(lively rhythmic music) (upbeat music) - Join the Albany Symphony on the Erie Canal, chat with Will Kempe's Players, and catch a performance from TV Doctors.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA."

(lively music) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robeson Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(lively music) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is "AHA," a House for Arts, a place for all things creative.

The Albany Symphony, in partnership with the New York State Canal Corporation, is in the middle of a festival called "Water Music NY: More Voices."

As part of WMHT's series "Reflections on the Erie Canal," producer Catherine Rafferty gives us a glimpse at an event from the 2024 Water Music Festival.

- We're really trying to shine a light on these amazing historic and cultural artifacts, but also on the immediacy and the beauty of the canal and all this water that runs through our lands and places.

- It was a late, stark, and rainy night, A solitary figure hunches over a desk.

A composer, surrounded by silence, grappling with an unusual theme for a new composition.

- The Eerie Canal.

- "Water Music NY" is one of the things that we at the Albany Symphony are most excited about.

Back in 2017, we had had a number of conversations with the New York State Canal Corporation, because I happened to know that the beginning of the bicentennial of the Erie Canal was going to be on July 4th, 2017.

That was when the first shovelful was dug in Rome, New York, in 1817, and so we developed this incredible project to float the orchestra, essentially, down the canal from Albany to Buffalo over a week, around the July 4th holiday, celebrating the bicentennial, the kickoff of the bicentennial, and so we began conversations a couple of years ago with the Canal Corporation and the Power Authority, and they very much wanted us to come back and do a sort of similar thing, but we and they very much wanted to make it a little bit different.

We call it, now, "Water Music NY: More Voices," the idea being that there are so many stakeholders, and historical figures, and populations whose voices and whose stories really haven't been heard, or haven't been told, so we're really focusing particularly on the stories and the voices of women, immigrants, people of color, of indigenous Americans, who obviously occupied this land long before the canal was built, and the voice of the environment, of nature.

We're doing these five little really fascinating popup events, one of which is right here in Schoharie Crossing Park.

(serene music) - This is a very beautiful and unusual place.

It's where you can see all three versions of the canal, but it's called The Crossing Because of that beautiful aqueduct behind me that was built in 1841.

I can't think of a more peaceful setting to be able to sit here, and to reflect, and to imagine what it was like when the canal was going at full bore, both in 1825, but later, in the 1860s and the 1870s, when literally hundreds of boats were going across the aqueduct, and to have it set to music is just a beautiful thing, so I'm really looking forward to enjoying the evening.

(serene music) ♪ I speak with grace to you ♪ ♪ My Water ♪ ♪ Flowing from mountains high ♪ ♪ To valleys low ♪ ♪ Carrying my spirit's flow ♪ - My name is Clarice Assad, and I'm a composer and performer, originally from Brazil.

Today, we are premiering a piece that I wrote called "Earth and Water," and the idea for this piece came from a conversation I had with Kay Olan, and she is a member of the Mohawk nation.

She told me something so beautiful.

She said that the oldest spirit that they believe in and they care for is Mother Earth, right?

And she also said that water was Mother Earth's blood.

So this piece is a composition that, it's a conversation between earth and water, earth being worried about everything that's happening to them, right, manmade structures, things like that, and there are introductions where I am the composer, so you literally see like, where I stopped my train of thought, and there's narration.

It's like, from here on, you continue, and I have an idea, and so it's like as if I was writing the piece in real time.

(serene music) - Right then, the composer paused, taking a long breath and letting the air flow into the lungs, carrying oxygen to every cell.

Silently, thanks were given to all plants, the phytoplankton, the atmosphere.

- And, of course, the earth itself.

- This is a very important program, and with the support that we're having from local communities, right, they're coming together to make this happen.

I think this is fantastic.

We are building a strong community for people to have their pieces heard, for the audience to listen to new works that they haven't listened, so I think it's just, it's a very important thing.

We need that more in the world.

♪ Whose dreams ♪ ♪ The humans who inhabit this place, ♪ ♪ Why the worry ♪ ♪ Other canals have been built millennia ago ♪ ♪ What sets this one apart ♪ - These popups are a little different from what we normally do in that they're, you know, fairly small ensembles, quartet, quintet, four or five musicians, plus singers, plus speaker, et cetera, but it's the same exercise as bringing the whole orchestra, it's a little more manageable (chuckles) with a smaller group, but it's all about celebrating and connecting to our communities, and all the communities around us, and who feed this incredible culture that is the capital region in New York State, so we feel this is like the most important and the most exciting and original work we do, (audience applauding and cheering) (gentle rhythmic music) - Will Kempe's Players is a regional theater co-op from Troy that produces a wide range of theatrical performance, utilizing the methods used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Here's Jade with more.

- Welcome, Sandy and Jack.

- Nice to be here.

- Hello.

- Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about all things Shakespeare and Will Kempe Players.

So to introduce the audience a little bit, what is Will Kempe's players like, how would you describe this to folks who are unfamiliar?

- Will Kempe's players is a cooperative, a group of people that came together to attempt to stage Shakespeare the way Shakespeare would have staged Shakespeare, at least, the way we think Shakespeare would've staged Shakespeare, and to present that faster, more lively, more interactive style of production to the people of the Capital District, especially to the people who don't often have Shakespeare presented to them easily, where you have to drive 30 miles, or 50 miles, or 100 miles.

No, in your park, in your bar, in your backyard, in your school.

- Nice, and would you say it's like a theater group, or how would you classify it?

- Well, it's a collaborative theater company.

We're a repertory company - Okay, nice.

- In other words, most of the time, when we perform, we have two or more shows ready to perform at any given day.

You can say, "Oh, we scheduled "Caesar's", but we really don't want "Caesar."

Could you do another "Alchemist"?

And we'd say, "Sure."

- Mm-hmm.

- I love that.

So I know it's important to your mission, you have a very worker-owned, consensus-based mission.

Why is it important to have worker-centered and have it be very collaborative and cooperative based?

- Let me go from the beginning, because I was the founding, one of the founders of the company.

We founded what we are doing on what Shakespeare's company did and how they worked.

Every one of the actors was a part-owner of the company, unless they were a day player, and then they'd be hired by the day and were paid at the end of the day, you didn't have any guarantee of work, but the sharers shared the profits.

So we decided to try the collaborative structure that Shakespeare used as a business practice, and then the more I worked with it, that it was a collaboration, because everything about the production process was also collaborative.

So it's kind of an organic adaptation.

Jack, you're a newer member of the company, so why don't you talk about it from, I'm sort of the beginning, and he's the middle of the end, I guess.

- Oh, well (all laugh) maybe not the middle of the end, but what it does for us is it allows every single member of the company to have some say, right, which allows us to make more creative decisions; rather than having just the director having their say, it becomes all of us bringing bits and pieces to the table.

For example, I am our dramaturg, so I do a lot of work doing research on particular plays, and then I get to bring that forward as I play, like Mark Antony, for instance, looking at where he's been, his time in Greece, and how that might influence his character.

And then other members of our company get to have a bit more of a say in how the costumes work, because again, it's actor-owned, it's actor-focused, so the actors get to kind of create the world that they're going to be performing in and playing in.

- Now, I know from you guys and other folks that having this be actor-focused is kind of rare.

Why, like, go against the grain of what's traditional?

Why have it so actor-focused, when that's kind of a rarity in these types of organizations?

- This could be in the weeds a bit.

(Jade laughs) - Let's dive on in.

- So get out your sides, 'cause here we go, it's weeds time.

The playing companies, as I said before, were collaborative, but we don't do that anymore.

- Mm.

- So the plays were written for a collaborative situation.

- Hmm.

- So does that change how we look at them if we look at it from a playwright top-down, or a director top-down, or a producer top-down, and the answer is absolutely yes.

We were talking about an Elizabethan play, Jack and I were talking about this on the way over.

- Mm-hmm.

- If a script was written, let's say "Hamlet," "Hamlet," the parts were handed out, people learned their parts all by themselves, and they came together for, are you ready?

20 to 40 hours of group rehearsal, 20 to 40 hours of group rehearsal.

That's maybe 5 to 10 rehearsals in a modern idea, and they'd have an audience.

- And that was mostly crowd scenes that they would be rehearsing, right?

- Or things that would need cooperation, like, well, fight scenes, - Yeah.

- or things that had music in them, or dances.

So maybe you ran the play twice before you opened it, maybe you ran "Hamlet" twice before you opened it.

Now, if it was a failure, you'd never see the play again, it was done.

If it was a success, then they'd invest some time and some money into making it more and more important, and if it was really important, it would stay in the repertory for a number of years.

Now, say it's "Othello" on Broadway, that version of "Othello" was workshopped, and workshopped, and workshopped in rehearsal, after rehearsal, after rehearsal, with audiences after audiences.

All the money for production was put in ahead of time.

It was all spent before they'd earned a cent.

It probably was workshopped out of town, maybe Off-Broadway, and then brought to Broadway, so that the difference is astronomical, because the Renaissance production grows organically.

Do you see how the actor-centered, actor-focused thing works there?

- Yeah.

- Here it's top-down, because we spend all the money up front.

And you freeze the production.

It doesn't grow, it doesn't change.

After the last dress rehearsal (hands clapping), it's supposed to stay exactly the same.

A renaissance production is supposed to grow, and change, and morph, and be responsive to the changing forces in a company.

When people would leave, or get sick, or whatever.

you had to put somebody else on.

The play itself had to be malleable enough that the show must go on, - Yes.

- no matter what.

- Interesting, I love that concept.

So why is it important to interact with audiences and bring them into the play?

And how do you guys do that?

- We talked earlier about kind of dusting off the classroom, right, and there's a lot of respect for how we approach Shakespeare in the classroom, right?

But, you know, there's only so much that you can get from reading it, and the way that you get people to understand what's going on is through that sonic kind of exchange between the audience and ourselves as these kind of co-conspirators and these co-creators of the space.

- What does it look like being in your play, like, being in a Will Kempe's, like, play or performance?

Like, are you guys going around and, like, interacting with folks, being silly?

I know you mentioned you may have, like, a stool up on the stage and invite people up, so like- - Yes, so we try to do, a lot of our plays will start with an audience entrance.

For "Julius Caesar" this summer, we have these two plebeians coming into the space and chanting, "Caesar, Caesar, Caesar," getting the audience to start cheering with us, and cheering, and getting excited.

Then we have some of some of the patricians come in to silence them immediately, but it's all about reminding the audience that they're a part of the play too.

When we go to Caesar's funeral, they are mourning at Caesar's funeral.

When they are, when we're watching the play within a play in "Hamlet," they are part of the court just as much as anybody else.

- That's my type of play.

To me, I like that for performance.

It's like being able to bring the audience in as well, which probably makes it feel even more communal.

It kind of ties back to that model that you guys are, you know, artist centered, - Absolutely.

- audience centered, and it all kinda combines into one.

- Ideally, in the best of our performances, you cannot tell, in terms of commitment, the difference between the audience and the performers.

They mesh in a kind, I know, ooga booga, (Jack laughs) but they mesh in a kind of magic space where we're all doing this together.

One of my favorite things is in a good production of "Hamlet," once you get into that last sword fight, you have two superb swordsmen on the stage entertaining us with a terrific show duel, because it's not supposedly to the death.

It's two fabulous swordsmen, and if you're lucky, you forget - Yeah.

- for those seconds that one of the swords is tipped with poison, that Laertes hates Hamlet, that Hamlet's killed Laertes' father and Claudius has tried to engineer murder, - [Jade] Mm.

- but there's a moment at which we can all love the sword play.

- Yeah, like on the edge of your seat, you know?

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- All right, so last question for you guys is what shows you have coming up, and when does your season start, so folks can get involved and experience this?

- So we're doing Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist," which is not to be confused with the novel by Paulo Coelho, but it's our first real venture into doing Ben Jonson, which has been really exciting.

And then we're also performing "Julius Caesar" all over the Capital Region, - Awesome.

- so that'll be from July all the way into September.

- Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

I appreciate you, Jack and Sandy.

Can't wait to go to one of your shows myself.

And guests, keep staying creative.

- Please welcome TV Doctors.

(energetic instrumental music) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (chiming music) Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz, thanks for watching.

(rhythmic chiming music) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robeson Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.