Forming the Creative Teams

Guerin began the Fragments process with a full-company meet and greet on St. Patrick’s Day at Hopewell Hub.

For playwright Zella Selvoy-Devan, 18, the event carried personal pressure as well as artistic possibility. “I knew when I got there that I was the youngest by far. But rather than being intimidated, I felt determined. I would prove my worth, regardless of age.”

The first practical task was to form the ensembles. As everyone gathered, the six ensembles had not been formed yet. The artists began with what playwright Niels Truman described as a round of director and playwright “speed dating” to get a sense of those with whom they might want to collaborate.

That process led Truman to director Mindi Logan. He wrote that they clicked for a few reasons: “We come to our work from a place of curiosity, we share values of rigor and optimism, [and] we’re both new to the devising process and eager to etch our own path.”

Logan already knew the actors who would become part of the ensemble, Ricardo Guevara and Sav Baird. Truman described that connection as somewhat of an exception, as several other participants met each other for the first time at the team meeting. The preexisting relationship between his director and actors shaped Truman’s first experience of his group. Logan was the actors’ former professor, and Truman understood they already shared “a built-in relationship and vocabulary.” At the same time, he saw the advantage: the actors had “undeniable stage chemistry and a willingness to iterate and adapt.”

Other playwrights entered the meet and greet with different levels of familiarity. Selvoy-Devan wrote that she “was placed with a director, two actors, and a musical director” and already knew all of them through their work with NWTW.

Nancy Campbell formed her first team through a mix of known and unknown collaborators. At the meet and greet, she partnered with a director she had met through workshops, one actor with whom she had worked, and another actor she did not know. The latter could not attend the meeting but had “boatloads of acting and writing experience.”

Picking the Sites

Once the creative teams were formed, the next task was for each ensemble to pick their site. In Fragments, picking a site was a dramaturgical choice. It was going to be an active collaborator as they devised their pieces. Each ensemble had to consider what the space offered: its objects, architecture, atmosphere, history, and contradictions.

Campbell and her collaborators explored “the yome – a yurt with canvas walls, slate floors, a bed on cinder blocks, and a rocket stove.” They also noticed the composting toilet, wardrobe, Tibetan prayer bowl, muted outside sound, diffused light, and “resident wasps.” They chose the yome as their site because it had privacy, vulnerability, discomfort, and enclosure built into it.

For playwright Hanlon and her ensemble, choosing the pond as the site for their devised piece meant embracing a location that did not immediately announce itself as theatrically rich. The surroundings “revealed to us a relatively boring site, frankly,” she remarked. But that plainness gradually became part of its appeal. The team began to notice the quiet, the smallness of the pond against the larger open space, the wet grass, and the creative challenge of making a seemingly ordinary place feel theatrically necessary.

For the team working with Bolchunos, a tiny, daisy-colored home and garden offered both domestic charm and visual disruption. The site’s tiny house was nestled beside a community permaculture garden, but what seized the ensemble’s attention was the “massive, rusty, oblong fuel tank.”

“It looked like a bomb,” Bolchunos said. The site appeal was the contrast between its pastoral beauty and the danger “the bomb” implied.

For playwright Kwik Jones’s ensemble, the site included a mushroom wall, shuffleboard, a tarp, and a picnic table. As with all the projects, the site was also to present aspects of the layered history of Hopewell Hub. His group began by observing what was already there and letting the location’s odd mix of objects and associations shape their understanding of the space. They chose the site because it gave the team a cluster of physical details to investigate.

For playwright Selvoy-Devan’s group, an art studio offered immediate imaginative possibilities. The studio’s density of tools, relics, art materials, traces of past art-making, and the feeling of a room already filled with creative activity. The site gave the team a world.  “We chose the art studio as our site because it immediately inspired us to brainstorm ideas,” she said.

Truman and his team chose the front porch site because it included an honesty box, a self-serve public payment container, which immediately inspired the ensemble to consider potential relationships that could exist between the two characters. They also loved how the porch was a clearly public area and full of objects suggesting other qualities of Hopewell Hub.

Across all six teams, the ensembles were using the site as a collaborator, asking what each specific location made possible before pondering any story ideas.

Hanlon later described how consuming that question became: “The thing they don’t tell you up front about the devised nature of the beast is the constant focus of the here part. You get almost obsessed with it. Wondering, ‘Does this make sense in this grassy field next to this trailer home overlooking this field?’ You don’t want to be able to just pick up this project and slide it anywhere.”

That distinctiveness was the essential demand of the site-selection process. The chosen place had to matter so much that the finished piece could not simply be moved to any other location.

The contrasting primary themes chosen for the show shaped both the process and the final audience experience. The production as a whole was fragmented by design. Each ensemble had its own site, collaborators, rehearsal process, story, and artistic problems to solve. But the artists were also building one connected event. The six pieces shared a location, a thematic frame, and, eventually, a kazoo band that would guide audiences through the overall work.

“I did not decide how to connect the pieces until I knew which artists were working in which spaces, and had a basic sense of the kinds of stories they were beginning to build,” Guerin said. “The teenage kazoo band became the perfect missing link because it brought youthful energy, musicality, and playfulness into the full experience.

“We had more older artists than younger artists, and I could see that the overall show risked feeling imbalanced. The kazoo band helped correct that. One of the six pieces was a musical, another bordered on becoming a spoken-word dance piece, and the other four were more traditional theatre pieces. I needed the sound of the full event to feel intentionally varied, not accidental.

“There was also an unevenness in playfulness,” she added. “A few of the pieces were taking themselves very seriously, which had the potential to weigh down a project that was meant to feel more like meaningful street theatre than a piece trying to win the next Pulitzer. A kazoo band playing musical theatre numbers brought in the lightness we needed.

“It also connected the plays to the live music audiences heard when they arrived and moved through the booths of food, wine, and art. And because the kazoo players told stories about the Hub as they led audiences from site to site, they connected the audience to Hopewell Hub itself. Together, those choices gave us the frame for the audience’s entire experience.”

Holding Back the Story

According to the playwrights, one of the hardest early steps was not writing too soon.

Bolchunos described the challenge. In a traditional new-play process, the script tends to come first and the theatrical elements follow. In Fragments, “the setting itself came first,” and that shifted the playwright’s role. Guerin had advised them that rather than generating a script at the outset, playwrights should serve “more like a documentarian,” he said. The playwrights were encouraged to “write down and stay open as long as possible to what surfaces as inspiration from the site itself in the form of actor improvisations, director impulses, and general thematic parameters of the project.”

That advice was difficult for more than one playwright.

Jones was especially blunt about it. “My mind didn’t work in that manner,” he wrote. “I don’t start thinking about a story until it’s time for me to write it. My laptop is shut until it’s time to work on a script. So, if we’re four months away, why are we here?”

His group was told not to worry yet about story but to collect data. Jones was not a fan of that approach. “NWTW wanted us to wait,” he wrote. “Under the structure of the Fragments project, it wanted me to stall my creative mojo. I didn’t like that.”

Still, even his team used the waiting period. They spent time at the site, talked about “fragments as a concept,” watched actors play games, and eventually set their own internal draft deadlines so the process would feel usable.

The rule against rushing story was not absolute. In fact, some of the best discoveries came when artists challenged it.

Truman’s front porch team had been told by their director, Logan, “not to discuss story or character, let alone text,” but then they found the honesty box on their site. Logan looked at Truman and said, “I know we’re not supposed to do this yet. But what if we named the play ‘Honesty Box’ ...?” Truman answered, “I like it. ‘Honesty Box.’ Now that’s a play I want to see.” From that moment, he added, “the title of the play was there, as well as the major motif, the value of honesty.”

How the Ensembles Did the Work

Honesty Box

Honesty Box took place on the front porch. Logan, the director,  was a University of Portland professor, and actors Guevara and Baird were former students.

“I was the outsider of the group,” Truman said. “I had no relationship with the university, and only a burgeoning relationship with the rest of my ensemble.”

After the team chose the front porch, they spent a good length of time “examining every nook and cranny of the space,” he added. “I took furious notes.” He listed items on the porch: “Plants. Books. Chairs. Pots. Signs. Rocks. Fountains. Paintings. Drawings.” He noticed that the porch was long and shallow, near a major road, but still separate. Potential conflicts began to emerge: “Urban versus rustic, inside versus outside.”

The first key breakthrough was the honesty box itself. From that object came the title and their primary motif. Truman initially wanted to contrast the motif of honesty with an exploration of manipulation and gaslighting, and how the contrasts might reveal the larger themes of fragmentation and connectivity in the context of the actors and the space.

But Logan disagreed. “I think the play should be about love,” she said.

“In this situation,” Truman said, “the right thing to do was bend with the ensemble.”

The group then worked through improvisation. Truman proposed composition exercises, but Logan preferred another method. “We practice living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” The team generated situations together, then Logan and Truman gave the actors prompts. The loose concept became two people on their way to a wedding whose car breaks down at Hopewell Hub. The actors tried versions of the scene with different secrets, irritations, and accidents.

Truman recorded voice memos of the improvisations, and later used them to write. “Many of the best lines in the play came from the improvs,” he wrote. “I helped with structure and flow, and I was behind some important problem-solving … but it was the group, and in particular the actors, who crafted the play.”

The performance at the work-in-progress run gave the team confidence. Truman wrote that the feedback centered on “small moments and specific concepts” rather than the basic strength of the play. But later, Logan warned him not to take the feedback too seriously. “I don’t think you need to worry about most of this. The play is good.”

In retrospect, Truman said he thought the truth was more complicated. He wished he had advocated harder for a few edits. His lesson was not that feedback should be obeyed blindly, nor ignored, but that the team needed to consider the feedback more thoughtfully and define its own middle ground.

Pond

Pond began with the site of a tiny koi pond. Hanlon, the playwright, knew both actors, Matthew Ostrowski and Edward Lyons Jr., but not the director, Jeffrey Puukka.

The ensemble began with loose ideas and later sat around Hanlon’s dining room table “and threw ideas back and forth after a few weeks of working with Ed and Matt on their feet.” She described the development process as “not linear but cyclical,” shaped by “each suggestion, mishap, and moment of improvisation.”

The early story possibilities included soldiers, ghosts, lovers, brothers, murder, mayhem, and questions of what would draw two people to that specific pond on that specific day. The final piece became a story of two brothers, sibling rivalry, familial love, inherited trauma, and unresolved conflict.

Hanlon reflected that the team learned “not to have any sacred cows.” Humor and mischief, often from improvisation, helped deepen the characters and relieve the tragic pressure.

The work-in-progress run pushed the script deeper. Hanlon recalled feedback such as, “Is that character dying?” and “I don’t get the gold part.” Such observations prompted rewrites for clarification.

As opening approached, the revisions became smaller: “a word here, a refinement here, a pause here.” Hanlon admitted the actors had to stop her from changing things just because she had not changed anything recently. Her core truth of devised work: “The process started with a blank sheet, and ended with a devised play with four names on it.”

Garden Stranger

Garden Stranger took place in the garden beside a daisy-colored home, with playwright Bolchunos, director Scott Stroot, and actors Rosalind Fell and Thomas Nabhan. Beside the tiny house, in the permaculture garden, the rusty, bomb-shaped fuel tank became impossible to ignore.

Bolchunos describes his anxiety as a playwright accustomed to “staying in his lane.” In devised work, the lanes overlapped. That was both the point and the problem. He wrote that “deliberately circumventing the usual role definitions and moving collectively into one lane felt like I was disobeying rules of the road, swerving into traffic.”

The team began by asking what they knew about the site and how it could embody fragmentation and connectivity. They learned about the house’s origins, its repurposed materials, and each other’s interests in building, dancing, gardening, mystery, and communication. Bolchunos tapped the fuel tank to hear its sound, which became an early seed for the drumming in the script. Birds nesting in the tank fed a concept of habitat, entropy, and home.

The team developed what he called a “scaffolding” script from those early conversations. Then the director took a pass at reshaping it. Bolchunos found himself unexpectedly stung. He worried about losing a conflict involving a private journal and feared that fragmented dialogue might become too unclear.

He later recognized that some of his initial reaction stemmed from ego and interrogated himself about it. “How much of my reaction to the revision was sound, objective analysis, and how much was simply me resisting change to my contributions?”

The group talked through it. That open communication became one of the reasons the process worked. The work-in-progress run showed the team they needed to clarify one character’s background as a dancer. But, by the end, Bolchunos felt the actor connections, and each member of the ensemble’s commitment to each other, had carried the piece beyond fear to a place where they all could feel pride about what they had created.

“Instead of being a bomb,” he wrote, “Garden Stranger became a firework. A flower of light bursting into bloom.”

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-Ce Que C’est

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-Ce Que C’est began with detailed site exploration by the ensemble. The yome, where the play would take place, felt like “a cocoon.” The team noticed the bed, rocket stove, wardrobe, prayer bowl, slate floors, canvas walls, and wasps within the space. Rehearsals happened in her living room, online, and outside under a gazebo that resembled “a yurt skeleton.”

They began with actors improvising to discover character, history, relationship, situation, and why the characters were in the yome. A toy hedgehog was tossed to whoever was speaking. As characters developed, the group added intimacy permissions and safe words. Campbell began a draft after the team landed on characters of an influencer, her husband, and an unexpected pregnancy.

But the process became difficult. Campbell struggled with trusting her collaborators and with the way some choices softened the script. “For me, the script began to feel diluted,” she wrote. “It lost its crackle, its spark. The script became safe. I am not fond of ‘safe.’ I like things a bit on the dark and unexpected side.”

Then, for various, uncompromisable reasons, the yome ensemble fractured. After the work-in-progress run, the director and two actors left. Campbell was offered the chance to write a script alone. She was tempted. Instead, she chose to devise again. She wanted “to see if different partners produced a different experience.” In other words, she said, “I was curious.”

The second ensemble for the yome site used a new director and two new actors. Rehearsals happened online, in her living room, and at the yome. Because of their late start, they had only six rehearsals before final dress; they squeezed in two more just before opening.

The new process moved quickly and darkly. As the actors worked with her drafts, Dr. Hostis, one of the two characters in the piece, became shadier, and Angus, her patient, “became more tortured.” The team implemented a fight call when the characters wrestled on the bed. A safe word was set for rehearsal, and the safe word became part of the script.

Campbell’s retrospective is one of the clearest statements of the role trust played in Fragments: “Devising, for me, is about trust.” She concluded, “I learned that the piece we created was more dimensional than what I could have generated on my own in such a short time span.”

Watersports

Watersports took place alongside a mushroom wall. The team’s process began when they explored the site and learned snippets about Hopewell Hub’s history, including the the origin of its buildings, rare bottle caps found under stairs, bikers who came through Hopewell, and the surrounding property.

The day also became personal. The team participants learned about each other’s families, siblings, lifestyles, and memories. “We became a part of the research,” Jones wrote.

An improv called “And Then” helped them find material.

“One actor starts the story. Next actor jumps in with, ‘And Then ...’” Soon the actors were doing “And Then’s” about the space and themselves. Jones wrote, “This rehearsal helped us find our fragments.”

The group then lost its director and an actor for reasons outside the project. Jones stayed. The team changed shape with a replaced director and actor and kept working.

They decided to create a story about a Fourth of July party, a brother and sister’s fractured relationship, and a path toward connection through “a jar of rare dimes and shuffleboard.” 

Jones folded Hopewell history and team stories into the script: dimes, bottle caps, bikers, a family collecting nickels, a bad haircut, and a fractured family relationship.

“I just took everything we spoke about, and we created Watersports,” he wrote.

His retrospective was unsentimental. “Our process was long and grueling,” he stated. “I was happy to complete the task.”

When The Artist Is Away…

When The Artist Is Away… took place in an art studio and the process began with excitement about collaboration that quickly turned into a lesson about its risks.

At the meet and greet, Selvoy-Devan watched ideas build on each other and felt “mesmerized by collaboration at work.” The group received a packet about devised work from Guerin, which every other group had read carefully, but her group was relunctant. “Our group’s first red flag was that while I read the pamphlet out loud,” Selvoy-Devan recounted, “they laughed.” The group saw itself as an exception: the most experienced, the most familiar with one another, and the only musical.

Selvoy-Devan latched onto “yes and,” a concept described in the orientation packet as a way to be a good collaborator during the brainstorming and improvisation phase. Then she decided that was a mistake.

A director’s dream redirected the show toward cats, birds, roosters, animals running around a table, and spectacle. Selvoy-Devan had doubts. “This is where I should’ve spoken up,” she remarked. “As the playwright, it’s my job to make sure gimmick and spectacle don’t come at the price of the overall story. As an ensemble, it is our job to make sure that the play stays site-specific.”

But she did not speak up. At the work-in-progress run, the feedback was harsh. Her summary of it: “Base line: it sucked. It dragged on too long, it didn’t make sense. The musical numbers felt out of place, and it just felt a little pointless.”

She rewrote the script on the first night of a cruise. “Headphones blaring to drown out the sound of gleeful shouts and drunken stumbles down the hallway, typing away on my computer.” She worked hard to preserve the group’s spectacle, characters, ideas and style, but to impose a stronger dramatic structure so the piece made sense.

Guerin warned her: “Usually, when you change a dramatic structure, the actors and director aren’t able to see what of theirs is still in the script because the new structure changes their experience.”  But Guerin also felt it had to be done. She told the young playwright, “I doubt they’ll react well. But it is your job to step up and give the group’s ideas cohesion, whether they realize that’s what you’ve done or not. That’s your job. And for the sake of your ensemble's work and the entire show, you need to do it.”

Although her ensemble wasn’t happy with the rewrite at first, the reaction of their peers at the dress rehearsal helped them get there. At that point, Selvoy-Devan realized: “While the spectacle may be cool and funny, it becomes detrimental when not backed up by a cohesive, motivated script.”

She also learned that not standing up for oneself is not good collaboration. “Breaking the rules of the project is not collaboration,” she wrote. “Trusting that others know better is not good collaboration. The foundation of good collaboration is established rules that everyone agrees to stick to. And it’s a lot more complicated than just ‘yes and.’”

The Work-In-Progress Run

The work-in-progress run happened in late June at Hopewell Hub. All six teams gathered to perform for one another to get peer feedback while the pieces were still in development.

Hanlon called it “a collective run-through of all of its components in the middle of devising the six plays.” Bolchunos explained that the purpose was to give and receive feedback to help the pieces reach further realization.

The progress run also brought the whole production into view. Participants saw each other’s work for the first time. They tested storytelling, audience placement, site logistics, projection, tone, and relationship clarity. They also discovered how difficult feedback can be when the work is not yet finished.

Director Jeremy Cole, who was working with his ensemble at the mushroom wall site for what would become Watersports, said that the work-in-progress run showed “the humor seemed to play very well.”

But Ethan Sloan, an actor working with Cole, said it also revealed that “people were confused about our characters’ relationship for the first several minutes.” Sloan also noted, “It’s really hard to know how people will experience a devised, site-specific piece.”

Director Michelle Seaton, who was working with her ensemble in the artist studio, noted issues with the staging, while others realized not all the actors could be seen throughout the run of the piece. Hal Logan, an actor and musical director for When the Artist Is Away..., said he felt the work-in-progress run may have come too early for useful outside feedback. But he added that he appreciated seeing how the six pieces coexisted in the space.

The ensemble working at the site with the pond learned that its story structure was solid, but needed tightening. Audience placement also had to be addressed because not everyone could see a focal point of action.

Bolchunos said his team received useful notes about what needed clarification, and he felt gratified that the audience understood a character’s simmering desire to leave her home life colliding against the difficulty of leaving a cherished garden. Rosalind Fell, an actress and dancer on the Garden Stranger team, said she valued hearing “people’s perspective of our play, and what stood out and what was unclear.” Stroot, the director, concluded, “Our intent seemed clear to people, and they seemed to find it compelling.”

Campbell appreciated the work-in-progress experience for making her step back from the work. “Feedback helps me reorient myself with the play and to view it from an audience perspective,” she noted. Working in the tight quarters of the yome heightened questions about public and private life, boundaries, vulnerability, silence, and what remains unspoken.

Truman, playwright for the ensemble working with the front porch, said the touch of magic they were trying to capture in their piece “felt natural and delightful.” The progress run clarified what was working and what was not, he said, and offered an outside perspective “we wouldn’t have had otherwise.” On the other hand, Logan, the ensemble’s director, questioned whether the run came too early and whether the feedback was even-handed enough in experience and discipline.

For Guerin, work-in-progress runs are difficult because they reveal how each ensemble handles the discomfort of being seen before the work is finished. “Watching an intelligent and talented ensemble get defensive towards feedback is heartbreaking,” she confesses.

“Work-in-progress runs reveal which ensembles are ready to keep working and which ones are going to protect the piece from the very feedback that could help it,” Guerin said. “Feedback is always true and accurate as a list of symptoms. It tells you what is being experienced from an outside point-of-view. But it’s not conclusive. Someone may say, ‘The love interest does not work as a character.’ That does not necessarily mean the love interest is the actual problem. It means something in the piece is causing the love interest to come across that way.

“That is the question a confident ensemble asks: ‘What is happening in the piece that is creating that response?’ Stories are holistic, so the symptom may show up in one place while the actual problem lives somewhere else.

“The ensembles that use feedback confidently and well don’t treat it as a verdict, but they don’t find a reason to dismiss it either. They take the symptom seriously and investigate what might be causing it,” she added. “The ensembles without the confidence to do that usually stall out. They explain, defend, or argue with the feedback instead of asking what the feedback reveals about the work.

“With that said, unsolicited suggestions are rarely the useful feedback, because the person offering the suggestion doesn’t know enough about the artists’ intention, process, or larger design to offer a suggested solution for a problem they can’t even see. It’s the artist’s job to do that.

“That’s true of devised work, plays, musicals–you name it. The creators confident enough to consider feedback grow, the ones who aren’t, don’t.”

The work-in-progress run also helped the everyone experience the whole of the show. Truman said all the pieces felt “of” Hopewell Hub. Stroot, the director of Garden Stranger, said he was excited by “the festival vibe.” Bolchunos described the rotation this way: “There’s a rambunctious texture in this assortment. Roaming from show to show plunges us into some compelling conflicts and beautiful surprises.”

Dress Rehearsal, Final Revisions, and Performance

After the work-in-progress run, the teams revised, rehearsed, and adjusted toward final dress and opening.

The final stages were different for each group. Hanlon’s team at the pond made increasingly tiny cuts and refinements. Campbell ended up with a new director and actors and had only six rehearsals before final dress, then two more before opening.

Selvoy-Devan’s team arrived at dress rehearsal with a substantially rewritten script. She was supported by other playwrights. They had helped the young playwright develop a deeper understanding of the work-in-progress notes she received, and how to navigate a challenging playwright-director relationship. They backed her decision to rewrite the piece when she faced opposition from members of her ensemble.

Truman withdrew into the background and saw his ensemble’s piece as an outsider and felt pride “mostly for what we had created together.” He added, “It was a piece of art that could only have been made by this specific group of people.”

The show itself sold out.  “We had people angry that I couldn’t ‘get them in’ or didn’t plan a longer run,” Guerin said. “But it’s a show we performed an hour and half drive from our audience base. I was shocked at how many people were willing to come that far to see our work.”

Audiences called Fragments “a blast,” and a “very impressive production.”

One audience member, a writer working on a manuscript about splintering in art, culture, and human experience, wrote that the production of Fragments sparked interest because “structurally, as well as thematically, it is an example of fragmentation that indeed bears the name.”

What the Playwrights Learned

After the show closed, the individual playwrights gave candid retrospectives of artists under pressure.

Truman learned a playwright in devised work is not simply the person who writes the words. He was “one of four cooks in a kitchen,” adding “text, structure, and story into an already-boiling stew.” He found the process addictive, but also learned that he needed to advocate more clearly when his own judgment contradicted his collaborators.

Hanlon learned the value of uncertainty and group authorship. Pond began as a blank sheet and became a play “with four names on it.” Her process depended on letting ideas fail, mutate, and return with deeper meaning.

Bolchunos learned to welcome more role overlap, among other lessons. His advice to other playwrights embarking on devised work is to “allow yourselves to take chances. Experiment. Communicate openly about trepidations you may have.” For him, the devised process worked when artists could speak honestly about fear, ego, uncertainty, and ownership.

Campbell learned trust is essential. “Devising, for me, is about trust,” she said. When the process with her original ensemble broke down, she didn’t abandon the project. She rebuilt it with collaborators she trusted and found the result more artistically fulfilling than what she might have made alone.

Jones learned that collaboration needs structure. His retrospective argues for deadlines and follow-through. He valued his team’s listening and creativity, but rejected a process that felt too loose for too long.

Selvoy-Devan learned the danger of mistaking passivity for collaboration. “Not standing up for yourself is not good collaboration,” she wrote. Her experience exposed a hard truth of the improvisation process within devised work: saying yes to everything can destroy the story as surely as saying no to everything.

In Conclusion

The process for Fragments was not clean or efficient for everyone. It exposed weak communication, uneven feedback, and the difficulty of making art collaboratively. But it also produced discoveries that a solitary writing process could not have produced.

Fragments was a demonstration of successful and meaningful collaboration. Six ensembles began with place. They explored the same thematic conflict in porches, ponds, gardens, studios, yomes, and alongside mushroom walls, as well as in improvised lines, missed chances, rewritten drafts, strange objects, difficult-to-hear feedback, and the final act of inviting an audience to walk from one piece to the next.

Fragments was made by letting the site speak first, then asking each ensemble to work in collaboration with it until they understood what they had heard.