Tiaja Sabrie

Devising is such a thrilling process because it really lets you dive all the way into an idea. In most other forms of theatre creation, you kind of start from the outside in. You have a text, or something that you're adapting into a text, you have a concept, you have a design, you assemble a cast, and you bring the thing to life. This process can, at times, limit the perspective and conversation within the piece to a few voices: the writer and the director. If you have a good collaborator in charge, the voices of the designers and actors are heard and considered, but in the end, the writer and director are the vision-makers. By beginning without a script, the builders are able to play without restriction, and to follow the thoughts and feelings of the group. This allows exploration into directions that may not even be considered in a more traditional production structure. You are able to dig down into the very heart of a subject, and bring it in its most bare form into view. It is this stripping-down that leads to discovery, which can be incredible and infuriating. Maybe your piece is about the life cycle of moss, and you dig and explore and end with a beautiful performance about the life cycle of moss. Or, maybe, you dig and explore and one day suddenly realize that your piece is actually about the relationship between a parent and a child, and now the whole process has to change. Even in this process, making pieces about murals, we have pieces that are about the mural itself, pieces about the images in the mural, and pieces that come from the mural but aren't about murals at all. It is this finding of the piece, like finding the sculpture in the marble, that becomes so invigorating. You can set out to sculpt a horse from your chunk of marble, and end up with a beautiful horse, or you can chip away at the marble and let it tell you what it wants to be. Maybe that's a horse. Maybe it's a few horses. Maybe it's an abstract representation of the passage of time. Unfortunately, this also makes marketing tricky. People have already started asking me what the pieces are about, and it's tough to have an answer. "Right now, we're exploring parades, but we keep talking about the impact of perception and context on the experience of an event, so I'm not sure where we're gonna end up. But right now, parade."