Failing Bigger, Failing Faster in Devising

Martin Boross: Welcome to the second episode of Bridge Between Realities, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. My name is Martin Boross, a theatre and filmmaker from Hungary.

Tara Khozein: My name is Tara Khozein. I’m a classical singer and theatre artist, and we are the hosts of this podcast series and the co-artistic directors of the artistic research project of the same name, Bridge Between Realities.

Martin: Over the course of these theatre workshops and residences in multiple locations, we create these six-episode podcast series.

Tara: Today we are in Albuquerque, New Mexico the day after Dwelling, which was a one-night only immersive performance. We have here Apollo Garcia, who’s a performer, director, dancer, circus artist, and designer; and Sandy Timmerman, who is a theatremaker, producer, and performer.

Martin: The fact that our work here focused on the theme of home is especially meaningful to me as working in New Mexico feels like a kind of homecoming. Back in 2018, we had a co-production with Sandy and Richard van Schouwen, the founders of q-Staff. That was when Promenade premiered, a site-specific theatre journey that placed the audience on a moving bus and led them across Albuquerque following actors who performed scenes at different stops throughout the city. And it was thanks to that project that Tara and I first met. For more information on the show Dwelling and Bridge Between Realities, check out the description.

Tara: This episode focuses on devising work, so let’s meet our guests.

Sandy Timmerman: My name is Sandy Timmerman. I am the co-founder of q-Staff Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And my history with devised work, I think that probably dates back to about 1996 when we took a performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull to Baltimore, the Baltimore Theatre Project, and there met Double Edge Theatre of Massachusetts. And that was really the first time I think I was introduced to the idea of devised work. Everything I had studied extensively in the United States and at university, but it was always scripted work. Anything radical was a new play. And so that was the first time I’d really seen anything that was created in a way generated by the performers from the ground up.

Martin: Sandy told us about her experience in Hungary, which he first visited in the late nineties thanks to Philip Arnoult. It’s impossible to introduce Philip in just a few minutes. His work deserves an entire series, in my opinion. Anyone who knew him understands that one of the great missions of his life was to connect American and Eastern European theatremakers and audiences. He’s the reason we came to New Mexico in the first place. Sandy shared how captivated she was by the aesthetics of Hungarian theatre, even though she didn’t speak the language.

Sandy: And I thought it was so fresh and interesting and such a different way of approaching work that it was something that Rich, my partner, and I, quickly latched onto and really wanted to explore. And then we spent a lot of years after that working and training with Double Edge and then going to Poland on studying with Gardzienice, which was an offshoot of Jerzy Grotowski, and then some other groups in Poland, Teatr Pieśń Kozła, all of it devised work. And that was kind of what we then based q-Staff on. When we formed q-Staff together, it was entirely devised work.

Apollo Garcia Orellana: My name is Apollo Garcia Orellana. I think my very first devised work that I saw was with the company Theater Grottesco, based in Santa Fe. They had come from a Paris-trained school called Jacques Lecoq, and the first show of theirs that I saw was Angel’s Cradle. It blew my mind in every way possible: the sets, the staging, the creatures, the ideas. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in my entire life. And something that I was like, “Oh, I want to make that.” And then to later learn that there was no script writer for it, there was no pre-written storybook. It was a group of people that had sat together and said, “What is the story we want to tell and how do we want to tell it? And what doors does it open for us when we get rid of a script and get rid of those basic steps that we’ve been working with for so long? How do we find something new?” And that really excited me. They eventually inspired me to go to Paris to train at the same school, and most of my work has been devised since then.

Tara: Sandy, and we’ll also edit this, and so feel free to say “I don’t want to talk about it” or whatever, but I know that you’re also in a place where you’re not really performing at the moment. You’ve taken a step away from theatre and you stepped into this process that we just finished yesterday as a sort of hero production assistant and prop master and stage manager and running the bar and doing tickets and also doing a sort of installative durational piece that resulted in baking beautiful fresh bread for the entire audience. So, even just from the perspective of now being in a more supportive role in this project, where are you at in terms of your interest in devised work? How is that feeling in this sort of supportive role?

Fail faster, because the faster we fail, the faster we can get out the things that don’t work and find the little gems that do.

Sandy: I still love it. It’s still my favorite form. I mean, I grew up with scripts and a good script well produced is a lovely thing. I just think it’s sometimes I’m a bit derogatory, and I call it talking head theatre or theatre of cover bands. But I still think that devised work is so much more interesting and that’s what I prefer to watch. It’s the process I prefer to be a part of in whatever capacity because I just think it makes much more immediate work. It makes much more interesting work. It makes work that is very current and is about the people that are making it in the place that they’re making it, rather than it being some weird story about New York.

You know, we’re sitting here in the middle of the desert. Yeah, I mean, I still love theatre. I still think it’s wonderful. I have no problem with theatre, and this project was fantastic. It’s my own personal journey that has kind of taken me out of the realm of wanting to create, because the thing about devised work, which I think when it’s live and exciting, is that it’s asking of you. It’s pulling from you. It’s making you be very alive and in the moment and present. And that’s a capacity I just don’t feel like I have right now personally. But watching other people do it and helping them do it is, I am still fine with that.

Tara: What are the skills that we need and develop inside of devising work and doing what for me is not just collaborative work, but hyper-collaborative work where we’re really in each other’s pudding all the time. Is that an expression? I don’t know.

Sandy: It is now.

Tara: We are in each other’s pudding all the time. 

So, at this point we started to talk about what we’ve learned from devising theatre and also what’s valuable enough to share with the people who have the most power in our world. What would we share with those CEOs and presidents and prime ministers and billionaires if given the chance to inject our learning into their brains Matrix-style?

Apollo: The first thing that comes to mind is to be aware of what we can’t do. In devised theatre and collaborative work, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s not just with a collaborator that I’ve known for a long time for most of my life. It’s with new people as well, working with strangers and being present and listening to what do they know that I don’t know that is actually going to make this piece bigger and more beautiful than I could have ever potentially imagined.

Sandy: Apollo, as an excellent example, you just described that he came down the day of the performance, his tire blew out. He arrived and in a very short period of time was willing, open, and able to in-load information, not take it, understand what he did know, what he didn’t know, and have the courage to jump into the process, and give it everything you had. And so it’s this intelligence, this ability to see intake quickly, a courage to not be handed a script and know exactly what’s going to happen. You have to be courageous enough to walk into this. In the devised world, it’s like, we always used to call it “the empty room.” And you are walking into the empty room, and nobody’s handing you a script, and nobody’s telling you what you should be doing. You have to figure it out. You have to come up with it.

You have to find it inside of yourself, and then you have to bring yourself to it and be willing to try and fail or try and succeed. But watching Apollo do that yesterday is kind of, to me, one of the epitome of that. And I think that so many people in power don’t have that. They want to know all the time. They want to be right. They’re not really looking at what’s around them. They have an idea; they’re just going to plow through it and enact their idea, their ego, without bringing anything of themselves into it. And they never walk into an empty room.

Martin: Now we shifted a little bit into talking about the process. When you walk into that empty room, what do you do? What does it look like when it works out, and what does it look like when it goes wrong?

Apollo: Starting a new show in a devising process, what we have is a blank slate, a blank canvas, a nothingness. Osho, who’s complicated now, but he describes it as no-thingness. And that’s the point right before the universe was about to be born. And that is so exciting.

And then it’s choosing the right people in the room who you trust, who you’re willing to trust at a distance for sometimes we’re stuck in a room together for a year, so how do we have these...Sometimes it’s in an afternoon we make a show, sometimes it’s a full year, but we still have to trust these people that we’re going to go on this journey into the unknown.

And I think almost every time I’ve done it, it’s been worth it. And what has been created on the other side has been far more than anything I could have imagined on the first day. So, that’s both the beauty and the challenge. And then there’s of course conflicts. There’s people who have ideas that are different than others. There are ideas that exceed the budget or the space or limitations, or there’s voices in the room that say, “What limitations? Let’s stick through this pile of , and then we’ll find what we need. And limitations don’t exist.” And those are some of my favorite people to work with. So, you’re really taking a gamble.

Sandy: I was trying desperately to think of how to answer this question because every process has been so different. I think one of the differences maybe in my personal experience is that even though it’s devised, I’ve pretty much always worked with a very strong director. So, it’s very, I think almost never been just a group collaboration. I mean, every process starts that way with people bringing their ideas and their stuff. But there’s always been in the processes I’ve worked through a very strong director that helps pick and navigate and ultimately guide the process. And I’ve been in projects where you literally walk into the room with nothing. There is no provocation, there’s no idea, there’s no nothing. And that’s beautiful and hard at the same time because it’s beautiful in that anything is possible, you can bring anything into it. But it takes a very, very long time, at least in the way that I started working, which was through physical exploration and improvisation.

It takes a lot of time to get through your first stupid ideas and then getting through that to get to a place where we could actually create something interesting. It gets a little easier, of course, if there’s parameters like “we’re creating a piece, here’s the themes that we’re talking about,” or “this is what we’re going to try to explore with this.” And then working with Stereo Akt, the fascinating thing for me was it was a very different way of devising work and in a lot of ways was very refreshing to me because it wasn’t months and months and months and months of pulling and hacking and trying and developing. It was like, let’s get some ideas. Let’s start putting them together and seeing how they move. But once again, with a very strong director, with someone who had a very clear vision. And so we were able to circumnavigate and able to keep moving until we got to something more interesting.

Martin: I just like to backpedal for a second and offer a game for all of us. The four of us in this room share the same native vocabulary on what devising is, or maybe we don’t. How about we just quickly define or provide our own definitions of what a devising method or process is? It’s already a question if it’s a method or an attitude or a structure or an aesthetics or whatever. So, just please with your own words—

Tara: What are we talking about?

Martin: Big question.

Sandy: I guess what I would say is that to me, devising, it’s broadly broken down in my experience with you’re handed a script and written by someone else. And a lot of times a director comes in, designers come in, people come in from the outside with their concepts around this, and the performer is enacting a role inside of this, but it’s very limited to their interpretation of somebody else’s words, their ability to interpret the director’s wishes and how to interpret these words, the designers coming in and building their vision of what this world is. Whereas to me and my experience, devised work is the people in the room are the creators. They create the content they create. In most of the situations I’ve worked in they create the scenery, they create the costumes, they create the storylines. They create everything together, and from themselves about something that they want to talk about or express or perform rather than taking somebody else’s ideas and interpreting them. So, creation versus interpretation, I think, is the simplest way I can separate it.

Apollo: My favorite activity during COVID was to get ten kilos of basic clay and throw it on a table in my living room and just start punching it. Not very violently, but just working with this abstract nothingness. And sometimes I would invite people to just grab at the clay with me when I could. Sometimes it was just me. I had no idea what it was going to become. I had no idea what I wanted it to become, and I wanted it to be nice. I wanted several hours of work to end up with a final product that I was happy with. But the journey in there was not clear from the get-go. And for me, that’s a bit of what devising is. I can have a shape, I can have a color, I can have a mood, I can give myself a theme to work towards, but doing the whole process is unknown.

And I think the two of the things that really work for me in devising is say “yes” more. “Yes and—" because you never know where it’s going to lead. And then also to fail faster, because the faster we fail, the faster we can get out the things that don’t work and find the little gems that do. And I think that requires a certain level of humility to allow yourself to fail. I don’t think we do that enough in this world, in art, in corporate, in anything. Let it go. Fail faster, move on, and we’ll find perfection or at least something more delicious on that path.

Martin: Devising can take a shape of one day, one week, six months, three years of process. And I think I often hear from theatre artists who prefer devising methods that if I knew what it was going to be the end, I wouldn’t have started working on it in the first place. So, yeah, I think there is a desire to discover, to dig deep and find something I couldn’t have thought of just like Apollo said earlier. But I feel like I always have a very similar arc project from project to project. In the beginning, everything is possible and everything is so interesting. And then in the middle there is a collective sense of big confusion. What is the gluing material? What is this whole thing is about? And in the end, oh my god, this is so small. And is this what we all accomplished in all this time? And why didn’t we just hire a playwright? Of course I’m exaggerating now and many of these things are post-dramatic interdisciplinary pieces. Most playwrights don’t do this kind of stuff, but you know what I mean.

Tara: Do you have a sort of shape that you can describe about what this process looks like for you?

Apollo: I think a spark helps a little bit of dopamine that says, “Yes, I want to see this.” What do I call it? Living the fantasy. Being full fantasy is exciting for me. I’ve had projects where my only starting note is that I wanted ten thousand ping pong balls to rain from the ceiling. And I don’t know why, I don’t know how we get there, but that was really exciting for me. Ten thousand ping pong balls and a synchronized swimming number. It’s a starting note. For others it can be an emotion. It can be a moment that I had in the subway with someone, a random interaction that provoked something that made me say, “I’d like to explore this more with people that I trust.” In the end of the rehearsal process, we may not have the ping-pong balls. We may not have that emotional spark, but it got us somewhere. It got us in the room together.

And then once we have these little pieces of the story of the motion of the arc of characters in this world, then we can start putting the puzzle together. Once the puzzle’s together, then we can get a sense of the image of this painting, and then we can see if we like it and then we can make adjustments. But for me, I think that’s the basic way that I work. With a spark, with blooming of those images, with myself or my collaborators, and then some editing of, “Okay, how do we make all of this insanity function in a way that is then presentable to an audience?”

Tara: I feel like this is super, super true for you, what you just said, of course. But it’s, you work in a way that’s actually a constant blooming, and I feel like you almost stay in what I think of as the first part of a devising process for a lot longer than most other art makers stay. I remember a specific example when we were in Paris together. We weren’t in the same year, you were the year above me, but we were both at the Lecoq School and it was the night before your big final performance, the soiree of the second year. And I remember you coming to me sort of completely exhausted/super, super stressed/super inspired, and a dog going after a piece of meat kind of moment. And you were just like, “Should I sleep or should I make a giant mask that could finish the entire piece with a spectacle?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I might go to sleep.” And you were like, “I think I’m going to make the mask.”

Apollo: I think I made a twenty- or thirty-foot puppet that was the opus, just it only existed on stage for fifteen, twenty seconds. But it was the vision that I had that was like, “Nope, this is all that matters right now.” But what comes from that is excitement and spark and inspiration. And the reason that I do theatre. If I wanted to do something, if I didn’t want to take a risk, I would’ve worked in an office. If I didn’t want to take a risk, what’s the point of going on the human journey if we are not here to risk and create and inspire and challenge and push the boundaries of what’s already been given to us?

Sometimes it’s in an afternoon we make a show, sometimes it’s a full year, but we still have to trust these people that we’re going to go on this journey into the unknown.

Tara: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

Sandy: Basically every process I’ve worked on, whether—and durational is basically the only thing that kind of changes in this—is that there’s that first section where with or without ideas, provocations, whatever, everybody just dumps everything on the floor, every idea they have, every inspiration they have every piece of music they want to sing or whatever. And then out of that mess starts to find the threads of what’s real. And this is the other part of devised work that I really like is that in every process I’ve ever been a part of, a lot of people could come up with a lot of really great ideas and sit here and talk about them. The difference between thinking about an idea and actualizing it on the floor is a wildly different thing. And what all devised processes have been is that you try it out on the floor, your idea hits the floor right away and you see if it works, if it doesn’t work, if it needs this, if it needs that.

And then slowly, I think I’m echoing probably exactly what Martin said, is that suddenly you’re in the middle of all this chaos. There’s a lot of ideas, there’s a lot of things that are good, and somehow those have to be woven together dramaturgically, directorially. And that is I think probably the most challenging moment in devised work is somehow taking all of this inspiration, all of this art, all of this energy, and distilling it into something that is presentable to an audience and, at the same time, still true to your making. And that’s one of the hard things when you create something the first time it works, it’s like this, heaven’s open and angels sing. And then you try to repeat that the next day and you’re just like, “Well, I feel like an idiot now.”

Tara: Yeah, now it’s different.

Sandy: Now it’s dumb. Yesterday God spoke to me. Now I’m sitting in a corner rocking. But yeah, so that to me is pretty much every devised piece I’ve ever done.

Martin: We’d like to hear your thoughts on authorship and credit because this is a tricky and sensitive thing in devising processes. It always starts this openness we were talking about and the moment of spark. It tends to be always more democratic. And along the way it narrows down. And as the more editorial process starts, the director becomes a bigger authority in the room. We know the reasons for this, and then we can, I think often sense a shift also in the authorship and who provoked what, who inspired what, and who owns the idea. So, this is a big topic, but maybe you have some specific examples, good or bad practices. Some people claim that the director brings together the team, they curate the artists, they inspire and pull out things from the artists that they didn’t even know that exist in them: the golden editorial hand, the vision that holds it together. Or it’s just appropriation from the beginning till the end. And it’s just taking credit for other people’s creativity who maybe are not as assertive or don’t identify as directors. Where does the truth fly in your opinions?

Sandy: I think for me it’s simpler when you have an ensemble, a group of people that works together repeatedly. And I’ve seen this in a lot of cases where I feel like it’s this group and it’s their work and people are noted, this is the director, this maybe was the music organizer. And whenever I would see that, it was never listed out, this person came up with this scene, this person came up with this scene. It was like this piece was created by this ensemble. And that to me, I at least always understood it, that everyone created it and all the pieces came together. I think it’s more tricky when you’re putting together a group and it’s not a unit that people can identify with as a whole. It’s a collaboration made up of various different artists for a project or a period of time. And so then I think it does get more tricky because you’re generally bringing in artists who feel like they do have their own voice and their own specific lines of work.

And that is a question that I don’t know that I have a good answer to in terms of how to give credit to that. I mean, I guess I would probably still take it back to the ensemble model. This group created this piece of work, and this person was the director, and this person ran the music rehearsals or whatever, but the group created it. And I think that’s kind of the only way you really can speak about devised work, unless there is something very, like everybody’s performing, but this one person comes in and they build a thirty-foot puppet and that’s their whole thing. That’s what they did for this. This is their part of it that you might say “puppet created by.” But in terms of the type of work I’ve ever done, I just feel like… But the group does have to be recognized. And I have been in situations where the group was not recognized and that’s not okay.

Tara: Over the process we talked with our participants pretty extensively about the ethics of crediting in devised work and how much space that crediting can and should take up over the course of a live performance. Sandy was one of the clearest voices participating in that discussion because she has a lot of experiences, both positive and hurtful about the issue. We wanted to get more pointed and clearer about her feelings about how we dealt with credit in our five-day workshop. There’ll be much more about this topic in the essays that we publish.

Sandy: I think maybe something that pops into mind is a big storyboard in the lobby that describes a little bit of the process and who did what. And somebody can sit there and read it and kind of understand or what everybody talked about today when in our discussion, maybe after the performance, that information is there so that you don’t come loaded in with “who am I looking at and what did they do?” And trying to parse it out. But afterwards you can look at it and go, “Oh, they did that. That’s fantastic.” Because I agree that I don’t want to have to try to explain it to the audience before they have a chance to see it and experience it. But maybe afterwards, yeah, like you said, these are the people that were involved in it. These are their websites. Here’s a little information about them. That kind of thing might be lovely. Because this group, who knows if this group will ever work together again?

Martin: And there are also those audience members who couldn’t care less because they just want a good experience. They want to have fun, and they see a collective, maybe it’s a temporary collective, maybe they work together for twenty years and they created a fun experience for them. And we acknowledge them as a collective work, but they didn’t come for an artist talk or to understand someone’s bio and ars poetica. Now I’m just provoking opposite spectrum.

Sandy: I agree with that statement completely. And I think more of my impulse was having worked with these people and feeling so... I was discovering who they were. And it was such a joy and revelation to me that I wanted to be like, “Look at this. I just saw them for the first time three days ago. Aren’t they stunning?”

Apollo: When you enter into a devising process, I think any process, collaborative process, it could be devising, it could be business, it could be whatever you choose, you become an organism. And as an organism, it is in everyone’s best interest for you to function to the best of your ability, which also means giving space to people to function to the best of their ability, which may not be the best of your ability so that this entire creature that you are now a part of can be 10,000 percent better than if you had all been separate little cells out there. And I think credit is a tricky thing. And it’s tricky in a world where money runs things and name credibility runs things, and those. I go back and forth between, “okay, I should do that more because that’s the type of world I live in,” and also, “how do I fight against that because that’s not the type of world I want to participate in?” So, another vague answer.

Tara: No, it’s good. And I think it also ties back to this original, or this early question, that we had of what would we tell politicians or what would we tell world leaders, that it’s like, “It doesn’t have to be your idea all the time. It can just be a good thing that happened. You can give credit to somebody else. You can take credit for fucking it up.” I think that, I don’t know, what a gift that we get to be artists and get to be in a world where those things are allowed.

Thank you so much. Thank you for holding space for us this whole time, Sandy. Thank you, Apollo, for showing up, despite having a blown-out tire on I-25. It was super scary. I’m so glad you’re okay.

Apollo: Me too.

Tara: Thanks, Martin, for reminding us to speak like human beings and not artists all the time.

Apollo: Thanks, Martin.

Tara: That’s all I have to say.

Martin: Are you talking about my accent?

Tara: That’s all folks.

Martin: Thank you for listening to Bridge Between Realities. Each episode focuses on a theme that was a core element of our workshop series. Other episodes focus on immersive theatre, site-specific work, the ensemble model, community involvement, and co-leadership.

Tara: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts, including on non-commercial open-source apps like Anytime Podcast Player and AntennaPod.

Martin: This project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding. If you like this podcast, please share it to your friends.

Tara: You can find a transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com.