We were lucky to catch up with Snails on a Bike recently and have shared our conversation below.

Snails on a Bike, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Yes! Snails on a Bike is a Chicago-based theatre collective that specializes in performing plays in site-specific and found spaces. Our most recent show, How to Defend Yourself by Liliana Padilla, was performed at Cheetah Gym in Andersonville, Chicago, after hours. This was our third production following Dry Land at the indoor pool in The Lawrence House and Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons at Heritage Bikes & Coffee.

Doing theatre in site-specific spaces merges the gap between performance and reality. If you are watching a play at a pool, smelling the chlorine and feeling the humidity on your skin, you’re automatically there with the characters. The space acts as another player, a way to immerse the actors and the audience into a story together, which in turn makes it more impactful. Plus it’s just really exciting and a unique way to experience theatre! Snails on a Bike is about breaking convention and pushing boundaries about what theatre is and where it happens by collectively and creatively thinking outside the box.

Snails on a Bike, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

ABOUT US: We are Snails on a Bike, a theatre collective based in Chicago, IL specializing in performing plays in site-specific and found spaces. More specifically, we are two actors/directors (Magdalena Dalzell and Jill Marlow) who were working as baristas together in 2o22 and decided we wanted to start making our own work! Our first show, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons was a passion project for the both of us; it was a show Magdalena had loved and wanted to do for a long time and I offered to direct which was something new to me but exciting to try. We just wanted to fearlessly and unapologetically throw ourselves into something and see what would happen. We needed a name to apply for the rights to Lemons and came up with Snails on a Bike after a cast member shared a thrilling cone snail fact (lol). We combined that with the fact that we met at (and ultimately decided to perform our first play at) a bike shop. Hence, Snails on a Bike!

CREATIVE WORKS: We are a theatre collective that specializes in site-specific and found space performances. We think being in a non-traditional theatre setting brings the story closer, not only physically (sometimes literally a couple feet away from our audiences) but emotionally as the audience and actors alike are directly impacted by the environment. The idea happened by accident, we were just working at a coffee and bike shop that was generously allowing us to use their space after hours to rehearse when it occurred to us that it would be cool to do the play there. Like much of the storefront architecture in Chicago, the bike shop side (where we performed Lemons) resembles a house which was a natural fit for the apartment setting of the play. Being in that space was like being a fly on the wall in someone’s apartment and witnessing a relationship unfold in front of our eyes. The same feeling applied to our following two shows; Dry Land at an indoor pool where we could feel the heat of the space and witness the characters in the water and on the tile of a girl’s locker room, and How to Defend Yourself inside a storefront gym with bright overhead lighting, the sound of people weightlifting upstairs and the general ambiance of characters entering the space from the actual outside.

WHAT WE THINK SETS US APART: Other than the site-specific aspect of what we do, we also include a lot of stylized movement and etude work into our shows. Magdalena and I share that we both have studied abroad at the Moscow Art Theatre School (something we did at separate times long before meeting at our coffee shop job) and instantly connected based on our shared love of the stylized movement and dance used in a lot of Russian theatre. We draw inspiration from this in our plays and use movement and dance to escape from reality and express the inner life of the characters. We feel abstraction contrasts nicely with a hyper realistic environment. For example in Dry Land, our second production, Amy has lashed out at Esther and says something incredibly cruel. The transition after the scene combined a movement piece to embody Amy’s emotional state that resulted in her slowly surrendering face first into the water.

WHAT WE ARE PROUD OF/ MAIN THINGS TO KNOW: I think we are most proud of the community we are building together of artists wanting to work in a creative, collaborative, safe environment and to be producing, directing, and acting in shows that we are excited about and that we think are important. Having agency over the stories we are telling, how we want to tell them, and what part we want to play in the process of getting them in front of an audience has been so rewarding. We really feel our momentum has picked up after How to Defend Yourself (which ran in March of this year) and are so thrilled to continue on with more productions. Our goal is to keep building a community of artists who want to create similar work; honest, relevant material incorporating movement and etude work in cool spaces.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Snails on a Bike is dedicated to creating a collaborative and consent-forward environment, where all artists involved in a project feel free to contribute their ideas and advocate for themselves. As a collective built primarily of young artists who grew up amidst #MeToo and witnessed immense change in the theatre industry with birth of intimacy choreography, we firmly believe that we are able to make powerful, impactful art that does not sacrifice the artists’ wellbeing. This idea shows up in our rehearsal rooms in many ways — first and foremost, our wonderful intimacy and fight director Kira Nutter has been an integral part of every Snails on a Bike show. At our first rehearsal, we have a company discussion about upholding a culture of consent as a team, and create shared vocabulary and expectations for the room. One such expectation (introduced by one of the directors of Dry Land, Nora Geffen) is that the directors will act as “audience advocates”- they will watch closely what the audience will see and determine whether it communicates the story the whole room has collectively decided to tell. This is contrary to many of the rehearsal rooms we were raised in, where actors are expected to just do as the director tells them, and we find that it helps support a culture where decisions are made not based on who has the most power, but rather how we can best tell the story within the actors’ boundaries. Other practices we incorporate into the rehearsal room include daily boundary check-ins, where actors check in with each other about their boundaries with physical touch in scene work, and delineating clear conflict-resolution pathways so that actors are empowered to advocate for themselves.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

It turns out that doing site-specific theatre is great publicity! Dry Land specifically received a lot of verbal buzz because it was performed at a pool, and the funky location certainly created a lot of excitement for the show. Similarly, audience members were excited to see How to Defend Yourself at Cheetah Gym, because it is a popular community institution in Andersonville (where many actors in Chicago live and work). The site-specific nature of our shows has not only helped us publicize but also has created one part of a consistent brand for our shows. The other part of our brand is that we do intimate, and frequently intense work, and have a reputation for productions that are moving because of the vulnerable, grounded acting and meticulous directing. A large part of that reputation can be credited to our show selection. By only choosing shows that we personally believe in, stories we care about telling, we are able to easily invest in the project as artists. Additionally, our performances are intimate and vulnerable largely because the spaces in which we perform are much smaller than a standard theatre, the audience is frequently just a breath from the action. And finally, our reputation continues to grow as we go on because we are committed to working with at least one new collaborator on every show so that we continue to expand our artistic community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.snailsonabike.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/snailsonabike/

Image Credits

Headshots by Ian McLaren (@ianmclarenphoto), production photos by Nico Fernandez (@fernandezfoto)