Ta-Nia in Conversation: (What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming

Tallulah Patricia B
Dec 24, 2025
14 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Ta-Nia in Conversation — and why this theatre work matters now

A few days before the premiere of (What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming, I attended a rehearsal in Zurich (thank you Meloe). The rehearsal took place at Schauspielhaus Zürich, Switzerland’s largest publicly funded theatre and one of the most influential stages in the German-speaking world. For readers outside Europe, that detail matters to understand that the work presented here does not sit at the margins. It enters the centre of Swiss cultural life. It's a space where theatre engages directly with questions of public responsibility, social change, and who is being addressed, and how. What I encountered that evening of the rehearsal did not feel like a production preparing itself for opening night. It felt like a work still listening.

Performers moved between dialogue, music, stillness, and repetition. The stage suggested a nightclub more than a proscenium: bodies gathering and dispersing, sound shaping the room, moments allowed to breathe rather than resolve. The atmosphere was attentive, alert, and unforced. Even during rehearsal, it was clear that this was not “just a play” organised around plot points or dramatic escalation. It was built around something quieter and more demanding: how people share space with one another. There was no sense of the work performing for approval. Instead, it seemed to be testing conditions. How much time could stretch, how stillness might be held, how an audience might be invited in without being instructed.

What stood out was the feeling. The feeling of being a subject in the room, not an observer. It was not simply comfortable — it laid things bare. It revealed more about myself than I had anticipated: how I hold back, how I scan a room, how rarely I allow myself to just arrive without performing a role. That is why I choose to write about this. Not to explain the work, but to name what it made possible. I wish for more people to experience that moment of exposure. To feel what happens when you are addressed rather than entertained, and when a shared space makes it possible to stay with what surfaces, instead of moving past it..

The debrief that followed after the rehearsal was powerful. It felt spiritual, inspiring, even therapeutic — not in a staged or self-conscious way, but because something real had been touched. What struck me most was how much unsaid, held-back energy suddenly had somewhere to go.

It became clear how rarely many of us are given spaces that allow this kind of release. The performance had undlocked or opened something, and the debrief made it possible to stay with it. Not to analyse it away, but to speak from it. To laugh and cry with it. People were responding to what the work had called up in them — in their bodies, in their memories, in how they had been sitting in the room.

That’s the power of theatrical interpellation: when a work doesn’t tell you what to think or feel, but addresses you directly enough that you recognise yourself in the call. When people who share that sense of recognition are allowed to come together, something shifts. The energy that usually stays containted or suppressed — because there’s no place for it, or no language for it — begins to move.

The debrief showed that the work didn’t end when the lights went up. It continued in the act of gathering afterward, in the simple permission to name what had been stirred, or to let it be present without needing to resolve it. And in that moment, it felt less like a discussion and more like a continuation of the space the piece had already created.

Zurich, December 2025 Talia (left) and Nia (right)

Two days after the premiere, I sat down privately with the makers of the work — Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell, the New York– and Los Angeles–based theatre duo who work together as Ta-Nia. By then, the piece had only just begun its public life in Zurich, Switzerland of all places. It had met its first audiences, absorbed their presence, and begun to shift slightly from night to night.

Our conversation took place at that early moment, after first contact, before distance or categorisation had settled in. We did not speak about reviews or reception. We did not dissect responses or measure success. Instead, we spoke about how they work, why they work this way, and what it means to invite people into a shared space without telling them who or how to be. We spoke about attention, responsibility, and trust. Not as abstract ideas, but as practical choices that shape how a room feels, how people move within it, and what becomes possible between strangers. Our exchange offered a way into understanding what this work is doing — and why its arrival in Zurich feels timely.

Who Ta-Nia are and how their collaboration took shape

Ta-Nia is not a production label or a loose collaboration. It is the shared artistic practice of Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell. Two artists whose paths crossed while studying theatre at NYU in New York, but whose collaboration only began years later, once each had developed a clear sense of what they wanted theatre to be for.

This picture was borrowed from Schauspiehaus Website

That delay matters. Their partnership did not emerge from proximity or convenience, but from mutual recognition. They watched each other’s work over time, noticed how their questions aligned, and waited until the conditions felt right. When they finally decided to work together, they describe the moment with a striking softness—less like forming a company than like making a personal proposal.This way of beginning speaks volumes. Intentional. Relational. Unhurried. This flows through everything they create together.

Nia Farrell: ritual, imagination, and near-futures

Nia Farrell comes to theatre as a writer, performer, and what they call a mundane afrofuturist. Their work is rooted in speculative thinking, but not in distant or abstract futures. Instead, Nia is interested in near-futures—possibilities that begin in the present, shaped through imagination as a practical, collective muscle. On stage and screen, Nia’s work often centres ritual as a way of honouring Black life not as trauma or metaphor, but as lived, dreaming, future-oriented reality. Their performances invite audiences to consider what it means to rehearse different ways of being together—not by explaining those futures, but by briefly inhabiting them.

Alongside experimental theatre contexts such as National Black Theatre, Ars Nova, Second Stage Theater, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nia also works within mainstream production structures. As Director of Development and Production at Nine Muses Entertainment, founded by Bryce Dallas Howard, they support projects across film and television, including collaborations connected to Disney+ and Imagine Docs. That dual position, inside experimental theatre and large-scale production, shapes how Nia understands institutions: how to navigate them, when to push against them, and when to use their resources without being shaped by their expectations.

Talia Paulette Oliveras: theatre as space, theatre as care

Talia Paulette Oliveras approaches theatre as a space of potential. An ever-evolving “now” where story, body, memory, and presence intersect. Of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, Talia’s artistic practice is inseparable from their work as a community healer, and from spiritual lineages inherited through their grandmothers, who served their communities as caretakers and healers. Alongside formal theatre training and work with institutions such as Brooklyn Academy of Art (BAM), Ars Nova, 'The Public' Theatre New York, Theater at 'The Shed', and the experimental theatre Mabou Mines, Talia has trained in Reiki, herbal medicine, trauma-informed care, and healing justice. They have organised with grassroots movements focused on mutual aid, food sovereignty, and community defence.

This background is not an add-on to their theatre work. It is foundational. For Talia, theatre is not primarily a vehicle for representation or storytelling, but a way of shaping spaces where people can be present with themselves and one another—without having to justify that presence.

A shared lineage, a shared method

Both artists emerge from experimental theatre traditions in the United States, particularly those shaped by Black performance histories. In these traditions, theatre has often functioned less as display and more as gathering: a place for repetition, ritual, humour, grief, and collective processing. Story matters. But it does not dominate. What matters equally is how people are brought together, and what becomes possible once they are. That lineage is present in (What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming not as reference or quotation, but as structure. The work does not ask what the audience should understand. It asks what the audience should experience together, and then builds patiently toward that experience. This shared commitment to theatre as a practice of gathering rather than instruction, is what gives Ta-Nia’s work its clarity. And it is what makes their arrival in Zurich feel less like a one-off production and more like a meaningful encounter between artistic worlds.

How their way of working meets Switzerland — and the moment it is entering

That Ta-Nia’s work has arrived in Zurich is not incidental. It enters a cultural landscape shaped by publicly funded institutions, formal selection procedures, and long planning cycles that concentrate curatorial and programming decisions in relatively few hands. These structures determine which artistic practices are granted time, space, and institutional legitimacy and which remain peripheral, often regardless of their merit or international standing.

This system offers continuity and security, but it is not neutral.

Like many publicly funded cultural ecosystems across Europe, it reflects long-established "ideas about professionalism", audience behaviour, and aesthetic value. All notions and ideas shaped by particular histories of taste, education, and access. Even as institutions become more outwardly diverse, the underlying standards by which work is assessed often remain remarkably consistent. In practice, this means that work which is clearly framed, emotionally contained, and easy to contextualise within existing narratives tends to move more smoothly through funding and programming processes. Work that unfolds slowly, resists clear categorisation, or redistributes attention and agency within the room can be harder to place. Even when it is careful, demanding, and rigorously made.

Ta-Nia encountered this logic directly. Before arriving in Zurich, they were warned—more than once—that this kind of theatre play “wouldn’t work in Switzerland.”

Not as an explicit rejection, but as a quiet assumption: that audiences here would remain distant, that participation would be limited, that the form itself might be too open, too bodily, too unresolved. What that warning reveals is not a lack of curiosity, but a set of expectations—about how audiences are supposed to behave, how emotion should be managed, and how much uncertainty a public institution can comfortably host.

This dynamic is not unique to Switzerland. Across Europe and North America, cultural institutions are operating under growing pressure from multiple directions at once: political calls for restraint and neutrality, heightened scrutiny over public funding, and a broader backlash against work perceived as overly political, difficult, or demanding. These pressures are often flattened into culture-war language—“woke” versus “conservative”—but at the institutional level, they manifest less as ideology and more as caution.

In such a climate, elitist hegemony rarely announces itself openly. It operates through norms rather than decrees: through assumptions about how audiences should sit, listen, respond, and leave largely unchanged; through expectations that emotional intensity be moderated, that participation remain discreet, and that difference be translated into familiar forms before it is fully welcomed.

Seen against this backdrop, Ta-Nia’s presence at Schauspielhaus Zürich carries a whole lot of weight. Not because it represents a symbolic breakthrough, but because it reflects a decision: an institution choosing to resource a form of theatre that does not prioritise legibility over experience, or control over trust. It suggests a willingness—however partial—to allow different ways of gathering, feeling, and participating to enter the centre of cultural life rather than remain safely at its edges.

During our conversation, Nia Farrell spoke candidly about learning how to work inside institutions without allowing institutional logic to hollow out the work itself.“We’ve learned how to be in rooms without letting the room decide who we are,” they said.

“That doesn’t mean we’re trying to disrupt for the sake of it. It means we’re clear about what the work needs in order to stay alive.”

That clarity matters in Switzerland, where relationships between artists and institutions are often long-term, carefully structured, and shaped by expectations of continuity. Ta-Nia arrive fluent in this reality. Their experience spans experimental theatre contexts as well as large-scale production environments, giving them a practiced sense of when structure supports a play and when it begins to narrow what can happen within it.

Rather than adapting their practice to fit imposed expectations, they allow the work to arrive intact and then pay attention to what the institution is actually able to hold.“We’re interested in seeing what a space can carry,” Nia added. “Not what it says it’s open to, but what it actually makes room for.”

That approach turns collaboration into a form of listening—on both sides. It asks institutions not only to host work, but to attend to what the work reveals about the space itself: how audiences are positioned, how participation is shaped, and which forms of presence are quietly understood as legitimate.

In a moment when cultural institutions across Europe are navigating political pressure, social fragmentation, and competing demands for relevance and restraint, this kind of listening is not a soft value. It is a decisive and structural one. It offers a way for public culture to evolve without collapsing into spectacle or retreating into preservation—by loosening inherited hierarchies of taste and behaviour, and by allowing new rhythms of attention and new forms of collective presence to take shape within the institutions that claim to serve the public.

What the play is actually doing

For readers encountering (What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming for the first time, it helps to be clear about what unfolds over the course of the evening.

At its centre is a familiar situation: a birthday party. Gabbi is turning 30 — again. Or perhaps she never quite leaves her thirtieth birthday. She and her friends go out dancing, hoping that a night in the club might help them escape a sense of repetition: the feeling of being caught in a loop.

The club is not a metaphor imposed from above. It is a place many people already know how to inhabit. A space of music, transformation, release, and avoidance.

The audience is not positioned outside this scenario. From the beginning, you are treated as part of the night.

What follows is not a plot-driven arc, but a sequence of shared situations: movement and stillness, laughter and fatigue, spectacle and pause. Gradually, the party shifts into something else — a ritual, not in a ceremonial sense, but in a practical one. A space where people slow down enough to notice themselves and one another.

As Talia Paulette Oliveras put it when we spoke,“For me, theatre has always been about space. If people don’t feel held — physically, emotionally — then nothing meaningful can happen, no matter how good the text is.” That emphasis on holding rather than directing shapes the entire work.

Participation without pressure

One of the most distinctive aspects of (What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming is how it treats participation. At various moments, the audience is offered invitations: to stand, to move, to breathe together, to remain seated, or simply to observe. Nothing is compulsory. Watching is not framed as passivity. Stillness is not interpreted as disengagement.

At certain points, audience members are invited — quietly, without insistence — to step onto the stage if they wish. Some do. Others do not. The work continues regardless.

This is not a minor detail. It fundamentally alters the atmosphere of the room.

“We don’t think the audience needs to be managed,” Nia said.

“People already know when they want to step forward and when they want to stay where they are.”

The result is a space that feels attentive rather than reactive. There is no sense of being monitored for the ‘right’ response. Different ways of being present are allowed to coexist without friction.

In a cultural environment where participation is often framed as obligation — whether in politics, workplaces, or even cultural events, this restraint feels notable. Interesting. And in many ways, liberating.

The body as knowledge

Ta-Nia describe the piece as a somatic ritual. In practice, this means the body is treated as a source of information rather than something to be disciplined or overridden.

The club setting plays a key role here. Clubs are places many people already use to regulate emotion — through rhythm, repetition, anonymity, and movement. They are everyday spaces of coping.

The play does not judge that impulse. It slows it down.

Alongside loud music and spectacle, there are moments of quiet, breath, and stillness. The body is invited to notice itself. Without instruction, without correction.

"We’re interested in what happens when people are trusted,” Talia reflected. “Not told what to feel. Not told how to show up. Just trusted to arrive.” In a time marked by constant stimulation and political fatigue, this kind of attention feels increasingly rare. Especially in a context like Switzerland...

Black and queer space, held rather than explained

(What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming explicitly creates a Black and queer communal space. On Swiss stages, this remains relatively uncommon. What distinguishes the work is how that space is held. It is not framed as an educational exercise. It is not explained or justified. It simply exists.

For some audience members, this presence is immediately familiar and grounding. For others, it may feel unfamiliar. The play does not smooth over that difference. It allows it to remain visible without turning it into overperformed spectacle. This is not about exclusion. It is about clarity. Ta-Nia are not asking the audience to agree, identify, or perform understanding. They are offering a space and observing what people do within it.

Why this matters now

Speaking with Ta-Nia shortly after the premiere made clear that this work is not responding to a single issue or moment. It is responding to a broader condition: fragmentation, acceleration, and a growing unease about how — and whether — we gather.

Across Europe and North America, public life is increasingly shaped by speed, polarisation, and managed forms of participation. Trust — in institutions, in strangers, even in shared time — feels fragile.

(What You’ll Find) On the Way to Becoming does not offer solutions. It offers a practice.

It asks a simple, demanding question: What happens when people are trusted to find their own way inside a shared space?

In Zurich, that question feels less like an artistic experiment and more like a proposition — one that reaches beyond the theatre.

Practical information & why now

(What You’ll Find) On the Way to BecomingA somatic ritual by Ta-Nia

The work is currently running at Schauspielhaus Zürich, in the Schiffbau Box; one of the theatre’s most flexible and intimate stages.

Conceived and directed by Ta-Nia (Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell)

The piece was commissioned specifically for Schauspielhaus Zürich and marks the first time one of their Afrofuturist, ritual-based works is presented on a Swiss stage.

What unfolds over two hours (without intermission) begins as a birthday celebration and slowly becomes something else: a collective night inside a Black and queer communal space, shaped by music, repetition, bodily presence, and choice. Participation is invited, never required. Stillness is as valid as movement. Observation is as meaningful as action.

The production is performed in German with English subtitles available at all performances. For optimal visibility of the surtitles, seats on the left-hand side of the auditorium are recommended.

Content & accessibility notes

The performance includes depictions of drug use, vomiting, panic attacks, and references to suicide. It also contains loud music, intense lighting effects, spray paint, and other moments of heightened sensory stimulation.Audience members are encouraged to take care of themselves as needed; fidget tools are available in the foyer, and stepping out briefly is always possible.