SDC Journal Spring/Summer 2024

SPRING/SUMMER 2024

JoANNE AKALAITIS

IDEALISTIC IN SPITE OF MYSELF

INTERVIEW BY CHARLES NEWELL

MICHAEL ARDEN

LAUREN YALANGO-GRANT + CHRISTOPHER CREE GRANT

OFFICERS

Evan Yionoulis PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Ruben Santiago-Hudson FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Dan Knechtges TREASURER

Melia Bensussen SECRETARY

Joseph Haj

SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Joshua Bergasse THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn

HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg

Pamela Berlin

Julianne Boyd

Graciela Daniele

Pam MacKinnon

Emily Mann

Marshall W. Mason

Ted Pappas

Susan H. Schulman

Oz Scott

Dan Sullivan

Victoria Traube

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

MEMBERS OF BOARD

Saheem Ali

Christopher Ashley

Jo Bonney

Shelley Butler

Donald Byrd

Rachel Chavkin

Desdemona Chiang

Valerie Curtis-Newton

Liz Diamond

Byron Easley

Justin Emeka

Lydia Fort

Leah C. Gardiner

Christopher Gattelli

Kathleen Marshall

Michael Mayer

Robert O’Hara

Annie-B Parson

Lisa Portes

Lonny Price

Jon Lawrence Rivera

Bartlett Sher

Katie Spelman

Susan Stroman

Maria Torres

Tamilla Woodard

Annie Yee

SDC JOURNAL

EDITOR

Stephanie Coen

MANAGING EDITOR

Kate Chisholm

COLUMNS EDITOR

Lucy Gram

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Adam Hitt

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Melia Bensussen

Joshua Bergasse

Terry Berliner

Noah Brody

Liz Diamond

Justin Emeka

Sheldon Epps

Lydia Fort

Annie-B Parson

Ann M. Shanahan

Seema Sueko

Annie Yee

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED

SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD

SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Emily A. Rollie

Ann M. Shanahan

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever

SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Ruth Pe Palileo

SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart

Joan Herrington

James Peck

SPRING/SUMMER 2024 CONTRIBUTORS

JoAnne Akalaitis

Leraldo Anzaldua

Michael Arden

Heather Arnson

Dani Barlow

Melia Bensussen

Terry Berliner

Liz Diamond

Justin Emeka

Pascale Florestal

Arnaldo Galban

Christopher Cree Grant

Pam MacKinnon

Mayte Natalio

Charles Newell

M. Bevin O’Gara

Bridget Kathleen O’Leary

Adesola Osakalumi

Maurice Emmanuel Parent

Annie-B Parson

Lisa Rafferty

KJ Sanchez

Megan Sandberg-Zakian

Ellenore Scott

Dawn M. Simmons

Lauren Yalango-Grant

Annie Yee

SPRING/SUMMER 2024

SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTOR

Michael Osinski

ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

SDC JOURNAL is published by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036. ISSN 2576-6899 © 2024 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Letters to the editor may be sent to SDCJournal@SDCweb.org

POSTMASTER

Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

COVER JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO MICHAEL HULL

ESSAYS BY TERRY BERLINER, JUSTIN EMEKA, ANNIE-B PARSON + ANNIE YEE

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

46 Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises

EDITED BY RACHEL BOWDITCH, PAULA MURRAY COLE + MICHELE MINNICK

REVIEW BY MICHAEL OSINSKI

SDC FOUNDATION

48 The Journey from Dancer to Choreographer

A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH MAYTE NATALIO, ADESOLA OSAKALUMI + ELLENORE SCOTT

MODERATED BY DANI BARLOW

SDC LEGACY

54 HINTON BATTLE

MICHAEL BLAKEMORE

MAURICE HINES

MIKE NUSSBAUM

André de Shields + cast in The Bacchae at The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO JOAN MARCUS

FROM THE PRESIDENT

This year, SDC is celebrating the 65th anniversary of its founding. An anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve come from and to imagine where we want to go next, to remember our origin story and commemorate our collective struggles and hard-won triumphs.

On April 24, 1959, Judge Saul Streit, Presiding Justice of the New York Supreme Court, signed the incorporation documents establishing what was then called the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC) as a national independent labor union.

Director Shepard Traube was elected as the first President of the Executive Board, with Agnes de Mille and Hanya Holm as First and Second Vice Presidents, respectively, and Ezra Stone as Secretary.

Those leaders—and the small group of women and men who joined them—founded the Union because they recognized that directors and choreographers were the only group of theatre workers on Broadway whose work lacked Union protections. Their first major battle was to secure recognition as the official collective bargaining unit for Broadway directors and choreographers.

After two failed attempts to negotiate an agreement with the League of New York Theatres, in 1962, the SSDC Executive Board authorized its Members to withhold their services from all first-class productions. It was only when Bob Fosse refused to break this strike pledge when offered a contract to direct and choreograph a production of Little Me that producers recognized the Union, setting the stage for the successful negotiation of the first minimum Broadway contract.

SDC has significantly expanded the size and strength of its Membership and its covered jurisdictions since 1959. Founded with 164 Members, SDC has grown to include more than 3,400 professional directors and choreographers working across the United States. Today, SDC provides vital employment protections, including health and pension benefits, through its many collectively bargained agreements, promulgated agreements, and independent producer agreements. SDC Members file more than 2,500 employment contracts per year, and SDC has expanded its employment jurisdiction to include fight choreographers and Broadway associate/resident directors and choreographers.

Through the years, our core conviction that directors and choreographers are vital to the health and future of American theatre has remained. SDC continues to fight for the recognition and compensation that its Members deserve.

To commemorate our anniversary, we are celebrating the crafts of direction and choreography with a social media campaign called 65 for the 65th. This spring, we sent out a survey to the Membership asking, “Who are the SDC Members whose work as a director or choreographer has most inspired the field or your own artistic path?” Seventy Members responded within the first 24 hours. From these nominations, a task force helped us choose 65 remarkable directors and choreographers to spotlight throughout the year. We are glad to have this opportunity to recognize these artists—our visionary leaders, colleagues, and friends—and to introduce them to those who may not yet know of their impact.

Together, we are custodians of our little piece of the timeline of the Union, entrusted with ensuring that SDC endures and moves ever forward. As the American theatre continues to experience existential challenges, the story of SDC’s founding and the achievements of our Membership over the years remind us that, with strength and solidarity, growth and advancement are possible even amidst uncertainty. We are inspired and heartened by our Membership’s dedication, artistry, and continuing commitment to protect and empower directors and choreographers throughout the field. Thank you, and Happy 65th Anniversary!

In Solidarity,

Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately. Quiet. This has been brought on, perhaps, by several years now of constant, at times relentless, noise, even as our work—and your work—was paused for much of that time. Of course, there are different kinds of quiet. The calm, the unsettling, the necessary. I would posit that we need a bit of each to be healthy—much like food, activity, and friendship. The quiet that comes with sleep, even with sleeps that are filled with to-do lists and dreams.

Lately, I’ve been drawn to the quiet that opens the space where inspiration dwells, inspirations we need to do our work at the Union in service of what you do. To get to that place, we must first identify the noise, the chatter that distracts even as it appears to inform. It may be shinier, but often this first layer can simply overwhelm without much benefit to anyone. Once we filter out the chatter, we must listen again carefully for the urgent and triage accordingly, committing ourselves to coming back once we have surveyed the full measure of what is out there. Only after, after the distractions have been separated and momentary crisis abated, can we hear differently. This is where noise becomes sound that resonates very differently, and we can begin to feel the quiet. A space where we can begin to consider, to find solutions rather than temporary fixes.

I seek some quiet each day as I move from meeting to meeting, task to task. I am not always successful.

Today, I had time set aside, a quiet space to read through this issue of SDC Journal. Maybe because I have been preoccupied by my own need for quiet, for space, on each page I found a moment or two where you found inspiration, in the quiet, in slow spaces. Members’ reflections of how meaningful the transformation of ideas can be in quiet space.

Michael Arden and his collaborators Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant worked together during the pandemic. Lauren and Cree shared the practice of “slow being smooth and smooth being fast” with Michael and he is a convert. As am I. Michael goes on to reflect on what he learned while working with his company, The Forest of Arden, in the midst of the pandemic. “What was it like when we were on a field outside, 20 feet apart, having to communicate?” he wonders. “What was helpful, and what from that experience can we bring into the fast-paced environment of the rehearsal studio? We have to keep reminding ourselves to slow down.”

Pam MacKinnon mentions liminal spaces as she shares her work with set designer Tanya Orellana on the play Big Data “We wanted this liminal, open space.” Isn’t that where we spend much of our time? Certainly, and perhaps if we spent more time there—on the precipice of something new—we might find it. I think you must be quiet; you must pause to know that is where you are. I think you must do this every day in rehearsal halls across the country.

Arnaldo Galban talks about Saheem Ali’s inclusive style of directing, which includes listening to everyone, unabashedly allowing others’ ideas to influence his work, and being humble. KJ Sanchez references writing a book she has titled The Radical Act of Listening. “In it,” KJ says, “I look at some of my favorite listeners and revisit why I fell in love with making theatre based on listening in the first place.”

In the conversation between Melia Bensussen and Liz Diamond, Liz talks about deep listening and acute observation as being central to a director’s process. Combined with Melia’s call for generosity of spirit, I imagine a space where inspiration is in abundance.

And JoAnne Akalaitis, our cover subject—what an amazing reflection she shares on New York in the 1960s, and everything that was important. (“Perhaps most important,” she says, “was acknowledging the importance and presence of children and family in the community of Mabou by including a babysitter in every budget. It was called, for the purposes of accounting and the IRS, ‘rehearsal assistant.’” Imagine?)

In Charles Newell’s interview with JoAnne, she quotes the English playwright Aphra Behn: “Theatre is a place where secret signals are sent to the audience.” These signals can sit in the moments of quiet. The moments that can send that next spark of inspiration to the audience member who will create the next moment, and the next, and the next. As our art form evolves and shifts and so much of what is new has come before, in different iterations, how do we ensure more takes hold? I, and I know all of you, will continue to yearn for the moments of clarity setting themselves apart from the chaos. And if we are lucky, those moments of quiet will transcend their seeming mundanity and transform into something powerful, something beautiful, something of meaning.

In Solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

PHOTO HERVÉ HÔTE

MUSES & MUSINGS

WITH KJ SANCHEZ

Who or what inspired your theatre career?

Way back in 1989, I was an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Up to that point, my theatre references were very limited. I had been a ballet folklórico dancer and had only been in a few plays—Agatha Christie plays mostly. Anne Bogart was a guest director at UCSD, making a play with the MFA

actors, and I went to see the production as an assignment for one of my classes. It was called Strindberg Sonata and was a collage of all of Strindberg’s plays. It was the very first avant-garde anything I had ever seen. I had no idea what was going on, but I found my body reacting to it; I found myself gasping at one piece of movement, laughing at another, feeling like I might cry at a third. Yet still, my brain was completely flummoxed. I had to go back a second night because my brain needed to figure out why my body liked it so much. Now, so very many years later, I get a lot of my inspiration from my students (I run the Directing MFA at UT Austin), especially when I see them making choices that are speaking to the body, not just the brain.

Where do you get your inspiration? Is it books, movies, visual art?

All over the place. Music: I listen to Bebe’s album Pafuera Telarañas on loop. I watch and re-watch the TV shows The Larry Sanders Show and Our Flag Means Death—long live queer pirates! I get tons of inspiration from the architect Santiago Calatrava—the way he can make my heart soar with scale and line. And book-wise, I’ve been learning a lot from Adrienne Maree Brown’s We Will Not

Cancel Us; Tim Harford’s Messy, which is about how as artists, the things that get in our way can end up being the key to our best work; each and every Miriam Toews book (how does she manage to be so personal, so dark, yet so expansive and so luminescent?); and the one book that I have gotten tons of inspiration from, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I first read it when I was in my twenties and I re-read it every few years. It’s a different book every time I read it because I’m different every time I go back. There’s a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky that blew my mind. They offer so much insight into the undercurrent critique of Stalin’s reign of terror. I can’t wait to see the recent movie adaptation that’s causing a stir in Moscow right now.

You are the Founder and CEO of the theatre company American Records, which makes theatre that chronicles our time. What inspires you about the present moment, and about directing now?

With American Records, it feels like a great time because a lot of our field is catching up to what some of us have been doing for a very long time: making work that says, “We see you, we hear you. You matter.” And I think more and more theatre companies are understanding that community engagement is not about ticket sales but rather about being good citizens of our towns, cities, communities, about being good neighbors.

This is also a hard time. I based 20-plus years of making documentary plays on the notion that everyone has a story to tell. But after the 2016 election, I no longer wanted to hear from a good portion of our country. What is a professional listener supposed to do when she can no longer bear listening? I had a crisis of faith. And little by little I’m crawling out now. I just finished writing a book, The Radical Act of Listening, which will be published by Routledge, and in it I look at some of my favorite listeners and revisit why I fell in love with making theatre based on listening in the first place.

What texts or writers have inspired you from a formal perspective and how do they influence your directing work?

Shakespeare and Octavio Solís. Both writers’ works have structures I never get tired of scaling; both have worlds I never get tired of exploring. The language asks me to approach it like a scientist—I have to know what to lean into, what to throw

PHOTO KRISTI GRIFFITH

American Mariachi at Alley Theatre, directed by KJ Sanchez PHOTO LYNN LANE

away. It’s math, it’s soaring ambition, a huge heart, and lots of fart jokes.

Karen Zacarias, Ken Cerniglia, and I are working on an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in Alta California in 1948, after Northern California had gone from being New Spain to Mexico to a brand-new US territory. The Montagues and Capulets are Mexican/Indigenous families and Paris and the Prince are US Calvary. It’s bilingual—Shakespeare wrote the English and Karen wrote the Spanish. Oh, and Romeo is a woman. We can do all of this because Shakespeare gave us formidable text: it holds us up. And as for Octavio Solís, I directed the first four productions of Quixote Nuevo, which I consider one of the best plays ever written. Full stop.

You recently directed José Cruz González’s American Mariachi. Where did you find inspiration for that piece?

American Mariachi is such a lovely event of a play—it invites you into a home and family and a love for mariachi music. When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a mariachi singer; they were the coolest, sexiest, chicest people I knew. I even took mariachi lessons. So all of us on this production—designers, actors, technicians alike—we just leaned into what we love. And to see the show in front of audiences at the Alley Theatre in Houston: wow. [Artistic Director] Rob Melrose is doing such great work there. To see the house full of Tejanos watching, listening, and singing along to their music. Yum.

What’s a great play or musical you love that you feel people don’t talk about much, or may not have heard of?

Herringbone [book by Tom Cone, music by Skip Kennon, and lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh], a one-man musical originally performed by Joel Grey. I saw BD Wong perform it at the McCarter. Total. Magic. And it has one of my favorite lines: “In hard times, culture does real well.”

KJ Sanchez is a professional playwright and director. She is the founder and CEO of American Records, a theatre company, and Associate Professor and Area Head of the MFA Playwriting and Directing programs at the University of Texas, Austin.

Emilio Delgado, Hugo E. Carbajal + cast in Quixote Nuevo at The Huntington, directed by KJ Sanchez PHOTO T CHARLES ERICKSON

INNOVATIONS

BY LERALDO ANZALDUA

Motion capture work for video games uses all the experiences I’ve ever had in theatre—as a fight director, actor, and teacher of stage combat.

My first job as lead action director was on the video game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. I learned that as the action director on a video game, my first job is to put together the character profiles for each character that appears in the game. This means I choose the moves, weapons, or abilities for each

character, and then make sure that the creative team takes those abilities and skills into account during the casting process.

Once we have a team of actors, we assign different roles or different moves and then work on bringing them to life. Unlike theatre or film, video game actors don’t have to “look” like the character they’re playing, but their ability to physicalize and embody the character’s style, motion, and moves is key. We try to find actors with skill sets or vocabulary that may apply to any given character; these are “utility actors” who can play multiple different characters for any given project. We also bring in specialists: martial artists of a particular style, people with experience with different firearms or weapons, gymnasts, or dancers.

As we build the character profiles, we compare the artist renderings and description and identify each character’s qualities and how they move. This can be influenced by things like size, shape, and descriptives, such as if the characters are human, animal-like, robotic, inorganic, etc. We then shape their actions from a menu of qualities we’ve identified: if the characters are fast or slow, if they have abrupt or extended attacks and actions, or if their attacks are linear or organic, for instance. These details help bring life to the characters and help make the moves more accessible to perform and repeat for the actors.

We look through the storyboard and shot lists and create move sets—similar to pieces of blocking and choreography for any given character. “Move sets” are anything a player of a video game can make the character do using their game controller or keyboard: running, walking, sneaking, attacking, etc. We also build “in-game moves,” or lists of reactions and actions for the characters, including how they celebrate, how they fidget when the player has put their controller down, or how they talk.

At this point in the video game development process, I start to draw more on my fight choreography training as we film the scenes. As in a theatrical rehearsal, we film on a set with some practical elements and some elements taped out for the actors. We choreograph the action or block the scenes like a regular narrative scene: entrances, exits, dialogue, and character action.

Much like film, the action in a video game must be fast and precise. Much like theatre, it must be choreographed and assembled. As the action director, it’s my responsibility to make sure that the action, the character work, and the shot lists are sustainable for the performer and take into account the length of time we have to choreograph and record. As with fight direction in theatre, it’s a collaborative process. I talk to the artists, the writers, and the team leads to come up with movement vocabularies that are interesting and creative for the characters and possible for the actors to perform.

Once all this planning is ready, the actors suit up in skintight suits and the team places little reflective dots on all their major joints and muscle groups. We set up shots in varying degrees of need and difficulty. To keep the performers healthy and safe, we make sure safety concerns are addressed: if an actor is falling from a high platform, for instance, we have pads, mats, and the team there to help. We schedule scenes in blocks that take into account the number of performers, complications of each scene and choreography, and level of impact on the performers’ bodies. Ultimately, we all want to build this world in ways that are fun and safe.

We rehearse, and the cameras and computers record everything. Unlike traditional film cameras, motion-capture cameras send out a red or white light that reflects off the dots on the actors’ suits and sends information back to the computers. The computers then create a stick figure of the performers—a wireframe—that computer specialists can then layer any kind of character “skin” over to serve the needs of the project. The work is precise and grueling because the camera doesn’t forgive mistakes, but it is some of the most challengingly beautiful work I do.

Leraldo Anzaldua is Assistant Professor of Movement & Stage Combat at Indiana University Department of Theatre & Dance and a fight director, intimacy director, actor, anime voiceover performer, motion capture/ face caption performer, and action director.

From The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay by Starbreeze Studios, with lead action direction and performance by Leraldo Anzaldua

HOW WE MET THAT CHALLENGE

WITH PAM MacKINNON

Kate Atwell’s new play Big Data premiered this spring at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, home of the tech industry. The play focuses on the power of technology and includes a character called “M”—played in A.C.T.’s production by BD Wong—who is an algorithm. SDC Journal spoke to

director Pam MacKinnon about how she worked with her collaborators to dramatize the impact of technology on the play’s characters and get the audience thinking about their own relationship to tech.

How did your work with Big Data begin?

I directed a world-premiere play of Kate’s in 2019 called Testmatch, at A.C.T., and we commissioned her shortly after that process. She wrote about three plays while trying to get to Big Data, but it really took off when she personified the notion of the algorithm of tech. That’s when the play took a turn toward exciting theatricality.

Kate and I are both interested in playing with theatrical form. Act One is very different from Act Two in this play. In Act One, characters interact with the algorithm character, M, who dictates, elicits, and aids in their choices. M is on stage and present; it is his world, so the set is a stripped-down liminal space. Scenes are short; transitions are many. M is not present in Act Two. And Joe and Didi, the new central characters of this act, do not live with technology, so their world

is tactile, cluttered and naturalistic. Act Two is one long scene in living time. This contrast drew me to the play.

How did you and BD Wong approach the challenge of playing an algorithm, M, who has no human motivations?

This was a brand-new play, so we learned the rules as we built it. In early drafts M was present but largely silent and therefore passive. We learned in the rehearsal process that M was most exciting when truly interacting with the other characters—when he was a thought partner who was integrated into the world in a human way.

Early on, BD felt his dialogue was hard to learn because his character didn’t have human emotions. M wants the other characters to do some things in service of capitalism, in service of “bigger and more is better,” but there’s no real emotional drive to accomplish those tasks. For example, dialogue like, “I can make your life better.” “Better in what way?” “Well, easier. I can make your life easier. Frictionless.”, doesn’t come with a

BD Wong, Michael Phillis + Gabriel Brown in Big Data at American Conservatory Theater, directed by Pam MacKinnon PHOTO KEVIN BERNE

clear need behind it. It becomes a challenge to activate as M is not a robot. Not a metaphor.

I knew from reading an early draft that I wanted to work with BD Wong. He could do this! He comes from a place of real honesty, invention, great humor, and smarts, and he has an A.C.T./ San Francisco following. He was a real new-play thought partner, grounding the character. He stepped into each scene with specific purpose. With both couples, he triangulates the relationship. With one he is another lover in the room. That’s inherently compelling. Then the other couple is facing challenges about career, money, and wanting to try to have a child. M is almost like a therapist that they can talk to. He’s like a Mephistopheles character who is very charming. You want to spend time with him, even though there are warning signs that you shouldn’t get too close, but you reveal yourself anyway, because he’s taken an interest.

It’s all about focus. There’s something about social media and online platforms, where you type in a few things about yourself and they reflect back what you’ve put in, and you feel seen. That’s an interesting character and dynamic

to have on stage, a person who can challenge and push, but who is only challenging and pushing you to the places that you’ve already stepped into.

How did you and your collaborators hone in on the design choices you made for the first act, which is so technology-focused?

We wanted this liminal, open space. The play was being done in the Toni Rembe Theater at A.C.T., which is a 1,000-seat house and a big, voidlike space. I was interested in color on the set walls, even though I knew we were going to have projections. When I think of the internet, it’s these deep blues, and everything is back-lit. There’s something buzzy about it. We wanted the world to be full of color and not black-andwhite, not some science fiction or dystopian world that would distance the audience or let them off the hook, but a seductive world of now.

The play starts with a 1950s TV that presents a prompt that says, “Press play.” When I first read the play, I thought to myself, “Oh, this smacks of doing it in a 99-seat black box. It feels like a small-room gesture. How will this be accomplished in a 1,000seat theatre?”

BD Wong in Big Data

PHOTO KEVIN BERNE

Act Two of Big Data

PHOTO KEVIN BERNE

I was in conversation with my projection designers, Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, and my wonderful set designer, Tanya Orellana, and they asked, “Okay, so where’s the button? What are they pressing?” And I said, “Oh, the button has to be on the TV screen. It has to be one of those now-intuitive triangles on its side, and someone from the audience is going to come up and press it.” And my production team asked, “What? How?” I said, “Trust me, trust me. We’re going to have to kill a couple seats. We’re going to have some stairs coming off the stage. We’re going to keep the house lights up, after the curtain speech, and then this tiny little video in the corner in a ’50s TV will come on, and then this button on the screen.”

We did have some prompts that we projected to our back wall to encourage people: “Press play” showed up in big letters, and then it said, “No, we really mean it. You’re not going to get in trouble. Please.” But we never had to wait for longer than a minute. Someone happily did it every time, and our audiences wound up being complicit with setting the whole event into motion.

The set for Act One was this open space with walls that had an infinity look, with scoops and curves. They were great projection surfaces and had some LED lighting effects on them. The projections were mainly used during transitions.

This is a play very much about surveillance capitalism, about data mining. The transitions took us into the video and got more frenetic as the character of M egged the two couples on. We also had a bit of live video in some early scenes. There’s something great about having a live closeup of someone who is on stage, so we can look at them in a different way, the way this algorithm is learning about this person, their nerves, their nervous ticks.

The characters who were being projected live noticed that their image was on the wall, because part of the story we wanted to tell is that we let these things in. We click “agree” without reading the pages and pages of “Do you want to change your privacy settings? Do you accept all the cookies?”—all that kind of stuff. We’re constantly—going back to the beginning of the show—we’re constantly pressing “play.” We want this distraction.

So even in a moment of having an intimate conversation about “Do you think about having kids?”, having an intimate conversation with a stranger, suddenly a character would notice on their home wall that their image was getting projected, and I had the actors find the camera, be okay with it, and continue.

How did you and your team help ease the audience into the different feeling and style of Act Two?

The play was first written to be intermission-less, and we were going to have an a vista set transition that would dump us into this new world that was prop-heavy and naturalistic. We couldn’t shrink the play down enough for North American sensibilities to sit still that long, so we did put in an intermission. But we didn’t want to lose the idea of Joe and Didi in living time, so we did the set transition a vista still. We had the liminal world of Act One break apart and the Act Two set come downstage. The actors playing Joe and Didi were on set in the transition, and then populated it throughout the intermission. Their life started at the end of Act One and continued in living time: sitting on the sofa, reading the paper, going in and out of that living room. So we still accomplished that notion of tactile living time as written and as performed.

Some of what Act One is about is the negation of being present, of being okay with a moment of breath. In Act One, we were constantly filling our time and being told that we should be maximizing every second, whereas Act Two does not have that feel, and so that’s very much on stage. For instance, there is a moment when both actors leave the stage empty for 50 seconds, and the audience gradually notices a ticking clock, collectively enjoying the simple passage of time together before the action of the story continues before them.

What’s been most interesting or challenging about this production?

I think it is going back to some fundamentals, as always. Really grounding the play in human and visceral scene work with this topic. You can’t play a metaphor. Audiences actually do like to participate. Simple magic is the best magic. All that stuff felt difficult at times, but in the best way.

Pam MacKinnon currently serves as A.C.T.’s Artistic Director. She is a Tony, Drama Desk, two-time Obie, Lilly, and Callaway Awardwinning director and the most recent pastPresident of SDC.

Jomar Tagatac + BD Wong in Big Data PHOTO KEVIN BERNE

THEATRICAL PASSPORTS

WITH ARNALDO GALBAN

In a conversation with SDC Journal, SDC Associate Member Arnaldo Galban spoke about his experience with theatre and directorial style in Cuba, where he was born and began his career as an actor and director, and in the US, where he recently completed a Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Observership

with director Saheem Ali on his production of Buena Vista Social Club at Atlantic Theater Company. Buena Vista Social Club dramatizes the making of the beloved Cuban album of the same name, following the stories of a group of veteran musicians as they record the classic songs. The show was Galban’s first experience with professional theatre in the United States.

What is the theatre scene like in Cuba?

In Cuba, we have so many talented artists but all the cultural institutions, all the venues, belong to the government, which means they’re paying your salary and they’re producing your plays. They can attend performances before opening night, watch what you’re doing, and decide if you’re opening or not.

Independent theatre is illegal in Cuba, because that means you’re doing theatre with your money, so the government can’t censor it. You can’t do theatre outside the institutions, and you can’t sell tickets.

The government won’t say, “Oh, we don’t allow independent arts in Cuba,” but they will make sure that you can’t make independent theatre.

I had friends doing that work. They were put in jail, or they were threatened. It’s a very difficult environment if you want to be a free thinker and create something. Which is crazy, because the Cuban Revolution has invested so much money in cultural things in Cuba. You can go to a cinema for a few cents, or you can buy a book and it’s less than a dollar. Everything that’s cultural in Cuba is so affordable. They’re giving culture to the people, and at the same time asking you not to use your brain, which is so confusing.

As a young artist, you’re very confused, but also it gives you that kind of rebel spirit that says, “Oh, you don’t want me to do that? Now I’m going to do that, and I don’t care if I’m not making money.” It’s beautiful; you do it because you really want to do it, because you love it.

Buena Vista Social Club at Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Saheem Ali PHOTO AHRON R. FOSTER

What was your directing experience like there?

I was directing, I was designing, I was building the lights. I learned that from one of my favorite teachers and theatre directors in Cuba, Nelda Castillo. She made everything in the theatre with her hands. I learned that from her. I built lights with tomato cans. I built whole electricity systems. It was an adventure.

What was your concept of a director then?

In Cuba, we don’t have a place where you can study directing. You can study as a playwright, a designer, an actor, a critic, but not a director. Almost all the directors I worked with in Cuba learned to direct by trial and error while they were actors in a very important company called Teatro

Buendía and the director there supervised their processes.

Those directors inherited skills from her, but they also inherited her style. In Cuba, the director has the last word on everything. They tell people what to do all the time. That happens everywhere in Cuba: in your house with your dad, in all different kinds of work environments. But in theatre, they use a very tyrannical style. That’s the way I grew up, seeing these directors call actors names or humiliate them in front of the rest of the company. I think we inherited that because of politics in Cuba. Our authority model is, “If you are not with me, you’re against me. You’re the enemy.”

I learned a lot from the directors I worked with there, and I will always be grateful for that. But I think in Cuba, no one realizes

we’re following a model or a style that is against creativity. Especially with theatre; it’s such a communal art. And I think that’s what I saw here with Saheem Ali on Buena Vista Social Club. In America, you are in a creative process, and you are co-creating with all these people that are part of the creative team.

How was Saheem’s style of directing different from your previous experience watching directors work?

Well, first of all, Saheem is so kind. He learned my name. He said hi to everyone. He took time to acknowledge that we were present in the room. He even took time to unite the company and have everyone introduce themselves, and ask, “How did you arrive here?” and “What is your connection with the material?” I saw people hopping up and sharing deep and emotional stuff, because he was able to create this environment that made people feel safe to share.

That’s him, that’s who he is as a person. The people he feels comfortable working with are also people with this style. They are very human, and humble.

Saheem also considered other people’s ideas. If he was talking about something, and he had an idea, and then someone suddenly realized, “Oh, there is this way of doing this,” he was able to say, “Oh, yes, let’s try that.” My previous experience with other directors was that they respond to other people’s ideas with, “Oh, I didn’t have that idea. I know it’s amazing, but I won’t say that, because that means you are more creative than me, and I can’t put my work at risk.” Saheem was able to be open and say, “Let’s try that,” and the show got richer and richer.

Does that style inform how you think about making work now?

The way I will approach the next thing will be different thanks to the experience I had with Saheem. I would love to imitate his style of inclusive directing, listening to everyone, being humble, that kind of thing.

I feel lucky to meet people who are showing me there’s a different way to be a star and a different way of being a talented director, and that doesn’t mean you feel you are above everyone.

Arnaldo Galban is a director, actor, and acting coach based in New York City.

Roberto Romero in La Estática Milagrosa in Cuba, directed by Arnaldo Galban

PHOTO C/O ARNALDO GALBAN

Eugenio Torroella in La Estática Milagrosa in Cuba, directed by Arnaldo Galban

PHOTO C/O ARNALDO GALBAN

ANNE AKALAITISCHARLES NEWELL IDEALISTIC

Jo Harvey Allen + Lauren Tom in Leon & Lena (and lenz) at The Guthrie, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO JOE GIANNETTI

Theatre director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis has been a vital, commanding, and uncompromising force in American theatre for more than 50 years. She developed her theatrical language—which, she says, was most informed by art and film—early in her artistic life in Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, and New York. Akalaitis co-founded the pioneering theatre collective Mabou Mines in 1970 with Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. Her body of work—for which she has been awarded a Drama Desk Award and six Obie Awards for Direction and Sustained Achievement—includes plays by Beckett, Churchill, Euripides, Genet, Kroetz, Pinter, Shakespeare, Strindberg, and Williams, among many others. She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2023.

Akalaitis met Charles Newell in 1987, when she directed an adaptation of two works by Georg Büchner—his play Leonce und Lena and his unfinished novella Lenz—at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where Garland Wright was in his second season as Artistic Director and Newell was the Resident Director. Two years later, in 1989,

Newell assisted Akalaitis on a production of Cymbeline for producer Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Marathon at The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, featuring a diverse cast including Joan MacIntosh as the Queen and George Bartenieff as Cymbeline, along with Joan Cusack, Wendell Pierce, Don Cheadle, Jesse Borrego, Peter Francis James, Michael Cumpsty, and more.

Celebrated by its many admirers and reviled by much of the press, Akalaitis’s staging was notoriously excoriated in The New York Times by Frank Rich, who wrote—among other criticisms—“While one can applaud Ms. Akalaitis for casting a black actor [Wendell Pierce] as Cloten, doesn’t credibility (and coherence for a hard-pressed audience) demand that his mother also be black? Apparently not, since the Queen is reserved instead for a favored Akalaitis leading lady, Joan MacIntosh.... It’s productions like this, which practice arbitrary tokenism rather than complete and consistent integration, that mock the dignified demands of the nontraditional casting movement.” The production, and Rich’s review, inspired a special section in American Theatre, “Cymbeline and Its

Critics: A Case Study,” by Elinor Fuchs and James Leverett.

In 1990, Akalaitis was handpicked by Joseph Papp to be his successor at The Public/NYSF; she served as artistic director for 20 months before being fired by the theatre’s Board, who referred to the period of her leadership as a “time of transition.”

The following year, when Newell began what would become a 30-year tenure as Artistic Director of Court Theatre, he invited Akalaitis to work with him there. As artist-in-residence she directed seven productions at the theatre over the next 10 years. And she has remained busy, directing at regional theatres and in New York, where she conceived and produced the María Irene Fornés Marathon at The Public Theater in 2019 and most recently directed Fornés’s Mud/Drowning, the latter as a new opera by Philip Glass.

As an educator, Akalaitis has served as the Andrew Mellon Co-Chair of the first directing program at the Juilliard School, Chair of the Theater program at Bard College, and the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair of the Theater at Fordham University.

JoAnne Akalaitis photographed at home

PHOTO MICHAEL HULL

CHARLES NEWELL | Where did your interest in theatre begin, and what were some of the important influences when you were young?

JoANNE AKALAITIS | I went to a Lithuanian Catholic school called St. Anthony’s School in Cicero, Illinois. It was a uniquely isolated environment of Lithuanians and a few Italians. I remember the rich, theatrical Catholic pageantry in our church. I loved it. I always felt sorry for other religions because they didn’t have that sexy, bloody, juicy religious iconography in their lives.

I was also lucky enough to go to a really good all-girls Catholic school, Providence High School, where I was educated by incredible women, including my art teacher, Sister Edith. At that time I wanted to be a visual artist. She did so much for me—she introduced me to Picasso and she gave me and a classmate one of the school’s walls to design and paint a mural. Like many theatre artists, I was influenced by my drama teacher—in this case, Ms. Cluny. It was thrilling for me to be in her productions. At the same time, I was going to productions at the Goodman School of Drama’s famous children’s theatre and learning about painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. The defining moment was when my Mom took me downtown to the Chicago Theatre where I saw Mary Martin in South Pacific. What I was seeing was an art form where everything was possible. Where a woman could wash

her hair on stage, at the same time singing about some dopey guy.

When I went to the University of Chicago, I saw Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet. I made a deep connection to it; there was something in it that was telling me where to go. But at the same time, I was thinking that I was too ordinary and not glamorous enough to be what I thought women became in theatre, i.e., actresses.

CHARLIE | What was your trajectory toward finding your place in being a theatre artist?

JoANNE | I ended up performing in student productions all during college. When I continued on to Stanford to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, I was cast as Beatrice in a university production of Much Ado About Nothing. I also took an acting class and I thought, “Boy, this is easy, much easier than philosophy and logic, certainly.”

And then Alan Schneider came to Stanford to direct [Brecht’s] Mann ist Mann. He was auditioning not only everyone at Stanford, but also professional actors from San Francisco, including Ruth Maleczech. I got cast as Widow Begbick, and I think I was pretty bad in it. Except Alan was such a great encouragement. All my life, all his life, he encouraged me. I would see him through the years. And of course, my Beckett productions were so different than his

Beckett productions, but there was never any reprimand. He always said, “Baby, what you do is so different than what I do, but you do it.” I think you knew Alan, didn’t you?

CHARLIE | I did. I assisted him on Pieces of 8 for The Acting Company, a series of one-act plays that he conceived and directed, my favorite being The Tridget of Greva, which was a short one-act that Ring Lardner wrote. And then that summer he stepped out in front of a motorcycle in London and died.

JoANNE | He did, mailing a letter to Beckett, I read.

CHARLIE | You moved to San Francisco in 1962. What was that like?

JoANNE | It was a series of fortuitous events. I met Ruth and Lee [Breuer] in Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco, in the coffee shop downstairs from Herb Blau and Jules Irving’s Actor’s Workshop. I auditioned to get into the Workshop and didn’t get in. After the audition, I got a job selling orange juice in the lobby. San Francisco at that time was a hotbed of experimental art, early Happenings, site-specific performance, and new music. Growing up in that world of performance and art created a very, very rich soil for me. Stan Brakhage, the filmmaker, was there, as was Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. I studied with R.G. Davis, founder of

Ben Halley Jr. + John Bottoms in Endgame at American Repertory Theater, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO RICHARD FELDMAN C/O AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Ruth and Lee and I started working on our own theatre experiments. Once, during an investigation of Antigone, I threw a chair out a window, but luckily didn’t hurt anyone. All of this gave me a taste for experimentation, but I still thought I wanted to be a (real) actor in a (real) play.

I went to New York, and it became clear to me that the theatre system wasn’t going to work for me, because of my personality or whatever. Then I reconnected with Philip Glass, who I had met on a trip he had taken to San Francisco on his motorcycle. He got a Fulbright in 1964, and I joined him in Paris. We lived in a small garage atelier. Phil played the piano all day—he was studying with Nadia Boulanger—and it drove me crazy. So I went to three movies a day at the Cinémathèque and it was a profound education. I learned about people like Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean Vigo, and of course, Godard and the New Wave. My work continues to be influenced by film, most notably by the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Right now I’m following the work of Claire Denis, a French film director. Her film Beau Travail is an adaptation of Billy Budd, and it’s astonishingly brilliant. And I love Kelly Reichardt.

CHARLIE | How did your time in Paris lead you to Mabou Mines, which was founded at a time when there were no boundaries

between artistic disciplines? How was this reflected in the work of the collective?

JoANNE | When Philip and I came back in 1966, everything was happening in New York. There was no hierarchy, everyone was hanging out together and doing stuff together—musicians, visual artists, performers. It was such an exciting time. We were all equal and creating together. That’s what Mabou was. Everyone was equal. We all ended up living on two floors for $75 a month. Philip built a music studio on one end and a rehearsal studio on the other.

Everybody was everything. So everyone could be a designer, an actor, a director, and we were always directing each other. Lee was the first actual director, a writerdirector. But we were saying freely to one another, “Maybe that doesn’t work. Maybe you should try this or this, or that kind of costume or that lighting.” The unspoken contract was that one could articulate any criticism or suggestion. And everyone got to do what they wanted to do. So if someone wanted to do a show that was not my “aesthetic” or my politics, well, the deal was that person got to do that show.

CHARLIE | Did that come about just by who you all were? Or was there some core guiding principle of aesthetic or process?

JoANNE | I think it happened to be in the stars that this group of people got together. It was a group of people who wanted to run their own business. So everyone got paid the same amount of money, whether one was working or not. Perhaps most important was acknowledging the importance and presence of children and family in the community of Mabou by including a babysitter in every budget. It was called, for the purposes of accounting and the IRS, “rehearsal assistant.” And indeed, that babysitter was a true rehearsal assistant. There couldn’t be a rehearsal, and certainly not a tour, without childcare. Our first tour, the first stop on the tour, Minneapolis, we had a babysitter with us. I had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a ten-month-old with me.

CHARLIE | Can you talk more about the first tour, just how that evolved and how that happened?

JoANNE | Sue [Suzanne] Weil, who was running the performance series for the Walker Arts Center, invited us. We stayed in her enormous house in Minnetonka. She was such a discoverer of the arts. Not only was she the first one to book Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, John Cage, David Gordon, Mabou, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk—at the same time she was booking stars like Miles Davis, The Who, and Led Zeppelin. The tour went on to San Fransisco, LA, Portland, and Washington state. Phil drove the truck

Cascando at Mabou Mines, the first production directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO ROBIN THOMAS

and we all loaded-in, installed, and loaded out the scenery.

At that time, Ellen Stewart [founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club] was also crucial because Ellen gave us our first salary. It was $50 a week. We could pay a babysitter and we could manage the food and rent. We were paid for being artists and it was a big deal.

CHARLIE | I know that you’ve called Ellen Stewart and Joe Papp your mentors. How did they challenge you or the collective of Mabou?

JoANNE | If encouragement can be seen to be rising to the challenge, that’s how they challenged us. They were so much alike and yet so different. What they shared was acting instinctively, which meant that some of their instincts were absolutely nutty and some of them were brilliant. But I learned an important way of thinking about the work.

“Let’s just keep trying... let’s try it. Oh… oh… it’s good. This is going to be over budget. Let’s just try it.” Joe always said, “Make the art and the money will follow.”

I remember when Mabou Mines was rehearsing at New York Theatre Workshop, where Jim Nicola was another incredibly generous leader. We were rehearsing Dressed Like an Egg, which I made from the writings of Colette. And I invited Joe to rehearsal. He came with Gail [Merrifield Papp, head of The Public’s literary department and Joe Papp’s wife] and said, “Oh, you’re artists. Come over to The Public tomorrow.” That day, Joe gave me a storefront theatre on Great Jones Street. Later that very same day, the executive director or the managing director of The Public Theater took it back because Joe couldn’t afford to give it to me.

CHARLIE | But he did it anyway.

JoANNE | Yes. He said, “This is yours. Do whatever you want.” Joe and Ellen had a kind of autocratic, artistic leadership style, along with an instinctive, encouraging belief in art, in making theatre, and in artists. When Ellen got her MacArthur, she bought a place in Umbria to be a residence for training actors and directors and playwrights.

CHARLIE | Tell me more about the evolution of your work through Mabou.

JoANNE | Well, I wouldn’t be a director without Mabou. I was an actor for a very long time, and I was unhappy. I hated it when the show opened, and we had to repeat. For me it was just repetition; for a really gifted actor, it’s continual discovery. I don’t have that gift. I’m most interested in rehearsal, the process. Really, there was no room in

Joseph Papp + JoAnne Akalaitis

PHOTO MARTHA SWOPE/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Ellen McElduff, David Warrilow, JoAnne Akalaitis + Ruth Maleczech in Dressed Like an Egg at Mabou Mines, designed + directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO RICHARD LANDRY

my creative being for that kind of constant rediscovery and invention. It’s one of the things that I admire so much about actors.

Once I directed my first show at Mabou, Beckett’s Cascando, I knew I’d never stop directing. My leaving Mabou was very natural. I was interested being out in another world, in working with people that I didn’t know, and tired of the collective and endless meetings.

CHARLIE | I can imagine many names, but who have been the most influential collaborators of the theatre design folks that you’ve worked with?

JoANNE | I think every designer ever. Certainly Jennifer Tipton, Kaye Voyce, Gabriel Berry, John Conklin, Susan Hilferty, Eiko Ishioka, Doug Stein, George Tsypin, Paul Steinberg, Thomas Dunn, all of them. They each work differently. Isn’t that the case for you?

CHARLIE | Absolutely.

JoANNE | You get together with a designer and maybe there’s not much conceptual conversation because you kind of get one another, but at the same time, the ideas flow. For example, for The Trojan Women, Paul Steinberg and I went from an empty ballroom

to an abandoned office building. Working with these designers, every door is open.

The actors and the audience meet in this common collective subconscious ground, which is magical.

I have a deep conceptual, intellectual, dramaturgical alliance with my designers. Designers like Kaye Voyce and Jennifer Tipton are real dramaturgs. Plus, they love actors. They don’t just show up for tech. They come to rehearsal. I welcome their directing notes, and notes on the shape of the piece.

CHARLIE | What is your rehearsal process— how do you begin?

JoANNE | With movement. Especially in the beginning of the process, when we often do several hours of movement. It continues after. There is always a physical warmup and often an actor-led vocal warmup. Personally, I can’t just walk in the room and begin rehearsal. I need to be with the actors in a nonconceptual, spatial way before we begin with text.

I don’t do table work. I can’t. I’m too impatient—except for Greek or Shakespeare plays or text-heavy things. Which is not to say that kind of investigation doesn’t happen, it just happens later. First is the physical work, getting the bodies in space. The movement exercises have evolved over the years, like the exercise “Stopping and Starting,” which I do with every show. It’s simply moving through space to an Ethiopian Afro-beat tune, arbitrarily stopping and then starting, which then evolves to the group forming organic compositions. This is a physicalization of an important quote from Genet’s notes to the actors for The Screens, where he asks them to take each scene and each section within a scene as if it were an entire play without any smudges, without the slightest notion that there is another scene to follow it. That idea is essential to my work.

The kind of theatre I’m interested in is a theatre without transitions, where you keep falling off a cliff. And that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for the actor. But there are some actors who will take a chance in rehearsal and it proves to be tremendously exciting. I always thought that Ruth Maleczech was certainly one of those where you never knew what she was going to do next. At the same time, her entire script was covered with writing, with notes, and she was the last person to go off book. In fact, I had to beg her to.

The Screens at The Guthrie, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO JOE GIANETTI

CHARLIE | Seeing Ruth in your production of Through the Leaves with Fred Neumann, I had no idea what was going to happen next. Can you speak about what you refer to as the Mudras in relation to the physicality of the actor?

JoANNE | It’s my own kind of borrowing of the Kathakali theatre from Kerala, India, which is my favorite theatre. It’s cross-cultural, cross-everything, and tells enormous stories from [the Hindu epics] The Mahabharata or The Ramayana. It’s not that we don’t have those big stories—we do in Shakespeare and the Greeks—but the fact that there are these signals, these signs. I see them as iconographic, nonverbal, nonintellectual gestures, on the stage, perhaps abstractions of what we have in the West, which is psychology, as opposed to in the Kathakali, where there are codified, universal facial masks of jealousy, anger, and fear.

The masks that I do are sort of abstractions of Western psychology. They’re not set, they’re very fluid, and often they’re inspired by something visual. I’m interested in using visual art in the work always. For example, in Mud we used Philip Pearlstein’s luscious nude paintings and the poses in the 17thcentury Spanish painter Zurbarán’s work. In the end, it’s all really messy and a lot of it is, “Hey, let’s do a Mudra here.” I also owe a lot to ASL, which I find myself incorporating more and more in my work. I’ve also used slow-motion for years. I like things very fast or very slow.

CHARLIE | At the first rehearsal for Leon & Lena (and lenz), my memory—and correct me if I’m wrong because I’m sure there were

lots of other things going on that I was not aware of—is that there was a way of creating the space, the room for the actors. We put on music and people started moving about the space, and you used the phrase “Walk through your life.”

JoANNE | Lee Breuer came up with that exercise based on what Ruth and I learned from our workshop with Grotowski in Aix-en-Provence. The exercise is basically walking around the room, one minute for each year of your life, starting with year one. You have to be open to any image from your own life that comes to you, no matter how trivial, with the possibility that it can be vocalized or physicalized. It’s amazing.

I took my little six-month-old daughter with me to that workshop, and lied to Grotowski, who did not believe that women who were mothers were capable of doing his work. And Ruth was pregnant. It was so hard. My Grotowski story about my crawling through the transom to nurse the baby in the hotel is pretty well known by now.

I got several things from Grotowski; one is to be fearless. Part of his teaching is that you don’t become the character. You only have these moments in your life. That seemed to me to be an absolutely revolutionary idea about acting and about creating a score for a production.

I’ve been involved lately in having very short rehearsal periods, which I like a lot. It creates a kind of edgy rehearsal and performance. At the same time, I could not have done certain shows—like The Iphigenia Cycle in Chicago or Bad News! at Bard College and the Guthrie—without the luxury of workshops beforehand.

CHARLIE | Indeed, indeed.

JoANNE | I am not that attracted to the European model, especially the Eastern European model where they rehearse for six months and then they do a production, often a male director’s vision. I leave a lot to the actor. The actors are working in their bodies, which leads to their souls and their minds and their craft, their natural ability to create composition. I don’t block anymore because the actors do it better than I do. Which doesn’t mean I don’t constantly adjust the composition on stage.

One example of actors creating and owning their own community was The Trojan Women at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC

Fred Neumann + Ruth Malaczech in Mabou Mines’s Through the Leaves, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis

PHOTO C/O MABOU MINES

Anne Dudek in The Iphigenia Cycle at Court Theatre, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO DAN REST

with Nick Rudall—a great leader from Court Theatre and the University of Chicago, who also was such a valued, wonderful colleague, such a man of theatre. I asked the Chorus to shave their heads. These actors came in to audition with gorgeous hair, and I said, “Oh, there’s just one thing, you have to shave your head.” We decided on a date, a time. They wanted a woman barber. They went out the night before by themselves and got drunk and ate a lot of food. I was not invited to the shaving. But Jesse Berger, my assistant, went and he got his head shaved. Then they came over to my house for margaritas and dinner. They looked fabulous, but more importantly, they had created an exclusive tribe.

CHARLIE | What role does the audience play for you?

JoANNE | The English playwright Aphra Behn, who was the first woman to earn her living as a writer in English, said, “Theatre is a place where secret signals are sent to the audience.”

Now, she happened to be a spy, and that’s what she meant. But I’ve turned those words to my own use. Yes, we are sending signals to the audience, and the audience is maybe sending their signals back, and the actors and the audience meet in this common collective subconscious ground, which is magical.

CHARLIE | My experience as an audience member when I see your work is that I get to have my own response because there’s so much opportunity being offered through the signals. In other words, I can find myself in it. I don’t feel like I have to get it the way that you as the director wants or intends me to. Can you speak about that at all?

JoANNE | I don’t ever think that way, that there’s something to get. But the making of theatre, of course, involves our intelligence. The audience has to work hard. In the beginning of Stereophonic, which Daniel Aukin directed, in the beginning I thought, “Oh my God, they have such thick English accents and they’re talking so fast.” I could hardly understand them. “I love this. I love this.” I thought it was so much fun that I had to work so hard.

CHARLIE | JoAnne, my sense is you ask an audience to work really hard, and then people need to assign some name or quality to you—such as an avant-garde director who is doing radical interpretations of text—as a way to understand their feeling. What’s your response to being given such definition?

JoANNE | I don’t get it. I mean, I am just a worker in the field. The avant-garde flowered with Gertrude Stein and Man Ray. That was ages ago. The whole thing of auteur or director’s theatre, that really has no meaning because the theatre belongs to all of us—the

audience as much as it does the director, the writer, the actors, the designers. It belongs to all of us. We all make it together.

CHARLIE | I’ve done many things with you that I’m proud of, and Cymbeline was one of them.

JoANNE | Oh my God, wasn’t that the most tiring, crazy...? We would have three rehearsals going on in different rooms at the same time.

CHARLIE | I remember it well. You would send me off to a room with Joan Cusack.

JoANNE | Praise Joan because she wanted to know what every single word meant.

CHARLIE | It was extraordinary. I mean, just so many performances. But I also remember the critical response from the New York Times

JoANNE | I was going to Minneapolis the day after opening to audition actors for Genet’s The Screens, which is set during the Algerian Revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s. We had a cast of more than 50. I was determined to interview every non-Equity, non-white actor in Minneapolis, including people who had never been on the stage, a woman who felt so panicked the only way she could audition was with her back to me facing a corner. I auditioned 80 actors in one day after reading that Frank Rich review.

The Trojan Women at Shakespeare Theatre Company, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis

PHOTO CAROL ROSEGG

CHARLIE | What a great way to respond to that.

JoANNE | The production had, not redemption, but people remember it was great.

CHARLIE | They do.

JoANNE | Ellie Fuchs did that eightpage feature in American Theatre . I meet people who saw the production. I ran into Wendell [Pierce] at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park, and he said, “Ah, thanks, that was so much fun.”

And working with Phil [Glass] and the band, working with you, the fight scene [choreographed by David Leong]—it was revolutionary among fight scenes. Once again, it just opened so many doors. But the racism, for Frank Rich to say, how could a white woman have a Mexican son and a Black son? Huh? Huh? What?

CHARLIE | When I got the news that you were no longer the Artistic Director at The Public Theater, I called you up and I said, “Whatever’s happening there, JoAnne, you’ve got to come to Chicago. What do you want to do?”

JoANNE | Charlie, that was so welcome. Thanks. Didn’t you ask me to direct something, and I said I couldn’t possibly do it because it was too hard, and I didn’t understand it?

CHARLIE | Yes.

JoANNE | Well, I never direct anything I understand, but it was like—was it Thyestes, was it Phèdre?

CHARLIE | I’m not sure, or Quartet [by Heiner Müller]. I’m not sure which one.

JoANNE | Well anyway, The Public: I always say the best thing that happened to me and the worst thing that happened to me was being the Artistic Director of The Public Theater for a whopping 20 months. I actually think I was right for the position, but not in those particular circumstances with perhaps that particular Board. We did some terrific work in that brief time. [John Ford’s] ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Woyzeck, Fires in the Mirror, Pericles, Henry V Parts 1 and 2. It’s horrible to be fired from a big job on the front page of the New York Times. I have kept all the letters I got in a shopping bag. They’re in my house. I’m grateful to all the people I worked with and what we did. But it’s also something I don’t think that, for my mental health, I should have been doing for very long.

All the planning that is hooked into the nature of institutions is a business model. It is not an artistic model. When I was at Bard, I never wrote a syllabus. I told them what to expect. When I was at Yale, they said, “You have to have a syllabus.” I said, “Okay.” The second class, I told the students, “You know that syllabus you have? Throw it in the garbage. It’s useless. I don’t want to do those things I said that I was going to do.” It’s not that you’re not preparing. It’s the whole fiveyear plan situation. It seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

CHARLIE | If you could create a new model for what graduate schools are doing rather than what they’re doing now, that’s not about business structure, what would it be?

JoANNE | Graduate school really is a lot about craft, skill, technique. Certain language should be out, language like “the industry” or “the business,” because it is sending the wrong message. And also, they have to read something beside their sides. They have to look at art, see opera. I always took my students to museums and opera dress rehearsals.

CHARLIE | Can you imagine a theatre that is creating the art, not to serve the institution, but just because of the work itself and how it might partner with the university around

Jesse Borrego, Frederick Neumann, Joan Cusack + Don Cheadle in Cymbeline at New York Shakespeare Festival, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO MARTHA SWOPE/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Elizabeth Laidlaw + Jenny Bacon in Phèdre at Court Theatre, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis PHOTO MICHAEL BROSILOW

the scholarship and the dramaturgy and the artists? It’s sort of putting all of us together without some of the restrictions of it being part of an institution.

JoANNE | One way is a salon model. I had a salon at Bard that went on for a couple of years. So many visiting artists came—Robert Woodruff, Anne Bogart, Bill Camp, Lynn Nottage—and such interesting work got done. It was a lot of work for me because I cooked dinner for 20 people every week. We pretty much never read theatre work; we read philosophy or theory or politics, for example Canetti, Foucault, Naomi Klein. After Bard, I had a women’s theatre salon once a month in which we read work about women. We read Strindberg, The Declaration of Sentiments from the first American Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Hallie Flanagan, Greek plays like Antigone, and obvious playwrights like Irene Fornés and Ellen McLaughlin. The group had a great range of women from age 24 to mid-eighties and eventually included climate change activists, journalists, academics, and visual artists. It’s really important to get together and read and then see how work is connected to reading. That seems like where theatre, for us anyway, begins. It begins with some words, which sometimes become stories.

That Women’s Salon led to a group of us doing a homage to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall. We did it in Madison Square Park on the day of the Electoral College election in 2016—it was called Cut Piece for Pants Suit. We also did a piece called 100

Years! Stay Tuned…, celebrating a woman’s right to vote in New York State.

When I was at The Public Theater I got a considerable sum of money from the Mellon Foundation, and I did not invest it in a project. Instead, I gave different amounts to artists, inviting them to be artistic associates. All they had to do, if they were free, was once a month come to my office and we would read a Greek play guided by a Greek scholar from the Classics Department at Yale. That was a lot of fun. Eric Bogosian reading Agamemnon was really fun.

But you don’t need a lot of money from the Mellon Foundation. What if you have a little bit of money? You could do something. For example, Leon Botstein, president of Bard, was going to tear down the old gym on campus. I said, “No, give it to the theatre students. Give it to them and they can produce their own work.” And it became a wonderful student-driven venue.

CHARLIE | What’s your sense of how young people are feeling about the theatre today?

JoANNE | I think young people coming out of graduate school are so worried. They have to face the post-pandemic world, real estate, and debt. They’re worried about money, how they’re going to make it, or should they bring children into the world because of climate change? And that’s why I keep looking around the corner for the next thing to do that is where the arts will matter. I’ve always believed in the great joy of making art and making theatre art. And in how much you give to people.

The most exciting theatre artists I know are my former students. They’re worried, they’re very worried, but they’re working. I am so proud of them, and I am also proud of myself, of what I gave them—which is fundamentally idealism and in these difficult times, hope. I think in spite of myself, I am idealistic. The theatre, as we know it, is pretty injured, pretty damaged, and so expensive. My hope is that it will go on to exist in some completely new and inspiring form.

Charles Newell is Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, winner of the 2022 Regional Theatre Tony Award. Later this year, Charlie will transition to the role of Senior Artistic Consultant and, in 2025, he will return to Court’s stage to direct the world premiere of Berlin. Recent directorial credits include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; The Gospel at Colonus, co-directed with Mark J.P. Hood; and The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, co-directed with Gabrielle Randle-Bent. Charlie has directed at Goodman, Guthrie, Arena Stage, Long Wharf, and many others and has received the SDCF Zelda Fichandler Award, four Jeff Awards, and seventeen Jeff nominations. Charlie is a cofounder of the Civic Actor Studio, a leadership program of the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement.

The Women’s Salon production of Cut Piece for Pants Suit in Madison Square Park, conceived + directed by JoAnne Akalaitis + Ashley Tata PHOTO C/O JOANNE AKALAITIS

JoAnne Akalaitis + Charles Newell at Akalaitis’s induction into the Theater Hall of Fame PHOTO C/O CHARLES NEWELL

FUELED BY

FAITH

AND LEADING WITH

CURIOSITY

An SDC Roundtable on Boston-Area Theatre MODERATED + INTRODUCED BY LISA RAFFERTY

The Boston-area theatre is unique in some ways. We are a small, big city—majority-minority since 2000. That particular truth has not always been represented on our stages and in our audiences. When I joined the Boston theatre world years ago, I could not hope for the progress we now see—with talent on stage and off representing our community in authentic ways.

There is still much that needs to be done to support equity issues. It’s up to us to keep going. The artists who gathered at our roundtable are doing the hard and joyous work to make it so, along with many others representing New England stages and productions, from fringe to first-class.

We are lucky to work in a supportive and congenial atmosphere, shared across professions and productions. Like many theatre hyphenates, we teach at high schools, colleges, universities, and other academic institutions. There is a generous spirit in sharing information, collaborative partners, and casting resources. We continue the good work every week, every season—even as we face familiar artistic and audience challenges.

Our gratitude to SDC for bringing us together at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre to offer insights and reflections on our shared experiences.

ABOVE Dawn M. Simmons, Bridget Kathleen O’Leary, Megan SandbergZakian, M. Bevin O’Gara, Pascale Florestal, Maurice Emmanuel Parent + Lisa Rafferty at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Pascale Florestal is an Elliot Nortonnominated director, educator, dramaturg, and writer. Pascale serves as associate director for the national tour of Jagged Little Pill, Director of Education for Front Porch Arts Collective, Assistant Professor of Theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee College of Music, and Visiting Guest Artist Professor at Suffolk University.

M. Bevin O’Gara is a Boston-based theatre director and educator. She spent three years as Producing Artistic Director at the Kitchen Theater Company in Ithaca, NY. She holds a BFA in Theatre Studies from Boston University and teaches at Emerson College and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Bridget Kathleen O’Leary is a freelance director, educator, and new-play developer in the Boston area.

Lisa Rafferty is a playwright, director, and producer whose work includes documentary plays and The MOMologues series (Concord Theatricals). She is producing director of the Elliot Norton Awards and a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and SDC. She loves teaching at Bridgewater State University. Recent: MOMologues The Musical at 54 Below, Queer Voices play festival at Boston Theater Company.

Megan SandbergZakian is the Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and the author of the essay collection There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theatre of Optimism and Honesty

Dawn M. Simmons is an Elliot Norton Award-winning director, producer, playwright, administrator, cultural consultant, educator, and Co-Producing Artistic Director of Front Porch Arts Collective.

LISA RAFFERTY | What’s one word, phrase, or sentence that describes your work in theatre right now?

MEGAN SANDBERG-ZAKIAN | New plays.

MAURICE EMMANUEL PARENT | Reactionary.

DAWN M. SIMMONS | Ever-evolving.

M. BEVIN O’GARA | Empowering. Blowing it all up to empower others.

BRIDGET KATHLEEN O’LEARY | I was going to say making space, but now that sounds like yours and we already have similar names.

PASCALE FLORESTAL | Radical. I only believe in work that’s going to make change or at least create conversation and a dialogue.

LISA | What fuels you? What charges you?

MEGAN | I am fueled by faith—by a sense of optimism and hope that it is possible to create a space where we can be in a room together and have an experience of our essential interdependence that reminds us of the truth of how connected we really are to each other, so that we can perhaps treat each other a little better in the world outside the theatre.

What I love about the New England theatre ecosystem, especially Boston, is that I find so much inspiration in what my friends and my peers are doing.

DAWN M. SIMMONS

Maurice Emmanuel Parent is an award-winning actor, director, and educator. His selected directing credits include SpeakEasy Stage, Lyric Stage, Central Square Theater, Greater Boston stage, Actors’ Shakespeare Project (Elliot Norton Award, Outstanding Director). He is CoProducing Artistic Director of Front Porch Arts Collective and Professor of the Practice, Tufts Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies.

MAURICE | I’m finding that, as a very much still-early director, I have to let the purpose of the playwright completely define my process—the questions I ask, what I bring to the table as preparation work for the actors, the container I create for them to play in, the sandbox I’m setting. It all has to come out of what I am connecting to about what the playwright is wanting me to say, at least the way I interpret it.

DAWN | Anything and everything. My own ambition, the success of my friends, a good script, something I saw at a museum, a song, something I wrote, an idea. Inspiration comes from anywhere and I think it’s important to keep filling up the well. That’s the kind of thing that fuels me.

Ken Baltin + Shawn K. Jain in Heartland at New Repertory Theatre, directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary

PHOTO CHRISTOPHER MCKENZIE

Much Ado About Nothing at Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian

PHOTO NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

What I love about the New England theatre ecosystem, especially Boston, is that I find so much inspiration in what my friends and my peers are doing. I want to keep playing in this sandbox for as long as I can.

BEVIN | Not knowing. That sense of, “I don’t know what it is, but it fascinates me.”

Particularly right now as an educator, what I’m really enjoying is going back to the basics of things I thought I knew and being like, “Oh, I just did that on instinct, but what is it that I’m actually doing?” Also the sense of the discoveries I make, because my students tell me new things every day. And I’ll say, being 40 now, it is great to be like, “I don’t have any goddamn clue what the hell I’m doing.”

Seeing the future in young people really fuels me for the possibility and the optimism and the faith I have that there is a different way and we’re going to find it, and we’re going to be able to recreate it in a place that everyone can access it.

PASCALE FLORESTAL

MAURICE | Yes! Tell the children. They think they know everything. The older I get, the less I know.

BEVIN | I love that I don’t know things, because I want to remain curious. Constantly. I want to live by that Ted Lasso mantra: “Be curious, not judgmental.” Lead with the curiosity. One of the quotes I teach is from Anne Bogart: “The director is the person who can tolerate uncertainty the longest in the room.”

PASCALE | Yes, preach.

BRIDGET | What fuels me right now is the generosity of others who are sharing those parts of themselves. I don’t know what “good” is anymore, either. I don’t think I have a need for something to be “good,” I just want it to be honest. And I want that transaction of vulnerability between me and the person who’s offering it up. It’s what keeps me going right now.

PASCALE | My fuel comes from my educator world, seeing the young people I’ve taught. A great example is Victoria Omoregie from

Fat Ham. She was a student of mine when I was teaching at Huntington when I first got here. To see her now in Fat Ham, in John Proctor, fuels me. Seeing the future in young people really fuels me for the possibility and the optimism and the faith I have that there is a different way and we’re going to find it, and we’re going to be able to recreate it in a place that everyone can access it.

Our company [Front Porch Arts Collective] constantly fuels me. It is the possibility of a different kind of future that keeps fueling me, this idea that maybe there is something different that we haven’t seen before that is possible.

LISA | I teach a class at Bridgewater State University called “Race, Class and the American Dream in Theatre.” As I tell the students on the first day, basically all of dramatic literature is race, class, and the American dream. How does this describe the work that you do, the work you create?

BRIDGET | As a new-play person, I think that everybody who writes a story, their story is worth reading. When I think about race, class, and the American dream, I’m thinking about whose voices are we amplifying? Whose voices are we giving space for? And for me—not working for a theatre company anymore and not having to be concerned about marketing value—supporting the playwrights who are writing about right now, right here is how I support that. Sometimes I need to know that you live in Dorchester and wrote a play about your neighborhood. When I think about what America looks like, I’m so “Boston First.” I’m interested in uplifting the voices of the people who live in the New England area.

PASCALE | Who is creating this American dream? Because that is something I’m constantly thinking a lot about in my work, not only as a director but as an educator. We have been fed this American dream by a specific kind of idea and person that has an advantage on the American dream. So

Regan Sims + James Ricardo Milford in K-I-S-S-I-N-G, coproduced by The Huntington + Front Porch Arts Collective, directed by Dawn M. Simmons PHOTO T CHARLES ERICKSON

who defines this American dream and who is it really for? Just because you say it’s an American dream doesn’t mean that people in America get to accomplish it or even get to have it.

I think that’s why I do the work I do and why I decide to do the plays that I do. I’ve been asked to do plays where I’m like, “I don’t want to do this work. What does it say about the world we’re living in?” I’m not here to talk about something that isn’t real—or isn’t real for the people who experience it. It’s interrogating it in every single way, whether that’s through text, through marketing, through everything, it needs to be talked about.

LISA | How does this manifest itself in the work of Front Porch? It’s been such a vibrant, incredible thing to witness in these past couple of years. It gives me joy to watch what’s been happening with the material you choose to represent.

MAURICE | I’ll be honest and also quite reductive. We started Front Porch because we wanted to make plays with our friends. We wanted to make plays with our community of Black artists and see more people of our community, Black folks in the audiences, for the work about that culture.

Whose voices are we amplifying? Whose voices are we giving space for?... I’m interested in uplifting the voices of the people who live in the New England area.

BRIDGET KATHLEEN O ' LEARY

We wanted to tell these stories from a place of agency, to change the narrative of who is telling stories in this area. We are not the first Black theatre company. We’re not even the only, but we also wanted to do it at a particular level. This might sound a little arrogant, but we wanted to honor who we all are in this community, what is meant for us to have dedicated our lives and professional careers here. And we wanted to build something that would sustain and add a place for producing work about these narratives from this place of agency at a certain level. So that—just brass tacks—we could pay the artists we were asking to work for us at least industry standard if not better. So that’s really what we came from,

having pay equity as a core of our philosophy.

We didn’t think, “I’m tired of these people doing Black shows and they shouldn’t be doing Black shows.” Everybody can do what they want. We’re going to do us our way and you do you your way. And obviously we still work for these companies doing these Black shows that are produced by predominantly white institutions. We wanted to add to the community, to be a positive addition and a positive space to this ecosystem of New England theatre.

PASCALE | I think the other thing we’re doing is providing opportunity for young people of color who want to see other people of color in theatre. As a young person who moved to Boston, I didn’t think that existed; it was something I struggled with a lot growing up, being here. That’s another gap that we fill, creating a space for young people of color who are interested in an industry that is dominated by white men, so that they can be around people like themselves and have work that represents them and their experience as well.

That’s such a beautiful addition—not just theatrically, but that sense of community and belonging that I think the City of Boston has been in dire need of since, at least, I moved here in 2014.

BEVIN | There’s something very myopic of how we think about the American dream. It doesn’t fit into this package and never really did. We were told that it fit into this package, but now—

MEGAN | But that’s always been the job of theatre. When you say, “Race, class and the American dream,” I’m like, Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun

LISA | Those are the first two plays I teach in that class.

MEGAN | I knew that from the title of the class. You teach those two plays together; both of those playwrights are saying, “This is bullshit.” Our most classic American plays have always been an interrogation of capitalism, an interrogation of race, class, social structure, feminism, and all this. It’s certainly not every facet, but there’s a

Jackson Jirard, Christina Jones + Sheree Marcelle in the Front Porch Arts Collective production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, directed + choreographed by Maurice Emmanuel Parent

PHOTO NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

way in which our art form has always had an extremely vibrant thread of this kind of interrogation. We’ve been interested in this. Sometimes you look at these musicals that were on Broadway 40 years ago and you’re like, “Wait just a fucking second.” I mean, sometimes they’re racist and horrible, but sometimes you’re like, “Oh my God.”

BRIDGET | I feel like it was prior to what we call modern theatre. The job was to say, “Look at yourselves. You’re broken.”

MEGAN | Holding the mirror up to nature.

BRIDGET | The mirror up to the audience. I’m sure theatre exists that’s like, “Isn’t this so great? We’re all so happy. Thank you.” I just don’t buy tickets to that stuff. I can’t think of any play I would put in front of my students and be like, “Don’t you feel hugged?”

BEVIN | But can we have this conversation? Pascale, you were saying, “I only want to do these things that push people, no theatre for entertainment.” But a lot of the young theatremakers out there—because of the world, because of a desire for comfort— want to do that. I do a lesson in theme and of eight student directors, six of them chose the theme “Sharing Is Caring.”

We wanted to tell these stories from a place of agency, to change the narrative of who is telling stories in this area.

MAURICE

EMMANUEL PARENT

There’s a large portion of them that want theatre for entertainment. How do we as educators, as directors in the work that we do, make them know that that’s okay? There’s such an emphasis on comfort and safety right now.

MEGAN | Which is different from entertainment.

MAURICE | Maybe we can tease out what entertainment is.

MEGAN | Fat Ham is entertainment. Chicken & Biscuits is entertainment.

MAURICE | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LISA | Well, the literal definition of entertainment is, “that which holds our attention.”

But I want to bring us back to something. Boston theatre is grounded in a unique way in our city in that many of us are involved in academia and education. We have something like 60 colleges and universities in the city of Boston alone. Many of our theatres have a strong relationship to a bigger academic institution. What are the advantages and the challenges of that?

MAURICE | A few things became really essential for us when we were founding Front Porch. It’s about making art and making a space that is Black-affirming, that is Black-centered, but it’s also centered in professional opportunities and paying people. A healthy fringe community is important for a theatre ecosystem. But because of who we wanted to center and who we wanted to pay, we built partnerships with mostly larger theatre companies as a way to use their resources to build communities around these plays and pay industry standard.

But then there are some sacrifices. You have to collaborate on all the art, and sometimes you have to duke it out when you’re not seeing eye to eye. Sometimes you have to realize that messaging is going to be off, and you have to be really on top of that. We have often depended on the director to be the hub of all these moving pieces to keep

Next to Normal, produced by Emerson Stage at Emerson College, directed + choreographed by M. Bevin O’Gara PHOTO CRAIG BAILEY/PERSPECTIVE PHOTO

things mission-aligned, particularly when it’s one of us or a director that we closely know.

BRIDGET | When I look at the companies that are really deeply rooted in a partnership or a relationship with a university, I do feel like they’re doing work that feels a little bit more exciting, a little bit riskier.

But I also think that companies that own their buildings, companies that are anchored in a building where they have a relationship that is an essential part of who they are as a company, don’t get to be as mission-driven. I don’t think that they get to take the same amount of risks.

MEGAN | I’m trying to think about everything that you said from a directing standpoint because I do think the positive side of it is that the subsidy from the university—not that they use that word—but the fact that they are the ones maintaining this physical space does give us a lot more freedom to program riskier work.

From a directing standpoint, though, it’s still a tiny paycheck. It’s still shitty hours because part of the subsidy is we’re working with students; you have to rehearse till 10 p.m. There is a way in which the professionalism is always coming second to the relationship with the institution.

We don’t have that many resources, but we have more than we did before. I think there’s something hopeful about the way that this community has built over time.

MEGAN SANDBERG-ZAKIAN

Now, for us at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, we also have an educational mission, which is different from ArtsEmerson or A.R.T. We are invested in training, doing graduate training for playwrights. Part of the deal is to help them form relationships with future colleagues. We want them to collaborate with the grad designers and the grad directors. That will only benefit them in the future. But I think there’s a lot of wrestling with resources no matter what level you’re at, and no matter what type of collaboration you have.

It’s not just institutions that think about money and values. Directors, we’re always thinking about that too. And you’re in this space of, what is the matrix of the taking of this gig? And the reason that all of us— maybe except Dawn—have these academic

affiliations is that we are building a base where we have the ability to live our values in our artmaking. But we couldn’t do that if we didn’t have these academic gigs, right?

BRIDGET | I’ve been trained to be grateful. “Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you so much.” If you tell me there’s not enough money to do this thing that I want, then I’ll say, “Okay, we’ll figure it out.” Part of that is because in 10 years of working for an institution, we constantly didn’t know how we were going to pay our bills. When I worked for Megan, it never occurred to me to ask for what I needed or what I thought the show needed because I’m so used to figuring it out. We have been trained to be resourceful and in a scarcity mentality and then just be grateful.

MEGAN | It’s very moving to sit around this table with all of you. I’ve known you a long time, Maurice, but you just started directing. Pascale, you’re young, you’re a young’un. But Bridget, Dawn, Bevin—how long have we been doing this together? Maybe we are getting into a new era where we collaborate, we work for each other, we work with each other. We don’t have that many resources, but we have more than we did before.

I think there’s something hopeful about the way that this community has built over time. In terms of Boston specifically, and the

Jackie Burns, Rachel Zatcoff, Libby Servais, Karla Mosley + Q. Smith in MOMologues The Musical at 54 Below, created + produced by Lisa Rafferty PHOTO NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

community of directors in Boston, from the second that we all hit the ground, we’ve all been like, “Oh, here’s an opportunity,” and “Oh, let me hook you up with this” and “Help me out with this casting problem.”

I feel like we’ve known each other long enough that we know if there was some bullshit. But it’s not.

DAWN | Not at this table.

MEGAN | That part, I find very hopeful.

LISA | Do you all have any brief advice for emerging directors or choreographers, of any age, who come into the New England/ Boston theatre system, that you’d like to give now?

DAWN | Don’t say yes just to say yes.

BRIDGET | Try something that makes you uncomfortable.

PASCALE | See all the theatre. Go. Put yourself out there.

MAURICE | Stay hungry and accept feedback. And don’t get complacent.

BEVIN | Also, stay curious, ask questions. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. Find out, investigate.

BRIDGET | Be in relationship with, not in competition.

PASCALE | Don’t compare and despair.

Be curious about your audience. What we do is in service of them

to a great extent.

M. BEVIN O’GARA

DAWN | Run your own race.

LISA | Is there anything else you’d like to add or think that the readers of the Journal should know?

MAURICE | How do I say this? All the regions and networks and theatre systems and communities around the nation are cool and unique and should not just be like, “Let me do what New York does.”

Really honor where you are, the community that you are part of. What works there may or may not be what worked in New York, so focus on building up the community that you have.

PASCALE | There was a point where I thought New York was the end-all be-all. But there are so many more opportunities. There are so many people all around the world. And why not make the community where you are? Because they need theatre just as much.

BRIDGET | Make what you have to make because you have to make it and be real with yourself about why you’re doing it. Because if you’re doing it for the money, if you’re doing it for the recognition, if you’re doing it for the cachet, that’s going to burn fast.

BEVIN | Can I “yes, and” yours, and also say, your community is your audience. Be curious about your audience. What we do is in service of them to a great extent. How are we serving our audiences? New, old? Just continue to ask that question. How is this work in service of this audience?

Pier Lamia Porter + Lovely Hoffman in Marie and Rosetta, co-produced by Front Porch Arts Collective + Greater Boston Stage Company, directed by Pascale Florestal PHOTO NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

Director Michael Arden and choreographers Lauren YalangoGrant and Christopher Cree Grant were first introduced over Zoom, when Michael started The Forest of Arden—a collective created to make safe theatre during the industry shutdown—with stage manager Justin Scribner, who was also a mutual friend of Lauren and Cree. They met in person in upstate New York when The Forest of Arden produced American Dream Study, a socially distanced, immersive dance-theatre experience created by more than 30 theatre artists who developed the piece while quarantining. (In the New York Times, Michael Paulson called it a “particularly ambitious example of pandemic-prompted experimentation.”) Their ongoing collaboration has also included Parade, winner

of 2023 Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Director of a Musical, and Queen of Versailles, which is having its world premiere this summer in Boston.

Michael, Lauren, and Cree sat down with Heather Arnson one bright and early Wednesday in January—back on Zoom—to chat about how creative collaborators can use their craft to push the dynamics of the industry forward. In an open and fluid conversation, they discussed fuller creative team involvement, what breeds a higher quality experience for the artists making the work, how striving for a healthier creative space also influences the quality of the work itself, and what type of work excites their exploration.

Jodi McFadden + company members in The Forest of Arden’s American Dream Study PHOTO EMILIO MADRID

LEFT TO RIGHT Christopher Cree Grant, Lauren Yalango-Grant + Michael Arden in rehearsal for Queen of Versailles PHOTOS DREW ELHAMALAWY

HEATHER ARNSON | Let’s jump in. You all seem to really love to engage with collaboration that encourages multiple viewpoints in the conversation. I’m wondering how you came to develop this way of working, and do you think this is a must for sustainability and growth for the industry?

LAUREN YALANGO-GRANT | I think the beautiful thing about the relationship that Cree and I have with Michael is that we met during the pandemic when the world was bananas, and we weren’t really able to make art in the way that we’re used to. It took real collaboration and effort to build what Michael and Justin Scribner organized as The Forest of Arden, and they were able to find a way to make art during very challenging times. Our relationship started with real collaboration, and not so much the normal hierarchy of theatre positions. That’s how we’ve always known each other. That’s how we’ve developed our relationship, and we’ve taken it into this more commercial

world of theatremaking, which I think is really beautiful.

MICHAEL ARDEN | The best work happens when we open ourselves up to both allowing people into our boxes and getting outside of our own boxes, because then you’re doing something as if for the first time. I think that kind of balancing between excitement and fear is actually really helpful for the creative process.

I have always felt that problem solving is best when it’s done from all perspectives, because if you’re only looking at something from one angle, as a director often does, you might not see what the wardrobe supervisor is seeing on a project, and that might be the key to unlocking the answer to a problem. I think this way of collaborating is a tool that can be used, but by no means are we saying, “This has to be the way it always works.”

Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes there can be pure chaos. Creating an environment where people feel comfortable enough to not be

bound by their past conventionality while still maintaining some sense, some semblance, of structure is kind of key.

CHRISTOPHER CREE GRANT | It also requires an amount of bravery amongst all the creatives, a certain amount of courage that you have to have. It can be challenging throwing your ideas into the pool. But if you allow yourself to truly be the creative you want to be when pitching those ideas, there is a space to be heard—even if it’s not taken in that moment, there still is an opportunity for something to stick, either that day or maybe in a week. Overall, stepping outside of your comfort zone, being a little scared, a little nervous, and a little messy can eventually yield good stuff. At least that’s what I’ve learned.

HEATHER | I really resonate with what you are saying about balancing between excitement and fear and just throwing your ideas out there. You never know. We have to be open, and that’s a fantastic approach.

Lauren Yalango-Grant + Christpher Cree Grant (BELOW) and Andrei Chagas + cast (OPPOSITE) in The Forest of Arden’s ALIEN/NATION at Williamstown Theatre Festival, directed by Michael Arden PHOTOS JOSEPH O. MALLEY + R. MASSEO DAVIS

MICHAEL | This is something that has really come to the surface for me in my work. Trying to get it right is never the way to work. It does take an environment in which people feel completely comfortable to fall on their faces, to put their foot in their mouth, or to say something stupid, because that will always lead to something more. There are no mistakes. There’s just learning.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone, being a little scared, a little nervous, and a little messy can eventually yield good stuff.

CHRISTOPHER CREE GRANT

LAUREN | Yes. To get the energy rolling, just being comfortable; it might be coming from team lighting, costume, choreo, or directing. Everyone’s in on the same goal of getting to the most interesting way that we can feel the story. Every idea pushes your thinking to think of the next thing, so it’s just opening up that space. Even if you’re scared, you say your idea, because it inevitably amps up the energy and it sparks other ideas. I think that’s a really beautiful thing that Michael creates when he’s directing, and we like to have in our space.

MICHAEL | Sometimes.

LAUREN | Your heart, I think, is always coming from a place of, “Okay. What’s next?” I think that’s a really important part of the collaborative process and making something new and having a new point of view, even on a really old story. Parade is an older piece brought back to life and told in such a new fresh way thanks to the space that Michael created and allowed. Lighting designer Heather Gilbert was in rehearsals. Costume designer Susan Hilferty was in rehearsals. We were a community, trying to tell a story the best way we could, together.

MICHAEL | More problems have been solved for me by costume designers than I’ll ever admit.

HEATHER | Fair, fair—I love it when design solves a problem! Speaking of projects, in terms of choosing stories that you all want to tell, how do you factor in concepts like changing or progressing the theatrical landscape for the future, and understanding what the art of theatre needs in order to drive it forward?

MICHAEL | I can only approach a work if I feel an emotional and spiritual connection to what I think it can achieve as a piece of viewable art. I have a hard time with just entertainment, unless it’s actually subversive

in a way that the audience is going to leave the theatre, and—at least for the 30 seconds before they get to where they’re having dinner—contemplate how they’re living their lives and if there’s anything they want to reexamine about that. That’s my guiding litmus, I would say. Otherwise, I just know that I’m not going to do a good job, because I actually won’t have a point of view; I think work has to be very personal to the artist, and it has to make sense. I’m obsessed with morality plays. I’m obsessed with consequence. I’m interested in theatre being a warning, an inspiration, and something that can hopefully lead to the idea of hope or faith—not necessarily in God, but in each other. I don’t think there’s a blanket, “Art needs to do this.” I think art has to be genuine and come from a place of personal inspiration for the artists who choose to approach it.

HEATHER | Lauren and Cree, from a choreography perspective, is there ever a play, a play with music, or a musical that you see that you want to tell the story of, and then you seek out other collaborators, where you are the point of genesis? If so, how does that come about?

LAUREN | We’re still newer to the musical world. We come from a dance-theatre background, and in that world, we did a lot of collaborating. We both were in Pilobolus

Dance Theater for many years. We always use this term, “upgrade.” I don’t mean it in a way that’s like an upgrade to your new iPhone, but in a way that helps elevate your thinking, or from someone that you admire, that you think you can learn quite a bit from. In that world, we sought out collaborators all the time, but in musicals, no, we’re not there yet. I’m sure that will happen for us, but I’m still at what I call “The Michael Arden School of Arts” in learning musicals.

MICHAEL | I’m in school too. We’re all in school there.

CREE | Life is school.

LAUREN | For us, choreographically, we like it when movement really feels like it’s serving a story: you dance because you don’t know what to say. We come from a world of movement. We really like collaboration, partnering with people like Michael, who we really trust and admire, and who have such a clear point of view, and then we can tap into that and help bring that to life. That’s what I’m looking for. It’s either that a piece is really inspiring to me and I want to tell the story physically, or I know the director and I’m dying to work with them because it’s collaborative, it’s going to push me. You

I’m obsessed with morality plays.... I’m interested in theatre being a warning, an inspiration, and something that can hopefully lead to the idea of hope or faith — not necessarily in God, but in each other.

MICHAEL ARDEN

CREE | I’ve been tracking these Instagram skateboarders lately. As I watch them fail, succeed, and innovate, I’m reminded that that’s the place that I like to live, kind of messy and rough around the edges. It’s an art form. There’s something so raw about it. Every process that I go into now, regardless of what it is, I’m really curious about how I can navigate the chaos of it all. I like to stay loose, and then whatever comes out of that can potentially innovate and further the story I’m trying to tell.

I love to play, and I feel joy diving into a project. There’s something appealing about how we can inject movement into a story or how movement can help create context that only movement has the power to do. Sometimes halfway through a process I might question my choices and think that what I’m making is not going in the direction that I thought it could potentially go. However, Lauren knows that I’m a serial optimist; I will always try to find a way for the work to bloom and become what I dreamed it could be.

HEATHER | Speaking of the concept of blooming, as it relates to thinking about the expansion and growth of the industry, and maybe some elasticity that is greatly needed, have you all found that producers are also invested in finding ways to back a new style of creating?

MICHAEL | I think, unfortunately, it’s counterintuitive to the system and the incredible cost of time in the theatre. It’s a really oxymoronic place we’re in. We are creating. We want to create something for an audience where the memory lasts a lifetime, let’s say, if we’re so lucky. Yet the time we are in the theatre making the thing that we are actually going to show people

feel like the captain of the ship is going to do great things. That’s how I feel about the work I want to do now.

Parade on Broadway, directed by Michael Arden + choreographed by Lauren Yalango-Grant + Christopher Cree Grant PHOTO JOAN MARCUS

and share with people is, literally, it’s like the game show Supermarket Sweep, because it is so unbelievably expensive to tech a show. Tech is actually the smallest portion of any process, and yet it is the most important part of it. That’s a problem that I don’t know how we solve.

Unless we run away and make theatre in the woods, I don’t know how this is solved working on Broadway, because it is actually irresponsible, detrimental, and impossible to give something the care it needs, which is what we all set out to do on the first day of rehearsal. And then by the time we get into the theatre, you’re in panic mode, and I think it’s really dangerous. I don’t know what we do about that. I wish I held the keys to the car, but I don’t, so I think all we can do is just create environments where, during that insanity, we are taking care of ourselves. I think all producers acknowledge that there is a problem there. I don’t blame anyone for not having the answer.

We like it when movement really feels like it’s serving a story: you dance because you don’t know what to say.

LAUREN YALANGO-GRANT

LAUREN | A job is something that can become a family. It’s such a beautiful, special, holy place—but it’s also a job, and so there’s always this bit of learning or balancing required. It’s really important to treat humans as humans in a space. We’re dedicating six days a week and 12 hours a day sometimes, and staying in the theatre until 2:00 a.m. We dedicate so much of our lives to our job, which we choose, and I love, but we also are humans, and we have to remember that and perhaps slow down sometimes and treat the human first, which inevitably makes better work. That goes both ways. It doesn’t matter what side of the table you’re on. We have to treat each other with respect, decency, and care, and I think that really shows in the work. Some producers, I think, are on board with that, and some might not be, or are learning.

HEATHER | I’m wondering, Michael, about your new venture with Limelight, a former club in New York that you and your partners are transforming into a theatre. Do you think that’s a way of finding new physical space in order to create a different structure for making?

MICHAEL | Possibly. It’s at such an early stage that we don’t really know, but certainly that’s how I would want to approach

something, especially it being a nontraditional space. I have no idea what it’s going to be from a production standpoint yet, just because there are still so many unknowns, but I think that it’s all going to break if we don’t make a change.

HEATHER | I want to tap back in to what you were saying about how you met during the pandemic, during shutdown, which was a strange and wandering time for us all to figure out how to make art in a new way. How did those virtual beginnings move into being tactile beings together?

MICHAEL | We started, obviously, by stopping, as everyone did, and slowing down. Lauren and Cree have taught me the idea of slow being smooth and smooth being fast, which is something that I will put on my tombstone and credit to them. I think during the pandemic when we got together, we were forced to go at such a slow pace and since our human bodies were further away from each other, we had to be articulate and very deliberate about what we were trying to do, and we went back to a childlike approach. That allowed me to actually stop briefly (as I think it did for many) and identify what made me feel good in a space.

So often, we are in such a hurry, we just do what we know achieves a certain product as quickly as we can, so the shutdown helped me identify what I’d like to kind of rethink. “Oh. Is my aesthetic based upon the fact that I need to stay afloat, or the fact that I’m actually interested in what I’m doing?” When we started entering spaces together, it just made sense, because I was so inspired by these two performers, artists, and creators, that I wanted to be inside a room with them. They were like, “How’s that going to go?” but I was like, “Hey, I’m doing this thing, Parade Do you have any interest in choreographing the musical?” and they said yes.

And so we just thought, “What if we actually didn’t do it the way we used to? What if it crashes and burns?” Of course, here we were doing it at Encores!, where there’s a twoweek rehearsal, which is the funny part, just in terms of how we decided to slow down with the company as well to let them find things. I’ve never rehearsed a show faster, and it didn’t feel like we were throwing it together either. It actually felt really calm, so that’s kind of how we started to go, and now we have to just keep reminding ourselves of that. What was it like when we were on a field outside, 20 feet apart, having to communicate? What was helpful, and what from that experience can we bring into the fast-paced environment of the

rehearsal studio? We have to keep reminding ourselves to slow down.

HEATHER | Right. I was associate director on the New York City Center Gala Presentation of Pal Joey, so I understand that sense of time, space, urgency that happens in that particular, condensed rehearsal-toperformance process.

MICHAEL | There’s always 30 seconds. That’s the thing. There might not be an extra day, but there’s always 30 seconds, so I think it’s also just being OK with things not being what we imagined. There’s a letting go that is helpful. I’m sure you felt that there, where you’re like, “Listen, we’re going to do what we can.” That’s all we can do.

HEATHER | Absolutely, because the curtain is going to go up, things are going to happen, energies will be exchanged, it’s going to be gorgeous, and we’ll learn from that night. Then we’ll do it again.

LAUREN | The Encores! experience was a good challenge of quick editing. I think sometimes, when there is a longer process, I can sit in the “woo-woo” of it all and get really indecisive. I can question everything and be like, “Wait, but this, or this?” At Encores! it’s like, “Nope. You’ve got to make a decision, be decisive, and go,” and for me, that was really a cool challenge.

MICHAEL | It’s a good exercise in instinct as well. Often, we actually know what to do, but if we ponder it too long, we lose sight of what it is. We rehearsed Parade in less than two weeks, did the show, and that’s basically what ended up on Broadway. And then there are other shows where I’ve been in workshops that have been six weeks long, and by the end of it, I don’t know what I’m doing. I think trusting your instinct, because that might be the clearest emotional reaction, is a good lesson.

HEATHER | That’s it. That’s the magic: “Trust your instinct.” Thank you all so much for joining me in this conversation. You’ve really rejuvenated my spirit this morning, so for that, I’m forever grateful.

Heather Arnson is a storyteller who connects through creative leadership via the direction and development of new and re-imagined work.

LEADING WITH INTENTION

VOICES FROM THE EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

MELIA BENSUSSEN + LIZ DIAMOND in conversation + essays by TERRY BERLINER, JUSTIN EMEKA, ANNIE-B PARSON + ANNIE YEE

Inspired by a conversation with SDC Journal’s Editorial Advisory Committee, we invited this group of theatre artists to ruminate on a question about shaping the future. How can directors and choreographers use their craft to propel the theatre forward? The resulting conversation between directors Melia Bensussen and Liz Diamond, and personal essays by Terry Berliner, Justin Emeka, Annie-B Parson, and Annie Yee, reflect their fierce commitment to exploring how directors and choreographers can leverage this particular critical moment in the American theatre to embody their values and lead in new ways.

— The Editors

ABOVE The Oath by Annie-B Parson, Big Dance Theater/PAC NYC PHOTO RACHEL PAPO

STAYING IN THE STRUGGLE

MELIA BENSUSSEN + LIZ DIAMOND IN CONVERSATION

MELIA BENSUSSEN | The first thought I had, which came out of a conversation with Anne Bogart a few years ago, is that, as directors, we have the opportunity to create an ideal society in a rehearsal room—in how we elicit the best from each other and how we support each other and how we lead with authority. We have authority in these positions, but must also have grace and generosity. We have the opportunity to model what we would like leadership to be.

I have faith in a rehearsal room. People bring their best selves into that room through this craft. There’s something magical about how, if we bring the self that we most appreciate in ourselves and we share that and we see everyone’s best self, that’s a pretty amazing space to be in.

LIZ DIAMOND | I think of the rehearsal hall as a space where, in effect, you’re rehearsing for life—for living in society with other human beings. When we talk about best selves, the words that come to my mind include generosity of spirit, which is manifest in the deep listening and acute observation that directors have to bring to their art. The sine qua non of being a director is being able to actually see what’s in front of you—not what you dream, but what’s in front of you.

MELIA | That’s it. Do the play in the room, not the play in your head.

LIZ | Yes. And curiosity—curiosity about the text, a hunger to understand it and one’s collaborators’ impulses, and so on. “Play” also comes to mind. There’s a sense of play that characterizes the best rehearsal spaces I’ve been in, where people are actually playing with one another and enjoying one another. That sense of curiosity, wonder, energy, laughter, is so missing in the world right now, but rehearsal—theatrical creation—reminds us that these are all available to us at every moment.

We use the word polarization to describe what’s happening in our country right now. The fact that people can’t actually hear each other, can’t put themselves in another person’s shoes and imagine what their impulse, intention, need might be, makes the practice of theatrical art more urgent than ever.

MELIA | Watch with empathy, and with attention to detail, and listen deeply. All those traits of the best self in the rehearsal room that you outlined so beautifully. The trap we’re falling into in society is that we’re only concerned with our own selves, we’ve stopped listening.

LIZ | There is so much fear, tremendous fear of the other, fear of losing in the mad scramble for resources, for power. In our own field, this shows up as tremendous fear of, “Am I going to ever get work? Is my work going to be seen and heard?” Fear can shut down creativity so fast.

MELIA | You’re absolutely right, and also, “Am I going to be hurt?” Resiliency is lacking. It takes courage to know that you’re strong enough to manage whatever happens in the rehearsal room, that you won’t be injured by the work or the institution. I don’t say that without awareness of how much damage has been done to people through these institutions and within the work. But can you find a balance between the necessary generosity and self protection?

LIZ | I say to my students, “The challenge and the joy of what we do is that we get to practice staying in the room with one another, staying in struggle with one another.” We have the opportunity to be in space with one another, to wrestle with a problem together and experience what it feels like to disagree and to find a path toward some kind of shared understanding. To practice conflict and resolution! And through that, to understand that it’s possible for someone to be right and someone to be wrong and for there to be no trail of destruction in the wake of that. It’s hard to develop the ease of spirit, the tensile strength, to understand that the creative process is dialectical and that this doesn’t have to be scary.

MELIA | It needn’t be scary. How do we now, in this moment, after so much darkness in the politics of this moment, and the polemics of this time, and the divisiveness of our world—how do we say that staying in the struggle can energize you, not enervate you, and that you will get stronger, and that you have, as an artist working in this field, you have the resiliency?

LIZ | I think we have to model it, to practice it ourselves, whatever our directorial style is—loquacious, quiet, gregarious, intensely focused, whatever. If we practice trying ideas out, allowing experiments to fail, inviting interpretive debate together with fellow artists, we can help everyone in the space to understand that there’s a thing we’re working on…

MELIA | …that is larger than all of us. You put the play, the production, or—we’re both aligned with institutions—the institutional challenge at the center and we all agree that’s more important than ourselves. That is what can happen in a good rehearsal room.

LIZ | It’s the fun of it.

MELIA | And you get to lose yourself.

LIZ | Yes! It’s very hard to lose yourself in these scary times, especially for emerging directors. Where’s my next job going to come from? Is anybody ever going to see my work? Am I ever going to get a chance? It’s very hard to put fear aside and play with freedom and pleasure. But it’s essential.

MELIA | The fear of “Where’s my next job?” never goes away. That is part of our life in this field. “What happens next and what am I doing next?” You have to integrate that anxiety or that fear into part of your practice, and have faith that it’s not a moment-tomoment experience, but that you’re going to be doing this for 40 or 50 years. Just having faith in the longevity of one’s presence in the field can help with patience and generosity. I’m moved by that.

LIZ | I think it’s important—if painful!— for directors to recognize the precarity of the art form we’ve chosen as our calling. When I look at all the fields for which training is provided at the drama school where I teach, there are jobs after graduation for folks training in many theatrical disciplines—technical design and production students, for example, theatre managers and stage managers, designers, even playwrights and actors.

MELIA | You think so? More than directors?

LIZ | I do. Partly because of TV and film, but also because the American theatre is so hungry for new stories, for the next great American voice. Nothing is guaranteed. We know this. But there is, for many artists, technicians, and managers in the theatre, an ‘industry.’ That’s the word used. I’m not sure there’s an industry waiting for directors as we begin our lives as artists. I think becoming a director is more like emerging as a painter or a sculptor. I suppose all artists have to create our own necessity; we’re not seen till we’re

seen. But a director’s work—a production— can’t be seen till someone is willing to take a chance and support the making of it. You can’t send it out as a PDF. Nobody knows they want a production directed by a young director till they’ve seen their work—and it’s damn hard to be seen as a young director.

MELIA | That’s really true.

LIZ | For the young director who steps out, it’s going to be extremely scary because the horizon that you’re looking at may be barely three weeks long, because you’re “lucky” enough to get to do a workshop of a new play for which you’re getting paid something a little bit better than car fare. It is just plain, bloody hard and there will be many people who begin in the field and who take the off-ramp into various other ways of living, because it’s really too difficult to stay the course.

MELIA | There’s more security.

LIZ | I wish I could see that changing, but I don’t know if there has ever been a time in the American theatre when this wasn’t true.

MELIA | How then to navigate fear, given the very accurate landscape description that you’ve drawn? Because you have to live two different lives. You have to understand the big picture, but when you’re working with others, when you have the privilege of being employed, you need to know how to hold that separate from the terror. To go beyond

the fear of not knowing where the next paycheck’s coming from.

And how you must re-prioritize and remember that everyone you are with is also in the struggle. If you’re trying to function within a rehearsal space or an institution, it can seem that you, the artist, are alone, but you’re not. How not to view yourself as overly vulnerable, how not to shut yourself down to others, to the work, and assume a confrontational stance versus a collaborative openness?

LIZ | In a world where there’s a tremendous amount of distrust now for institutions— whether schools or theatre companies, just to name two in our own field—it is really challenging to cultivate the kind of contributing mindset that you’re talking about. There is a narrative about institutions at large in the world, both on the right and on the left, that is about the way institutions are failing us. Certainly those narratives don’t come out of nowhere; people have suffered.

MELIA | But it’s like what we say when directing a great play with a long history. We know we have to treat it as a new play. I heard the brilliant Fiona Shaw once say about working on Medea, “The hard part is leaving the baggage outside the room.”

LIZ | You’re right, of course. I think the freelance artist who is employed by an institution has more power to support an institution’s strengths, and more power

to effect positive change, than we often perceive ourselves to have.

MELIA | If you see yourself as powerless, you become a black hole: you end up absorbing all the life in the room. Whereas, if you feel yourself as an active participant in the struggle of the school or the institution, then you’re engaging, then you’re helping change it and not sitting cynically on the sidelines.

LIZ | Understanding where you fit into the organism when you arrive as a guest artist is important. You don’t want to presume to know more than you know about an institution’s culture, but you also don’t want to pretend that—once you are hired—you are not now an integral part of it. Here, too, curiosity and generosity are essential. I think it’s really dangerous if you don’t find a way of saying, I am now a member of this organization—for however brief a time. I’ve been invited in and I have something wonderful to contribute, and my colleagues, who are part of this institution, have something wonderful to provide me, and we’re going to learn from each other, and—have a ball.

MELIA | We’re saying something really challenging. We’re saying, start with a position of optimism.

LIZ | And trust.

MELIA | We say to actors all the time, “When you walk into an audition, they want you to be good, they want you to have the job.”

Godfrey L. Simmons Jr. + Marsha Mason in All My Sons at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen

PHOTO T CHARLES ERICKSON

An institution wants you to succeed beyond all measure. I understand many institutions have a legacy of not supporting the artist to the degree that they should, but how do you start fresh with us? How do you treat the institution and the job the way you would treat any play? With respect, with a deep affection and a desire to succeed together.

LIZ | It’s extraordinary to be given the opportunity to bring a bunch of people together and to direct a play. I mean, it’s just spectacular. It’s a big responsibility and it’s a big privilege.

MELIA | Gratitude and grace at this most challenging of times. But it is asking a lot, given the frailty in the culture and the frailty of our field right now.

LIZ | And the legitimate anger, which I certainly see among young artists, at a long history of betrayals and failures to support the next generation, for example.

MELIA | It’s the classic challenge we have in our field, where instead of looking to support institutions and each other—freelancers supporting institutions, institutions supporting freelancers—we’re looking for ways to bring each other down.

We are in an extreme moment, so how do we ensure we take a long view? How do we place the darkness of the now in the larger arc of our work? How do we remember what theatre means and how transformative time in a rehearsal or a classroom can be?

It’s challenging, but I believe that individual acts of trust, faith, and grace pay off.

LIZ | But I would say, too, that there’s an obligation in our art to really, really, really be fearless about speaking truth to power. Anger has its uses.

MELIA | We’re not talking about being complacent, and we’re not talking about being passive. Quite the opposite. I love your vision of being in the struggle. And don’t be afraid of your anger, but also don’t be afraid of anybody else’s. Trust that everyone has best intentions. That’s the challenge. So that the anger can go toward this thing in the middle, toward the work itself.

LIZ | Can be galvanic.

MELIA | Can be galvanic and transformative and help make change. Speaking truth to power is essential to our work.

LIZ | I was just working on Caryl Churchill’s play Escaped Alone, in which four elderly women sit in a garden, talking. What’s really potent for me in that play is that—as they chat each other up and drink tea—great gaps of understanding, painful, unresolved conflicts, and dark, existential terrors surface, and yet the women stay in the garden, with one another.

MELIA | So they’re not alone.

LIZ | I find the commitment to staying in the room, to staying in the garden with one another, is what matters.

MELIA | Staying in the struggle, as you said, is a great way to look at it.

LIZ | And of not allowing all that binds us together to be torn asunder.

Melia Bensussen is Artistic Director of Hartford Stage and the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center.

Liz Diamond is the Chair of Directing at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre

Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, Rita Wolf + LaTonya Borsay in Escaped Alone at Yale Rep, directed by Liz Diamond

PHOTO JOAN MARCUS

THE SHARING ECONOMY: MOVING TOGETHER IN TIME AND SPACE

BY ANNIE-B PARSON

In 1991, in order to have a platform to create my work collaboratively with a group of artists and designers, I co-founded a dance/theatre company, Big Dance Theater. For many decades we used one model: essentially, I was in the lead, and I would make work in deep collaboration with our group for the venues that commissioned us. These were in-depth experiments into the nature of choreographic elements interacting with music, classic texts, video, and found material, created over a year and sometimes longer. This required me to be highly generative, which is why I created the group. But it also put me in a leadership position, which I am less interested in—and probably less good at. This was our model, and from an artistic perspective, I think it was successful.

For me.

But then our world changed, and thus theatre changed. So after 30 years, in an effort to recognize our ongoing responsibility to challenge inequities in the downtowndance ecosystem, Big Dance revised our model. And we approached this new model in the same way that we have approached creating a new work—in the spirit of experimentation. Since 2020, Big Dance has been striving toward the realization of a shared economy, and

we have done this as both creators and administrators, marrying these two roles in order to present the world as we want it to be: on stage, in the office, in rehearsal, in relationships. We have realized this with the sharing of materials, funds, knowledge, and labor. In addition to developing and producing our own projects, we have enacted initiatives to support underrepresented voices on and off stage. With diverse creative teams and staffing, we have explored a broad range of resource sharing. Some of these efforts include free artistic and administrative advisement, mentoring, shared props and costumes, and curating other artists in shared programs. Additionally, this year we will publish a shared book project with 12 choreographers on the history of dance. These projects overall have deepened our initial artistic experiment; more voices create a shimmering, prismatic worldview.

This past year, to put artistic muscle behind these efforts, we decided to reshape Big Dance’s latest large-scale commission from the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) into a shared evening created by three distinct choreographers: Tendayi Kuumba, Donna Uchizono, and myself. This show, a choreographic tryptic, tested the power of the sharing economy using horizontal, inclusive, and collaborative artistic leadership models to impact arts-workers’ artistic opportunities. The March premiered at PAC in December 2023 with a shared cast of 17

intergenerational, diverse, female dancers shared by three choreographers.

The piece that I made for this shared evening with our cast of 17 was called The Oath, and the human compulsion to move together in unison was the seed and the formal core of this dance work. Central to this dance was the notion of “getting big,” both in scale and emotion, moving as one voice, as one body, and the necessity and power behind this impulse to be in unison. The Oath referenced vernacular unison movement in the world, from the harmonious to the monstrous, from the communal to the mechanistic. Both utopian and dystopian, the dance starts in the beginning of time, and stretches past the present to the ends of our perception. It presents synchronous action as stronger and stranger than the individual. Here I offer images of The Oath [see also p. 38], in the hope that it expresses to you, both in tone and scale, the mighty sword of dance.

Annie-B Parson co-founded Big Dance Theater in 1991 with Molly Hickok and Paul Lazar; she choreographed American Utopia and Here Lies Love on Broadway, and her most recent book is The Choreography of Everyday Life

The Oath by Annie-B Parson, Big Dance Theater/PAC NYC PHOTO RACHEL PAPO

PHOTO SHIRA FRIEDMAN

THE DIRECTOR AS GRIOT

BY JUSTIN EMEKA

I believe a director is essentially a storyteller or “griot” whose function is to help recall the stories that remind people who they are, especially when they are in danger of forgetting. Theatre is a ritual space where audiences engage their collective imagination to see the world in a new light, a new perspective, so they can remember the extraordinary consequences of the choices we make while living. Today, as the world erupts in growing turmoil, I believe our work has never been more important.

An unfortunate reality in America is that we inherit a theatrical tradition that was largely shaped during racial segregation. From “blackface” to Birth of a Nation to “Cowboys and Indians,” the earliest forms of theatre, film, and television were all used to assault Black and Brown humanity. Some of our most cherished artforms served as platforms to justify and promote racial inequalities as a way of living. Historically, audiences were trained in theatres as to which American lives mattered and which did not. And so, working as a Black director in LORT theatres around the country that depend overwhelmingly on predominately white audiences, it can still feel like my presence, culturally speaking, is relatively new. I am proud to contribute to the creation of opportunities for new voices that might offer insights for new modes of storytelling and institution building.

Within the theatre, there are important stakeholders who have been conditioned to exist and/or see themselves at the margins of the stage and society. They need an invitation and encouragement to move closer to the center. Likewise, there are important stakeholders who expect to always see themselves at the center of every great story and/or experience. They need to be reminded of the wisdom that is gained by stepping out of the center. So many truths are only revealed by changing our position. As we share a theatre, it is important to be generous in how, where, when, and why we occupy space so we learn to recognize our own reflection in the needs of people who might not look or think like we do.

As a director, it is my responsibility to create a rehearsal environment that supports each artist in their process. This begins by affirming who they are as artists and having

a creative vision that opens pathways for them to personally relate to the text, their character, and the world of the play. Each artist is connected to a unique history and legacy. They are not just themselves. They carry with them the memories and reflections of many unsung heroes. I want artists to feel welcome bringing all of themselves into the room and into our process. I often do this by inviting them to share stories of the people who helped them arrive at this moment. Sometimes we post their pictures all over the walls of the rehearsal room alongside our visual research of the play. Along with the dramaturgy, the director’s greatest resources are the actors’ imaginations, memories, and experiences. Each actor brings a multitude of new perspectives and complexities to a role that the playwright and director could never have imagined. Through the process of rehearsal, the actor and character become bound in a symbiotic relationship. Depending on the character, this can be terrifying for the actor—to find oneself in a character who does or experiences something horrible. Therefore, a rehearsal room must feel infinitely supportive of actors who must take such incredible risks.

Love is central to every process. The most productive rehearsals are filled with people who have decided to love what they do, and therefore always find a way to love each other as a company. With every production, I learn how theatre requires a sincere love of humanity and genuine respect for all

life. A good actor and director must always find something to love about a character because they do not have the luxury to judge them as “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong”—no matter how noble or morally reprehensible they are. Their job is to reveal what makes that character human—worthy of the audience’s attention and emotional investment. Even if we do not like their decisions and behavior, our job is to build empathy for the needs, ambitions, pain, and humor that inspire all the actions of the play.

Ideally, through the process of rehearsing and performing, the company learns to love themselves and the characters, even while recognizing their extraordinary imperfections. And if our work is successful, we inspire our audiences to invest in their own imaginations—to live and love better as more thoughtful, soulful human beings.

and filmmaker.

Justin Emeka is a director, writer, teacher,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Harlem at Pittsburgh Public Theater, adapted + directed by Justin Emeka PHOTO MICHAEL HENNINGER

PHOTO TANYA ROSEN JONES

BE AN ADVOCATE

BY TERRY BERLINER

Be an advocate. Specifically, I am referring to taking care of the people who do what we do and support what we do. If you look at the bedrock of why we do what we do, you might unearth what I did many years ago. Fundamentally, I realized, I do what I do to make the world a better place. I want to explore the truth about human nature. I want people to leave the theatre with a better understanding of themselves and the world in which they live. Those objectives drive all of my actions.

Today, when everyone is worried about how they are going to continue making theatre with shrinking budgets and “limited” resources, there is this resounding struggle. I hear it when a person says, “It’s hard to cast a person of color in this area.” My answer: “Well, you need to try harder.” A person can’t just say, “This is hard to do” and then give up. I won’t. Because I am an advocate for us. I say expand your reach and look hard at what you are paying people. People want to work—for a fair wage. If you aren’t paying enough, people will say no. So get them to say yes. It’s not rocket science.

We are problem solvers by nature. It is with joy and effort that we do what we do. What we directors and choreographers have is an ability to identify a problem and creatively solve it. We do not do what we do because it’s straightforward—even though oftentimes the answer is right in front of us. We do what we do because something inside of us drives us. The reason for each of us is unique, but I guarantee, whatever drives you is deep and consistent. For instance…

Why do I teach? I teach because I want students to work with and meet a person who knows how to do what we do. I also want to provide a pathway from where they are to where they want to go. If a student succeeds, I succeed; we all succeed. We expand our community of the skilled and informed.

Why do I work on new work? Because I know that there are new stories to tell, by writers who no one knows. Those writers need a guide who understands, has compassion, and is an advocate for new work, ideas, stories, and most importantly, new writers. They need people like us who

know how to read what’s on the page, finesse it, and then manifest it. Is it easy? No one who has ever done what we do knows better than us how hard it is. And I’m not talking about just the art. I’m talking about bringing it to life in a production.

Why do I work in corporate entertainment? Because I use every single thing that I know how to do, with speed, and bring an event to magnificent theatrical life. Do a group of female attorneys need to hear the music of Six? Yes, because they will love it and they will buy tickets and take their friends to the show. Does the American Heart Association need a well-directed show that puts women’s cardiovascular health in the forefront? We all do.

Why do I help producers get budgets right? So I can help make good decisions about where money goes. Because I know what things cost. Call it a pastime or an active pursuit. People don’t always agree with me, at first, but eventually they see that putting money into humans is a winning proposition. Because humans make the art. If the incredibly talented, creative humans with whom we all work are taken care of (paid enough) we have made the world better. So

I am always an advocate for people getting more than minimum, because—I’m sorry to say, and this will be a surprise to no one— minimum isn’t enough.

Why do I always ask for an SDC contract? Because these contracts help each one of us and they help us all. My health contributions go into the health fund that helps us. If money goes into the pension fund, that is me looking out for our collective future. And, if I use an SDC contract anywhere I can, even when it’s not required—yes, sometimes you have to ask for it—that creates a path for others to do the same, and reap the benefits of a united front.

So, be an advocate for humans. We are the engine that drives the art and the success of the business.

Terry Berliner is a director/choreographer, writer, and educator based in New York.

Sherri Shepherd, host, in the Red Dress Collection Concert 2024, directed by Terry Berliner PHOTO AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

WE ALL SHARE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

BY ANNIE YEE

An essential element to help propel theatre forward is having opportunities that include a diversity of voices collaborating in the room. We all share the human experience, and these diverse voices can add much enrichment, a variety of perspectives, and an authentic truth to stories.

I take great joy in creating movement that is specific and detailed for each show, scene, and character. As an Asian American, female choreographer, I am extremely proud of working on plays with Asian themes, yet it also has been my desire to be seen as a creator who gets opportunities for all types of productions. Just as an actor can play

many characters, I want the chance to be able to do the same and pull from my life and dance/movement experience to create many types of work. When I do get these chances, I feel over the moon to be able to create anything and everything.

While my choreography specialty is Chinese dance, Chinese Opera movement, and hula, I began my training with jazz and ballet dance, studied on scholarship with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and with Joe Tremaine, was in the circus for a short stint as an aerialist, and was an LA Rams Cheerleader and LA Laker Girl.

I love historical dance, and I recently had this opportunity for The Winter’s Tale at Antaeus Theatre Company. It was thrilling to work on the Minuet for the opening scene and the Morris dance for the sheep shearing scene. I loved collaborating with director Elizabeth Swain to bring my highest vision of the choreography to fit the scenes and tell the stories.

I was also in the room as choreographer for Grumpy Monkey, the Musical, a world premiere at Pasadena Playhouse. I got to create dances for five different animals who danced groovy 1960s styles, Fosse style,

ballet, and full-on jazz show dance with some ASL. The opportunity was created when Producing Artistic Director Danny Feldman started the new Youth and Family program and made it an inclusive collective for the creatives and cast.

Continuing opportunities for all can help keep theatre exciting, relevant, accessible, inclusive, and growing. I’m excited that this can reach out to more communities where they can see themselves and their stories in the theatre.

Annie Yee is an awardwinning choreographer based in Los Angeles.

Grumpy Monkey, The Musical at Pasadena Playhouse, choreographed by Annie Yee

PHOTO JEFF LORCH FOR PASADENA PLAYHOUSE

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises

Edited by Rachel Bowditch, Paula Murray Cole, and Michele Minnick

Routledge, 2023. 324 pp. $46.95 Paperback.

If you are looking to incorporate an expressive and somatic, movement-based approach into your work, you have countless techniques to choose from, including Viewpoints, Lecoq, Laban, and Bartenieff. At least one solid “how-to” manual exists for all these approaches and the dozen or so other techniques not mentioned. Yet one approach has not had its own book until now: Rasaboxes. Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises , edited by Rachel Bowditch, Paula Murray Cole, and Michele Minnick, is the first book about Rasaboxes to come from Richard Schechner’s direct pedagogical descendants. For those who are eager to learn more about Rasaboxes, this book will not disappoint.

Rasaboxes is a technique inspired by the Natyasastra, the ancient Sanskrit manual on performance practices, and the concept of rasa, which translates as “juice, flavor, or essence” (48). Schechner, who spent several months in India in the early 1970s, conceived a way to use the 8 rasas—eroticism, humor, pity, anger, heroism, fear, disgust, and wonderment—to achieve specific emotional states and the corresponding physicality more easily in performance.

The editors title this text a “sourcebook,” which is a wise choice, as it does not need to be read from start to finish to get the most out of it. You can easily bounce among the book’s four parts to find what you need. However, those who do choose to read the book straight through will find a natural progression—from historical context to exercise instructions to practical applications—and a cohesive pedagogical approach. The editors and contributors stress that for maximum efficacy, students need to show up regularly and take the work seriously; instructors need to create clear physical boundaries for the work; and all participants need to stay present in the work. They have even incorporated a food motif, using food-based terminology throughout the first part of the book, acknowledging that taste is a crucial and often overlooked factor in acting work.

Part 1, “History and Theory,” focuses on Schechner himself and the origins of what he calls The Performance Workshop (TPW), the approach he developed with his experimental troupe, The

Performance Group, and other artists. If you are familiar with the field of performance studies and Schechner’s role in defining that field, you will recognize much of this information. Schechner’s essay “Rasaesthetics,” revised from its 2001 appearance in TDR, provides a detailed explanation of Rasaboxes and connects the work to neurobiology and our enteric nervous system. Even those who already understand the approach will find greater clarity in this section. Shanti Pillai’s chapter, “What is Rasa?” contains the best explanation of rasas I have read.

Part 2, “Practice,” gives the reader a detailed look at the core exercises associated with TPW. From the outset, the editors provide a disclaimer, acknowledging the incompleteness of the chapter and claiming “[it] best serves as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, guided instruction led by an experienced facilitator” (82). They still advocate that the reader train in Rasaboxes and use the book as a reminder of the experience before teaching it to others, stressing that the most carefully worded explanations, the most high-quality photos, and the clearest diagrams cannot substitute for the knowledge gained from doing the work. Still, they provide useful tools for total novices to bring the TPW experience to their own studios and rehearsal rooms without attending their training.

Peppered throughout Part 2 are “Experience” sidebars—short first-person descriptions of the exercises from the perspective of a fictional TPW participant—which give the reader a better understanding of the process. It is especially helpful for novice facilitators who might lack intuition and need a way of knowing whether their students are doing it “right.” It also works well for exercises that do not demand a very defined physical state or require weight sharing. When they do suggest there might be a more “correct” way of doing something, they acknowledge there is always value in the work and encourage readers to follow the same guidance Schechner himself provides whenever a TPW participant asks for clarification: “Do what you think [we] mean” (87).

The editors have grouped exercises together thematically not chronologically, and later in the book they provide a suggested order for completing the exercises in a three-week workshop setting. Everything you could ever want to know about Rasaboxes is here: how to introduce them to students and actors, how to use them with and without text, how to incorporate them into chorus and character work, and even how to use them in site-specific settings. But there is more gold to mine from this section. I found their descriptions of the “Crossings” exercises to be clear and incredibly valuable for any type of acting class or workshop. These exercises involve having actors cross the space, pass by each other, and notice how that encounter affects (or does not affect) them. It returns our focus to the fact that acting, in its simplest form, is an exchange of energy between two humans.

Part 3, “Facilitating the Performance Workshop,” gives facilitators some general guidance without getting too prescriptive. It includes a 2016 interview with Schechner as well as an insightful article by Scott Wallin on the need for a leader in this work. I found

Schechner’s first-person narrative and reflection useful for all approaches to teaching acting, regardless of the technique.

Finally, Part 4, “Notes From the Field,” demonstrates the myriad practical applications of Rasaboxes. Acting teachers and directors will find many chapters useful here, but especially Ursula Neuerburg’s chapter connecting the work of Strasberg and Stanislavsky to Rasaboxes, Rachel Bowditch’s detailed reflection on using TPW in a production of Machinal, and Fernanda Guimarães’s chapter applying Rasaboxes training to Brazilian telenovelas. Moreover, there is ample evidence of the effectiveness of Rasaboxes in K-12 education and drama therapy. I was especially moved by Dana Arie’s case study on using Rasaboxes as treatment for a 14-year-old social anxiety sufferer.

I found the book less helpful with handling the matter of cultural appropriation. To their credit, the editors encourage readers to question this early on: “How can the ‘intercultural’ aspects of

this practice, especially Rasaboxes, continue to be a source of productive dialogue and the building of new relationships?” (8). But they rarely address the issue directly and instead point the reader towards other sources for “Schechner’s argument for culture of choice and interculturalism” (41). Though defending the practice of Rasaboxes is clearly not the purpose of the book, it would be beneficial if the book supported acting teachers, directors, and facilitators by offering specific guidance about how to address the matter if students ask about it.

Crafting a “how-to” manual for any physical theatre technique is a daunting task. Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises makes good on its promises. No matter how much knowledge or experience you have with Rasaboxes and TPW, this book is informative, enlightening, and useful on a practical level.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Published by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC JOURNAL serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC JOURNAL’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. The SDC JOURNAL Peer-Reviewed Section seeks essays with clear language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/ sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

REPRESENT

$5 from every item purchased will be donated to SDC Foundation’s programming.

MICHAEL OSINSKI ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

SDC FOUNDATION

THE JOURNEY FROM DANCER TO CHOREOGRAPHER

A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH MAYTE NATALIO, ADESOLA OSAKALUMI + ELLENORE SCOTT

MODERATED

BY

DANI BARLOW

In February, SDC Foundation hosted an in-person panel, “The Journey from Dancer to Choreographer,” with Mayte Natalio, Adesola Osakalumi, and Ellenore Scott at Sunlight Studios in New York City. Moderated by SDC Foundation Director Dani Barlow, the conversation focused on career transitions or expansions, specifically for dancers who have shifted or added choreography to their artistic practice. This feature was edited and condensed; the full conversation, including questions from the audience, is available on YouTube and Vimeo at SDCFoundation.org.

Mayte Natalio, a choreographer from New York City, began her career as a concert dancer. She performed and toured nationally and internationally with several companies and pop artists. In 2023, she was seen as Rosie Perez in The Hippest Trip—The Soul Train Musical at American Conservatory Theater. This season, she choreographed the Broadway productions of How to Dance in Ohio and Suffs

Adesola Osakalumi is a Bessie Award-winning, Drama Desk-nominated choreographer and actor. As a performer his Broadway credits include Equus, Fela!, and Skeleton Crew, which he also choreographed. His choreography credits also include Cullud Wattah and Coal Country at The Public Theater and he served as associate choreographer and dance consultant for The Hippest Trip—The Soul Train Musical

Ellenore Scott is a Lucille Lortel-nominated choreographer and director. As a performer, she was a finalist and All-Star on So You Think You Can Dance? Her Broadway choreography credits include Grey House, Funny Girl, and Mr. Saturday Night, and her Off-Broadway credits include Little Shop of Horrors and Titanique. This season she co-directed The Lonely Few with Trip Cullman at MCC.

DANI BARLOW | You all started as performers, so my first question is, where did the spark for your interest in choreography come from?

ADESOLA OSAKALUMI | My mother and father were in a dance company formed by my father and uncles, called Africa I Dance Theatre, in Brooklyn. I was always around and exposed to dance and music, primarily focusing on West African movement styles, so I knew I would do something around performing and the arts from a young age.

The fuse was really lit [in 1995] when I was in a show at the Minetta Lane Theatre called Jam on the Groove, which I co-directed, cochoreographed, and co-wrote with a group of my peers. The producers brought in a few choreographers to give us some choreographic consultation, and the person we chose was Jerry Mitchell. By talking to Jerry, I started to understand and see a larger world of choreography and telling stories through movement. Even though we co-wrote the show that we were working on, it opened me up to not just the potential opportunity that exists [for] choreography as a career, but the art of movement and visual chicanery and trickery, and all of that.

MAYTE NATALIO | I had an interest in choreography in college when I was studying composition. However, I didn’t feel ready. I knew too many great choreographers and I was such a fan of so many choreographers

that I was like, “I don’t feel like I have anything to say.” I just remember being in rooms as a dancer, and always being interested in process. I’ve always loved the puzzle pieces of it.

The more I got into rooms that were more theatrical, and [more] story was involved, the more my interest started sparking and I started thinking, “I wonder what I would do? How would I have done this?” To me, making steps wasn’t the hard thing. To me, it was like, “What am I offering to the field of choreography?”

There used to be a choreographer showcase that Jen Jancuska, a friend of mine, ran, called BC Beat. She asked me to do something, and I had just seen a documentary about the Central Park Five—not the Ava DuVernay one, but another documentary. I was in New York when that happened, in the ’90s, and the music was the backdrop of the sound of New York at that time. I started writing a piece, and I got some friends together, and I made that piece. That really triggered something like, “Okay, now I have something to say.” I feel like that’s when my career as a choreographer really began.

ELLENORE SCOTT | I also feel blessed to have dancing parents. My dad is a hip-hop dancer, and my mom was a more classically trained ballerina and jazz dancer. I grew up seeing them move, and at age 10 or 11, I wanted to do what they did. I vividly remember choreographing solos to perform at the county fair, and at the

Elks Lodge Senior Center. I remember picking out songs and costumes and wanting to add storyline into a solo. And I remember that feeling of taking things that I had seen, and reinterpreting them, at a young age. Training then became the number one thing for me. Moving to New York, training at LaGuardia [High School] and at Alvin Ailey, I pushed away that drive and that need for choreography because I thought, “I need the technique. I need the foundation. I need to feel comfortable in my body.”

It always was lingering, it was always still there, the desire to create. But I felt like learning the technique would help me become a stronger choreographer, so I think there was always something in the back of my head that said, “No, work on your training. Get that foundation, do the Horton, do the Graham, do the ballet and the pointe, and use that technique for choreography.” Once I started performing, I was taking from the choreographers that I was working with and recognizing, “I love this about this person, or I don’t ever want to work like that person again.” I started taking those elements, and making that decision of, “This is how I want to work, and this is how I want to interpret and speak with dancers.” I had it when I was very young, and it went away. But then I think it started coming back in my early twenties—loving dancing, but loving that, “How do I create something new? How do I figure out that voice?”

DANI | Was there a specific show that you worked on where you thought, “Oh, this helped me become really clear on how I

want to do my work,” or “This was not how I want to do my work, but I had to learn it in real time?”

ADESOLA | I was fortunate enough to be cast in Equus [in 2008]; this was a time when I was like, “Oh, I’m not dancing anymore. I’m an actor. Don’t send me on dance auditions.” My manager, who is very wise, was like, “Sure. Sure, you are. So this is an audition you’re going to go on.” And I went, and I was fortunate enough to get the job.

The choreographer was based in London, her name was Fin Walker. I didn’t know what her movement palette and her style was going to be, but when we got in the room for the audition, she was very nontraditional musical theatre. “We’re going to be playing horses, so let’s do some role play. Act like you’re a cheetah and walk across the floor. Isolate your shoulder, because you’re going to do a lot of isolation.” And I’m thinking, “Wow, all of these tasks play to my strengths as a hiphop, popping-locking, house, African-based mover.” It really made me realize that you can be yourself in these spaces and find success.

Once we started working and rehearsing, we had a lot of different dancers with different backgrounds—tap, modern, ballet, Ailey dancers, former Ailey dancers—and it was beautiful to see her say, “Your strength is this, so I’m going to play to your strength, while helping move you slightly into something that you may not be comfortable in. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it; you just maybe haven’t had the opportunity to express yourself that way.” I came out of that

opportunity, that job, thinking, “Well, this is how I want to be when I’m working with anybody.” Whether it’s Soul Train when a lot of the people are based in the vernacular styles, or if it’s Cullud Wattah or Coal Country, where it’s not even choreography as much as it is movement. It made me really mindful of seeing who you have, and shaping your approach to who you have, to bring the best out of them. As opposed to saying, “This is what it’s going to be, and you have to fit into a rigid structure.”

MAYTE | I feel the same. I worked twice at Public Works at Dallas Theatre Center; it’s a program that started at The Public Theater and now is in several places around the country. You put up a show with the community, so you only have about eight trained actors, and then about a hundred people from the community, from age five to 85. These are moms and dads and kids, people from a senior program. There was a community group that was teaching immigrant children how to read, to get them on a level for kindergarten, that was part of it. There was another group that was an environmental organization. It’s different kinds of organizations that are going to put a show together.

And it was the same thing. “Oh, they’re not dancers, what am I going to do with them? What are you going to do?” And then you start pulling dance, you start carving, and you just have to figure out how to talk to different kinds of people. That has been the biggest benefit for me now, because I feel like I can go into any room. I just finished How to Dance in Ohio , and half the cast was autistic. And it’s like, “Okay, I just change the way that I speak. I have to learn, I have to adjust.”

It makes me more inclusive, because to me, the whole point of telling stories is to get people to see themselves, and for us to see humanity. The stories I want to tell are where people feel like humans on that stage and are still moving. And everybody loves rigor—you find out [that] everyone wants to be pushed, everyone likes to be challenged. That also made me feel, instead of seeing these people and being like, “I’m going to give them the easiest step,” it’s like, everybody wants to step up to the plate. So that experience of Public Works completely changed the way I looked at what I do.

ELLENORE | I feel similarly. There was a show that I was an associate choreographer for, and the choreographer, who was

How to Dance in Ohio on Broadway, choreographed by Mayte Natalio

PHOTO CURTIS BROWN

unbelievably talented, was very, very keen on working with the ensemble dancers. [They were] very much, “I want to work with the people that are talented in traditional styles, and I want to put my focus on them. So Ellenore, can you work with the principals? Can you work with the nondancers? Can you work with the actors?” I remember feeling, in that moment, very nervous to try and make that translation of someone being like, “I have two left feet. I can’t dance, so I’m not going to do what you want me to do,” and finding, how do I make you feel comfortable? How can I make observations about how you move, and encourage the movement that you already naturally do, and sway that into what the aesthetic of the show is?

I feel like from that opportunity, I learned how to use my gifts to make folks that are uncomfortable dancing feel comfortable. Jane Lynch, who was Mrs. Bryce for the Funny Girl Broadway revival, literally looked at me at day one and was like, “I don’t dance. I don’t do that.” I said, “We’re going to have to figure it out, because you have an entire number that you’re dancing in. What’s something that you like?” She said, “I love to do the hoedown.” I said, “We’re going to do the hoedown.”

So you find out, from your experiences, how to connect with artists, because everyone that is in these spaces with us is an artist. It’s just, how are they expressing it? Is it through text? Is it through dance? Is it through lights? Is it through the script? I think once you make that connection, you find the ways to get what you need and what you want, for the narrative of the show.

ADESOLA | I think that choreographer gave you a great gift by not just letting you work with the featured and lead performers but teaching you and helping you to start figuring out how to bring out the humanity in people. To your point, if we only deal with those who can already do it, we are not growing at the same time.

DANI | I’m curious about transitioning or expanding your practice—if you felt you had to choose a lane, maybe specifically because of this industry being like, “You’re a dancer.” Was it tricky for you to get the first gig as a choreographer?

MAYTE | It’s very tricky. First of all, I’m still a dancer; I will always be a dancer. I like the word expansion. I think that’s what’s happening. I think it’s expansion.

You have to be strategic. I remember when some choreography jobs started to come up, I had to make a choice. Many times,

there were several dance jobs that I had to turn down, because I was like, “Actually, if this is of interest to me, then I need to get that experience.” Training is important to me. The same way I went to a conservatory and trained to dance, I thought, “The way that I’m going to train to choreograph is by doing these shows, being an associate, being an assistant.” But within, I was always trying to find the balance. I took a class today at 8:30 in the morning, because I’m still performing, too.

Sometimes you decide, “I’m actually done performing,” and that might be okay. I’m not there yet, but you do have to decide what to do. The thing that I chase is rooms that I want to be in, and projects that interest me. “Is this something I’ve done before? No? Then I should do it. Is this a person that I admire, that I want to work with? Do I like their work, and want to get in that room with them?” That’s always what I chase. Is this meaningful to me? Do I care about what this is? Because it’s so hard, already. When it’s the

Kurt Csolsak, Julie Benko + Justin Prescott in Funny Girl on Broadway, choreographed by Ellenore Scott

PHOTO MATTHEW MURPHY

Yasha Jackson + Antoinette Crowe-Legacy in This Land Was Made at Vineyard Theatre, choreographed by Adesola Osakalumi PHOTO CAROL ROSEGG

best scenario, with the best people, and you love it—it’s going to still be hard.

ELLENORE | I had a lot of pushback when I came to the decision that I want to only choreograph. I made that decision when I was 22. I had just come off of performing on So You Think You Can Dance, I was doing television shows, I was doing background dancing. When I said to my dance agents, “I think I just want to choreograph,” they were like, “No, we make way more money [when you dance]. Please don’t do that.”

It was so interesting because it was the age. “You can choreograph later. You can do that when you’re in your thirties or your forties. You need to perform now, while your body is still young and flexible.” I just didn’t want to hear no, so I started my own dance company. I thought, “I need to develop my own voice. I need to prove to myself and to others that I can do this. And I also need to develop my choreographic voice.”

I started my own dance company in the city, and started figuring out how I wanted to choreograph, and how to work with folks. I did that for three years, fully funding it myself, creating a business plan of teaching at dance conventions, using that money to pay my dancers for rehearsals and performances, and doing a big season every year. Eventually, one year, my agents came, and they were like, “Okay, I think you’ve now proved that you can do this.”

It was a very interesting time to be told, “No, no, no, just wait.” And I was like, “I don’t want to wait. I want to make that transition now.” Sometimes I come out of retirement and do performances, here and there. But I’ve made the transition. I still perform when I’m teaching dance class, but I’ve tipped my hat to the performing days.

MAYTE | That’s why it’s tricky, because people think there is one path to it, but it’s your job to make your own path. You have to have the vision, not your team.

ADESOLA | I agree with what Mayte said, it is an individual choice, and I don’t think there’s a right choice. The only wrong choice is to go against what your heart tells you. Again, if you really believe in what you want to do, and you have the drive and the ability to withstand some disappointments and a lot of no’s, then you can do it.

I was told many times—more times than I care to remember—“You know Adesola, you’re pretty good, right? But the styles you do, there’s not really representation of that on Broadway or Off-Broadway.” And I was like, “Okay, cool, cool.” And I would meet someone who’s like, “Hey, can you do this

thing?” “Sure, I can.” “Oh, you have a little bit of background.” Then, I’m in the door. And from that door I met someone else who said, “Oh, I can’t use you in a job, but I’m going to refer you to someone who’s going to give you a job.”

So now I’ve gotten myself into this world. Not that I didn’t see myself there, but if I listened to the naysayers, I would’ve said, “Well, I’m just going to do Instagram 30-second videos and be Instagram famous, and go judge at hip-hop and popping events,” which was absolutely the last thing that I wanted to do. So you have to really trust in yourself, and put the work in. And don’t take any opportunity for granted.

I believe in paying tribute and giving homage to people who help you. Darrell Grand Moultrie met with Ruben SantiagoHudson [about Skeleton Crew], and Ruben said, “Oh, I’m doing this thing and I want this person to embody the factory of an auto plant.” Darrell says, “That’s not really what I’m going to bring value to you for in this project, but I got the guy for you.” Ruben didn’t know me; I didn’t know him. He calls. We go meet at Signature Theatre, and he speaks for 35 minutes, “I’m going to do this, it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that.” And I’m like, “Okay. I’m your guy.” In that instance, it helped me because he said, “Okay, you know the dance movement, but you also understand how this world works, and you’re going to understand what’s expected of you in this world. Can you start next week?” That’s how I got the job to

perform in and choreograph myself, my own solo, in Skeleton Crew

DANI | Do you have any advice for dancers in the room who are interested in choreography? Would you give any suggestions in terms of how they can utilize being in the room as a dancer to develop any choreographic skills?

MAYTE | If you’re just trying to be a choreographer, not in theatre, I think the best thing to do is get in the studio and improvise, and figure out your own movement style, so that you understand how you’re different. Because when you work with a lot of people, all those people are in your body. Try to find out what your movement style is. Going into a studio and improvising is one thing.

In theatre, I say watch how the director is directing a scene, even [when] they’re not using the dancers. Read the script. A lot of times, you don’t have lines, or you don’t have scripts, or you’re like, “I don’t even know what’s happening. When do I come on stage?” Know the show, understand the scene. I’ve learned so much from watching directors.

I worked on Jesus Christ Superstar Live, and the director, David Leveaux, was amazing. So quiet, but [with] every choice that he made, I would hear him. “Oh, that just changed how that actor moved. That made sense.” Even the notes he would give. I have worked with directors who give me great notes. I make this thing and I think it’s

Suffs on Broadway, choreographed by Mayte Natalio PHOTO MATTHEW MURPHY

fierce. And they’re like, “Actually, can they stop right there? Can you bring this person forward? And what if they actually move the other way?” Because there are directors that have really good eyes.

So I would say as a dancer, watch the director, because that’s how you learn how to story tell as a choreographer, too. And watch how the director, even if you can’t hear [what they’re saying], you can see the changes that a choreographer is making, based on what the choreographer and the director spoke about. That’s the best advice, to just observe, stay in it, and watch what’s happening in the room.

ELLENORE | I just did a workshop where we did table work with the entire company. And I love that, because exactly, some ensemble members do not speak in the whole show. They sing all the lyrics of the show, but they might not have speaking roles. I’ve been in rooms where sometimes table work is only for the people that are speaking. It was so useful and helpful to have the full company talking about the theme of the show, and what does the song mean for the person that’s singing it? As the ensemble, we are embodying that emotion.

I also think going and seeing theatre. I know it’s unbelievably expensive, but we’ve been talking about the variety of what choreography or movement can be in a show, or in a play. There are shows that are “kick ball change, pirouette, pirouette,” and then there are shows where you’re like, “I

can’t tell the difference between what the director did and what the choreographer did.” That blend of what is musical staging, what is gestural—

MAYTE | Transitions. Transitions.

ELLENORE | Transitions.

MAYTE | That’s all musicals are.

ELLENORE | Literally.

I think being observant and paying attention in the studio and in the space that you’re in, and taking class, and seeing how other creators and other artists work with dancers. But I also think you have to get in the studio, and you have to figure out what you want to say, because you cannot carbon copy what you’re seeing that’s successful on Broadway, and just try to do that. That is someone else’s voice that was created for that narrative, for that show, specifically. So you need to take the time for yourself, and figure out, “How do I tell a story?”

MAYTE | I agree that you have to know the craft. Especially people that are like, “I’m going to change the game.” You can’t break it until you know what it is. You have to understand the structure of a musical, and you have to study it, because there is a structure and there is a form. A lot of times you think you’re innovative, but the more you see, then you’ll really know what innovation is.

ADESOLA | I’ve taken so much away from watching. I’m a big fan of just seeing how directors think, and why they make choices that they make. Because to Ellenore’s point, they impact what the choreography will be.

It’s also important to find like-minded people, and ask questions. Sometimes, dialogue allows us to begin to open up our minds to other possibilities that we didn’t think about, or we may not have seen. And of course, getting in a studio, wherever you go. Now, with technology, you have such a big advantage. Put that phone there [to record] and just free form, just move and see what comes out. You might get in a five- or 10-minute session, 10 seconds, or 30 seconds. “I like that.” And then you can start to shape and craft your own stuff before you bring other people in, to add to and help expand your vision.

DANI | You have all gone from being part of a group, part of a cast as dancers, to being the choreographer. I’m curious if there are certain things that have helped you feel like you are still in community, because there is a different power dynamic in the room that comes with a position as a choreographer.

ELLENORE | In a lot of the spaces where I do musical theatre, I try to do a group warmup. It doesn’t always happen, it doesn’t happen every single day, but especially the first day that we do movement, I ask the entire group of people in the room—ensemble, principals, musicians, director, PAs, stage management—I ask everyone. I’m like, “I don’t care what you’re doing. Get off your phones, get off the computer, get off the script. Let’s all move together.”

MAYTE | I love that.

ELLENORE | Everybody just roll their shoulders and shake it out. It’s always fun to try and get the director and see which director will do it or not. Most of the time they do it.

I also find that having a strong choreo team helps with feeling less alone, having someone to turn to—an associate or assistant choreographer—and ask, “Was that good? Does that work? It doesn’t work, right? What should we do?” Playing off of having that extra set of eyes. So assistant and associate choreographers are amazing. Eventually, if you’re on a bigger project, dance captains. If you’re a dancer, that’s also a great way to navigate toward wanting to become a choreographer. Becoming aware of the big picture, as opposed to your singular body, helps you expand into the puzzle pieces, the problem-solving. For me, finding those dance captains and bringing

Adesola Osakalumi in Skeleton Crew at Manhattan Theatre Club, choreographed by Adesola Osakalumi PHOTO MATTHEW MURPHY

them onto team choreo and saying, “Hey, this is how we give notes. This is what I’m looking for in this piece. When I’m not here anymore, this is what I want to see you looking out for.” They help me to not feel so alone in the space.

ADESOLA | The dance team is everything. To your earlier question, for dancers who are wanting to make that transition, that is exactly what Ellenore was talking about. When you are really on it, we are always watching. “So-and-so never is off count.” So if there might be a question, you’re going to maybe gravitate to that person, and that person may eventually be your dance captain.

It’s about, again, constantly paying attention and being present. I always say if you are dancing in a piece, you should not go home and be like, “It wasn’t a hard day.” Because if it’s not hard physically, and you’re not having demands put on you physically, then you have the luxury to really watch and focus and pay attention to everything. And that takes mental energy, which is to my point. Either way, there should be work, physical or mental. But if that choreographic team is together, and is supportive of each other, then you can see who is standing out, who is on it.

MAYTE | It’s about intention, right? I think that as a dancer, there’s that thing—“Don’t ask too many questions.” But if the intention is right—

ADESOLA | Ask questions.

MAYTE | If it’s not a gratuitous or selfindulgent question, like, “Am I doing this right?” You know those questions. But if you have a genuine question about story, ask those questions. That’s how my first dance captain job [happened], because the choreographer was like, “That girl has been asking the questions. I think she understands the story.” Because I was asking questions like, “Okay, so are we moving forward because this is happening, or no?” That helps the choreographer be like, “Actually, that’s a valid question.” I genuinely was curious about the story. If the intention is clarity, people recognize that immediately. If the intention is your ego, nobody needs that. I’m not knocking ego; you need ego to survive in this thing. You just have to know how to check it, and how to dial it up and dial it down.

DANI | You’ve given lots of great advice already, but is there one final piece of advice that you’d like to leave folks with, as they go out into this very tricky industry?

ADESOLA | Be yourself. Be who you are, and don’t take anything for granted. Do the work. Your work is your ultimate calling card. When you get the opportunity, shine.

MAYTE | Chase the work. I know money’s important, but if you chase projects that are meaningful and with people who are interesting, and are doing the work, the money will come. Chase work, chase good rooms, chase different works, chase work that’s going to challenge you. Chase work that scares the hell out of you, chase people who scare the hell out of you. Chase those scary rooms first.

ELLENORE | Always ask, “How does this help the narrative?” That is always the question I come back to. Every step I do, every transition I do, I say, “How is this telling the story?” If I go back to that very simple question, answers are revealed to me in the space.

Zakiya Baptiste, Corbin Bleu, Khadija Sankoh + Morgan Ashley Bryant in Little Shop of Horrors Off-Broadway, choreographed by Ellenore Scott PHOTO EVAN ZIMMERMAN FOR MURPHYMADE

SDC LEGACY HINTON BATTLE

1956–2024

Hinton Battle is the only performer to win three Tony Awards for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, for his performances in Sophisticated Ladies, The Tap Dance Kid, and Miss Saigon. His additional Broadway credits as an actor include The Wiz, Dancin’, Dreamgirls, and Chicago. He co-directed and choreographed the Off-Broadway production of The Evil Dead: The Musical, for which he was nominated for a Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreographer. His credits as a director also include The Marvelous Wonderettes and Respect: A Musical Journey of Women. His credits as a choreographer include the films Idlewild, Bolden, and Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story, as well as “Once More, with Feeling,” the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Additionally, he directed and choreographed ballets for the Baltimore School of the Arts, Washington Reflections Dance Company, Jones-Haywood Dance School, and Philadanco. Battle’s many honors include the NAACP Image Award, Fred Astaire Award, Ira Aldridge Award, and Amas 2014 Rosie Award for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of extraordinary accomplishment in the theatrical arts.

MICHAEL BLAKEMORE

1928–2023

In 2000, Michael Blakemore had the singular distinction of winning two Best Director Tony Awards, for his productions of Kiss Me, Kate and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, a playwright with whom he was long associated. Born in Australia, Blakemore trained as an actor in England; he transformed his early experiences acting in British repertory theatres into a novel, Next Season. His credits as a director include landmark productions such as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols, Arturo Ui, Frayn’s Noises Off, the musical City of Angels, Lettice and Lovage, starring Maggie Smith and Margaret Whiting, Uncle Vanya with Michael Gambon, and Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury. In 1971, he directed a celebrated revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, starring Laurence Olivier, who appointed him Associate Director of the National Theatre during his tenure as inaugural Artistic Director. Following a bitter split with Olivier’s successor, Peter Hall, Blakemore wrote about their intense rivalry in his memoir, Stage Blood.

Hinton Battle (center) choreographing Idlewild PHOTO UNIVERSAL STUDIOS/PHOTOFEST

PHOTO PHOTOFEST

Marin Mazzie + Brian Stokes Mitchell in the Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate, directed by Michael Blakemore

PHOTO JOAN MARCUS/PHOTOFEST

PHOTO MARTHA SWOPE/ NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

SDC LEGACY

MAURICE HINES

1943–2023

Maurice Hines made his Broadway debut in 1954 as a Newspaper Boy in

The Girl in Pink Tights, a short-lived musical directed by Shepard Traube and choreographed by Agnes de Mille; his brother, Gregory, younger by 26 months, made his debut in the same show as a Shoeshine Boy. The brothers had made their professional debuts five years earlier as the tap-dancing Hines Kids; they went on to appear with their father, Maurice Hines Sr, as Hines, Hines, & Dad. In 1963, the family performed together on The Ed Sullivan Show. Hines co-directed and choreographed the national tour of the Louis Armstrong musical biography, Satchmo, along with a production of Havana Night in Cuba. He conceived, directed, choreographed, and starred on Broadway in Uptown…It’s Hot! (for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical) and Hot Feet; his Broadway credits as a performer also include Sophisticated Ladies and Eubie!, in which he appeared opposite his brother. The Hines brothers’ tumultuous relationship was mirrored by their roles as feuding brothers Clay and Sandman Williams in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Cotton Club.

MIKE NUSSBAUM

1923–2023

Known for a decade as the oldest professional actor working in the American theatre, Mike Nussbaum was also a director of distinction. His directing credits include Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me and Don Juan in Hell for Northlight Theatre, Skylight for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and American Buffalo for American Theatre Company. As an actor in Chicago, where he grew up and made his home, he worked with companies like Hull House, Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Northlight, which he helped found in the 1970s. Often called “the dean of Chicago theatre,” his credits include originating roles in David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he won a Drama Desk Award for his Broadway performance. His work was also honored by the Joseph Jefferson Committee, DePaul University, the University Club of Chicago, the Sarah Siddons Society, and with the Illinois Legend Award and Spirit of Shakespeare Award from Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Mike Nussbaum in Relativity at Northlight Theatre

PHOTO MICHAEL BROSILOW

Maurice Hines + Z. Wright in Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway

PHOTO MARTHA SWOPE/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Maurice Hines Sr., Maurice Hines + Gregory Hines PHOTO PHOTOFEST

SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES continued... Tarah K Flanagan

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