RW: Thomas! You just left your full time job so you can spend more time being an artist. What art are you particularly excited about/inspired by right now?
TC: I am inspired by urban spaces, both the transitioning of new buildings/complexes and the ongoing aftermath of abandoned buildings/ outdoors spaces which have laid empty for years. I just walked around my neighborhood and took pictures of spaces that have an element of abandon or incompleteness. Defining that “incompleteness” is provocative to me. I also went to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at MoMA last week, right before it closed. The melding of art like Yoko’s, which is highly conceptual is really up my alley right now.
I’m continually fascinated by your excellent nose for good books. What are you reading right now? And/or recently read that you loved?
RW: I’ve been gobbling up novels this summer. A few choice picks:
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews: Jess gave it to me, actually. Story of a girl in a mennonite community in Mexico and the Mexican film crew that starts making a movie on the neighboring farm.
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker: A-MAZING trilogy about WW1-era England. First book takes place in a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, second in London and with the Northern England anti-war movement, third splits its time between the Front and an anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits. Stunning books.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: post-apocalyptic tale of a traveling Shakespeare and music troupe.
Right now I’m reading Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal. I mostly picked it up for the title, and am kind of surprised to find that it’s not just the story of my life.
What are you most looking forward to seeing in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival?
TC: I am looking forward to seeing Arielle Pina’s UNARMED. She originally developed a thought provoking photography-based installation while she was my student at Headlong Performance Institute last year. The installation was a launching pad for this larger piece that she has created for Fringe. The installation boldly put the audience’s bodies in relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement and provoked immediate responses to the shootings of unarmed black individuals.
I am very excited to see where Arielle’s artistic mind has taken the piece now. She is primarily a dancer and choreographer, so visual art work was a new exploration for her.
The Fringe piece UNARMED is back in her artistic sweet spot, so I am eager to see what her and her collaborators create.
RW: Some former students of mine are also doing really interesting work in this Festival. More than a year ago, I saw a rehearsal of SHE IS A PROBLEM, an immersive exploration of female artists and mental illness. It was created by a fascinating group of UArts women, some of whom were in my collaborative creation class there a few semesters ago. Since then they’ve continued to develop it and toured it out of Philly, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what it’s become. I also can’t wait to see Sam Tower’s piece, 901 NOWHERE STREET; Sam was never a student of mine, but I’ve been following her work since she was at UArts: what a fascinating artist. It’s great how many people from the schools and institutes in 
Philly stick around and make work here now. And it’s fun to be at an age where we get to watch new waves of makers come up and kick ass.
TC: You recently bought a giant house, and some early Applied Mechanics shows were staged in your tiny West Philly apartment. Would you ever consider doing a show in your home again?
RW:I love thinking about art in domestic spaces in general, and believe that Applied Mechanics’ ethos and aesthetic is deeply informed by our early work in home settings. Part of what set us on the path to buying a house was the desire for more workspace, and I’m excited that the wild
rambley home we ended up with provides office space for both me and my spouse, as well as a pretty decent rehearsal room on the ground floor. It’s been an enormous pleasure creating and rehearsing App Mechs’ 
pop-up Fringe piece Black Market in this new space. Our first rehearsal really made the house feel like a home for the first time. At this point, there’s so much to do to fix up the house for regular living, that it’s a little hard to imagine making a piece in it–and there’d be so much more space to fill than that old apartment on Cedar Ave! But I’m really excited to be able to use it as a work space, to have a home that is also a site of artistic labor. And I totally think there could be more house plays in Applied Mechanics’ future. I’m also slotted to direct a different kind of house play this spring: a one-man show that Alex Bechtel is creating, using Peter Gabriel music as source material.
It’s been a while since we’ve done a Fringe piece together. How has your experience been creating and performing Black Market?
TC: Black Market reminds me of our earliest Applied Mechanics pieces. Partially because it was made so quickly and the down and dirty generative we did. It felt very inclusive of the ideas that were put on the table by the artists. It has also been exciting to work with artists I haven’t worked with before. Tabitha and Lee were both were in iterations of Vainglorious, but they weren’t on Team Beethoven, so I never collaborated with them. It is exciting to discover how other people generate work. Performing Black Market is stretching new muscles, too, since we are performing for an unsuspecting audience. There is an element of teaching the audience that they are participating in a performance at this very moment. I’ve found that even though we are playing a secret resistance organization, being blatantly obvious about our covert operation is hilarious to portray and helpful for audiences to understand what’s going on.
Selling cookies and crackers as an art front is pretty ridiculous.
RW: Yeah, it was so fun watching you all perform yesterday in Old City. People were clearly intrigued, some were a little confused, some were completely delighted, and some maybe just thought you were from a restaurant or something. A few of my favorite overheard comments included: “I guess the Fringe Festival is, like… everywhere.” “I don’t know what that is, but it’s awesome.” “Who ever heard of a home-made cracker?”
The rotating cast is also really cool: everyone brings their own spin. Can’t wait to see more iterations!