Jiggle It A Little It'll Open

Ira and Aaron welcome Ira’s friend and collaborator Seth Zurer, longtime Chicagoan recently transplanted to Southern California. The starting point is a piece of family history that Seth recounted in the 2007 performance about utopias through which he and Ira first met. It is the little-known story of Clarion, a short-lived early-20th century Jewish agrarian settlement in Utah where his grandmothe...

For JIALIO’s first tri-national episode and first episode with more than one guest, Aaron and Ira are joined by former Chicagoans Tony Macaluso and his son Giulio from Chapel FM, the community radio station Tony runs in Leeds, UK. They discuss a road trip they took the previous summer exploring  places meant to offer alternatives to mainstream society in the American West, including the urban desi...

Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed. Jesse Schumann  stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibrati...

For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwright András Visky to its recent move from the neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where it was one of over 250 theatre companies dotting Chicago’s North Side...

The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we offer each other access, what are we offering? And what are we giving up? Nascent online communities, clandestine cocktail bars, and city neighborhoods all...

Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environmental theatre to installation art, live action game play, and pricey Instagram-ready themed “experiences,” immersion as aesthetic approach and marketing...

The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of connections between resisting perfection, eschewing deliberate meaning, and valuing participation, hoping to find process orientation cocooned someplace...

The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone. But the collective also requires a certain level of individual sacrifice to larger organizing principles – be they theatre, yoga, or architecture. It c...

Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices to what might happen in the future.” So is ambition by definition a young person’s game? And is letting go of it a sign of maturity, or resignation? Grad...

As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickly becomes a meditation on how to live a life in art, and what is required to do so. It seems that money, scale, yoga, and happiness each may help, or get...

Aaron and Ira return to the podcast studio for a new batch of episodes after a 6-month hiatus from recording. The thread they choose to pull from the previous episode, and the whole first season, is comedy. Comedy may actually be one of the key threads running through their friendship, which was cemented in part over Aaron’s concept for a still-as-yet-unrealized, obscurely comic short film. What m...

Inaugurating JIALIO’s new format, your hosts choose the topic of work, specifically the value produced by labor, as a thread they want to pick up from the previous episode. They begin with jokes that deliberately do not work as jokes. This leads to a discussion of French humor and the tendency of French comic artists – from Moliere to Jacques Tati – to appropriate, in the name of refinement and el...

This is what we call a shorty. After the duration and weight of the previous episode, Aaron and Ira spend significantly less time covering a greater variety of topics than usual, beginning with Aaron’s plans for the estival solstice, and moving on to a meaningful recent conversation with their mutual friend and collaborator, the weird internal logic of the song “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giant...

JIALIO is not a current events podcast, but Aaron and Ira exist in real time, and this episode constitutes something of a time capsule. Recording back in May 2022, shortly after the US Supreme Court’s majority draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade was leaked, Aaron and Ira respond at length to the news from their positions as Americans who were born after Roe was decided in 1973, as people who cann...

After hosting JIALIO's first guest on the previous episode, Aaron and Ira hash out how that decision was made back in episode 5, and how it might impact the direction of the podcast going forward. At issue, in part, is the value of centralizing difference and conflict versus prioritizing solutions, a tension which has characterized much of the collaboration between Aaron and Ira over the year...

JIALIO welcomes the first guest in its history, attorney, critic, author, patron of the arts, and Aaron’s maternal uncle, Joel Henning. Joel appears courtesy of the process established in the previous episode by which Aaron asks someone who has known him for a long time (in this case his brother Jason) who he should invite onto the podcast. The wide-ranging conversation covers arts clubs, societie...

To mark the 5th episode of Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open , Aaron and Ira invite an existential crisis by briefly looking back at what has happened so far on the podcast, and asking, “Where do we go from here?” Eventually, they agree upon an experiment that will finish playing out as a kind of trilogy over the course of episodes 6 & 7. Along the way, they encounter yet another cultural divide b...

Aaron and Ira unspool some tiny corner of the cultural response to COVID during the early days, and uncover some differences between American and  European discourses. The changes and deprivations of the COVID era trigger a more expansive reflection on anticipating loss and absence when approaching great change, and the inner continuity that can sometimes be found on the other side. Evaluating the...

As an American who has lived the better part of the last 15 years in Europe, including Eastern Europe in recent years, Aaron reacts to the onset of the war in Ukraine. Wrestling with the enormity of what is happening, he describes his own thoughts during the first days of the attack and his surprise at the responses of many of the people around him to what, only a short time before, had seemed uni...

Aaron and Ira contemplate the implications of a rather bureaucratic messianic revelation before turning to the purpose of theatre and, with a h/t to scholar Sara Jane Bailes, the uses of theatrical failure. Several important names in experimental theatre are dropped and one of the best plays you have probably never heard of is discussed at some length. In the end, they succeed in their goal to sta...

Aaron and Ira embark on the project of finding out just what their new podcast, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open (JIALIO), is or might be. (SPOILER ALERT: They come to no conclusions and have no plans to do so, but will return to the topic often.) Along the way they reveal the origins of the title, consider the benefits of embracing irrelevance, and brainstorm a needlessly complicated promotional fun...