Emma & Bailey
Now. Tell us about 108 Notes at Rough Draft Festival!
kanishk pandey
Yes. 108 Notes is a play that I’ve written about two PhD students who are studying different theses, and while looking through the books in their university’s library, they come across little index cards shoved into each of the books. They end up assembling all of them, totaling 108 index cards. They start this project on the side of their research to try and come up with an analysis that can tap into what it means to know a person, just through their words. It’s having a workshop-presentation, let’s call it, at Rough Draft Festival, which is hosted by the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in the Main Stage Theater on March 13rd at 7pm.
Emma & Bailey
What is the dare that you’re giving yourself in this presentation, and in this moment? In this iteration of where you are in the development of this project?
kanishk pandey
I got to do a reading of it with the Ecstatic Peephole Play Club [a monthly reading series hosted by Emma & Bailey at Pete’s Candy Store], and this play has had…this will be kind of like a long, winding thing of the development of it…
Emma & Bailey
Give us the nuts and the bolts! Give us the age and history of 108 Notes. I find that people like to skim this part and this is… this is the stuff!
kanishk pandey
I don’t know how I always feel about talking about it, but with 108 Notes, it feels, like, very important. And because it was very much not the way I write normally, In 2025,
while I was in production for my ANT Fest show (Me & My Friends, We Have So Much Fun), I suddenly had this instinct to just start writing 108 index cards with stuff on them. Not thinking that hard about them, not really caring about where they led me. I was really interested in, like, the tangibility of the index card. Even prior to this piece, my desk and life is covered in index cards. There’s 3 near me right now. I love index cards, and so I was just… I wanted to just write on cards. So, I wrote these 108 index cards, and I didn’t know really what they were going to be. And I suddenly was drawn to type this beginning. These characters of Ava and Eve. I never type things first, so that was also strange. So, I had two characters, and these index cards that I wanted them to randomize and read in a random order every time they did it. Then, I went on a residency with Fresh Ground Pepper. And one of the things they do [is] you have to lead at least one rehearsal that involves every single resident. I made two people come up and sit in front of everyone, and I had everybody go through all of the index cards, reading them aloud, and then they had to say whatever thought came to their mind. If they had any. And I wrote it down.
There’s this one dialogue that starts with Ava and Eve mispronouncing Schuylkill, which is a river in Philadelphia. And that was because Andrew Scoville could not figure out how to pronounce it correctly while reading it. That was a fun thing and excited people.
Emma & Bailey
The same thing happened at Peephole.
kanishk pandey
Yeah, exactly. It’s always hilarious. It’s great. Nobody knows how to… I mean, unless you’re from Philly…
Emma & Bailey
It’s not intuitive, Schuylkill.
kanishk pandey
No, not at all. And so I got into this idea of responses to the index cards in their randomized order. I started devising dialogue for Ava and Eve with each note, and that’s what I brought to the Barn At Lee [a residency where Emma & Bailey & Kanishk worked together for one fabulous week]. I think the discovery I made at Barn at Lee was that it was a big mistake for me to try and come to a conclusion where they figured anything out. I needed to resist the temptation to figure something out.
What I’m taking to Rough Draft that I feel really, really excited about, is beginning to engage with movement, because it’s gonna be in the round. I’m in the Mainstage, and the Mainstage is, like, a lecture hall that people take for Chemistry 101, where it’s, like, a bunch of seats.
Emma & Bailey
What a perfect marriage of material and space.
How do you hope your collaborators will help you enliven the 3D- on-your feet version of this piece?
kanishk pandey
Marissa Joyce Stamps is helping with choreography or movement. Choreography maybe is a bit too prescriptive, but that sort of the thing. Similar to the light design, I wanted to create a movement framework that the actors can have. So rather than thinking about the piece in terms of blocking, thinking of it in terms of a pathway, a spiral, almost, that these two performers can depend on. Something to keep a fluidity to the motion of the piece as it goes through. We’re using Rough Draft to explore the movement of the piece, the physicality of it, and the creation of the world, which I think is what Whimzee Hanna [Lighting Designer] and I are trying to look into as well, keeping it meditative, I guess? Drawn out and gradual, rather than immediate. I’m also very excited about my cast, Emma Callahan and Char Nakashima-Conway, and how they’ve come to embody these two characters and this randomized plot, as well as my Stage Manager, Cori Diaz. It’s a team of people I just adore and love to work with.
Emma & Bailey
You were at Rough Draft in 2024 with PRISONCORE! What does it means to you as an artist to return to a place of development? I think we are in this moment right now where people like to imagine that playwrights hit one thing development-wise, and then they never return to it, and I’d like to think of a world where we can develop work with longevity of relationship in mind. So I’m just curious if you can speak to your previous experience and what it means to return.
kanishk pandey
It’s completely different. When I got Rough Draft for PRISONCORE! in 2024, even though it was a reading and the amount of money LPAC was able to give us wasn’t as much, when we went to them and we said, okay, we want to, like, set up a VTuber, so can we have, like, a TV and, like, a laptop station and all this shit? Handan [artistic director of LPAC] was just like, yeah, absolutely, like, I’ll help however I can. It was super important to the process of that play, which would then take up a year and a half of my life.
I think one thing that’s interesting is, coming back to Rough Draft with this piece, which is very different from PRISONCORE!, I’m getting so much freedom in how to present it and how to workshop it. I think there’s a level of comfort? That I know I’ll be able to try things and test them safely. I don’t think I had enough experience last time to appreciate that.
I’m coming to Rough Draft much farther ahead than I did last time. And there’s security in that, because PRISONCORE! made very little sense at Rough Draft. And I think 108 Notes — while disagreeing with the concept of sense — is more fleshed out as a piece.
Emma & Bailey
I love that way of putting it.
kanishk pandey
I was talking to Daniel Holzman about it. And he put Rough Draft in a way that I thought was great. It’s where you can be treated as an artistic resident at a University without having to leave New York and live in some college town for a while. And that was pretty spot-on of, like, the level of resources you get and the environment you’re working in.
Additional material that will make this maybe too long:
Emma & Bailey
There are many duets happening simultaneously in this piece, between Ava and Eve, between the index cards, randomness and cohesion, between the play itself and the audience. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about the 2-ness of this play, the doubleness of this play, the duality of this play.
kanishk pandey
I think at the core of it, it comes down to, sort of, that this play is about something asymptotic, like innocent flirting with the idea of a dialectic, two things being true that cancel each other out. To know someone also means to not know a lot about someone, no matter what. There’s levels, and they go up and down, and people change, and people grow, and like… like, that’s one thing about the ordering of the cards: whoever this person is, they may have changed over the course Eve and Ava read them.
Emma & Bailey
Right.
kanishk pandey
Ava and Eve have changed over the course of their studies, their relationship to each other has changed a lot over the course of studies. How much they know about each other, about the notes, and don’t know about each other, and don’t know about the notes is also continuously warping.
I funnily feel like that is my answer about duets, but I also feel like an awareness of even, like… I feel like we use the concept of a “2” to frame it, because it makes it easier to frame, or to conceive. That there are, like, two opposing things, or two things dancing within, when it’s millions and millions of things, canceling and coinciding and having their own little relationships at the same time.
Emma & Bailey
Right. It’s really, like, relationality more than two-ness, I guess is what I mean.
kanishk pandey
Yeah, I like that.
Emma & Bailey
rapid-fire answers to these questions:
kanishk pandey
Okay. Alright, I’ll try.
Emma & Bailey
All plays are ghost stories, true or false?
kanishk pandey
Mmm, both.
Emma & Bailey
Nature vs. Nurture.
kanishk pandey
Both.
Emma & Bailey
Astrology or religion?
kanishk pandey
Both. Saying that to a Hindu is, like, complicated, because Hindu astrology is, like, really important.
Emma & Bailey
Is personality real?
kanishk pandey
Yeah.
Emma & Bailey
What comes first for you, dialogue or character?
kanishk pandey
Neither. Stage Image. I get the first line and the last line and the stage image. That’s what I start with.
Emma & Bailey
Very Caryl Churchill of you.
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