Theater for All: Here Comes Wild Swan!

Wed, 02/21/2024 - 12:40pm

When: 2024

In Theater for All: Here Comes Wild Swan!, Wild Swan Theater co-founders and directors Hilary Cohen and Sandy Ryder take us through the history of the all-ages theater from Ann Arbor that created performances and classes for over 40 years.  Director Toko Shiiki uses historical images, articles, and performance films to showcase an organization that was an integral part of the local cultural landscape, performing for over 1 million theatergoers since 1980.

Transcript

• [00:00:06] HILARY COHEN: I love this picture.
• [00:00:09] SANDY RYDER: It's a good one.
• [00:00:12] HILARY COHEN: I love the colors. [MUSIC] The year was 1979, and at that time, there wasn't any professional theater for family audiences in Ann Arbor. Wild Swan started out of some projects that we were doing at the residential college in the adolescent psychiatric hospital, and there were a group of us who found that we really liked working together and we decided to make a theater company out of that. There were four of us to start with and we started to talk about how we could make theater that would be for lots of different ages of people and reach a big, wide, diverse audience. But we didn't know exactly what we were doing then, and so we just started brainstorming about how we were going to make this theater that would reach all of these different kinds of people.
• [00:01:05] SANDY RYDER: When they did bring in professional theater groups from around the country, the tickets were very expensive, and we felt that we should be able to make it affordable, make it accessible, and we all cared about the same thing. Then we basically started Wild Swan's Theater in 1980, not expecting it to go for over 40 years. But that was how it started.
• [00:01:36] HILARY COHEN: We started with a mission, and for 43 years, our mission stayed the same. The mission was that we would make the highest quality theater we could. We would make it for the widest audience possible, and we would make it accessible to everyone. We did not know what making it really accessible meant, and so we spent all of our working creative lives figuring out what it meant to make really accessible theater.
• [00:02:06] SANDY RYDER: We felt like people, often the values were reduced because the audience was going to be kids and we didn't feel that way. We felt like kids deserved as good a theater as adults. We were lucky to be in Ann Arbor where we had incredible wealth of actors, artists, writers, composers, dancers, choreographers. We went to them and we started collaborating and we discovered we could make amazing theater that was really for all, it wasn't just for kids.
• [00:02:39] PERFORMER: Friends and classmates folded 356 trains to make 1,000. Satako's friends began to dream building a monument to her and all the children who were killed by the atomic bomb.
• [00:02:52] SANDY RYDER: Then we started with access. We realized we cared a lot, that deaf kids could come, that blind kids could come, and that whole accessibility became really important to us early on, like I'd say the early '80s, we started thinking that way. Making our masks textural so that a blind child could get information about the character by touching the mask.
• [00:03:18] HILARY COHEN: The name Wild Swan, it was a little bit of a flight of fancy. We tried a lot of names and we liked that Wild Swan's Theater suggested something poetic and something that touched the imagination. It had a little bit of Shakespeare's, the Swan Theater, and we'd like that it connected to that, but it didn't mean something very particular to anybody, so in the end, we settled on it.
• [00:03:50] SANDY RYDER: It was very open. I think that was another thing we really liked. Because we didn't know what we wanted to do yet. We thought we might want to do a play for adults. What we felt like, we were sort of G rated, we were general audience. You didn't have to worry about the content being inappropriate for kids, but the stories were so great. Everyone like Charlotte's Web for example, I mean you could be 80 and love that story, you could be eight and love that story. When we were specifically working for little guys, we did very carefully shows what stories we were going to do that they wouldn't be too scary, but most of our theater was for everyone.
• [00:04:31] HILARY COHEN: We also did make plays that were not for young children. Then we were very specific to tell families this is not appropriate for kids under fourth grade. We did plays about the underground railroad, and we meant for those to be for high school students and middle grade students because they were serious subjects. They took a different kind of sensibility and sensitivity that just weren't appropriate for a small child, but we loved tackling those things too. We named our theater in a way that allowed us to work without limits.
• [00:05:03] SANDY RYDER: It's probably just a sweater that makes it harder.
• [00:05:06] HILARY COHEN: Now you can get a feeling.
• [00:05:09] SANDY RYDER: I would wear this little hat and that would be like, guess who's coming to dinner? I'll lock him up in my air tight cellar where he won't be able to breathe the seven nice feast for Baba Yaga.
• [00:05:24] HILARY COHEN: See sandy turn around. Go slowly around and you can see this nice stuff all over it. It's beautiful costume, isn't it? We did a lot of workshops. We love working directly with kids. Another side of Wild Swan was, working directly with young people in a workshop settings.
• [00:05:48] PERFORMER: Don't move. Just hold, keep your ground. Let's go back to try line again.
• [00:05:53] FEMALE_1: Hey, Colin, what do you think you're doing here? This is a boys [inaudible].
• [00:05:58] PERFORMER: It's my first day, and I think I did pretty good for the first day.
• [00:06:02] SANDY RYDER: At the end of a year, we might have done 200 performances and 200 workshops. We also did summer camps, which we love too, because those were usually a week long with a theme, and the kids wrote their own plays, made their own costumes. It was giving the kids as much opportunity to make this play. I think our idea too, is that we need to be in touch with our own artistry inside and lots of times classrooms just don't have time to do that.
• [00:06:34] HILARY COHEN: We found that especially for special needs kids, because they tend to be in more isolating kinds of circumstances, that theater workshops were particularly important for those guys, and their therapist told that to us. They were able to take some strides and to feel confident and to try things and to laugh a lot. We developed a handbook for doing creative workshops with kids with special needs, handbook was sold to classrooms, distributed all over the country. It would end up being used in every state.
• [00:07:08] PERFORMER: You may be small, but you are clever, you fooled me.
• [00:07:13] PERFORMER: Yes turtle, you may be small, but you fooled me too. I'd be glad to call you friend if you stop calling me names.
• [00:07:22] PERFORMER: I guess small creatures can be as important as big ones. If you stop calling me names, I'll be your friend too.
• [00:07:32] PERFORMER: Elephant and hippopotamus learned a lesson that day, but so did turtle, and the three of them are friends to this day.
• [00:07:42] SANDY RYDER: [APPLAUSE] What our process was we would figure out what show we were going to do, and we would have auditions. We were looking for the best person to play the role. When we were doing Alice in Wonderland in the late '80s, we were lucky enough to find some amazing actors, we always found amazing actors. But her name was Michelle Wilson and she was black. Many people thought Alice needed white, and we never felt that way, we felt like it didn't need to be white, didn't need to be black, it needed to be the best person to create that character, and it was Michelle. We did hear though from children that they were so happy to see a black representation of Alice because they had wanted to play Alice, and now they felt like they could too. We really realized we had a lot of power to break some of those stereotypes, which we really felt pretty honored to be able to do.
• [00:08:43] HILARY COHEN: Says right from the beginning, it didn't matter to us how we cast except for the best person for each role, and that was the most important thing, but we wanted to make sure we were giving everybody good opportunities, and we did hear from people that that wasn't true everywhere. Eventually, those attitudes changed, but from the beginning of Wild Swan, we were very egalitarian in our whole attitude about how we did everything, and that included how we cast our productions. I'm reading a letter from Michelle Wilson about her experience playing Alice in Wonderland in the late 1980s. Oh, Wild Swan, how you captured my heart. I was soon to graduate from U of M, and desperately trying to figure out how one has a creative career. Hillary asked me to join her troop, and my path stretched out before me. Wild Swan gave me a blueprint for creative ambition, inclusion, and integrity. My fondest memory is walking out on stage at the Power Center as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, to have a little boy pronounce.
• [00:09:58] SANDY RYDER: I didn't know Alice was black. There was no judgment behind it, just an acknowledgment that something was different. Alice is me, I could be Alice. That was Wild Swan in a nutshell, casual yet purposeful inclusion.
• [00:10:16] HILARY COHEN: I realized then that I would always look for the integrative creatives who understood that this ancient art is so much bigger than petty ego. The lessons of my Wild Swan days have served me well, and I'm so grateful to have been a part of such a brilliant ensemble of artists.
• [00:10:35] SANDY RYDER: You've done well sweet Sandy and loving Hillary, you made a true mark in this world. Enjoy your next chapter, knowing that you left the theater world better than you both found it. Michelle Wilson. I didn't like that I broke up a little at the end, it was just so emotional. Well, you know what, is just hard.
• [00:11:01] HILARY COHEN: It's very hard.
• [00:11:03] SANDY RYDER: But she did write a good letter.
• [00:11:05] HILARY COHEN: I think Wild Swan came to a point in the pandemic where it became clear to us that it was very hard to continue. We had had a wonderful history, 40 years, when we got to the pandemics. That's an amazing amount of time to do the work that we did and very unusual for the founding people to still be the founding leaders of an artistic organization, that's quite unusual. Most arts organizations took a big hit during the pandemic. Wild Swan was not alone in that. All of our places that we performed were close. We had no audience, we had no income, and it just became impossible for us to continue, and it was very hard to recover after that. That's essentially the story of the end of Wild Swan.
• [00:12:02] SANDY RYDER: It was sad because we were actually really having a great time doing a show at that moment. We were at the peak of us in a lot of ways and that was just how it was.
• [00:12:12] HILARY COHEN: It was a hard moment to have that all come tumbling down and yet we know that we performed for over a million people. That is a great large whopping number of people to have performed for and to have loved and appreciated our work, so we're very proud of that.
• [00:12:34] SANDY RYDER: There are many many people in the world that are the artists they are or appreciative of the arts because they started coming to Wild Swan. We feel pretty excited about having one little bit of influence on those people. They were like a little kid watching a show. That's what I want to do, and they did, they became great artists themselves that we go and watch and for the audience, for them, and it's just fantastic to have been able to have played a part in that.
• [00:13:09] HILARY COHEN: Wild Swan had some magic to it that you can carry on.
• [00:13:15] PERFORMER: I'd like to do that, I've always wanted to go to the moon.
• [00:13:18] SANDY RYDER: All the pasta you want.
• [00:13:22] PERFORMER: Wait, [inaudible].
• [00:13:25] PERFORMER: She'd rather turn to folks like me.
• [00:13:28] HILARY COHEN: I hope that a little bit of magic keeps spinning on and on. [MUSIC]