An Homage to Theatre in The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy

Tjaša Ferme: Hey theatre, science, and innovation fans. This is Tjaša 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.

Today I'm talking with Josh, Joshua, and Jon, from a Sinking Ship and Theater in Quarantine's production, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy.

Joshua Gelb: That's right.

Tjaša: That's right. Hello, guys.

Joshua G: Hi.

Jon Levin: Hi.

Tjaša: If we can just go around, and say your name and your role on this production.

Joshua G: I am Joshua William Gelb, and I played Egon Tichy in The7th Voyage of Egon Tichy and I was one of the co-creators.

Josh Luxenberg: I'm Josh Luxenberg. I am the writer of The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, and also one of the co-creators.

Jon: And I'm Jon Levin. I'm the director, and also a co-creator.

Tjaša: Amazing, welcome. I'm so excited about this conversation. Yeah, I was there with my friend, and we were both like, "Oh, my God, how did they do it?" And then I was like, my season was technically over, and then I approached my producer, and I was like, "Hey, there's like two more episodes I want to do. One of the shows that I saw was really masterful in what he was doing with video design. Would you extend it?" And he was like, "Are you talking about The7th Voyage of Egon Tichy?" "Yeah, I thought he was masterful." So I got a season extension. But I really wanted to talk to you guys, because, well, honestly, I wanted to learn all of your secrets.

Joshua G: We're happy to give you a few.

Tjaša: Yeah, amazing. I would love that. Yeah. Let's start with a little warm up. If you guys could tell us how you collaborated, how this came about. My understanding is that this started during the quarantine, and the beginnings of this were in a closet. So walk me through your process.

Joshua G: Sure. Well, I'll get started. So Jon, Josh, and I have worked together several times over the course of the past some years. Of course, Jon and Josh have Sinking Ship Productions. They've been working together since college. Jon and I go all the way back to high school. And so we had just come off of our previous production, which was an adaptation of Kafka's The Hunger Artist, which we did in 2017. And it had been touring for some years. And then of course, the pandemic happened in 2020, at which point I started my own company, called Theater in Quarantine, which was operating outside of my closet. Which is right behind me, if you could see me pointing to it?

Tjaša: I see a lot of screens, is what I see.

Joshua G: Well, there's a whole lot of screens in the closet right now. But you can see it's four feet wide by eight feet tall, and only two feet deep. I was living alone at the time and going a little stir-crazy, when I realized that the aspect ratio was very similar to an iPhone. I put an iPhone on a tripod and began recording these studies in movement and performance, that eventually escalated into these full-scale live productions. One of the early ones, I think we did over two dozen different live streams, and one of the earliest ones, and one of our first big hits, was 7th Voyage. I reached out to everyone I knew, and Jon and Josh got back to me with a very exciting pitch. Take it away.

Tjaša: What was the pitch?

Jon: Well, we were looking for a source material, and I'd recently stumbled upon this collection of short stories from Stanislaw Lem, all about the space traveler, Egon Tichy, who is having different adventures. And there's a whole book, and he goes on different adventures. And the first story in that book, bizarrely called “The 7th Voyage.” It skips around, there's no first through six voyages, the seventh is the first one. And was about him being trapped alone in his spaceship, and then running into all these versions of himself from the past and then the future, and arguing with himself, and in this claustrophobic way. And I thought, "Wow, that's really..." And also the cover of the book, the image on the cover of the book was a little teeny room with a little window, and outside the window is outer space.

And I said, "Oh, my goodness, this looks exactly like Josh's closet. Wouldn't it be cool if we could make Josh's closet feel like a spaceship floating in outer space? And if we could expand it into multiple rooms, so that the room transforms into different rooms, and feel like we're on a space adventure.” Particularly at this moment, where we're all trapped at home, and feeling really, really stuck—the idea of voyaging somewhere through our imagination was really exciting to me. And so we took the story, and the structure of the story, as a jumping off point. And then we started playing around with, "Okay, well, what can we do in this closet? How can we move from one room to another?" Josh said, "Well, I've got this plank of wood. I can hide behind this plank of wood." And I said, "That's great. You're going to do that constantly." And he said, "I hate you. I don't want to hide behind this plank of wood all the time." But—

Joshua G: It was very uncomfortable.

Jon: And then we started building the piece together. And we were all working over Zoom, so it was a really strange process. And we brought in our design team, who were also working remotely in Zoom. And we would Zoom into Josh's apartment, and he would try things, and then jump back on the call, and say, "What was that like?" And we would all say things, and sketch things out, and post them into a Miro board online. So there was a lot of this really online collaboration, that was very strange at the time.

What does it mean to make theatre for the camera that remains theatre, doesn't become cinema, but also isn't a poorer version of something that you'd rather see on stage?

Josh L: It was really intense and unusual. First of all, every rehearsal was a tech rehearsal. Second of all, we were working, I feel like it was fourteen to sixteen hour days. I had my computer and monitor and everything set up on my kitchen table, and I would just get up and walk to my computer and open it up, and sit there for the entire day. And fourteen or fifteen hours later, I would close my laptop and go back to bed. It was just absolutely wall to wall. And we've never done anything like it. I think we were all new to this way of working, obviously, the pandemic-imposed way of working. But even video, I know Josh and our video designer, Jesse, have both worked with the Builders Association, and incorporated a little bit of tech that way.

And Jesse particularly, of course, is an expert in it. But it also felt like we were making up a completely new way of working and making theatre. And we were trying to answer the question: what does it mean to make theatre for the camera that remains theatre, doesn't become cinema, but also isn't a poorer version of something that you'd rather see on stage? And so I remember Josh said at the time, "I don't know, but I think you have to be able to see my feet." Which, I just thought was a great way of thinking about it. And of course, the liveness was really important. And as we get into the duplication, the repeating time loop, and Josh doing scenes with himself, we wanted as much of that as possible to be live. And this newer version that we just did takes that even further, because you can't hide anything. The audience is actually seeing him do it. So we really needed everything to be live.

Jon: Yeah, we've got these great two-person scenes. So these two, two-person scenes, where we see the scene twice. And in one version he's doing one of the two characters, and then in the next one, he is doing the other of the two characters. And when we originally did this, the goal was always that we would live-capture the first time around, and then play that back the second time. And so it would really be identical. And of course, as we were getting closer and closer to the performance date, it suddenly became clear that this was not going to be possible. We just didn't quite have the technology there. And so back in 2020. And so we were like, "Damn it. Fine. Well, we'll just cheat this time."

But now when we revisited it now, for the Redux version in 2025, we were able to be like, "Okay, here we go. Live capture. We're doing this." And we did it. And it was so satisfying to be able to do that, even if not everyone in the audience clocked that this was now being live captured and live looped. It was really important to us. And it was really exciting to see that the idea from 2020 finally happened the way we had originally imagined it, in 2025, was very exciting.

Tjaša: It was mind-blowing. Yes, it was satisfying for us too, because we clocked in that this is for real. I know that I was comparing, looking at small details. And then I think that the thing that really blew me away was also that both of the Joshes, both characters from two different timelines, coexisted in the same space, and both of them seemed equally real. And when there was a handoff, it was just so real. There was no blurring of the line, or there was no part of the body that was kind of, I don't know, glitchy, or in shadow. I don't know, they just looked really real.

Joshua G: We were really lucky that Jesse, our video designer, was familiar with some compositing techniques, that made it immediately seamless, to be honest. Because we were working out of a purely white box at first, the earliest composite we used was just bringing the darkest color to the forefront, which meant I was inevitably pretty much darker than my white closet. And of course, over the course of the show, we've used a bunch of different techniques, and a bunch of little magic tricks, like those pass-offs you were talking about. But in the meantime, the goal was always to really feel the tactility of each iteration. And so I think it was exciting that we were able to achieve that.

Tjaša: Yeah.

Jon: And I think part of what works really well about the compositing technique that Gelb was talking about, just there, is, it brings the shadows of both characters in as well. So we're not having one thing as the background and then cutting out the person and sticking him in there. The richness of both recordings gets layered on simultaneously, and so they both feel really present, the way that you're talking about.

Tjaša: Okay, we just went straight to the meat. We skipped the soup and the salad, depending on whether we're in France or somewhere else. Let's talk about this. Okay, great. Compositing techniques. Great. That I feel like maybe I know what that means. Like putting things together, layering things together in some kind of a container. But can we talk a little bit more about the live capture? Where is that going? And then what's, I guess, the processing? What is the container where you composite something that was live two minutes ago, and it's now recorded?

Joshua G: Well, originally we were using a program called Isadora. This was the 2020 version. Which has been the foundational program for my work. And of course, Jesse was very familiar with it. That was where we did all the earliest stuff, and where I had worked out a bunch of looping techniques that are effectively just like an audio pedal looper, but for video. So it's not dissimilar from that at all, just purely software. I believe now, over the course of shifting it to this hybrid in-person version that you saw, which we haven't really described. But in many ways it was taking that digital version, putting the closet on stage next to these large giant screens, and so you're able to see this composite simultaneous with seeing the capture. What I am doing is being fed into a computer and then a whole other movie is being spat out back at you. And so I believe on the new version, we use TouchDesigner and we used Millumin. For sound, we were using QLab, classic theatre software. Yeah. So that's how we were doing it, but truly it's delightfully simple.

Josh L: I think what's amazing about this, though, is, the complexity of the programming that Jesse was doing meant that sometimes really unexpected things would show up. And we spent a lot of time, essentially, squashing bugs in tech rehearsal. There was at one point, where a design element, a white line that went across the middle of the screen, that we had tried out in a workshop a year ago, just reappeared for one of the performances. I don't know how that was still in the computer. I don't know what triggered it to show up. It seemed like there was a little... After the amount of time we spent working on it, it seemed like there were some ghosts in the machine. And sometimes the virtual camera that we were using would move differently than we were used to. It would not go all the way, and the room would be positioned in a different place on the screen than where the camera move was programmed for.

One of the cool things about the newest version of it is that we were able to use a virtual camera in a 3D environment, to move around the ship layout. That is a composite of all the different video streams that we've put into it. The original one, we faked it. So every time we zoomed in and out, it was essentially a 2D thing that just required very careful tracking. But this one, Jesse could actually move the camera around in the space and get a little sense of that 3D motion. It was really incredibly sophisticated.

Jon: And part of what that allowed him to do, was to add different layers in the foreground and background, of little details, little schematic... So the overall design framework of the show is a little bit like a blueprint of the spaceship. And so we start off, we're just looking at one room of the spaceship, and then as we see him move to another room, it shifts over a little bit, like Wes Anderson style. So we're in the next room, and then you get to see another room. And as the piece goes on, slowly the camera zooms back, and you get a sense of the whole ship, and all of the rooms together, and that this is part of a spaceship complex of a number of rooms.

So part of what Jesse did in that 2D schematic blueprint, was add some elements a little bit in the foreground, and a little bit in the background. So whenever the camera moves either laterally, or deeper or further, we're getting these other elements whooshing by at different speeds. You're getting that parallax effect that really makes it feel 3D and lived in and rich, in this very exciting way. And in addition, we added the background background, which is the star field. So we have the feeling of being in outer space, even as we're in this blueprint.

Tjaša: Yeah, okay, what kind of a camera is this? And this is a camera that you operate from a computer rather than holding the camera and zooming in and out, and pointing left and right?

Joshua G: Part of the trick here, of course, is that the camera never, ever, ever moves, which is why we're able to do all of the compositing. So we just use a Blackmagic Pocket 4K, although I believe the original was something else. And it sits on a tripod. And truly, if anyone touches it, the show's over, because we have so much pre-recorded footage and all of it has to match.

Tjaša: Yeah.

Josh L: You pointed to something interesting by talking about zooming the camera. The frame of the shot never moves at all. In that way, it is almost vaudevillian. It's like a piece of proscenium theatre. It's a flat plane. The camera is aligned with the performer, and that never moves at all. And all of the movement that you see, all the feeling of zooming in and out, that's all happening in the computer. But everything you see on that screen is a collection of images that match perfectly, because they are taken from the camera in that exact position. So in a way, it's almost like a lot of little proscenium theatres all put together.

But part of the desire to keep it theatre and not tip over into film, meant that we made a rule for ourselves that we never do a cut-in or a physical push-in with a camera zoom, that Josh's body, in the frame, always exists in the full shape of that closet. And even if we have multiple ones of those, and we can virtually zoom in and out, we never go so close that you aren't seeing the full frame of the closet. And so it still maintains this element of theatricality. And I think that's part of what gives it its distinct feeling.

Tjaša: I so agree. And there's so many layers of this vaudevillian thing, or theatricality, as you call it. One of them is this incredible precision, basically almost like physical theatre take on how we move in the space, and how we deal with props, how we hand things off. How every angle of the counter, the box, whatever you want to call it, every plate is 700 percent accounted for. You use everything you set up. This game of precision is just so admirable. And Josh, the writer, Josh, what you were talking about when you were building this, and how you were working on this for fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and that basically every rehearsal was a tech rehearsal. I feel like I want to pull my hair out, because as much as I love doing this and watching this, I know how frustrating it had to be. And especially at the beginning stages, when you guys had to go through all the rough stages of figuring out what this is, and how it works.

Josh L: I feel like, and you guys, maybe my memory is getting cloudy, so tell me if you feel differently, but I feel like it was more frustrating in the tech week leading up to the in-person production, or our workshop, than it was doing those long hours during the pandemic. For one thing, it was saving us. We had something to do and something to throw ourselves into. And there was this process of discovery. And it feels impossibly complex when you look at it now, and you think, how could they possibly have put that together? But we really did build it step by step, from something simpler. And I think once we tried to get it in person, the complexity had grown. There were technical challenges that exist in person, that don't exist online.

One of the things we had to deal with was the fact that when we were doing live looping, the sound in a room where audience members have to be able to hear the sound over speakers, is also getting captured, but we need to not hear that, or it becomes an echo. So there is also some live sound mixing and programmed muting that's happening, to try to deal with that. But every performance is a little bit different, so it can't be completely programmed. So there are a lot of challenges, but in some ways, my memory of those early days was that they were long and hard, but a little simpler in some ways as well.

Jon: I'll say that we kept adding more complexity the second time around. So these moments that you talk about, with the handoff, that was something we didn't have back in 2020. And so as we were doing it now, and workshopping it last year, we said, "Well, wouldn't it be cool if they could interact a little bit more? Ooh, how can we up the ante here? Ooh, how can we surprise them even more? How can we do another impossible thing?" And of course, each one of those adds another thing that can go wrong, and that has a bunch of other ramifications. And so I think there was a feeling maybe, because we'd done it once before, that, "Why aren't we just back to where we were the first time around?" But the answer was, because we added a whole bunch of more obstacles and a whole bunch of more things to make it more difficult.

And there were all these places, where the first time around we could be like, "Ah, we'll just cheat here. And this little twenty second piece will be prerecorded and nobody will know." But this time we said, "Okay, we can't cheat. So that means we have to find ways to make all of this work. And we're going to make the fight more complicated, and we're going to add in these other moments here." And so I think we set the bar even higher this last time around, which, of course, also always introduces more complications. And then there's more things we have to figure out how to finagle.

Josh L: I'll say one thing that is frustrating, I think, from a creative point of view, is that due to the complexity, you don't have the opportunity to change things nimbly, the way that you do in a regular theatre production. So for example, from a writing perspective, I could not change one word in previews. Because in order to change one word, we have to go through an entire process, involving several departments. Josh is using an in-ear monitor to do his performance, receive his lines. That's how he can achieve the precision with the prerecorded or looped version of himself. So in order to change one word of any scene that had compositing in it, we needed to create a new in-ear track, which meant a recording session. Then we needed to shoot the pre-shoot version of it, that video and sound have to be processed. Then we have to do a new in-ear that's based on the real timing of the scene, and then we have to put that into the programming and into the live performance.

And if it was extremely important, maybe we can make time for that in tech, but it really... Adjusting the timings, the little things, the cuts in scenes that tighten things up, was something we had to really figure out. And a little bit just guess at, earlier in the rehearsal process. You learn a lot about how to write for the situation. And something Josh pointed out to me during our workshop is that big cuts were much, much easier than small cuts, because he has to just receive these lines in his brain and say them. It's not a memorization process, in the traditional way, but it's not fully... It's not like somebody could be whispering in his ear and he would say anything, because he also has to have that precision, and he has to be very familiar with it. So a little tweak would throw him off way more than a complete rewrite of a line. And all of that meant we were pretty locked into our choices, pretty early in the process.

Tjaša: Wow. Yeah. Jon, I want to speak to what you were talking about, making things more and more and more complicated. And I think that from an audience point of view, I see how many traps you're setting for yourself. I see your obstacle course, and I'm like, "Oh no. Oh no." And I'm almost like, I'm definitely rooting for you, because I don't want you to fail, but you win every single one of them. So from an audience standpoint, it's also incredibly satisfying when I see that you guys didn't cut any corners. You didn't want to make it easy for yourself.

Jon: We appreciate that. I think it's, we're always trying to figure out, is this new crazy idea worth it? And then sometimes we say we're going to do it, and then we've gotten too far along in the process to change our minds. And so then we're like, "Oh, God, I guess we have to make a spring-loaded lock mechanism that wraps all the way around the closet, and you can pull it over here. And that thing flies in with a spring hinge." And, "Oh, I guess we have to make that now, because now we've written it in and it's too late to remove it."

Tjaša: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, that's definitely true. And I just wanted to throw out, before I forget, for your listeners who want to see what we are talking about, you can watch the original 2020 streamed version of the show on the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page. Josh, I don't know if you want to chime in on that.

Joshua G: Yeah, everything that we produced from 2020 through 2021, including some more recent pieces, is up on the YouTube channel. It's all still there, all the process behind the scenes, every live stream.

Tjaša: Just one question about pre-recorded. Is really nothing, nothing, nothing pre-recorded in this iteration? Because I feel like right at the end when you see the entire ship with all of the rooms, and Joshua being in every single one of the rooms in different positions, and different stages of life, I guess, even age, was any of that prerecorded?

Joshua G: Oh, yeah. We don't want to mislead you. A ton is pre-recorded, an absurd amount is prerecorded. It takes us about a week. I think it took us almost two weeks this time, because we were being a little meticulous, to record all of the different versions that we have to do. The process is so different than most theatre pieces that we've all worked on. Because in most theatre productions, you do a lot of rehearsal, and then you get into tech, and that's the show. As Josh said, though, every day was tech. And really, our process began with this pre-recorded session, where we would have to set and figure out what all the other versions of me are doing, in order for me to then learn how I can perform with them.

And so in that respect, it was much more like a film shoot, where we just do a whole lot of takes, and then choose the best one. I think our longest take was about eleven minutes, twelve minutes, right? Anyway, so it is true, there's a ton of prerecorded stuff. The looped stuff, we were really excited to get in. That's the first two or three scenes in which I'm doing a duet with myself, that are fully repeated. But once we get into the material that doesn't fully repeat, of course, then we just had to prerecord it.

Tjaša: Okay. Thanks for clarifying this.

Joshua G: Sure.

Josh L: Yeah. What Jon meant when he said that we didn't want to cheat at all on that, in the original, there were moments where there was nothing live happening on screen. And in this version, there's always something live happening on screen, with one exception, which is the fast-forward in the scene that we call the triptych, which is the big fight scene with the three of them. And we make a point of the fact that it's not live in the staging of that moment. But other than that, everything is live, and everything that repeats is a live captured loop. There's no cheating, even in the interstitial, going from one scene to the next.

Jon: Yeah, it's funny, there were some audience members who we talked to, who said, "Oh, I thought it was just all prerecorded, he was just moving along to the video." But no, that is never the case. The live Josh in the closet is always on the screen, and so there is always a live one of him at every moment in the show.

Tjaša: I have a stylistic question, or a question of theatricality. And I don't know if this is a question, maybe this is an observation. Obviously as an actor, a lot of actors obsess over, "Oh, I'm doing this on camera. Am I too big?" And so I feel like I was very meticulously researching this in real time as I was watching you, Josh, and so you see yourself pretty physically embodying this character. I feel like the physicality is big. And then at the same time, watching your filmic representation. And this is bizarre, because for some reason I kept feeling that the filmic version of you, even though you were captured in real time, and this was you in real time, seemed more cinematic. So I'm running into an oxymoron, and so please enlighten me. Tell me, what? What?

Joshua G: This has been my quest and my mission from the get-go here, which is, yeah, what does the theatrical mean on film? As Josh said, I believe you should see feet. Or rather, that's to say, I think the major difference between performance on screen and performance on stage, is that the full body is almost always being experienced on stage, and our usual experience of performances on screen is the close up. And so of course, you get this much more intimate style of performance. I think what is exciting about pulling out to this unchanging wide shot that we give you in this process, is that it allows the performance to be both simultaneously cinematic, in that it's being captured on a camera, and that it fits into the cinematic mise-en-scène that we've established. But it's playing by theatre rules, by proscenium rules. And so it's doing one and the same.

And I think in many ways, I like to look at the old silent movies. When I think about Theater in Quarantine, when I think about Tichy, the camera rarely moved, right? It was too big, too bulky. And so you have a lot of static wide shots with just immensely theatrical performances. All of these people were from vaudeville, and that is the birth of cinema. So in that respect, I feel like maybe it's a throwback to an earlier version of cinema, but it's also, in many ways, just our way of really concentrating on this question of how to make a movie that feels theatrical.

Jon: In a sense, after this process, and watching the show, there's a way in which it really does remind me of the early George Méliès’s films, where he's trying to think of all the camera tricks that he can do. You know, Gelb, at one point when we were doing this, you described it as, "Yeah, it's a series of tricks. We're doing a series of tricks. That's the show." And I think there's a way in which that's like... There's some truth to that, right?

Joshua G: It's not dismissive.

Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly.

The audience knows that it is impossible, and yet we find a way to do it.

Josh L: I think that it's almost a way of offering something to the audience. And it's what you were talking about before, the complexity, and the, "Can we do one more thing that seems impossible? Can we do this? Can we have three things out of this thing that we thought could only do one?" is a little bit of a gift to the audience because we put in time and energy into thinking, "How can we surprise and delight?" And I think that something like the handoff of the pliers, that we were talking about earlier, which feels like it's impossible, a digital version of a guy who hands a physical object to a real person, and then vice versa, when it repeats, is something that is so much fun. Because the audience knows that it is impossible, and yet we find a way to do it. And the reason to indulge in that trick, is just for the sake of the delight of pulling it off.

Joshua G: I think also what's so exciting about the hybrid version, of course, is, we break the rule of magic. We do it once for you, and it's astounding, and then we literally repeat the scene and do it again for you. But that second time is when you get to concentrate and see how we're doing it, and really think about the methodology. And not just the trick of it, but the technique. And I guess that gets me so excited about these new behind the scenes ways of looking at the integration of technology and live performance and digital performance, and really thinking about how we can create something that's really multi-layered and fun, and gets you thinking.

Tjaša: Yeah, it's almost like an homage to theatre. What is theatre in all the meta ways, and how can we really, I don't know, enjoy, geek out, kink out in the theatricality. It was like ice cream, ice cream, ice cream. A lot of ice cream. More, more, more. All the theatrical buds were on.

Josh L: I think going back to that initial question about how it feels cinematic and theatrical at the same time, just digging into this idea of the full body a little bit more, I think that is the trick. I suspect if we punched into a close-up of Josh's face, and he was doing exactly what he was doing, you would start to feel it tip over into something that feels a little too big. But I think that by having that frame be pulled out, his performance was scaled to the size of the box. It wasn't scaled to the size of a Broadway house, but it was scaled to the size of the room that he was performing in, which is what we do in theatre. And there's expressiveness throughout his body.

You mentioned physical theatre earlier. We all come from physical theatre background. That is how we describe the theatre that we make. And so we're always thinking about how to tell the story using the full body, and all the elements that you're seeing. And so I think that cohesiveness is part of how we pull off the trick of having it be theatrical and cinematic at the same time.

Tjaša: Yeah, talking about the full body and the box, there was also a lot of playing and twisting with the perspective of how you were grounding the box, where the gravity was. I know that every single time you shifted gravity, or shifted the perception of where it's leaning, I was like, "Oh, my God, this is totally viable. This is completely believable. I can see Josh in front of me, I can see where the gravity is, and for some reason in the theatrical, or in the cinematic version, I believe that too."

Joshua G: I spent a lot of time upside down.

Tjaša: Yeah, comfortable, it did not look.

Joshua G: It's where all of the digital work began for me in 2020, was tilting the camera and realizing that we could walk on walls. And that was truly the beginning of all of these questions, and is, I'd say, is manifested in Tichy in one of its fullest ways. So that's been very exciting to continue doing, particularly now that we're out of shutdown. I don't have nearly enough excuses to walk on my walls anymore.

Tjaša: What does touring this piece look like? How easy is it? What are the challenges? What are you afraid of? What are you trying to accomplish?

Josh L: It's both easy and hard, in the sense that the show packs down really well. It's a fairly small show to tour, in terms of just the amount of stuff you have to bring with you. And Josh is one person. It does require a team of people to pull it off. We've been trying to figure out how to simplify that as much as possible. But the biggest challenge is, what Josh alluded to earlier, which is that the camera can't move even a millimeter once it's been set up. And a lot of the best touring opportunities, are to festivals. We talked about whether or not we want to take this to the Edinburgh Fringe. We've all done the Fringe before, but we can't set up in fifteen minutes, and break down in fifteen minutes. And so I think the biggest challenge is finding places where we can set up. But the interest has been terrific, from presenters. I think people were really excited by what they saw, and we're hoping we can let this have a life for a while now.

Tjaša: Okay. Well, this has been so delightful. Thank you all for taking the time. Amazing meeting you. I can't wait to see more of your work. And I'm also interested in difficult questions, so I would love to work with you, any of you, at some point. Because I'm like, "Yeah, that obstacle course, let's go."

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