Mallory Catlett and Aaron Landsman

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

While working on a project in Portland, OR over a decade ago, theater-maker Aaron Landsman accepted a colleague’s invitation to attend a city-council meeting. In between moments of boredom typical to such meetings, Landsman, who had made a career of making works of theater in a variety of unusual settings, glimpsed inherently theatrical moments. The clincher came when a well-dressed sixtysomething by the name of Pete Colt, clearly well-known to and barely tolerated by the city councilors, testified about the drug-related paraphernalia that littered a children’s park in the city. At the end of his testimony, to make his point, he dumped the contents of his briefcase — the very litter he'd railed against — on the table in front of him.

Thus was sown the seed of what would become “City Council Meeting,” a participatory theatrical event that Aaron — along with his collaborators, director Mallory Catlett and theater artist and visual designer Jim Findlay — mounted in several American cities, including New York City, Tempe, AZ and Houston, TX. Just this past summer, University of Iowa Press published Mallory and Aaron’s “The City We Make Together: City Council Meeting’s Primer for Participation,” a thorough and galvanizing examination of their process that is sure to inspire a new generation of artists looking to engage communities in the intricacies of making democracy.

Since “City Council Meeting,” Mallory and Aaron have continued building their remarkable and eclectic careers. Mallory is now the co-artistic director of the legendary Mabou Mines theater company and is developing several new operas, and Aaron is artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York and is preparing the premiers of “Night Keeper,” a new work commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, and “Trouble Hunters,” a performance created in collaboration with artists in Serbia.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Mallory, who studied dance as a high school student at UNCSA, and Aaron describe how they developed their unique theatrical viewpoints and esthetic and how throughout their careers they’ve succeeded in hewing to their iconoclastic artistic passions.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

Pier Carlo Talenti: Mallory, how did you pivot from dance to theater?

Mallory Catlett: As a young person, classical ballet was my passion. I was from a military family, and so at a certain point just to get consistent training, I auditioned for NCSA, which is now part of the UNC system but at the time was just NCSA, and I got in.

It really was my first artistic métier, I guess. It was there at that school that I was first able to have a lot of exposure to all forms of art, to theater. I had a good knowledge of classical music, being a classical dancer, but also exposure to musicians and visual art. I think it was a multidisciplinary experience, even though it was a conservatory and it was very narrow in the conservatory sense. But many of my friends were musicians and actors.

That's really where I first was in a place where all the disciplines were coexisting, and I had access to all of them. A lot of my friends were actors. I would sneak into their workshop showings and shows and things, and they would always ask me what I thought afterwards, and I would just tell them what I thought. They always found it really interesting, and it became a thing where they would want to ask me in the snack bar what I thought. They always found what I was saying astute, and I was just expressing my thoughts.

That was just a really interesting thing that happened to me, and it was the first time that people, my peers — often they were older than me because the actors were in college and I was in high school — it was just the first time that I had affirmation from a peer group, I guess, about my thoughts in a totally different form. I think it was probably then that I figured I wanted to do something in the theater, probably direct, but I wasn't really able to articulate that for many years, because as a classical dancer, you're trained that it takes 20 years or 15 years or 10 years at least to be able to do it, to have a right to do the form. And so it was a big hurdle for me to think that I could just shift into theater with no experience, so it took me a while because of that hurdle that was sort of ingrained in me because I was a ballet dancer.

Pier Carlo: I'm amazed that college-age artists really wanted to take advice and critique from a high-school-age artist. What was it about you that you think gave you that kind of confidence and the ability to share your opinions with insight and to be heard?

Mallory: I don't know. [She laughs.] I really don't. I don't know. I guess because the first time I did it, it was taken at face value and considered valuable by the listener, so it didn't seem like an extraordinary thing. I wasn't rejected. Had I been rejected, had my thoughts been rejected, I might have been different.

I think the school was a very supportive arena in that sense. Even though my ballet training was very, very narrow and in many ways very destructive, the environment and the community and the friendships I made were this other very supportive thing. I wish I could tell you, but I don't have a good answer.

Aaron Landsman: I have a possible answer from the outside, based on my experience of Mallory as a collaborator but also as someone I'm just happy to have come look at a rehearsal or performance. You'll take anything seriously that someone says, and so there's never this sense of, "Oh, I can't believe you asked that question," or, "I can't believe that you want to know about this", whether it's a very simple proposition that somebody's trying to wrestle with. I've seen you in other artists' processes also. If it's something really complicated, you'll just take it at face value and say, "Oh yeah, this is worth considering because you asked." I just think there's an affirmation embedded in that, that not everyone brings.

Mallory: I'll also say that I think that the thing I've always taken with me as a dancer is that I'm very sensitive to the fact that form has emotional content. I think what was valuable to my friends who were actors was that I had a very different approach about talking about what they were doing, because I think most of their training was a sort of method acting kind of training. Or clowning. I think I probably talked about it in a very different way but a way that was concrete.

Pier Carlo: Aaron, given that your bachelor’s from Tisch was in the experimental theater department, I gather that even at a young age, you knew you weren't just going to do Ibsen on a proscenium stage. Or I might be wrong. But anyway, at what age did you realize that making well-made plays on a proscenium stage was not going to be your jam?

Aaron: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, there's a series of inclusions and accidents that led to me going to the Experimental Theater Wing and led to me not feeling beholden to a more traditional kind of way of making work. So you're right. No, I didn't necessarily think that I was going to gravitate toward traditional theater-making.

But also I was part of a really scrappy, awesome youth-theater company in Minneapolis in the ’80s. A couple of those people ended up going to NYU two years before me, and they were like, “Only go to the Experimental Theater Wing.” That company that I was part of was this strange haven for this crossover between people who liked musicals and also were in the punk scene, and I was in a really active, vibrant scene in Minneapolis as a fan.

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] I never imagined that Venn diagram!

Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I still can't quite imagine it either, but my first play was the all-city musical of “Anything Goes.” There were all these people from this thing called the Anarchist Bowling League that were part of it. The Anarchist Bowling League would literally just drive around and throw bowling balls through Army-recruiter windows. And they were like, "Yeah, but we like the people who are doing the weird theater." I think that just it was the first group of people that utterly accepted my strangeness.

And I had a kind of epiphany the first time I went onstage that was like, “Here's where I feel at home.” I have to say I was dreadful in that show. My dad has a very good-natured joke about watching the whole chorus dance to the left, and then a second and a half later I would dance to the left. So it wasn't nascent talent by any stretch; it just was a very rewarding combination of experiences and needs being met.

Then when I got to the Experimental Theater Wing, it was a similar embrace of, first of all, formally picking apart the component atoms of what makes a performance. I was very lucky to work with Mary Overlie while she was developing Six Viewpoints, which is more commonly known through Anne Bogart's work. I think that being around a really particular artist who was making a very elegant breakdown of what are the essential elements of art-making that don’t just apply to theater furthered me on this idea of, “Oh, I could work as a dancer sometimes, or I could write for the page, or I could think about media.” A lot of it was that the circumstances were right.

And then my natural proclivity to want to push back against any particular form that I land in, for better or for worse, I think also lent itself to not feeling beholden so much.

Pier Carlo: So let's talk about that, for better or for worse, whatever you land in. You both have pretty remarkable artistic careers. I think it's hard to describe you in just two or three words because you work in a lot of different manners and media. Talk about how you mapped out these adventurous or eclectic careers for yourselves.

Aaron: Mal, you want to take a stab at that?

Mallory: I think because I always knew that I wanted to do my own work and that I would always have to carve out space to do that, I never felt like I had to rely upon the system out there. So even though for a while, I was like, “Why is no one asking me to direct their new play?” I realized at a certain point that it was because if I really wanted to do that, I could have done that. But I was actually working with people who were making things without writers, or I was always busy with other things, so t a certain point, it was like, “Well, if I had wanted to do that, I could have done that.” But there was something in me which always found that not to be the most interesting thing, even though it might have sustained me and my career in a different sort of way.

I mean, New York is a funny place because there's always the other thing pretty close to you that you feel like you should be doing or you could be doing but you're just not doing it. At a certain point, you have to assess that. What I realized was that it was because I wanted to do my own work and that took a certain amount of energy and time. I just had to figure out a way to organize my life around my own work.

Also, probably later than that, I realized — Aaron knows this — that I don't actually consider myself a storyteller. I think most people who write new plays want to work with someone who is thinking about interpreting what they've written, and I don't really think about it that way. I'm really interested in, well, taking it apart, and not all playwrights want to do that. Not that I would take it apart in its outcome, but I would want to take it apart in the conversation around it. That takes a certain kind of writer. I've been lucky to work with really great writers like Aaron and other playwrights who love that sort of process, but I don't think it's for everyone. And it doesn't necessarily fit into a neat economic structure of how new plays are developed in New York either. So I'm into sort of labor intensity. [She laughs.] I think it also doesn't pocket into the way new plays are developed.

I've always been really interested in not newness in the sense of “I'm going to do something that no one's ever done before,” but for me, the question about invention has always been important.
Mallory Catlett

Pier Carlo: Aaron, Mallory just referred to you as a playwright, but you in your bio describe yourself as a text-maker and performance-maker. Tell me about developing those descriptors for yourself.

Aaron: Yeah. I can tell you a story. The first thing I will say is I spent way too much time worrying about whether and how I should slot into one of the prescribed roles within theater, including my work for a bunch of years with Elevator Repair Service as performance and ensemble member. I loved that, but I loved it also because alongside that, I was always developing my own work. Then at a certain point, I couldn't really afford the time to be on tour with ERS a lot because I had other projects that were emerging and that were taking more of my interest and time. But for a long time, I was like, “I should really figure out what kind of artist I am within the stated confines of one or another part of the field.”

The turning point for me was that I had a meeting with a fairly prominent curator who curates seasons of new performance outside of New York and was interested in a project of mine and in building a relationship. They were like, "I really want to work with you, but I'm having trouble placing you. Are you an ensemble, like ERS? Is that what you're building? Or are you a playwright/director like Richard Maxwell? Are you forming a company like Young Jean Lee? Or are you doing this other thing? Are you more socially engaged work?" They had all the words.

And I was like, “Oh yeah, I really should figure that out.” And then I left, and I was like, “Oh no, actually the answer is whatever the project demands.” I like writing a play now and then or what I think is going to be a play and then often turns into something else. I tend to favor heavy monologue-based work when I'm writing something from scratch that is not necessarily derived from interviews or derived from found text, but I don't really have anything against making plays. It's just not a go-to for me necessarily.

Like Mallory, I like to pull apart things into formal structures that may or may not be evident at first glance. As a viewer, I feel like I'm often in a play, figuring out where we're headed before we're headed there. And I don't mean it as like “I'm so smart.” I just mean there's a lot of plays out there, and we've all seen a lot of them, and there's a lot of methods and approaches that say, “his is how you make a play.” I find that when I'm in that moment, I start to tune out from what's actually happening onstage.

I'm a real fan of work that disrupts my own sense of my intelligence and puts me in an uncomfortable or unknowing place. So I think that's just where I start to go as a maker. How can I challenge myself in terms of how I want to use time and an encounter with an audience?

The group that I work with most here at Abrons is called Perfect City, and it's young adults and other people in collaboration. Right now, we're working on a project with domestic-violence-shelter residents. We are working on ways that their stories can be alive outside of the shelter, which is very difficult. How do we make it safe for them to tell their stories and also poke a little bit at how we think about protection for people who are vulnerable? The goal is to say, “What would the neighborhood look like if people who were escaping domestic violence didn't have to be isolated to be protected?” The other members of the group are really gifted at working with the shelter residents and their kids to make interesting material, and then my role is to say, “Oh, the frame around this is that the systems that are meant to protect people actually isolate them.”

Somehow that feels like what I do as an artist is just to distill down a very complicated set of laws, histories of policing, histories of how we look at different people's bodies and notions of safety, and just say, “Oh, the people we're trying to protect, we isolate.” And then from there I talk to the collaborators and the people in the shelter about saying, “Well, what would zoning look like? What would policing look like if this wasn't the case?” It feels like my role as an artist is to just ask those really thorny, fundamental questions, and that could be in a theater setting.

Pier Carlo: Well, given that you've just mentioned a number of participatory ways in which you work, I want to talk about your collaboration on “City Council Meeting.” What did you learn from that process about your own artmaking?

Mallory: I think we’ve taken away different kinds of things from working on “City Council Meeting.” I had not worked with non-performers or non-actors, and that has become really fascinating for me. Also what I learned in “City Council Meeting” is that the limitation that you're dealing with really is the opportunity for invention, if you really use the limitations. Often with theatrical adaptation, we kind of just put in any input and output, like theater that happens in a proscenium, and so the theater itself is this monster machine that just ingests content and then spits out plays basically. But if you decide that that input is really going to determine and create a very specific set of limitations and you really use those limitations, then what it probably will spit out is something that no one's ever seen before or something that will require you to reinvent and rethink and reimagine what you think that the theater is capable of or what it can contain.

I've always been really interested in not newness in the sense of “I'm going to do something that no one's ever done before,” but for me, the question about invention has always been important. And I always drew from that. If I could work with a group of collaborators and get us all to ask really deep, important questions about who we are — and I really try to get that out of everyone I'm working with — and about the material that we're dealing with in the moment that we're making it, then the thing will be very specific and unique.

What happened with “City Council Meeting” and that I think is still true is that the limitations that are there, if you take them seriously and you really see them as an opportunity, then formally that also adds to the formal uniqueness of the thing that you're going to make.

I'm a real fan of work that disrupts my own sense of my intelligence and puts me in an uncomfortable or unknowing place. So I think that's just where I start to go as a maker. How can I challenge myself in terms of how I want to use time and an encounter with an audience?
Aaron Landsman

Pier Carlo: Aaron, what has really stayed with you in your artmaking thereafter?

Aaron: I think I could just embrace the fact that every time I think I know what something is and where it's going, I probably don't. There was something very affirming with this project about taking on bigger challenges that don't seem to have a logical outlet or conclusion. With “City Council Meeting,” literally it was a series of moments that were like, “Well, that's really cool to look at! Somebody dumping a bag of trash in the Portland, OR city-council meeting provoked a response in me.” Just like Mallory was saying, in that response, if I go back to pick through that meeting, which we do a lot in the book, I can see what were the germs or seeds of a lot of different outlets that then led to further research.

And then the moment of being like, “I think the audience should perform this,” and sticking to, as Mallory said, that obstacle or container really let the piece become things that I never could have foreseen or expected. For example, I now teach a freshman seminar using our research process that we put students through, and then they make an end-of-the-semester performance based on local government meetings that they see around Princeton, like in Trenton, Princeton, Hamilton.

The other thing that that's led to is we're building a curriculum for middle-school and high-school students. On one hand it’s about, “Well, we'd like to see more people from more kinds of communities get more engaged,” but I think a lot of civic-engagement work for young people stops there. What we found in working on the project was that young people who would take a workshop with us were like, “Oh, it means something for me to sit in the mayor's chair.” It allows, I think, for some creative thinking on the part of young people to imagine what the system might look like if it worked better or if it was better or just to see the problems of it as not being insurmountable. So the goal with the curriculum is to say civic engagement includes being on the city council but it also includes really good activism and organizing. I just feel like it keeps opening up, this work.

The other way that that's manifest is I started Perfect City thinking it was going to be the follow-up to “City Council Meeting.” While I was on tour in London, I got taken to a specific meeting for London developers and architects presented by then-Mayor Bloomberg's sustainability program called PlaNYC. Something clicked for me there, just like it had at the city council meeting I saw, and I was like, “Great! I'll assemble a group of young adults through my residency at Abrons, and we'll make something in about a year and a half, and it will be open-ended as to the form.”

The young people in the group were really focused on gentrification and the rhetoric of sustainability versus the reality of it. At some point six months in, our meetings were getting really good, and I was like, "But if you all want to really do something about gentrification, it's going to take 20 years. Haha." And the group, because they were all in their twenties, were like, "Cool! Twenty-year project. Got it." And literally now, we have three salaried working-group members, and we are thinking of ourselves as a 20-year project that encompasses both activism or advocacy and artmaking and some crossover between them. Part of that stems from seeing how a project like “City Council Meeting,” like once we had run through the resources we had to make it a legible, live-performance project that could exist in those kinds of venues, it was kind of like, “Well, what else could this be?” I think that embrace led to things like Perfect City. It led to me just going like, "Oh yeah, OK. Twenty-year project. That's terrifying, but let's try it."

Pier Carlo: “City Council Meeting” and Perfect City and a lot of the work you do seem to look at the performance of power and regulation. I want to talk about those two things, about power and governance in theater itself, which as you know has been under the microscope in recent years. How has your work given you a better sense of how the governing and managing of performing-arts nonprofits could be influenced, reinvented or changed?

Aaron: I have an answer that I don't mean to sound cheeky or overly blunt. I think healthcare is the response. If this country provided healthcare to people who work in nonprofits, then we could sustain nonprofits better. If the country provided education at non-exorbitant loans or was just free and was high-quality for everybody, then we could sustain the nonprofit industrial complex much better.

I started building a series of peer-to-peer artist workshops about how you sustain your work life financially and otherwise. For me, that peek under the curtain was just like, “Oh, this is a problem of resources.” To a degree. I mean, I think there are of course lots of other attendant problems that —

Pier Carlo: Wait, could you say more about these workshops?

Aaron: Sure. Now it's independent of the Creative Capital Foundation, but that's where it started. It's me and, say, three other artists and then a strategic planner who go and teach artists in a number of cities and communities how to make a budget, how to look at the systems that govern the arts — whether it's visual art, music, literature, live performance — and then figure out how you can sustain yourself within them and around them. We're asking people to rethink the models that are there.

Doing that for a number of years, I'm just like, “Oh right, well, the combination of the idea that there is this mission we're all in thrall to as artists or creative individuals or nonprofits but without the basic underpinnings of a stable life means that like ... .” Those kinds of inequities or those kinds of lacks — I think this is embedded in your question a bit — obviously affect people of color more, affect people with differing abilities more, affect people who are not on the strict gender binary more. Embedded in some of these things for me are also issues of equity that have come up more to the forefront.

But I do feel like if the country treated people who weren't wealthy better, then we would have better performance venues that weren't so overtaxed.

Mallory: I certainly would second that issue about healthcare because we all have to do a lot of things to ensure that we can cover that. Those things that we do and those compromises that we make keep us often from really thriving as artists, and not just individually but — I'm a co-artistic director of Mabou Mines —also making institutions that really can support artists in the ways that they want to be supported. Someone coming from Mabou Mines, which has a long tradition of having a collective-leadership model, it's very rare. We just had our 50th anniversary. It's a very rare model, which is interesting, but it's been able to support hundreds of artists over its lifetime and continues to support individuals in a very flexible way that gives artists what they need. If myself and our artists, if our government gave us healthcare, I think so much stress would be relieved from our lives, and it would really change the landscape for so many people.

Aaron: Can I add one other thing that's more about the kind of creative aspect of how we often define the process? I was reading one of Peter Brooks’ books where he's kind of recounting one of his more well-known productions. Of course, he's based in an EU country, which, while it's more complicated than this, does have more in terms of basic social-safety net. But there's this moment where he is talking about the process, and he says, "Well, we had booked 15 weeks at this castle in the South of France to develop this piece, and then we realized right away that that wasn't going to be enough time, so we booked another 10 weeks."

On one hand, that cracks me up, as it does you, but I also wonder what would our theater infrastructure look like if more theaters were able to say, "What do you need, artists? And how much time could you take advantage of?" So this is shifting away from something like healthcare or even the availability of castles for creative process. What if our theaters were really embracing the idea of an ongoing process of many, many weeks of figuring out how a piece can live best and what it needs, which is something, honestly, that Elevator Repair Service does, spending that kind of time developing a new work.

Pier Carlo: Does Mabou Mines do that as well, Mallory?

Mallory: Yeah. We now even have our own space. The structure is the co-artistic directorship have projects, and there's a kind of round robin, where projects are being developed and they come up for production. But in that round robin, there's all sorts of fundraising and there's space — they've always had a rehearsal space — to work consistently on those projects so that when something gets ready, it gets moved into that production mode. We all have ongoing pieces that we're developing, and there's support in terms of space, in terms of a development person, to try to raise money and to help foster those collaborations until one's ready to go.

Pier Carlo: So it's project-specific, rather than traditionally season-specific.

Mallory: Yes. Ruth Maleczech had this wonderful thing that she said, which is that when they made the company, they committed to not only supporting artists doing the work but doing the thing they had to do before they could even do the work. So if that meant you just putter around in the studio and plug in equipment or whatever that meant for the individuals, they were committed not only to actually making the work but also to the thing the artist needed to do before they could even make the work, which I think has to do with when you enter a space.

When I as a younger emerging artist worked with Mabou Mines, it was immediately apparent to me when I walked into their space that that was afforded to me in a way that they could make possible and could be generous with. It's a kind of generosity and a kind of understanding that anything that you may start may fail. It may be an exercise in learning something else so that you're committed to all the things an artist has to do to make the work. It has a very particular ethos that I as a younger artist found incredibly supportive.

Even when there wasn't money, there was generosity, there was a place to be, there were people to talk to and there was a community that was afforded to us. And that's what we continue to try to foster. Now we have a performance space and a rehearsal space, so we continue to do that work. That was just a very powerful thing that I reflect upon a lot with Ruth and her commitment to the artists who began that company.

Pier Carlo: This is ringing bells for you in terms of what you were saying about Elevator Repair Service, Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, it's ringing bells in terms of the ethic of community care, as jargony as that might sound, that exists in the ensemble world. I love this idea of the thing you have to do before you can start rehearsing.

There’s a very playful part of ERS's process, which is just it's a group of people that really like cracking each other up and trying stuff, and that, I think, creates an ease from which on a good day really deep material can flow. So there's a lot of trust.

I'd also say, my wife is a dancer/choreographer, and in the early mid-’90s, she was making work with a steady collaborator, and they would make these duets. Because of the economics of living in New York at that time, which were a bit easier, they would just have four or five hours in a rehearsal studio, and they would eat lunch and chat and maybe take a brief nap. And then they would work for a couple hours, and then they would do something else relaxing. And that all felt like productive work. I think the dance world, especially the experimental-dance world, embraces the idea that there's somatic things that can be a part of the practice of choreography or improvisation that feed what you see onstage, that there's not a massive separation.

Pier Carlo: Collaboration is so central to the work that both of you do. What do you think are a couple of essential tips that an up-and-coming artist should keep in mind, whether collaborating with other artists or with the community on a project?

Mallory: I can chime in here. I think it was an Elie Wiesel thing. I fear I'll get this wrong, but I think I heard him say one time, "When you get to heaven, what would God say to you?" I'm not a religious person, but I think that the answer was something along the lines of “Why weren't you more yourself?” It really struck me, this idea of itself-ness. And when you work with people, that to me became a thing. It's like, can we be ourselves? I'm looking for the itself-ness of each person that I'm working with as the key to the piece itself making itself known as well.

The more we're thinking about who we're in the room with and can we be ourselves and what does that look like … . Because we may not know that. We may not know that personally, we may not know that as a group, but to really try to figure that out as a group, what happens for me is that it instills in the work a kind of itself-ness so that you're not determining the work. The work at a certain time becomes autonomous from you, and it begins to tell you what it wants or what it needs.

For me, that's always a thing about, “Wow, what is the itself-ness of each person I'm in the room with? And can this space draw that out of people?” That to me became the key to the uniqueness of the work, which is that you're never going to get these people together with this material in this moment ever again. If you're really digging into that, then what you make will be very unique because of that.

I think that's a real core thing for me about collaboration. If you're committed to that, if you're committed to the work, failure is a possibility because success is not the goal. So that's also part of it, that somebody in the group wants to go down, wants to discover something, or that hopefully we're all doing things that we haven't done before. And that means that there's a possibility for failure, right?

Pier Carlo: Man, what you're describing, it demands a lot of humility!

Aaron: I was just thinking that also what I really like about that is that it allows you as the artist to let yourself be transformed by a process. I think I came in early in my work-making life as not wanting to be in control but wanting to know what I was doing before I got there. So it's back to that Ruth Maleczech thing of, what do you have to do so that you can let go of this idea that you know where this is going? If you are really being yourself in the company of a group of people, then you are inevitably going to be changed by that process. So I’ll just pick up on that and say, let yourself be changed by the work you're making.

Then maybe another thing for me is adrienne maree brown has this phrase, “moving at the speed of trust.” I think what we learned a lot with “City Council Meeting” was that building trust takes longer than you think it's supposed to, especially in community collaborations, especially if you're coming in somewhere that you're not from. So just allow that time as much as possible, which also demands resources.

The other thing is a little bit more slightly parental to my younger self, which is just, curiosity's a muscle and there are always things to be interested in when it comes to an ongoing process or a new endeavor. For me, it's been very helpful to recognize when my defenses are up and that's shutting me down or recognize when I think I know too soon how to do something because I've done it before, but I haven't done this version of that before.

Keep just trying to engage with, “OK, what am I curious about?” Especially if a process is really dogging me. I wrote a libretto during the pandemic that sort of came to me through a collaborator, and I'd never done that before. I just found all these moments when I was like, "Oh, I know how to do this," and then I realized I didn't. Then I could ask myself, “What is it that I don't know? And how can I get through this?”

Pier Carlo: Instead of panicking and shutting down.

Aaron: Exactly. Or panicking and relying on old habits. So those would be mine, I think.

October 13, 2022