How one theater group maintains its friendship, even while living countries apart

According to the four friends of the 热表兄 theater group, everyone has a hot cousin.

The name was born out of gossip, 斯蒂芬妮·富勒, 严肃派的一员, all female troupe living in the United Kingdom, 说. 

“If you don’t know who the hot cousin is, 那就是你了,” Assistant Professor of Instruction in the 戏剧学院 Ally Poole explained with a laugh. 

The group presented a virtual workshop to OHIO students on creating hybrid and devised theater work as part of the 美术学院’ 访问ing Artists and Scholars program. They also shared their newest show, “热表兄 Mystery Party. “

“When I pitched the potential to bring us here, something that I heard a lot from my students was that they want to know how to make their own work,普尔说。 “It's messy and complicated. But also, these are three of my closest friends. 所以，你只要让它工作. And I think what was important was to show that we are a collective of emerging artists who are still figuring it out.”

Elana Binysh，美国.K.基于小组成员, and Fuller both have worked with students before, too: Fuller has been a teacher in secondary school for 13 years, and Binysh has led workshops for young actors.

“这真的很令人兴奋, 因为通常, the type of theater that's taught in schools is not the type of theater that we're talking about,宾什说. “[Our] ways of working … [and what we] bring are genuinely brand new to some people.” 

“热表兄 Mystery Party” is inspired by Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” a detective novel published in 1926. 

“She's just [a] really interesting literary figure,宾什说. “同时, [she’s a] cult part of the canon, but also kind of trashed and not taken very seriously. And we are trashy and don’t take ourselves very seriously.”

The group’s creativity also comes from their own backgrounds and interests, as they are an intersectional company. This show explores themes of true crime, lies and gossip.

”,因此, how we can take our interest in gossip and rumors, and distill those to our own lives as well,普尔说。. “And that's part of a lot of our work too, is how we can inject ourselves in the world that we inhabit into our performances.” 

The group describes itself as “four gal pals who make shows together and look good doing it,” and draws inspiration from gossip, 流行文化与历史. But, because of the pandemic, the friends haven’t been together in-person since February 2020.

“Once we understood that this was going to be how it was going to be for a while, 我们就像, “好吧, there's actually a lot of really interesting creative potential here for doing something that is kind of a new art form, 在很多方面,’”宾什说. “We take everything we love from theater – liveness and intimacy and all of those things, and then think about technology and cinematography and internet culture.”

Poole 说 the group met in the same master’s degree course at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and decided to form 热表兄 in 2018.

“We developed a show and did it in London, all live, and then the pandemic happened,宾什说. “It changed everything about the way that we worked. [We] went from seeing each other pretty much every day … to being really far apart from each other.”

Though Binysh and Fuller both live in the U.K., about 40 minutes apart from each other, Poole is in 雅典 and Madeleine Lewis, 另一个成员, 住在澳大利亚. 

Making work at a slower pace than they were used to created a learning curve, 富勒表示, and because members span across three different time zones, meeting with each other can get tricky. Rehearsals and meetings can take place as early as 6 a.m. 对一些人来说，或9点.m. 为他人. It’s an intimate experience to become the first or last person you talk to on any given day, Binysh说. 

“We have to work with very different energies,” 富勒表示. “When it is our shift to do a 9 p.m. 在美国的[会议.K., I mean, I'm dead, I've got no personality.”

Despite constantly adapting to the changing world around them, 热表兄 still manages to make time for friendship.

“Yes, it's slower, but it also means that we have been able to keep going,宾什说. “People can check in and out as much as they need to, and the others will absorb the work. Because we’re all friends and we care about each other, it just means the whole thing just keeps chugging along.”