
PIG IRON VALUES
As we come out of the pandemic, Pig Iron has taken a moment to try to better articulate the core values that define and guide our work. This is intended as an orientation and as a commitment—for our collaborators and staff and students and for the leaders of our organization—as we make plans for the future.
Pig Iron is:
Artist-Driven
Pig Iron was founded by artists and for artists. We are a space that invites in new voices and gives artists the agency they need to take risks, dig deeper into their passions, and create work that is personally and intellectually meaningful. Of course we listen to and care about audiences too—but our work begins with the artist’s process and the forging of a shared language within ensembles and collaborative teams of artist-makers.
Unusual and Risk-Taking
We began in the 90s thinking of ourselves as “the experimental theater with a heart,” a cadre of weirdos who could appreciate both the “uptown” and “downtown” theater scenes. Even as what defines the mainstream shifts and evolves, we always look for what is unsaid—both subtle and radical—in the world at large. We find special joy in unexpected turns and in elevating perspectives and ideas that can seem hard to see at first.
Ensemble-based and Collaborative
We began as an ensemble determined to challenge “playwright’s theater” with a collective model of creation. We’ve continued to experiment with new approaches to authorship and with collaborations across disciplines, where creative engines drive performance in new ways. We like to set aside time in our process for communication among all of the assembled artists. We also believe in taking time to warm up together and share ourselves in the interest of building trust and new, shared vocabularies.
Embodied
We should face it—we are a brainy group of artists who care about ideas and literature and intellectual tides. But what separates performance work from the other arts is the language of the body. Not all of our work is athletic, but all of our work springs from an understanding of performance as an art form made up of breathing bodies in space. Breath and the rhythms of the body are part of our evolving training and part of our lifelong practice as theater artists.
Rigorous
We always set a high bar for finishing our creations and continuously refining our works; this also means always setting high standards for ourselves and continuously interrogating our process and our values as we work. We also recognize that rigor must be balanced by a deep sense of care to make space for people to bring their whole selves and best work to the room.
With A Spirit of Play
Oh, play. This slippery invisible quality that can be so hard to define—it lies at the heart of our work. Sometimes it is whimsical, sometimes it is a very practical antidote to bullshit or succumbing to a formula. For us, it means many things: a special quality of aliveness and awareness of the audience in real time; a willingness to start over and change course as we make our work; a way that the shared work of making great performance must ping back and forth unpredictably within a collaborative team; and fundamentally a belief that everything can mean more than one thing.