Sensing Our Way to the Future Together

MicroCosmos is an inquiry into our ability to affect meaningful change on a small scale through the inner dimensions of artistic practice. How are artists tapping into those inner dimensions to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live? When things feel out of control on a macro scale, how do our artistic gifts meet the needs of the world?

In response to these questions, MicroCosmos co-curators Javiera Benavente, Matthew Glassman, and Nick Slie created a framework of creative prompts and then convened artists who are knee deep in this inquiry to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. In this conversation, Severin Blake and Rebecca Wright of Applied Mechanics and Annalisa Dias come together to discuss their responses to the MicroCosmos framework in a conversation facilitated by Javiera Benavente. Applied Mechanics is a multiracial Philadelphia-based collective of queer and genderqueer theatre artists that has been making original performance work since 2009. They have made over a dozen immersive works: plays you can walk through, with intricately designed installation sets and multiple storylines unfolding simultaneously. They are Severin Blake, Brett Ashley Robinson, Izzy Sazak, MK Tuomanen, and Rebecca Wright. Annalisa Dias is a Goan American transdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and award-winning theatremaker working at the intersection of racial justice and care for the earth. She is a co-founder of Groundwater Arts and a co-director of HERE Arts Center.

This process began by convening pairs of artists who are knee deep in this inquiry. We invited each to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. Each participant in the MicroCosmos project undertook a three-part process of individual work. They were asked to meditate on five questions:

What questions and callings are you living?

What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?

What seeds are you planting and tending?

What are the practices that would help you?

What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?

Then, participants engaged in shared study of excerpts from Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis, “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint its Feet” by Bayo Akomolafe, and "Communication is Sacred” by Nora Bateson. Finally, participants created a short expressive response in any creative medium as a way of sharing what the prompts and shared study activated in them. Those creative responses appear interspersed throughout the following conversation.

There's a real here-ness to the work that we make, and we're engaging the history of this place and the histories of protests and movement that are embedded in the space of the town where we've met and made the bulk of our work.

Rebecca Wright: We were all trying to answer the question about questions and callings for Applied Mechanics as a group. Applied Mechanics really does, through making our work, explore questions about collectivity and community; what it means to come together and still be individuals, but to need each other; what it means artistically and aesthetically to uplift interconnectedness and to put it in its most honest but ambitious configuration.

We're asking the world to re-vision a more just and accessible future through making art. We're using immersive theatre to re-narrativize histories as a way of dreaming up a better world. We're making that world exist for the discrete little moments of our shows, and we invite audiences to literally walk around in that world with us. So, there's an embeddedness to the future and the power of building futures and systems that we're exploring when we make work together.

We're also very aware of being in Philadelphia and in relation to each other, and Philadelphia has been the locus of our relationships. So now the five members of the company live in different places. We all come from different places, but there's a real here-ness to the work that we make, and we're engaging the history of this place and the histories of protests and movement that are embedded in the space of the town where we've met and made the bulk of our work.

To the "What seeds are you planning and tending?" question, we all in some way wrote about the power of the small. We wrote about planting seeds in the interstices of our world and hoping that those seeds grow sometime in the future and putting our faith into that. We talked about making new stories. We talked about uplifting each other. We talked about taking care of ourselves and our loved ones and having that ethos be part of an artistic event.

In spite of the great suffering and loss that we are all living through, living with, I want to plant seeds of hope that connection is possible.

Annalisa Dias: I am a playwright and director and performer and dramaturg and, and, and, and, and, and, and… I really feel like I stumbled into quite a lot of things. Sometimes I've described myself as somebody who will do whatever job is necessary to make a project happen. So I have also been known to be a scenic painter. I've also been known to be a very bad scenic designer. If I care about the project, then I'll find a way to fill a gap. Sometimes I'm a gap-filler, maybe that's a way to describe myself.

I also am a producer, but I think producers are also gap-fillers—gap-identifiers and gap-fillers. And I've been living and working in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore area for over fifteen years now, which is wild. I’m currently working as an independent artist, but also working with Groundwater Arts, which is a company that I co-founded five or six years ago. My primary collaborator there is Tara Moses, who's Seminole and Muscogee. We do a lot of work that is climate justice and performing arts related. I'm also one of the new co-directors at HERE Arts Center in New York.

At 6:00 a.m. today, I was thinking about myself as my independent artist self in relation to “questions and callings.” I'm in a moment of life transition. I mentioned this is a new job for me, I have a lot of questions right now about what does it mean to have a singular vision? People keep asking, "What's your vision for HERE Arts Center? What's your vision for XYZ thing?" And I'm like, "I don't know that I am interested in that.” I don't think I'm interested in a vision for the future. I am more interested in sensing something. I don't know what I mean by this, but I feel like a little mushroom connected underground, and I'm like, "Can we sense our way to the future together? Are there multiple futures?" It's not neutral to say, "I have a vision." So stop asking me that question. Those are some of the questions and callings I'm living right now.

 “What seeds am I planting?” I'm planting seeds of boundaries and hope for connection. In spite of the great suffering and loss that we are all living through, living with, I want to plant seeds of hope that connection is possible.

Severin Blake: Everything you're saying right now. It hits.

Annalisa: Oh, okay! So I want to do this project, and it's very nascent, and I want to figure out what it is. Is it a thing that I write? Is it a thing that I am going to create in some way? Or is it a communal process? Is it a dance? Is it a monthly dance class or something that I could offer to the community and call that the project? Or is it something that feels more like a play or an evening-length something? I'm calling it I Believe in the Night. I know that title, and I made a little comic this morning called I Believe in the Night.

Javiera Benavente: Wow, Annalisa. Thank you for taking us to all those places and for that share.

Severin: We might've made some art about it, some dance movement.

Javiera: You want to share?

Rebecca: It's true. We did. It's only a minute-long. Under-rehearsed, but a sincere response to the readings.

Annalisa: Oh, thank you for that.

Rebecca: Annalisa, I was freaking out when you were talking about being a little mushroom. Our last big piece, Other Orbits, was about that exact thing. There was a collective character that were mushrooms, and it was all of these middle-aged aliens and mutants trying to collectively govern a planet. We spent five years in that headspace making that world.

Relatedly, there's little effective modeling for collective governance. It seems to me that there isn't a future without that. We cannot maintain this single charismatic leader mindset. It doesn't work for any living thing. But every time you end up working with people to lead, you have to reinvent or work together to invent a bespoke version of how that works so that you can all actually do it together. I mean, maybe this is less true now than it was ten years ago, but I'd say when Applied Mechanics was starting out and writing our bylaws and stuff, it just felt like, "Oh my God, no one's talking about this. We are really making it up."

Annalisa: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: But I love that process. I'm so excited that you're in it. I hope I get to hear more about your journey with it.

Annalisa: It's wild—the people that I'm in a relationship with at HERE are amazing and very much values-aligned, and we are still working within priorities and timelines and deadlines and schedules of the American theatre. So, there was some decision that needed to get made over a weekend, and because there are now four of us, it was like, "Well, what is the process for this?" If somebody is like, "I'm not checking my phone over the weekend," which should be fine, but then there's a call that needs to be made… How do we find different ways of communicating our timelines and our needs to people that we're working with so that they know we are just going to move slower and that it's going to have to be okay?

Severin: Codifying decision-making within the multi-headed organism… Then sometimes those needs and desires change, or you bring in new people. It's exciting, but you're like, "All right, let's go. Let's keep building that living document ecosystem."

There's also installation art within the spaces that Applied Mechanics makes together. It's really beautiful. I think that it's immersive. I think that we build interactivity into it. And then again, just the continued offer of invitation. So if you're following this one person, it's not like sleep no more where someone's going to grab you and take you away. Although someone might, but it's an invitation. It's never a, "You have to do this now", but if you're following someone for fifteen minutes and something draws your eye, you're allowed to leave that storyline and follow what is guiding you to that space in that moment. It might be another person, it might be something you see out of the corner of your eye, but you can rest assured that even if you don't get the entirety of the story that you were following, you will be able to build. You are held in a narrative journey. You'll get to where you're meant to go, and then if you want to, you can come back and go on a different journey.

Rebecca: Traditionally our work has been these installation sets and open world concepts where audiences can move around. I think audience members who have followed us for a long time get attached to the experience of watching one scene while listening to another. So you can edit together your own version of the world.

World building is such a central part of our process. Also, every show contained a lot of artifacts of a specific culture. So, a couple of shows ago, Severin played a character who wrote a children's book, but that also meant that Severin wrote a children's book and that children's book was in the play. And if you took a certain path through the play, you'd read the children's book or see it in translation to all the languages it got translated to or hear a radio interview about it. That's actually, like, these worlds are birthing a lot of layers of the world.

We cannot maintain this single charismatic leader mindset. It doesn't work for any living thing.

Annalisa: How do you document your work?

Rebecca: Oh my God, it's so hard to document.

Severin: We're getting better.

Rebecca: It's so hard to get a video document of a performance. The best way of doing it would be to do a multi-camera shoot over several days where cameras follow each of the characters, with designated sound. We've just never truly been able to afford the best possible version of that, so we've had lots of attempts at the second and third best options. And we do have the children's book—these other artifacts are easy to document because they just exist and you can hand them to people. But the plays are live events.

Annalisa: In any of the work that I've made that's multidisciplinary, installationy-type things, I'm like, "I have no idea how to document it well." I found that unless I'm talking to people who have a sense of what I'm saying already, it's damn near impossible to communicate what the fuck is going on.

Rebecca: Yes. There's no way to get the fullness of the experience of being there without being there.

This was just so great. How exciting. Annalisa, I'm so excited about you and I hope that—

Annalisa: Likewise, Rebecca. I just have a lot of gratitude. The jobs that I've been working have forced my focus to not be on my own artistic practice recently, so it was really lovely to have a reason to be accountable to that.

Severin: Engagements, a ripple effect.