Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Es Devlin: Stage Design - full transcript

[Es] Over the last two decades of working,
one of the things I've discovered
is often things are made to fill voids.
[light switch echoes]
[Es] The impetus to fill that hole
with art, to me, is fundamental.
[other-worldly music playing]
[Es] My canvas tends to be
devoid of light.
You sort of do need to start
without light to find it.
[other-worldly music continues]
[director] Here's my first question,
and I've been curious about this.
Do you pronounce your name
"Ezz" or "Ess"?
I pronounce my name "Ezz,"
because my name is short for Esmeralda.
Often it's perceived
as being a man's name,
so I do get reviews in Germany, which say,
"Herr Devlin's incredibly masculine work
would have benefited from reading
the feminine aspects of the text."
So, it's a useful,
neutral little name, actually, Es.
I find it quite handy.
It's serving me quite well as a name.
Every project starts exactly like this.
Blank piece of paper, blank table,
there's usually one other person there.
Could be a director, or a playwright,
or the artist, if it's for a pop show.
And a conversation happens,
and I'd normally just start drawing
while we're talking.
So, if I were to be having a conversation
about my own practice,
it would start with this one,
with a little drawing
of a pair of scissors on it.
'Cause you used to get those,
and you still do,
on the back of a cornflakes packet,
and it's an invitation to take
the piece of the cornflakes packet
and cut it and make an intervention in it
and change it
and turn it into something else.
Like that, that will do.
And then you hold it up to the light
and you go,
"Oh, there's light
just coming through that bit that I cut!"
So I like that one.
I often get asked by people,
"How did you start doing what you do?"
I often get asked by young,
like, 17-year-old people,
who don't know what to do.
And I always feel very empathetic
towards those 17-year-old people
who say, "I don't know what to do."
I was no different to that,
I didn't know what to do at all.
But then I did a course in theater design
and I found myself in this room full
of people making model stuff.
I thought, "This is good,
these people are feral,
and they stay up all night making models,
I feel quite at home here."
So, I did that.
I just made stuff for a year in this thing
and then at the end of it,
I won this prize.
One of the first major shows
I was asked to do
was the Harold Pinter play, Betrayal.
Big piece at the National Theatre
in London, so I threw everything at it.
And it says it's set in a bedroom,
a living room, a hotel room in Venice,
and what I did is I overlaid
the ground plans of every scene
with projections.
And at that time, it was quite unusual
to use projection and film in theater.
There wasn't really
an infrastructure for it to work.
And the point about that particular play
is it really doesn't need any of that.
It does not need it.
It's a very happy play in a white box
with a few white curtain changes
and furniture, it's happy that way.
But that was me, I was doing my thing
and Harold Pinter was very sweet about it.
'Cause he was quite excited
to see all this gadgetry,
and, as a joke, he, on the first night,
introduced me to Antonia Fraser,
his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser,
and said, "This is Es,
she wrote the play."
So that was sweet.
[futuristic music playing]
The beginnings of my practice
were making small theater.
You know, literally, there's an audience
of 78 at the Bush Theatre,
which was where I first started working.
[Bradwell] The Bush Theatre
is about the size of a matchbox.
What it was, was close-up magic.
We created worlds
in a very, very tiny space.
How do you build a revolve
in a theater that seats 80 people?
How do you do projections,
television screens?
People were spending
a lot of money doing that.
We were spending
about four quid doing it out of junk
and Es was working out how to do it,
every single step of the way.
She'd paint the set,
she'd make the stuff, she'd weld.
[Es] I began to find what I wanted
to say quite quickly
and quite quickly,
people who didn't like the kinds of things
I was doing stopped asking.
My practice has been following
my own paths of inquiry.
And in order to practice,
I have found willing collaborators
who I've been able to align my paths
of inquiry with.
From pop stars like Beyoncé,
through to Wagner operas.
The interesting thing about the process...
I've learned that I don't actually
make anything or know what to make,
until I know what the space is
that it's going to inhabit.
'Cause as soon as you have a frame,
of course the first thing you want to do
is start breaking out the edge of it.
The Faith Healer is a series of monologues
through rain, through sludge,
through bleakness.
The interstitial gaps
between each monologue
needed to evoke that itinerant bleakness.
The rain fulfilled that need,
but also fulfilled a more practical need:
we are in a theater
that does not have wings,
does not have a fly tower.
How do we change the scenery?
We are using our rain box
like a curtain, practically.
From the actors' point of view,
they enjoy the way that they are
revealed and concealed
at the beginning and the end
of each of their monologues.
This is a theater which has a brick wall
right behind what you see there,
and the audience who come to this space
know that brick wall intimately,
they're used to being confronted
with shallow space.
So to give them depth
and an element that is real.
You can feel the audience feeling
the emotional response that anybody has
towards lit rain in a small, dark room.
And I'm satisfied.
By the way,
I have no idea how the rain system works.
It just shows
that you can design nice things
without having a clue
how they fucking work.
Es is somebody who absolutely
amazes me every time we work.
I come back excited from meetings,
because she's always coming up
with information I would've never known
or discovered by any other means.
A new stimulus every time,
many in a meeting.
[Es] Normally, throughout the process
there will be a number of meetings.
There might be five or there might be 25.
And it might take a year
or three years or three months.
I will have my team make models.
I will draw the kind of models
I think it's going to be,
and then when I come back,
we've got a whole bunch of options.
Sometimes they're interesting.
Sometimes they're less interesting.
We have another meeting,
we say, "We think it could be this,
it could be that..."
So you need to turn up with everything.
[upbeat music playing]
[Es] This is actually probably
the most recent, and it's a rejected idea.
He was drawn in Paris
in Karl Lagerfeld's studio,
while Kanye West and Kim Kardashian
were being photographed on a bed.
And I sat at the end of the bed
drawing ideas that Kanye was having
and one of them was a man
made out of LED,
and this posture is the result
of many, many sketches.
Because at first, he looked too strong,
then he didn't look
sufficiently vulnerable.
so we got to a sketch that he loved
on that day
and we made this model.
And then we took it to Los Angeles
and it was hated instantly,
so it came home in shame.
And it's hanging its head in shame
with a little parrot-headed man on it
to cheer it up.
[laughs]
-[Es] You have that...
-Mm-hmm.
-[Es] I want a little doorway.
-Just flat?
-Blank.
-Flush.
-A flush door.
-Mm-hmm.
[Es] And it can open.
I was invited to make a piece
for the Belgian Triennale Exhibition.
It's an exhibition about
the relationship between music and art.
A visual embodiment of music.
And that's why I was invited to take part,
because of the work I've done in music.
You know what you could do?
You could put the gauze there
and then have just a torn out area.
So, I think that's quite elegant,
if you just stretch it.
Yeah, I think that
would look really smart.
I immediately wanted to make
a cube that would revolve,
that would have different apertures
on different sides,
projecting images of some
of the shows I've made over 20 years.
I'll tell you
what my mind's going through:
is whether it's interesting
to see the mess inside,
or whether you want to keep it mysterious,
you know. That's the--
That's the point.
-Ta-da!
-Okay.
[laughs] I love that, I'm going to come
around here more often. It's done!
There's an element
of anxiety about it all.
There's an element of terror,
because Kanye is not going to be there,
Beyoncé is not going to be there.
I've got to make something
that is worth watching on its own,
which I haven't really made before,
so we'll see.
It might or might not be worth watching.
[doorbell rings]
-[intercom] Hello?
-[Es] Hello!
[door buzzes]
[Tim] I would never have been seen dead
at a pop concert,
and I'd never would have gone to one
but for Es.
Well, he can speak for himself.
I would've been to lots.
But I think it's the spectacle.
[Tim] All those lights that come up,
people taking pictures
and the deafening noise and everything,
I've actually quite taken to it.
This was a lovely Christmas present
Es gave us last year,
and it's offcuts from a big set she did
in Dresden, and it's Der Freischütz.
Another nice thing is we get to see
a lot of the stuff she does,
so we're camp followers.
We are roadies, really. We go around.
And it's wonderful, because all sorts
of places we'd never would've been.
[Angela] By the way, my husband,
you may not know this...
Es's dad is a great crocheter.
-[Tim] That's my speciality--
-[Angela] He makes tea cozies--
-[Tim] I also made the table.
-[Angela] He made this table.
-My husband made this table.
-This is out of scaffolding planks.
Yep. Old scaffolding boards.
I mean, 90% of the stuff in this house
is from junk shops
and we just painted them or made them.
[Tim] Yeah.
[Angela] So I think Es has done
exactly the same thing,
but we never really thought she'd go
into anything connected with art.
Music was her thing.
[Es] My way of escaping or adventuring
away from the countryside
was through music.
'Cause I would go up to London
on the train, age 11, on my own,
and I had music lessons in London
at the Royal Academy,
and then when I finished my music lessons,
I would then have
the rest of the day in London,
rocking about with my travel card.
[violin music playing]
[Es] So music kind of was an entry point
into another tribe.
And I have always enjoyed, since then,
being amongst the tribe of musicians.
I thought that bands, you see,
'cause I had been going out
with a record producer,
and we went to see lots of shows,
and I always thought they were
visually desperately boring.
Probably because I went to the wrong ones.
I didn't go to the fascinating ones.
But they looked like this.
People playing guitars here, guitars here,
you might have had keyboards here,
and then you sometimes had
a curtain or the band's name up here,
or, if you were really lucky,
you might have had some projection.
But that was pretty much
everything I saw in bands.
And I didn't like this shape,
'cause I thought it was
a humpbacked band shape.
I was used to looking at opera
and theater,
and I thought that was a mess.
And I didn't like these lights up here
that just did "ri-ra-ra-ra" lighty things.
I didn't like it.
So, the first time I did a rock show,
I said, "Why don't we put
them all in their own little box?"
You can go in here, Mr. Drummer.
You can go in here, Mr. Guitarist.
The singer can go in here...
[rock music playing]
[Es] I put a gauze on the front,
like this, which is a kind of netting,
and I put a mirror all over the sides.
A very cheap, crap mirror
'cause I didn't have much money.
And my idea was to sort of deconstruct
the anatomy of this four-piece band.
So you just saw the vocalist's mouth,
the drummer's nose,
the guitarist's eye
and the bass player's ear.
But, in my excitement,
I neglected to remember
that this was their farewell gig
and they would need to take a bow
and step out and be seen
by their adoring fans.
[applause]
So, I just stapled this front gauze on
and also, once they're in,
I stapled the rear projection screen on,
so they actually couldn't get out.
People tell me I should
watch a film called Spinal Tap,
but I've never seen it
and I don't intend to
at this point in my life,
because everyone says
my life is too similar to it.
So I'm never watching that film. Sorry.
And this is what Kanye saw
when he was in the middle
of sacking his set designer,
and my friend heard him
sacking his set designer
and said,
"Look at this. She's just done this."
And Kanye said, "Oh goody, goody!
I'll have one of those."
So that's how it all started.
[heavy bass playing]
[Es] What can this artifice
bring on that's true?
What are you going to make
the audience feel?
How can something pretend,
initiate, or generate anything true?
I have been given the opportunity to spend
sometimes millions of an artist's money
on, effectively, a sculpture
that they have commissioned,
like Take That's giant man.
The question of "Why?" endures throughout.
Why did we want that slice of light
through the middle of Beyoncé's cube?
Why did we want that circle of light
around the Pet Shop Boys?
Why did we want that block of light
in the middle of the arena for U2's tour?
In fact the U2 show,
the whole conversation we had
was a journey from a square to a circle.
From the home, to the world,
and that stage ended up actually being
a journey from a square stage
to a circular stage.
What I tend to be most interested in
is the psychology of a space.
A lot of my work now
is about finding environments for music.
And there's a lot more freedom,
I would say,
because many lyrics are already poetry.
So I guess I'm designing for poetry
to happen in, more often than prose.
I really quite methodically go,
"Okay, let's listen to the lyrics,
let's write down the lyrics
that we respond to,
let's try and find a poetry,
let's try and find a story."
And each time an actor or a singer
sings or says a word...
♪ Blossom's fallin' from a tree ♪
that's another question:
what should be around them
while they're saying this?
What would support or counterpoint
what they're doing?
So, it's really complex,
there are a lot of parts to it.
[futuristic music playing]
In spaces where I make things,
I can find light and scratch out light
and shape things to allow light in.
Like the U2 show.
We found magic tricks
that work best to control light.
For example, a mirror.
The first time I used a piece of mirror
would've been Macbeth,
where we sliced a box in half with mirror
and we were able to see
one half of this table,
with and without the ghost of Banquo
as it revolved.
And it behaved as his psychological space,
as a metaphor for the tricks
that were being played on him.
And then recently I used a mirror
on a piece called The Nether,
which was about a world created digitally.
So I somehow needed to make the audience
not trust their environment.
So what was interesting is people
who came out of that play
described having seen a glass box,
but actually, there was no box.
There was nothing there,
it was just objects placed in space
with a mirror set quite far behind them,
so the audience's depth perception
was really messed about with
so they thought they were reading a box
and they were just reading objects
in relation to an invisible box.
And I use mirror a lot in the fashion
shows I've been doing with Louis Vuitton.
This is a new discovery
of a transparent, two-way mirror
that is mirror whenever
there is not light behind it.
So, if you put a piece of LED screen
behind a piece of two-way mirror,
then if you conjure a face
against black behind mirror,
then the mirror will reflect the room
everywhere except where the face is,
so you effectively see a suspended face
amidst a huge double sized room.
I'm making more immersive pieces
that an audience can wander around
and find themselves in.
Just recently, I was invited
to create anything I wanted
for this Chanel project.
As long as it was about scent,
it could be anything.
I came up with a mirrored maze,
and it seemed to me that
that was a good analog
for the frontal brain making
50,000 decisions a minute.
And then suddenly allow them
into a room where the floor falls away
and they plummet.
Then you'd be creating
a sculptural physical analog
for how it feels to be
plummeted back in time to a memory,
in the way that you do when you
suddenly smell your mother's perfume.
[piano music playing]
[Es] I used to come to this church
and the extraordinary thing
about this church
is it's a very small, little parish.
And yet, there are
11 stained glass windows here,
which were designed by Marc Chagall.
Which is an extraordinary thing, I think.
[piano playing continues]
[Es] A local member of the parish council,
his daughter died in a sailing accident
tragically in 1963.
She was 21.
In memory of her,
he commissioned these windows.
When Chagall came here
and saw this window in situ,
he said, "Okay, I need to do
the whole church."
So over the next ten years, he created
the rest of the windows, one by one.
[piano playing continues]
There was a big Chagall exhibition
in the early '80s,
and it would've been around that time
I would've seen all of Chagall's work...
and also joined it together
with seeing these windows.
So this feels like
paint turned into light.
The intensity of that cobalt
and ultramarine and cyan,
all those different blues
that are going on together in that,
is something that I would've seen in paint
and then I would've come here
and realized what happens
when you pour light through it
and look at the refractions
that are coming off it on the wall there.
And the fact that this guy...
There's his name.
You know, he was here.
It reminds you that artists all have to
come from somewhere, however small.
[birdsong]
What strikes me about these windows is,
from the inside,
they are this glorious,
jewel-like emanating source
of colored light.
But look at them here, they're black.
It's waiting to be brought to life.
It's how I feel
at the beginning of a show,
before the lights come up
on a piece of scenery.
The turning of the lights out
at the start of a performance
is a really special thing, isn't it?
When you sit with a group of people
in the dark.
'Cause it's not something
we habitually do.
And I think that goes back
to earliest childhood,
the lights being turned out.
You know, if you think about sleepovers...
A group of children awake in the dark,
being an entry point into something.
And I think that sort of
does get rerehearsed.
There's 80,000 people
and the sun goes down.
That's the same as
what happened at Stonehenge,
before there were any Christians here,
but there were druids.
Something happens at that point
in the show, because there's a change.
They have all come to focus
their gaze on one person.
We don't need to say worship,
but all the energy of the room
is focused on that one little individual,
and that in itself is an extraordinary,
physiological event.
Eighty thousand humans are all looking
at one other little human.
[electricity crackles]
[crowd roaring]
[heavy bass plays]
[Es] I worked with Beyoncé
on the Formation tour,
and we came up with a thing that's not
terribly dissimilar to this in some ways.
It's a cuboid, but it does open
with this slit, this aperture of light.
When she was a child,
she spoke to a TV preacher
and the preacher said to her,
"Put your hand on the TV,"
and she felt the sensation of prayer.
I think it was the combination
in a child's mind of what a TV does
and what the language
and tone of prayer feels like.
And later she realized
this big revolving block of her
is another way of broadcasting
her and what she's saying.
If you look at most concerts before 2003,
most of the photos were done by
professional photographers near the front
and you'll see a big god-like image
of the pop star
and a load of lights behind.
And that's how the imagery was recorded
and that's how most people who didn't go
would perceive the show.
So cut to cameras on phones...
Suddenly that event is being recorded
from every angle
and therefore my work
is suddenly being seen from every angle
and being understood in a different way.
So it's a big shift.
The artists I'm working with are bombarded
with images of themselves and their show.
They know their show
like they never knew it.
They're aware that how many people
will perceive this show
will be via those media,
so, to a degree, we're designing
to a square at the moment.
That will probably change. Instagram
might suddenly become a triangle.
The more I practice
and the more I begin to be
more self-reflective in the practice,
which is happening now, really,
then I begin to ask: why do I need
to engage with these people?
What relevance is this work to me?
Why do I need to...
What can I bring to it?
It's interesting, isn't it,
because the word "show" suggests
that you're revealing something.
It doesn't suggest finding.
What would be nice...
And because I do what I do every day,
I have to make sure the showing of things
is in itself the seeking for things.
-Make it a little bit more punchy.
-OK.
[Es] Yay! Oh yes!
What would you have to show
if you hadn't been looking
and finding and seeking?
This is going on a truck tomorrow night,
going to Belgium.
So I looked at some footage of babies
playing with those sorting boxes,
where you pick up a triangle,
you pick up a circle, you pick up a square
and you try to slot it through
different apertures in the box.
It's actually
extraordinary footage to watch,
because what's happening in their brain
is every time they discover something new,
they're getting a little dopamine rush,
which is why we're biologically selected
to be in love with new things.
This baby literally,
either when it does go through
or when it doesn't go through,
either of those instances
is a new sensation,
and it gets a little reward.
That baby is the equivalent of me here
or in a stadium with Beyoncé,
whatever it is.
It's literally what's going on
in that little baby's brain,
loving that.
That's what this box is about, really.
I have been trying
to fit different projects
through different apertures
in my own little practice.
It's a little retrospective.
This is Rye, in East Sussex.
We moved here when I was six,
and we lived here till I was 13.
And it happens to have in its town center,
a model of this town.
The model tells stories,
which I was very captivated by.
A ghost story, or a fable,
or the story of a butcher
who killed a mayor.
My house is just there,
and the roof is actually a pair of roofs.
And I used to climb out
and sit in the little V out on that roof
and look out over the town.
I started to associate storytelling
with models.
The systems and influences
of one's childhood are inescapable.
There's something about this
that I'm absolutely drawn to,
and my mind mentally enters
all of its streets.
But there is another part of me that does
sort of wonder what would happen
if you just picked them up
and smashed them apart.
You know, what if you put in
something really subversive
or poured some paint over it?
My work is as much a reaction against this
as it is continuing to perpetuate
the influence of this.
You can perceive the systems of a city
and the history of a city,
when you look down on it.
The roads that were built
on top of the other roads,
the periods of time...
So how I often use model cities
is I don't put them on the floor,
I put them on the wall.
Which puts the audience on the ceiling,
which I find fun,
and people do feel something
when they look down.
We feel something here, I think,
and if you can bring this feeling
into a black box theater, that's exciting.
I play with scale.
Scale is one of my ingredients, I guess,
just literally practically in my studio.
I have people of all different heights.
And one of the things
that I enjoy in my practice
is to position a human, huge or tiny,
in relation to the same object.
Recently, on the Adele show,
her makeup artist
became our scenic painter
because we knew that her eye
would be this big
and that bit of mascara
would interact with her hand here.
When I look over this particular city,
I play a little time-lapse
of my own journeys through it,
my own arrival on that train
when I was a kid,
the number of times I walked up and down
Tottenham Court Road,
when I worked in a bookshop there...
Perceiving the system,
finding the systems,
finding the patterns I guess, isn't it?
It's much easier to find a pattern
if you're looking down on something.
This is another pair of artists
that I collaborate with.
Kanye and Jay Z, for Watch the Throne.
Once we said, "Okay, 'Throne.'
What does 'Throne'
actually mean in this context?"
And really it's about,
once you've found yourself
in the exalted position,
then the next thing
is the anxiety about losing that position.
So they're at once
in positions of almighty power,
because they're 15 foot up.
But they're also vulnerable,
because they're standing up there
and they could easily be shot or fall off.
And they're alone, they kind of look
very lost and alone up there,
so it's a combination of power
and vulnerability again, I guess.
That tension between power and fallibility
is very fascinating territory.
I'm not scared.
Just in case you're wondering.
[laughs]
I'm not scared.
[Warner] Es, without any doubt
in my mind,
is the most driven human being
I have ever met in my life.
You know, in fact, you know,
she is so driven,
I think her imagination
needs its own chauffeur.
But it's not ambition in a normal sense;
it's really about
exploring the imagination.
[chime music playing]
And there is quality in Beethoven
and Wagner and Shakespeare and Pinter,
which perhaps there isn't in other fields.
And I've got a feeling
that deeply inside Es,
the quality has got to win through.
This was made for Don Giovanni,
which is called the graveyard of designers
'cause it's a notoriously hard piece
to design for precisely that reason
that it's very specific about people
getting stuck in corridors in the dark,
so if you don't provide the necessary
doors for all of that to go off,
it actually doesn't work.
So, we made a revolving box.
It's a kind of maze.
All of these doors could slide.
All of this could be completely closed
or any bit of it could slide or open,
so it was like
an ever-changing architecture.
It was projected on, on all sides,
with a mapping system.
When you make kinetic pieces of scenery,
it's very exciting to an audience.
She always came up with things
that made me think about things anew.
And she talked about
the democracy of the theater.
If you've got 20 people on stage,
you cannot control
where the audience looks.
The theater demands that democracy,
where you're making sure everybody
from the top of the house,
to the bottom of the house
is getting an experience.
[Es] The rook in Wagner's Parsifal.
What happens throughout the piece
is it turns
and you see it from every angle.
The reason we chose the rook was because
it's a symbol that everybody recognizes.
It's not necessary
for the audience to know every detail.
It's actually more helpful
to create an object
that, for everybody, has meaning.
For example, how you feel in a tunnel.
I think there are just
these absolutely basic, atavistic,
primal responses we all have
to being in a dark, curved tunnel space.
So I do think, on everybody,
there's an emotional response to that.
But the things that I create
are not the things.
They are the time
that the people at the show spend
in the company of the things.
So it's time that you're making, really.
Time perceived by an audience.
[pulsating sounds playing]
The objects themselves
are not what you think they are.
What I am trying to say is
if you were to keep the things I make
and put them in an art gallery,
they wouldn't be behaving
as they were designed to behave.
They can only do that in time.
Reflecting the light and projections
in different ways,
with different people inside them,
saying different words
with different sound effects.
With Hamlet, we made
a very specific timeline.
We read the pages of the script,
and we literally make a chart,
second by second, page by page.
What is happening? Who is saying what?
As I start to shade things in,
what I'm always thinking about
is how the audience will feel.
How long will they experience this for
and then what will happen next?
Everything else is sort of serving that.
[Bradwell] The design you see
is the tip of the iceberg.
But the amount of work you do
to provide that tip of the iceberg
is what's important.
It will hold you up.
When I was a child, what I'm doing
right now was my idea of utter heaven.
This was pretty much what I wanted to do.
But yeah, obviously now,
the things I make are a little bit more
contemporary than a Pollock's toy theater.
But, you know, look,
you're already doing surrealism.
I'm just doing that, look,
or I'm doing this.
With Hamlet, we made a very specific copy
of an Edwardian stately home,
and it had to be that specific
and that real and naturalistic,
so that we could then violate it
with an influx of black poisonous earth.
So sometimes, as in the rules
of a surreal painting,
surrealism works because there's reality.
[Es] Here, Lulu, try this one. Look.
If you push it in here...
-Then push it from there. There you go.
-But this is supposed to be the curtain.
-[Es] That is the curtain.
-[Ludo] He died.
You put it in here, Milly.
-[Ry] Where?
-[Es] Here.
[Ry] Oh.
[Es] There is a parallel
with some of the artists that I work with
who feel that once you've toured the world
and have played in front of 80,000 people,
you then say, "Well, what do I
actually want to make for me?"
I ask why this needs to happen.
[Ry] Wait, don't pull the curtain up yet.
-[Ludo] Ooh.
-And...
-Go!
-[Ludo hums]
[Es] I do it for love.
I thought
that if I made a beautiful object,
it was the most important use of my time.
[playful music playing]
[Es] Theater makers are aware of the
ephemerality of what they're making.
Nothing's going to last.
You know when you set out to make it
that it's going to be gone.
Sometimes in a week,
sometimes in four days,
sometimes in four years.
In the end, everything is only
going to exist in the memories of people.
You had to be there on that night,
to see that performance from
Benedict Cumberbatch, or from Beyoncé.
Or Kanye West is only going to say it
on that day.
[playful music continues]
[Es] So that will only exist
in people's memories.
[playful music continues]
[music playing]