Katrin Hilbe

Director, Writer, Producer
New York, New York USA

Where do you look for inspiration? Art, life, people around me, everything everywhere is fodder for my imagination.

What’s your favorite book / movie / line from a play / pop culture guilty pleasure / cocktail?
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan: “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.“

My favorite cocktail is the French 75 in either the gin and the cognac version, and I giggle helplessly at the 3-minute exchange between Steve Coogan and Ray Brydon in the movie The Trip “We rise at Daybreak”.

What play or production changed your life? Peter Sellars’s production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro set in Trump Tower with amazing actor-singers, back in the 80s, informed me small-town girl that THAT can be done with opera! All of urban Europe knew this since the 70s, but I was sequestered in rural Liechtenstein. A professional life later I saw Michael Thalheimer’s production of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti at BAM. It contained the most moving physicalization of how one’s heart is broken.

I feel most like myself when I … am preparing a production, preparing rehearsals, and then am in rehearsals working with actors/singers, having all my planning overturned at the spur of the moment in the surge of batting ideas around, daring to try and err. Then I’m most myself in the best way that I am meant to be. Which is not to say it’s the most easy.

What is your best escape? Since being the best I can be of myself is deep effort, venting and lamenting with drinks and friends, peers, beloved, is the best escape.

What’s the one thing nobody knows about you? It’s so hidden, even I don’t know about it.

Katrin Hilbe is a director of opera and theatre, writer, producer and translator of Liechtenstein-Kansas origin. Her feet are planted firmly in mid-Atlantic, so international artistic outreach is vital to her. She functions as the Artistic Director of International Relations for MITF. More on: katrinhilbe.com and manytracks.org.

Romy Nordlinger

Actor / Playwright / Theatre Teaching Artist
New York, New York USA

I look for inspiration in people who dare to be honest about who they are and live on their own terms. I am always inspired by kindness and empathy, particularly on an overcrowded subway!  I will forever be inspired by the kids I teach theatre with in special education who amaze me with their creativity and love and lack of self- consciousness.  Though some of their bodies are bound to wheelchairs, their spirits are boundless.  It sounds corny but I am so jazzed by smiling and by receiving a smile – the kind that comes from the inside.

My favorite plays are The Zoo Story and this line “WITH GOD WHO IS A COLORED QUEEN WHO WEARS A KIMONO AND PLUCKS HIS EYEBROWS, WHO IS A WOMAN WHO CRIES WITH DETERMINATION BEHIND HER CLOSED DOOR…” And T. Williams’ Orpheus Descending – “What else can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you with both your hands until your fingers are broken.”

My favorite authors are Dostoyevsky, Zola, Orwell and so many others it’d be too many to list – and choose from. If I had more time I’d read and read!  I’m pretty obsessed with the New York Times. The first place I’d go to if I had a chance is Egypt or the duck pond on 112^th in Central Park. I love the Sex Pistols, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Woody Allen, Virginia Woolf, Mozart, Camus, Shakespeare, calamari, and my husband Adam Burns (but perhaps not in that order). I’m not so crazy about math or sardines. I love people who are passionate and aren’t afraid to say they are. I am most frustrated by people who don’t appreciate enough – though I can’t say I always appreciate enough.

I love red, I love to dance (though I can’t take choreography and my college fencing teacher said I have no eye/hand coordination) and I feel most myself when I’m acting, writing or teaching. I feel most myself when I’m sharing an emotion, be it happy or sad, as long as it’s alive.

Romy Nordlinger Theatre/film: Resonance Ensemble Member, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kirk Theatre, NY Fringe Festival, Primary Stages, Circle Repertory, Fleetwood Stage, Wilma Theatre. Law & Order CI, One Life To Live, All My Children. Playwright : Lipshtick @ NY Fringe, Sex & Sealing Wax @ Midtown Festival, Feeling Part @Theatre For the New City, Broadville @ The Source. www.romynordlinger.com/