Thought Residencies

Hi, it's Marcus Youssef and it's thought number 13. I'm sitting in a rehearsal room with Back to Back Theatre from Australia, beginning work on their project, The Democratic Set . And thinking about Back to Back, which is a company, that has inspired me and my work, or aspects of my work, for close to 15 years. It's an ensemble that is mixed-ability. It's neurodiverse folks and neurotypical folks,...

Hi, it's Marcus Youssef. Thought number eleven. I'm thinking about the recent events in Iran and the assassination of the Iranian political and military leader. And then also in particular, the images of his funeral and the sort of breathless coverage of the people who are trampled and the millions of Iranians who are out, at least according to the news reports I saw, mourning his death. And the w...

Hi, it's Marcus Youssef and this is number 11. I'm thinking about - whatever - the usual thoughts of how toxic social media is. But in particular about - the fewer and fewer times I'm on social media recently - how those feelings of resentment and upset I have about my friends posts, which are always about their success. And thinking about Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism...

Hi, it's Marcus Youssef. Thought number 10. Thinking about the number of times that I've been in rehearsal rooms, mostly as a writer recently, and had my language or perspective or presumptions challenged – often about gender fluidity or, I guess, gender identities. And how that's been mostly great. Like, I'm always kind of like, "Huh? What? Huh?" And that makes me think about the condition of get...

Marcus Youssef here. Thought number nine. Thinking about a conversation I had with Sarah Benson last week. She's the artistic director of Soho Rep. And   was a big part of developing the play Fairview, which is an extraordinary play about race in the United States, and representation of race in the U.S. In which, like so much of the work I'm most excited by right now, the form, formal inventions p...

Hi, it's Marcus Yousef, thought number eight. I'm thinking about being a freelancer and how I'm no longer artistic director at Neworld. I stepped down from that position and the difference between controlling the conditions under which we make work. And when we don't, when you're working in relationship with others who control those. And the kind of tradeoff which is that -- like I stepped down fr...

Hi, it's uh Marcus Youssef here with thought number seven, which I think might extend into thoughts number eight and nine. Um, thinking about Saturday night when, uh, my partner and I were invited to a party for someone in our community, who was connected to many theatre people. Um, and we didn't realize it -- we knew she was uh sick -- um but we didn't realize it was actually the party the night...

Marcus Youssef here with thought number six. At a production of a mainstream, big theatre musical and thinking about how it's illegal for me to take this picture. And how I really want to take a picture because this set's really beautiful -- I'm not going to say what the production is. The set's really, really beautiful. And yeah, it's just the risk -- this is a boring thought -- but the rigamarol...

Marcus Yousef here, this is thought number five. Thinking about the ideology of busy-ness and its connection to technology. And how, you know, as we all know, like busyness can be sort of weaponized. Or I feel like I weaponize it in relationship to other people. "I'm so busy. I'm so busy." But how also that's a real thing. And the desire to feel useful. The excitement of working a lot. The way it...

Hi, it's Marcus Yousef, and this is my thought number four. I'm staring at Jamie Long, my friend and often collaborator, as we write a screenplay adaptation of our play Winners and Losers in the same room that we wrote the play in ten years ago, or something like that. And just thinking about the long trajectory of projects. Or how when you start a project, you know, once in a while, one of those...

Marcus Youssef here again, and this is thought number three. Thinking about two plays, An Octoroon and Fairview . Two remarkable plays that I love. I have yet to see productions, I've only read them. How those two plays -- which seem to be fundamentally changing the theatrical discourse about race and whiteness and the African-American experience or its relationship to culture in the U.S. -- were...

My name is Marcus Youssef. I'm a bit throaty and this is my second thought. I'm thinking about my friends, theatre makers James Long and Maiko Yamamoto, who just won this Simonovtich Prize for directing. And thinking, particularly about something Maiko said to me when I was doing some work helping another company, pals of our's, strategic plan. She said a question she was really interested in aski...

Hey, my name's Marcus Youssef. This is my first thought. Today, I'm thinking about transitions, as theater artists and for me, as a writer who's just come out of like two intense rehearsal periods and coming back to writing and spending the vast majority of the day by myself and how it feels utterly unfamiliar and terrifying. Although like seven weeks ago, it was – it felt utterly right and exactl...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number twelve. We all know that we should eat well, exercise, limit alcohol, and not smoke- but when I do all of those things and still feel like going back to bed, I feel like I am somehow failing at life. So...Today I'm going to FLIP IT!  Who says I can't change up what I expect from myself to succeed at life today?  Have I hugged someone? Chec...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number eleven.    I am sitting in a café working on the next draft of my script , Mizushobai. I am at a point where I am struggling with THE hardest question whose answer all roads will lead outwards from.   My deadline for this draft is tonight and I'm pretty sure that I won't reach it, because all I can think about is "When is the most appropri...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number ten. I have been thinking all day of something to think about for this Thought Residency but I have come up with nothing and I think it's because I'm in a very medium place right now. I am not sad but I'm not happy, I am not stressed but I'm not chill, I am not waiting but I'm not settled, I'm just here and I'm not even trying to not be he...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number nine. This thought is on time. Or at least it was supposed to be on time. A stranger once told me I needed to look into the underlying reasons of why lateness was an issue of mine: was it because I overestimated what I could achieve in a day? Was it because of my ego- thinking that my time was worth more than others' time? I've never done...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number eight. You know when you're walking down a busy city street and your hood is up because it's snowing and you almost walk into the intersection without realizing it because you're thinking so much about where you belong in this world and who you belong to? I used to have this friend who would grab the back of my shirt when I would thoughtle...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number  seven. In thought number two I talked about a comfortable silence. But I am also thinking about a different kind of silence. The silence of backing away. The silence of shutting down. The silence I experience when faced with racism, towards me, towards others, even now as an adult. The silence of our brothers when we are not present to de...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number six. So I have been thinking about inner demons-more like feeling them. And I am wondering how we hear those inner demons and choose to go forward, open the door and go outside. Um. I don't have a solution to that, I've just been thinking about it.

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number five. I grew up in a small francophone town south of Montreal. I had been ridiculed when I was younger for not speaking French properly, so I made sure when I walked into a diner to order a "lait frappé". The woman behind the counter said "Enh?"  I said, "Un Lait frappé? She said, "Quoi?"  "Un lait frappé." And I pointed to the big menu on...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number four. Today I went to visit my Japanese grandparents' grave. It's in a tiny Anglican graveyard in a small francophone town in the Eastern Townships of Québec. They were not Anglican but there wasn't much choice for their final resting place. The story of how they got there is the story of displacement of Japanese and Japanese Canadians aft...

My Name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought three. So I was in a show with a life-sized elephant puppet, called Jumbo. Jumbo had 2 puppeteers inside him and one manipulator/actor on his trunk. One of the most poignant scenes with the puppet was a non-verbal scene with a fourth actor. I always wondered what made that scene work so well. It occurs to me now that it was one of the only moment...

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number two. I've been thinking about silence. Recently a friend told me that I gracefully repress emotion. And that that's not healthy.  But sometimes silence is good. Sometimes there is so much love and beauty in Silence. Sometimes Silence is just the absence of words (which can be so exhausting and complicated) and not the absence of me.   

My name is Julie Tamiko Manning and this is thought number one. This summer I was working at the Blyth Festival Theatre in Huron County in Southern Ontario. I would wake up every morning and before I got out of bed and I would take 30 seconds to think of something that I was grateful for. This was something that a friend of mine had encouraged me to do, and we would report back to each other every...