morningtomorning.net 

Erin: OK, so you were just at B and H?  What were you getting?

 

Andrew: I was just at B and H, I was getting a mono pod for umm...

 

E: Which is a tri-pod with only 1 leg?

 

A: …is that what that means?  

 

E: I don’t know actually…

 

A: The etymology of pod… let’s not dwell on it, we’ll look it up later.  So, I bought a mono-pod because I’m shooting this documentary about a theater company.  Ok, so, this fulfills 2 things of mine.  One is, I don’t own pro equipment, I mean consumer pro equipment, like the Canon 5D and good audio equipment.  I don’t own it nor do I have any stories that I want to tell that require it: I don’t want to make a film, I don’t want to make a short movie, or if I do it’s not a priority right now.  

 

E: Have you shot a documentary before?

 

A: No, and I haven’t used most of the equipment before, but they don’t really have a budget.

 

E: In a good or a bad way?

A: In a way that’s kind of perfect because I don’t have to worry.  If they had a huge budget I would be out of my league. I don’t really know their work flow very well, so this is more in line with what I usually do, which is that I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ll figure it out organically.

 

E: Is that how you work? Like, coming up against a challenge or a problem and answering it?

 

A: That’s typically what has happened.  Grad school was all about assignments, like, make an interactive thing and think about privacy or think about personal space and it has to bring two users together somehow, or, there are 5 things, use 2 of those 5 things.  One assignment that we had was to use either video or music. This was one stipulation, the other stipulations were to use an article of clothing and to get people to move.

 

E: What did you do?

 

A: I put sensors in shoes that would communicate wirelessly to a computer, and the idea was to make giant shoes; shoes that kids could have where you could be a giant.  When kids pretend to be giants and stomp around and make giant footsteps- I wanted to make giant footsteps.

 

E: Like, aurally…?

 

A: Yeah, you could hook it up to speakers and kids could walk around and have giant sounds coming out of their feet.  And this is proof of concept.  I mean, a lot of my ideas, at least on the interactive electronics side, are a flash out of the blue, and it usually involves something that is ridiculous that I would think a kid would come up with.

 

E: “wouldn’t it be cool, if…”

 

A: Yeah, wouldn’t it be cool to have this that did this and obviously it can’t happen.  But I’ll try to make that.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I won’t plan the whole thing, I’ll just do the first steps that I know how to do and then it will change.  Most of my projects are the result of not being able to do the first thing.  Either it’s not actually possible, or I don’t have enough money and the fallback thing ends up being more interesting.

 

So with the Giant shoes I tried to get it to where every time the foot would hit the ground there would be this sound but it wasn’t really working, the timing was off too much, but, proof of concept-although, my initial idea didn’t work, I wanted to show the class that the sensors work and you could see the data from the photo cells. You can see it communicating wirelessly using all the code that I made.  I made this Max patch, and I put some Michael Jackson music into the thing and depending on how far your foot was off the ground, it would do an attenuation of the volume but it would also do the speed, so as your foot would come off the ground this Michael Jackson would start playing louder and faster, so it became this weird analog way of scrubbing this awesome music that was so much more satisfying than the giant shoes, I think…I think?  It ended up being this whole project that came out of a failure.  It’s not until I talked to you that I realized that that project was proof of concept on something that I wasn’t actually able to do.  Crazy.  (Check it out!)

 

E: And this still applies to the work that you’re doing now?  It starts off being one thing and the process of working on it transforms it?

 

A:  Yeah, with the performance stuff it’s usually tiny moments.  I’ll have an idea of something that I want to see onstage- that’s where a lot of things start and then I’ll try to make it.  I can’t do the planning to do a whole thing, like, “I want to do a SHOW, and this is the SHOW: a GUY in a WORLD…” because, like there’s only so many narratives you can write. There are like seven stories: boy meets girl, boy loses girl whatever that stuff is, and I don’t really have so much of an interest in doing that but maybe that comes out of the fact that other people do it so much better.  There are so many inventive storytellers out there in narrative storytelling, especially in film, I think.

E: Do you think film is a better medium for story telling than theater?

A: Yeah, I do.

 

E: Why?

 

A: Me, I rarely go to see a piece of theater that captures me in the way that screen based storytelling does.  I don’t mean interactive screen based storytelling because I don’t see many successful examples of that.  But with really good filmmaking, you are inside the screen, your peripheral vision goes away and you are there and rarely does that happen in the theater for me.  Seeing Wooster’s  work, something like House/Lights  for instance, you are not seeing a story but you are in the experience of the world that has been created and nothing else exists and that affects you on a different level than a video or a film can.  Because theater, you know, even the best theater, there’s still a tiny thing of self-awareness about performance.

 

E: It’s more removed.

 

A: Yeah, I mean with film, I’m in it, I buy it, where in theater I’m like, “wow, they are so good at performing, at acting” and already you are removed from the experience.  You’re thinking about the fact that you are in a theater and these people are pretending.  On the other hand, I was able to see “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf” this year…

 

E: With Tracy Letts..?

 

A: Yeah, and that was incredible. I mean, that’s what narrative story telling in theater should be.

 

E: So maybe there’s a small percentage of this type of theater that’s really successful in that they’re able to get past that…

 

A: …get past the audience contract of “hey, we’re in a room in midtown Manhattan next to some other place that’s in midtown Manhattan and we are all pretending that this is happening onstage, that this is real.  Or, we’re all pretending that this is not real.”  But I really go back and forth on all this stuff I just said.  Like, a lot.  There’s this great quote that somebody gave me, about what an actor’s job is and why that’s such a powerful thing.

 

E: What was it?

 

A: I don’t want to misquote it.  It’s beautiful though.**

 

E: Well, what was the sentiment?  That their job was to…

A: To, um, to have the catharsis for people that can’t have it.  I think this was written a long time ago but it also goes into the concept of mirror neurons where you are sitting watching a thing and you have the same experience as if you were doing the thing and I think that that experience is more powerful in theater than it is in film, actually.  Because you’re right there, in the room.  That’s why I like making the work that I like to make because I don’t necessarily have a story to tell but I do want to share an experience with an audience and in all of my stuff, from the moment you enter the theater, I try to strip away anything that says, “we’re about to see something that transports us out of the room.”  Everything that I try to do tries to have the mentality of “hey, thanks for coming people I know and people I don’t know who bought tickets or came because it was free.   So, you’re going to sit in the chairs for, I don’t know, fifty minutes or something and I’m gonna be up here on stage talking to you.”  That’s just a given, in some of my stuff I actually say these things, but even if I try to set up mystery, you’re still in a room with me.  You’re in a bank vault in lower Manhattan, or you’re in my apartment, or a college black box with me.

 

E: In hopes that people don’t…with that knowledge sit there thinking about…

 

A: Well, it just so happens that that’s what my work is about-us being there together. It’s like we are having a conversation [laughs] I mean, we’re not really having a conversation, I wish we were, but precise timing has to happen sometimes.  But if we need to be transported outside I will put a camera on me and we’ll run outside.

 

E: Have you done that before?

A: Yeah, definitely.  I just did a performance last week on the pier…

 

E: Yeah, I was sad I had to miss it- was it right over there?

 

A:Pier 15. it’s a beautiful pier you should go just to go.

 

E: What did you do?

 

A: Well.  There are a lot of layers to this too.  Bruce Odland, who we work with at Wooster, mentioned my name to Laurie Anderson who was curating a bunch of performances as well as doing her own.  So she curated this site specific performance which was actually the first thing I ever made in New York.  The whole thing came out of… it’s so ridiculously weird… I was interning for Wooster and I was wondering about their process.  I thought it was crazy but I didn’t learn anything about their process because I just saw a finished piece, they weren’t coming in for rehearsal and I didn’t talk to them so much because I was nervous I would just like, get them coffee and stuff.  I was a terrible intern. I receded into the background.  But, I was really concerned with process.  I don’t know why, I guess because I went to a liberal arts college.  I was really into devised theater, although I didn’t call it devised theater, I still don’t, but I guess that’s what it was.  But I thought, well, the process still has to be there.  We can’t just start at one place and end in another place.  I can’t just say I want to see this onstage because it’s gonna look cool and then we’ll figure out what it means later.  But I DID want to do that.  It felt like I was going backwards.  I was starting at the end and going towards the beginning, so I was like, well if it’s backwards then let’s just translate that literally.  So I tried to do a performance thing backwards and then the content became about how I didn’t think that was a valid process.  

 

 

E: It’s the same model as earlier, where you start off doing one thing…

 

A: I guess that’s true, yeah, but later on, I finally was okay with that whereas in the beginning I was not okay with that.

 

E: You saw it as failure?

 

A: Yeah, I really saw it as failure.  But now I see it as: okay, great, yes, it’s failure, great!  I need it, I need the failure.   So, the whole thing is a backwards performance where the first four minutes I am listening to myself recorded saying things backwards.  It was the first time I was introduced to the in-ear system that Wooster uses, which I found fascinating and a great way to rapidly prototype stuff…

 

E: So, I know what the in-ear is, but for people that don’t, it’s that there’s an audio track…

 

A: Yeah, Wooster uses this great system, which is basically that they all have little wireless walkmans and you can transmit whatever audio you want to them.  The way it started was Liz [LeCompte], who is the director of the company, would give everyone in To You, The Birdie! directions all at the same time so everyone could be in synch.

 

E: Live?

 

A: Live, in the audience.  So the actors would be onstage with in-ears and she would have a direct line to them like, “everyone look to the left in 3,2,1…”

 

E: Oh my god.

 

A: Which really, I mean, you can either choreograph something or you can have a genius at the helm saying crazy things into their ears.  It’s such an amazing tool for rapid prototyping stuff because all my stuff now, the way I’ll make it is I will put it into a timeline in Final Cut or Ableton Live.  I’ll write something, more often I’ll have an idea, I’ll record it into a microphone, put it in the in-ear track, it’s split out- I have Left/Right mains that go to the sound score and I’ll have an in-ear track which just goes to my ear so I can just time it out.  I see the wave forms, I line it all up, light cues, video cues, I just line it all up, program it, and then I don’t have to think about it.  For the backwards piece, I would give myself directions in my ears, like, this is coming up in 5,4,3,2,1.  That would be lined up with a lighting cue.  So I’d know exactly when to do stuff onstage, like hit a mixer cue, or something.  Anyway, Wooster had this in-ear thing and I was like, that’s cheating, well, I’m going to cheat.  So, instead of the in-ear I called attention to it by having these giant headphones that I painted white.  You couldn’t buy white headphones at the time.

 

E: You definitely can now [laughing].

A: Yeah, it seemed like a big thing, like I was making a statement.  So I do this backwards performance for the first four minutes.  In the original performance there was a TV and VCR onstage.  I would run out of the space and as soon as I hit the hallway, what I had just done live in the space was all recorded, video and audio, that from beginning to end, from 0 to 100 was flipped over so now it was played from 100 to 0.  By now you began to understand that I was saying words because the first whole half was just gibberish, so unless you’re like, “I bet he’s talking backwards”, which maybe half of the people pick up on, the other half just might be completely lost.  Concurrently, with that, a live camera picks up on me SnorriCam style, you remember Requiem for a Dream?

  It was the first time they had those shots where it looked like the tri-pod was attached to their heads somehow which is ubiquitous now.  I just attached the tri-pod to my body.  I would run to the deli, and buy milk and cookies for the audience and bring it back which is an Andy Kaufman reference.   Concurrently, the text was saying, “I just want to give you [the audience] something, something we can all share,” at which point I would run back into the theater, like, the past was looping back into the farther past but it was looping into the future because I was coming into contact with myself again.  So that was the first time I did that performance.  

 

E:  When was that?

 

A: 2005.  With that, I applied to this Avant-Garde-a-Rama thing that Salley Mae curates.  At that time, I had this master plan for my performance art career, and I never call it performance art.  This was my first year of ITP.  So I applied to do this thing and I totally didn’t get in.  I had this plan where DVD’s would drop from the ceiling after the performance and there would be a reel of my work on there but there would also be instructions for doing scene work with me where I would write half the scenes and you would act out scenes with me on the TV.  [Laughing].  I guess that, too, kind of turned into a different project.  But I didn’t get in.  Then 3 weeks before the show Salley Mae called and said, “somebody dropped out- can you do it?”  I was like, “Oh, fuck, oh, I guess!  Hopefully?”

 

E:  Not ideal.

 

A: Not ideal.  But it really gives you a deadline.  It goes back to the whole thing about assignments.

 

E: Did you do the DVD’s?

 

A: No, I just did the performance.  Some people liked it-Andy invited me to do the Prelude festival, and that was good.  Work begets work begets work.  There was another festival about structure and destructure.  I really like making work around titles.  I really like making site specific stuff.  

 

E:  Because that’s like, a huge sort of assignment.

A: Yeah!  And I don’t even mean outdoor work.  The pier was the first time I did outdoor work, I think…but-The Chocolate Factory!  I made a performance in 2009 called WOW+FLUTTER.  I workshopped it at The Garage but then I had like a week in The Chocolate Factory and I basically made the show in that week- that space made the show, it was all about that space. Double levels, white room, length wise.  The elevator shaft, or whatever.  But yeah, back to the pier.  Laurie asked me to do the show again.  I thought I could make it like 45 minutes.  

 

E: Had she seen it?

 

A: No, she hadn’t seen it, but she was curating people doing stuff about time and all of my stuff is about time.  Time and communication.  Weirdly, yeah, it’s about time, usually.  So, originally we were trying to do it at Staten Island Ferry Terminal but the logistics of that were tricky- I wanted 2 projectors, so we would need to turn off the lights.  We realized that bureaucracy and getting the Parks Department to talk to the DOT was going to be a nightmare.  Then they showed me these other places.  Other artists were doing something on the pier 2 night’s prior with projectors and a sound system and I was like- perfect.  So I changed the name of the piece and wrote a bunch of new stuff for it and as it turned out, I think we got about 30 % of the way there with the piece.

 

E: Just 30?

 

A: Yeah.

 

E: Is that OK?

 

A: Yeah.  I’m not gonna do it again.  It does feel okay because it was like a snapshot taken of the cross-section of where we got to in the process.  Though maybe it was more like 50%.  It was finished.  It was a thing.  There was a screen there, there were 2 cameras.  It was the same general format as before, I talked for like 15 minutes at the beginning and just because it’s so long talking in gibberish there were cuts of speaking forward...

E: just to give people some sense of…

 

A: To give people like, hey, hold on, go with me, we’re gonna get there.  Another thing was that the scale of the piece wants to be in a black box theater and we translated to this giant pier with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background and how do you make this real intimate thing big? A great thing happened when I was talking to Bobby, who was helping me with the sound, Bobby McElver who does sound for Wooster too.  I bring him in a lot to consult, use him as a sounding board. He makes stuff too, he’s just generally game for making the things I try to do work better.  I don’t know who came up with it but we were like why don’t we put the vocals in the audience’s ears? Since it’s so hard to decipher the vocals anyway and it’s outdoor sound, there’s helicopter traffic, there’s ferry traffic, there’s this great boat called The Shark that goes by every 20 minutes with 100 drunk people.

 

E: Party boat?

 

A: A high speed party boat.  What seems like a terrifyingly dangerous party boat going by.  But we were like, why don’t we put my vocals in the ears and have the sound score be everywhere else?  So I spent a lot of time researching museum tours, TWG had done this DADA thing so we got in contact at Free 103.9- they didn’t have the radios anymore so I basically bought a 5 watt FM transmitter and 100 Coby FM radios.  I mean it was in the budget…although I still haven’t gotten the money back [laughs].  But when we tuned all the radios to the right frequency it was a big gamble because we didn’t know- maybe when we brought all the radios down to the pier the maritime spectrum would interfere- it actually worked so much better on the pier than at Wooster where we were testing it.  There it was all static-y and glitch-ey but it actually worked beautifully on the pier.  So the audience got FM radios and they tuned to the frequency so that my voice was in their brains.

 

E: They got in-ears too!

 

A: Yeah, and everyone I talked to that had a radio…

 

E: Because some people did not?

 

A: No, so we put a little bit of vocals in the PA and it actually sounded beautiful.  The helicopters stopped and the maritime traffic died down because we had to do it after sundown.  I think the voice in the ear made people focus. I didn’t think about that, I just wanted people to hear, but I guess it helped people stay with it since it was just gibberish.  And Bobby said you should just project a countdown clock somewhere so people know something is going to happen.  Which is great because in the reverse thing, the clock starts counting upwards. But when we got to the pier that didn’t actually happen because the framing of the camera had to be different. It was crazy because we mocked everything up in The Garage but you don’t have time to mock it up at the pier because equipment is all rented and it doesn’t get dark until 9:00.  So we didn’t even focus the projector until 15 minutes before the show, you know?  [laughing].  There was a lot of guesswork involved.

 

E: Is it always that way?

 

A: I tend to do a lot of festivals and short things so it is.  But recently, I have become fed up with it.  I really wanted to make things that were jarring, I wanted to alter space in a way I haven’t seen before, which you can do now with projection and LED lighting- there’s instant on/instant off, and you can physically alter the space in a way that’s really disorienting.  I don’t know why I am interested in that right now but I am.  This has nothing to do with the piece I just did because it’s an old piece.  But I got really sick of not being able to roll into a space and have some time.  Because, I’ve never known how to do lighting.  I mean, I understand a sound board a little bit.  Everything that I know how to do I know how to do because I have an idea and I don’t know how to do it so I have to figure it out, or sneak into a theater after hours.  [laughs] That’s what has been great about Wooster- that I have keys to the space, so… I mean, we’re in rehearsal 5 hours a day so that leaves… 19 hours to mess around with equipment.  

E: So you’re at Wooster after hours? [laughs]

 

A: Oh yeah.  I mean, I’m there all of the time.  The past two months, I’m just in Wooster, even if it’s just sitting downstairs with a computer thinking about space.

 

E: Well space, is um, highly valuable and rare in New York City…

 

A: It’s huge.

 

E: I think that’s one of the major problem that artsist’s, maybe especially young artists who don’t have much money, confront, is that it’s hard to find space to try stuff.

 

A: This goes back to my thing- I want to make the work I want to make and I can’t do it for like, a Dixon Place or an Avant-Garde-A-Rama. Well, I could do it for sound. I mean there’s really complicated sound cues and I can’t have an operator do that because we don’t have time to rehearse it so I will program it all into the computer.  Everything goes into Ableton Live, even spacialization, it all goes into Abelton, even vocals with this last show.  I thought, I really want to automate all of these vocal parameters, but I can’t roll into a space and have an operator do that.  It’s all in Live.  So the techs in the festivals are like, so what are the cues?  And there are no cues!  It’s so satisfying going in and saying, Bobby will come in and hit the space bar and it just rolls.  Just give us 2 channels, Left and Right, and no one is going to touch it.  

 

E: Does that ease some of your anxiety?

 

A: Yeah, well, but then no one is going to touch it and it’s going to start feeding back.  That’s happened several times, it happened on the pier, where we sound check all day and then in performance something changes and there’s a low feedback and Bobby can’t do anything about it.  You learn- we now know that we need a slider, that at least the mic needs to be on an aux send, we at least need to be able to  tune the mic on the fly.  So I was doing that with sound, I was doing that with video- so the Ableton would trigger Midi cues which would talk to video program in the computer that would trigger the video cues.  That’s all fine.  No DVD’s, no CDS, just a laptop, hit the spacebar- one program cues every other program.  The last thing that I needed to do was lighting.  So I hacked all of these LED lights.  Grad school taught me a lot about physical computing so I was able to program these things in Arduino talking to Max MSP so now super synched, precise lighting cues were able to happen.  I can just bring in my really crappy, non-theatrical kind of dim LED lights that I taped to some aluminum with LED tape.  I had to think about how I could tour this in a micro way- how can I set this up within 15 minutes.  I wasn’t thinking those words but I realize now that this is what I have been doing for the past 3 years, making a totally self contained piece so I can realize the things I want to see in the space with very limited means.  Like, no budget.

 

E: It’s ambitious stuff you’re trying to do.

 

A: Yeah, so where the budget lacks it forces me to make stuff that is self contained.  I can’t afford theatrical lighting or even concert lighting so I have to make my own because I need the precision.  And that makes the work something else which is fun for me.  I’m so glad that I didn’t have a budget.  All these happy, cool accidents happen because I couldn’t afford stuff.

 

E: The problem solving becomes the end.

 

A: Yeah, and now, I get so relieved when I roll into a festival and I can give them like 2 cues: bring the lights down and then bring them up at the end.  And don’t touch anything.  That’s the best.  But, you know, I’m thinking about things and then it’s a real concentrated period of making.  You gotta produce.  You get in a space you have to produce- you see, oh this isn’t working, ok, you have to figure it out some other way.

 

E: Rapid prototyping?

 

A: Yeah, rapid prototyping.  Everything is all connected.  Everything I learned in physical computing in grad school you can put it all into performance making.  It’s all about release early, release often.  It’s also because I’m lazy and I can’t think about the big picture.  I will probably never storyboard anything.  I probably should but I end up not.  I think if I story boarded something I would end up in the same place because I would probably throw the story board away after day 3.  

 

E: Is that because it changes so much along the way?

 

A: It’s because you do the first thing and the first thing tells you what to do next. If there are 100 steps, or 100 iterations of something, I’ll think about iteration 50 and what is the 1st thing I have to do to get there and then the 1st thing will tell me what the 2nd thing is.  Obviously by now, we’re pointing not towards 50 anymore, we’re pointing in a different way at a different vision of 50 than what I thought it was going to be.  It’s great.  Keep what’s interesting, throw away what is not but just keep prototyping.  The big thing in physical computing is that everything is going to break all the time.  So, if you are setting up an LED wall and you have 50 LED’s and your soldering everything up, don’t solder up 10 and run the program to see if it works, solder up 1 and check, 2 and check, etc.  Because if you solder up 10 and 1-5 don’t work, you don’t know which one is broken, and you have to go back and do it again anyway.  So it’s all about releasing early, releasing often and testing it along the way.  It’s a little dubious when you relate it to theater because it’s not like I’m doing the whole show every time.  But rapid prototyping for performance is so easy in the way I make stuff because I just put it all into Ableton Live and like, record 2 minutes worth of an idea, or read it straight from a book-I take a lot of my stuff from non-fiction, quantum mechanics, physics, or fiction- David Foster Wallace, Eric Bogosian, Don DeLillo- I think it’s an interesting thing and read it into a microphone so I can later look at the waveform and edit.  Instead of writing, or cutting and pasting a word document I’m cutting and pasting the waveform of my vocal score.  

 

E: Hearing it is totally different than looking at words on a page.  It’s more active.

A: Yeah, so I can say, this should build more here, so you take the minute it takes to re-record that chunk.  You’re editing line readings all the time.  That’s the rapid prototyping of the stuff I do.  Get it on your feet as soon as possible, don’t sit down and think about it.  I mean, do sit down and think about it but get it on its feet sooner than you think you should and see what it looks like because that will give you an idea for the next thing.  That has always happened.  I’m usually really scared to start things but all you have to do is do the first thing.

 

E: Does that apply to the way TWG works?

A: I don’t know.  Wooster is really a separate thing and I’m like, a cog in the machine.  Sometimes it’s frustrating because I think I see what Liz is trying to do and I think I can relate it to what I am trying to do.  But she’s orchestrating all these parts.  I’m only orchestrating one part.  I don’t have to worry about other people’s time, about other people’s resources.   I’m sitting in my apartment usually, it’s one in the morning, if I want to stop and check my e-mail I can [laughs].  I can program the thing I want to see and hit the spacebar to see if it works whereas Liz has to tell the lighting guy what to do, tell the sound guys what to do.  Liz hires the best sound people to make it sound incredible and to live mix it, like, “oh, as Ari is coming up to do that dance move put some verb on it and bring it into the back speakers and bring the chinese opera in louder here.”  She has to do that, she has 16 people in the room all doing something different. That’s her programming.

 

E: Conducting people.

 

A: It’s so easy for me, I can just put it into the timeline in my computer but her timeline is real life [laughs].

 

E: But do you think there’s some element there of just jumping into a project without knowing where it’s going to go, of not having a fully conceived notion about what something could be?

 

A: Oh yeah, Wooster definitely does that.  I don’t know how much I am affected by it, a lot of stuff happens through osmosis, I spend a lot of time steeping in that which is both great and terrible.  But yeah, Liz surrounds herself with source material: books, films, audio recordings, ideas, props, costumes, furniture, people, everything.  Experts.  All this stuff.  She puts it all in a room and edits on the fly.

 

E: Organizes the chaos.

A: Yeah, exactly.  But more often than not she’ll need to hear the whole thing or see the whole thing.  Someone will read a whole book to her over the course of a day.  We’ll all be in the room.  And then we’ll watch a couple of movies.  It’s important that everyone sees it because she’ll say suddenly, “oh, that sound from Smoke Signals, that’s what we need!”  Meanwhile there’s a video source from another movie so sound design, video design, scenic design is already happening.  And camera pans- she’s really into translating a film language onto stage.  Jump cuts, panning, zooming.  You see that a lot in Hamlet which is an incredible feat to watch.   Yeah, Wooster is crazy because there’s not a lot of original material, we always start with texts.  Those texts include movies, real texts, dances, and Liz just combines them in a very specific way, meticulously editing them over the course of 2 years.  

 

E: Yeah.  I almost wonder if that’s all you can do anymore.

 

A: Yeah, what are you gonna write that’s original?  

 

E: Instead of trying to create something new that’s original what is maybe more original is creating some sort of a collage.

 

A: Re-purposing, re-combining.  Yeah, I don’t know.  I feel like in movement there’s still things to be explored. There’s more room for original stuff in dance and movement.

 

E: Yeah, more so than narrative.  I don’t know. I don’t know if what I said is really true.

 

A: And you know, new technology affords you new opportunities to tell stuff in different ways.  Although people really like to jump on the technological bandwagon. When people talk about Wooster and cutting edge performance I think that a lot of people mistakenly attribute the cutting edge quality of the performance to the technology.  I mean, we are using an analog board from 1990.  All the video equipment we bought at radioshack and B and H- it’s not pro equipment. We’re programming MAX patches and Isadora Patches- that’s not where it’s cutting edge.  If there is any cutting edge quality it comes from Liz’s direction.  I mean, people have been putting televisions onstage since the 70’s.  People try to make it so much more of a thing.  It’s not a thing.  I mean, it is but it’s just as much of a thing as that chair you’re sitting in onstage is.  Unfortunately, when you lean on it and make it “the thing”, it doesn’t work.  Because you’re then just showing someone some video onstage in a room and that’s usually not very interesting, or it’s a gimmick.  Working on Vieux Carré at Wooster was actually sort of frustrating because I had three screens to put content on and that’s not what is interesting to me.  I have a hard time making screen based work.  It’s either going to turn into a prop- a window or something- or it’s going to show you content and at that point you’re back to just watching TV onstage.  I still really like projection because I think of it as more lighting than projection.

 

E: It’s atomospheric. You’re not representing an object that could just as easily physically exist onstage.

 

A: Yeah.   I don’t know.  I don’t understand why it’s a thing.  The television has been in our homes since the 1950’s- of course it’s going to be onstage.  If theater is acting as some mirror of nature, obviously televisions and cell phones and people being on laptops is a no brainer.  I remember seeing a listing for an undergrad NYU class called “small acting”, a class dedicated towards how to do small business onstage in a naturalistic drama.  How to act with a cell phone.

E: Why??

 

A: I don’t know.  I thought it was the most ridiculous thing.  Like, kids know how to use cell phones- you don’t have to give them a class.

 

E: But I suppose that’s a lot of acting classes- taking things you do in life and transferring them onto the stage.  Or, how do you blow up the iPhone swipe so that it is theatrical and transfers onstage?

A: But do you have to blow it up?  That’s the thing about theater that’s crazy to me.

 

E: It’s a weird paradox.

 

A: That’s what I like about Wooster’s work- that the actors are taking from the movement of a film that’s being shown to them and not the audience, or they are mimicking the camera moves.  As to audio- either they are saying the words they are hearing in their ears, they are taking direction, or they are taking the intonation of the track from a movie while saying Shakespeare’s words. Liz is really interested in people and how they translate things. She doesn’t, well, I don’t know what she thinks about this, but I don’t think she likes acting in the traditional sense.  It is true that it is much more interesting to watch someone do something onstage than to watch someone pretend to do something onstage.  When you are onstage with Wooster you are always fulfilling a task whereas other places you, or the director have to invent tasks or reasons for doing but Liz is interested in how outside stimulus affects the people onstage.

 

E: It sort of shuts off the higher brain.

 

A: It frees you from making decisions.  It frees you from making bad decisions about acting.  

 

E: It’s pretty naturalistic, actually.  

 

A: It can be, yeah.

 

E:  Naturalistic in the sense that there’s little artifice because there can’t be when you are having to concentrate so hard on doing the task.

 

A: You’re not bringing your own terrible interpretation into it.

 

E: I guess you could be like, well, I’m going to pretend to imitate this…

 

A: There’s definitely a grey area in there.  There will be times when it’s not happening but Liz likes it and that’s the fun part.  Liz likes seeing people have fun onstage.  I think she knows when you are getting joy out of what you are doing and when you hate what you’re doing.  Sometimes she will make you do what you hate because she likes the result and other times she will allow you to do what you love because it’s a good result.  

 

E: Is it hard to function as a performer and a designer at the same time?  I mean, you do both of these things in your solo work and at TWG but I imagine it’s a different experience.  

 

A: So, I really like performing at TWG because I really love doing the in-ear stuff and taking off the videos and I like having that voice in the room-it’s just fun being onstage with those people.  You get to move around and be in a play- that’s awesome!  I like designing my own stuff because these are things I want to see and hear and I can make it exactly how I want.  I can only fulfill what I’m doing onstage in my own work if I do the design stuff first.  I could hire other people to collaborate but it’s really hard.

 

E: Have you thought about doing that?

 

A: Yeah.  But, the last thing is I don’t like designing for Wooster.  I don’t have the passion anymore for the grand vision of a video design.  Because I don’t really work like that.

 

E: It’s not your grand vision.

 

A: Right.  In Hamlet, it was the Richard Burton Hamlet and we were taking people out of it.  Vieux Carré - most people see Vieux Carré and don’t remember that there was video in it.  What I liked about Vieux Carré was the overhead projection stuff, which I started and handed off to somebody else.  It’s coming into Troilus and Cressida too.

 

E: It’s great, I mean, it opens up another plane.  We’ve always had these “four” walls or whatever.

 

A: We made it for The Swan in Stratford which has so much height that the floor became inevitable.  

 

E: They didn’t have the luxury of projection back in Shakespeare’s day.  I suppose the groundplan was interesting.  Anyway, you said you don’t like designing for Wooster?

 

A: I mean I do, of course I do.  It can be frustrating. When it is satisfying it’s when you’re integrating sound, video and lights and you get to think about the grand scheme of things.  

 

E: Great.  Did I have any other questions?  It’s funny- I had all these questions lined up and I think they were all answered in the course of this conversation.

 

A: Yeah, well it’s one big question, really.

 

E: Lots of little answers.  

 

A: Did we address your question about collaboration?

 

E: Yeah, I think so.  It’s hard- collaborating.  I think you need to be really specific about what your intentions are in said collaboration.  It’s easier in more traditional forms of theater where everyone has a specific role that they are fulfilling and they know from the get-go what that will entail.  If you’re designing the video for a Broadway show, you get a sense of what you have to do, go off and do it on your own and then don’t see everyone until tech and they give you work notes.

 

A: Yeah, and someone is going to give you a pay check.

 

E: A decent paycheck, probably. But it’s different to be there everyday.

 

A: The next thing I’m doing is hopefully going to be a bigger thing and I want to bring in collaborators on that. But we’re not doing it from scratch and it will be people I’ve worked with.  Almost the biggest reason I don’t collaborate is because I’m a terrible manager and I hate wasting other people’s time.  Here’s the thing- I know that 9/10 of the first things I do are going to be bad, like, embarrassingly bad.  Traditionally, you would think about an idea and know that it’s not going to work, and it’s also juvenile and bad.  It’s a bad idea but I have to do it anyway.  But I don’t want to do that in front of another person.  

 

E: And also, inevitably collaboration, or collaborating on someone else’s vision becomes this sort of time/value relationship and if you, as the cog in someone else’s machine, don’t know what you’re doing, you might start to feel sort of resentful.  Then you get nervous.  Then the person whose idea it is just starts to feel anxiety and this changes their process based on the other persons feeling resentful.  

 

A: Yeah, I think about when I first moved here and we were all trying to make stuff together.

E: I guess that’s where I’m at right now.  This is what we’re figuring out, quickly, that collaboration is really hard.

 

A: You need a central vision, and you probably need a hierarchy.  If you don’t have a director who is saying “yes” or “no” then everything is going to be considered equally.  There are different models for collaborating and working but it gets hard.

 

E: I’m hard pressed to think of an example that’s truly democratic.  I don’t know if human nature would allow that to exist.

A: You basically have to have a central vision and it has to reside mostly in one person.

 

E: I think what’s really dangerous is when there’s an illusion of democracy-

 

A: Like, you just can’t have a mission statement and a group of people..

 

E: ...because eventually someone is going to have to become the dictator, whether that’s transparent or not, and people are going to be pissed off about it.   But if you’re in a one man country there’s no problem here.

 

A: Yeah, though I also think I’m really missing out on other ideas.  But there’s too many ideas already.  Maybe once I get the ideas out, I can start to bring collaborators in, both to have other ideas and because I’ve gotten 90/100 of the terrible ideas out.  I’ll bring people in later in the game after I’ve been rolling around helplessly for a year and actually have something to show.  

 

 

**"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away. Grief and rage —- you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you —- may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch {yourself} act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours."
-- Anne Carson