On July 19th, Open Channel Performance Lab (a multidisciplinary group of performance-makers) hosted a brown bag lunch discussion to explore creative processes and reimagine the next generation of ensemble theatre-making. Pig Iron’s Artistic Producer Eva Steinmetz moderated a lunchtime discussion and Q&A with the artists about continued practice and training in ensemble theater.
Vanessa Ogbuehi, member of the Open Channel Performance Lab and Pig Iron School Class of 2019, wrote a reflection write-up of their residency time.
OUR TIME WITH PIG IRON THEATER
Philadelphia, 2024
An open channel is both a container and the kinetic force that moves through it. It is the guided movement of water, its flow, as well as the technology that translates invisible frequencies into new media. Channels are a network of connections and a mode of transportation, as well as pathways for communication. In our present theater ecosystem, we have an urgent need for new containers, new networks, and new movements. We created Open Channel Labs out of this need, and formed it around a communal investment into time and space focused towards collective research and individual artistic pursuit. We came together for a three day residency at Pig Iron Theater in order to create our own container for creative work, one held by activated space, invested time, and pooled resources. What emerged from this experiment was theater, but the kind that generates from intuitive and collaborative processes, from bodies sweating in a room, and from the merging of multiple imaginations.
Open Channel’s four members, Phoebe Hiltermann, Wyn Batson, Vanessa Ogbuehi, and Hannah Burt, are theater artists, actors, makers, and directors who met at various points of intersection over the course of 8 years in the world of ensemble theater. Our collective is unique for three reasons: we focus our creativity on process over output, we come from a high-flying range of backgrounds and experiences united by shared practice, and as an ensemble, we are geographically separated. This last is a complication and a blessing which means that our working environment is in perpetual exchange with different landscapes, communities, and art cultures in states, cities, and rural towns often outside of the national theater conversation. Despite our physical distances, we each fatefully met in the period of creation of new work. All theater artists recognize this period of development, the weeks and months before a performance takes flight that are heavy with intensity and frustration. It is also the time where bonds form quickly, and trust is built. Open Channel Labs is a commitment to this period of work, the time before the flight, when the unknowns outweigh the knowns. In devised theater, the rehearsal time is usually much longer than the run of the show, but current theater practices emphasize output over the slow work of building something without bones. If theater-making is a growing season, then we take our time in the soil: that fertile darkness from which something mysteriously and inevitably sprouts to life.
Open Channel Labs circulates between three central motivations: exploration, collectivity, and generation. We are here because we love the process, and are seeking space to be in process without the objective of a performance. In this open space lies the value of our work which does not pretend to have itself all figured out for the sake of a grant, or attempt to prove its value in a culture that overvalues profit. We source our inspiration from a well of unknowing that is not divorced from our daily and national realities of ongoing war, violence within our own communities, and global environmental crises, but in acceptance of this context and out of the necessity for art and imagination during this time.
Not only are we committed to our own creative practices, but we also invest in each other’s. Theater is not created in isolation, and as artists committed to the work of “ensemble theater,” we see this limb of the theater body as all the more necessary given its relegation to the outskirts. The work also does not begin and end in the studio: art includes hospitality, food, drink, games, gathering, celebration, community, and family.
The focus on generation speaks not only to the creation of material, but also to our place within a long history and lineage of devised ensemble theater with a physical training methodology. It is through this larger network that extends across time and space that we came to be in residence at Pig Iron Theater, a giant in the branches of ensemble creation, and in American theater today. In a theater niche that is largely under-resourced, we ask: How can we be resources to each other? How can we pool our resources (financial, creative, social, etc.) to propel all of us forward together?
During our time in residence, we arrived with a wealth of individual interests, impulses, and curiosities, ranging from dream-journaling, stage magic, and gardens to the follies of the nuclear family, motherhood, and 1980s Philadelphia. We also came with eclectic backgrounds in clowning, puppetry, shape note singing, and theatrical design. We each brought props, costumes, and designs to train with and play in a world we built out of the fragments of our research. We organized our time around open training, led training, and material creation that resulted in a sharing of our research as a montage of striking imagery, musical and physical performance, and pure play. In the end, the value of our time together was not in what we shared, but in how we came to share it.
Our open trainings were a period of work much like the “fishpond” training of Denmark’s Odin Teatret, where each individual follows their own path of action within the contained world we were building together through a shared method of rigorous physical improvisation. In this space, we could each explore our own individual influences and personal practices, while simultaneously watching the action in the room and allowing it to inspire or react against our own meaning-making and storytelling.
Our led trainings were individually hosted by each member of the ensemble, engaging methods of material creation through various angles on improvisation and composition in the form of auto-fiction, games, object manipulation, tableau, and song. One training involved balancing canes on our fingertips while moving about the room, trying to find a moment of stillness; then, allowing the canes to transform into ways of walking, and a focal prop in movement scores wherein the cane might become an oar, a telescope, or a pet dog. Another training involved tacking images from movies and paintings and text onto a wall and recreating them with our bodies and voices, while also allowing them to transform by individually stepping out of the image in order to redirect it. These more structured trainings allowed for us to share our practices, while also inviting new proposals and stepping out of our own ways of making in order to step into someone else’s.
The fluid exchange between leading and following the group allowed us to exercise our ideas while challenging ourselves to never get too set or rigid, instead recognizing the beauty and benefit of seeing an idea evolve to fit the needs and the momentum of the group.
These more explorative and improvisatory trainings were punctuated with time for focused creation through composition: we took the abundance of action and images created in the open space and tested them in the rehearsal room, channeling the results into the soft beginnings of a performance. Our presentation was a wild splash of visions; a lucid dream that teetered between a sitcom featuring a family of clowns, and a frightening folktale of magical and morbid creatures. The fifteen minutes of material we presented on our final evening may never again see the light of day; however, any future projects we go on to pursue in the wake of this residency will carry the traces of our time together, in a moment, an image, an action, or an idea that was discovered in the open and activated space we held. And this is our primary intention: to engage our imaginations fully and physically in the container we’ve carved out for ourselves, planting the seeds of our inspiration in the soil of our practice, knowing that the flowers of our labors are done in time. We ended our time together with an open question: what will the future of our work bring?
