Scott Emerson Moyle | Stageworthy

Scott Emerson Moyle is an intimacy director, educator, visual artist, director, producer, actor, and ship’s captain based in Toronto. He does lots of things for The Boundless Library, mostly involving audio drama and making weird physical objects. He probably has one cat, but there may be more hiding in his beard. His favourite accolade is having been Harolded into the House of Don McKellar.

Instagram: @moylesmeticulousminis

The Boundless Library
The Boundless Library is a groundbreaking way to experience stories. Told across multiple formats and from varied perspectives, each of our transmedia experiences stretch what stories can be. Through complex and interactive narrative forms, our stories might span multiple timelines — or even multiple realities! One fragment of a story might come to you in an exquisitely crafted package filled with unusual relics; another might come as an unnerving audio recording; and a third may come as a digital research dossier.

www.theboundlesslibrary.com
Instagram: @boundlesslib
Twitter: @boundlesslib
TikTok: @theboundlesslibrary

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Transcript

Welcome to Stageworthy, a podcast about Canadian theatre and the people who make it, hosted by me, Phil Rickaby. This is episode 307. My guest this week is Scott Emerson Moyle.

One of the things I’ve really noticed in the last 18 months with theatres being closed is the resiliency of the theatre artist. Pretty much every artist has come up with a way that they can still make art even with venues closed, whether that’s Zoom plays, live stream productions, pre-recorded video productions, or audio dramas like my six-part production last Christmas, St. Nick and the Big F*** Up. We’ve all had to make changes, buying new equipment, learning how to do video online, how to produce online, and what promoting an online production even looks like.

So many changes to make things happen in this very strange time. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Scott Emerson Moyle. Scott is one of the creative brains behind The Boundless Library, a sequential adventure that you take part in, both through online resources and actual, physical treasures mailed to you.

The Boundless Library uses the elements of audio plays and written text and combines it with these treasures to tell an intricate story. I was able to take part in the library’s first story, and I connected with the story more viscerally because of the way these pieces tied together. The Boundless Library is an ambitious project made all the more important because of the pandemic, and I highly recommend it.

Scott is not only one of the creators of The Boundless Library, but he’s also a director, fight choreographer, intimacy director, and performer. Here’s our conversation. If it is possible for you to give the elevator pitch for The Boundless Library, what would that be? The Boundless Library is multi-platform storytelling in a subscription model.

And that description is technically correct and also mightily hecking dry. Another way to describe it might be it’s sort of like an alternate reality game, an ARG, or in some ways sort of like an escape room, except it comes to you. And that’s sort of true as well.

Another way to put it is it’s an immersive narrative experience that you, for one or more audience members, where you get to intake it at your own pace, in your own comfortable space, and you get to build your own understanding of what the story is. That is, I mean, all three of those are good explanations, or explanations. And it’s, to me, having participated in the last week or so, and that’s like an accelerated version since it takes about, it’s like six mailings over six months.

The story you did is a six-month experience that you crammed heroically in a week. But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing.

It’s like, oh, for me, it was a whirlwind, but I could see if you had, if you got your first mailing, you know, there’s a month until the next one. And there’s a piece, like a media piece a week, in addition to the mailing that you’re having, that you’re gaining access to, you are slowly uncovering this story, piecing through all of these little treasures that you’ve been sent in the mail. And they’re significant in amount and intricacy.

So the team that put this thing together, your team is wonderful. It’s because it’s every piece is gorgeous. Everything is gorgeous.

Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. It’s been a lot of, a lot of the hands-on work was done by me. There are four of us sort of at the core of this thing.

And, you know, there’s someone who does a lot of the writing and someone who does all of the editing and the sort of graphics manipulation stuff. There’s someone who does all of the digital structure and sort of the business model behind the scenes, you know, that stuff. And then I am the point person on most of the hands-on making.

So it’s really been a blast to sort of talk through in the story meetings what the story is going to be and then go, so what can we make and how can we make it? You know, what would it look like to produce a few hundred wooden Ukrainian style painted eggs? Or what would it look like to do a mailing that has, I think it’s like 105 pieces of paper, each of which is heat damaged and water damaged. Yeah. And to do all that, not just to figure out to do it once the way you would do it as a theatre prop, but to do it at scale.

Yeah. Is a real ride. I’m sure it is.

I’m sure it is. And it pays off because the experience of it is, I think at first, just if I’m not going to give anything away except to describe that at first you get this package, the first mailing and it’s full of stuff and you start piecing through it and you’re not quite sure what any of it means, but you read it and you piece through and then you listen to their first audio piece and things start to connect between the two. And then you get the next, the next, the next piece, and then you get the next audio piece.

And by the time of the month, like you’re still not sure, it’s not a complete picture, but it’s so intriguing and it’s so. Wonderful to have this tactile experience of of holding the paper and reading it and recognizing names that you’ve heard in the audio bits and things like that, it’s just it’s quite an experience, I have to say. Yeah.

And I should clarify that the experience you’ve done is the story is called A Feather in Dust. That’s not the only that’s currently the only story we have available, but there are several more in the pipeline, each of which are totally different in content and totally different in format. It’s still going to be a monthly subscription model.

Not all of them will be six months long. In fact, the next three we’re developing are each three months long. Right.

But. But, yeah, every the idea is that every story is is different in the way it’s framed and different in terms of what you what kinds of things you physically get. Some stories will have.

So A Feather in Dust has, let’s say, some light puzzle elements and the main puzzle is just connecting the dots and sort of building your understanding of the story. There will be there are stories in the pipeline that have a much more intense, direct puzzle element where you are, where you are solving puzzles. And it feels a bit like, I don’t know, Myst, if you remember that video game.

And we’ve got stuff in the pipeline where there’s where there’s no puzzle. It’s simply a story that you. That you get to hold in your hands while you experience it, so there’s sort of a range of things, and for that one, we shot for a little bit of game.

Yeah, yeah. Could I ask what the genesis of the boundless library was, how did this how did this idea start, how what how did it come together? Tell me everything you can. Yeah, well, hilariously, the story starts with I paint toy soldiers sometimes.

I was I was contacted by a friend of a friend, a guy named Tim Sullivan, who I, you through the the board gaming circles that I’m in and we had hung out a few times. He he contacted me to paint a custom miniature of his D&D character. And when I went to drop it off, he went, Do you have a minute to talk? Can I pitch a thing to you? And he sat down and told me about this this idea called the boundless library.

And Tim, Tim is the co-founder or was the one of the co-founders of of a company called the Mysterious Package Company. And so this was this was his sort of years later, his sort of 2.0, you know, if he could reset the clock and and try a narrative mailing experience again, what would he do differently? And he approached me because because, as he put it, he went, you know, I see you. I see you doing these plays all the time.

And. And I have no idea how you do that, but it always seems to work. And of course, a lot of the theatre I’ve done has been sort of immersive staging or has blurred the boundary between audience and and and the show.

And so I think that was part of it as well. So he asked me to sort of be the the starting creative lead on this thing. And he sort of talked about this idea of an extradimensional library that has every story ever told, written, recorded and every story ever conceived of, but not told, dreamed up, but not written down, which is the case for for A Feather in Dust, that we’ve got the, you know, the post-mortem works of Sir Terry Pratchett, for example, and Christopher Marlowe in there.

And and that we’d sort of be doing stories from the library, but also in an ongoing way, the story of the library as this as this fascinating, weird magic place. And we from from there, there are sort of two other core co-conspirators. Joseph Beebe is our he’s a documentary filmmaker by trade.

He’s he’s doing all kinds of edits, all the audio and has done a bunch of the writing and is responsible for the a lot of the all of the digital art. And then Natalie Zena-Walschatz, who’s an author, her book Hench made a real splash last year. Natalie was the fourth to come on board and we sort of put our heads together and went, OK, what is this and how do we, practically speaking, actually do this? This was right before the pandemic started.

So we we pre-sold a couple of things to sort of raise some capital for this thing and and get the word out there. And a lot of the a lot of the objects that were in that were involved in that initial product were being manufactured in the States because some of them are quite specialized. For example, we had a set of a medallion struck for our cardholder kit, we called it, that there just aren’t a lot of places that can do small runs of weird medallions.

But the the across the border manufacturing thing at the start of the pandemic became a real problem. I bet. And so all of a sudden we had to email all of our supporters and say, hey, so we kind of can’t do anything we thought we were going to do, but we’re going to keep you posted.

And and as the pandemic went on and sort of businesses figured out how they could operate remotely or how they could return to work in limited ways, we were able to move it through and get to get that cardholder kit shipped. And and we sort of rethought A Feather in Dust, which was our always going to be our initial story. We rethought that in terms of what does it look like to make an immersive art experience that that’s kind of pandemic proof? Hmm.

You know, this is where I’ve been putting a lot of my all of my theatre making energy over the pandemic, thinking about, you know, it is stuff in the mail and digital content and, you know, audio drama, all of that. But past a point, it’s just how do you you know, how do you throw people into the deep end of a story and create a great experience? And the the sort of transfer of skills from theatre paid off more than I might have guessed it would. Now that now that A Feather in Dust has has been out in the world and people have had our initial subscribers have experienced the whole thing, we’re we’re about to launch a Kickstarter for our next our next few stories, because capital is always the challenge in in this format.

Well, yeah. And the fact that we had to do this over a much longer span of time than we thought we would made it much more expensive to do. Did the pandemic is the pandemic the reason why it like one of the reasons that that it took longer to do, did it slow down the production in addition to obtaining some of the stuff? Yeah, it was it was about things we were having manufactured off site took longer.

Things we were having printed took longer because, you know, our printing partner is is working at half staffing and they’ve pivoted. They’ve pivoted their entire business to printing disposable menus and floor stickers for social distancing, right? To pivot back to the kind of printing we needed was actually kind of like gummed up their workflow a little. We you know, we knew that we were going to be recording lots of content with actors and the space we had pre pandemic to record in, which was this amazing recording studio.

My God, beautiful space. We just couldn’t get access to anymore. So we had to rethink all of the audio content for what is safe to produce in, you know, in the format we have access to.

We did also to sort of to sort of fill the gap and to to produce something that would tell our audience we’re still here and we’re still making stuff before we could start into Feather and Dust. We we made a podcast called Boring Crimes that was we we thought of it as we built it by starting from the point of what do we have right now? Well, we have we have me, Scott Emerson Moyle, and I have a microphone and we have we have access to a few other actors, but we can’t get in the room with them. So what’s a story we can tell where we won’t have to disguise that almost all of the conversations are recorded phone calls and Instagram’s free.

So how might we loop in Instagram? And we wound up building this thing called Boring Crimes that basically starts out as a mediocre white dude named Matt Comstock doing a mediocre white dude true crime podcast and and stumbling into the Boundless Library. And it turns into sort of magic realist horror over the course of it as he realizes he and his his co-conspirators find out that they are in way over their heads and that they have found something far weirder than they thought they would. So that wound up being sort of another way to to tell a story and to experiment with it.

And that one was built entirely around pandemic restrictions. Right. Just a bit of a ride.

I mean, I mean, so is everything. I mean, we had like one of the things we’ve all had to innovate. We’ve all had to find different ways of telling stories that we had initially thought that we would tell the stories.

Yep. We’ve all had to learn new skills and and and purchase new equipment and and and things like that. And it’s sort of to me, it’s the resiliency of the theatre artist that people are doing it or are finding ways to still make art and still still make creative things and still put stuff out there, whether it’s audio, whether it’s video, whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, it was real fun. Every time I needed to cast a new role in Boring Crimes, I would, you know, I would sort of go through my mental rolodex and call someone up and go, hey, do you want to do this thing? We’re going to we’re going to I’m going to phone you using a phone recorder app and we’re going to we’re going to play the conversation over the phone a few times. And then, you know, then if we need any retakes, I’ll just phone you again.

And so sort of the weirdest thing. And every actor I asked about this just went, oh, my God, thank you. This is like it is so great to do something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that wound up being, you know, some connection that I was really that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. Yeah.

You know, the people that I that I consider friends, but but who I’ve I’ve built my friendship around working with. Yeah. And and, you know, that was really easy when we could always be in rehearsal or performance for something.

But being able to to just call people and say, hey, it’s been a while. How are you? Also, do you want to do this thing? Wound up being it felt like a lifeline to me, and I hope it did for the the artists I looped in. I should particularly call out, actually, there’s there’s there’s one there’s one name that that we couldn’t have done Feather and Dust without.

So Christina Bojanowski wrote. The core story of a Feather and Dust, and I’m not I’m not going to you’ve you’ve experienced Feather and Dust, so you know what object I’m talking about. And and I’m not going to give it away because I want people to be able to experience it without without sort of hitting the ending first in this podcast.

But Christina, when we the core story of a Feather and Dust is about a Ukrainian refugee in the 1930s who winds up in in Canada briefly and then in in the U.S. in the Dust Bowl, where she works as a seamstress with a circus. And and Christina’s family is Ukrainian. And and she wound up.

She wound up just bringing so many of her own family’s stories in little ways into this. And again, an example of an artist that I’ve really enjoyed working with in live theatre. And it was just it was such a treat to get to, you know, to have a reason to get on Zoom with her every week to to, you know, further hash out the story treatment of this thing.

It was and when I finally saw her for the first time in person, once once this thing was in was done and in the can and was able to to give her to hand her a key piece of this thing, it was and go like, look what we made. Look at what you wrote. It was really it’s pretty wild.

That’s wonderful. That’s awesome. It felt wonderful.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of theatre.

Yeah. In past years, you’ve been heavily involved with doing Shakespeare in in in unusual locations, around Toronto. I know that you don’t you’re not leading that company anymore, but it’s been a big part of what you’ve done Shakespeare in like around the dog fountain in Toronto’s downtown or when that wasn’t available.

I think at the gazebo at at St. James Cathedral and all kinds of other places where you’ve you sort of put Shakespeare into places that people can just sort of stumble into it, not without even realizing what they’re walking into. Yeah. First off, where did your love for Shakespeare start? Oh, boy.

You know, I think, yeah, so so my my mother got me this book when I was off to summer camp. She got me a book called Tales from Shakespeare, which is which on the surface appears to be short story adaptations of Shakespeare that, you know, that maybe a young reader can dig into in a way that’s a little less daunting than the play. What it actually is, it’s it’s by this brother and sister, Charles and Mary Lamb, who in the 18th century decided they were going to adapt Shakespeare for for young younger readers, specifically younger boys.

There’s a there’s a thing in the preface about like this is obviously for for young boys. But but if you have, dear reader, if you have a sister, perhaps you could select passages appropriate for for a womanly ear and share with her the delight of the bard. And, you know, the whole like 18th century bardolatry tire fire produced this thing.

And and it’s the the neat thing about it, for better or for worse, is that it’s not really adaptation. It’s basically just Shakespeare’s dialogue cut down into the length of a short story and framed with and then he said, and then she said, and then the words laid out as as dialogue on the page. And so that at maybe 11 or 12 kind of kind of sparked my interest, I think, because the language is so was was so unusual.

And I was fascinated with with language as a kid. And then I sort of got to high school. And, you know, every year we did a Shakespeare.

And I think because I had got this head start, I I had a pretty good leg up into it. And and it’s interesting to think of like, you know, that way that it’s possible for for someone like me, a, you know, a straight coding like guy to to fall into Shakespeare as a as a thing. And I definitely wasn’t thinking about it for the longest time.

It was just I was constantly socially rewarded for for being for being good at this thing and for being for being handy at this thing and having, you know, quick access to mentally to the details of this thing. And and when I got out into the world and and started, you know, working with with working professionally, I sort of at that point, I sort of went Shakespeare’s my thing in a in a way that I now look at it and go, that was really ill considered. Shakespeare wasn’t my thing.

Shakespeare was was my comfort zone. And, you know, 10, you know, it was 12 years ago when I founded that company. 12 years ago, the social rewards for being me obsessed with Shakespeare were substantial.

And so I was producing, you know, I produced those first few shows in, I think, pretty pretty unconsidered ways with I mean, I think, you know, there was good in them. People enjoyed them. I got to you know, I did some some work that I learned a lot from and I think everybody had fun working on them.

But to put it bluntly. If I could get into a time machine and go back 12 years ago, I would sit 12 years ago, me down and at the very least say, smarten up about the way you represent gender in your Shakespeare, smarten up about depictions of race in Shakespeare in particular. Don’t do your first few shows with all white casts and not think about that.

Yeah, and I don’t like, you know, we’re all learning and I wasn’t thinking about it until I started thinking about it. But it became in the last few years of working with Dauntless, it became more and more about how do I how do I subvert this? How do I use the how do I use the tools that are Shakespeare, the thing that I get for free that, you know, that that is absolutely my lane and that nobody, you know, nobody doubts my expertise in whether or not I deserve that expertise. You know, I can I can I can be introduced.

I have been introduced in context for like, this is Scott. He’s a Shakespeare expert. And no one ever goes, you know, but you see or prove it or, you know, what’s what’s Hamlet’s inseam, none of that.

And so it became about how can I use that thing I apparently get for free to crack it as wide open as possible, which is ultimately why I know you just asked me about where it started and then I told you the whole arc. But that’s ultimately why I was really interested in passing Dauntless along to a new artistic direction, because I wanted to I wanted to see what what not me made of it, because, you know, there’s there’s just there’s enough Shakespeare being made by white dudes who grew up being told that they were that they were Shakespeare experts and being socially rewarded for that. I just you know, I always want to make the work I want to see.

And the work I wanted to see was work that I was not ideally set up to make. So it’s I’m so excited for for what Kate and Shanika and Stevie are going to do with it now. Yeah, it’s interesting that that because I think it’s really easy to look back at your past and say, I really need to go back in time and shake myself for what I was doing at the time when chances are what you were doing was a product of what you’d experienced.

Absolutely. And shame on our institutions who up until that point were mostly producing us and showing us plays and Shakespeare, especially with a bunch of white people in it and the occasional person of colour and certainly not playing with gender unless the bard told us we could. Yeah.

And yet the where you’re at now with it is sort of like a way to look back and say, this is how far I’ve come. That was a journey. And I’m more happy with where I’m at now.

Yeah. And I think I, you know, I had to start where I started, but I’m that the last show I did with Dauntless, I really couldn’t have been happier with it as a way to to sort of tie a bow on it and go, this is for now the end of my journey with this playwright. And, you know, and I think we that production of All’s Well That Ends Well, you know, subverted everything I wanted it to subvert and and, you know, celebrated everything I wanted it to celebrate and frankly, made grumpy all the people I like making grumpy.

I, you know, I won’t name any names, but there’s always, you know, you can always look at at a piece of at someone who doesn’t like your work and go like that is I am so glad you don’t like that. Well, because you didn’t make it for them. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And yeah, I know the the people I was making that for found it and and I think it clicked and, you know, and it’s it’s it feels weird to have to have Shakespeare so hard for so long. I mean, one of one of my tattoos is is a Shakespeare tattoo.

And and it’s not a tattoo I regret because it stands for something I, you know, really loved, really do love still. I mean, I think they’re good plays and I like them. But I 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I would find a time when I when I wasn’t thinking about the next Shakespeare I would direct when I when I, you know, when I wouldn’t necessarily care if I do another Shakespeare.

And I feel that way now. It’s just I feel like I like I did what I wanted to do with that. And and for the time being, I’m good.

You know, I want to learn more about other stuff. Before we leave Shakespeare entirely and talk about the other stuff, I’m curious if there was was there a Shakespeare that was the one that stuck with you? Like, I remember the first Shakespeare that I saw. It was a it was as you like it.

And it was a Stratford production that was on CBC. I must have been like 12. And that has that stuck with me so that if ever anybody says, so do you have a favourite Shakespeare play? It’s always going to be that one, because I connected with it.

I was like, oh, this shit is funny. You know, that sort of thing. It made sense and all of this stuff.

And and so I connected with it. Is there a play of Shakespeare’s that you saw or experience that stuck with you? Is there a particular one? Yeah, there. Yes.

And it’s the there were there were two shows at the Globe Theatre, which is, you know, for a while was where the most traditional Shakespeare happened. But the in in in in the space of I guess they were a year apart. Emma Rice’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was so spicy that she didn’t work at the Globe after that.

It really it cracked the play wide open. It was the hardest I’ve ever seen an audience laugh at that play. It is it is the only time, you know, I’m sure I’ve seen more Midsummer Night’s Dreams than I’ve had hot dinners.

I’ve done the play like five times. But this was the only time that it ever that I had ever been like moved to to big feelings and tears by it. And it was so funny and so weird and so queer.

And so just it was like it got the play’s heart and all of the joy that that that play is about in a way that was visceral. And then the year after that, my partner and I went to see. Oh, God, I’m blanking on the director’s name, but she also played the lead.

It’s a production of Richard II in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which is the tiny little candlelit theatre that’s attached onto the Globe. It’s a production of Richard II, which is a play fundamentally about transfer of power, right, willing and coerced and hereditary. And it’s just it’s a play about how power gets handed off across, you know, across time and space.

And this production was cast entirely with women of colour. And and it was it was it was extraordinary to see actors who who just aren’t getting cast in those big, meaty roles. The Duke of York, for example, is a very is a major role in Richard II and the actor who played the Duke of York.

I’m, you know, looking at her bio, she she mostly played doctors and professors on on serial TV. And here she is crushing the Duke of York in in the most like Richard II is one of my favourite plays, certainly one of my favourite Shakespeare’s and York is my favourite character in it. And I’ve never seen a performance of that role like that one.

And every role did that. And then you look around the space that’s sort of this horseshoe of a theatre, this rectangular shape, and all around this this rectangular pit are are canvases hanging with with portraits of women on them. And that look like they’re from different time periods and different parts of the world.

And then I found out at intermission reading the program that every actor in the cast brought a brought an image of of an ancestor of theirs and that those were the things. So we’re doing a play about transfer of power by people to whom performed by people to whom power is not generally transferred in a large scale way. You know, surrounded by portraits of women who couldn’t, who, you know, centuries before wouldn’t have pictured this happening at all.

Right. And oh boy, it was a ride. I bet I bet.

I’m having left Dauntless behind and sort of like seeing that production of All’s Well That Ends Well as being sort of your last Shakespeare, at least for now, for the foreseeable future, for the foreseeable future. What kind of theatre do you see yourself making in the future? Outside of outside of the Boundless Library, when you when theatres finally reopen and we’re able to be in this space with other actors, with other audience members, what do you see? How do you see what kind of theatre do you see yourself making? I’m still sort of waiting for that to jump out at me, if that makes sense. And I’m I’m you know, I’ve I’ve been I’ve been reading and I’ve been, you know, something I think about a lot.

Certainly, I am I am far more excited to go to theatre as audience right now that I am to make to make theatre. And I’m not sure I’m not sure why that is, but I’m that’s that’s sort of where I’m at. The the thing that I had started doing before the pandemic was training to work as a theatrical intimacy director.

And and that really when I when I met Tonya Sina, who was sort of sort of my main mentor when I met her, I guess six years ago now, I I left that workshop with a really clear sense of of, oh, I feel drawn to this like I’ve not felt drawn to maybe anything ever. So so I think that’s going to be and that’s that’s work that’s obviously been totally on hold because that’s, you know, Zoom theatre doesn’t really have much use for an intimacy director, although I have I should say I have seen Leslie McBay did some really cool intimacy work for a Zoom play a while ago, the name of which is Escaping Me. But it’s it has and can be done.

But it’s that’s obviously the exception rather than the rule. I am I am really excited to continue to pursue that work because it’s because it fires me up like like nothing else has in a long time. It’s and I think particularly coming out of this this pandemic thing, we’re going to have to really rethink in the rehearsal room our relationship with proximity, with touch, right, with all with with with just all of the things that we took for granted.

I think everything’s going to feel a little weird. And where there’s there’s an organization called Theatrical Intimacy Education that has a slogan that’s We Make It Less Weird. And there’s going to be so much weird when we come back to, you know, as we come back to working in person.

And I’m I’m really excited for for all of the other parts of the intimacy directing job. But but more than anything, I’m really excited to learn this new dimension of it. That’s just going to be how do we relearn how to share space after, you know, after what is a substantial trauma? Dude, that’s like one of the things that that like I think how wonderful it will be to be in a theatre and a rehearsal hall once again.

And then in the next breath, I’m like, am I ready for that? Yeah. Like, how do I get past? Because we’ve spent like we will have spent like over two years avoiding proximity. And there’s no way that we can just suddenly unlearn that.

No, I mean, it’s it’s like any other it’s like any other trauma, right? It’s it it’s it’s just going to take some time to to work through. And it’s going to take some some work, you know, some intentional, thoughtful work to work through. And with the caveat that, you know, I am not and your intimacy director is not a mental health professional.

And, you know, we are not your therapist, though we do we do have mental health first aid training. And a lot of that is just about, you know, tips and tricks for navigating trauma, right? For figuring out like when something in your body goes, ah, no. How do you sit with that? What do you do with that? How do you understand that impulse better to decide whether or not to follow it? I yeah, I think the the again, just like I was saying before, caretaking, right? Yeah.

Caretaking is and empathy and compassion are going to be a key piece of of coming back to making live theatre. And and that caretaking piece, that emotional labour work is is the thing in theatre, I think that fires me up the most where I am right now. I kind of think that any any theatre production that’s bringing people back into the room should on the first day have an intimacy director present and take everybody through exercises and how we exist in the room.

How do we relearn how to casually touch someone on the shoulder or shake hands or or hug? How do we how do we get past our two years or more of of avoiding people and make this like so that we can do this together so that it doesn’t look awkward on stage? Like and so we don’t go through anxiety when we have to do it in a scene. I think that would be a really wise thing for any production to do. Yeah, I you know, from a place of bias that I’ll cop to also think everybody should hire an intimacy director.

But but particularly so here’s the thing before the pandemic, before anybody had heard the word COVID-19 and we were all just cheerily making theatre, there were people in the room in every rehearsal room who who had a difficult relationship with something you were doing with proximity, with touch, with intimacy, choreography, you name it, right? The difference is now that that that playing field has leveled and and where before the challenge was, you know, learn everybody’s needs and and and be sensitive and thoughtful and and careful in in accommodating everybody’s needs around proximity and touch and so on. Everybody’s part of that was was making sure that people who who had more challenges around that content were accommodated. Well, now everyone has more challenges around that content.

You know, it’s it’s the same way that a number of of friends of mine with with disabilities have, you know, have been able to work from home in the last 18 months in a way that was, you know, that that wasn’t possible before the pandemic. But as more work from home has become available, they’ve just been able to do more, thereby revealing that we could have been accommodating those people and their needs the whole damn time. Yes.

And I think so in the same way that the lesson for that is workplaces can think about, you know, disability accommodations better and and be thoughtful about people’s needs and and, you know, particularly when those needs don’t impact their ability to do the job, the arbitrary hours, the arbitrary work location can’t, you know, can just we could just learn what we’re supposed to learn from that and be better. Similarly, I think this is a chance and I say chance like it’s optional, but I don’t think it’s going to be optional. Everybody’s going to learn what it feels like to be to have a traumatized relationship with touch in the rehearsal room.

Everybody is going to is going to learn what some people knew and were dealing with the whole time. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And I think that, you know, I think it’s important that that the companies are considering that now as they’re making plans to go back into the rehearsal room, they should be also thinking about how the hell do we make people comfortable in the rehearsal room? Yeah, there’s a production of Passover on on Broadway right now that Anne James, who’s an intimacy director in the US, she is working on as as intimacy director. Passover is a play that on the surface doesn’t have any sexual or romantic intimacy to it.

But it sure has a lot of vulnerability. It sure asks the actors to, you know, to tackle some content that is that is going to be traumatic in a personal way just by virtue of the skin they live in. And so Anne’s work on that production as intimacy director has been facilitating vulnerability and caretaking and sort of broadening the the scope of what intimacy direction can mean.

I am really curious about that. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely.

Just to bring things back around to the boundless library, where can we find the boundless library? Yeah. So on the interwebs at www.theboundlesslibrary.com, the landing page will ask you to sign up and you get to go through a fun little cardholder application, at which point you can you may start getting emails from from someone named Alice, who’s sort of. She’s in the library and she’ll, you know, she’s learning to understand it herself.

We are we are on the social medias. We’re going to be launching a TikTok very soon. The boundless library is the tag for that as well.

And I can confidently say that it’s going to be hilarious. And we’re going to be launching a Kickstarter on October 18th for our next few stories, which will be a chance to both sort of get a first look at some of our next our next stories, but also get some sweet deals on on the subscription. That’s pretty awesome.

Yeah, I think it’ll be cool. And there’ll be some neat, exclusive swag. The swag we made the last time we we did this stuff, you know, difficulties of getting stuff made during a pandemic aside is so cool like this.

I have a metal library card in my wallet. That’s one of the bits of nonsense we made. You know, there’s just there’s gonna be some cool stuff to be had.

So the Kickstarter is another thing to keep an eye on. And then there’s one other place we made a podcast called Borrowings, Tales of and from the Boundless Library. You can find it on all the things that you get podcasts on, you know, when you’ve run out of stage where the episodes to listen to.

And it’s it’s about the librarians of the Boundless Library and their weird, weird jobs. Nice. Nice.

Yeah. So, Scott, last of all, for the entire 18 months, 19 months, whatever it’s been now, one of the last questions I ask is about joy, because I feel that, you know, we’ve all had those moments when we really feel like we need to be reminded of joy. Oh, I think it’s great to ask other people about what’s giving them joy.

So, Scott, what’s been giving you joy? What has been giving me joy? You know, the a number of things. The thing that has really the thing that jumps to the top of the list for me is that and this has nothing to do with with theatre or arts work or any of that. But my partner is a high school teacher.

And so her past year has looked like what you think it’s looked like. And she’s back at school this week, you know, teaching in masks with all kinds of all kinds of rules around keeping everything and everybody safe. And the thing that has brought me, I think, the most joy has been that this set of circumstances has pushed me to step up the way in which I show up for her most immediately, because when she’s teaching, you know, out of the desk in our bedroom, like I’m her pit crew.

But just in general, it has pushed me to be a better support to people around me to, you know, to show up when people need an extra set of hands or to, you know, get on my bike when somebody needs something delivered and they can’t get out of the house. And, and the fact that this has pushed me towards just, yeah, showing up for the people around me in new ways is, is the top of my list for things that bring me joy. That has really been feeding me.

Thank you, Scott. And thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. Yeah, thank you, Philip.

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