AOA Season 5 Ep 2
Molly: Hello and welcome to a podcast about creating experimental art in trauma-informed and sustainable ways that support artists, our communities and the organization as a whole. I'm your host, Molly, and you're listening to Any Other Anythings.
In this season, we are focused on the latest project being produced by Grey Box Collective. It is titled Positive Ruminations. So, this is an event that will feature four new works and each episode of this season of Any Other Anythings will feature conversations from the creative teams developing the new work, and we are really focusing on capturing the process and sharing out the things we find interesting along the way. Hope that you enjoy the season of Any Other Anythings.
Alright. Hey, y'all welcome to another episode of Any Other Anythings. So this is season five, episode two, and we are focused on the project Positive Ruminations. And again, I'm Molly. I'm your host as well as the creative producer and founder of Grey Box Collective.
Let me provide just a little bit of context as to what has happened so far in the Positive Ruminations project in our production process so far, right? So of course, obviously there's like a call for creatives people responded and then we kind of go through a couple different iterations, a couple different, I call it like a consensual. What do I call it? A consensual onboarding process. I don't think that's I think I came up with a more clever name, but it's basically a lot of dialogue back and forth. So I say, hey, there's a call out. People respond, hey, I want to be a part of this. And then there's also an info session where we can have more detailed conversation before like that application is submitted.
Once that application was submitted, it was one on one conversations with me. And then we did a meet and greet once offers were made with the entire team and from that meet and greet, we then did contracts and the meet and greet was virtual. So it was very much like more, I guess, an onboarding meeting than like a fun meet and greet kind of thing.
And then we had our first rehearsal that was everyone. So all four teams showed up to the first rehearsal. And in that first rehearsal, it's the focus of the first third of trauma-informed creative practices where we are. Focus on invisible work, and I think invisible work comes from the book the actor in the target.
Honestly, I've never read it. I just heard someone call something invisible work once and reference that book and I'm not sure if I took it or not completely accurately. So just naming my poor citation there and origin story of using the phrase invisible work, but it's essentially like the stuff that you do that technically would never make it to the stage or make it to that final performance, but is so imperative to include in the creative process, especially in device work because it is laying such a solid foundation for us to build on top of.
All right. So that first rehearsal that everyone was present for it was invisible work. It was learning our shared vocabulary, learning how we communicate together, learning what those power dynamics might be in the space, learning what our skills and our comfort zones are. And just like, understanding that like the very beginnings and also naming about half of this group of creatives are returning to Grey Box Collective and have been a part of other shows and about half have not.
So we've got a nice blend which is actually like my ideal is that there's always a 50 percent return. And yeah, so we had the all, all creative, all creative teams, all ensemble, rehearsal first, and then we broke out into separate rehearsals the two weeks following that. So technically, it's been three weeks of rehearsal so far.
And everyone's had like a one and a half-ish rehearsal, you could say. And so, you'll hear from each of the creative teams about their first kind of independent rehearsal. And in those independent rehearsals, we're still doing some invisible work, right? Still learning how like the smaller groups, the smaller ensembles, the project creative teams are going to work together.
But then we start to dip into a little bit more specifically the work that we are creating. And it's nothing like a deep dive. That's going to happen next time. But yeah, so these are like the very beginning conversations, the very beginning experiences with developing this work. All right. So I hope that you enjoy listening to the creative teams discuss their development process so far and I will pop in to just give you like a little transition and heads up for each one. All right. Enjoy.
Hey, listener. Thank you so much for taking the time and energy to check out another episode of any other anything's greatly appreciate your presence. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to find out more about this podcast, the speakers and Grey Box Collective. You can also go to greyboxcollective.com/podcasts for a full transcript of this episode.
Thank you again for listening. Thank you again for being here. Greatly appreciate it. Take care of yourselves and each other.
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