Pink Fang on Legacy, Care, Collaboration, and Possibility

Ash Marinaccio: Hey friends, this is Ash, your host for the Nonfiction Theatre Forum. I’m thrilled to introduce you to the first episode of our podcast produced for HowlRound, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. The Nonfiction Theatre Forum will bring together artists and culture makers across various disciplines to explore performance reflecting real people, real events, contemporary social issues, and history. Nonfiction theatre comes in many forms—from documentary and autobiographical theatre to ethnographic verbatim and tribunal performance. This podcast will platform conversations about this work in relation to collaboration, ethics, staging, devising techniques, audience, and artistic processes.

Of course, there have been many names given to theatre made with primary sources and real materials. Scholar Carol Martin’s umbrella term, “Theatre of the Real,” might be one of the most recognized. I’ve chosen to use “nonfiction theatre” here because it situates theatre in a larger body of nonfiction and documentary work where theatre is often overlooked and, I think, has a unique contribution to make.

I’m a New York-based documentarian working at the intersection of theatre, photography, and film. I recently completed my PhD in theatre and performance. My research took me deep into the world of nonfiction theatre and how it’s created and rehearsed in places impacted by war and conflict. Along the way, I crossed paths with many of the incredible artists who you’ll meet right here on this podcast. This podcast is also a project of my company, Docbloc, which was founded to bring together artists working across nonfiction forums for performance and theatrical collaborations. If you want to learn more about Docbloc connect with us on our website at docbloc.org or on Instagram @docblocprojects. That is D-O-C-B-L-O-C, block with a “C.” 

Like many millennials, my first encounter with documentary theatre was watching The Laramie Project in a small community theatre in Long Branch, New Jersey. In the late nineties, I was a closeted kid, a very sheltered evangelical teenager. And I’ll never forget the first time I saw visible LGBT people speaking openly and celebrating their identities on stage.

Actor: (from The Laramie Project) My understanding is that I was the first out lesbian or gay faculty member on campus, and that was back in 1992. So it wasn’t that long ago. I was asked at my interview what my husband did, so it came out then, do you want to hear a funny story?

Ash: When I moved to New York for college, I performed that monologue, the Catherine Connolly monologue, at every audition, a wildly inappropriate choice for an eighteen-year-old, but it meant something to me. So yeah, I’m drawn to nonfiction theatre because giving a space to real stories and experiences on stage is powerful. I love intense research processes and devising with friends. I’m fascinated with how personal memories, experiences, and historical events get archived beyond documents, in bodies, voices, movement, and through performance. Over the next eight weeks, we’ll be taking a cross-disciplinary approach to our conversations, bringing in theatremakers, journalists, documentarians, anthropologists, and activists. We will look at different approaches to creating nonfiction theatre, discuss collaborations, research processes, and how truths are represented on stage and in the rehearsal room. 

On our first episode today, we’re joined by three visionaries, Jane Jung, Sara Zatz, and Mei Ann Teo, the leadership team of Pink Fang. Pink Fang creates art at the intersection of performance, community building, and social change, rooted in the ethos and artistic legacy of Ping Chong. They are artists and builders creating bold new works of performance. Pink Fang is a home for daring experimentation, expanding the boundaries of theatre, and nurturing creative communities of care. Their co-creation process digs deeply into community-specific histories and narratives. Jane is Pink Fang’s managing director, Mei Ann is the artistic director of new work, and Sara is the artistic director of engagement. We’ll discuss these positions and how they work together later on in our conversation. We’ll also discuss some upcoming creative work, including the Undesirable Elements, which is the anchor of Pink Fang’s theatrical storytelling. Undesirable Elements began in 1992 and is rooted in approaches to interview-based theatre and collaborative storytelling. 

Here’s an excerpt from a 2012 performance.

Actor: (from Undesirable Elements) 2001. The months following 9/11 are filled with despairing events. Students drop out of my sister-in-law’s class because her name is Yegane Moderside. She wears a hijab. My friend Sholeh’s brother is pulled off an Amtrak train because he’s talking on his cell phone in Farsi and interrogated by the FBI. My uncles changed their names from Mohammed to Steve and Mike. My best friend’s ten-year-old son asked me where my family’s from. I say, “My father’s Iranian.” He points his toy gun at me and says, “Oh, those are bad people.”

Ash: Thank you for joining me today. I am so psyched to have you all here for our first episode. I just played a clip from the 2012 Undesirable Elements anniversary performance. And I had spent some time in your archive listening to performances from some of the communities who’ve participated over the years, including youth, and a disabled community, and voices from New York’s Muslim community, and many others. How do you choose whose story to center and the communities you work with?

Sara Zatz: I can start with a sort of historical overview of how that’s worked in the pre-Pink Fang times and then I’d love to invite Jane and Mei Ann to consider how we’re broadening that in the Pink Fang times that we’ve now entered into. A lot of the communities that we’ve worked with historically have been through our Undesirable Elements community-engaged project, which brings individuals who are not necessarily performers onto the stage to tell their own stories. And that’s an ongoing project that Ping Chong began in 1992. And we’ve done over sixty-five productions in that series with different communities and different themes. And historically, that has been a project that had a balance of community partners, venues, organizations coming to us and saying, “We heard about this work, and we are working in this context, and we’d really love to invite you in to explore these themes or these issues, something that’s pressing within that community.”

A big chunk of that sixty-five came out of an invitation to us when people knew the methodology and thought that it would be a great way to enter into these conversations. And then also, Ping or myself or other artists that we’ve worked with have brought to the table experiences or themes of our own interest lens in terms of stories, conversations, communities that we felt like had something to say and that weren’t being amplified in different ways. And sometimes the projects kind of beget new projects. For example, we’ve had someone who was interviewed for one project that didn’t end up being included in it and then came to us with an idea for another project, which specifically happened with a piece that we did about did with the Congolese refugee community in Syracuse, New York.

And right now, there’s a new project that I’m working on that looks at stories of caregiving and people with dementia, and that is coming out of my own direct personal experience. So that’s something that I was really excited to bring my own needs and interests into that community conversation and discovering as I go with that, what a big community there is out there that’s eager to have this conversation.

Ash: There’s a huge community out there for that, and it’s something I think that’s been so overlooked in terms of work that’s been created about that, and with people who are caregivers. I’ve been a caregiver for a terminally ill parent—a decade of that. And it’s something that I think for a while there was a lot of shame around. I mean, I was just thinking about how it’s changed. I feel like COVID may have put these conversations out into the forefront around caregiving and grief and things that are associated with that. But I would love to know more about that project.

Sara: That project is the first project that I’ll be developing within the new Pink Fang framework. And so one of the things that we’re looking at in terms of nonfiction theatre is how to expand the structure of Undesirable Elements, which as I said has been going on over thirty years now. But it always had a very specific format that Ping had developed and that had been pretty continuous throughout with the different artistic innovations. It was always told chronologically, it was always told with very seated, very sort of static physically, and very simple design aesthetics. And as we’ve invited new artists into the Pink Fang community, and over the last ten years of, particularly during COVID where we played a lot with form when we couldn’t meet in person, we’re really trying to unpack and expand the form of Undesirable Elements along with how that kind of community engagement process is integrated throughout all of our new work generation, not just held in the Undesirable Elements form.

So my hope is that this new project that looks at dementia and caregiving, which will be the second or third project that we’ve done that has explored living with chronic illness or living with disability and what that looks like, that it’ll have a different format formal in its presentation, and particularly considering how to integrate individuals with dementia into a creative space that doesn’t require remembering the last rehearsal or doesn’t require needing to have a language around how to be a certain way in this space. So it’s very much in development right now, but my hope is that it’ll be integrating individual stories that are sort of pre-recorded with a kind of spontaneous creative process collectively modeled on a memory care cafe model, which is a sort of new direction in caregiving spaces for people with dementia and memory loss.

Ash: I am so happy to hear that’s being done. It’s so needed. It’s so necessary. And thank you for sharing.

A lot of it is about relationship building—ongoing relationship building that’s not just solely transactional—but also the recognition of capacity, sustainability for all the humans and individuals involved.

Mei Ann Teo: I came in during the transition, and one of the reasons why I was called to it was because of a lot of this work that Ping started, and Sara, and Talvin, and many other people were really crucial in building it to be a living legacy of an artistic impulse from Ping. And a lot of it is coming through my own alignment of having done documentary theatre for a lot of my art making life and doing it in China, in conservative Christianity, and in a lot of different places, and really thinking about what it means to hear people tell their stories and then see them in juxtaposition to each other, what meaning can be made from that, or the shifts of meaning that can be made from that that are possible. That in itself, the process in itself, is something that’s very interesting in meaning-making. And when I came into the company and I started to learn more about Undesirable Elements and I looked at the process of it, I was like, “My God, the process is just as important as anything else.”

And I think that I was drawn to being here because of a lot of that alignment, the alignment of listening, the alignment of the curiosity, really, that people who are doing documentary theatre—God bless you, please lead with curiosity. And that’s honestly what I see as such a beautiful impulse. And it’s not only the curiosity, but the ability to have empathy for that resonance and finding those relationships. So I think when you think about, “Oh, how do you choose stories?” I have worked with a lot of different communities that I’ve been invited into, and I’ve been able to look at how being Chinese Singaporean is actually very different from being Chinese in the mainland, in a rural town, in a big city. There are many different kinds of experiences that we can’t sort of just lump into “being Chinese.” And the stories that’ve been able to sort of be inside of and a part of have come through an invitation that had something that was like, “Oh, you’re doing this thing. You made a piece called Red Books with Seventh Day Adventists.”

Well, we have red books in China too. Let’s look at education in regard to communism and what people are taught. And all of a sudden, conservative Christianity meets communism in some little overlap of how I got from one project to another. And it feels completely disparate. But because of relationships and being able to meet people who are working in different places, you find just how much the place of impulse can be shared. And that’s honestly what has come to be a part of the work that I do, which is predominantly with professional theatremakers who are making work about their own stories. But I’ve also had the delight and honor to work with community members who have never actually stepped on stage.

Ash: I grew up in a conservative Christian evangelical house, so evangelical Christianity and communism, I see a lot of intersections there. But I also get excited when it’s brought out.

Mei Ann: And I think about... I just worked on a play with Madeline Sayet, Where We Belong, about her journey as a Mohegan Shakespeare scholar who goes... And I remember thinking to myself like, “Maddie, I don’t know much about the Mohegans.” And she pretty much was like, “No one knows anything about Mohegans. This is literally going to be the only play about Mohegans that is going to be told right now.” But what I started to find was what colonization meant to her and what colonization meant to me, and the way that I could really open up my understanding of what it meant was very much part of how the stories that I choose to say yes to emerge, where I was like, “Oh, I know a lot about colonization of my country. I don’t know about this.” And then that kind of brought me into a shared space that is a completely different situation.

Ash: Oh, wow. Yeah, I know Maddie, Maddie’s amazing. And Where We Belong is—I’ve read the script. My husband auditioned for the tour, I believe, because they had an opening.

Mei Ann: Who’s your husband?

Ash: Opalanietet.

Mei Ann: Oh!

Ash: Yes. Yeah. So I’m like, oh, yeah, I know the community, the Indigenous Native theatre community very well because of my husband. But in that play, particularly talking about being a Shakespeare scholar and Mohegans and colonization, which I think you were saying that, “Oh, nobody knows much about the Mohegans.” I’m realizing nobody knows much about colonization. What has been done here on this land to the Indigenous people? What continues to be done? But I’m curious about research as well, unless there’s anything else about choosing stories and themes.

Jane Jung: Yeah, so I think I’ll add from my vantage point to reinforcing how important the core and key the Undesirable Elements series has been, not only through this transition period to Pink Fang, but really the last few decades of Ping Chong Company. That was the groundwork for where we are now. And as Sara said, what we’re really exploring and excited about and energized around is taking that practice, the long-standing practice, interview-based documentary community-engaged work, which has been very, very responsive in terms of how the work gets made, very responsive and iterative to community relationships and needs coming from specific communities and us working very much in partnership and to now. And this project really started and was generated as an artistic impulse, and really an artistic installation back in 1992 when Ping Chong first originated it. It has since really grown and expanded across the world but also grown into pedagogy training practices and education programs in the community.

And so the principles and approach and methodology and practice is now really underpinning the organization looking forward. And we did a lot of thinking and work and setting around how the practice of community engagement that we’ve seen in Undesirable Elements, but also the organization in its DNA is really artist-centric, experimental, and focused on artistic integrity. How do we ensure that these are core, fundamental, continuing values, but ones that we can really own and reclaim in a way that makes it something new and old at the same time? And so that’s where we find ourselves with Pink Fang. And so the practices and values really have translated way beyond even the creation of the work into how we as an organization are operating and functioning and how we’re going about supporting and creating infrastructure for the work as well.

Ash: How does that work, though, in this moment with doing research and balancing the “necessary evils,” I guess, of the nonprofit world and nonprofit theatre with your ethos and your politics? The work is about community, and it centers on community care practices. How do you balance that with capitalism and those kinds of neoliberal structures?

Sara: Now we are... I mean, that’s one of the big questions going forward. We’re in a new model and a new leadership structure with three full-time leaders and that kind of internal producing versus partnership versus shared resources. So we’re definitely on a learning curve in terms of the next chapter. I think in terms of research and how to dive into the storytelling, I think a lot of that research comes from what’s shared from the community members that we’re talking to. And so hearing what is prioritized in terms of the stories that they want to tell and folks saying, “Okay, if you’re going to understand the educational system in Minneapolis, you need to go back to this moment when this regulation was passed.” And so I think it’s easy to do a massive unending rabbit hole dive into research, and I love research, but to kind of put some parameters around it, I think it’s really important in the structure that I’m familiar working with is that you can’t lead with just data, data, data. It needs to be the human story. And so always tying someone’s personal experience of “my grandmother experienced this moment in history,” and then making sure that you have the factual material to support that context.

And then of course that opens up all sorts of questions about who wrote that history and whose point of view is it? But that balance of providing context within the show and then framing it around someone’s individual lived experience or their family’s ancestry lived experience, I think is sort of the balance that I usually try and strike.

And it was always hard, especially if you’re trying to go back hundreds of years to boil down that material into something that an audience member can absorb while holding the human side of it. And sometimes that also looks like lots of resources that go with the production itself. But I think carving out the time in the creative process for research and more than research, I want to say building relationships and connections so that if we’re doing a residency, if we’re meeting “partners”—that I’m air quoting, which you can’t see on a podcast—but the research really is about talking to people, getting to know individuals.

And so much of the Undesirable Elements in community-engaged work is about highlighting stories that wouldn’t otherwise be highlighted. We’re not trying to put the mayor of the town on stage because that person has a platform already. So trying to find people who have been doing the work, doing the advocacy, living their lives, but not necessarily ever had a chance to really put that out in a public way. I think building those relationships, making sure that our partner organizations also have those relationships so we’re not just parachuting in and being extractive, but that that is part of what is folded into the partner organization and their reasons for wanting to do that work.

Ash: Do you partner with organizations when you started new project?

Sara: It’s a mix. So we may be invited in by a theatre, but then they have relationships to local community organizations, or we may be invited in by a community organization that has a relationship with an arts organization. So it can be a very main stage regional theatre or a completely grassroots youth-led nonprofit. But most of these projects, typically, you need a venue to do that final product, and you need a community organization that you’re building relationship that has those pre-existing relationships already.

Ash: That’s great. I appreciate hearing about parachute, parachute journalism. I’ve only really heard it talked about in the context of journalism, which is exactly what you said, like coming in parachuting into usually a conflict area or an area where there’s some kind of upheaval and coming in, being the expert and then leaving when the story’s over. It’s very extractive. I love hearing it discussed within the context of nonfiction theatre and documentary theatre. It’s really important because it’s something that has in some capacities outside of your work of course, but in some other projects it’s a huge issue with parachuting, and how do we continue to give support to communities long after the project is completed? What are we building and how do we continue it if it wants to be continued?

Jane: Yeah, I think as Sara was talking about, and kind of alluding to the question around reconciling nonprofit structures with the practice of making compassionate care. You know, a lot of it is about relationship building—ongoing relationship building that’s not just solely transactional—but also the recognition of capacity, sustainability for all the humans and individuals involved. It’s how do we support that? A lot of that is really unseen and unrecognized labor that happens behind just the time it takes to build relationships. And so that’s been a big ongoing kind of theme and topic, I think, as we are moving forward in this moment. Because at the sixtieth anniversary mark, when we started out on this next chapter, I think one thing we were just celebrating was the underlying approach to sustainability that made artistic career like Ping Chong’s possible, the ability for him to generate works continually over a fifty-year period.

What is the sustainability approach that could make that feasible and possible for the work of the work that we’d like to do, the work kind of impact that we would love to make partnership engagement with communities that we work with? And so I think sustainability has been a big through line and question and just taking a real look at the human needs around doing the work and being really honest with each other and ourselves about what it takes, is a big priority to moving forward.

Sara: And I think that goes also into the producing and the budgeting and thinking ahead when you’re thinking about the engagement needs of a project. Do you need ASL interpretation? Do you need other kinds of language support if you’re working with community members who live far away from the rehearsal space and have day jobs? Most of our folks aren’t equity actors. We did a project a couple years ago with the Kirya Traber, which was about people who are formerly incarcerated and working in justice reform. And where we were able to get rehearsal space, was, in some cases almost two hours away from where people lived.

And so budgeting in transportation support, budgeting in the night-after tech to be able to send people home in a Lyft so they’re not getting home late, and the next time to work the next day. So, I think all of that kind of producing in the eye of both sustainability and human care, is the kind of stuff that isn’t always obvious on the first day that you’re putting together a plan or a budget and you don’t want to think about it. When you go into tech and no one’s thought about it yet, do we actually have the resources to give everyone dinner? So, I think we’re always trying to make sure that we’re planning in that sense too. What are people going to need to show up to participate in this work?

Mei Ann: And to add to that: flexibility and adaptability. I think what I’ve always been really astounded by is the level of nimbleness and flexibility and adaptability that this organization has had in the past and just the thoughtfulness of how it has transformed. So, there’s a lot of that there.

Ash: Why nonfiction, and why now? I’m curious, do you call your work “nonfiction” or “documentary”? I started using “nonfiction” because I’m multidisciplinary and it brings theatre into the conversation of other nonfiction forms, which I think theatre’s always been kind of left out of those conversations, so that’s why I use that. But I know a lot of people prefer documentary theatre or investigative theatre. So I guess it’s a two-part question. What do you call your theatre, and why now? What is the role of this in this moment?

Jane: It’s interesting because historically I think we have had an aversion to label, although they are necessary in terms of communicating and signaling what we do. I think that there’s a lot of consideration and thought we give to language and word choice as a company. The work historically, currently, and moving forward is very research-based that really engages history, engages and honors lived experience. That’s something that we always come back to and want to tap as a through line, and formally speaking of the building on this legacy, experimental, interdisciplinary work.

And, yeah, I think of course there’s been a lot of different ways to kind of frame it—like interview-based, community-specific—and it really always goes back to a very core particular commitment to being artist-led and having that perspective really open up to shared lived experiences, unearthing histories that are generally forgotten in a broader sense and being very rigorous in terms of artistic process around research and around formal and creative process. And all of that I think is the grounding on which we’re building and moving forward.

Sara: Thank you, Jane, for encapsulating all of that because you said that so beautifully. When I teach about Undesirable Elements as a form, I usually use “interview-based theatre,” because it’s not verbatim, and I always want to make that really clear. It’s not oral history, although it’s a cousin to oral history. But I want to recognize that there is an entire professional field of oral history and that’s not what we’re doing. It is definitely community-engaged, community-based. And “documentary” to me is sometimes a little too vague. I mean so many things can be “documentary.” So that’s why I like “interview-based” because we do interviews, we are recording people’s stories, but it’s always made from those interviews. And I think one of the things that makes Undesirable Elements unique is that because we’re working with the actual individuals to tell their own stories, they have a final agency and sign-off on the script.

And, so, we do sometimes create dialogue out of a story that was told because they might say, “Oh, I don’t remember what my teacher said in that.” And we may create a moment of dialogue, and if it feels authentic to that person. That it goes into the script. But I definitely shy away from “verbatim playback,” and it’s fun. This is a conversation about non-fiction theatre. But there are so many different approaches to non-fiction theatre, and so it’s really fun to be intentional with the language. Think about what you really mean when you say “blank.” 

So for me, “interview-based” has felt the most comfortable, however, as Undesirable Elements and the engagement work that we’re doing that’s based in lived experience, which is also a phrase that I love is that expands, maybe it won’t be interview-based theatre because maybe we’ll be doing something else that’s not directly rooted in interviews while still coming out of one lived experience.

Mei Ann: One of my favorite filmmakers is Krzysztof Kieślowski. He’s pretty well known for the “Red, Blue, and White Trilogy” [Three Colours Trilogy] and is known as a really amazing narrative filmmaker as opposed to documentary filmmaker. He started as a documentary filmmaker, and he at some point in time decided that he actually felt that fiction would be able to reveal more truth, because in the process of making documentaries, he could see how people, in the acknowledgement that it would be true, would hide whatever they needed in order to present the truth they wanted. Where when he worked with an actor it would reveal something. So, I just kind of throwing that in there a bit because when I think about the forms of nonfiction, fiction, what is true? What is more true? How do we get to the truth? I think there’s so many amorphous things inside of all of those places. It’s like, how much poetry are you adding? You can have something that is called “documentary theatre” that is called “interview-based theatre,” and it looks completely different. 

So, I love us going like, “Well, what is a label, and how are we actually moving through something, and what are we trying to communicate about a process versus what you might see versus, versus, versus...” And I love that oftentimes when I teach a class called Documentary Theatre, it’s all about, well, what is it really? And the answer is it can be many things. Many things can be under that umbrella.

Jane: We’re also developing and supporting and creating a work called The Truth Beneath, which addresses these very questions around the relative nature of truth in light of disinformation, social media, and from texts from Maria Ressa, a journalist in the Philippines. So, I love how these are pervasive questions like both in the work and also amongst ourselves, the disorganization process.

Sara: That sort of themes around this work around dementia too, is this idea of memory, and memory is fallible whether we have cognitive memory loss or not. And so these questions of how do we tell our own stories? And the story that I told ten years ago was true then. And the story that I tell now is true now, but it may have changed and my memories may have changed, and some of the conversations I’ve been having with other artists who are caregiving for people with memory loss because what is truth to you when you can’t remember all the details, doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen, doesn’t mean that it’s just how you kind of express it in that moment. And so I think that’s actually... intellectually, I think that’s very interesting. We’ve been talking about societal memory loss and what does that mean if we’re talking about dementia and this idea of like, “Are we going through a collective amnesia?” And so, I think even within these frames of documentary theatre, there’s so many beautiful layers around that, the idea of narrative and what telling a story in a public communal space means artistically.

Ash: The notion of have we, as a society, what does it mean to have collective memory loss? That’s a really important question to ask at this juncture. And also who controls the memory? There are powers at play that are banking on us having collective memory loss and rewriting history and whitewashing history. So this work is so necessary now and these questions are—I hate saying it because it’s so cliche—more important now than ever. It’s, I think, what artists need to be looking at right now.

So just a few more questions we’re going to wrap up. You’re in a position as shared leaders, and this is something that I see happening where people are taking on shared leadership practices. How is it going for you? How is that structure working out, and how do you make it work in your artistic and also in the administrative process?

We’re three very different people with very different kind of approaches, ways of moving through work and collaboration, but we really balance each other so beautifully. And we think we have built already a huge amount of trust.

Jane: Yeah, I think that right now it’s very exciting because we have such an opportunity and a moment and a legacy inheritance that we have all been part of and that we’re all taking up the mantle of to move forward. And so I think what’s really exciting is after this three-year transition period where the emphasis was so heavily on identifying an organizational direction forward and investing so much thought and time and resources into organization groundwork. Where we’re at now is really the most exciting part, which is we get to make the work. We get to make the art that will be Pink Fang. 

And so this new structure, we have Mei Ann as artistic director of new work and Sara as artistic director of engagement. And myself, as the managing director, used to feel really important to the intertwined pillars. And we’re all, I think really excited. I feel very privileged to be able to be working with long-standing colleagues that we’ve really built a kind of shared vision and direction around over the last few years. Sara and myself, we’ve been working together for over a decade now to create the next body of work that will be Pink Fang.

Getting into the creative process, getting into the mix of making the work is where we’re at. I think at this moment, as you said, so important and necessary, everything that we’ve done in the transition period leading up to this has really been grounding for the exploring process, trying to identify and work through and articulate that process for ourselves, for our audiences, community stakeholders. 

And also there’s a lot that we’re figuring out. This upcoming year will be the first year where we’re sharing the artistic output of Pink Fang. I think again, we have projects, the Memory Generation projects that Sara’s mentioned. We have really exciting partnerships with artists and particularly their body of work that they’re bringing in and how that’s all integrating is the very kind of, again, entwined, intense, but also privileged place to be right now.

Ash: Do you have a specific moment where your shared leadership has shaped an artistic decision?

Mei Ann: Yes. I feel like there’s been a lot of collaboration for the last two years since I’ve started with Sara and Jane and the other interim artistic leaders. So I feel like there’s a lot of consensus that we have found in terms of how do we do this kind of event? And how do we bring people together? And what does this mean? And then what splits up instead of goes? But I feel very much that Jane is a creative producer and Sara is an extraordinary dramaturg and maker, and I absolutely feel that this is a team that—you know, I have a finance degree—so this is a team that’s very well-rounded in many ways and also has our passions and our delights moving in complementary ways.

Sara: In our first gathering, when we were the interim artistic leadership team in the transition period, we had a body conversation with a number of organizations that were also going through kind of legacy leadership change, and Chanon Judson from Urban Bush Women used the phrase, “asset-based leadership.” And I think that is really something that’s resonated with us that we’re three very different people with very different kind of approaches, ways of moving through work and collaboration, but we really balance each other so beautifully. And we think we have built already a huge amount of trust. I think is the kind of starting place, not every moment of the three-year transition was peaches and cream, but that we found a way of having hard conversations and continue to move through them with care. And so that’s where the shared leadership can really inform the artistic conversations and decisions because we’re really coming at it of a place of complementing each other as opposed to being in a contrast with each other.

Jane: I think that says a lot, too, about the particularities of our entry and approach into shared leadership. There’s a degree in which it’s been organic, but there’s also been a lot of structured work and support partnership with our Board and with consultant partners to help us come to this place. As we’ve kind of talked a lot about transition, what the typical search firm kind of assembling together a group of people, but rather a kind of mix of a very intentional. At times when we started this, there was really no clear what it would look like at the other side. And so there were a lot of difficult moments of feeling circular, feeling like, “What are we doing?” But just working through that has really made it feel at this moment like moving into the next phase something, but there aren’t something that we’ve built to get here.

Ash: That’s incredible. So, this is the end of a three-year transition process?

Sara: Yes.

Ash: And you took a break from making work. It was the focus on the transition process.

Sara: Well, we were making work throughout, and we had this five, in the transition period, there was a five-person leadership team, so there were two additional artists: Nile Harris, who’s now artist-in-residence with the company for this year; and Talvin Wilks on the artistic leadership team; and Mei Ann, who at the time was not full-time. And so we were making work, particularly those three artists, making work throughout, while we were in the process of building the ship as we flew it.

Ash: That’s amazing. And that’s something that many companies are interested in replicating, and I think any kind of learning about the benefits but also the challenges of how that’s worked is really valuable. So, looking ahead, how can people connect with you and participate in future work?

Jane: Coming up in this year, we’re going to have lots of opportunity for people to engage with the new work that we’ll be creating. Looking towards the fall, we’re actually kicking off the year with a symposium about Ping Chong and his body of work. And that felt like a nice continuity, but also grounding for the new work creation being led by Mei Ann and Sara and resident artist Nile Harris, as well as collaborating commissioned artists. And so we’ll be announcing these projects and ways to attend and engage with public programming. And also, this is the very beginning of this journey as we’re figuring out, and building again, our process and way of making work. We’re hoping to really share out through various platforms and ways of how we’re going about doing this as well, which is what we tried to do during the transition period: to be very open about the process and hopefully document that as a resource for those interested in that.

Mei Ann: Some exciting events that are coming up after the archive symposium are Harris’s tour of this house is not a home to the Walker. Very excited about that. And I’ll be directing a Sugar Vendil’s piece, Antonym at the Pioneers Go East Festival in January as well. Sara will be making Memory Generation, and I’ll be making a new work called The Table with Erika Chong Shuch that will be in June 2026, and more to come that we can’t share just yet, but really excited to share in the future.

Ash: So exciting! Thank you so much for joining me on our very first episode, and I look forward to seeing how everything progresses.

If you’re listening and want to learn more and connect with any of the work discussed in this episode, click the links available at the bottom of the transcript on the HowlRound website. 

This has been an episode of the Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast. I’m your host, Ash Marinaccio. This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, and non-commercial open-source apps like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone or AntennaPod for Android. Be sure to search HowlRound Theatre Commons and subscribe to receive new episodes.

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