Laura Paige Kyber: I love the name of this collective, Every house has a door. How did you choose this name? What does it mean to you?

Matthew Goulish: We wanted a name to reflect the concept of a company with an unfixed ensemble. The only permanent members would be Lin as director and myself as writer and dramaturg. Later we were joined by Sarah Skaggs administrating and Christine Shallenberg designing lights and sound. We envisioned each new performance as defined by an invited team of intergenerational specialists, diverse in their backgrounds and practices. I found this passage by Jacques Derrida in his book Of Hospitality, co-written with Anne Dufourmantelle (translated by Rachel Bowlby).

“In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world. There is no house or interior without a door or windows.” (61)

The extracted phrase Every house has a door seemed to capture the desired quality of circulation, the sense of being both closed and open, the way every interior by definition gives way to an exterior. I immediately began to get compliments on the name from bank tellers. When we were in the process of filing our not-for-profit paperwork, I needed to call the relevant government agency and the woman on the phone said, “I love the name!” Incidentally, Lin and I just gave a copy of that book, Of Hospitality, to Chef Jason Hammel and the team at Cafe Lula in Logan Square to congratulate them on winning the James Beard Award for Hospitality. It’s a very competitive national category. We always have a dinner there at the end of each intensive rehearsal residency. They are very accommodating to Essi Kausalainen’s vegan diet. I have found so much inspiration regarding writing and performance in Jason’s cookbook that it seemed appropriate to give them the gift of a book of philosophy. We presented it at the start of the dinner shift. The whole team gathered around to look at it.

LPK: Every house has been around for decades in Chicago. Legions of young artists have worked with the group over the years, and you’ve influenced so many students through your work at SAIC. What I love about your work is how you’re able to create moments on stage that are so richly layered with meaning, while keeping relatively minimal stage design. Are there any core principles for making performance that you either hold onto in your own work, or share with young artists?

MG: Thank you for that very generous assessment. I have always thought that Lin when directing and teaching has the capability to see people for their most singular contributions. She has that clarity, not an aesthetic or philosophical or moral position as much as simply the ability to see what is in front of her. She will then remove any element that competes with that singular contribution. This can make a performer uneasy, I know from experience, because it makes you feel as if you are performing yourself, although a more clarified version of yourself than you are in the habit of presenting to the world. It carries with it the implicit imperative to accept your strengths, even if they seem too easy or if you wish they were different. She encourages everyone to work from them and only them. In that respect, your observation about minimal stage design is related to the influence of the work and the teaching. Remove all non-essential elements and trust that what you have will be enough. Do not crowd the work or overload it out of insecurity. I think our performances grow out of this, with a related aspect of pure pragmatism, of transparency, like a performer putting on a costume onstage, building the image in front of the audience. No technique or technology interferes with the image that the performance presents of itself. I think this simplicity, which might be characterized as a somewhat punk rock aesthetic, is very liberating for students in speeding the arrival of their own work. In a sense there is no offstage. I think people watching the performance see the performers as people first, with whom they identify as people, rather than as studied performers. These concerns also bring everyone’s attention to the room or the setting of the performance, whether a theater or a public place, to appreciate its singularity rather than blocking out the world in order to creating a sheltered virtual space to perform within. All of these qualities come from Lin as a director, and I think I feel very close to them partly because growing up with an engineer father who insisted that we build the house ourselves before living in it, I learned to appreciate construction and the beauty of a lack of mystery in physical reality. I am often inspired by how the idea of offstage can also be onstage through a different consideration of space and how performers engage it. Lin and I live near the Empty Bottle, and one time we went to have dinner at Bite (now Pizza Friendly Pizza). The Bottle had a line around the block. We discovered people were waiting to see a live performance by Tim and Eric of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! After dinner we were once again walking past the Bottle around the side. It was now night and all the people were inside. Just as we walked past the back alley the door flew open. We heard the sound of people laughing and cheering, and Tim and Eric came rushing out. The door closed behind them and all was quiet again. They stood for a moment in the dark alley looking around disoriented. One of them looked up at the sky. A few stars had come out. He exclaimed, “We’re outside!” The back door opened again and a stagehand stuck his head out. “Guys,” he said, “I forgot to tell you. There’s no backstage.”

LPK: You’re drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects in your work. When we met almost ten years ago, you were working on a play surrounding the little-known work of poet Jay Wright. For Broken Aquarium, you’re again taking a work from the past as your source material. This time, a very famous piece of music, Camille Saint-Saën’s Carnival of the Animals, which in 2025 will be 100 years old. How do you choose texts or subjects as inspiration? Or why the Saint-Saëns piece this time?

MG: Cave Canem, the organization founded “to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape,” this spring celebrated Jay Wright’s work with a major event in New York which featured Jay reading his poetry just before his 90th birthday. After our 2017 performance of his writing in The Three Matadores, we co-published, in collaboration with Kenning Editions, a three-volume selection of his plays. It has been a joyful experience to spend so much time with Jay’s work and to correspond with him and Lois Wright, his wife and literary manager, over the past ten years.

Regarding The Carnival of the Animals, it is true that Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite for children is his most famous composition and a recognized classic. He premiered the work on a Shrove Tuesday, a true carnival event preceding Ash Wednesday. While it was immediately popular, he only allowed it to be published posthumously because he did not consider it as important as his other compositions. This is another case of an artist’s most playful and lighthearted work succeeding beyond his more labor-intensive and serious attempts.

In our series of performances, we treat Saint-Saëns’s composition as an armature and a poetic structure, adopting only his categories as he names them. His logic for dividing up the animal kingdom follows a performative logic of contrasts and peculiarity, I suppose to keep children interested. When we began to collaborate with Essi, she brought the skills for including children or young people performers of ages ranging from 6 to 16. The Carnival structure gave us the possibility of devising multiple performances over many years, making one for each category, with children in mind from the initial structure and intent of the series.

The introduction of neglected subjects, as our mission states, took the form of substituting endangered or extinct species for Saint-Saëns’s actual animals. Our performance Broken Aquarium, which MCA will present, warps his Aquarium movement by populating it with actual aquatic entities such as the Lesser Electric Ray, Eyelash Seaweed, and Polyps that build coral reefs. All of these creatures are either endangered or extinct. This is also one of two Carnival categories, like Aviary, that describes an environment. Loss of or degradation of habitat is often the reason for the endangerment of these creatures, who live only in extreme locations with very particular conditions. Thus ours is an impossible aquarium, since they could not all share the same environment. In Saint-Saëns’s day, the aquarium appeared only as a rare public performance, sometimes featuring a large tank full of tropical fish rolled out on a stage in front of an audience. We treat it this way, as a public event, like sitting at the edge of a park or square watching all the various people absorbed in their activities or playing or passing through, only in this case the people are dressed in fantastic costumes and pretending to be sea creatures.

LPK: Tell me about your collaborators! This piece is co-presented with Essi Kausalainen, who is based in Finland. How did you meet and begin your work together?

Lin Hixson: Essi Kausalainen forms an adjacent core to Every house has a door. She has a deep understanding of the complex relations with other beings, situations, and environments and, as an artist, is devoted to life-giving. 

We knew and were inspired by Essi’s work before we met her, particularly her interests in inter-species communication, human-plant and human-animal relations, and her ten year collaboration with plants. She writes, “My ten-year artistic collaboration with plants has redefined my relationship with artistic ‘materials,’ my own body and those of others. I have learned to see myself as a community, an open process that is constantly taking place relative to another.” So when we were in Helsinki in 2015, we arranged to meet her and asked her to collaborate with us.

Essi designed textiles for the performers to wear in Broken Aquarium. She constructed these textiles in response to each performer and the specific creature they played. Essi describes her textiles as a relation, a way of being with. In the particular case of Broken Aquarium, it was a being with fish and a being with performer. The costumes broke the idea of clothes and instead activated body-sites for the performers to wear. Blurring the lines between performer and creature, a tentative relationship emerged between the two. The textiles sculpted an event-fabric, a middle in mobility.

LPK: This work has been performed once already amidst a rain storm at the Humboldt Park Boathouse. Again, it will be performed outdoors, but now at the MCA and in a very different environment. How do you anticipate adapting the work for the space? How do these conditions change the work?

LH: We will encounter certain undeniable differences, such as performing in a private space rather than a public space and performing under the sky rather than under an enclosure.

When we perform any performance, we adapt the work to the site. Each site comes with a particular set of conditions. It is not an empty basin where we enter and perform. It is an unfixed force with its hours of the day, its seasons of the year, its particular temperature, and its particular wind. It is not reducible to the performers or the performance. We will need to co-compose with it and discover its wonder, to discover the ways in which the performance and the site become inseparable.

LPK: What do you want audiences to take away from experiencing this work?

MG: This question reminds me of one of my great teachers, the playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes. Lin and I met in a workshop on the West Coast where Irene was one of the teachers. We learned so much from her approach to making theater. We met up with her some years later. She told us that one of her plays was being considered for production by a theater with a higher profile than she had previously known, and when they interviewed her about it, they asked this question: “What do you want audiences to take away from experiencing this work?” She confessed to us that she had found the question confusing. It seemed like a test, and if she gave the wrong answer they would not produce her play. In the moment, exuding her usual confidence, she answered as if it were self-evident: “I want them to be so overjoyed by the experience that all they can think about is coming back the next night to see it again!”

I think there is so much truth in her answer, and it also escapes the constriction of the question, which seems to misunderstand the relations of the event, at least as I know them. So much of the value of the performance is prepersonal. It does not entirely concern what we who design the experience of the work want, and it does not offer something that we can instrumentalize as tangible to take away. It neglects how the presence of an audience completes the experience and becomes absorbed into it. At the same time, it is true that the experience of the performance might present something otherwise missing from our lives, a feeling of affirmation of our abilities, everyone’s abilities, and a reminder that we are alive, and alive together. These affirmations might even remind us that life is worth living. The weight of concerns that we carried with us when we arrived at the start of the performance—I’m speaking as an audience member now—they seem lighter at the end. I leave the experience of the performance with a new perspective on them. This is entirely because the performance did not concern itself with who I am and what my concerns may be. It respected my privacy, and offered me the hospitality of an alternative. It made a space for me, offered me the comfort of a place to sit or stand. It made sure I could see and hear. It did not overstay its welcome. There is a common feeling that sometimes arises at the end, that I have felt and other people have told me they have felt. I will risk calling it happiness.