Adam Paolozza

Adam Paolozza is a director, performer, producer, teacher and Artistic Director of Bad New Days.

As a performer Adam has collaborated with Zou Theatre, Fixt Point, Why Not Theatre, Soulpepper, Vertical City, Litmus Theatre & Ahuri Theatre. His co-translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Pylade (a modern re-telling of theOresteia story) was recently debuted in NYC by legendary La Mama theatre and toured all over Europe.

He regularly teaches privately, giving classes based on his interpretation of the Lecoq pedagogy, designed to open up students’ minds and bodies to spontaneity. He’s a sessional instructor at Soulpepper Academy and guest instructor at Ryerson (he directed 2016’s The Holiday Trilogy) and at U of T.

Adam is currently directing Bad New Days and Ahuri Theatre’s production of Flashing Lights.

Twitter: @adampaolozza

Flashing Lights:

Created by award winning Bad New Days (The Double) and Ahuri Theatre (This is the Point), FLASHING LIGHTS is an original play exploring how digital technology is radically shaping human evolution.

FLASHING LIGHTS tells the tale of Peter (Dan Watson), an unremarkable guy who inexplicably becomes famous. His dizzying rise and fall effects everyone around him, in particular his family; his savvy wife Shannon (Miranda Calderon) and their child Ter (Liz Peterson). What starts off as a portrait of contemporary family life quickly unravels into a meditation on the borders between digital and physical existence and the future of this brave new world being created.

Bad New Days:
https://www.badnewdays.com/
Twitter: @badnewdays

Ahuri Theatre:
http://www.ahuritheatre.com/
Twitter: @Ahuritheatre
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ahuritheatre

Stageworthy:
http://www.stageworthypodcast.com
Twitter @stageworthyPod
Facebook: http://facebook.com/stageworthyPod

Transcript

Welcome to episode 96 of Stageworthy, I’m your host Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy features conversations with Canadian theatre makers from actors to directors to playwrights and more. If you want to drop me a line you can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. My guest this week is director Adam Paolazza.

Adam is directing Bad News Days in a Hurry Theatre’s production of Flashing Lights, opening October 11th at the Theatre Centre in Toronto. Can you tell me a little bit, Adam, about Flashing Lights? Yeah, Flashing Lights is a new play, collective creation. It started off as a collaboration between myself, Ravi Jain from Why Not Theatre, and Dan Watson from iURI Theatre, and it started off really exploring photography and how the use of photography and the meaning of photography had changed over time from its invention until kind of modern digital technology and how that had affected us, the way we read images, use images.

And then Guillermo Verdecchia came on board and it started to evolve. We developed it over a couple of years and we just realised it became more about the way that we interface with all kinds of technology and the way the internet kind of changes our perception of what’s real, how the virtual has sort of like bled into, blurred the lines between reality and virtual reality. And we started to read a lot of like Baudrillard about simulacrum and Marshall McLuhan then became a big figure in it.

And then we kind of came up with a story, a story about a man who inexplicably becomes famous through an image that goes viral on the internet because we started to read a lot about kind of like how YouTube was sort of spawning these kind of strange celebrities. And so then we, once we had a story that became the focus and then it became about the man and his family. And so he sort of becomes famous for kind of literally like 15 minutes or something like that.

And after that point, kind of all, all hell breaks loose and kind of every member of the family is sort of on some kind of track of becoming or transformation and the fame kind of acts as a catalyst. And after that, all the different members of the family are sort of propelled further along their lines of transformation. And it’s almost as if time speeds up a little bit, which was also a way for us to kind of, I guess, deal with the phenomenon of of that feeling of time speeding up, you know, because of technology and the kind of anxiety that produces and how that, uh, the speed of information and how our bodies have not necessarily quote unquote upgraded themselves to be able to keep up with that.

Um, and then, and so now it’s sort of sitting in this place where the mother is, um, somebody who’s working with a kind of a technology, uh, sort of this idea of uploading her consciousness or going beyond the body. Right. Uh, and the father kind of becomes obsolete in a sense of, he’s not able to, like after the fame kind of comes and goes, he’s not able to be in that fast paced world anymore.

So he’s sort of, uh, kind of stuck in the analog world kind of, and the daughter is sort of searching for this other way, uh, this other way through the body of connecting more with other beings and not away from this idea that we use technology as a tool. And it kind of supports our attitude of proprietorship over, you know, the planet and things like that. So she’s kind of interested in, uh, finding something within herself, uh, another kind of consciousness that’s based in a body that can relate to other bodies.

And she’s interested in the animal world and something a little bit more, not necessarily going backwards, but finding kind of a sideways kind of line of flight that allows her to feel connected in a way that’s not this kind of digital connection. Um, it was starting to get interested in this idea that Marshall McLuhan had that, um, digital technology is sort of like ones and zeros, uh, and there’s a connectivity that comes with that, but there’s something that humans have and McLuhan kind of used it in the context of a metaphor. So the two terms in the metaphor don’t connect in this kind of binary way.

And there’s this precarious space in the middle that the human imagination can fill and allow us to connect to each other and be present in a more meaningful way. Um, so that, yeah, that’s sort of a kind of a thematic backdrop. Yeah.

As a, as a collective creation, um, you said you were going to for two years. Yeah. Sort of the way these things go is, you know, you get some funding to do research and development.

You work for a couple of weeks, uh, you kind of go away and you have to wait a year or two. And so we’ve done like four weeks here, two weeks there. The last time we worked was two weeks in last May.

Before that it was two weeks in September, 2015. Uh, and now we’ve got like a four week period of kind of rehearsal proper. Yeah.

And in between that time, uh, Guillermo, who’s primarily a writer, he’s also performing in the piece. Uh, he and I sort of fleshed out the story and based on scenes that we had already created collectively. Uh, and then he invented some new scenes based on kind of dramaturgical work that he and I did.

And so it’s a bit of a give and take between him bringing stuff in, us using that, transforming it, and then, um, him writing new things and then finding some things that’s not based on text that kind of comes from writing in the space as we call it. Were the, the performers, has it always been the same group of performers? Uh, no, no. Um, it was, like I said, Ravi Jain was in the first version and then he, uh, just kind of got too busy.

Uh, and the daughter and the mother are now played by Liz Peterson plays the daughter and Miranda Calderon plays the mom. And before it was Amy Nostbakken and Nora Sadova from quote unquote collective who are, their show, uh, mouthpiece has kind of blown up. So they also didn’t have time anymore, but they’re still supporting us, you know, in spirit.

Um, so when you’re getting actors together at the beginning of the collective process, um, what is it that you tell them? What is your starting point with a group of people? Yeah, that’s a good question. It really depends on the project. Um, for this one, once we invented the story, we were able to kind of talk about the world of each character and their relationship to technology.

And so we had done some improvisation, so we kind of had a basis of the family dynamic. And then in between that kind of as prep work, I would just try to talk to the actors about, you know, the history of their character, what they want, um, give them a couple of references, you know, like the mom one references like, um, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, which is kind of like a tech guru, uh, for the daughter, we, you know, we would read like some theoretical readings by Donna Haraway or, uh, Marshall McLuhan, Sherry Turkle, Jean Baudrillard, just different things that, so that they could take the kind of conceptual framework and then translate it into the, the life and intentions of the character. Yeah.

Um, and, uh, like I’ve done a couple of creative, uh, or collective creations in the past and always you end up in a different spot than you thought you were going to end up in. What’s been the most surprising thing about, about this particular process for you? Um, uh, I, I totally empathize and understand that. And, and actually that’s what I love about the collective creation is that I feel like, uh, I’m a big believer that words are not the only way that we convey meaning or, and I think theatre is much more than that.

And I think in Canada a little bit, you know, for better, for worse, uh, it’s really a playwright driven kind of ecology. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

And so I’m trying to like advocate for other, you know, more traditional ways of theatre that are not text-based. Um, I mean, there is a lot of text in the show, but we try to use text in a way as just another element and a kind of total theatre experience. But I like to keep room for spontaneity and to see what the actors bring.

So yeah, we’re always looking for that surprising thing that comes out, you know, when an improv goes a little too long or they feel like it’s not working, you know, and like some things, uh, like we had ideas for things that would happen and the way they would happen in the show. But, you know, and even just last week, like there’s a, we, we had to come up with a montage of explaining or, you know, showing the fame, the rise and fall of the main character, Peter. And we kind of hit a brick wall is near the end of the day.

We just needed to find the end of it. And, and, you know, Dan Watson, who’s playing Peter was just sort of really kind of trying to make us laugh and kind of out of frustration to start improvising a scene. And then we’re like, Oh my God, that’s it.

That’s so then sometimes, yeah, it’s a great, you find something that comes from the necessity of being in the space and performing rather than, you know, something that you think of sitting at a computer and what have you. And I find that that’s what makes, and the other thing I like about collective creation too, is that it is kind of more of a democratic process. So I think it would just be boring if it was just my ideas and I think, so I think about it more like I like as a director come and give them, like I do prep in kind of a traditional way of like the super objective of the character, you know, the objective of the scenes, but then leave room for them to bring what they feel like, defend the character on their own terms.

And so that always has more of a heterogeneous feel of, you know, that things are coming from their own experience and also that they own the material a little bit more after. So just to, to get away from, from this play just for a little bit, I’m curious, and one of the things I always talk about on this podcast with people is, is what it is that drew them into the world of theatre? What was their, like, why theatre? Of all the things that you could do with your life, what was it that made you want to do this? For me, I started, I was taking like an art class in high school and my art teacher was like, oh, you should audition for the play. It was like grade nine and I just happened to get a good part.

And I just really liked theatre class after that. So I just kept doing it. And at that point, it was really just an actor.

And I don’t know, for me, it was something, I knew I wanted to be in the arts somehow, like that was important to me to find a way to express myself. And theatre seemed to be the thing that I was the best at. And, you know, I think these things are always connected to things in childhood too.

So I think I just remember entertaining the family, you know, making the adults laugh kind of thing. So for me that, and I was very shy. So somehow having control over my behavior through a script or rehearsed, you know, a bit of action, I could, it allowed me to kind of come alive, come out of my shell and I could connect to people more.

So I guess that, yeah, that feeling of connectivity that comes from the live performance experience, I became addicted to it and kind of, and now I think that, you know, with the ascendancy of film in the 20th century, and now it’s like the internet and Netflix and all that stuff, like, I think those things are great. And I don’t think it’s either or, but there’s something about getting people together in a room. And that feeling of like, I love the feeling on an opening night when I’m, you know, the actors maybe flub a line a little bit and a bit of reality creeps in.

And I think it’s important, like the theatre is still a place, like, you know, it seems to be something that even in times of great political upheaval or disasters or things like that, you know, oppressive regimes, somehow theatre survives. So it seems to be something that is to me, at least essential to the human condition that we come together and pretend, you know, and act out stories. It’s always like interesting because, you know, when you think about, you know, oppressive regimes, like, you can shut down a movie, because there’s a big thing that goes around that.

Yeah. But a group of people in a small room can really fly under the radar, but it’s in that small room, that this strange thing happens where the audience and the actors just sort of feed each other. Yeah.

And that’s one thing that that film can’t do. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, you know, it’s funny, because whenever we start thinking about that sort of thing, or whenever I’m talking to somebody, I remember, I think about all the times that some that there’s physical violence in a movie.

And we’re so used to physical violence in a movie, it’s nothing, you know, somebody slaps somebody else, nobody ever reacts to it, really. But if somebody slaps somebody in a theatre, the audience always reacts. Yeah, yeah, always reacts, because the actors are in that same in the room with you.

Yeah, yeah, that element of danger. Yeah. And that, you know, you could say anything.

Yeah. And it’s a space to like, really foment, you know, some kind of reaction to the audience. Yeah.

And I think, yeah, yeah. When you were thinking about, like, when you were realizing the theatre was something you were going to be doing, or like, that you really enjoyed it? What was the point where you thought that this was going to be like, you knew you wanted to be in the arts, but when did you come out to your as a theatre person? I think they knew pretty early, we had it, we were just lucky, you know, it was like the late 90s was before Mike Harris, there’s still a lot of money in the arts programs at school. And remember those days? Yeah, we were just fortunate that we had a really into really dedicated drama teachers.

So we were like, doing collective creations, like, they’re turning us on to lots of different directors and playwrights. So we, you know, took a play to Italy performed on the streets. It was really by that point, I was like, I think my parents knew it was kind of, kind of gradual, but probably by grade 11 or 12.

I was like, Okay, I’m gonna go to theatre school. And this is what I want to do. Did they ever try to talk you out of it? Not really.

No, my dad. My dad’s a property manager. But when in his youth, he was a singer in a band in an R&B band.

So I think and I think he stopped because he had kids. He had, you know, a stable job. So I think actually, for him, it was a way for his dream to be a performer to kind of continue.

So they’ve been supportive, you know, they’ve always been sort of, okay, what are you gonna fall back on? Yeah, in maybe in my 20s. And then as you know, time went on, and I am able to survive doing this. Now, they’re just sort of like, they don’t mention money so much anymore.

And they’re just kind of supportive. How did you handle that? What are you going to fall back on question? Because I think that’s something that a lot of people get when they’re in their 20s. And starting out and their parents might be a little concerned about? What is it that you said to them at the time when they were asking that question? I think I paid a little lip service to it.

And I knew there was always a possibility of teaching. And I still do do a lot of teaching. I think that’s a great way to keep practicing your craft and also supplement your income.

And like, also, like, I’m pretty lucky that I come from a background that’s privileged enough that I could make that transition from having a restaurant job to then suddenly, you know, I had a support network that I don’t think everyone has. But I think I was pretty adamant to them that I needed to go 100%. If I didn’t go 100%, then I saw a lot of people that I had either gone to high school with or even theatre school with, kind of make that compromise.

So I didn’t want to make a compromise. Yeah. I mean, now that I’m, you know, I’m like, almost 40.

Now it’s a little bit. Sometimes I’m like, okay, I mean, it is going on this line, it would be nice to have a little bit more money and, you know, be able to save up for a house or whatever. It’s actually pretty rare to find people who are like, I know, I look at my theatre school class from 93.

How many people are still doing it? And how many people lasted three years, five years before they just sort of started to think, yeah, you know, a larger apartment would be nice. Yeah. Having, you know, little things like that.

But I think that people who find a way to make it work find other ways to have a little bit more to settle into the life of it. And I, and again, I don’t know if this is just, I’m lucky because I come from fairly privileged upbringing, but I felt like I was like, I was adamant that it’s what I absolutely had to do. So I think a bit of that single-mindedness allows you to kind of like put up with some of the harder times and be a bit more resourceful to try and find other ways to, you know, to survive while you’re trying to make your art.

Yeah. Other than that, did you, were you primarily a restaurant guy when you were starting out in your twenties or were you, did you find other, Yeah, I was like pretty, I didn’t really want to like get too creative about it. So I was like, as soon as I moved to Toronto after I graduated, well, I went to Ryerson and then I went to a school in France called Le Coq.

It’s like a, yeah, you’ve heard of it. So it’s, it’s just really a school, something, think of it as a mime school or a clown school or a movement school. It is all of those things, but it’s primarily a school about original creation.

So leaving that, I started a company right away. So I was always had a company and we were always managed to work a little bit, but I was like, okay, no, I’m just going to get a restaurant job. And for a little while I was a supply teacher because I spoke French after being in France.

That was kind of torture. Being a supply French teacher in Oshawa is not something that you want to, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So that, but I was lucky enough that maybe it was like when I was 27, I could, I was getting enough work that I could stop the restaurant job. And so, you know, there’s leaner times and like a more thicker times, but since then I’ve been able to kind of, oh, there’s always been something. So you went, you went to Ryerson initially to theatre school.

Did you audition for any other schools or was it Ryerson for you initially? I auditioned for, yeah, I auditioned for NTS, the National Theatre School, didn’t get in. U of T, I think I got into the Sheraton program. George Brown didn’t get in and Ryerson offered me a scholarship.

But I like, they had an audition too, that I remember was create your own piece. Oh shit. Really? Yeah.

And I was always drawn to that. So that seemed like my people kind of thing. They didn’t do that when I auditioned for the Ryerson.

Yeah. It was, it was a standard, sing a song, do a monologue sort of thing. And there was no more, I think we had to do that, but put it in a piece or something.

So that made it a little bit more palatable because I also hate auditioning. Well, P.S. I don’t actually know many people who enjoy auditioning. I know maybe two people who enjoy it and everybody else is just like, it’s pretty masochistic.

And people on both sides of the table. Nobody likes it. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Now that I’ve auditioned people, it’s the worst. Yeah.

Cause you’re like, you want to make them feel comfortable. Yeah. Yeah.

And to create an environment where you can get where people feel comfortable enough to show what they have. Yeah. When you’re saying that you want to make them feel comfortable, are you talking about when you’re behind the table or when you’re auditioning? Behind the table.

Yeah. Cause I always feel when I’m walking, if I walk into a room that I’m like trying to make them feel comfortable. Right.

Cause I’ve also been on that side of the table and sometimes it’s not comfortable. Yeah. I guess that becomes just sort of like, okay, I made a couple of choices.

I’m going to defend them. Yeah. Yeah.

So what drew you to the Lecoq school? Well, part of the Ryerson training I really liked and other parts I really didn’t like. I still felt it was really this kind of British kind of rep colonial model. And, and I was getting, you know, they w they had this kind of like, uh, ideology or they had this sort of like attitude that, Oh, it’s going to be very fair.

Anyone can play anything. But then it was always just sort of like the tall blonde white guy that had the main role. And, um, I’m not a person of color and Italian heritage and, and kind of like French Canadian and a bit of a mutt on my mom’s side, but I was played like the Arab serving or something like that.

So I was like, okay, this is not reflect and other people in my class feels like this is not reflective of our talent. It’s more reflective of the way we look something. And I thought if this is already starting in theatre school, that’s really crummy.

Um, but each year I had a teacher who had been at Lecoq. So I’d like a mime class in one year and movement class in another year. And then we did like, then Perry Schneiderman took over the program in my third year and he had done Lecoq and he does mask work and he’s like a great director and teacher in his own right.

So I started to really love that training and I wanted to study mask at that point. And I was looking at Italy or then I saw the Lecoq kind of perspectives and I was like, oh, well, France is like Italy, which is my naive self. But I was like, oh, not only do they do mask, they also do mime and movement and tragedy and clown and all this stuff.

So, and as soon as I got there, I was like, this is exactly where I need to be. Uh, and I just loved every minute of it. And I didn’t even know that it was so focused on your original creation, but at the school every week you get a theme and you make a piece outside of school time.

They call it auto core, which actually started during the student riots in 1968. Really? Yeah. The students were like, Lecoq was like, well, I, I like to be collaborative.

So what do you want to do? Do, should we shut the school down in solidarity? And they were like, well, what if we, what if you let us kind of run the school for that portion of it sort of thing? And so it came out of that and the Lecoq was like, oh, we’re on to something. So you’re always sort of like put, you know, like trial by fire and you really get used to creating and you get used to being an actor who kind of creates on their feet. So I think when you leave the school, like Dan Watson in the piece also went to Lecoq.

Um, Miranda Calderon went to Lispa, which is a school in London that’s based on Lecoq pedagogy. So, uh, I mean, the other actors are fantastic and they all have their own kind of practice, but there’s something about the, that pedagogy that gives you a kind of a creative muscle that really allows you to quickly economically. Okay.

Like let’s do the scene. You’re going to do that. You’re going to do this.

And there’s sort of like a practical real-time knowledge of how to play a scene. Is it just like, it gives you the ability to not have to think about it too much and jump in. Yeah.

Yeah. Cause you have all of this, these hours, you know, it’s like that Malcolm Gladwell quote, like takes like 10,000 hours to be, so it’s that it’s not exactly 10,000 hours, but it’s that kind of thing. And so little things like about, you know, rhythm, when to enter, when, how to listen to the other actor, those become kind of ingrained and you’re able to, yeah, be more in the moment and just listen and respond.

And yeah. The auto court, does everybody get the same theme or does everybody get a different theme? Everyone gets the same thing. Yeah.

So, and then you make your little groups and it’s an international school. So you might have somebody in your class from like Rwanda or Spain or Norway or whatever. And then you show it on Friday in front of the whole school and the teachers critique it.

And it was also, that was a great, because they’re very not harsh for the sake of being harsh, but in a positive way, very unforgiving. And sometimes they stop you right away. Like, okay, bon, merci.

And you ask, well, do you have any notes? No. Some, you know, and in retrospect, you know, when you’re young, you’re like, oh, what the hell? Like a lot of feedback, but I think they realize that some things you’re not going to understand in that moment. And then they have, you have all the other time in class to kind of understand.

So, and other times they would give you notes or sometimes they let it go on longer for a pedagogical reason. And then if you really did succeed and you got a chapeau, as they say, then you like really enjoyed Friday night and went to the bar and, you know, when, when they would like, if they stop you right off, I mean, that’s gotta be a little bit of a blow to everybody’s ego. Yeah.

And they don’t give you any feedback. Did you ever have moments of like, I don’t know if I want to do this anymore, or did you understand the process enough to know? I, I, I think personally, I was okay with that because there, there’s some part of you that knows when something’s not working and watching it’s, it’s useful to see when they stop too, because then you start to develop your eye, your outside eye. So some people would complain or be upset because you don’t put all that work in.

Sometimes though, if you had such a hard week and you weren’t really jiving with the rest of the group, but they did stop you, it was kind of a relief, right? Like, okay, I had a feeling about that. So it could confirm your instincts or, or sometimes you think it’s great and they stop you and you, and you understand another, you understand what you do, you know, sort of through the eyes of the beholder on the outside. And that’s a really valuable lesson for like a performer to know because a lot of times we don’t, we don’t get that.

Totally. Yeah. That kind of insight because we’re so inside.

Yeah. And I, when I left Ryerson, I think I, I realized just how little practical time on stage we had. We did a lot of text work, a lot of movement work, everything kind of in isolation, but the kind of spatial and temporal exigencies of performing on a kind of basic level of like, how do you, I, how do I enter? Like what, you know, when do I enter? How do I, all those things were, uh, it became something that you embodied and you had that physical, uh, muscle memory of afterwards.

Yeah. It’s really interesting to think about, about the fact that, you know, when you’re going through school like that, cause I’m thinking back on my George Brown experience at the time, it was very similar that, that, you know, you’re studying all the things in isolation. You don’t have a lot of time on stage and then somehow you’re just supposed to, when you come out innately understand all of those things.

Yeah. And, but you’re thinking about your voice. Am I on my voice? Am I like, am I moving enough? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think when you, when Lecoq is really the mime training and all that one practical thing that it translates to is that you understand that the way you move creates a space in the art and the audience’s imagination, or, or if you have more elaborate set design, it creates a dynamic between, you know, the geometry and the architecture of the space and the way your body moves and that you, that’s part of the storytelling. So you understand the value of stillness versus movement, you know, depending on the moment.

Yeah. Did you, did you, and I often find that silence is a thing that we have difficult difficulty with a lot of times. Oh, totally.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s always interesting to, to push that.

Yeah. But we’re really uncomfortable with it in the theatres. Yeah.

And this piece actually, like we really, one thing we talked about a lot and we’ve been trying to explore in different moments is those times when we are uncomfortable with idleness or silence and we go to our phones and what does that mean? So there’s, I think there’s a lot of moments in the show where you’re watching characters kind of they’re together, but they’re not because they’ve checked out on their phone. And so what we’ve tried to do is almost create this sort of POV of like a kind of a post-human point of view, or like if you were looking at these, if the show was just these images that were somehow captured in a time capsule by maybe something even non-human in the future, like what, what did we look like? What, to have a bit of objectivity to the way, the way that the technology is like in our lives, like it’s very intimate. It’s always on our bodies or near us and how, how we can be close, but far away.

And so, and you know, we have a, a scrim between the audience and the stage that is all, not always, but for a lot of the scenes is projecting a live feed. So the piece is kind of mediated by a screen and we’re kind of playing with that, what that means in a theatrical context, does that distance us? When do we feel closer, further away from the performers? Yeah. How do you feel about technology having worked on this show? I actually, I, well, I’ll give you one.

Recently I broke my iPhone and then I had always been like, man, I, I’m on this thing too much. Like, as I’m sure most people feel like this, every time I go on Facebook, I have like anxiety attacks or things like that. So I was like, I’m going to get a flip phone.

I’m going to go back. So I went, it’s sort of, yeah. So in a long story short, it’s opened my eyes to my own kind of habits around it.

And then just all the research we’ve done, I think it’s, and this is sort of a Marshall McLuhan idea that it’s not that things are good or bad, but it’s, it’s how they affect, it’s our relationship to them and how we use them. So I think it’s definitely made me more aware of how much time, uh, when does the technology, you know, there’s a certain point where I’m like, I don’t want the screen in my bedroom anymore. These kinds of things.

Like, so, and I do think it’s naive to think that we are going to stop or that it’s going to go backwards. Hopefully it’ll go forwards in a different way. I think that’s what the character of the daughter Ter is looking for, like kind of a third way.

That’s not just like, okay, let’s go in whole hog, which is more of the mother sort of like goes sort of wants to advance that process after the fame of the father. But I think I’m interested in this more, like I identify more with the daughter’s idea of like, it’s great to have this stuff, you know, like, I’m not going to say no to a GPS if I’m somewhere where I don’t know where I am, but at the same time, like, I think it’s important that we, uh, still spend time with each other in real time and still experience. I think it was a great quote by Louis CK, where he talks about driving this car and feeling sad.

And instead of going to the phone, just like putting the phone down, experiencing the sadness, let it come and then let it go. Um, so, and I do think that there is a way that our nervous system kind of changes through the stimulation of the technology. So it’s, it’s similar to like, I hate going to restaurants and have a TV screen totally because it doesn’t matter how interesting the people you’re with are eventually everybody’s looking at the screen at some point, um, we’re drawn to it and it feeds something in our brains.

And so the phone sort of does that too. Totally. Have you found that other people in the cast are suddenly treating their phones differently or, or, or yeah, that affected them last, the last workshop we did, we all made a pack that we would go off social media for the two weeks that we were working.

And that was interesting. Cause like, uh, yeah, just to see little things like people feeling more present to each other, you know, more spontaneous things would happen between us, even during breaks or things like that. And one of the actresses, I think she hasn’t gone back to Facebook.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny because I know I I’ve seen people, there are two kinds of people that I’ve seen people who like three people who tolerate their social media, people who just like, they’re really comfortable there.

And people who start who like, like you were saying, feeling anxiety when they go on, on Facebook or something like that. Yeah. I think that, uh, I don’t know if those are phases of social media or if it’s just different ways that we’re reacting to the flashing lights.

Totally. And the speed of it, I think is what is the most like dangerous thing because it keeps evolving so fast and it doesn’t allow you like, here’s an anecdote. We, for the character of the daughter, who’s a teenager, I mean the actress who’s playing her is in her thirties.

So we, we just wanted to be, we didn’t want to kind of take liberties with that representation. So we invited in a group of teenagers and just talked to them about their relationship to technology and what we kind of explained to them, the character and they, they were, they had at one at once, like an incredible wisdom about it that we didn’t expect, but also the way that they interacted with it was like, kind of blew our minds a little bit. Like they were all like, Oh yeah, we all have three or four Instagram accounts.

One is our spam account. And we were like, what, what’s that mean? They’re like, Oh, it’s for our friends where it’s less curated. Then we have like, they were art students.

So they were like, Oh, then we have our artist accounts, more curated. And I can’t remember what the third one was, but it was another like highly curated one. And they’re like, Oh yeah, Facebook’s just for family and events.

Email, like, you know, hardly at all. It’s funny because I remember talking to a couple of people. They were like, well, you know, you’re looking for somebody that age.

They’re going to be on Facebook. And like, it’s my mom saying that I’m like, they’re in there. Like they just turned 19.

They’re not on Facebook. Yeah. They’re on Snapchat.

It’s still Instagram, but they’re not on Facebook. If they’re on there, it’s so they can talk to you. Exactly.

Yeah. And they were saying things like, yeah, I guess on Instagram, I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a, you send somebody a short video and it’s like a, and it becomes like a thread. Yeah.

But they talked about how if they hadn’t been on it often enough, they had lost track of the kind of inside joke or the story between their friends. And that was a great source of anxiety. And so what they were saying was like, yeah, I have to just keep up with this one thread.

It’s been going for a hundred days. Or another one was like, I have to sometimes just go off for a month or two because that pressure of keeping up or, and even just knowing what their friends are talking about. And then they were talking about this kind of, I was like, oh, that’s an incredible perspective.

They’re like, yeah, we really think a lot. We’re really worried about kids that are younger than us that will never know what it’s like not to have these social media platforms, which seemed to be something that we had said about these kind of 17, 18 year olds, but that they were already thinking about that for like 10 year olds or. So I think it’s something that, yeah, like everyone’s thinking about it and, you know, every age group, each platform, it seems to be tailored to a different demographic.

Yeah. It’s funny because the Facebook sort of stayed with the people who were in college or university at the time that Facebook came out and then our parents, and then Snapchat I’m there, but I don’t really. Yeah.

I think I had it for a bit. But I had never thought about how stressful for people, like young people, as I say that I sound so old, but like keeping on top of the Instagram stories for people, because that’s gone after 24 hours. If you don’t see that, it’s gone.

You will never know what happened. And if that’s like a sense of something that your friends are talking about, the FOMO must be like pretty intense. Yeah.

And I think that’s also connected to the way that images, how they mean things and what they mean has changed. Like the first photos kind of like in the research we’re doing in the earlier stages of the project, it was really to create something that would last through time. And even your relationship, exposure time was incredibly long, like a couple of minutes.

But now the photo is instant and it has this ephemeral, or yeah, like the stories on Snapchat, it’s got this ephemerality to it that is, once it’s gone, yeah, it creates this FOMO or also it’s like, when are we going to attend to all these photos that we’ve taken? It seems that when you had the artifact, the printed photo back in the old days, not even that long ago, like now it’s like they’re on their own hard drive somewhere. Or also like if you have, say you break up with somebody, like suddenly you have all of this photographic evidence, so to speak of, but yeah, I just, the inundation of images and that we take them so that we can look at them later. But do we ever look at them later? That’s the thing.

That’s the thing. The other thing that’s kind of interesting is like, if you break up with somebody and Facebook offers to block them for you, like you change your relationship status and Facebook is like, do you, we can stop you from seeing them if you want. And there are services that you can get that are being like, all right, so I’m going to block all these people for you, all of their friends so that you can’t be involved, so you will never have to feel that pain again or whatever.

It’s crazy. So crazy. That there’s an algorithm that will figure that out.

Yeah. Yeah. And it just makes me think a lot about, like I miss the days when I would watch much music, you know, like in the nineties and you didn’t know what you were going to get.

And if you got stuff that you liked, that was a surprise. But now it seems to be the idea that you curate everything about your life feels that you don’t get exposed to surprise, that you never leave your kind of bubble of experience. That’s actually really true.

Cause I remember those days on much music and it was like listening to the radio because you didn’t know what you were going to get. And now, you know, we’ve got our Spotify playlists and we know what those are. We can like, we know what’s coming next.

We’re never surprised in that way. Yeah. And I feel like our bodies, like our nervous systems are, I don’t use the word design, but they have evolved.

They work well with surprise, actually. They work well with adaptation and it’s good to not be stuck in a kind of any kind of like synaptic neurological pattern. So I just, yeah, I feel bad or I wonder what that, all this stuff is doing to us and that those kinds of like primordial ways that we interface with our milieu have been kind of disrupted by this.

And yeah, I mean, I just, I hope that kids have that experience of being like something that, you know, that they don’t like at first, but then they grow to like it because they have wisdom, which seems there doesn’t seem to be a lot of place for wisdom in this kind of like connectivity of the digital kind of binary. I think that’s where theatre becomes really interesting because you’re in a room, can’t use your phone. If you open your phone in a theatre, everybody knows it.

And it’s a room where you don’t like the things that you’re most used to, the tropes on TV and film are not likely to happen. Like you probably can’t spot the, you know, oh, that guy’s going to retire. He said he’s going to retire.

So he’s going to like, there’s like all these things that you’re used to in a movie that help you predict the end, which probably don’t happen quite so obviously in theatre. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately there’s other theatre tropes that are just as well-worn and boring.

Yes. But I, and I actually, I think about this a lot in my work and especially when I work with younger students, but even with my colleagues, when we’re creating stuff to find in the work, what, what is theatrical, what’s proper to theatre? Cause I think the language of film kind of seeps into so much of what we do, like, they’ll do this scene and we’ll cut to that scene or we’ll do a jump cut or, or I think it’s more interesting in theatre to like deal with the constraints of the medium and find novelty in that rather than bringing in other languages. I really think that’s where, where theatre shines is limitation because you only have the time that you have and you only have this room and so you can throw a lot of money at stuff to bring in a jump cut or a pan or whatever, but when you can work really simply with small things, there’s a certain magic to that that you can’t get anywhere else.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Is there something that you hope that people take away from, from this show? Hmm. I, I hope that, I hope that on a first sort of first pass, it feels very strange. And then I hope that there’s an effect of, oh, this is not that far from reality.

And what I’m hoping is that the kind of mirror that we’re reflecting back on all of us, and we’re trying to do it in a sort of non-dogmatic way, not to say that this is good or bad, but this is what it is. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it’s just creates a space where people feel like they have the agency to reflect, or they have maybe a bit more agency over their relationship to technology.

Yeah. And I know we were talking about how you’ve given up your, your, your smartphone and gone back to a flip phone, but are you on social media? I am. Yeah.

I haven’t, I, I, I struggle with this all the time. Like I’m still on Facebook and Instagram. Um, the excuse that I use is that, well, I need to be on Facebook so I can publicize events and Instagram to publicize the show.

But more and more, I even see artists that I like that are not on them anymore. And I still know when they’re, so I, I dunno, I hope, I wonder if I could even go whole hog and just sort of not use any of them. You could do like an experiment for a while.

Yeah. And again, I think it’s a thing of like, they aren’t bad in and of themselves. Yeah.

However, though, the one thing that does really, I don’t know if we’ve, I’m trying to get this into the show, but it just might not fit. But I’m, the thing that worries me is the way that so much of our information and data is being collected by. So I feel like big data is the next big like villain or something like that.

So I do worry that who owns these platforms because in the beginning, the internet felt so democratic and now, you know, with the net neutrality being threatened and the fact that Google is so powerful now they, you know, I read an article and I can’t remember if it was the guardian of New York times about how the Pentagon is talking to Google. So the sort of benign neutral nature of the, these companies for me is becoming more problematic. Well, they all know so much about us.

Like it’s always like occasionally on Facebook, you see the meme where Facebook is not to start charging unless you share this message or whatever. And I’m always like, Facebook is never going to charge because you’re their product. Everything you do tells them something that they sell.

They’re funded by what you tell them about yourself. This is an idea that McLuhan had too, that now with the sort of electronic age, and I think he was really like about to say internet, maybe I think he even coined worldwide web. I’m not sure, but I feel like we, what he says, we have become the content, which I think is like, it’s interesting in theatre and some of the new trends where the audience is given a lot of agency.

And I think that’s a healthy thing, but the way that it’s kind of like almost silently crept into the way we use technology, sometimes I worry about that, especially with younger people who don’t, like, I wasn’t thinking about those things when I was younger. And just the idea that, you know, your facial recognition information, all of the information about what you like and what you don’t like, that you’re not just putting that on, it’s not, it’s not benign. Yeah, no, it’s not.

Somebody is making a profit off that. So again, you know, we have to talk about capitalism. We have to talk about who owns the means of representation, all these kinds of things.

So, and again, I think like you said, theatre being live, there is a way to short circuit that, whereas, you know, the connection between audience and spectator, there is that empty space between us, but we fill that with our imagination rather than, you know. There’s a lot of spaces in this city where that space between us is not that huge. Totally.

Yeah. And that’s one of the things I really enjoy about the small space. In terms of, of all that, you know, all that, all that thinking about all that data and as that might not be something that you can fit into the show, do you feel liberated from that? Giving up your phone or, I mean, obviously you still use the internet, so you’re not completely off that, but you’re not giving, you’re not giving them quite as much information about where you go.

Yeah, I do. I do feel a bit, I feel like, you know, like on break during rehearsal or something, if I don’t have my computer with me, not having that access. I try to cultivate time where I just do nothing and, and even retrain my mind that that’s okay, that that’s actually valuable, that boredom is something where creativity, it creates a space for creativity rather than constantly trying to like placate some kind of like, you know, desire, really.

I think that’s a nefarious thing too that, you know, so much content is sexual on you, obviously, but that it, that it’s connection toward desire in a very easy way. We slip into it and then suddenly, you know, they have access to like, you know, like, I’m sure if somebody showed you your internet history, it would be terrifying. What kind of a story would that tell? And that things become documented.

And I think that changes our relationship to our actions. It’s interesting what you’re saying about, about boredom. I spent like, it’s almost been a recent rediscovery for me about the importance of boredom.

Yeah. I was spending so much time with video game or Netflix or social media or something that I was like, why aren’t I writing anymore? And I was like, my brain doesn’t have time to imagine things. Yeah, totally.

I think that, yeah. And I read more and more articles about that, like, especially with children or teenagers. Like one of the books we’ve been reading, it’s by Sherry Turkle.

I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s, it’s something about leaving space for boredom and leaving space for conversation. Because another thing that, like her research with teenagers is that people are shying away from real time conversation, because it produces too much anxiety. You can’t curate what you say, you might get a response that you have to deal with right away.

Like, and though, like, to me, I’m like, Oh, obviously, but it also so sad and kind of blows my mind that that’s people are breaking up with each other through text messages or talking to each other through text messages. So it’s like this thing where she talks about, it brings us close together in one way, but takes us further apart. Same gesture.

Well, this, this has been a really good conversation. We’re pretty much out of time. But thank you so much for thank you.

Yeah, it’s a pleasure.