Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Theatre, Part Three: Institute Directors

Jeffrey Mosser: Hey hey hold up hold up!

Sorry, dear artists, a quick preamble before we kick this episode off. So since this interview there’ve been some major updates to what is happening at the Pig Iron School in Philadelphia. Namely, they’ve found a new university partnership with Rowan University in New Jersey! A big part of this episode refers to the purgatory that they were in before that was all settled. Consider this episode as a snapshot from that moment in time. Cool? Thanks!

Welcome to another episode of the From the Ground Up podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mosser, recording from the ancestral homeland of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These episodes are shared digitally to the internet. Let’s take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology structure and ways of thinking that we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the work we make leaves a significant carbon footprint contributing to climate change that disproportionately affects indigenous people worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging the truth and violence perpetrated in the name of this country, as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles and reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship.

Dear artists, welcome back. You’re here for episode three of three dedicated to Pig Iron’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Theater. And I am so excited that you are here with me.

Y’all, we did something kind of rare with this episode. So nearly a year after the first two episodes were recorded at the institute, I caught up with Allen Kuharski and Quinn Bauriedel, organizers of the conference and longtime Pig Iron collaborators, and I sent them the raw audio and asked them to respond in this episode that you are now listening to, to episodes one and two. So we are having a semi-real-time reflection on the experience and what they hope to do going forward.

In addition to what we did and having a call one year later, there was no way that we would’ve known that the Pig Iron School, which was housed institutionally at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, would all of a sudden close its doors, permanently leaving thousands of students in the lurch.

And the time of this recording, Quinn was going through a Herculean lift to make sure that the students could complete their education and make sure that the faculty and artists affiliated with their program would be paid. It has since been announced that the Pig Iron School would not be accepting a new class in 2024, and they remain optimistic that they would reopen for January 2025.

Even the moment that I’m recording this introduction to this episode on August 14th, which is months ahead of when this will be broadcast, there has been new news as well that came out today. So listen, I will do my very best to keep the audio transcript of this on howlround.com updated. So please, I’ll try to put the most recent news links there, so do check it out, but also subscribe and follow Pig Iron School for more information about how they are working through their process for their MFA program.

And I don’t know about y’all, but this certainly does raise a lot of questions for me. This podcast about sustaining ensemble and collaboratively creative content also encompasses how educational institutions intersect with that. Some of the questions that come up for me are, how can we trust that an educational institution has permanent structural investment in ensemble-based work? And this all ties back, if you will, to the first of this three-part series. In my interview with JD Stokely, they asked, “How do we bring ensemble practices to larger institutions, and how do we encourage them to validate the work beyond the three big prongs of iterative theatremaking, including directing, acting, and playwriting? How do we embody this generative kind of work and show that it is imperative to universities for more holistic learning and storytelling?”

And I don’t know that we have an answer to this or any sort of questions that might come up without serious query into the hierarchical practices already in play, but just know that I am curious and thinking about these just as you might be.

Speaking of, if you or anyone who might be seriously interested in talking about this or any topic around ensemble-based sustainability, please connect them to me. You can reach out to me at [email protected] or on Instagram as Ensemble Ethnographer, and of course, the podcast page at FTGU_Pod. You can also catch us on Facebook under those similar monikers.

All right, here we go to our final episode of our in-depth coverage of the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theater. This was recorded on June 10th, 2024. Allen and Quinn were Zooming in from Lenapehoking land, now known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Enjoy.

How are you all? Hello, hello, welcome.

Quinn Bauriedel: Hello. Good morning. Wow, that’s a serious new beard.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I didn’t have the full beard effect at the institute last year.

Allen Kuharski: That’s it.

Jeffrey: Hey, y’all, welcome. How’s everybody doing?

Quinn: Well, you could say great, but it’s been pretty awful. So we’re somehow surviving, managing through lots of urgent matters to deal with. Every couple hours there’s some new piece that is like, ugh, but—

Allen: Yeah, it’s been kind of like best of times, worst of times, Jeffrey, because for me, I came in my front door and the new issue of Theater Magazine, the hard copy was sitting in my mail, which was thrilling. And then two to three hours later, the cascading messages started about UArts. And so we had this, really this thing that I took a week to even read through the issue because of all the distractions. But then the issue is such an important product of the institute and everything. And then within hours we were facing this giant feeling like the Titanic or really feeling like we had been hit by a drunk driver with no insurance.

It’s just like, we did nothing wrong, it’s not our fault. And then there’s been a lot of really wonderful developments with people from the institute, people for our students. There’s been things moving ahead, but it’s really hard to focus on celebrating those while we have all these unknowns that are really very urgent and immediate, right?

Jeffrey: Thank you both very much. I understand it’s a really hard time right now. I hear you loud and clear, and I really appreciate you taking time to chat this morning. So thank you.

So I sent along the audio from what’s meant to be episodes one and two in the season. So I want to start by asking: what was it that made you say, “You know what, we should do an institute on the field of ensemble and devised work?”

[Pull Quote]

Quinn: Yeah, I guess there are a couple different origin stories. One is just that Philadelphia has been such an incredible home for Pig Iron, and there have been many other chapters of the story, not just the story of Pig Iron, but interesting intersections of people from the seventies and eighties that were making wild experimental things in South Philadelphia on South Street. And there were constellations of artists that somehow found this as a home base to generate their own work, to work in idiosyncratic and unusual forms, to cross-pollinate between music and dance and theatre. And we caught onto that and we were very much in the mix doing that ourselves and also having some legs to be able to have that as a long-term part of our operation with the school. More and more there were people who were drawn to come here.

And I guess there was a question that arose within Pig Iron at one point of, existentially, who are we, what are we doing, what’s our mission? All of those good questions that we continue to ask ourselves. And it came up that we were more than just a company that produces its own work. We were a gathering place, we were a school, we were a school of thought, we were a approach to performance. And the idea of a center emerged, and we’re still battling that, whether that’s the right term or not, but we had residencies, we had artists in our studios who were making things. We had wider conversations about the field. And somebody said, “It sounds really like you’re in a moment where an NEH Institute for Higher Education about what this is going on in Philadelphia, what this story means, and the fact that you’re not the only ones doing it,” that actually devising an ensemble is something that we care tremendously about. We learned about from Allen and many other people, we cross paths with people who were a generation ahead of us who were forging that path in various communities.

We began to learn that, of course, it’s not just something in centers of art and culture, but there are indigenous communities of devisers and ensembles. There are things in rural areas, there are things that are happening and that story is often untold. It also was the energy source of: that’s not right, it’s not right that the story gets told out there of the genius playwrights who are making the great dramatic experience of American cultural moment—that we do that too, and we do it in conversation, we do it in communities. We do that in ways that actually tour and have resonance beyond our own home base.

And a friend of mine, Andrew Kircher, said basically, “You should look into the NEH Institutes,” which we did and realized it was not an easy application to put together. And so it took some time to have the stars align. Of course, we talked to Allen about it because Allen has been our mentor and our sometimes provocateur and the one who asks interesting questions always, and also somebody who has the national scope of how higher ed is functioning, how it’s dysfunctioning, how marginalized sometimes this realm of performance making has been, how impactful it is on students and how they crave this, and that an institute could more than just jumpstart new pedagogical models, new centering of ensemble within departments, not just a day on devising, but something that could have more heft and could help develop the field and just recognize the legacy that has come before, but also where it’s heading. And then we put the application together and began to gather the faculty and began to realize that this could be something really remarkable and special. And of course it was. So I don’t know, that was sort of the genesis of it.

Allen: We started with a lot of anecdotal information, knowing people the way we do through professional networks and artistic networks and people who have studied with us in various ways and gone on. And then, so it’s really interesting to talk about whether the institute was more inductive or more deductive and how it went into the subject. And that basically we’ve been… our deductive, or I guess our inductive thinking has been confirmed that the anecdotes proved accurate enough, true enough that then we could, when we did the institute and what came back confirmed and went beyond what we could know.

So I mean, we discovered all kinds of new things that we couldn’t have known without doing the institute, but it fit the pattern that there was remarkable stuff to be found and people ready to step up and be in the institute and who brought information from all kinds of different communities, different parts of the country, different kinds of practices, different cohorts, generationally interdisciplinary people. Our thinking was confirmed as fundamentally correct, I think. But then we found all kinds of things we could not have known without following through on the institute project. And that continues.

Jeffrey: I want to know if there’s anything you heard in the last couple of episodes that stood out to you?

Allen: Yeah. Well, first of all, I was very grateful for the voices that you captured, Jeffrey, because they really were voices that were not active in the issue that just came out of Yale Theater Magazine. And so it was a very key set of participants that you were able to then include. So I felt that those voices are really important. And the sincerity, I think of everyone’s connectedness. I think that was also a thing that we were very proud of and very… we feel is genuine, that a community emerged of genuine connectedness, of genuine respect, of genuine curiosity of, that the work was happening, but there wasn’t a linkage between the speakers and the participants. And that’s really continued, I think to this day and will only go I think further.

It’s very affirming, and it’s what we hoped would happen, that there’s now a positive momentum around building national community, I guess I say, and international community, which was a kind of not really official part of the agenda of the institute for NEH, but we were able to include international outreach and inclusion of participants or connections, and people have benefited. Americans in the group have benefited by being able to go abroad through things that would not have happened without the institute.

Jeffrey: There was so much that wasn’t captured in these two episodes. I’ll forever remember the participant who put up the Venn diagram. It was like a Prezi presentation where you could—

Quinn: Johanna, it was Johanna Kasimow.

Jeffrey: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Johanna did this amazing Prezi where basically a Venn diagram or a constellation of, you’d click on one constellation star and it would open up and it’d be this theatre company or this dancer or choreographer or et cetera, and they’re linked to all of these other ensemble theatres. But the idea of being that the constellation lines were drawn between all of the other stars, and it was so beautiful and so cool. And I think that for the most part, they were 99, 95 percent just Philadelphia. And to what you said earlier, Quinn, the richness of what’s in Philadelphia in terms of that devised work was really clear. And it really got me thinking, “Oh, my gosh, what if this constellation existed in the world? Think about how this individual touched so many other lives or so many other artistic aesthetics be—”

Quinn: I love that moment too. And I do think that that sparked a lot for a lot of people, particularly about how it is that we’re telling this story. It’s very easy to be reductive and to tell the story in a kind of this artist and this path, but all of the ways in which that artist influenced who’s been in that room, who has taught the exercise that led to such and such, and it was just an elegant way of saying, listen, the web of influences and interconnectedness is vast. We’re going to take this really small sample size of this ten-year period in Philadelphia of people who are working within small collections of individuals, small companies. But all of that begins to aggregate into things that actually have tremendous impact and resonance.

And if you don’t know all of the ways in which let’s say Lightning Rod Special have gone on and made a big impact, well, there’s dozens of people who have been in their rooms and vice versa. And I think it speaks to maybe this particular generational, I think this has been going on for a long, long time that companies don’t really work in isolation, that there’s permeability to who’s a part of it, who is not, who is traveling on this project and brought in for this particular set of materials, and we only envisioned it aggregating outlets. Could you do the same thing for Seattle? Could you do the same thing for the Northwest? There’s a wider story to be told.

Allen: Yeah, and what I would also say already, it’s that was a really memorable moment and it was also why I think for me, one of the biggest discoveries of the institute was Quinn’s very wise insistence that we create an element of the institute where the participants can briefly present something of interest to them, and that’s how that happened.

But the way that was actually framed by Johanna was about women’s ensembles. It was less Philadelphia, but women’s ensembles who happened to be in Philadelphia. So it was to really foreground how women were leading a kind of devising and ensemble process and sometimes a physically based process. And then it’s already, you’re touching something, they call it Philadelphia in air quotes is already a little bit limiting because Johanna is actually based in Iowa. She’s now a tenure track professor at University of Iowa, so she’s a pod that we think is really… the kind of pod that’s really important for us to see that the work is spreading beyond Philadelphia and for the institute in teaching through teaching that she’s that agent for change and they’re enthusiastically receiving her work and ideas, and there are people from New York in the ensemble and whatever.

And even yesterday I went to a showing at the Icebox in Philadelphia, which is just a five-minute walk from Pig Iron, and it’s these women led by Johanna Kasimow leading a group of women whose work were highlighted in the presentation you saw that are making a new piece. And there was our community of about thirty, forty people were attending an invited work in progress showing last night, and it was one of these affirming things that’s happening alongside all the stressful news of the UArts right now.

Jeffrey: Were there any other things that weren’t captured in the audio that you found really striking in the same way?

Allen: We had a really strong framing by Mike Vanden Heuvel from the University of Wisconsin and Madison, who was one of the kind of foundational writers and scholars and thinkers about all of these issues. And so we gave him kind of the keynote position of speaking at the beginning, and he really did a marvelous job of framing issues, provoking discussion. I think none of us—we learned a lot in the first thirty-six hours of the institute. The group found ways to discuss meaningfully controversial, difficult things raised by Michael and a video that we showed about The TEAM, that the discussion that we immediately merged around… that was not something we had exactly anticipated, but it was already, we saw the group ready and able to respectfully, constructively engage with really different thinking about issues that were put on the table.

And Mike also framed issues in terms of political social trends in kind of a sociological way of understanding what’s happened historically with this work and what’s happening right now with this work. What are the stresses right now for these working artists in this current neoliberal economy, which is how he framed it, and I think it was very apt and struck a nerve. And even the video then we watched was about a kind of a case study of artists struggling in New York in the wake of the financial crisis to make this time to theatre, and the uncomfortable issues that emerge about trying to be an artist doing this kind of work, as an emerging artist for some in this current setup of subsidy, grants, distribution, touring.

And they don’t really touch on higher education in that material, but then that’s where we all lead to in the institute is like, what’s our relationship to all of that? But Mike Vanden Heuvel really framed it in a way that… And he had to leave after a day, so he missed the rest of the institute too. He had, I don’t think, a sense of how it played, how he had really framed and launched an ongoing discussion that goes right through to the issue of Theater that just came out last week.

Quinn: I would say also thinking that first week Jessica Nakamura came and gave this super enlightening discussion about how it is that we can take some material from the past that’s filled with all kinds of colonial and western power dynamics, including Artaud, and Artaud of course so foundational, so important to so many people and yet totally flawed and complicated and really gave us kind of a scholarly framework of how to think about that, not completely push it aside as material to be never taught again. But we all know that it reinforces a number of things that have to do with the value of ensemble devising and innovating and risk-taking, and it has a very particular lens that obviously does some objectification of the eastern traditions.

And she sits in the center of trying to complicate that and trying to understand who gets to tell whose story, in what way can we all be a part of this enterprise to recognize the values that have been brought across continents to the work that we do without trying to just own somebody else’s material? It was really a rich morning, and I think it catapulted something into the second week.

Allen: And it really captured, I think, the gist of the mission of the institute, which is to link out kind of traditionally academic subject matter and set of approaches and someone who’s a scholar primarily who led one of the most dynamic discussions for practitioners and then what emerged, or with practitioners. And then what was striking was how alive Artaud is in people’s thinking. Everybody had studied it or it seemed like maybe people were quiet who hadn’t, but there were so many voices came out in that discussion of—that Artaud mattered, it still mattered to people, that the flaws are included, but it still matters.

I mean, yeah, many things came out of what she brought to the institute, and one of them was obviously the links to Asia and this global framing that people were really… we were consistently pushing beyond the American context and the American point of reference. So that was an interesting tension and richness of the institute was almost every day we moved into global framing one way or another, though ostensibly it’s the national endowment for the humanities and it’s about issues of American higher education, but the global thing kept coming in the room and being necessary, I think, for the discussions of the American issues to be there.

Then we had this marvelous woman who’s from mainland China who’s now gotten her PhD in the United States and is now on tenure track appointments and writing articles and is a contributor to the issue of Yale Theater writing about devised theatre companies in mainland China that go back decades. See, and it was the kind of opening up of arena in the world that we had no way to know until we had her in the room. And then the Artaud discussion, I think was a piece of what has brought that voice forward and that whole vast arena of China into the discussion.

And the other thing I just want to say because I think it’s important for the discussion going forward, because it’s always complicated, the institute is three things. It’s devising, company based, and physically based, and physically based seems to be the thing that gets dropped because it’s too many words or it’s not always all three, but as an institute, the physically based approaches which go back to Lecoq and what Pig Iron represents all three things in its practice as a company, and Artaud is one of the… one of the values of Artaud is he began in a certain way to emphasize physically based approaches to acting that bring theatre closer to dance and practices like yoga and all of these things.

And that that’s a thing that I’m always struck by how easily that’s the category that goes silent when we’re discussing the institute. And I’ve had to push and say, “I know it’s a lot of words, but we have to keep physically based in the definitional framing of what we did.” And Artaud is one of the places that that really comes forward and historically in how we’ve all gotten where we are.

Jeffrey: Thank you for that.

Quinn: And I guess I don’t know how it appears in the audio recordings, but there was a lot of physical activity that we built into the institute. And so there was a dance theatre session. Sometimes the day began with walk and talk. Sometimes we would just move out of our discussion rooms, which could be endless from the start of the day until midnight to a space of movement. And knowing that part of the legacy of what this work does is the body knows things that are hard to put into words, if not impossible, and that there’s a scholarly approach to knowledge that is absolutely lives in the body, in the bones, in the movement, in the gestures, in the breathing together. And we felt like it was important in the institute to not just sit and talk, but to have these moments where we could learn in different ways.

And those were always, I would say, well received. They put things into light that were emerging as themes in our verbal discussions. They get context. They reminded us all of actually what it is that we’re here to do, which is to preserve this ephemeral, tangible, three-dimensional art form. And we ended up doing some of those same things in our approach to the institute. That was special.

Jeffrey: I’m glad you brought Lecoq and the work in there too, and Artaud in because it all is about global influence. But I’m wondering if you’ve seen any other ripples of the participants since this event about a year ago now?

Allen: Well, one thing that we kind of knew was looming when we were doing the institute and it came to fruition was that there was a international conference held in Poland, and we had an observer, you may have met her who was here from Poland just to observe what we were doing, and she was part of the planning committee as I was for this. So there was a direct tie in through me into the planning of this conference, international conference in Poland in November in Katowice, and then many people from our program, I was part of planning the Polish conference, but then we brought half a dozen people from the Philadelphia institute to participate in this other kind of context very richly. Duška Radosavljević from the UK was a big presence there. So we’ve already had a spinoff and it was a very successful conference and institute and included, again, a balance of workshops and physical work with academic panels in a very international way. So that’s one thing that happened that’s been really a kind of happy kismet that it all was able—

Quinn: Kathryn Syssoyeva was also a part of that institute. I mean, we’ve been tracking all of the participants and there have been some really remarkable things that have happened. And certainly it’s not just to the credit of the institute, but I’m sure in professional way it has helped people along. Johanna was immediately offered a new tenure track position at University of Iowa, and she got that position. Lex Brown became a Rome Prize winner recently, and so she’s moving to Rome to work on her own artistic work over there. That’s a very esteemed position. There’s… Erica Murphy went through a whole job application with lots of support from some of the mentors that she met through the institute and got a full-time job at Syracuse University teaching movement and devising.

So in some way… And then of course there’s been panels at a variety of different conferences. There’s a group gathering to be kind of featured panelists, I think in London later this summer at a conference. So there’s already a world that is spinning out well beyond our own organization, which is the participants and the faculty are collaborating on new initiatives and new discourse and new writing and book projects. I know that Ry and maybe Ryan have come together around particularly queer ensembles and archiving the impact and importance of that. So there’s just lots of tentacles, I guess, or orbits that are continuing to find their own energy well beyond our time a year ago.

Allen: And one of the voices that you caught and I was grateful for in your interviews with the participants for HowlRound was Leslie Elkins at Rowan University. And I was very moved by what she said that she felt… And it was really important, and it was for me, a fighting point to have someone like Leslie in the cohort that we have dance represented in a very appropriate but pure way, and that she felt a fish out of water or at the deep end of the pool coming into our… I guess that’s the thing that she felt, “Oh, my God, is this the right room for me?” And she never flinched, but she stayed with it.

But she’s from a combined theatre/dance department, and she said then how strongly… I was really struck by, for many reasons, what she shared, which is how strongly she identified with our participants and with our grad students that she met through the Pig Iron, grad students who were helping with the institute, that she, in a way, as she’s chaired her department, that she was finding this, the connection was at that level and how she would welcome these students and people into her department, and other people from her department who weren’t in the institute came to our party, the reception we had to meet everybody, and that was really strong.

And now it’s one of the schools we’re in dialogue with to help replace UArts. We don’t know if it’s the right one or if it can happen, but it is, produced this concrete link and sympathy and openness. It was so important that she was there. And then I think it also, her voice is really one of the things we saw, which is that there was a horizontality of how people related and that someone could be a faculty member or a leader or a participant, and people often chose, who could have been in either side of that, to choose the participant position instead of the faculty position. And that she came in as one of our more senior people, frankly. And for her, the connections that mattered most that she took away were with our grad students.

And then the interdisciplinary thing of, we really didn’t see dance as like, oh, a big stretch at all. We saw it as organic, but there are these silos that people inhabit and we create too that the student was working very hard to break down and open up and have that freedom of exchange and movement between generations, between status and the academy, between disciplines, between scholars and practitioners. They kind of, not have… We kept saying it’s not a binary to be a scholar, a practitioner, a theorist, a writer, and being the performer. And often we look at the people in the room, including Jessica Nakamura, who began as a director and has an MFA in Asian Performance Traditions before she got her PhD.

I mean, see, people are hybrids and acknowledge and support the hybridity, and then to encourage people to work on their hybridity and not like say, “Oh, I don’t do that. I’m too cool for school. I can’t be writing articles. I’m the artist. I can’t do that.” And it’s like, well, yes you can, and we kind of need you to, and maybe your work will be better served if you give yourself permission to write and not see that as what another kind of person does. And vice versa.

Jeffrey: Our practice is our research. Our practice—

Quinn: It came up a lot, and it was in some way such a room of support around that idea with also the recognition that it’s not a given, that those who make critical decisions about hiring and tenure see it that way. And so in some way, having this body to support practice as research kind of knowledge, living outside of book deals was helpful. And recognizing that things like the Yale Theater Magazine do matter to prove once again that this is culturally valid, that it has importance in the story of America and the story of counterculture and the story of whatever it might be. And we had to really… The institute kind of gave some more legitimacy, I would say, to that, because some people are fighting big battles with their higher-ups.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Allen: One of the many remarkable byproducts that if you want to talk about ripples, but it’s things that exactly what we hoped would happen is that this marvelous woman who was a participant in 2023 and we hope would be part of the faculty for the institute in 2025, Jasmine Mahmoud at the University of Washington in Seattle, one of her contribution to the Yale Theater issue is this remarkable article that opens up exactly… reveals the need and the gaps and the potential of such scholarship of that in Seattle. She’s going through the origins, the history of African-American ensembles in Seattle going back eighty, ninety years in a part of the country that’s not known for generating African-American work.

And there’s an amazing photo in her article of the young Merce Cunningham—who if I ever knew he was from Seattle, I had forgotten—that when he was a young man doing modern dance in Seattle in the thirties, was dancing with Black dancers in a mixed-race dance theatre that Jasmine is documenting that there’s been no documentation of, and that this then goes across decades. And that Jasmine… It’s a very specific community through line, and that Merce Cunningham is kind of the global point of reference that was in the moment as an unknown young man, was there. But that then all the other things about Seattle ensembles, theatres, companies through the eighties, nineties until now, but that she’s specifically as an African-American scholar looking at this history because it’s where she lives and what she’s always worked on one way or another. And she comes out of Chicago previously, but it was just exactly that we had no way of knowing.

And she needed the institute to kind of give her the… Maybe I hope, I assume she needed the institute, or at least it made it happen faster that this work gets out. But it’s the thing of we didn’t know, and we needed to know that there’s an eighty-year history of dance in Seattle that includes these issues of ensemble making, devising interdisciplinary performance, racially diverse performance in a place where you wouldn’t necessarily think to begin to look.

And so it’s a really extraordinary set of affirmations of, again, our intuitions, our anecdotal information was that there had to be such things. Would we have ever guessed that that’s what would come out? No. What would’ve pointed us to it is, which I did know that UW Seattle is one of the country’s oldest, best resourced, largest scale drama schools with one of the country’s oldest, best resourced, largest scales dance schools. And that university environment has served as this, I think for generations as an incubator for these waves of theatre and dance, innovative work in Seattle, which was one of the visions for starting university theatre departments in the 1960s, was for them to be incubators and agents for cultural, better dispersion of artistic activity across the country. And the regional theatre movement in many places, Seattle, the Bay Area, Chicago are heavily indebted to universities being the seedbed from which companies could then grow in the region.

And this relationship to the academy, which is what I emphasize kind of, my voice in the institute was about this, is that this is historically not always a graph that the American regional theatre movement, not everywhere, but in many situations, was made possible by investments in university theatre departments in a way that had not been understood or embraced at liberal arts undergraduate schools, places like Berkeley, places like UW Seattle, these are not drama schools, these are not conservatories. They often grew to include conservatories. But the idea was that a fully diversified university should add theatre and dance degree programs to the curriculum with support of things like the Ford Foundation to create a stable platform from which things could then emerge.

Berkeley Rep wouldn’t exist without the department. I did my doctorate in at Berkeley because Tony Taccone, who founded it, was a dropout of my doctorate program, which was a combined hybrid directing PhD program, it was called Director Scholar. And many people like Tony Taccone came through the directing piece, took their masters and went across the street to start a theatre because it was one of the few places you could study directing in the Bay Area at that point in time.

So it was like there was a kind of a plan, a coordinated plan to plant these seeds, these incubator environments around the country in higher education. And now we’re kind of looking at another moment in the twenty-first century of the theatre that’s emerged, including this devising, physically based, ensemble based category. How can the universities be understood as still really important partners and sources of resources? And then when we lose something like the University of the Arts, suddenly the stakes of higher education as a partner, as a stabilizing force, as an institutional resource—and UArts was very modestly resourced.

Jeffrey: Yeah, lots of presenters got to state why they think this was a historically important institute to hold for the field. And I’m wondering why was this institute particularly important for Pig Iron?

Quinn: Yeah, Pig Iron is about to celebrate its thirtieth year unbelievably in 2025. And so in some way it was an incredible moment to host twenty-five participants, fifteen faculty, esteemed colleagues, people that we’ve been in conversation with for decades and people brand new to us to recognize that we’re one part of a larger story. But to be host for that larger story did something very significant to Pig Iron. It’s a reframing of how we see ourselves.

I think in the early days in Pig Iron, we very much saw ourselves as doing our own thing in our own way for our own audience, wherever and however we could do it. And its smallness was its specialness, that we were a secret and we were making work that was not copying something else. But as you develop and mature and find more people in a larger community, you serve that community in a different way.

So to be able to be of service to this higher ed world and to have folks come and have a wonderful time in Philadelphia and feel close and a part of that larger circle, it definitely widened our conversation. I don’t know if we ever had considered ourselves being a center of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For sure, the National Endowment for the Arts, but the Humanities was kind of a new thought process, and I think it was a really rewarding one, and it did make us have new questions about archiving our own material and what the long-term story of Pig Iron would be as complicated and nuanced as it is to tell and to maybe consider other types of activities where Philadelphia, Pig Iron, this wild interesting group of people can do more to think bigger, to not think just about serving our own immediate needs, but to somehow be of service to the wider field.

Allen: And Jeffrey, if we have reapplied, they can’t be repeated more frequently than every two years. So we have resubmitted a revised version of the institute plan, but fundamentally the same goals and objectives and themes for 2025, which will be the thirtieth, by coincidence, the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of Pig Iron as students graduating from Swarthmore back then. So yeah, it’ll be an interesting anniversary if we were successful in getting the institute repeated in all those ways.

And we can become the center of a kind of a synergizer and crossroads for how all these things are understood nationally and that it’s here because Philadelphia really has the most diverse ecosystem in the nation for how this has grown over. And Pig Iron is part of a bigger constellation of companies, and it’s kind of one of the senior groups, but there are now many generational cohorts of people emerging, many of whom are our former students from the Pig Iron School, but not only them.

And so there could be several books, and this is one of the needs. There could be several books about just the Philadelphia constellations of work since 1995, and that this is such a rich dance community has been part of that from the beginning, and from the founding of Pig Iron, dance has been right in the center of the DNA of Pig Iron in the definition of the company’s mission and work and practice and origins.

So all of that, yeah, also in a way brings Philadelphia appropriately forward. And it’s the problem of, there are amazing companies here. For example, there’s a group called New Paradise [Laboratories]. I’m not sure there’s more than one scholarly article about New Paradise to be found in a bibliography and be even called one item of bibliography. I mean, see, the work is so huge to be done and that the Pig Iron is the… we’re kind of the senior group, and then with the school, we’ve been in a leadership role in a very specific way and together with things like the Fringe Arts Festival and partners, but.

Jeffrey: Within a couple weeks of this recording we’re recording on the 10th of June. I’m wondering UArts in Philadelphia closed very suddenly leaving a lot of students and faculty abandoned in its wake, and so I’m wondering, Pig Iron School was rooted there. I’m wondering if we can talk just a minute because I’m sure things are still unraveling. Is there any sense at this moment how the school is being affected, how the theatre company’s operations might be affected?

Quinn: Pig Iron is very determined not to let this be the end of our story. And we did enter into a partnership knowing that we would be both supported, but also we would be riding some of the ups and downs of a place like that. It worked out well, although there were certainly hiccups and headaches along the way in a partnership, particularly for an organization that always was able to organize ourselves, call our own shots, make all of our own decisions suddenly to be in partnership. But we wanted to do that with the right kind of ethic and with the idea that it was going to be a give and take. And at its best, it really served the students and served us.

We are absolutely caught in a unmooring situation where a number of our students are in the middle of their graduate education without a plan for what is next. We are doing everything we can to create that plan, but without an institutional partner, we don’t have a international student office to be able to help our international students stay in the country. We don’t have a loan program that can immediately step in and support students who are financing their education. We also are not accredited, so we’re not able to just extend an accreditation to an MFA student. And so we’re caught in this moment where we’re trying to see how fast and can we help out our students who are right in the middle?

And we were about to enter a new group of students and carry on who are hoping to study with Pig Iron, but under what guise, and as you can imagine, there’s lots of ifs and there’s lots of wonders and there’s lots of chasing down different opportunities and potentials. Nothing is fixed. And I also know that, probably mostly for the good, higher ed moves at a particular pace, and it is not change things on a dime, make rash decisions. It is studied and thoughtful and careful, and we don’t want to start a new partnership without being careful and thoughtful and sober about how that is going to work, first and foremost, to protect the beautiful organic thing that we’ve created over the last twelve years, the people who have been there to create it.

In no way do we want to sell off the business and let other people maintain it. It has a very handmade quality by the people who are here, the long-term company members of Pig Iron and other faculty who have just given their heart and soul to this and as well as the students. So our main effort right now is to just preserve what we’ve made and try to find the right conditions to see it going forward.

In the short term, of course, there’s all kinds of financial effects that will be very difficult for Pig Iron to weather, and we are actively doing emergency fundraising and trying to just see our way through the short term. My hope is that the long term is actually something better, more stable, more harmonious, and art school was a logical fit. We had our students take in visual art classes. They could go take metalworking, they could study songwriting, they could take choreography. There were so many beautiful things and wonderful faculty and just generosity at the faculty and student level, and then at the upper administration, that was where things obviously were less known to us and perhaps a big reason why things didn’t work out for UArts. But we’re very much in a precarious, uncertain time on June 10th. The news is only ten days old, and so we’re still very much moving at a rapid pace of process and to not leave our students in the lurch.

Jeffrey: Thanks.

Allen: And among the many, again, the affirmations that have been coming to us simultaneously with all the hard news from UArts is we just, over the weekend, we got messages from one of our last MFA graduates to complete all the requirements, still waiting to get his diploma, but who’s just gotten a full-time teaching appointment in a very prestigious theatre department in a university in Ankara, Turkey. And he was one of our international students. He was here on a Fulbright. And this is one of, I mean, a very important, very exciting, very stimulating group of students that we’ve been able to include coming from places like Turkey, mainland China, Canada, Peru. These are students that… And some, like the one from Peru, I guess we don’t know yet if she will get the visa that she needs to come back and then also be able to complete the credential that justifies the visa.

These are reminders, important reminders of what’s been accomplished here. And it’s a large MFA program within Philadelphia. I think we may be the largest by enrollment of any MFA in any field in the arts, and it’s a valuable program if we can find an institution that can work with us on the terms that has made it successful, preserve its integrity, preserve its character, preserve its appropriate autonomy, and yet we do need that institutional partner. We need stable resource, institutional partners who can bring those resources for the students benefit mainly.

Jeffrey: Thank you for that. Thanks for the update. Thanks for being as candid as you can be about that. It’s much appreciated. I’d love to end thinking about the future, thinking about 2025 and your future ambition for what the institute could be in a year. Peer through the fog of this moment that’s happening to us and thinking about a moment that we can put a lot more hope into.

Quinn: We have reapplied with a revised program, very much the same character, but with some new elements and some things which may have had redundancy that we felt like we didn’t need anymore. We will hear in August about the application. As we move through, we learned a tremendous amount as you do from running at once the participants were so generous with pages and pages of notes and thoughts and feedback that we’ve submitted to the NEH about the experience. A lot of themes emerged about the meaning, the culture, the community that was created, the pacing. We packed days from early till late, having the participant voices in twenty-five stories that we weren’t able to include and merge during those lunchtime sessions. And we want to kind of go toward that because we realize we are not the be-all, end-all storytellers. It’s actually a much wider berth.

So Jasmine, for instance, we’ve invited her to come and join the faculty. There’s some folks that have written kind of the ensemble theatre story in Chicago. We are bringing them in to help us learn how they’ve done that and how they chronicled that and what that book has meant to the Chicago theatre community. We realized that as much as there have been European influences, there are South American, Asian, African, global influences, and we want to widen that scope to recognize the permeability of the border, but also how that has been wrought.

We’ve invited UNIVERSES, which is a legendary African-American ensemble-based theatre who have toured the world and the country working in spoken word and ensemble practice physically based to be on the faculty for both a kind of discussion about their own path as well as workshops. So those kinds of things are, I think, going to make it feel like a brand new institute with the same heart.

Allen: And I would say that one of the things we found out, and we’re a little, well, proud but surprised to find out that when we were given the original grant in 2023, we were the only institute devoted to contemporary American theatre. And I’m old enough to remember that there was a time when I was a grad student and beyond where there were such institutes for theatre professors and theatre grad students, and that it was a thing I heard about and it’s completely gone to sleep as a practice. And so that actually when we’ve had to explain to people what an NEH Institute in theatre studies might be, and it’s of course an unprecedented version and an unprecedented focus, and that also, it’s a theatre company primarily that’s the host institution.

We’re in a really interesting category of, we’re very familiar with National Endowment for the Arts as Pig Iron, but when we moved into the National Endowment for the Humanities, the application came from the Pig Iron Theater Company, not from UArts. We were considering for a while partnering with Swarthmore for a bunch of reasons that ended up not being how we want. And so it went in as a proposal under the institutional sponsorship exclusively of Pig Iron Theater Company. And we’ve gotten apparently good marks from the NEH for what we did.

But it’s a significant set of resources. It’s a significant grant for the company’s annual operations and successes, kind of the checklist of grants we can get, the scale of the grant, but also that it’s a gathering of it was fifty-five people. This is a substantial gathering in any academic operation, any academic conference gathering that it’s medium-sized, I would say. Obviously there are national conferences where there can be hundreds of people, but a gathering of fifty-five is pretty significant, and it was such a good cross-section of the profession and the nation and the demographics of the country and some international folks.

So if it can be repeated at least once more, and then we don’t know yet what might spin out of it in terms of maybe a new association emerges within something like ATHE [Association for Theatre in Higher Education] or within ASTR [American Society for Theatre Research] or within the performance studies group. So these are things that if we can be consistent enough with two or three iterations that I would be confident there will be emerging constellations of longer term of kind of structures that are generated by this kind of more ad hoc thing. But for the field, it’s really significant to revive it.

And I was surprised when I blew blank stares from some colleagues at ATHE when I was explaining to them. They were like, “What’s that? What’s an NEH Institute?” These are academics, and it’s very high status for any institution. Harvard University would be very pleased to have their faculty receive an NEH Institute grant. It’s scored for rankings. It’s high status. So that theatre studies has evolved away from sponsoring NEH Institutes, I had not realized how far that had diminished in my lifetime, and now it’s coming back in this unexpected way. And if we are the only one, again, that makes me sad in a way. I hope we are inspiring other people to maybe take advantage of these funds, and NEH is a very good partner.

Jeffrey: Y’all, thank you so much for your time this morning. It is much appreciated. It’s no small task to ask an hour out of your day in this moment of history, so I really do appreciate connecting with you and chatting with you and just remembering what happened a year ago. I’m so full. My heart is so full. Remembering back a year ago and just being in your company and being in your garden, Allen, and sharing food with everybody and spending time together. And so thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really do appreciate connecting with you all again. We can do this again sometime soon under better circumstances and in person.

Quinn: Agreed. Thank you, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: It’s my pleasure.

Allen: Yeah, thank you, Jeffrey. Yeah.

Jeffrey: All right, first of all, a sincere thank you to Milwaukee Repertory Theatre for the use of their Zoom lines that I might conduct an uninterrupted Zoom call with Allen and Quinn. Also, a big thank you to Allen and Quinn directly. Thank you both so sincerely for being so transparent about this process.

I have found myself crossing paths with these folks over and over again, and I have to say it has been my greatest pleasure to do so. Y’all, thank you so much for your time and generosity, and especially amidst all the issues that have been going on with University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

As Allen mentioned, Theatre Magazine, a publication from Yale has put out a full magazine dedicated to the institute. So if you’d like other perspectives or insight, I highly recommend checking it out.

Lastly, and a part of a set-up for the next few episodes, let me say that while I was at the institute, I met some really amazing figures who are part of the ensemble theatre quilt, namely, Deb Margolin, a solo performance artist and playwright who is formerly with Split Britches. She’ll be joining us soon, but our next episode will be with Alyssa Hughlett of Dell’Arte International, another long-term ensemble-based organization that until some big financial news broke in 2023 was on the verge of collapse. Join us next time when Alyssa will take us through what Dell’Arte has been doing to ensure that their educational programming and international touring continues as their founders step away and their funders sunset.

Lots of seismic shifts happening these days. Hoping we can look at it all together. So we’ll catch you all next time on the next episode of From the Ground Up.

Think you or someone ought to be on the show? Connect with us on Facebook and on Instagram at FTGU_Pod or me at ensemble_ethnographer.

And of course, we always love fan mail at [email protected]. This podcast’s audio bed was created by Kiran Vedula. You can find him on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and at flutesatdawn.org. From the Ground Up is produced as a contribution to the HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. Be sure to search with word HowlRound and subscribe to receive new episodes.

If you loved this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to this digital commons.