Category: ARTS & THEATER

Dr Ayshia, Colleen Hughes, Marie Percy, and Sheryl Williams invite you to celebrate the release of the first textbook to address intimacy and consent work in our theatre classrooms. This livestream event celebrates the book release of Intimacy Directing for Theatre: Creating a Culture of Consent in the Classroom and Beyond with selected readings from the textbook and a Q&A. The book ranked as a Top New Release on Amazon for several weeks upon its release and is a critical addition to the world of performance. The themes we will address include navigating movement and consent; intimacy work in devised theatre; choreographing violence; and building a future of consent. Join us, and let’s make consent contagious!

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.

Dr Ayshia, Charlie Baker, Kaja Dunn, and Kimberly Senior invite you to celebrate the release of the first textbook to address intimacy and consent work in our theatre classrooms. This livestream event celebrates the book release of Intimacy Directing for Theatre: Creating a Culture of Consent in the Classroom and Beyond with selected readings from the textbook and a Q&A. The book ranked as a Top New Release on Amazon for several weeks upon its release and is a critical addition to the world of performance. The themes we will address include a letter to directors; intimacy directing and human rights; choreography with cultural competence; and transgender identity and intimacy work. Join us, and let’s make consent contagious!

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.

In the next rehearsal, everyone gets back in a circle and shares their lists to find overlaps in what was most popular and what resonated the most, which creates a distilled depository. From there, ensemble members once again break up into groups and spend forty-five minutes to an hour creating story outlines from scratch, drawing elements from the depository. These outlines are shared with the collective, then the process is repeated, four times in total. In the most recent devising process, the collective ended up with twelve outlines.

Next, the collective has a day of discussions, talking through all the outlines and expressing which ones are most exciting to members, narrowing the selection down to four outlines. The next rehearsal provides space for another group conversation, which results in the selection of one outline, which will be developed into the new play. Finally, the devising ensemble meets for three or so more rehearsals to expand that outline into scenes, having actors in character improvise those scenes a couple times. As the collective selects and builds the outline, their decisions are guided by real-life constraints, including budget, logistical feasibility, and who the actors are in the room.

Once the devising process is complete, the designated playwright(s) turn the outline into a script, which is shared with the devising ensemble in at least two workshops to receive feedback that informs script development. Finally, the collective reconvenes for a several-week rehearsal process leading up to the show’s premiere. The COVID pandemic dramatically changed Intramural’s devising process timeline. In the past, the collective spent just thirty days from the first writing prompts to opening night. For the upcoming show, devising work began in August 2023, and the show will premiere in May 2024.

Democracy is really slow.

It is important to highlight that every step of this decision making is consensus-based. Kirschner is a facilitator of the process, and he takes his role in setting an example of egoless-ness seriously, by not being overly attached to or precious with the ideas he submits to the group. All those iterative discussions take time, and as company member Elizabeth Frenchie Faith quips, “Democracy is really slow.”

Davis elaborates, “Especially for people who are new to the company or don’t know everyone as well, it takes a while to feel like people will listen to you and your ideas matter, which is heightened by any differences in race, orientation, or gender. It’s intangible, but creating a space where people feel truly welcome as their authentic selves is important, and that takes time.” Kirschner is attentive to making sure all members of the group feel encouraged to voice their opinions. Mary Langley, who joined the company this year, says, “Intramural organizes that space in a way that feels safe and supportive. How things are supposed to be done, how conflict was supposed to be handled, what the goal was for the collective, was all clear from the beginning.”

As much as the devising process is designed to create a play, it also requires ensemble members to vulnerably participate in a creative negotiation. Ensemble member Madi Zins, who also joined the company this year, says, “Consent doesn’t have to mean you are enthusiastically for whatever decision is being made. It’s about what feels safest for everybody in the room, and what everyone is willing to try. It’s a moment of collaboration, listening, and hearing where people are.” Listening is a word that came up repeatedly in interviews with company members, as a skill they honed throughout the devising process. Everyone’s ideas are valuable in this non-hierarchical way of making, and while individuality is necessarily forsaken for the group’s collective decision making, every ensemble member can point to something of their own in the finished product. Working with Intramural has not only made its ensemble members better listeners, but also encouraged them towards more risk taking, and feeling more confident about their artistry.

Taking time to build every element of the show together creates an impressive bond of trust that leads to a more symbiotic rehearsal process down the line. Company member and sound designer Bobby Burvant describes the “liberated surreal creative wildness” that emerges after participants dare to diverge from the prompts. He says, “I love the way that once somebody does it and it inspires us, then everybody starts to loosen up a little and just writes what they’re thinking, instead of trying to fit within the parameters of the prompt.” This creativity feeds off itself, and after two to three rehearsals of sharing prompt responses, it creates a “special safe playground of a container” to “bring ideas into space, and trust other people to play around with them,” according to Zins. She continues, “It allowed me to push what I could be doing a little bit farther and try things a little bit weirder and be a little bit more raw with things I was thinking and feeling.”

The as-yet-untitled devised show has the largest ensemble to date, with a whopping seven members in the devising collective. Having more voices in the room for this process led to less time to consider each individual’s contributions, but the pleasant surprise of several new talented writers joining the group.

Stereotypes in Traditional Mask Designs

As a mask maker, I am tasked with representing a character on stage. I’m often asked to fabricate masks for training, rather than a particular character. The goal is to convey strong aspects of character for anyone wearing the mask. This is tricky because there are no genetically impartial features; our physical bodies all have connections to our unique heritage. When tasked with representing social status in a mask (as is required in CdA masks), you must answer impossible questions: “What does a lower class nose look like?” “What features should signify ‘poor’?” This is the mask maker’s conundrum.

It took years for me to realize that it is my responsibility to represent students of today, not players of the past.

In the US in 2023, anyone is supposed to be able to attain wealth. This was not the case when Commedia dell’arte was a dominant theatre form, and is not reflected in Renaissance-era masks. Of course, opportunities for people of color and marginalized identities to attain wealth today are drastically less than those of dominant cultural identities. But theatre is aspirational—it should serve everyone and reflect today’s diverse world of players.

As a mask maker, my first instinct was to mimic the ideas and designs of my predecessors. It took years for me to realize that it is my responsibility to represent students of today, not players of the past. To do so, I have made many changes to this traditional form.

Separating the Harm from Commedia Characters and Their Masks

When I began, I had to identify the most important parts of the Commedia acting experience for students. I didn’t want to do harm. Traditional Commedia dell’arte masks have rich histories, but also deeply embedded stereotypical features that stem from ageism, racism, sexism and misogyny, genderism, classism, ableism, etc. I refused to put that pain into the masks that I would use to teach Commedia. But how? If I didn’t use the “stock” characteristics of Commedia’s traditional characters, would people know who they were? And given the harm that has come from contemporary artists using these masks, should I make new masks that are recognizable as the traditional characters they stem from, or should I abandon those models altogether for contemporary devising practice?

I had been using emotion play with Commedia students for fifteen years, so I knew I would be building emotions into the new masks. Emotions play across a face bombastically, throwing symmetry out the door in favor of fascinating visual events—a crinkly nose lifts one side of a lip, pulling the entire left side of a face upwards in wrinkles. Emotions create intersections, conflicts, and big changes of direction: everything the Lecoq territory on Commedia dell’arte might highlight as the purpose of the play.

Emotions are archetypal—recognizable in a large majority of humans across experience and history. Archetypal qualities differ from stereotypical qualities; archetypes are driven from within an individual, whereas stereotypes are driven from external identification. This was the foundation for my pedagogy, “Embodying Archetypes.” I reasoned that if emotions are not generally part of the mask shape for traditional masks, but I knew they lived in those stock characters, I could use those shapes to give definition to new masks.

There were other “archetype containers” I considered for building meaning into the Reimagined Commedia designs, several of which I used, including: inspiration from Carl Jung and his archetypes, the Rasas from traditional Indian dance, family member archetypes, the Grand Passions (a list of character qualities included in my training at Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre), elements from nature, and the traditional hierarchical form from Commedia and European clowning. These collections of archetypes gave definition to an idea that might be used in a physical way when sculpting a mask or embodied by an actor: I was looking for archetypes that could do both.

Partners

My concept was to reimagine the way Commedia could play in the Lecoq-informed traditions with archetypes rather than stereotypes, with masks that didn’t hold a history of harms embedded in their features, and with values that redefined the energetic focus of Commedia-inspired play by centering justice and joy. I needed collaborators who could also see what I saw. I was actively seeking environments to develop these ideas into practices. It wasn’t until I was approached by Faction of Fools Theatre Company that the work began to flourish.

I am blessed to partner with people who are passionate about this work: Francesca Chilcote and Kathryn Zoerb, the co-artistic directors of Faction of Fools. We spent many hours sharing concerns, observations, and interest in finding articulation of specific traditional stock characters for new, less harmful masks. They hired me to sculpt the masks using a rubric of archetypal qualities inspired by the traditional masked characters. We worked together to think about how these concepts would inform the company’s foundational training, “Commedia 101.”

Developing the masks and training side-by-side, I continued to bind mask functionality with social justice directives. Faction of Fools funded and co-created the reimagined masks, and became my partners in discovering how these parts would converge to make new, Commedia-inspired actor training.

Abandoning Traditional “Hungers”

Aiming for masks that were true to the work we loved, we first identified qualities that we did not want to see in the reimagined masks. We referenced the traditional wants and needs of the historical characters, the “hungers” of the three societal classes presented in historical Commedia. Generally, when CdA characters are taught, they are given a class-specific directive like, “The servant class wants to eat. That is their behavioral motivation.” I recognized how classist it is for today’s actors to categorize an entire class of people as “servants,” and to say, “all that class wants out of life is to eat.” This line of thinking denies human complexity, and makes stereotypes of everyone. However, by removing singular wants, I removed a lot of what practitioners found so advantageous to the form: its ability to quickly facilitate embodiment and movement stemming from those wants. It is this freedom to play in a well outlined container that makes Commedia so fun. I needed to keep a central want for each character, but one that didn’t encourage stereotyping.

Eliminating the articulation of “a class of person with specific class-wants” loosened the chokehold of stereotyping on the form. When we drop the connection between character social class and character hunger, we acknowledge that our human identities have definition beyond our status within capitalism.

Marina: Thank you so much. We started this season talking about queer MENA, SWANA artists with Adam Elsayigh who is not in the room right now. But when we talked to Adam, he said, “Really? A season on queer? Okay. Is this really the framing you want to do?” And he asked some really important curatorial questions that we appreciated. Acknowledging that now, so we don’t necessarily need to dig into that in this episode. It exists and I hope that you’ll look at that framing because it was a great question that Nabra and I had already been talking about because it can be tokenizing and essentializing but it can also be really affirming and productive to be in a space dedicated to addressing the lived experience of these intersectional identities. I also wanted to mention that this morning I was reflecting on what we were doing today and the podcast started whenever… I called Nabra one day… well, I started my PhD and I thought, “Now I’m going to be in a space with people where I can talk about MENA theatre all day long and they’re going to care.”

And we do talk a lot about performance. But the people that want to talk about MENA theatre is actually quite limited in that space. And I was like, “Nabra, what if we started a podcast where we would just talk about this and anyone who cared could tune in?” And that was before I realized anything about MENATMA, really. And I found that there’s an affinity space that exists where we can do all of that. So it feels so luxurious this weekend to be in this space, but also recording this episode together. Amazing. Nabra?

Nabra: Yeah, she started her PhD and she was like, “I’m going to have so much free time. We should start a podcast!” She didn’t say that. She was, I think, smarter than that. But it’s a ridiculous request at that time, I realize. But I’m glad it’s still happening and we’re in season three, it’s very exciting. So we’re diving deeper into affinity spaces and I’m actually also really honored to have been a performer at Mizna+RAWIFest yesterday morning at 7:00 AM. I was performing virtually. And then came over to MENATMA at 9:00 AM. So what a lovely morning that was yesterday. So we would love to just start with how each of you define an affinity space. In our MENATMA programming committee meetings and conversations about this session, what an affinity space is and how it should function was not trivial for all of us to define. So we wanted to know how you define that and how they have played your role in your life as an artist, if you haven’t already spoken about that. Anyone can take this away. We are going to edit out all the giant pauses, I think, in the final episode.

Evren: For me, an affinity space in my life career has been really directly connected to advocacy and strength in numbers. So it’s always been, actually, with an eye towards change-making. I don’t know if that’s just because of the way I’m built, thank you parents, or just how it works within the specific identities that I hold. Queer organizing is messy and beautiful and difficult and in a lot of ways, that definition of making trouble through not necessarily agreement, but in aligned goal is something that I feel like within the theatre space has been gifted to me from my elders. And I’ll go all the way back to, I don’t know, Tennessee Williams and beyond, Oscar Wilde and beyond, for this. And in the MENA space, it’s really, in my own journey as an immigrant, and an immigrant that is quite white-passing, where assimilation was the goal for the first, I don’t know, five to seven years of my life in the US and trying to lose my accent and trying to figure out how to pass as white American and feeling like I was just really truly bad at it.

It took a space like Golden Thread which is of course an affinity theatre company. Not even realizing at the time what a luxury that was to be able to be in a space where I could say, “I don’t know if I’m this, I don’t know if I’m that. I don’t know how this works for me. I don’t know if I’m Muslim.” I have a lot of feelings as a queer man of defining as Muslim and then being allowed to make plays about that and have conversations about that and say possibly terrible things about that in safe spaces and being corrected or guided or just allowed to hit all of the walls and figure out where I stand and build my spine.

The thing I will say for me for affinity space, in my experience of affinity spaces, especially within the Middle Eastern, North African context is a really American idea. Yesterday we were having lunch and we were at a table with a Turkish American artist, an Iranian Armenian American artist, an Azeri Armenian artist and an Armenian artist. We had to laugh that in this given moment that this lunch wouldn’t happen anywhere else. And we were really having a deep, wonderful conversation about representation and translation and the impossibility of finding words from one language to another. This really deep, lovely artistic conversation about Chekhov and beyond. That was the context, was an affinity space, that really felt, in a certain way American, in a certain way San Franciscan, in a certain way Golden Thread and MENATMA-only possible space. I grew up there as an artist so it feels so second nature to me. It’s been a real learning, working in more mainstream theatres, larger theatres, and meeting so many Middle Eastern/North African, artists of Middle Eastern/North African descent, who haven’t had that luxury of growing up and having their soft spines built solid around political and representation issues and the true emotional and mental, which is sometimes physical, suffering they have to go through or have had to go through in theatre specifically.

I feel lucky to have grown up in an affinity space like this, and an affinity space that is intersectional, that allows me to be all the things I am and not have to explain myself all the time. And I, in a way, wish that on every young artist because it is nice to be seen, it is nice to be heard, and it is nice to not have to translate yourself all the time.

Andrea: I was born in the United States and didn’t grow up in a location where I had access to an Arab or Middle Eastern community for most of my childhood. I want to acknowledge that I grew up in what feels like now a very, very different time in terms of queer identity in the United States. I’m a dyke of a certain age. I made a big deal of turning fifty on social media this year so I’m not afraid to say it. I’m going to say something and then I’m going to qualify it. I was in my process of coming out, I was very afraid that Arab and Middle Eastern community spaces would not accept me because of my queerness. Now I need to say I grew up in a predominantly Christian rural Pennsylvania environment that was so deeply homophobic in the eighties that I literally thought someone would kill me. Literally kill me if I came out. So I think we often get stuck in this narrative that somehow urban Middle Eastern communities are more homophobic than anyone else. I’m saying rural Christian America. Right?

And so those affinity spaces, queer affinity spaces were key to feeling safe as a queer person, as a young artist. Am I allowed to cuss? Shit has changed. I’m amazed by young folks talking about transgender identity, questioning gender, questioning the relationship between sexuality and gender, which wasn’t even a conversation we had then at all, the language for. There has been extraordinary progress. I think now that I look back on it with this question, what was truly transformative for me was that when Arab spaces welcomed me as a queer person and I didn’t need an affinity space because the whole space was welcoming. And I have to name because I think it’s important that we remember our history and we name people, Barbara Nimri Aziz was the first person to ever give me a radio interview, the first person to invite me to RAWI, to be on a panel about the intersection of queer and Arab identity.

And it’s really important that here at Golden Thread in this convening, there has been 50 percent or more on the regular daily and pretty much everything, queer representation. Yes. Beautiful and amazing and powerful and just not questioned. And so that makes me go, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we just didn’t need affinity spaces anymore and every space was like this?”

Sara: I was thinking about this and moving to the Bay Area in the early aughts, I remember being very clear that I had three distinct identities: as an Iranian, as a woman, and then as a lesbian. And that I would play different parts depending on which room I was in. And then I also thought that I never quite felt enough of any one of those. So I remember, Deborah and I share a group of very close friends. And it was in their company, one drunken night, I was outside and I used to call myself Sara [pronounced Se-ra]. Everybody called me Sara. And I was drunk and there was some Middle Eastern guy, he was drunk and his name was Mohammad and he called himself Mo. And I’m like, “No, Mo, why don’t you go by Mohammad?!” And my friends overheard it and they’re like, “What about you? Are you going by Sara? You can be Sara” [pronounced Sah-ra]. And it changed then. I started going by Sara [pronounced Sah-ra]. And it’s a very easy way of telling who knows me and who doesn’t if they call me Sara [Se-ra] or Sara [Sah-rah].

But in that moment it felt like, “Oh, my Iranian self and my American self maybe can live closely together.” But I kept having these moments. And I remember I did a show with a wonderful theatre company in the Bay, and I took my then girlfriend to it. This is a room full of very queer artists. And I told her, I said, “We can’t be queer here because they’re Middle Eastern.” And we went through this whole party and I remember being so amazed at how wonderful, how drunk, how great they all were, but it’s like we can’t be queer around them. So up until the very, very long period, these worlds were completely separate. And now I think the only reason they’re probably here is because I live with it so loudly and so comfortably. That shift happened though, over time. And I take your point because even deciding as a queer woman whether I wear mascara or not. Because when we moved to the Bay, we had to be very butch, we had to be very femme. And even that identity, how I present myself as a queer woman, has taken time.

And now I recognize just this living is radical in and of itself. And it’s an example for so many folks that I’ve only realized because I couldn’t recognize, I hadn’t seen it as much. So anyway, when I was thinking about affinity I was really thinking, for me the longest time it was so separate.

Marina: Feras?

Feras: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, I see affinity perhaps as community care, practicing community care in tangible and in material ways. How do we show up for each other in each other’s lives? How do we move together in the world? Who do we bring into rooms with us? I think also I feel like a lot of organizing is really around education and educating folks about concepts that might be, like what Evren was saying. I don’t know if I’m butchering your name, but pushing the envelope kind of forward, and I would like to invite us all. I think this is a good example of that because I was sharing feedback with Marina prior to the call and I’m so glad that you brought those pieces of feedback and you integrated them so quickly into the program, like about the Nakba and affirming that the occupation of Palestine has been since 1948. But I want to invite us all to see queerness, definitely it is a sexual identity, but beyond the sexual and gender as well.

Beyond the sexual and beyond gender, to see it as something, a political decision as well. Today I see nobody in the world is more queer than those in Gaza. You know? The way that they are invisibilized, the way they are demonized, the way they are intentionally silenced, the way there is a genocide against them the same way that there was a genocide here against queer people in the form of the AIDS/HIV pandemic, so to speak. They call it an epidemic but it affected more than just people. It affected Haitians as well. It affected working-class Black folks. I was having this conversation a little bit with my also fellow colleague on the RAWI board, Zeyn Joukhadar, an amazing transgender writer and organizer, just about how do we push those boundaries of queerness beyond and how do we see, and also with George Ibrahim about how Palestinian-ness is a form of queerness in a way, just the way it’s constantly marginalized, the way it’s constantly pushed to the side.

And I want us to, not necessarily right now, but to reflect on that question and carry it with us as we make our way back home together.

Evren: Feras, you inspired me, too. I just want to say that I do think I use the term “queer” rather than “gay” to define myself. One, because I don’t want to be that specific about who I sleep with as I identify myself, for some reason. It feels like none of your business. Also for me, queer is a political term. And a very specific political term because, I’m so glad you brought up the HIV/AIDS epidemic, talking about failure to our government to take care of people as we look at what they’re doing right now, we have a long history of this and that’s just one example amongst so many. What I find very moving is the AIDS funerals. The funerals of the people who were killed by neglect as well as this virus were celebrations, drag parties, dance parties. I feel like I look at our theatre, just I’ll speak about my art form, and I feel like joy has been gentrified, that there is this idea that there’s a cis white woman version of joy that has… And if I actually claim joy as my resistance, which I say all the time, I am negating the pain and the grief and the rage that we’re all feeling.

And having grown up over there, I have a lived understanding of people who are under the worst conditions that they are the funniest, they are the campiest, they are the most satirical in certain places. And for me, I am queering theatre actually feels very similar to the political actions of Middle Eastern-ing theatre, which is really about living in comedy as political action. As community, joy, and claiming that despite the fact that we’re all being killed to a certain extent. And this is something that is really difficult for me to let go of, especially as I work in mainstream spaces where the card I have to play is pain to get a job. And I feel like affinity… Yeah, they want my trauma, some of which I don’t actually have, by the way, I had a lovely upbringing as a queer boy. My family was wonderful.

Nabra: Don’t tell anyone.

Affinity space is also where I get to be unabashedly joyful and celebratory and unapologetic. Not just politically but as friends, as colleagues, as co-conspirators and that we hold each other accountable to that as we make space for our rage and grief. 

Evren: Second, if I’m doing this panel not led by Middle Eastern or conscious folks, the first question is, “How was growing up queer?” Asked with that soft white tone of care that is actually not care. That’s an invitation to perform my pain that I do not have. And this is not to negate all of the really terrible experiences queer folks have had in Turkey. So as I say this, I feel like I’m not representing something, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t have to talk about it on this podcast because everyone here understands. But the thing for me is, as we talk about queerness, as we talk about affinity space, for me, affinity space is also where I get to be unabashedly joyful and celebratory and unapologetic. Not just politically but as friends, as colleagues, as co-conspirators and that we hold each other accountable to that as we make space for our rage and grief. I am adding that to every community agreement from now on, by the way, it is the most brilliant addition. I can’t remember who proposed it, but my God.

So I just want to say that that idea of joy and political joy as political action lives in my body, both in my queerness and my Middle Eastern-ness, and I want to claim that for this space.

Marina: Yes. Evren, that was so beautiful and it takes me back to something Hamed Sinno said earlier which was, “You can’t, don’t use me talking about my queerness,” I’m paraphrasing them wildly, but, “don’t use my queerness to pinkwash and don’t use my queerness for part of your political or colonial or imperial agenda.” And that’s where joy gets in the way of people who try to use these stories for that purpose. And I want to add to what you’re saying, my favorite bell hooks quote, if you’ll indulge, anytime we can throw an amazing Black feminist into the space I feel like we should, but, “queer not as in being about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” I love that. It’s very much what Evren and Feras were just saying. But wanted to throw hooks and Hamed Sinno into the mix.

Nabra: Yes. Yeah. You’ve already touched on a lot of what we were going to talk about so we should just end the podcast here. I’m just kidding. We’re not going to, don’t worry. We’re here for twenty more minutes. One of the things I wanted to go a little deeper into, you’ve each talked about how and a little bit of the journey of how the affinity spaces have become intersectional for you or have presented themselves as being open to intersectional identities. Folks often will talk about the tensions of being MENA or SWANA in queer spaces and the tensions of being queer in MENA or SWANA spaces as some of you have touched on. But can you identify what are the aspects of affinity spaces that have made a platform a supportive platform for your intersecting identities? Some of you have had experience with spaces that have been, one or the other, you had to turn on and off certain identities. But in those spaces where you were able to bring your full self, are you able to articulate what are the elements of that kind of affinity space that has allowed for you to bring your full self with all of your intersecting identities? And those listening can learn from that, hopefully, and curate better affinity spaces moving forward.

Sara: As Evren was talking about, one of the best places was the annual Golden Thread party, where we would bring lots of food and dancing. One of the moments I probably felt the most seen, you and I were on the dance floor. And there was some great drumming going on. It was all of a sudden out of the blue there was drumming. I think someone was singing. And I feel like he probably had more…

Evren: Hip action.

Sara: Hip action than I could muster and I probably had more shoulder action than he could muster. And between the two of us, we’re doing extremely queer, completely role reversal dance in the living room of one of our founding board members. That to me speaks to everything that’s been said, the joy of it, the fluidity of it, the queerness of it, and the complete Middle Eastern-ness of it. It’s what gave me, constantly, it gives me joy and great memories.

Evren: Just so it is said. I did dance her off the dance floor. Not that it was a competition but I did win.

Sara: We had multiple matches. I think I won some of them.

Evren: I disagree. I would say really, people matter more than words for me. Actions matter more than words for me. I think we’re in a place right now in the American theatre where we have to say all of the right words. We feel like the words are the welcoming thing. And I would rather people show up in their imperfect language but with open hearts. I understand that I sit in a very privileged body to be able to say this. I also want to own that. But for me, what makes an affinity space welcoming is that people look me in the eye and say welcome. When I correct them, they say, “I’m so sorry,” and then just try to use the right pronoun or call me queer rather than something else or apologize for an assumption they made.

I’m a little over perfection before arrival as a requirement of an affinity space because I think as activists, as organizers, and I think everyone on here probably identifies with those words at different levels, but we all are, knowing everybody’s work to a certain extent, we keep leaving behind people who are actually really important by doing that. And as someone who lives in very liberal spaces and then is supposed to represent not necessarily people in theatre who might actually have those words or believe those things or they are welcoming but they actually don’t know that that’s the word you use for that thing. I am always negotiating that for myself as I try to create space and represent this impossibly large umbrella of folks called Middle Eastern, North African, or Muslim. I try to figure out how to make space for people who are coming from different spaces and make sure they feel welcome and they have an understanding of the rules of engagement rather than correcting people’s verbiage.

Andrea: Evren, can we model what you just said?

Evren: Yes.

Andrea: Because sitting here and I appreciate the feminist impulse that you started the panel with to acknowledge and say, I am so happy to be up here with, but I don’t identify as femme.

Evren: That’s fantastic.

Andrea: Yeah, because I really suck at femme. I’ve tried and I fail miserably. It’s like queer failure all over. I can’t do it.

Evren: I’m very sorry to have used that.

Let’s go deep into the mourning and face our trauma and face our complicity as US citizens in what our country is doing and also be queer and joyous in the same process.

Andrea: Oh, no. But you’re correct that I do identify as a cisgender woman and that is a specific privilege that I inhabit. So we’re doing the conversation. We’re like, that was the thing we want y’all to do. And we want spaces to do, is like, have that conversation.

But actually I really want to dig a little deeper into the joy and trauma conversation. Is that okay? Can I go there? Because I’m thinking about everything you said and how that resonates with me about joy and queer space and also I’m thinking about my own work which dives deep into trauma often. I was very much, as an activist, and I also embrace the word queer because I do think of it as a much larger political framework than only my sexuality. And that is resisting the normativity or the seduction of capitalism and pushing back on all levels of political analysis.

I was formed as a young queer person coming out and as a young activist in the nineties during the AIDS crisis where our slogan was, “Don’t mourn, organize.” And we did that. And we never mourned. And we carried that grief for more than a decade. And it still hurts us. It still hurts us. So I think that a lot of my work on trauma is about creating safe spaces to mourn, collectively, publicly to cry, to be witnessed mourning. And also there might be a queer Elvis impersonator in the middle of the DRONE project because that’s also important to me. Let’s go deep into the mourning and face our trauma and face our complicity as US citizens in what our country is doing and also be queer and joyous in the same process. I feel sometimes that there’s an either or thing happening that I also want to disrupt.

Feras: Absolutely. Absolutely, Andrea. I love that you mentioned that because first of all, I want to thank you for mentioning Barbara Nimri Aziz, for naming her. As the RAWI founder, we all are indebted for her. And actually, the Mizna+RAWIFest was exactly a space, just as you mentioned, we had moments of mourning, of collective mourning, and we had moments of collective joy and we had moments of practicing collective care and support and moments of creation as well. And as we all know as artists, that’s the place where we create from or where we write towards, too. I think to touch on what Evren was saying as well about mining the trauma, we face a similar predicament as Palestinians. What’s your displacement story? That’s what the media is always interested in, but never in what brought us to this moment. So I really appreciate Marina and Nabra and naming the root causes of the violence that we just encountered and naming those white supremacy structures that uphold colonialism as a violent structure in of itself. And therefore an act of resistance becomes really an act of love. And resistance is existence, even if it manifests in violence. I believe that it’s a lesser evil, to use liberal talk.

But to answer the question that was asked, I think when it comes to affinity spaces, I think it’s all about really removing the barriers to entry. And that’s something that again, we try really hard to do with RAWI and Mizna. For example, how do we make it more accessible for disabled folks? And that’s why we chose to do a hybrid festival and required masks and asking people to vaccinate before or at least take their tests, even though knowing that the tests are not as effective with certain strains. It’s also making space for plurality, whatever manifestation that takes. We’re expanding beyond the Arab speaking world into entering SWANA and beyond as well with joint struggle partners with our indigenous Black, Asian, Latinx siblings. Again, challenging and resisting anti-colonial, anti-imperialist structures, removing barriers to entry for working class people in terms of economics as well because class is a very important dynamic that we should all make space for.

And always look below on the food chain. What do unhoused folks need? How do we bring them into the room? And always thinking about who’s not in the room and how do we bring them into the room. And that was a lovely practice that I witnessed this past weekend. Because it helps us multiply. Every time we bring somebody that is not in the room, we bring them into the room, then our numbers increase, and that is how we build power. That is how we build care. I believe that is the way to the future, a livable future, if I may say. How do we push back against white supremacy? How do we confront our own antiblackness within certain Arab communities as well? There’s so much to unlearn and so much to learn as well. So yeah, I really appreciate this conversation and where it’s going. Thank you all.

Nabra: Thank you so much for bringing up the other intersections that we have to be considering when expanding and transforming and growing our affinity spaces. Because queer and MENA and SWANA friendly space is not necessarily disability friendly. It’s not necessarily antiblack. So I love that. Thank you for bringing, and especially those very specific examples as to how Mizna and RAWI are doing that. I know Golden Thread is also doing that. I know MENATMA also working on that. And that’s working for all of us. It’s work for all of us and is a constant growth process. It’s interesting to start thinking about as we become more inclusive, and this is something we’ve also been exploring in this season, as we become more and more inclusive of intersection, what does an affinity space mean? I love the ways that each of you all have defined affinity space because it’s a definition that is hard to put on paper. You’ve defined it through the vibe or the way in which your joy can be present in that space. The way in which your grief, your rage, your emotion, what’s inside of you can be present in a space. Which is very different from saying it’s a room in which everyone is MENA and SWANA and queer, which is an interesting way to think about that and to think about how we grow and expand and create more intersectional affinity spaces.

I also wanted to touch on something else you brought up, Feras, which is this hybrid model. So today we’re in person, we’re live streaming, we’re sharing this asynchronously on Kunafa and Shay. And living in a more hybrid world, considerations, the merits and drawbacks of in person versus live versus hybrid gatherings have become very ubiquitous. And while art making has been multimedia, since really the beginning of advancements in technology, virtuality has become an even more present consideration, especially for performing artists. So how do you consider physical space in your community building, in your affinity creation, and in your art making?

Marina: We have about five minutes left so we’ll do this more rapid fire.

Nabra: Yes. And I’ll also throw in there consideration for safety and affinity within virtual spaces that can be so much grander, can be international. How do you consider that when it comes to your community building and affinity curation?

Andrea: I will jump in and say, I’m just going to throw a wrench in here, which is gender. Because the spaces that I like to create, maybe because I miss them, because so many have disappeared, are women-only spaces. And that is trans-inclusive. I do that a lot in my work, in my art making. My joy and pleasure is in women-only ensemble spaces. Again, there was a period of time when there were lots of… And this is so ironic, right? It’s ironic because Middle Eastern and Muslim communities get criticized all the time for having gender segregation in certain situations, and yet women-only spaces are my favorite places to be. So when I’m thinking about creating spaces of safety, it’s often around gender identification that is inclusive of trans, non-binary, and various sexualities rather than around sexual identity defined space, in my own work, in my own artistic practice.

So I don’t know, I wanted to lift up that when we’re making our own ensembles, we’re, in a sense, making our own affinity spaces. We gather people in a certain way to create together and to create the safety in which we can do our best work or ask the deepest questions or share the deepest stories. So I don’t know. Maybe that’s where I’m at, making and remaking those spaces. I don’t know if that answered the question but that was just what was..

Evren: I just want to say we’ve been using the word affinity space which usually goes with an idea of limiting attendance by identity, however that identity is defined. I’m in a place, we just, in the conference, just had this really beautiful conversation across different networks of color representing all sorts of communities, all sorts of backgrounds, and the intersectionality of our goals and resources that is needed. I think I was using this term two days ago to a friend where I was like, “I’m just looking for my people.” My people includes many, many, many Middle Eastern Muslim queer folks but also Nataki Garrett, who’s a cis Black woman, is my people. Eric Ting, who’s an Asian-American, cis straight man is my people. Mei Ann Teo, Asian-American queer femme human, is my people. And I’m always trying to figure out, as I build ensemble or as I build space, especially if the space is either around political action change making or it’s about difficult conversation or processing, whether that be through laughter or tears, as you said, Andrea. I am looking for my people and trying to make sure that the people in the room share some understanding.

And I wish, as I said, I’ve just started using this term so I don’t know if I have the articulation of how that is defined for me. But the thing I can say is that I know when someone is and when someone isn’t. And that is not necessarily across identity lines for me, always. The thing I will say about the digital aspect of the question you asked, social media, the digital space that has really sprung up even more now due to the pandemic and the isolation, we all felt through that has expanded my community, has done great things for my career, has done great things for my organizing and activism and advocacy. And then I attend a conference like this in person and remember that I’m an in person person. So it’s safe for me. And as I haven’t been back home for so long and my brother lives in a screen as far as I’m concerned, I feel like it’s all of it. And it has to be.

And if you’re an immigrant or children of immigrants, it’s really telling to me that in this moment of unbearable violence, the thing that Israel is doing is to shut down internet access. That is a violent act right now. And if that is the case, we have to accept that digital space and that access is community. That is access to truth. And that does not negate the need for me to hug my brother when I see him next, but it is both.

Nabra: Does anyone else want to comment on this before we wrap up?

Feras: Yeah, I’ll keep it short just because I know that we’re short on time. But for me, I’m obsessed with indigeneity. I guess it’s because we’re all indigenous to somewhere. I invite everybody to invite the folks in their lives, especially white folks or folks that have not questioned yet, where are you from, basically. Where do you come from? We get asked that question a lot as otherized, racialized people, as other subjects. I think that it’s time to flip that question back. It’s also important for each one of us where we come from. I believe James Baldwin said that you’ll never be able to move forward until you confront your own past and you know where you come from. And to mark your journey because there’s a celebration there of your growth of how far you’ve come. So yeah, just to ask each other and ourselves, where do we come from and to return to that place.

A beautiful, wonderful writer and also, he’s a performance artist who I love very much, his name is Fargo Tbakhi, says that “the future is a past that we return to.” And I truly believe that. I’ll leave it there. Thank you all so much for this wonderful space.

Marina: Thank you. We’re going to end the way that Nabra and I end all of our episodes, our phone calls, the way that you might’ve ended the twenty minute goodbye at khaltu or sito’s house, with a nice, “Yalla, bye!” So can we do it all as a group?

Nabra: As loud as you can.

Marina:It’s very cheesy but we love it.

Nabra: All right. Yalla, bye! Everyone.

Marina: One, two, three…

Audience: Yalla, bye!

Nabra: Thank you so much joining us. Thank you so much, Feras.

Feras: My pleasure. Thank you.

Nabra: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching HowlRound wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the howlround.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay or TV event the theatre community meets to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the comments.

Yalla, bye!

Marina: Yalla, bye!

Conceived of and produced by Mark Russell & ArKtype in partnership with the International Presenting Commons (IPC), Creative and Independent Producer Alliance (CIPA), and HowlRound Theatre Commons, the 2024 Under the Radar Symposium will convene 250 arts presenters, producers, service orgs, funders, and artists toward rigorous, facilitated small-table discussions, taking a deeper dive into visioning emergent paths for a stronger sector of national and international performing arts.

Featured Keynote Speakers Jeremy O. Harris (Playwright), Ravi Jain (Artistic Director, Why Not Theatre), Kaneza Schaal (Director/Performer), and Hana Sharif (Artistic Director, Arena Stage).

Under the Radar (RADAR) is a festival celebrating new theater and performance works from both around the world and down the street. Taking place in New York City from January 5 – 21, 2024. Produced and programmed by thirteen different venues in collaboration with RADAR.
Under the Radar 2024 addresses a city, a country, and the world with the voices of innovative multidisciplinary artists speaking to their time. The festival stands for transparency, equity, and equal collaboration in the development of new live works. It represents global citizenship, innovation, and a platform for those whose voices have yet to be heard.

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.

1

When we’re talking about theatre, the dock from which we depart, we’re usually talking about plays and musicals. Most of the time, plays exclude other forms (if they incorporate music or dance, it’s commonly diegetic, or at least not abundant enough to alter its categorization too much—the “play with music”). Companies tend to produce only one sort of performance.

2

I’m bored by ordinary play structure, and I think a lot of neurodivergent theatre lovers and makers are as well. Most plays really are structurally and formally similar. Whenever I’ve tried to write “a play,” what I end up with has felt really dull and inimical to the raw, radiant spark of the live moment. Though many neurodivergent people feel most comfortable (or at least least distressed) when they know precisely what to expect of any situation, the problem is that the thing that the word “play” represents is so boring and incompatible with how our brains work that we’re not even showing up. We aren’t built to understand “the play” as a stimulating, coherent enterprise; it will always be inadequate compared to what could occur on a stage, but all too frequently doesn’t.

3

Of course, the very wide category of the “play” really isn’t so homogenous as all that. And even as a neurodivergent person, there are plenty of plays that I love, plays like Love! Valour! Compassion! and John and Seventy Scenes of Halloween, and of course I love musicals. But the works of performance that have really lit me up, treated me to the most electrifying nights in the theatre, have also been works that take some of the largest steps away from being “merely” plays. I’m talking about shows like Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun, the Debate Society’s Blood Play, Charles Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Reza Abdoh’s The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, Spalding Gray’s monologues, and work made by performance groups like Forced Entertainment, Elevator Repair Service, and The Wooster Group.

4

Leaving the notion of the “play” wobbly for a minute, I’d like to think of the intentionally live moment as the smallest essential element of what theatre is and why it’s valuable—because that’s the thing I still haven’t been able to shuck, why I can’t quit the whole fabulous invalid—and then build an architecture that takes into account the way that the neurodivergent mind works and what we, I, crave.

5

Shades of Konstantin Gavrilovich pinwheeling around the stage: “we need new forms, new forms”—but we do, mary!

6

ADHDers have wacky relationships with time. It’s an ADHD truism that there are only two times: now and not-now. Many of us are time-blind and struggle with the flow of elapsed time into action. We often experience episodes of hyperfocus, when it is (not just feels) impossible to pull ourselves away from a task, whether that be a chore or a digression or an improvisation (or, when lightning strikes, work). We make to-do lists and save things for later, but there’s only the present moment for getting anything done or for recharging once we’ve done it.

Theatre has been sorely lacking in options and opportunities for pieces that are nonfictional not because their narrative and content are “true,” but because they choose to throw in their lot formally with what nonfiction affords.

7

The thing about performance is that it also, by definition, exists now, live, in the present moment. If it’s recorded, it’s not live. When we see performance, we are watching art get made, and participating in it through our palpable attention. This is unique to performance.

There’s an ADHD phenomenon called body-doubling, where just having somebody else in the room with us gets our otherwise indolent motor purring, and we can suddenly focus and get our work done. It’s wild that it works, but it does. I love making and watching theatre because you’re never in the room alone.

8

The slice of time that we call a performance is, I think, of especial value to people with ADHD. It provides a comfortable enrobement into a linear experience of time, where all we need to do is arrive, sit in the dark, and let the thing happen. No flipping around, scrubbing, changing the channel, or toggling between tabs. Sensory immersion, in the dark, is so attractive to my kind of neurodivergent person. It’s like a temporal-visual Temple Grandin squeeze machine. The dark irises in on the stage, and I just have to take it all in, and what happens next could be anything.

9

So what’s the form? If not a play, then what? I’d like to propose the live theatrical essay as the fundamental form of neurodivergent performance.

The essay, and nonfiction generally, occurs to me as the most open and valuable and fascinating mode that exists. In many narrative forms, but particularly theatre, works that occupy the binary position of “fiction” tend to be king, regarded as the default, in contrast to those in the “nonfiction” position. Think of the novel over the book-length essay; the feature film over the documentary; nearly every play ever over, what, The Laramie Project and Mike Birbiglia? (No shade to either! It’s just all either verbatim theatre or one-person shows.) Theatre has been sorely lacking in options and opportunities for pieces that are nonfictional not because their narrative and content are “true,” but because they choose to throw in their lot formally with what nonfiction affords.

I reached out to the Norwegian consulate, and they were interested in helping. The day I went to meet with them, the Norwegian actress Anna Guttormsgaard, who now goes by Anna Gutto, was there. I was introduced to her, and they said, “Sarah is working on bringing Fosse to New York.” She had been thinking about doing this as well. So we teamed up and created Oslo Elsewhere as a theatre company to co-produce with Spring Theatreworks and worked to secure Norwegian funding to make it happen. 

I thought, I’ll direct the play. I assumed I would change some Britishisms into Americanisms, really not knowing much about translation at all, but also understanding there were things that didn’t resonate. And then Jon sent me a couple other attempts at American translations of this text. I read the first couple pages of these other translations, and then I looked back at the Nynorsk version, and then I looked at the first couple pages of the British. One was too literal/foreign sounding, and the other felt like it was trying too hard to be American. None of them were actually nailing it in terms of what the Nynorsk is doing. They were close, but certain things were not working. 

That’s when I wondered, “How am I going to really make this work?” Jon encouraged me to do my own translation, and my dad, who is Norwegian, said, “You can do it, Sarah.” 

My friend Marie Louise Miller stepped into the role of dramaturg, and she really encouraged me. We spent hours and hours, days and days, going through that first translation, honing it, listening to the tones and trying it out with actors to get it where it needed to be. I was so committed to translating this unique voice as effectively as possible for a New York audience.

Fosse writing in Nynorsk informs the poetry. When I read it, I understand the physicality of the place that he’s writing from because it’s in Nynorsk.

Amelia: Translation is such a collaborative process, especially for theatre, and it’s wonderful that you have been in conversation with Fosse from the beginning. I imagine that shaped your path with this work.

Sarah: I am a director, first and foremost, and my concern was always, “How does this come to life on stage?” The thing that was amazing for me as a young artist was that Jon really trusted me. If I would ask him a question about something, he would say, “You know the answer.”

That meant I had to decide. It was such a different experience than working with my colleagues who are American writers, who I love dearly, but who were finding their own voices, so they were protective of everything. His trust in me encouraged me to get closer to what the work was really trying to do and say. Fosse talks about writing as if he’s channeling the words, so he doesn’t even totally have control over it, it’s just coming to him.

It made me want to do the best possible job, to work so hard to get it right but also trust what I felt was right, was what was right for this moment, this place, this time. Someone else would do it differently, but his works are so open that the best thing I can do as an artist is to trust completely in what my vision is and give over to that.

The work speaks to so many people in different places. There are no pop culture references, so it can translate into any culture at any time. There’s no technology; there’s never talk about the local spots. In his plays, there are very, very few specific references to locale. That means that it can really go anywhere and feel connected to place. 

Because of his sparse language and repetition, there’s the open quality to the work, there’s space between the words. There’s space between people. Words are not always sufficient, and we are always trying to get closer to somebody through our words, but it’s never really working exactly the way we think it is. It’s this delicate poetry that has a real driving force beneath the words. 

Formally, it’s just so different. The characters are The Young Woman and The Young Man, and The Older Woman and The Older Man, etc. Often, it’s the same person in different generations, so he’s playing with time and temporality. The content is interesting, but I think it’s the form that’s mind-blowing, and what makes him so masterful. 
 

On 9 August 2023, the International Presenting Commons (IPC) and the Edinburgh International Festival gathered an invited, international group of presenters, producers, artists, and agents for a candid exploration of the opportunities and barriers artists and programmers face as they move work across borders. Given the common challenges of limited budgets, governmental support, time, and space, participants shared their innovations and successes in the creation and touring of work. The conversation began by honoring the context in which it was taking place and centering the Scottish voices in the room, and expanded to include everyone present. This unique, horizontal space for sharing experiences across roles and hierarchy led to the discovery of common questions, learning opportunities, and potential collaborations.

About the IPC

The International Presenting Commons (IPC) is an emergent, evolving, volunteer group of United States–based performing arts presenters and creative independent producers who have joined forces to keep international cultural exchange and engagement alive and vibrant now and into the future. IPC does this through advocacy, active learning, resource sharing, and collaboration among performing arts presenters, artists, producers, and funders, who work together to build more sustainable policies and funding models for the exchange of work around the world. The group’s mission is in service of its increasingly diverse communities throughout the country. IPC celebrates its role as part of a global cultural ecosystem and by partnering with artists and presenters from all over the world. IPC does its work through a commons-based approach and is currently organizing with the support and thought partnership of HowlRound.

About the Edinburgh International Festival

The Edinburgh International Festival is a global celebration of performing arts, bringing the finest performers of dance, opera, music and theatre from around the world to Edinburgh for three weeks every August. The Edinburgh International Festival exists to promote the exchange of ideas and deepen understanding between cultures through a global celebration of exceptional performing arts. The International Festival was the inspired idea of Rudolf Bing, a refugee of the Nazi regime who became the General Manager of Glyndebourne Opera, along with Henry Harvey Wood, the Head of the British Council in Scotland, and leaders from the City of Edinburgh. It was established in the aftermath of the Second World War as a cultural event to bring together audiences and artists from around the world, and over 76 years has gone from strength to strength. 

The next International Festival will take place 2-25 August 2024 and is the second from Festival Director and Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. Each year the programme is developed around a central question or theme. 2024’s theme “Rituals That Unite Us” follows on from Benedetti’s first year, which asked “Where do we go from here?”

The International Festival’s impact also extends beyond the annual programme, with community learning, engagement and professional development programmes running throughout the year, contributing to the cultural and social life of Edinburgh and Scotland.

Larger Theatre Companies With Buildings

Requesting a larger company’s actual stage is a huge ask, and often not financially practical for small companies or independent productions. But there are other ways to utilize existing theatre buildings, thinking beyond the actual stage. The bar, the lobby, the rehearsal rooms, even the bathrooms—they already exist as a place where theatre-going audiences like to attend, so why not fill the entire building with innovative programming? Producing a smaller scale show as an auxillary offering to what is happening in the main theatre can lead to great results.

I recently produced a headphone audio installment from Murmuration, a Dublin-based theatre collective, in the lobby of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. We ran the show in the hours leading up to Woolly’s 8:00 performance, which was beneficial for my company because we got exposure to new audiences, and likewise our host at Woolly was happy to offer audiences a broader way to meaningfully engage with their building. Additionally, I produced the previously mentioned show, The Smuggler, in the newly renovated lobby bar at Round House Theatre. I pitched the play there as a way for Round House to show off their newly minted bar/cafe, keep audiences in their building longer, and provide a performance venue for my company. We ran the show between productions at Round House, so when tech was happening inside the theatre for Round House’s next show, audiences were in the lobby engaging with our Solas Nua production. The doors to the public would have otherwise been shut for both our companies, but programming our show during this time offered Round House audiences more engagement in the building as well as a venue for Solas Nua. Both of these experiences showcased how large and small companies can mutually benefit from collaboration and broaden their communities.

Shifting Landscapes

The need for site-specific work is becoming one of financial necessity, not just creative ingenuity. In the past ten years, the DC Area has lost the Logan Fringe Arts Space, Fort Fringe, Warehouse Theater, Flashpoint (which had a theatre, visual arts gallery, and dance studio), and H St Playhouse. There are more theatres set to close in the immediate future, and no current plan from the city for new arts venues to be constructed. While I’ve found success making my theatrical bed out-of-doors, DC city leaders need to believe and invest in affordable permanent homes for the arts.

I’m also torn between two realities. On the one hand, I’m romantic about bringing surprising, memorable experiences to places audiences don’t expect. On the other hand, I’m exhausted from the slog of reinventing new performance spaces. Last season at Solas Nua, all of our shows were hosted by fully staffed venues with box offices, front of house staffs, a cafe, and sweet, sweet air conditioning. The summer before, I lost fifteen pounds in a month setting up an outdoor show every night in the DC summer heat. How can I not do that again? And yet, I’m currently location scouting for multiple shows next year that I’m producing in nontraditional spaces. Not being tied to a building leads me to not only ask the fundamental artistic director questions of “why this play and why now?” but also “where this play?” That seemingly small shift of interrogation opens up worlds of possibilities.

Small companies are where risk and innovation are fostered, and they have a meaningful role to play for an industry currently searching to reinvent itself.

I think small companies have the most to gain from embracing nontraditional spaces. Nearly without fail, these site-specific productions have not only been the most financially successful for my organization, but they are also the shows that are still talked about amongst our audiences. Years after the final performances, the plays I’m asked if I will ever bring back are: “that one in the house,” “that one on the pier,” “that one in the cocktail lounge.” The full production budget for these shows was only what many large companies in DC might spend on the scenic design alone, but the productions have shown that artistry is priceless. The ability to bring productions out into the community is a unique strength that traditional brick-and-mortar theatres don’t have because they are locked into a geographical location. Furthermore, as large companies face the financial burden of keeping substantial overhead bills paid, itinerant companies can provide a new, flexible producing model. I deeply value our large institutions; they provide anchors for our artistic ecosystems. But small companies are where risk and innovation are fostered, and they have a meaningful role to play for an industry currently searching to reinvent itself.

This article isn’t an exhaustive resource. There are so many other amazing people and companies working in this model: Rorscharch Theatre, a fellow small DC company, has found great success by making “magic in rough spaces.” Anu Productions, an Irish company that exclusively makes unconventional work, blends location, theatre, dance, and visual art to create innovative exchanges with their audiences. There are certainly others. I’ve also written a longer guide that has more nitty gritty details like renting equipment, getting permits for locations, and many of the other aspects of producing that you’ll need to consider when in a nontraditional space. Hopefully these recommendations are helpful for reimagining and rethinking where theatre can happen in our cities. While renting out a fully staffed performing arts venue certainly has its benefits, thinking outside the black box can offer artists and audiences unforgettable experiences and can redefine our collective imagination of what, and where, theatre can be.