Michael Casselli at Millworks

In the next few weeks, Nonstop will be moving over to a space in the Millworks, off of Railroad Street and south of Fairfield Pike. Michael Casseli, Antioch alum and artist who has recently moved here from New York City, has also taken a space there. He came to reunion this summer and has been active in the Nonstop movement in a variety of ways. His energy is palpable. I spoke with Michael one Saturday after getting an informal tour of the Nonstop space with Ellen Hoover, Millwork’s landlord.

LS: It’s my understanding that Nonstop is going to be moving to Millworks. You are a major player in that move. I wanted to know what actually is the plan for the space and why Millworks?

MC: For one- it’s affordable. We got a really fair price. Right now it’s looked at as temporary. At this point it’s six months with the ability to renew for three after that. We realized that even if we get the campus back, initially we are going to need alternate space while buildings are taken care of. It’s kind of a fall back position.
Its interesting too because now there’ll be YSKP, Michael Jones, me and now it’s going to be Nonstop so we’ll have four cultural institutions of some matter there.

LS: It’s a kind of interesting geographic shift of the cultural energy in the town over to this industrial site.

MS: Which perfectly mirrors what happens in cities. If you look at New York- Soho –art was always moving into the industrial section and sort of making it so that artists could use it

LS: It’s like Yellow Springs—Williamsburg.

MC: Yeah, we’re calling it SOFA- South of Fairfield.

L.S.: Yes indeed!

MC: Migiwa (local artist Migiwa Orimo, involved with Nonstop) came up with that one .So I worked on designing the space. The thing is…OK …I had to try and satisfy a lot of constituencies because the Hoovers don’t want anything that’s permanent, necessarily. We want to have it happen quickly. We have issues of light and stuff like that we have to deal with. It’s industrial. It had to be cleaned. I came up with doing walls that are only eight feet tall in a nine foot six ceiling so that you have air and light that come over the top. I have plexi-glass windows in all of the offices that I am building so that light can get in.
There are two rooms…There is one long room and then there is the other room which is a little more funky. One room we’re building in. We’re going to be building a room for the server with two offices and a meeting room off to the sides. Minimal building in that side. Spaces for people. The other room is kind of the I look at it as more of an open space. No building is happening in there we are going to have things with movable walls…eight foot by eight foot movable walls.

LS: Kind of like partitions.

MC: Yeah, about one foot wide, movable gallery walls. With wheels. We’ll have a kitchen area there, a countertop and a sink and a microwave..I hate microwaves I think they are horrible…toaster oven..refrigerator…
We’re going to have a lounge area. I’m getting twenty five ounce velour from Rosebrand curtains and I’ll close off that area to keep noise down. And that will have two bookcases and computer stations inside of it. There is also a lofted area.

LS: The loft has a lot of light.

MC: The whole wall is light! It’s all windows-- it’s beautiful. That will be the CG space. And then we ran into a thing because we wanted Sharon in there as a kind of person to greet people. Donna and Sharon said that they really needed to be near each other. Conceptually I designed the space to be two different kinds of spaces: one built and one not built, funkier kind of free flowing. They really want an office in the free flowing space. So there is an alum named Bruce Lobell who makes emergency disaster relief shelters, geodesic domes. He studied with Buckminster Fuller. He has this one 16 foot diameter, twelve foot tall. It’s a polystyrene plastic, semi translucent and it goes together in about two hours. You can have doors in it, you can have windows in it. So that is what we came up with as a solution. It can be painted so there can be some really interesting graphic stuff on it. It’s kind of interesting when you first walk in to see this big geodesic dome inside of the space. The thing is too we can take it with us when we are done.

LS: That’s an interesting statement.

MC: Someone could live in that easily. His company World Structures—they make all kinds of stuff. We’re also doing this thing called daylighting with solar tubes.

LS: I’ve seen those. They’ll be coming through the ceiling.

MC: We’re putting in eight of them.

LS: Providing daylight in the space.
I was wondering about that because it is a very industrial space. How are you going to get the public to know where you are?

MC: I haven’t thought about that. On the outside…we’re doing one special thing. At the garage door we’re going to roll the door up and leave it in place but we’re going to build a doorway with three panels of glass in it. I just actually met with Daryl from Physical Plant yesterday because he was working with Xenia Glass and Lock and he said Oh yeah you can get five inch tempered panes that are roughly 36x74 for about a hundred bucks each and its insulated. We’ll do three of those and then Meg designed a little atrium area that you can go out into and its all glass and its all sustainable. Papercrete and a soy plastic top and glass walls.

LS: You are trying to be as green as possible.

MC: We’re trying to be as green as possible.

LS: Within reason.

MC: Well. We’re using 2X4’s

LS: But you’ve had to adapt to a pre-existing structure.

MC: And we’re trying to be aware of that. We’re recycling all of the materials inside that we took down. I probably could have used less wood but I didn’t have the time to figure it out because I didn’t have much time. The thing is I leave in two weeks to go on tour with Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton and I have to go to Vegas next Wednesday for the circus I am working with.

LS. I had a brief tour with Ellen Hoover and she said she is getting all of the bathrooms prettied up because she said it used to be a factory. People didn’t care but now it’s more public space.

MC: We’re hoping that by a week from Wednesday we will pretty much be finished with the major building. The walls won’t take much at all. The solar tubes take time. We have some concrete work. I am just trying to get as much done as I can while I am here. Next week we will be doing a lot of building.

LS: I saw your e-mail about getting volunteers so people should be getting in touch with you.

MC: Yes they should. And if they volunteer they should show up.

LS: And Nonstop in Millworks will be there for six months.

MC: At least six months if not more. I think it is a good idea to keep it open. It is great as another, alternate space because then our campus becomes…

LS: More in the Village and it situates us as you said…there are all of these cultural organizations that are around you. You are kind of leading a movement.

MC: I enjoy working on it.

LS: So do you think of this like an art project?

MC: Like an art project. I’m also interested too in teaching seminars out of my space and classes in the kinds of things that I do.

LS: You’ve got all of your stuff there.

MC: I want to do a class called STUFF. Stuff, 101, Advanced Stuff, Stuff Theory. All About Stuff.
I have resources. I have cameras controls, computers—all kind of stuff.

LS: There is also that kind of synergy with an organization like YSKP or Michael Jones.

MC: Also Michel-- who teaches stone carving, and the guy next to me is a clockmaker.

LS: SOFA!

MC: SOFA.

Intersections

This is a time of major decisions with major consequences. On the global level, we have choices about how we live on the planet and with each other. On the national level, we are faced with with either choosing to make history or suck up more of the same. Locally, our village is facing changes and choices on major issues such as energy, a new village manager, how we grow and thrive economically and what happens to the historic college that was a cornerstone of our identity as a town. In the next weeks and months, I will talk with faculty, students, staff, alumni and villagers on a weekly basis about where we are and where we are going globally, nationally, locally and even personally.




It is mid September. A year ago in June, we got the word that the college would be closing in a year. For many this was a shock. For some it was a gut feeling that came to fruition. For a few it was an inevitability in a long decline. Whatever your analysis, the event had unforeseen responses and repercussions. We all know the litany of endeavors to save Antioch College: the Alumni Association, the AC3, the efforts within the Village of Yellow Springs to bring pressure on the University and show support on the local level, National academic entities such as the GLCA and the AAUP have gotten involved in a variety of ways that are ongoing. The Antioch College faculty brought a lawsuit, set it aside and revived it. They also worked to gather roughly a thousand signatures from academic luminaries and fellow professors in favor of their cause and most potent of all, created the Nonstop Institute for Liberal Arts. The Alumni mobilized in unprecedented ways, building over 40 chapters around the country and funding the Institutional Advancement office for the campus as well as the Nonstop Institute. Current, past and future students engaged with the effort on every level, from collaborating to launch Non-stop to enrolling and pledging to return after a term on Antioch Education Abroad or co-op. The list goes on. It is not for lack of trying that the college is still in limbo.

So where exactly are we? There is now a new round of discussions about separation of the college from Antioch University underway. The existence of Nonstop gives us an orientation towards getting on with the journey of revitalizing the college for real, a kind of action research that will yield valuable insights and information about how and who we can be in the future. In the coming month, a meeting will be convened at Earlham College, sponsored by the GLCA that is called “Invent a College”. It would be a crying shame if the organizers of this event do not pay very close attention to what is already being invented every day here in our village. Nonstop has great potential and its leaders and participants are already developing the understanding that will move this effort forward.

Going forward means working with Nonstop and the other efforts that we can impact on a daily basis within our scope of power and influence. The October 1st Committee is working with the village leadership, villagers, faculty and alumni to preserve the campus. This committee has recognized, as many of us have, that the University has done a shoddy job at best and an intentionally negligent job at worst, of putting the buildings to sleep until we figure all of this out. Whatever the intention, the result is the same: a major compromising of the physical and historical assets of the college. We need to look behind us, where we have come from to the historical aspects of the college that we are stewards of. Without that we will fly headlong into creating an entity that bears absolutely no resemblance to what was. And while this may be desirable to a small portion Antiochians, for many of us, our passion for the place is grounded in shared values, understandings and memories that cannot be separated from our roots on the campus. In the coming weeks and months, it will also become apparent how our village has built its identity around the college. The health of the village financially and socially is in great jeopardy.

All of us have had our own personal response to the major upheaval that we have collectively experienced. I took a bit of a left turn. Several years ago, when our numbers had fallen and grandiose plans were put in place to revive us, I realized that my personal journey was taking me elsewhere. I spent four years at University of Dayton earning a Masters of Science in Education in Community Counseling. Ironically, while being a student at another institution, I came to value Antioch all the more. I also found that I liked how therapy and teaching theater talked to each other in my brain. I worked for a year as an intern at Wilmington College counseling students there. (I hope to do this again with Nonstop.) However, I knew I needed to challenge myself and move forward on this new road. This summer I took a position as therapist on an ACT team at South Community Behavioral Health in Dayton.

ACT stands for Assertive Community Treatment and my job entails home visits to clients who have persistent and serious mental illness. The people I talk to are mostly diagnosed with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder and the challenges they face are numerous : managing finances, medication compliance, skills of daily living and the acute isolation that comes with a lifetime of living with a severe mental disorder. I commute every day to Moraine where the agency is located and then spend a good portion of my nine hour day driving around parts of Dayton I have never seen before. I am challenged in complex and unexpected ways to respond to people who have great need. I work with a team of people in a “transdisciplinary” way. While I am a therapist, I am also doing case management and assessing med compliance. The nurse clearly does counseling and the case manager is surprisingly knowledgeable about medication side effects. There are more acronyms in mental health than Antioch ever had (ACT, IDDT, ODADAS, ODMH, CCOE, DID, PTSD, OCD, ODD etc.) and the politics involved in the health care system are far more screwed up than academia. So I feel right at home—wait—Why in heaven’s name did I do this anyway?

Sometimes I think that despite myself I am living out some kind of Antiochian ideal. For fifteen years I was a professional actor. The next fifteen I was a teacher and for the next fifteen years I plan on developing into a therapist and reinventing my art practices to reflect all of the learning I have been doing. Nonstop is part of this next phase of my life, one in which the walls of the hospital and the college fall away, where definitions of who I am become more expansive and fluid, and where I are humbled and inspired by situations that make me muster more than I knew I had to give.

This article was originally posted at The Record on October 1, 2008 -

Are you at the crossroads? Write me at I want to hear your story.