Between Theatre and Anthropology

Ash Marinaccio: Hey, friends, it’s Ash, your host for the Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast, produced for HowlRound, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. The Nonfiction Theatre Forum brings together artists, documentarians, journalists, scholars, and theatremakers to explore the wide world of nonfiction performance, from documentary and autobiographical work to ethnographic, verbatim, and tribunal theatre and everything in between. Together, we’ll dive into how these forums intersect with community, collaboration, ethics, staging, and more.

Today we’re looking at the relationship between theatre and anthropology. And I have to tell you all something: I have been so excited about doing this episode from day one because it is taking me back to my early academic roots in anthropology. A little personal lore: I am a member of the American Anthropological Association [AAA], and I almost did a PhD in anthropology—very close. And I think having a background in anthropology has informed my creative work across the board more than anything else. You guys, I love this stuff. Both anthropology and theatre pose fundamental questions about what it means to be human, how we share our stories, how we witness one another, and how culture is perceived and performed. Today we’ll discuss how anthropology can influence the creation of theatre and how performance can serve as a means of conducting research, sharing stories, and understanding community.

I have with me Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti. Cristiana is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of recognition. Greg is an associate professor of theatre at the University of Arizona. He’s a playwright, theatre director, and actor. He has co-authored plays, The Laramie Project, [The] Laramie [Project]: Ten Years Later, The People’s Temple, and Unstories I and II. He co-authored the book, Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater, and since 2015 Cristiana and Greg have working together to develop a method for research, writing, and theatrical devising called Affect Theater. Together they’ve created performances and authored articles that play at the intersection of anthropology and theatre.

Their new book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories was published in June 2024. We will have a link to that book at the bottom of this podcast transcript. Affect Theater is a devising technique influenced by moment work originated by Greg Pierotti’s former theatre company, Tectonic Theater Project, and Mary Overlie’sViewpoints. This devising technique is a practice for working with non-theatrical source material, like interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports to construct narratives for the stage.

Cristiana, Greg, I am thrilled to have you with me today. There is so much to talk about. Let’s dive in. Tell me first about your collaboration. What brought you two together?

Cristiana Giordano: So we have our little origin story. When I was a graduate student in anthropology at UC Berkeley, I was really struggling with writing my dissertation based on the research that you described. I went to see a play at the Berkeley Rep, and the play was The People’s Temple, a play that Greg co-wrote with Leigh Fondakowski. And I knew nothing about Tectonic Theater Project, like zero. I was blown away by the performance because it was a play based on a story, the story of Jim Jones and his movement, based on archival research that the company had done. It was based on interviews with people who belonged to the movement, people who survived after the mass suicide in Guyana, the family members. Not only the play was based on material that I realized it was an ethnographic material, but also it portrayed the story in such a complex way that when I left, I was confused. I was confused about the moral categories through which to judge the event. And I felt like that’s how I would like to write my dissertation.

And so that really helped me, but then over time, because I did a lot of ethnographic research in institutional settings, and so institutional settings, I became really interested in thinking through theatre and training in theatre writing. And so after writing my first book, which was the dissertation turned into book, I started exploring theatre and how I could intersect with theatre. Greg happened to be in Davis, where I teach, at the time. So it was kind of like the stars aligned. I was starting to move in that direction. Some colleagues told me Greg was in Davis, and I reached out to him and I asked him, “Look, I had this amazing experience with one of your plays. I want to experiment between the two. Are you interested in it?”

Greg Pierotti: Yeah, and she reached out to me via email in that way, and I did what I always do when I get an invitation from the universe, and I ignored it and pretended like it hadn’t happened. And then she was amazing and persistent, and she asked me again, and so I was like, “Okay, I’m going to meet this professor.” We had coffee and just started talking about our interests and our work, and it became very evident really quickly that we could do great work together. Then I think we started teaching a workshop or a course—it was the graduate course. We worked on some empirical material that I had gathered in Baltimore around the death of Freddie Gray due to police violence. And then we did a series of workshops around Cristiana’s ethnographic material that she’d gathered in Italy around questions of the border and bodies and movement, and we developed these pieces, Unstories and Unstories II.

During that time we were developing these pieces but we’re also developing the way that this practice worked. We were very influenced by moment work and Tectonic, but how this work differs from moment work and what we were each individually bringing, sort of finding a way of blending that together. It’s been an incredible collaboration, so generative. Cristiana can talk more about this, but I think typically in anthropology there’s a kind of culture of working alone, and for me, I don’t know how to do that. I can’t produce anything by myself. And so having Cristiana to work with really has been such a gift for me in the last ten years. Just, it helps me think and create when we’re playing with each other.

Cristiana: And I’ve learned to collaborate because cultural anthropologists, we collaborate when we do research in the field, but when you produce your own writing, we very, very rarely collaborate. And I don’t think we know how to do it. I don’t think we train students to do it because the institutions, the funding agencies, usually fund individual projects. But I think we should do more of this.

Ash: I do too. I come from a background of anthropology and theatre. I know I was telling you a little bit about it before, Cristiana, but I did undergrad work in anthropology, and I think anthropology thinking and methodology has completely informed all of the work that I do as an artist and as a scholar. I’d love to know about your collaboration. How did you work together before you entered the room?

Cristiana: Yeah, I think the first step was for me to really learn moment work, and Greg gave me and other colleagues some workshops. He and I played around. I did a workshop with Tectonic. So, it was the matter of really kind of learning this different way of writing.

Greg: I would just add that, for me, even though I think that [The] People’s Temple certainly had ethnographic approach and Laramie to a certain extent does, too—we did field work and that turned into the play—but I also had to learn more about ethnography and research. Cristiana introduced me to a lot of theorists, especially Jeanne Favret-Saada who’s a French technical analyst and who we’ll probably talk about in this interview. So as she was learning this kind of collaborative practice, I was learning these theoretical underpinnings that are now a really important part of the work too.

Cristiana: And then we do a lot of preparation in terms of structuring how the workshop unfolds, what kind of material we bring into the workshop, and then there are different formats of the workshop. But when we were doing the workshop that led to Unstories, they were longer workshop in the sense that they unfolded through two academic years, and we would have, I don’t know, every quarter, two weekend-long workshops. And so, we would do a mix of training and playing with the technique and then bringing in ethnographic empirical material working with that.

And so, in terms of what you were asking, the preparation was to select some of the material, not thinking too hard though, because that’s... I also just, when we were working on my material, there were some interviews I thought were very interesting, but I also just didn’t think too much and shared some field notes. It was never random because then the things that came up I realized they were so central. Part of the technique and the practice is also not to think too hard about what to pick, where to start from, how linear things should be because we have really been working with the power of the associative, like, associating things.

We kind of look at the ways that the elements of the stage can not only support the text, but also act in contradiction or create collisions with the text in order to create a meaning-making process in the minds of the audience.

Greg: I also would say that Cristiana and I have, over the ten years, come to a place where we really do have kind of a practice that’s easy and natural that we bring to people pretty directly without a lot of thought. But it was great early on when we sat down and we had to teach a course, we were like, “Okay, what parts of devising practice do we want to introduce? When do we want to introduce this theoretical material? When do we want to read the forward to Fires in the Mirror? When do we want to look at Carol Martin’s stuff?” And so we did think through a lot of that course structure. And then with any new course, some of it works really well, others doesn’t, and you kind of make adjustments. And so having to actually think about teaching it as a course was useful, but now I feel like it’s gotten into a very organic place where we can just come in and do things more intuitively.

Ash: You were talking earlier about how you had to learn theory, you had to familiarize yourself with, you said psychoanalytic theory. How has diving into theory informed your practice?

Greg: I do think that I was always working with a kind of ethnographic bent, even though I wasn’t a trained ethnographer and I’m still not a trained ethnographer, but it introduced me to a more nuanced way of listening to worlds. I think in particular, for me, I’m not a great dense theory reader. I can do it, but it’s often hard for me. But the Jeanne Favret-Saada material that Cristiana introduced me to I think has had a profound impact on my work, and that is just this idea in her article about participation. She talks about how when we enter the field as ethnographic researchers, we get positioned by the culture and by the language and by the social context that we don’t really have a lot of power in the way that we’re sometimes placed into these things which she calls getting caught in the field, and that was very much my experience in doing all my field work for the plays that I’d done before I met Cristiana.

So I really did understand that, but then she posits this incredible idea that it can be very disoriented and overwhelming to be in the field and get caught by these social constructs or by these subject-object relations. And then coming back to your desk to write where the typical approach is to catch your research in an analytical or a theoretical frame and write about it from a position of understanding, like, “I get this material now,” and organizing it and making it really easy to digest. She posits this idea of getting caught again in the empirical material so that you’re not writing from position of understanding, but you’re kind of documenting this encounter that you have in the field more that is more unclear and disorienting.

That for us is where the experimentation in our practice has really gone is into this place of how do we get caught again? How do we write from a place of not knowing, not understanding? Obviously when you’re creating a performance there’s a point where you start to think dramaturgically how are we stitching all this together to give it some continuity. But I think this idea that Favret-Saada introduces, which Cristiana introduced to me, is really one of the big ways that we depart from what we do in Tectonic Theater Project, which is more about creating coherent and cohesive narratives, that the main point is the story in the end, right, whereas that may not necessarily be the situation in what Cristiana and I are doing.

Ash: Can you tell me a little bit about how that translates in the rehearsal room? Are you working toward a final product, or what does that look like? Or are you focused more on process?

Cristiana: We do different things depending on the project. So when we started working together, the purpose was to create a performance, Unstories. Then we created another one because we worked two years. So the purpose was to have by the end of the year a thinking piece, right, like something that allowed us, not a finished full-length play, but…

Greg: Cristiana loves the term from Tina Landau, “the theatrical essay,” right? It was like a—

Cristiana: Yeah, like theatrical essay, yeah. That ended up being also more like a dreamscape in the sense that it was fragmented and evocative more than linear. So in that case, the idea—and the idea was to think about all the stories that have somehow to do with questions of borders, movements, migration but that usually don’t get recognized as the official story or the story is worth listening to by the state or by the institutions. And so we were trying to listen in between the lines also of the ethnographic material and see what were some of the events or non-events that were part of my relationships in the field and part of the life of the people I worked with but that usually we don’t read about because they don’t have to do with the crisis, they don’t have to do with the critical moment of rescuing people at sea or people are disembarking.

So that’s where the title came from, and Greg came up with the title of not working with stories, but we’re working with the stories that are unstories in the sense that they don’t really get recognized as stories. So in that case, the idea was to have a final event. But as we continued working with this combined practice, we realized there’s really so much value in just the process. So doing workshops or bringing some material in just for the sake of trying to see some of the analytical forces within the material come up just by being in a workshop with other people, it’s really just the process which is just instead of reading your ethnographic material and then reading theory and trying to come up with interpretation and analysis, allowing the process itself to be the beginning of an analysis.

Greg: And this is a place where we do owe a real debt to Tectonic and moment work because one of the ideas in Tectonic and in moment work is that you have these different what we call “lines of discourse” where the theatrical elements of the stage each have their own kind of way of speaking, their way of communicating from the stage. In moment work we always start our workshops by saying, “Why do we want to always demonstrate what the text is already doing with the other elements of the stage?” So if I say “There’s a bright light shining in my eyes,” and then there’s a bright light shining in my eyes, that’s interesting and fine. But if I say, “There’s a bright light shining in my eyes,” but it’s shining in the audience’s eyes, that does a completely different thing. And so we kind of look at the ways that the elements of the stage can not only support the text, but also act in contradiction or create collisions with the text in order to create a meaning-making process in the minds of the audience, right?

Well, what does that mean, since it’s not lining up rather than doing what you do in a more traditional narrative story which is this—Hedda Gabler, she talks about the guns and there are the guns. I think that’s part of this whole getting caught process is that as you start playing with the elements of the stage and you follow your intuitive hunches and you mess around with this costume piece and that object and that piece of architecture, the material starts to speak back to you in a way that you hadn’t intended. And that’s this getting caught again process that I was talking about earlier. You might put what we call an episode together to communicate a particular thing, but then there’s this feedback process in the practice where people actually tell you what your episode means. Rather than you saying, “No, it actually means this,” they tell you what it means, and oftentimes the misinterpretation is much more interesting than what your original intent was. And so that’s this process of getting caught.

Ash: What usually comes up for participants when they see their work interpreted and misinterpreted?

Greg: I wouldn’t call it incorrectly interpreted. This is a really interesting question, and this question about ethics and representation always comes up in any kind of Theatre of the Real sort of practice, and I think Cristiana and I both have a kind of maybe a little unusual take on it. One of the things that we are both interested in is the fact that when you put a body on a stage saying a particular thing, it seems somehow to agitate people in a way that something written on the page doesn’t. Just the body performing in space in front of other people and speaking an utterance is different than what’s written on the page. Our challenge back to people who often get overwhelmed by this idea is it’s like it’s really no different than representing something on the page. You’re still taking your empirical material and then creating something out of that.

It’s really about the encounter between the researcher and the field. For me anyway, it’s not about the direct. I’m not saying, “This is what people had an experience of and I’m going to explain it to you.” I’m saying, “I encountered the field, and this is what I say about it.” But we’re very careful in workshops to be clear that within the workshop space nothing is going to be outward facing, publicly available until it’s agreed upon. We really encourage people to have permission to make ethical mistakes in the workshop itself with the understanding that no one’s going to misinterpret your work and we’re going to say, “It has to be performed this way.” We might see something new about the material that we hadn’t really glimpsed or intended when we first started putting something together.

Obviously if something’s in direct conflict with what you believe you’ve experienced in the field, we’re not going to encourage people to perform that for the public. We just want people to be a little less ethically careful inside the workshop itself, right? If you’re hamstrung by your ethical anxieties, you can’t really play as satisfyingly as you might want to.

Cristiana: I did have a moment, an experience though during the second year of Unstories where a group of participants picked up a section of my field notes and they were about, the content, the literal content of the notes were about some tragic event that happened in the crossing of the Mediterranean, and the collaborators inserted humor in it, and my stomach just went like... It was very, very difficult to witness because it felt, and I think they were playing with different elements to see what would emerge from the material, but I felt it was extremely disrespectful. Not towards me, it wasn’t me, but towards the story itself that was really not about humor, and I became all uptight because I felt there was some boundary that was crossed. But that moment I remember very well because at that moment I did say, “I actually was there. I don’t know if I have the right interpretation of what happened because being there is not enough, but you are using my words describing an event, and it just feels very, very dissonant, and I feel uncomfortable with that.”

I think they were voicing some kind of discomfort that they had with this whole question of representation, and some people feel that they are reenacting the refugee which is not what we are thinking. We are thinking about this practice as a way of performing the relationship with the empirical material. So I encountered a material which is the story of a refugee. I’m not becoming the refugee. I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody. But I am performing a relation and an encounter that occurred. It’s very different from saying, “We are staging the story of a group of people who cross borders and are recognized as refugees and I become them.”

Greg: But I would also add even that painful moment, and when we were working with material from Baltimore that I had gathered in the previous workshop, I had some of those moments too and some moments where I really felt overwhelmed by the way that the material was being treated and also the way that it created a lot of tension within the group in terms of the disagreements between interpretations of what was being said from the stage. We spend a lot of time in what we call analysis where we really pull apart, like, “Okay, well, what happened structurally on the stage? When you picked up the doll, I imagined that you were a god. And then, why did I make that association?”

We spend a lot of time on that, and it can get quite uncomfortable. But I think misunderstandings actually give rise to some of the most valuable information that you can learn about your experience of the field, like things that you hadn’t necessarily even examined. For me, that’s my favorite part of the practice is the associations and the analyses because it really does unearth oftentimes very uncomfortable stakes that I might have about my positionality or whatever. Again, that’s a different thing than making a decision to put something out for public consumption.

Ash: Cristiana, as an anthropologist, I’m curious, how has the field of anthropology responded to this work? Are academics open to theatre? What has the response been to this collaboration between anthropology and theatre?

Cristiana: I think mixed, right? On some level, most of the workshops that we are taking around are hosted in anthropology departments. I think there is a lot of experimentation right now going on, and people are curious about different forms and ways of writing: graphic novels, performances, installations. So on the one hand, there is that. On the other hand, among the graduate students, who are the people I would like to share this more with, in anthropology I think there is resistance. In part because they have to produce grant proposals, so they have to follow a certain format and template and demands on the part of the institutions, and so they are concerned that a creative practice might not help them do that, even though I don’t think so. I think this creative practice can actually lead to more creative ways of even writing more standard articles, books, a grant proposal, but I think the process is lower and so it doesn’t provide a quick outcome. You just have to stay with the process.

And so in the graduate seminars that I teach, either by myself or with Greg, there are some graduate students from anthropology but mostly they come from performance studies, cultural studies, some anthropology. So I feel that for people who are training in anthropology, they don’t always see the usefulness of drawing from the arts and drawing from an artistic practice to do anthropology and to train in anthropology, because some of the people who took our seminars, maybe they were anthropologists but not interested at all in theatre but they were writing books or dissertations and they realized that the practice helped them write in a different way. So it’s really not only about theatre and performance. It’s just really about establishing a different kind of relationship with the empirical material, and to actually convey this message is not always easy among the graduate students.

Ash: I’m a member of the AAA, American Anthropological Association, and attended the conferences, and I was especially involved in the Visual Anthropology Conference. The last time I was there, I saw a lot of experimental ethnography, and there seemed to be a lot of interest in moving away from what was the traditional text-based ethnography, and also a more public scholarship, like crossing ethnographic research with theatre and public scholarship. I was so excited about how accessible it was making some of the research. Part of my experiences in academia have been it’s not very accessible. It’s niche, nobody knows what you’re talking about really outside of your field. This work was allowing for some interdisciplinary conversations and then also some broader public conversations that became very productive.

I’m curious—this sociopolitical moment we’re in, it’s terrifying—What do you think is the role of this kind of nonfiction work in the world right now, in this post-truth, post-fact, alternative fact world?

Greg: Cristiana and I have been discussing this a little bit, like how do we encounter this current moment, and I’m not sure we necessarily have a good answer to that question yet. I certainly don’t want the work that we’re doing and the way that I’m describing misinterpretation and collisions between content and theory to be understood as endorsing lying, right, to use a current political discourse that’s very popular. It’s really, I think, and obviously this depends entirely on the intent of the person using affect theatre, but I feel like our intent is to come to a clearer, more humane understanding of our field sites and the world around us, and how to actually necessarily engage this practice to speak directly to the political moment.

Cristiana: One of the desires behind this practice is to engage with ways of thinking and being with other people that are more associative. Also, another theoretical influence for us is affect theory. So it’s how do we relate to the world in a much more affective, visceral way, and not in an academic, rational way. I’m seeing it here in the US. I’m seeing it in my other home, in Italy: A lot of populist and right-wing movements have the capacity to tap into the visceral, the gut feeling of the citizens, right? They really connect there, and I feel that the left is completely detached, disconnected, right? And so I think on a very small scale is also how do we actually draw from that power, the power of the visceral, the power of the affected, the power of the emotional, and build conversation from there from a different political stand.

So that’s one thing that I think we need to learn also to operate from that level and not just from the intellectual, the statistical, the reasoning, the moral. It’s just, it’s not enough. And the other thing, I mean, I think the way in which we approach stories in our work is always not thinking about... I mean, of course you take a political position just by deciding to work around a certain issue, but the idea is also how do we keep the divide not a divide, but we open it up so that it can become more blurred. So again, my experience in The People’s Temple, I didn’t know what was right or wrong in my head anymore. I could not create a specific line between right and wrong, moral, immoral because it was too complex, and I think that’s the other thing that we are suffering from is that the divides are too extreme and there’s no talking.

It’s really not only about theatre and performance, it’s just really about establishing a different kind of relationship with the empirical material.

Ash: And there’s a lack of nuance. I think it’s interesting also that you bring up the left and the lack of storytelling. That’s something that my husband and I talk about a lot in this moment is this question of how do you have all of the artists and all of the storytellers, or most of them who identify as left on this side, and yet you can’t quite craft a populist narrative.

Greg: I do think this is a really major question for me and the connection between affect and narrative, right? Because they’re not separate. You can have this completely mushy, affective experience where nobody knows what’s going on and you don’t know how to believe who’s right and who’s wrong in the story. But the other way that the right really does create a lot of powerful visceral affect in the populace is by telling really simple stories that enable a kind of effective overwhelm of fear, of anxiety, of rage, of whatever. And so it’s a really interesting question to me because I think one of the reasons that people on the left do appear to not have their brand together and not have their narratives together is because we are more interested in nuance, or a lot of us are, and that nuance actually makes room for a lot of contradiction. If you have contradiction, your narrative is less marketable, right? Like, it’s—

Ash: Oh, absolutely.

Greg: That’s something that I write about is that narrative becomes more accessible and more marketable the more pared down it is, and the less nuance and the less complication that there is in a play or the more narrative clarity that there is in a play the more there is to anchor onto for an audience, and that’s true in politics as well, right? So it’s the really complicated question, how do you empower complex narrative and still speak back to this laser-sharp narrative that’s coming from one particular camp.

Ash: Yeah, I’m going to be sitting with this and thinking about this because I think this is, for a lot of the work that I do, the part that always gets us stuck.

Greg: It pops into my head as we’re having this conversation that early on in my kind of training and devising, which I did with moment work, we always had this kind of idea how does the text not do what the elements of the stage are doing, and we would often have this idea that agitprop theatre is too direct, it’s too on the nose, it’s too... but who knows? Maybe at this moment in time it is about that. Who knows? Maybe we just need some leftist agitprop theatre to speak back to this like kind of very clear narrative that’s coming from the right. It’s funny, I just wanted to voice that because it’s so part of my DNA that agitprop theatre is not the way. But who knows? Maybe it is the way, but it’s not necessarily the practice that we’re doing. But I just had the thought, maybe some hardcore agitprop work.

Cristiana: This year, because we’ve been doing book talks and book events, we had a desire to stage some theatrical episodes around the current political moment. We never got around to doing it. But I think it would be interesting to do like one workshop where people just bring text from the press, from wherever they want to, that somehow address this question and see what emerges, right?

Greg: I think it would be amazing because you’re making me think, to get back to the Favret-Saada idea, it’s like we are all currently caught in this field of the political moment, and we are all overwhelmed and we are all caught, and that’s what these workshops do is they get us re-caught again. So I think what you’re describing, Cristiana, is great because we don’t have to know what it will be or what it will do. It is a workshop that we create for thinking and analyzing our experience, and so we could just like dare everybody to bring in content that’s of concern to them and then just see what happens. That’s a lot of the fun of the work.

Ash: I do that with my students. It’s actually straight-up agitprop newspaper theatre in the Boalian sense. I teach in media studies, so it’s part of teaching media literacy, and oftentimes when I do it with my students it’s very impactful because you’re doing alternative readings of headlines, alternative readings of newspapers, looking at a story from this newspaper’s perspective and that newspaper’s perspective and the school newspaper’s perspective, and thinking about how stories are being told. Something that we do with the end of doing the exercise is how does this translate beyond? How would this translate into becoming an interesting theatre piece? How would you make this theatrically interesting? The exercise helps build critical thinking skills. There’s often work that needs to go into it that would make it theatrically compelling.

Greg: Yeah. And that’s what we break down into these three parts of research, composition, and dramaturgy, and that is the third part of our practice is if you’re making a piece, you take all these compositions that you’ve created just freeform which are super compelling, and then you figure out what are the narrative and non-narrative structures that can hold this piece together so that an audience can stay with it from beginning to end.

Ash: We are at time. Before we end, how can listeners learn more about your work, where can they go to connect with you and to book a workshop of their own?

Cristiana: Affecttheater.com.

Greg: E-R, “theater” with an E-R. There’s the page that has all of our work listed on it, so you can link to the book and different articles that we’ve written.

Ash: I’m going to link everything on this podcast website, and I’ll also link some information about moment work and ethnography just in case folks need some context for that part of the conversation.

Greg: I just didn’t say at the beginning how wonderful I think it is that you’re launching this particular series, and I wish you a lot of luck. It’s such a great topic, and there’s so much rich stuff happening. I think it’s great that you’re taking the time to examine it.

Ash: This has been an episode of The Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast. I’m your host, Ash Marinaccio. This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, and non-commercial, open-source apps, like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone or AntennaPod for Android. Be sure to search “HowlRound Theatre Commons” and subscribe to receive new episodes. If you love this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content, on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear, visit HowlRound and submit your ideas to the Commons. Think you or someone ought to be on the show? Connect with us through Docbloc and on Instagram, @docblocprojects. That is D-O-C-B-L-O-C. Thank you for joining us at the Nonfiction Theatre Forum.