Centering Place and Creating Community with Ava Roy

In this episode of You Can’t Eat Art, Clara Kamunde speaks with Ava Roy, founder of We Players, an innovative site-specific theater company that blends storytelling and public performance, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of public art. Ava's singular artistic vision is about the power of art to imagine and create brave new worlds all around us.

About Ava Roy: 

Ava Roy is the Founding Artistic Director of We Players, founded in 2000. Her unique style of dynamic, site-integrated performance aims to highlight the historical and natural treasures of local landscapes and encourage new ways of experiencing and appreciating these places. She holds a Stanford University BA (2003) in a self-designed major: Ritual and Performance in Aesthetic Education. Since 2008, she has pioneered unique partnerships with the National Park Service, the California State Park system, San Francisco Recreation and Parks, and other municipal and regional park sites, creating spectacular immersive performances throughout the Bay Area. Inspired and guided by Shakespeare since her teenage years, Roy has explored many characters from the canon, ranging from Juliet to Henry V, Mercutio to Lady Macbeth. Roy is a fan of classic literature, crumbling buildings, historic sites, majestic natural landscapes, espresso, salt spray, and sunshine. Roy is a yoga teacher and a sailor, and in her next life plans to live in the ocean.

For more about Ava, visit our webpage ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and We Players' ⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠. 

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About Clara Kamunde:

Clara Kamunde is an Oakland-based, Kenyan-born cultural worker practicing at the intersection of arts education and social justice. Her career began with the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles where, as a grantee for the Artist-In-The-Community program, she collaborated with community organizations to produce and present site-integrated programming in  traditionally under-served communities throughout Greater Los Angeles.  She is a Marcus Curatorial Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center.

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About the Lucas Artists Residency Program:

Established in 1939, Montalvo Arts Center is home to the third oldest residency program in the United States. In 2004, Montalvo re-committed to its support of artists by opening a new, state-of-the-art facility, relaunching as the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program. The residency is dedicated to providing artists with a flexible and expansive space in which to create, encouraging the creative process, risk taking, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary investigation of contemporary issues. The LAP is a hybrid model that supports uninterrupted time to develop new work, while offering opportunities to share ideas and projects through public programming and partnerships.For more info about the residency, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠. Follow the LAP@lucasartres 

Credits:
“Syndrome” from the album Tide’s Arising Instrumentals (Mashibeats, 2024) used with permission of LAP 2023 CA Fellow Mark de Clive-Lowe; © Mark de Clive-Lowe/Mashibeats  

Podcast cover art created by Olivia Esparza© Montalvo Arts Center, 2025 

Transcript

Episode 2 YCEA: Centering Place and Creating Community with Ava Roy

[00:00:00] Welcome to You Can't Eat Art. I'm your host, Clara Kamunde, coming to you from the Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Art Center. 

Whether you make art, consume art, or are somewhere in between, you can't eat art is for anyone who's ever been affected by. A book, a painting, a poem, a song, choreography, film, or had any experience with any form of art that somehow imprinted on your mind or your soul, and continues to resonate.

This podcast is also for anyone who questions whether art is relevant. It's specifically for the person who said to me, what's the point? You can't eat art. Welcome one and all. Let's explore the power and purpose of art. Its ability to [00:01:00] confound, confront, astound, inspire, heal, challenge, and transform. Most importantly, let's explore why art matters now more than ever.

In today's episode, centering Place and Creating Community. My guest is Ava Roy. The founder of We Players an innovative site-specific theater company that blends storytelling and public performance, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of public art. For 25 years, we players has been enriching the cultural landscape.And with their groundbreaking partnerships with the National Park Service, California State Park Service, and other civic organizations, we players provides a model for creative placemaking, other artists, organizations, and cities can emulate or build upon. All right, let's get started. Get ready to be entertained, informed, and inspired.[00:02:00] 

This is. You Can't Eat Art. 

Yes. Alright, Ava. Woo. It's been such a long time. Too long, too long. Welcome, welcome, welcome to You Can't Eat Art. Thinking about this conversation, one thing that kept cropping up in my mind was cast of Shakespearean characters. You've played over 25 years. All those characters we'd make for a really interesting one woman piece. But the role that really intrigues me is your very first Shakespearean role. Talk about that. 

I'd be happy to. It's so nice to see you. I'm so pleased to have this opportunity to talk about we players and specifically with you. So yeah, I have had the tremendous. Good fortune and opportunity to play Shakespeare since I was 13 years old. When I was 13, I had the opportunity to play Juliet and my first director is. A woman [00:03:00] named Anne Podlonzy, and it's particularly special that you ask that question right out the gate because as we're celebrating our 25th anniversary this spring, Ann Podlonzy, my first teacher, my mentor, over the years I've evolved to calling her my mentor sister, mother, friend, 'cause she has at various times in my life, played all those roles. Mm-hmm. She is now out here from the UK She lives for the most part in London and she's out here both to be my coach as I'm playing Macbeth in this current production of Macbeth at four Point, but also to play Lady Macbeth opposite me, which is incredibly magical and special and is one of those things that I don't think either of us could have imagined or planned.

It was a perfect timing of a conversation over the summer that led to this opportunity to be together, collaborating again now 30 years since we first worked together. Wow. And when she cast me as Juliette, it was incredibly transformative, both to play that character at that age and then thereafter to have established with that show such a deep and abiding [00:04:00] love for the poetry and curiosity that has.Fueled 25 years of my work with we players and 30 years of working almost exclusively with Shakespeare. 

So fast forward to 2000 and the creation of We Players. 

Take me back to that moment. I had the privilege of, attending Stanford University as an undergraduate, and I had never visited the campus before my first day of school. I grew up in rural western Massachusetts. Rich in cultural activities, both in the present tense with museums and summer theater festivals and Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. Also, historically, many famous authors and artists lived there, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
When I got to Stanford, it really was. Like a stranger in a strange land. And I didn't know how to relate to the campus that felt like a private country club. At first, I thought, I'm not in the right place and I should be backpacking around Europe studying avant garde [00:05:00] theater. 

And the big shift for me was when I started to see the campus.Not as this exclusive country club I didn't have a pass to, but as a playground and allowed my imagination to get curious. It started with seeing in my mind's eye banners falling from the clock towers or some of the very dramatic backdrops of Stanford University also would make great sets for a play, and so that's central to how the ethos and methodology of we players grew might need to build a sense of belonging in this place. I also had this knack for productive hanging out and making all of my friends who were all so smart and creative and cool and interesting, be productive in our hanging out and started creating work with people who were not actors, now, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and many other disciplines. 

And I guess another thing that is important to admit is that the ignorance of youth is sometimes so critical because I [00:06:00] had had this tremendous privilege to train with Shakespeare company throughout high school. So when I got to Stanford, I was displeased with the theater department. I thought I either have to quit or make my own, and because I was. 19 years old, I had the audacity to think that I knew everything and began inventing outdoor site specific theater, which of course, come to find out later that there is a long tradition.

One of the pivotal changes for me was a professor in religious studies who opened a major portal for my work, showing me that there are ancient ritual. Traditions, underlying modern theater, underlying storytelling, and that there are ancient religious dramas. I got really interested in looking at the ways that we, as people have been telling stories to better understand ourselves, inventing the gods, inventing myths to better understand ourselves since we've been humans gathering around fires. So those things combined to begin my quest that evolved into we players.

 Wow. That's the kernel of so much that is [00:07:00] great about we players approach to bringing art into public spaces. You've been known to say that place is a second director. You have the 360 philosophy, how you activate public spaces for artistic expression. This re-imagining renewed sense of place that invites the public to look at these places in a new way. Can you elaborate on that? 

Places, hold memory and hold stories w ithin them, and when we are working site specifically, it's that place and not some other place. And so it brings its historical record, what's passed there before, as well as its present tense, as well as the possibilities of the future informs both the practical logistics of how we move through the space, as well as the overarching aesthetic colors, texture, shapes, and so on, as well as soundscape. The site is the other creative force and scene partner working [00:08:00] in relationship to place. Every show is built for a different location and is always informed by the site. This way of working activates this kind of kin-esthetic relationship to storytelling and to experiencing art.

There's something really interesting about expanding the bounded stage, placing action and images or detail in the environment. We can place those things above us, behind us. In the distance up close so that we're inviting and challenging our audiences to choose and change their perspective. All of this serves the way I like to make art that is rich and engaging, but is also in part an ulterior motive for practicing the way that we can pay attention in our everyday lives.
Mm-hmm. And that paying attention is a choice. We have a degree of agency within. where we give our focus and where we pay attention. Mm-hmm. And as Mary Oliver says, attention is the beginning of devotion. Yeah. As we get more and more addicted to our phones and our devices and this idea we have of quote unquote convenience, those things separate us [00:09:00] from the natural world that we are a part of, not separate from.

Yeah. You've anticipated so many of my questions, but one of the things that I'd like this podcast to really delve into is the intrinsic and instrumental value of the arts. With we players, public spaces become spaces for artistic expression. They're more than just physical locations. With your process, having been an audience member, it feels like they're cultural hubs - how you integrate the audience's counterpart to how you integrate place. You take Shakespeare at his word, all the world is a stage, and all the men and women players; and the way people come together, you create community. What you do is a form of civic engagement.
Talk about your process for creating immersive performances that provide audiences with an experience that's both very personal, but coherent to [00:10:00] the performance.

 I love what you said about the audience becoming a community. I hope that's true, and I think that has everything to do with being together in space and not in seats staring at each other's backs. Storytelling and specifically place-based art making has the opportunity to really connect us in a personal way with locations. The first step of taking care of our public lands and civic spaces is to care about them. My hope for the audience, yeah, is to engage in these places in new ways.
I often have the joy of hearing that audiences have discovered gems of the local landscape f or the first time through we players and that they see places in new ways. There's a bonding among people if we've seen the same movie and we can talk about it, but something else that happens when we are sharing a real experience in the present. And a degree of discomfort I actually think is important. So I don't want people to suffer for the art, although sometimes that happens by doing things in places that are cold and windy and rugged [00:11:00] and difficult physically. But I think when we s it back and expect our art to come to us. We're missing the part that it's a conversation. A conversation about listening and leaning forward.I'm trying to make work that invites the audience to lean in, be part of the conversation. Not separate watching from a distance, but to be literally and physically immersed in the play. That invites the audience to invest more. Mm-hmm. And whatever we invest in, we care more about it matters more to us.

One of the things that has struck me about. We players is how nimble and agile it is as an organization. The ecosystem for theater in the Bay Area recently has just been devastating. You must be doing something right. Talk about your model. 

The word that's coming to mind was hunger. You have to be hungry enough to make work no matter what.I've chosen a path where I only make work I can't not make in an [00:12:00] economy that doesn't support art making. It's exhausting and it's really hard not to dally with the edge of the burnout cliff. So I have that fueling me. I would rather struggle to find the means to produce the work that I need to make.Mm-hmm, than make adjustments or compromises about the work I'm making. Right. I think that getting started young was really helpful because I was so hungry and had energy and stamina. I felt I couldn't ever take my foot off the gas even a little bit or we go careening off the road. You gotta get enough momentum to keep going, but at some point just becomes a habit.
Yes. 

The company really grew word of mouth for like the first 12 years. For me, that was the right way because I was established in my voice and my practice, then started figuring out how do I build more infrastructure to keep this going, to take better care of my artists? Nobody was paid for the first decade and that took dedication and passing the hat.

Mm-hmm. This partnership you have with the parks is brilliant because not only does it invite place-making, but it's a [00:13:00] way to sustain the parks. It's a way to sustain an organization. There's the. Instrumental value of bringing people to experience the parks. 'cause I read that 70% of audience members go back to the parks. But then there's the very intrinsic value of being outside. Something transformative about being outside... but some connection there in your practice to ritual and performance and being outside. What draws an audience to We Players. 

I opened my phone here a second ago 'cause I had written this down the other day to remind myself, Emerson is one of the great early guides in Western intellectual thought as it relates to spirituality and relationship to nature.
This we know, quote, the happiest person is she who learns from nature the lesson of worship. Ralph Waldo Emerson. That came up for me when you were speaking about our relationship to place and the value of spending time outdoors. I [00:14:00] deeply believe nature is medicine and spending time outdoors is medicine. The Japanese phrase, forest bathing has come into the zeitgeist and there's all sorts of scientific research about how our parasympathetic nervous system is soothed by green found in nature. Mm-hmm. That our brains show reduced anxiety and disturbed activity when we are in nature. So I'm just kind of jumping on that and adding to it by staging shows that invite people to spend time outside and to remember being able to experience a sense of awe and wonder is.
central to our superpowers as human beings, our imagination, empathy and wonder. 

Yeah, so that's an ingredient for creating community 

Anecdotal evidence from our audiences who write in our surveys, and we often hear with every show, some version of the spaces forever transformed. For me, I will never look at Golden Gate Park in the same way.I will never look at Alcatraz in the same way. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. 

A couple of things swam through my mind. I'll start with this. Because I don't [00:15:00] want to forget it, and I say this as someone who believes like Maya Angelou that Shakespeare was writing for me, Shakespeare is sometimes relegated to the dustbin of the dead white male. We Players is strongly associated with Shakespeare. Speak to why now more than ever. Shakespeare is important. 

Yeah. He was among the first to write characters who are multidimensional human beings. Shakespeare is profoundly relevant in this. Moment when neither side of the political spectrum is willing to see one another is human. Even his worst villains. Have a backstory. Have a history. Richard III on the first page and the first monologue tells us why he is, how he is the lack of love. His own mother abused him, told him he was worthless, and that he was. A bunch back towed and he was made fun of to be as capacious and generous in seeing people who disagree with me as human and worthy of their lives [00:16:00] and thoughts and ideas is o ne of the things that Shakespeare gives us, plus the plays are exciting. The way that they're written presents these dynamic human beings and anything that is possible to feel within this sort of human condition. It's so rich and profound and layered that we grow with it. The text. Seemingly stays the same, and yet, how does it mean a different thing every time we come to it, because we are changing.

Thank you for that. Ava. What's next? Where it's happening? When it's happening? Yes, of course. This spring opening April 11th and running through May 18th, we players is celebrating our 25th anniversary with a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, staged at Fort Point, the historic Civil War fortress under the Golden Gate Bridge. A tremendous cast, brilliant designers. Exciting design elements and music is incredible. The acting is beautiful, and of course the story is tremendous. And that is April 11th through May 18th and people can find out more and get tickets@weplayers.org. The fort is only open three days [00:17:00] a week, and so it's a LA cool enough opportunity to be there at night in the drama of it all, and you might just find out you like Shakespeare if you come and experience it. 

When will you be back at Montalvo? 

Oh, Montalvo. I love Montalvo so much. I think. Montalvo is doing a pretty amazing job as a place that walks a talk in supporting artists and giving them space and time to work. I don't know when I'll be back, but I look forward to being back at Montalvo. I've had the privilege to both present work there and I've also had the opportunity to be in residence there developing new work and writing scripts, and so thank you Montalvo to all you do to support so many artists. One of the things that's so special, as we said before we started recording, the dinners and the conversations that happen amongst artists across disciplines; and I have been learning so much from disciplines I didn't know I was interested in a few years ago.
You never know where inspiration's gonna come from. Sometimes it comes from within, sometimes it [00:18:00] comes from without. And sometimes it's someone who works in the field, you know, nothing about is asking a question or, or approaching the same question you have, but in a different way that just lights something up and opens up new pathways and at this historic for me, anniversary moment, I'm also asking myself how I get to evolve as an artist. Mm-hmm. Time spent at Montalvo specifically and places like Montalvo. Mm-hmm. remind me that evolution is the natural way. Ava, congratulations on 25 years of evolution and thank you. Thank you, thank you. This has been such a joy.
It's so wonderful this time with you. Thank you. Thank you. 

That wraps up our second episode, centering Place and Creating Community with Ava Roy. Ava's Singular artistic vision is about the power of art to imagine and create brave new worlds all around us. We Players centers, place, and community making in the [00:19:00] idea, to borrow from Shakespeare, that "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Quoting the Bard again, thanks, Ava. All the rest is mute. 

But I do want to give a big shout out to the George and Judy Marcus Family Foundation, the Jo and Barry Ariko Fund for Artistic Programs, Sally Lucas, Kelly Sicat, Judy Dennis, Montalvo Arts Center, and a special thanks to Mark de Clive-Lowe for the podcast theme music, and to the art lovers at Fog Design and Art 2025, whose voices contribute to the soundscape. And last but not least, thank you for tuning in. A quick reminder, this is a 12 episode series and a new episode goes out every month. Stay curious, stay inspired, and until next time, stay well. This is Clara Kamunde signing off from you Can't [00:20:00] eat art.
My name is Ashara Ekundayo. You can't eat art, but you can definitely breathe it in.