I’m in Marian Goodman Gallery, expectant, wandering a bit myself, encountering the paintings of Julie Mehretu and her exhibition Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology). I hear scratches, hums, vibrations, distortions, angles of amplification across drum surfaces, and a violin. I’m listening to the sound-scape of multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Hahn Rowe, who stands with his set up between two paintings in the second room of the gallery’s main floor.

Some of these paintings are wall size monoliths, some are smaller (titled TRANSpaintings) and placed inside metal structural frames by Nairy Baghramian that hold them in the space like Shoji Screens. All the surfaces are flat polished and the imagery, the gestures on them, provide texture, like a rubbing or transfer through a screen of mesh, pushing a blown up pixelated feel. I have spent decades looking at Mehretu’s work, and have watched it get darker in color, more densely layered, and finally with these works, zoomed in so the marks are larger, less precise, like she has been focusing the lens closer and closer to the interior of the work. Her Shoji are opaque, though shadows of movement can be seen through and now we get to see her from both sides, a thing we were told she engaged with for years, but didn’t see.

I’m here to see Wanderings. The John Jasperse Projects dancers enter and take their places scattered like discarded pieces of fabric down the short set of stairs that lead to large windows overlooking the street. They are each their own color, pink, blue, light green, etc. in the costumes of designer MX Oops. Part solid fabric, part mesh arrangements on the bodies, short sleeves, long pants. After some slow faint movement from them as though they are all waking, dancer Cynthia Koppe enters and suspends herself in mid flight, a carefully balanced crane, with long lines, and slow even développé. There are clapping bursts of sound from the other room we will find out are mattresses hitting the floor. As the dancers on the stairs bend, squirm, lift, overcorrect, rise, Koppe remains fixed. Then, sort of at once, they are all moving in front of us, pacing the space in different linearities, and finally one of them slowly heads towards the wall where I’m leaning with a few others. She doesn’t stop and we get shuffled out of the way so she can arrive against the surface.

This will remain a theme throughout the work, although this first section sort of trains us for the rest. I like the confusion. Everyone whispering apologies, shuffling around, looking behind them so as not to step into another person or a painting. Gallery guards reaching to keep us away from the work, and all the while the dance goes on, the mattresses hit the floor, Rowe’s score hums, ticks, pulls at and bounces over everything in the room. There are large pieces of cardboard being manipulated through the doorways and across a space, dancers standing, crawling, rolling underneath them, reaching out, peering out from under the material.

As the dancers pull away from this first level and head upstairs, we are motioned to follow them or take the elevator to the second floor. The work continues to develop there and eventually on the third floor. Each space a new construction of Mehretu’s work, and each space asking different things of the dancers and the viewers. At the third floor it switched from the soundscape Rowe had built to the mixed stylings of Bronx born multimedia artist and composer Will Johnson. His work ramped up the energy of the piece helping, or encouraging, or pushing the dancers through the last portion of the work, which built to a repetitive frenzy before a slow quiet exit.

John Jasperse’s choreography had a casual and causational play to it that kept it feeling fresh and improvised while building repetitions that showed you over time just how set the work was. 

The dancers would lean, wait, stretch, roll over, walk, sit, stand, collapse, fold, fall, wilt, and tumble. There were stillnesses and pauses, and partnering that was Contact Improve coded, while keeping their faces held in a post modern neutrality. We partner with them in a way, a part of the shuffle, adjacent to the paintings, as they are. They pile on layers of simple repetitions, framing the head, the body, the chin, the space – bodies in Canon. The spines are liquid lines, the duets and solos washing through the space in waves, and undulations, and implosions, leaving the dancers behind the TRANSpaintings to be seen through the screen in shadow form, or falling and rising around the mattresses. It builds and builds, the repetitions more closely timed, the cannon getting tighter and tighter until all of them in unison on the floor roll through the space and rise one by one to leave.

The dance was neither for or about the paintings. It was in conversation with, offering gestural, ephemeral explanations and unpackings of, adding tautological referrals and overloads. The consistent and measured dance vocabulary throughout allowed for some sinking in and leveling with the work, letting me look past the movement to the paintings in the room. I could start to pass ideas between the two. And I liked that I had to choose where to look, that I couldn’t be greedy, couldn’t have all the images at once, and had to miss some things. Although once I realized that repetitions were building, I felt I was catching everything, just in different spaces. And as the gallery emptied I got to spend more time with the paintings, that were now somehow encoded or exposed in a way with the afterglow of the movement.

I have one dramaturgical critique of the work and its impact occluded my ability to see it as whole, or inclusive, or about identities and interstices the way it was described. It was a dance that included so much raw interplay of identity and relation, as long as you were able bodied in the space with them. On top of the structure of the piece and the shuffle of viewers, cameramen wove through the action, adding another layer of quiet chaos and frustration. Because neither they nor the dancers slow down, adjust, or allow time for response — even when moving to take the position of someone using a cane, or visibly struggling to get out of their way. The work ignores basic conventions of accessibility, treating different mobilities as unseen rather than conditions to account for. This is an easy fix that I hope the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery will consider for future works.

Upon entering the experimental theater at Abrons Arts Center, the stage was set with three sculptures (or chairs) made of fabric and vinyl wrap evenly spaced out evenly in a line upstage. The space was surrounded with cherry red vinyl curtains, executed by Caz Slattery and conceptualized by Sarai.

Eventually the buzz from the audience settled as the double doors shut and we knew to shift our attention from conversations among ourselves to the stage. To much our surprise, our attention was quickly diverted back to the bleachers where we sat, as the performers stomped up and down the risers. These risers are like bleachers at a high school football field. The loud banging was an assault to the ear drums and a thrilling experience. Some members of the audience in the aisle seats could be seen almost flinching away as the performers passed by. The stomping was not militaristic but rather noise making, for the sake of noise making, and the unevenness of the stomps coming down the stairs left me uneasy. 

Performer Kentoria entered the space as the other performers remained in the shadows of the sides of the bleachers. They proceeded with the delivery of a monologue addressing a “bitch with a chopped bang”- Kentoria expressed their distaste for this figure and her hairstyle. The three other performers echoed Kentoria’s words like a chorus of supportive friends. The monologue began to distort as movements took over and Kentoria began to manipulate her monologue. It was hard to imagine that this was choreographed: it was effortlessly precise. 

Kentoria’s performance was the first vignette of many- not many. I would guess at least 20. The notion of counting did not occur to me while being taken through this pastiche-ified style epic. These different sections offered a glimpse into their collective psyche, where different conflicts and disagreements between performers / or between audience and performer are breaking out, but any specific source of the conflict is not explicitly discussed. The small sections materialized as bursts. In big displays of emotion–rage, lust, envy. Most of the time inflating with energy, until the space erupted with the performers displaying a physical or emotional extreme. Recalling Kentoria’s solo that I mentioned in the beginning of the piece. A natural progression of the choral support and from the offstage dancers lead them onto the stage and onto all fours, barking on all fours ferociously and fearlessly at the crowd, and at each other. 

Writing about the display of emotions feels a bit misleading, because the anger expressed was far from binary. I am emphasizing the reds and oranges color wheel of emotion–this is true for some parts –particularly in the “cuss out” where the performers get right into the audience and yell at them- saying that they look stupid, or just down right saying “fuck you” to their face. But I would be missing arguably more important bluer undertones of tenderness and vulnerability that different sections approached through chaos. 

CHIMI, the performer who anchored the piece from a table on stage left, provided live musical playback, as well as her own voice and was often tasked with advancing the amplification of these scenes. When succeeded in facilitating Performers Kentoria Earle, Symara Sarai, and Kashia Kancey into an almost psychotic state, she slipped into the abyss, as her music echoed and amplified. In one scene the dancers engaged in acts of pulling the vinyl curtains that surrounded the space, as if trying to tear them from where they were fastened almost 40 ft above their heads–the movement taking the dancers as well as the curtains further and further into the center of the space and towards each other, crossing paths with one another. The movement got bigger, and the sound provided by CHIMI continued to get louder. Among this spectacle. the lights got dimmer, and bluer.

I was left with so many questions about if this violence, tenderness, inhibition was intended to have political undertones. At home I was still unpacking so much of my own experience. A couple of weeks later I sat down with Symara in her Crown Heights home on a Tuesday morning and asked her questions about her work and the process that created “Angelic Architectures”.

RD: You describe “Angelic Archetectures” as a dance play, correct? 

SS: Yes.

RD: Have you called other pieces you have made dance plays, or is this the first time you’ve made a dance play? 

SS: This was the first time that I felt like I called something a dance play because it was the first time I felt like I sat down and intentionally tried to write something. I knew that I wanted every section to hold text, and we generated it not only through writing, but obviously through improvisation. So I was like, it doesn’t feel like just a dance, even if it doesn’t follow the linear narrative. 

RD: But calling it a dance also didn’t feel right. 

SS: Yeah. I also just wanted to make a play and call it a play. 

RD: What’s better: a dance or a play? If you had to choose one?

SS: That’s so controversial, but I want to say it’s like a play just because when I think about a play, I think of accessibility. A lot of the time, like when you put words to things, people have an access point. Whereas with dance more naturally, like I feel like you can feel it emotionally and energetically, but for a lot of people, it can feel abstracted. And it’s like, how do I get them there, to the point of feeling viscerally. I feel like watching a play can someone be like, oh, right, you said something and I say that too. So I think from an access point, play is my answer. 

RD: I have shared with people that I am an experimental dance maker, and they say “So the audience is having the least fun and the performers are having the most fun.” When people make these comments it can come off as offensive, of course, but also I get it, if you’ve experienced feeling very alienated as an audience member, and that’s very valid. 

SS: It’s interesting. You know, I feel like when I’m making, I’m always considering the audience where I feel like, I don’t know, a lot of people rebel against that. Which is fine.

RD: I want to ask you about who influences your current methodologies. 

SS: I feel like when I graduated working with, like, Joanna Kotze influenced me a lot. She works a lot in improvisation. I feel like the format of how she set up rehearsals really changed things for me. She would start every rehearsal, like, hour warm up. like then go into a practice and like then get into like the meat of the work. This was before I knew how to formulate my own thing. 

RD: Do you start making your dances in the same way for the most part? 

SS: I think so. It starts off with primarily improvisational parts that I eventually set. Like these are the ideas and things and we’re like consistently shaping their improvisations.

RD: With angelic architectures, you kind of took a departure from that? if that’s correct. 

SS: It’s kind of different. We started in a few different places. I started with wanting to make a piece about fighting. I want to fight. I wanna fight something. I want to fight someone. And so we came in physically first. How can we fight? Let’s fight each other. Let’s fight for space. Let’s figure out how to fight. So that was like part one. Then part 2 is like, how do we add text to this? What does it mean to like to fight with words? We had a residency where we were just writing and generating. We worked with this writer Trebien Pollard, and he came in and he guided writing exercises, texts, spoken exercises and helped us really figure out how to put the text in the piece. And then the 3rd part was well, and in between, like, it was like me choreographing small sections. I was left with all the material and then I was like, how does it come together? 

RD: Having the writer come in sounds like it was such such an amazing resource!

SS: That was a good moment. That was like the thing that I also learned from Joanna. I was like, oh, every choreographer should always have a writer with them. I’m like, you know we went to fucking Purchase. I didn’t know how to write my shit. So I was like, we need to have people who articulate well. 

RD: I can say personally I feel like writing has also informed my practice when making dances, being able to, like, write and have that feedback loop–writing about my own process. Do you feel like this pushed this work forward more? 

SS: 100%. And it made me also like, know what I was doing. 

RD: I feel like I was watching ideas be stretched to their very fullest extent in this piece. I was like, Samara’s mind must be, like, exhausted or something. But now I’m like, okay, there was an effort from multiple people helping to bring these scenes to their extreme.

SS: We had time too. Yeah, it’s really cool. We have 18 fucking months. Which is crazy. I’m like, everyone deserves that residency. Truly. It’s gonna change my life for real.

RD: Could you describe what this piece is in your own words? 

SS: It feels like a rage fever dream of, I don’t know, black femmes losing their mind in a way where there’s no judgment after. Like, you get really drunk, and the next morning, you’re like, oh, I feel bad about it, but it’s like, you don’t have to wake up and feel bad about it. We just got to put it all out, and that’s that, and it’s okay. I think I was trying to move towards asking like, how can we just, like, do things? Because I think I often feel bad about how I engage day-to-day. So how can I create a container of like no one gets to feel bad about the decisions they’re making? And what does that mean? And how does harm exist? How does accountability exist? And I was really fascinated to see that, like, when some things were eliminated, everyone felt okay and safe. And if anything, like, maybe more emboldened to dialogue things. 

RD: You were exploring what new things could be created in a less judgmental space, where there are no consequences. 

SS: Yes

RD: What stood out to me about the piece was how it read as a lot of different vignettes or scenes. Sort of a pastiche, but with bits of narrative. From the beginning, was this the idea for the format? 

SS: I think, yes, I don’t feel like I really know how to make outside of that. Because I feel like I don’t know what to make outside of that. I am like oh, this works. I put it together and it’s inherently like a bunch of stuff. Sue Bernhard at purchase was always like “pick an idea.”

RD: Really? But you couldn’t depart from this approach!

SS: Yeah. I was just like, that’s what it is. And that makes sense to me. 

RD: Yeah, because when I think of a more traditional concert dance composition, it’s like a continuous flow of ideas with subtle lighting changes that tell you you’re in the new section or, new music or whatever. But this was very fragmented in a really interesting way, but it also was also surprisingly natural–because it all was so responsive. How did the collaboration work with CHIMI? 

SS: I have known CHIMI for a long time. I brought her and I thought she was just gonna make music and do playback. Then through her being in the space, because, like, I was like, you’re just gonna do all the scores with us. and like to format the scores for everyone altogether, solos, duets, like 3 minutes each, whatever, we’re gonna be inside of an hour score. But then I was like, oh, she’s a performer. And, like, we quickly realized, like, when she wasn’t there, we were, like, oh, this isn’t what it was when she’s here, even if we have her just on playback. So I was like, you have to be in the piece. And she started to be more involved, like as you saw–she talks a lot. 

RD: She’s sort of like this narrator-like character. 

SS; And I feel like, like, echoes the things that we’re saying and it’s like, did you get it? Like, okay, I’m gonna give it to you in case you missed it. 

RD: Relating to the accessibility and considering the audience. Yeah. Kind of like a delivery mechanism for certain ideas that might not work for an audience without the text. It was really interesting the she had her station over there with her equipment and it’s like very concrete, part of the space–and then there you three, Kashia, yourself and Kentoria. It was kind of like the roles were established from the very beginning.

SS: Yeah. And she wanted to, even when it was chaotic, it was like she was always in it. 

RD: And then CHIMI kind of faded out when you guys were like pulling the curtains or doing other very physical things and three of you sort of lost yourselves in the score. But then there were parts where everything was very responsive with the chimney.

SS: Yeah. I mean, at first she really was like, I want you to hide me. And then she started wanting to. Well, I was like, no. Yeah. I was like, she was like, put me in the back, and then she was like, how about, like, how about my costume drape thing and you can’t see my face. And I was like, no, you’re not gonna be like this, like, ominous, like, voice making figure. Yeah. I think she just wanted to, like, feel shielded. Which is valid, but I was like, you have to be in it all the time like us.

RD: Kentoria’s solo in the beginning, going on with the text about the chopped bang and the thing and then it sort of starts distorting and movement like comes into it. And I was just like, how was this made?

SS: That text, she made that shit up off the dome. And I was like, this is insane. 

RD: Well her delivery was so earnest throughout the monologue. In the movement too. I was like, is that improv? It was done with such precision.

SS: I mean, she made the text on the improvisation and we solidified it and then I made all the movements on her to go with it. And then I like changed some of the text, but she just made that shit up, all cut down. It was crazy. 

RD: When you guys are coming to the audience and kind of getting in the audience’s face..

SS: With the class out? 

RD: The cuss out, yes. This could just be me because I don’t know if this was the intention. But I found myself hyper aware of my actions in response to how intimate the experience felt. Like, I’m like, what expression is my face giving off? Am I responding appropriately? Was it your intention to turn the audience’s focus onto themselves and how they’re kind of performing as an audience?

SS: I mean, it’s awkward, right? As an audience member, it’s awkward. It’s interesting because, like, for a lot of that section, I couldn’t participate in the cuss out section because I had to set it– so I had to be in the audience. So I was like, what does this feel like to receive this? And for me, it felt like a charge. Like, I almost felt like I was reaching something. I don’t want to say but it felt good.

RD: it was like… Was it therapeutic for you?

SS: Sort of. Yeah, I was like “cuss me out.” I was like, “hit me. Hit me in my face.” Like, it became like some BDSM shit. But like, I was just like, oh shit, this feels good. Yeah. And I think I was just hoping for that experience for the audience. I mean, we’re not going to hurt you actually. I hope that you just sit there and like, you’re like, yeah, like this feels good. Cuss me the fuck out. Tell me I’m stupid.

RD: I wish I was a little more ready for that, I guess, because I think I was very like… Um, felt put on the spot. 

SS: Yeah. I mean I think a lot of people felt that. 

RD: This makes me wonder what the intended audience is, kind of, because you have this institutional support from Abrons, and that is going to draw a certain audience. You’re gonna have your community, your audience who follows your work. So I want to ask, who do you perform for in general?

SS: I mean, I think I just always, like, priority one is, like, black queer people, and, like, the responses were quite varied. I think it just depends on who’s there that night and what’s happening. Abrons is so good at reaching out to the LES community. There’s like people who’ve come and they’re like, hell yeah, like that cuss out I know that shit. 

RD: Right. Some audiences felt very embraced by it. 

SS: Yes. And they’re like charged by the idea of a fight. like,” go get her!” you know? And there’s other people who are like, “I’m not familiar with this” and like, “what does it mean?” And like, “I want to give you your space.” Like they are putting a lot into it, which I understand because it’s a large thing, but maybe there’s just less direct meaning or something like that. Maybe it’s just we, wanted to just yell and cuss out and that’s it. And like, how did you feel? And like maybe you felt bad. Yeah. and awkward or like maybe you felt really good and I think the variation is important because I would feel weird too. And we put the pre-warning, like, there will be profanity and yelling, but, like, you can’t really expect it. And especially if you are someone, you’re just sitting there and you show up in your outfit and someone’s like, “you look stupid.” You’re like, what the fuck? It also depends on the energy of the crowd too, because there’s crowds that were like cussing with us, and that would have probably changed your experience. 

RD: So you emphasize wanting to perform for black queers. Do all of your collaborators identify as queer? 

SS: Yeah, it was actually a very queer situation. My priority was making sure that the performers were black and queer. Very queer, very lesbian. I don’t think Kashia or Kentoria or I have just ever been in a room where we’re only working with, like, black lesbians, and it was just… It was great. Yeah. I think it helped a lot of us identify, I think, a little more boldly with our queerness too. 

RD: And what do you think that, like, brings him to the work? Like, aesthetically or, like, what relationship does it have with what you’re doing on stage?

SS: I think my primary thing was like, I want to work with black queer people because I want to feel like when we get into moments that are like intimacy, that there’s like a shared understanding, you know? I think that was like a primary thing. I was like, I don’t want to have to explain this to someone. I want them to just understand. I was thinking about it more because we worked a lot with pleasure too. So I think that’s why it was so hyper important because I had a collaborator before and I was like, we’re gonna go into this, and she was like, I can’t do that. And I was like, I need to just work with black queer people. 

RD: Well, I think, like, to be queer could also imply that you understand that there’s like overtones and undertones of a lot of these things, even if it’s like an aggressive score with fighting, nothing was totally absolute- Maybe this is also because not everything was like traditionally narrative in the sense of a play where there’s a direct understanding of why so-and-so is mad or whatever. What I’m getting at is that there is something maybe queer about the way it’s not all anger in the fights, that there’s this tenderness or something underneath it or like pleasure even in the fighting. 

SS: Yeah, 100%. I feel like it would change. Like, I was like, you know, we’re fighting and I’m like, oh, now this is like a desire for me. Like, I find you beautiful and attractive and then it’s like a slap. Oh, we’re back. You know what I mean? 

RD: That’s so real, because that’s the beauty of, like, really intimate relationships too. Even just with my personal life and friendships and partnerships, you want to get to those extremes and sometimes fight in order to regulate your emotions, and that is healthy. It’s not always healthy to hold all of this tension. 

SS: Mm-hmm. You know, what I mean, as a maker, you deserve to have people in the room who are making you feel encouraged to be in your full spectrum. Totally. And that’s hard to find.

RD: Is it difficult as the facilitator and then you have the group of collaborators you like to like and feel okay with being vulnerable with them and in these containers. 

SS: Yeah, for sure. It is hard to find. And I think that like, you know, I would bring in like Kalliope sometimes because I’d be like, can you help me say this? Or like, how do I achieve this? I want things to get wilder. How to do it without making people uncomfortable. Also I have to trust that these are adults and they’ll say no. There’s a point where I told Kashia I think this probably would be better if we kiss, and she was like, “no.” I was like, great, love it.

RD: Is there one part of this piece that has a significant impact on you?

SS: I feel like the part of the piece that I really hammers in the theme is the duet between Kashia and Kentoria. That is when it really feels like peace is becoming the piece. I was injured, so I just sat out and watched. And that feels like, oh, this is the work. The way they’re diving through their emotionality, how they like to be in teamship with each other, like the ways in which they separate and then come back. That to me feels a lot like the nucleus of the work. 

RD: It must feel good to kind of create a system where they could step into that and you would sort of step back on their own.

SS: 100%. They’re fucking good. They’re really, really good.

RD: What did this piece leave you with in terms of feelings, memories, relationships? 

SS: What did it leave me with? I felt, I think, finally a little emotionally exhausted. Which was super exciting. I think that I had felt prior to this that there was a lot inside of me. Like, I had a lot of energy and anger around, like, you know, I just, I feel like I had gone through so many transitions in my life and I felt like my emotionality was just like a fountain of like reoccurrence, like rage to like all of a sudden, now I want pleasure to, you know, it’s just like so much boomeranging. And I felt like after this, I felt a little emptied out. I think it was good because I think I need a little bit of a drain, you know what I mean? I felt my memories of it are just like, I feel so grateful, like, forever of CHIMI, Kentoria, and Kashia, like, best family ever. Yeah. I just, I’ve left with a deep gratitude for the collaborators. They’re just incredible. And I just, I felt proud. amazing. I’ve never made a piece with this much, like it felt like a work and a product and done.

Emily Chackerian: How did ||: Girls :|| ||: Chance :|| ||: Music :|| originally come about?

Eisa Davis: It all starts with Pam MacKinnon because one of the first actions she took when she became artistic director of A.C.T. in 2018 was to come and visit me. She said, “You’re from the Bay. I want to commission works about the Bay, and would you write a play?” I was a little hesitant. It’s tough to take on a commission, you have to make sure that it’s something you want to do, but what came to me when thinking about the Bay was this incredible music school that I went to from ages 10 to 17 called the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley. I studied classical piano, voice, theory and musicianship there. It was means tested, so it was free if you were below a certain income, which meant that they fed us and gave us bus passes. They were some of the happiest days of my life, and that’s what I love to write about; things that I love, things that I feel passionate about. So I thought, “Let me write about that place. Let me set it now though, and let me actually make it an all-girls or girls+ environment.”

I thought that would allow people in, in a way that a period piece wouldn’t. I wasn’t interested in what it was that I experienced beyond this great love of music. None of it happened to me, but the characters are all in me. They’re archetypes and teenage dynamics that many of us have experienced.

There are a couple of other inspirations, like the film L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni. It was playing in a restaurant in San Francisco, during one of my first residencies to work on the play in 2019. That narrative about a disappearance stuck with me. One of the people that the play is dedicated to is my late piano teacher, Mr. Eugene Gash, and also to Craig Taborn, who is an incredible keyboardist/maker of spontaneous compositions. In knowing him and understanding more about his music, I started to hear music in a new way. That’s where the chance element comes in. Chance music is not new, people have made chance music for quite some time. I wanted to have young students embrace it and have it be a musical language that the audiences could start to hear in a way that they hadn’t heard before.  

EC: What is most exciting or challenging about writing about the Bay Area now versus the Bay Area of your childhood?

ED: In some ways I was able to escape that question because the play is taking place mainly in this Petri dish. It’s more about the sense of disaster and the sense of being very fragile as regards to climate. That aspect of being in the Bay and being in California is something that is deeply embedded in the play, and something that is there for kids all over the world, Specifically, when it comes to wildfire season and earthquakes and floods that’s something that California has been bearing the brunt of.

EC: Yeah, I was so struck by how environmental catastrophe is so interwoven into their world. My dad also grew up in the Bay Area so I was talking to him last night about the Oakland Fires and the ’89 earthquake, which were (and still are) such huge events, but now these kinds of natural disasters in the Bay are becoming more and more commonplace.

ED: It’s there and it’s something that in particular teens are coming to accept. They also have a very strong climate consciousness and are doing probably more than anyone else to actually implement solutions that would help us. It’s actually possible. We can come back down from that cliff.

EC: As you say that, I’m remembering that for a couple years as a preteen, I went to a sleepaway music camp in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico. The Jemez are ravaged by wildfires every year, and when my parents asked “So what do you do if there’s a fire and you can’t evacuate the kids?” the staff said “Oh, we’d go stand in the river, in our sleeping bag” in a very matter-of-fact manner.

ED: This is also a time where more ancient traditions, indigenous traditions can teach us a lot about how to live in the right relationship with the environment and how to survive the wrong relationships that we have been in.

EC: You’re pulling from so many traditions and musical styles in this play, namely chance music, and I wonder if you could explain how the improvisation works within the piece.

ED: There are a few elements there. There’s the tone row, which are the 12 notes on a whiteboard that the audience chooses when they come into the lobby. That’s a collectively created melody that then moves out of the lobby on that whiteboard, and onto the stage. The performers are then able to implement that melody as something that they are singing, performing, playing on the piano in the show, and improvising off of. That’s one of the major ways that we’re using chance in the show and keep that aleatory feeling of experiencing sounds in a certain sequence that no other audience is going to have.

Then there’s improvisation, period, which is happening throughout the show. Both around the tone row, and in the sonic language that is being spoken between some of the characters. It’s wonderful because we worked very hard to be able to find people who were incredible actors and were incredible musicians.

Naomi Latta [who plays Margo, the drummer] came in to audition for another part, but the way she was carrying herself struck me as something that was more akin to Margot. So Pam McKinnon and I were like “Do you play drums?” The answer was no. Then we said “Can you learn to play drums? Would you be interested in learning?” She said, “Yeah, I would love to channel the musicality that I have into another instrument.” The amazing drummer Shirazette Tinnin came on as a coach and taught Naomi to play. In some ways that’s another level of improvisation. Naomi learned a new instrument, and is playing in ways that are far beyond the number of months that she’s been at it.

There’s a lot of structured improv. Sometimes they surprise me, and will improvise something, which makes each show alive and present. It also infuses them with an energy that you don’t always see in shows where everything is rehearsed down to the last bit of punctuation.

EC: It necessitates the liveness of theater in such a fun and unique way. You weave in music and musical experimentation in so much of your work, and I wonder why that structural experimentation and experimentation is important to you?

ED: It’s not only music, but sound that I am deeply interested in. All playwrights are thinking in terms of rhythm. Musical experimentation and the embrace of a larger world of sound is part of a larger project that I have of continuing to expand our minds and our notions of what’s possible. I always want to shake up the way we see ourselves in the world. If we shook up our ways of thinking about climate and we shook up our ways of thinking about what a play is, what music is, what is musical, and allow for fissures and cracks into a new way of seeing, then we would have more compassion. So there’s a real aspect of wanting to create an openness in a piece with collaborators and allow an audience to think freely, consciously or subconsciously.

EC: Because you often end up with this lyricism and sense of rhythm within your plays, do you start with a central musical theme or structure and then build out from there? What’s your process?

ED: I always expect the song, sound, or characters to talk to me. I listen for that. I keep listening for the way a person talks or how a scene needs to end, because sometimes there’s a truncation or fragment that will provide an interesting rhythmic variety. I ask what is the thing that is calling to me that I need to be sensitive to and portray with accuracy and reverence. In this play, I’m listening for the ways that teenagers speak. It’s a lot of exposition or people are saying things that are right on the nose. But that’s part of being a teen. You’re learning about philosophy or about science or about literature or about music, and when  you’re learning all of that, you’re trying it out and talking it out with your friends. I love very specific slang, dialect, the way that characters, people carve out their lives through the rhythms of how they speak.

EC: I really see that in Bulrusher, in Angela’s Mixtape, in this. Notably, all three are sort of plays about young people figuring out their identities. New York has seen such a slew of these plays about young women, which can be seen partially as an producorial/industry trend and also demonstrative of an openness to taking girls seriously–I’m curious what you find compelling about it.

ED: I do think it’s important to take girls seriously, and it needn’t be looked at as a trend. It’s a genre, right? People don’t ever say, “Oh, that’s an adult play,” but people go, “Oh, this is a teen play.” Teens are as much humans as adults are. And that there’s a purity to your teen experience that is beautiful to look at. It’s a place where identities are being forged. It’s a very labile time.

I wasn’t thinking about this as participating in a trend or a genre. I was interested in these people who are in fem bodies and younger bodies and not dismissing their voices as being less than. I was interested in the students’ dynamic with each other and how they treat each other. I’ve had the best teachers that exist on the planet, and I know that the way that I ingested all of the knowledge that I was being given by my teachers was in working through it, kneading it out with other students.

EC: Because it’s just centered on these students navigating the dynamics of being young people finding themselves in both the world and each other’s orbit, the piece ends up with this narrative or question of “Am I thrilled to finally find someone like me? Or am I in love with them? Or both?”  

ED: Some people experience their sense of self being mirrored early on, and for some people it takes a long time. In this play there’s a scramble up a mountain to see, oh, are we mirrored? Is that mirror something that I want? Is it dangerous? Does it make me confront other aspects of how I identify that are more fragile than I’m willing to handle? I wanted it to have this kind of hypernaturalism in how the structure of the play works, how the scenes work and how the characters experience each other.

EC: As you continue with ||: Girls :|| ||: Chance :|| ||: Music :||, do you have anything you hope audiences take away?

ED: It’s about being open to considering their lives and the trajectory of their lives, and thinking about moments of deep, sometimes overwhelming passion they’ve had for a person or a thing like music. Just being able to return to those pivotal moments in life and see where they are now. There’s a bit of a look back, but it’s also a flash-forward to what it is that your life can include that you’ve left behind.

EC: I want to end by just acknowledging that you’ve had so many incredible projects this year with different styles and forms. How do you find balance? Are your projects playing off each other?

ED: You know the superbloom that happened [in Death Valley in March] with all of the flowers growing? That’s what it feels like now with my work. It’s something I don’t take for granted, because I had a show at HERE in the fall called The Essentialisn’t. That was the first time I’d had a full production in New York since 2009. It’s been a while.

It’s beautiful to be able to create and have the ensembles of The Essentialisn’t and ||: Girls :|| ||: Chance :|| ||: Music :||. It takes me back to the ensembles of Passing Strange, of Angela’s Mixtape. And I’m developing Warriors right now. I feel like that also is about women trying to make their way in the world, in a matter of life and death. All these pieces are linked in that they’re strongly about women, interiority, and handling the world as it comes at them. What I love is that it feels like it’s just the beginning. There are so many plays and pieces and musical pieces, or music theater pieces that I’m looking forward to writing. I have them perched on the horizon, and I’m also interested in some of the plays that are in the past, being able to have a second life. It’s all exciting.

It’s a good thing that they have so much energy, because they’ve been busy. Later this month, Ruckus will present thirty shows in four days. The scrappy trio has assembled an expansive lineup, from Broadway performers to rock musicians, poets, and clowns. The range of performers is intentional: the creators of Ruckus want the audience to discover. Each performance is short, and they are programmed one after another. Come for something you know you like, stay for the next show, and stumble upon something you love. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Annie Rasiel: So let’s start with how you know each other! How did the three of you meet?

Cara Ronzetti: College! 

Carson McCalley: We all went to Carnegie Mellon. 

AR: Are you all actors primarily? 

CM: Primarily is a tough one. We all do so many different things. All three of us write, direct, and act, depending on what feels artistically fulfilling. 

Alex Wanebo: Carson and Cronz have both written, directed, and produced their own short films in the past year. Cronz is at a festival in Europe right now with the movie she made! And we all act sometimes.

CR: I also teach. 

AR: What do you teach?

CR: The classes are called Character and Imagination and Directed Screen Acting. They’re acting classes at Stone Street, which is one of the Tisch studios. I teach acting to the Gen Z, and I love the Gen Z. They teach me so much. Like this! [Ronzetti makes a heart with her fingers in the classic Gen Z style.] It took me two years to learn how to bend my fingers like that.

AR: Why did you start this festival? What inspired Ruckus? 

AW: It just felt so hard to find a theater space that was exciting to us, a place where people really felt invited to be introduced to new artists. And it’s so expensive to do anything in New York City. We wanted a way to bring a bunch of artists together and encourage people to see art they wouldn’t normally see, to refill your creative reservoir and expand the kinds of performances you see. Having this many shows in a row encourages people to expand their horizons as an audience member. If you like comedy, come for a comedy show—and then stick around another twenty minutes and you might discover that you love performance art.

CM: We keep coming back to this idea that the festival is half about the audience and half about the artists. When I directed Alex’s play at the Fringe in Edinburgh, we were struck by this community element in European theater. If you go to Germany, there are repertory theaters that are really about the way that the audience experiences the show. There’s an expectation that the audience should learn or experience something new. Commercial theater here isn’t like that. We wanted to cultivate that energy. And with that, I think, comes a cool vibe. You can make theater cool by returning to what people are in theater for, which is being together in community—not trying to make a million bucks by making a tourist hit.

AW: And we certainly won’t be making a million bucks!

CR: But I think that’s kind of beautiful. Our intention was never to make money here—and, speaking frankly, if we break halfway even, I think we’ll be happy. When Alex and Carson told me about this idea, I immediately wanted to be involved. It was something I’ve wanted for years. For the last four or five years, I’ve really been in the indie film world in New York. There was this moment in my life where I was like, “Wait a second, why did I stop doing theater?” That was my first love. I moved to New York—which is supposed to be the capital of theater—and it somehow felt so inaccessible. Filmmaking was more accessible to me than renting a venue in New York City and producing theater. For so many of us, theater is our first love, but the gates are locked so tight. It was exciting to me to find a way to unlock those gates with two of my closest friends, not just for ourselves, but for others.

CM: I love the image of the locks. It’s making me think about how what is needed for the art form changes the form itself. The type of things that you can produce changes because of the barriers that are in place. Accessibility allows you to take bigger risks. Even as an audience member, if tickets are cheap, you’re probably more likely to take a risk. The locks change what is being made. That is something we’re hoping to change with the artists and audience that comes to Ruckus.

AW: That was beautiful.

CR: That was so beautiful! One of our performers just buzzed me about some equipment. He’s playing music, which reminded me to say that this is a theater and arts festival. We aren’t just producing theater. We’re doing all kinds of live art, which is so exciting. Though now I’m asking, what is theater? Is theater anything that exists on a stage? Music can tell a story. Is music theater if it tells a story?

CM: We have performance art, we have clowning—

CR: Which I’m so excited for, because I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a real clown act. 

AR: Do all three of you have shows in the festival? 

CM: We do! Alex and I are bringing the show that we did at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I’ve also written something. I’m not performing at all, which is kind of cool. Normally performing is my way in, and I’m excited to be experiencing this festival differently. I’m directing two pieces.

CR: I’m having the opposite experience from Carson. In the last few years, I’ve really moved away from acting. I’ve mostly been behind the camera, writing and directing. For Ruckus, I’m dusting off my acting! I’m acting in one play, and performing a piece I wrote about that explores gender identity and memory, through eight rounds of boxing. 

AW: And I’m acting in the play I wrote that Carson and I did at the Fringe a while ago.

AR: What kind of producing experience did you have before this?

AW: None of us had produced on this scale. We had all done a little bit. I had produced a play. Carson had produced a short film, and he and I produced another play together. Cronz has experience producing films. I had never produced for someone else.

CR: I’ve done a lot of producing in film, and I self-produced a short play that I did in Queens. I’ve never produced a theater festival. I keep thinking about the hardest producing job I’ve had, which was a short film. It had around twenty-five actors and took place across different generations. It was a complicated film. I keep thinking, why is this harder than that? That was a really complicated film to produce! It had somebody who was eight years old and somebody who was eighty years old! I think what’s so specific about this experience is that we’re producing one festival, but the festival consists of thirty different productions.

AR: How did you get from Alex and Carson having the idea and bringing on Cronz to the festival being less than two weeks away?

CM: Overcoming fear was a huge part of it. We just had to go one step at a time. Just step by step. That sounds obvious, but we were scared, and breaking it down like that helped us. And remembering why we got into theater as children. It’s because theater felt like a really safe place to be. We constantly remind ourselves that we’re doing this because we want it to be fun and safe and exploratory and exciting.

AW: Our individual personalities, skills, and communication styles have been important too. I’m often the reigning pessimist. I’m always the one asking, “what if this all goes horribly wrong?” It’s been so important for me to have collaborators who respond, “what if it doesn’t?” We’ve given each other permission to go after exactly what we want and to dream about the best case scenarios. We imagined our dream venue, and then we found it. We’re obsessed with Box of Moonlight in Bushwick. All along the way, we’ve been like, “what is our top ask here?” And then it falls out how it does.

CM: That’s the benefit of having collaborators as well. We take turns being scared. We take turns taking the reigns. We champion each other.

AW: It’s like when you’re a small child walking between your parents, and each parent takes a hand. We take turns being the one in the middle.

AR: Was there anything that really surprised you or anything that you’ve learned along the way? 

AW: People have been so generous with us. Beyond even just artists. We have collaborations with Brooklyn Art Haus and 1319 Press. People have been so generous with their time and their energy and so excited to help.

CR: I experienced that when I made my first short film, the shock of just how generous and eager to help people can be. It’s been a pleasure to watch you guys learn that lesson. What’s that phrase from the bible? “Ask and ye shall receive?” It’s shocking how often that is true. Asking for help still isn’t my strongest muscle. It still feels awkward, and I feel embarrassed and guilty, but people have been stoked to help—I think because they can sense our genuine loving intentions, or because we want to make art and help people we believe in make art, and people want to help with that. 

We have a space we’re calling The Den, and it has a loungy, in-the-round feel, so we wanted to cover it with carpets and floor cushions for seating. And Alex and Carson were walking home the other day, and they passed by this store that sells the most beautiful cushions and rugs—

CM: Sarab in Williamsburg! 

AW: Mahmoud!! We told him what we were planning, and he immediately offered to partner with us. He is decking the space out. 

CM: He was like, “Take everything I have outside and return it when the festival’s done.”

CR: This was a man they just walked by. He’s incredible. It makes me want to cry. It’s like, holy shit. People are just out there trying to help each other. They sent me a picture of their car with the trunk totally full of all these beautiful cushions and rugs. He really came through. 

CM: Expectation is such an interesting thing to wrestle with when you’re producing. Obviously, you can’t bank on something like that happening, but you have to leave yourself open to it, to the spontaneous possibilities of the world. We stay open to the world and open to each other. When you’re working alone, you can create an image of exactly what you want to happen. But when you have three people all working together, you have to release your expectations. You have to stay open to what other people can contribute, whether it’s your partners or a stranger. By releasing our own expectations, we can allow for these beautiful kismet moments.

AR: That spirit of openness feels essential to this festival. You’ve stayed open to all these different collaborators, from the performers in your thirty shows to all the people who have helped along the way—and, in turn, you are encouraging the audience to be open to a wide range of performance. 

CM: When you produce just one piece, you need to be in control. You need to know how it’s going to go and what everyone is going to feel. You can’t do that with thirty shows. This has been a process of releasing all that. 

AR: What were your first steps? Did you like look to any other festivals? Was there anyone you went to for advice?

CM: Creatively, we were solid from the beginning. Logistically… There was a lot to learn. George at Breaking the Binary festival was wonderful. Isabel Pask was also helpful. Brenna Power, who ran a film retreat where she produced five short films in two weekends, gave great advice about making sure artists are all on the same page in terms of expectations for the festival. There were other people who advised us about logistics too. 

AW: We talked about bringing on a line producer or executive producer, but we realized that we were excited about doing every aspect of the work ourselves. We wanted to get our hands dirty in every aspect of it. A big part of the joy in this project has been learning by doing. 

CR: I talked to several friends. It was a lot of hitting up buddies and asking for feedback. It’s been this beautiful, communal leap of faith, the three of us holding each other’s hands as we jump. And the audience is taking a leap of faith in coming to see kinds of art they’ve never seen before. And knowing me, and knowing Alex and Carson, it’s fitting that our first time really producing theater is so wildly maximalist. 

CM: I’ll also say that—as much as the logistical advice was helpful and so appreciated—we are attempting to do something that I have not seen in New York. Even among festivals, it’s typically a week per show, or even just a day per show. We are packing shows back-to-back into four days. As far as I know, no one is doing that. So I actually wonder if a more experienced producer would have been more rigid in their approach, if they might have tried to limit us to what they believed was possible rather than serve this crazy vision.

CR: The reality is that this is a community effort. We have this thing called Legends. The Legends are our friends and people in our community that are volunteering their time to help run the festival. We’re giving them free tickets but they aren’t getting paid. These are just people who want the festival to work, who want it to be great, from a place of love and shared vision. When something is based in community, its bones are so strong. 

AR: Is this something you want to do again? 

CR: Oh hell yeah.

AW: Ruckus 2027, baby. 

CM: We already have a document that’s a list of everything we’ve learned.

AW: It’s called LESSONS LEARNED, and it’s loooong. 

AR: What are your biggest dreams for Ruckus? Do you have any dream acts? What does Ruckus 2050 look like? 

AW: I want to go on tour! Build tents! Go state to state like a traveling circus! I want to get a boat! We can do Ruckus on a boat! 

CM: Thinking about dream acts is interesting, because we aren’t really focused on individual acts. We think more about how they all come together. Of course, there are so many incredible artists involved—but it’s how they all come together as one experience, how their performances bounce off each other that excites us. 

CR: I think what’s special about this year is that we didn’t approach it with a curatorial mindset. We led with community. I think it would be exciting as growing producers, to experiment with what that might look like in future iterations of this. What would it be like if we had a unifying theme or a central exploration for the artists? The artists in this festival came from our inner circles, but, God knows, we’ve got some beautiful medium circles and even bigger circles. It could be exciting to see what could come from casting a wider net with a theme. And maybe we do two Ruckuses in one year! Maybe one is about the environment and we partner with environmental organizations. That’s very specific to me, but I love a theme.

CM: Through this experience, we’ve seen that people really need rehearsal space. Maybe someday Ruckus becomes an Arts Development Center. 

CR: YES!!!

CM: I want to build something that feeds back into the needs and dreams of artists who have something to say and don’t have a place to say it. I want to provide them a place to develop work and a place to perform it.

AW: Gotta get a warehouse. 

CR: We could even—call me crazy—but it would be amazing to get a rich art lover to throw us some money and actually pay artists. God forbid an artist gets paid! We should dream big like this, because we all deserve that. The artists we’re believing in deserve that. Mark our words, we’re going to do all of this someday. 

AR: I like that artists getting paid came after boat in terms of wild dreams. What are the craziest things you can imagine? A traveling circus, a boat, a warehouse, an arts center, and then getting paid—the biggest of dreams. 

This feels contrary to what you were saying earlier about not emphasizing individual acts, but I want to hear about what each of you is working on. Plug your shows! 

CM: Instead of pitching our three pieces, could we plug somebody else’s? I would hate for it to feel like the festival is about our work.

AW: Our very first show of the festival is a work in progress by Dillyboi called On Our Backs. It’s the perfect show to kick everything off. It’s a femme fantasy cabaret, inspired by Dilly’s queer archival research. There’s glamour, vulnerability—she said “bring the spirit of your highest heels” or something like that, and I don’t know if I know what that means but I love it so much.

CM: Keyon Monté is a playwright I’ve admired for a long time. He recently produced a version of Macbeth in an office basement in Kansas City in which the costumes and set were made out of trash bags and duct tape and other easily accessible materials. When we were creating this festival, I thought of him as such a perfect fit. He is someone who is willing to get really creative and do a lot with a little. He’s premiering his second play, Second Born, and I’m so excited to see it. 

CR: Something I’m super excited about is this initiative called Human Instruments. The founder, Nick Demaris, is determined to prove to every single person that music lives inside of them—whether it’s banging on something or using their vocal cords, everyone can make music.  He uses words like Gertrude Stein, finding music in the syllables. What’s really exciting about this is that it’s a workshop, so it’s immersive. I’ve done this. He did a workshop at my friend’s wedding, and I was like, hell yeah. It was a bunch of people moving around in a circle, making sounds. And he would kind of spontaneously conduct us, or have us move our mouths in certain ways. We picked up on his kind of sign language just by following him and trusting him. I’m a secret recorder—I’m always secretly recording things—and when I listened to it afterwards, it sounded gorgeous. None of these people were trained singers. They were just people using their bodies and their voices to facilitate sound and his magical ability to conduct humans in space and to hone in on each person created an incredible symphony. He’s going to lead the workshop, and based on what comes out of that, he’s going to come up with a piece and perform it that same day. It’s very experimental and very live and very impromptu, and I’m so excited for it.

AR: Wow! 

CR: I love proving people wrong like that. So many people claim they can’t sing. Little do they know… 

AR: It reminds me of a line from the cartoonist Lynda Barry. She says that adults constantly claim that they can’t draw, but you never hear young children say that. When kids draw it’s all about the joy of the motion and the storytelling, and they’re less concerned with the final product. At a certain age we start thinking about what the drawing should look like, and then we become self-conscious. I’m sure I’m butchering the quote, but it’s something about how all children can draw confidently and joyfully, but the vast majority of adults freeze up when asked to draw. 

CR: That’s it. Man, that’s exactly it. I think that’s what our festival is about. We aren’t focused on the product of it. We care more about facilitating the process of it and bringing us all back to the massively enjoyable and godly thing that is to create. Creation is godly as hell! 

RUCKUS: A WEEK OF THEATRE AND ART
MAY 28-31, 2026
BOX OF MOONLIGHT
17 SARATOGA AVE, BROOKLYN, NY 11233

I studied ballet as a child, and though I was quite serious about it emotionally, the potential of my technical prowess was limited by biology– I did not have the feet– and life expectations. Devoting the amount of time necessary to become something slightly close to proficient– ballet is very very hard– would mean altering my educational trajectory. I am the daughter of two doctors and part-time schooling was never going to be an option. But, because I grew up in New York City, I had a disproportionate access to two of the finest ballet companies in the world. After the requisite viewing of The Nutcracker– an experience I still remember mostly for the chinese meal my family shared at the now defunct Olie’s on 67th and Broadway– and then a program of American Ballet Theater at New York City Center that included The Green Table and Sinatra Suite (it is here reader that I feel deeply in love with the principal dancer Angel Corella), my ballet viewing became possible by way of my sister. She is seven years older and in possession of a season subscription, which were much cheaper in those days. 

One day when I was in fourth grade, a friend of my sister’s unexpectedly canceled, and she took me as her date instead. After that, she continued to take me. Particularly notable performances included Philip Neal’s 2010 retirement performance, the first time I saw Serenade, and the first time I saw Geroge Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante danced by Megan Fairchild after her year-long hiatus from City Ballet. She was simultaneously expansive and so precise, precise in her expansiveness! I think I cried. This access to dance– beyond ballet, our mother ensured we saw things across genres including the last performance of The Merce Cunningham Company at BAM where Merce, at 89, was wheeled on stage for bows– allowed me to enter into a world of ideas and analysis that far surpassed my own ability to physicalize the very thing I was thinking about and analyzing. With age, the knowledge and passion for the subject only grew. Years after my regular ballet classes stopped, I still went to the ballet all the time, immersed myself in the world of choreography, poured over videos, learned about the intricacies of repertories, and listened to scores. Meeting Marina was meeting someone else who could engage in the knowledge I cherished so dearly. Like spotted like.

I don’t remember when I saw Marina next. I believe she invited me to go to the ballet with her and I nearly plotzed at the prospect of going to the ballet with a critic. She continued to invite me and over the years our casual viewing together developed into a friendship. At this point I was reading her work closely and couldn’t believe I knew someone who wrote for publications that I’d watched the grownups in my life read for my whole childhood. Meanwhile, as my twenties meandered on, while trying out every possible combination of employment I could think of, I took notice of how often I seemed to want to discuss dance, art, and culture, in professional settings. I taught American History for a year and for the “Colonial American” unit, I screened videos of Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. Unable to miss an opportunity to discuss New York City Ballet, I referenced Balanchine’s Four Temperaments when The Four Humors appeared in the students’ textbook. 

Some time in this stew of passing years– I was 26– I decided I wouldn’t go to law school, the professional outcome I deemed inevitable: it was medicine, but with words. I came to realize, I might find being the only lawyer constantly thinking about Leonard Bernstein alienating. I was working at a law firm when a colleague sent me the first episode of a podcast about Balanchine. I am very sensitive about the treatment of ballet outside in media. I attribute this to my eighth-grade horror at Black Swan. I listened to the first episode of the podcast in my apartment in Bed Stuy and found myself unable to stop yelling every time the host said something inaccurate. I, a person incapable of not torturing myself, listened to the entire series. I seemed to recognize a lot of the guests on her podcasts–some were writers I admired, others were dancers I’d studied with– and these people, mostly women, didn’t sound like themselves. The audio had been seriously edited. The podcast was so inaccurate, so poorly constructed, and so unnuanced, I felt I could not sit with my frustration that bordered on anger. I decided I would write a response to it. This led me to CULTUREBOT and the eventual publication of the piece titled Sure, Critique Ballet and Balanchine, but Erika Lantz Does It Wrong. Though the piece, like every project I take on, took me ages to write, I was ecstatic at the ability to articulate a perspective about a subject matter I hold so dear. It was the first experience that made me realize that thinking seemed to matter a lot to me and that I’d like to be able to do something with that thinking. This is also my earliest exposure to dramaturgy: what made me so upset was the blatant dismissal of context. My first piece led to another and then another, and then to editing for the site. But, before that, I confided in Marina that I was doing this, and then after the publication of the podcast response, over dinner, I admitted to her that I wanted to write, and that I had many ideas I’d like to pursue. It was truly an admission. I felt foolish admitting this to a publishing writing and following so closely in her path, but her response was completely untroubled. She told me to pursue it. 

It has been some time since these early days. Since then, I’ve been in graduate school twice– Marina wrote me a letter of recommendation for the second iteration– and while I am far from where I want to be as a writer, Marina has remained a consistent support in my life, and a consistent source of inspiration. I look at her career, her discipline, her focus, and her ability with awe and admiration. 

I now see it as quite fitting that I didn’t know much of Marina’s career when I met her. It seems to me that the cursory understanding of what a critic was, was equivalent to my cursory awareness that my many years of viewing could actually be meaningful for something. The more time I spent with Marina, the more I became aware of her profession. She, perhaps without meaning to, showed me a way. 

Below is our transcribed conversation from our public conversation that took place this past January at Pluto’s Loft, the home of some dear friends. The publication of this conversation– an interview of Marina attempting to decode dance and illuminate the logistics of her career, there are a few moments where Marina starts to interview me! – coincides with my decision to leave CULTUREBOT as co-editor. Over the past three years, I’ve had the great privilege to immerse myself in the world of performance writing and thinking. I’ve gotten to work with many brilliant minds and hearts, and gained a proximity to the beating pulse of performance in New York City. If I understood that arts writing and criticism was essential before, I leave knowing it to be vital. I am glad to have contributed to efforts to sustain deep thought and engagement as media turns towards the short-form. 

This conversation had been edited for both length and clarity, though I’m sorry I wasn’t able to include audience questions. There was a great moment where Marina and I bonded over annoying fellow audience members for our propensity to move along with the dancing in our seats. While I won’t be working on CULTUREBOT directly, I will still contribute. My hope is, in true Marina fashion, to write without abandon. Luckily she’s only a text away should anything go awry!

Eve Bromberg: Hello, Marina!

Marina Harss: Hi! It’s been so long!

EB: I know… it’s almost as if we barely know each other! I’m going to start by reading Marina’s latest review from the opening of City Ballet’s winter season because it’s titled Con Brio, and if you know Marina’s work, you know Brio is an often-used Harsian term. 

MH: Oh god.  

EB: Without further ado.. “Programming, programming. The opening night program at New York City Ballet was on the long side, but what a trio of works: Serenade and Prodigal Son by Balanchine, followed by Ratmansky’s restating of the Grand Pas from Paquita (now thankfully performed without the addendum of Balanchine’s Minkus Pas de Trois). Serenade is such a powerful way to begin the season: the sweep and drama of it takes the breath away. Megan Fairchild, approaching retirement, is in her element in the “Russian” role, which is mostly allegro—lightness and speed are her domain. Emily Gerrity looked stronger and more expansive than I’ve seen in months; her arabesque, as she was partnered by Davide Riccardo, received well-deserved applause from an enthusiastic audience. In Prodigal Son, Anthony Huxley was a youthful, but too polite Prodigal. He dances the role beautifully, as he does everything, but doesn’t register much as a character. Miriam Miller, in contrast, is an extraordinary Siren who infuses the part with a kind of melancholy coolness. The closer, Paquita, is a feast of classical steps, driven along by Ludwig Minkus’ faux Spanish (actually quite Viennese-sounding) score. The strength of the staging lies in the juicy, embodied style of dancing, full of changes of direction, of level (low, medium, high), of angle of the shoulders and head. As well as in the way the corps amplifies the movements of the soloist woman. On opening night, the ensembles looked a bit rough (not enough rehearsal?), with some spacing issues and inconsistent epaulement, but the overall effect was still thrilling. Several solos stood out. Dominika Afanasenkov, for example, in a slow waltz that begins like a prayer, with huge enveloppés followed by a diagonal of tiny steps, made more beautiful by the angle and twist of her upper body. Emily Kikta’s boldness in her “entrechat and bend” solo. Mira Nadon thrilled in the different facets of the lead role, soft and wafting at the start of one solo, only to eat up space in huge soaring cabrioles (and later, even larger saut de basques), demonstrating balance, control, and freedom in equal measure. A little girl in the audience cheered, jumping up and down. She knew what she was seeing. Such beauty seems even more valuable now, as the civilized world reels.”

Marina, how many years into your career are you? So?

MH: First of all, thank you Eve. Thank you, JD! Thank you all for being here and yes, the civilized world reels. Today we have another example of that in Minneapolis where ICE has shot [Alex Pretti] another person. So art is happening in the background of a really dramatic time, and we’re all trying to figure out where it all fits in together. Sometimes ballet can be this incredible escape, and also a suggestion that there is beauty still in this world to be to be seen, enjoyed, and striven for.

I started writing about dance. I can’t quite pinpoint the date, but it was a little over 20 years ago when I was working as a fact checker at The New Yorker magazine. So it’s been maybe like 25 years? The fact checking that I did for The New Yorker actually played an important part in my writing because I worked closely with the late Joan Accocella, who was for many years The New Yorker dance critic. So in a way, it was through working with her, seeing dance through her eyes, and sometimes actually having the good fortune of going to see dance with her, that the whole idea of thinking very closely and intensely about dance and writing about it formed in my mind.

EB: Could you speak to what was so distinct about Joan’s writing?

MH: I also want to ask the same about you, Eve because you also write about dance. We’ll get to you after, after Joan. Joan had this incredible ability to make dance writing feel very plain spoken. She could take the most complex and heady piece of choreography and make it immediate and unpretentious and comprehensible, while still being vivid. I know, David Remnick describes her writing like writing about a boxing match. There’s something so direct, visceral, and uncomplicated about the way she described it that made you feel like you could understand it, that anybody could understand it. But at the same time she was incredibly sophisticated. She was showing you the connection between what you’d seen on stage and a book, or movie, or poem. She had this huge frame of reference, but at the end of the day, it was the ease with which she wrote that tricked you into thinking there wasn’t art to it, but there was enormous art to the way she wrote. 

EB: And before you started writing about dance, how familiar with dance were you?

MH: I am as familiar as anybody who was kind of interested in the arts in general. I knew more about music because I studied music as a kid and pretty seriously through college, but I had a secondary interest in dance. 

EB: Something that I hear a lot from people who are less familiar with dance is a confusion about what to look for and what to watch. What was it like to become familiar with the tradition, and how did you learn to both engage with dance and then critique it? 

MH: I think what happened was I started going to see New York City Ballet and specifically ballets by George Balanchine, and talking about them with Joan and reading her reviews, and then I started to become excited by the way the choreography showed, explained, and augmented the experience of hearing the music. A piece of music that was familiar may start to feel more complicated. Whereas a piece of music like Stravinsky’s Agon, which is very difficult to listen to on its own, could become more comprehensive by seeing it as choreography. It was like somebody was helping you to see the inner workings of the music and helping you to find dramatic aspects of the music that were not immediately audible if you just listened to it. In addition to that, beyond the structural and musical illumination, there was this drama under the surface. Even though these often weren’t story ballets, the way Balanchine created a kind of an underlying dramaturgy, and stakes– the music has stakes and the way people interact with each other, the way the soloists interact with each other or with the core creates a unity– a story starts to surface. It often isn’t laid out for you. You have to figure it out on your own. 

EB: It’s almost ecological. 

MH: But wait, how did you get interested in dance?

EB: How did I get interested in dance? Well, my sister is here. I got interested in dance because my sister studied dance, so I followed her example. 

MH: You actually danced? 

EB: Yes, actually danced. I did ballet for many years. But, in addition because we grew up in New York, we supplemented technique classes with going to see live performances. So from a very young age, my sister was taking me to see the ballet, and like you, I became familiar through the work of Balanchine. His work seemed to me to represent what people talk about when they talk about the effect of art. I remember seeing Serenade by Balanchine for the first time. It’s a significant ballet for being almost a pedagogical piece. Balanchine made it on students. It’s very essential in terms of City Ballet’s repertory and Balanchine’s oeuvre. I remember seeing that, I think it was for Philip Neal’s retirement in 2010, and being swept up in how the movement replicated the feeling of the music. It was this extraordinary experience. I suppose my experience before that would have been narrative ballet, and Serenade seemed to surpass any need of story. It was intellectually challenging, and I found that really exciting.

MH: How did you make the transition, and why did you make the transition from dancing to writing about dance?

EB: Well, I think a lot of people who study ballet have the experience of realizing they will probably will never become professional, because the sort of margin of error to be a professional is extremely narrow, and it’s very hard to continue studying it seriously without professional aspirations. You end up finding yourself in this very kind of weird situation where you want to be serious about it and dedicate yourself to it, but without any guaranteed outcome. And also, you end up in this strange position of choosing between ballet and an education because if you want to pursue ballet professionally, you more or less have to stop going to school. It was never going to be the case that my parents would let me stop going to high school in order to study ballet. So, dancing more or less phased out in my life, naturally. But, I always continued to see it. My intellectual attachment to ballet outlived and surpassed my actual technical ability. 

MH:  Physical embodied. 

EB: Yeah, so the transition to writing was natural because I had all this working knowledge of the art form, and realized I could maybe do something with it. I’m currently studying dramaturgy, and one of the reasons I became interested in the subject is because of Balanchine. I learned what dramaturgy is from Balanchine ballets, and I think he may in fact be the world’s greatest dramaturg, because his ballets have these almost sacrosanct internal logics that can exist without narrative. I saw that from a very young age, that these ballets seem to know themselves and that no decisions seemed random, which is surely because of his relationship to the music. 

Okay, back to you. When you started seeing dance, and I want to mention genres beyond ballet, what was your initial engagement like? Similarly, ballet is such a physically impressive art form. Did you go through a period of having to almost become desensitized to technical prowess, to be able to look beyond the high leg and multiple pirouettes?

MH: Well, I don’t know if you really have to, I mean, not to harp on Joan, but she loved the male dancers of ABT for example. She found the bravoura to be incredibly exciting. So, I think it’s okay to love the things that the dancers can do. It’s part of the experience of dance, right? It’s like seeing a great pianist too. You’re not just impressed by their musical choices, but the domination of the instrument. The ability to coax out incredible colors from the instrument. And the same thing is true with dancers. Not just ballet dancers. There are incredible dancers of so many different genres with an ability to show you the choreography and extend your idea of what’s physically possible. Not just in terms of how big their movements are, but also how subtle, how much detail, how much contrast. All of that happens from great training, talent, devotion, intelligence, and also, most importantly taste. At the beginning, maybe you go and you’re just so thrilled by some of the things that dancers can do that you’re not as aware of whether the choreography is actually good, but I always had strong feelings and responses to the work. Everything is subjective, right? I wasn’t necessarily saying this is good, something else was bad, but I was thinking about what was interesting and what I thought was worth exploring and thinking about more more deeply.

EB: As you entered this tradition of criticism, did you see any sort of classifications amongst different kinds of writers? Did you see Joan as a writer who was more generous versus someone else who was more likely to criticize a dancer or a work?

MH:  It’s like any kind of discipline. Everybody develops their own voice and their own color of their writing. You become familiar with different people’s style and approach, and sometimes you really admire somebody’s writing, but you can’t necessarily emulate it. It won’t make sense. It’s not you. A good example is Arlene Croce. Her writing for The New Yorker was so incredibly knowledgeable. The confidence with which she wrote was beyond, even when she was wrong, she had the most incredible confidence and she convinced you through the writing that she was right. 

EB: She tended to be incredibly harsh, no?

MH: Not necessarily. She was also incredibly positive in other reviews. She was just quite mean. Somebody just told me that Lincoln Kirstein used to say she was like God because she saw everything. Like the rest of us, she was often wrong. But, she could harness incredible evidence to support her thesis. And in a way, I mean, reviews are, and I want to ask you about this too, reviews are a kind of argumentation. You’re trying to somehow convince the reader that what you’ve seen is what is to be seen in that particular work of art. Do you feel like when you do reviews or when you write about art, there is an element of argumentation?

EB: This reminds me of a conversation we had a bit ago that I think about a lot. You introduced the notion that all critics figure out their values, their artistic values, and what matters most to them, which becomes the critic’s focus. For some people, that might be descriptions of technique, or the mood of the piece, or the ideas of space. I think I tend to be drawn towards the ideas of a piece, what an artist is trying to communicate or respond to intellectually. In the Croce reading I’ve encountered, she seemed quite interested in reflecting what she perceived the choreographer was doing. In her response to Goldberg Variations by Jerome Robbins, for instance, she seems to be critiquing Robbins for trying to employ more academic ideas in this ballet. 

MH: She could be incredibly negative. There’s a famous review, well, it wasn’t even a review because she hadn’t seen the piece, about Bill T. Jones’ piece was about death and dying. She famously wrote the piece as a protest against seeing the piece. She refused to see it and made an argument of what she called victim art, art that’s manipulative. She refused to be manipulated. So that is a very radical, you could perhaps call it stupid, or provocative stance to take.  The piece pretty much destroyed her career, and Bill T. Jones won that argument, as he should have. It was a stupid thing to argue but there was a provocation there about what she thought about what the values of art is: should art be used as a platform to talk about and bring attention to and hope for empathy for the people involved in the creation of that work of art? That’s an interesting subject. If she hadn’t been so negative about it, it would have been an interesting subject of conversation.

EB: Reading that review now, it’s almost kind of funny, because it distills into sort of a generational clash. 

MH: It turns out she was pretty right wing, so she just didn’t approve of the piece. It didn’t pass her smell test. She didn’t think art should do that. That’s not what she thought it was for. We all have our values, both negative and positive, but I try to think of my artistic values not in opposition to something. That seems less constructive to me. 

EB: What has become important to you in viewing and how has that changed over the years?

MH: I think back to your earlier point about each critic having their own entry point. For me, my entry point for dance is music. That was the thing that first thrilled me, the way that movement and movement ideas, phrasing, choreography, and larger structures interact with music. That’s not just in ballet. There are other forms of dance where that is incredibly important as well. I’m often drawn especially to those forms of dance, like flamenco, for example, where essentially the two elements are in direct conversation. In fact, the dancer and the musician are often facing each other and responding to each other very directly. In Indian classical dance, the way the body moves is an illustration of and response to the music. Often there is vocal music, an extra layer of sound, as well. I’m really interested in these dynamics. I am also really interested in freedom on stage. It’s really something that I really respond to and write about and am interested in exploring, is how dancers are not just illustrating something, but how they are embodying and transcending the set narrative. How they are bringing themselves and their experience and drawing outside of the lines, which is why I love dancers who are not just precise, but who are also interesting. Dancers where I can see their minds working. These are just two of many values I uphold in dance. Another one, which is something negative, is that I don’t love choreography that depends on men manipulating women’s bodies a lot for dramatic value.

EB: In the context of partnering?

MH: In the context of partnering, yeah. I think that’s one thing that ballet has developed to a huge extent, but without thinking about what that kind of physical manipulation is saying. People ignore the subtext of that manipulation and use it as a way to impress or show flexibility or something like that. 

What are your artistic values? Can you name one?

EB: Just one? 

MH: Can you start with one?

EB:  Well, I wonder because I studied ballet for so many years and I know what things are supposed to look like.

MH: I think this is a point of disagreement between us

EB: Yes Marina and I often disagree! In the best of ways! This may sound contradictory, that because I know how a step is carried out, that I don’t necessarily need a dancer to perform it in the most technically accurate way, the way a step is meant to look. I actually think my background has freed up my ability to observe. I am similar to you, in that I’m more interested in approach and interpretation than perfection. I actually think perfection can be quite boring. There are certain dancers we talk about who are maybe timid in attempting interpretation because they’re focused on looking a certain way. A big thing for me is I often become quite infuriated if I can’t distinguish a dance or deduce what’s particular about their approach. When they’re dancing the steps, but it doesn’t read in any particular way. I find it infuriating, because so much about watching dance is finding those particularities. If I can’t find them, I get annoyed. 

MH: But also, because you study ballet, you pay more attention than I do to things like a dancer’s feet. In a way I don’t care that much about a dancer having a perfect feet. 

EB: But you notice turnout more than I do.

MG: I do notice. I just assume people have turnout. It’s one of those things you can’t unsee. When someone shows you something, it shows you a dancer. It’s like, Look they’re so turned in! Once you see that you can never unsee it. And it translates to every other dancer as well. You just look for their turnout.

EB: There are few photos I’ve seen of dancers in leaps and more often than not, their front leg is completely turned in. So, I don’t know. People should be working harder on their turnout.

What does your profession of dance writing look like today? What does your portfolio of writing look like?

MH: You’re the next chapter of this with CULTUREBOT. You know what has been, what has to happen now, and what is happening in cultural criticism. When I was working at The New Yorker, and Joan was the dance critic there, there were dance critics who had jobs at newspapers and magazines. And so there was a vague notion that if you stayed in the business long enough, maybe one day that would be you. But I think I am the first generation who discovered very quickly that that was not going to be the case, because all those jobs just quickly disappeared. So I, like all other dance writers, am a freelancer. I write for different publications, and I do different things for each of these publications. I’ve had to learn to be nimble and develop different voices for those different publications.

For The Times, I do Features, Q and A’s, and profiles. For those pieces, I channel a newspaper style mindset. They’re usually 1500 words or fewer, so I have to be direct and succinct. Then, for The Hudson Review, I have this space for longform pieces, which are reviews that are around 3500 words about more than a singular piece. For these pieces, I get to reflect about different types of dance, or different dances within the same choreographer’s repertoire, or however I want to put them together. But it’s all about associations: reflections between one piece of work and another, or what a season felt like. I also post on social media, which I really, I quite like because I can go to a performance and then have an immediate, very kind of spontaneous reaction to what I’ve seen, like what you started our chat quoting. It’s simply a response like This is what I saw without having to really do research. In this day and age, that’s just what you have to do, and these approaches inform each other. One thing is not divorced from another. The short reviews are also the first draft for the longer reviews. They’re my first impression, and they go into the soup that ends up in a longer piece. Or when I wrote about a new Martha Graham biography [for The New York Review of Books], I read all the previously published Martha Graham biographies. It was incredibly interesting to dig into many, many different sources about one subject. It makes it richer. I also wrote a biography and I spent years researching, spending time in the studio, watching ballets by this person. That was also yet another much deeper arc in considering someone’s career and artistic choices and character. So it all feeds. They all feed each other.

EB: And you write a Substack?

MH: I eventually put everything on my Substack because it seems useful to have a singular location for all my work. 

EB: And with Instagram, those captions have almost replaced what would have been 1000 word reviews after the fact?

MH: Right, because now I save the bigger ideas for The Hudson Review.

EB: When you were writing 1000 word reviews for publications, and being edited, what was the experience like? I mean, what was it like to be edited on a piece entirely based on your impressions?

MH: Editing can be really useful and it can be difficult. It depends on your relationship with the editor and their priorities and your priorities, but I learned a lot from writing 1000 word reviews. I taught myself about my taste by writing those reviews. When I started out, I would stay up till like four in the morning. Often, you know, just to get my thoughts on paper. And that was amazing training.

EB: You must have also learned the art of recording while watching?

MH: Yes, I take copious notes. Do you take notes?

EB: Yes, but what’s the content of your notes? I often just write down descriptions that sort of remind me of a thought about something that’s happened, or the name of a step or a color of a costume. Whatever helps to render an impression.

MH:  When I watch dance, I have a stream of consciousness going on in my head. I think that’s why I write about dance, because I don’t have that when I go to the opera or when I hear a symphony. There’s something uniquely stimulating for me about going to see dance, and so my notes in the dark are a mixture of words that came to me because of what I was looking at at that moment, or a note about the music, or like you said, the color of a costume or sequence or a series of steps. Some critics have amazing memories, like Alistair Macaulay, the longtime critic at The Times. He has this recall, which is just phenomenal. He can describe a sequence of steps that he saw 30 years ago. And I have the opposite kind of memory, which is, I remember the end. I remember more than the end, but it’s hard to reconstruct everything that happened between the beginning and the end. But with my notes, I find that I can completely recall the experience. I can go back and relive what I saw moment by moment, especially if I listen to the music as well. For those of us who are not as gifted in the memory department, I think notes are really, really helpful.

EB: How did you come to take interest in other forms of dance? 

MH: Just one last thought from the last question is that actually what matters most are the details. It’s not just an overarching feeling you had. It’s that detail, and those details are the things that make one performance more interesting than another performance, or one dance more interesting than another dance. It’s always these particular things, that one thing, and you and you can so easily forget that one thing unless you write it down.

How did I get interested in other forms of dance? I just started to see everything when I started getting interested in dance. I started writing and I volunteered to write for the “Goings On” section about town at The New Yorker. I think they needed someone, and that gave me an entry to a huge cross section of what was going on at the time. This was when the “Goings On” section about dance was a whole page, so we had to see an enormous amount of dance. So I saw everything. I saw modern dance, I saw downtown dance, I saw flamenco, I saw, you know, everything that I could. So that was an education right there. And then I also audited some classes at Columbia, taught by Lynn Garafola. That was a second education. I felt like I needed some chops. So, both of those opportunities opened up my world. 

EB: How do you choose what you want to focus on for your feature pieces? Do you seem them as part of a larger project? 

MH: There are several of us who write features for The Times, and we all have things that interest us. Brian Siebert wrote a huge book about tap. Siobhan Burke is really interested in downtown dance. We all have certain areas that we’re drawn to. But at the same time, I write about a lot of different things. I was recently in Denmark, and so I wrote a piece about Bournonville. I really am interested in the work of Jodi Melnek. I wrote about the piece she did about a Clarice Le Spector book. I thought that was an interesting combination and I wanted to write about it. So it’s really about something that sparks. I never pitch a story that is something that I’m not really interested in. There’s such little space anyway, so you might as well write about the things that you’re really interested in. My last piece for The Times was about Georgian dance, because I love dance traditions with interesting histories that don’t get enough space.

EB: That seemed quite fun to watch. I remember reading a piece that you wrote in The Nation in 2008 about Jerome Robbins. It was specifically about Dances at a Gathering, which is one of his most famous ballets. It’s an hour long ballet to Chopin. I was amazed by the last sentence where you recount the experience of walking out of the theater and onto the plaza of Lincoln Center. It felt so unlike your work now. 

MH: Oh!

EB: In an enchanting and interesting way. I think you’re one of the critics I know who is more cautious about including yourself in the work. What are your thoughts on the role of self and criticism?

MH: Hmm, it’s interesting because my biography of Ratmansky has a lot of me in it, because the experience of writing it and doing the research was in itself, so interesting and felt relevant to telling the story. I’m not averse to sparingly mentioning your relationship to that piece of you know, of music or choreography, if it seems relevant. I don’t know. How do you feel about first person?

EB: I’m quite in favor. I enjoy using the acknowledgement of the self viewing because, I think it goes back to values, and I’m interested in thinking about why something impressed upon me in a certain way. 

MH: I think one positive thing about using the first person is that you are acknowledging the fact that it is a subjective experience, and that’s something that I actually think is important. I do believe very strongly in my taste, but I know that it’s subjective. Both things are true at the same time. I also think using the first person is also an admission of a certain amount of vulnerability. You are affected by art, right? It’s not a cold, distant thing. When something moves you or creates an atmosphere, that’s a real experience of art. So it’s worth noting. I think.

EB: Not even that long ago, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the George Balanchine Trust, which is the organization that exists to uphold the legacy of Balanchine’s work, didn’t allow any footage of Balanchine’s ballets on the internet. I remember being in high school and finding bootleg footage and bookmarking it and hoping they wouldn’t take it down. 

MH: We’re all like pirates. All dance lovers are pirates. Like any bit of footage you find, you download immediately.

EB: The videos would always have these weird titles so no one would guess what it was. They’d be something like “The ballet to Gershwin music from XYZ year.” But, this is no longer the case!  

The Trust must have changed their rules because City Ballet has become quite robust in their social media presence, and most recently I saw they have a new video series called “Favorite Phase,” where they have dancers demonstrate their favorite movement form a particular ballet and then City Ballet collaborates with the dancer’s personal instagram when they publish it. 

I hate discussions of how social media changed things. I find it rather facile, but New York City Ballet is an interesting example, because their social media strategy seems to be so dancer-focused. 

MH: City Ballet is a little different, because they curate their own social media very strenuously, and they put out beautiful videos. ABT maybe doesn’t publish that much material but they encourage their dancers to post things. I think it’s good for the dancers and it’s good for the company. The audience is able to develop a relationship with this or that dancer, which may encourage them to go see a performance when a particular dancer is performing. The dancers now also put out their own videos, and none of that was true before. I think it’s given the dancers agency. They’re now all professionals, not just of dancing but also of marketing and their own artistic output. There are negative aspects as well, of course. It disfavors dancers who aren’t interested in this kind of promotion. It doesn’t mean they’re not as talented as those who are interested in it. I recently interviewed Isabella Boylston, principal dancer at ABT, who told me that she makes more money off of her Instagram account than she does as a dancer. That really puts things in perspective. Both that dancer salaries are low, and that the potential for making money on these things, if you curate it well, is enormous. And of course, they do it. I mean, why would they not do it? They have short careers. They don’t make that much money. And yet, even Isabella acknowledged this, it takes up a lot of time and creative energy to be constantly coming up with new content. 

EB: Do you think this dancer-focus approach has changed the viewing experience of the corps? Are they less a connected uint and more these many individual agents? 

MH:  I think it’s changed the viewing experience in the sense that people seek out particular dancers. 

EB: How do you think, stylistically, City Ballet has changed over the years? 

MH: Oh, wow. Just a small question. It has changed. It has always been in a state of change, even during when Balanchine was alive. In the time that I’ve watched the company, I’ve seen the big transition between Peter Martin’s and the post Peter Martin’s years. I’ve also seen the transition between the company I was seeing when I first started to really intensively look at ballet, which was really the work of Balanchine and Robbins, to a company with a lot of new choreography being made. What came first, Justin Peck or Ratmansky? I think it was Ratmansky. There was this feeling that there is a new voice that is not Balanchine or Robbins. It’s very different, but it’s interesting, and it’s individual. There was a feeling that something new was happening. Then I think after that it was that Justin Peck started to make ballets. And so there was like City Ballet going along and there was still these amazing original ballets like Concerto Barocco, but now there was actually some new stuff to look forward to. That has been a big change. There’s excitement about every season. And it’s not just Peck and Ratmansky, it’s that a few anchor talents brings out talent everywhere, because people are inspired and move in a different direction. It makes the whole field more fertile.

EB: Last question! Do you ever feel you can turn your critical eye off? 

MH: No. 

EB: Okay. Actual last question. Is there a particular moving performance that you remember? 

MH: Oh gosh, I mean, there’s so many. Maybe a Wendy Whalen or Alina Cojocaru? There was a two day period where Alina Cojocaru and Natalia Osipova both danced Giselle back to back. You couldn’t believe how powerful both of them were and how different they were from each other. But even more recently, I saw Swan Lake with Catherine Hurlin one day and Chloe Misseldine the next day.  These two dancers were so extraordinary, so inward and so in control of the material, and so alive on stage. It was the same thing, but the performances were vastly different. I simply felt lucky to be there.

EB: Though Catherine is quite outward. 

MH: Yes she’s the opposite. 

PHOTO BY JG DBRAY

Maia Sauer: It feels worth mentioning that we’re having this conversation right now on the edge of Herbert Von King Park on a particularly busy afternoon. As we watch people catch up and linger on picnic blankets, I’m already considering the dynamics of watching and going unseen that you contend with in Mouthpiece. What inspired this frame?

Sam Kann: So I had just seen “Temporary Boyfriend” by Niall Harris and Malcolm X Betts and was thinking about identity in dance and in the body. I was reflecting on previous dance work that I’d made, where I was kind of following this postmodern thread of the “neutral” body—like, yes, we could have a Black man and a white cis lesbian on stage, but we’re pretending that everyone is the same and not paying attention to how these bodies are seen in different ways, socially. “Temporary Boyfriend” is a piece that could only have been made by two Black gay men. I was interested in this kind of dancemaking rooted in identity, perception, and perception of identity.

That’s what led me to want to work with Chloë [Engel], because we share a lot of identities. We have similarities with regard to gender queerness, we’re white, and we’re both from Connecticut. There was a lot of overlap, some more and some less superficial. We’re of fairly similar height, we have similar-sized boobs. There was this way of acting as a double for each other. Within that, I saw the opportunity to make a dance about how bodies like ours are seen and flipping or subverting that.

I think this piece has been a coming-together of my film and dance training. So much of my writing for film has been more explicitly rooted in my identity and experiences, but I think in dance, for some reason, that’s less how I’ve thought about making. But everyone has a body and is being watched, so the ways that you’re seen outside of the theater will still clearly show up. So how do we pay attention to that and then fuck with it? 

MS: I’d love to hear more about the duet structure you’ve chosen. You’ve mentioned this doubling or mirroring effect that you lean into and subvert at different times, but what are some of the other challenges or unexpected joys of the duet?

SK: So much of this dance is thinking about distance: between two people and between the inside and outside of one person. Something great about the duet form is that we can both be totally separate and the same person. Often, I feel like Chloë represents, or has become in this show, an inside version of my outside. Because we also look a bit similar, we’re allowed, I think, maximum visual closeness. And then we can be totally in our own worlds, too. That merging and overlap is exciting.

The challenge of the duet—and it’s mostly just a challenge of being in your own work— is that it’s hard to see what’s happening in real time. We’re not really looking at each other for a lot of the dance. A lot of it occurs in separate dimensions.

MS: I know you’ve been working with characters. From the roster of roles you’re moving between, how did you decide which ones made the cut?

Photo by Jenna MaslechkoSK: Until a few weeks ago, I was primarily moving through this Diva character. Now, as of only recently, I’m mostly in this Businessman character we call Jaw. I found with the Diva, I didn’t really want to be in beauty mode, ultimately. It wasn’t as interesting to me. I like being sort of disgusting with Jaw. I think there’s something really exciting about performing as hyper-masculine, given the distance between my gender presentation as I walk around the street and that hyper-masculinity. That distance felt a little bit funnier and richer to me than going in the Diva direction.

A lot of the other characters have become more and more blurry, in a way that has emphasized this internal-external idea. Chloë’s characters have kind of blurred into “magician” and “id.” Chloë has become more of the real,  internal self, while I’ve become more of the external, presentational self.

MS: Can you talk about how stage design and costumes have played into the internal and external shaping of the characters?

SK: Yeah, one of the very first things we had were costumes. We had this breakthrough in the piece as we prepared to perform the initial version for Plex Arts Festival in Vermont. I wanted to try a score with marshmallow fluff oozing out of my mouth. We were rehearsing on my roof, and I was like, hold on, give me a sec. I went inside and put on suit pants and this sort of slinky shirt, and it immediately helped embody the character and build Jaw’s world. Costumes are so amazing for giving you permission to go to a character’s extreme. 

The set has been a really fun journey, as well. There’s a repeated refrain in the piece when I walk onstage, which came from a real conversation that Chloë and I had about the dynamic of walking into a room and having everybody be like, oh my God, I need to know that person—our fantasies of positive social perception. That conversation led to me wanting a fantasy room onstage, and to break down that room as the body is also breaking down. The room itself became part of the exploration of the internal and external, and the fictional constructions of both.

The other big inspiration for this set was thinking about David Lynch’s Red Room in Twin Peaks and the Red Room-esque place in Mulholland Drive. I was thinking about dreams and dream dramatizations and how I could create a room that felt both familiar and really strange. An imaginary place that you’ve seen before.

MS: How else have your experiences as a filmmaker influenced your dancemaking?

SK: For a long time, I saw dance and film as separate mediums for me. Then I had a conversation with the playwright, Amanda Horowitz, who trained as a sculptor. We were talking about not necessarily putting dance and film together, but about a combined lens that I could use to view my own process across mediums. That freedom has been really fun and exciting to explore.

I think people hear dance-film and they’re like, oh you’ll project a video in your dance or you’ll have a dance moment in your film. But I’m realizing it’s not necessarily about literally putting the medium in any single work. It’s about the lens I use.

With Mouthpiece, I’m drawing from cinema’s use of images. The rehearsal process included a lot of improvisation, and at the end of each score, I’d take the still images that I liked—like the cinematography or mise en scène of the space. I was basically film editing: rearranging, like: What if we tried this over here, because it needs a bit more space… I was talking to a friend recently about David Lynch and how his movies aren’t just like dream sequences, but they themselves are dreams. I’ve been trying to think about that in dance, as well.

MS: The word dreamscape brings up the question of what’s authentic versus imagined or unreal. How do you relate to the idea of authenticity?

SK: There’s this quote about how any drag queen knows that sometimes two wigs are better than one for getting to your true self. I think artmaking is a way to get at authenticity through the extreme. Mouthpiece was rooted in improvisation, which can feel authentic just because it’s unplanned. But the crafting, choreographing process has been about how to maintain that initial authenticity, to make something that feels real at every moment while also thinking about the magic trick we’re trying to pull off on the whole. 

I was texting my friend Neva the other day, and they were like: the audience just wants the truth. I think this dance is about showing the inauthentic in order to reveal the authentic and play on its spectrum.

MS: Because sometimes the inauthentic has a truth somewhere in its expression, right?

SK: —and is also ridiculous and laughable! This is also part of me playing a high-powered businessman: the distance between how I’m typically seen and who I’m playing onstage reveals the in-authenticity.

I guess another thing I’ve been thinking about is the breakdown in dance making. Dance is such a great vehicle for falling apart. That’s actually a score that we used a lot at the beginning of this process—”fall apart.” It’s honestly hard for me to make dances where the whole piece is not only falling apart. The crux, for me, becomes constructing the choreographic arc of a piece solid enough to set up an eventual crumbling. Buildup builds desperation, and there’s an authenticity to desperation, I think.

MS: I’ve heard you mention that “there’s nowhere to hide” as a performer in Mouthpiece—that the stakes of this dance feel different than in previous work you’ve made.

SK: Well, I guess it comes back to the identity stuff. There have been a couple of moments making this piece where I’m like: Oh, I really want to have dreamy audio, and somebody has to say it…I guess it has to be me! I’ve had feelings where I know what the dance needs and then realizing I have to be the one to figure it out. It’s just me and Chloë up there. I’ve had to encourage myself as a performer into things that are scary, because the dance needs it.

So there’s nowhere to hide there, but also in the sense that the dance is about the internal world and all that comes with it—the sex and violence—and about revealing the distance between my personal internal and external. So it feels vulnerable in that way. It’s also kind of a harsh dance. There’s sappy, vulnerable voice overs, but also there’s a gunshot. It’s revealing both the soft, embarrassing parts and the violent, intense parts.

MS: Were there any other images or references that were useful as you played with choreographing these soft and harsh tones?

SK: A big one was the book Ice by Anna Kavan. I was thinking about it again today. It’s this slipstream sci-fi book loosely about this guy who’s on a planet where a sheet of ice is slowly taking over. He’s trying to find this girl he’s in love with, but she isn’t that into him. There’s this other guy who’s sort of her husband but sometimes her captor and sometimes the king. These characters, none of whom have names, are all slightly different permutations of themselves. That was exciting to me as a model for character slippage, as well as for the intense and dark intermingling with a softer dreamscape. 

MS: Knowing that Mouthpiece has been performed as an excerpt at the Brick Theater already, do you have any hopes or curiosities about how this full run will go?

SK: Doing an excerpt is hard, because I’m so interested in the journey, you know, the slow dancing in all its detail and build up. It’s like listening to a really long song that repeats and not noticing you’re going to a new place until you’re in the new place. So I’m excited about this full version to really feel the progression. To really fall apart.

Mouthpiece by Sam Kann
Performed by Sam Kann & Chloë Engel
Life World – May 14, 15
Lighting by Shana Crawford
Set support by Lydia Kern
Special effects by Hilary Brown-Istrefi
Sound by Jack Herscowitz
Sound and lighting support by Jeremy Wiles-Young and Ava Renz

In their hysterically provocative and slyly passionate “solo” performance piece, Can I Be Frank?, writer and star Morgan Bassichis unearths the past. Combining their own writing with works by queer comedian, performance artist, and activist Frank Maya, Bassichis conducts a riotous metatheatrical séance for the assembled. Ahead of Frank’s return to SoHo Playhouse for a remount run (May 21 – June 27), I connected with Morgan Bassichis and director Sam Pinkleton to talk the superpower of telling the truth, the dangers of nostalgia, and the political importance of a really, really good time.

The following interview has been edited for both length and clarity.

Ethan Karas: With remounts of shows, when you’re bringing it back or rehearsing it, it’s almost like an excavation, like you’re going back to the choices you’ve made or the text that you’ve written. And Can I Be Frank? is also, as a show, an excavation, revealing an artist and an activist the audience isn’t potentially familiar with. Are there things over this past year that you’re uncovering as you start to return to the material?

Morgan Bassichis: Well, it’s a revisiting of a show that he did in 1987, which his friends also revisited at his memorial in 1995. So there’s this ongoing queer tradition of revisiting, reinterpreting, re-performing, reimagining performances that happened. Two years ago, we did it at La MaMa, and then we did it again last summer [at Soho Playhouse], so it feels like the revisiting itself is the work, and then trying to get really present and telling the truth about what’s going on now. I’m excited to see what iteration of it shows up. The revisiting itself is the thing.

Sam Pinkleton: Morgan has a superpower of not being able to tell a lie, which means that the show is constantly existing in whatever context it’s in- and that changes daily, and it did during the [prior] runs. There were performances that just felt heavier or lighter or more angry. Speaking for myself, I’m very excited about seeing how it’s shaped differently because of Morgan’s aliveness with the people in the room on the night that they do it.

MB: Sam and I both share a kind of love of endless refinement. We will be open to whatever opportunities there are to sharpen and discover new things.

EK: How do you both build the container to have it feel structured enough that we’re going on this ride, but also loose enough that there is that ability to adapt?

MB: That was something I really feel Sam brought to the process because I maybe go too far to the extreme of, “Every night is its own night,” and working with Sam was really my first experience of being… I was kind of like, “I’ll figure it out when we get on stage,” and Sam was like, “No, let’s actually rehearse it and actually figure it out beforehand.” The theatre of it all was a nice combo with my “Every night is my first night on Earth” kind of feeling. 

SP: Especially bringing it to Soho Playhouse last year, there was a period where we were like, “Oh, it’s okay if we say that it’s a show.” It’s okay that there is actually a very clear structure. One of the secrets of the show, I think, is that it’s just an exquisite piece of playwriting, and that is not an accident, and that’s not figuring it out in the moment. But it took a weird combination of courage and surrender from both of us to embrace that there was a thing there that could be repeated, as opposed to a nightly social experiment.

EK: That experiment, has it changed from the audiences that you’re getting at La MaMa to the audiences you’re getting at Soho Playhouse to the audiences for the return to Soho Playhouse when there’s more familiarity with the work? Have there been shifts in how that experience has impacted people?

MB: I definitely went from the beginning of knowing every single person in the audience, and performing for the fifty people I’ve known for a million years, to mostly being people I don’t know in the audience, which is a really fun task and adventure, and the thing you want. You want it to go beyond the people you know. Hopefully, one of these people this time will have a lot of money.

EK: That is always the hope. (laughs)

MB: We’re screening for that…

SP: Or access to cosmetic surgery. 

EK: With shows about queer history, I feel sometimes like I’m pressed up against a glass in a museum exhibit. It’s hard for me sometimes to feel the heat of the thing because my own experience of queerness feels so vastly removed from what someone like Frank Maya is going through, or the art that they’re making, or the context that they’re making it in. But also, you’re working in a theatrical medium that feels like a very live way to break through that glass barrier. When you were initially constructing this show and in the time since, is that distance something that you’re thinking about?

SP: I think there’s no substitute for excellence, and Frank wrote these amazing monologues that Morgan has put real time into embodying with specificity. Morgan has a way of talking directly to the audience that is completely disarming, and of creating intimacy with strangers that I think can make strangers be like, “Wait, do we know each other?” And that unlocks openness and a vulnerability in people that allows them to actually go on this journey and feel like they not only know Morgan, but that they also knew Frank. I think that is a major magic trick of the show that is almost entirely credited to Morgan’s uniqueness as a performer.

EK: Morgan, do you feel like that truth-telling ability is what allows entrance for that level of intimacy with an audience?

MB: I have an allergy to feeling like this is pretend or something. I wanna really believe everything that’s going on. I don’t want people to feel like, “We get to sit back and watch a show.” I wanna be like, “We’re having a conversation right now.” When I get lost in what the show is and who’s in the audience, Sam’s always like, “Just talk to the audience.

That’s what you do. Just talk to the audience.” I think I also have another allergy to a kind of nostalgia that you [Ethan] described that says, “Go look through the glass, and you’re not a part of this,” or “I’ll describe a party and be like, ‘It was so fun.'” That’s a boring experience for people, you know? I want to create a thing that we’re doing together right now, rather than a thing I’m telling you about that already happened. Part of the point of the show is that Frank wanted to get laid and get famous, just like we all do right now.

EK: There is both an incredible amount of artifice in that it is Morgan as Frank. But also, the awareness built into the show dissolves it from feeling artificial. 

MB: One of the things we share is a deep reverence for that period of downtown East Village performance and its intersection with activism and counterculture, and also an allergy to nostalgia and sentimentality. 

EK: What was that initial spark for you about that time period, about that culture?

SP: Part of it is just that great work was happening. My favorite art of all time came out of downtown New York City from 1981 to 1994, and that includes work that is explicitly political and angry, and it also includes the work of the B-52s and the Talking Heads, just like joyous stuff.

I’m obsessed with the Pyramid Club. I’m obsessed with the whole story of going out dancing in contrast to everything else that was happening. 

It’s a period of imagination that feels like it could only have happened in such a specific context, and that context isn’t just AIDS. That context is also about the cost of living, about community, and about not having technology. I don’t think it’s as simple as, “everyone was dying, so they made great art.” That feels awful, actually. A thing that we both love about Frank is that he was like, “Sure, sure. Yes, all of that, and like, I want to be famous and get laid. And can’t I still talk about that even though all of this other stuff?”

MB: We kind of can’t overstate the impact of that period of art and performance on dominant culture now. So many of those aesthetics, experiments, and genre intersections are now normal and taken for granted. Whether it’s about certain kinds of drag and gender fuck, or literally what was happening in the late ’80s, which was people started talking. And that’s his show in the 1970s called Frank Maya Talks, and this was the era of Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, and Holly Hughes, and the birth of the kind of “solo talker” which I think is really what’s underneath the kind of stand-up mania that we are living inside of now.

What’s really important for me is to acknowledge that what we do now comes from that time, it’s made possible by that time and by a lot of people who died and whose work did not get recognized and who labored under very different conditions, and to resist the kind of amnesia and gentrification of that time that can happen. You look at things, and you’re like, “Wait, but you know we’re in a lineage here.”

SP: Both in our own ways and in the work we make together, I kind of resist the notion of originality period. With Oh, Mary! even, I’m like, “Cole [Escola] is a super distinct voice, and we’ve done something really specific, and let me draw a line through fifty plus years of queer performance to tell you how this happened.” Have we put a stamp on it that only we could do? Totally. But nothing is new, and I feel like those guys knew that, too. It’s part of why I don’t get bored doing what I do. That kind of cultural magpie work is more interesting to me than being like, “I’m a visionary genius who created something out of a white room.” Fuck that. That’s not real.

MB: And it’s very, very straight white male, obviously. This idea that anything would ever be original is such a deeply fucked up idea. The reason that we know about Frank, that I know about Frank, is because of the people who were around him, his loved ones who cared for his archives and cared for his memory and talk about him. So it’s not only about recognizing the lineage of artists in that time, but also the lineage of the loved ones around them, and the audiences that make it possible for us to know about them. Even when there’s one person on stage, obviously, there’s never just one person on stage, it’s always a collective act. So, by talking about history, by rooting us in lineage, we’re refusing the idea of both originality and individuality.

EK: Which feels like part of that lineage of queer art. You’ve touched on it for a second, how has working on this show affected the work that you’re making outside of it?

SP: I will again talk about Morgan like they’re not here. Morgan sets an incredibly high bar for intelligence and specificity and not being bullshit-y. I live a lot of my life in a commercial theater space. Like, I work on Broadway. 

MB: You heard that, Ethan?

SP: I don’t know if you guys have heard of that. (laughs)

MB: Make sure to mention that.

EK: That’s the pull quote right there, yeah.

SP: Morgan sets such a high bar for like, “Why the fuck would we ever make performance and also ask people to give their night and their money to a performance?” It has been a service to me to make the show and make the show the way we have, because it has given me a sense of accountability in my other more- for lack of a better word- mainstream work. It doesn’t mean that I always necessarily pass that test. Sometimes it actually just means that I feel terrible about myself. But there’s a way that this show and the process of making this show, for me, completely separate from the reception of it or the thing that we’ve made, has been a bit of a lightning rod of, pardon the cliché, “Why We Do It.” I love making big stuff. I love working on Broadway. And a thing that I, on the best days, can try to do in these spaces that I have access to is challenge a room much more than I might were I not exposed to Morgan’s work and brain.

MB: I’ve really spent the past 13 years in more of art/performance art spaces, and getting to work with Sam has been kind of a boot camp in what it means to make theater. Which is why I initially came to New York, but didn’t quite figure out how to be a part of that world. Getting to work with Sam has really deepened my respect for theater-making, and for the rigor of theater-making. Sam said something to me early on that was like, “First and foremost, we have to make an entertaining, amazing night of theater for people.” All the politics, the history…all of that is secondary to our first goal, which is to make a really entertaining night of theater. That is a needle to thread constantly that keeps us accountable to not resting on nostalgia or sentimentality or anything like that.

EK: There’s that tension of entertainment in turbulent times, which was happening then [in the 80s] and is happening now. “Entertainment” can become a bit of a dirty word, in that it implies a certain artificiality, or a certain sentimentality, or nostalgia, or a smoothing over of things. For both of you, what does entertainment mean to you, and why is it so important?

MB: The false dichotomy between entertainment and political work is something…obviously, there’s a lineage of people who are like, “No.” Entertainment itself can be deeply political, transformative, and boundary-breaking in lots of ways. So to me, it’s like a reclamation of the word entertainer, not as a slur, but as a modality. 

SP: I have such fatigue from the notion of “turbulent times performance.” I think in theater at least, we’re living through an epidemic of work that you feel like you should like but actually don’t because it’s boring, but it’s important, so you need to. I so thoroughly reject the notion that we come to performance to suffer. I suffer just fine all day. We are all actively living through horrors all day. The thing that I wanna do, whether it’s with Morgan’s show or whether it’s with Annie, is to be like, “You made it to the end of the day. Congratulations. Have a nice time.” And that doesn’t mean that we have to present you with something that’s brain-dead. And in fact, I think the fucking Trojan horse opportunity that we all have as performance makers is to make something that is a delight, that is entertaining, and that doesn’t deny the reality that we’re all living in. I have absolutely no patience for, “I wanna bring you here to feel bad.” Read The Atlantic. You don’t have to put pants on for that. You’re gonna pay money to go to the theater to feel awful about something that you already know about? That is crazy to me. Call me a fucking entertainer. I would so much rather be an entertainer than an artist right now.

MB: “Read The Atlantic.” That’s another good pull quote for you, Ethan. (laughs)

SP: We have to think about what the form can do. We have to think about why we chose this form.

MB: As someone who is really committed to organizing…[there is] a politically suspect logic that says feeling bad leads people towards being more active. It’s actually not true. Toni Cade Bambara says this important quote, which I say over and over again: “The goal of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” Whether it is a protest or whether it is a play, I wanna make joining this thing irresistible and something people want to join. The idea that you would come and I would lecture you and tell you how bad you are and how good I am is the recipe for people saying, “I do not wanna be part of that.” So, yes to everything about entertainment for its own sake, and also, if you are interested in propaganda and in recruiting people to feel a part of something bigger, you wanna give them a good time.

EK: What is the revolution that you’re trying to make irresistible? What are the things that you’re longing for, whether in art or in the world at large?

MB: To me, it’s not vague or abstract, and I think vagueness and abstraction are where good politics and good art go to die. We have to do every single thing we can to stop our government from sending billions of dollars to massacre the people of Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon. That is front of mind for me at all times. That’s not the only crisis going on, but it certainly is a defining crisis of our moment when we look back and say, “What did you do?” People always like to think of themselves, “Oh, if I were in the Holocaust, I know I’d be hiding those Jews. If I were in the civil rights movement, I’d be on that bridge, I’d be on that bus. If I were in the late ’80s, I’d be in the ACT UP meeting.” Cool. Okay. So let’s talk about what’s happening right now. Everyone’s a radical for something that already passed.

My work is also about normalizing saying we need to stop sending weapons to bomb the people of the Middle East. That’s also a through line in my work that doesn’t get flattened. It’s always there. I want people to go be like, “Oh, that’s normal now. Now we all say that.”

SP: A huge part of what lights me up about working with Morgan is their insistence on specificity, which they just demonstrated. There’s a coziness of politics on Broadway especially that is people screaming about things that we all fundamentally agree on, which I find to be absolutely hilarious. I do think that when we get the Broadway musical that’s like, “Actually, you know what’s bad? The extermination of Palestinians,” then we’re maybe onto something. 

I’m really obsessed with people learning from the ancestors in a way that isn’t nostalgic or gooey, that’s toothy. Part of that is acknowledging the inevitability of death, which has its own set of politics. I look to Morgan, separate from our collaboration, separate from our identity as artists or entertainers, as a North Star politically, always. Sometimes behind their back, I’m like, “I don’t know how to feel about this because I’m too stupid and busy! Okay, what’s Morgan caring about?” And that is the gift of an organizer, but it’s especially the gift of an organizer with a sense of humor, which does not describe many organizers.

MB: A dear friend who is now an ancestor- passed on over the past year: Miss Major, a legendary Black trans activist. If you knew her, you would know she loved to have a good time, loved to make a joke, and loved to get laid. And that was the secret sauce of her, as of so many good organizers. It’s not what we’re up against, but what we want. You can only be up against something for so long until you say, “But what are we actually moving towards?” A good organizer gives you a taste of the world to come. So that’s what she did, she was like, “Let’s talk about boys while the world is trying to destroy us.”

Morgan Bassichis is a writer and performer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker and “I think an actor but hasn’t been in anything” by their father. Morgan’s performances have been presented by MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum, New Museum, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Danspace Project. Recent shows include A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023) and Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022). They are the author of The Odd Years and co-editor of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Morgan edited and wrote the introduction for the 2019 Nightboat Books reprint of the 1977 cult classic, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, written by Larry Mitchell and illustrated by Ned Asta. An exhibition of Morgan’s work, More Little Ditties, was co-presented in 2023 by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Morgan won a 2026 Obie Award for writing Can I Be Frank?.

Sam Pinkleton is a Tony, Obie, and Drama League Award–winning director. His work for the stage includes the current Broadway revival The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54; Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!; Josh Sharp’s ta-da!; Morgan Bassichis’ Can I Be Frank?; Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick; Untitled DanceShowPartyThing (with Ani Taj for Virgin Voyages); Elizabeth Swados’ Runaways; and deranged revivals of The Wizard of Oz (A.C.T.), Head Over Heels (with Jenny Koons), and La Cage aux Folles (Pasadena Playhouse). As a choreographer, credits include Sondheim’s Here We Are, Jeanine Tesori and David Henry Hwang’s Soft Power, and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Film and TV: “Dying for Sex” and The End (starring Tilda Swinton). Upcoming: the participatory Scottish dance musical Ceilidh.

In a small Indiana town, someone has gone into a high school classroom over the weekend and spray-painted a swastika over pictures of queer people kissing. The school’s journalism teacher, Judith Benson (Colleen Clinton), is determined to investigate and to publish the story in the school’s newspaper, including the name of the culprit. In her opening monologue, she clearly articulates her convictions: Judith is committed to “exposing the truth” with a capital T, as she believes this is the remedy for every ailment in the world. To hear her talk about her student newspaper, you would think she was Woodward or Bernstein of

The time is 2015, a few months after the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex couples’ right to marry. In Erik Gernand’s The Totality of All Things, the small conservative community of Lewiston (population 6405) is meant to stand in for America as a whole, back in a time when average folks holding different political opinions or religious views all got along. We catch a glimpse of this neighborly tolerance early on in the play when Judith joins others for the high school football game. She’s introducing her new teaching assistant, Ms. Carter (played by the excellent Logan Floyd), to some of her co-workers: math teacher Gregg (Joseph Dean Anderson), who is a devout Christian; and DeeAnn (DeAnna Lenhaert), another teacher who quips that Obama is “not really the President because he was born in Kenya.” Gernand sets up these characters like opposing pieces on a chessboard; as the play unfolds, he wants audiences to conclude that both sides are somewhat to blame for our current polarization.

Or maybe it’s really those damn liberals’ fault? In its effort to examine both sides of the ideological spectrum, The Totality of All Things makes a number of false equivalences, arguing that the most effective social cohesion comes from a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. Within minutes of discovering the swastika, the school principal (a talented Rik Walter) immediately points out that the queer images on the wall are “against school board policy,” implying that Judith (who is also the Principal’s ex-wife) started it. This thinking gets elaborated later while sharing a drink with DeeAnn, who reveals how upsetting it is to have this “whole gay marriage thing shoved down our throats” before making a comparison to her anti-abortion stance. The play never digs into the debate further than this, even though one would think someone would point out there is a significant difference between a law allowing two men or two women to marry versus one stripping reproductive rights and bodily autonomy from millions.

In addition to the issues stirred up by the swastika incident, The Totality of All Things also touches upon secularism and Christianity. Again, these are portrayed as opposites–as if no journalists or Leftists go to church, and every Christian is homophobic and pro-life. In one engaging scene, the play also touches upon sexual assault, questioning how we frame the event in our minds and how we weigh the harm in our search for justice. Gregg tells Ms. Carter about a former student athlete accused of rape who later committed suicide, convinced that his accuser lied. “He would never do that,” he tells her passionately. “She ruined his life!” When Ms. Carter asks what happened to the accuser, the victim, Gregg doesn’t know. It’s clear he’s never asked that question before—an illuminating fact for Ms. Carter as well as for the audience.

Student reporter Micah (Cody Jenison) is tasked  with investigating the story, and Judith doesn’t seem to consider what kind of model she is setting when she consciously violates some ethical standards. Further, for all of her declarations of “ally-ship” to the LGBTQ community, she seems surprisingly indifferent to the potential danger she is causing to her reporter, whom she knows is secretly gay. For Judith, pursuing The Truth and setting The Historical record are more important than the lives of actual human beings in front of her.

The Totality of All Things ends in a climax that can be shocking when it occurs, but ultimately feels out of character. Part of this could be Shannon Patterson’s direction: while all of the actors imbue their characters with a relaxed and easy naturalism, the stakes of Gernand’s script feel muted. Where is the urgency? Are Micah or Judith ever truly in danger for pursuing this story? If so, show us (don’t tell us)—make us feel the pressure. Separate from the performance style is the play’s concluding structure. In the play’s final scene, Judith and the Principal are at the school football game. As they summarize what happened to all of the characters in the aftermath, I was surprised that nobody suffered any significant consequences. No regrets, no lasting injuries, no outrage, no real change. For me, this undercuts the stakes of the play as a whole. What, then, was all of this risk for?

There is earnestness to this production that mirrors the principles of Judith. This creative team believes in the transformative power of art, and that if an audience can sit together in a theater to listen to “both sides” debate, that we will emerge with newfound tolerance and understanding for our fellow citizens. Maybe this will be true for some, but my experience is that The Totality of All Things will instead confirm one’s biases.

In Jerome, John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at Playwrights Horizons, avoidance is a matter of survival. Set in rural Arizona in 1993, the play follows Con and Doane, a long-term gay couple who have built a secluded life together in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Grappling with aging, illness, and monotony, the couple opens their relationship to Bruin, who has fled a traumatized San Francisco.

Con and Doane live in Jerome, a ghost town where the once-booming mines have become mining museums. There are phantom explosions no one can explain, long-dead miners still tinkering at night. The three men prefer to keep their pasts quiet. Con and Doane don’t talk about the war. Bruin won’t reveal who he calls at night. They can’t quite face the future either, though: Con is getting sicker. Tethered to the past and terrified of the future, the characters reach for each other in the present. Intimacy persists, even in the darkest moments and the strangest places. 

John Caswell—whom I first met when I took his wonderful playwriting workshop last fall—and I spoke via Zoom in early May. We discussed his childhood in Arizona, the fading historical memory of the AIDS epidemic, writing towards what scares us, and a retreat he once attended where tiny plants grew from stone.

This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.

Annie Rasiel: I love reading the play. I read it in one sitting. I was really enchanted by the setting. What can you tell me about Jerome, Arizona?

John Caswell Jr: Jerome was founded on copper mining, went bust in the 50s, and since then has become this tourist ghost town. There’s a line in the play that says, “Our story is industry, and now our industry is story.” So the town has become a place of lore and legend. It’s a fascinating place. I haven’t been there in probably ten years, and from what I hear, it’s become quite bougie and hipstery. It’s becoming a place that a lot of people like to go.

AR: Can you tell me a little bit more about what inspires you or what first struck you about Jerome? 

JC: Jerome was a place that I visited often as a child. My great grandmother grew up in the Verde Valley region, which is where Jerome is located. She lived in a little town in a double wide on top of a hill called Camp Verde, and we would go and visit her often and take day trips to other towns nearby, like Sedona, Cottonwood, Prescott, Rome, Flagstaff. That area always felt like a second home. And I remember thinking as a child just how extremely weird it was. You can stand in vortexes and absorb energy from the earth. You can choose psychic mediums from a menu off the wall of a crystal shop in Sedona. The landscape itself feels like Mars with the red sandstone rock features. As a kid, it felt like a place that was weirder than I was. And so when I was there, I felt like I could really exist in my own skin, because the place that surrounded me, was one-upping the queerness that I contained and that I wasn’t telling anybody about. It was a place where I really felt at home and like myself. 

AR: A place that’s weirder than I am! 

JC: As a kid who feels really weird, it’s exciting to go somewhere with strange stuff happening all around you.

AR: And then you have these characters who feel like really fully formed people with histories and full lives. How did you find these characters?

JC: Aside from Jerome, the play was inspired by a former convent turned writing retreat outside of Spoleto, Italy, where I wrote a very early draft. At this retreat, we worked in a rehearsal room that was built up against the side of a rock face. One entire wall of the room was completely stone, and the room was very dark. There was very little light. But somehow, from the stone, grew small, unhealthy plants. Despite there being no visible source of water, life was persisting in this dark space. I started thinking a lot about love in times of darkness. I was going through family problems and thinking about what it takes to keep that love alive. Then I started thinking about the space I was in, specifically this crazy room with the rock wall. I started to imagine, if this were a place of residence, who might live here? That’s when the characters started speaking. 

AR: That’s such an incredible image. Though, the neurotic Jew in me is immediately concerned about mold. It sounds damp! 

JC: It was really beautiful.

AR: I’m also interested in the choice to write them as veterans of the Korean War.

JC: Choosing the Korean War as the place in which Con and Doane served was mostly an issue of practicality: when I wanted to set the play, and knowing how old I wanted them to be. The Korean War is a blight on this country—as so many conflicts that we’ve been involved with are—so the idea of these two finding something positive amidst the darkness of war was really appealing to me.

AR: For the first time in my life, I’m writing a play in which a central character is significantly older than I am, and I’m kind of anxious about it—about whether her voice is authentic, whether I’m able to imbue this character with the wisdom of someone who has lived much longer than I have. Did you have that experience writing Con and Doane? What was it like writing a play in which all the characters are older than you?

JC: I’ve done it before with Scene Partners, and I’m doing it now with Jerome. I would say that the process for me is initially writing the character as best as I am able to channel them. Then once I have a collaborator in the actor playing that particular role, I do a lot of talking to them and listening and trying to understand that perspective. Since childhood, I’ve gravitated towards people who are older than I am. Maybe I feel older than I am. I definitely feel an affinity of some sort with people who are older. 

AR: Speaking of age, I think this is my favorite sex scene I’ve ever read in a play. All the talk about logistics feels so joyful and real. Can you talk about that?

JC: I knew that I wanted to write a play about queer people in a rural environment, and I knew that I wanted them to be characters that I haven’t seen on stage, which is older, rural queer men. I wanted to honor their romance and their sexuality, to really put it front and center. We are able to love and to fuck at any stage of life. I didn’t want to shy away from that.

AR: There’s something abject about the body as it’s breaking down, something we want to look away from. I found it exciting that you didn’t do that. I’m also curious about the role of AIDS in the play. The characters never actually say the word AIDS.

JC: I’m writing a play that I wanted to see: a play about gay men existing in the shadow of the AIDS crisis in rural America, and a play that explores not only the impact that AIDS has on bodies, but also the impact that it had on relationships and intimacies and aging, specifically in those who survived the epidemic. The play was also inspired by my own fears surrounding illness and death. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s as a closeted gay kid in Arizona, all I knew of AIDS was what I was told by adults, which is that it would kill anyone who, “chose” to be gay. So for me, love and sex were built on a foundation of extreme fear. I wrote this play as a way of unpacking the stunted relationships that I have to love and sex as an adult as a result of that trauma growing up.

AR: Did you talk to any older queer people who were adults at the time about that experience?

JC: I tried to talk to my drama teacher. I went to school in a place called Gilbert, Arizona, which is a farming suburb in the Phoenix metro area, way on the outskirts. It was a very conservative place, and I knew that this teacher was queer—not because she publicly acknowledged it, but because I was just able to tell somehow. I tried to talk to her about my feelings, but she just couldn’t engage with it. She could have lost her job. I just remember looking in her eyes and seeing the pain and the conflict that she was experiencing internally about wanting to help, but not being able to, because of the potential ramifications. And now it feels like we’re headed back into that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” dynamic in schools, which is frightening. 

AR: And there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths from HIV because of USAID cuts.

JC: It’s horrible. We’re sliding into the past. It’s hard to think about.

AR: There’s a certain level of removal in the play. Con and Doan are isolated. They have their own little world, this cave that they live in, and when they let a third person in, it’s a really big deal. It made me think about the line between peace and avoidance, the ways that, though I am inundated with terrible news all day, I’m ultimately cloistered in New York City in this little bubble. There’s such privilege in tuning out the news, and there’s also risk. It can be dangerous not knowing what’s happening in the world, but it’s also dangerous to get lost in it.

JC: Tuning out can be a mechanism of survival and it can be a mechanism of self destruction. I have a hard time not tuning out. I have to make a conscious effort to check in with the realities of the world, because it is so much to handle. Especially when you’re trying to live in a creative space, there needs to be a balance between knowing what’s going on in the world and also enough space and peace internally in order to process those things and make art about it. My biggest struggle as an artist is finding that balance between engaging with the reality of being human at this crazy time and wanting to turn it all off and live in fantasy.

AR: Your work is a testament to the fact that it’s not either/or, that there’s a third way, because your writing engages so much with the present political moment. Even though the play is set in the past, the AIDS epidemic is still raging.

JC: I think a lot of people are forgetting. I think that there is a huge disremembering of AIDS. I worked at a hotel last year as a part time job—because playwrights don’t make a lot of money—and I was working alongside a young queer woman who was about to graduate high school. I was reading How to Survive a Plague, which is an excellent book about the epidemic. She picked up the book and read the back of it, and asked me, “When was there an AIDS epidemic?” That really shook me. I started thinking about how much time has passed and how much is going on in the world now. It’s easy to miss things when you’re growing up. But it reinforced to me that we aren’t talking about AIDS the way we once did. AIDS is still a huge problem. I think a lot of that has to do with the pain associated with it. For Bruin, the pain and the fear and the paranoia is so intense that he puts his head in the sand. He shuts it all out.

AR: It’s hard to find the balance between remembering and letting it in and letting it inform how you move through the world while also not falling into despair. Were you ever worried, because you don’t explicitly say the word AIDS, that someone might not get it?

JC: I’m not worried about it. If they don’t fully get it, hopefully they will leave and be interested enough to do some research. The play is not about AIDS. It’s not written to educate or to inform. It’s a slice-of-life view of people who are experiencing the epidemic indirectly.

There’s a terrible agitprop version of plays like this, that try to teach us a lesson, but I feel like there are plenty of resources to learn about AIDS. I’m more interested in how people survive in the midst of something so devastating

AR: And that could apply to how people survive as veterans or how queer people survive in rural Arizona in the 90s—

JC: How people just survived Covid! I don’t think a vast majority of the population really understood the terror that queer people felt during AIDS, how it felt when a disease came for you, until Covid came for everyone. And the response was massive. The response unified the world. When AIDS broke, people ignored it for so long. It only affected people whom they viewed as second class citizens, who perhaps deserved what they were getting. Covid was a wake up call for a lot of people, and also, I’m sure, traumatic to a lot of people who had survived the 80s and the 90s.

AR: While none of the characters has AIDS, Con is dying, or at least getting progressively sicker (about which Doane seems to be in denial). How did you approach writing about death?

JC: I’m terrified of death—not so much what happens after death, but the actual process of dying. I’m afraid of pain and suffering. I’m afraid of seeing people that I know and love in pain and suffering. I approached writing death from a place of fear initially, but writing this play has expanded the boundaries in which I think about death. I feel more comfortable pondering my own end now than I did before I started writing this play. It’s been helpful, because I’ve had to deal with it head on. 

AR: Are you drawn to writing about the things that scare you?

JC: It’s the only way, for me. I don’t know if computers still have defragmentation programs, but they used to have these programs that would move all the files around that were all spread out, and put them in the right places, and delete duplicates. I think this all happens automatically now, in the background, but it used to be an actual program you had to run. I think of writing as defragging my brain. It forces me to pick things up, look underneath them, move them around, reorganize them. Writing about things that I’m afraid of is a therapeutic tool. It also can be a destructive tool if you’re not ready, or if you’re writing about it in a way that’s too closely tied to your own experience. But yeah, I write about things that I’m afraid of, because what else would I write about? 

AR: Your last three plays (including Jerome) are all set in Arizona. What is it about Arizona that keeps you going back?

JC: Jerome is the third in a series of plays set in Arizona that deal with queerness, disease, and caregiving. The play sits pretty firmly in conversation with Man Cave and Wet Brain. Arizona is the source of all of my joy, all of my hate, all of my fear. It’s where I was born and raised and went through some really difficult things, and it feels like I have an obligation to go back and to uncover the place that I left behind. I left a lot of things unresolved in Arizona, and as long as they remain unresolved, I have to keep going back in my writing.

AR: So it’s more about your personal connection to Arizona than what that state might represent in the abstract.

JC: Absolutely. It’s just the place that I know. It’s easy to access because it’s so familiar, and also difficult to access because of the content, because of where I have to go mentally and emotionally to write about it.

AR: You’ve been writing Jerome for many years. What has that process been like? How has the play changed? 

JC: The first draft that I wrote of the play that became Jerome was in 2017, so it’s been almost a decade. There have been dozens of drafts in between. It takes a long time for a play to become what it is. Students always ask me, “How do you know when a play is done?” You know when a play is done when it gets produced, because by the time you get into a rehearsal process—even if you think the play is done—you’re going to realize that it’s not. A play is a living, breathing thing that keeps evolving until you put it in front of people, until you see how the play interacts with actors and audience. So you write a play, and you put it in a drawer. Then, when an opportunity arises, you take it back out, and you re-meet the play wherever you are now. Sometimes you read something you wrote after a period of time, and you think, “Oh my god, what was I doing? What was I thinking?” You were a different person when you wrote the play! Your cellular makeup was different. So you have to keep re-meeting your plays over and over again, sometimes even after you have a play produced. I know some really well-known playwrights who are still making changes to plays that have won Pulitzer Prizes. 

AR: I had a wonderful time in your workshop last fall. 

JC: That’s sweet of you. You gotta hustle out here and somehow pay the bills. I love doing the workshops, because I feel sequestered up in the middle of nowhere [Caswell lives upstate]. It’s nice to be able to get together with artists on the phone or on the phone on Zoom and chat.

AR: Is there anything you want to say about the workshop? 

JC: I will be teaching two online workshops in June and July, called Writing in the Overlaps: A Generative New Play Workshop. They are open to individuals of all experience levels, and all are welcome. You can get more information on my website, johnjcaswelljr.com.

Tickets to Jerome can be purchased here.

Photo by Chelci Parry. 

From 2011 until 2020, in the suburbs of Paris, Gisèle Pelicot was repeatedly drugged by her husband who invited dozens of men over the course of the nine years to rape his wife while she lay incapacitated and unconscious. The French public and news media took a keen interest in the case, and over the course of the trial’s 16 weeks, coverage expanded beyond France in what was referred to as a “global” or “feminist reckoning.” The trial prompted discussion about the misogyny embedded deeply within our culture, as well as the role of digital technology in perpetuating violence. (Many of the rapists were frequent porn watchers, and the assaults were arranged on a location-based French chat site called Coco, which, alarmingly, relaunched in April of this year). Countless articles, books, and television documentaries have covered the crime. There were rumors that Meryl Streep would play Gisèle in an upcoming HBO series. It seemed that Gisèle Pelicot was everywhere, and her suffering was too.

On the evening of Passion Sunday, a group gathered at Judson Church for The Pelicot Trial, a performance by Servane Dècle and Milo Rau, presented by NYU’s Skirball Center. The play takes the Gisèle Pelicot trial as its source material. Over the course of nearly five hours, we listen to testimony from the trials read here in succession by a wide range of New York actors, writers, and activists. No recording was allowed in the courtroom during the trial, so the texts that the actors speak are reconstructed from emails, public interviews, and notes from journalists who witnessed the trial in person. These texts, laid out as forty roughly sequential “fragments,” detail the crimes– the ways that she was drugged and abused– against Gisèle Pelicot in brutal detail. Laila Robins’ masterful performance of Pelicot’s initial testimony was especially difficult to witness.  Her portrayal was incredibly brave while she remained on the verge of tears. Hearing the testimonies of the men that raped Gisèle was even more difficult: in fragment after fragment, they refused to admit their own culpability, insisting that Gisèle Pelicot, an unconscious woman, was somehow consenting to the abuse. After scenes and scenes that detail her suffering, I took a break at the three-hour mark, hiding in a bathroom stall for five minutes. It really felt like too much. During this self-made intermission, I considered making a break for the crisp night air and circling nervously around the Washington Square Park fountain until I felt ready to go home. But I’d committed to write this piece, and more importantly, I’d committed to witness Gisèle’s testimony that evening.

That Passion Sunday morning, before the performance, I went to church at 11am as I usually do. This year, I served as the crucifer: the person who carries the cross during the liturgy. During this service, there is no sermon, a break from the rituals of most Sunday services. Instead, we listen at length to the story of Christ. 

He enters into Jerusalem on a donkey, greeted by a parade of people waving palms. He is betrayed by one of his disciples. He is tortured by state authorities. He is murdered in a spectacular miscarriage of justice. Even while dying on the cross, he is taunted and humiliated — Roman soldiers extend a stick with a sponge drenched in vinegar for Jesus to drink. In this Sunday liturgy, there is no preacher to guide us through the text, no pastor or deacon to tell us how to interpret these words in their historical context, no one to tell you how to feel. Instead, the only context is scripture — sung at my church by three men from the choir each year. Hearing about Jesus’ suffering, to put it bluntly, feels bad!

Listening to the Pelicot testimonies, I was struck by the parallels between the liturgy I had been part of that morning and that evening’s performance. There are the obvious formal echoes. Both of them take place in churches. The performance’s forty “fragments” echo the forty days of Lent — the season of penitence and reflection leading up to Easter. Beyond that, that evening’s performance required from me a type of active participation I’ve normally ever deployed in Church, that I’ve gained from an active participation in liturgy.  

In church, you must choose to pay attention in a way that you don’t often have to during  performances:  arts events where directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and so many other theater makers have invested so much time, talent, and money in capturing and holding your attention. Megamusicals of the 1970s and 1980s act as an example, perhaps par excellence, of this. It would be hard to miss Miss Saigon’s helicopter flying in to airlift people away. Or Christ’s passion when Jesus Christ Superstar himself is screlting his lungs out up on stage. Present-day revivals work even harder relying on new immersive elements. The frankly delightful Cats: The Jellicle Ball transposes the musical to the New York City ballroom scene, with crisp dancers moving across the stage and throughout the theater at a breathless pace that befits the social video generation. A performer in Diane Paulus’ Phantom of the Opera revival Masquerade recently posted a TikTok proclaiming that the show’s immersive design was perfect for audiences with short attention spans — with so much going on, one can’t help but pay attention to the show. As much as I would love to rag on expensive musicals for competing for the ever-shorter attention spans of audiences, nearly all performances are designed to be able to.. Even in a 30-seat venue in a downtown storefront watching a quiet, intimate play, when you’re close up to a skilled and well-rehearsed actor, they’ll certainly ensure you don’t tune out. Theater and performance are ultimately invested in snagging audience’s attention.

But a liturgy leaves more time for your thoughts to wander, often by design: individual silent prayer and reflection are part of the experience. You really do have to lean in to stay with   the liturgy. On a sleepy Sunday morning, it can sometimes be hard to feel fully engaged in the reading of a Bible passage. To listen carefully and witness is not always an easy choice to make or practice to cultivate, especially in the context of our hyperspeed digital present. And yet, here, at the presentation of Gisèle’s story, I was struck by how demanding the piece was on my attention — there was no set design or strategic lighting cues to direct my attention to one performer or another. There was just a table, where two women sat reading stage directions and the lawyer’s questions,  and a podium for performers to read their fragments of testimonies. A video screen hung enlarging the performers’ faces. But in the absence of flashy design, those gathered in the room were left with little beyond the words.  Words that conjure up graphic mental images of Gisèle’s suffering. Having seen countless Instagram posts in 2024 about the trial, scrolled through countless thinkpieces, and even read her memoir in short bursts on the subway in preparation to write this piece, I thought I understood Gisèle Pelicot and her story. To sit together with other people and witness it was a different experience, and a galvanizing one. When left with only words, we are left to reflect on something bigger than ourselves, where we are truly able to marvel at  Gisèle Pelicot’s bravery. 

It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of this violence in the quickness of social media — both the prolonged nature of the crime and the sheer number of men who perpetrated harm. It is also easy to sensationalize Gisèle’s suffering. In one fragment of the performance, a survivor of sexual violence who went to the court to witness the trial describes feeling titillated by watching the video evidence of the crimes. At the end of the evening, we heard the verdicts of the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot. They were found guilty and sentenced to years in prison. It is gratifying to see some form of justice served, but what else was this evening for than to embark on the work of creating a more just world? 

On Easter Sunday, we are called to witness Christ’s resurrection. We are called to live as a transformed people in our world, to build God’s kingdom of justice on earth. I felt a similar sort of call listening to the Pelicot trial.

Photo by Greg Kessler.