Meet Molly W. Schenck of Grey Box Collective in Tempe

Today we’d like to introduce you to Molly W. Schenck.

Molly, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I founded Grey Box Collective to create brave and supportive spaces where people to step outside of their personal and professional comfort zones by taking methodical artistic risks and embracing contradiction in messy, grey areas of life. I think of the company as an artistic vehicle full of change agents who are looking to challenge social norms and shift the culture. The inspiration comes from my #MeToo moment when I was a freshman in college. After my assault, I felt completely alone and clueless on how to handle it and I kept thinking, how did I not have the resources to process this experience? I thought a lot about my educational experiences and wondering why ‘how to be a human and deal with the messiness of life’ wasn’t a part of it. My way to deal with it was creating a show about sexual violence on college campuses shortly after my own experience. I wanted to create a space outside of classrooms where we could grapple with tough conversations. And about ten years after that, it became the ultimate inspiration for Grey Box Collective.

Throughout my education, I’ve always felt that there were gaps in curriculums mostly around how to be a human being that functions optimally in society. It’s great to gain knowledge, skills, and abilities but if we don’t bring our humanness into the conversation and talk about how our education becomes a part of our life, then what’s the point?

I feel like I need to add a little context here; in addition to being a visual and performing artist, I am also an educator in the valley. And I know there are schools and teachers out there trying to change the gaps of the education system, and right now, unfortunately, most of us are drops in the ocean – I’m sensing there’s a bit of a shift in the tides if you will, but it’s going to take a lot of time. So, while the system slowly changes, I founded the Grey Box Collective to help fill those gaps.

More recently, I’ve also been thinking about the values interwoven within the Grey Box Collective and how they connect with my personal experiences. As I’ve reflected on creative spaces and learning environments I’ve been a part of throughout my life, I’ve realized how rarely I felt like I could show up as my whole self. With Grey Box Collective, people can bring their whole selves in and know their presence and energy are valued in the space. There’s an understanding within the company that we are all balancing work, school, personal life, professional life, being a creative human being, and the many unexpected things that can stretch us thin. We also value the time and energy creatives put into the company. Grey Box Collective is committed to contributing to a sustainable arts community by providing stipends to all artists, creating opportunities for professional exploration and development, and allowing for flexible and non-traditional rehearsal models.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been a bumpy road and I don’t think I would have it any other way. Grey Box Collective is carving out a niche that we would not have arrived at if the road had been smooth. Many of our struggles have been associated with space and sustainability. How do we sustain the company financially while holding onto our values of fluidity and flexibility? Where can our work live? Where does it live and what does that mean? How do we sustain the work beyond ephemeral events? How do we sustain ourselves as artists, creatives, administrators, and human beings? I still don’t have answers to most of these questions, yet, here we are. I have been holding on tightly to a quote I saw float through my social media pages a few months ago, “we discover the way on the way” and that we most certainly are.

Since really latching on to this as my motto, I’ve been able to ask for more help in running the company and turn to others within the collective for more support. It’s making it more sustainable for me which is having a positive impact on my personal mental and physical health which therefore has a positive impact on the company. There’s a freedom that has come with the transparency of saying I have no idea how to do this and we’re going to figure it out. We have since the beginning, why would we stop now?

Please tell us about your work.
I’ll talk about what we do in a few ways. Grey Box Collective is a dance, theater, multi-media, a performance group that makes original shows about social and emotional wellbeing rooted in social issues. We see social and emotional wellbeing as embodying high levels of self-awareness, understanding the body-mind connection, and being connected with the community.

So, that’s one way to talk about GBC and another is that GBC is an interdisciplinary, experimental, and post-dramatic performance group that devised new work on socially relevant topics. Let’s unpack that. Interdisciplinary meaning integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines within our performances. We work primarily at the intersection of performing arts, visual arts, psychology, educational theories, and feminist theory. I don’t think this is a comprehensive list of all the disciplines we pull from, but these are the dominant ones. Experimental meaning we’re doing something brand new which is somewhat inherent in any devised work since we create from scratch – there’s also a bit of a rebel aspect of it, in that we are choosing to reject the “norms” of making performances. The last one, Post-dramatic performance which comes from the theatre world, prioritizes investigating broad ideas and typically steps away from traditional plot lines or characters I like to think of post traumatic performance as what happens when dancers make theatre.

Most collective members are artists, creatives, and educators. None of us are doing this full time – yet #businessgoals – we are all living the side hustle, gigging lifestyle. We’re mostly millennials and generation Z with reps from generation X and alpha. Because our work almost exclusively comes from traumatic events – and most of us are balancing significant stress in our lives -, we are cognizant of the practices and processes we implement within the company, the rehearsal period, and each interaction. Within the rehearsal process, we utilize a methodology I created called Trauma Informed Creative Practices. Trauma Informed Creative Practices is designed to provide a framework for arts leaders on the body mind connection of trauma and how to reduce the impact of vicarious or secondary trauma while working in creative spaces. I’ve refined it over the years of working on performances about sexual violence and share it within the collective to ensure our creative practices are sustainable for our mental and physical health.

Another way to keep our work sustainable for ourselves mentally and physically is by balancing the content we embody. Much of Grey Box Collective’s work is built on the concept that humans can embody multiple truths. For instance, personal truth inherently sparks a performer’s movement, while the text they speak may be crafted from another’s story or stitched together from multiple researched accounts. Performing something derived from oneself and integrating that with something technically foreign holds inherent contradictions that are ultimately resolved in service of the performance. By exposing our performers and audiences to the embodiment of multiple truths, we push them toward personal growth that nurtures compassion, which will eventually lead to a more social-emotionally generous society.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The proudest moment with Grey Box Collective thus far has been after a talkback with the audience in our most recent show. I was beaming (underneath the exhaustion and dark circles under my eyes) by what had been accomplished in the performance, how the audience soaked it up, and the energy in the room following the event. It’s what I hope for with every production. It’s that validating moment where you’re reminded that the work you do and the spaces you create are so worth the hard moments. I have thrown my hands up and flung myself on to my couch countless times ready to give up on this dream. Then there are shows and conversations around those shows that make the low moments completely disappear.

Pricing:

• Pay-What-You-Can ($15 suggested)

Contact Info:

• Website: greyboxcollective.com
• Email: info@greyboxcollective.com

Image Credit:
Abisai Alvarez
Allison Bailey
Connor Child
Molly W. Schenck

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