No. TWO

SATYA BHABHA

Brooks How are you?

Bhabha I’m so good.

Brooks Where are you?

Bhabha I’m in London. I'm here now for many months, pretty much until November, or I'm in the U.K. until November, and I'm gonna be shooting in Bristol. I've been back and forth a little between London and Bristol, but I head off there tomorrow morning and then permanently. The production is still coming together, the scripts are still coming together, which is always a little stressful. But this is not uncommon, so I am used to dealing with it. Generally, it has been an incredibly beautiful time.

Brooks Summer in Europe can be ideal.

Bhabha Yes. It has been dreamy and pretty and sunny and all of the fucking things!

Brooks When Europe is like that, it’s perfect.

Bhabha It really is.

Brooks Can you tell me about the project you’re working on?

Bhabha I'm directing this television show called Boarders for the BBC. I'm doing the end of the whole thing, the last three episodes of the whole series. It's been on for a few years and it's really lovely. I really like the series and want to do a great job and bring it home strong.

Brooks That sounds amazing.

Bhabha Thank you, it is, I think. I’ve been here for a while now, and I’m excited to get to work. But it has been so lovely to be in Europe and in London. I’ve got a lot of friends here and there's a lot of culture. It seeps out of the city here, and you really feel that. I love that.

Brooks It’s your home, in a way. It was mine, too, for a few years.

Bhabha It is. There’s really that feeling for me here, which is funny because my siblings don't actually share that feeling so much. We moved around so much and have been in so many different places that I think that notions of home and place are so different for each of us. Looking at my siblings, it’s interesting because there’s a bit of an age difference.

Brooks You’re older or younger?

Bhabha One of my brothers is two years older and my sister is four years younger, and the way that I see how notions of home and place exist for them and for me is very different. There are some places that for them are very seminal and very important. When my family left London, we went to Chicago, and my sister took a great kind of connection to Chicago. I was there for seven years, but there was never like a major connection for me. It's just so interesting to see how subjective these ideas actually are. You know, you can have what you perceive as the same upbringing and the same series of situations and scenarios and actually have very, very different, relationships to the same place.

Brooks Absolutely. How old were you when you moved to Chicago?

Bhabha I moved to Chicago when I was twelve, and I turned thirteen that year.

Brooks It was a hard age to move, I suppose.

Bhabha Any age is both hard and kind of amazing to move in. Whenever my friends are agonizing about moving their kids, I'm always like, look, the number one thing is do it. I'm fully in support of it and I think that moving around was such a feather in my cap and just a huge expansion of my identity and experience. I was this person from these different places, from multiple places, and that was extremely exciting for me and extremely good for me in my life at large. At the time, of course, it feels challenging, it feels discombobulating and all of those things, you know, but in general, it is something that I think about actually pretty unequivocally fondly of.

Brooks Where did you live in Chicago?

Bhabha My father is an academic, and he moved to teach at the University of Chicago, so we lived in Hyde Park, on the south side. My mother also taught there; she was a human rights lawyer. They were both sort of from many places and used to constantly being fish out of water. They were citizens of the world. That is just the way that my family has always been, in long history. My mother's family are German Jews and there is the history of exile over centuries and of shifting and the moving of the Jews and migration. And similarly, my father's family are Parsi, which are the Zoroastrians who were exiled from Persia in the eleventh century. They are often referred to as “the Jews of the east” because they had kind of been shunted from place to place to place. They both were living in London when I was born, and had kind of met through university, and my mother worked as an immigration lawyer, a pro bono human rights lawyer, and that's really what her whole life was. My father taught at Sussex, but when he moved us to Chicago, she began teaching as well.

Brooks What year did you move to Chicago?

Bhabha I guess it was 1994 or 1995 until 2001. I graduated high school in 2002, and I did my senior year of high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my parents moved to Harvard.

Brooks Tell me about your interest as an art collector.

Bhabha It has been so interesting. I haven’t really thought about it a ton, to be honest, but I think I've always been someone who likes keepsakes. I have boxes of things, notes from school, posters from old plays that I did. From a very young age, whether it was a family picture or a poster from an exhibition that we went to, there was a lot of art on the walls in my parents’ homes. There was a lot of imagery on the walls, and particularly from my father's point of view, the home is a really creative expression of one's own artistic identity. In my house growing up, there was never a white wall. The rooms always had some color on them, and as a child I painted my study purple. I always thought you go into a room and the question is well, what color should this be? I think that the decorative home, the curated home, and the home in general is an expression of the self and of the culture and of the family.

Brooks What a great notion.

Bhabha When I think about that purple study, the walls were covered. There was the University of Chicago Film Club that used to do public screenings with these very well designed posters. I had a stack of those sort of up on the wall, so that you could see the old ones behind the newest one. I had multiple posters from our high school plays, pieces of the set that I would put up. I’d make these large collages of photographs. I was taking a lot of photographs and I always felt, you know, the power of the frame, the power of putting something on the wall. Placing something on the wall has the ability to elevate, or you can offset something by surrounding it in a frame, even if the frame is just empty space. It is a way that you really can look at something differently. I remember there would be scraps of paper or little things, and I would situate those on my wall and it would add to this tapestry that I was building and I think that traveled with me. When I lived in New York, I lived in a tiny little walk-up apartment on the sixth floor and yet still was always hanging different things and putting things on my wall. I had a formative relationship with an artist when I lived in New York, this guy that I dated for a number of years, and he was a collagist.

Brooks Kurt Schwitters? [laughs]

Bhabha [laughs] No, his name was Cameron Dailey. Cameron would make these amazing, wonderful collages. He was really committed to the practice of using children's books and using sellotape and very humble found objects to create these beautiful two-dimensional pieces. I remember some really interesting conversations we had about framing his work and about putting this kind of expensive frame, you know, going to a shop and having to pay, and sometimes framers looked at his work and said things like but this isn’t archival, this tape is going to yellow, and he would say yeah, I know, I want that kind of feeling. As far as collecting, as in I've seen a piece of art by somebody that I don't know and I'd like to acquire that or I want to have that in my home, I think Instagram has been a huge part of that. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by many artist friends. I love the art world because I don't see myself as part of it, and I can engage in a creative way with something where I have no ego investments in my own place within that scene. I'm really just there as an observer, and also as somebody who likes a conversation about art, and it's very refreshing to me. I would really seek out friendships with other artists who are not filmmakers: theater makers, performance makers, even music makers. I played in a band when I first moved to L.A. for a number of years. This band called He's My Brother, She's My Sister, and we toured the States supporting Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on their first tour.

Brooks I didn’t know that.

Bhabha Yes! But visual art is not something that I've engaged with as a professional in that way, so I massively enjoy conversing about art with people who work in this medium which I see as really quite separate to my own. I have seen from the outside—and I don't know if you feel like this—but I have felt like in the art world, people are very supportive of each other.

Brooks I do agree that is true, generally speaking. It also seems especially true in Los Angeles.

Bhabha It seems to me there's a lot of sharing of each other's work, a lot of cross-promotion, and I was just exposed to a lot of art via my friends who work in the field.

Brooks Was there a piece or an artist that was a catalyst for you?

Bhabha Yeah, actually there was a sculptural piece, a wall piece, made by a wonderful British ceramicist named Sam Bakewell. I saw one of his pieces and contacted the gallery and acquired it. I also love engaging with you and looking at the drawing of yours that I bought, John.

Brooks Oh, thank you.

Bhabha I do not consider myself any sort of a major collector, but I have a few pieces. There is also a piece by a friend of mine, Iliodora Margellos. I don't know if you know her work, but she’s wonderful.

Brooks I don’t think I do.

Bhabha She’s a Greek artist, and she’s represented by Baert Gallery in L.A. She makes these tapestries and work with stitches. So, as you can see in my house, it is a patchwork of old things from my family and some things that I've acquired and many things that I've sort of found along the way. I have pieces that I’ve been given by my family that are very valuable hanging next to a circus poster. I don't know if you remember that circus poster on the wall that I found in Portugal? It’s from a small town advertising a circus, it’s this huge poster, probably about four feet by seven feet that I brought back from a trip.

Brooks I do. It’s very cool.

Bhabha I guess I'm a little bit all over the place, as far as collecting. But my interest has been a mixture of a social scene and a kind of cross-pollination as people were sharing and engaging with other people's work, and I started to follow that along.

Brooks That aspect, the cross-pollination, is particularly interesting to me. The collaboration, too. As someone who came to the visual art world, in a real way at least, a bit later in life—I was in my mid-to-late-twenties when I started—I feel grateful to have, over the years, developed my practice and to have found my people, to have found some sort of community. I have been consistently pleased and surprised how supportive people are. That is very much true here in Los Angeles. People are curious, they’re supportive, and in L.A. the different artistic communities seem somewhat interconnected, or at least they brush up against each other. Maybe it is just that there are so many creatives here. I come into contact with visual artists, I come into contact with musicians, I come into contact with actors, writers, photographers, designers, and it’s exciting and enriching.

Bhabha As somebody for whom the majority of my commercial and  professional work has been in film and television in Los Angeles for the last number of years, I'm incredibly deeply and eternally grateful to the art and music community specifically for developing geographic locations of culture. I feel that Los Angeles has culture floating in the air, but sometimes it is hard to physically locate. Certainly “Hollywood” and cinema and television is not something that is geographically located. You enjoy it independently; it doesn’t demand, require, and create communities, and I think that historically there has not been a very open, flourishing, and welcoming theatrical community in Los Angeles.

Brooks You’re doing your part to change that with Public Assembly, the theatre company you helped found.

Bhabha I think that one of the real inspirations behind Public Assembly was the question how can we create a different kind of performing arts community here in Los Angeles that acknowledges the outsized and dominant presence of the film and television industry but also stakes its own claim? I think that art and music have been doing that in L.A. extremely successfully and for much, much longer. We all meet each other at art openings. You know, we're not meeting each other so much, at least from my experience, at movie premieres or television premieres. These are really very commercial marketing events, and of course you can go to support your individual friends, but as a scene hoping to engage with a community, a social world, a society, in that way, I do feel like art and music have been leading the way in Los Angeles. Hopefully we’re at the beginning of a theatrical renaissance where the different theatrical organizations are not siloed, not independent verticals existing to develop their own unique ecosystems and communities that exist solely within those specific ecosystems, but rather there's a collaborative and fluid exchange of ideas, an exchange of audiences between multiple different theater companies. I think there are some companies that are starting and certainly I take great pride in that those things being very key for us at Public Assembly. While theater may be our medium, community is our mission and what we are building, more than any individual piece, is a community based on collaboration and creativity.

Brooks That’s wonderful. For those who don’t know about Public Assembly, can you tell us a bit more about it?

Bhabha Of course. Public Assembly is a 501c3 nonprofit theater company dedicated to reinventing community theater in Los Angeles. The way we do that is that every month we develop a brand new show of three short original theatrical pieces based on an audience-proposed theme. We work with writers from our community, and that quite literally means from our audience. The only requirement to submit to develop with us is that you have seen a show. Each month, the company shepherds three new writers through this very rigorously supported, structured, collaborative developmental process that culminates in a free-or-pay-what-you-can show with an open bar. At the end of the evening, we get a theme for the next month's show and we start it all over again. Since our founding in 2018, we’ve done over forty-two shows and counting. We’ve developed almost one hundred and seventy-five pieces of original work with five hundred-plus artists and shared it with almost four thousand audience members in Los Angeles who line up for hours outside of the theater in order to engage with that live moment. That has been our mission, a mission of accessibility, both in terms of the low-or-no-cost ticket, the no-cost of participating in our program, but also that anyone can submit to develop with us and can engage with our community, even by yelling out an idea. Through that, I think we have really seen a commitment to and an engagement not only with live theater, but with the importance of the live event as a communal gathering. I think that that's something that people show up for again and again, and really have taken a great degree of ownership. I think that through the accessibility we have offered, our audience has built ownership. They think of it as their theater. They yell out the scene. It's their open bar. They contributed to make it work. They know we're entirely donation-supported. Their friend wrote the piece last month and acted in the piece in two months ago. It’s theirs.

Brooks Fantastic.

Bhabha I do think that the visual art world has done a very good job of welcoming the film and television and music world into it. I also just don't think that any of these individual communities in L.A. are big enough or a consistent enough presence—in what ultimately can be quite a transient and amorphous city—to do it alone. We need to feel like there are other communities who are taking interest in what we’re doing. I think we need each other.

Other Swans conversation No. eight

Satya Bhabha (b. London, England, 1983) is a director, writer, and performer, and a founding Artistic Director of Public Assembly. He has performed extensively in New York at venues such as The Public Theatre, Signature Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, St Ann’s Warehouse, and The New Group, as well as at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and the Kirk Douglas in LA. He recently created an experimental performance piece, TRUE STORY, which toured in Europe and the USA. Satya’s film work has played at TIFF, Telluride, and Palm Springs film festivals; he has directed over twenty episodes of TV for Apple, Showtime, Amazon Prime, HBOMax, Peacock, and Hulu. As an actor, he starred in the cult-classic film SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD, played the lead role in MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, and appeared on many TV shows including THE NEW GIRL, SENSE8, and KEY & PEELE. He trained at Yale University, where he was awarded the Sudler Prize for the Arts.