Grantee Partner Spotlight: The Neo-Futurists

A Q&A with Sivan Spector and Annie Share

Spector is an educator, actor, clown, and puppeteer / Share is the associate artistic director for Neo-Futurists  

Sivan Spector: That’s one of the themes we explore in our show – why don’t people remember this huge maritime disaster? And going off that – how is collective and personal memory created?  

Annie Share: Part of why so few people know the full story behind the Eastland is the multiple layers of bureaucratic negligence. Many of the people in power knew that the ship had long-standing stability issues, but it continued to change hands and there was no clear entity to blame. And when it capsized, the story got even more lost in the throes of a complicated trial.  

Annie Share: One of the tenets of Neo-Futurism is that we don’t play characters. We tell true stories from our own lives and perspectives. We wanted to bring other voices into the room - real people tied to the Eastland - without pretending to be them. Puppetry allows us to bring their stories on stage in a way that still feels honest to who we are. There is no suspension of disbelief. We want to establish a live relationship between ourselves in the present and these puppets as representatives of history. We’re also interested in how objects or artifacts are used to tell stories. Puppets are objects we bestow meaning on - so can be true for things from our everyday lives: mix CDs, apple peelers, anything. 

Sivan Spector: And we have shadow puppets, and overhead projectors. We have been working with a wonderful archival group – the Eastland Disaster Historical Society - that collects stories of the crash as well as photos and other archival data. But even with their work, many people don’t know about the story of the Eastland.

I was intrigued by the technology they developed in relation to long-distance telephone calls - and the telephone in general - and how this was connected to the Eastland. One of the ‘characters’ we include in our show is Margaret Condon, who was the head telephone operator for Western Electric. After the ship capsized, she stayed at her switchboard for 34 hours straight. We were curious about the calls she was receiving and what calls she didn’t get.  

Sivan Spector: Throughout the show, we are drawing parallels between the past and the present. Both in a personal sense and also in a societal sense. The early 1900s were a pivotal moment in technology: steamships and telephones were beginning to become very common. Annie and I are part of the last generation whose first phone was not a touch screen. We’re asking how technology impacts our memory. 

Annie Share: In the same decade as the Eastland disaster, Western Electric engineers developed the vacuum tube technology that allowed for long-distance phone calls. We’re exploring losing and forgetting, and how memory is affected when communication changes. 

Suggested Reading:

Eastland Disaster Historical Society Website

About the Neo-Futurists