The Brooklyn Rail

Sometimes a work in progress is exactly where it needs to be to enthall an audience member. That was the case when Theresa Buchheister sat down to watch Diana Ly’s Sex and the Abbey at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s 2023 Rough Draft Festival.

“I was very stressed out and busy, and I sat down, and then the piece was just so incredible,” Buchheister said. “Afterwards, I turned to Handan [Ozbilgin, Rough Draft Festival’s director], and I was like, ‘This has to continue. We have to figure out a way to support Diana and continue this project.’”

Sex and the Abbey went on to have a run at The Brick in August 2024, where Buchheister served as artistic director for five years. New works require time and gestation, but they are rarely granted breathing room without strings attached or expectations of completion. Yet, that step into the liminal, when a work is materializing, and still taking shape, is as important, if not moreso, than the finished work. Few though they are, new-work incubators offer artists what is often invisible to audiences: the freedom of discovery.

Ozbilgin, who was born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, had been working as a freelance director and teacher for several years when, a little into her tenure as a professor at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center twenty years ago, she was given two venues to use in Long Island City with two hundred and seven hundred seats, respectively. “It was a wonderful surprise discovery,” she said. “We started small, and then I started playing with the idea of different levels of residency. Okay, some people get twenty hours, next level, third level.”

Soon the residency grew and developed, as did its team (which now includes Buchheister), and by 2013 it was a month-long festival: Rough Draft.

“I was ready to say, ‘Okay, I know how we can do this kind of festival with trial and error, and that was the best shape, and with mission and philosophy behind it,” Ozbilgin said.

Through an annually rotating selection committee, Rough Draft chooses works, exclusively for development, that probe a question: What is the puzzle that this artist is trying to figure out? Buchheister added, “There's part of me that sort of, in a way, hates how theater does aim towards, like, fixing a thing and having it become repeatable in one particular form. It sort of starts to kill the liveness of it.”

Instead, Rough Draft embraces a theatrical work’s mutability and questions, offering its creators rehearsal space, technical staff, a stipend, and, need be, sounding boards to continue to evolve.

Ars Nova, birthplace of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, similarly offers artists space to show off works in process via the off-Broadway theater’s one-night programming, which has been offering one-off performances this winter and spring. “We provide a full tech team the day of the show and at every one-night-only show. We're always exploring new models,” Head of Programming Matthew Antoci said. Constantly on their mind is figuring out how Ars Nova and artists can bring out the best in one another. “How can this model that we've been using for now try to stay nimble like the artists?” Antoci asked.

Ars Nova’s Head of Artistic Development Teresa Sapien also said, “Artists also get a video archive of the show and photographs. The idea being, they're also leaving here with the resources to continue to promote themselves in a really robust way, which not all institutions are able to support.”

Archived work is often required for grants or as a way to present a proof of concept. Antoci reflected on their own experiences, saying, “Having been an artist that is presenting my own work, self-producing it, documentation is one of those things that you're like, ‘Oh my god, we have to do this’ and scraping the budget to get it.”

But such a crucial part of the artistic gestation period is simply having space and resources. The Center for Performance Research’s Executive Director Jaclyn Biskup noted how rare that baseline level of support is, without the pressure of presenting something complete.

“For our residents, we tell them, you can present work or you don't have to present work,” she said. “We have something we call an OPEN AiR, which is a work-in-progress showing, but we also have something called an OPEN LAB that is another opportunity for them, in which they can engage with audiences or participants to come and be a part of the process.” Artists can share their skills with one another, as interdisciplinary artist and dancer Ogemdi Ude did via movement workshops, and use space for their needs and, as Biskup put it, “generate data for their own projects.”

Biskup understands different resources are useful to different artists. “We're not trying to force anyone to create, to be on a timeline or a process that's not helpful to them. We're offering them use of these resources if they're useful to you,” she said.

Spaces like Rough Draft Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Ars Nova—plus, Mercury Store in Gowanus that lets directors and artists put rigorous and nascent works on their feet—are especially beneficial for theatermakers whose work bends genres and challenges conventional ideas of live theater. Each of the aforementioned institutions noticed that non-narrative, mythological, clownish, cross-genre, and hard-to-categorize works were showing up across their desks and in submissions. Works by stand-ups, musicians, choreographers, dramaturgs, and other kinds of performers display a desire to push the boundaries of form and evolve with the audience. Their growth cannot be realized via traditional readings, and so space and resources become the keys to unlock their next stage, whatever it is.

Sapien said, “For me, it's been just a real joy to get back to work and process. It's where I started, and I really enjoy being able to engage with artists wherever they're at.” That theater is, due to its liveness, always a work in progress has encouraged theatermakers, curators, and programmers to consider how their process impacts their own lives.

As Ozbilgin said, “You never stop learning, never stop revising, never stop discovering. I take chances. Rough Draft is exactly who I am.”