Finding your Feet - pt I
by Leah Thomas
In my mind, art is synonymous with relationships. What I make, what I want to make, and where I make it, is all shaped by who I know, love and work with. 2020 was a huge year for all of us in the arts. For me it was shaped by a spirit-crushing final year of music school, heartbreak, COVID, adopting my first fur baby and meeting one of my now good mates and creative colleagues Ben Ashby.
Ben and I collided while working at the BATS Box Office before going on to direct and produce a show together, called Running Into the Sun, that combined elements of experimental theatre and classical music. From Ben, I’ve learnt how to have fun in the creative process and embrace play, throw ideas onto the floor without fear and most importantly how to be kind to everyone in the room while building something together.
We sat down for a chat about our first years out of music/theatre school and the kind of art we like to make.
Leah: How did you feel in your last few weeks of study at Toi and what were you thinking about future wise? Because I remember that time real clearly, we had just become friends and you were a week out from graduating.
Ben: When did we meet?
Leah: We met in October last year.. no 2020.
Ben: What was the context?
Leah: BATS, when we were working in the Box Office.
Ben: Yeah yeah right. I was just like what, I was just trying to remember the party.
Leah: No it was a work context! Very professional.
Ben: Oh yeah. How was I feeling? I was feeling.. Excited. I had just gotten the Panthers TV show contract, and I was feeling pretty invincible. Hell yeah, I haven’t even graduated and landed a TV gig. This is going to be easy, everyone said it was going to be hard but this is going to be easy. But I knew that the Long Cloud job was up for grabs and I kinda had known for ages that I wanted to run a youth theatre company but I thought I was gonna do it when I was 30. I thought, maybe I should just apply for it, because I liked living in Wellington, I didn’t want to move to Auckland. I thought I was going to be able to make theatre in Wellington and land big gigs in Auckland that my agents hunted for me, and the reality has been that I have been able to carve out a space for theatre stuff but the film gigs have been harder to come by.
Leah: I think it's funny that you always knew you were going to run a youth theatre company. Was that because the theatre company was such an important part of your teen years. You were always in theatre companies when you were a kid in Christchurch?
Ben: Yes, I was in the Court Youth Theatre company when I was 16 and that was very important to me because my high school did not really do theatre at all. That was one of the first times that I was like wow all these people make theatre, a classic find your tribe story, I really want to do that.
Leah: And that stuck with you? All the way through Toi? Even though you were being exposed to a different kind of tribe?
Ben: Definitely in a real backburner way. The year before I went to Toi, I was in Long Cloud as a company member for a year. But I wasn’t like, one day I am going to run a youth theatre company. I was just like, I feel like, that's a job I would enjoy doing.
Leah: Yeah I know what you mean. With Classical Sessions, I performed in that series when I was a student, when it was run by Chamber Music New Zealand.
Ben: I thought you invented Pōneke Classical Sessions.
Leah: Sort of. Chamber Music New Zealand, the national chamber music company, used to run a monthly concert in the Tuatara bar but the bar closed down and they weren’t going to start again. So I changed a lot of things about it, and I have invented how it exists now, but I inherited something.
Ben: Cool.
Leah: But yeah when I played in it I definitely thought the series was really cool and that being a creative person who makes performance spaces was a cool job, but I wasn’t moving through my degree being like so how do I get there. What steps do I take. In the last year of artistic training you keep getting told “its going to be so hard to build a career”, and it is but sometimes things happen without you asking for it.
Ben: 100%. My philosophy on my arts career is that I look backwards now and then and I see oh thats the path that has led me to get to here, that makes sense. But looking forwards there is no path and I just trust that in five years time I will look backwards and see oh theres the path.
Leah: One thing that I wanted to talk to you about is what kind of theatre you like to make because, from what I know about you and how you work, I feel like that explains why you became the Director of Long Cloud. You like experimental theatre, and you like things that are youthful and fresh.
Ben: I think it became clearer to me in COVID year, in 2020, because I realised what I really liked about theatre was the shared experience of it. And the sharing of an experience with people. I’m not talking about 4D or whatever. I saw Rushes in 2018, and they took over the entire building. It was abstract art and music and you promenaded around. And I left feeling like wow I felt something, I was part of a tribe. That is the theatre I make, theatre where you leave with an experience. The real reason why I love experience-based theatre is because if you want to watch a story I think film is the better way to do it. The world building and storytelling you can have in film is incredible, and its getting more and more accessible. So why would you try and compete with that in theatre? When what film has nothing of is the ability to share an experience and share breath and be on this emotional journey with everyone. Unless you watch movies with a massive crowd, thats just not how I watch films.
Leah: People can absorb stories in so many different ways, but the sharing of space and breath is the unique part of live performance art. Both in live music and theatre. Maybe this is a comment that could get me in trouble, but I don’t think classical music is super successful recorded. It is beautiful, but it is way more moving when you are in a room watching people communicate. When you see classical musicians perform, you can see the process as they are delivering the product and I feel like that with theatre. You see people working together to make something which is hidden in things like film where huge parts of the process are purposefully not included, or supposed to be hidden. Theatre is super honest about the process.
Ben: I love maths questions that say show your working, I love that with theatre. The theatre where you can see actors running around backstage. When someone left the stage 5 minutes ago and appeared in the other corner, you can tell holy shit that person just ran around the theatre. With film and recorded music, they try and make it look so effortless and polished. Whereas I want to show the effort. To show that you are right there with the performer, they are working hard, you are working hard just watching.
Leah: So many people get stuck making things of a certain style or that tell a certain kind of story and there is something freeing, I think about the work you do, where you think so much more broadly than that.
Ben: Yeah 100%. The thing I want to train the company members in is how to be an artist. And by that I mean how to have an idea, and how to transform it all the way into a piece of art that people can experience. Some of that is the craft of being able to act, to learn lines, and deliver a story, but there are lots of places where you can learn to do that. What I am more interested in are the soft skills - saying here is my idea, what do I need to do next to make it live and breathe on stage.
Finding your Feet will be published in three parts - stay tuned for parts two and three!
