Leading the Flock

Last month I put something on a stage in Detroit. It wasn’t a big thing, but it was a thing, and lots of people came to see it, and some people claim to have cried (!), and someone sent me a screenshot of a text conversation where their friends were quoting the show to each other. I coached a couple people through their first times being on stage, and I hung out til three in the morning at the backyard bar of someone who’s been making theater in Detroit for much longer than me. So all in all, I considered it a success.

The event was the Detroit Cantastoria Festival, cantastoria being a many-hundred-year-old performance style where a storyteller uses painted banners or scrolls to illustrate a story as they tell it. (Cantastoria is Italian for story singer.) Today, in the US at least, the form is strongly associated with political street theater, most notably the Bread and Puppet Theater, founded in the ‘60s by Peter Schumann and still touring nationally today. (Two of the folks who run the festival here spent years working at Bread and Puppet.)

The way you get into Detroit’s cantastoria festival is you show up to a meeting at St Peter’s Episcopal Church and explain your idea. The way I got into Detroit’s cantastoria festival was I met someone at a party who said she had been wanting to paint banners for this thing at St Peter’s. I said yeah, I could probably come up with a story for the banners to be about.

We ended up adapting a piece I wrote a few years ago for an Erik Ehn project and originally published here on substack, a piece about birds and unison movement and learning to be a flock. We quickly figured out that the cantastorias should be on the inside of the bird’s wings, so they could open their wings to display them, close to hide, etc. This discovery was exciting — it made the logic of the piece click into place — but it also meant a big escalation from a few painted banners to eight 2-sided, wearable pieces of art. My collaborator assured me it would be no problem.

Meanwhile, I set to work finding performers, or rather, keeping performers. Just when I thought I had a quorum of birds, someone would disappear into the cantastoria scrum, having gotten pulled into another project or over-committed or lost interest altogether. I tried to schedule rehearsals outside of cantastoria hours, but quickly learned that you just have to show up on Tuesday and Thursday nights, which is when there’s free cardboard and free boxed wine but also ten other people working on their projects in the same room. When the ensemble eventually coalesced, their experience levels ranged from someone I co-teach theater with at a youth program in Detroit (and was excited to work with in an adult context) to someone who agreed to be onstage as long as she didn’t have to speak.

The chaos continued to intensify as the performances approached. What was called “tech” on the schedule did not involve lights or sound; it began with someone who comes to the church for the soup kitchen yelling into a microphone on stage and no one stopping him; it continued with the stage manager telling me that she’d pass my sound requests on to the band, who would be here eventually. So many things were still getting painted on the day of dress rehearsal that whole sections of the show were a surprise to me when I saw them during the first performance.

And yet, somehow, when the performances started the surprises did arrive: not just finished (if slightly wet) banners and cranks, but also pots of soup for the actors, popcorn for the audience, a whole booth of art pieces for sale, a pretty excellent band, and a couple hundred people waiting to get in nearly an hour before curtain.

There was a show about ranked choice voting. There was a show about drawings of cats found in the margins of ancient manuscripts. A show about the old ladies who run block clubs and the difficult young people who move onto their blocks. A show about injury-lawyer-turned-local-celebrity, Joumana. There was a group of witches who brought their cauldron-cantastoria all the way from New York to perform. My piece came near the end of the night, by which point people had settled in for the long haul (the whole event lasted more than 3 hours), and were ready to receive something a little more language-dense and contemplative than many of the other pieces. Our one good rehearsal paid off: my actors mostly remembered their lines, nobody’s wings fell apart, and you could feel people in the room responding to the piece.

Honestly, it was the largest and most enthusiastic audience I’ve had in years.

The very official — and constantly changing — show order

And yet, when I went to post photos of the show to my instagram, I hesitated.

I imagined someone looking me up for a grant or residency, and felt unsure whether seeing these images would help me or hurt me. On one hand, here I am, out here, making things. On the other hand, this looks very much like what it is: a community-driven art event. The aesthetics of this could not be further from the new-play-development world. Would someone considering me for an opportunity be willing to believe I belong in both?

Mastery in almost any part of the American theater involves creating something compelling out of limited resources, while working against an increasingly technology-driven understanding of what entertainment looks like. In the same way that aesthetics can signal class, I see the aesthetics of the new play world working, in the absence of money, to signal a certain tier of professionalism. The look is slick, minimalist: a single, well-chosen costume piece. The right lighting on an almost-bare stage. This particular tier of the theater world is one I desperately want access to. Not because there’s a living to be made there, but for the opportunity to make my plays with other artists working at the very top of their game.

I flip through the images of cantastoria. The straps on the birds’ wings should be brown, not white. The colors are too bright. The choreography is never quite symmetrical. Would a person reviewing my application — looking over my life — be willing to believe there is also a kind of virtuosity required to make this?

About five days out from the show, it became clear that the painter I was collaborating with had significantly misjudged the amount of time it was going to take her to finish the wings. I’d been worried about this for weeks, but we were new to working with each other and I didn’t want to micromanage. As I pulled my car into her driveway at 9am on a Tuesday, having cleared the remainder of my week to help her, I thought of Ragged Wing, where I made theater for most of my 20s. I thought of the company’s artistic director, and of the times that she had calmly showed up to carry me across the finish line when I found myself wildly behind our production deadline, because of immaturity or inexperience or both. This, too, is a kind of virtuosity: to move fluidly between mentor and collaborator, guide and peer. To shape your work to both the very real talent and the real challenges of working outside of institutions. To still make something that feels like your work — not like a poor version of something you’d rather be making elsewhere, but the version that works best for the people and place right in front of you.

(I’m focused on my own experience here, but it also feels important to point to the organizers of the festival. Creating an event with such a low barrier to entry that inspires people to get involved while still putting on a fun, wild show that feels like a party and fills audiences past capacity every year? Definitely the kind of virtuosity I’m talking about.)

And it’s not just that it’s virtuosity. It is, in reality — outside a few small pockets of the industry — how most theater gets made.

So, anyway, I posted the photos.

Because I am out here, doing things.

While on instagram, I saw a video in someone’s stories of the cantastoria after-party — people gathered and laughing around a frigid backyard fire. Watching the video, I was shocked to hear, in the background audio, a conversation I had completely forgotten about. “We need to appreciate Addie!” says one voice in the video. Another voice agrees. It’s two of my performers, telling me how good the process felt to them. They are using words like “fun” and “ease” and “trust.” They are saying they felt well-led.

I try for a moment to figure out whether I can save the video. It’s just on someone’s story — is that creepy? Should I ask them for it? Could I record it with my own—

I catch myself, pause, feel silly. You had to be there. That’s the point.