perseverance of a human being and the just sort of neutral and unwavering.4 (15m 32s):We know it's not really true, but like they're like, but the unwavered, what I saw was an unwavering unshakable, almost naive belief in oneself.2 (15m 42s):This is what I wanted to talk to you about. This is what I wanted to run by you. Cause the, the connection between talking about that, me working on the documentary and, and this a, I agree with you, Cody is an amazing documentarian. And we could totally learn a lot from the way that he weaved his own personal story into that, his relationship with this, you know, mega personality. But yeah, you know, the scene where he's talking to a bunch of kids and he's, he's talking about self-compassion, I mean, he, he has a point, you know, what, what should you, you created an amazing piece of art and somebody compliments you on it and you you're supposed to pretend like you're dumb.2 (16m 29s):You all, you don't agree that it's, that it's amazing. You know, like there's something to be said for that. And there's something to be said for what you're just describing the unshakable confidence, but I want to hear what your thoughts are about their relationship.4 (16m 45s):It was interesting to watch the process of what I would call a simultaneous process of infantilizing him as well as idolizing him as well as parental defying him, as well as believing in him. It's a combo platter. And I believe from watching her and watching what I noticed in her mannerisms and his that I think they both had a mania thing going on, like in her eyeballs. So I have become really good at looking at people's eyeballs.4 (17m 26s):And I notice in the documentary, as it goes along when Kanye is manic, his voice goes up in pitch and his eyeballs looked different and she had this eyeball situation, which is this sort of darty, Desperate eyeballs. And I noticed it in my clients all the time and I'd be like, oh, they're manic, they're manic. It's not an, and it's like, hypomania, it's not for her. But like, I saw that in her. And I was like, oh, like, what's happening? Where am I going? What's happening? Who can I okay. And, and covered with a bit of like, you know, self-help, you can do it this and perseverance, but it's, it's all a combo platter, but that was my take.4 (18m 15s):What was on their relationship was like a, I need you, you need me, what's happening. I'm worried about you, but I'm going to then hope that by, by really pumping you up, that I'm going to pump up the mental illness away.2 (18m 31s):. Yeah. Well, I, I agree with what you say about the, their relationship, their dynamic, and it makes sense that yeah, maybe she had a touch of the bipolar too. What I was thinking about it is, and like I say, I haven't gotten through the third episode, but what I was thinking is it's so evident how meaningful their relationship was to both of them, but in this case for, for him and that he could just maybe spend the rest of his life, chasing that relationship, chasing a woman who will fall over him, the way that she did.2 (19m 14s):I mean, really what it seems like, what he needs is a person who kind of use it as their sole purpose in life to, to, to support his genius, which is why he probably makes a terrible partner, But that the, she gave him like this, like she was mainlining love to.4 (19m 35s):Yeah.2 (19m 37s):And you know, he's unlikely to find that any place else. Right,4 (19m 41s):Right.2 (19m 41s):But he's still looking, I think, Well,4 (19m 46s):And then it's really interesting. So like Cody gave up his whole life to, to follow him and it wasn't enough. Like it, it becomes not enough. And then when the person literally is removed by death, then what do you do is what we're seeing in the documentary. But like the it's, it's a it's, it's so fucked up because I, I feel like from watching from the outside, she must've felt like she was his only hope. Right. Which is which, okay. Which I'm sure is it's2 (20m 18s):Hard to me was her only hope.4 (20m 19s):No, she was, she's like, I'm my son's only advocate. Right? My old, his only hope for love and happiness comes from me ultimately. And whatever went down in his childhood, I have to make up for what other, all of them, with the other, all the mothers stuff happens. Right. I can imagine. And then it's like, yeah, it sets him up to be, like you said, chasing that the rest of his entire life. And she's not going to be around forever. And she did the best she could. And she did so much compared to what a lot of people do. And he's, it's just, it, you throw in mega stardom in there and it is a recipe for absolute meltdown.2 (21m 6s):It actually, it really relates to the thing we were talking about when we started talking today, which is about limits and limit setting. And I think I mentioned to you that I'm also reading this book about Sandy hook conspiracy and the straight line between Sandy hook conspiracy and the January 6th instruction. But in the part of the book where they're talking about Adam Lanza and his mother, I hadn't heard this before that, you know, he, he he'd been flagged in the psychiatric system, you know, going back since he was a young boy and I don't know why she opted out of treatment for him. But what I do know from this book is that what she strove to do was keep meeting his needs wherever they were.2 (21m 53s):But because he was so mentally ill, his needs were things like w w when he had his, the intake at Yale, the clinician noted that he said to his mother, you need to stand with no part of your body touching the wall and that she just did it. And that at home, it had gotten too, there were things he couldn't have cooking odors, curtains, door knobs.4 (22m 23s):Yeah.2 (22m 24s):And she just kept meeting the need. And this was something that I really relate to. Hopefully I have not going off the rails like that, but when your child is suffering and what they're telling you is I want this thing, the decision to say, I know better than you. You think you want this thing, but that is not the right thing for you and for that child to be screaming in your face or not. But, you know, with all of their energy, all of their conviction, they're coming to you saying no, this with my kids, it's the screens.2 (23m 4s):No, I need my screen time. And I'm going. Yeah. But you, you can't know what I know, which is that you, it's not good for you. It's simply not good. And it's just so hard to tolerate when your child is enraged or hurt by you4 (23m 22s):Suffering the suffering.2 (23m 24s):So nobody said any limits for Kanye, and he's now floating like a balloon in the ether, right?4 (23m 32s):Yeah. It's, it's really bad. He's now he's now has restraining orders. And now he's got the Grammy said he can't perform there. So now the limits are being imposed that are huge. And I don't know what's going to, and I also, from working in Hollywood, what I noticed was it is so easy when you have money and power yeah. To, to develop a team that will, will do what you're saying. That, that Adam Lanza's Mrs. Or miss Lanza did. It's so easy to have that bought and built in.2 (24m 15s):And I will tell you this, my, one of my very most successful treatments that I did when I was at private practice therapist is I treated somebody with very, very severe borderline personality disorder. And it was a kind of situation where the client would quit all of the time, you know, quit, quit therapy. And then, and then you would do this dance of like, they, you know, they don't really mean it. So you don't, you don't give up their appointment time because they're going to show up. Sometimes they're going to show up and act like nothing happened. Like they never said they were going to quit. So with this one person that I've been working with for a really long time, and we had a good relationship, which, which is to say yes, she was very, very sick.2 (25m 4s):And she was very, very difficult, but also she had so many great qualities that it kept me. Like, it kept me really invested in her, but the 50th time or whatever it was that she quit after I, she was also in this group that I was running and she like got violent Sharna in the group and left and whatever. Anyway, this time around, when she quit treatment, I said, okay, we're done now. And then she showed up for her next appointment. And I said, no, we're, we're done now. And that precipitated a year long hospitalization for her, but this person is now doing amazing, honestly.2 (25m 49s):And I knew in her family dynamic, her parents were afraid to set limits with that because she was a very, very strong personality, but it was only through the limit setting anything. It had to go all the way to the end, right. For her and, and to, to reject and decry and be victimized and blah, blah, blah, for then her to like follow her dream College. She, she, I can't say what it is obviously, but she has a job that was the job of her dreams and that she learned, she only discovered was the job of her dreams in treatment and that she could have only gotten to do after having really had to contend with actually living with the limit.0 (26m 42s):Well,3 (26m 55s):Today on the podcast, we are talking to Josh . Josh is graduating this year with his MFA in directing from Cal arts. And he formerly had a whole career in Chicago as artistic director of the Haven in Chicago. And he has a lot of interesting insights about his experience of being in school again, after having well launched into his career. So please enjoy our conversation with Josh Sobel.2 (27m 36s):So Josh was just explaining the Cal arts is, I was saying, is it a conservatory? And he was saying, it's an art school in the truest sense. So go ahead and repeat what you're saying.6 (27m 44s):Yeah. So like Travis, who's an alum of like Yale back from the Robert Brustein days of Yale. He he's like, look, Yale school of drama is always considered like, Ooh, Yale school of drama, but he's like, if you think about it within the larger Yale structure, you've also got like the business school and like, you've got the journal, you've got the medical school, you've got all these things. So like within the theater universe, it's huge, but within the structure of the university, it Yale, you know, and so the beauty of Cal arts in a way is that it exists outside of that larger sort of academic structure. It isn't part of a university. It is an art school with a theater department.6 (28m 27s):And there's something that, that is really freeing honestly about that. And the Cal arts in particular sort of leaned into in terms of its sort of generative and, and experimental sort of Ben it's, it's been an interesting experience. Yeah, please.2 (28m 45s):Gina Bridget went there. Yes. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I think she's the another co Cal arts alum we have.6 (28m 51s):Well, and it's funny, cause you mentioned they were an acting alum and the acting program I have to say is in particular fascinating and unique. And I love it because unlike a lot of programs I've encountered and I've like taught in academia a little bit before I went in, before I started as a student in it, it's like very few programs encouraged teach and want their actors to be generative artists in their own. Right. And bring that to the table in the room. And honestly, as a director, I'm like, it's a gift. It is such a goddamn gift in terms of the collaborative process. Like I, I can sometimes when I'm hitting my own moment, like really feel comfortable being like, I need like a physical gesture representing a panic attack in slow motion that moves across the stage this way, take third, take 30 minutes.6 (29m 44s):Here's some music and an object.4 (29m 46s):Oh God, that sounds like the greatest thing I've ever heard.6 (29m 51s):I did something similar with a particular actor in my thesis show thesis show, quote unquote. And like she killed it. Oh my God. Avalon Greenberg call. She's about to graduate from the BFA program and she's, or a couple of years. And she's incredible. But like she ran with it and these actors are sort of prepared to take that and like, just make shit and be like, is this what it is? What does it need? And then I can sit there and like sculpt, we can then like work together to be like, Ooh, let's expand that moment out. Let's tighten that bit. And we're then working collaboratively on this other thing.4 (30m 25s):So amazing Josh, like, like I, I, I do this every time we talked to someone that I really like, and I like their vibe and I like how they're talking about their education. I'm like, oh, I'm going to apply there. And then I remember that I did apply to Cal arts for undergrad and I got a call back, which was like the greatest thing, because I was a terrible actor. And I like in the truest sense, like what you're talking about, I would have been like, so, so I am, so I am so glad to talk to you because I, when you say things like that, about how you direct as well, and I'm not a director, Gina directs, I don't direct, but like I want to work with someone who says shit like that.6 (31m 7s):Well, I, I really, I don't know. It's funny. I, you know, outside of like grad school, when I was in undergrad, I went to undergrad at Oberlin college, which is really sort of a diamond in the rough school for theater. It's like, and it's a lot of OBS do well out there. And it's weird because it's like, it's not known, but it's really good. But while I was there, I also did a semester at the O'Neill and I don't know if you're familiar, the national theater Institute. Yeah. So I, I did fall 2007 and like, I really lucked out my partner and I were a year apart actually, before we ever met weird small world, but we both walked out because we've got there right at the time as this particular artistic director was there, Michael Cadman, who was a, an alum himself of the Royal Shakespeare company.6 (31m 52s):And like he understood ensemble. It's funny. Cause I always like, what am I, I love Chicago and I miss Chicago so much, but one of my like little gripes with Chicago is that the word ensemble gets thrown out a4 (32m 6s):Lot.6 (32m 7s):And I, I have a very particular opinion about that because it's like, I think ensemble sometimes it's just meant to mean or thought to mean like a collection of actors, you know, or the company members, you know, the, the Steppenwolf ensemble or the straw dog or whatever. And I'm like ensemble is a value. I think ensemble is, is some it's about how one sits in the middle of a collaborative process. It's about how the threads are drawn. Not even just in the actors, it's about the threads are drawn outside to stage management, to producing, to designers, to everything. Like, and we're all coming together to sort of generate something together, right?6 (32m 49s):Like that's ensemble and Michael understood more than anyone I've ever met in my life. Like how to nurture, how to build, how to find the ensemble impulse in people. And he would just build semesters of the young students and sort of demonstrate that for for four months. And yeah, that's sort of been a foundational thing from that point forward. So I'm, I'm always ready to like chill for the O'Neil. Like, I love the, I love being,2 (33m 16s):Yeah. I actually live kind of near there. I live in Connecticut. Yeah. Oh, that's6 (33m 21s):Brilliant.2 (33m 21s):So you just made me think about something. Has any group of theater artists ever called the ensemble? Also the, the whole entire staff, like everybody on crew, because it is such a group effort. And we as act, this is one of the big things about, you know, going through an acting program, you just, and maybe it was just me, but you just think like, it's all about this. It's all about the actors and you just think everybody else is there supporting what you're doing.4 (33m 55s):Well,6 (33m 56s):It treats it like a technical term, right? It's like, it's a category. And rather than like, no, it's actually about an energy. It's about a trust. It's about something else. And I will say to answer your question like that w when I was a strong dog ensemble member, that that was one of the things I loved most about being on the straw dog ensemble was you had designers, you had managers, you had people like from every aspect of the creative process, sort of understood as part of the ensemble. It was all framed that way.4 (34m 24s):It's interesting. Like, I feel like what happens maybe is like, so take Steppenwolf because everyone talks about Steppenwolf as the original ensemble, which really you're right. A side note tends to mean in Chicago. And I can say this because I'm from there means that nobody is prettier or more famous than, than other actors. Like, that's what they mean by ensemble. Like that's how people talk about that. They're like, no, this is an ensemble piece. Meaning that even though you're really pretty, you're not going to be the star, like to someone, they never say that to me. You know what I mean? Okay. But anyway, side note, but ensembles. So when it's interesting, because it's like when a theater gets bigger, meaning a broader audience, more money, I feel like there becomes a really strong, clear delineation between technical staff and the actors.4 (35m 15s):And it comes, becomes compartmentalized probably because they have to run a freaking business with a multimillion dollar budget as we're like straw, dog. Like you can kind of stay it's like that storefront. It kind of, you can really get in there, which is how stepping will start it. So I think what we're talking about is the capitalization of the,6 (35m 33s):Oh, always, I mean, honestly, always all the time,4 (35m 37s):But yeah, but I'm, I'm curious about she and Gina, did you say2 (35m 42s):I did and I'm so sorry. I forgot to say Josh Sobell congratulations. Your surviving theater school. You're almost done4 (35m 49s):Art school theater school, you know, it's all the thing, but yeah. So I wanted to ask, I guess, take it back before I get on the runaway train of like, did you start out as a direct, like where you would act what's what was your path to the school of Cal arts? I guess6 (36m 7s):I've, I've been a director most of the time. I of course did a little bit of actually got rather late. Like I'm not one of those people who was like really involved in a lot of things when I was really, really little, but I had sort of a formative experience in high school as an audience member. My school was really remarkable. I, I unfortunately should catch up with them and see what they're doing in their theater department. But at the time, like we were a high school that was doing like Ian ESCO and Tom Stoppard and shit. Like, it was pretty cool. I assistant directed rhinoceros my senior year of high school, like Steve Rochester, New York, right in high school, shout out to Steve angle, Mr. Angle.6 (36m 47s):He was incredible. He also was the AP lit teacher and ran an incredible AP lit class. Like, oh my God, we, we read and watched just incredible stuff. And so actually his show, but he was one of the other directors there did chorus line and they did like an unedited chorus line in high school, which I also very much admired. And Paul's monologue hit me like eight when I don't know how familiar you are with, with the show. But like, you know, it's a classic Broadway, 1970s. It was sort of groundbreaking at the time because it was all real interviews of people who were all fighting chorus.6 (37m 27s):Of course, Paul Paul's monologue when he sort of finally breaks down and tells the story about his, his parents meeting him at the drag show in the back of, I lost it. Like I was a weeping mess. I don't know. And I had not had that particular experience before. And I walked out, I remember going home nerdy, like misfit fucking high school student hadn't found themselves yet and was like, I feel different. I don't know how I don't, I can't quantify it, but I feel like I am moving through the world differently than I was before I had that experience.6 (38m 8s):Wow. I want to do that. And that was, that was the moment. And so I started auditioning a little bit, but I always got interested in directing because I, it was the idea of like creating that holistic experience for an audience member, the way it was created for me. And so we also had, I think it was like an official partnership, like you could license with the 24 hour plays in New York. So my high did the 24 hour plays every year. And so I would stay overnight at the fucking school and, and do and direct. And that was sort of my first directing configuration. I was terrible. God. And my first few shows like first few shows at Oberlin were terrible.6 (38m 55s):Why, why? Oh my God, too, in my own head, I'm still too in my own head. It's the main thing I'm working on. I'm a very cerebral artist and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I just am seeking balance. That's part of the reason I went to Cal arts and Kellogg's was actually really the right choice for that in a lot of reasons to sort of break down some of my more cerebral and rigid habits. But I just didn't like, I, I was in my own way. It was that classic. Like it, my insecurity, I was second guessing. I was, it was actually Michael Cadman. It was the O'Neil. That was the turning point of that as well. So like I, anyways, I went through high school, got into it, went to Oberlin, was sort of jumping between theater and film got focused in theater because I liked the linearity of the process.6 (39m 40s):It just fit my brain better. You can really build the Dominos in order and watch them fall. And I love that from a process standpoint, joy. And so I went to the O'Neill and I was still like, I was overthinking and I was over like complicating and convoluting and Michael Cadman who I'm the final day of the program. I was like, you asshole, you couldn't have said this to me like weeks ago. I'm the final day of the program was like, you're very, very smart stop trying so hard to prove it.7 (40m 19s):Ah,6 (40m 20s):And that was, that was another game changing moment for me. And I, I started sort of stepping back and letting myself have more fun with it and just found myself sort of like what were my passion projects? What were the things that made me feel the way I did it, chorus line in a way. And my first show back in undergrad was a cabaret. And that was, that was a really huge, huge show for me. And I was very proud of that show and still have, like, I watched the video sometimes I was like, oh God, those transitions fucking suck. But, but yeah, directing, directing has always been sort of my thing because of that idea of like, I get to sort of, I don't know.6 (41m 4s):I, I, it's funny because so many people think about directing in this very hierarchical standpoint, right? Like they like the sort of like top-down, they get to sit at the head of the thing and create their vision. I challenged that constantly. And it's funny because people think by challenging that you give up the sort of directorial authority I call bullshit. I I'm interested in what I like to refer to as horizontal hierarchy. I say, I refer to it. I didn't invent the phrase, but like I've sort of taken it and I really love applying it to collaboration. I like the idea that as the director, I'm sort of sitting in the middle, I'm the same plane as everyone else surrounded by all of these brilliant fucking artists.6 (41m 48s):And I get to be like, Ooh, yes, it's a bit of that. It's not quite that. Can we bring it over there? I, yes, let's bring that in and pulling all of it towards the middle. And I still get to, by virtue of being in the center of a doll, just make decisions I get to make, be the arbiter of the quote, unquote vision or whatever you want to call it. But it's not that it breaks down the hierarchy in a way I'm not above anyone else that doesn't have to be my idea. It has to be the coolest idea. And so by sitting in the middle of it, I just get to sort of help tie the threads together in a way that feels like the audience experience we're going for. Like, that's my job to God.4 (42m 30s):Interesting. So it's so, oh yes. And I'm so curious as to why more directors don't do a horror. Is that, is it just an ego thing? A horizontal.6 (42m 47s):Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of like, I'm not even going to call it insecurity. Cause I actually think that doesn't do it justice and I think it's too easily dismissible. I think it's fear. I think there's a lot of fear. I mean, if I'm really Frank, I'm confronting it in certain areas of my program right now.4 (43m 25s):Okay. Wait, so you're saying that I just want to reiterate for my own brain because this happens all the time in all organizations across the board. So I'm really, and we're like, we were talking about it yesterday sort of. So, so you, you, you, there is an atmosphere of like, we want to make change, right.6 (43m 43s):Faded a stated goal,4 (43m 46s):Right? Not an atmosphere. Okay. So a stated goal, which a lot of theaters that I am familiar with and institutions are making these statements right now that the statement on paper or on the web or wherever it is saying, we want to take your feedback and make change. And it usually revolves around the word change. Like we're open to change. And if we're always, if we're honest, nobody's fucking open to change. We fucking,6 (44m 14s):And that's what we're talking about. It's the same fear to me. It's the same fear that you find in directing. It's a fear of some, some kind of loss of authority. It's a fear of some kind of loss of control. It's the fear of, I don't know. And it's so funny, like all of the ways you encounter it, because then yeah, you go and you actually say, here's the thing. And like I did this recently and I got yelled at, I got, and again, I've been, I've been working in Chicago theater for a decade before this. I don't give a shit. I was an artistic director, right. Like I was artistic director of Haven, Chicago. I don't like, this is, I don't need your ego. So I think it was actually kind of fun.6 (44m 56s):I think whether it's directing, whether it's artistic directors and institutional leadership, whether it's corporate leadership, whether it's, it's all of this, it's, it's, it's a full each year that, that somehow you're going to lose your Control.4 (45m 10s):This is so classic in, in terms of, so Gina and I were both therapists for years and look, and obviously we were children of parents. So I would go to my mom and say, this is the exact same thing. I would go to her and say, Hey mom, you're pretty abusive verbally. And she would say, but I'm the best mom. I know how to be. And at least you're not being beaten. Like I was beaten. And I'm like, okay. Yes, true. That all that is true. I, and you're still abusive to me. You're hurting me and sh and whether or not you want to make changes. That's the thing.4 (45m 50s):So we, we are literally reenacting parent child relationships in every walk of life. Like this sounds like a conversation a kid might have with their father where the father is like, well, I provide, we we're great.6 (46m 8s):And it's not about perfection. Like, it's not about like everyone and just like, we're all human beings. Right? Like I, I never wanted to feel like, and that's sometimes my problem with like, like I'm, I'm as left to center as you can get in a lot of ways, but it's like my one problem with sometimes a lot of left wing stuff is w where it's like, I think there is a purism that sometimes get, gets into it. And it's like, no, like we're all fucking human beings, right? If we believe in the ability to change and restorative justice and all of these things, then we have to actually believe that people can improve and get better. But it's like, there needs to be that honest interest in improving and getting better. There needs to be that genuine interest in it. And it's like, it's one of the things I was really proud of that we built it at Haven in Chicago with4 (46m 47s):Such a great theater. Gina Pavan is amazing. We're going to be there in the summer. So maybe we'll check it.6 (46m 53s):Ian Martin, like it's so funny. Cause it was such a, it was also a gift to really be able to do a transition process with Ian, you know, cause we really tried to be in, I've been part of some really unintentional transition processes. So like there were a lot of reasons where I really felt like Ian was exactly like, not, it wasn't even about sustaining what Haven had been doing. It was about how do we build and evolve on what Haven had been doing. And so Ian was sort of perfect. And we built the structure that you don't see very often where I, he was, yeah, he was my art, my associate artistic director for half the final season. And then we switched and he became artistic director and I was his associate artistic director for the other half of the season.6 (47m 36s):So he could have the responsibility and be in the decision-making position, but have the institutional memory sort of right at hand. And then it's like, and then I step away. So like I bring that up because there was an intentionality that we tried to bring to, like, we're going to be a theater company, let's be a theater company. Like you mentioned the business. Like let's, let's try to be a business, but let's try to be a next generation business.2 (48m 2s):And by the way, statements statements are to change as you know, sex is to relationships. Like it's a good start, but like you have to do more6 (48m 12s):Exact than just exactly.4 (48m 13s):So I guess the question is, what is it for me for me anyway? What is it in you, Josh? That is the kind of person because what is it? And there's a reckoning, obviously that I talk about a lot in, in terms of American theater and theater in general and the movie industry, the reckoning that's coming or in is, is that part of your drive right now to do this? Or it sounds like you've always been this sort of way, but why the fight? What, what, what about the fight?6 (48m 43s):Yeah, I think, I think, I think it's got it. That's such an interesting question because it's making me think in a chicken egg way, like is my ethics and my politics, like in here, like I don't know, the weirdest thing just came to mind and I'm going to follow that impulse.4 (48m 58s):Great.6 (48m 59s):Do it. And forgive me if I get a little bit emotional right now, it's it's my dad. If I'm really being honest, my dad is actually, he's not in the arts, but he's very artistic. He's a cellist. He's a musician. His odd actually, if you go to the Dem theater in Chicago, where Haven is the space that Haven exists in is the Bookspan theater specifically, the Janet Bookspan theater. Janet Bookspan is my aunt, his sister who was a major opera director, vocal coach, teacher, performer, actor assisted how prince back in the day, like holy4 (49m 40s):Shit.6 (49m 41s):Yeah. So like, and I have it on my mom's side as well, but my mom actually is an artist. She's a painter, but my dad, my dad is a radiation oncologist. He's a cancer physician, but music and art has always been a very big part of his life. His family, my life, he actually sidebar. Cause this is just a fun thing. And I hope this gets included. Cause I love bragging about this. My dad talk about politics and, and art colliding and art ed creative ethics. My dad has always been a big fan of Dr. Seuss's the snitches, this exists. You can go online. It's amazing. I'm so inspired by this. He was part of the Rochester academy of medicine and they have this amazing old building that has a roof.6 (50m 23s):That was basically, it's like a mansion that was donated and it's got this that was built for chamber music. And he developed relationships with the Rochester Philharmonic re developed friendships with musicians and created basically a chamber trio to play at the Rochester academy of medicine. And through this met a composer as Spanish composer, living in Berlin, named the Lorenzo. Palomo, who's pretty bright. His music is pretty outstanding and ended up commissioning a piece of music for this trio. And one thing led to another. And we found out that since my dad was young, he had believed that Dr.6 (51m 6s):Seuss is the snitches one. It was one of the most impactful, universal and effective lessons about acceptance and like anti-racism that you could find. And it was always his dream to have a piece of music, Allah, Peter, and the Wolf that was composed to be performed in tandem with a narration of Dr. Seuss's the snitches. So you can license this now on music theater international, because he did it. He commissioned Lorenzo to compose a piece of music for Dr. Seuss's the snitches. And we also by hooker by crooked premiered at my Alma mater at Oberlin and has since played around the country actually.6 (51m 52s):And I believe internationally. And, and it was all because he wanted to spread the message. It was because he wanted to use art to create an anti-racist piece of art. And the other cool thing is through a connection with his niece who ran the department of cultural affairs in Miami Dade county. She had a connection to John Delancey, who you might know as Q from star Trek, the next generation who did the original narration, the premiere. And so actually it's all on YouTube. You can hear John Delancey doing the speeches. And so like that's an aspect of my dad right there.6 (52m 33s):Another aspect was that I'll never forget this story. He actually built, he in Clifton Springs, New York built the cancer center, finger lakes, radiation oncology, because there, you know, there was a large elderly in particular community out there if I recall. And so, you know, as people are getting later in life, you know, biology happens and access to cancer treatment was non-existent except like 45 minutes or more at least minimum drive out of the way, if not hours out of the way. And especially as you're getting older, that becomes less and less sustainable for radiation treatments, for chemo treatments for all of these things.6 (53m 15s):So he found funding and worked his ass off as I, in some of my youngest days and built this cancer center from the ground up. And there was a day that I remember very distinctly hearing this story where as we've all been in any doctor's office, they were just running like, you know, three, four hours behind and sorry, I get emotional tug this story. It's so funny because it's like, that's, that's my true north in a way. You know, he, he sent his technicians out. This was back in the day when like Rent-A-Center was still a thing and blockbuster and shit, and like went out to get like sent them out to get like a television, sent them out to get a bunch of movies, sent them out to get like a sandwich platter and just showed up and basically were like, Hey, we're sorry.6 (54m 11s):We're we know we're running behind. We just want you to know, we haven't forgotten that you're here. You know? And like when does that happen at a doctor's office? Like when has that ever actually happened? Right. That's my,2 (54m 27s):Not for nothing, but my dad sold x-ray equipment. I've met a lot of radiation oncologists, and it's very unusual. Like there tends to be kind of a personality type with people who go into radar and it, it's not that what you're describing. So your dad must be a really remarkable person,6 (54m 45s):But yeah, no. And so I think it was a values thing. If we really want to talk about it, it's a values thing. It's, it's, it's a sense of how can we make this better? Like how can we be people first? How can we like again, we talk about Haven, right? One of the things I used to say, and I, and I would try, I tried to work hard to embody was like, oh, sorry, this does plug into our original conversations to bring it back perfectly on topic. One of my first shows I did in Chicago, I did a production of a play called xylophone west by Alex who's becoming a leg. Yeah. Alex is great. He's he's rising really well.6 (55m 26s):And like, we, he was actually, when I was the associate director of the summer Oneal program, he was a playwriting student when I was associate director. And that was our first. So it's cool. Just like, as we've sort of grown together, it's been amazing. And we did a reading of it and I, we have very strong opinions, especially because of the O'Neil being sort of a hub of new play development about what new play development is. There's a lot of bad, new play development. There's a lot of bad talk-backs, there's, there's a lot. And really it comes down to the difference between responsive feedback versus prescriptive feedback and how to cultivate that and understanding the difference.6 (56m 6s):And these, this artistic director did not understand this. And well, similar to what we're talking about, we were like, Hey, can we structure the talk back this way? Can we, this would really help Alex, Alex would say, this would really help me, like understand my play better. And artistic director's response was, I'll never forget this. Just remember who's the employer and who's the employee.4 (56m 34s):Right, right,6 (56m 35s):Right,4 (56m 35s):Right.6 (56m 36s):Case in point to everything we're talking about. And so like, I, it's sort of, when I think about like the sort of challenge to, sorry, I completely lost my train of thought.4 (56m 49s):No, no. What we're talking about is no, no, it's fine. It's when we're talking about a lot of things.6 (56m 53s):So4 (56m 54s):That's okay. What we're talking about is like this whole idea of like that your mentor wasn't your mentor anymore and why people don't want to change and the message versus what is actually happening in.6 (57m 6s):Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember why I specifically brought up xylophone west, but it was like this idea of, I don't know. I think about this, this, I owe my, my dad my values. Yeah. Value system. That's right. Thank you. I just needed to hear about, yeah. Yeah. It's a value system thing. It's like, that tells me what that person's value system is. Right. That tells me sort of the culture that they built. And for me as at Haven, sort of taking a note from my dad, right? Hey guys, that you're here. We see that you're here. The way I would phrase that as an artistic director was like, yes, you are our employees. Let's be like, it's not that, that isn't real. Like we are, you were signing a contract to work for us.6 (57m 49s):We have expectations based on their contract. You are also a guest in our home. And that is our responsibility. Like as leadership as a company, as an institution, as a director, like you are, you are a guest in our home. This is our home. We are responsible. Especially if we want to talk about mentorship in academia, some of us are paying $50,000 a year,4 (58m 14s):Right.6 (58m 15s):Be in your home. Like you have all of the control of this space. You can, you can make this, whatever you want it to be, and we're paying you to exist inside of it. And, and it becomes a question for me of how do you take that responsibility? Like what if, whether it's an academic responsibility of like, we are literally paying for the privilege of this, or in a professional standpoint where it's like, it's, it's a little bit in the reverse either way. It's like you are in the position of power. You are in the position where you can like build culture that I use, that I find that word comes up a lot. When I rant about this, which I rant about4 (58m 53s):Culture, building culture,6 (58m 54s):Building culture, whether it's academic, whether it's professional, like that's the responsibility. And if you don't take that as the responsibility it's so,4 (59m 3s):Okay. The, the, the other thing that I was going to say is you had a moment where, so I have these moments where I say to myself, usually not out loud, but you kind of almost said it out loud, but you didn't either. Which is I say, my mama did not come to this country as an and work her ass off for this shit. And your moment was, my dad did not build a fucking radiology oncology center and then get Rent-A-Center furniture and sandwiches for me to be doing this shit like that is that moment. Well, I think, well, that's what I heard there. Everyone has a line and a true north of like, wait, wait, my legacy is not going to be, this is not going to be not saying anything to you.6 (59m 47s):And legacy is, is something I think about sometimes, but it's like, it's not even about that per se. It's like, I see what it means to people. Right? And like, if, if we believe in our own bullshit, like, especially as artists, you know, because artists are, are at the forefront of talking a lot of shit about like empathy, right. About community, about humanity, about seeing each other about uplifting each other about making the world a better place. And it's like, well, that's all well and good. But like, are you like how? And it's not even just like, again, like there's so many ways to do it, but I think sometimes we take for granted the small ways of doing it.6 (1h 0m 29s):I think sometimes we take for granted the like, what if we just buy everyone dinner? What if we like make a concerted effort to pay people a little bit better? Like, what if we, what if we show our work in that? Like, what if we actually believe in the transparency that we add? Like so much, like we talk about transparency so much in our industry, like, or rather not in our industry, I should say like artists talk about transparency in the world, right? Like we want corporate transparency. We want more governmental transparency. What are some of the least transparent motherfuckers?2 (1h 1m 4s):Yeah. I feel like I know why that happens in theater too. It's because there's no money. So everybody goes into it with all of their, like very theoretical and ideological approaches. And when you get very cerebral, very theoretical, you forget about things like, oh yeah, people don't want to do 10 out of twelves anymore because it's, it's, it's too fatiguing. And it actually works against the thing that they're there to do, which is create a new each performance, like being able to offer something fresh each time. So it, it, that is actually an area in which it's helpful to think about theater as a business.2 (1h 1m 47s):Because if this, if you were running a seven 11 and you had an employee, you'd have to have a bathroom, like it's, you know, you just think about the pragmatic things more when you're thinking about it as a business.6 (1h 1m 57s):Right. And, and it's like, I, and for me, it's like a lot of these things are considered mutually exclusive for some, or they're treated as mutually exclusive, but like, you have to, it's like the business and the sort of like cultural, ethical side, somehow don't mix. And I just don't agree. I don't agree for a lot of reasons. I don't agree in part through the Haven experiment. You know, I it's like, look, we, we're still not making money. And we, we, I want to say we were very privileged to have particular financial support. I don't want to take that for granted that we were not starting in the same place as a lot of other people. And I, and I don't take that for granted. It's not a brag. It's like a, like the bootstrap Smith. Like I want to make sure that it's not like, you know, taken for granted, but it's also like, there's still this idea that people won't show up sometimes like that, like literally I've had other artistic directors talk to me about Haven work in Chicago being like, what are you sure there's an audience here.6 (1h 2m 53s):I'm like motherfuckers. We just sent like 15 people away at the door for Isaac Gomez, horror play. But no one else would produce like, like why, what are we it, and those decisions are made because of business, right? Because, because how are we going to sell it to Chris Jones? Because like, how are we going to, and I, I, we found time and time again, that there is an audience for this work that we were able to at times even make money on, like compared to what we, what our show to show budget work. We were able to make money back, like, and we were paying people, you know, it still stipends, you know, not what they're worth. I don't want to pretend we were ever able to pay people what they worth.6 (1h 3m 35s):But we were able to pay people, usually double the typical storefront stipend it's like, and, and still keep ourselves on a typical like budget that I was used to for other storefronts. So it's like, it's this question of like, why are these things treated as mutually exclusive on a bigger scale? Look at center theater group right now, an article just got written. I got to see slave play out here, which amazing production also Chicago, shout out. I got to see cause he's under studying. And I got to see him perform that night. Rashad hall. Brilliant, brilliant. And his2 (1h 4m 11s):Shot6 (1h 4m 11s):Is brilliant. Oh my God, his Phillip just broke my goddamn heart. Oh my God. He was so good. That's a show that is deeply controversial, deeply challenging queer by PAC sexual BDSM oriented, racist, racist, racist, or in terms of its its topic matter like racism in the United States. And historically, and today it's it's and they gave away like 5,000 or more like free and discounted tickets. And they still made money.2 (1h 4m 48s):Jeremy DOE he recently just put something up on social about this that he made. He made accessibility like the most important feature of his, you know, this play being produced and it worked and it worked better still made money on this scarcity model, which is, I mean, that's a lot of this just comes from the scarcity model, influencing how everybody feels. So constantly afraid of losing the one little sliver of the pie that they have that, you know, all they can think about is how to make that tiny little sliver. How to divvy it up instead of saying no, how can we get more pie people? We want more pie. We want to just keep getting our tiny little slivers we want, we, we want to add.2 (1h 5m 28s):So I'm mindful of the time because I know we're about 50 and we're going to be having to wrap up and I want to hear about it's your last semester and you're working on a project and you're going to have spring break next week. What is your, is it a thesis? Is that, is that,6 (1h 5m 43s):That, that was actually last semester. That last semester. Yeah. That's so that's done. I've I've kept myself a little bit busy. I don't know. I, I found myself strangely in spite of the pandemic lab, maybe because of the pandemic last year and now being back in in person and, and all of that. I just, and also I think because of like big was amazing and like my designers were incredible. The students here are unbelievable, but it was also because of some of the things I shared, like an exhausting process, excuse me. And so I sort of took a break and then got into the semester and for some reason just was like, I want to make shit. I want to be involved in making shit.6 (1h 6m 24s):I want to, I want to be involved in my own shit. I want to get involved in other people's shit. I just want to make shit. And so I'm like, I just finished up working on a collaboration with a doctoral student in the music school where we created a, I worked with a lighting designer and we worked collaboratively to create a light based sort of design journey, like a sort of light experience in conversation with the music called busking style in real time, as part of his doctoral thesis.2 (1h 6m 60s):Wait, you're saying it was busking like that the project was6 (1h 7m 4s):The, the style of, of calling the lighting. Was it wasn't like, it was sort of like, Yeah, it was a, yeah. So it was board op up in the booth watching and listening for particular moments. And the music was also highly improv. The reason is because the composition had moments of high improvisation. So there were moments where it was literally like just listening for certain things to shift the lighting responsibly to the music as it was happening. And it was just something I had never done before. So I'm like, let's try this out. And then I'm, I'm drama turking and assistant directing a play that an acting MFA student who's a dear, dear friend has written in his performing it.6 (1h 7m 48s):So I can be sort of the outside eye while she's on the inside of it. And then I might have another project cooking for right before graduation. I'm I'm figuring that out right now. And then I've also got things outside. I'm thrilled to say my partner is actually going to be going to USC for film school next year. So she and I are actually working collaboratively on a couple of things with another acting alum from, from Cal arts, actually a which I'll be able to share a little bit more, actually there's some stuff online with little like BTS stuff it's called goon and I'm actually really pumped about it. Yeah. I'm really, it's, it's, it's super fun, super quirky.6 (1h 8m 30s):We found a great cinematographer. Right. We shed who's just has an inspired eye. And so, yeah, just, I don't know, just finding myself in that moment of like, I think also out of frustration, maybe with Cal arts at times, like I just want to get with the students here and make some shifts. Let's just make some,2 (1h 8m 47s):I think your thing is you want to helm your own ship, always. You want to kind of be in charge of your own destiny and which is a very good, I mean, I see you're making a face about it, but I just, from my prime saying that's a very good quality to have. And it actually leads me to another question I was going to ask you, which is, are you, age-wise about there with your peers in this MFA6 (1h 9m 9s):And that's been interesting. Yeah. Older, older. Yeah. I'm in my mid thirties. And that has been a, an interesting difference of experience at times. Yeah.2 (1h 9m 19s):Yeah. Well, we've talked to a lot of MFA's who, because they were in their thirties, we're able to see the whole thing about school in a m

Gamuary continues as Adam and Chris watch the best Gamera episode, season 3's take on Gamera vs. Guiron! They get to talk about the Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, The Wooster Group, Mark Russell, and Michael Feinstein.

Gamuary continues as Adam and Chris watch the best Gamera episode, season 3's take on Gamera vs. Guiron! They get to talk about the Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, The Wooster Group, Mark Russell, and Michael Feinstein.SHOW NOTES.Gamera vs. Guiron: IMDB. MST3K Wiki. Trailer. Adam was trying to recall reading Samaris twenty years ago, and may have gotten some details wrong.Adam's other podcast, A Part Of Our Scare-itage.Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [trailer].Chris talked about Boys in the Band on another podcast.1984 [trailer].Cleopatra [trailer].Exorcist II: The Heretic [trailer].The Exorcist II has a small role for Dana Plato, who is best known for being one of the Diff'rent Strokes kids, but was in an episode of The Facts of Life, because those shows are in the same universe.Our episode on Rocketship X-M.Arnold's Gourmet Kitchen presents: Woks.John Lennon: Rock ‘N' Roll.The Wooster Group.That Geraldo episode.That scene from UHF.Death Wish IV: The Crackdown [trailer].Mark Russell's final show.A 2021 concert from Michael Feinstein.The General Cinemas trailer we referenced in our episode on Teenagers from Outer Space.BONUS.Support It's Just A Show on Patreon to hear the super-fan bonus bits that don't quite make the show.

The Wooster Group, perched on a street corner in Soho in downtown New York, has been at the forefront of experimental theater for some 40 years. Their startling performances unravel and transform classic texts by Brecht, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Eugene O'Neill, along with their own shocking original works. Six Obies, nine Bessies, accolades from around the world as they tour their works through Europe and Asia. Singular, rigorous, flamboyant. Theater. One of the more ephemeral of art forms. How to preserve the work, chronicle it, archive it for the ages? Yes, there are scripts, props, sets, costumes — a pair of muddy shoes from a 1981 production of Route 1 & 9. But what about experimental theater? Devoted to process, improvisation, the dense layering of ideas and texts and sound and image? How do you catalog something in a constant state of flux? Enter Clay Hapaz who started as an intern at The Wooster Group in 1992 and in 2002 became their official archivist. Voices you'll hear include Clay Hapaz, Kate Valk, Frances McDormand, Hilton Als, Peter Sellars, Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte. Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and Evan Jacoby in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKee.   Special Thanks: Clay Hapaz, Kate Valk, Frances McDormand, Juliet Lashinsky-Revene, Hilton Als, Peter Sellars, The Wooster Group Drama Club and Elizabeth LeCompte. Music: Matt Dougherty (his company) and The Wooster Group's archive. Thanks also to Lumi Tan, Lewanne Jones and Claire Maske. Support for the Stories comes from The National Endowment for the Arts & Listener Contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions (Many thanks) The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia Podcast Network on PRX. Thanks for listening

Peter Filichia, James Marino, and Michael Portantiere review The Lehman Trilogy, Gingold Theater Group’s production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Thoughts of a Colored Man, Is This A Room, The Celebration of Tin Pan Alley Day, Freestyle Love Supreme, The Wooster Group’s production of The Mother, and The Last of the read more The post This Week on Broadway for October 24, 2021: The Lehman Trilogy appeared first on BroadwayRadio.

Arianna Gass is a theater-maker who primarily occupies the multimedia theater space. They are a worker-owner of Obvious Agency, an artist cooperative in Philadelphia known for creating interactive live performance. They are also currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Chicago which we talk extensively about. This was an enlightening conversation for me and really exposed me to areas of theatre and performance theory that I did not know much about before today. For a full transcript of this episode visit beyondthelightspodcast.comMentioned in this Episode[00::02:20] Stella Adler Teen Conservatory [00:04:56] Vasser College Experimental Theater [00:05:55] Barnes Foundation[00:10:15] Obvious Agency and Creative Cooperative Futures[00:11:53] Applied Mechanics[00:11:54] Headlong Dance Theater[00:09:55] Ninth Planet[00:13:15] New York Theater Workshop[00:14:11] Ivo Van Hove [00:16:17] Barnes Jawnt [00:18:50] Bicycle Coalition[00:18:53] Black and Brown Workers Cooperative[00:19:11] US Federation of Worker Cooperatives[00:19:17] Girls Rock Philly[00:28:21] Hamletmachine [00:29:13] The Wooster Group[00:29:14] The Wooster Group's HamletFollow AriannaWebsiteTwitterFollow Obvious AgencyWebsiteFollow Beyond the LightsWebsiteFacebookTwitterInstagram

Grammy award-winning producer Vivek J. Tiwary is an acclaimed producer of musical entertainment from Tony Award-winning Broadway shows to groundbreaking immersive experiences, a Grammy Award-winning record producer, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and a media financier/investor. He is the founder of Tiwary Entertainment Group. Vivek's graphic novel The Fifth Beatle won numerous literary awards, including the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award and two Harvey Awards. It's a Lambda Literary Finalist for Best LGBT Graphic Novel and has been added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives. Vivek secured unprecedented access to Beatles music for its TV adaptation, for which Vivek is a writer + Executive Producer. Vivek is currently the lead producer of Broadway hit Jagged Little Pill (based on Alanis Morissette's classic album), nominated for 15 Tony Awards, including Best Musical—second only to Hamilton (16) for the most ever—and the best-reviewed show of the season. Vivek also won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for producing the Jagged Little Pill cast recording. Past Broadway productions Vivek has either been a financier or Producer on including such groundbreaking work as Green Day's American Idiot, A Raisin In The Sun, The Addams Family, A Little Night Music, and both of Mel Brooks' musicals The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Combined, these productions have won 25 Tony Awards and 59 Tony nominations. Vivek is also a pioneering producer in the world of site-specific, tech-based, and immersive theatre. He consulted on the creation and development of The Walking Dead Escape and The Walking Dead Experience. He served on the Board of Directors for New York's seminal GAle GAtes, considered the founders of immersive theatre. He also produced experiential shows and installations for boundary-pushing companies such as The Wooster Group, Fischerspooner, and the São Paulo Art Biennial. Before founding TEG and online music education/empowerment company StarPolish, Vivek held several major labels music industry positions and has worked with artists covering the entire musical spectrum from Bruce Springsteen to Britney Spears. Among many charitable pursuits, Vivek is the Co-Founder of Musicians On Call, a nonprofit organization that uses music and entertainment to complement the healing process. Vivek is a magna cum laude graduate of both the Wharton School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences and a cum laude graduate of the Collegiate School in New York City. He also holds a filmmaking certificate from The New York Film Academy and is an acting student of Susan Batson/Black Nexxus Acting Studio. www.musiciansoncall.org www.tiwaryent.com The Business Side of Music ™ © 2021 Beyond the Music Co-Produced and Hosted (by the guy who has a face for podcasting):  Bob Bender Co-Producer, Creator, and Technical Advisor (the man behind the curtain):  Tom Sabella Director of Video and Continuity (the brains of the entire operation): Deborah Halle Audio/Video Editor Mark Sabella Midnight Express Studio  Olian, NY Marketing and Social Media: Kaitlin Fritts Executive Assistant to Bob and Tom (the one who keeps us on track and our schedules straight) Tammy Kowalski All Around Problem Solver: Connie Ribas Recorded at: The Bunker in Franklin, TN (except during the Covid 19 pandemic, then it's pretty much done VIA Skype or over the phone, with the exception for those fearless enough to come to Bob Bender's living room… and there are a few). Mixed and Mastered at Music Dog Studios in Nashville, TN Production Sound Design: Keith Stark Voice Over and Promo: Lisa Fuson Website: Sponsorship information   Interview submission      

Bill Smitrovich is an exceptional TV and film *Actor, Director & Producer Pt. 1 Bill's favorite movies, directors and his big break in theatre doing an Author Miller play! {The WIN app Writing In Network! } *The November Man, "Penny Dreadful" Showtime Network, Independence Day & Co-Starred on A Nero Wolfe Mystery with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin, had a recurring chief prosecutor role on The Practice and played a lieutenant in the Fox hit series Millennium. His many film roles include Key Exchange, Renegades, The Trigger Effect with Dermot Mulroney, Independence Day (1996) with Will Smith, a strong role as a public defender in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi and Air Force One to name a few. Connecticut-born actor Bill Smitrovich (on May 16, 1947) started his acting career rather late. A Masters degree holder from Smith College and a former acting teacher at the University of Massachusetts, the hefty actor earned his big break in an understudy role in the world premiere of Arthur Miller's "The American Clock" at the Spoleto Festival, a production that went to Broadway. Other stage parts have included "Food from Trash," "Requiem for a Heavyweight," "Far East" and "Frankie & Johnny at the Claire de Lune." Bill was a founding member of the No Theatre Company, now in association with the Wooster Group, whose members included Willem Dafoe and the late Spalding Gray. Bill made his 1978 New York debut in the company's production of "The Elephant Man." *Thank you for listening & supporting the podcast :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sneakies https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/anonymouscontent *Royal Girl* Funds will go to sound and editing. Paypal (friends & family) petcarebuddies@gmail.com https://www.patreon.com/sneakies Instagram @marylinartist LinkedIn: Marylin Hebert Please Subscribe to our YouTube:) https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos Zombie Diaries: https://youtu.be/tBmgi3k6r9A Our books :) Young Adult wizard book series: "Margaret Merlin's Journal" by A. A. Banks at Amazon! :) https://www.instagram.com/margaretmerlinsjournal/ MMJ Book I The Battle of the Black Witch https://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Merlins-Journal-Battle-Black-ebook/dp/B01634G3CK MMJ Book II Unleashing the Dark One --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/filmaddicts/support

Bill Smitrovich is an exceptional TV and film *Actor, Director & Producer Pt. 1 Bill's favorite movies, directors and his big break in theatre doing an Author Miller play! {The WIN app Writing In Network! } *The November Man, "Penny Dreadful" Showtime Network, Independence Day & Co-Starred on A Nero Wolfe Mystery with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin, had a recurring chief prosecutor role on The Practice and played a lieutenant in the Fox hit series Millennium. His many film roles include Key Exchange, Renegades, The Trigger Effect with Dermot Mulroney, Independence Day (1996) with Will Smith, a strong role as a public defender in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi and Air Force One to name a few. Connecticut-born actor Bill Smitrovich (on May 16, 1947) started his acting career rather late. A Masters degree holder from Smith College and a former acting teacher at the University of Massachusetts, the hefty actor earned his big break in an understudy role in the world premiere of Arthur Miller's "The American Clock" at the Spoleto Festival, a production that went to Broadway. Other stage parts have included "Food from Trash," "Requiem for a Heavyweight," "Far East" and "Frankie & Johnny at the Claire de Lune." Bill was a founding member of the No Theatre Company, now in association with the Wooster Group, whose members included Willem Dafoe and the late Spalding Gray. Bill made his 1978 New York debut in the company's production of "The Elephant Man." *Thank you for listening & supporting the podcast :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sneakies https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/anonymouscontent *Royal Girl* Funds will go to sound and editing. Paypal (friends & family) petcarebuddies@gmail.com https://www.patreon.com/sneakies Instagram @marylinartist LinkedIn: Marylin Hebert Please Subscribe to our YouTube:) https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos Zombie Diaries: https://youtu.be/tBmgi3k6r9A Our books :) Young Adult wizard book series: "Margaret Merlin's Journal" by A. A. Banks at Amazon! :) https://www.instagram.com/margaretmerlinsjournal/ MMJ Book I The Battle of the Black Witch https://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Merlins-Journal-Battle-Black-ebook/dp/B01634G3CK MMJ Book II Unleashing the Dark One --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/filmaddicts/support

Veteran Broadway press agent Jim Byk is the co-founder of The Press Room, a theatrical and entertainment publicity office based in New York City. Current clients include Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, Born for This, Chasing Rainbows: The Road to Oz, Broadway Black’s The Antonyo Awards, Beyond Babel, Working Girl The Musical, Estella Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist, Havana Music Hall, Make Some Noise: The Legend of Frankie Wilde, Out of the Box Theatrics’ The Last Five Years and Baby, Vineyard Theatre, The Wooster Group, Barrington Stage Company, Miami New Drama’s Seven Deadly Sins, Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata for the Shaw Festival, actor/pianist Hershey Felder, Rosie’s Theater Kids, Hunter Theater Project, Theatre Row, New York Classical Theatre, Swamp Motel, Shakespeare’s Globe and Southern California’s 3-D Theatricals.

Vivek J. Tiwary is an acclaimed producer of narrative entertainment from Tony Award-winning Broadway shows to groundbreaking immersive experiences, a media financier/investor, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and a Grammy-nominated producer. He is the founder of Tiwary Entertainment Group.Vivek’s graphic novel The Fifth Beatle won numerous literary awards including the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award and two Harvey Awards. It’s a Lambda Literary Finalist for Best LGBT Graphic Novel and has been added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives. Vivek secured unprecedented access to Beatles music for its TV adaptation, for which Vivek is a writer + Executive Producer.Vivek is currently the lead producer of Broadway hit Jagged Little Pill (based on Alanis Morissette’s classic album), nominated for 15 Tony Awards including Best Musical—second only to Hamilton (16) for the most ever—and the best-reviewed show of the season. Past Broadway productions Vivek has either been a financier or Producer on including such groundbreaking work as Green Day’s American Idiot, A Raisin In The Sun, The Addams Family, A Little Night Music, and both of Mel Brooks’ musicals The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Combined, these productions have won 25 Tony Awards and 59 Tony nominations.Vivek is also a pioneering producer in the world of site-specific, tech-based, and immersive theatre. He consulted on the creation and development of The Walking Dead Escape and The Walking Dead Experience. He served on the Board of Directors for New York’s seminal GAle GAtes—considered to be the founders of immersive theatre. He also produced experiential shows and installations for boundary-pushing companies such as The Wooster Group, Fischerspooner, and the São Paulo Art Biennial.Prior to founding TEG and online music education/empowerment company StarPolish, Vivek held a number of major label music-industry positions and has worked with artists covering the entire musical spectrum from Bruce Springsteen to Britney Spears. Hear our conversation with Vivek, his journey, his struggle, his aspirations, and his very very warm heart.

Fun conversation comparing and contrasting the snarky American take on my data (ie https://datalotto.biz/) with the more sober European one (https://online2020.mydata.org/) Kaliya talks about her new role in helping the self-sovereign Covid credential ecosystem within the Linux community, while Seth reveals his background in avant garde theater and drops references to Jerzy Grotowski and the Wooster Group in talking about the pendulum swinging back towards extreme physical community formation late year. They talk about Tim Hwang's book on Subprime Attention Crisis And look forward to next week's guest Carissa Veliz who wrote Privacy is Power

From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Methuen Drama) examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage. Karen Quigley is Lecturer in theatre at the University of York, UK. Her previous publications include contributions to European Drama and Performance Studies, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland and Performance Research. Originally from the North Shore in Massachusetts, Toney Brown is a theater director/performer in New York City. He studied Theater Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In NYC, was a Performance Project Fellow at the University Settlement and adapted Harmony Korine’s A Crack Up at the Race Riots at Theater for a New City’s Dream Up Festival. In addition, he was worked extensively with the director Dennis Yueh-yeh Li adapting King Lear, assistant directed Maeterlinck’s The Blind, and performing in his production of Albert Camus’ Caligula (Chaerea) as part of the New Ohio Theater’s Producers Club Festival. When he is not podcasting on NBN, he hosts NYTF Radio, a podcast exploring the history of Yiddish Theatre for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, available on all platforms. He is an enthusiastic cinephile and avid Red Sox fan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Methuen Drama) examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage. Karen Quigley is Lecturer in theatre at the University of York, UK. Her previous publications include contributions to European Drama and Performance Studies, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland and Performance Research. Originally from the North Shore in Massachusetts, Toney Brown is a theater director/performer in New York City. He studied Theater Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In NYC, was a Performance Project Fellow at the University Settlement and adapted Harmony Korine’s A Crack Up at the Race Riots at Theater for a New City’s Dream Up Festival. In addition, he was worked extensively with the director Dennis Yueh-yeh Li adapting King Lear, assistant directed Maeterlinck’s The Blind, and performing in his production of Albert Camus’ Caligula (Chaerea) as part of the New Ohio Theater’s Producers Club Festival. When he is not podcasting on NBN, he hosts NYTF Radio, a podcast exploring the history of Yiddish Theatre for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, available on all platforms. He is an enthusiastic cinephile and avid Red Sox fan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To hear this episode's bonus clip, where Jamie explains TeachFX's bottom-up strategy for implementation, subscribe to the Business of Learning Letter. Jamie Poskin is the founder and executive director of TeachFX. Jamie is a former high school math and English teacher, coach, and athletic director with an MA in Education and MBA from Stanford. He also spent seven years working as an experimental theater artist with The Wooster Group and as the director of his own company. TeachFX's mission is to promote more meaningful and equitable classroom dialogue by superpowering teachers' work — using technology to provide educators with regular, automated feedback on their practice.

A candid and playful interview with ER's Maura Tierney. She's an old friend and sat in my recording studio as we covered her extensive tv and film career, along with her theater work, especially famed NYC avante garde troupe, The Wooster Group. We also discussed being on set with Gene Hackman, Richard Gere, John Travolta and Tom Hanks. She shared her preparation for a role. She revealed her severe anxiety of being on talk shows. And she was very clear her feelings about all the heat actresses receive for doing facial work. She's straight up and charming and insightful.

Vivek J. Tiwary is an acclaimed producer of live entertainment from Tony Award-winning Broadway shows to groundbreaking immersive experiences, a media financier/investor, and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. He is the founder of Tiwary Entertainment Group. On Broadway, Vivek’s productions have won a combined 25 Tony Awards over 44 Tony nominations and include such groundbreaking work as Green Day’s American Idiot and A Raisin In The Sun. He is currently the lead producer of Jagged Little Pill, based on Alanis Morissette’s classic album, which opened on Broadway on Dec 5, 2019 at the Broadhurst Theatre, where it is currently enjoying rave reviews and box office success. In addition to Broadway, Vivek is a pioneering producer in the world of site-specific, tech-based, and immersive theatre. He consulted on the creation and development of The Walking Dead Escape and The Walking Dead Experience. He served on the Board of Directors for New York’s seminal Gale Gates et al—considered to be the founders of immersive theatre. He also produced experiential shows and installations for boundary-pushing companies such as The Wooster Group, Fischerspooner, and the São Paulo Art Biennial. Vivek and I sat down to talk about food, heritage, as well as. . . Why you need to talk about all of the tough stuff first What's wrong with biographical and jukebox musicals Why not every musician needs to have a staged show How to deal with having way too many investors interested in producing Why you need to be unique and find a niche in life Enjoy and thank you for coming back to our new season! This week’s #SongwriterOfTheWeek is Drew Gasparini! If you enjoyed the outro song in this episode, go on over to www.thedrewgasparini.com or check him out on Instagram @drewgasparini. Keep up with me @KenDavenportBway on Instagram. Check out my blog for daily content: www.theproducersperspective.com This episode was produced by Mary Dina. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk of The Wooster Group speak with Peter Scott of Carriage Trade Gallery.  The exhibition mentioned in this episode, The Wooster Group at Carriage Trade Gallery, is on view in New York through February 16, 2020. The exhibition features archival material, props, and performance documentation emphasizing the group’s significant contribution to both performative and visual culture over the last four and a half decades. The production mentioned, A PINK CHAIR (in place of a fake antique) was at NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts through February 2, 2020. A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) references one of Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor's (1915–90) manifestos. It describes a theater that gives the simplest, everyday objects—chairs—hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory. The Wooster Group (originating in 1975) is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street in New York. Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk are founding and original members of the group along with Spalding Gray (1941–2004), Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter (1948–94), Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith. Elizabeth LeCompte is director.

Willem Dafoe and Chris talk about the first time he was on the podcast, the making of The Lighthouse and the uniqueness of the story and characters. Willem also talks about his appreciation for yoga, working in the theater and with the Wooster Group and living in Italy!

Sommerudsendelserne på Skønlitteratur på P1 er sammensat af tidligere programmer på nye måder. I denne udsendelse handler det om krænkelser og om at søge lykken på den anden side af Atlanten. I bogen 'Korrekthedsbibelen' går Christina Hagen amok i satire og sarkasme over alt det, der dominerer debatten i dag: Politisk korrekthed, krænkelseskultur og hensynssyge. Klaus og Nanna mødte hende i en tom teatersal til en underlig samtale om - mange forskellige ting. I Madame Nielsens roman "The Monster" følger vi en ung europæisk mand, som er taget til New York for at arbejde hos den amerikanske teater- og performancegruppe The Wooster Group. Det bringer ham på en rejse gennem New York, fuld af kunst, mareridt, død og kaos. Og ikke mindst en lang række bizarre møder og sammenstød. Værter: Klaus Rothstein og Nanna Mogensen. (Redigeret genudsendelse).

In 1965, Elektra Records released an LP called Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons recorded by the American folklorist and ethnographer, Bruce Jackson. This album is the foundation of a play being mounted by The Wooster Group at St. Ann's Warehouse. "The B-Side" opens on March 1, 2019, and to tell us more we're joined in the studio by director Kate Valk and Eric Berryman, main performer and conceiver of the project. And then, hear from Bruce Jackson himself.

En ung europæisk mand tager til New York for at arbejde hos den amerikanske teater- og performancegruppe, The Wooster Group, hvor han finder sin plads nederst i hierarkiet som en ny frivillig fra Europa. Er det endnu en american dream? Eller måske et mareridt? I Madame Nielsens roman "The Monster" følger vi den unge mand gennem New York, fuld af kunst, mareridt, død og kaos. Og ikke mindst en lang række bizarre møder og sammenstød. Et andet sted i litteraturen arbejder den norske forfatter Gunnhild Øyehaug med det mærkeliges kunst: Novellesamlingen "Knuder" svæver i grænselandet mellem hverdagstrivialiteter, surrealisme, drømme og relationelle forbindelser - mens en masse mennesker falder. Værter: Nanna Mogensen og Klaus Rothstein.

Bruce Jackson has a had a long, varied, and brilliant career as a teacher, photographer, folklorist, writer, and filmmaker. Colin first encountered his work while researching the prisons in Arkansas. Bruce visited prisons in the 1960s and 70s, trips that produced photos for his books Killing Time, Cummins Wide, and Inside the Wire. Bruce was born in New York City, joined the Marines as the Korean War was ending, and studied in New Jersey and Indiana before winding up in the English Department at the University of Buffalo, where he still teaches. He also tried his hand at engineering and took the law exam before winning a Guggenheim and a fellowship from Harvard, both of which allowed him to travel to Arkansas to do his prison research.     During his career, Bruce has met everybody from Johnny Cash to Michel Foucault. Recently, he's worked with the Wooster Group, which has been home to actors as varied as Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe. As he tells Colin, he calls himself "lucky." Thankfully, his somewhat accidental creative process has produced original and revealing work. 

Tiny bathers relax in a puddle of oily water on a pavement; a galleon sails on the head of a pin, a dancer twirls next to a mote of dust under a microscope - Dr Lance Dann, lover of miniature worlds, crouches down on hands and knees to better observe the world of tiny art. Prompted by advances in technology, and the enduring wonder of things created on a really, really tiny scale, Lance Dann follows his own obsession with the miracle of miniature art. Knocking on the tiny doors of creators from street artist Slinkachu, whose mesmerising cityscapes are created, photographed and abandoned in the street, to the collection of antique miniature portraits in Sotheby's where expert Mark Griffith Jones delicately reveals the hidden treasures that span from over 500 years of art history. The 21st century has experienced a revival of the small in art Desiree De Leon has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers for her Instagram account of small doodles, whilst the 'the chewing gum man' Ben Wilson, has gathered a loyal following for his hidden gems scattered about the London streets. Every morning Ben gets up and starts creating tiny tiles on which his innermost feelings are expressed - and then he leaves them on the Underground for people to find. Then there is the barely visible - Willard Wigan MBE - the poster-boy of microscopic art, a dyslexia sufferer who has found relief in the creation of tiny art works. Recognised globally, his sculptures, which are small enough to fit on the head of a pin, sell for six-figure sums. "I work between my heartbeats. I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don't inhale my own work." Then there is the nearly invisible - Jonty Hurwitz - who sculpts with Nano-technology, and sometimes loses sight of it in the process. "When I found the sculpture it was one of the most moving moments of my life, you see all these grotesque pieces of dust as the microscope is moving around and suddenly there's a woman, dancing" What is the enduring appeal of the miniature in art, and where has this revival come from? To discover where it hides, why it appeals, and how the artists' work on such delicate objects, Dann plays with scale, sound and voices to bring a closer, more microscopic focus on the art world. Presenter: Lance Dann is an associate member and former sound designer of The Wooster Group, a writer and director of a range of radio dramas including podcast "Blood Culture", commissioned by The Welcome Trust, and won a Prix Marulic for his production of Moby Dick for BBC Radio 4. Producer: Sara Jane Hall iPlayer photograph: Slinkachu.

Hai-Ting Chinn Read more at www.hai-ting.com American Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn performs in a wide range of styles and venues, from Purcell to Pierrot Lunaire, Cherubino to The King & I, J.S. Bach to P.D.Q. Bach. She was featured in the revival and tour of Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, performed at venues around the world from 2011–2014, and she is currently singing the role of Belle in Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, also on tour. She has performed with New York City Opera, The Wooster Group, OperaOmnia, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and the Waverly Consort; and on the stages of Carnegie Hall, the Mann Center in Philadelphia, the Edinburgh Festival, the Verbier Festival, and London’s West End. She has premiered new works by Amy Beth Kirsten, Du Yun, Conrad Cummings, Stefan Weisman, Yoav Gal, and Matt Schickele. Hai-Ting is also an Artist in Residence at HERE arts center, where she is developing Science Fair, a staged solo show of science set to music.

What we’re excited to see at the theater (and in a few cases outside the theater) in New York City in May: Daphne’s Dive by Quiara Alegría Hudes at Signature Theater The Town Hall Affair by The Wooster Group at The Performing Garage Fly By Night by Duke Riley at Brooklyn Navy Yard[...]

One of the most respected, accomplished artists in the world, Willem Dafoe has always been fearless in his performance and has shown us legendary performances in films like Platoon, Last Temptation of Christ, Spiderman, Shadow of the Vampire and The Grand Budapest Hotel to name just a few. When he hasn't been onscreen he could be found through the years experimenting with form & performance across the globe with everyone from The Wooster Group to the great Robert Wilson. He talks to Beth Lapides about adventure, exploration, willingness, High School art films that get you in trouble and ultimately, the triumph of the WILL (emmmm).

The exciting conclusion of our 2-part discussion of Showtime’s The Affair, a show which, like this podcast, is built around diverging perspectives on the same story. This week we discuss episodes 6-10, including the season finale. More subjectivity! More adultery! More Hamptons! It still stars all the same people, including Maura Tierney (NewsRadio, The Wooster Group’s 2010 revival of North Atlantic at the Baryshnikov Arts Center), and Joshua Jackson (Racing Stripes, The Skulls) as the wronged spouses, and Darren Goldstein (Limitless, the 2015 short film, Love Life). Follow us on twitter: @ArtsCrappodcast E-mail your thoughts, moral teachings, or suggestions of things you’d like us to talk about to: artsandcrappodcast@gmail.com http://taylornetworkofpodcasts.com/

The exciting conclusion of our 2-part discussion of Showtime’s The Affair, a show which, like this podcast, is built around diverging perspectives on the same story. This week we discuss episodes 6-10, including the season finale. More subjectivity! More adultery! More Hamptons! It still stars all the same people, including Maura Tierney (NewsRadio, The Wooster Group’s 2010 revival of North Atlantic at the Baryshnikov Arts Center), and Joshua Jackson (Racing Stripes, The Skulls) as the wronged spouses, and Darren Goldstein (Limitless, the 2015 short film, Love Life). Follow us on twitter: @ArtsCrappodcast E-mail your thoughts, moral teachings, or suggestions of things you’d like us to talk about to: artsandcrappodcast@gmail.com http://taylornetworkofpodcasts.com/

Theatre is not a discipline in which the word “postmodernism” has an especially precise or generally agreed upon definition, though its connotations are powerful, varied, and remarkably elastic. In 2010, performance artist and scholar, Richard Schechner, lamented in “The Conservative Avant Garde” that the “current state of American theatre and performance art is of circulating stasis,” tracing the theatrical modernist and postmodernist avant garde in the U.S. from the nineteenth century revolutions that produced theatrical modernism to the late twentieth century work of the theatre company that emerged from his own Performance Group, “roughly,” he writes, from Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879) to the Wooster Group’s LSD (1985).* The shifts in experimental theatre in the U.S. during the postmodern era (deriving from the work of Merce Cunningham & John Cage, Allen Kaprow, Ellen Stewart, Barbara Dilley & Mary Overlie, Schechner’s Performance Group, and others) signal, however one understands their radical reorganization of theatrical space and method, a turn to what is often called postmodernist performance. But is that postmodernist theatre a style (or styles), which, in practice and production looks or operates in ways that at least seem to reject modernist and traditional forms? Or is postmodernist theatre practice a means of creating (often begun without a fixed text, often created in an ensemble, often performed in non-traditional performance spaces) in a way we might call more “horizontal” than “vertical” in terms of authority over the performance event? And how might this affect something as seemingly old-fashioned as “playwriting”?

Wednesday Reading Series Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor who lives and works in New York City. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been seen such institutions as The New Museum, The Kitchen, MOMA, Joe's Pub, PS122, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, RedCat, OUTFEST, SXSW Film Festival and Performa '07, '09, '11, as well as many international dives both great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years”. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag, she has also been seen acting in work by The Wooster Group, The Residents, Kalup Linzy, Susan Lori-Parks, among others. She is an adjunct professor of Performance and Theater studies and Comedy Theory at TISCH NYU. She is currently in development on a television series with Electric Dynamite. dynastyhandbag.com Bhanu Kapil teaches through the monster at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado — and through the unicorn at Goddard College in Vermont. She is the author of five full-length works, most recently a novel of the race riot derived from performances and talks in India, the U.K. and throughout the U.S: Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, October 2014).

Frances McDormand and Joel Coen Adventures in Collaboration Join us for a conversation with stage and film actor Frances McDormand and writer and director Joel Coen, moderated by Commonweal board member, Eric Karpeles. Up for discussion are the ways in which the creative act, kindled in an individual, often requires active input from others to be realized. Collaboration manifests itself on many levels—personally, professionally, and communally. McDormand and Coen have each made careers forming strong, supportive bonds with other artists in their field. And sometimes they work with one another. Adventures in Collaboration Frances McDormand Actor Frances McDormand studied at the Yale School of Drama. On Broadway, she has appeared in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, and as Stella in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Off-Broadway plays include The Sisters Rosenzweig and The Swan. She has worked extensively with The Wooster Group, in To You, The Birdie!, North Atlantic, as well as in her most recent stage performance in Early Shaker Spirituals. McDormand played Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Gate Theater in Dublin. Her film work includes Promised Land, Moonrise Kingdom, This Must Be The Place, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, Burn After Reading, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Friends With Money, Laurel Canyon, Something’s Gotta Give, and Wonder Boys. With her husband, Joel Coen, she made the films The Man Who Wasn’t There, Fargo, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple. Joel Coen Film writer, director and producer Joel Coen studied at Simon’s Rock and New York University. With his brother, Ethan Coen, he has made sixteen films, beginning with Blood Simple in 1984. Other titles include Inside Llewyn Davis, Serious Man, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, Miller’s Crossing, True Grit, and Barton Fink. With his wife, Frances McDormand, he made the films Burn After Reading, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Fargo, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Helen Pickett, born in San Diego, California, studied dance at The San Francisco Ballet School under the direction of Lew Christensen and Michael Smuin, and later, Helgi Tomasson.  In 2005, Mikko Nissinen, director of the Boston Ballet, offered Helen her first choreographic commission,Etesian. The New York Choreographic Institute awarded her a Fellowship Initiative Grant in 2006. In the same year and through 2008, Helen choreographed for Boston Ballet, Washington Ballet, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Louisville Ballet and Ballet X. In 2007, Dance magazine named Helen one of "25 to Watch". She received a Choreographic Residency from Jacob's Pillow in 2008. From 2009 through 2011, Helen created new ballets for Royal Ballet of Flanders, Ballet West, Boston Ballet, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. In 2012 and 2013, her commissions include Atlanta Ballet, Semper Oper/Dresden Ballet, Vienna State Opera, Scottish Ballet and Smuin Ballet. Helen was one of the first choreographers to receive the Jerome Robbins Foundation’s New Essential Works Grant. For over a decade Helen performed with William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt. During her last season with Ballet Frankfurt, Helen simultaneously performed with The Wooster Group, director, Elizabeth Le Compte. She acted with the Group for five non-consecutive years in the OBIE award winning House/Lights,North Atlantic. In 2005, Helen returned to the role, as a guest artist with The Royal Ballet of Flanders, in William Forsythe Impressing the Czar. In 2009, Impressing the Czar received the Laurence Olivier Award and in 2012, the Prix de la Critique award for outstanding performance of the year. Helen collaborates, as an actress and choreographer, with installation video artists and filmmakers including Eve Sussman, Toni Dove and Laurie Simmons. Helen, a founding member of Eve Sussman The Rufus Corporation, created the role of the Queen in 89 Seconds at Alcazar, which was shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and now is in the permanent collection at Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007, Helen acted in Sussman feature length film, The Rape of the Sabine Women. She played Sally Rand in Toni Dove's video installation and feature film, Spectropia. Helen teaches Forsythe-based improvisation and her motivational creative workshop entitled The Expansive Artist throughout Europe and the United States. Dance Europe published Helen's article, Considering Cezanne,in 2006. In 2011, Helen earned a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Hollins University.

One-on-One with Elizabeth LeCompte and Young Jean Lee: On Saturday, May 19, 2012, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) hosted a One-on-One Conversation at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater with award-winning theatre makers Elizabeth LeCompte, Founding Member and Director of The Wooster Group, and Young Jean Lee, Artistic Director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Moderated by Kristin Marting, Co-Founder/Artistic Director of HERE, these two highly accomplished, adventurous theatre artists talk about how they build their visionary works, the controversies they create, gender issues, critical response to their work, how they view failure, and why they believe their companies continue to thrive in the downtown, experimental theatre scene. Originally recorded - May 19, 2012. Running Time - 1:14:53 © 2012 SDCF

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to actor Scott Shepherd of ERS and the Wooster Group about strictures, exposures – and helicopters!  We also ponder the intangible and ineffable in theater and the surprising and inevitable consequences of vitamins, nutrition, and bad shellfish on acting

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to actor/director Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater about navigating a tremendously diverse body of work. Paul has worked in everything from the Wooster Group’s Brace Up to Hollywood gangster flics, from Korean monster movies to modern dance (he’s currently working with Mikhail Baryshnikov on a new piece). And he now hosts his own radio show “Talk to Paulie” on BBOX Radio in New York – a show on which we are, also, simultaneously HIS guests. (A radio show within a radio show!)

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to performer Kate Valk, one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, about her sustained commitment to the company and her evolution and transformation as an artist within it.

As Yet Unnamed London Theatre Podcast 02-Sep-2012 With T R P Watson  -Nick from Partially Obstructed View - Play Discussed Troilus and Cressida - Riverside Studios  [00:10] Reviews Troilus and Cressida - Riverside StudiosJumpy - Duke of York’s TheatreThe Illusion - Southwark Playhouse News and Blogs Why major theatre institutions should be left to die

Nature Theater of Oklahoma talks to actor Jim Fletcher (of New York City Players, ERS. and the Wooster Group) about mistaken identities, the great North Dakota oil rush, the magic of Northern Michigan, making hay, “junk” DNA, and how honest hard work makes the American actor.  

With John Wilson. Booker Prize-winning writer James Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late) discusses his new novel Mo Said She Was Quirky, a story which explores fear, trust, and relationships through the eyes of a woman who worries about everything. Seth MacFarlane is best known as the creative force behind the TV cartoon series Family Guy. Ted, his first live-action feature film, stars Mark Wahlberg as a 35 year old man with a boozing, swearing teddy bear. Seth himself provides the voice of Ted. Laroushka Ivan-Zadeh reviews. The RSC's new Troilus and Cressida is a collaboration with the New York experimental theatre company The Wooster Group. The two companies have been rehearsing separately: Mark Ravenhill directs the Stratford team who play the Greeks, and Elizabeth LeCompte directs the Americans who play the Trojans. John meets them both in rehearsal, to discuss the art of creating one show involving two companies with very different approaches. To mark the Olympics, the BBC - in partnership with The Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh - has selected and recorded a poem representing every country taking part. Each is read by a native of that country who lives here in Britain. Every night during the Olympics, Front Row features one of the poems. Producer Ella-Mai Robey.

On Saturday, May 19, 2012, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) hosted a One-on-One Conversation at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater with award-winning theatre makers Elizabeth LeCompte, Founding Member and Director of The Wooster Group, and Young Jean Lee, Artistic Director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Moderated by Kristin Marting, Co-Founder/Artistic Director of HERE, these two highly accomplished, adventurous theatre artists talk about how they build their visionary works, the controversies they create, gender issues, critical response to their work, how they view failure, and why they believe their companies continue to thrive in the downtown, experimental theatre scene.

"Bangkok; content; commercial; developing world; entertainment; exhibition; fashion; hiso; la-ka-pid la-ka-perd; nontent; public voids; pretties" are the keywords provided by thingsmatter partners Savinee Buranasilapin and Tom Dannecker to describe their work -- suggesting no shortage of content, even if the user is unclear. For thingsmatter, architectural production means engaging with Bangkok's kaleidoscopic commercial culture; they use traditional hard surfaces and electronic media to create environments, exhibitions, free-standing buildings, and more. When asked to describe thingmatter, a GSAPP faculty member came up with another set of keywords, calling their work a combination of "OMA, the Wooster Group, and Seventeen magazine."