Mei Ann Teo is a Director, Theater Maker, and Artistic Leader dedicated to liberatory work that centers marginalized people and challenges audiences. Working in the legacy of Ping Chong, Mei Ann’s directorial choices are inspired by community-devised works and the theater of the real. In the following conversation, Mei Ann discusses their origins in theater, encountering texts that open up something inside us, and strategies that make audiences active participants in the work.   

Kate Blair: How did you come into theater directing and theater making? 

Mei Ann Teo: When I was in college, I was backstage as an actor missing my cues because I was too busy directing the actors on stage in my mind. That was the moment when I realized, “Oh, I actually really want to be watching and crafting it rather than acting in it.” I realized, I'm not interested in just one character, but in how all of them play together. Another shift happened when a professor of mine, Victoria Mukerji — she taught me film because the school I went to didn't have theater — and she told me, “You think like a director.” When she said that, that kind of just opened everything up.

Another teacher I had at that time was Gennevieve Brown-Kibble, an incredible choral director, and I remember how she crafted our breaths. Sensitivity to breath came from her and the way in which she would shape a phrase with a sixty-person choir, and the care she took with each one of us. I think that really set me up for the rigor of crafting a moment and how to listen.

Kate: That leads nicely into another question that I had for you: As a director, how do you cultivate a safe and generative collaborative environment for your cast, crew, and team to work together?

Mei Ann: The other day I said to my partner, “I want to make sure that in our relationship, my needs are not more important than yours, but our needs are as important as each other’s.” 

Every group is different, and it’s really the assessment of the people in the room — what they need and how to lead everyone towards the thing we're moving to together without leaving people behind. I try to get a clear sense of the situations in which people do their best work and how to create a collective container for that.

The theatrical process is not therapy, it's really not. But it can hold us in a healing way or harmful way and all the ways in between that. Another mentor of mine, Tony Taccone, would say, “If there are fifteen people in the room, you have to learn how to speak fifteen different languages,” which is a different modality than the director who says, “You learn my language or else.”

It's not only up to me to learn everyone's language; we all have to learn each other's. That is at the core of a generous and generative room when you actually care to do so. It's not one person’s vision or needs above the others.

Kate: You mentioned one of your mentors, Tony Taccone. Are there other mentors and inspirations that you bring into your work?

Mei Ann: Yeah. Anne Bogart is like my theater mom, if Tony Taccone is like theater dad. I also learned a great deal from Robert Woodruff and Chay Yew. 

Ping Chong is my North Star. I'm the Artistic Director of New Work at Pink Fang, which is the next iteration of Ping Chong and Company. Ping’s artistic impulse followed his curiosities, engaging disparate histories and communities that are not usually understood as entangled. But because we are all interconnected, his work exploded open the connective tissues. 

In addition to the interdisciplinary work he made for fifty years, he created a new form which became an over-thirty-year-long series called “Undesirable Elements,” an interview-based work with real people telling real stories. The range of what theater can be, and who theater is for in his work — all of that resonates so deeply for me in my own artmaking in theater of the real and specifically documentary theater.

Kate: I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how you got started in documentary theater and whether it still is a big part of your practice now.

Mei Ann: What guides my artistic practice even now is ensemble-devised documentary theater made in a community — that’s the milieu in which my art making began. 

I grew up and was educated in a conservative Christianity, and the first piece I made was about the prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Ellen White. The recognition that there was an old wound that was covered up compelled the work, and we sought out the reasons for the rifts. It was made from interviews with intergenerational members of the community and our own experiences having grown up as Adventists. We found scenes that would hold conversations that wouldn’t have happened in real life, using theater as a metaphorical space for the hardest dialogues to have.  

So, in a way, it is a fabrication of poetic moments that happen from real experience. In some ways it’s very much like documentary film — there are always edits, contrivances, there's always a frame. In both there is the sensation of knowing that we're grappling with real history. it’s a different sensation to fiction. Not sensational, but it's a sensory, sensual difference of knowing that it actually happened.

What is different in documentary theater is the performer acting is then living inside of that real live person’s experience. When I was making a work in China, this twenty-two year old actor had interviewed this sixty-five year old man who had lived through the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. When he spoke that man's words, he was embodying the history that man went through. We're not watching an image of that man like we would in a film, we're watching a young man gain history. We're watching him accumulate experience in front of our very eyes. That's what is so thrilling about documentary theater to me.

I've also supported performer-generators telling their own story. I am a dramaturgical director, so I both direct and ideate on how to frame the work. It’s a form that weaves storytelling and theatrical metaphor that reaches into our own mythic ideas of ourself and our society. And it can look like many forms. 

I’m currently making a very personal work called The Table with theater maker and choreographer Erika Chong Shuch, and dramaturg Tomi Tsunoda. The process itself has required me to dig into my own experiences in a new way, and all of the listening that I’ve learned to do, I’m now doing with myself. It’s terrifying. We are looking at the experience of a femme body approaching middle age and coming to find how the ways we have been operating are not sustainable, as a metaphor for our ecological situation. So while this isn’t traditionally documentary theater, I’m finding that many of the practices I’ve employed are still happening in this process with the creative team and performers.  

Kate: My next question is about audience and audience activation. In your artist statement, you wrote: “the difference between theater as a place of contemplation and theater as a contemplative practice is the intention to transform a paradigm of audience from one of consumption to one of communion.” The question is, what strategies do you use to make this transformation? 

Mei Ann: This is always aspirational. To me, that is the bar. The Table will have a participatory meal as an element, inspired by the Zen meal ritual of Oryoki, which invites the question “what is enough.” So the act of consumption is brought into the communal theatrical space. 

I made a piece called Labyrinth: Defining Our Humanity for the Beijing Festival, and it was an intermediary participatory game-like structure where everybody, by handing their ticket in, will be consenting to actively participating and defining what humanity is for that time period with that group of people. So, it's an active commitment. 

Within that structure, many things happen. They're answering questions that start from very ubiquitous questions. This was in Beijing. So I was like, “How often do you see family? Is your family in Beijing?” To me, it was an interesting question. If humanity looks like people who see their families often or who don't, feels different to me. And then it moves to moral conundrums — would you kill to protect a loved one? 

This kind of participatory work is very actively like, if you are not participating, if you are not actually in it, humanity doesn't get defined. It's a necessary act. And so in terms of form, you can't really consume that because you're participating. The strategies for that piece were overt, where you must participate. 

And I think it's also about the attitude of like, “I've paid for this ticket. Perform for me.” That is also the attitude of consumption, versus what Anne Bogart says in her book And Then, You Act. She contemplates what a beautiful thing it is that the performers and the audience wake up in the morning, and they know that whole day they're going to meet. And when they arrive that night, they spent the whole day knowing, anticipating, that meeting in performance. I remember reading that and feeling like — oh yes — that’s communion. 

That's the thing that's so beautiful about theater because every night is different because the audience is. It's always going to change because of how the energy flows between the actors, between the audience, and the state of the world. I really want theater that helps us integrate and process what's happening right now in our culture.

Kate: I really loved the social media video you made for us, and I really loved how you mentioned a couple times how artists will read you for filth, because I think it just made me yearn to be read for filth. I feel like I haven't had that experience with art in a while.

So I guess I was curious — what does it mean to you to be read for filth? Do you try to evoke that response in your own work?

Mei Ann: This is one of the many reasons why I'm currently directing JESA by Jeena Yi, produced by Ma-Yi at the Public. It's a play about four Korean American sisters who are very different, completely, in the jobs they do, their personalities, all of that. And they come together to honor their deceased parents at a ritual called Jesa. It’s savagely funny while uncovering the multiplicity of ways we're conditioned, especially as Asian femmes from immigrant families. 

After one of the reads, I was like, I feel so read by this play. It's really embarrassing. I feel like I'm every single one of these sisters in a different way. This one's closeted and going to come out. This one's literally a theater director who's struggling with whether or not her work is relevant or if she will ever be successful. This one is a really brash, foul-mouthed chef who feels like a failure. And another one needs some anger management, but like a finance person. And while I didn't choose that path, I do have a temper and a finance degree. I'm like, “Why are all these people reading me for filth?” And one of the people I said that to replied, “Oh, did Jeena write your Inside Out?” Read for filth. 

So, I choose to work on things when they are actively working on something inside of me. And it doesn't need to be that literal of Asian femme. Everything that I've made has unlocked something inside of me that is a little hard to open up. And the ways to do it can be so gentle and so loving and so funny.

Kate: To close, what will this fellowship will afford you?

Mei Ann: This is a detour, but I don't know how to speak about this award and its meaning without speaking about Diana Oh, who was also a USA Fellow.

When I think about people, artists who would read people for filth, Diana Oh did so in every single possible way. The way they spoke truth to institutions, the way that their art dealt with so much of the clearing of shame and the courage to face that and the relentlessness in which they moved through all of that. They read themselves for filth. And then that in turn also read us for filth, read me for filth in the most queer, loving, embrace.

In their last email to a group of us who had been supporting them, they wrote, “May the work live on. And our Queer Liberation and Happiness and Truth and Fervor.” This award feels like encouragement from beyond. I am a director and I love directing, and I also have been afforded a beautiful opportunity at Pink Fang to be a maker again. This award is a really clear sign for me that this is where I should be. 

And real talk, like, what even is retirement? Is this my safety net? My dental plan? Thankfully, it does allow me to actually be a dutiful child and send money to my parents. Although my mom was like, “Oh, that's nice. Is that 50k award for every year?”