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Go Deeper Happy Hour on the Fringe: Adrienne Mackey and Lizzie Hessek, TrailOff

Happy Hour on the Fringe: Adrienne Mackey and Lizzie Hessek, TrailOff

Posted September 22nd, 2020

Today on the podcast artistic producer Katy Dammers speaks with Adrienne Mackey, founder and artistic director of Swim Pony, as well as Lizzie Hessek, a Program Manager of Trails and Recreation at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. Adrienne and Lizzie discuss how Swim Pony and the PEC came together to collaborate alongside Toaster Lab and Michael Kiley to create the unique project that is TrailOff, which will be launching via the TrailOff app as part of the 2020 Fringe Festival. TrailOff is an immersive augmented reality audio performance which presents ten original audio narratives, each connected to paths within the Philadelphia region’s expansive Circuit Trails network. In this conversation, Lizzie and Adrienne speak with Katy about how their project grapples with environmental injustice by centering experiences that connect with communities traditionally underserved by environmental programming.

 

Katy Dammers: Hello and welcome to Happy Hour on the Fringe. Fringe Arts is Philadelphia’s premiere presenter of contemporary performing arts. I’m Katy Dammers and artistic producer here. And today on Happy Hour on the Fringe we invite you to pour one up and enjoy our conversation with some of the most imaginative people on this plane of existence. Today on the show, we are joined by Adrienne Mackey, Founder and Artistic Director of Swim Pony, as well as Lizzie Hessek, Program Manager of Trails and Recreation at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. Together, we’ll be discussing TrailOff, a unique collaboration between Swim Pony and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, in addition to Michael Kiley and Toaster Lab, which will be presented as part of the Fringe Festival this September. Presented through the TrailOff app, which you can download on their website. This immersive augmented reality audio performance presents 10 original audio narratives, each connected to paths within the Philadelphia region’s expansive Circuit Trails Network. Accessed via a mobile app, listeners will hear original dramas while walking each route. So welcome, Lizzie and Adrienne. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Adrienne Mackey: Hi there.

Lizzie Hessek: Hi, Katie.

Katy: So since this is Happy Hour on the Fringe, and I will say today we are recording on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. So definitely a happy hour for us all. We usually start by asking our guests on the podcast what everybody is drinking. So, Adrienne, what are you drinking today?

Adrienne: Right this second, I am drinking a lot of water because I just came back from site testing on a trail. And as per usual, these days, I’m pretty sun-baked and so trying to stay hydrated.

Lizzie: Oh, I feel badly that I am drinking a rosemary pear old fashioned.

Katy: Lizzie, I’m so happy to hear it. That’s great. I wish I was drinking that. I’m just having iced tea and like you, Adrienne, trying to stay hydrated. It’s kind of warm this weekend, which is good. There was a couple of first days at the beginning of the month where I was like, oh, Fall is here already. But we have some time. So to start us off today, I wonder if the two of you can just orient our listeners a little bit to this incredibly large and exciting collaborative project. This is really a piece where the whole village came together to craft it and participate in different ways. But the two of you are in some ways important leaders in that team. So I wonder if you can talk about who Swim Pony is what the Pennsylvania Environmental Council does and how the two of you came together to start this unique project.

Adrienne: I can start with that question. I founded Swim Pony originally as a immersive site-specific theater company as Fringe knows, having produced a bunch of projects. I would say in the last five years, I’ve been increasingly interested in finding new opportunities to get, I think both new audiences and also more interactive components to the performance projects that I do. Part of that is I’m really interested in getting audiences that are maybe not folks you’d normally see at a contempo experimental theater piece. And part of that is taking works into new spaces. I also went back to grad school to study how to apply game design to theater and doing that taught me a lot about sort of like how do you structure an experience that really makes it easy for people to understand how to participate. So all that was kind of swimming in the mix and I happened to meet Lizzie kind of through a social connection. And we started talking and I was like, well, I have this, like, crazy idea kicking around to, like, create an immersive audio thing. You work for trails like let’s do this.

Lizzie: And so for my part, I work for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, which I’ll call PEC for the rest of this happy hour. PEC is a longstanding nonprofit organization in the state. We’ve been around since 1970. This is our fiftieth anniversary. And what a 50th anniversary 2020 ended up being. But we do work throughout the environmental sector in the state. Some of our work is in energy and climate. Some of our work is in watershed restoration and conservation. I work in the trails and recreation part of our… you know, the work that we do. We both help to build out trail networks across the states in the Philadelphia area. We are working on the Circuit Trails Network. The Circuit Trails is a planned eight hundred plus miles of trails. Three hundred and fifty plus are already built. So we’re working on getting the rest of those eight hundred miles done. And for the parts of the Circuit Trails that are already finished, we’re working on programing them. And what we have seen through our programing is that there’s a fairly homogenous set of folks who are already tapped in to the trail network. That’s mostly white folks, it’s mostly upper income folks. And that we identify as a problem. We don’t want one type of person to be using these public spaces that are built to be accessible to everybody. So for several years now, we’ve been trying to think creatively about how we can explode the programing that we’re so used to doing that we’ve been doing for 50 years. And what new ways can we try to engage new communities or underrepresented communities- people who don’t necessarily see themselves as trail users. So when Adrienne and I met and she said, I have this idea for an immersive project that happens on trails, that immediately was something that struck me as a very creative solution to a challenging problem.

Katy: Mm hmm. Thank you so much for that background, that’s super helpful. And I would encourage everybody to also check out the circus.. Circuit Trails, not circus trails, the Circuit Trials website, which was recently relaunched. And I know so many people in the midst of Covid… one of the few things we can do or that feel more safe than others is to be outside. And I definitely know, at least for myself, I’ve learned a lot more about the Circuit Trials in the last couple of months and enjoyed them than ever before. But I appreciate both of you bringing up a really important part of this project, which is its focus on traditionally underserved audiences as related to environmental programing on the trails. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit for our listeners about how that came to be. Like, why are some reasons that trails are seeing this more homogenous audience base?

Adrienne: I think. Well, I think it’s not just trails. I think there are a lot of spaces that are pretty homogenous. And…

Katy: For sure.

Adrienne: And I know as a theater maker, something I have been thinking about for a number of years on different projects is like if part of my role is as a curator of narrative, right? Like when I decide to take on a project, I’m deciding what narratives my audiences see and don’t see. And I think we’re all aware that there are certain narratives that take up just a lot more of their fair share of room. And so, as Lizzie and I were talking about the early conception of this project, the idea of like literally putting stories in places where they aren’t often seen was both a exciting creative opportunity and also in some way, sort of like a reclaiming of spaces that have been dominated by a very small number of stories.

Lizzie: And I think, too, for the environmental sector. You know, the environmental movement in the United States has white supremacist roots. We frankly were looking at preserving land that was lived in already by indigenous people, that was colonized by white folk. And so, you know, even though it is certainly a good thing to want to preserve that land, there’s always been a question of preserving for whom? Who gets to benefit from this work? And then beyond that, who is doing this work? You know, looking around the people who are working in the environmental sector, myself included, I’m a white woman, it is predominantly, certainly not exclusively, but predominantly white people who are doing- getting paid for- this work in environmental non-profits. So certainly the work that we are doing is coming through our own perspective. So to the extent that we are making room for other perspectives for other communities, both in the program we’re doing and also in the heart of our own organizations and our own coalitions, that is, I think, the only way to de-center whiteness from the environmental fields and environmental spaces.

Adrienne: Just to jump on that, too. I think you really see it in… I mean, I think every single one of the pieces that were created as part of the project are artistically stellar. And they also do this incredible deep work of interrogating the spaces they’re in relationship to, and they’re so specific to the trails themselves. So in some cases, there are trails that we have that are right in the middle of Philadelphia in really industrialized neighborhoods, and those stories are getting in and sort of thinking about like what does it mean to be in this place? Maybe this isn’t the bucolic, beautiful nature trail that you think of. And it points your attention at that versus other trails, which maybe are incredible, like in nature with a capital ‘N’ trail. And the characters within the stories are… like I’m thinking Ari, who wrote for the Chester Valley Trail, grew up as a young LatinX kid in this area and like spoke in their application about like being on this trail and being the only brown person. And so I think the stories like, in addition to being incredibly entertaining, they get in you and sort of unseat the dominant narrative that maybe you expect in these places.

Katy: I think that’s so important and one of the many reasons that we at a Fringe Arts are thrilled to be partnering with you all on the presentation of this project. I think it’s so critical that we kind of unseat these dominant narratives of environmentalism as purity, which, as Lizzie pointed out, certainly has so many connections to white supremacy. And as each of these stories very specifically look at within Philadelphia and the broader region, have connections to concepts of urban renewal or, you know, taking of land, all of which might have been at their original moment, you know, posited as positives. And sure, it’s great to have green space; It’s absolutely in some ways, quote unquote, “good” for our environment, for our air quality, et cetera, but does come at a cost. And I think particularly in this Covid moment when there are so many moments where we’ve been like, oh, like the water is clearer now. The air quality is better now. That really in some ways covers up the great harm that has happened in crafting these supposedly pure spaces. So I’m grateful that this project is looking at that.

Lizzie: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting point to think about. There are positive benefits to so much in the world, but asking ourselves at what cost? And not necessarily to ask ourselves at what cost in order to turn a positive into a negative, but to see holistically what we’re dealing with and in identifying the costs, being able to repair them, being able to address them and being able to listen more deeply to the people in the communities who are dealing with them. So, I mean, I’m hoping that this is an exercise in deep listening to the stories, to the spaces, In addition to being an exercise in inviting new perspectives.

Adrienne: I think particularly… I’m thinking particularly of one of the stories that takes place on the Cooper River Trail at Camden Gateway Park, which was written by Afaq, who is a Sudanese poet. And the writing that she did, which is really fresh in my mind because we just walked in together recently. I think it’s… I love all the stories, this one is a favorite of mine in particular because of the way it works on you. It’s a trail that… you know if you live in Philadelphia and you drive over the Ben Franklin Bridge you’ve probably passed it a hundred times and literally never looked at it twice. And the space, I think, on first glance is a space that feels like an interstitial space. It feels like “no” place. And what Afaq’s incredibly beautiful piece of poetry does is really require you to be in this space. And you’re walking down the trail and on the right side, you can see a discount liquor store and a major highway through fair. And on the left side is the Cooper River. And you can sort of… you spend the whole walk literally between these two places. And the work really requires you to be present in both the beauty and the dissonance of that.

Katy: Adrienne, it makes me wonder, you know, how did you choose these sites? Each one is so specific in the resonances that it brings up. And each author has in some cases, like Ari, as you mentioned, but I know in others they built relationships while crafting their stories for the trail. So tell us a little bit about the process of determining the authors and then also each of the trails.

Adrienne: I’ll start with the authors, because I’m going to definitely tap in Lizzie on the trails. I mean, the authors were chosen… It’s funny I say this actually, like in the very, very best way. PEC… Lizzie, correct me if this is true… had really not done a lot of artistic programing kind of in this deep a way before working with Swim Pony. Is that fair to say?

Lizzie: Oh, that’s completely fair. We’ve… you know, art on trails is sort of a buzzword, something that happens frequently. But it’s more like… we haven’t even done this but like getting a sculptor to donate a sculpture for a trail, or we had partnered with some community arts organizations to do like plan a painting on a trail, but never anything that was in of itself a two and a half year long arts project on trails. This is definitely something new for us.

Adrienne: And I think for me, you know, Swim Pony does a lot of partnerships. We work a lot outside the art sector. And I, I think that sometimes folks who have established art programs can micromanage the process and in some ways, because they have a preconceived notion of how the process is going to go and what the collaboration is going to look like and what’s already been done in the field, it actually limits the scope of what’s possible. And the reason I bring this up in the context of the artists is that because PEC didn’t necessarily have an idea of how selecting authors for a trail project like this was supposed to go. They were like, well, we trust you to find really great people. And I was like, OK. And what I did was, I spent a year… you know, I started with the premise that, like, there are people out there who are incredible artists that maybe aren’t already folded into sort of like the nonprofit sector. And those are actually going to be the people who are going to create the works that are going to bring in people that aren’t already in this kind of sphere. And so I probably sent a thousand emails and I probably had like 200 cups of coffee because every single person who responded to the emails that I sent, I sat down with and had a conversation with as the very first connection point. And I talked to them about the mission of the project. I talked to them about my work and why I was there as an artist. I talked about PEC and what they wanted out of the project. And I talked about our developer, Toaster Lab and their background. They said, like, here’s where we are. We don’t know what it’s gonna look like. This is what we want to do. What about that is interesting to you? And of the folks that ended up finally in the cohort of 10, the thing that’s consistent about all of them is they were interested in all three parts of it, like they were excited to write for a medium that didn’t exist yet. They were excited to get into this question of like, why aren’t the people that they write to in these places? And they were really excited to work with me to figure out like what’s the kind of story that can fit in an immersive audio walking based performance. And so they’re just this incredibly deep, deep, deep, collaborative conversation where they have changed the process so much… like they did not walk into a template. And they really, in addition to writing the stories, helped me, and an in turn, I think PEC and Toaster Lab, helped write what would be possible in a project like this.

Lizzie: I agree completely and to the… to speak to your question, Katy, about the trail selection. That was something that happened before the author selection and was incorporated into the selection, the author selection and the conversations that Adrienne was having with them. The trails were selected based on looking at the wider geography of the circuit trails, which… the circuit trails exist in Philadelphia and in the eight counties that surround Philadelphia in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We wanted to have a good mix of trails first across that geography, then trails that were more rural- as Adrienne said before, nature with a capital “N” versus trails that maybe had more of an industrial legacy that really brought you into the city and the city scape. So having a diversity of aspects of trails as well as a diversity of communities that they run through. And so thinking about these different elements, we were able to pick 10 trails that really represented different parts of the circuit. And then one thing that was really interesting to me in seeing the authors that were engaging with Adrienne in the application process was the types of trails that the individual authors were drawn to. So Adrienne had mentioned Ari being drawn to the Chester Valley trail where, you know, where Ari grew up. And so you had this individual connection, and almost, I don’t know if nostalgic is the word, but a past connection to the space. Donia Salem Harhoor, who wrote for the Perkioman, the Perkioman Creek Trail, was just also really drawn to this landscape. And that was something that she immediately knew she wanted to take part in. Whereas on the other side of capital “N” nature, the Delaware River Trail in South Philly was something that Eppchez was really excited to explore, which has a completely different aspect than the Perkioman. So it was neat to see how the authors brought their intentions to the project and from the get go had very different attractions to how they wanted to tell the stories of these spaces.

Katy: It’s such an exciting project and is, I think, groundbreaking in so many ways, not only in its administration and in the way that it evolved with the authors and with the various different partners, but also, as Adrienne mentioned, in its medium- one that feels in some ways perfectly suited, you know, for this unexpected pandemic period that we’re in where we’re hungry for IRL or in real life performances and yet need to be distanced from each other. And being outside is in some ways safer than being inside. And so something that is an audio experience that’s geo-located to a site feels particularly great. And yet I don’t really know of anything like that that’s happened before. So I wonder, Adrienne, if you can talk now about the process of crafting those stories. What was that like for the authors to create something that evolved in real time as people moved through the space? And what are some unexpected challenges that you came up against as you worked through this new medium?

Adrienne: Well, I mean, there’s another project actually that’s in the Fringe this year called Walk Around Philadelphia that’s being administered by J.J. Tiziou and that project had its seeds… the version that is there now is definitely like J.J. taking it to a whole new level. But initially, that was actually a collaboration that happened with Swim Pony, where J.J., Ann de Forest, Sam Wend, and I literally circumnavigated the border of Philadelphia on foot. And it was kind of a… I don’t know, it was sort of like an exercise in, like creative exploration. We didn’t have a lot of aims in it. One of the outcomes of of doing that crazy thing over five and a half days was I just started to notice my own experience of being on foot, moving at the speed of walking, being in these places where, like, I have a relationship to Philadelphia and some parts of the border, I knew really well, some parts I didn’t. And just being hyper observational and sort of similarly around the same time, I was doing a lot of running with podcasts and music in my ear and noticing that experience that I think a lot of us have had where you’re like walking through the city, and then the music or the the words you’re listening to kind of sink to the place around you and it’s not exactly like you are the performer, but it does kind of feel like your perspective on the landscape is like a movie that’s sort of synched to you personally. And I was really obsessed with this idea. And I think that that feeling has been the thing that’s that’s sort of carried through the entire creative process. So our developer Toaster Lab and Swim Pony, had a series of workshops over a year that was funded by the Network of Ensemble Theaters, really to explore this question of like, what is a story that’s in your head as much as it is in the landscape, that’s personal for you, that tracks you, but also is in relationship to the things that you’re seeing? And we developed like a little booklet of, like, best lessons from that series of workshops that we then gave to all the authors at the beginning of that process. And that kind of became a Bible that we returned to. I don’t know that the authors necessarily looked at it all the time, but those concepts were things that I brought back when I would give feedback on the writing, or I would say, like, you know, think about the time that it takes a person to move from this place to that place. Think about giving them intentional space to reflect on the thing that you just wrote about. Like, if you’re if you’re listening so deeply to words 100 percent of the time, it’s actually hard to look at what’s around you. So how are you balancing that kind of inner and outer space? And then I think the last thing I’ll say is just that once our sound designer and composer Mike Kiley came onto the project, who actually also happens to have this incredible background in creating geo located sound walks, the project just sort of like hit an entirely different level of creative expertise. Because Mike is so smart about crafting sound around the user’s head and experience and geography. And we’re working in binaural, which means it’s like 360. So it’s like you actually feel like the sound is taking place in space and just sort of is this extension of, you know that was a lot. But like, I think it’s one of the things that’s so exciting about this medium is it feels like when movies were beginning, like you’re discovering the rules of how… of what’s possible in this format for the very first time.

Lizzie: There’s also, Adrienne had facilitated, Adrienne and the Swim Pony team and Toaster Lab as well, facilitated a workshop for the authors after going through almost, I mean, over a year of trial and error with this technology. So the first time after the authors were all selected and the beginning of their period in residence, coming together at the Seaport Museum, which is one of the environmental centers that we partnered with to do this project, to go over some of the findings from exploring the technology. And it was so exciting to be… and I think that was shared by everybody in the room… to be in this space with all of these creative people who were genuinely just enthusiastic about being a part of this project and seeing each other, meeting each other and hearing about each other’s ideas. And at the same time, learning about how to really take advantage of this medium. It was super exciting and just I was such a, I was so pleased to be a part of it and to see, like, all the work that Adrienne was putting into it- to expressing the best way to use this medium. It was really cool.

Adrienne: The one last thing I’ll say, which has sort of been… This process is so different from live theater for me in some ways, because the lot… like though the intended outcome of the experience is to feel live, there are so many sections of the development of it… I was joking for a while that I’m like theater directing by spreadsheet, you know, because the authors created this script, we would walk the trails together and help me sort of like literally use Google Maps to like pin their scenes to places in space. We went into a recording studio and got all of this audio and created these files. And then I had to go back out into space walking around with these files that were fixed into place and certain nudging and constantly playing and tweaking with exactly how they were going to trigger in the app that Toaster Lab built from scratch for this project and actually figure out how to make sure that, like, no matter how fast you walked, no matter whether or not you took a wrong turn, like if you stopped for five minutes because you wanted to take a look at this beautiful tree in front of you, that you as the user really are allowed to engage however you want and the experience is going to follow you.

Katy: I have to say, for everyone listening, Adrienne has been an absolute saint in the making of this process and is constantly trying out all of the trails. And one thing to remember is that not only is the creation of this new medium and all of the various collaboration’s, there are layers upon layers there. But then, of course, sometimes the trails change. These are living, breathing environments, just as the people walking them are living and breathing people. And I know we’ve had a number of big storms this spring and summer. Trees have gone down, terrain shifts, which is great. You know, it’s variable, as live theater always is, and adds another layer of challenge. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, too- Lizzie, both from your perspective, in terms of keeping up the trails, but also, Adrienne, in terms of responding to that in real time.

Lizzie: Yes. So the Circuit Trails are always in development- hopefully not always in development. One day they’ll be finished and we’ll just be able to program these amazing spaces. But they’re currently still under development. So there’s changes that are happening, both Katy as you mentioned, from natural factors as well as human factors of this space still being sort of a work in progress. And, of course, Covid-19, and the fallout from our pandemic has also caused some changes. So we’ve seen, since we’ve selected the trails, some of the parking lots, for example, have closed and we’ve had to reassess where’s the most accessible place for somebody to park in order to start their TrailOff experience? Or in Bartram’s Gardens there’s the extension of the Schuylkill River Trail is going to cross the river and meet up with Bartram’s Gardens, which is mostly exciting, though, as a parentheses the Circuit Trails Network is also thinking about anti gentrification issues with an expanding trail network, but that’s an aside. That I mean, it’s an aside that makes putting diverse narratives in that space even more important. But thinking about how does this ongoing development affect the ability to tell the story? It is. Yes. Just constant changes and constant challenges on how do we adapt to make sure that this story and that this experience is accessible to folks while still making sure people are safe and not trespassing.

Adrienne: And I think kind of similarly, this is very different from me coming from theater, where I think there’s that opening night mentality, which is you open the show and it’s done and it’s fixed. And I think one of the things that actually is the most exciting for me about the partnership of TrailOff with Fringe is that we have this incredible month-long platform for people to try the trails, give us feedback and actually continue to change them and make them better. Right? So the place that the trails are going to begin the festival at, I hope, is not going to be the same place that they end at.

Lizzie: TrailOff will be available for the full year as well. So this month with Fringe is, as you’re saying, like a jumping off point for a ongoing experience.

Adrienne: Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways it’s almost like a month long, like collaborative development period for us that… you know, like our team knows this project and knows the stories so well in and out, like I’ve been on these trails I know what’s supposed to happen. And I’m actually excited for Fringe audiences, like whether that’s like going on our website, which is www.trailoff.com and like leaving us feedback on the connect page that we’ve set up there or, you know, DMing us on our social channels which are on Instagram and Facebook or even just like sending us an email. The thing is, if somebody is like, ‘hey, you know, like just so you know that this part of the story, like, it just seems like it’s going really fast for me, like, I wish I could hang out in this music longer’ or ‘this piece of the trail, like, didn’t quite sync up or this audio file is…’ you know whatever it is. Normally, if you got that feedback from an audience in a theater show, like you just couldn’t do anything with it. With this, if we get that information, like we can go into the, we can go into the tools that we have on the back end and update it like almost immediately. And I think having… for me in a way, it’s like we’re going to get hopefully hundreds of new collaborators on the project as soon as it opens up through Fringe.

Lizzie: We’re also interested in, and I think I speak for both Swim Pony and PEC, but certainly a part of PEC’s interest in this project to begin with is the ongoing development of environmental stewards and thinking that, you know, if you have a personal connection to these spaces, you’ll be more inclined and encouraged and inspired to take care of them. Because they are public spaces, right? That we are all able to participate in. But knowing that people need an invitation to do that and seeing how these spaces do change. These are not static areas. They need care. We are hoping that people who have a TrailOff experience who connect to the stories that are in these spaces, will then perhaps take a next step and see how they can get involved in the care of these places.

Adrienne: And one other thing I should mention is that many of the stories, many of the stories change in subtle ways, depending on the time of day or the the weather. Some of them have multiple options for parts of the story so you actually can’t get the entire story in one go. I’m really excited for people to do it this fall to try the same story… I’m thinking actually of Salem Harhoor’s piece, which has this beautiful poem. I won’t spoil it. But it has this beautiful poem that references the history of- they were called Shine Boys who would like cut the ice out of the Perkioman Creek with these horses. And it’s a beautiful piece. And right now, the poem ends overtop of the Perkioman Creek in you’re watching this water rush by and all I can think every time I do it now is like what’s gonna happen in five months when there actually is ice out there and it’s an entirely different creative experience because the landscape is changing? So I think over the course of the year that TrailOff will be up, and hopefully more knock on wood if we can sort of secure some funding to bring new stories into the fold down the line. I think my hope is that this isn’t a one off thing, that people actually do develop a deeper relationship to these places through the stories and beyond and really get to have this almost like nostalgic personal connection being like this is my trail.

Lizzie: Adrienne It’s also making me think about like, what if somebody is doing to Donia’s story and they’re standing over the Perkioman Creek five months from now and there is no ice because our winters don’t get cold anymore and have this you know, I guess nostalgia could be the use of the word you’re using with context, too, of like the history of this place is, you know, not where we’re going towards any more. And how like the urgency that that creates in a person, which is not necessarily the point, so to speak, of Donia’s story, but is an unintended consequence of just having a story in a space that is constantly changing.

Katy: And I think just seeing that story in a real space rather than a crafted environment of a theater, I think makes all the difference. It really brings it that personal quality that you both talked about, which is so exciting about this project. So thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Happy Hour on the Fringe. To all our listeners, we hope that you’ll continue to follow us throughout the run of the Fringe Festival on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and, of course, download our app to access TrailOff in particular, you can always do that through our website at fringearts.com or through the trailoff.com website that was mentioned earlier. We thank you again to Adrienne and Lizzie for joining us and encourage everybody to take part in this and to also join us for some launch events. Each of the trails will have an online event held via Zoom to give us an opportunity to speak more with each of the writers, their various different collaborators, and to get some further information about the thematics of each trail, including an opening conversation on Friday, September 11th that’ll be moderated by Zach Blackwood here at Fringe Arts with Lizzie, Adrienne and Michael Kiley to hear more about the process of crafting this project. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Lizzie: Thank you, Katy. It’s a pleasure.

Adrienne: Thank you.

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