 My name is Karen Gruber and I use she, her pronouns. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Level Up Symposium presented by the Associated Designers of Canada with support from Toaster Labs Mixed Reality Performance Atelier. I am a member of the board of directors of the ADC and really excited to be your host for today's event. To begin our session today, I would like to acknowledge that I'm currently located on Treaty Six territory, the traditional lands of First Nations and Métis people. Edmonton, as it is known colonially, is and has been home to a diverse range of indigenous nations and peoples, including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nacoda Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibwe, Soto, and Isnabe, Tsutsina, Inuit, and many others. Since time immemorial, this land has been a meeting place for this diverse range of indigenous peoples who have enriched this place with their histories, languages, and cultures. As a settler, I have benefited from indigenous generosity and hospitality and knowledge and for that I wish to express my gratitude. In this spirit of gratitude, I would like to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, our primary funder of the symposium as a whole, as well as our dedicated member volunteers and volunteers on the board of the ADC who have made this symposium possible. Thank you so much. Today's event is sponsored by Theatre Alberta. We are equally grateful to these additional sponsors, IAPSI, University of British Columbia, CITT Alberta chapter, Concordia University, Ryerson University, and York University. Sorry, for your information, all symposium events will be recorded and presented in a freely available archive. Please check back a few days after any event you missed to see the recording at levelup.designers.ca. Thank you so much for joining us today. You are watching this Level Up livestream either on the Level Up website, levelup.designers.ca, on HowlRound at howlround.com or through our partners at Toaster Lab or on the respective Facebook pages for the ADC or Toaster Lab. Regardless of your viewing platform embedded on the same page as the video is the chat function. It's in the top right-hand corner of your screen right here and questions can be asked in the chat at any time by clicking on that icon. And they will be right out to the presenter during the Q and A portion of this session. If you have technical difficulties at any point in the session, please send an email to levelupatdesigners.ca for immediate support. This event can be enjoyed through auditory or visual access or accommodation of both. I will read aloud all questions we address from the chat and this information will also appear visually at the bottom of your stream. Visual access is also supported with live captioning for myself at the bottom of my stream window and it will be added for additional speakers in the archive which is available within 48 hours of the end of this event. If you require technical assistance to support your access, please email levelupatdesigners.ca for immediate support or to provide feedback following our events. If you enjoy this session, please consider donating any amount to the Associated Designers of Canada. This helps support our National Arts Service Organization achieve its goals in the areas of advocacy, mentorship and industry promotion. Donation links are available in screen on all viewing platforms and I hope you'll consider donating. Thank you so much for your patience with our announcements. Today's event is Grandpa Drew Stories of the Lit Cigarette AKA Illuminations from Article 11's Room Series and it features the artist Andy Moro who I'm so grateful to have with us here today. Andy uses he, him pronouns and is a multidisciplinary artist and one of the co-founding artistic directors of Article 11. With the 2020 Saminovich Laureate, Tara Began. Their work embodies Article 11 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 11's most recent work, Dear Woman, has met critical acclaim at the Edinburgh and Sydney Festivals, Chioma Otearoa and Arts Centre Melbourne. Recently, Dear Woman was transcribed digital media for a lockdown audience and presented widely with Calgary's Downstage Theatre. Up next, Secret Room for Making Treaty 7 at the Grand Theatre this March. In addition to this work with Article 11 Andy has collaborated and toured extensively across Turtle Island and overseas and it's my great honor to have him here with us today. I'm so grateful. He's willing to spend some time with us and with you, our audience. So welcome Andy. Thank you so much for being with us. Hi, Erin. That was such a nice introduction. Thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for being with us and for sharing your valuable time with us. We know you have so many exciting projects on the go. So the fact that you spend a bit of time with us here means a lot. Thank you. I feel really fortunate to be busy right now. It's that, you know, as we all are in that strange like, are we going, are we not? Are we going? And so there's a number of projects that have actually started up and some of them have pulled back a little and some of them are going even faster. So really interesting time. But I want to thank you for this and this platform is beautiful. And it's kind of like, this is weirdly, I feel actually a little nervous which I don't use these circumstances like, it's like, shit, these are designers listening now. This is that real, so, which is great. But I'm... That's great to hear. That proof of liveness, hey? We're all live now. Totally. That's the real thing. It reminds me of when I was a kid, you know, like I was so tempted to walk in and put a sweater on and sit down and do like a Mr. Rogers intro. But because I remember as a kid, like I'd be sitting, this is like too much information for sure, but I'd sit in the toilet and I'd be like, geez, if we can see Mr. Rogers in his house, like at any given moment, like can people see me right now? Like am I? So this is one of those moments where people can actually see me. I think I... Yeah, totally. I love that we've opened that chasm, right? The unseeing eyes come into our lives. Totally. Yeah, that's really interesting. I wanna thank you. I'm in Calgary. That was great to hear all those sponsors for this session out here in Alberta. Maybe that means someday I'll get hired by theater Alberta. That's amazing. Woo! That's really cool. I'm just kidding. I love theater Alberta. But I am a guest here in Mokinsis, which is the Blackfoot word for Calgary. And I have, I'm really proud to say I have a lot of friends and colleagues and here in relations here in Blackfoot territory. And I just wanna pay my respects to be here in the territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy. It's also the homeland of the Sixka and the Guyana, the Pagani and the Stony Nakota and the Ten Up First Nations and also Métis Treaty III Alberta homeland. So I also wanna thank Creator and offer my heart and my intention, my good intentions and I hope to do well here today with everyone. So thank you. Yeah, am I, should I just jump in? Am I doing my... What's the meaning Andy? Absolutely. Let's hear about your work. I'm so excited. I will thank you again. And I will say that, yeah, when Andrew and I spoke ages ago, it seems now, we talked about obviously the opportunity to have this conversation. And at that time we had just, I think, begun working on a digital version of Dear Woman, I believe. I don't even know if we had achieved that yet, which is kind of the last big actual live theater work that Article 11 did. One of them, there's a bit of a transition period that I'll talk about in a minute, but so we talked about what this could be and the idea of what digital dramaturgy is and what that relationship between work in real time and real space versus work in some kind of hybrid, pandemic, you know, distance safe world. And then of course, taking theater and putting it directly over onto a digital platform. That's a whole other scenario as well. So since we had that conversation, I am happy to say that we've played in kind of all of those territories. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about, I'm gonna talk about three separate endeavors, not just the Room Series, which was what was listed in the description, but there are three things we've done. And I'm gonna kind of just ramble through them as best I can. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the what and the why of each of those pieces. So it's not a portfolio session, it's really just kind of showing you the work that we've done that I think and I hope is addressing what this really interesting territory is. And we're all here, you know, in the middle of trying to pivot to becoming digital artists if we're not already and try to understand what that means because as we learned, especially in our work in Dear Woman, again, which I'll talk more about later, there's a big difference between what's magic in a room and what's magic on a screen. And there's no judgment or comparison between the two. It's just not entirely intuitive until you start playing with those media, what the magic places are. And so what, and what that means is that when we're turning something that works magically in real time, real space, into something that we can watch whenever we want and wherever we want, there's a shift that happens. Things that we expect and take for granted in film and video are things that we sometimes never see in theater and things that we do in theater that can blow our minds are really commonplace in the film world. So that is really what our biggest challenge has been. And I hope that the three pieces that we're gonna look at right now, I hope that I can at least talk a little bit about that and that we can have a conversation later. So I'm hoping that it's, I hope it'll be an hour of me yammering and looking at some images with you. And then I will open the floor for some questions. So I will jump in though with a piece. This is a recording we did. We did a piece in Ottawa at the National Art Center, geez, five years ago called Declaration. And that's a thing that Article 11 created, which was about bringing indigenous artists together under this umbrella of this piece or show or experience called Declaration and creating work in public. So we would be in different venues. We did it at the ROM, we did it at the NAC, we did it at City Hall here in Calgary in the foyer, the big, there's a kind of huge atrium. So we've insert ourselves into a live environment, public live environment, create work with a team of indigenous artists all day long and then do an offering, what we call an offering at night. And it's pretty exciting. Like we, so people are allowed to actually sit and witness the creation process. And really what that was about for us is, especially at the time, you know, that wasn't that long. It was around the time of the TRC. So there was a rise in indigenous presence in the performing arts scene. And we really wanted to talk about the degree to which this is work. So by exposing process, we hope that that would become a little bit more evident in what we were making. And then also being able to offer something that night in terms of the immediacy, the process, et cetera, it was kind of just a real like theater, indigenous theater, loving for us. And we brought people that we loved and it actually started in Toronto. This isn't one of the things I'm gonna talk about. So I'll cut myself short. But we started in Toronto at Fort York and it was really just a showcase. And what happened when we were there was one of the days got rained out. And we, meaning a showcase, we had the same thing. We invited artists we love, but we were like, okay, everybody's gonna have some time. We've turned this, for lack of a better term, found environment into a performance space. We're bringing in Santy Smith. We brought in Michael Greyeyes. We brought in Carlos Rivera. So people we love and know who are working in the community and just did kind of like back to back indigenous artistry. The first day got totally rained out and the second day was wonderful. So everybody amazing like generous artists that are our colleagues and friends were like, well, you know what? It's raining and nobody's here. So let's, we'll come back tomorrow. We'll kind of try to do our thing. And so people came back the next day, all the artists. And then we had too many artists. So people just started kind of collaborating and doing things live and in the moment. And it was, it was just amazing. And I was like busking video and Tara was kind of interjecting with like commentary and word and helping to direct the environments. And we had created a context was kind of the launch of article 11. So we had copies of that article available for people to look at. It was exciting. But what we really were moved by was this creation space that was created where people were collaborating, you know, like for example, Carlos and Santy suddenly were like, hey, we haven't done any improv for however many years. Let's just go out and do something right now. Audience was coming and going and it was really awesome. So that was kind of the beginning of our work in this media of this kind of like live video, live performance, interactive, you know, spectator scenario. So anyway, this little clip I'm going to show you at the beginning is Jesse Wenty, who some may know he's a phenom, a beautiful force of wisdom and knowledge and activism. And he was invited to our NAC version. And what we did there was in the during the lunch hour we did a thing called Declare, where all the artists that were there collaborating just would be interviewed live by Tara Bagan. So she would ask questions, they would respond and we just got to know them better. And what I did was kind of, we had a little pre-meetings and interviews. So I was able to speak with them. We were able to speak with them about some of their influences, especially Jesse who's a huge cinephile. And so we got to know A where he was from, what he loved, the work he did. And so we created this 360 degree video escape around him while he was being interviewed. And this is just a clip from that interview with all of that context was just cause it was fun but really what we want to hear is what he has to say. Thank you, Ed. I wanted to follow up with you talk about being political cause I think existing as an indigenous living as an indigenous person is a political act in this place. And, but it's important to understand the context which is we did not make it a political act, right? Is that someone else made it a political act, you know? If you, you are the one that politicized us through 400 years of genocide. It is not, that is not our doing. So, you know, when we danced our dance and told our stories before you ever came, they were not, they may have been political to us but they were not big P political in the grand scheme of things. We were doing our dances. You're the ones that outlawed them and made the act of them political. And so that's why this, why you have that reaction. That's colonial dude. I ain't in that game. Thanks, Andrew just told me my mic was live and Tara's here just listening as well. I was just saying, come on, it's over here. So, Tara Bagan's here in the background. Poet, our laureates, our right laureate, the writer laureate and sitting in this room with us. So anyway, so that was Jesse Wenty and that's an important kind of underscore for the work we're doing which is that it's in the moment, it's real. It's indigenous, it's by and for the indigenous community. And, you know, we were talking about it last night and Tara brought up the great point, which is that, you know, part of the reason why this work is working and I think why I'm busy right now is because on the heels of this time of reconsideration and reevaluation, it's, there is an understanding that has risen that it is time to make these changes and it is time to invest in relevant kind of contextual important indigenous stories. You know, we were laughing that, you know, for all those years when there was this effort to kind of get more indigenous work and content and artists on the main stages of Turtle Island and, you know, the constant refrain was, well, it's a big ship, it's hard to turn, there's a lot of, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, well now we've just, everybody's just canceled everything and changed everything and so clearly it is possible to make these changes and it's good to see that in some cases they're happening. So that's just a little bit of context. The work that we did, the actual theatrical main stage work we did at that time was a piece called Reckoning. And that's the place where I'm gonna start talking about this relationship between work that is on screen and work that is on stage. Because we, as a designer and as a projection designer, I've obviously, I brought that toolkit to the kind of the union of Tara and I in the formation of Article 11. And as such a politically motivated and activist writer, she was kind of ready to incorporate all media, whatever would work we were ready to explore. So she was able to write content that not only called for that kind of imagistic support but embedded the presence of that kind of imagery in the writing. And I will say off the top that I believe that that is a huge percentage of the reason why this work I hope is successful. And we started to see how that worked in Reckoning. Reckoning is a three-part piece. It's a triptych. It was released around the time of the final report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And it was a piece that Tara wrote about the, it's kind of the fallout from that commission inside the community. So a little bit of a window into the world that mainstream Canada doesn't see in terms of what that process did to individuals and communities and families. So it was three parts. The first part was called Witness and it was about the adjudicators who engaged with community members to unearth those traumatic experiences that occurred in the residential school system. That is played by a non-indigenous artist and it was a dance piece. There are some images we'll look at in a second. The second part was called Daughter and that piece was about the daughter of somebody who was unjustly accused in the process of that Reconciliation Commission. And the third part is called Survivor and it's about a man who used his payout money which was the result of a very kind of like, there was a quite, what's the word? An administrative process that allowed the system to arrive at exactly how much of a payout you should get based on the heinous things that were done to you while you were in residential school. So this guy's using, he's working at the band and he runs the website and he's digitally and smart and he's gonna use his money to enact the ultimate protest on the steps of Queens Park in Ottawa. So those are the three sections. The third section Survivor is actually, he's actually telling his story to a camera. So that's the context that we were working in theatrically. In the theater, the kind of the unifier between those pieces was just a 16 by nine foot platform, all three pieces to place on that platform. Three very different theatrical styles. In the third one with Jonathan Fisher playing the man, Survivor. He's addressing the camera directly and we're seeing his live, a real-time image projected behind him which I'm manipulating through is a Dora. What we also discovered is that when we tried to capture that because I was shooting, we were projecting onto black, it was impossible to see him and the projected image in the same exposure. So I started playing around with ways of creating an archival for that. And in the process, we ended up creating this piece that was a standalone digital piece of that section of the show, if that makes sense. So I'm just gonna quickly, I'm realizing I've got things here to look at. So these are the posters that we made from the original piece from the triptych. So that, what you're seeing right there coming up is Jonathan Fisher and he appears in part three and the other performers were in parts one and two. That's what the promotional material looked like. And what can I show you now? I'll show you a few pieces from some of the exists. This is from the first section. This is when we did it at the Centaur in Montreal, that's Julie Tamiko Manning and she is the adjudicator in the first section, which was really done as a dance piece, kind of dance and lighting and audio. And the audio was transcripts from those forms and adjudication kind of documents that I mentioned earlier, very difficult to listen to and then a score by Melody McIver, which was phenomenal, cello. So these are just a couple of stills from that piece. Sorry, Viola, not cello. This was a kind of, it really, we really just went deep into kind of a dance aesthetic. So they're what Julie didn't speak, well, it's a little bit, but really just in the context of the score, it was a very much a movement piece, which was new territory for us as well. And you're just seeing that border in light of that 16 by nine platform. And then the lamp was her desk lamp, which she started at kind of her desk doing her job and slowly unwinds through the course of the piece. That's about 20 minutes for the first section. Then what we did was we created this kind of reset moment in between each section where we could see the performers come out in, not in character. They would reset the stage live in front of our eyes. So the few pieces of furniture that were out would be removed, the next piece would be set. The performer for the next piece would come onto stage, acknowledge the booth, and then we'd switch over to the next piece. So the second section was called Daughter. And this is in a version that we did in Montreal and in Edmonton where Tara played the role in Toronto when we premiered it was PJ Proudat. So there's just a few stills from that scene. This was a kind of a more naturalistic, almost like a proscenium style presentation to people who meet through internet dating. However, we learned that it was highly engineered by the daughter who knew that this man who she was gonna have a date with is the person who had accused her father. The date also declines quickly. So the third piece was Survivor and that's the piece with Jonathan which we're really here to talk about. So here's him just in the opening of that section. So he has the other performers have come out in fact in Daughter which preceded this. There's wine that spilled, the furniture's tipped over, et cetera. So the team comes out, we see people actually express affection for one another and kind of like it's a little bit of a lighthearted transition in order to a little bit of a palette cleanser because the work as one can imagine is traumatic and tumultuous. So then once the stage is reset, Jonathan kind of checks his environment. He's got a camera, he's got a chair, well it's actually a kind of a little school desk and his laptop and he's about to begin this process of recording his testimonial. And we're gonna watch a little bit of that, here he is just getting ready to talk here and we'll watch a little bit of that testimonial in one second. I will tell you it's a little bit dated when we did I think it was 2016, is that what we premiered? We were still in a world where we were using cameras that had tape in them, which is not the case anymore. It's amazing how quickly things change, how that felt so amazingly progressive. Like I remember getting 150 foot S video cable and feeling like I was like in the future but that's all ancient history now. And so what I will show you is, actually give you a second here to kill some things. What I'll show you now is the, so what we did is we took the video from that piece, which was actually recording in the context of the piece, just because it was the best way for Jonathan to work with it and in fact there's a section where he does a live test, test, test, plays it back in real time. The cool thing about that was that there were, if people in the audience laughed loudly, we would actually hear them in the playback. So it was a very clearly a real time playback situation which added just raised the stakes in a really interesting way. So what you're gonna see is kind of like a record box around his image, which we added for the playback this digital version. It's very dated now, but at the time it was awesome. This is the beginning that we're seeing right here where he does his reset and begins to show. So he's in fact really actually setting that camera up. So that's his nod and then he starts, obviously these titles have been added for this digital representation, but it's something that we created not that long ago. Test, Stephen Harper, Syphilis. So at that point, he actually does play it back and we watch it and we hear ourselves. In fact, that chuckly sound is me sitting by the camera, but, and it is actually in the playback as well. This was, that was an Edmonton one. And in Edmonton it was awesome because I didn't have to run the show, which I think was the first time that's ever happened. So I was able to actually sit in the house and record, but so that what actually was different about what you just saw was that kind of box with him in it, with the record icon and so on, that didn't exist in the actual show. That was kind of a way of just introducing what that aesthetic was about in this video. Anyway, he unveils his plan, he talks about his life, he talks about his childhood and his upbringing and what this process has done to him. And then there's a point where he asks the audience to engage in a very special activity, which was a really interesting thing and I'll talk more about it. This is about, I think it's about a four minute clip. So settle in for a second, but he engages quite directly with the audience and I'll talk a little bit about how this was interesting in real time after we watched this clip. Anyways, before I finish this up, I wanna do something I've never done before. Always wanted to, too shy. Hell, I've never even talked this much, never mind singing. But I wanna lead you all, everyone watching. I want to lead you all in the national anthem. Okay? So, stand up. Stand up with me, guys. Come on, a dying guy's wish, okay? So come on. Okay, I would never force anyone to do anything, but if you wanna stand and sing, then let's do this. For reals, stand up with me. You know what? When I was at that fucking school, some boys didn't even know the anthem yet and know what? Because of that, all us junior boys had to kneel on our bony little knees overnight on the hardwood floor. Boys, 10, nine, eight years old, we knew the damn song by then, already been there a few years us, but those newest boys, some only five years old, they didn't even know what half those words meant yet. Never mind how to say them, sing them. And we all suffered for it. So you could stand for two minutes and we'll sing the national fucking anthem. Stand up. Okay, and if you're gonna do this with me, I don't want nobody just moving their lips, pretending to sing or nothing. Don't matter if it makes you feel uncomfortable or something. You think we were comfortable, staying awake all night on our knees, getting strapped if one of us fell over for a second? You sing loud. If you don't care about those boys, you sing loud for hockey or Rita McNeil or whatever you gotta do. Okay. Oh, Canada, our home and native, true patriot love. That's a funny one, because I know patriot has to do with being patriotic, but I never did understand what love has to do with that. Maybe it's because I never really did understand what Canada is. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a part of it, but that's the name we got, ain't it? Canada's first peoples, true patriot love. Love? I know. I learned about love in school. Learned I love my mom because my heart felt how far she was from me, even though I had no idea where I was. Learned I love my dad when his own hurt stopped his life short. Learned I love my big sister Trina when I could see her across the dining hall and my legs wanted to run over to her for one little minute to hug her and feel her hands on my hair. Remember where I come from. I learned about love through hurt, through not having. So being Canadian has to, so being patriotic has to do with not having. I find that confusing because as far as I can see, Canada just takes whatever it wants including kids. Anyways. True patriot love in all thy sons' commands. Whoops. Sorry, ladies. We're glowing hearts. We see thee rise, our true north strong and free. See, because I got friends who live up north, eh? And they're strong as heck, but that idea about free is a little funny. They got a curfew siren that goes off every night around 10. Government says it's to keep them safe, but you can bet your boots, their kid didn't feel too safe when he got hauled off to the cop shop for being out past 10. Especially when his parents weren't told where he was for four days. They didn't rough him up or nothing. He slipped on the ice, got that black eye falling on a fucking snowbank or some shit, and ribs heal on their own. Thank God, because there's no hospital up there anyways. Sorry. Okay. True north strong and free. I think, I get this now. This is a comedy song. From far and wide, oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land, because there's some people who think people can own land. And those same people tell other people that they can't own land and that the queen is gonna go ahead and own that land for them. Glorious and free. Woo! This, this is a good one. Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee. And then the next line is just the same. You can sit. I won't ask you to stand again. The same mass. Get comfy. Let's still get choked up when I watch that. Jonathan was amazing because he never, even in rehearsal, he never worked at less than that level of intensity. So it was pretty, it was pretty wild. The amazing thing about that section was that what we didn't realize and learned in real time, this premiered at the theater center in Toronto, was that for example, if you're in the armed forces or in any version of a kind of an official service and somebody says to stand up for a national anthem, you have to stand up. And in addition to that, lots of people just did. So it was this really interesting relationship between people not knowing if they should stand and then standing and then Jonathan having to process that and kind of incorporate it into his work. And then of course, during the context of what you just heard, people kind of trying to figure whether or not they should keep standing. But of course, there's nothing untrue about what he says. So it was a profound time. What we're not seeing there is what's happening on the screen behind him, which is that basically the video you're watching with a little bit, I mean, what I haven't done yet is been able to turn a live visit door action into a captured video, or at least we didn't do it for this piece. But there is a lot, he's being manipulated on the screen behind him in a way that's obviously we queued. But when we looked at that content, we felt that it stood on its own. So that really was the beginning for us, for article 11 of having content that existed within a theatrical context. I mean, this is 2016. So we weren't thinking ahead to this time in any way. But we started recognizing that when video was included as, with its own rationale, like with the fact that it is video in the context of the work, it gives us a lot more flexibility to explore what that medium can do. And it also quite surprisingly allowed, and I mean, whether or not you agree that that piece stands on its own, certainly for us as a record of what that show was, it stands on its own, but there's a level at which that piece can exist as a piece of storytelling independent of the perform diversion of that work. So that was the beginning also for us of live interactive video, real time. And we then moved on to a piece called Dear Woman. And this started, I guess, in 2018, 2019, we started working on Dear Woman. It's a companion piece to the first work that Tara and I did together, which was called In Spirit, about Tara's cousin, a young woman who disappeared from the Highway of Tears near Merritt, Kilshenna, N.B.C. And so this was a kind of the retribution version of that piece, where it's a woman who is in her 20s, 30s, doesn't matter. She has been trained near our forces. She has mixed blood heritage. Her father's white, her mom's indigenous, and her sister was also taken. So she is also speaking directly to the camera. She is recording a video testimonial about the fact that she is going to avenge her sister who was taken while she was overseas in Kandahar fighting. So here's an image of the theatrical version that we did. We were really proud of this work because it toured literally on our backs. She's sitting on a cooler, which contained all the props and the technology that we toured with. They're amazingly like those insulated coolers are great road cases, just so you know. And you can get them with the space to lock them up and so on. So we use that. And also it works as I carry on luggage. So that thing she's sitting on is what all the props, costume and technology was in. And then we had this kind of like a very simple hunting blind backdrop. And in the context of the story, she has gone out to a hunting blind to tell us about what she has done, what she has just done to achieve vengeance over this guy who she has tracked and found, the guy who took her sister. So what we're seeing now are stills from the theater version where we were taking a live feed from that iPhone that's on the stand in front of her and projecting it onto the walls of the hunting blind. And there's camo around. And it's funny when we workshopped it in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in Wellington at the QML Festival that Erin mentioned in the intro. The show, it was a kind of a festival workshop scenario, not unlike, I checked against the dance here or in Toronto for indigenous work to be developed. And the show that was on before us had a whole bunch of like leaves and brush and stuff in their set. And they were trying to clean it up in whatever the 15 minute turnaround was. And so we said they could leave it and it actually in fact really enhanced our world. So she was surrounded by leaves on the floor and grass and so on. But we didn't need that really when we toured with it. We just traveled with that hunting blind that breaks down into like a few sticks and some lightweight canvas that you're seeing on the background there. And it all fit into a snowboard bag that you could carry in your back, not heavy. So a cooler and a snowboard bag and we were on the road with this work called Dear Woman, One Person Show, Cherish While in the Blood, who you're looking at, written by Tara, directed and designed by kind of Tara and I together over the course of its evolution. And it did really well. We, I mean, amazingly nobody here on Turtle Island picked it up. I think it was a little too real for everybody here but we definitely did some touring in Australia, New Zealand. We were invited to Columbia. That got shut down by the pandemic and we were on our way back to Perth. That got shut down. What happened was that downstage here in Calgary had also offered to pick up the show as a live event. And then that was canceled the next year, which was the beginning of the season. They came back to us and said, hey, can we do a live stream? And we said, you know what, instead of doing a live stream, why don't we commit this to a digital medium as a way of not only capturing and preserving it, but kind of like lifting or raising the stakes a little bit for a live stream. And this is really now we're present day talking about how to turn theater into film. And there's a surprise ending at the Dear Woman, at the ending of Dear Woman that I'm not gonna talk about right now because it's about to be a re-release by the National Arts Center on Sunday, it's a 14th Sunday. So we've actually recut it. We did the shoot with downstage. We did a really quick cut of it. We were very optimistic in terms of the amount of time it would take to edit. I really underestimated it because it was a piece of theater that already existed and felt like, hey, man, we know this show inside and out. We're just gonna, we're not gonna have a problem turning this into a oops, teacher like that. Here's the trailer. I just... In October, he sent us to school with a note. Said, dear teachers of Lila and Pamela, I'll be taking them hunting for a week. Thanks, Bob. And we went. Kindness is powerful like a shun-up. Warm with such a relief every time. You can write that down if you want and put it on a fucking thank you card. Native proverb. My name is Lila. I'm a proud Blackfoot woman. What I am doing is illegal. I understand that. So I just wanted to make sure that... Sorry, I didn't mean to press play on that so quickly. But anyway, that was the trailer that was made for the Sydney Festival where we were invited to, which was amazing. It took off really quickly. It may or may not have been apparent, but the footage that we were watching there was actually from the very first workshop we did, which was that in Saagichuk in Toronto. And she's in fact reading the script off of a lectured in front of her. So that's why she's looking down at me. But that was how we got out to the world. And anyway, I was saying that there's a part at the end of the piece that theatrically we felt was kind of explosive. And as a matter of fact, in video isn't. It's something that we see all the time. So that's what we really struggled with. And I think when we underestimated the amount or when I underestimated the amount of time it would take to cut, I wasn't yet as versed in what that meant. And I will say that that process has really enhanced our understanding of what works on film and video, relative to how it works in theatre. But it's a very interesting process to really respect and maintain the theatrical existence of that work and its roots and still be able to have it stand on its own in this new format. What I will show you in a second is what we did. So the way we wanted to respect that relationship was by having a kind of a very simple, simple shoot. So we shot it almost in the same way that we would have done had it been a live stream, although we used a couple of different locations. And she goes in and out of different states of mind. We tried to support that through the medium in the best way that we could. So the technical premise is that she's speaking to her camera, she's recording this document so that the people she loves can in no way be implicated in what she has done, which she is slowly explaining to us during the course of the piece. And that's about it. And I'm manipulating that footage. So we're sending like a wireless signal to the booth. I'm manipulating through Zadora and sending it back. It was remarkably low lag and sometimes none. And we were doing all kinds of overlays of other footage and live effects on her image and so on. It was pretty exciting. And that was a big leap for us. And again, working specifically with a medium that is embedded in the concept of the story. So I think that really helped it be an easier, even though I just talked about it being harder than we thought it would be. It was a relatively easy jump over to video because of the fact that she in fact is giving a testimony to video, not unlike the reckoning piece. So here's the opening. We shot in three locations. We did an outdoor, well, two locations, but three states. We did an outdoor daytime shoot because as I mentioned earlier, she goes to her hunting blind. So we see her setting up the hunting blind during the day. We see her return to the hunting blind at night, which is part of her plan that she tells us about. And then we also did a version. We shot the show in kind of in real time consecutively as if it were being performed in a black box theater here in Calgary, which was a feat in itself because we were hardcore in the middle of lockdown. We had to get special permission to go into this theater, certain numbers of people, both security had to let colleagues in and so on. So it was quite an endeavor to make this piece. But so we thought we'll shoot those three locations and then we'll cut it together in a way that supports the states of mind that she is in during the course of the story. So I'm gonna show you a couple of clips which will illustrate a little bit of each of those things and then come back to it. So what we're gonna see now is the very beginning when she's actually setting up camp. Throughout what I promised. And, you know, they mostly make welfare pops and name brand pop factories, eh? That way they're just competing with themselves anyway. But I still feel like I got one over on them when I buy welfare pops. It's like fake name brand jeans or jerseys. People are all like, don't buy those cheap made in China ripoffs. And I'm like, everything's fucking made in China. No diff. I got this fucking thing at them all. You know how many bakers are out there wearing the same hoodie and they never even been in the army? Well, locks. I'm taping this because I was thinking. I don't want anyone to decide that I'm crazy and so that what I did doesn't count. That wouldn't be fair. Plus, Gloria did my makeup and all that. So no point in wasting all this pretty. So what we did there as you could see was we kind of had one fixed camera position outside of her camera, which is what we could cut to when we needed to see or experience her separate from the world that she's creating. And we really just cut back and forth between those two cameras. And because of the fact, as I've mentioned numerous times that that medium is embedded in the story. We feel that it really was successful. And we're really proud. That piece will be released this weekend. So what I'm gonna show you now are a couple more clips. So I'm gonna kind of speed up my pace because I don't wanna run out of time. But I'm gonna show you a clip now. There's one point where they go to a fair and she has an experience that kind of like affects her for the rest of her life. And this is where we started playing with where we took the content that I was using on the screens and worked in a, by superimposing it in the flat version that we're looking at now. We feel happy about it. It was one of those things that took some time to figure out how to make it work. So we took the content that we shot in the black box, used that as the world that we went to when she kind of revisited past events. And that's when I was able to overlay these other worlds of imagery. And then we returned back to the bush shots like what you just saw. So I'll show you a little bit about that. This is when they go to a fair. And the perv at the teacups. That's when I learned my first big word, consistent. I like big words, right? Cause people get all shocked to hear some trailer park ex-army rat say things like impermeable or catastrophic. You got to choose the exact moment to drop those though for maximum effect. My mom, my sister and me went to the crappy little fair that had come to the mall parking lot. Just a few rides, cotton candy and a handful of rotten tooth tattoo guys working their ex cons. Hammy was begging for more money to play this game to try and win this big smurfette. We knew she wouldn't win. So mom wasn't giving her more than the two bucks she already blew no matter how much she wind. And she wind. I was just tall enough to ride the twirly teacups. But Hammy was only six and mom didn't want to. So I just waited in line by myself. There was this dad in line and two kids and the teacup ride takes four people in each cup. So the ex con working the ride just puts me in a cup with this guy and his two kids. Boys, about mine and Hammy's age, I guess, didn't know them really. So they must have been in special class, either super dumb or super smart, which kind of looks like the same thing. Both of them are being pretty quiet considering we're out of fare, right? Like have some fucking fun weirdos, we're out of fucking fare. That's just a little example of the kind of textural world we go into. So we're able to superimpose those memory style images. We chose to use a super saturated palette for that territory. The audio that you were hearing is directly from the theater show, which was created by myself and my son. We collaborated on that score. So we really were able to take, and that's the same footage also that we used as an overlay in the theatrical production. So again, it wasn't a difficult shift between the work that we did on stage and the way that we committed it to film. I'm gonna show you one last thing from that piece that addresses what that relationship was. First I'm gonna show you, there's a scene where the two daughters are going on a camping trip with their dad who has been silent since their mom left not long ago. And this is kind of this, you heard it in the trailer, when she says that, just said he was gonna take us on a camping trip. So they go on that trip and we hear a conversation when they're in the truck on their way to the hunting blind that she revisits later that we're seeing in real time. So I'm gonna show you the clip from the theatrical version which is archival kind of just like the house camera. So it's not pretty quality, but I wanna show you that and then I'll show you what we did to it in the video version just as a straight up comparison and then we're gonna move on to the last piece. Mating means how they make new deer. The bucks which are the boys go into ruts and the dolls which are the girls. Yes, honey, what's ruts when the bucks are wishing really hard to become dads? So all they can think about it drives them crazy. And when the dolls are wishing really hard to become moms, it's called estrus, no. So the dolls get to decide who they make new deer with and the bucks end up getting to decide who they make new, who they make babies. So that's the theatrical version of that exchange. So it's three of them in a truck, a course cherish is playing all three characters as that goes without saying. And so we worked with that physicality and that streaming kind of like driving video that's playing in the background just plays straight up as you saw it right there. This is one area in the transfer over to video that we took a little bit of a liberty. One of the things we spent time thinking about which I think is relevant to this bigger picture conversation is, and we're having it in other, there's a couple of other shows I'm working on right now where we're in that zone of like, yeah, we might have a live audience, we're shooting it for sure. And so you're in this world of like, am I designing this set for camera? Because that's a really different thing than designing for an audience. Clearly perspective and point of view is completely variable with the camera as opposed to what we all know in a theatrical environment actually respecting or acknowledging whatever that vantage point is. So in this version, in this particular scene, the drive, we took a little bit of a liberty and we were able to shoot it from three different positions so we have a kind of a POV version of that same conversation. Mating means how they make new deers. The bucks which are the boys go into rut and the does which are the girls. Hammy, what's rut? Rutt means when the bucks are wishing really hard to become dads. It's all they can think about. It makes them crazy. And when the does are wishing really hard to become moms, it's called estrus. Can one? Yup. So the does get to decide who they make new deers with and the bucks end up pretty riled up. Yes, Lila. So the does get to decide who they'll make new babies. I mean, fawns with? That's right. So that's a version of that conversation. So we were able to switch back and forth. That's a liberty that you can obviously can't do in the theater that we took in the film version just because we could. I'm gonna just show you the end of that drive sequence so we can watch similar situations, same fixed camera position, but we were able to switch time of day and that really helped in our storytelling in a way that we couldn't quite emulate on stage. So in this instance, without changing any of the content, same video, same audio, same script, everything's identical to the theater version, but we were able to take some liberties with that video here as well. We don't shoot those. That's a family rule. You got it? We did. And then Hammy asked why human moms don't care about their babies as much as dear moms do and starts to cry. And once she gets started, so we turn on the radio until we made camp. We pitched a tent and gathered candles. Dad made an awesome fire. We cooked hot dogs and marshmallows. We each get our own pop. And since Hammy's cheered up, dad keeps teaching us. It's called rattling. That sound makes a buck think that you're a buck and hit straight doors, you two. You can fight with his antlers. That's right, Lyle. Now. So that's an example of how we could use the technology to switch locations. The blocking is the same as the theatrical version and everything else is the same, but we were able to just throw that little extra layer in there and in our opinion elevate the story, just that tiny bit. It's fine. It stands without that, but that's part of the world that we're able to explore in terms of this transference from one medium to another. So I'm gonna go into the last section right now, which is about our work that we call sort of as an envelope room. And these are pieces that we started creating I don't know, a year or two ago. And it had to do with our desire to enhance the level of autonomy that we could experience theatrical, that we could experience storytelling through. So I personally, I'm not a big fan of sitting still for a couple of hours and being told when to stand up and go to the lobby and get a drink and so on. I like moving through story in my own way. And we wanted to start to see if we could create a theatrical experience that respected that aspect or that way of viewing. So we started this thing called room which were active story environments that the audience could move around through. I mean, many of us have seen sleep no more. That I would be lying if I said that wasn't a bit of an influence, but we wanted to do something that was kind of a little bit more, I don't know, I'm not gonna actually expound on what we were trying to do. You'll see it in a second, but we wanted to do something that we could, more like a gallery experience in story as opposed to that kind of linear stand up and watch or sit down and so on. So we created script, we invited artists, we built a space, and I'm gonna start flashing through some images while we're looking at this. Oops, got some live camera there. Sorry about that. Let's hear this up for one second. Okay, so this was an early sketch. We were invited to the arts commons here in Calgary to do, we got access to a space for a week with a technician and a little bit of a budget, and it just happened right at the moment when we were starting to talk about exploring this kind of work. So bringing all the elements of our theatrical production together in a space that is a bit less linear, as I've described already. So this was an early sketch. This is where the title of this talk comes from. When I was a kid, I used to sleep with my grandfather's a lot, a place a lot. He's from up north, he's my Cree blood, and he would sit in his bed and tell me stories with, and he would draw with a cigarette in the air. Sorry. And it was really beautiful. I love that. I still remember it today like it was yesterday. So that was the impetus for this kind of a storytelling experience that kind of to revisit the place that for me was the kind of the really, the true essence of what story is. It's also funny because I only thought about many years later, the fact that he was always smoking and usually drinking during those times. And he was, this is old school, like the two twin beds, which you can see in the sketch. And I would be on the one bed and he'd be sitting on the other one with a cigarette and the room would be dark and he would illustrate his words in the air. And I don't know how we didn't both burn down in that house, but we didn't. And that's why I have that memory now. But when we started to rebuild that world, this is maybe a little bit hard to see, but this was a little bit of our early planning for kind of projector positions and furniture and the layout when we went into this room called the engineered air theater at the arts commons, which is an interesting kind of cabaret space that we just removed all the seats from and took over the center of the room. Here's me with a bunch of stacks of two by fours that I burned with a torch in our backyard, which is one of the best things I've ever done in my life, was spend days, days in the backyard just burning stuff on another. I can't believe nobody called the police or the fire department on us, but they didn't. So we brought that material in. Oh, and that's, so the idea of the burn came from that memory of the degree to which that was a potentially volatile situation. So we decided to build this world that was charred and put something beautiful within it. So here we are constructing these two cubes in this space. We covered them with various discount bin translucent fabrics and scrims that we thought would have a kind of a presence that we liked, but also support the projection layers. I'm gonna move a little bit fast so we have a bit of time for questions at the end. We brought in, we bought furniture off of a Kijiji that we also torched. We felt particularly bad about these beds because the guy that we bought them from told us about how we actually shipped them here from Germany and they were the beds that he and his wife bought when they first got married and we didn't tell them that we were just gonna take them home and set them on fire, but it was awesome. And so then we built these rooms and here's this image is really us in front of the construction. This is me talking to the performers. And so what we did in this instance because we didn't have a lot of time to develop the content, we, Tara wrote a series of vignettes based on stories from my past and with some expansion as well. And we would meet here, we are talking with the actors, describe the scenarios, they to some degree committed to scripts or at least the concepts to memory and then they went into those rooms and lived in them. And the audience, once they were in those rooms and in character, we opened the doors and the audience was allowed to kind of move around that space at will. I'm also in the space dressed the same as the young man who was me. So I was wearing a pair of old school pajamas just like he was and I was running video and audio live. So we're all kind of riffing off each other in that space. I'm just gonna plaster a few images of what happened. We went to town on detail. We wanted to recreate those spaces. There's a living room in a bedroom and we, like I said, we burned everything and it's Telly James, Stacey De Silva and Owen Soop are the performers that we're working with. So there's the bedrooms, a scanner on the desk there that played a big part of our audio score. My grandfather always had a scanner going. This room here is almost exactly the room that I spent all that time with my grandfather in. And we watched the characters go through some pretty heavy emotional territory throughout the course of this piece. It was really brave of those artists to take these risks together. I'm just gonna move fast through a lot of the scenarios. Like this is all unfolding in, I think we worked in kind of like 20 or 40 minute chunks and then we would, just as in terms of what this workshop was for us, we would then eject the audience, meet with the actors again, talk about what worked and what didn't and then open the doors up and do it again. So we would do two or three loops like that and just to see what happened. So these are just a bunch of stills. And I'm gonna, yeah, oh, and the other thing was the video that we created that you're seeing projected, we shot on the stage in that same room. So this is just a little snap of us making some of that video and then immediately implementing it into the piece itself. She could do all the ordinary bird things, fly, sing, hop and swoop, but she does not make her own nest. Do you know what it is that she does? No, sir. Over time, the cuckoo has learned to make her eggs look just as the eggs of other birds look. The cuckoo mother lays her eggs in the nests of others. Others who have worked damn hard to create a lovely home out of their surroundings. She lays her eggs in the nests of others expecting these other birds to care for her babies to invest their heart and comforts in her parasitic little urchins. In the meantime, the cuckoo freely flies, sings, hops and swoops, and these other birds do all of the work. Those chicks go on to abandon eggs for others and those cuckoos, should they thrive, will do the same. Always expecting others to provide, feed, keep warm, teach them why sing, hop and swoop. And he wrenches his wrist, busting that little cuckoo right out of the clock, pushed it into my hand. This is my home in the kitchen, busted as clock. And I don't even think she really believed her, but she punished me like she did. And I wanna tell you, my mom raised me as best she could and I wanna tell you, I raised your mom as best I could. I wanna let you know, I didn't bust that cuckoo clock grandson son, but believe it myself. So that's a bit of an extended piece that it was really, we sort of worked on bridging this gap between these Tableau, this kind of visual art style Tableau and this ongoing narrative. So that story, I wanted that to be included. That narrative was part of my grandfather's story. He was, his mother was the housekeeper for a minor up North near Moose Factory, Cochrane area. And when, and my grandfather's dad wasn't on the scene. So she ended up marrying that guy that she was a housekeeper for. And he refused to officially adopt my grandfather. So that was the story that Tara wrote by using that metaphor of the cuckoo bird as somebody that's not being accepted or endorsed. So he, my grandfather ended up living with this guy who wouldn't accept his existence. And he even took his name. So it was a very awkward scenario, but that, so we worked with that dubbed audio and the video was me busking live. There were several other audio scores and all kinds of different interactions that occurred between those characters, but it was a really amazing exploration. We're excited about it because we started working on that long before COVID. And now we've got this template for creating distance theater that we are really looking forward and moving forward with. I'm gonna quickly move through this very last piece, which was the version of that room that we then later that year took to Nanton, Alberta, which is a small town between Calgary and Lethbridge. It's known for antiques now, but it's one of those towns that has, you know, there's like a place for the train to stop and an old hotel. And we were invited to work in that old hotel. We're talking to a woman named Sharon Stevens who runs the Alberta Media Arts Alliance. And they do a workshop every year where they feature work that is media-based and includes an audio score and so on. And they invited us to do this installation. And we told her about the fact that there's this burn quality to the work we're doing. She said, oh yeah, there's this old hotel that I think a section of it burned down in the 80s and it's still like that or something. And we just knew that was where we were gonna do this work. So we went there and we visited and we met the guy, Larry, who runs the place. And it was I think 11 a.m. And we walked in and he's behind the bar smoking and there's a couple of guys doing shots, also smoking. And it's this crazy big old school bar room that's gigantic with a stage at one end with a barricade in front of it and pool tables and all kinds of taxi-dermied heads all over and about an inch of dust on everything. And we walked up to him and just really didn't know how to address this, but we're like, where are these artists? We're here from Calgary and we hear you have a burnt out section of the place and we kind of want to do some work in it. And he was like, all right, just go on up there. Just be careful. So we went upstairs. And this is us arriving at the very nice. So this is the main downstairs lobby. Fine. And then we went upstairs and opened this door to this section of the hotel that has not been touched since it burned somewhere in the 80s. And we later met people who were like, yeah, you know, me and my mom were in our station wagon in the parking lot across the street and my dad was a volunteer firefighter and it was 3 a.m. And the place was on fire. And so we saw stuff in this place that was still there from when it burned. Like these are what the rooms looked like when we arrived. It was amazing. It was like walking into a frozen moment in time. Some of these images actually are from our installation. So we used pieces that were already there, started reconfiguring those rooms to turn them into little story spaces and including this one big section. So yeah, and it took a while. It was dirty. Like I probably still can't breathe as well as I could before we did this because of all that dust, but it was worth it. And there's this one chunk that was still like literally open to the sky. And this is a part of that room. There were pigeons living in there. Like we watched this one pigeon nest where there was a dead pigeon and there was another couple of pigeons in the same nest just every day trying to push this dead pigeon carcass out of their nest. It was surreal. So there we were installing lights and sound. And yeah, like here's like a dozen roses laying on the floor, like just dry laying on the ground like probably from the night that the place burned. So we spent a couple of days cleaning it up and eventually got back in there with our gear. And we started layering in these video pieces. A lovely home out of their surroundings. She lays her eggs. So this is part of that cuckoo story in one of the bedrooms. And what we're seeing now is the raw footage where we just projected within the room onto a piece of fabric on the wall next to the bed. I'm gonna talk more about what we did with this in a second. The cuckoo freely flies, sings, hops and swoops, and these other birds do all of the work. So what that was was a very raw version of one of the rooms that we set up. We put a projector in the room, projected onto the wall, and oops, it just disappeared. Sorry. Oh, I think I'm still here. Hang on, I'm coming back, I'm coming back. One second folks, sorry about that. Wrong button. So what we did was we created these spaces and the thing that was difficult for us to manage was the view. There was, because there was all kinds of garbage that we had nowhere to put and we wanted to do something. And this comes back to that conversation about how we deal with the perspective. So we needed to control it a little bit because of how wild the space was. So what we ended up doing was buying a bunch of doors that Habitat for Humanity, putting those apartment people's in them and actually adding doors to the rooms that didn't have doors anymore. They had all burned or been removed. And so that peephole allowed us to, for example, put a projector down on the floor at the bottom of the door. We had speakers coming through the doors. So the way that we would, as an audience, experience each of those spaces was by looking through these peepholes. I'll show you some of the versions of what was in each of the rooms in a second and then the way that people saw them. What I forgot to mention was that we also didn't get a grant that we had hoped for for this piece which made us have to figure out how to do the project that we had workshopped at earlier at the Engineer Theatre without actors. And we were nervous about that because we really felt that the presence of those live bodies in that space would be really engaging. And of course it would have been, but we couldn't. So we felt nervous about going with a straight up video-only presentation. However, the feedback that we got was that it really resonated for people because it felt like these were stories and people that were embedded into the walls of this building that was still so in the time that we were representing. So we did a series of rooms with a few characters. Here's one of them with the grandmother slash mother character. So it was sort of her dressing room. One of the hotel rooms is all down that hallway. There's a series of them. And the score that we're hearing is her just reading the names of Avon perfumes and lotions. And we also had that staircase activated with, you know, as you go through the rooms, you experience a bit of what happened in this family unit which includes the couple having a flow out. The son is there, grandson is there, and he's just lighting matches and throwing them on the floor. At the top of the stairs, we eventually see the couple dancing. Here's one of the little rooms. And again, this isn't the final view. I'm showing you the raw version of what they are. This is not through the people. This is just what the content looks like. So what we're panning to now is one of the doors that we also torched and inserted those people into. So that door will eventually be closed and the community will look through that people and see the video that is playing inside that room. So this is what we would see looking through a people, for example, from that earlier view of the dressing room. And we would hear that score directly from behind the door. A really cool thing that happened was that people didn't know that we had invented those doors. So we would hear audience or whatever the public saying, oh man, you can still smell the smoke on these doors. This is awesome. But literally I had burned them in our backyard like a week before that. So it was pretty cool to hear people really buy into what that world was. And this is just an audience shot. So these are people looking through those peep holes and experiencing each of those rooms. There's one room that we left open that you could walk into. I unfortunately don't have shots. Some of the stills that you saw are from that room. But we made one room the bedroom, which is where we heard an audio score of an argument happening. And that's the one room that the audience could walk into and actually see the beds. There's a desk, there's a couple of empty glasses and beer bottles and so on. So we did do that one immersive space within there. But the thing that we love the best about it was that the community who had been living and working and existing in Nansen forever, because it's one of those towns where people sort of stay there was, we were really nervous about the interpretation that we were presenting. We really wanted it to be received well, of course, by the community who's home we were in. And in fact, it was. They really, a lot of people talk to us about how they used to break in there when they were kids. We really got a lot of engagement in that way. I'm just gonna show you one last thing and then we can have questions right away. What I'm gonna show you now is just the raw video from those characters. It was shot in the theater and in our living room of those characters, which is the content that we embedded. It's just, I'll just show you 30 seconds of all of them together on a screen, which you can see is the video content or the way that we captured those artists for this straight up video installation where there were no live performers. Ooh. These are, you're hearing the audience more simultaneously as well. But that's our cast. And so you see us. I'm going to show you a body, show you that in there. And that little cubby hole of the young man is just lighting up the tournament around which is his way of reacting to it. His way of reacting to the instability of his home environment. So that's the piece. So that was at the, it was called The Odd. That hotel is called The Odd. It's in Nanton. And we are now in conversation with Making Treaty Seven and we're developing a huge scale version of Room, which we had originally slated to do at the Grand Theater, which is a beautiful old venue downtown Calgary. But now that we're in, I'm sorry, I'm getting really backlit here. It's quite lovely, but it's hard to see my face. We recently decided and have been approved to move that entire work outdoors. So we're now in the midst of developing a huge scale version of Room along the lines of that Nanton video only iteration that you just saw, but on the side of downtown buildings so that we can create a map, possibly put in some AR layers as well and make it something that's 100% COVID friendly, something that people can visit on a walking tour in their cars or however they choose to visit those locations. And it can literally run all night long. We're in conversation with the city and various other stakeholders to figure out how to do that. But that's kind of our next big work that's gonna happen in, I think in May, this is when we're looking to work a launching network. Like I said, it's moving fast because of the shift from an indoor venue. We're just, we don't know, obviously none of us know what's gonna happen in the next little while. In terms of COVID, it may get worse and may get better, but we just wanted to make sure we were doing something that people could experience. And that we knew we could depend on in terms of our schedules and our making protocol. So that's all I have to show. Those are kind of the territories that we've been engaging in in terms of this relationship between film and theater. And I'm really happy to thank everyone and to take any questions if anybody has anything. Thank you so much, Andy. It's so exciting to hear about this concept of removing the body of the performers for the safety of themselves and the public in this COVID era, but not removing the performance. And I think that's something really unique to these projects that you're sharing that we haven't really been exploring in many of our other talks. And so it just, it's really exciting in this final week of the symposium to hear from you about this idea of shifting your storytelling mode into a reality where you can still create with performers in whatever capacity that looks like now with getting exceptions and all kinds of stuff. Every province is different. I'm in the middle of something similar. Right now, trying to get permission to do filming, but then also finding ways to present those performances where it can still be very live for the audience in the fact that their action, their engagement with it is very live. So they're having an embodied experience and not just seeing everything through a mediated version of the screen. And then of course hearing about your project and getting the like, what a gift for us. I was just losing my mind, getting to see footage of your live version, your one woman show, and then see compared to the archival footage compared to your translation of it into this new medium for the screen specifically. Again, this is the kind of project many of us are sort of in the middle of now. So it's such a gift to have you as sort of a leader in this area to be able to share that with us is such a gift. Thank you and very helpful. We have a comment here from Sean. Looks so great, Annie. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Sean. Thank you. I have to also throw over to like my partner in life and crime, Tara Bagan, because that's the written word and the story, the story making is really the why that works. I hope it works. It really comes down to story. Like, you know, lots of us have access to the technology to put, you know, to make big, beautiful images, but really you really need solid story to anchor it. And when it's, especially when it's story that's relevant and important and current and living, that does everything. So I feel very fortunate as a content creator, as a designer, as an image maker to be able to put my work in the service of those words, that I don't think we'd be having this conversation if that wasn't the case. Absolutely. It's 100% the case. And it's something that's come up again and again in all the different formats we've been discussing, whether it's gamification or AR, VR, you know, new formats using Zoom performance, any of them, every single artist we've spoken with has said, you know, if you have a good story, then you still really have something. And we know that our audiences have responded to that from time immemorial. And it's encouraging to be able to, you know, bolster one another and remind one another as artist that that is still what matters the most. And it's so wonderful in your work to see what a strong basis you have in terms of, you know, story and content as always being, you know, that first foot forward. And so it's unsurprising that, you know, translating it to all these different mediums that it remains so successful. And I love to hear you bring that up because it is one theme that we've been hearing throughout from all our artists, so. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's an honor to be here. Yeah, I mean, do we wait for questions? Are we, what do you think? What should we do? Here's one right here. Question, is Isadora the only video technology that was used live? In terms of, well, in the actual theatrical work, yes. That, you know, obviously we probably, I would assume everybody who's watching this has had some experience with QLab and or Isadora. Sorry, I keep letting that like, because I'm seeing the mirror version, I try to move out of the way and then it just gets worse, but anyway, or into the way. Yeah, so the theatrical work was all Isadora. Isadora is really well situated to receive that live feed, we, you know, in terms of the live camera stuff. So it's kind of already that package exists for that kind of work as we all know and it's really wonderful. It's very weak in the audio department, which is a little unfortunate. I did a lot of, you know, kind of two space bar shows where I had a separate computer just running audio and letting video be Isadora on its own. So I would run audio through QLab and some occasionally there would be pre-made content, whether if it's just a title slide or something like that, that may or may not be in Isadora or QLab, depending on the context, but in terms of all the live video feed work, that's all Isadora, absolutely. That's awesome, thank you so much. I have a question. It's really exciting to hear that you're putting together this version of the rooms that sort of outdoors and in the city, what kind of relationship have you found building with, you know, businesses or places where you want to share your image? How do you found compared to sort of pre-pandemic? Are people keen? Are they interested? Are they hoping to bring people out? Or they sort of don't want cat crowds together? What's the vibe in that process so far? It's a great question. We're just starting those conversations now. It's really only been a couple of weeks since we took this concept of doing the indoor version and sort of said, you know what? We got to pivot here again and do something that we know can work. So what I will say is that not only was that received like with such a level of excitement by Making Treaty 7 who are hosting us for this work, they have already started engaging with some of their stakeholders. And yeah, people are psyched. Like we know there's that Montreal version or a lot of us have seen that Montreal version of that kind of like online projects. Like, I mean, I don't think I've ever been excited as walking around a corner and seeing like whether it's on the side of the NFB or that stuff down near Centaur, et cetera. Like there's such amazing content out there and it's just there. So I think, you know, when I use the there's a promo video out there for the Montreal piece that I'm going to some Calgary folks and they're really excited about that idea. So I think what we're gonna find in a really short order is that we have a lot of buy-in because as we all know, people are pretty desperate for any kind of engagement. So we're trying to make sure that we can create art that lives at the level that we've been looking at for the last hour and a half but is at the scale that people can engage with without any fear or concern. So again, looking at AR layers in there just starting to explore that and then finding those partners out there where we can, you know, engage with, yeah, can we put our projector in your window? We're gonna put, you know, make sure that lights off at night so that this wall is clear, et cetera. That's, we're really in the middle of that right now. I'm also doing a piece over at there's an organization here or an institution called Seaspace which is kind of like Toronto's Artscape. It's a building that used to be a school that's been turned into an artist's studio building and there's a lot of work. Yeah, thank you. Somebody just mentioned C.T. Minwauak which is the Montreal piece. That's exactly right. That's kind of a model we looked at as an inspiration. But so yeah, we're working with Seaspace and they also, they're very engaged at a municipal level and with a huge artist community and people are very, very much excited to help us activate this work. There's another project we're doing with them that also has a sculptural video piece. So everybody's just doing everything they can. And then on top of that though, we now we're in this kind of polar vortex. So there's one of the pieces we would have been installing this week and it's like 40 below out there. So now we're on hold for a whole other reason. Yeah, I'm also in that same polar vortex. The radiators in my building broke this week. So I hear you, it's a big change. It's a weird, it's a weird time right now. But yes, the short answer is absolutely I think people really want to, people need any energy, any creative energy. And let's hope that the one of the big carryovers from this time is a recognition that we need art. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really exciting. We heard from Moment Factory and some people who work there about their also called Illuminations. Interestingly enough, Illuminations Project which was about projects bringing groups of people together and sort of exploring space together and that they were really surprised at how much buy-in they got from the public was kind of an experiment for them when they first started. And so it's really interesting hearing you talk about starting up a project with a similar sort of level of engagement with the public in this current time. And I think that it is really appropriate to where we're at now because people can readily engage at their own pace in their own way. They can choose how much they see or how little when they go. So it gives the audience so much agency which I think is something that's come up again and again in these different formats we're working with now. How do we both give the audience agency but not give them too much that they don't sort of read the dramaturgy that we're intending for them to receive? So coming up with projects where our audience has agency as you've done by placing them in public space but using your artistic experience and your sort of multimedia background to really control will the dramaturgy still come across? Will the message still be clear and strong? So that's really exciting to hear about those different parameters. It's a little bit trying to work with that kind of like that sort of old school like William Burroughs like cut text thing where you take a body of content and then dice it up and in the way that we dream or in the way that Cubism is painted that we can experience those fragments or those different kind of viewpoints and be able to put the story together in a different way every time and in different ways between people. But so really working to kind of trust and understand that there's a poetic core to the work that is going to reveal itself in the way that it should and kind of playing with those layers in that way. And again, like I have to throw over to Tara Bagan in terms of understanding what that is and how to create textual context. And she has such a huge vision in terms of what the media can do to create that so that we can be confident as you're describing that the dramaturgy actually remains intact and that no matter what viewpoint or angle or order people receive this information in that heart of it is going to form for each person. Yeah, and what a gift for so many of us coming from our theater backgrounds. We have audience members who come from all kinds of backgrounds, of course, but to be able to break outside of this square. So it's wonderful to hear about your projects and of course, all the different work that you're doing and how it's kind of demolishing this square and bringing things back to the public and giving them back agency which is such a powerful part of what Live Theater is for many of us. And it's so exciting to hear about you just really harnessing that in a different way. So thank you again, Andy, so much for sharing with us. It looks like our questions are quiet. We have just about a minute left. So I'm so grateful to you. It's not a small amount of time when you're such a busy artist. So I'm so grateful to you for giving us this time and sharing with us so much of the inside of your process. I know for me, there's already like two projects where I'm like, oh, okay, I'm gonna show my collaborators this video. They have to see this. So I hope it's a useful tool for other artists out there listening today and for the collaborators that they have on their own processes as well. So thank you again, Andy. Thank you. Yeah, anybody, if I mean, if other questions or interest comes up, I mean, I can, I have a website, Andymore.com and we also have article 11.ca. That's article 11.ca. And you can find Tara or I at that address. So please any questions, interests, comments, we love it. That's fantastic. Thank you. I want to generous offer Andy that you're willing to share with the public and talk to other artists and we'll put those links in the chat. So if you open your chat box now, Andrew will pop those in so that people can go there and see other parts, because there's so much of your work. You have a massive back catalog on your website, which is wonderful to be able to see all those projects. It's still a bit outdated, but we'll get there. I think that in a pandemic, we would be able to finish our websites, but... Yeah. Yeah. Everyone I know has that on their to-do list, but, you know, for most people, it's still pretty low. Yeah, I guess so. Absolutely. Thank you. This is an amazing symposium to create and move people. Thank you. Thank you so much, Andy, for everything you shared with us. So for anyone who's really interested in Andy's current work, we'll post some links of where you can find access to Dear Woman, which will be available this weekend, as he said. And also please, if you're interested in other live performance or online performance performances that are happening right now, check out our live performance listings on our website. We have a number of things posted there of current things that you can go out and expand your curiosity, experience other artists' work, as well as a digital art gallery available on our website as well. So again, you can see what other artists are creating in this time with the sort of new realities that we're all facing. And the symposium's not quite over yet. We're finishing things up on Monday the 18th. So, sorry, the 15th. My goodness. And so we have six more events. So there's workshops happening this weekend and we have three different wrap-up events happening on the final day of the symposium. So I hope that you'll register or come out. Registration's not required, just an option. So I hope that you'll come out to any of those final events we have before things wrap up for good. And long after the symposium is over, all of these events will be available in archive into perpetuity. So if you wanna come back or make reference to these, or like I was saying, I'm planning on doing, send links out to collaborators who may benefit from this information and your process is moving forward in terms of learning that will all be available via the archive. So thank you so much everyone for your time today. Just like I said to Andy, we know that your time is very valuable and that time in front of the screen is challenging these days. So we're really grateful that you're willing to spend some of it with us. And I hope that you have a really wonderful week and that we see you again at some more events soon. Oh, finally, don't forget to donate to the ABC if you like this event and you wanna see more programming like this. It helps us reach our goals. And Andrew will pop that option in the chat as well. Thanks again everybody and have a great day.