All Music courtesy of Squonk Opera Steve O’Hearn: Our decision making process, when you don’t have a story is, and this a quote from Robert Wilson, one of our early heroes, was that every decision was intuitive. So you’re hearing these sounds and you’re looking at that thing, does it work? Or is it stupid? It’s a fine line. Jackie Dempsey: It is. Jo Reed: That’s Steve O’Hearn. He and Jackie Dempsey are the artistic directors of Squonk Opera and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. You could say that Squonk Opera is a group of interdisciplinary performing artists centered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…and you would be right, but that doesn’t convey the sheer fun and exuberance of Squonk Opera. The Boston Globe calls it a carnival on wheels and that seems just about right. It embraces mayhem and silliness, combining original music with performance, visual jokes, and outrageous often kinetic sets. Squonk Opera has created twelve distinct shows and performed in over 250 venues throughout the United States. It’s also been touring internationally since 2003. It’s the brainchild of Jackie Dempsey and Steve O’Hearn. I really wanted to know what they were thinking when they began Squonk Opera. Steve O'Hearn: We did start with a notion that Jackie is a musician and composer and I'm a designer and visual artist. We started with the kind of notion that you could make theatre, as in live performance that people can watch, to good effect, using essentially those two art forms, and very little verbiage or narrative or plot. Jo Reed: I have to know about the origin of the name. Steve O'Hearn: Oh, sure. I'll tell you that, 'cause there's like five different stories, and Jackie only knows the dumb ones. But the fact is-- Jackie Dempsey: Watch it. Jo Reed: I want the best one. Steve O'Hearn: Alright, the best one is simply, it's a funny word that we liked a lot. Jackie Dempsey: Oh, that's a really good description, Steve O'Hearn: And, well, first of all, okay, let me back up there. First of all, we decided we would be an opera company because we were using the two forms that primarily drives high opera or traditional European opera, or opera generally, which was sight and sound, musical sound. And so we decided we were an opera company, and we happened on a poster in Philadelphia that was for a Chinese opera, and we asked someone about that, and of course, since then we've seen Chinese and Korean operas, and they told us that that kind of opera was much more like American spectator sports; as in you boo the bad guys and you cheer the good guys. It was much more participatory and informal, and they would eat the equivalent of the hot dogs and leave the show and come back half an hour later, and drink beer. So, it was much more like spectator sports are in America, and we thought, well that's the kind of opera we are. So we needed a word to contrast it with the, of course, the high tradition of regular opera. Jackie Dempsey: So people would know we weren't doing Mozart or Wagner. We wanted a ridiculous word in front of "opera." Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: We figured squonk was ridiculous. Jo Reed: It certainly got my attention when I saw it. Tell me how it began. How did Squonk Opera begin? Jackie Dempsey: Let's see, well, Steve, do you want to tell the story about how I was just a crazy kid? Steve O'Hearn: I, okay. So Squonk Opera started. I had been doing commercial design for a while and despised it and had a bitterness toward both my employers and clients, and, I came back to Pittsburgh after living in a bunch of different cities all over the country, and I happened in a little hamburger joint here in the south side where we are right now, and there was Jackie waiting tables. She was all starry-eyed, just out of grad school, from Washington University in St. Louis, and I said "Jackie, let's make some art," and she-- Jackie Dempsey: That is some origin story. Steve O'Hearn: And "possibly, could you bring me some ketchup?" So between those two, Jackie Dempsey: And he's not a very good tipper, I can tell you that. Jo Reed: Jackie, do you have a different origin story or are you gonna stick with Steve's? Jackie Dempsey: Well, I have a detail on one of my origin stories for Squonk, and that is the first time I saw Steve perform was at a club here in Pittsburgh, and I met him afterward and when he came over, he had his costume on, which consisted of pantyhose over his face. So he had to lift the pantyhose so I can see what he really looked like. Steve O'Hearn: Wait. That, this all sounds very undignified. The fact is, the pantyhose, hose had a hole cut for the mouth and I was, I'm a wind player, and I thought the only pertinent part of my body for an audience, for a wind player, is my mouth, and they really had no purpose looking at any other part of my face. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, it was very high art. Steve O'Hearn: So, it was a focal structure. Jackie Dempsey: And I thought I want to work with this guy. Jo Reed: So if you're a wind player, are you also a musician, Steve? Jackie Dempsey: Well, I put some air quotes around that. Steve O'Hearn: A sore subject. Essentially, as long as I keep designing shows, Jackie will humor me and let me play wind in the band. All the rest are professional musicians, but old Steve, well, they just pop in once in a while for a little, a little, Jackie Dempsey: Color. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: Little flavor. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jo Reed: So it wasn't Steve, no offencse Steve, but it wasn't Steve's musicianship that drew you as much as the pantyhose? Jackie Dempsey: It was actually his lack of musicianship which drew me, because after I saw the show I said "I really love the visuals. Maybe you could use a little help with the music." Steve O'Hearn: She did, she did, and I was, of course, very intimidated by that fancy classical chromatic stuff that she had been studying in grad school. Because I'm just a folk musician, just a traditional musician, learned by ear. But, it worked. Jo Reed: Jackie, what's your background at that point? Jackie Dempsey: At that point, I had just finished grad school for music composition and piano, so I had just come back to Pittsburgh from grad school, and I was waiting tables, as Steve said, and trying to figure out what to do next with my master's degree in music. Jo Reed: How did you proceed? You know, okay, let's put on a show. But, tell me a little bit of the trajectory between that decision to create art together and actually mounting something? Jackie Dempsey: Well, when we were first starting, we were more like a band. More like a rock band, and we went on the road as bands do, in one van with one tech person and all of our crap in the van, and we toured all across the country, you know, for 50 bucks a gig and played in bars and clubs. Steve O'Hearn: But actually before that, though, we did our first couple of shows in little art gallery basements and museum stairwells and clubs here in Pittsburgh. So we kind of played both high art and low art venues, which was a really interesting education for us. Jackie Dempsey: And it was fun to play in the clubs, because we were very unexpected for people. So, I remember when we did our first big club gig in Pittsburgh at the Bloomfield Bridge tavern, and we had no idea what people were going to make of us, because we came out with ridiculous costumes on and headpieces and we got everyone pretty quiet and they were actually watching. So that was kind of an interesting experience at the bar. Steve O'Hearn: And then pretty much the same year we did that, we did the stairwell show for the Carnegie Museum, at which we were just as unexpected, and we had our singer sing with her head in a box. It was a Cube Descending a Staircase, reference to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Anyway, Jackie didn't understand the reference, but it went over. It was a, it was a completely different audience, and it was good. It's Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, I know who he is. Jo Reed: You two are the artistic directors, and I kinda want an idea of the structure. So are there a group of Squonkers that you work with regularly? Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, we have a crew of musicians and artists and technicians and designers that we work with. We collaborate with them to make our shows, and several of them go on the road with us, so are more on the road, where about nine or ten people making the shows happen. So yeah, we try, and we try to keep the same people as long as we can. We've had musicians who've been with us for 10 to 20 years. So we're, we try to stick together as long as possible. Steve O'Hearn: So, we are very much of an ensemble and we like that structure. So when we lock into people we like working with, we try to keep them as long as we can, and there is that crew that goes on the road. So we're very much like a family, a dysfunctional family, because we spend so much time together in different situations, and then there are some outside people that we bring in, like Beth Corning to help us choreograph a new show when we make a new one. Jo Reed: The first Squonkish piece, if you will, that you put together, would be Night of the Living Dead: The Opera? Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, well, Steve O'Hearn: That was our first theatrical commission. So that was kind of our breaking out from the club and art gallery scene. It was a theatrical commission. Jackie Dempsey: I was gonna say, but a couple months before that, we did a show in a junkyard. That was probably our first big production that we did. It was just in a junkyard here in Pittsburgh, and Steve worked with a guy there who drove the crane around and moved the crushed cars, the cubes of crushed cars, into platforms, and we played on the back of pickup trucks, and we had the audience come in for free, bring their lawn chairs. Steve O'Hearn: We had that crane operator, was on a headset with us to choreograph the crane. So this was a 60-foot crane that lifted crushed cars, and it was doing pirouettes and leaping: the crane part of it, not the bottom part. But, Jo Reed: Okay, not to be mundane. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jo Reed: How do you rehearse that? Steve O'Hearn: You pretty much don't. Jo Reed: Yeah, I figured. Ok, then the first commissioned piece you did was Night of the Living Dead: The Opera? Why Night of the Living Dead? Jackie Dempsey: Well, we had done a show at City Theater, which is the theater that Marc Masterson, who was there at the time and commissioned us, they were doing a performance art festival, and we were able to draw a lot of young people to the theater, which they were struggling with, and so Marc was excited to work with us, and it was actually his idea to do Night of the Living Dead: The Opera, because the movie was filmed not far from Pittsburgh, maybe about an hour away. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: And he thought it would be a good pairing. Steve O'Hearn: And of course, in the 25 years since, or the 22 years since, whatever it was, zombies et cetera had become quite a thing all over in pop culture. But at that time it was still kind of an underground cult thing, and it had, it had some real interest. The other thing we had here because it had been made in Pittsburgh, was that Marc had connections to get the rights to it, and he was, he was pretty hardcore about having paperwork like that. So we negotiated the rights to it from the original directors. Jackie Dempsey: So we were able to show the film in its entirety, and we each played a character in the film, and we were able to turn the soundtrack up and down, so we could, we wrote our own music for it, and we actuall, we did a celebrity night where they invited the actors who were in the film to come to see it, and George Romero was there and it as quite exciting. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jo Reed: How did you proceed with that? Did the visual follow the music, did the music follow the visuals? Did you plot it out and then go your separate ways to go work on it separately, and then come back together? How did you-- how did you move forward? Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. All of the shows pretty much happen like that. We come together and go apart and come back together and try different combinations of things. That one was a really interesting test of our, our ability to work cues to the millisecond. 'Cause everything was synchronized exactly to the movie. One of our initial ideas was to not stop or manipulate the movie in any form. So the movie rolled, and we had to synch with it and if we were, if we were mimicking or parroting what the actors were doing physically, we, it had to be at the same second that they were doing it, and the same with the music being faded in and out. So, but Jackie and I do generally go off, and I, I do story boards and she does kind of oral sketches of music, and we come back and work them together, and in this case with the third, with the third art form, which was the movie running. Jo Reed: Do the people who you work with for a long time, do you work with them as well during this process? Jackie Dempsey: Yeah. When I work on the music, I'll start writing things that I think will go with the concept that Steve has come up with and that might go with some of the scene ideas or the, the visuals. Or, I'll just start writing things that I think would be fun to do, and we go back and forth, and then I will give all the stuff I've written to the other members of the band, and people will work on their parts individually, and then I, I work with each person. I'd say "I like this, I don't like that. Play here, don't play there," and then we get together in small groups until we're all together. So it's very collaborative, and some of the music comes from all of us being together. Steve O'Hearn: And it spreads out bit by bit, with us getting feedback the whole time as the groups get larger and, and the designers talk to the musicians about the music and vice versa. Jackie Dempsey: Something I hear in music rehearsal a lot from our drummer Kevin, is "Uh, maybe you should save that one for your solo album." Steve O'Hearn: Yeah and we aren't afraid to fail. I mean, one of the basic premises of being an artist, I think, is keeping working and being okay with failing. So, a whole lot of the trick, I think, is the editing process; is generating a lot of stuff and then editing down. Of course, Jackie's far more precious with her stuff. She'll say "Oh, we gotta put this new song in." Whatever. She'll make me redesign the show five times, but she won't lose that song. But there's this whole process. So you have both creation and kind of an editing process. Jo Reed: Your shows have a lot of moving parts. Who directs them? Is there a director? How do you manage that? Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: Yes, that is tricky. Steve O'Hearn: We-- Jackie Dempsey: We've worked with different directors over the years. In recent years we worked with a guy here in Pittsburgh, a British guy, Rick Kemp, who has helped us, and then Beth Corning who's worked with us. But it is tricky. Steve O'Hearn: So-- Jackie Dempsey: They will say that we're not the easiest group to work with. Steve O'Hearn: It's an inversion of the standard hierarchy. We aren't hiring a director to direct; we're, we're directing a director to direct. Which is awkward. Jackie Dempsey: And they will tell us so. Steve O'Hearn: So it is essentially the composer and the designer with final say on things, and us asking these people to essentially subcontract some ideas and clarity and tightness to the production. But it's really interesting for us, because Beth Corning's a contemporary dancer. Rick comes out of the kind of European Lecoq clowning tradition. But we have become less and less directed, too, over the 20 years. Since Night of the Living Dead, where we worked with another local director, very intensively, and essentially, he had final word. Jackie Dempsey: It is important for us, though, to have outside eyes, because that's what the hard part is, because we're both performing, and so a lot of time with these outdoor shows we're doing now, Steve will drop out of the music and he'll watch to see what's going on. Steve O'Hearn: Which no one really objects to, much to my disappointment. Jackie Dempsey: Sometimes we don't even notice. Steve O'Hearn: And sometimes we put it on video, and oftentimes when we do night shows or lit theatrical shows, I'll do an entirely separate set of rehearsals where I'll work with the lighting designer and some models on stage to figure out lighting. Jo Reed: That was my other question. And it really was about structure. Do you write the shows as outdoor events? Because they take up a lot of space. Steve O'Hearn: Yes, and they, they always have, and we've bounced back and forth over the years, but in fact in the past four years or so, we're only doing outdoor shows. We just finished a run, yeah, year and a half ago, we did our last theatrical run in New York and since then we've just been doing outdoor work. In great part because it's so fun for us, the nature of the informality. Much like the junkyard, of the audiences gathering and the surprise of performing in a public space instead of a high-art venue. We really enjoy it and I think there's a real lack of, of American artists doing work in that form, the way some Europeans and Australians and Asian groups are doing. Really exciting outdoor, public work. So we're kind of focusing on that recently. Jo Reed: I would think, moving the shows inside, the difference between inside and outside, I would think would be quite spectacular? Steve O'Hearn: Yes, yeah. The problem with outside, of course, is you have none of those great tools for creating focus and, and visual, and even sound system issues. So you have none of the tools. It’s like being on a sailing ship or being a cowboy. Which is kind of a lot of fun on tour. So it's a lot more work, a lot more tension. You're checking weather every five minutes. We've been huddled out there with 100 grand-worth of equipment with tarps over them and waiting for a rain shower to end. But the issue is, is that it's festivals, I think, are, are a really growing part of culture, and it has something to do with, I think, young audiences aversion to the temples of high art like theaters and, and concert halls. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, it breaks down all those barriers of, you don't have to know who Squonk Opera is. You don't have to know what we do. You don't have to know what the show's about. You don't have to buy a ticket. You just show up, you turn the corner, and you see this crazy wild thing there, and you stay for five minutes or all 30 minutes. What, it's up to you. So it's been really fun for us. Steve O'Hearn: And I think living in Pittsburgh, again that reference to spectator sports. Somehow a couple of guys hitting a ball around is exciting enough for tens of thousands of people here to gather and create whole lifestyles and lawn ornaments -- Jackie Dempsey: Steve-- Steve O'Hearn: -- related to-- Jackie Dempsey: -- just because you were never picked for the football team in elementary school-- Steve O'Hearn: Anyway, I'm just saying. There's something about the human need to gather in mass audiences, and right now, unfortunately, sports is fulfilling that need, and of course it'd be lovely if the arts did that. Jo Reed: Well, let's talk about the importance of Pittsburgh itself to Squonk. You’re very much centered there artistically as well as physically. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. I think that's true. I think we kind of embrace this, and I think that's one of the things that distinguishes us from other kind of contemporary multimedia groups out of New York and L.A.; where there, there's whole worlds there that are all interconnected and feeding each other, and, and we're kind of out here in the flyover state in the Rust Belt, and, I think, it's important for us to acknowledge that and kind of embrace that difference. Jo Reed: Well, you've said that you want to create post-industrial performances. Tell me what you mean by that. Jackie Dempsey: I knew someone was going to ask you that someday, Steve. You can't just write that stuff. Steve O'Hearn: No one's ever asked me that before. I think the issue is that, there was, middle of the 20th Century was kind of a period when the world was defined by America and our, our kind of muscle in manufacturing, of which Pittsburgh was a central part, and we're proud of that heritage, but obviously we're past that now, and the question is, what happens to art? I think a lot of classical art forms and what we call high art forms, and I'm just using that in quotes, come from European royalty and the European class system. Which was then mimicked by Americans for a couple of centuries, and now we're kind of past that in some new world, and I think, I think that's why we're Pittsburgh in nature is that we have no particular attraction towards those venues, and in fact what you've heard us talk about as spectator sports and in admiration for what that accomplishes socially, rather than what theaters or concert halls accomplish socially. Jackie Dempsey: That sounded good, Steve. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, but did it answer the question? Jo Reed: So is that what you mean when you say much of your work is site-specific; that you create work for those particular places? Steve O'Hearn: No, that's not actually so true anymore, because we're kind of a touring machine. So we create a show that can live in different sites. What happens is each show is different, it's much different to perform our current show Pneumatica in front of the State Building in Rhode Island, like we did two weeks ago, than it is to perform in middle of a wading pool in Calgary, like we did two weeks before that. But essentially we have to be pragmatic enough to get a show there for a certain fee without losing money, and so there are all these kind of real-world issues that we have to do to create a touring show. Jackie Dempsey: For several years we did do a series of site-specific shows, though. Our hometown opera series where we did, for example, Pittsburgh: The Opera, Baltimore: The Opera. Where we would go to the town and, Steve O'Hearn: We did like 20 cities. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, 20 or 25 or something, and we would go to the town, do a residency. We would interview people and use video clips of their interviews in the show, talking about the town. Videotape the place. We had local dance groups on stage with us. So that show had a template, but all of the material in the show was derived from the actual place. Jo Reed: Well, there’s your show, Mayhem and Majesty, and that’s a show with no story and no characters. Is that lack of narrative typical for your shows? How did it come together? Jackie Dempsey: That's like a lot of our shows Steve O'Hearn: That's our forte, really. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, we've done a couple shows that have had a narrative, and they are not our more successful shows, I would have to say, because it's not really what we do, because we come from music and art. We come from two abstract non-narrative art forms. It's a real struggle for us to put a story to what we're doing. Steve O'Hearn: And, our other thought is that we don't need to. So many other people are doing that, so well, often, and poorly. But there's nothing but story line rolling out of every machine in the household, and every theater and most operas, and so there's all these, all these kind of narratives, and narratives important in stories, important to humans, but it's not the only thing. So we're kind of exploring the other end. Jackie Dempsey: And in the home town show, it was fun, because we had a lot of stories in the show-- Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: -- but we didn't tell any of them. They were all told by the local people. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, that was nice. Jackie Dempsey: That was nice. Steve O'Hearn: But, ultimately, our decision-making process when you don't have a story is, and this is a quote from Robert Wilson, one of our early heroes, was that every decision is intuitive. So you're hearing these sounds and you're looking at that thing, does it work? Or, is it stupid? It's a fine line. Jackie Dempsey: It is, and one of the other changes we made recently is up until a year or so, we always had a singer in the group, and just now we've, we've gone instrumental with the latest show, and what that did for us, it gave us a real freedom. With the audiences we've noticed, since we've done that, no one comes up to us after the show and says "what was that about?" Because, they think that a singer is telling them a story, and they think they're missing it if they don't know what she's saying. Steve O'Hearn: Which was a quandary for about 22 years. Jackie Dempsey: So it's nice that people just relax and, and let everything wash over them. <music> Jo Reed: The latest show is Pneumatica. What's the back story with that? What's its origin story? Steve O'Hearn: Well, a lot of the origin stories are very simple Zen-like notions. So, with, well, let me just give you two other shows. The reason we did the Hometown Operas was we said "Well, what do we do our next show about?" And we said to ourselves "Well, why don't we just do it about wherever we are?" And that was that, okay. Then the next show after that, Jackie Dempsey: Because being a touring group, we don't really get to explore the places where we go. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: But this way we could. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, usually you load into a theater and load up the next morning, and you don't even see the town. Jo Reed: Oh. Good one. Steve O'Hearn: Thank you, and then the next one was "Well, we're driving in a truck full of crap. Why don't we not even unload the truck?" And that was Go Roadshow, where we performed on a truck bed that unfolded once we arrived in a space. So we performed right on the bed of the truck as, after it opened up. And so anyway, for Pneumatica, our most recent show, we thought, well again, thinking of things like spectator sports and festivals, mass gatherings outside, what's interesting is that you're out in the open air. So the whole show is simply about air. Everything in it refers to air or uses air to power it, and of course there are a lot of connections between air and the, the art form that we call music of vibrations going through air. Jackie calls that music. So, it was about air. Jo Reed: Jackie, you play the piano in all kinds of interesting positions: upside down, twirling around. Jackie Dempsey: Yeah, Steve likes to give me a challenge in every show. He's, I think, he's testing me. He's thinking "Oh, she thinks she's so fancy. She can play the piano. But let's see if she can do it if it spins. Let's see if she can do it if it goes up over her head." And I do it. Don't I, Steve? Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, yeah. I said anybody can play a piano, but who can play a piano upside-down? That's my question. Jackie Dempsey: I can. Steve O'Hearn: Exactly. The other thing that we kind of play off a lot is simply, and I'm quoting someone here. I just don't remember who, “The tiny athleticism that is music-making.” Another basic premise of it is that it's interesting to see musicians play music, and there are really blatant ways to emphasize that. You light the musician's hands, if it's their hands that are moving. But essentially it's the kind of tiny athleticism of making music that we're using as our abstract source for theater, often. Jo Reed: Yes, and certainly in Pneumatica, you also play with the instruments a lot. They have things coming out of them. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, yeah. We try to be as inventive as we can, and think kind of the way an acrobat would think about the human body, about our instruments. Which is what weird things can we do that no one has, has seen before? Jo Reed: Okay. Given the complications of the shows that you put on, I really want you to share one of those nights where you thought "Oh my god, will this ever end?" Jackie Dempsey: I can think of one, but I won't say where it was or what show it was, but it was the last time we did a particular production on the road, and I remember it was really cold. First of all, we were outside. There were about five, maybe eight people in the audience, and hopefully because it was too cold, not because of the quality of the work. But a couple of props broke. I think a giant screen almost fell over. I remember my keyboard stopped working, and our sound guy was up on my platform with me, trying to get it to go. Steve, do you remember anything else? Steve O'Hearn: No, I'm an optimist. I don't remember any of this. Was I there? Jackie Dempsey: He just has a bad memory. But we have had, we've had a few. We've had some accidents. And I believe Steve fell off the stage once, Steve O'Hearn: Oh, yeah. Jackie Dempsey: -- because he was wearing a bull head mask. He didn't know where he was. Steve O'Hearn: And I was playing wind synthesizer at the same time I was wearing a bull head mask, and dancing. It's a lot to accomplish when you're 50. Jackie Dempsey: We had a singer fall into a speaker system because she was holding a giant face puppet in front of her face. I think there's a theme here. Steve likes to challenge everyone. Jo Reed: And what about those moments where you think "Oh my god, there's no place on earth that I'd rather be than right here, right now." Steve O'Hearn: Oh, that's actually most of the time when we're on tour. It's so fun and interesting and we get to travel just enough for it still to be that way. Jackie Dempsey: And, I would say it's even more so now that we're doing the outdoor shows. And especially in the daytime, because we can see everybody, which you can't when you're in a theater, and people are laughing and smiling and dancing and shouting at you and there's so much joy all around. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah. Jackie Dempsey: And it's contagious. Steve O'Hearn: I mean, we're booked for almost three months straight this fall, and the truth is, every weekend, we get to go do an arts festival. So, if nothing else, we're at an arts festival in a decent hotel, and we get to do shows. Jackie Dempsey: And eat a lot of hot dogs and funnel cakes. Steve O'Hearn: Yeah, so it's kind of… Jo Reed: Those are two of my favorite food groups. Steve O'Hearn: Exactly. Jo Reed: I'd just like to make that very clear. Jackie Dempsey: There you go. Steve O'Hearn: So it's great fun. Jackie Dempsey: It's really the payoff for everybody, and especially I think, for me and Steve, because we spend a lot of our time sitting at our desks doing office work. Writing grants, trying to get gigs, doing accounting, and I remember someone said to me once "You're always smiling when you're performing. You look like you're having so much fun," and I, that is the big payoff for us. That's why we do all the other work. Steve O'Hearn: Well, that and creating a new show. That's got a whole separate sense, a whole separate series of a satisfactions and joys. But creating a new show, which is someone we do every two years, and which is what the NEA supported, is really fun and exciting, and then you get to stand back and look at it once you're done with, you know, videos from the festivals. So there are two kinds of great satisfactions. The rest of it is, you could be running a gas station or a 7-Eleven, the business is about the same. You're doing e-mails and talking on the phone and, but the fun parts are fun. Jo Reed: Well, Steve and Jackie, thank you. I've had so much fun learning about Squonk Opera. Jackie Dempsey: Thank you. Steve O'Hearn: Thank you so much for covering us. Jo Reed: That was Jackie Dempsey and Steve O’Hearn. They’re the founders and artistic directors of Squonk Opera. You can find out about more about Squonk Opera at Squonkopera.org You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. Transcript coming up soon.