RealTime Arts’ Molly & Rusty on interactive happenings in Pittsburgh, where it's all about "Feeling the bean"

The Conversation Art Podcast

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In Episode 373, Molly Rice & Rusty Thelin, co-founders of RealTime Arts in Pittsburgh, talk about:

The especially niche field of their work, which is the performance of live theater that aligns more with visual art and doesn’t really check any of the ‘theater’ boxes, and how they have interactive elements but don’t confront the audience the way a lot of performance art does (they describe a “lot of conventions around theater… that contemporary audiences have trouble with…”); their series “People of Pittsburgh,” whose tagline is ‘Theatrical Portraits of Extraordinary Ordinary Pittsburghers;’ the size of their audiences and how they’re shows are often tailored to the neighborhood’s they take place in, and how they make their performances as open to all as possible, with a ‘radical hospitality’ option whenever possible; their hosting of Little Amal, the puppet of a Syrian refugee girl that travels the world doing performances amidst community and how their version added a play that incorporated a massive local crowd; their rock performance, ‘Angelmakers: Songs for Female Serial Killers,’ which was a tight show, as compared with their more experimental and improvisatory shows, and how they got a much more mixed audience, including concert-goers to a rock concert, for that show.

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In the extended Full Patreon Bonus Episode, Molly & Rusty talk about: how they financially support their program, through a mix of fundraising, grants and occasional ticket sales; the gentrification that’s happening in Pittsburgh, which they admit to being a part of, and moved there because they wanted to be somewhere they were needed, as artists, and was a perfect medium in between a big city and a small rural town; Pittsburg’s cohesive art/cultural community, which reminds Molly of 1990s Austin, TX, when she played in bands; how she consider their work multi-disciplinary, influenced both by site-specific work, and that they’re descendants of the happenings of the ‘60s and ‘70s (including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Wilson); their current approach to social media (including looking into leaving Meta platforms); how connecting is a large part of success; and how they feel about connecting with the podcast’s Open Call (the short answer is: ‘really good’).

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