Quinn Riggs (they/thm) is a fourth-year directing transfer student whose work focuses primarily on gender, sexuality, identity, and the human experience. They previously studied acting and costume design at Oklahoma City University before transferring during the pandemic to TTS. A dream production to direct is Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 as well as Seussical. They would like to thank themself for being an icon as well as anyone that said hi when they first got to school this year.
Liv Garcia [LG]: I would love it if you could just start by describing what your Lab looks like right now?
Quinn Riggs [QR]: Right now we’re meeting in a classroom, because we're not allowed in TTS, at least not for a few weeks. And we sit and we talk about queerness and also not queerness, and also just ourselves and what's going on in our heads.
I prompt them, sometimes, with things that have been on my mind, or I ask them questions, so that's what it looks like so far is us talking. And that's what it's going to look like for a little bit, which I’m really excited about because I love table work and I love communicating and building up the individual ideas of everybody in the group rather than me regurgitating all my months of hoarded thoughts. And then asking what feels appropriate for who's in the room because now I have a free space to kind of do that! Like, “Okay, zero structure’s the goal now.”
LG: And what's the role you view yourself in for this process?
QR: I don't know! I mean, they call me the director? How I see it is I’m the person that brought the people into the room and you know, right now, because this happens to be a part of a bigger project, I'm documenting the whole process.
LG: Oh, how are you documenting it?
QR: Through photos and iPhone videos and Maday sometimes brings her camera in. After the process, I will be interviewing all the people in the company about it. Right now what we're doing is we're trying to document what it's like for us to do this thing with a lack of structure, because that's pretty much what the project is about. To kind of see what happens when we just kind of use our brains and let that be the driving force, just pure curiosity.
LG: Can you talk more about that intentional lack of structure and why you started at that place?
QR: Yeah! Mostly I just felt nauseous at the thought of being a director again [laughs].
LG: No, yeah that’s fair, that’s fair.
QR: Like, I have a real, visceral reaction to just the thought of trying to pick a script for people to do. Or even, in this case, it was originally going to be like, “Oh, I give you scenes, and then we're going to like gender swap and do fun casting!” And that's still what we're doing, it’s just the way that we're doing is we come in and we see what happens with whatever material gets brought in, and then we go around the room and we play with the idea of impact.
What is powerful in this performance? What makes us think about gender in a new way from this body performing this piece? We’re shaping the show around those exercises and those discussions, that's kind of where we're going with it, and then the show itself will be filmed.
LG: I do want to hear more about the seed of this idea, like where it came from.
QR: It's come from a lot of different ideas. The origin point in my memory was a show I saw at OCU, a little black box show called Clowns, Lovers, and Women in Pants. Essentially, it was these seven or eight actors who were chosen from their understanding of Shakespeare and their ability to play. It was very much like, “Oh we choose a company of people that vibe well together and just bring good thoughts and interesting ideas about Shakespeare into the space,”
Then they created a piece to teach about Shakespeare through watching the scenes and then breaking character in the middle of them and, like, talking to the audience and being like, “So, what Shakespeare is trying to say here is really confusing and he doesn't do a great job also it's sexist And we don't like that!” You know, do stuff like that.
It was really cool and honestly, as somebody that did not care about Shakespeare and still really doesn’t, it’s still one of my favorite shows that I’ve ever seen and it made me enjoy learning. And that is where this started from! I was like, we need something like this on other things besides Shakespeare. There are better things to explain besides Shakespeare. And so this idea kind of got birthed throughout the past year.
And then, I got the whole documentary aspect of it from the film In and of Itself, if you know that.
LG: No!
QR: It’s cute! We watched it in Reza’s or Azar’s class, or both, I can't remember. Essentially, it's like a filmed performance of a theatre piece, but also a one-man-show type of thing. He does magic tricks, talks with the audience, brings volunteers up, there's a lot of stuff to it. It’s on Hulu you should watch it.
LG: I would love to watch it, that sounds really cool.
QR: So, that's kind of where I got the idea of making it more than just a series of scenes exploring gender-swapping casting, which is still really great and gonna be part of it. It will just be kind of confined and it won't be the entire point of just like, “Look, we can play different genders!” So yeah, those are the two pieces that have gotten me to where I am now.
LG: Has there been anything so far that's been surprising to you?
QR: Um, I mean honestly DePaul has been surprising. Just because we’re having to deal with the physical relationship with TTS that is much different than doing it over Zoom. So, I think that's been the most surprising, which seems trivial, but has been an issue.
LG: I also think like, gender is an embodied experience and it would suck to not be able to reflect that embodied experience by being in space with each other.
QR: Yes, yes, exactly.
LG: Like, gender is only constructed when we perceive each other.
QR: Day one was honestly really fun and I could also tell that it was like, and maybe I'm speaking for them, but I could see that at some points, it was maybe intimidating for some of the people in the room. We did this exercise that I did in my makeup lab my freshman year. We had to look at everybody and write down a certain number of words and essentially perceive them, And it was all under the guise of like, “Oh none of this matters, but how interesting that that's what you thought, what made you think that?”
I thought it was really interesting, and so we did that. I was like “I don't care what you wrote down, that’s for yourself but just think on that. What are the perceptions you're making about people? Were you even honest about your perceptions?” The thing that's also been the underlying driving force is this idea of perception and the perception of identity as a whole and stamping an image on someone so quickly with that information.
And how communication and conversation honestly can solve a lot of those misconceptions about people. Not being afraid of it. So yeah that's kind of what we’re talking about is like “Hey! We’re all perceiving each other, even if you don't want to be!” It’s funny, but also we're all perceiving each other, it's a fact of life, and we'd like to joke about it and pretend it’s a casual thing but it's affecting bigger things.
LG: There's this theorist that talks about the idea of “doing gender,” [Ed note: the term comes from a 1987 article by Candace West and Don Zimmerman]. But the idea is that, like, gender is something that an individual does, but then we are also as observers engaged in “gendering,” and that's something that we should all own.
QR: Yes, yes! We watched a TED talk on day one. It was something I got from Reza, I don't know if you know Jo Michael Rezes? They're a really cool theater student academic person that does gender theory and performance. They open the talk in a half-fem, half-masc costume and then literally start out with a performance of a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. And they’re like “That was really awkward and I didn't do well at that because to define it so acutely and to find those two things and try to maintain any kind of balance in myself is hard.”
Something they talk about is “gender rehearsativity,” the idea of being in rehearsal versus performance. The difference between them, what does your gender rehearsal look like? Because that's different than performance and it's really important to establish that you can perform your gender, but you also rehearse your gender, so what are you doing in your rehearsals? Which is like [mimics explosion noise].
LG: Yeah, wow.
QR: Like how are we rehearsing? I'm trying to tie this all back into the idea of process because we're in rehearsal right now and I’m like “Let's rehearse gender together!” Let’s think about it and actively discuss it, and figure out what's going on. It's really fun because, like half of them are like, “I don't even know what I am anymore!” I feel like it's all releasing into the room and then it just kind of evaporates. So it's been nice to kind of watch people start saying stuff that they haven’t talked about before.
LG: That's such a trippy thing.
QR: It is!
LG: And there's like such a level of consciousness that you as the facilitator of that have to be aware of.
QR: That’s the thing! Essentially, what happened was I was nervous about facilitating the space because I’m a mess. And now I’m like, okay let's talk!
Honestly, the way to approach it is I’m just here to pose questions as y'all need. I’m just hosting the space, I’m giving y’all an excuse to talk. I don’t know, I’m asking them to just trust me to make art with whatever they talk about. So that's kind of what I’m trying to do. Thankfully, it’s like four people just talking and chatting at this point, and all of them are sophomore people that we were all in classes with last year. It's cute and like we all kind of know each other but nobody's besties really.
LG: So, I just have one more question for you.
QR: Okay, yes.
LG: In an ideal world (or not an ideal world, because there's no such thing as ideal), what are your hopes and dreams for what an audience would walk away from your show having experienced?
QR: I hope everyone walks away feeling… um, excited and curious, mostly.
I think there are other things that come with those emotions! Mostly, I want people to be curious about themselves and about the people around them. I think that's the most important thing.
And also, I don't know, to… to keep thinking.
Definitely, the intent is to spark thought and to possibly do the whole little, like, incremental change thing. Somebody, you know, somebody learns something and doesn't blatantly offend somebody at work, stuff like that. Because I know there's people even at TTS, plenty of people at TTS, that are still struggling to figure out how to be good people and be respectful and not make it about themselves. I would love to use this as an opportunity to speak some thoughts to the DePaul community as well because I think this is my only opportunity, or one of my only opportunities, to do that in this space.
