This section collects all HowlRound content that takes the form of an interview between two or more theatremakers. Interested in contributing your own interview? Here are our interview guidelines and best practices!
In this episode, Emma Bexell from Bombina Bombast, a performing arts company in Malmö, Sweden, takes us to the space of gamified society and theatre. Bombina Bombast combines documentary audio, gaming interface, and immersive installation in a Virtual Reality show where audience members can rest with insomniac Swedish gang members—all while criticizing the attention economy.
Multidisciplinary theatre artist Regina Victor (Pharoah) and playwright and director Sean Daniels discuss navigating being in recovery from addiction within the theatre industry, what recovering artists need, and the power of witnessing.
Disabled choreographer, dancer, designer, engineer, and founding member of Kinetic Light Laurel Lawson talks about performing aerially in a wheelchair, accessibility as its own artform rather than an add-on, and their app Audimance which includes haptic interpretation and sensory modulation.
The Virtuosity of Black Storytelling with Tarell Alvin McCraney
6 March 2024
Hosts Leticia Ridley and Jordan Ealey interview Oscar winner and MacArthur genius Tarell Alvin McCraney about his work as a playwright, how Black people tell stories, and what it means to be an artistic leader.
How LUNG Is Breathing Radical Joy into Theatre in the United Kingdom
5 March 2024
verity healey speaks to Matt Woodhead and Helen Monks, co-directors of LUNG, about LUNG’s work making campaign theatre that uses verbatim theatre strategies and associated political work to explore issues impacting the United Kingdom.
In this episode we talk with the founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, Rubén Polendo, about the hope for the future that inspired Utopian Hotline—now traveling through space as part of the Golden Record. We also discuss the gore, myth, and puppet-robots with their own point of view in Jodorowsky-inspired Santa Sangre.
Masi Asare is an assistant professor of theater and performance studies at Northwestern University. She is a songwriter and dramatist and also works as a performance scholar specializing in the study of race and vocal sound and musicals. On this episode, hosts Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley interview Masi on her experiences as a Black woman working in musical theatre and why Black women’s vocal training is so important.
Scott Walters, author of Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career, sits down with Munroe Shearer to discuss the ways artist-owned theatres can succeed and best serve their communities.
Annemarie Hagenaars is an astronomer, physicist, and actress. In this playful conversation with Tjaša, Annemarie speculates about Einstein's famous equations, love, and shares her own experiment that she conducted with her one woman show The Story of the Einstein Girl, where she performs the play four different ways and lets the audience choose.
This week, Tjaša speaks with Josh Corn, a true renaissance man. He uses technology to tell absurd and subversive stories about humanity. Josh built René—the most technologically advanced robotic arm from 2002, who had her own circus act. He also made Field Day Games where you can compete with groups over video call to spill, drop, break, crack, ignite, and burn machines in their studio. Everyone wins except Josh. He has to clean up.
Completing the Unfinished Sentences of Our Ancestors with Jonathan McCrory
7 February 2024
Jonathan McCrory is a Tony Award and Emmy Award nominated producer and a two-time Obie Award-winning artist who has served as executive artistic director at the National Black Theatre since 2012. In this episode, hosts Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley talk with McCrory about his work with the National Black Theatre and his ongoing commitment to nourishing and cultivating Black creativity and Black life.
Automation, Slavery, Monsters, and Misery in Search of the Whole
1 February 2024
Maud discusses monsters, and the “humanization process”: the idea that humanity asks of us to leave some part of the world at the door and opt in for a very specific, very small part of all that life has to offer. They also dissect the West’s capitalist need to reject the consciousness of inanimate objects in order to participate in the consumer culture.
How can theatre make an impact in moments of crisis? During a time of ongoing genocide and brutal occupation in Palestine, this special episode focuses on Palestinian theatre and political action across borders. We discuss The Gaza Monologues and To The Good People of Gaza. Then Palestinian actor, writer, and scenographer Jeries AbuJaber joins us in conversation about what is currently happening in the West Bank and Gaza and his experience as a theatre artist in Palestine.
A Twelve-Foot Robotic Arm, Like Chekhov Would Have Wanted
25 January 2024
In this episode, Tjaša chats with director Igor Golyak of Arlekin Players about the power of virtual theatre and the experience of using technology that had never before been used for live performance. And if you were wondering why there was a twelve-foot robotic arm on stage, serving coffee and sweeping the floor in The Orchard at Baryshnikov Center, Igor thinks that’s what Chekhov would have wanted.
How can we think of queerness as a form of political intervention? In this episode, we talk with Erdem Avşar about Turkish theatre, queer utopias, and ghosts. We examine queer dramaturgies in Turkish and international theatre, discuss translation into and from Turkish, re-think temporality in playwriting, and question what queer utopias look like onstage.
We dive deep with Anonymous Ensemble into LIontop: a technologically ambitious installation and multilingual performance that centers on Quechua voices; Google finally translating Quechua; and the mystery of the ancient Incan Quipus.
Producing Queer MENA Theatre on the American Stage
17 January 2024
This season, we have talked about what it means to create characters who break out of boxes and create new queer representations. Once these characters are created, then comes the challenge of having your work produced. In this episode, we talk with Kareem Fahmy who has dealt with the considerations of producibility and what it means to have his work produced on stages in the United States.
Guest Heidi Bosivert believes that our bodies are archives of stories and if we can't get those stories out, the whole fabric of society will break down. When she worked in tech, addressing social issues, she had a crisis of faith and figured that bringing people into physical spaces and working with the body might be one way of mitigating deleterious effects of technology. Now, she’s creating a media biogenome.
Interrogating the Politics of Oppression in The Struggle
4 January 2024
Dan Kpodoh’s The Struggle dramatizes governmental and corporate exploitation in the oil-rich Niger Delta by telling the story of a group of militants who sought liberation but became corrupted by financial interests. Eseovwe Emakunu, a Nigerian theatre professional, interviews Kpodoh about the play’s function as protest theatre against political oppression.
Alberto Justiniano and Milta Ortiz, artistic leaders at Teatro del Pueblo and Borderlands Theater, respectively, have to balance organizational leadership and prioritizing their art. They discuss this work and the ways they engage their Latine communities while providing them with avenues to reflect on social justice issues.
Affinity Spaces for MENA/SWANA and LGBTQIA+ Artists
13 December 2023
Affinity spaces have been an undercurrent of discussion across the three seasons of Kunafa and Shay. In this live session at the 2023 MENATMA Convening at Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, in partnership with Mizna+RAWIfest, Marina and Nabra sit down with artists to discuss the nuances of MENA and SWANA affinity spaces and MENATMA, Mizna, and RAWI’s roles in facilitating national cultural affinity among artists of intersectional identities.
On Translating Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse’s Works for American Audiences
11 December 2023
Amelia Parenteau sits down with Sarah Cameron Sunde, who has translated and directed six of Jon Fosse’s plays, to mark the occasion of Fosse being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Their conversation pays tribute to Sarah and Jon’s longstanding creative relationship, examines the plays’ Norwegian context as it is translated internationally, and uplifts the need for American audiences to see more dramatic work in translation.
MENA cultures are deeply familial with a strong connection to home, defined geographically and through close family bonds. With fraught political and religious opinions about queerness throughout the region, making queer art can threaten those deep connections. How do queer MENA artists consider those complications when making theatre? How do individuals change culture in the face of possible exile? Multi-hyphenate artists Zeyn Joukhadar and Raphaël Aimé Khouri interrogate these questions.
Theater Mu managing director Anh Thu T. Pham and development director Wesley Mouri discuss the ideology behind the theater’s Pay As You Are program, how it works, and what impact it’s having on the theatre six years after its implementation.