Instigate, collaborate, invigorate
Anna Driftmier designs. But, for her, ‘design’ is an umbrella term. She really does so much more. She talked to us about choices made, helpful mistakes and slowing down to catch the poetry.
Who are you?
That could either be a really simple question or one of the deepest questions that I am asking myself. There are two questions swirling around my head recently, “who are you and what do you want?” So, to answer, my name is Anna Driftmier. I’m an American who has lived in a lot of places. I’m a scenographer and production designer working in live events and film. In terms of my profession, I don’t identify myself with solely with one genre or one type of art form, I jokingly say that I have a lot of practical and creative skill sets which allows me to take on board anything that sounds fun and interesting and challenging. My selection of projects is not really based on the medium but more based on the collaborators and the spaces. The term ‘designer’ for me is an umbrella term that allows me to manoeuvre and transfer my skill set between different areas. I work in opera, I work in dance and installation, I work in plays, I do post dramatic, experimental work but also a bit of Shakespeare.
Why do you do what you do? How did you get here?
I always wanted to work in the arts. My father was a professional musician, my mother is a painter and a fine artist. That choice of moving into the arts was always natural and encouraged. I started off wanting to be an actor. I was constantly trying to be an actor but not being very good at it, I never got attention or much acceptance. I auditioned for every single show in high school and didn’t get into any of them. I tried to help out backstage but they wouldn’t respond to my emails. So I hightailed it out of there when I could and moved to Italy. I lived in Rome and, while there, I found one poster that I could read in the high school there. It said, “TEATRO GIOVEDI.” “Wait, I think that says ‘theatre’ and I know the words for the days of the week - that’s Thursday!”. So I ended up joining the theatre group. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t speak Italian, so they let me hold the curtain. I did end up having a speaking line in the show at the end of the year. I went off to University for undergrad, originally to do a double major in Classics and Theatre, but because I decided to go to Edinburgh (who have a wonderful Classics department but also because of the Edinburgh Fringe), I ended up minoring in Theatre...which meant I could pretty much do what I wanted! I went there with the thought that I wanted to act. It was then I realised that acting didn’t come naturally to me. Designing did. Working backstage and working in production was a much more natural process in the way that I had hoped acting would be. By the end of that year I had done three shows at Edinburgh Fringe and was involved in all the theatre programmes. I came back to the US to finish my degree and asked myself what I had done by doing a degree in Classics. I remember calling my mother telling her I’d made a huge mistake. Little did I know I had made the best mistake as that education has been an incredible foundation. I’ve always been good at a lot of things; I sang, I did seven years on the classical double bass. However, I’d never known what it was to be driven, having been good at all these things. Suddenly I had found something that humbled me every single day with how much that I still didn’t know. For the very first time there was this challenge; as soon as you open a door and you think you understand what’s going on, you open another door and realise you were only in the first room. I found that with Design, that’s what it provided for me. That’s what I was really craving. And maybe it was instinctual but, when I made that choice at the end of my first degree, I felt that something sort of clicked. It just felt right and I haven’t doubted that direction since then.
I ended up designing the main show at the end of my undergraduate degree and I just knew it wasn’t very good. I always have loved that saying, “You develop your taste before you develop your skills.” So, I thought I’d better go get some training - I didn’t want to just be a practitioner but I wanted to deconstruct the form. I wanted to be an innovator (which is a lofty term to throw around). I’m still trying to figure out what that is and sometimes I feel like I’m wading through weeds. “Am I really doing this? I don’t quite know, but I’m going to keep on moving forward.” I realised in order to deconstruct a form, you needed to know how to build it from the ground up, from the very foundations. That’s why I ended up applying to the Guildhall (School of Music and Drama). I needed to know how to paint a set, how to build a set, to find out how these spaces are created before I go on and study Design. The entire time I was there they told me I was in the wrong programme, that it wasn’t for Design, but I knew that and that I was there for the foundational skills. After two years of that, I ended up transferring over to Central Saint Martins for my Masters in Performance Design and Practice because I liked the institution’s spirit of innovation. It’s interesting now to see how that mixed background informs much of what I am moving towards.
What do you do with all these threads, do you keep mixing and matching or will it ever hone down? Do you want to hone down or are you happy playing with everything?
While I think the more you know the stronger you are, what you’ve asked is one of the fundamental questions that I’ve been asking myself this year. I have been sifting through a lot of these forms and trying out new mediums, technology, playing with form and looking back at the practice. Right now I’m looking at the practice itself and the cultures surrounding them. Who do you want to associate yourself with? What communities do you think will help you flourish and support you as an artist? You can appreciate and understand what they’re doing but realise it’s not supporting you in the way that you need in this continual growth. I think there is a desire to hone it down because I think honing it down will only strengthen it. Still, there is something to be gained from this constant expansion. I don’t think that we change as humans, I think that we expand. Life is a constant expansion from that initial core and the seed. What we preserve of our memories, our selective memories, shows us that we haven’t really changed as individuals but expanded. There is a benefit and a danger in too much expansion where you don’t take the energy and time to hone things down. And to find a stronger foundation in that. Our work is entwined with our identity and self-worth - to hone down would build a stronger core around that, that would help then propel yourself forward.
Has this forced break made any difference to your “collecting”?
Yes, it really has. I think - no, I know I’m a better artist now than I was in February.
Prior to this time, for both professional and financial reasons, I would get so excited the potential of everything and where it could go. I don’t bite off more than I can chew but I do take on just enough. But I think I take on so much that sometimes when I walk away I feel that I haven’t fully committed to that project in a way that I think I should. It all comes back to Latin. In my translations I would jump into a paragraph and just blaze through it. I say that everyone should learn Latin and Greek, not just for the literature but the methodologies around the grammar and syntax. It teaches you that, in order to full realise the potential of something, you have to work through it systematically. One word will inform an entire paragraph. If you just blaze through it, you’ll understand what’s going on and you’ll understand the translation but you won’t catch the poetry of it. Over the years, I’ve realised that’s how I actually approach a lot of things in my life. My passion and enthusiasm brings me to blaze through and I don’t slow down to systematically work through things. Pre pandemic, many of us were rushing, rushing, rushing. Now there is time to really (in the pre, making of and post production) work through things in a systematic manner and give it the time it deserves. It’s made me realise how much time it actually takes to really create a great piece of work.
How does that sit with you now?
I think it’s also a reckoning in terms of our relationship with regret and feelings of regret. In trying to not look back at past work with a feeling of opportunities lost; but, instead, to see them as opportunities of lessons learned.
I have a couple of smaller projects in the works right now but now that this bigger opera has ended, I have more open time. I’m excited for the next project that comes my way. You’ll get the full me having thought about all of this.
When we come through the other side of the pandemic, will you go back to blazing through or will you be able to continue to breathe and take the time? Will you take that forward?
I want to say the latter, even though I know the former will happen more than I might want to acknowledge. I think, with our relationship with time passing, how easy it is to go back. It’s going to take a lot of discipline to not go straight back into where it was. I do have that discipline but being such a creative junkie, the potential for that creative hit will be so intoxicating. There’s no reason why the two things can’t work together. In collaborations, when there are two different options, most of the time I come into the room and say “we should do both.” It’s never a choice of one or the other. I try to collaborate with myself all the time.
I’ve also seen how just how stubborn I can be. So now, when I have to do things that are uncomfortable, I like to think of the process as similar to taking myself to the kiddie pool and get used to the water before moving to the deep end. It goes something like: “Anna, this is how we deal with you. This is how we get you to normalise these new practices and normalise this new mindset. We don’t throw you into the deep end but wade you in so that by the time you get to the deep end, you didn’t realise you’d got there at all…”
You’ve just finished design on a big production. How did it work during all things Covid?
We just finished the last showing of The Threepenny Opera with City Lyric Opera. It was a blending of lots of different mediums, with live and pre-filmed content, with recorded music, blended together with post production FX that are blended in with a live, interactive audience. Covid informed every moment of it but the idea behind the production was that when you watch it the show embraced the challenge of digital mediums to be innovative and exciting and that it wasn't just trying to replace the void left by live performance. Because of the small team, and due to the fact I work as a production manager, I had to organize and oversee a lot of the production logistics. I had to work with the team to design and build plastic recording pods with clear plastic so that singers could see each other and the musicians could see the conductor. All the costume fittings were done virtually, which involved shipping costumes out to performers and then everything else was done via zoom. In the venue we had to organise cleaning schedules of dressing rooms, rotations of dressing rooms, spray downs, bagging and steaming costumes, designated touch zones, prop cleaning and overall overseeing of the actual recording/filming space. After that there were all the zoom rehearsals, with performers that I never actually met physically and, on top of that, the collaborative process. We called it lateral collaboration. We realized, within Covid, in order to achieve ambitious things, everyone needs to truly commit. Instead of the traditional hierarchy within the space, there has to be a much more lateral collaboration and the willingness to try new things. It was a very intense process but overall very fulfilling.
Through this process I came to realise that even though I try to focus on both the performer and the audience’s experience, I never had never put as much though into just how much we make space for other artists. I walked away knowing that I had singers and performers that hadn’t performed in six or seven months and after that first day of rehearsal in that space, I had created that space for them. I didn’t really anticipate the impact that it would have. It makes me emotional now to think about it. We create the spaces for other people to create. Hopefully we can take that forward and the new feeling of teamwork in order to make these things happen. It opens up a new world of responsibility and hopefully will be able to continue with physical proximity with people in the room.
Who is it all for?
I think, ultimately, it’s for my collaborators. I think I learned all these skills because it allows me not only to build spaces for them but also to help realise and expand their ideas and their knowledge of what is possible. I sometimes say that my career is an excuse to engage in amazing conversations with incredible people all over the world for the rest of my life. What I get in exchange are the conversations and the process. For me, my profession is almost an excuse to play. I remember once when I was in Cornwall running around the woods, collecting all these giant sticks I actually had a flashback to when I was making fairy houses when I was seven years old in the woods of Washington State. And I’m there in Cornwall, in this beautiful forest saying, “I can’t believe they're letting me do this…”
How has the journey of your art form (to this point) engaged your voice - personally, artistically or politically?
Four years ago with the election of Trump I listened to a podcast which offered some words of advice that really spoke and stuck with me: “Well, what can you do now? What as individuals can we do now? What are our responsibilities now? What are our responsibilities now as artists? How can we as an individual make an impact?” This is paraphrasing, but the idea was that we should try and do what we can to the best of our ability. In the podcast there was the question, “If not politically engaged, how can we, in our everyday life, be responsible?” And that can boil down to: be as strong and efficient and as good at your work that you can be and see that as a sign of leadership and mentorship. I’ve started to take my responsibility as a leader and a mentor quite seriously. I’ve had people come up to me and say “I saw you doing x, y and z and you gave me some advice and the week after I decided to apply for my Masters degree like you did.” I hadn’t realised that the conversation we had had inspired and supported that person enough to go off and apply for something they hadn’t considered before.
Who are you?
I’m just me.
