Megan recently sat down with Laura Sullivan Cassidy, a Seattle-based artist and editor who’s hosting interviews with our artists this season, to discuss her first few months at On the Boards:

LSC: What is your earliest memory of performance?

MK: I grew up in an artist household. Being around art was a way of life. In my teenage years I became involved in the punk scene, and there was so much that would happen in those punk spaces that was really performance. I started to be drawn to things that were cheeky, or things that would poke fun at the audience, and things that weren’t really related to just seeing a band. Certain punk groups were really starting to push the boundaries of what it meant to be at a show.

LSC: How do your early explorations in art, music, and organizing inform your work with art institutions?

MK: That punk ethos is core to me and to my relationship with the world. I ended up studying sociology and art in college, and thinking about people and meaning-making together in community, and how those intersect with power. That’s such a punk thing to think about! It’s questioning the things around you, questioning authority, looking around at why structures are the way they are, and asking if we can change them. I think that’s the same whether you’re working at a really DIY space, or working within a large institution. One thing I’ve learned is that organizations are not a single thing. They are made up of dozens of people that are trying to work to move the organization forward, and there’s so much room in there for play and experimentation. A lot of that comes with creating structures, and organizing platforms in such a way that artists can then present their work and what they have to say.

LSC: How would you describe the relationship between performance and inquiry?

MK: Living with or experiencing ambiguity is uncomfortable. I think that’s a lot of what draws me to art and artists. It’s taught me how to live in ambiguity for longer, and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve tried to do while working in arts organizations…not having art provide answers, but instead having people sit in ambiguity for longer. Maybe that is actually one true purpose of art in a certain way: increasing the amount of time spent. The more we can figure out how to be in those states for longer, I think that’s a benefit. It’s helped me with things like not jumping to conclusions, not needing an answer, and leading with inquiry. And asking questions, whether that’s about what I’m seeing or even just about myself. That has been really helpful in both my life and professional practice, and it’s one of the things I love about art and performance.

LSC: So you've just moved to Seattle to join On the Boards, how are you navigating the push-pull conflicts between our city's heritage and nostalgia, and our boundary-pushing, forward-moving ethos?

MK: Everyone has been kind in inviting me into the community, but it'll probably take years to really learn Seattle! It’s been interesting to hear more specifically about Seattle’s legacy of fringe and experimental work. Our city is an epicenter in many ways. People want that to continue, though they acknowledge that the economic context is really different now, and that’s challenging. I’m thinking about how a place like On the Boards can be instrumental in honoring and respecting that legacy, but also thinking about what is next. What are the next phases? What does it mean to be in Seattle now?

LSC: Can you tell me a little more about how you balance the need to organize with the creative and artistic elements of your role?

MK: So many organizations, including On the Boards, were founded by artists and people that come straight from the creative world into the practice of running an organization. My trajectory has been so different from that: I have been an arts administrator since the beginning, and not a creator. On the whole, I like my work behind the scenes and the practices that are presented on stage to actually, and importantly, be very different from each other. Behind the scenes I like to be organized, I have a lot of experience in maturing an organization's systems and building that scaffolding so that work can happen on stage. And then I like what’s presented to be radical, and free. I think that those things actually go hand-in-hand, I don’t think they’re opposed. That is a way that we can support artists. We can build a house that’s safe, so that artists can put their most radical foot forward.