Brecht and Sister Sylvester Defy Authority in Theatre

Tjaša Ferme: Hey, theatre, science, and innovation fans. This is Tjasa Ferme, your podcast host for Theatre Tech Talks: AI, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Tune in.

Sister Sylvester is an artist and amateur microbiologist, based in New York and Istanbul. She creates visual essays and expanded documentaries at a place where technology and science meet politics and history. Hello, Sister Sylvester. Hi.

Sister Sylvester: Yeah…I don't know how long we've been trying to make this happen.

Tjaša: Oh my God, for a year and a half? Finally, we intersect in the same space and time. I mean, maybe not. Are you on New York time or some other—

Sister: I'm on New York time.

Tjaša: Okay.

Sister: Are you also on New York time?

Tjaša: I am on New York time. By the way, congrats on Creative Capital.

Sister: Oh, thank you.

Tjaša: When that email came in, I was like, "Yes, people I know." I love that. I love that. I mean, look, first question is this, you do a lot of stuff that bridges many mediums. You use essays, you use new media, you use performance art. And then also, you are an amateur microbiologist? So how does all of this meet? Where did this come from? How are you able to ride so many horses at the same time?

Sister: Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just an essayist at heart. I'm an essayist and I follow my curiosity to different topics and subjects and questions, and then an essay arises out of that. And often, that essay is a visual essay, rather than an essay that is just words. It's words intentioned with, or maybe it's primarily visuals, but it's often words intentioned with visuals and sound and different technologies. Yeah. So I think they're all essays. They're just essays about different things and using different mediums.

Tjaša: How does one go, if you want to become an amateur microbiologist? What have you all read and how did you go about? Because, I saw your Good Genes and you seemed very proficient and very confident talking about DNA and experimenting with certain things. So how did you get to this point?

Sister: Yeah. I mean, it was, I never intended to become an amateur microbiologist. I stole this hat that hadn't been washed. The technician who gave it to me, who encouraged me to steal it, told me that it hadn't been washed since the 1930s. So then, of course, I was incredibly curious about what kind of information this hat was holding. And the skills I needed to learn in order to read the hat happened to be genetics, microbiology skills.

And so, it was just following that chain of curiosity. And if you want to become an amateur microbiologist and you are in New York, the best thing to do is go to Genspace, which is this amazing community biolab in Sunset Park, which is where I ended up with this hat. Thinking I would go there, find a sympathetic scientist, spend two weeks doing a little bit of faffing around in a lab, watching a scientist, and then go away and make the piece.

But instead, I got completely hooked and it's been, what, it's been at least half a decade, more now. And so once you get obsessed with something for that long, at this point, I teach a class, which is a bio-art class. I work really closely with evolutionary geneticist on other projects that are unfolding.

I have thrown myself into this synthetic biology, biotech, genetics world, but it was never intentional. It was just following this one strand, trying to acquire this one skill set I thought I needed for this project. But then, that spiraled out into all of these other things I got excited about.

Tjaša: Beautiful. I love the flexibility and non-identification with the old, but the ability to just follow the flow and follow the curiosity, like you said. I'm not sure how many of our listeners have seen Good Genes, they certainly should. But maybe, if you can tell us a little bit of the narrative of what actually happens in Good Genes.

Sister: Yeah, it's weird, because it's, right now, it's got two... I'm really bad at naming things, and it currently has two names, which is, it's been going back and forth between Drinking Brecht and Good Genes constantly. The one that you saw was, I think we were supposed to be a work in progress. We didn't invite press, but it was finished, and it was called Good Genes.

But then, I just premiered an installation version of it at this festival, called IDFA, in Amsterdam, and that one was called Drinking Brecht. So I need to make a decision at some point. I probably should've made a decision already, but if I go back and forth between those two names while talking about it, that's why.

But it is the story of, well, it's not really a... So I was in Berlin back in 2018, I'd been touring with a show and I had a day off, and I went and did some touristy things in Berlin. And one of the touristy things I wanted to do was go to the Berliner Ensemble, because I'm a huge Brecht fan, and I'd never been there before.

So I turn up, but it was completely closed. And trying to hop a fence and see what I could see of the closed building, I ran into a bunch of technicians who explained that it had been closed for a transition of power. They'd just finished loading out, after a closing night party. They were all about to lose their jobs. They were all drinking beer in the Berlin summer sunshine.

And one of these disgruntled technicians still had his keys and very kindly saw the superfan me really sad I couldn't get in, unlocked the building and took me on this amazing tour. And in the course of that tour, he picked up this hat, which he said had been with the company since the beginning, had never been washed, because Brecht wanted it to stink like the war. And then, he encouraged me to steal it, because he said nobody cared about history anymore and it was just going to wind up in the trash.

So I stole the hat and then ended up obsessing over how that I could read the clues on the hat, how I could find the information that was contained in this piece of wool. And that led me to Genspace, that led me to this whole adventure of genetics and microbiology.

It's no coincidence that fascism and this very simplistic reading of, or coercive reading of genetics, which becomes eugenics, happens in tandem.

And the piece itself, Good Genes/Drinking Brecht, whatever it's called, is a kind of essay that takes you through both my process, discover, like learning microbiology, the biohacker movement, and then tries to bring together these strands of Brecht and science, because he was really obsessed with science in the way that in his theories of theatre reflected a lot on science and the uses of science, the entwinement of science and politics.

And one of the things that I think's at the heart of the piece is this idea of a kind of, the parallels between a particular simplistic reading of genetics, which is very, very tied to a kind of fascist mindset and this simplification in politics. So, of course, it's no coincidence that fascism and this very simplistic reading of, or coercive reading of genetics, which becomes eugenics, happens in tandem.

These two things are linked not only by history, but also by a particular kind of outlook on the world. And I think that outlook is in danger of happening again in the contemporary world. And so, I'm trying to, in the piece, pull together these parallels between the two and the danger of a simple story. I guess that's it, the danger of a simple story.

One of the things that I was interested in was the ways that he never really questioned the truth promise of science. He uses science as a metaphor a lot, and he has the beautiful play about Galileo. But he uses science as a kind of aspirational thing for his art, even though he's living in a time where you have eugenics, you have physics leading to the development of the nuclear bomb. The ways that he uses the word science or the ways that he uses science as a kind of aspirational metaphor are very intriguing to me.

But he's staunchly anti-Nazi. He's a Communist, his books are burned, he flees the country. He's in exile in the US. He gets basically kicked out of the US for his communist tendencies and goes back to East Berlin and forms the Berliner Ensemble there. He was definitely on the right side.

Tjaša: Okay, excellent. I do remember that there was a part where you tackle, still, the dark side of Brecht, which was this, it had a feminist angle and how he had a woman collaborator that disappeared in the credits, that was never credited in his work though.

Sister: Yeah, yeah. He's a tricky character in terms of that. Because he has, I mean, he's an intriguing character. He has a lot of lovers who contribute to the work. And, on the one hand, his collective, the Berliner Ensemble was known as being one of the only spaces, a space that really promoted female dramaturgs, young people coming in and working on things. But he works as a collective, but the collective is him.

And that becomes this really strange thing where he is taking work from these female collaborators who, because of the power imbalance, aren't credited for their work. And there's some things where in this course of exile and fleeing the Nazis, one of his lovers, Red Rosa. At one point, she is the more famous and the more well-known in the duo, and she's really making theatre with the workers, and Brecht soaks up all of these theories and things from her.

And then, in the course of the travels and exile, she becomes the unknown powerless, and he is the one that, and her name gets erased from the work. The piece also looks at the parallels between that and what happens in science. The story of Crick and Watson stealing Rosalind Franklin's photograph, or electron micrograph, of the structure of DNA, which leads them to discovery, which gives them the Nobel. And so, the piece weaves together these threads, also, of the parallels between the two disciplines.

Tjaša: Yeah, it's really tricky. A lot of things come to mind. It seems like he almost had a devising theatre that he was running and, yet, he took all the credit. And I see parallels with artists today, artists today that I’m talking to that say, “We were doing this and there were four of us, and yet the piece has one name only.” And I’m like, “Well, how does this work? When and how did these people dissipate? And how can you not credit them in some meaningful way?”

Because, you could credit somebody for a part of the process. There’s so many different credits and nuances, and it’s a matter of consensus. These are not official categories, these are not positions in Congress. So it’s really just a matter of are you willing to do that?

Sister: Yeah. There's an interesting parallel in science. Because, in a scientific paper, you have a really, specific way of whose name goes on the paper. And I forget exactly when it was, but there was a feminist scientist who decided, in order to make a point about the labor that goes into producing scientific knowledge, she listed all of the students, graduate students, undergraduate students, who had worked on the project. And so, just the credits took up, I think, the first three pages of the paper.

Tjaša: Wow.

Sister: And it’s an amazing statement, because there is so much, especially in science, there’s so much labor that doesn’t end up getting credited, and there are all of these inequities in the hierarchy. So I really love that as a kind of statement. And I worked on this piece a lot with students when I was starting out, and some of the early ones, I was trying to play with that. So, we would have the program and I was keeping tallies of all the students who’d ever contributed an idea to the piece.

Tjaša: I love it. Yeah, I mean, the science community is just as convoluted as any other community. It just feels like the systems don't work and that there is misconduct and misrepresentation everywhere you look, unfortunately.

And then, also misrepresentation of stories. This was experiment number two, and the girl that was actually doing the experiment says, "No, this was experiment 802 and my hair was falling out, and it's been a year of this. And I was ready to give up because I was getting nothing." So there's a lot of that. Yeah. I'm curious, what, in your journey, has been perhaps the most interesting learning experience? Which we could also ask, what's the biggest challenge that you've had so far in your creative journey?

Sister: No, there's no one. I mean, it's just a series of challenges, which are also ways of pushing back and finding new paths. I don't know if there's one show-stopping challenge. Making work is hard, but it's not the... There's way harder things in the world.

Tjaša: Right. When you work with scientists, how do you work with them?

Sister: It varies. I mean, for Drinking Brecht, I had a very specific, Good Genes, I had a very specific aim, which is that I wanted to track the people on the hat. And so, I wanted to extract the DNA from those particular people. So, when I got to Genspace, there was a very kind scientist who introduced me to some of the techniques and was there if I had questions. So that was very much me, trial and error, figuring stuff out, but having someone in the background who was super kind and generous with their time if I was really stuck.

In Colorado, I co-teach with a professor called Dr. Hanson, in Colorado, and that's been a really exciting process. There's actually three of us that teach, a philosopher of performance, a biologist, and me, and it's a really exciting way of pushing ourselves and learning. And we choose a different area in biotech that we want to focus on each time and share readings together. So it feels almost like we have our own kind of reading group in the lead up to the class.

At Genspace, we, for a while, and I hope they carry on with it, because I can't organize it anymore, but I want to join in, there was a cyborg reading group. And we would get together once a month and read texts that we'd all proposed together. So yeah, Genspace was very much me trying to figure stuff out and then having people to consult with. With Dr. Hanson in Colorado now, I'm really curious about her research.

She works very specifically on evolutionary genetics, on a particular species of yeast. And I was just out there working with her and we were playing with electron microscope. So we were looking at these yeasts under the electron microscope. And then, I was also working with the printing press, and I was creating a first draft, like prototype of one of the series of art books that I want to make, as part of the Creative Capital thing, focusing on this particular yeast.

So that was a lot of learning about her research, reading her papers, asking her questions. We also worked with students for a while, and we had the students interview her, because I thought it would be interesting to hear from the two sides of a professional divide, thinking about this particular yeast. Yeah, so that's a different kind of relationship and different kind of learning.

Tjaša: Yeah. I find that, I guess this comes, because I'm an actor primarily and that became a playwright and director, but I think in dialogue. So talking to people or interviews, transcripts, that's the most direct way for me to engage and to learn. But obviously, you have all sorts different learners as well, such as visual or people who just like to be secluded in home reading books.

Sister: I was going to say I love being at home reading books, but I also love the hands-on. And I think in Drinking Brecht/Good Genes, that guiding the audience through that first biohacker exercise and allowing them to learn by doing, felt an honest reflection of my own process, but also really important for the topic as well.

Tjaša: It was so much fun and probably unexpected. But maybe not so much, because everybody that comes to see a show is a human, right? A human with an inner world and thoughts and a history, and a recent history of where they just came from. It was really funny, because the table I was at, whenever we had to do any part of the experiment, I was very eager. I was hoping to do all of the procedures by myself.

And there was a courtship going on next to the table. So it wasn't a planned story, but it was certainly a part of my experience of this play, how these two humans are embedded in this world that you created, and how they're engaging with the material, with literally the needs and wants that they have of this particular moment. I'm curious to hear from you, what is the feedback that you've gotten or what was maybe the most interesting to you to hear back from audiences and participants?

Sister: My favorite part of the piece, and what lets me know that it is doing what I want it to do, is that after the piece finishes, people do stay at their tables and they drink their drinks and they talk to each other. Hopefully, they talk to each other about science and politics. Maybe they talk to each other about what they just saw. But the fact that you don't just leave the theatre and go on your way and go get dinner and forget about what happened.

But that the piece really gets handed over to you, that feels really Brechtian to me, and it is the reason for the coming together of these threads and the making the drink. And the piece for me happens afterwards with the audience drinking and talking. And so it's really satisfying when we tour the piece and people don't leave.

And we've had it where we've been at theatres and they've had to kick people out, because there are union rules, they're shutting up for the night. But I think, so I can't remember what we did, but the final instruction is to read, talk, and read these prompts that are in the bottom of the Petri dish. And lately, I mean, for the last year and a half, but I can't remember if I had started it already when we did the Sawdust one, those prompts have been related to the genocide in Palestine—

Tjaša: Wow.

Sister: ... specifically, and asking people to think about the relationship between science and politics and what's happening right now. And there's some other prompts, there's some Brecht quotes, there's an Edward Said quote. When we just did it in Amsterdam, it was really satisfying to see people actually taking the time to sit and think about those prompts, and think about what they'd watched and the relationship between this, again, the simple story, ethno-nationalism, the connections between an ethno-nationalism and eugenic understanding of humanity and this attempt to control and contain.

So I think that that final prompt for conversation... Brecht used to do this, he would take headlines from the day, and before he'd start rehearsal, the actors would all read out the headlines and they would talk about what was happening. And then, those headlines would often get projected into the piece, so that even if the story that you're telling is a story about history, the audience are hopefully making the connections directly to what's happening in their own lives, in the contemporary world.

So yeah, that's my best feedback is when I can see that people are engaging with that, taking it seriously, talking about the connections between science and politics in whatever way they see fit. Maybe they're talking about AI, maybe they're talking about Trump's, the whole 2025 thing, which is riddled with eugenic ideas. But yeah, that's my best feedback is when that happens.

Tjaša: I love what you said about Brecht bringing in the headlines and making it part of the beginning of the rehearsal. I love the giving permission for something that's happening in the real world outside, that's a part of everybody's reality, no matter how much we're trying to shield ourselves from it. I love that he brings it in and makes it a part.

Because, usually, in some way, in some rebellious way, actors always find a way to talk about it, but it's almost like it's a thing. It's a fun thing, because it's forbidden, like giggling at the dinner table or making a mess out of a dinner table. But he made a ritual out of it. So the integration of what's allowed and what's inner and what's outer, I think, is really interesting and really important for any critical thinking and art-making project.

Sister: Brecht had this idea of crude thought. You say things in the simplest way possible, and that was the basis of his poetics. And so, I think the end there, those quotes, those statements, the provocations, maybe, are an attempt to channel this Brechtian crude thought and say, "Okay, here you botched this. Now, take it on for yourself. What does it mean to you? How does it apply?"

Tjaša: Yeah, reflect back.

Sister: Yeah. And hopefully let it change you. Brecht's theatre was not supposed to be a theatre that, in an Aristotelian way, purged dangerous emotions inside of the space so everyone could go back out and just get on with their lives. It was actually supposed to stir things up and provoke people to action and make them engage critically with what was happening, and their role in it and their place in it. Those are lofty aims. I don't know if it always does that, but that's there. I'm trying to draw on that. Yeah.

Tjaša: Human attempts. Well, an artist needs to be driven by something. And it needs to be an ideal so that the human persists through all the setbacks and through all the obstacles and pushbacks for there to be a guiding light, a little Tinkerbell lamp that still keeps pushing you forward. I think if it wasn't that lofty, it'd be so easy to give up. What is the next stage of the Drinking Brecht/Good Genes, now going into Ghost Genes and using transducers?

Sister: Yeah. I'm not totally sure. But the great thing about the Creative Capital award is that I've now got three years to kind of, I'm giving... They're flexible, but I'm giving myself three years to really start researching and go deep in it. It's a piece that I began at a lab in Copenhagen some years ago. It's a film festival called CPH Docs, and they have a lab for new media projects. And I was there and I knew I wanted to work on...

I've been working on these new media pieces, like VR pieces, and I was really sick of the technology mediating. And I really never wanted to put another headset on in my life. And I wanted to make a piece that just felt simple, and that, in the way that Drinking Brecht/Good Genes I think about it that, in drinking the drink, the actual performance is taking place inside your own body and your guts. And so, this piece is a piece that will take place inside your own body again, but this time in your bones.

Tjaša: I love it. I love it.

Sister: Yeah, I just wanted, I was looking for a technology that could kind of, I could use to explore these ideas, but a technology that didn't involve a lot of mediation, a lot of clunky hardware, and I also didn't want to be beholden to Meta or to these big, evil companies anymore. I still wanted to work in this new technology realm and experiment with technology, but I knew I wanted to do it differently.

And it was through this lab at CPH that I came up with this idea of using the bone conduction transducers and playing with audio. So these are literally audio transducers. So they're kind of like, they vibrate at a frequency that isn't going to be conducted through air, so that it's being conducted through a solid. Basically, you create a line of connection between the transducer and your skull, using bone, and they conduct very well through bone.

Then you're going to turn your skull into a resonant cavity, basically a speaker, and it'll sound like the words are inside your head rather than coming through your ears. So this is the basis of the technology. And, of course, that's a beautiful technology to explore these connections between science and politics, and fascism and instructability, and the ghosts in the history of genetics.

Tjaša: Wow. Because, how can you then tell the difference that you're hearing something, somebody else's thought versus having that thought?

Sister: Well, I think you know it's not your thought, but it is a weird blurring of the lines. It's using a different mechanism to reach you, and it does feel like a much more interior process.

Tjaša: It seems like you're on tour a lot. What is your method? Do you work with a booking agent? Do you do it all yourself?

Sister: I wish I worked with a booking agent, because I'm really, really bad at all administrative things, and it's chaos. But I am now, as of, we started last year working with a really amazing producer, studio manager, somewhere in between all those things, called Marin Day, who is a dancer and also works in arts admin, and we just do one day a week together. But she is really helping me get things in a little bit more of a order. But yeah, I wish there was a booking agent.

Right now, it's a weird mix. Last year, there was a lot of theatrical touring, which is incredibly intense, administratively, because you're flying seven people. I mean, it's way beyond me. It was chaos. And I feel like that's why I haven't made any new work for a while is because I've been completely consumed by either creating adaptations for touring or the actual administration for touring.

The kind of festival, film festival or museum or new media thing is a little easier, because those pieces are just me and a computer and a suitcase full of bits and bobs. So, for example, the difference between touring Good Genes with a crew of seven and ten flight cases and all of this stuff, versus touring the installation version, which is literally just me showing up and pressing a button.

Part of me is, I mean, I love the big scale, theatrical touring, but I'm trying to get the installation touring to the point where I can just send it and it can run itself. And that, Marin is helping me create the systems to do that.

Tjaša: Beautiful.

Sister: Because yeah, it's a weird thing trying to... It's amazing that people want to bring work.

Tjaša: Yeah.

Sister: But then, it is hard to carve out time to make anything new, especially if you're bad at organization and admin, because then those things consume.

Tjaša: We all need clones. Hermione, how did you do it? We all need that spell.

Sister: Right. Yeah.

Tjaša: Yeah. I feel like everybody that's an artist and at least semi-successful in getting their work out there, I feel like we're all running into the same problem, that you're wearing seven hats, and maybe I'm underestimating, between grant writers, hiring people, like who's my next da-da-da in the show, or who's my next technician? And then, obviously, the writer, the performer, it's all these personalities need their own time to be fully embodied and to be good at what they do.

Sister: One of the things that makes it easier is there are no performers in my work. I mean, there's musicians and there's me speaking, but I think it would be a lot harder to tour if there were performers who then had to, someone couldn't make... In the past, when I have worked with performers, it's really difficult because someone can't make it, and then you have to train someone else up for that role. You need the exact specific skillset of the... So it's been many, many years since I worked with performers, and I think it does make it a lot easier touring work when it is an essay rather than a play, you know?

Tjaša:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I think that I'm calling a part of you that's on stage speaking the text, I'm calling you her, the performer. I also think that musicians are performers.

Sister: Yeah, totally. The musicians are performers. And I don't think we... Well, we had a different percussionist at the beginning of the first time we did Drinking Brecht, and then he wasn't able to join the next round, because he'd got an academic position and we brought in another percussionist, but the percussionist made it their own. It was a very smooth process. But yeah, I guess we are performers, but I think it's, somehow, I think of us all as designers more.

Tjaša: Hmm.

Sister: I think about it as a group of designers.

Tjaša: Wow.

Sister: Yeah.

Tjaša: I think this is a unique concept that you call yourself, speaking an essay on stage, basically creating some kind of a performance piece, with musicians, that you find all these people, designers. Tell me more.

Sister: Well, I think that the musicians are primarily composers, like DMR, the Drinking Brecht... the Good Genes composed the score, and happens to be performing it, because that's what's necessary for it to be heard by the audience. I'm primarily a writer. I wrote the essay. I don't know that if someone's doing a reading in a bookstore of their novel, you call them a performer, they're the writer who's reading their novel.

Tjaša: Were you directed? Did anybody direct you in this piece?

Sister: I guess that's me too, but I don't think of myself in those roles. I'm an artist who's... together different things. But yeah, I think in my speaking, I'm not acting. I'm not really performing. I'm just putting the words in space. Because someone has to, and it's first-person, so it makes the most sense that it's me.

And in the installation, my voice is recorded, so I'm not in the room. I'm nowhere. People are watching a film. So I think with Drinking Brecht, it's kind of a... I've done versions of it where I'm not on a stage, I'm in another room and I'm speaking the audio. So it's just narration. It's just a voiceover in a film, you know? Just a voiceover that happens to be happening live, and it's a score that is happening live.

Tjaša: Yeah, but as an actor, it's so much that goes into it. An actor's just talking about—

I prefer the installation version where you don't see me, because I think it means that the audience become more of a community and have to figure things out together in the room, without an authority figure.

Sister: For you, for an actor, so much goes into it. For me, speaking it, nothing goes into it. I just walk on stage and I read. I don't even learn it. I just read. It's really a reading. And that I think, I think I would be insulting actors by saying that I was. I'm literally just reading off a piece of printed out text, or off the computer, in the case of Drinking Brecht, because they need to be able to scroll it because I'm doing the microscopy at the same time.

But yeah, I mean, I prefer that piece without me in it. I prefer the installation version where you don't see me, because I think it means that the audience become more of a community and have to figure things out together in the room, without an authority figure. I think that piece works best without an authority figure.

Tjaša: I don't think that we need to agree on the category or any kind of a judgment. I'm just reeling. I'm enjoying in this, in our very different perspectives—

Sister: Yeah.

Tjaša: ... very different experiences of the same piece. And, of course, this comes with the territory. You made the piece, and I was a consumer of the piece, right? I saw the piece. So already, our roles are completely different, but just the way you perceive. Maybe because I go and primarily watch theatre, I perceive that through this lens.

Sister: Yeah.

Tjaša: I don't know that there is a whole massive genre out there of visual essays or that people are—

Sister: More than you think. But, like you say, we will bring different sets of references and things to the work. So it doesn't, I mean, it's Brechtian piece, so maybe it's good that it is perceived theatrically. It's a piece about Brecht, so maybe it's good it's perceived theatrically.

Tjaša: Yeah. Thank you so much. This was fun and enlightening, and I feel like very different to our usual conversations.

Sister: It's been a great conversation. Thank you.

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