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Found Theater: Brewerytown Residents Act, Direct in New Theater Piece: “Nothing to See Here”


“It’s, well, it’s, um… the basic framework is… how do I describe this show?”

This is how Sean Lally, member of Found Theater Company, typically begins describing the company’s next show, “Nothing to See Here”. Found was, well, founded by Lally and Brewerytown-based actor Alison Hoban in 2009. When they begin talking about “Nothing to See Here”, it’s usually accompanied by a far off look, shoulders straightening and slumping, and hands gesturing in the empty air, as if their respective bodies are attempting to help find the words to describe the show. The labored response isn’t one of somebody with a lack of things to say, but more the approach of somebody who doesn’t know where to begin. “I actually practiced [describing the show] today,” Lally laughs.

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Lally is credited as “lead artist” for “Nothing to See Here” and joins Adrienne Hertler, Steph Iozzia, and Brewerytown-based Joe Palinsky as directors. As lead artist, Lally is in charge of developing the show’s concept and organizing the process in which the show is written. He describes the new show as Found’s first foray into political theater. Lally distills “political” into four themes: forgiveness, debt, complicity, and resistance.

“We started with the question, ‘how do we or I make the world a better place?’ And we are deconstructing this question through those themes.” Lally said.

The show itself is split into four vignettes loosely framed as surreal trail scenes, each one grappling with one of the four themes. “My goal, at least, is to distill the chaos of the world as opposed to telling one narrative,” Lally said. “I like coming up against the impossibility of understanding something.”

Found formed in 2009 when a handful of Temple theater students began working under a graduate director and Fulbright scholar named Felipe Vergara. Vergara was assigned a project in which he would have to direct a piece based upon myth and, in what seemed to plant the seed of the group’s future methodology, asked them to thematically respond the question: is God dead? A handful of undergraduate students signed up, including members of Found Theater Company like Hoban and Phoebe Schaub (still an active member and assistant director of “Nothing to See Here”). The show they put together with Vergara, “Something With Wings”, inspired the group to produce the show outside of an academic environment, so they entered it into the Fringe Festival. After one more year of directing, Vergara moved back to Colombia, but the group decided to stick together and keep producing work together.

Hoban said, “It’s funny, when people ask me what the process is for writing the shows, I kind of say, ‘well, we don’t write the shows, actually,’ we create the movements, the atmospheres, the scenes, how it looks, how it sounds first. Then from there we develop a script.”

Vergara influenced the rigorously conceptual methodology used to create each piece from the ground up. The process first involves choosing a theme or themes members of the company research and talk about. Besides hard data, the ‘research’ can take the form of essays, poetry, and images relating to the themes. Where “Nothing to See Here” focuses on the themes of forgiveness, complacency, resistance, and debt, in past productions, those themes have included outer space (“The Twilight Kingdom”) and the end of the world (“Event End”). For “Nothing to See Here”, one of the bits of research mentioned was a poem called, “And I Fall Asleep Just Like That” by Xu Lizhi, an employee of the Taiwanese company FoxConn who, among many others working at the company, committed suicide due to the poor working conditions while producing iPhones for Apple Inc. Joe Wozniak, a performing artist in “Nothing to See Here” and another Brewerytown resident, said, “You form a vocabulary of actions. You find the action in those words.”

Next, the directors create assignments for the other artists to help them engage with the themes, usually in the form of short performances. For “Nothing to See Here”, Lally assigned most artists four individual assignments per week over the course of 14 weeks, each artist fulfilling around 56 assignments each. Pulling from those assignments, artists then take part in slightly more challenging and communal exercises, such as improv. Once original music is created, the directors and artists begin cobbling these experiences together to form a final production.

Wozniak said, “It’s a very unique group of people. The things we create together, it’s a combination of selves.  The pieces are very much shaped by each person.  We color it differently. Somehow, we find this oil spill in a puddle.”

You can catch Nothing to See Here at JUNK in The Boy Scout Room (2040 Christian Street), April 20th-May 1st, Thursday through Sunday at 8PM. Tickets are $10.

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