Speculation: Friends around a table, wine flowing, talking about impossible things like how the fuck we’re going to mount a puppet show in a living room. This is Niki’s vision we’re serving here. And when I say serving, I mean it in the most primal sense.
Everyone at this table, Nat included, is there to figure out how to translate what’s in Niki’s head into something an audience can actually experience. It’s a form of translation, really. She sees something, feels something, and now we’re here to make it real.
Nat’s there for the score, we’re talking about the emotional architecture of the whole thing. What does Niki want people to feel? How does sound support or undermine or elevate the movement of a puppet? These are not trivial questions. These are the questions that separate art from craft project.
The wine helps. Not because anyone’s trying to get drunk, but because wine around a coffee table does what it’s always done, it loosens the grip of self-consciousness. It lets people say the stupid idea that might actually be brilliant. It creates space for vulnerability, and vulnerability is where creation actually lives.
There’s something beautiful about the democracy of it. Everyone’s got a role, everyone’s got expertise, but in these meetings? We’re all just trying to solve the same puzzle. How do you make magic with wood and fabric and string? How do you make people believe in something they know isn’t real?
The photographs show exactly what they should: people leaning in, people focused, people engaged in the problem. This isn’t bureaucracy. This isn’t corporate horseshit. This is a group of artists trying to birth something that doesn’t exist yet. And yeah, that requires sitting around, drinking wine, and talking it through until someone says something that makes everyone else go, “Yes. That’s it.”
I don’t think people are going to talk in the future.
They’re going to communicate through
eye contact, body language, emojis, signs.
Kanye West