The Luxury or Necessity of Ensemble

Martin Boross: Welcome to the fifth 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. I’m a theatre and filmmaker from Hungary.

Tara Khozein: My name is Tara Khozein. I am a classical singer and theatre artist. And we are the hosts of this podcast series and the co-artistic directors of Bridge Between Realities.

Martin: Over the course of theatre workshops and residences in three locations across the US, we created this six-episode podcast series. We recorded this episode in Philadelphia on the heels of our session with the HotHouse ensemble, the actors ensemble at the Wilma Theatre.

The session began with an open format sharing circle where some administrative updates were shared by the leadership team, and then went into a really wonderful physical training developed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, who worked with the ensemble and who is mentioned briefly in the episode.

Tara: Our workshop used a combination of Soundpainting, which is Walter Thompson’s multidisciplinary sign language for live composition, as well as several short group improvisations to work towards our concept provisionally called SoundFishing, which is a kind of public space concert with actors.

Martin: For more information on the HotHouse ensemble and Bridge Between Realities, check out the description.

Tara: This episode focuses on the ensemble, both the model and the training of an ensemble. Let’s meet our guests. Yury Urnov is a theatre director and producer and one of three co-artistic directors at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, alongside Morgan Green and Lindsay Smiling. The Wilma is one of the leaders in contemporary theatre nationwide. It received the best regional theatre Tony Award in 2024. Yury’s performance, My Mama and The Full Scale Invasion, at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre was named best theatre production in Washington, D.C. in 2024, receiving the Helen Hayes Award. He also teaches at Towson State University in Maryland and serves as an associate director of the Center of International Theatre Development. That’s CITD.

Martin: Suli Holum is a director, performer, choreographer, and playwright, and has been a member of the HotHouse Acting Company at the Wilma Theatre since 2018. She was a co-founding artistic director of the Pig Iron Theatre Company where she co-created ten original works. She teaches ensemble creation at the Pig Iron MFA program and serves as the head of HotHouse professional training at the Wilma. Her new play, The Woman Question, premieres this May at People’s Light in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Tara: We love many, many things about the Wilma, but it was especially interesting for Bridge Between Realities because of their ensemble, the HotHouse actor company, and their commitment to shared leadership models, which is tangible on every level of the organization. We asked them about what the Wilma is to HotHouse ensemble and what the HotHouse ensemble is to the Wilma.

Suli Holum: So, the HotHouse ensemble was founded by one of the founding artistic directors of the Wilma, Blanka Zizka. And Blanka, after years of running a traditional regional theatre, wanted to go back to her roots that began in Czechoslovakia and that she and her husband at the time brought to the United States, which was influenced by Grotowski and other modalities. So, she formed this resident company of actors, and she named it the HotHouse. We’re going on ten years now, and some folks have been in the group the entire time.

And we continue, we accumulated trainings, and we have encounters with amazing guests who expand our toolkit, widen our view on what the training is. So, we’re not locked in. Like, if other influences come in, then it disrupts the training. It’s more like the training, like I said, is this bedrock, and it’s a collection of trainings that Blanka felt would create the most agile, emotional acrobatic, physical availability.

And initially she was very text. She loves text. She was like, play-plays. She wanted to have these vigorously, super embodied, emotional beings to do plays, big plays. And over time, I think we’ve gotten more playful about our relationship to text. And I know we want to talk about narrative or not about narrative, but yeah, that’s the HotHouse.

And we meet every Monday almost, and we are paid for those hours that we come, which is a tremendous rarity. And then everyone in the company works all over the place. We are not guaranteed performance work at the Wilma. We are guaranteed these training sessions. And then sometimes we’re able to apply those skills on the Wilma stage, and sometimes we bring them into other spaces.

But the thing that really continues to resonate with me is this individual and the group, like what is your relationship to your individual performance practice and how do you stay available to the group and permeable, and all of the iterations of what that means. It’s a very particular kind of trust to know that you can kind of recede, you can step into the group, you can even get a little lost inside the group and be of tremendous value and then emerge from the group. Yeah, it’s really rare. It feels very unique in actor training, at least in the United States.

Yury Urnov: If we are talking about theatre not as therapy. What is the result of theatre? If the result of theatre is every other production, that you can survive without a company. But if we’re talking about theatre as a process which accumulates experience and builds upon the previous experiences and develops, then where else could this knowledge and experience live, but in the actors’ bodies and souls, minds? For me, it’s a necessity. It’s neither a luxury nor just a weird idea, but if we’re talking about theatre that develops, I think it only can develop with the company.

Suli: We have this theatre that’s quite large-scale, and Blanka’s like, “I need to train actors how to fill this.” And so, a style has emerged from that, a style and an ethos. So, we are literally at home on this particular stage. We have trained for this and this relationship to the audience. The way that the theatre is built, it’s very easy to see everyone in the audience. It’s a very specific relationship. And I love to consider how the training is, yeah, it’s very specifically connected to that.

Tara: We literally just left from getting to do this workshop with HotHouse and I was really interested because it began with a kind of check-in, open check-in with the whole group, and several people talked about other experiences that they had had outside of what they had done at the Wilma. And I was really impressed and also moved that there was also this kind of just interest in everybody’s experiences from the outside and no, I didn’t feel any jealousy or ownership of any of the artists, and that it just, it felt so accepting, curious, and open.

And I’m wondering how, if that resonates with you, because I just went over and spent four hours with you and you spent many, many, many hours in this context, but if that seems accurate to you, I’m wondering how you’ve been able to create that kind of culture.

Suli: I think that connects back to what I was saying about this unique detail about this training, that it is certainly we are growing ourselves, our individual selves, but we are also training to be in community. And so, for example, often when we’re workshopping a new piece, people will rotate the roles. We get to watch each other muck around in character, and then we pick up what someone... So that there’s this way that a proposal gets laid down, and then somebody else picks it up and takes it somewhere new, and then somebody else takes it up. So that creates a culture that is, it’s a culture of mutual support and investment.

So, I feel like when we do those circles, people talk about their kids, people talk about—we have this bonding time—but also people talk about the opportunities that they have. We all feel like, “Oh, they’re taking the work there and they’re taking the work there.” We all have that investment in each other’s practice as artists because we grow together. So, when we experience others, we go see, I love to go see HotHouse members other places. You know? I love to see like, “Oh, wow.” And you can see it. There’s a vibration that’s happening.

Yury: Well, part of that is just, I think, some ethical principles on which Blanka was building the company and forming the company, but also a lot of that is in training because there are all these exercises that are about, yes, you’re individual, but you are with the others, but you’re the part of the ensemble. There is the shadow exercise that I probably, the first one I’ve seen some years ago, years ago now, when one person is kind of, can you describe it?

Suli: Oh, ghosting?

Yury: Yeah, ghosting probably.

Suli: Ghosting, yeah.

Tara: Ghosting is a technique that the HotHouse founder, Blanka Zizka, developed to let the actors work on their feet right away. It also replaces extensive table work.

Suli: So right away, a member of the ensemble is whispering the text into the performer’s ear and then the performer gets to play immediately. And that to be the ghost is to be able to be on stage, but not the focus, and to be delivering, but in a way that’s not imposing an interpretation of the text.

Martin: It’s like a prompting machine? A teleprompter?

Suli: Exactly, yeah. And it’s intimate. It’s very intimate.

Yury: It’s very intimate.

Suli: Because you’re like, “You are what you are.” It’s like you become like the internal thought of that performer. So, there’s like a visceral thing that’s happening too. I’m so used to it. I’m like, I was in another room where we were workshopping stuff and I was like, “Oh, god, we’re so hamstrung by people holding scripts.”

Yury: And a ghost, yeah.

Suli: And the director was like, “What? No, then there’d be a whole other body on stage.” She was just like, “I don’t understand at all, that’s weird.”

Tara: And you’re like, “But is it? But isn’t this also weird? Isn’t also reading books weird?”

Suli: Yeah, isn’t the idea that only one person can play a role? You know what I mean?

Tara: Yeah.

Yury: I think we all perceive it as some sort of luxury, like artistic creative luxury. I mean, it’s a norm, but in the given circumstances of the American economy, it is a luxury. So just having this space where we, yes, we work towards the result, but we’re not producing a show at this moment.

Suli: To spend that day with you guys, I feel so fed. So, there’s a way that having this time to be together and to train and explore together, to be invited to show up and also to talk about things, that’s a rarity in the American. You get cast. There’s a limited amount of time. If you’re talking, you’re talking about what your character wants around a table. And then you have to be very careful not to impose what you might think somebody else’s character wants. You know what I mean?

All of that is just totally out the window in our room because we’re invited to show up full mind, full body. And we are always thinking about what it means, the why. So that came up in the conversation. We just had the little check-in about Snow Queen and a wonder about the impact that the piece is going to have and the whole group is holding that. That’s a part of it.

Yury: Yeah. I think there is a feeling of shared responsibility.

Suli: Shared responsibility. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I find the HotHouse time to be really sustained. I find it to be very sustaining for that reason. It’s like a pool of energy, care, intimacy, security, risk that we can dip into.

Yury: Yeah. And actual creativity, you know?

Suli: Super creative, yeah.

Martin: And how do you guys experience this creativity, this risk taking, this safety? How do you experience this to influence the productions, the forms, or the choice of material, or the directors that you choose to work with?

Yury: Yeah, I think there is an answer to each of these points because what was happening today, for example, in HotHouse is a bit of a date. We do sometimes, that happens, but rarely just would hire a director to do the show. So, it’s usually a process that is developing between director or directors and the HotHouse members. And if there is a contact, if there is chemistry and if there is some aesthetical curiosity and alignment, then it becomes a show. Then it becomes a production that becomes a thing. That’s one thing.

Second thing I would say that as a director from my end of things, I’m certainly, I know that I can do much more. So, I’m thinking much more with much more freedom and liberty when I’m thinking about the future show. I know that these actors will be able to do that.

And another thing on the director’s end is that I walk into the rehearsal room with—I don’t want to say with no fear, the stakes are always high when you’re directing so there is always some fear—but it’s never a fear that actors will reject your idea or won’t even go there. I think it’s so important on the director’s end of things, so important that you have some idea, it’s sort of formed, but it’s not fully formed. You need to try it. You offer it to people and it’s a very intimate process of proposing an idea, of proposing the thought. And then it’s very easy to close it at this moment. It’s very easy for actors to reject it, even without rejecting it verbally and openly.

And I think what HotHouse is so good about is about picking up any idea, however idiotic it is, and running with it for some time until it expires or until it flies. And from the perspective of director’s creativity, that’s absolutely valuable.

Suli: Over the years, HotHouse members have become directors in their own right, and so we’re entering a new chapter where HotHouse actors are conceiving of projects and then directing HotHouse actors, which is just lovely, it’s lovely. And also, that ethos of try, of like, “Before you understand, go,” it infuses the work that everybody’s doing, as I’ve said, in other spaces.

And I think when we’re dating directors, that person, that director who holds the room as a space for inquiry as opposed to execution, and for instigation, that really works. That really, really works. And the ensemble is really ready for that.

And you said this great thing because Blanka hadn’t directed here for a while, and she just came back this past season to direct Archduke. And you said it was like having a tuning fork because she hadn’t worked with us for five years, and she came back and went right into the exercise, went right into the training with us, and right into this space and suddenly like, “Oh, right, here we are with Blanka.” All the lights are off, and we’re experimenting staging in the dark for a while. We’re wolves. We’re whatever. We’re just going with it. And it felt so good to feel how what she had instigated had continued in her absence and then she was able to jump in back into that stream.

Yury: Everything in the system wants you to have everything planned. You need to know everything, all the designs, all the blocking preferably before you walk into the rehearsal, which kind of kills the purpose.

Suli: We’re going to focus on table work. We’re going to make sure everybody believes what they’re saying, means what they’re saying and knows what they want.

Yury: And then everybody stands up and nothing is left.

Suli: Right, right. And it’s like you have lost then that layer of the unexpected use of space and the unexpected use of rhythm and color and design. And I mean, that’s been such a glorious thing. This is true of Blanka with Archduke, with Yury, always the ongoing conversations with designers.

Yury: Again, it’s about the space, as you talked about, its specificity, but also about not dividing, “Here’s the content, and here’s the ornament.” The design in this theatre is never an ornament; it’s a performer, it’s a role, it’s a part, it’s a voice. And I think one thing that HotHouse actors understand so well, that it’s their partner, that the design, stage design, lighting design, costume design, prop design, they are performers, and they are their partners, and they know how to partner with their partners.

Tara: How do you move between these roles? I’m reminded today you were also participating in the workshop and playing along with the actors. How do you negotiate that personally between moving between different roles and taking on those responsibilities and letting go of those responsibilities?

Yury: I think that trying to create the space with less hierarchy, I think that helps a lot. The co-directorship, we have three co-artistic directors, helps with this. One certainly healthier thing in American theatre than in my native country, in Russian theatre, is that director doesn’t have to be a person sitting in a high tower on a marble chair. There is still some hierarchy of decision-making, but that’s a different thing. I think we’re trying to get to a place where this hierarchy doesn’t exist or is not that obvious in the world of even fundraising. I don’t know. You know what I mean?

Suli: Mm-hmm.

Yury: People who support us, specifically those who support us for a long time, they’re kind of like, I mean, family is the wrong word, but they are our partners.

Suli: Compatriots.

Yury: They’re compatriots, right?

Suli: Yeah, yeah.

Yury: So, I do think that this breaking the unneeded hierarchal borders is helpful.

Suli: Yeah. So, when we enter and we drop into that, to the Terzopoulos training together or we go into resonance work, it’s an invitation to set other concerns aside and just be very present physically, vocally, even spiritually. And so that helps me a lot.

I would say my biggest struggle—and I’ve been in a lot of ensembles, and I’m used to wearing a lot of hats from artistic director to creative producer to writer to directing while I’m in it, it’s a lot. Those are a lot of juggling. My biggest challenge in this space is that I want to be involved in everything all the time. And so, managing expectations and actually keeping the other fires of my professional creative life going so that this can be what it is, this can offer what it offers, and I can enjoy that and it can be fortifying, that’s the challenge. Yeah.

Tara: So, if you had to say it really simply, why is the ensemble work so important to what you’re doing here? How does it serve everyone in the room?

Suli: That room is full of people who have won major fellowships, whose work has toured around the world outside of the Wilma. So, the wildness that that group of people, it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll show up on Monday and just mess around,” I think it’s really special, and I think it really speaks to how rare the invitation is.

Tara: To train together.

Suli: To train together, to be present, to care, to… permission to be invested in each other as humans. It’s like... Yeah.

Yury: It’s so needed. Even in Eastern Europe and Russia, we don’t actually train together, right?

Suli: Yeah.

Yury: So, a company, it’s an organization, it’s like an administrative body. And musicians train all the time. Dancers train all the time, every morning. And the fact that actors or theatremakers don’t have space for training feels weird because without training, there is no growth, and there is no irresponsible ideas that you sometimes need to try.

Suli: Yes.

Martin: How do you guys think whatever you do whenever you do it is atypical for American theatre?

Yury, you come from a different country, different artistic and political and cultural context and with a ton of experience from there. And also, you bring European pieces and Eastern European pieces, and you translate some, so you introduce new material to American audiences.

Suli, if I’m not mistaken, you have a ton of experience and background in devising theatre. Actually, we might call you one of the pioneers of that, how it was introduced and more and more become part of the mainstream for American professionals and the audiences as well.

So, we are curious, in your own words, how you would put your position on the map of American theatremakers?

Yury: I do have a privilege of working in two different cultures, and I feel there is, it’s like fuel. There is energy there because you keep comparing, and you keep looking at what is missing in this theatrical particular culture institution that is there and otherwise. So, I’m looking at this really as a privilege. And there is something about theatre just as an art form, it’s not easy for that to travel. Theatre, it’s expensive, it’s heavy, there’s that.

In United States, it is separated by the ocean, and often it does feel like the American theatre culture is too hermetic. It’s too much looking inside and not taking enough of the outside air. And again, information in theatre travels slow, and with no government financing for travel, for, I don’t know, Norway sends their stuff around, Germany sends their stuff around. So, there are ways how their theatres are becoming the part of the broader worldwide theatrical context and narrative, trend, whatever.

We are a bit secluded here. There is this feeling, and a lot of my efforts are to open up this particular theatre for now, Wilma, to other experiences, to other artists, to other cultures, be it playwriting and directing and traveling sometimes, because I feel like, yeah, it’s just like, I don’t know. The first big festival I went to was 2009 Grotowski’s one-hundred-year anniversary, and I’m still under the impression of that sixteen years later because I was suddenly exposed to a concentrate of the avant-garde theatrical ideas. I’m still feeding off them.

Again, information travels very slow, and we are in an already quite isolated culture, which is now, because of the politics, probably will become even more isolated. So yeah, I see my specialty as trying to fight against the isolationism of the American theatrical company.

Suli: I have always been really interested in the why of storytelling and, in particular, why some stories get told and others don’t, or why some bodies are invited to tell their stories and other bodies aren’t. And the HotHouse Company is such a thrilling space for me to land after decades of working this way because it’s a really, people come from a lot of different backgrounds, like training, but also where they grew up and countries and languages spoken, and it’s a really diverse group. We don’t agree on stuff. And that has always been really exciting to me.

For me, when I’m teaching devising, I say, “Okay, well, where’s the argument? Where’s the disagreement?” If an ensemble has an idea and they’re like, “We all agree that X, Y, Z,” I’m like, “Great. Well, you don’t need to make a play about it.” And then ideally there’s a foundational disagreement that then the audience gets invited into and then you can grapple with it together.

I really love how delicate that can get, how you have to create a space where people feel really supported and respected if they’re going to get vulnerable and actively disagree with each other. Politeness, it can’t be polite. It has to be authentic. And I think that the American theatre needs more of that. I think we need to grapple with the big questions.

One of the foundational pieces, one of my foundational pieces I made in collaboration with Deborah Stein, and even the way that we were working was an argument with American theatre. I was like, “Yes, a person can be an actor and a director and also not be writing the play, but be making the play. And then someone else can be a playwright who’s also directing.” And it would break people’s brains just the way we were working. And designers can be dramaturges. They can be. If you set up a multi-year process and just work in these intensive creative sprints, then you can end up with something where everybody’s really invested.

Anyway, the central argument of that piece is, “Is nonviolence a privilege?” It’s an impossible question. And if you put that question on a female body, it has different resonances than if you put it on a male body. Yeah, it feels really rich and thick. Not a play that I could pitch to, it’s not an easy pitch. It’s not an easy place for an audience to sit through. I’m drawn to that.

And I would say that the Wilma occupies a space for those difficult conversations that our audience—we’re talking a lot about this, actually, you used the word brave—that America needs. We need these spaces for people to come together and grapple with edgy, difficult, uncomfortable conversations. We’re in crisis as a country because we’ve lost the ability to do that with each other.

Yury: Or even to sit in the same theatre with each other.

Suli: Yeah.

Tara: You wrote a brief email when we asked you to do this, and I think at the end of it, you said something like, “And these are the things that I’m interested in, and theatre is the perfect way to grapple with this.” I’m misquoting you, but it really made me just want to ask you that question. What makes theatre the right medium for what you’re doing?

Suli: Oh, yeah, yeah. Awesome. I’m really excited right now about, or I have been for a long time, about history and the way that history is taught as a foregone conclusion. And so, I’ve been experimenting with archival research as theatre. How does it translate into a live theatrical event?

And what I love about theatre as the medium is that everything is happening now. I’m really interested in what brought that performer to the theatre that day. Why are they on stage, and why are they in front of the audience? And what does the audience see? And I think you mentioned this, being really interested in performance that changes the rules a lot, so that the audience is like, “Oh, I thought...” Right?

And just being alive to the fact that there’s a traditional theatre experience where the audience is like, “I’m going to pretend that that person doesn’t know I’m here, and I’m going to pretend that they don’t know they’re playing that character.” And I’m really interested in exploding that so that the audience is in touch with how we are all living the history. We’re living, we’re standing on ground that has a tremendous amount of history. We are embodying that history and how we relate to each other.

And that’s something that is really contentious in this country right now. There’s like a real desire to shut down conversation about history at all as a backlash against a desire to talk about it all the time. You know what I mean? So, I’m just interested. And then how we were working a lot with intimacy and interiority today in the workshop, and I’m interested in how interior the political can be, how simple.

Martin: Suli’s working on a piece called The Woman Question, which centers archival research. We asked her about the process and how she’s dealing with form and content.

Suli: We’re tracking these historical medical students. There’s all these women who became doctors in the 1850s in Philadelphia that nobody’s ever heard of. Why haven’t we heard of them is one of the questions. But if in the middle of that exploration I start telling my birth story. Then I am both this historical character and myself, and the audience is being asked to sit with my own history, which is political because of the way that I chose to give birth, and that these historical predecessors anticipated. It can resonate on a... That’s the magic of theatre. All of those things are happening at the same time. I’m both embodying this historical character, and I am also myself reflecting on my own child twenty years ago, and I’m also me now.

Yury: In this audience with these people listening.

Suli: In this audience with these people, asking them to hold space for me. If you’re actually asking as opposed to pretending to ask the audience, which is a whole other thing. Yeah, that’s why theatre.

Martin: We’d like to hear about what you guys are working on. What are your desires, dreams in the near future, or maybe any upcoming project that’s something that you are aesthetically or content-wise drawn to? And we’d specifically like to hear about what are the challenges that you roll in front of yourselves to tackle and to challenge yourself and to renew and find something new?

Yury: My head is all in Snow Queen now because we’re going into rehearsals in three days. So, it’s been clearly months of work with designers and with actors in HotHouse sessions, but so it’s coming, so it’s the focus. It’s the first time Wilma is doing the all-ages show, and it’s the first time for me. I never did the show for all ages. We advertise this at 7-107, I believe, so if you’re 108, don’t come.

The harder the times—and I feel like the times are actually pretty bad, just like genuinely pretty shitty, to be honest, and not just in the United States, but broader than that—the more I’m inclined to do it like a fable or a fairytale. I want a bit of simple truths. I want to know for a few minutes what is good, what is bad, what is cold, what is hot, because the moment I’m turning any device on, I already don’t, and so I’m holding to this.

And I’m also really holding to the idea of talking to children as to grownups and to grownups as to children. I think theatre is a perfect space for that and I really hope we can do a very contemporary, very modern, and very alive fairytale that both very young people and very not-young people would be sharing the experience of without breaking this division between the two.

Suli: I’m really looking forward to Snow Queen. Yury has invited me to play a king and a spoiled bandit, and I have no idea where we’re going, and I can’t wait. I’m so excited. I was always like, “Yes, Yury, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.” I can’t wait.

Tara: I really look forward to seeing the Venn diagram that you have to create.

Suli: I’m so excited about that. I’m so excited about that. And as far as my own work, The Woman Question is something I’ve been developing for a couple years, and it goes up in the spring at People’s Light for a run, and then I would love it if it had more life after that. But what I’m focusing on in that project, and it’s rippling out, is an image that I got from the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, which is this fun fact that oak trees, below ground, their roots don’t go straight down. Their roots grow sideways and then they wrap around each other so that when a big wind comes, the oak trees are holding onto each other. And that is very alive. And the history that I have stumbled upon is very alive in the ensemble and the designers. We are all doing that with each other. And then I feel very much like our entire community in Philadelphia, our theatre community, artists everywhere, we just have to, we got to wrap our roots around each other.

Yury: Yeah, and there is this moment in the last scene of Snow Queen where all the characters are holding hands, and you’re, as a director, like, “You can’t do this on stage, Yury.” But then you’re like, “You know what? Fuck it. Yeah, let’s do it. “

Suli: It’s actually, yes.

Yury: “Let’s hold hands.”

Suli: In moments like these, things get very clear.

Tara: Thank you so much for making an image of everyone holding hands. I feel like I need more images of that these days.

Martin: Thank you for listening to Bridge Between Realities out of Philadelphia. Each episode focuses on a theme that was a core element of our workshop series. Other episodes focus on immersive theatre, site-specific work, devising, 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.

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