Scenic designers Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk, and Kimie Nishikawa formed their collective, dots, out of a realization that it would benefit them more to collaborate than to compete for work. In this conversation, the three members of dots explain how operating as a collective protects them from the vicissitudes of life and creative work in the theater world, ensuring pay and space to rest without compromising job security. They also talk through the exciting, collaborative process of putting on a show and collective ideation. 

Kate Blair: I love hearing the metaphor you use, about dots being an umbrella that takes care of you, and really, the idea of care that goes into your collaboration overall. I'm wondering what that looks like for you all?  

Andrew Moerdyk: We're humans and life happens, and when you're working by yourself, sometimes the work has to stop for life to happen. And then you have to go down the anxiety spiral of — oh my God, will I work again because I took this time off to deal with this thing in my life? We've all had major life events in the last five years, good, bad, and in between. Just knowing that we can step away for five minutes and the emails will get answered, the choices will get made, and we'll still have a job at the end of it is the thing that's really helpful.  

Kimie Nishikawa: And it doesn't sacrifice our financial situation. If we were all working by ourselves and had to step away, you end up losing that job, or you end up paying a lot of money to your associates and assistants to fill in for you. But in this case, you can leave. And then we have the sustainability of whoever is not there, they still get their salary.

We're very open about money too, which in this industry somehow you can't really talk about. But we're very open amongst us, our assistants, and our collaborators. We share our contracts with our fellow designers too, so that we know that there's parity, and that's something that's very important to us. 

Santiago Orjuela-Laverde: When a challenging situation comes to us, we can always take a second before responding and check with the team. When we talk about the umbrella, it's the umbrella that gets the problems, and we are inside, and we can talk about it. The [problem] is hitting the umbrella. The idea of having this other name like dots as a name and an identity, is that it's a whole thing bigger than us. dots receives a problem, and it's a dots problem, and then we address it.  

Andrew: dots is a legal entity in the world that exists separate from us, which is psychologically helpful, in terms of dealing with problems and also separating personal identity from professional identity. Before we started, I felt like I, me, Andrew was my work. And that there was very little separation between those two things, which was tough. Having that buffer and knowing that the work is a thing that's also something bigger than just me is really exciting and helpful and motivating.  

Santiago: It frees us, too. I feel more creative because we're giving into a bigger pile. The outcome could be bigger because it's very rare that we own an idea. We just put in a part, and then we all add parts, and then at the end it's hard to tell. The collectiveness of the creation is interesting.

Andrew: Which, really is the status quo [laughs], but in an informalized way, where just one person is getting all this credit for a thing that a full team usually is responsible for executing. That's important to us, acknowledging that the task we do is actually based on teamwork 99% of the time.

Kate: Theater is inherently collaborative from top to bottom. I was wondering if you feel already operating as a collective helps you work in that environment better or if it changes the work in that environment at all?

Kimie: What I love about our job is that each new job is a new set of people, a new place. And you have to go in with an open mind and be open with suggestions and also be ready to have a disagreement or just talk through it. Already working as a collective, you're just used to that in everyday life. Because before, it's a designer and an assistant or associate where there's already a hierarchy. But that's not the case with us. We're all equal collaborators, and for that to be baseline helps in any situation. 

Andrew: I think the answer to your question is the inverse of that. I don't think us working as a collective prepares us better to work in theater. I think working in theater actually prepared us better to work as a collective because that's how it is anyway. Every project is its own new collective where the outcome is the show or the production. It's kind of weird that it becomes an individual authorship thing again at the end of that.

Kimie: It doesn't matter who has the best idea. And I think that's the beauty about theater.  

Andrew: Yeah. We are just making the production, making the show.

Kate: I think it is strange that people have ownership over ideas because when I'm collaborating with other people, my bad idea might lead to someone's better idea, and it’s all just part of the process. I'm wondering if you could talk more about the more-than-the-sum of the parts thing that happens when you're collaborating with other people. Is there ever a feeling of magic, where you're like, how did we do that? Where did that come from?  

Kimie: I don't think it's magic because it is based on hard work, but I do think there's this sense of losing control a little bit. Because if you're faced with a problem and if you're by yourself, you try to plan everything and take each step intentionally, but then that can also lead into a rabbit hole. Whereas if you have other voices coming in, it can disrupt your train of thought in a positive way. We all come in with intention, and then we disrupt and crack open each other's ideas.   

Andrew: Many brains are more likely to solve a problem than if it's just yourself, so it's a lot of listening and acknowledging how the process of being a designer is to try something, respond to it, take what works, throw out what doesn't work, and then keep iterating. The process of iterating when you're alone can become super exhausting, and then it's really easy to burn out; you run out of fuel on the iterating train. But if there's multiple people offering iterations, then you keep forward momentum. 

Kimie: It speaks to our process in the actual set design, too. We rely on having a scale model, and we don't edit prematurely. We give everything a chance, and as you said earlier, you're right, we put out the bad idea so we can respond to it, and our intuition tells us which way to go. And I think that speaks to how we collaborate too, when we talk and dish out all these ideas, and then we get to respond to them. 

Santiago: We are different people, different brains. So when we come to a brainstorming session and we need to figure out a simple technical thing, or we’re conceptualizing a whole production, our multiple point of views of life, existence, and how we see the world come together into a bunch of research, references, and takes. We just respect the brainstorming nature of — “there's no such a thing as a bad idea.”

Andrew: It's weird. In a collaborative context, some people have said to me, “the best idea wins,” and I don't agree. It's not a contest, and I think being a collective helps shape that. It’s part of our ethos of working together that is not part of why we formed [dots], which was “why are we competing with each other for work?” and just being against competitiveness in general.

Santiago: I'm trying to connect the metaphor of the umbrella with a brainstorm, where there are so many ideas coming; and dots as a whole works by grabbing those ideas and putting them together. And I think that comes through the actual thing that we do in our hours of the day, which is model-making, drafting, and taking meetings.

Andrew: I don't think any of us believe that designers should be the originator. We're responding. We respond to a thing, whereas the director and the writer are creating the thing, and there's a difference there. They're the ones making the story. We're responding to and visualizing what they're putting down on paper and finding an aesthetic, visual, and spatial translation of that.

Santiago: We are also dramaturgs. We have a skill for understanding how a story will move. Whenever a director invites us to that conversation, it's nice because then we can create all this together, imagine this story together, and then we talk about the set piece. The set piece will happen, but that invitation to the conversation, that's where the magic of the collaboration happens.

Kate: dots is such a rich and fascinating metaphor. I love that you can add more dots, think about connecting a line between the dots, and that you can create greater detail with more dots. Given all of that, where do you think that dots could evolve in the future?

Kimie: One of the reasons why we love our name is because there could always be more dots. And we don't know concretely what that looks like yet; is it more members? It’s so easy to say yes, everybody's dots. And I think there's just conversations to be had with each person. We want a future to grow, and our goal is to be a sustainable, safe place to work. And if the three of us decide to go and want a family and leave dots, that's okay too. The question is, how do we do that responsibly?

Andrew: dots is a company, which is kind of another word for a collective, and I think the goal is to grow it to a point where it is a self-sustaining thing. 

The thing for us is just always about transparency and openness and not being cagey about what it all means financially. We love to say exactly what our salary is. We are happy to tell people because, it's not much, but it is stable and regular, and that works for us. But we also know that it doesn't necessarily work for everybody.

Kate: I really appreciate that transparency about pay and money. I think that's a really exciting thing about you all too, and it has helped me learn about how pay in theater works in general. I feel like you just uncovered something: there's a kind of dreamscape of dots, but then there's the reality that you're all working within serious payment structures and having to pay other people. So I wonder, how do you hope theater will change in that regard?

Kimie: One of the reasons we made dots was because we can't really change the whole theater industry, but we can change how we offer ourselves to the industry. 

We've all worked as assistants in the past, and the issue was the designers didn't, or in most instances couldn't, pay us out of pocket. I don't want to generalize. I'm sure some people who work in admin and theater have been freelancers, understand, and are trying to make it better. That's not lost on me, but a lot of the experiences we had were waiting for the theaters to pay us. 

If we had a say in the restructuring of payment, I would advocate for tech and previews to actually be a weekly salary because we are physically present. They know what we're doing all day, so that should be a weekly or daily rate.  

Long story short, there are many issues in payment structure, and I think that's why us having control over that — not not being paid the way theaters want us to get paid, but at least getting that money and then paying ourselves how we went to get paid was a big step.  

Andrew: We just have a better understanding of the lived reality of a designer's life and how to best support that [laughs]. The industry standard doesn't connect to what that day-to-day, feet-on-the-ground reality of being a designer is.  

Kate: Creatively, what excites you all about a project, or how do you decide which projects to take on?

Andrew: We have this matrix: the Three-F Matrix of fun, fortune, and fame. If a project has two of those things, obviously fortune would be the one that kind of overrides it. If it's fun, it is about a team of inspiring collaborators and the profile of the piece, but creatively, it's really the team, the story, and the text.  

Kimie: The people are a big factor. Of course the director and writer, but the fellow designers too. It's amazing going into a room knowing that you can just be open with ideas, not worried about stepping on each other's toes. When you have trust with a fellow designer, that's really great. And I love it when the director is so excited about the piece — they're excited and scared, and that's very contagious. 

Andrew: A director that has a strong point of view but doesn't know what that looks like is always such a strong provocation and an exciting one. It puts us on a path of discovery that's always fun. What's most satisfying to me about what we do is that each story is its own unique little world. You get to become a temporary expert in that niche little subject, and that's super satisfying.

Santiago: When directors come with some fear of something, that's also very captivating for me, because it’s a challenge that has no prescriptive answer. The fearless or full-of-fear director who says, “I have so many ideas, I don't know if that's the right thing, let’s try.” That's always exciting because we're also using theater as a device for learning something. How do we learn from every single step something new, something for the next project or something for ourselves or our lives? To never stop learning is major. How do we get out of our comfort zones? 

Andrew: Curiosity, I think, is a necessary personality quality for a designer. Projects that satisfy that are always the most exciting. Just being able to keep the curiosity alive throughout the process is always thrilling.  

Kate: What are some of the things that do drive or ignite your curiosity?  

Kimie: I think, everything. I could be interested in anything if I'm asked to [laughs]. It's kind of great for every project we have to be, as Andrew said, an expert in that niche little thing. We suddenly become researchers and historians and detectives. One of my favorite parts about the process is the research. 

Andrew: There’s always something to find, to mine. I don’t know what ignites it, project-wise, but on a personal level, I get really bored by monotony, which is why I love this job. 

Kimie: You hit on something that we keep saying, which is our personal taste or likes or style, it doesn't matter.

Andrew: Yeah. It's like, what does this production of this story need? And how does it look to tell the story this particular way? That’s what we pride ourselves on, I think. Our process of discovery, getting there. We never start a project with the outcomes being known.

Santiago: When we work with directors and writers, it’s so generative to be invited into their viewpoints, their universe. After a day working on three or four projects, you’re like, oh, from 9 to 11, I was in a cave, and then from 11 to 2, I was on this spaceship.

Andrew: I haven't found another profession that offers this level of variety in your day-to-day tasks. We were talking about this the other day — that our job takes us to different places. We go to different places and make different choices and then go somewhere else and make other choices, which is tiring, but never boring. 

We do interact with a lot of people, and that's why also being a collective is really important. We've all taken advantage of that need to stop, think, and smell the grass for a day because we’re part of a team where you can say, “I am incapable of having an idea right now. Can you cover me?”