Roomier Than Theatre: A Conversation with Asher Hartman

By Tatou Dede

T: How did you end up here, being an artist today?

A: I think it depends on how you define the term artist. I was always in theatre since, maybe, kindergarten. When I was a child I used to produce and direct sort of nonsensical plays for my schools, wherever I was, in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. So every year I produced a very bizarre play that, for some reason, every school had me put on. And then I studied with the Berkeley Rep theater. After that I went to UCLA and did a theatre major and later I had some years doing fashion design, believe it or not, in Tokyo. Then I came back, and started a program in a theatre company in downtown LA. I did that for a lot of years, but at a certain point I understood that I wasn't a fan of American conservative theatre, which is very rooted in the kind of classical tale of the white American family, and/or middle class people and their problems. I just didn't relate to it, honestly, so I left theatre and started getting interested in performance art. By real luck I went to Santa Monica College, and there was this incredible program called Design, Art and Architecture and for about $100 a semester I was able to get an actual graduate program in visual arts. It was quite incredible. From there I went to CalArts. But I started really, I think, in performance. Performance allowed me in some way into live art that was much roomier, less based in narrative and definitely less based in storytelling, and in a particular type of storytelling, than theatre. So I think that's in essence how I came to it. And I always wanted to paint, and sort of doing that alongside. I would say that I wrote some books — what we call trade reference books — and that afforded me the tuition.

T: Do you think the act of creating is a journey or the process of building a structure?

A: I think it's a real journey. I like the unknown. I think the unknown is frightening for some unnecessarily, because the unknown is where your unconscious can kind of bubble up and tell you what is really true for you. I think that sort of planning a structure for me isn't useful, because I get very self-conscious about what I should say, what I should write, what's fair and equitable, what might be the best political solution, and I get very much in my head with the structure. And so, trying to meet a destination doesn't really work for me very well. I like the fear that the unknown opens up. And for me it's like: OK, there is a big place for spirit or the spiritual or the non-human to play. And in that case I get to be maybe an observer of what I write, versus a dictator or a controller of what I write — and that's much more useful for me in my practice.

T: How did you make the choice of staying out of the stage, of being a director? What was it for you that you wanted to be on the outside?

A: That's a great question. I don't know that I actually really know what that is. I think as an actor I did experience a lot of misunderstanding. I'm a small person, and for most of my life very feminine. And as a young, feminine, small person, people usually saw me as the gamine, or the ingenue, or the little weird person who would be the tagalong of the star. And that's not actually who I am, and I wasn't able to be cast in roles that were right for me. So I left theatre, I think, largely for that, and the other reasons I cited. Why I wanted to direct — I think largely because when I started writing I don't think anybody could understand what I was trying to say. Except me. So there was no way to translate what this language means, except if I did that. I do feel very attached to acting and I do feel very respectful of the actor and maybe admiring of the actor. Also I do feel I have a certain gift for seeing inside of people, what they can really do and who they really are to a certain extent, and trying to cultivate the actor is something that I enjoy. So maybe those two reasons. But I think for me as a performer, I transitioned maybe 17 years ago — maybe it's a little easier for me to get roles that I am more attuned to now.

T: Is it also because you feel more as an artist, as a creator, than as a "work of art"?

A: Ha! Yeah. Good way to put it. I do identify as an artist versus a theatre director, although I tend to do that. I think I want to be an artist and I want the license that being an artist gives you, because obviously if you're an artist anything can be of interest to you, anything can be a material. There's just a breadth of possibility. Yeah, I think I do want to be an artist. I do think of my works as artworks versus theater productions and I do expect audiences to come to them that way. And that can be a bit frustrating when people sit down in seats. I don't know what it is about a seat that makes people think they should have a narrative, and they should understand it and it should be beginning, middle, end, conclusion and moral. I think that for me is also quite annoying as a theatre maker, because obviously there is another kind of theater. Historically, experimental theater is well known to actors and dramatists and dramaturges, but for whatever reason it's a challenge for people still to sit through something that is non-narrative and maybe has a conceptual versus a linear narrative. But as an artwork people have no trouble looking at a red painting. They don't ask what is this red painting about, because there's this specific training to look at paintings. I think there should still be enough training to look at theater as very broad in its spectrum, very open to lots of different interventions and not just necessarily entertainment.

T: Is there too much structure around us, and is breaking it a resistance act for you?

A: Yes, 100%. Yes, the structure, at least from my perspective, is this sort of linear life timeline. I was born, I got educated, ideally I got a job, hopefully I found someone, maybe I bought a home (that's sort of deleted at this point), and then hopefully I died well and not too early. That's the structure. In my day it was: yes, I find someone, I get a home, I have some children, maybe I go on a cruise, and then I die. (Laughs) But this idea that we have this narrow life, that we have a singular purpose in life, that we have a singular identity, that we have a singular personality — to me is quite false. So those narrative structures, I think, they do get reified by this idea of storytelling. I really am suspicious of that idea that we are storytellers. I think that's true, but what is the story? The story is brush your teeth, the story is be good to your neighbors, the story is make all the money you can — what is the story? Because I think it's quite myopic. Anyone who had a real death experience — well, not anyone, I guess I should say: me. I've had near-death experiences, I remember dying, and I think that my life review was from a book or something. I couldn't distinguish my life review from this book I got in college. I got very confused about what is the story. Was that my life? I was about 23 and I was like, this is it? I can't remember the name of the book, but I said I've seen this before. I think it sort of troubled me. The near-death experience, on the way to death, it's quite big, it's quite seductive, it's beautiful. My experience — I can't speak for someone else — was quite magical. I understood from that that the journey was quite expansive. And when I read for people, which is my business, I'm able, as anyone can be, to see all the complexity. To see that the human being is not one person, not one psyche, not one history, not one genetic history. That we are really multiple. And when we storytell in the way that happens on Netflix, we shut down our life. And it's very easy to do that. It's very easy to get to the end of your life and realize you basically only watched television. And I think, with my first near-death experience, I recognized that. I had a very thin idea of what life was, and the dying journey taught me something different. So yeah, I think the structures are way too narrow, very upsetting — and I will add that our self-worth and our self-value are really predicated upon these stories that are nonsense. Like: how much money do you make, how successful you are, quote unquote, in the contemporary world, how many lovers do you have, what is your weight, what's your lifestyle. These are terrible questions. And very painful.

T: Devil's advocate: as artists, we still need an audience. We need people to show up and connect with the work. So what does success mean in relation to the audience?

A: First of all, it's independent to each artist — what you value in your work. Whether it's "my work is very popular," or "everybody understood my message." I'm not saying that it is a negative thing for everyone. For me, integrity to my particular thinking, feeling, and interfacing with art is really important. Because when I'm writing — all my work is based on writing — I write what comes up for me. And I don't know if it's my unconscious, or the spirit world, or both, but I'm often very driven by an energy that I don't understand to write. If I delete that, diminish that, try to adulterate that in some way, I think I'm doing a disservice to the work. But I understand people want to come to a show and be delighted. And I do think that people would be delighted or intrigued or interested, if there is substance. But what the substance is really depends on the artist's life path and what they're interested in talking about. So, if someone is interested in talking about a very linear narrative — Lassie the dog rescued the boy, Lassie came home, the family reunited — fine. That's not my work. And so my work is challenging for people. But people do come to it, largely I think because it is challenging and because there are many conventional narratives that people have access to. Audiences don't have a tremendous amount of access to work that is both, I would say, abstract and conceptually interesting. Really rehearsed, really thought through. My company and I, we rehearse for about a year with every performance. There's not a lot of that combination. So I work for art audiences.

T: So success for you, you would say, is that communication with the people that come to experience your art?

A: I think success would be having integrity in my vision. If I change my vision, or attempt to, I do fail. Almost every time. And I know that. I have tried to do that. I have tried to be a different person, I've tried to be incomprehensible, I've tried to be a lot of things that I'm not. And I know that's failure. I have no choice but to have integrity. Because I literally know that the piece would work if I'm attuned to it. And the piece will not work if I try to please people and give them what they want, or what I think that they want. Because I don't know what they want, to be honest.

T: How do you keep imagination and intuition out of the logistics? Artwork today is a lot of logistics. We have to deal with taxes, organizations, producing, curators, money…

A: First of all I tend to work with organizations that are very risk-taking. The only people that have been very interested in my work are those people, those curators and those organizations. So I've been very fortunate that they are very supportive of the content and the structure. But as far as producing, which is what I do — I coproduce and produce — it is really hard. I guarantee you. I think everybody knows that. Finding money for payment, for artists, for designers, for actual materials that you need, is incredibly difficult. I've only gotten some more major grants in the last maybe five years, but prior to that it's just borrowing money, putting it on my credit card, working three jobs, which I still do, trying to earn enough to support my theatre. That's really how I work. And it's incredibly stressful and it is — not to be reductive — a left brain/right brain thing. As a producer I am very much in my left brain. I'm very structural, I know what I have to do, I know how much I have to pay people, I know the realities of production and I start pretty early. Sometimes I have to be very honest with people: this is the budget, this is all I have, and if there's more I would give it to you. But this is what we're dealing with right now. And sometimes there is more luxury, or sometimes you go over budget. And that's just a reality that I don't know how we deal with, because there isn't a lot of support. There is no financial support in theatre in particular. So theatre people, I think, have to look at the realities of whether you want to do this or not. It's not film or television. And even in film and TV things are getting harder. So it's sort of love of the art. And it's incredibly stressful. I'm dealing with it right now. I don't know what to tell people. It's just really, really hard.

T: You try to keep the love of the art alive in the midst of a hurricane.

A: Yes, exactly!

T: Are the performers you work with tools or collaborators?

A: Collaborators for sure. Everyone I work with has their own practice. And sometimes they are truly hyphenated — like actor, performer, composer, writer, etc. — so they are really sophisticated people who don't want to be tools, for sure, and they have incredible intellectual and philosophical input into the work. I think that's why it takes so long. I think that mostly I do write for them specifically, and then we work through text over and over. They usually bring a lot of intellectual, physical, pragmatic, aesthetic, and artistic ideas to the process, which I'm typically really happy about. And everybody is very different. Some people have a very heavy theatre background, some of them have a more performance background, some people are visual artists, or all of the above. So yeah, they are truly collaborators. The only thing I would say is they do not write the text. I'm very possessive of the text. That's very much me. So there is no improvisation in most of my live plays. The film I just finished has quite a lot of improvisation, which is great.

T: Is art an elitist sport today? And do you think your background in theatre keeps you somewhat more grounded, having the text as an anchor?

A: I think that it's true for high-end visual art that it can be very elitist. I mean, obviously you can't even go to the Venice Biennale if you can't afford a plane ticket and a hotel or an Airbnb. So you can't witness it unless you have a certain access. That's just the reality of the visual art world. But I think your question about performance and theatre is a very good one, because I feel very visual-art adjacent. Because what we make doesn't quite fit into theatre or the visual art world — we are really on the outskirts. Doesn't mean people don't enjoy it or like it or want to support it. It is pretty gritty. The spaces I perform in sometimes — no disrespect to these wonderful spaces — you want to know how many rats have been seen, what is the cockroach factor… (laughs) But I love those spaces. They aren't always struggling but that's the nature of theatre.

T: How is the world's situation today affecting your art and soul?

A: I do believe that art should always be extremely contemporary and responsive to the moment. And obviously the USA is living under fascism. The misogyny, the racism, ICE and the abduction of normal people who are trying to live their lives into concentration camps — that is the condition. And to your question about the elite too: when you're trying to make art, you are typically talking to creatives, and creatives can be part of the elite or not, depending on the audience. So the question for me is, what is in all of our unconscious that gives rise to this in us? How did this happen? Because it's not just them over there who created fascism — we are part of it. And we have to look at that, and it's quite complicated. To me race is a huge issue. As a white person, I am continually looking at my own racism, which is always in my face, and it is the kind of monster that we keep trying to bury as a nation. It's really, still, surprising to me that we, in any way, have glimpsed the grotesque body of child slavery, the decimation of Native Americans here and in Canada and other places, the internment of the Japanese — we can go on and on. Chinese immigrants, and of course, Latinx people, Chicanos and Chicanas. That we've even been able to open an eye to it, as white people, is actually kind of shocking, because in my generation people would persistently try to bury it — that didn't happen, that was a while ago — yeah, no. It is the monster. And it is the most egregious part of living in the USA with the US history that we are obviously still contending with, whether we are going to succeed or fail. That is unknown at the moment. So my work is attempting to deal with that. That's the small thing I can do. I can do many other things outside of making art, which I do, but if art doesn't address that I'm not personally that interested in it — I'm not against it, but I'm not personally that interested in it. So that's how my psyche and soul is responding. But sometimes it's very abstract. Our unconscious is not always linear, and our own antipathies and self-hatreds don't always show up like "hi, I'm your self-hatred, let's talk today." It's not how it works.

T: How do you prepare for a work? Is it a method, is it a path…?

A: Fortunately for me I am very controlled by certain spirits, certain gods and goddesses of the unseen, and so sometimes I don't prepare. Because they all just grab me and make me start writing. And I usually know that they're there because I feel a kind of force that makes me get out of bed, or get up early, or get to the typewriter right away, or the laptop right away. And I attempt to obey them. I think that's the best thing that I can do. I think if I try to fight them, I don't know what I would write. Sometimes I would try to think: I really want to revise that cool scene that we did in 2019 — and it would be: that's what I'm thinking, and my hands would be typing something else. Because spirit is like: no, you can think whatever you want, we're typing this.

T: Keeping your mind open to creation like that is amazing.

A: You have to be yourself. That's the hardest lesson for a younger artist to learn, I think. Unless you are one of these lucky people born into this kind of comfort with who you are. But usually it's a struggle. Especially in your 20s. The world is weirder and stranger and more complex than we even want to be. But once you come into the fact that you are a very complex, not always good, person — the struggle with goodness, or the perception of goodness is a big problem in theater, it is a struggle — you come into some comfort with the dimensions of who you are, and it gets easier.

T: Does growing older affect you as an artist?

A: Yeah, definitely. I am a big advocate of getting old. It's really important that we live long lives. Of course people don't want to or can't — I'm not trying to say anything negative about that — but I think in this culture we do fear age. It's a very ageist culture. We privilege the young; I understand that. But once I turned 50 my life became really quite golden. For whatever reason I started to get real about who I was, and not worry about what other people thought of me to the degree that I used to. I was open to what was inside of me as a writer, I met people who liked me because of me, and not because I was doing something for them. I can't describe the benefits of aging with enough language. As long as you basically eat well — and I feel ridiculous saying this — but don't do a lot of drugs, because it's not good for your body, obviously. Drink water, be kind to yourself, stop punishing yourself, and all that stuff. As you get older it's easier because maybe you're out of your reproductive years and you're less concerned about who likes you, and who's going to get with you and what is going to be your future, and are you going to buy a house. You don't care anymore. You just care about living a true life. So if you can get older, I would recommend it as an artist. Yeah, of course the art world doesn't like old people. Of course not. There's nothing to invest in. You're going to die. You can't get a job as a professor in your 70s because you're going to die. We can't invest in you. You're not valuable. The whole culture tells you you're not valuable. But the reverse is true. You really learn what life is. And you struggle still. I'm not saying aging is the perfect pill. You do struggle, but you see the struggle and you're aware of the struggle and you can let yourself off the hook more frequently than when you're younger. And as a writer you just tell the truth. Because there's nothing for it. Who are you kidding? Who cares? People don't even see you. You're an old person. You're completely invisible.

T: What do you wish?

A: I wish all of us could have enough self-awareness and self-esteem to stop being cruel to other people as a way to access power and value. I do wish that ICE would be abolished. And people who find some kind of interest in power or torturing other people would magically find something else to do. But I think that the source is capitalism and the cruelty that is required of capitalism. I wish people could be generous to themselves so that they can't hurt other people consciously. If they do it unconsciously, then I hope that I and other people — if I do that, I'm sure I do — can get better.

Tatou Dede is a theater director and multidisciplinary artist. Starting as a pianist, she moved into dance and acting before finding her path in directing. Her practice focuses on developing original work and reimagining existing plays through a contemporary, multidisciplinary lens. At a time when genuine liveness — real person-to-person connection — is harder to find, she believes theatre remains our most powerful tool to reassert our humanity.