BoD Episode 22: Simón Adinia Hanukai

Simón Adinia Hanukai is a theater maker, director, and educator. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, he spent the early years of his career in Oakland, California, where he was a founding member of headRush Crew and the Co-Artistic Director of the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. Working with both companies for six years, he was instrumental in creating original full-length dance theater pieces, which toured nationally and were seen by over 25,000 people per year. Highlights include sharing the stage with Desmond Tutu, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Neil Young, Alfre Woodard, and Martin Sheen.

Since leaving the Bay Area, Simón has created work and taught throughout the U.S., the Middle East, Europe, and India.  His directing credits include JUPITER (a play about power) (La MaMa E.T.C., NY), SPACES: Oakland (Oakland City Hall), DATAPRINT Multimedia Installation & Performance (The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA & Cubbon Park Metro Station, Bangalore, India), SPACES: Saint-Denis (Market Hall and Cathedral of Saint-Denis), The Shared Prince (Cabaret Sauvage, Paris), Rest Upon The Wind (Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NY), The Golden Drum Year (University Settlement, NY), Les Alibis (Junevents Festival, Atelier De Paris – Carolyn Carlson, France), Decline & Fall or; A Guide to How the End Begins for Those Too Big To Fail (Tricklock Performance Lab, New Mexico), The Fall (Flamboyán, NY), Flying Ace and The Storm of the Century (Odin Teatret, Denmark), One Heart for Two (Winkel & Balktick, NY), Phaedra's Cabaret (Flux Industries, NY).

Simón is an honored recipient of the Dean’s Fellowship from Columbia University and the Emerging Artists Fellowship from New York Theatre Workshop. Artist Residencies include: NACL Deep Space Residency; Odin Theater, Denmark; E|MERGE Interdisciplinary Artist Residency; Catwalk Art Residency; Sally and Don Lucas Arts Program at the Montalvo Arts Center; CHIMÈRES Interdisciplinary Residency, Ministry of Culture, France.

Simón is a Theatre Professor at Sciences Po Paris. He holds a Master's degree in Education from the University of San Francisco’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice and an MFA in Theater Directing from Columbia University.

https://www.kaimeraproductions.com/

This monthly gathering invites directors and other theatre makers to come together, share experiences, and seek advice in a supportive community. There is often an isolating nature to directing, and this new space aims to foster connection and collaboration. The Board of Directors is an opportunity to set aside time each month to be alongside members of the Directing community all over the world. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:42

There are some people who speak about theater as an art form, and others who speak about it as a necessity. Something that doesn't simply shape a career, but alters the course of a life. That's what struck me in my conversation with Simone Hanukai. Simone and I share a connection through Columbia University, though we were there at different times and only briefly crossed paths. More recently, students of mine independently found their way to his work through Chimera Productions and the Chimera Lab in France and came back transformed. Not simply inspired, but changed by the experience of being inside an artistic community built around rigor, vulnerability, and deep exchange. In this conversation, Simone traces a remarkable journey from Azerbaijan to Oakland, from street theater in the American Southwest to immersive and site-specific performance across Europe. But what runs underneath all of it is a search for belonging. Theater for him was never just about making work, it was about finding people, finding a language, finding a place to stand. We talk about theater as survival, as citizenship, as collective practice. We talk about participatory performance, about building artistic laboratories, and about creating spaces where strangers become collaborators. More than anything, this conversation is about community, how we find it, how we build it, and how we return the gift once it saves us. This is my conversation with Simone Hanukkah. Simon, thank you so much for joining today.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

First of all, thanks for having me. It's really nice to chat in this way in a very formal, informal way at the same time. And when did directing do that to me? I'm not sure. The first time directing kind of shook me up was um I was my senior year of undergrad and I wasn't studying theater at all. Theater kind of jumped into my life in a very strange, unexpected way. And that year I was part of a theater group. I was imagining just I'm gonna act, I'm gonna do some stuff. And it was my second year of a very informal, more of a theater as a way to bring people together group uh that was organized by a really wonderful professor at UC Santa Cruz, where I was at. And um, on day one, uh actually before they went, he was like, You're gonna direct this year. And I said, uh, no, absolutely not. And he was like, No, no, no, you're gonna direct, you don't have a choice. And I tried to get out of it for a couple of weeks, and then finally I realized that I'm not gonna get out of it. So I ended up directing, and it really, really just blew my mind. Um, because I I I mean, I was very young, I was, you know, 20, 21 years old, and suddenly I realized, wow, there's this whole other thing that happens off the stage that is so freeing in some way. Uh, because to me, theater really shook me up and saved my life. Uh, it's a different story. But a couple years before that, and I really found a lot of freedom in it. But this I found to be something a whole new set. And I really actually enjoyed not being on the stage and really enjoyed creating the space for others to dig in and to figure things out and to be together. And then some years later, I ended up, I was in Oakland, California, and I was just completely also by chance. Life is strange. Ended up becoming a co-artistic director of an incredible dance theater company for young people called Destiny Art Center. It still exists, Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. It's an award-winning organization. I it actually received some years ago one of the biggest uh awards for youth development in the United States. And joined that company and ended up being core artistic director for six years, and really we ended up working on much larger stages, performing to about 20,000 people a year, touring. And at the same time, I started my own company with two friends and colleagues, and with them we were doing much more experimental theater and that we were performing, writing, directing all ourselves, just between us. And the more I was doing all of these things, the more it just felt like my real home is in directing. My real home is off the stage, is in the creative room, is in the space of bringing people together to create these little babies, right? Because each show is its own baby. And what does it mean to create this thing that then grows and figures itself out and you nourish it or you guide it? And you just felt more and more freeing. So I ended up applying to Columbia's graduate program at that point. And from then on, I actually have never really been on stage again. I've just always focused on directing.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

When you maybe not the first project as you were thrown into it by your professor, but when you decided to come back in, did you notice something that you were continuously searching for? Was there a theme or a guiding principle that just kind of was dragging you along the entire time? I mean, maybe it's easier in hindsight to kind of see that, but even then did you kind of know what you were following?

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that actually to this day um exist in the things that I make or the way I'm interested in making work is that to me, the work I'm interested in creating is really there to create a space for people to come together. Um it's for people to question what's happening around them and to them. Um I was very, very political. I'm still very, I'm still political consider myself a political person, but I was very much in an activist community in my 20s, late teens and 20s, and it really shaped the way I see and create work. And also I feel like in this moment politically, that's a whole different point, but absolutely just feel to me, had always felt like what are we creating? How do we bringing people together? What are questions are we tackling? And I felt like theater has this magical space that we can bring people together and create connection faster than any other space that I've ever been part of. And simultaneously, we can create worlds for an audience that could be real, that could be fictional, that could be blends of both. It could be things that people have imagined, have never imagined, and let audiences step into those worlds. And by stepping into those worlds, suddenly they get to question their own world and figure out who are they and why are they there and what are they doing? So to me, that is um that's I think from the beginning is what really touched me and really felt like home.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

And I imagine your background has something to do with that of political awakening and and communities and things like that. Could you speak a little bit to that? Because I think that story is is really interesting and um sure.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

I mean, there are there are a bunch of things. So my family were originally from Azerbaijan. My family's been on the land of Azerbaijan for centuries and centuries and centuries. My family is a mix of different ethnic groups from that area. My mother is Armenian, my father is Tatsuki or mountain Jews. There are Jews from the mountains of Azerbaijan who are not Ashkenazi or Sephardic. They're this different thread that's been there for over a thousand years. People have no idea how they got there or where they came from. Their language is more like farsi, so more like uh the people think that they came through Iran, and their cuisine is kind of a mix of all these things. And my mom's side, even though they're originally Armenian, they've been in Azerbaijan for over 250 years and um very very much rooted in Azerbaijan. So my family's there, was there for a long, long time. And then when I when I was 10, a war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. So as conflict broke out. At first, we actually stayed for quite a long time, and then it became too dangerous to stay. Yeah, especially for my mom and my my grandmother, who are both Armenian. And so they actually ended up having to sneak out. It was a it was a strange time, like nothing was was for sure. It was one of those things that you have no idea what's gonna happen the next day. So they had to end up taking a ferry boat across the Caspian Sea one night. I mean, I remember just coming home from from school, and my parents were saying, mom's leaving tonight, and grandma's leaving tonight. And they left uh and they took the cast, uh, took this ferry boat, and there were all these rumors. People were saying that this boat's gonna be bombed, people were saying that this is gonna be the last boat, there are all these things. So then they and actually um another very close friend and her two kids uh who were also Armenian were hiding together on this boat, and they took the boat, I believe, into um Turkmenistan. So they landed on the other side of the Caspian Sea from where they received refugee status. Uh, they were kind of identified as refugees. And then we met up with them three months later uh in Moscow. Uh, and my parents really worked several times to try to get refugee status to the United States. They applied several times, they were denied several times, and on the third attempt, we received refugee status. It's not clear yet, because that that was the moment, this is 1990. You know, 1990, so a lot of things are shifting at that point. Uh, Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, so it was the right during the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of communism. So it was kind of like both because um there was a lot of persecution against Jews in former Soviet Union, much less so in Azerbaijan. Uh it's actually was the opposite in Azerbaijan. The specific ethnic Jewish group were very close to its uh to the Muslim uh counterparts who are Azerbaijani. So like probably 98% of Azerbaijan is Muslim, and there is this weird affinity. It's actually, I think it's actually one of those things that also really marked me because uh in a lot of the world we have these understanding that Jews and Muslims don't get along. And it's not at all how I grew up. I actually grew up in this very opposite setting where if you say something negative to the Muslims in Azerbaijan about this specific ethnic Jewish group, you would be scolded, like, and vice versa. There's this very like this affinity to this day. There was actually interesting, uh, my father kept reminding us that when we were leaving, there because Azerbaijan really wanted to be independent. It was one of the first countries that wanted to be uh republics that wanted to be independent. And there were slogans and marches saying Russians leave, Armenians leave, Jews stay, because really there was such part of the fabric and it's been there for so long. Uh for my grandfather, his first language was Azerila, you know. So for them, it was really they were part of the world. So, anyway, getting fast forwarding a little bit, so we ended up arriving to United States. I was 12 and a half at that time. We came with uh 10 suitcases and 500, $500 per person. Uh, and we arrived in the Bay Area um at that time. And it wasn't always easy. I mean, but at the same time, we were very lucky. And so I mean, looking back, you're just like, man, how do these things happen? You know, sometimes it's just very lucky that things, how things fall into place. But the first year is very tough. It took us some time to figure out the country. My father was the only one that spoke pretty okay English. He went, he studied English in school, so he spoke pretty decent English. The rest of us had to learn. It was much tougher for my mom. My mom's a musician and music teacher in Azerbaijan. She, I mean, she's a wonderful musician. And I think she took a really big hit because it took her a long time to find her place. It took her a long time to play and to find people to play with, but mostly she didn't get a chance to play. Uh mostly she ended up teaching, which also she uh gladly she enjoyed, but it's something that she didn't really have a choice in doing. And I think if she stayed in Azerbaijan, she would have played much more and for much bigger stages because she was an excellent or is still an excellent musician. So those few years were rough, and I was somebody who rebuilt a lot in high school. I had a hard time, and also just a neighborhood that we moved in was going through big transitions. It's actually we moved to Mount View before Google moved to Mount View, California. And the reason Google moved to Mount View is because Mount View was a very affordable neighborhood to move to at the time. And it was a very working class, exactly a complete opposite. Now it was a very working class neighborhood, and there was a lot of things going on that my parents had no idea about when we moved. Like we had no idea that on our street was the biggest gang of the town, like about seven houses down. And we had no idea that wearing red was uh the thing that we should wear, and wearing blue is the thing that we shouldn't wear. You know, like things like that. It took some time to figure out. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't super intense, but there were some really intense moments, you know. Like overall, we got away with, you know, not being too getting in too much drama, but there were some elements of drama. So just it was kind of creating my understanding of who I am and just changing countries, changing languages at adolescence by itself was already complicated for me. So it took me time to figure out what am I doing, who am I doing, like, you know, what's going on around me. And my senior year high school, I was, you know, I was really struggling at school, not because I was having a hard time, because I was just not interested. I was just really, really bored and I felt the school is not for me. And uh I asked my high school counselor, what class can I take that requires no work? I literally asked her that question. I mean, looking back, I'm like, I can't believe what guts did I have to ask a question like that. You know, who the hell who the hell says that? You know? And then uh she said, Hey, how about intro to acting? And I said, Okay, sure, why not? And I got two of my friends to join the class because I was like, you know, I want to hang out with my friends. So stepping into that class completely shook me up. It just completely changed my perspective of what, you know, who I am. Suddenly, I also think I I mean, I don't think I know I had a lot of pent-up anger in those years. I got into a lot of drama with, you know, police, with some fights. Like there were some things that were happening in my time because I didn't know how to deal with all these emotions and all these things that were that were happening to me and around me. And um I ended up taking this class and the teacher saw something. Like she, like I remember like from the first, like one of the first days, she was like, hey, yeah, you know, come talk to me. And she really pushed me and it really pushed me and really pushed me and encouraged me to addition to the first school play of that season to that year. I ended up auditioning. I said, Why not? You know, this is fun. I ended up getting one of the lead roles. She ended up additioning, make pushing me multiple times. I ended up doing three prof three productions that year, which completely blew me apart. Like suddenly I was like, whoa, you know. And what I felt magical is like, yeah, it felt it felt good. It felt like I was good at something. It felt like I was part of a like a because you know, those of us who do theater, you know, every show you do, you make, you kind of create a new little family, right? And in that moment, with all the drama that was happening in my life, having those little families felt really, really good and felt really, really safe. So I think I was really craving that. And so having those spaces that were nourishing me and getting, I felt like that was my therapy. Like I didn't, you know, I didn't go to therapy for many, many years, but that was my therapy to get all this aggression out of my system, frustrations out of my system, anger at the world, myself, my family, all these things. So, and also it was really cool because my parents actually loved theater. They actually met in a theater group when they amateur theater group when they were in college. So my whole life they're like, you should do theater. And I was like, Oh, absolutely not. I'm never gonna do theater. And then of course it happens. Uh so they were also, for once, were really excited what I was doing. So they came to see the shows, and I was like, oh wow, you know, um, I'm getting I'm getting love from people instead of getting being told you're not doing so well. Um, so there was a moment at midway through that senior high school where I'm back to the same high school counselor and I said, Hey, I want to go to college. I really like it, it like suddenly I was like, oh, I was seeing perspectives and seeing opportunities. I was like, I want to get out of my neighborhood. Because I saw a bunch of my cousins and my friends who went to the local community college, they just got stuck there. They didn't really, they were just, they were just, I just feel that they were being, you know, held, felt, they were held back or holding themselves back. And uh my husband, that same house counselor said, uh, you know what, your GPA is really terrible, your SATs are not so good. Don't waste your money, don't apply to college. You know, go to community college, and I was like, ugh. And I said, you know what, I'm just gonna apply. I'm just gonna try. And so I applied to four universities and I was really stubborn. I wanted to apply to UCs, and I applied to four UCs. And back in the day, uh, I don't know if probably at your time was with the same way, you know, you when you got into university, you received a big envelope. And when you didn't get in, you received a small envelope. And I remember, I remember being out running around with my friends somewhere, and back then I had a pager, and my mom paged me 9111 with the code 911, meaning like call me back immediately. And I may I remember going to a payphone exactly, I remember exactly where I was in Mount View when I called from where I called my mom back, and I can hear like tears in her eyes being like, You got a big letter from Santa Cruz, you got a big letter from Santa Cruz, you know, like this feeling of oh shit, like things just changed. And it's the only place I got into. And I think once I got out of my mentality and once I got into undergrad, I was like, oh yeah, I feel good. And I've kind of found my stride, and I've never had another, never failed another class, never had anything lower than to be moving forward. And because I really felt like I was doing what I wanted to do. And I think the thing that clicked in was like, I was doing this for me, I'm not doing this for somebody else. And I think theater was really the space that helped me understand myself to be able to figure those things out in that really difficult moment. In that moment where everything was up in the air. I think that space of imagination, that space of being seen, that space of this small community of people who were caring for each other, I felt like those were instrumental. And I think that, you know, jumping a few years later in Oakland, California, that was still part of like the magic of this group of people who are there with each other and for each other. And at that time we were, as I said, we were very political. So the the Destiny Arts Street Performance Company that I was part of, that I was co-artistic director of, was a really engaged group of individuals. I mean, Oakland is a, you know, Oakland is Oakland. And it's still to me my artistic home, one of my main artistic homes. And it really, you're fueled by being there, by all of the elements that are happening, the political levels, the social levels, the fabric of that city of that city being things are so intertwined in that place. And even when things become difficult, the community really comes together in Oakland. And it really left a huge mark on me the years that I was there. And every time I go back, it still feels that way. But um in Oakland, we were really trying to figure out what is the point of performance. There was really a moment I felt like in my 20s, I was with a couple friends, a couple of them were uh at least, especially one of them was several years older than me, and we were making work, and we had a group called Head Rush, uh, which is a very political piece, uh very political group. So Chad Gondorosa, my two collaborators, we were really trying to figure out who gets to be, like whose stories are told, who are they told for, who are they told with, who needs to be in the performance space, what is a performance space? And I got really, really lucky. Uh we were exposed to the work of Theater the Oppressed and got had opportunities to work with Augusta Boal, the founder of Theater the Oppressed, a few times. And being with him and being in that space, it really shifted my perspective of what is theater? Like it suddenly was not, you know, you know, the traditional thing on stage with this very, very thick fourth wall. But suddenly it was a very fluid space. Uh, we were also really inspired by the work of Teatro Campesino, which is a farm worker theater movement and the incredible performance, you know, in just a little bit of south of the Bay Area, um, and the work that they were doing with farm workers back in the days in the back of pickup trucks, but then moving forward, uh, we knew really well the company and and and they were friends and got to see the work and how they made work and what does it mean to make work of and for a specific community? So those things were really influential. Um, but from Bowal, the question of a spec actor really kind of like shifted my perspective. And the idea that the audience is not necessarily have to be passive, the audience does not necessarily have to consume, and especially at that time, the just society felt like just we're just consumers. Like we're just here just to eat what we're fed, and we are not here to ask questions. It was Bush was president at the time, and we were really like, wow, what what is this for? Who are we doing this thing for? And really, I felt like for some time the theater was an extension of this consumerism because you just, you know, you buy a ticket, you show up, you sit where you where you're told, you uh, you know, clap when you're told, you, you know, and then you leave and you say, ah, that was so nice, or that was not so nice. You know, it just felt an extension of a consumer mentality. And so we really began to play around with with Chago and Rosa with Group Will Headrush, play around with these questions of like, where is the stage? What is the stage? We didn't, we weren't actually conscious of it, but we were just doing it. We started to first um break the fourth wall, then we started to jump off the stage, then we started to bring some people onto the stage, then we ended up just breaking the idea of the stage completely. Then we went onto the streets. We actually, in the first Obama election, we did a street theater tour that started in Oakland and finished in El Paso, Texas. And we're stopping in multiple cities along the way, really mostly focusing a lot on parts of Southern California and rural California and on Texas. And just not telling people what to think, but creating a piece called People for President and just pushing people just to get up. And it was a very, very a lot of exchanges with the public. So really just questioning, you know, what is this fourth wall thing, you know, which is such a such a sacred thing in the in the theater world. So those were the questions I think that I was grappling with then, and they're still to this day. Like when I went to Colombia, I really went to continue this, these questions, to, to keep playing around with these questions. I was very lucky because I mean, and Bogart is a wonderful guide. She kind of smells what you need and she pushes you in that direction. She like she could feel it. So from the beginning, she was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, keep going. So I ended up exploring a lot of immersive work, a lot of participatory work before the work, the word immersive actually landed. That was like right before we actually got this word immersive that became all over the place. But at that time, we were just playing around with this relationship to the audience and the role of the audience and who are they and why are they here? And who are we and why are we here? And why are we together in this space?

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Well, I mean, you know, now looking at the that the path makes total sense of where you are now, what you're doing now. It's I imagine, I mean, it's the question I always ask in the podcast is the the origin story, because the kernel of the thing that drives you is there from the beginning, and it's just a slow kind of like fanning the flame of that. And, you know, I have several questions to ask in there. Um one of the many reasons I wanted to speak with you is my best friend is married to uh an Azerbaijani woman who also had to leave uh Azerbaijan in similar circumstances, and they currently live in Mountain View. So that's that's a that's a very funny thing. And and we, as a company, we were able to go to the Coptum in Baku uh the year before last. And I wasn't able to go. He was able to go with his wife, they were visiting family, and our playwright went, and they were just marveling about how beautiful the country was, how open everyone is. So there was just something about that that I wanted to bring up that I really regret not being able to do.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Yeah, Azerbaijan's a strange place because it has all of these layers. It has this layer of gorgeous beauty. It's I mean the old city of Baku is just you step into a different time and place, and it's incredible. And it has a lot of very complicated political, like the political situation is very complicated. Yeah. With the same group of people in power for the last uh 40 years and very little freedom of speech, freedom of you know, but it is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

I can see now how Chimera began, the the seeds of all of that. When did that start for you and when did that become because it's not just it's not it's not a it's not just a producing company of work, it is a lab. I mean, it's very specifically in the name. Both of those things are integral to the work that you were doing and the explorations that you are having. How did that come about? Like, not just like I can see the the path of it, but like logistically, like, oh, you know what? I'm going to France. I'm gonna open this lab. This is gonna be an international workshop, this is gonna be where I'm gonna go. How did how did you jump the pond from touring through the American Southwest to, you know, on streets to then in a beautiful villa in Britney?

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch of different um ways. So, first of all, as I I finished working, I finished my master's at my MFA at Columbia. And I was in New York, I was loving being in New York. I was making a lot of work. I had a wonderful community of artists and and and folks around me who I really feel felt challenged and engaged and taken care of. At the same time, I felt like something was missing. Because I felt like in New York, a lot of time you make things for other artists or for the press. And I really felt like this there was this lack of connection to like who are you making this thing for? Who has the community that you're in dialogue with? So that like in the back of my head, I had this thing that I felt was missing. And then I ended up uh while I was at Columbia, I ended up meeting a collaborator, Jonathan Camazo, who is an incredible musician composer. And he and I started working together. And we ended up, first he was just playing in one of my shows, then he was playing in another one of my shows, then he was doing music direction, then he was doing more music direction, and he was then co-creating a show with me. And then eventually we're like, oh wow, we've made like a dozen shows together. I along with him, there was a couple other really close collaborators, David Bengali, who is an incredible lighting and video designer, uh, Narope Pabinitas, who is an incredible producer and creative person, Beto O'Byrne, who's a wonderful writer. There's like this whole group of people that we were just making stuff, imagining stuff. And then I had a couple folks, a couple of mentors, one is Gideon Lester, one is Anne Bogart, who were like, you should make your own company. You know, you should really start your own company because they were really actually practical. Especially Gideon, I remember he was very practical, but he said, you know what? It's still gonna be your work, but because you're gonna have a company, it's gonna somehow seem more legit. And at first I was like, oh, really? It feels like so much administration, so much stuff to do. And then the more I thought about it, the more you know what, I think they're right. And I had a couple other folks, I remember I did a an I was assisting Robert Woodruff on a project, and we spoke a lot about work, and he mostly was an independent artist most of his years. And he was also saying, like, you know what, think about this. This is a real question to ask yourself. Do you want to do this or not? Do you want to be independent, or do you want to have like your own space and collaborators and people? Um, so then eventually I reached out to Jonathan and said, Hey, what do you think? You know, do you what what about putting like a frame around our work? Because really, it was already the work that we were making. All the work that so the mission of the company that we created is the mission of all of our work beforehand. And it was really create work in order to build a space for dialogue. That's at the heart. Create work that is interdisciplinary because all of our work, I mean, I I didn't mention, but or maybe I mentioned Destiny Arts Center in Oakland was really dance, multimedia, theater. So from early on, I was really playing around with different disciplines. And even martial arts was actually a part of the world of Destiny, which is really fascinating. Like, what does it mean to move past traditional movement, but in other forms of movement? So interdisciplinarity was always really interesting. The other element was uh international focus. Me being from where I am, Jonathan, who's French American, who's lived in multiple countries prior to moving to New York, both of us felt like New York just there was this mentality in New York that New York is the only part of the world, like the center of the universe, which we felt to be very pretentious and not real. And US also has this just a this idea like the US is the center of the world, which also to us felt really strange because we've had quite a few experiences of working internationally, and we felt very nourished when we were outside of the US and in New York. So we knew from the beginning that it felt important for us to work internationally, and we just kind of like put these intentions down, right? And the last thing we were really interested in is the relationship with the audience and the audience, like who are they, where are they? Um, right around that time, like this is 20, this is before the company started, but I finished my graduate program in 2012, and that was around that around around that time that um sleep no more hit New York City, right? And suddenly this work word immersive emerged, right? Before that, we were just making stuff that was putting audience in the center. And suddenly we started to bring the word immersive, and it started to be called more and more that or participatory or site-specific, like all of these things. And we worked a lot at the intersection of all those three things. Because also the reason for me, all of these mattered, and especially actually site-specific work, is that when we create work in a theater space, we know the rules of the world. Like the audience arrive and they know the rules of the world. And the moment you get out of that space, suddenly the rules of the world are up in the air. And I love that. I love that idea that, and especially in immersive work, participatory work, we're able to create new rules for a new world. And that really excites me. That makes me like really interested in, you know, who are we? Why are we here? What are we tackling? So those were the pillars. And the other thing, actually, we're really frustrated by sometimes ourselves, sometimes the people around us, that a lot of the work the people were making, there was not deep research. Like when we were working with, uh let's say you're working on a piece that's talking about climate change, you do some researching and you're done. And to us, it felt shallow. And it's exciting because Jonathan's actually his background is he's uh works for the environmental defense fund. So by day, he's actually in climate circles all the time, he's working with scientists, and he has that kind of mind state state much more than I do, of really like this inquiry and and research. So for us, it was always like, okay, how do we work with the idea of experts inside and outside of the arts in creating our work? So those are like the pillars of our of our of our work. And at first we were just we started the company in New York thinking that we're just gonna be in New York. And then just life happens, you know. It's more for personal reasons. I ended up slowly kind of migrating to France. And at first I was so scared. Oh my God. I spoke zero French, I had no connection to France, I knew nobody. And again, a few people, including Anna. I remember having a coffee with Anna and being like, Anne, I don't know if I can move. And she's like, What do you mean? Get out of here, move. She's like, You're gonna learn so much, and York is always gonna be here if you want to come back. Yeah, and there were a few people who really pushed uh and encouraged me, and others who were like, What are you doing? How can you leave? You have so much stuff right now. I was also teaching uh in at CUNY that I was really which I was really enjoying, and uh, but it was just kind of this big leap, and I said, Okay, you know what? I'm gonna try. And I'll go little by little and I'll start learning this language and start to understanding the system, which is so drastically different. Like the artistic, the way art is made, developed, curated, shared, produced is so drastically different in Europe. Not just in Europe, because we've we've we've been very lucky to have worked in many places. It's so different from the US. So I just feel like it also just really helped me open up my mind into how work can be made and beyond the very like structured regional theater mentality or Broadway off-Broadway mentality of the United States. And so then the lab is actually our training program. And the lab we launched, Chimera is now 10 years old, the company is 10 years old, and the lab we launched on our fifth anniversary, because I've always, from the beginning, I've always felt like we need to create a space where artists can come together and question and play and experiment and try to figure things out around these questions of immersion, participation, and site specificity. So to me, like really, and specifically, how do we transfer these not just to create exciting entertainment experiences, which there's a lot of, but how can we use these forms to bring around societal transformation? How can we use these forms to get people thinking about our world and reflecting on our world? And how do we have moments of carefully intimacy? Intimacy where we are actually taken care of. Because we feel I felt like, and I still feel like we don't have a lot of that in our society. Usually we're just in groups of strangers, and there's a very, very big wall between us. And what does it mean to just connect with others around us?

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Can you speak a little bit more about this? Because I've had two students now, one last year and one coming this year, seek out the Chimera Lab. And um Ron Weiss, who was my student who's listening to the podcast, went last year and raved about it, raved about it enough that even though I spoke about it uh in class, the student who's coming this year heard Ron and sought that out. And I'm curious how you build what you are working on to build the environment to create the space where artists become more themselves, unlock the thing that's already in there, that it's not it's not an accumulation of skills per se, it's an unlocking of what is already inherently there. And then there's you're providing tools that are part of that because I'm imagining that your rehearsal rooms are a similar way. So can you talk about the lab and rehearsal and what space you're building for people, for artists, for communities?

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Yeah, for sure. So I said the, as I said a second ago to me, the lab was really something that's been on my mind for a long time. And for some years now, I've been invited by different organizations, different cities, different places to come and do like masterclasses and immersive work or create a divide a masterclass on devised work. And I kept feeling feeling like every time I went and did these sessions and was part of other programs, I felt like something was missing and there wasn't a coherence that I that I crave as an educator. I'm also somebody I've taught for many years, and I really appreciate the space of exchange of knowledge. So to me, that felt very important. So when making the lab, we had a couple of things on in our mind. Number one, and I think really the number one is actually not at all about the lab itself, but it's about how do we create a space where artists are just really taken care of? Like just really taken care of. It's something so rare, so rare in our world today. And, you know, when I'm talking about our world, I don't just mean the rehearsal room in New York. You know, we have artists coming from four to five continents every single year, from communities where there is zero infrastructure for arts baking, there's zero economy for arts making. They might be holding, wearing many hats to survive and to make their art. And, you know, in in those spaces, whether you are in making work in Idaho, in Marseille, France, or in uh you know, Delhi, India, how do we create a space for those people to come together and to be taken care of? So that's why to us it was very important from the beginning, we need to be in a gorgeous space outside of the city to take people out of their usual hustle. Ideally, where the internet is not amazing. Um, because that is part of it, it's just also we encourage people to as much as possible, like leave your phones on the side if you can. Also, we have an amazing chef. Like an incredible chef. Jeanne, who I hope to share this podcast with at some point later, she is just magic. We have this person who makes food from the heart, and she makes food that is just from all across the world. There's always like this element of French food, but she connects with cuisines from all over. I mean, it's fascinating. We've had people from Morocco be like, she makes better tagine than my grandmother, or you know, somebody from India be like, wow, that's the biggest, the best masala that I've had. Really, somebody who puts love into her food and who would for us the dinner table, the lunch table, that's that that's a space that we it's not just to eat, it's to connect, it's to be with each other, is to exchange. So to us, those are very important things. The other things we try to structure our curriculum in a way, and really we've we took time to develop a curriculum that we've then perfect, like been cleaning it up every year, we're adding some elements around a theme. So every year we'll bring a theme. Um, usually it's themes that are already in the back of our head because maybe we're working on a project around that theme, or we're thinking about that theme for some reason, or we just feel like it's very relevant in our society today. So usually it's centered around a theme, but the theme is very broad and lightly. So the idea that the participants can take from that theme what they want and they play around with that theme as more inspiration than a mandate. And then uh each day builds on the next. So we introduce little by little questions of immersivity, site specificity, participation, working around societal questions, working with experts. Each day there's a new thing that's added. And it's a blend, it's usually the way the day is focused. There's a lecture and then there's devising. And artists move from one to the other. There's some presentation of ideas, and then they take those ideas and they devise work, they receive feedback. We do what we call playtesting, where people share things with others as a you know, test audiences, get some feedback, work some more. And little by little throughout the week, we actually then the last three days, we shift to rehearsal mode and we actually use all the things that they've made that whole first part of the week, or two-thirds of the week, to create a final performance. And the final performance is then shared on the second to last day with people from the villages around the place. And they come for free and they get to see it for free, and they stay with us after the performance for an apiro for a little uh exchange around the, usually around the drink and some snacks, to just have a moment to connect with each other. And now for the last two, two and a half years, maybe three years now, we began to also incorporate this cultural exchange element where we've been partnering with local nonprofits in Normandy. Right now we've been in Normandy for our fourth year. First year was in Picardy, France. Second year was actually in Poland, and the last this will be the fourth year that we'll be in Normandy. And so we've been partnering with local organizations. So we do a tour on our day off for people who want to join into local village where we get to meet some local folks, visit some local organizations, just for people to get to know where they are and why they're there. And then we've had this wonderful uh local uh community member, her name is Justine, who does a presentation of local songs and stories on one of the evenings. And that has been just an absolute joy. And then she she presents these pieces, and then as I said on the final performance day, there's another moment to connect with the folks in the local local community. So, really, it's also how do we bridge people from all over the world? And usually we have applications from all over the world. For example, this year we received applications from 10 countries across four continents. You know, usually it's a four continents, has been the least of continents that we've received applications from. So, which has been really nice because that's one of the elements. Also, what does it mean to bring people together across differences and find commonality? And commonality doesn't have to be the way they work because often the performance styles are very different. The other thing that I didn't mention, from the beginning, we really wanted to bring people from this different artistic disciplines. So it's not just for theater, it's not just for dance. Every year we have a big chunk of folks who are coming from the theater background for interested in immersion and also interested in interdisciplinary work. But we often have researchers, we often have people from visual arts, we often have people have people from more experienced design or LARP. We've had people coming from visual arts, we've had sculptures, we have it's really this diversity of forms. And when they make things, we actually encourage them to not just think of performance. When they create during the lab, to really think to say, you're an artist making work, and you open up your lens and you say, okay, what is what is this thing that I want to play with today? Uh so really that's the goal of the lab is to that you're 10 days, that you're in this really intense space of creation, you're really well taken care of, and you're really this beautiful group of people from all over the world. And we try to keep the group relatively small. It's usually between like 13 to 17 people. That's the size of the cohort. And it's myself and Jonathan who co-facilitate. Um, and and the goal is really just how can we make a little group that then supports each other? Uh, what's really exciting that uh it's actually interesting, after the first year, we weren't expecting this at all, but uh pretty much all the participants were like, Can we come back? And we said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, we just designed this as a one-off thing. Like it makes sense, no sense for you to come back. You'll have the repeat, the repetition of all the of all the material. So we ended up actually developing an alumni lab. An alumni lab is people can reapply and they apply this time with their own project. So instead of making new work with other people, people can apply and develop their project. Uh and we every day we give them different prompts and they create things, they show us, we give them feedback. So the idea that by the end of the process, they have a really good structure to go back to their home community and then test it, try it, perform it. So, really, the goal is for more to now, instead of learning with each other, is to really create your own work and develop your own work. Um, and this this year it's really exciting because it's the first time actually we have two people who met at the lab from two different parts of the world who are now collaborating with each other and applied as alumni together to work on a project together, which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

That's that was always my favorite part of taking these labs, like whether it was Cities Workshop or or La Mama, those places where you're brought together and you are. You are you are introduced to like-minded yet also very different people who are going to push you and and break you open in new ways. And I I've collaborated with so many of those people over the years, and I've seen whole companies born out of those processes.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

And I imagine that this infusion of new blood, of new ideas, of new cultures adds to your productions as well. Not only in in terms of like, I know this, I used to run labs as well. It's a great infusion of cash to the company, that's for sure. But it's actually not sadly.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

Because I mean it's you know why it breaks even. We break we break even and now it's a little bit more, but the thing that we realize when we give ourselves a goal is how can we do this in a way that takes care of other artists? We realize that when we get applications, somebody coming from Ethiopia is not going to have the same budget as somebody coming from Denmark. So we've structured it in a way that we make it very accessible, especially people coming from places they don't. So our goal is to break even every year. Usually it brings a little bit extra income to the company, but we've also had a year we've given, I think, out three full scholarships, which really diminished our income. And we broke even that year. Or actually, no, we lost a little bit of money that year. But to us, the goal is just to. Bring me build this community, but you're right. There is an element of feeding us in other ways. We're definitely fed through artistically, creatively, just by being in the room of people from across the world, you're fed in so many ways and having exchanges across around dinner and lunch and having those conversations continue when people finish. I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of feeding uh the company in a different way.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Have you from these workshops, but I mean, really from anything, does the idea for the show that you're working on or you're working toward come first? Are you finding the from the workshops themselves? Or like, where are you getting your next project from? Like you're stepping into something, I'm imagining soon. You've got some things on the the on the stove somewhere, but like where is that coming from? What I mean, I hear all the itches that you're scratching.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

Where's it coming from? I think our projects actually, it's I I it's hard to say, to say where they come from. They're all kind of emerge out of the things that we're making and thinking and we're debating. We've had projects that are so drastically different from one another. They're all have the same through lines that I've mentioned multiple times, but they all form like when it comes to form, they're so different from one another. So the lab is more usually a continuation of like just thinking around the themes, but it hasn't been necessarily something that's fed directly into a project. I know there are other companies out there, like like City, like uh One Year Lease, who are all friends who've made really like use those moments to develop new work. For us, it hasn't been, it's been much less of that. It's been more of exploring themes, but in a in a very general way. Um, our work, it really comes out of more dialogue and conversation and just what we feel like is happening in the world today. Like we have projects that are drastically different. We have a piece right now. We have two projects that were born at the same time. They were born as Trump won his first presidency in the United States, and simultaneously, as Europe and a lot of the world was experiencing this migrant crisis, migration crisis, which was what it was called around you know 2016, 17, 15. So we've had these two drastically different projects. One, I kept hearing like the place that I was living in Paris at that time, like I would walk out of my house, and in front of my house would be about 500 tenths of people living on the streets. And that's I think at the height of it, there were about 2,000 people living on this big avenue, literally like 100 feet from my front door. And I kept hearing the words of the cherry orchard in the back of my head. I kept hearing the words of Spezia, who's saying behind every leaf, behind every tree, there are all these people who can't even walk through the back door or walk to the kitchen door. I can't remember the exact words. I kept hearing this in my back of my head. So we started exploring the text of the cherry orchard with the questions of who belongs in this cherry orchard of Europe today? Who can say that this is my orchard today? And then little by little, it was just when I started to move to France, I had very little connections. I had very, I knew almost nobody. And just it happened to be that little by little we developed this little baby, which is now a big monster. It's uh it's an adaptation, an immersive adaptation of the cherry orchard. It's called Nous Rivendrons. We will return in the spring. And we premiered it at the Cache Toucherie in Paris uh uh three years ago. It's been playing now, it played last year at a theater uh the year before. And this summer we'll be going to an Avignon Festival and we're presenting at Avignon Festival for um, we'll have 12 performances uh at the specific festival within Avignon called Villeneuve enseine, which is a town just next to Avignon, and they're focusing, it's a wonderful festival with a really great team, and they're focusing on um work that is really non-traditional formats, participatory, circus, street performance, immersivity, all these different formats. It'll be actually the 30th anniversary of this festival, and this will be the 80th anniversary of the Avignon Festival as a whole. So it's actually a big year this summer. Um, so we'll be presenting that piece. And simultaneously, we had a commission from the Harlem Arts Festival in New York, this is 2016, who knew of the way we work with local communities and said, you know what, we've been mostly a music and dance festival. We really want to create something that's more uh theater-ish. Would you be able? And we have this beautiful church across from Marcus Gower Park in Harlem as a as the location for this piece. Would you be able to create something? So we ended up developing a piece called Spaces. And that piece has had a life of its own ever since. And that piece is all there are no performers on stage, but there's no stage, it's self-site specific completely. And the idea that we in the months prior to the show, we connect with tons of tons of local residents. We have many ways of doing that that we've developed over the years, and we work with local residents and we invite them to share their story as during the performance itself. So there are no performers, no actors. Originally, when we began to make the piece, we thought, oh yeah, we're gonna interview local residents, we'll have actors perform those stories. And this was right like right as Trump became president. We had no idea when we got the commission that Trump was gonna become president. And then through the process, it became evident, and then we became president, and we're like, wow. I remember distinctly being on the metro with Lauren Cox, who is the our collaborator, and looking around and feeling like, oh, how many people here voted for him? Which means that maybe you don't want me in this place. Maybe you don't want me in this country. And I mean, it took me so long to feel American, and then suddenly to be to feel that it to look around and to see that and be like, wait, am I like do I belong in this place? Can I still call myself American? And Lauren, who's an African-American, like all the luggage that comes, like you know, all the elements that were in her mind in this moment of like this violence against the people. Like, what does it mean to be American today? Like, who can say this is my home? So we ended up building this piece, we ended up removing the filter of the actor and just building a piece around local residents. And then the piece, the glue of the piece around local residents is actually dancers, musicians. And dancers are the guides of the audience as they move through the space. And the music is this world that we create, inspired by history of music of that place. Dance is inspired by history of dance of that place. Uh, often working with multimedia artists to create this other, like a layer of like a cocoon around the performance. And when we finished that piece in 2017, we were like, wow, cool, that felt really good. And we we we walked, I mean, I just remember people walking out of the show and like laughing and smiling and playing with each other. And that was not a moment that a lot of people were laughing and smiling and playing with each other outside of a performance space. It was just very like a heavy moment. And the producers of the festival uh came to us and said, Hey guys, you're not done. You gotta do this again. You know, like we're so happy that you made it for us, but you got to do this again. And we just we got lucky because uh the French consulate of San Francisco was developing a large-scale project that they were bringing it called the Oakland Saint-Denis Project. They were bringing together the cities of Oakland and the city of Saint-Denis, France, which is which is pretty much Oakland of France. You know, it's like a city which directly north, it's kind of like Oakland to San Francisco, it's directly north of Paris. Uh and it's one of the most diverse, it's a smaller city than Oakland. It's about 110,000 people. It just grew because it merged with another city, it's about 150,000 people. 186 languages are spoken there. So it's one of the most diverse cities of France. It also has this like uh um a bit of uh uh like expectation of attitude, kind of like Oakland does, which is which is which is what I love also. So she was developing this project, and we ended up creating this piece in Oakland and Saint-Denis. We ended up doing it in Saint-Denis three times over the years. In Oakland, we took over the City Hall of Oakland to do the performance in Saint-Denis. We ended up doing the piece in the big market hall and the Basilica of Saint-Denis, so these two iconic huge spaces. Basilica of Saint-Denis is what Notre Dame was based on when they built Notre Dame. So it's a Basilica of that size and scale, which is gorgeous, where 88 kings and queens of France are buried. So it was really powerful for us to do a piece that Saint-Denis is also a city that where hip-hop was very much like one of the first places of hip-hop in France. So it's really powerful for us to have dancers and hip-hop dancers, three out of four of who were coming from past French colonies, dancing in this building, literally over the tombstone, like the where the kings and queens of France are buried. So there was a lot of like symbolism behind that and having these really beautiful uh storytellers from all kinds of walks of life present their piece. So uh after doing those productions, we're actually making the next version in Chicago next year, and uh partnering with an incredible organization in Albany Park, called Albany Park Theatre Project, who do wonderful work with uh both with young people and adults. Um and that will be a version that will happen next. So does this piece kind of continue to live on our own? But both pieces came from this question of who can say this is my home? Like who can bel who says I belong here? And because obviously, you know, it's not easy to make the connection with my personal trajectory. Like, what does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be taken away from the place that you call home? The work that it takes to belong. And really, underneath, one of the things that really drives me in this project, specifically in the Spaces project, is the idea that citizenship is not passive, it's active. Like, what does it mean to be, say, I am a citizen of this place, I'm a resident of this place? It's not just like just because I live in a place, I'm not a resident of that place. I if I just walk from my home to my place, to to wherever I'm going, I don't interact with anybody, I don't cross any, I don't take time with anybody, am I really of that place? So, what does it mean to really think of yourself as I am rooted here, I am here, which I think is easier said than done. We sometimes say, oh, I live in this place or I've been in this place for 20 years, but I talk to nobody around, I know, don't know that many people. Uh, so to us, that was really, and and now a new piece has emerged from that, which is a sound installation, immersive sound installation focusing on stories of forced displacement. Because as we were doing a spaces project, we kept hearing over and over people who shared with us their experiences of forced displacement for one reason or another, which is again connects to my uh background, also a couple other collaborators on the team. So we ended up shifting and making a whole new piece now that's gonna be premiered next year, which is a multimedia installation. There's no performers, no performers on stage. It's the audience who triggers shifts in the sonography as they move through the sonography, and they we track audience movement in real time. And depending on their movement, they hear different things in their headset. And as they move through the sonography, there are shifts in the sonography that impact their experience and the experience of others around them. So it's a piece that we're developing, we're finalizing now for next year.

SPEAKER_00 55:34

You were talking about the experience of home and place. I very, you know, I've not had had to leave a home. I've not had that thrust upon me, but I purposefully chose to go overseas and recently had on the podcast uh a director from Singapore, and we were talking about Singapore, you know, the very famous play from Singapore called Hotel, because Singapore is like a hotel. There is the population that lives there, and then there is the constant coming in and going out of quote unquote expats, which is just a fancy way of saying white immigrants. And and I was saying that, you know, I lived there for 10 years, and it's the longest extended period I've ever lived anywhere in my life. I've never gotten that far. But even then, it was it's it's hard for me to say that like that was my home, but it's the one that I associate enough with because I was there.

SPEAKER_01 56:24

And what do you feel like it made like what made it your home? Like, how is it coming in place make your home?

SPEAKER_00 56:31

I had a community. I built a community. I mean, it was um still deep, dear friends. I mean, I call them family, honestly. I mean, they were they were they were the found family that that we create. Um, I created my theater company there. Um, it was it was where my really where I artistically grew. I I left Colombia, went straight to Singapore. All the work that I've ever made really started there. I mean, I I can say that there was I was an actor before I got to Colombia. I was just testing around with some ideas of what directing was. And then I got to implement and test those things in Singapore. So that identity, artistic awakening happened there. That's why I consider it home. And then now I'm married to an Egyptian woman. I have a farm in Egypt. I'm going there next month. I will be there all summer long. And that's a new home and a very different place that I have to go to. That I am purposely trying to build community there as well. So I really I recognize that that thing of anybody that that's listened to the podcast long knows that I'm constantly harping on community, that this audience, this audience, the individual going to community is where I'm where I'm always pushing the work. And I'm I've I've just been like buzzing listening to you you talk about these kind of things and really because I do think that it's something that like you know, the magical thing of theater is we create communities.

SPEAKER_01 57:53

We create communities, we build communities, we reinforce communities. I think there's something that theater is very or life performance is very rare, that through this work and through the things that we create, the ultimate goal is being together. Right? It's not I I don't think that many people in the arts who are making a work just to make a thing, you know, they're mostly there because they're questioning uh things that are happening in the world, and they want to question it not in in uh by themselves in their home, but with others in a space. And I do think that at the end of the day, that's why we do the thing that we do.

SPEAKER_00 58:29

Yeah. I mean, I I don't think that theater can change the world, but I do believe wholeheartedly that theater can change the individual and change the individual through a community, and then the world only changes through communities collectively organizing and acting and doing those things. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 58:45

I think theater changes the world every day. I have somebody who, of course, not in a way that you know, I'm not this naive person who feels like this show that you're gonna do is gonna shift the world, but I think changes, yeah, I think changes are incremental and they're small and they're minuscule and we don't see it on a large scale. But I think by creating these little small gems, we're planning seeds for small transformation. And sometimes we feel very futile when we see these huge, monstrous like slashes of what we're hoping for. But I think that that's the uh it I do think change is change. Whether you look a huge change or small change, it is changing the world. It is changing people, like you said, individually or in small groups, and those things do ripple out. That high school teacher never thought that she would change me and my experience, but she absolutely did and has left a huge mark on the work that I make and who I am as a human being and through me other people. So I think to us, we have we have no idea what impact we make.

SPEAKER_00 59:45

I I learned this phrase yesterday and I'm I'm still percolating on it. This may be a draft thought, but I learned this phrase, ruthless optimism versus delusional optimism. And that ruthless optimism is saying that, like, yeah, the world is fucked up. It is crazy and dirty and awful, and everything has to change. But the optimism is chosen in accordance to that. That that the optimism I am going to be optimistic to fight the negativity that is there. It's it's not that it doesn't exist, it's not that those things aren't there, it's not that there's systemic oppression and all that. It's not it's not even hope. It's not even a belief in like, oh, it'll get better one day. It's like, no, I and my actions, I am going to act as if. I am going to make these things happen. The optimism of just being ruthlessly optimistic, not delusionally optimistic. What are you optimistic about?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

It's funny because I'm optimistic about a lot, optimistic about this world because I have this weird pessimistic people might think this is pessimistic, but I find it so optimistic. Like I feel I find it incredibly freeing, the idea that I'm in completely unimportant. Like I'm this tiny little speck on a tiny little planet in the middle of this humongous thing. And the fact that that is me, like I find it incredibly freeing. And it helps me be optimistic. Like it helps me try things, it helps me do things because I feel like because we're all so unimportant, in some way we can be free to pursue the things that we love and want to do. Obviously, you know, brings in question people who are doing things that are very destructive with that uh pursuit. To me, there's uh I'm optimistic that by us doing what we do and believing and pushing forward and trying things that we want to try, there are shifts and there will be shifts. I mean, I see around me, I see the people around me. I feel like people are questioning things, people are active, people are, people care, people give a damn. It's like we don't live in a world that's some people are trying to paint as a world where it's completely individualistic, that is me for me and for nobody else. I just don't believe it. Uh I believe in abundance, I believe in connection, I believe in interconnection, I believe in that we are in a place where there's plenty. And I think that that is a narrative that we need to shift and continue to shift because I feel like there are those who paint a narrative as not enough, and that is easy to divide and separate people when the narrative is not enough. But I think the narrative is actually plentitude, and through that, I feel like there's a lot of possibility for change and possibility for connection. Um, I'm also optimistic because I don't know, I just see my son like be nourished by nature, and like every time I see him in nature, I'm like, oh man, like we gotta do more of that. Like I see that connection to to this planet. You know, it might sound cheesy or silly, but I I feel like there's a lot of a lot of power that we are not connecting to, and a lot of power around who we are and why we are doing what we're doing. And I feel like we're just beginning to understand who we are. I mean, there have been many people who've understood it for many for a lot for a long time, but as a society, as a majority of the world, people are just kind of in their own little bubbles, and little by little we're getting these senses of who am I, where am I, this knowledge of what's a little bit beyond our, beyond our skin, beyond who we are. Um, and I do think more and more I'm getting a lot of nourishment from being outside of the urban space. I'm getting a lot of inspiration from being outside of the urban space, even though I've lived in a city my whole life. The longest moment I've been outside of the city is during the uh COVID lockdown, where I ended up being in the countryside for three months at one point of that. The rest of it been in the city pretty much my whole life. But those little moments of nature just I feel like are incredibly nourishing. I also do see a lot of a lot of hope, like when in our Chimera lab, having these artists come together from all over the world and see the connections that they built with one another, it just gives me just so much joy. I just feel like those moments that we that we play, that we work, that we develop, even moments of of of conflict when they're like, you don't understand what I'm saying. Of course you don't. Like there are four languages in this in the circle. Of course, there are gonna be some misunderstandings. Like in those moments, there's still a lot of just like something new is happening, and something new is building, and and it really gives me a lot of energy.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

Emma Hart, who you're gonna meet this summer, my student, asked me this question one day, and it was a I don't know if she knows how deep this question has resonated with me and with the other artists that I asked this question on the podcast. Because it was it it felt like for her like a little bit of a throwaway question. She asked, What's a show, not one of your own shows, what's a show that you've seen that changed you as a human being? Not as an artist, but as a human being. There was Simone before this show, and there was a different Simone afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:02

Wow, that's a tough question. I mean, a couple of things come to mind. Can I give two?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:11

You can, absolutely. No, say I have I have I have three or four that I that that you know, like there were fundamental shifts in me, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:18

Um one comes to mind is actually um when I saw I I ended up assisting Robert Woodruff on a piece on an adaptation of Feston in Romania in Cluj. And just watching the way Robert worked and the way his drive to create and to look and to search was just so rich for me. Like I just felt like this is a person who cares a hundred percent, and not just about this baby of a show, but uh about all the people in this room. And that I felt, I felt there's something that it was magical. And I felt like the work that was created was magical, and it was playing with all these questions of site specificity, of immersivity without really thinking about those questions at all, but because that that's what the show required. The show needed that, and it needed to bring people together to question very painful elements of our society. So that definitely being part of that experience and being in the room with Robert and learning and being part of that world was definitely something that shift me. The other show that really impacted me was actually totally drastically different. It was actually Quartet by Bob Wilson. It's um I had in New York and That show blew my mind on the visual element. Like, what is what is art? What is the boundary of art? Because even though I was watching a theater performance, I was actually watching visual work. I was I was watching sculpture, I was watching performance, I was watching song. I was to me it it like I was already playing like deeply with interdisciplinarity, but I really felt like that piece just blew apart my expectation of interdisciplinary work in a very traditional space. I was at BAM in New York on stage, but there was something about it that just shifted, like I really felt a shift in me as I was watching that show. And it really pushed me to see the stage differently. Now I still, to this day, I think this was something like 15 years ago, I still see images of what happened uh in that space. And the other thing that really impacted me, I think, like when I when I was in my undergrad, I saw some work of Teatro Campesino in California, and seeing the way like they have this beautiful show that I think to this day they do every Christmas. Um, and it's usually takes place in the missions, one of the missions in San Juan Batista. And it's this beautiful piece that brings that layers together Christianity, Native American mysticism, ideas, culture, what does it mean to be Chicano in California today? Like all these layers in one, and it's an absolute community celebration at the same time. Like it's this thing that puts all this stuff together, and it's definitely has stayed with me. I see, I think I've seen it twice over the years, and each version, both versions were slightly different from each other, but it there's this feeling like you are you are somewhere else, you're transported, you're in a different space. And obviously, being in in one of this call California missions with its history and and the treatment of Native Americans and that community in those places by those missions, but taking it over by this really powerful Chicano, you know, theater company just felt very powerful. There's just all these layers to it. I think I guess those three. I'm sure there are many more, but those three.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:33

Of course, of course. But those are those are good ones. Um I I was thinking about this of like, I think both of my I have two as well, both of mine take place in France. Um, because I used to, I I I I would go to the Avenue Festival as much as I could. I've been uh several times. I wish I could go this year. I wish I could come to see the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:53

You should.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:54

But yeah, seeing, you know. If you're in Egypt, it's not that far. It is, it's true. I might, you know, I'm I'm now I'm thinking about it. I'm sitting here actually thinking about it. Hey, July 9th to the 21st. Can we both come to Paris? That's check it down or Marseille and take the train over? Uh you know, exactly. From Marseille, it's 30 minutes. Exactly. It's true, it's true. Um, but you know, seeing seeing the work at Avignon, seeing, you know, world-class artists, but then also like stumbling into a show that you know you've never heard of and is this a company that's just come together for the festival and that's it, those are the beautiful moments. Seeing Ivo Van Hova, the Roman tragedies, you know, his use of time, uh, the extended duration of something. Um Ari Manushkin, that's Ari Manushkin Les FMR like changed my life. That's that's a it's a full on stop. Like seeing eating eating a meal with your fellow audience members, and then like walking past her, shaking her hand, walking through the dressing room. That was, yeah, that's okay. Theater pen uh has peaked right there. I asked this question, this is the last question I always ask the artists, and this is this is a bit of a dangerous question. I I didn't mean it to be a dangerous question, but I'm realizing the the implications of it. This is not to say who are the best artists, this is not to say who are your favorite people. Who are people who are directors that you wish people knew more about that I mean, this is an international podcast, it is mostly English speaking, obviously geared toward America. But like if you could introduce us to directors that you think, man, if you could ever if you're ever in the city where they're at or they're doing something, go and seek their work because they're onto something, they're really doing something cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:41

Well, one for sure is this company that we're working with now, uh, Albany Park Theater Project in Chicago. They have the show. Actually, I should have said that as one of the shows that really blew my mind. They have this beautiful beautiful piece called uh Port of Entry that is performed by a cast of 28 young people, I believe. Um, and it's only for about 24 audience members, if I'm correct. And it's it's incredible. Uh and the work of that company is just super thoughtful. It's you know that we've had a chance to start working with them on a new creation, like I just can see how much care is placed. So it really, there are several people on that team, you know, um, that are really co-create this world. And I just feel like that that company is a little gem in the United States. So that's one. There's an artist that I personally love in France who is a is a the dear friend who's actually one of our performers in my cherry orchard piece. Her name is Eva Carmen. She's doing really beautiful work around immersion and participation and just playfulness and imagination. And she had this beautiful piece around death, in which when you arrive at the performance and actually you're asked questions before coming, you realize that you're in purgatory. And she replicated the format of French bureaucracy. So you're received by like a bureaucratic agents of French bureaucracy in purgatory, and it's there to process your death and then to go to the to the next step. And it was done in a very beautiful, gentle way of immersion, but you really feel like you're in this French bureaucratic space where people care about your next step and in your existence or non-existence. So I just feel like she's she's playing, and she has a new piece that's called Motel that she's playing with, also around immersion and participation. I really like her work. Um a dear friend of mine in New York who I think has been on your show, Mianteo. Yeah. Yeah, she's a dear friend who I haven't gotten chance to see her work in some years, but I feel like every time uh, you know, we just talk or we're in the same space, I just feel like nourished because we balance off of each other in a lot of ways. So there's something around, and again, like I haven't had a chance to see her work in years just because we're not on the same place, but there's something about that that gives me a lot of energy. I would absolutely say the work of Teatro Campesino and the work of Destiny Arts Center, who I mentioned as in, you know, they still continue to to build and develop amazing work. Yeah, there's more, but those are the ones that pop into my mind.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:03

Those are great, those are fantastic. Simone, thank you so much for taking the time this morning. You're about to get on a train. I should let everybody know that that uh you you you very graciously fit fit us into this uh this morning, and I really appreciate it. I've wanted to talk to you for years. Like I said, I think I think we may have met in Nash. Like I think I think I came back and you were doing it, doing like a something in in like your second year at Nash at Columbia, something like that. I I I I distinctly remember something about just briefly meeting you, um, but I've wanted to talk to you, and I'm very excited that about the work of Chimera. My students were raving about it, and I do hope, I do hope I can come to Avignon and see the show. Yes, it would be. I'll say, I'll say because Jean Guy shared with me what I guess was a trailer of the Cherry Orchard piece.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:51

Yes, he came to see it at the Carteshree.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:53

Yeah, he I mean he he he sent me the trailer before he went to go see it because we were trying to work on an immersive uh Hamlet in Singapore, and he was just like, Have you heard about this? I was like, Oh yeah, I I went to school with the guy. He's just like, I'm gonna go see it. And so he he really he did he really did love it. Um so the work you're doing is fantastic, and the the world you're trying to create is also uh laudable. So thank you for joining the board of directors. It's great to see you, and um hope I'll see you in Avenue. Absolutely. Take good care, thank you. If this episode gave you any insight, inspiration, or even just made you smile, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts for more conversations like this. And if you're looking for guidance with a creative challenge, or want to advance a dream of your own, we'd love to help. Visit Board of Directors.world. The Board of Directors is a global constellation of theater directors dedicated to building community, sharing knowledge, and transforming the role of the director in the 21st century. We convene and curate a fellowship that fosters mentorship, artistic inquiry, and collective care, transcending borders and institutions and traditions. Until then, take care of yourself and take care of each other.