Legacy Is GinormousFootnote ¹

Assemblage as a way to make art carries the expectation that existing elements will be combined with other existing elements to make something new, to expand impact, to enable new perceptions. One might argue that the SITI Company (Saratoga International Theater Institute, 1992–2022) were masters of assemblage. They were not the first acting ensemble, nor the first to devise new work or deconstruct classics. The training they taught came directly from Tadashi Suzuki and indirectly from Mary Overlie; and company members brought to SITI years of preparation from their professional careers. But together as an extraordinary ensemble, they took techniques and tools and literature and realigned, reimagined, and re-envisioned them. They created productions stunning to witness and offered life-changing training to the artists who worked with them. They redefined and edified the idea of a company and evidenced the extraordinary courage and rigor required to maintain the integrity and aesthetic of an ensemble.

The SITI Company consistently ventured into new territory, ensuring that their palette offered an array of challenges. With no brick-and-mortar home, they traveled the US and the globe. Self-described by company member Ellen Lauren as “a classical company wrapped in a post-modern bow” (in Rodriguez 2014), they devised new work and collaborated with dance companies; they created A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2006) and played with Noël Coward (Private Lives, 1998); they collaborated with visual artist Ann Hamilton (the event of a thread, 2012; and the theatre is a blank page, 2015) and choreographer Bill T. Jones (A Rite, 2013). They made Macbeth as a radio play (2004), envisioned and realized an opera (Seven Deadly Sins, 1998), and bounced the walls with Streb Extreme Action (Falling and Loving, 2019). They shifted from The Bacchae (2018) to A Christmas Carol (2022). Their flexibility as artists resulted from the clear structures in which they worked. With disciplined and vigorous mental and physical focus, they found what Artistic Director Anne Bogart termed “freedom within the form” (2019), bringing to their worktable and their rehearsal rooms the profound desire to question their artistry. Although the SITI Company no longer exists, their international impact has been exceptional.

Founded in 1992 and collectively disbanded in 2022, SITI leaves behind a changed landscape. Their lasting legacy includes a challenge to theatre-makers as to how theatre is conceived and executed, a remarkable contribution to the way in which theatre artists are trained, and an influential example of how an ensemble can thrive.

The process of creation for SITI was always a conversation—a process of discovery. They believed that theatre is about creating an environment where you can explore that which you don’t know, not trying to understand what is in front of you. The expansive research and preparation undertaken by the company combined with their training, particularly the Viewpoints, provided a way of searching, of asking questions, affording a space for the collision of philosophy, politics, and art that defined SITI. Their methodologies afforded ownership of the creative process to everyone in the room and demanded that they actively and instinctively responded to the challenge of each project. The canvas on which they worked was intentionally expansive and when they began, no one knew what it would ultimately contain. As Darron West, company member, designer, and dramaturg, notes:

The faith required to stand on shifting sand was built on a shared intimacy, trust, and a complex/effective system of communication—what SITI Company members consistently refer to as the common vocabulary provided by the training. The common vocabulary made it possible to embrace a diversity of visions and fulfill the company’s mandate for artistic exploration. The company pursued what Bogart described as “the violence of articulation” (Bogart 2001).

In their 30-year history, the SITI Company engaged in an array of work. Even their first productions expressed their desire to wrestle with the most difficult of challenges. They dramatized the writing of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium, 1993), deconstructed and reassembled Chekhov’s five major plays (Small Lives/Big Dreams, 1996), and combined Edward Albee with quantum physics (Going, Going, Gone, 1997). These early theatrical puzzles made them creative, nimble, powerful, and energized; it made them solidify their common aesthetic. The radical work demanded a radical, rigorous approach in preparation and execution, which they soon began to share broadly, training and empowering several generations of theatre-makers. They generously shared their methodology centered in “composition work,” defined by Bogart and Tina Landau in The Viewpoints Book as “the practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art for the stage” (2004:12). The approach enabled them to work quicky, instinctually, and with a vocabulary that allowed them to “articulate which ideas, moments, images etc. we will include in our productions” (12).Footnote ²

Long-time SITI collaborator, playwright Charles L. Mee, talks about how this approach changed his work:

Figure 2.

Ellen Lauren and Stephen Duff Webber in War of the Worlds. Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2000. (Photo by Richard Trigg; courtesy of SITI Company)

Mee professes it changed his approach to playwriting. He was inspired when he worked with Bogart in 1997 and she set an artistic expectation for him: “Take me someplace I have never been before” (2023). It is the lofty challenge that underpins all of SITI’s productions.

SITI Company member J.Ed Araiza recognizes the impact of SITI’s work in this arena:

Indeed, SITI’s influence is easily seen in the work of theatre-makers from as far apart as Brussels and Singapore.

Director Rachel Chavkin recognizes why SITI has been, and will continue to be, so influential:

A fundamental belief in the value of their work, not just for themselves but also for others, combined with an extraordinary generosity of spirit, motivated SITI to provide the kind of access Chavkin describes. This may have been a reflection of the foundational influence of the Suzuki Company of Toga, Japan (SCOT), whose mission has always been to ensure that there was purposeful broad engagement with their work through training in the Suzuki Method, their extensive touring, and by inviting artists to visit Toga, a remote mountain village facing the Japan Sea. Thousands of students studied at SITI’s summer theatre intensive at Skidmore College in Saratoga, NY, at SITI’s New York City Conservatory, or in the training SITI offered wherever they toured—which was constantly. The presence of other artistic ensembles from an array of disciplines who were in residencies at Skidmore at the same time as SITI bred a sharing of work and cross-pollination of techniques. Through their contact with the global student body who came to study with them, SITI’s methods spread throughout the world.

Figure 3.

bobrauschenbergamerica. From left: Danyon Davis, Akiko Aizawa, Ellen Lauren, Will Bond, J.Ed Araiza, Leon Ingulsrud, BAM Next Wave Festival, 2003. (Photo by Richard Termine; courtesy BAM Hamm Archives)

Director Rebecca Taichman believes, “They have offered an alternative vision for what theatre can be—provided the invitation—the invitation to think in these other ways about how a story might feel or look or sound onstage” (2023). SITI’s invitation did not only extend to artists. Their work also demanded a partnership with audiences. As SITI member Kelly Maurer notes,

Marc Masterson, who worked extensively with SITI while artistic director at Pittsburgh City Theatre (1981–2000 and 2018–present) and the Actors Theatre of Louisville (2001–2011), sees clearly why their work stood apart:

What is singular to SITI is that the process of exploration used in devising—entering a state of unknowing—remained the same with texts by living writers such as Charles Mee and Jocelyn Clark as it did with the classics. It was how SITI lived in their space—in an unending act of discovery—and it is a key reason company members remained loyal for decades. West easily prefers the chaos to what he finds in a non-SITI rehearsal, which he describes as “being in a room of strangers where hopefully the director has really got a good pitch to get everybody on board.” He is frustrated by what he sees as quick and easy decisions:

SITI’s approach seems on the surface unruly, not likely to result in impactful work. But Joseph Haj, artistic director of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre, who was involved in the work while SITI was forming in the early 1990s, believes that in fact SITI’s approach has much greater potential:

The other foundational difference in the work of the SITI Company is the primacy of the body in training, rehearsal, and performance. The Viewpoints originated in the choreographic world of Mary Overlie, and her influence on Bogart was retained as she embraced and expanded Overlie’s Viewpoints as a theatrical tool. Overlie shared her work on the six Viewpoints she used with dancers when she and Bogart worked together at New York University in the late 1970s. Bogart immediately recognized the Viewpoints’ potential noting, “if actors could work this way, they wouldn’t constantly ask me what to do. They would get up and make a choice based on spatial and temporal issues” (2023). Bogart renamed some and expanded Overlie’s Viewpoints from six to nine. They are defined in The Viewpoints Book as “a philosophy translated into a technique for 1) training performers; 2) building ensemble; 3) creating movement on stage” (Bogart and Landau 2004:7). Working with the Viewpoints enables actors to create powerful stage movement by being sentient, physically open to the environment, and motivated by instinct unimpeded by intellect.

The Viewpoints are based in the body, the actor’s physical responses to the text with which the actor is working. West confirms that “the company has always been about the actors’ bodies in space. We started that way and we ended that way” (2023). Many who have studied with SITI believe in a “radical presence”—the ability of the performer to transform those in the performance space—to form a collective relationship between actor and audience who together experience “a sense of awakening from everyday life” (Lingafelter 2023).

The focused, driven, specific, and highly impactful physical work of the company was one of its greatest achievements. Joseph Melillo, emeritus executive director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1991–2018) and one of the first producers to hire the company sees that

Full commitment to an ensemble as the defining feature of all of SITI’s work has made for transformative, effective performances driven by complex ideals of what the art can be, and who can best create it. Rebecca Lingafelter, coartistic director of the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble and long-time SITI student, remembers Bogart paraphrasing an inspiring quote from Leonard Bernstein that Lingafelter feels defined the company: “What is the purpose of art in challenging times is the large question. The answer is that you make the music more intense” (2023). SITI’s consistent choice to wrestle the difficult questions in art and life—to make them more “intense”—is reflected in many of the ensembles who follow in SITI’s footsteps, not aiming to recreate SITI’s work but to emulate and encompass its values.

It is perhaps surprising that among the many theatre-makers worldwide whose artistry and theatrical pathways have been clearly defined or influenced by SITI are some who have never seen a SITI production. Ironically, it is not the productions that define SITI’s legacy but the training that was part and parcel of their process of creation. Artists sought out SITI training for an array of reasons, often stemming from a discontent with the contemporary theatre and its approach to preparing its artists. SITI’s training offered an alternative by combining the more formal Suzuki Method, in its original form, with Bogart’s deeply felt exploration/expansion of Overlie’s Viewpoints. Together, the methods were extremely powerful, but it was embedding them in SITI’s extraordinarily collaborative pedagogical and artistic environment that made them so impactful.

Carrying through the nonhierarchical workspace SITI had created in rehearsal studios, their classrooms were likewise a level and equitable landscape. All company members taught Suzuki and the Viewpoints in collaboration with each other, and when they were not teaching, they studied alongside students. As company member Will Bond says: “I think students were inspired by how we inspired each other in the group, you know, how we spoke to each other, how we took each other’s classes, how we were really bonded in that way” (2023). Lauren continues, “I think our contradictions and discourse together in the studio, teaching other people, allowed a horizontality. If I was teaching in front of Stephen [Webber], I would be talking to Stephen through 30 people” (2023a).

Former students speak of the profound desire of the company to share the work. Richard Hess, former chair of theatre at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (CCM), remembers when he first engaged as a student, in 1997:

Gábor Kozma, coartistic director of the Chance of the Hunter Theatre in Budapest, who studied both with Suzuki and with SITI, had never “seen a company who would be so generous and also so wise to form their own story, to form their own narrative, to share their narrative, not through asking people to write about them. They have formed their narrative by handing it out to others” (2023).

Over and over SITI provided its students with what Lingafelter describes as

SITI ignited a generation of creators, of theatre-makers, and of forward thinkers who have been asked to challenge what’s possible. According to Lingafelter, to “bust open narrative and turn up your art-making. They made so many art-makers and empowered us with the audacity to believe that we could do it too” (2023).

SITI Company Members

The training and its expectations were, at times, often unachievable. But SITI made no pretense of mastery, pursuing the same grueling schedule of work, fully integrated among the other students, feeling the pain and continuing to strive for the impossible. Over and over, former students talk about falling in love with them, inspired by their artistry, humbled by their humanity. At a May 2023 conversation at La MaMa, looking back on SITI, an audience member shared a widespread sentiment, “You were like gods to us.”

But SITI saw it otherwise. Canadian director and SITI student Ravi Jain clearly remembers Lauren telling him something that “stayed with me forever”: that he was an equal artist, “the only difference is 20 years of experience” (2023).

SITI has invested in the legacy of their training by identifying over 40 “SITI Ambassadors” who span the globe. Invited by SITI and under the watchful eye of Ellen Lauren and SITI Legacy managing director Brad Carlin, ambassadors include artists worldwide who have studied and/or worked extensively with SITI over the years. They are the next generation of actors, directors, ensemble members, and teachers who are invested in ensuring that people who have experienced the training continue to share it.

Although Anne Bogart is better known than the SITI Company, and many assign the company’s success to her vision and influence, SITI was, at its core, a fully collaborative ensemble. No artistic director nor administrative board defined them. When a decision needed to be made, the whole company, crammed in a small office in downtown Manhattan, decided what to do. There was always disagreement—in the office and in the rehearsal rooms. Collaboration did not mean agreement; there was a significant amount of rough and tumble. Bogart often quips, “SITI Company believes in suffering—unless we are in pain or on the edge we don’t feel like we are doing anything” (2023).

They had arguments that nearly tore them apart, about how to share the training, who should be “allowed” to teach, how to manage a gig, whether to spend more time in NYC or away, whether to invest in studio space. Being consensus based, SITI could potentially argue about anything—and they did. But their commitment to each other and to the way that they made theatre was—for the vast majority of SITI Company members who spent many years working within the company—unfailing. As Lauren notes:

Company members describe the powerful feeling of connectedness, honesty, and respect. The company was always home.

In the unique environment they created, all artists in the room had equal voice. Those voices ebbed and flowed, some louder at moments than others. Bogart was most often the launcher, knowing how to start a room and make a good room for collaboration. She was often a conductor, listening and selecting an emphasis or a pursuit. But the longer the company was together, the less Bogart attended to the details of the production. Former executive director Megan Wanlass (2000–2014) remembers Bogart saying she was really good at beginnings but then:

But they always figured it out, returning to the creative collaborative space the Viewpoints afforded them, always willing to leave behind that which was not working and create something new, even at the eleventh hour.

Lauren describes Bogart as a “horizontal sort of nonleader leader who we couldn’t function without—because she has a secret magic quality. And yet you wouldn’t know she was a director in a room ever” (2023a). Indeed, if you walked into a SITI rehearsal, you would be hard pressed to identify who was in charge. This is perhaps true because Bogart’s vision was so consistently challenged by the company. Lauren remembers, “We were always like, ‘Anne, thanks for the idea. That’s not gonna work.’ We really buffeted her about a lot” (2023a). In a fundamental shift in the way American theatre rehearsal rooms traditionally function, everyone spoke and was equally attended. Kelly Maurer describes SITI’s way of working as empowering everyone in the room, including the designers.

While they originally modeled themselves on the Suzuki Company’s strong sense of community that values everyone’s contributions, according to Ingulsrud, SITI actors had much more agency than members of SCOT. As Barney O’Hanlon notes:

Bogart knows the strength of the ensemble-infused performances.

SITI can be credited with generating, across the world, new theatre companies for whom the artistic values SITI embraced and shared were foundational. Some devise, most train together in some form, many share the Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method with other artists. Additionally, The SITI Company also modeled for many ensembles how a company can work with other producing organizations and how it can function fiscally. Ensuring the financial health of company members was central to their mission as Bogart notes: “This is a company of actors, and they don’t leave—partly because they’re very dedicated, and partly because we paid them decently. I started the company saying it—‘Actors have to be paid decently’” (2023). SITI maintained a “favored nations” approach to salaries with everyone receiving equal pay; Actors Equity rates were paid for show contracts and compensation for workshops was at or close to that same rate. This ensured that the company did not follow the common practice of paying actors only for rehearsals and performances and not for the time the work was being developed.

With no building of their own, SITI, for its entire existence, had no consistent rehearsal space. Money was tight and the company often lacked resources to begin production. To compensate, SITI was strategic about their producing partnerships. Within a world where all of the big questions had no immediate answers, Wanlass pushed Bogart for defining information:

SITI was on the forefront of forging relationships where an independent ensemble could, for example, partner with an arts presenter, or a university, or a regional theatre, and then encourage them to partner with each other. Wanlass sees SITI as having “broken open a pathway where those entities could engage with really forward-thinking work that they would not have been able to put together on their own” (2023). In so doing, SITI opened that pathway for others, developing a new perspective for the institutions with whom they worked.

In the last decade of its life, SITI chose to collaborate with other artistic ensembles including the Martha Graham Dance Company, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Streb Extreme Action, as well as individual artists such Ann Hamilton. For SITI, the partnerships were a purposeful effort to challenge themselves to chart new territory.

One of the most exceptional qualities of the SITI Company is their longevity as an ensemble and the commitment its artists made. SITI has stayed with the same core group throughout; 15 out of 19 early members of SITI were still with the company in its final year of performance. This bred a maturity that deepened their work. Joe Haj recognizes this exceptional feat:

Figure 4.

Death & the Ploughman. Will Bond (foreground), Ellen Lauren, and Stephen Duff Webber. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2004. (Photo by Al Zanyk; courtesy of SITI Company)

SITI’s members welcomed this, especially when other ensembles were quickly disappearing. This responsibility to others demands more of an artist and the company embraced this commitment. Company member Stephen Webber describes SITI as a “chosen family with a shared aesthetic. The aesthetic was informed by the training, but it wasn’t just the training, it was something beyond that. So, I think as long as we were interested in that aesthetic, there was a reason to stay in the company” (2023).

The training centered the company, tethering members to one another. As they honed and developed their approach to creating work, they found fulfillment and joy. Lauren: “it’s really hard to find people to laugh with in the world. To share that. We did share a sense of humor and even when we wanted to kill each other, we still could bring each other really good zingers” (2023a). Discord, argument, and collision were common yet valued as a necessary part of creating work. The familial, respectful, intimate relationships they shared enabled them to stay together despite clashes. As SITI associate artist Violeta Picayo says:

The ensemble made them better artists but that was not all. Company member Gian-Murray Gianino elaborated:

While commitment to the company was primary, ensemble members worked outside of SITI. There they spread their approach to making theatre to their other projects. But they did not missionize; they influenced by example. Other artists wanted what the SITI people brought into the room: an exceptional use of body and voice, the ability to collaborate, and personal empowerment. As SITI continues to influence new generations of theatre artists, many believe that today there is a greater need than ever for the inspiration and challenge that SITI’s legacy offers. Lingafelter sees the legacy at work:

30 Years from Beginning to Ending

Tadashi Suzuki established the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976 when he moved his theatre troupe, Waseda Shogekijo, out of Tokyo. Already internationally known, Suzuki’s hope was that SCOT would be where people would train and make work together, and then share his methods with others across the globe. Suzuki became known in the US during the 1980s for his The Bacchae, performed at La MaMa in 1982, and The Trojan Women, presented at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984. In 1988, four regional theatres teamed up to produce Suzuki’s The Tale of Lear, with an American all-male cast.Footnote ⁴ During those years, Suzuki visited and taught at several American universities including the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; University of California, San Diego; and Juilliard in New York. Also, in 1988, Peter Zeisler, cofounder in 1963 of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre and from 1972 to 1995 the executive director of Theatre Communications Group, brought Bogart and Mark Lamos, artistic director of Hartford Stage, to Toga. The visit was, in part, a response to Suzuki’s wish and Zeisler’s encouragement, to find American companies to present work at the Toga International Arts Festival. On this trip, Bogart met Ellen Lauren, then a member of Suzuki’s Company, and Leon Ingulsrud, Suzuki’s assistant director. Lauren became a founding member of SITI and Ingulsrud, who worked with SITI from the start but remained a member of SCOT, joined a few years later.

In 1991, while touring his production of The Chekhov to Purchase, NY, and StageWest in Springfield, MA, Suzuki renewed his interest in an American partnership. Also in 1991, while SCOT was performing Dionysus at the New York International Festival of the Arts, Suzuki and Bogart reconnected at a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel: the seeds of SITI were planted. Not long after, in 1992, the two created a manifesto, “Towards A New International Theatre Center,” stating their commitment to “the growth of individual artists and the development of a new approach to world theatre.” Their plans were shared in the program for SITI’s inaugural season.Footnote ⁵ Suzuki’s intent was to sever himself from the collaboration after five years.

Suzuki invited Bogart to Toga to work with him in 1992 on a new production of Orestes by Charles L. Mee. He requested that Bogart bring American actors trained in the Suzuki Method. Bogart already had a deep interest in actors who had Suzuki training. According to Webber:

In fact, Bogart appreciated the actors’ focus, presence, and particularly their stillness. She asked how it came to be: “You don’t shuffle your feet. You’re very clear. Your voices are good. Why are you all so good?” (2023).

Then, in the late summer of 1992, Suzuki and Bogart together led the first summer institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga, NY, out of which the SITI Company would grow. Students came to train with Suzuki’s company, who brought the productions they had developed in Toga earlier that year: SCOT’s Dionysus and Bogart and SCOT’s coproduction of Mee’s Orestes. At this point, according to Darron West, Bogart was clear that “I want to make a certain kind of work and I have to have a company to do it, so I’m going to make a company” (2023).

At the Saratoga Institute the following year, the Suzuki Method was taught alongside the Viewpoints, which Bogart used as a way of “bringing actors together quickly and establishing a company ethos” (2023). Suzuki brought SCOT’s King Lear and Bogart showed an early incarnation of The Medium, SITI’s first production. At this point, Bogart clearly planned to develop an ensemble that would train in both Suzuki’s method and her extension of Overlie’s Viewpoints. The intention was to devise original works with international collaboration. By the 1994 third iteration of the Saratoga Institute, SITI had been established with a clear mission:

• To create bold new productions;

• To perform and tour these productions nationally and internationally;

• To train together consistently;

• To train theatre professionals and students in an approach to acting that forges unique and highly disciplined artists for the theatre;

• To create opportunities for artistic dialogue and cultural exchange. (Bogart 2007:44)

Figure 5.

Akiko Aizawa, Ellen Lauren, Stephen Duff Webber, and Makela Spielman training prior to Under Construction, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2009. (Photo courtesy of SITI Company)

Early work focused on the performance of what Bogart termed “theatrical essays” (2023). Within four years, SITI had dramatized nondramatic material from Marshall McLuhan in The Medium; reimagined bits and pieces of five Chekhov plays in Small Lives/Big Dreams; and extracted text from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to make an argument between Newtonian and quantum physics in Going, Going, Gone. Methods of devising were ambitious and diverse. Bogart writes about Going, Going, Gone:

The Medium, as well as Small Lives/Big Dreams, and Going, Going, Gone were subsequently performed in Toga, Japan; in New York at New York Theatre Workshop and PS 122; and at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Training noncompany members was central right from the start. SITI was inspired by Suzuki’s focus on training and they also recognized that training could provide the company with sustainable income. Combining the Suzuki Method with the Viewpoints became what O’Hanlon describes as “this sort of holistic entity. And that really, that’s really what finally exploded. So, it [training] went from an extra income stream to actually being part of our identity” (2023b).

Conversations in Toga among the American actors who would later form SITI were forward thinking. Leon Ingulsrud remembers these discussions:

Figure 6.

The Medium. From left: Will Bond, Kelly Maurer, Tom Nelis, J.Ed Araiza, and Ellen Lauren. New York Theatre Workshop, 1994. (Photo by Joan Marcus; courtesy of SITI Company)

What these artists valued in SCOT’s work was clear, as Webber recalls:

But even with these points of focus, SCOT did not mean the same thing for all early members of SITI. Again, Ingulsrud remembers varying perspectives:

From the beginning, SITI was built in an environment where different, often juxtaposed, ideas coexisted in a dynamic and energized creative space. Power floated among everyone in the room in a world in which, according to West, “the best idea wins—which is an easy thing to say, but a harder thing to really do practically—to get everybody on board with an idea, to really fully try it, and then try something else” (2023).

The SITI Company coalesced over the next three to four years as Bogart and early company members recognized in fellow artists a kindred spirit and aesthetic. Many of the actors who joined had traditional Stanislavsky-based American actor training; most had successful careers. But they sought a more rigorous physical training that was not imposed from the outside. Maurer recalls:

The founding actors of SITI—Ellen Lauren, Will Bond, Kelly Maurer—all studied with Suzuki for years before SITI. Suzuki suggested them to Bogart for Orestes, their first collaboration in Toga. According to Lauren, “we already had a taste for company ensemble work and what it was to work in a company and have a glue, like a training, that was there to hold you together when you didn’t know what you were doing” (2023a). Tom Nelis was also in Orestes and part of the first summer in Saratoga. Over the next few years, Webber, KJ Sanchez, and Jefferson Mays, all of whom had been at UC San Diego when Bogart visited, joined the company.

Akiko Aizawa and Leon Ingulsrud were both members of the SCOT Company. Aizawa acted in Dionysus and Ingulsrud in Orestes during SITI’s first summer at Saratoga. Ingulsrud worked with SITI from its inception and within a few years transitioned fully from SCOT to SITI. Aizawa, a member of SCOT for seven years, followed later, after training with SITI in 1995 and 1996, which she felt was “like heaven” (2023). About the same time, Barney O’Hanlon joined. He had worked with Bogart off and on since 1986 and had studied the Viewpoints with both Overlie and Bogart at NYU. When Jefferson Mays had to leave the production of Small Lives/Big Dreams as it went on tour, Bogart invited O’Hanlon to replace him and he quickly agreed. He notes, “Each of us had been out in the regional theatre, and I think ultimately all of us wanted to be in a company because that idea of an actual company in the United States was pretty radical at the time” (2023b).

Bogart directed several shows at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) between 1990 and 1993 where she met actor J.Ed Araiza and sound designer Darron West. She invited both to join SITI. West recalls: “KJ and Ellen sort of grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, Anne’s doing this project with this company she’s starting in Japan this summer. You should go tell her if you want to do it’” (2023). According to West, one day in rehearsal at ATL in 1995, Bogart “pointed at [stage manager] Megan [Wanless] and said, ‘Don’t you think she’s one of us?’ Anne immediately was just like, ‘Hey, do you wanna come work with us?’ And then boom, you know, Megan came along around Going, Going, Gone time and ended up running the company for a while” as executive director (2023). In 1991, at En Garde Arts, Bogart directed Mee’s Another Person in a Foreign Country. Mee quickly found a home when SITI was formed, and notes that they “seek so much knowledge to begin with but also because they are such open people, ready to take in what the playwright has done and take that to where they think it might go” (2023). West describes that early group as “Anne Bogart’s Ragtag Theatre Players,” which they were, for a while. But, according to West:

When the opportunity to join SITI appeared, no one hesitated. According to Maurer, “When you get a chance to change your world—to do something that’s so hard—it’s unbelievably unique and makes everything else pale—you go” (2023). In 2022, the SITI website still listed all these artists (except Mays, Nelis, Sanchez, and Wanlass) as active members of the company, for many, 30 years after they had joined. The list also includes actor Samuel Stricklen (joined 2006), designers Neil Patel (joined 1998) and James Schuette (joined 1998), and stage manager Ellen Lavaia (joined 2013).

The early years were challenging. The Medium, Small Lives/Big Dreams, and Going, Going, Gone were labor intensive, requiring months to develop. Money was tight and SITI pursued opportunities as far as Ireland. Over its life, SITI performed and trained in over 27 countries. Araiza remembers, “We had a little tiny office on Grand Street down in Soho and the actors would meet at the Moonlight Diner” (2023). According to West,

As Lauren recalls:

Early on, SITI recognized that they needed partners with resources, an effective network of presenting and producing organizations. These collaborative partnerships provided SITI with physical space and financial support. An early supporter was Marc Masterson of the City Theatre in Pittsburgh:

Over time, SITI was recognized and supported with opportunities to perform at the Wexner Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and major regional theatres including ATL, City Theatre, Court Theatre, and the San Jose Rep.

SITI was tremendously productive in its first decade. They radically interpreted classics: Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1998) and Hay Fever (2002), August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1997), Bertolt Brecht’s Seven Deadly Sins (1998), and Deborah Dratell’s opera Lilith (2001). SITI collaborated with Jocelyn Clark on Alice’s Adventures (1998) and Room (adapted from the work of Virginia Woolf, 2002) and with Mee on bobrauschenbergamerica (2001). They did their version of Orson Welles’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds using a text by Naomi Iizuka (2002). They devised Cabin Pressure combining Coward and Albee (1999), Culture of Desire reflecting Warhol (1997), and Bob inspired by Robert Wilson (1999). Will Bond notes that SITI’s “productions were built not just for the sake of building productions, but as an expression of a specific group of people working together in time. Productions that we made were an expression of our personal conversations and interests” (2023).

But money was tight and the future insecure. According to Brad Carlin:

In 1999, SITI generated about $425,000 in income; 50% of that was from engagement fees and about 30% from teaching. The remainder included grants and contributions, but this kind of funding did not flourish until the early 2000s. Ingulsrud describes “a kind of puritan embarrassment about self-promotion coupled with a kind of arrogance like, that’s below us” (2023). The need for money was ever-present. West recalls “we would stuff envelopes in Barney’s apartment back in the day to keep it going about midway through and each time it was like, ‘Oh, we weathered that storm’” (2023). Through it all, company members were consistently employed. Wanlass knew, “We needed Anne to be able to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m only interested in directing this project if I can bring my company members on board. This is how we work’” (2023). Bogart recalls, “We lost a lot of work early on but then people didn’t call us unless they could pay for it” (2023). Employment was also for those not directly involved in a production as Wanlass explains:

SITI Company Chronology of Works

SITI created and performed 277 productions. This is a list of each work’s premier performance. Many of these shows originated at Skidmore College where SITI held its summer residency. Skidmore productions are only listed here if there was no premier outside the residency.

The system worked. West notes, “I can’t believe we made it 30 years. It’s still mind-blowing to me a little bit” (2023).

In the early 1990s, it was not exceptional to be part of a theatre ensemble.Footnote ⁶ But, as Nelson Chia, longtime SITI student and now part of the SITI Ambassador program says, “By the 2000s, SITI was exceptional, not only for their longevity but because they were a functional ensemble” (2023). They had established their strong national network, they had codified and expanded their training, and they were committed as a full ensemble to their mission. But they remained itinerant. Then in 2008, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Nonprofit Finance Fund awarded SITI a $1,175,000 grant—part of Duke’s plan to “tackle sector-wide challenges such as shifting audiences, decreased funding sources and new technologies” (Jones 2008). SITI’s grant was specifically to enable them to “establish this ensemble-based theatre company as a resident New York City organization with relevant partnerships and support” (Jones 2008). SITI shifted their business model. According to Wanlass,

Returning to a familiar model, but with stronger executive leadership and an effective board, SITI was on much more solid financial footing. In addition to the Duke grant, SITI had, over 10 years, more than doubled their income (close to $958,000 in 2008). According to Carlin, “a majority of that came from earned sources split between engagement revenue from touring ($350k) and teaching ($225k). The roughly $300k in contributed revenue was heavily weighted toward foundations and government sources (federal, state, and local)” (2023). The financial security enabled SITI to expand their horizon. As O’Hanlon notes, “We were an acting ensemble that could fluidly and organically cross over into other disciplines. We did opera, dance, music, visual art, and theatre” (2023b). Overall, the work was, at this time, on a larger scale. Araiza describes the Company’s evolution: “Our early work in the SITI Company was heavily devised. In the last 10 years, we’ve devised a bit, not as much, even though our work always has a certain devising element to it, even when we’re doing The Bacchae, or when we’re doing Radio Macbeth, or when we’re doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (2023). In 2014 Megan Wanlass, who had been executive director for 14 years, passed the reins to Michelle Preston. Administratively, the company was more solid than it had ever been. Still, it was never easy. As Ingulsrud rues: “It felt like we were bucking the wind for 30 years” (2023).

As the company matured, there were internal challenges as well, some emanating from the personal lives of the artists. Many of them had partners and some had children, forcing them to make hard choices—to turn down tours or distant training opportunities. The company expanded its artistic associates as actors and teachers were needed. It was new territory for the company and it was challenging. Some company members were freer to work more. Some chose to work long days; it was how they wanted to contribute—to live their life. But, according to Lauren:

Figure 7.

Will Bond in Bob. New York Live Arts, 2012. (Photo by Shebab Hossain; courtesy of SITI Company)

The formation of the conservatory in 2013, primarily driven by the desire for a longer-term relationship with their students, was, in part, also an effort to provide more work for company members in New York City.

Over 30 years together, artistic relationships within the company also shifted. SITI members became progressively empowered by their relationship with Bogart who expected them to participate equally and even, at times, to assert themselves more aggressively in the process. No one disputes that Bogart was extremely present in SITI rehearsals, but simultaneously, particularly in recent years, she kept a distance, putting more space between herself and the company, both in and out of the rehearsal room. This was perhaps not unexpected after many, many difficult rehearsals in which the company, according to Ellen Lauren, “just shut her down” (2018). In 2011, SITI decided to add a second artistic director to accommodate Bogart’s time away for both personal and professional reasons. Lauren and Ingulsrud both sought the position and ultimately, they proposed a triumvirate, which the company supported.

Nonetheless, Bogart remained a driving force in the theatrical conversation. Early conception, research, and the formulation of the big questions that drove the process continued to come from her. But this does not mean that she knew what the end product would be, and, over the years, Bogart’s need to guide the often far-reaching exploration process diminished. In the first decade of SITI, if Bogart felt the work was over expanding, or if there was disagreement, she would interrupt. In the final decade, Bogart did not interrupt, allowing creative conflicts to linger for as long as it took the company to resolve them. Will Bond saw that “she would let these disagreements go on for days, for a long time, before she felt like she had to intervene. It could be super frustrating. And that was a change” (2018). Still, remaining with their process of exploration, or what Bond sometimes refers to as “chaos,” ultimately enabled the company to facilitate greater discovery.

In 2018, SITI was a nearly $1.2 million organization with the majority of income coming from engagement revenue, half of that from teaching and workshop revenue and the remainder from contributions, which increased in the final years as the company solicited funding for legacy activities (Carlin 2023). But the conversations were not about the finances. Over a decade ago, they began talking about ending despite a new level of financial security. As Bogart recalls:

From left: Ellen Lauren, Stephen Duff Webber, Leon Ingulsrud, Akiko Aizawa, J.Ed Araiza, Will Bond, and Anne Bogart in their New York Studio, 2017. (Photo by Darron West; courtesy of SITI Company)

Maurer says:

According to O’Hanlon, it was only the timing that remained in question:

Executive director Michelle Preston says:

Covid shut down some of the big plans SITI had for their final years, but even so, they had an expansive final season. They led 12 trainings, in the States and abroad, revisited some of their favorite works including The Medium, Radio Macbeth, and War of the Worlds, and performed at favorite places, including BAM and City Theatre. SITI took their final bow on 19 December 2022 at the Fisher Center on the campus of Bard College with A Radio Christmas Carol.

Ending has not been easy for members, as Lauren stated in the spring of 2023:

Training with SITI

The training engineered by SITI, their unique combination of the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints, is SITI’s global legacy. The Suzuki training instills discipline while the Viewpoints expand flexibility in imagination and physical performance, nurturing freedom. According to Araiza:

Thousands of artists trained directly with SITI in Saratoga, at their Skidmore summer program, at their conservatory in New York, or at the hundreds of training sessions they led worldwide. This global training expanded yearly. A two-week workshop at an arts festival often led to an invitation to teach at a university or theatre. Wherever SITI went to teach, they established a community of artists engaged in the work. Some of these people later reengaged with SITI for another week-long training or for a month at Saratoga; others worked for many months, five days a week, in SITI’s conservatory program. Many returned year after year to reconnect with and to advance their artistic preparation. Bogart expresses what she sees for her students: “SITI offers rigorous training that can help to cultivate focus, power, clarity, and courage combined with intuitive trust” (in Dudley 2015). For some, a greater value was that the language of training provides an organizing principle helping artists to work collectively.

The Suzuki training is a deeply rigorous physical, vocal, mental, and spiritual practice focused largely on the relationship of the lower body and feet with the diaphragm and voice. The training is geared toward stimulating a sense of presence in space with movements that provide criteria to measure yourself individually and as an ensemble. Bogart likens it to ballet barre work: “It’s like looking in the mirror every day and seeing how you’re not breathing right, or why your balance is off” (2023). Julia Whitworth in “Translating Theologies of the Body” writes that the work presents an extraordinary challenge and a unique opportunity for self-assessment: “The diagnostic nature of the technique comes to the fore—it’s the participant against her body, against her breath, against the training, against the floor” (2003:24). The Suzuki training, practiced daily and with a focused engagement prior to performance, places attention on the center of gravity and footwork, engendering extraordinary breath control and command over the body, including, most of all, the ability to be still.

Lauren and Araiza describe the training as foundational for any creative endeavor that does not dictate a style of acting. “The training seeks to heighten the actor’s emotional and physical power and commitment to each moment on the stage” (SITI n.d.a). Ultimately, it demands that the performer embraces the difficult, pushes forward, and comes back again and again to work harder and smarter. This energy carries into the Viewpoints training, which similarly demands its own commitment to the difficult, to pushing forward, to coming back again and again to work harder and smarter.

There are an extraordinary number of artists who have trained with SITI who now share the training with new ensembles in private workshops, at international conferences, and classrooms throughout the world. The Viewpoints training as practiced by SITI or the combination of the Viewpoints with Suzuki is an established practice in North America and beyond. It is part of the curriculum at universities and arts institutions from the Netherlands to Singapore, from Ireland to Chile to South Africa. Joseph Haj of the Guthrie Theatre relates how this developed over time:

Figure 8.

Ellen Lauren, Stephen Duff Webber, and Will Bond training prior to Radio Macbeth, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2009. (Photo courtesy of SITI Company)

Richard Hess of CCM, another proponent of the work, studied extensively with SITI:

Probably more performers studied Suzuki with SITI than with Suzuki himself and more practiced the Viewpoints with SITI than with Mary Overlie. For many years, Overlie remained focused on SITI’s use of the Viewpoints for both deconstruction and creation, and for staging, but the relationship between Overlie and Bogart was often fraught. At times Overlie stated that she was “sympathetic to the idea that […] the Six Viewpoints began to change as [Bogart and Landau] worked with them” (1998:38). At other times, Overlie described Bogart’s progressive ownership of the Viewpoints as “devastating” (in Bogart 2012:418). Despite the fact that Bogart often explicitly referenced Overlie as she taught, “The Viewpoints” became known as Bogart’s creation. In the end, it was perhaps that Bogart referred to her work as “Viewpoints” that was the most difficult for Overlie; in later SITI years, Bogart herself, according to Ingulsrud, said she “should have called it something else” (2023).

Figure 9.

SITI Company training prior to Under Construction, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2009. (Photo courtesy of SITI Company)

In 2000, when, according to Lauren, Bogart’s “fame for having invented the Viewpoints was catching fire,” Overlie and her colleague Wendell Beavers invited SITI Company members to participate in a six-week, Six Viewpoints intensive they were leading at NYU. Bond and O’Hanlon took them up on the offer and in subsequent years, Beavers, who taught the Viewpoints as Overlie created them, worked with SITI at their invitation and, as O’Hanlon recalls, “educated us on Mary and the origins and history of the Six Viewpoints” (O’Hanlon 2024). What followed these purposeful encounters was a slow movement by SITI back toward the Viewpoints in their original incarnation—“the six”—both in practice and in an advocacy for restoring Overlie’s legacy through more purposeful acknowledgement of her work. In the last decade of the company, several SITI members taught using the six Viewpoints Overlie identified. Others were hesitant having never studied directly with Overlie and chose to continue to teach with Bogart’s nine. Ingulsrud notes “it moved the center of gravity pretty significantly but implementation was not symmetrical. We did not come to consensus” (2024). Still, according to Lauren, “as a company, we did what we always did and what we knew how to do. It wasn’t prescribed or labeled as either/or. It was the best of both. It deepened us and I am eternally grateful we had exposure to Mary and Wendell before it was too late” (2024b). In the end, it was not so much a reconciliation of two different methodologies but a recognition that what Bogart originally brought to the company was one artist’s way of talking about it, emphasizing it, applying it, but what she was talking about was what Overlie had created. Particularly in their later years, SITI company members taught with and their students were often inspired to study with Overlie or Beavers.

There is additional circularity in that SITI’s work has also invigorated the Suzuki Company’s training. According to Lauren, “Suzuki sometimes gave us a hard time because of how much we were teaching. But now a lot of the people they’re getting over there have come through our program” (2023a). Fernando Montanares, who studied with SITI for many years and is now a SITI Ambassador, was in Toga in March 2023 and recalls, “We were talking with other people from the States that today we don’t have SITI anymore, so everyone has to go to Toga to train in the Suzuki Method, with the source of the knowledge. Before we had these poles, in Japan and also the States, but now everyone has to go to Japan” (2023).

For years, SITI conducted the training programs to earn money. Income from teaching in residencies, at their summer intensives, and at their conservatory sustained the company. But teaching was also driven by a desire to elevate actor training. In a HowlRound interview, “Your Guide to Theatre Education,” Bogart, Lauren, and Ingulsrud listed elements of actor training they felt were in short supply: genuine collaboration, rigor, innovation, expressivity, objectivity, humor, crisis, intelligence, imagination, openness, and fierce compassion (Dudley 2015).

Finally, their teaching was driven by a desire to bring to others the practice that was essential to their own work.

Despite their seemingly oppositional qualities, the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints trainings are synergistic, each fortifying the other. The formality and exactitude of the Suzuki training combined with the purposeful freedom offered by the Viewpoints comprise an unusually comprehensive experience. Bogart shares that:

Relating the two methods, SITI student and ambassador Lisa Lechner:

Their harmony results from their aligned ability to expand an actor’s expressive capabilities. Suzuki “heightens the actor’s emotional and physical power and commitment to each moment on the stage.” The Viewpoints “allow the individual artist a way to practice observing the present moment with increasing sensitivity, and to respond with greater range” (SITI n.d.a). The Suzuki Method provides a grounding essential to the Viewpoints. The control, clarity, and focus of the Suzuki Method works in conjunction with the improvisational freedom of the Viewpoints to empower the actor.

While the term “training” is applied to this work, those who engage with it see it far more expansively. Bogart sees it as the “cement that’s kept us going over time” (in Vincentelli 2022). Ingulsrud:

Lauren adds, “we want students to make work, make new things we couldn’t make, make a big noise, build an audience for themselves, find their people, find their homes” (2023a).

Those who have studied with SITI use powerful words to talk about their training—epiphany, life-changing; and to describe the space of study—sacred. They are grateful for the “gift.” Vocal and physical prowess expand. Actors flex physical, emotional, and spiritual muscles they had never flexed. They find independence in their rehearsal rooms, and the ability to embrace and solve complex problems. They describe the work as revolutionary, cleansing, and challenging; it clears away the baggage, enabling forward movement. It is often described as transformative—with long-lasting impact.

For many, the training offers something unique. SITI artistic associate Violeta Picayo found “a training that unites body and voice and treats those as the same instrument, something I hadn’t found anywhere else, a tool set through which I could grow as an artist outside of a particular project” (2023). Jonathan Taylor, who both studied with SITI and worked for them, recognizes SITI training, and its impact as a “primary experience” in the lives of those who have experienced it, “is going to have deep and long ripples” (2023).

The company themselves see the training as exceptional. Lauren says of the summer intensive:

A quality that students describe as having a profound impact was the collaborative, horizontal nature of the training. There was no “guru”—no master—no traditional power dynamic. In many programs, specialists teach each given subject in a master-pupil relationship. “But when you study with SITI,” Ingulsrud notes, “the entire acting company teaches our core training. So, you will study the same material from multiple points of view. […The] master is the training itself. We are all studying it” (in Dudley 2015).

Lingafelter finds a “reciprocity in the exchange that’s happening between the teacher and the student” (2023). Lanxing Fu, coartistic director of the theatre ensemble Superhero Clubhouse and also a long-time SITI student, observes that “the way they teach is through collaboration as an ensemble rather than there being one singular genius who has all these great ideas and imparts their wisdom onto you” (2023). The work is welcoming, enveloping, and invigorating. Picayo found it extraordinary that “there was space for me to engage with people who have been making work together for so much longer than me and treated me as an artist who is there to really be in the conversation. Not someone to watch from the outside” (2023).

There is always more than one artist at the front of the room, leading the work, and those artists rotated. Members of the SITI Company who were not teaching were working alongside other students, demonstrating that this work is ongoing and that no artist, despite years of experience, has fully mastered it. This was described by director Ravi Jain as “empowering because we were working alongside these Titan artists” (2023). SITI student and ambassador Thomas Jones clearly remembers the “look on the faces of SITI artists as they listen to each other teach and share. That level of depth and understanding is only possible when an ensemble has worked as they have” (2023). The care and respect they have for each other and their students were consistently evidenced.

Students came to study with SITI from an array of backgrounds and for various reasons. Some came because they had seen SITI perform and were inspired to elevate their artistry; some because the training offered a larger philosophical and aesthetic component, beyond most actor training opportunities; some because the training shaped not only actors but theatre-makers. They came because they sought training that recognized the primacy of the body and were hungry for a visceral, rigorous engagement. They came seeking a community. Lingafelter says, “I think for my whole career, I was always looking for ensemble training and trying to work with people consistently over time. I’ve never been totally satisfied in rooms where I haven’t had those kind of deep relationships” (2023). Many were disillusioned with the theatre they knew and came to SITI as a last effort to reinvigorate their passion for the art. The thread tying all these motives together was the desire to work with like-minded people who were serious about the craft, and who had a practice on which they could build and use to converse with one another—a practice that could be the common denominator inside an ensemble.

Those who trained with SITI continued to train with SITI, or with ensembles or training collectives they formed following their SITI study. Training was a vehicle for accessing an international community of partners and potential collaborators. New communities were formed around the globe. People who had trained and now sought others with whom they could train sent collaborators to SITI, or invited SITI members to come to their communities.Footnote ⁷ Artists who trained with SITI began to teach. This global network is SITI’s most evident legacy.

Nelson Chia, long-time SITI student and now SITI Ambassador, and artistic director of Nine Years Theatre in Singapore, sees the work as essential:

Ravi Jain speaks of the need younger actors have for this rigorous training. He values extreme challenge and the rewards it brings.

Even the Covid pandemic did not interrupt the training. SITI taught virtually, which its students considered a lifeline. Current and former students met on Zoom to practice together. Some travelled across the country to shelter with other former students specifically so they could practice in community. Those who had to practice alone did so knowing that in their practice they remained part of a larger community.

SITI training is intergenerational. SITI students are teaching new students and over the company’s 30-year life, students of students are now teaching new generations. When SITI members first recognized that there were those who had come to study with them who would return home and themselves teach, it gave them pause. Worried about distillation or misapplication by those who perhaps had only taken a weekend workshop, they were initially possessive. Araiza remembers:

But it quickly became apparent that SITI’s ability to control who taught in their name, and what they taught, would be very limited. Over time, they found peace with this. Araiza advises, “Take it, use it, do it conscientiously and with rigor as you develop your own journey” (2023). As Maurer notes, training changes over time: “I can only imagine Stanislavsky or Michael Chekhov. I mean, they would look at what is being offered now in their names and go, what is that?” (2023).

Still, SITI members always preferred that anyone who planned to teach at least begin by studying directly with them. As this becomes less likely—SITI members will continue to teach sporadically and as individuals but not as a company—this core component of SITI will pass. But they hope that they can continue to share the work by means of their ambassador program, in which their students who have evidenced the strongest commitment to teaching with integrity will continue to do so and will also provide SITI Company members with opportunities to continue to share the work.

Whether or not the SITI name will endure is unclear. The training may eventually exist without any SITI association. But the legacy remains, even untethered. Ingulsrud shares a conversation he had with Suzuki during his last summer in the Suzuki Company:

But for now, with nearly 50 ambassadors spanning the globe committed to carrying on in SITI’s name, the training may become even more widely known than it was at the end of SITI’s life as an ensemble.

A New Generation of Theatre-makers

A primary impact of SITI having trained thousands of artists is the formation of dozens of new ensembles. When SITI chose to sunset, the company was hopeful that their choice would support a “necessary evolution […] of companies that represent a broader range of aesthetics, identities, perspectives and values” (SITI n.d.b). This has come to pass.

The work SITI shared at Skidmore, at their conservatory, and in their workshops was equally focused on training and on creating theatre. Students left their encounter with SITI hungry to form their own companies. Many focused on devising, using the Viewpoints to create a common vocabulary and a methodology. Richard Hess remembers Tina Landau offering a demonstration:

Companies who trace their roots to SITI are numerous and exist across the globe. Their productions may not resemble SITI shows, but the SITI way of working is manifest. Some companies work only with SITI-trained artists, and some have SITI-trained artists at their core. Some are ensembles (although fewer since Covid) and some are transitory. Some use SITI’s administrative structure and others work in an array of business models. Some devise work while others use extant texts. But as their websites, publicity, playbills, and conversations indicate, they proudly declare their SITI ancestry, and many continued to study with SITI. Ingulsrud notes:

Araiza noted in 2023:

The SITI model facilitated community. As Joe Haj said, “I can’t think of a university that isn’t annually churning out the five people who are going to join together and create their own company. I don’t think the impulse has gone away. I don’t think the impulse will go away” (2023). This idea is reinforced by Lanxing Fu of the Superhero Clubhouse:

Companies formed under the SITI influence continue to train together, which serves to bind their community. This was particularly visible in the resilience of some of these companies during the pandemic. The companies to be highlighted here—a small representative sample of perhaps 25 currently working—vary greatly in their practice and the shows they produce.Footnote ⁸ But their methodologies and relationships with training clearly show their ties to SITI.

The Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s mission is “to propose new ways of being through creative inquiry and performance.” PETE was formed in 2011. Their website resonates with their SITI roots, speaking to collaboration, training, and a “radical kind of presence shared with audiences” (PETE n.d.). Coartistic director and founding member Rebecca Lingafelter says, “it’s hard to capture the depth of SITI’s influence on our lives personally and as a company. And it is hard to express how deeply they have changed what the American theatre can look like” (2023).

All the founding members of PETE studied with SITI. They had all been drawn to SITI by witnessing a production of Room, a solo play performed by Ellen Lauren. One had seen it in Seattle, one in Boston, one in New York. As Lingafelter points out, for all of them, it was a profound event: “To experience that kind of presence, to see a performer being truly transformative, was something that we just had never experienced” (2023). All of the current 14 ensemble members—performers, designers, and writers—train together in Viewpoints and Suzuki. Even guest artists work from the body, if not the Suzuki Method. PETE also runs a 10-month training program passing on the SITI legacy.

PETE produces one or two new productions each year. They do not have their own space for shows, but they do have a space for training. They’ve performed in various venues including the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and Reed College. Most often they are supported by the venue—sometimes with production assistance, sometimes with space and marketing. Most recently, they performed at a bar/café, recognizing the need to bring their work to those who don’t attend traditional performance spaces. A partnership with a regional theatre is likely in their future.

In their 10 years of life, PETE has built a following with audiences and critics, “fans” who consider themselves “lucky” to see a PETE show. But PETE does not appeal to all.

In response to PETE’s Beckett’s Women, an evening of short plays by Samuel Beckett produced in 2020, Krista Garver wrote:

Figure 10.

Ellen Lauren in Room. Julia Miles Theatre, NY, 2011. (Photo by Chasi Annexy; courtesy of SITI Company)

SuperGeographics is a global ensemble of artists who have worked with or trained with SITI. Members live in the US, Chile, Australia, and Mexico but they come physically to the same place to make work. SuperGeographics combines their interest in “disparate” and “marginalized” cultures with a commitment to “horizontality in executive structure” (SuperGeographics n.d. and Taylor 2023). The group emerged from The Water Company, whose members trained at the SITI 2015 summer intensive. SuperGeographics uses the Viewpoints to stage devised and existing written texts, including Castillo de Cartos (by Charles L. Mee, 2018), Panic Everything’s Fine (2017), and Helen (2022). As cofounder and artistic director Jonathan Taylor says, “There’s a lot of recycling happening of the component parts that made up SITI and the experiences that we’ve had in SITI” (2023). Unlike SITI their ensemble is fluid, because as Taylor notes:

Although SuperGeographics’ internationality makes it difficult to convene a consistent ensemble, because they prioritize working with artists who have SITI training, even artists in the group who have not previously worked together can connect quickly through their SITI roots. As director and former SITI associate artist Violeta Picayo realizes, “If there’s already shared language, we get to the unknown between us with a stronger foundation” (2023). Taylor notes that it is not only the training or sense of ensemble that comes from SITI:

SuperGeographics also follows SITI’s lead by pursuing support from an array of international partnerships. Some, says Taylor, “have brick and mortar theatres, and some have people who want to do the training, and some have ideas for plays” (2023). For example, SuperGeographics collaborates with Still Space Theatre in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, whose artistic director and founder, Akhshay Gandhi, met Taylor at the SITI conservatory in 2016.

SuperGeographics also directly engages SITI Company alumni. Darron West is their sound designer and Megan Carter, past producing director for SITI, produces for SuperGeographics. For Helen, Bogart introduced them to people at the Getty Villa and to Anne Hamburger, founder of New York’s En Garde Arts. Hamburger produced some of Bogart’s early work. Taylor comments, “Helen is a product of SuperGeographics fully and purely, but it’s also very much a product of our relationships and experiences with SITI” (2023). This connection is sometimes less explicit but nonetheless evident. A New York Times reviewer found their deconstructed text reminiscent of Mee (Collins-Hughes 2023). But SITI’s influence is most clearly felt in the powerful, focused actors whose physical presence and vocal work clearly reflect their training.

Jem Pickard and Lanxing Fu, the codirectors of the Superhero Clubhouse in New York, were both long-time students of SITI. Inspired by a 2006 production of bobrauschenbergamerica, Pickard headed to Skidmore:

Pickard started Superhero Clubhouse in 2007. Their mission is to “create theatre to enact climate and environmental justice, cultivate hope and inspire a thriving future”—what they term “eco-theatre” (SC n.d.). The company maintains a strong relationship with the science community, often collaborating on specific projects about climate change. Flying Ace and the Storm of the Century (2013) was created with scientists from Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Piece of Cake (2019) was developed by Fu and Fabian Wagner, a climate scientist at Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. They have had an array of residencies including those at Theatre Row’s Kitchen Sink and Pratt Institute’s STEAMplant, and have received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts as well as an array of private foundations.

Superhero Clubhouse’s work is designed to have broad appeal. As Melissa Moschitto wrote in the Brooklyn Rail:

Early on, Superhero Clubhouse tried to consistently incorporate SITI training, but they ultimately limited this effort because of their commitment to working with a broad array of artists, who may not have had SITI training. Pickard recognized that:

That said, Pickard acknowledges that “many of our early productions were built upon the questions and ideas that came directly from SITI training” (2023). Fu says that the rigor of the performances, the use of space and time, the presence of the body are all “part of our rehearsal processes, but it’s not explicitly stated” (2023). Superhero Clubhouse sees their core values—commitment to interdisciplinarity, rigorous work, a nonhierarchical ensemble, the presence of a sound designer throughout the process, and continually questioning what comprises art—as coming directly from SITI. Like their mentors, they continuously construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their work. While they do still offer classes akin to SITI’s work, such as “Devising for Social Change,” much of Superhero’s “training” is now focused on workshops open to the community, including an eco-performance lab and science storytelling.

SITI’s impact can also be seen in companies whose members encountered SITI’s work indirectly at a university. Richard Hess incorporated his SITI training into the curriculum of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Five alumni then studied with SITI and formed Hit the Lights! Theatre Company (HTL), an ensemble of multidisciplinary artists who collectively and nonhierarchically create and perform stories. Cofounders Casey Leach and Kristopher Dean acknowledge their SITI training. Dean: “It was extraordinarily formative for me. You are truly thrown together with these people and told to make, to create” (2023).

Founded in 2017, HTL continues to practice the Viewpoints and compose work using SITI’s methods. As they bring in new artists, Leach says “we are very careful with the way in which we teach people the process in order to maintain the collaborative spirit” (2023). Like SITI, HTL earns money by teaching—they work in high schools, universities, and at other theatre companies such as the Atlantic Theatre in New York. Leach enthuses: “Like SITI, we have something cool and then teach that cool thing. […] I think that might be the most brilliant thing about what it was that SITI did. The teaching brought people to their work” (2023). Leach notes that HTL does not teach exactly what they learned but rather, as Dean explains, teach: “their version of Viewpoints and composition work, constantly in pursuit of this perhaps seemingly impossible task of working in a nonhierarchical way, inside of a very hierarchical structure that is the American theatre” (2023).

HTL, which averages two new productions a year, does not have a permanent home. They sometimes rent spaces but also have ongoing relationships with Ars Nova, the Peoples Improv Theater, and the New Victory Theater, all in New York. Their success is evidenced by the many commissions they get, including from the School of Drama at the New School, New York City Children’s Theater, and the New York Botanical Garden. Critical response to their work shows an appreciation of their combining strength and whimsy. Alan Scherstuhl of the Village Voice described their production, Whales, as a “punk-rock shadow-puppet sea-chantey sing-along marvel” (2018). While HTL’s work does not resemble SITI’s, the physical relationship among the actors and powerful stage presence in performance recall their mentors.

Figure 11.

Hanjo. From left: Akiko Aizawa, Stephen Duff Webber, and Christian Frederickson (on viola). Japan Society, NY, 2017. (Photo by Julie Lemberger; courtesy of SITI Company)

Director Rachel Chavkin, after finishing her BFA in the Drama Department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, studied with SITI for several years and then trained with Bogart in the MFA directing program at Columbia University. Chavkin recognizes that SITI “changed how acting in theatre and performance is taught” (2023). Well-known for her work on Broadway, Chavkin is also the founding artistic director of The TEAM, which The Guardian described as “theatrical excavators of American culture, American dreams, and the American psyche” (Billington et al. 2019). The TEAM devises new work collaboratively where “it is nearly impossible to trace any one line of dialogue or image back to a single author’s hand. To date, we have created and toured 12 original works” (TEAM n.d.a). The TEAM’s work has received much critical praise. In 2019, The Guardian named their production of Mission Drift one of the 50 best shows of the 21st century (TEAM n.d.b.).

Chavkin initially invested herself in the SITI practice, noting, “I used Viewpoints very, very directly and aggressively to make my very first collaboratively created show, which was Howell, an adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem [“Howl”] (2023).Footnote ⁹ But soon things changed. Chavkin says, “The idea that there was any sort of shared physical practice went away quite quickly at the beginning of The TEAM, in part because the rest of the members pretty aggressively were not interested in my teaching them this methodology” (2023). Indeed, The TEAM shows an array of influences, including the Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service. Still, in Chavkin’s descriptions of the TEAM’s work, the group’s kinship with SITI is evident. “Everything is collaboratively written line by line almost, and moment by moment. It’s very, very physical work. It’s very funny, often” (2023). The TEAM also leads workshops such as their 2024 “Devising within a Democracy” (TEAM n.d.c.).

Because SITI toured globally and attracted international artists to their training at Skidmore and in NYC, ensemble-based theatres who trace their origins to SITI exist across the globe. Gábor Kozma of Chance of the Hunter in Budapest states: “SITI really helped me to form my own ideas about how our companies should or can look […]. Artistic process and community process. When I started to think about forming a company, I followed SITI’s lead” (2023).

The Syndicate, founded in 2014 by artists who studied together at SITI’s inaugural conservatory earlier that year, includes members from Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Chicago, and the Hague. Their work, created collaboratively by the company, focuses on plays by “women, queer and trans+ artists” (Syndicate n.d.). Like the SuperGeographics, they come together physically in different cities to create work. This is a necessary by-product of artistic partnerships formed from the global community SITI inspired. After producing for six years, The Syndicate stopped during the pandemic. Presently, they are raising money to produce again. When SITI announced it was shutting down, Syndicate founder Janouke Goosen lamented:

Singapore’s Nine Years Theatre also began in 2014 and disbanded in 2021 as the Covid pandemic sent members in different directions. Under Nelson Chia’s leadership, Nine Years produced “re-imaginations of classics and adaptations of literary works” (NYT n.d.), and as Chia shared:

SITI began a collaboration with Nine Years on a bilingual version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters based on an adaptation by Sarah Ruhl. But the Covid pandemic kept the companies from performing together onstage. Instead, in 2021, Nine Years actors performed alongside projections of SITI performers. The performance, conceived and codirected by Chia and Darron West, could be viewed live in Singapore or streamed throughout the world.

In 2014, Chilean theatre artist Fernando Montanares asked his aunt in Spain to bring him books about theatre directors. Included in what she brought was Bogart’s 2001 A Director Prepares. As Montanares tells it, he “fell in love” and decided to study with SITI, which he did later that year at the summer institute (2023). The following year, Montanares returned to Chile and founded MB2 Theatre in Arica. But he also continued his studies with SITI at Skidmore and at their conservatory, and studied with SCOT in Japan as well. MB2 is a five-person ensemble, with Montanares and one other local artist trained by SITI. MB2 also works with another SITI alumna, Rocio Perez, who visits from Spain for three months each year. The company, guided by Montanares, trains in the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints. MB2’s devised pieces focus on local indigenous people; the work is very physical, what Montanares calls “dance-theatre” (2023). Montanares, a SITI Ambassador, says, “I think they are responsible for an invisible core of a new vanguard movement in theatre around the world that is connected through the training” (2023).

Christopher Manousos first encountered SITI in 2008 at the University of Windsor, Canada, where they came for a two-week intensive. Hearing from older classmates how “they were just the most incredible artists, and you just couldn’t even fathom how their minds worked and how creatively infused they were with what they did” (2023), Manousos took the workshop. He continued to study with SITI for many years beginning in 2009. In 2016, he founded House + Body, an “interdisciplinary performance company focusing on experimentation and collaboration” (House + Body n.d.). House + Body’s mission is akin to SITI’s:

House + Body is not an ensemble; they don’t have the money to support a permanent company. But the mornings of the first week of rehearsals are devoted to training for the cast and open to the public. This approach both prepares the cast while also reaching out to potential future collaborators.

Vueltas Bravas, of Bogota, Colombia, is a group whose primary artists met at SITI’s summer intensive in 2009. Over the next few years, Jhon Alex Toro Grajales and Gina Jaimes from Colombia, Tina Mitchell from Australia, and Lorenzo Montanini from Italy created a bilingual production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, adapted by SITI’s J.Ed Araiza. The show premiered in 2013 in Bogota and then toured to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Naples, Italy, and Cadiz, Spain. As of 2023, Vueltas Bravas was still performing Miss Julie but recent opportunities in Los Angeles and Mexico City were delayed due to the pandemic and busy schedules. Grajales describes Vueltas Bravas as a “one-hit company” (2023). The group planned a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but the project stalled when Albee’s estate offered rights to a production in either English or Spanish but denied the rights to a bilingual production.Footnote ¹⁰ In the summer of 2023, Vueltas Bravas offered their first summer intensive in Bogota with 11 participants from Colombia and the United States. Grajales shares:

Vueltas Bravas is planning their second intensive for summer 2024. They are not sure they are a company, but their commitment to working together whenever they can, and training others, is central to their lives. As Grajales says:

The landscape of these young ensembles is vast and energizing. Marc Masterson sees how SITI’s legacy might develop:

The work described here represents a small proportion of companies worldwide whose artists are SITI-trained. While none of these are SITI clones, they do evidence their generational link to the SITI legacy.

Collaborations

During the last third of its life, between 2009 and 2019, SITI collaborated with the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Streb Extreme Action, and visual artist Ann Hamilton, among others. These partnerships reflected the company’s, and particularly Bogart’s, desire to have SITI “grow out,” to challenge itself, to join their “model society with other model societies” (2023). O’Hanlon describes these collaborations as “amazing” and “mind-blowing,” capturing a company consensus. Ingulsrud notes:

Figure 12.

American Document, SITI and Martha Graham Dance Company members. Joyce Theater, New York, NY, 2010. (Photo by Costas; courtesy of SITI Company)

While SITI was in residence at Skidmore College every summer, other companies came and went. Work with the Graham Company began in 2009 when, according to Graham artistic director Janet Eilber:

Soon after their shared time in Saratoga, Eilber came to Bogart with a proposal: a partnership to reinvent Graham’s 1938 American Document, the dancer’s response to fascism. American Document featured Graham dancing while an actor read excerpts from the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a letter from Otetiani (later Sagoyewatha). Very little documentation of the original production remained, as Eilber shared with Bogart:

The performers cross-trained in each other’s classes. Bogart began with compositions, pairing actors and dancers together, providing some of Graham’s notes and asking the performers to come up with movement phrases. While elements of the Viewpoints such as time (tempo, duration of movement), shape (of the body), and movement of the body through space were familiar to the dancers, the expectation that they would use them as tools to create was new. Graham principal dancer Miki Orihara recalls:

Bogart encouraged the dancers to contribute and eventually, according to Orihara, “Some people started to say, ‘Oh, I think we should do this, or, you know, I have this idea’” (2023). Graham dancers were intrigued with Bogart. Orihara says:

Orihara remembers that the dancers were impressed with the actors’ “ability to speak with their bodies” (2023), which they had not expected from theatre artists. The dancers learned how to define a character and Orihara was excited to watch them do this, both while working with SITI and after. While the dancers’ skill sets expanded considerably, they were continuously challenged by the connection of the text to the movement. Charles Mee had been brought in to provide new written material for the piece. After watching the Graham company perform other works and getting a sense of the quality of their movement, he chose text ranging from Betty Smith’s 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to letters written by US soldiers in Iraq. Still Eilber recalls: “The actors danced and the dancers acted, and the piece came together” (2023). It was performed at New York’s Joyce Theatre in the spring of 2010. Although it was a success, it was too expensive to tour.

SITI’s postmodern approach to classics made them the perfect partner according to Eilber:

The Graham Company followed their collaboration with SITI with other artistic partnerships and with commissions from choreographers, moving away from performing only Graham work. According to Eilber, SITI helped to pave the way. “It was kind of a new experience for our dancers. But it prepared them for working with new choreographers who value improvisation” (2023).

Dance companies turn over quickly. In Graham’s current company, only Orihara worked with SITI. But selecting new dancers has been impacted by the SITI partnership according to Eilber:

Skidmore in the mid-’90s was also where SITI met the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, founded in 1982 and known for innovative, collaborative work that blends modern and classical movement. In residence at the same time, the two companies took each other’s classes, developed a mutual respect, and a desire for integration. Janet Wong, associate artistic director of the Jones Company, remembers the response of her company to SITI as, “Oh my God, this training is crazy” (2023). Twenty years later, in 2011, the Jones Company was hesitant about staging Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring until their producer, Bob Bursey, suggested collaborating with SITI. By then, half of the Jones dancers who knew SITI had moved on. As Wong notes, “They [SITI] were still there, all of them. But our company had completely changed” (2023). Still, they decided to pursue the collaboration.

Rite premiered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), in January 2013. The production then went to Bard and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While in residence at UNC, the two companies trained in each others’ methods. Wong notes how difficult it was to do SITI’s training, which challenged the performers to:

They started making the piece using SITI’s process of devising. This was not totally new to the Jones ensemble, as Wong said, “We have been making work together. It’s always collaborative. So, in a way, we also devise and work but without the terminology” (2023). Early on they defined small sections without a clear picture of the whole, using a hybrid system combining the Viewpoints with choreographic techniques brought by the dancers. The performers created shapes, gestures, and movement sequences to make a basic vocabulary—the common physical language—for the piece. Jones himself was not in these early rehearsals. That allowed the group to engage in the open-to-all process so valued by SITI. Wong: “They’re more democratic in the way they work. Everyone shares responsibility. In our company, there is a driving force” (2023).

The two companies had another collaborative residency at Skidmore in 2012 to further develop the piece. There they ran into a challenge familiar to SITI but new to the Jones artists. Wong remembers:

As they headed to the premier at Carolina Performing Arts, they created an ending. It was not one that fully satisfied anyone. The morning of opening night, they changed the ending they had just created by cutting a dialogue scene that led to the conclusion—which had been developed under Bogart’s watchful eye—and then revising what followed. This was not new territory for SITI. During their production of Private Lives, Bogart left earlier than the company for the Christmas holiday and the last thing she said was, “don’t you guys change anything.” But as West recalls:

Figure 13.

A Rite. SITI Company in collaboration with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. University of North Carolina, 2013. (Photo by Paul B. Goode; courtesy of SITI Company)

Wong says, “We learned a lot working with them.” For her, it was empowering; SITI was reinvigorated by these collaborations. Lauren:

Jones came in halfway through the process. He was able to look in from the outside. Wong remembers that Jones added elements that “lifted up or calmed a moment which was very important” (2023). His approach sharply contrasted with Bogart’s collaborative process. According to Wong, “The buck stops with Bill,” whereas

Wong values the opportunity to have worked with SITI in part because it gave the Jones company a chance to reconsider some of their company’s approaches to collaboration, to become more “horizontal.” Wong says, “I look at SITI Company’s body of work, the way they take apart theatre. It gave permission for other forms including dance to take things apart” (2023). The work on text also made its mark. In 2016, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company removed “dance” from their original name. “When we auditioned people, of course they have to be fierce movers,” says Wong. “But then at the last part, the auditionee is redoing text or singing. I hear Anne’s words often when we are working with texts—just the way she would direct” (2023). Also, the daily interaction with SITI had an impact. Again, Wong:

Figure 14.

Falling & Loving, SITI Company and Streb Extreme Action. PEAK Performances, Montclair State University, 2019. (Photo by Marina Levitskaya; courtesy of SITI Company)

A few years after the work with the Jones Company, Mee suggested a collaboration between Bogart and Elizabeth Streb, founder-director of Streb Extreme Action who describes their work as “a mixture of slam dancing, exquisite and amazing human flight and a wild action sport” (Streb Extreme Action n.d.). Mee had run into Streb at a party and over coffee, the two discussed working with text. Streb said she’d need a director and Mee suggested Bogart. He connected the two of them and, as Streb remembers, “We started chatting and then, lo and behold, there was some moment when we decided to collaborate” (2023). It was new territory for Streb:

Extreme Action’s collaboration with SITI became Falling & Loving, which premiered at Montclair State University’s PEAK Performances in 2019. Streb defined an environment in which the performers had to avoid two moving, airborne, bowling balls and manage multiple buckets also suspended in the air dropping flour, molasses, water, and sand when the performers pulled hanging strings. She didn’t know exactly how it would turn out, but “just thought it was one of the most glorious romps on unreasonableness that I’ve ever really constructed” (2023). Mee provided the text, excerpted from his plays. He knew the piece was about love so he decided there needed to be text that was “beautiful and fantastic and also scary and awful,” so he chose pieces from plays he had written and the SITI Company suggested other pieces included in Mee scripts they had performed (Mee 2023). As with the collaborations with Graham and Jones, the companies came together at Skidmore. The SITI and Streb company performers cross-trained, with everyone learning new skills. Streb remembers:

Bogart’s pursuit of freedom within the form meshed well with the methodology of the Streb performers who move, to a certain degree, as independent artists. According to Streb,

SITI actors were challenged by Streb, who is known for pushing the limits of the human body—defying gravity. Streb performers resemble acrobats who launch themselves into the air landing on their chest or sides. Streb believes that “risk and danger essences residing in an action room are necessary territories” (in THNKR 2013). The SITI Company came to the collaboration with some trepidation. As Bogart confirms, “We don’t leap from high places. We don’t know how to smash into things” (in Kourlas 2019). She remembers how it felt at the start: “The actors say it’s impossible. I take a deep breath and don’t tell them that I’m as nervous as they are, but I’m not going to let them know. ‘No,’ I say, ‘we’re doing it. We’re going in there. We’re going in. You can do it’” (in Bogart and Shevtsova 2021). Recognizing that these tasks were as daunting to SITI as speaking was to the Streb company, the performers coached each other through rehearsals with Streb’s dancers supporting fear of crashing and SITI supporting fear of speaking. Reviewers commented on being unable to distinguish Streb from SITI performers and O’Hanlon notes that they “were proud of having blurred those disciplinary lines” (2023a).

The work had lasting impact on SITI, as Lauren remembers:

While after Falling & Loving the Streb dancers did not use texts and SITI did not perform physically dangerous actions, the artists of both ensembles know the collaboration influenced future work. As Streb notes about Bogart, “she’s so brilliant that just hearing her direct them but also make comments is really just so magical on so many levels that I just keep learning from her” (2023).

Ann Hamilton first met SITI in 1998 during a SITI residency at the Wexner Center of The Ohio State University. Hamilton is a visual artist; she defines her large scale, “site-responsive process” as working with “common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor” (Hamilton n.d.). Bogart and Hamilton grew fascinated with each other’s work. Hamilton recalls, “There was just this kind of mutual recognition, or this feeling, [that] it’d be really great to do something together” (2023). Years later, in 2012, Hamilton was preparing the event of a thread at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. She wanted to use live performers as part of the installation. As Hamilton recalls, “I didn’t really know how I was gonna bring this in, but I knew it needed to be live. And so, totally intuitively, I got in touch with Anne and I was like, ‘I have this project. It’s really soon. I’m in New York, can I come talk to you?’” (2023). When they met Bogart suggested that Hamilton use SITI actors, sound, and lighting designers.

Figure 15.

the event of a thread, a collaboration with Ann Hamilton. Park Avenue Armory, 2012. (Photo by James Ewing; courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)

The result was stunning. The room was hung with great silks and swings available to the audience in an environment the New York Times described as “complexly participatory” (Smith 2012).

Hamilton credits the impact of the event of a thread on the collaboration:

Figure 16.

Akiko Aizawa in the theatre is a blank page, a collaboration with Ann Hamilton. UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, 2018. (Photo by Calista Lyon; courtesy of SITI Company)

In 2015, Hamilton and Bogart collaborated on a new installation, the theatre is a blank page, that used text from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The work premiered at the Wexner Center and then moved onto the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance in 2018.Footnote ¹² This ambitious undertaking asked the collaborators to attempt to solve, through their different approaches, a complex puzzle. As Hamilton put it:

Prior to working with the entire company, Hamilton and Bogart shared a residency of several weeks at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida, where they worked with Woolf’s text. Hamilton focused on the connection between text and textiles, Bogart on the connection between the text and the body. Together they asked how the words become tactile and how to make the act of reading visible. As Hamilton recounts their collaboration:

As the collaboration progressed through performances at Wexner and UCLA, Hamilton noted that she became more “comfortable in the process.” She made “more choreographic suggestions” or suggestions about the audience (2023). According to Bogart, the theatre is a blank page “is an impossible project that challenges the audience with a ‘call to adventure’” (2023). As they devised, SITI wondered if the audience would “accept their call,” but Hamilton was confident:

It turned out that Hamilton was correct:

Working with Hamilton was impactful for SITI and O’Hanlon notes that it gave the company the opportunity to

The work challenged them in terms of scale and also in exploring duration through its purposeful extension of action. It also allowed redefinition of their relationship of the physical body and the spoken text—so integral to their training. Lauren felt it “really allowed a different kind of somatic pleasure, sensory pleasure with speaking. We weren’t speaking the way we normally speak. We were miked, but we were there—there was an intimate quality to it that was new” (2023b).

The relationship with SITI also had a great influence on Hamilton:

Hamilton works in the visual arts where “things sort of stay in their made form.” But with SITI she developed her interest in “things relationally that are changing” and in duration—“in what way or how things are alive, what’s the atmosphere of wideness in a piece.” For Hamilton, “that’s partly a legacy of working with SITI” (2023).

Influencing beyond SITI Walls

Artists throughout the performing arts world have been influenced by SITI. Some, as discussed, have had direct contact; others have been touched generationally; still others may not even know how SITI’s work has influenced them. On one front, the legacy of SITI and its work is intertwined with Anne Bogart’s books and articles and her teaching in Columbia University’s directing program, where she has been since 1993. According to Lauren, this work was continually interactive with that of SITI:

Joseph V. Melillo, executive director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 1999 to 2018, admired Bogart for asking more questions than she answered: “As with many of the ensembles SITI inspired, the legacy is not in repetition of the skills but maintenance of the values. They were encouraged to find their own way” (2023). Chavkin, who studied at Columbia with Bogart, affirms Melillo’s opinion:

After performing In the Heights off and on Broadway for three years, Luis Salgado felt he was not growing artistically. He left the show knowing he “wanted to create a lot more.” He then “stepped into the SITI Company room for the very first time and was just blown away” (2023). When he began directing and choreographing, Salgado strove to incorporate his SITI training, which was, for him: “this thing that is like touching me, seducing me, provoking me artistically.” Salgado credits SITI with broadening his perspective, focusing him on creating ensembles instead of casts, and applying Bogart’s horizontality in rehearsals. Even with tight schedules, he finds ways to pull in the training:

Salgado references a 2023 production of Aida at STAGES St. Louis: “it’s very clear that we did a very avantgarde thing on a very commercial piece of Disney theatre” (2023). The Broadway World review noted his “modernistic choices,” commending his “unconventional choreography and blocking [that] marries slow-motion movement [from his Suzuki Method training] with African cultural dance” (Lindhorst 2023).

Not every director influenced by SITI worked with the company. Rebecca Taichman—former associate artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre and winner of a Tony in 2017 for her direction of Paula Vogel’s Indecent—learned first through The Viewpoints Book. Taichman says of SITI:

As a female director early in her career, Taichman shied away from working in nonhierarchical models, aware that her leadership was under scrutiny. It made the deep collaboration she sought less comfortable. Now, she sets up the space for the actors. “I just want to see what they’re going do first—before I go asking anybody to do anything” (2023).

Suzuki has noted that he was perhaps more interested in training directors than actors because they create the expectations in the room. Bogart’s work with generations of young directors helped them create expectations. Bogart trained directors who valued a high level of collaboration and performer input. She challenged the hierarchy in the rehearsal room.

Megan Wanlass likes a joke about directing students who come out of Yale thinking “where’s my venue?”:

Whether they studied with SITI at their summer institute or worked with Bogart at Columbia, as Joseph Haj notes:

Figure 17.

Café Variations. From left: Akiko Aizawa, Leon Ingulsrud, and Barney O’Hanlon. Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2012. (Photo by Michael Brosilow; courtesy of SITI Company)

Ravi Jain, founding artistic director of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre, believes that:

Sometimes SITI also influenced management. While in residence at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, SITI ran workshops focused on professional relationships just with the Krannert staff. Ingulsrud explains:

When Wanlass moved on from SITI to become an arts administrator she knew:

As Kelly Maurer says:

SITI also impacted artists who were just physically in the same space but not otherwise involved in the work. When the company was at the Guthrie, Haj recalls:

Ingulsrud sees SITI’s residencies as extremely influential:

SITI’s impact extended far out into the community, on and off the stage. Cabin Pressure at Actors Theatre of Louisville (1999) was created largely out of the experience the company had while working at ATL on Private Lives (1998) for which a Pew Charitable Trust grant provided resources to engage the audience in the rehearsal process. Marc Masterson, who led ATL at that time, notes this moment as a transition point for SITI in terms of “caring what the audience was experiencing” (2023). At a La MaMa Coffee House conversation in the spring of 2023, Bogart described herself as from the generation that brought a “fuck the audience” attitude to their work (La MaMa 2023). She found it “strange” reading about Moss Hart pacing the back of a theatre during an out-of-town tryout and then rewriting his work “based on the audience reaction.” But it made her reconsider. Then a story that pianist Alfred Brendel told about his work changed her thinking:

Bogart and SITI ultimately came to regard the audience as “sacred,” as those who complete a necessarily circular relationship.

At the regional theatres and presenting arts centers where they worked, SITI truly fostered this relationship, building a following not by meeting audience expectations but by recognizing that an audience would join them in the creative exchange of live theatre. Masterson clearly sees SITI’s impact outside of New York:

As SITI members worked outside of the company, they brought SITI with them—as actors, designers, stage managers, and dramaturgs. SITI’s designers, West (sound), Neil Patel (scenery), James Schuette (scenery and costumes), and Brian Scott (lighting) often took on roles not traditionally expected. West shares his experience:

Often, it was an overall SITI aesthetic that was sought, but sometimes the request was more specific. Again, West:

West sees this kind of ask as a “scary thing” (2023). As the SITI work moves farther from the source, it becomes something else. But other artists believe they are working in the style of SITI. If they advertise that, West says, “Yeah. Then we’re all in trouble” (2023). Ingulsrud recalls:

As Bogart worked outside of SITI, particularly on operas, she brought to those productions a SITI aesthetic. She describes this as an “expectation that the artists are going to make choices constantly and that there will be a certain rigor of setting the material, an exactitude and also lightness at the same time” (2023).

Not every environment welcomed SITI’s level of collaborative input. Figuring things out requires patience, confidence, and the ability to work in partnership. During a limited rehearsal period these are often in short supply. When this happens, SITI veterans are disappointed. West shares:

Lanxing Fu feels

Jem Pickard recognizes the complexities:

Even if the rehearsal room is not inherently hospitable, SITI-trained actors continue to work in ways that reflect their training, which they hope will guide those around them. Former SITI member Susanna Wilson feels:

Webber uses the training to help him to fit into something new:

Ultimately, for these artists, it is about treating any room like a company where you expect and encourage the best in people.

Presenting Partners

As an itinerant company without a performance space of their own, SITI forged relationships with many partners including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, the Getty Villa in LA, and the Wexner Center of The Ohio State University. SITI modeled a shift, paving a way for other ensembles.

SITI arrived at the doorstep of regional theatres in the mid-1990s when those theatres were struggling to maintain their own resident companies. As Marc Masterson notes:

Figure 18.

The Bacchae. From left: Stephen Duff Webber, Roshni Shukla, Barney O’Hanlon, J.Ed Araiza, Akiko Aizawa, Samuel Stricklen, and Leon Ingulsrud. J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa, 2018. (Photo by Craig Schwartz; courtesy of SITI Company)

SITI brought a different aesthetic to the regional theatres and engendered, in what many might assume to be a more theatrically conservative audience, a true appreciation for nontraditional performance. Joseph Haj:

Chuck Helm, emeritus director of performing arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and an early fan of SITI, was “taken by their unique sensibility and precision of the work” (2023). Helm brought The Medium to Columbus in 1996. The Wexner’s mission as a “multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art” made it a natural home for SITI (Wexner Center for the Arts n.d.). This partnership continued over SITI’s entire career. Wexner presented seven SITI shows including several premieres. For the Wexner community, the impact was significant. Helm observes:

In the first decade of the SITI Company, Helm, Masterson, and Melillo provided valuable administrative and financial help, laying the groundwork for SITI’s long career. They offered advice on leadership, management, and sustainability and provided the financial support necessary to mount SITI’s shows at their theatres. According to Masterson, the partnerships also impacted the work of those organizations:

Helm speaks of developing and producing new works that individual presenting organizations could not afford on their own:

Joseph Melillo joined BAM in 1983 as the producer of New York City’s first nontraditional performing arts festival—the Next Wave Festival. The Next Wave was “the place for innovative, progressive, nontraditional, large-scale work” (2023). Melillo, an avid theatregoer, saw it as his job to figure out what the artistic landscape was in the 1980s, and how BAM and the Next Wave festival “could be a destination for artistic work that would change people’s perception about storytelling.” Bogart and the SITI Company came quickly onto his radar, and he often brought their work to BAM, including The Medium, Hotel Cassiopeia, Steel Hammer, and The Bacchae. This was the result of an ongoing investment in the work of SITI. Melillo felt a responsibility to establish a relationship with the artists he worked with, enabling him to understand Bogart and what “she was seeking, what she was doing, and how the institution [he] was servicing could play a part in a project she was gestating or developing for her company” (2023).

Figure 19.

Who Do You Think You Are. From left: Ellen Lauren, Barney O’Hanlon, Will Bond, Akiko Aizawa, and Leon Ingulsrud. Galvin Playhouse, Arizona State University, 2008. (Photo by Michael Brosilow; courtesy of SITI Company)

SITI often began developing a new work during their Skidmore summer residencies as a part of the composition work they did with their students. A month’s worth of exploration might then be followed by a commission from the Wexner Center, who provided, over the course of another month, rehearsal space, technical support, and salaries. At the same time, SITI received support from regional theatres and other presenting partners. Thus, they would complete a residency at the Wexner and then perhaps move on to City Theatre or Actors Theatre of Louisville to continue to hone the work. Then onto the Getty Villa or BAM—or, often, touring nationally and internationally. Masterson watched an “ecosystem that grew” (2023) and became a model followed by other ensemble-based theatres. The “ecosystem” was crucial for SITI. Helm: “If you are going to inhabit an ensemble and keep it going, you don’t want to ride the cycle of feast or famine where you get the big grant, get a couple of great presenters around on one project, but the next project—nobody” (2023). And as Melillo says:

The National Theater Project (NTP), piloted in 2010, offered another key component. NTP was designed to promote “the development of artist-led, ensemble and devised theatre work while extending the reach and life of these projects through touring” (see Progress Theatre n.d.). NTP’s grants supported the artists themselves and the producing theatres in an effort to bring the “work to different regions and audiences” (NEFA n.d.). With the requisite pieces already in place, SITI became what Helm calls the “case study” for NTP (2023). The result was a series of working mechanisms for ensembles. As Helm sees it:

Figure 20.

Stephen Duff Webber and Leon Ingulsrud in Hotel Cassiopeia. Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2006. (Photo by Michael Brosilow; courtesy of SITI Company)

That’s a real part of their legacy—that they could bridge these kinds of theatre worlds that have seemed so completely separate—in different orbits.

It can be argued that SITI did not establish as strong a reputation among New York audiences as ensembles who produced consistently in the city. But they may be one of the only ensembles to have a powerful following in regional hubs, such as Pittsburgh, Champaign-Urbana, and Columbus. Here, local audiences, artists, and often students at nearby or affiliated universities experienced the productions and intermingled with the artists.

The leaders of the organizations who have produced or presented SITI’s work have no doubt about their long-term impact. Mike Ross, director of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, writes:

Figure 21.

Antigone. From left: Stephen Duff Webber, Akiko Aizawa, Tom Nelis, and Will Bond. Dance Theatre Workshop, NY, 2009. (Photo by Erik Pearson; courtesy of SITI Company)

Closing Thoughts

There is no doubt that the seeds SITI Company has sown will root and continue to grow. But SITI has also been purposeful about defining its own legacy. SITI’s Digital Archive, launched in January 2023, focuses on the collaborative processes of the ensemble, “providing insights into SITI’s historical artistic practices” as documented in photographs, press clippings, video, and production histories (SITI [2023a]). SITI’s work is also documented at the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute (TRI) at The Ohio State University. “The SITI Living Archive joins an international community of performing arts archives and is the first of its kind for an ensemble-based theatre company” (SITI [2023b]).

According to Brad Carlin, managing director of SITI Inc., funding for this work was available

Some of the nearly $400,000 was necessary to fund work on the archives and “keep the lights on.” SITI Inc. “stewards the Legacy of SITI Company and its Emeritus Artists for the benefit of future ensembles” (2023). SITI Inc. has also been focused on other video projects. There is continued pursuit of partnerships for broadcasting productions through educational streaming platforms; restrictions put into place by Actors’ Equity have meant that no full-length productions are currently included in the archives managed by Ohio State University. SITI Inc. has also reengaged with and invested in a documentary film that was started by Greg King in 2018.

This work is important to the company, but as a part of its legacy plan SITI also hopes to continue to build bridges to future generations of ensembles and spent much of 2023 in discussion with the board about what this would look like in practice. One project evolved as a coaching and mentorship program designed to create very “specific opportunities for emeritus artists to engage with ensembles and artists all over the globe” (Carlin 2024). SITI emeriti designed the program with the late Diane Ragsdale, who joined the SITI board in 2020. A call for applications was shared with the intent that all of the work would take place within calendar year 2024 if at all possible. Under the guidelines, SITI Inc. pays the SITI emeriti salaries and the other costs—travel, housing, rehearsal space, etc.—are left up to the host. According to Lauren:

Figure 22.

SITI Company gathered during their final performance of Radio Christmas Carol, Fisher Center at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2022. (Photo by Chris Kayden; courtesy of SITI Company)

With this same focus, but a longer trajectory, SITI also created the ambassador program to spread its legacy. Nearly 50 artists who have worked closely with SITI have been invited by Ellen Lauren to become “SITI Alumni Network Ambassadors.” Ellen Lauren with Brad Carlin will oversee this work. The ambassadors have committed themselves to actively sharing the training with their local communities, to broaden audiences, and to maintain engagement with SITI Company members. There are ambassadors throughout the United States and in Singapore, Canada, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, France, Chile, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Columbia, Portugal, Korea, Hungary, Norway, Ecuador, and Argentina. The SITI Living Archive website posts a calendar of training and workshops led by ambassadors and open to the public. SITI Company member Samuel Stricklen describes the program:

Gábor Kozma finds it to be “emotional to be an ambassador—a big responsibility” (2023). Violeta Picayo says “there is a big investment required to continue to share the training” (2023). Ernesto Martinez describes it as “deeply delicate” (2023) and Emma Shafer sees it as a “privilege” (2023).

Those SITI invited did not hesitate. Many were like Diego Coral López:

Valerie McCann was eager to commit herself to a project that

Juan Diego Bonilla Ibáñez just wants to “replicate—even a little—the way they taught and do theatre” (2023).

There is no formal plan for the ambassadors. The only expectation is that each ambassador attends quarterly meetings and facilitates Suzuki and/or Viewpoints workshops in their part of the world. It is unclear how it will work now that SITI Company has disbanded. Nelson Chia says, “We’re at the point of talking about this. So, I think there is a legacy, but I can’t articulate it yet. We’re in the middle of it, which is exciting” (2023). Ambassador Emma Shafer sees work ahead for the group:

Many ambassadors are wrestling with the charge. López notes that “above all, I take it as a question: How can I share not only the knowledge, but the enthusiasm, generosity, and rigor that SITI gave me?” (2023).

SITI recognizes that each ambassador will find their own way; that is part of the plan. For Shafer:

Ambassador Lisa Lechner has already facilitated a week-long Suzuki/Viewpoints workshop in Boise, Idaho, bringing in SITI Company members:

McCann offered “regular free or pay-what-you-can drop-in” Viewpoints sessions at London Performance Studios in the first years of her ambassadorship. She has recently relocated to Los Angeles and “will be launching something similar here” (2023). Thomas Jones will continue to offer the training annually, free of charge, in Winnipeg. Arjan Gebraad is in Amsterdam where there are fewer artists familiar with the training. He and three others call themselves the “Training Ensemble of the Netherlands” (2023). They have committed to offering several weekend workshops.

Continuing the training acknowledges the need to provide opportunities for artists who have trained with SITI to convene and pursue their practice in the presence of other trained artists. There is also a desire to expand their community in order to create work in a manner similar to SITI. Previously, people came to Saratoga or NYC or a SITI Company workshop. Now, the ambassadors are responsible for the training and there is a clear call for ambassadors to introduce new artists to the work, to train new generations.

Many ambassadors are eager for SITI Company members to remain involved. Chris Manousos, an ambassador in Toronto, says:

Ambassadors may become impromptu gatekeepers guarding the integrity of the training. Manousos got a “little knock on my door, and someone was like, ‘I just got hired to teach this voice and movement class. They used Viewpoints. I’m gonna read the book. Can we have a talk about it?’” (2023).

The moment made Manousos feel a bit closer to SITI, experiencing what he described as his “micro version” of the challenge they face to discourage the dilution of the training, an “angst about who’s teaching what” (2023).

Those carrying the work forward are thinking about its trajectory. Stricklen realizes:

Shafer welcomes this perspective:

SITI Company members and the ambassadors want to bring the training to an even broader community of artists and to theatre companies of color. Luis Salgado sees

Figure 23.

A Radio Christmas Carol. Foreground, from left: Ellen Lauren, Will Bond, and Gian-Murray Gianino, and Violeta Picayo. Fisher Center at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2022. (Photo by Chris Kayden; courtesy of SITI Company)

Salgado is also committed to bringing SITI artists to work at the company he founded, R.Evolución Latina in NYC:

Even more traditional repertory companies are engaging with SITI ambassadors. Manousos and Jones were coincidentally working at the Stratford Festival in Canada at the same time and they generated a conversation focused on training there. In 2022, Manousos was working in Stratford’s experimental wing, known as The Lab, which he describes as having “a focus on how Stratford can have a more international reach—a more creatively driven reach” (2023). The two ambassadors led classes for the Stratford Company, who had not done this training before. It was a positive experience for Manousos:

Some ambassadors and SITI Company alumni are exploring how to apply the training outside of live theatre. Stricklen is very interested in the opportunity to

These company alumni and the ambassadors all see a need in the contemporary theatre to continue their work after and beyond SITI. They see live theatre as under threat. Stricklen captures the ongoing need for ensemble:

Manousos is also concerned about the current state of the theatre. Theatres are closing and audiences are dwindling:

Bogart sees an ongoing need to include the audience:

SITI affiliated artists are clear on the exceptional impact that SITI’s work has had but also fear that this may decrease over time. Salgado:

Manousos shares his hope that

Figure 24.

SITI Company toasting their final performance of A Radio Christmas Carol, Fisher Center at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2022. (Photo by Chris Kayden; courtesy of SITI Company)

But the question remains: can SITI’s effort to change the landscape succeed? Darron West realistically observes:

In considering SITI’s legacy, Stephen Duff Webber echoes Ingulsrud and many of his colleagues:

Bogart looks back and reflects:

Did the SITI Company change the DNA of the American theatre? They certainly changed the DNA of thousands of artists and audiences. And while a stone dropped in the water does not change the water it disturbs, the ripples continue to fan out.