Last Updated
April 28, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Jamie Gahlon & Vijay Mathew. [Live show recorded: April 24, 2020.]
Guests: Jamie Gahlon & Vijay Mathew
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
JAMIE GAHLON (she/her/hers) is the Director and a co-founder of HowlRound. She is a co-creator of the World Theatre Map and New Play Map, oversees the HowlRound Journal and HowlRound TV, supports the work of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and co-administers The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s National Playwright Residency Program, and regularly produces theatre convenings around urgent field-wide issues. Prior to her work at HowlRound, Jamie helped launched the American Voices New Play Institute and the NEA New Play Development Program at Arena Stage. Jamie has also worked for New York Stage & Film, and the New Victory Theatre. She is a proud member of the Latinx Theatre Commons Steering Committee, the Committee of the Jubilee, and a Think Tank Member for the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Jamie holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service with a focus on Culture & Politics from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She originally hails from Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, and likes to dabble.
VIJAY MATHEW (he/him/his) is the Cultural Strategist and a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College, Boston, USA and is privileged to assist a talented team by leading HowlRound's development of commons-based online knowledge sharing platforms and the organization's notions of cultural innovation. Prior to his current position, he was the Coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) New Play Development Program, as well as a Theater Communication Group (USA) New Generations Future Leader grant recipient in new work at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Vijay has a MFA from New School University, New York, a BA from University of Chicago, and an artistic background as an ensemble-based filmmaker and theatremaker. He is a board member of Double Edge Theatre located in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi. I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE! The Morning(ish) show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Jamie Gahlon and Vijay Mathew. Jamie and Vijay are two of the co-founders of HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College in Boston, found online at howlround.com. HowlRound is a knowledge commons that encourages freely sharing intellectual and artistic resources and expertise, and was created as a direct response to research that suggested artists were increasingly distant from the center of theater making, within the not-for-profit institutional infrastructure. And, the new possibilities created by technology to influence theater practice. Its founding came at a time when they were seeing too many voices left off of our stages, not represented inside of our institutions, and not recognized for their substantial contribution to our past and present. The co-founders set about to create a group of tools that would amplify voices and issues chronically underrepresented and unheard in the theater, and we are excited to chat with them today. Without further ado, Jamie and Vijay, welcome to the show.
Jamie Gahlon:
That's so much for having us.
Vijay Mathew:
Hi. Thank you.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay, so let's jump right in. One of the questions we've been ... I'm really, really excited to hear your responses, because I think the work that you're doing, the conversations you're having, are so very timely for the sector, is, how is your community doing, and what are you hearing right now?
Jamie Gahlon:
Yeah, that's such a great question. I would say that our community is vast and diverse, so we're hearing a lot of different things. I've been heartened to see and hear the work that a lot of individual artists are doing to promote knowledge sharing and solution envisioning, right now in this moment. Obviously, it shouldn't go without saying, but the impact of the pandemic on the theater sector is devastating, in particular for freelance artists, who have been hit incredibly hard. We've been lucky to collaborate and support on an incredible series via HowlRound TV with a group of freelance producers, Nicole Brewer, Hannah Fenlon, Ann Marie Lonsdale, Abigail Vega, who created a website called the Artist's Resources for Freelance Artists Website, and they have been hosting an incredible ongoing series on HowlRound TV addressing the needs for freelance artists right now. Talking about everything from processing this moment, grieving, sort of self care, spiritual response, all the way to very practical financial strategies, et cetera, et cetera.
Lauren Ruffin:
Awesome. Vijay, do you have anything to add to that?
Vijay Mathew:
What's been really wonderful is our ability to immediately support this incubator, or help support these initiatives that are really run by the community out there themselves. And that I feel like is our nice sweet spot, when ... or it's very fulfilling when we're able to do something like that, and so quickly.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, so Tim gave you all a fantastic but very formal bio.
Tim Cynova:
It's Friday formal.
Lauren Ruffin:
I missed the memo. How do you all typically introduce yourselves, and your work?
Jamie Gahlon:
Yeah, so I guess I'd introduce myself as, "Hi, I'm Jamie Gahlon. I'm a producer, cultural organizer, theater maker." Yeah, currently based in Boston. I would introduce HowlRound's work... co-founder and director of HowlRound. We're really building a big and open table for conversation about the state of the theater field globally, and with an eye towards trying to really push the field to be more progressive, equitable, just, and sustainable. We function as a knowledge commons, which is... Another way of saying that that might be more approachable is that all of our content is community sourced. So our platform is really about stewarding the ideas and knowledge contributions of theater makers who choose to participate, along the values agenda that we've laid out. And all of our content is licensed under Creative Commons, which means that it can be shared openly and freely, which is in line with our ethos.
Tim Cynova:
HowlRound has made some really amazing resources available to help people with the technology backend to be able to do this. And Lauren I should pause here to thank you for, in particular, the piece that you wrote, How To Produce a Live Streamed Event. Spent several days pouring over that, looking at the resources, testing stuff out. You were also so kind to test a couple of things out when we were in the early days. For those who are interested in producing their own live stream event, HowlRound has some really amazing resources there. I also want to thank you for the piece that you wrote, that I learned about it in the fall, What's Your Vision For a Post Carbon Art Sector? Which was a really fascinating piece to read in the fall, and that was before we started seeing travel and life shutting down. In our green room, I was remarking that I saw a piece today that said, "Two days ago, only 24 flights took off from LaGuardia in the month of January." Just out of LaGuardia, 31,000 flights landed and took off from there.
Tim Cynova:
We're seeing photos of places around the globe that had been cloaked in smog for years and we're seeing cities that have, other than Albuquerque, coyotes walking down the center of the street, kangaroos and animals coming back to cities in a way that we haven't seen. I'm curious where your mind is right now as you think about what's going on in the world. How can we be proactive about some of these changes that are happening and holding on to some of the positive ones?
Vijay Mathew:
We're in a catastrophe right now, but at the same time it feels like there's a bit of grace. There's this time, or this moment, where before the... More of the waves of climate change starts to hit the global north, the wealthy countries. This is actually the moment, this is the opportunity to totally re-figure the way that we all operate as a society, as a civilization, as an economy. And I think at the end of this physical distancing moment, if we're coming back into the same thing that we had, what will our future opportunities of taking pause, what will those look like, and will they be more difficult to actually recover from? Yeah, I think we're at a fork in the road right now, and actually this is maybe the opportunity, at least us in the... what we can do, what we have control over, or a little tiny influence over, is our arts field. This is maybe the moment to redesign.
Lauren Ruffin:
In some ways in terms of building pipes for other folks to move along, the work that HowlRound does north of [inaudible 00:06:44] is similar, and I'm curious about your work structure as a team, internally. How has that shifted over the last few months and what tools and resources have been particularly helpful as you do this?
Jamie Gahlon:
So okay, on one hand everything has changed, but also in some ways nothing has changed, because so much of our work has existed digitally primarily. And so now we're all working from home, and obviously we all have different home circumstances that we're adjusting to and giving ourselves grace and flexibility with. But I would say the biggest area of shift for us has probably been around the preponderance of TV events and the figuring out how to adjust our capacity within our own staff to help meet the increased demand there.
Jamie Gahlon:
We've brought back someone we used to work with, and we've also increased hours for some other folks that we've been working with. But in terms of how we work together as a team, we've kept a lot of the rituals we had going before. So, we have our weekly team check-ins, we have an editorial meeting, we're certainly Gchatting a lot more. We're doing more Zoom Hangouts, and also we're anchored in the Office of the Arts at Emerson college. So, HowlRound is a sort of pod that's part of a bigger culture of Office of the Arts and there's a lot of meetups that we've been doing in that context as well, which have included things like yoga classes and meditation, and other kinds of newer offerings around self care that folks can choose to opt into.
Tim Cynova:
You all have been working for a decade on live streaming video events, and there's this rush of organizations and people now trying to figure this out. What have you found for the quote, unquote, best practices or for people to think about as they're hoping, or trying, to transition into more of a virtual convening setting than what might have formerly been 3D only?
Vijay Mathew:
Like best practices? I mean it depends, not everything needs to be live streamed. Just a conversation that's not completely public can meet all the goals. So, I mean that would be one thing is...really set the goals of why you're doing anything online and what you're hoped to achieve, and that can help determine the design of it. If it's just a video conference or a video conference and gets live streamed, and also keep things short and planned and maybe have an outline or structure because I think we're all getting a bit of a screen fatigue now.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Just a little bit. Or are you laughing, Tim, because you're so very structured?
Tim Cynova:
I look at Lauren and I'm like... I have a good sense of what Lauren is thinking about me, thinking about what I'm thinking about. But yeah, it's like they often refer to it as the Zoom meeting exhaustion coefficient. At least... It used to be just twice as exhausting as a 3d meeting, and I think it might be three or four times as exhausting now because we're just going from one thing to the next and it's just all on our screen. It's no longer a 3D meeting and then a Zoom meeting and then something else, and you go outside and you walk around you and... so just the back-to-back, I think. Maybe it's as the day goes on, could have been a 60-minute meeting... you're good if you get 10 out of it before people just start to fade.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I just think that's the importance of saying no to things, and of being really protective of your calendar, I think is definitely... so many of our guests have struggled with the shift to being totally on screens.
Vijay Mathew:
And I think one of the things that we may take back, all of us, is that a lot of in person meetings, gatherings, conferences, don't actually have to happen in person, and I think we're getting an idea of what's important to actually have in person and what can you actually accomplish really well and with a lot less resources, online.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, it does amplify that meme about how this meeting could have been an email.
Vijay Mathew:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
I feel like it's really hard. Yeah, for sure. I'm also sort of in that vein. Are there aspects of working like this that you think you will keep, or do you feel like if things open up, I use that very tongue in cheek, are you going to go back to the way that y'all were previously?
Vijay Mathew:
Look, I'm personally more productive than I've ever been, just because no more commute and the ability to walk around and go to my kitchen.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah,
Jamie Gahlon:
Yeah. I mean I definitely think the... Before we were like pretty office based, with one day a week work from home. I think that certainly there will be shifts, I would imagine, around flexibility of just where we work and how we work moving forward, more flexibility there. I guess I'm really interested in thinking about the things that folks are doing now in the field. The pivots that I'm seeing and what we might carry with us moving forward out of this moment of crisis. So, I've been really inspired by all of these mutual aid networks popping up. I mean they're essentially commons in action both from the hyper-local Slack channel that me and my neighbors have to keep each other sane and offer mutual support, and get that tomato that somebody might have that you need or or what have you, all the way to stuff that I'm noticing in the field happening like, the ICA in their East Boston location is now a fresh food distribution center. Same thing with Jack in Brooklyn, they've partnered with the, We Keep Us Safe Abolitionist Network to set up as a food distribution center. We know that all of these theaters and many theaters are sewing masks.
Jamie Gahlon:
Folks have found ways to pivot to be part of some of the essential services that are so needed right now and immigrated in response to local community needs. And, as well as looking at things like the work of [inaudible 00:12:36] around emergency [inaudible 00:12:37]... needed, but I am very inspired by the launch of The Art of [inaudible 00:12:43], you know, what [inaudible 00:12:45] is doing in the [inaudible 00:12:47] area on a more local level. And third strand, I think, is around the artist-led relief initiative.
Jamie Gahlon:
So, Trickle Up thinking about new models for support for artists, thinking about the work that the freelance producers are doing that I referenced at the top of the call, and this sort of generosity of knowledge sharing that's happening on platforms like HowlRound and elsewhere, and I guess I hope, or I'm wondering and I'm curious about what we can learn from these behaviors that have felt so needed in this moment and are coming out as a response for this moment, but I hope that [inaudible 00:13:28] that we carry with us... forward and that help us create a different landscape for our field moving forward, that can serve more of us.
Tim Cynova:
Let's [inaudible 00:13:38] to a question that's coming in. You both were talking about these things, I just wanted to see if there's anything else that might get picked up here. The question is, can you give a sense of the various conversations emerging on The Journal on how the communities you serve are fairing, feeling challenged and feeling hopeful.
Jamie Gahlon:
Hello. Hi Diane. Thank you for this question. Let's see. There's so many threads of conversation emerging I will think of... yeah, I'll pull on maybe just a couple of pieces and then Vijay you should weigh in too. So, we published a beautiful essay this week by Noel Venus, who's a playwright based in New York, and she was reflecting on a lot of the different opinions that have been floating around, the notion of making in this moment and the role of a playwright in this moment. And the thing that I found so... she talks\ed about how the theater is often an art of futurity, that we're looking to the future. We're planning, we're planning more planning, and she sort of offered a provocation around thinking, what if we think of theater as an art of the now? Like what does that mean in this moment around how we make, who we make with, what our priorities are, what kind of models we need to support the work. That's a question that I've been sitting with.
Jamie Gahlon:
Another thread of conversation that has been really... I guess we've been talking about it a lot as a team since we published this piece was... Kaja Dunn wrote a beautiful piece about the need to take a pause and the need for us to, in this moment, give ourselves time to process and grieve and intentionally resist capitalism's insatiable need and urge for productivity and to produce. I guess I feel maybe less equipped to speak on behalf of communities ar large, Diane, and how they're feeling hoped and challenge. I feel more inclined to pull out just a few specific voices that have felt really compelling to me in this moment. But I'll throw it over to Vijay who I'm sure has some other opinions.
Vijay Mathew:
Yeah, I think we're still also in a moment of people just dealing and processing the shock of what has happened, and so I think we're seeing a lot of that in the TV live streaming programming where we have a lot of masterclasses, playwriting classes happening like Suzan-Lori Parks Watch Me Work from home, which was an ongoing series but now it's happening every day at 5:00 pm Eastern.
Vijay Mathew:
It's a moment to work on the craft of playwriting, but it's also a time to come together as a community just to see each other from all our places in isolation and to collectively process the trauma of what's going on. And interestingly, we have two other playwriting series going on as well, the Latinx superhero playwriting class, and then there's also this other emerging story, or idea, how in these crises, they already marginalized... communities and people get doubly or triply marginalized and there's been a very interesting series of live streaming events organized by a collective called Unsettling Dramaturgy. They've had two events already, one was specifically about land acknowledgements. Another was about crip and indigenous from the churches, and they're an action group in a sense of trying to figure out how they can start to center these ideas so that it becomes a mainstream practice.
Lauren Ruffin:
Along those same lines, one of the things that I've always wondered about making theater, as someone who was not an artist or theater maker at all, is are you seeing ensemble groups continue to create together and having plans to produce or produce or show work online from separate places, is there anything innovative happening in that realm?
Vijay Mathew:
Oh yeah, definitely. In addition to tons of conversations that are happening, people are starting to figure out performance in physical distancing and using these internet technologies to collaborate around performance. That happened... that coincided with the number that started mid-March, where people putting up performances, adapting immediately what they're doing in person to the online space, and regularly there are organizations such as CultureHub and La MaMa, both based in New York city that are creating a platform for artists to figure these things out, to really truly experiment with these technologies to see how performing artists can use them.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, it strikes me just knowing what I know about the economic model for theater, there's such a high cost to needing to work in the same place, and it strikes me that there's a real ability to unlock capacity and resources and connection and collaboration if you let go of needing to be in shared space and start thinking about shared reality instead. And I'm really curious to see how that plays out in the theater field in particular.
Jamie Gahlon:
Yeah, that's so interesting. I also think along those lines that Vijay just referenced, I think we're in a really fascinating moment where folks are beginning to move beyond this transposition of what was the real thing, into digital and into thinking through what it means to be innately digital right now because of this forced circumstance. But I do wonder what are the practices and new norms that we're going to bring with us wherever we may go as a result of this time. And that feels very exciting and very much like a... well for new creativitys, especially when we think about things like lessening our carbon footprint, the resource allocations that you talk about and accessibility of all the work.
Tim Cynova:
All right, this feels like a good time for the suitcase question.
Jamie Gahlon:
Yeah? Okay. I need to figure out who does the backpack. So the suitcase question started with Deborah Cullinan, and she was on our show talking about how she has all these... the suitcase that she carries around with her live-workplace practices and life practices. And she realizes that she's unpacking a lot of stuff and then putting in a lot of new things, and new habits, and new behaviors that she's learning as she's working more and more online. And so my question for both of you is what is one thing that you are... thrown out of your suitcase that you've been carrying around for a long time? Can be work, can be personal and what's one behavior or practice that you have just started to do that you are going to carry far into the future?
Jamie Gahlon:
I guess by necessity I feel like I've thrown out equating real life with... I think I've decoupled togetherness and intimacy on some level with real life. Whether or not I want... But I think that's, something I'm feeling right now, and I think one thing that I'm carrying forward are... I guess I have a certain number of rituals that I feel like I've developed in this moment, and for me they're around the sort of cultivating space for work time when I'm in my 808 square foot apartment, that's also my personal space. And I think they're very simple. They're about changing my kitchen table from a kitchen table to my desk, and I think there's something really beautiful about those small rituals and also I have a gratitude practice that I've been cultivating for a while, but I think that that has felt even more important to me now, and that's something that I will also carry forward, just like a daily gratitude practice.
Lauren Ruffin:
Awesome.
Tim Cynova:
Vijay?
Vijay Mathew:
Yeah, so the thing I'm throwing out of my suitcase, I think is maybe the despair or hopelessness that things can't and won't change fast. I was so, so surprised by literally how the world could dial down on what it's doing within a week. Extraordinary kind of thing. The fact that the way that our civilization works... it felt such a huge, insurmountable monolith. How does anyone ever stop that machine from running? So throwing out that notion, that kind of mental thing, throwing that out. Then I'm adding just taking care of myself. Walking every morning is a wonderful thing.
Tim Cynova:
Awesome. As we land the plane on this episode, we'll have 24 planes landing at LaGuardia, I guess. What are your parting thoughts? Something maybe we haven't covered that you really think is important to leave in this space or just whatever's on your mind?
Vijay Mathew:
One thing on my mind is that as we're creating new things that we really think hard and prioritize accessibility and inclusion. Like what Jamie mentioned earlier, especially when we do online things. That's one thing, and also that this online world that we're all now diving into... that we figure out limits to that and actually think about what does a metered internet look like? What if the internet is actually a scarce resource, which it is, but we live under the illusion that it's unlimited, that we can always have this energy running all these servers.
Jamie Gahlon:
I guess I'm just really thinking about notions of mutual support on both person-to-person level and field wide. I mean our field is broken. Many of us may have felt this before, but you look at what's happening now and I mean we need to fundamentally rebuild how we work together and what our systems are, and we need to put artists at the center of those systems and we need to build equitable models of support. So, I think this is an opportunity for us all to really interrogate our status quo on every level and think through how we can build a better... better models moving forward.
Tim Cynova:
Jamie, Vijay, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thanks for being on the show.
Jamie Gahlon:
Thanks for having me.
Vijay Mathew:
Thank you very much.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE! adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Cathy Edwards, executive director of New England Foundation for the Arts. Miss us in the meantime? You can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE! episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic and join the fund too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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