ArtStorming
Ever wonder what makes really creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? In each episode of ArtStorming, we’ll explore how new ideas come to life, and how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new.
Host Lili Pierrepont takes us on a journey of discovery; inviting us to ponder what drives and sustains the creative spark within each individual.
With great appreciation for music written and performed by John Cruickshank.
ArtStorming
ArtStorming the City Different: April Cleveland
What happens when a group of professional actors abandon conventional theater, move into a house together during a global pandemic, and reimagine how performances are created, staged, and funded?
Music for ArtStorming the City Different was written and performed by John Cruikshank.
Ever wonder what makes really creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, lili Pierpont, and this is ArtStorming, a podcast about how new ideas come to life and become paintings, sculptures, plays or poems, performances or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new.
Speaker 1:I am with April Cleveland, and I will have not to prompt her to project her voice because she is an actor.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm a director, she's a director at her current, but you've been an actor, right, I mean you, you, you present in a very I give actor, you give actor, yeah.
Speaker 1:So anyway, we're here, and she was nice enough to come to my house, and Bree is also here, so hopefully she won't make any noise, but okay, so I'm so glad you're here and I had the great privilege of seeing a performance a pre-performance, I guess is what you call it of Cyrano, and it was amazing. And during that. So I'm going to let you introduce yourself, because your story is so great During that. So I'm going to let you introduce yourself because your story is so great and one of the reasons I wanted to get you on this episode is because I saw a presentation that you gave at Creative Mornings and your origin story is one of the most compelling I have heard in a long time. So I'm just going to give you the mic and let you do that all over again.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so you got started, I mean, and how you got to Santa mic. And let you do that all over again. Okay, yeah, so you got started, I mean, and how you got to Santa Fe and how you started Exodus yeah, so I want to hear it all.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want them to hear it all.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to I'll distill a little because that talk was, like you know, 30 minutes long. But basically I was born in Champaign Illinois, and I started acting when I was a kid. And you know, you're not really able to, you can't, you can't be a child director, so the only way that I had access to theater was through doing musicals and um performing at school and performing in, like every community but were you wanting to be a director because you wanted to, you were bossy already and wanted to to, or you had a vision already.
Speaker 1:Is what a better way to say?
Speaker 2:it. You know, I think I was directing very young, naturally, like on the playground, like I would force my friends like I couldn't imagine why they didn't want to do this all recess, but I would like force them to be directed by me in these like skits or plays at recess, and I would get like a lot of pushback and it was kind of the only thing that I wanted to do, like from elementary school. So I guess I started doing that really early and I realized that I wanted to direct when I was like maybe 12 or 13. And it was because I would watch this director in this summer theater company that I would do and I would just sort of feel like that's what I want to do. Like I see her running the rehearsal and giving notes and having a vision, and I don't even remember why, but it was just like I was very attracted to that role in the room and um kind of set my eyes on that when I was I don't know like 13 years old and then, under after high school, undertook a very long training program that I designed for myself, um, to set myself up to enter the world as a director.
Speaker 2:So I started with four years of acting school at the Strasburg Institute in West Hollywood. I moved to LA in high school so that was like in my backyard. Um did that for four years. Then came to Santa Fe for the first time and went to St John's college because I knew that that was. I didn't talk that much about that at creative mornings, but St John's was like probably the most foundational educational period for me as a director, because for me directing starts with being able to find the deepest questions and contradictions within a text and that just for people who don't know about saint john's.
Speaker 1:It's a, it's a curriculum that's based on the classics. Yeah, so it's a deep immersion into a very I don't want to say limited, as if it's limited, but into a very specific number of books and texts that you go deeply into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you get. It's a very peculiar school and you have to be. It's not a school that most people would want to go to because you get no choices. So if you go to St John's, you have an all required curriculum across all four years. So if you go to St John's, you have an all required curriculum across all four years, and it's not just the humanities, it includes math and science.
Speaker 2:And there's no textbooks, like everything is from a primary source, which is really attractive to me, because I was sort of like uncomfortable with the idea of textbooks and secondary literature in general and there was something really appealing about like I really struggled with math in high school but like what if I could go back to the beginning and what if I could study math, um, starting with Euclidean geometry, like before, there's numbers and is there something about like going all the way back to first principles and then working your way to modernity? That could like kind of answer this question that I was looking for in literature and philosophy and drama and math and science. So I went there because I wanted to be able to look at any text, whatever it was, no matter how hard it was, and find my way into it and I thought that like okay, if I'm going to be the kind of director I want to be, then I want to be able to tackle anything, even if it's not like my gift, like a math text or something. So I went to St John's for four years, met my partner, which is important in my story. We were both students. Then I went and got my MFA in directing in Chicago at DePaul university and that is where I got to practice directing um intensively for three years and I got to work with like really amazing undergraduate actors.
Speaker 2:After St John's or sorry, after DePaul I started directing um in Chicago and New York and I was about to go to London to help bring over some West end shows to New York. So things were like very exciting and big and that was 2020. And so COVID happened and I was working on a show. It was about to open, it was shut down and then, like everything I had lined up for the next year and a half, which was a lot of huge projects, were just like bam, bam, bam. It was like, within you know, two weeks, everything.
Speaker 2:16 months out just stopped, yeah, um, and it did for everybody I knew. And then, in July of 2020, my partner, who was um defending his dissertation at the time, was hired back at St John's um to be on the faculty. And so we sublet our apartment in Chicago where we were living and we drove to Santa Fe. And on the way to Santa Fe, I got the idea that all these incredible actors I knew who I really wanted like. My vision was like okay, one day I'm going to be, I'm going to have be up there enough as a director that I'll be able to get all these people back into a room together. And all I wanted was to like have this group of people that I'd gone to school with, who were so amazing, um, be able to be in a show together that I would direct? And I was like that might be in 15 or 20 years, but in COVID they all lost their work. So I was like you know what? I'm going to invite them all to move to Santa Fe, new Mexico, with me for what I thought would be a short period of time and just make some work together. So I sent this like crazy eight page email about why I thought they should move to Santa Fe, what I wanted to create together and, um, and also that they needed to do it in like three weeks and that we'd figure it out. So I sent the email on July 30th of 2020. And on September 1st of 2020, uh, I think eight actors arrived in Santa Fe and we all moved into a house together and we started to create work together.
Speaker 2:That answered the question. Create work together that answered the question how can we make theater? That isn't boring to us? Because we were all professional Well, I'm a director but they were all professional actors trained in theater but had gotten very quickly soured by what was available in the professional regional theater world and we wanted to make something that we would be captivated if we could see. And so we spent a lot of time interrogating everything about theater and coming up with the values that we would share and rally around and create work around, and we chose words like color, saturated, fast paced. What else was there? Like daring, edgy, irreverent, like disgusting but sexy, like we just chose these words and we're like, okay, we're going to make work like that.
Speaker 1:Well, I just want to pause for a second, because all those um terms that you just threw out are exactly we're. We're very much present in the, in the presentation that I saw. That's great, yeah. So I mean, yeah, you, you've succeeded in taking it not only from inception to what's. This is your. What performance?
Speaker 2:the zero, now 400, something it's our seventh like production, production that we've created together, and like our 400, something um performance together unbelievable, so go back to so.
Speaker 1:So you are crafting this way forward and you're all living in the house together, and that must have been its own story yeah it was and was, and you know I had a sense, I was.
Speaker 2:I was a bit older than everyone else because I had been a grad student when I met all these undergraduate actors, so they were all 22 years old, ish.
Speaker 2:When they moved here I was like 31. Um, and I had this sense that like, okay, not only do we need to go back to the first principles of what matters to us in live theater, we need to go back to the first principles of what matters to us in live theater. We need to go back to the first principles of how people coexist together, cause I had this feeling that like okay, this could go really wrong and having any like, we should never just assume that we share the same living standards. So I remember this moment that at the time I felt like was so silly. But now I'm glad I did this, where I've had everybody together and I've picked up a spray bottle and a paper towel and demonstrated how to spray down a counter, and then cause I was I just remembered from early roommate situations that so much bad stuff happens when we don't communicate and share standards about how to share space, and so I was.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's really important that we know how to do this, or everything's going to fall apart. And we like instituted a weekly deep clean, which have a full blown spreadsheet checklist, and every week there was three hours set aside where the house had to be deep cleaned, and so it was a combination of insane theatrical experimentation and an experiment in like how do you get 10 people to share a space without killing each other? And it was sort of equal parts. Yeah, it was St John's in a way, because it was like let's go back to the beginning of everything. Yeah, how to make art happy with each other.
Speaker 1:I mean, you hear about exercises, that companies where they take people to kind of do a bonding exercise. What better bonding exercise? And the fact that you were able to integrate the theater into it. I mean, were people pretty lighthearted about it and kind of took on roles and practice things, or what did that end up looking like?
Speaker 2:Or were you just scrubbing toilets.
Speaker 2:Like whether people well, we were definitely scrubbing toilets, but we, I mean, I think the thing I really thought about before I brought everyone together was like what is this going to look like and where are we going to focus our time? And we, I knew, we knew that we were going to take these three months to create one major work, and that was a decision. And then, on the side of that, we would create, you know, other smaller, adjacent projects, and then we would also take time to train as an ensemble and to forge a vocabulary together through different methods, from actually actor training exercises to going up, you know, going up the mountain together to the Ospens and like pitching source authors. So we had a lot. We were focused on the hydros that we were going to undertake and we knew we were going to make one big thing. And so it was like how are we going to do that? That was a question.
Speaker 2:We ended up choosing to read a bunch of public domain texts, and the reason we did that was because anything in the public domain which is before it's something like 1923. It changes every year by a year. We can change it however we want. So if you take something that was written in the 1800s. You can slice it up and you can edit it, and you can inject it, and you can say it in your own words, and there's nothing wrong with that, and is that why we see so many iterations of shakespeare, for example?
Speaker 2:it might be. Yeah, it's like shakespeare, checkoff, ibsen, um, any, yeah, anything before 1920. Something is just like up for grabs, right, it's also, um, something you don't have to pay for rights for. So it was like we were thinking practically in a way which is like, well, we don't have any money, so we can't buy rights, and also we don't want to be. We want to be loyal to the author by identifying what we think is the essence of something and then adapting it into our own voice and our own.
Speaker 2:So, again, very saint johnsian yeah, yeah, yeah, and it was like we don't want to. We're not going to be beholden to an author because they're, uh, important or because they're old or because they wanted something. We're going to look into the text for ourself and we're going to find what we think are the bones and the muscles, and then we're going to discard everything else and we're going to try to make something that hopefully the original author and who cares because they're dead would either be really proud of or really angry at, but that we decide as a group is like the DNA that we're going to take and run with. So we read all these public domain texts, we read the Bible, we read Shakespeare, chekhov, ibsen, we read a bunch of stuff, and then we ended up voting on the author. So the author we voted on was Chekhov, and it was because we had a literary appreciation of Chekhov.
Speaker 2:But none of us had ever been satisfied seeing Chekhov and we were like, okay, this is something you study in school, it's something you know is beautiful, but when you go to see it, it very rarely makes you laugh out loud or actually cry or feel alive.
Speaker 2:Can we make it feel alive? So we, we voted on Chekhov and then we pitched all of Chekhov's major plays to each other and we took a vote on which play it would be, and we ended up selecting the play Ivanov, which is one of his least known plays, and it's about. It's basically about a sad guy who has a series of tragedies that he kind of brings upon himself and ends up taking his own life, and so we chose that show, but we chose to do it through the lens of like a teenage drama, and we were thinking about TV shows like Skins or Degrassi or like the OC, and we were like, ok, chekhov is about all these relationships between people who are like kind of in love with each other but kind of hate each other but kind of can't but, but have a lot of unrequited feelings. Well, that's a lot like shows we watch, like Euphoria or the OC. What if we made a Chekhov play that felt like that fast paced and like that high stakes?
Speaker 1:Right and add all those those terms into it, like the colorful and the yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that was our challenge to ourself. We were like we're bored every time we go to see this. What's wrong, Can we unboring it? And then we set about devising that show and we made it in our house from September to December of 2020. And Santa Fe was totally shut down. Every you couldn't go in restaurants. It was that period.
Speaker 2:So we didn't have anybody else in town. We just had each other and our like excursions to the hot springs and stuff. So we had like ourselves, our house and the outdoors, and we would just spend every day creating this show through our own weird process, which is a series of like improvisations that get iterated over time so how did you?
Speaker 1:did you start with the script and then deviate? Or did you rewrite the script? Or did you just get to know the material so well that you just say, let's do the scene where this and such happens Go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we actually try. We we kind of intentionally try to not get to know the script. Well, like we read it. I think we read Ivanov twice and then we put it down and we never looked at it again. And then we did an exercise where we're like, ok, everybody, we've read it once or twice, we're not allowed to look at it. Write down all the major events that you remember. And it was sort of an exercise to be like what from your gut, what's stuck? Yeah, what sticks, what's the story, without being able to look and be like, well, this happens and this happens. And from that exercise we were able to get like a vertebra of like major events and we never looked at the script again.
Speaker 2:And then we started thinking about, okay, it's a this many act play, these are the big things that happen in each act.
Speaker 2:Let's start improvising around those events and like we also are going to have to kill off all the adults because everybody's 22 in our company and so, like that play has, like these two important parental figures, our parental figures like die in a car accident at the very beginning, which sort of sets the show in motion.
Speaker 2:And then we would um create characters, relationships and events that have been translated into our at the time, like 21st century world, with these characters in this place, and our characters in ivanov are santa feans like they're these.
Speaker 2:They're these siblings who live in new york who have a lot of money and their parents die in this car accident. And they decide that they're these. They're these siblings who live in New York who have a lot of money and their parents die in this car accident. And they decide that they're going to go back to their roots, which is this like house in Santa Fe, because that's where we lived, and so it's like, well, we're in this house, this is the house that these characters live in and this is the house that the other characters kind of come into, and this is where it's going to take place, and so we would like create scenes in every room. And that play just started to organically be this experience that moved from room to room, and it was this old house, like many are in santa fe, that had this like wraparound, um, like retainer wall, so it already felt like this kind of old chicovian estate and like everything was connected.
Speaker 2:There was like 30 doors, because it's santa fe and and it would, the whole experience would just like weave from room to room like a real rabbit warren yeah, and it's like this scene would be out in the front lawn and then you'd climb through the window and it would be the next scene in the bedroom and then and this is all a co-creation, yeah, and as a director, yeah, like that's.
Speaker 1:You know, you're gonna have to help me understand a little bit between you. Know, obviously you're not imposing a vision, you're.
Speaker 2:You're letting everybody kind of co-create and then you're sort of stepping back to see what's working, what's not working is that, yeah, I give a lot of prompts like go make something like this that has like these qualities, like you're gonna make a scene, go off for 10 minutes and make a scene where these characters are at a birthday party and this character sees her boyfriend kiss somebody else, and it needs to have a moment of slow motion and a moment where a pop song plays in a moment where everybody's talking at the same time and how do you know to do that for the scene?
Speaker 1:How do I know yeah, I mean, like, where does your inspiration to say I want to see this, this and this, to give the directive, like, have you? It's just so hard for me to understand If you haven't, if you're not working from a narrative and you haven't already seen it, how do you know what to even like what context that you want to create?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I guess we do start with an original story. So we're like, all right, beginning, middle end, beginning, character, these characters come together. Or like some of them come together, Like this play has maybe 15 characters, but we only have six people or seven people, so it's going to have seven. Who are the seven?
Speaker 2:Let's start experimenting with characters. So go off and make a scene where there's this character, z and this character, ivanov, and they're doing something. It's just this process of like layering, where it's like, well, if at the end of the day, we're going to need characters, events and relationships, then we're going to create 1500 little scene lists that explore characters and you kind of pick and explore scenes and explore what the relationships are like, and then we're going to need a plot and it's like, over time, these improvisations and beginning to sequence them together starts to create a very like macro draft of something and it doesn't have most of the things you need for the play, but you're like, okay, it seems like what we're, what we're getting attracted to, are like these seven characters and and then just to interject there, how on earth do you figure out who the character is?
Speaker 1:your ensemble is a very diverse group of people with, you know, I'm sure, very specific types of personalities. So how do you cast something like that? Do you decide that, oh, you would probably be the right person for Ivanov, or does that emerge from the whole?
Speaker 2:collaboration? Yeah, because, well, especially the first few shows, I didn't do any casting and what's kind of nice is. It's like, well, the actor is creating. Anytime they dive into an improvisation, they're bringing all of their skills and qualities to whatever that role is they're creating in the moment. So it's like I don't have an idea. Well, that's not what Ivanov is like. So I'm like, well, I don't know what Ivanov is like in this version. You are what Ivanov is like. So it's like if Nick Wren, who's the original Ivanov, starts to like be Ivanov in the improvisations that we start to do, we're like okay well, you're Ivanov and he's like this.
Speaker 2:And then Kaya, who you just saw in Cyrano. She plays Sasha, who's this like 16 year old, like YouTube diva, who is like extremely exuberant but her parents have just died and she's dealing with this like insane grief that she's covering up by being this like um social media youtube star. And it's like, well, that sasha is the sasha that emerged from kaya playing that role in improvisations from the beginning, and so it just starts to patterns start to emerge, I guess, and then other choices start to fall away. So it's like, if there's a billion choices to begin with, then each time we do another improvisation, something becomes clearer and we start to go down a pathway so that eventually it's like, well, clearer, and we start to go down a pathway so that eventually it's like well, it looks like kaya is sasha, the 16 year old gracie is anna, the sick girlfriend of ivanov.
Speaker 2:Garrett is the like boisterous gay boyfriend who is trying to like keep this house in order. And people just start to fall into who they're going to be and I just accept it. And it's like as, as they start to jive with something they're playing, I'm like, okay, like it seems like you're really clicking and like something's really starting to happen and we just like, without, without verbally saying anything, this like agreement about what we're creating starts to unfold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you really become a unit, a single unit that's moving. We're hearing the coyotes yeah, that's why she was starting the book. So we're going to hear Bree and the coyotes doing the background to April's podcast. I love that. Hold on. We might have to hold on. We're going to just break for one second. Okay, we're back. The coyotes seem to have calmed down, they've calmed down and Bree has calmed down a little bit. So we were talking about casting and getting in character and you guys are. So now you're kind of moving as a unit, like a dance troupe or jazz musicians or anything. You're working as an entity. How did that carry over back into living? So you're practicing this play. You've got something like actively that you're creating. Do you? Did the characters come back into your living situation? Like, how did you separate practice from life, especially in isolation? I?
Speaker 2:mean that was a weird, I don't know. I mean that it was a weird, I don't know. I mean it was a weird time Cause you, you referenced like when people go on retreats for bonding and it's like this was that was such a funny time because there was no clear picture of when it would be over, so like, as opposed to a retreat, it felt more like Lord of the flies, Like this is what the world is now.
Speaker 2:We don't know when that's going to ever change, and so it was like I think when we go to retreats, we're like, well, this is going to end.
Speaker 2:Then we go back to life and hopefully we learned something, and this is like we're forging a new world and there was something, so we were able to surrender into the creation of it all because there was not a definite end date.
Speaker 2:So I think living was like I had such a different experience than most people's in COVID, because most people were alone or with their partner and I was with nine people for most of COVID in a house together, working every day, and it was wild, but it was also very orderly in the sense that, yeah, that's a crazy thing to do, but at the same time, we had to wake up every day and everyone had to meet on my rooftop at 8am and we would write morning pages, which is a practice from Julia Cameron's the Artist's Way, where you have to write three handwritten like journal pages every day, and we all did the artist way together.
Speaker 2:So all 12 weeks of it, and it was like you had to be there date and if you were late it was like, hey, why were you late, don't be late. Then after that we would like start rehearsal and then we would have designated lunch times and then we would keep rehearsing and there was a schedule every single day. So it was like there were crazy things, like we would all go to the mountains together but at the same time, we like kept this very regimented schedule in order. I think to say we're deciding to do this crazy thing together, but we're working Like we're not here just like screwing around. We are actually very serious and we need to complete this big project and did you know what.
Speaker 1:What did complete look like that you were going to perform it, and did you know that? Were you going to perform it in the house, or was that you know, like, yeah, from a stage, like how did you figure that part out?
Speaker 2:well, we knew we'd never. We knew it wasn't for a stage and we knew that we were.
Speaker 1:We knew it wasn't for a stage, like we knew that wherever it ended up being and where it ended up being was every room of our house, that that's the kind of experience that it was but did you have you ever been to a venue where, where it happens, like I mean, we talked about the McKittrick Hotel, I think is what it's called, but still, I mean that's a theatrical venue for the most part.
Speaker 2:I had done some site-specific work before, like I had done with three of the original actors in Exodus. I had done a project with the MCA Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and we had created a short adaptation of a kafka novel in a freight elevator and so yeah, at mca, and so I already had this like attraction to different kinds of spaces and I was sort of like over prosceniums and so that was something that was like already very interesting to me so that was that.
Speaker 1:That's was part of your um intention when you came here is that you were going to do part of what was going to be uncharacteristic of typical theater was even the venue. You knew.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because in my head when we, when I invited everyone to move here, we would rehearse outside. Um, that was like the obvious thing in my head. But then when we got here, it was more complicated because we found out we couldn't be outside in groups larger than five in santa fe. So, okay, well, we're not actually allowed to be together in public, so I get or outside, so I guess we'll do it in the house, and so that was kind of a shift. But as soon as we started shortly after we started like creation mode in the house, it was like, oh yeah, it's in a house and checkoff plays are usually in houses and they're like these groups of people that come together in houses and then there's like dynamite that explodes because you're shoving different groups of people who have complicated feelings for each other into an estate and we're like, oh, that's where we are. We're in this estate where these families are coming together so when did you finally perform it?
Speaker 2:yeah. So we basically we worked and worked and worked on it and we created this show from scratch. That was like almost four hours long it's a little shorter now, it's like three hours long and change. But we were like, okay, we need to do it for someone, cause we don't know if we're going to stick around or like what's going to happen next year. So we had our friend who we'd gone to school with, um drive down from Utah and film it, cause he had a lot of like behind the camera experience and was also an actor. He came down for like two or three days and we showed it to him and then he filmed like archival, an archival like tape of it. And then we were like, well, that's great, but we want to like do it for someone.
Speaker 2:And so my I had a friend here who I'd gone to saint john's with and we called her and we were like I called her, no one else knew her, and I was like, do you want to see this thing that we made? And she was like, okay, so she came over to the house and we performed. This was like I just had like what was worth like a $3,000 ticket. And that's when I was kind of like huh, like that's interesting, because I didn't think about money at all and I hadn't thought about like well, what is the value of this experience? And she was like well, that was one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life and I feel like the value is like so high. And I was like the first time I'd heard I hadn't even thought about like money or like how this would work, because we didn't. We didn't know if we'd keep doing it.
Speaker 1:And then she was so for you is that in the doing of it, and how? How was her and I want to get back to the money piece, but how was her witnessing of it? How did that impact the experience of having done it? So you've been working on this for months and months, and months and months, and now you have this, this third thing or this yeah, yeah, because we'd done it like I'd seen it.
Speaker 2:But I'm very different, because it's like I'm making it with them, watching, watching it with them. My partner had seen it, but he was also sort of like in the group Matt, who'd filmed it, had seen it. But then when Maggie came, it was like I don't know. It was like okay, like there was like that little bit of um, nervousness that we hadn't had with each other and it was all for one person, right For four hours of taking them through this like pretty epic experience that ends in like a profoundly tragic way that they're witnessing alone.
Speaker 2:So it was. It was exciting and nerve wracking. And then afterwards we just did this like I don't know 30 minute like and nerve wracking. And then afterwards we just did this like I don't know 30 minute like feedback session with her, cause it felt like we should. And then she left and then I like had coffee with her, like a week later, and it was like through her eyes that I started to see that like maybe making this happen was not as crazy as I thought it was and that things that seemed so nuts to me, like well, yeah, like at the time she was like, well, how much money do you need to raise to like keep people here?
Speaker 2:And I was like, oh, I don't know, like $20,000. And in my head that was like impossible. And she was like, okay, well, it's not that bad. And I was like really, and it my head that was like impossible. And she was like, okay, well, it's not that bad. And I was like really, and it was like I would talk to her. She works in a pretty high position at Meow Wolf and so she was able to like start getting this kind of business and number stuff into my head in a way that was very new at the time and just like begin to think about, like, what does it mean to crunch numbers? What would you need to charge? Does charging even make sense with, like how expensive it would be? And those conversations sort of set up the groundwork for taking very seriously like what does it mean to keep doing this together as the pandemic starts to, you know, fade away?
Speaker 1:a little bit. And so what was the experience of your fellow ensemblers? I mean, did, did they? What was it as satisfying for them to just have? I mean, if the goal was just to produce this thing, that wouldn't bore you. And you've gotten to the point where you have the beginning, the middle and end. You've got the choreography through the rooms. You've got a thing, you've thinged it, you've done that. Now it's done. Is there a hunger to start from scratch and do a whole other one? Or was it not complete until you got to have the audience experience?
Speaker 2:Say a little bit more about, yeah, that space we wanted to show people, but we had to make the decision, like when we showed Maggie, it was December of 2020, so everybody was gonna leave and go to their families for the holidays and we had to make the decision together, like, like, after the holidays, are we going to come back or are we going to go back to like our normal life? And we decided that we'd come back, and I think people were. They were eager for the work to be shown, but it seemed like people were equally eager to begin the next thing, but it seemed like people were equally eager to begin the next thing. And so, when we got back and moved into a different house together, we did start showing Ivanov Well, we had to translate it into the new house, sure and then we did start showing it.
Speaker 2:And, at the same time, we started developing the next show together. And did you use the same process? We used the same pitching process, yeah, so everybody could put forth a source text, we would investigate, we would vote, and then the final winner was chosen through a vote. And that second show was Bathsheba from the David and Bathsheba story in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Well, it must have been so satisfying for you to have the dream fulfilled of knowing that at some point you wanted to work with this cast of incredible actors. And now you've done it, you've succeeded. So what was going through your mind? Did it just whet your appetite for more? I mean, what role did you play in in convincing them or inviting them to take on this next project of Bathsheba?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think my main other than the creative which is directing the pieces is, and especially in the early years was figuring out how to make it possible logistically, because doing it was really hard and we never were part-time.
Speaker 2:So it was always like my belief and I think, our shared belief that to create something extraordinary means doing it all the time, full time.
Speaker 2:And it's a little bit different for, like, a visual artist or a solitary artist can create, make a schedule, um, a group of people, like in my art form, we need everybody to be there together all the time and that means that this has to be everybody's job. And that's really hard to do, especially when we didn't have very much money. So it was like, okay, we still don't have very much money, but it was like we need a house that everybody can pay $300 a month for rent and afford. We need to share cars. We need to get everybody on Medicaid and health insurance. We need everybody to apply for food stamps. We need to, like, make the conditions that make it possible for a group of 10 people to work together eight hours a day, every single day. And I think the thing I did that's most important actually isn't artistic. It was this like tireless commitment to the fact, to the belief that doing this would require it to always be a full-time job for everyone, and figuring out how that would be possible.
Speaker 1:And so you know you've taken it out completely out of the context of a typical theater venue where people are buying tickets and you know the the income or the revenue stream is certain based on how many seats you can fill and all of that. So how did you get from this germ of an idea to bringing people in and the performance? From what I understand, it's still not an expensive ticket, it's free, it's a volunteer pay, as you what you want. So how on earth did you figure out the mathematics to make that work? And that really points to another skill set that you have, in addition to masterminding this incredible creative component, to be able to mastermind a context, a financial context, for this is another kind of creativity. So say a little bit how you got to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think it. It required being very attuned to everyone's individual needs and being like okay, life is a combination of, among other things, how much things cost. How can I make that cost so low for people? What is it going to take? Well, it's going to take people only needing to pay $300 a month for rent. Student loans are suspended right now. I know they don't have to pay that right now. They make so little money. I know they don't have to pay that right now. They make so little money. I know they can get food stamps. Okay, that's going to give them $200 a month for groceries. Then I just need to cover a little bit more right now for them. And so it's getting like really specific about like, what's the in and out of people's income versus expensive expenses, and everyone's in a different situation. But I could kind of be like well, I know what the rent costs because we're all being housed together. I know what this costs. I know what this costs. So I just had to be really intentional about creating that whole like ecosystem of how living would work, which required really tough living conditions for a while, because living together and working together in that in any context is pretty crazy and that was necessary for the beginning and I think important that that's no longer how we live, but it was how it had to be for the first couple of years when the way revenue started working and it happened really fast. Right, because it's like we made this play.
Speaker 2:We showed it to one person in December. Everyone went home. I had to scout and negotiate for like super cheap rent for like two houses for the team. They came back in February. We started performing for audiences of six at a time in March and it was these tiny audiences and it was just sort of an accident that after each performance we'd be like hey, if you liked that, like please make a donation.
Speaker 2:And we started to notice that people would give a lot, like people who seemed like they were just like us would be like wow, that was life changing. And there were only six of us here's like five hundred dollars and we're like whoa, like people are really giving and that money because we didn't have overhead like rent for a theater or like operational costs. It was like everything in is going to go in a bucket to then go back out to these artists because the only thing that matters is they need to have enough money to live and we just did that, performance after performance, and we would. I remember the first time someone gave like I remember the first time someone gave, like I remember the first time someone gave $1,000. And I was just like that's the most money like I've ever seen. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:And then I remember a couple weeks later, someone came to a show, who I didn't know, and they pulled me aside afterward and they were just like this, really unassuming, like southern gentleman, and he was like that was amazing, I want to give you $30,000. And I was like that, that was amazing, I want to give you thirty thousand dollars and I was like what.
Speaker 2:And I like took him to lunch and I was like thank you so much, like what do you like, what do you want?
Speaker 2:And he was like I just want y'all to stay here and keep doing what you're doing. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we just need to be really upfront and honest and be like we're doing this. If you want it to be here, please support us. And also we acknowledge that some people some people's $50 is the same as some people's $5,000. Some people's $5 is the same as some people's $1, dollars. And to, I think, always give voice to that explicit difference in people and then just ask people to like show up in the way that they can and by saying that every single performance we found that like okay, the performance you went to, someone gave $5, someone gave a thousand dollars, someone gave $50, someone gave five hundred dollars, and it's like a bunch of people gave ten dollars and people sort of come together and make this thing work and it's really like unpredictable. And yet it's been like predictable, show after show that's just so amazing.
Speaker 1:It's really crazy, yeah, and I think it's just like amazing.
Speaker 2:It's really crazy, yeah, and I think it's just like obviously, we're all really passionate about what we do and the group is extremely talented. That's really important. But also we just ask people for what we need and then we we produce a lot as well, and people have been pretty amazing in meeting us, where they are, where we are, and last year we raised $600,000. But also that's what it costs now, whereas when we started, it's like it costs a lot. Well, we didn't even think about costs. I was just like well, I need these people to be able to live. And now it's like well, we have 10 or 11 professional artists. This is their job, job, this is what they do every day.
Speaker 1:They need to be compensated fairly and they've all moved from wherever they came from to santa fe and they're now permanent residents. We're so lucky to have all of you, yeah and so now I want to drill down a little bit, and and so here you are, 400 episodes.
Speaker 1:I mean, uh, yeah shows shows later of however many you said, seven productions or something, and um, currently in in the Cyrano series, which was just so creative. And so I don't want to say hilarious, because there were some hilarious parts, but there were some very dramatic, very poignant, very touching parts, to the point where I was crying and I couldn't help but notice even though I was so captivated by what was going on, because often you were not too there were 16 of us in the audience. Yeah, 15 of us.
Speaker 1:And so sometimes we were sort of all lined up and you'd be there at the end taking notes, and there was another gal who was also taking notes. I noticed and so I was wondering. I mean, the the version of what I saw was flawless, I would say, and so I was I'm. I asked you this the other day like what on earth were you taking notes about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, everything from technical stuff that has to do with light and sound, but more often scene work stuff, because we're creating the show together and it's always fresh, always fresh, and especially in these early performances, it changes every day. I'm watching to understand like how does this scene need to work? And to hear something like no, you shouldn't say that. I think you should say something more like this or like that scene went on, that scene spun out longer than it needed to. Why don't you just like? Why don't you just end it Like after you hit the conflict here?
Speaker 1:So so in a scene like that, because again you have no script, yeah, and so an actor has to remember, from from scene to scene, from show to show, what approximately what they did the time before, what the dynamic was, and obviously it gets so in their bones that they can do that. Yeah, but how do you give notes on something that is so immediate and in the moment?
Speaker 2:yeah, in a very normal way actually. I mean it is. They are extraordinary, they are some of the most. They have some of the most incredible muscles that act as actors because they have to be able to take a note from me and implement it, like immediately in the next show and do it every single night, just like changing they, every show they do up through opening and beyond, is different and they have to be ready to take an adjustment and just run with it. And that's not a skill, that's a rare skill and the speed with which they're able to like synthesize a note is pretty rare and comes from doing this all the time and being really talented. But giving notes is actually very it's very normal and in a way it's a lot like how I did it in my previous director life, where it's like, okay, well, you're going to get a note. It might be about saying lines differently, but it's just we. We give the notes and we receive the notes like you would an actor in a play with a script.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, obviously they have a certain amount of trust in you that you know you're seeing it from the audience perspective and you have a perspective that that they can't see because they're in it doing it so you're, you're a bird's eye view, or yeah, for lack of a better word, and so you know you, you get to see the whole, the whole context yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And every night it's sort of like they're. It's sort of like we're writing a novel and it's not done yet, and it's it's either a novel or a symphony, but it's not done yet. And so every night we're changing the notes or the sentences to try to get it to that living, breathing ecosystem where the entire thing is in dialogue with the rest of the entire thing. And to get there, that means that the chapters are going to have to change every night. The way the chapter starts is going to have to change and they're in it like as these characters, as these sentences, and they have to just be ready to be like okay.
Speaker 2:Well, tonight we're cutting chapter three and tonight, maybe last night, chapter four ended with this big bang, but it's just going to end with this little whimper, and they're like okay, and then we might like I might give them a note and be like did you want to just try that real quick? And they'll be like no, I'm good, I'll do it in performance tonight. Or they might be like yeah, let's try that. And so they're just ready.
Speaker 1:And with 16 audience members, I would imagine. I mean, given that it was an interactive experience as an audience member and you know, my name was actually woven into the context of the show and I was sort of startled. I was like, oh, there's a Lili in this show, and then I realized that you were just riffing off whoever was in the audience, and that was really. It was startling in a good way, you know. But obviously there is an. They have a skill set as improvisers that they can kind of take into consideration who the audience in in that slice of time is. I mean, we had a. I had brought Brie, so you had. You know, even Brie got into the action somehow, I'm not really sure how she was referred.
Speaker 2:I'm sure she did yeah.
Speaker 1:But you know, it was just. It's fascinating. So do your artists express? I mean, this must be amazing for them, your whole troupe, because they've left conventional theater and now they're doing this with you. What feedback do you get from them as actors in this experience?
Speaker 2:I mean it's a lot. We ask a lot of our actors. So I think it's like probably it's some of the most challenging, intensive work that an actor can undertake and it's very physical and it's very. I mean they're running I don't know how big those galleries are Tons of tens of I don't know tens of thousands of square feet and as you experience experience, you're moving from place to place. Meanwhile the actors, to get to a place, are having to run around the whole building to get in. So it's very physical, it's very emotional and it's very demanding in terms of like how present and aware you have to be and be with the audience every night. So I think it's really hard.
Speaker 2:But the level of like autonomy that an actor gets to have in terms of what they're creating in exodus is really pretty high. They still most of them, do their primary theater work with exodus. We have someone on broadway right now he'll be back later but they do lots of tv and film and commercials outside of this work. So it's like they're they're on set, but that's a very different. It's like almost the opposite in the. You know, it's like a microscopic slice of something that you're shooting and then you're stopping and everything is very precise. So I think it's actually really useful that they're moving back and forth from like TV and film and camera work back into Exodus work, because I think our work, though like highly theatrical, also feels, it feels cinematic immediate, it feels kind of like TV show e movie e. So I like them to be, I like them to be TV and film actors who then can bring that into a more expressive medium of theater.
Speaker 1:So do you think that this is, you know, what you've hit on here is something that is um trending in theater in general, or is it very, very unique to you guys?
Speaker 2:I don't know enough about theater to be able to to comment about that. I think it's pretty unique to us because it requires it required us to create a completely different framework of creation. So, like in my former life as a director, you get three weeks to rehearse and then you know there's no time for risk. Everything is just like um, too little time, too little everything.
Speaker 2:Well, because it's part of a financial machine, a machine that's like not conducive to anything except like a very systematic way of programming. And I was always just like, well, that's not how art works and like, sure, that's how these big theaters work. But I don't think, and I think theater is demonstrating that it's not how art works and like sure, that's how these big theaters work, but I don't think, and I think theaters demonstrating that it's not going to keep surviving with audiences unless it changes. And so I think I don't know, like even the McKittrick Hotel that you saw, sleep no More. That is an immersive theater, but it's a very different style than ours because it's like environmental, like you're exploring an environment. Ours moves from room to room, but it's all driven by the acting and the narrative, which to me, is like how can we take what's most essential about theater, which is an opportunity to see extraordinary acting and extraordinary stories, and keep those things there as the heartbeat, but then adopt contemporary frameworks that can be exciting again to people?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean, there's no lack of excitement with what you're doing. So I should add that, when you were referring to the thousands of square feet, you are now domiciled at CCA, which is important to say, and hopefully you'll be there for a while and it seems to be a really good venue for you. And so, how are you? What's your vision for keeping this a sustainable thing, as taxing as it is on the actors, as taxing as it is on your um, you know, spreadsheet, Um, what? What do you envision for the future? What's your ideal Like if you could speak into the audience? Your, your wish for Exodus going forward? What does that look like? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Well, my wish for Exodus is that we can always be based in Santa Fe it's very important to us, Our community is important but that we can increasingly share our work in other cities. So we want to be able to take the work to New York, which we are planning on doing soon, and then we want to be able to take the work to other cities and countries internationally and to have a voice and to be a leader in the future of theater, not only like from Santa Fe, but across the country.
Speaker 1:And then you know, and so that obviously is going to mean not a single, the small ensemble that you have now, but it would it sounds like you would need in order to keep it active, or would it just be one troupe that travels to various different places and then makes their way back to santa fe? I mean, I imagine there are a lot of different ways this to play out, but to have an exodus troupe in san francisco, in boston, in chicago, in new york, or is it more like this particular group goes everywhere, which is exhausting?
Speaker 2:just sounding yeah. Well, to me it is the this group, because I think I don't. I think something that's special about exodus is that it's not really franchisable. Not that other people can't be inspired by like what we're making, but it's like an exquisite, obsessive attention to the work of art and who's making it and how and how it's made. Yeah, and there's only one of me, there's only one of each of these actors. I think what needs to happen is like we have grown, we've gotten so that the actors can have coverage when it's like if so-and-so books, a TV show, we have another actor who's understudying.
Speaker 1:Right, that's new, actually we didn't have.
Speaker 2:We used to have it where if someone got sick, we had to cancel the show oh wow For like years because we just didn't have enough like coverage, and so that's been growth into the sustainable. And then, as we move forward, it's like well, we do need to grow a bit, we need more talent. We also need more support. Ideally it's like we keep. We keep what's essential about who we are while we grow the infrastructure so that we can be in New York and do the London trip and and always come back here.
Speaker 2:And I think what's so cool about Santa Fe is like we grow these pieces here and we have these audiences now that have been with us, and we have these audiences now that have been with us. Like what's neat is like a lot of people have seen all seven shows and a lot of people have seen them in their very early stages and then years later and they've seen like six different casts do these shows, and so we have this like family here that like understands how we work, and so we always want this to be like where our home is, and then go do a four week tour in New York, right, right, and three weeks in London.
Speaker 1:Well, that is my wish for you too, then. Thanks, yeah, and um, I'm really excited that I'll get to spend some more time with you, because we're about to do this project at CCA, this collaboration lab, and you're going to be on the panel for that, and I think your episode is going to air right in the middle of that, probably right before we do your panel. So this, this will be a nice integration piece, and so people can find you at Exodus Exodus ensemblecom or on Instagram at the Exodus Ensemble.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much, april. Thank you, take care, okay. Well, thanks for joining us today. Please like and follow us on artstormingorg, where you'll find a list of our shows, a transcript of this episode with links to the guest page, as well as our other projects. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by ArtBridge and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms.
