Ira and Aaron welcome Ira’s friend and collaborator Seth Zurer, longtime Chicagoan recently transplanted to Southern California. The starting point is a piece of family history that Seth recounted in the 2007 performance about utopias through which he and Ira first met. It is the little-known story of Clarion, a short-lived early-20th century Jewish agrarian settlement in Utah where his grandmother was born. From there, the conversation drifts to Seth’s own westward move to Riverside, CA, whe...
May 9, 2025
1 hr 27 min
For JIALIO’s first tri-national episode and first episode with more than one guest, Aaron and Ira are joined by former Chicagoans Tony Macaluso and his son Giulio from Chapel FM, the community radio station Tony runs in Leeds, UK. They discuss a road trip they took the previous summer exploring places meant to offer alternatives to mainstream society in the American West, including the urban design project Arcosanti in Arizona, where Ira and Aaron have both lived. What unfolds is a quit...
May 9, 2025
1 hr 41 min
Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed. Jesse Schumann stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibration, Jesse has practiced mindful self-compassion on a Canadian meditation retreat, launched a rap...
May 19, 2023
1 hr 25 min
For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwright András Visky to its recent move from the neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where it was one of over 250 theatre companies dotting Chicago’s North Side, to North Lawndale on the city’s West Side. Melissa talks about what it means for a historically...
May 10, 2023
1 hr 14 min
The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we offer each other access, what are we offering? And what are we giving up? Nascent online communities, clandestine cocktail bars, and city neighborhoods all maintain barriers to entry of one sort or another, until they don’t. And we can rarely control wh...
Apr 27, 2023
1 hr 21 min
Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environmental theatre to installation art, live action game play, and pricey Instagram-ready themed “experiences,” immersion as aesthetic approach and marketing ploy always offers irresistible novelty amidst the ordinary. Immersive theatre and art over the l...
Apr 13, 2023
1 hr 41 min
The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of connections between resisting perfection, eschewing deliberate meaning, and valuing participation, hoping to find process orientation cocooned someplace within. The clouds start to part a bit around the parallels that become evident between holistic...
Mar 29, 2023
1 hr 24 min
The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone. But the collective also requires a certain level of individual sacrifice to larger organizing principles – be they theatre, yoga, or architecture. It can be easy to confuse the collective impulse with a desire for what may actually be its opposite:...
Mar 9, 2023
1 hr 24 min
Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices to what might happen in the future.” So is ambition by definition a young person’s game? And is letting go of it a sign of maturity, or resignation? Gradually abdicating long-held and largely unexamined ambitions, a couple of middle aged guys might s...
Feb 23, 2023
1 hr 58 min
As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickly becomes a meditation on how to live a life in art, and what is required to do so. It seems that money, scale, yoga, and happiness each may help, or get in the way, depending on which way one is heading. The words of a surprisingly insecure AI langu...
Feb 9, 2023
1 hr 34 min
Load more