 So welcome everybody here to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka. I'm the director of the CUNY Siegel Center here. So it's a great pleasure for us to have hosted the workshop, the Parliament workshop this afternoon. The second we did and I welcome Emily, Corey and Michael to be with us. We had a three hour experience of a workshop of what's called the Parliament and we're going to find out all what it is we have here with us about 20, 30 members of the workshop. I don't know if everybody can see it. Welcome to our viewers on HowlRound and thanks for HowlRound to cover this on the national nonprofit live stream platform. And we also published this book about Parliament because we thought it's such an important work. And the editor is here with us, Corey, who is also a PhD student in theater here at the Graduate Center. So first of all, even so, it was not a traditional piece of choreography, but I think still Michael deserves an applause. I don't know, did you ever hear one yet in Kaliamans? Do you get an applause? No. So before we come to the discussion and talk about this unusual animal of what Parliament is, I think we do not really know, but everybody who tastes it likes it. I had a friend who was a Japanese curator and she says, my goal is to let people taste the Iwami, something that looks a little bit odd, but once you taste it, you know, it tastes really good. And you know what it is, but you didn't even know that it was missing from it. And so this is one of these pieces, I think, that are of real significance, the idea behind it, but also the experience. So we have with us Emily, Corey, and Michael. As I said, Michael, maybe you first tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you come from, and then we go into the project. First of all, not everybody loves Parliament. Some people really hate it. Is it on? No? Yeah. Okay. Can you hear me? No. So first of all, not everybody loves Parliament just to make that little correction. Some people really hate it and have a very difficult time, and that's okay too. And they talk about it five years later still about it, which I appreciate too. So it's an experience. I'm Michael Clean. I'm a choreographer, an artist. I originally from Vienna, but via various European countries, up in the South in North Carolina at Duke University, where I'm a professor in dance, and I also run the laboratory for social choreography at the Keenan Institute of Ethics. So a lot of the work is actually supported or emerges out of thinking and creating interventions in the field of ethics, which means you have a much broader conversation with a broader kind of demographics. Since we are close to Broadway, we will have that broader conversation here. Corey, tell us a bit about you. I'm not sure if it's Michael's work. It's on, but it's on. Is yours working? Oh yeah. Okay, so we'll share. I'm Corey Tamler. As Frank said, I am in the PhD program in theater and performance here at the Keenan Graduate Center, where I am writing about co-authorship and performance. And apart from having put together this book, I also have a creative practice largely working with water and working with a collective in Maine that makes work with bodies of water and also doing some similar work in Berlin. And I am also the co-program coordinator for social practice CUNY, which is co-sponsoring. This panel tonight and co-sponsoring the Bringing Parliament here. Social Practice CUNY is an initiative across CUNY initiative that supports graduate students and faculty at all of the different CUNY campuses as many of them as possible who are doing socially engaged artworks in various ways. So I can also talk more about that, but just wanted to say that SP CUNY also with the Segal is co-presenting today. And that's awesome. And I work for them and they're cool. My name is Emily Roboto. I'm a CUNY professor. I teach at the City College of New York, which is the Harlem campus of the CUNYverse. I teach creative writing. I'm a creative writer. I'm not a journalist, but I'm kind of a little bit of a journalist, but I have more creative latitude than a journalist. And I write about social and environmental justice issues from the lens of motherhood. And I am participating as a fellow in the social practice CUNY cohort this academic year. One of the things I'm really enjoying about it is getting to talk to artists at different disciplines. I'm also married to a writer is a little boring because I mean it's wonderful, but it's so delightful to talk to visual artists who are socially engaged, choreographers who are socially engaged, to kind of think about what does social engagement look like in art. So this was a wonderful experience for me to participate today. I live mostly in my head, not in my body. So when you invited us to think about, well, body thought, that felt very exciting to me and pushing some boundaries for me. So thank you. Maybe we share that one, Mike, give it to Michael. So, Michael, I don't know if this works at all, but Mike, what is Parliament, what is social choreography? Oh, yeah, I was hoping that we kind of, I don't have to answer so many questions, but especially the difficult ones like that, because what is social choreography? And I think the book lays it out quite clearly as well. It's sort of like a, what do you call it, a heavy term or a loaded term? A baggy term. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's sort of a catch all for a lot of different practices, I think, that came out of a root system of movement and dance and choreography. In the case of the laboratory or high, look at it. I think of social choreography as something where you engage the kind of existing, where you're trying to deconstruct the existing social socialization or the fabric of socialization. At the end of the same time, you're trying to present something else in its place or you're kind of trying to cultivate something, some alternatives, some alternative realities. And there might be very short realities. There might be little climpses that last a couple of hours or there might be prolonged environments or initiatives. For all the HowlRound audiences who weren't here today at four o'clock, and a little bit later because it rained so much, about 30, 35 people came here to the room, took their shoes off or not, and then for three hours spent time in here, most of them kind of starting out lying on the floor or sitting, and they were watching each other. Michael gave an introduction talk where he said, be in the room, do not talk, don't be creative, don't have any ideas, and see how you relate. What are the distances? What do you experience in that time watching others, knowing that others watch you and also in some way, in a consent way that there can be a contact in between each other? So it was over three hours, which is a very long time. There's a great Harvard professor in art history who says, if you go to a museum, don't run and look at each piece for two or three seconds, take a notebook, stay for two hours in front of one painting, and experience it. And I often do it, and it really is a completely different experience. So in a way, this reminds me, you quoted Rilke and said, at the end of a poem from him, I want you to change your world. Is that your idea? You want to change the world, the person? There's a quote, you must change your life. You must change your life. At the end of the poem. And yeah, sorry, novice. You must change your life. And I don't think, I mean, I'm not naive to think like, oh yeah, it will change your life as such. But what it does, it subtly goes to work, to destabilize kind of existing realities. A lot of people who leave parliament, especially when you do it as a practice, like more than once or continuously, something is destabilizing outside of the room. And you find yourself moving through the supermarket aisles differently, talking to strangers. It just starts behaving differently, and it sort of bleeds out. But like any good intervention, usually it's being pulled back after a couple of days, returning to an old normal. So it has to be a practice. But what I often say, it sort of should offer psychedelic thunderbolt to take you out of your day-to-day world and present a kind of different way of being in the world. So and make you feel what it could be and why it's so weird that it's not like that and what happened along the way. In traditional dance, we see well-trained dancers who have trained for decades in front of us doing beautiful work. We pay a lot of money. We sit in our chairs and we watch them dance and actually in a way destroying sometimes their bodies for us. Here it's different. The choreographer gives some instructions. You wrote some beautiful notes over there, a scoreboard, a little Torah roll which you rolled out. And you leave the room and then people are among themselves. So it's radically different. And you worked with Forsyth. You did also great choreography. But you thought, thanks thing needs to be different. Something has to change. Corey, my question for you. You are one of our great students, brilliant students. You've seen a lot. You have participated a lot. Why is this so important to you? Why did you say I even want to make a book about? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about, I mean, I've only done parliament one time before this. It was quite a while ago at this point. It was before the pandemic. It was the first time that we did it at CUNY. I've talked to Michael a lot about it. I've talked also to other people who have participated in it. A fair amount about it. And the book itself has also some contributions, short contributions from people who have participated in various parliaments over the years. So it was interesting to experience it again after quite a long time and after, I don't know, the world's changed a lot since whenever we did it to end of 2018. I think recently I kept, in the last couple of days, I kept coming back to thinking about how, I don't even remember if it was you who described it as a medicine at some point, or if that's something that I came up with, or maybe came up with in conversation with someone else. But I think I was thinking about what made me think of it that way. And it also has to do with this, it has to do with this kind of unbuilding while building that social choreography does or aims to do this need to take down and build at the same time. I was also just reading a piece of Emily's writing where you were kind of talking about the basically experiencing the built environment in Harlem and I was thinking about that, knowing we were going to have this conversation in relation to some of the things Michael just said about what parliament can do to you, the sort of lasting effect that it can have on you, making you feel kind of thrown out of place in your built environment, making you feel how fucking weird it feels to be in a place with corners and walking in a city that's a grid and how it can make you, it doesn't have this effect on everyone, but last time certainly had this effect on me, how it can sort of make you conscious of those things and of the constructedness of it. And so I think that's one of the primary things that's interesting for me and what I just was thinking about a lot in the last couple of days is like, you know, if that's true, if that's one of the things that it does, it's sort of like a, and if it's a medicine that can basically give us sort of a sense of our world ending, what it might be like for our world to end. And then it's kind of like an inoculation that where, you know, it gives an inoculation that gives your body a sense of what a virus could do to it without you actually having to live through the virus. And yeah, I mean, we know a lot of that for a lot of people, the world has already ended or the world is ending. And it's something that like for us, we maybe get to experience like a safe version of that. Emily, for you, who is not directly coming out to theater performance or dance world, how do you look at this? What is of interest to you in this project? One of the things that was interesting to me was the length of time. We had the gift of time, two and a half hours, almost three hours to move through different sets of emotions. And I was interested, Michael, when you shared at the beginning, the first parliament was held in Greece. Is that right during a time of social rupture? And so that invited me to think about, well, what is the rupture we're living in at this moment? There's a, we're in a moment of poly crisis. There's so many things that are tearing the social fabric. And so to be invited into a room full of strangers with very little instruction felt a little bit risky and also exciting because we had to put our phones away and we spend a lot of time distracted, at least I do. And so interaction had to look different. And one of the things I enjoyed was how swiftly we turned to playfulness, a kind of childlike state. And there was laughter pretty fast. I think maybe five, 10 minutes in there were a group of people laughing and I teach climate writing at city college. And I think about environmental writing as something all of us can do because we all live in environments, even though sometimes we tend to think of environmental writing as being nature writing. It can take place in a city and I do a similar exercise with my students that's about length. Like I do it around Thanksgiving. I teach them a Malosh poem, try to praise the mutilated world. And then I have them list a hundred things they're grateful for around Thanksgiving. A hundred, not 10 or 15 because that's going to be my mom, my cat, you know, but it forces them to be strange. And we were forced to be out of our element because we were given the gift of a length of time amidst one another. And I moved through, I'm sure it would be interesting to hear from others what they moved through, but I moved through feelings of delight, discomfort, both kind of physical and mental at some points, boredom, at some points like whimsy or just extreme interest in others. And I don't think we're asked to pay attention at this level often. So that felt like a gift to me. And it's something I think a lot about as a writer as well, just paying attention. In the way you pay attention when you're falling in love, right? Or when you're traveling. Maybe we take the mic and have some, like someone wants to share an experience. Is it fine? Let me go to a question. How was it? Oh, okay. I can talk. I feel like, first of all, like I'm a professional dancer. So come back to this. Really giving back the focus to social function of dance. And how dance all started. It's almost like a ritualistic warm. It will all gathered. There's a certain rule, but there's a no hierarchy. So that's kind of like all God, all spiritual is invited in this, like whatever you believe is real. So kind of like what do we, the world we're living in now, like we all have different realities. And that was the best version of, of course. I want to talk a little bit about I want to talk about the awkwardness. I feel the politic of touch. The permission you're giving people, why it can be so simple and a non, non like linguistic communication, but just simple a message, not even a gesture, but you know there's consent to touch. And why cannot, I don't know, like if that's a part kind of struck me the most is why we need the four, like what consent means why that just deliver such message is so clear and so strongly. Yeah. Yeah, for me it was I have been here in New York City for like seven months or eight months. And I am always feeling like my body is constantly I am always feeling that there's a lot that I am not complaining or that I am being to something that I shouldn't be or to it's colonization, of course, but it's very difficult to untie that kind of understanding inside of your mind. And these kind of experiments let you play with that fears with those the third eye that is watching you and also with the scenic in your head the scenic that it's saying hippie mother fuckers, what are you doing this is so really cool. And at the same time you coexes with that scenic but then you let yourself be a more childish and play and not take it too serious and not be too transcendent and then you find having fun time but the exercise of reaching spontaneity through the other I think it's very important. I thought it was wonderful how this consent led to a tenderness and an intimacy that does sort of go back to your essence but what was also really fascinating and wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had this in the length of time was that I then observed people who I had really beautiful intimate exchanges having intimate exchanges with others and it was all in a spirit of generosity it was a joy for me to watch observe someone else express something ineffable something untangible with someone else when I had also had in my own a very unique experience with that individual and I saw that happening all throughout the throughout the time. One more? Okay then before we come to the question part which is of course the important Michael question to you where did it start and why did you do this? I sort of mentioned that in the introduction a little bit that it started out of a conversation with a museum in Athens in Greece What year? In 2012 probably we started discussing it and I wanted to really when I went to Greece I moved to Greece from Ireland and Greece was really breaking apart at that point and it was very fascinating we moved there because we had a house there my wife's Greek so we and I was starting to integrate myself into the troubles in a way to kind of figure out what's going on in this place that I have no clue about that really I don't know much about and it felt like such a binary the way the protests were the way everybody was pointing the fingers at everybody of guilt nobody took any responsibility for anything it was such an interesting situation and I just thought what could be a meaningful contribution choreographically which is sort of a ridiculous thought because as a choreographer in dance you don't necessarily think of it a meaningful political statement or something like that and so we started I started out with this process and kind of workshopped it over a year I also fell from having a big production base to having no production base so I kind of realized okay maybe I just going to work with whoever I work with whoever is in the room and what can we do and we started out in the first time on the island of Idra we did it with eight people a few people half of them locals from the island half of them artists and it worked out really quite interestingly and then it moved into the binaki museum where it became like hundreds and hundreds of people engaged in it and that didn't work out that well I thought there was something wrong with it I didn't probably have the right vocabulary and then it sort of over the last then I brought it to Durham to Duke and in Duke we really did a lot of parliaments in the last years and it it does something bringing professors together with undergrads together with together with the community and actually doing across the ages and experience bases it creates a different kind of quality it creates an interesting community that I think was missing before at Duke so it introduced that and now I feel like it's on the cusp of actually going more out into the world again I think there was a period where it was going out into the world those people were doing parliaments as well as an open source technology if you want then it got sort of retreated back to to a research base and now I feel like it's opening up again but yeah so people hundreds of them have been done if I understand right and often you are not even there people guide it so we always I think we show interesting work here interesting artists but it's important for us the audience and we have a great audience and it's important to be a good audience also for the artists and to think about how does it change our life, our world what you want so we would like to hear from you and now I think we could go to what questions do you have for Michael after having been in the room for three hours taking out an entire almost day which is a very tough thing to do in New York City but thank you all for doing that and so here we go who you first, yeah thank you so when we were practicing it it reminded me a lot of the meditative retreats that people do that you gather in a room and you can't use technology you can't talk to each other I was just wondering how do you distinguish that with distinguish this with a retreat and where is the choreography when we often comes as opposed to something that happens as like an improv or something like there is usually something is dictated to the performers where is the choreography in that hmm well two things first of all I'm not very well schooled in retreats or meditation I might have some personal practice but I don't practice it widely I see parliament really as a political project so I come at it from a different kind of perspective and also in terms of choreography I think choreography is such a as well a baggy term in a way that it's always churning itself it's always changing in fact we didn't have that word a hundred years ago so it in a sense to choreograph we didn't have the word to choreograph and choreography meant something completely different a hundred years ago we talked about dance making and so the term is constantly changing and for the last 20 or 30 years it has been really under scrutiny kind of this because of its sort of authoritarian voice upon the body and this kind of dictating the flesh how to move which is a very particular western phenomena and there's been a lot of discussion around that in academic circles and in artistic practice of how to change that and maybe turn it around how choreography and dance could become partners and I define choreography as creating the conditions for things to happen so actually I'm much more concerned with creating appropriate conditions in which new systems could emerge and that's what the interest is so I'm not interested in telling people how to move, when to move, where to move that's just past I used to do that, you can google it but for the last 20 years I didn't do that Thank you Michael for being here thank you all for organizing this today just a couple questions one, I'm curious if you've drawn any conclusions Michael over the 12 years of doing this about how power is operative in Parliament or if you've observed any trends about how power operates in the room especially in relationship to the title Parliament you're not in the room I'm curious how intentional that is or why that's important and then Frank mentioned something earlier about instructions to not speak and I actually don't think you gave us a parameter around speaking or not speaking, you did? just those two questions then, thank you totally what was the first question just from Wendell oh the power there is definitely first of all I don't see Parliament so there's a practice part of it where I participate in Parliament regularly and I've done so in the beginning very actively but then I also noticed when I go to places where they don't know me people start copying what I do I'm sort of the authority in the room and that becomes very this derving to me but also destructive to the situation because I don't know what I'm doing so I'm like as lost as everybody else with these strangers so I decided to take myself out of the situation but I gather a lot of stories people tell me stories they write me emails so I gather a lot of material of their journey through this and there is always a real reflection of society within Parliament so it's not like this utopia that is just it also breaks open who's participating how are they participating when are they participating and I often say well you don't get the Parliament you deserve you get the Parliament you get and you have to deal with it and you have to position yourself and you can go like oh I don't like that it's whatever but it's what you get and whatever you decide is actually also a real reflection of your ability to engage or disengage at the outside of a certain discourse and so that is part of it I mean the work in itself might be at times dystopian it doesn't need to be just great love that's wonderful that is happening and I experience that strongly as well within Parliament but at the same time there is real power structures that are breaking open but sometimes they take over the room and it's very fascinating to for me it's fascinating to observe it or to even learn about them and figure out okay that this is real and maybe if I change a couple of words within the introduction I can actually yield against certain things or enable other kind of things so yeah these introductions that are only 15 minutes they're very very careful in fact so it sounds like it looks like I'm relaxed but I'm actually thinking about it from the day I wake up on the flight I'm like trying to get the wording just right if you're too funny it becomes very funny Parliament it's incredible how mimetic the whole system is I think we totally underestimate that on a genuinely how mimetic it really is and how you have impact if you're in a position of authority how it just translates so I hope you don't mean me with this no I'm just kidding here you go thank you and thank you for that idea of setting the container and how you start it can really set a chain motion in effect so it was interesting to hear how you think about the words as soon as you wake up I actually have a question for Emily who just experienced her first Parliament because you mentioned that you're drawn to this length of time that we had together and drew a connection to the assignment that you give to your students to write a hundred things right in that length thing and I'm wondering if there's any other connections or parallels you thought of in a social context of this social experience of people kind of playing off of each other in this Parliament situation or noticing each other that you also see in a writing classroom and writing practice yeah one thing we were communicating about Cory and I over the weekend was an interesting co-authorship I'm becoming increasingly interested I'm also 20-25 years into my career as a writer you mentioned you haven't really told people how to move their bodies in 20 years that way we typically think of choreography and I'm increasingly moving away from an interest in single ownership that was always a fallacy anyway because you're edited by others so to have your pure name on something doesn't feel right to me anymore and I'm trying to introduce my students to the practice of thinking about what does it mean to maybe author something to co-author something something I tried myself as a writer that I could share with my students what it means to do with paying attention and observation was really inspired by this climate scientist named Katherine Hayhoe who says the most important thing we can do to combat climate change is to talk about it there's a big distance between those of us who are appropriately concerned and frightened and those of us who talk about it with any degree of regularity and so in response to that I gathered well I asked important questions like how do you feel about climate change in your body and in your habitat I asked everybody I knew that question and recorded what they said and I wrote I can't say I wrote that I literally put their words hundreds of people from across across the globe right it's like a chorus or a dirge or something and I show that to my students what is this what does this open up for you what are the possibilities for working through on the page together what I liked about today is that it wasn't on the page at all it was it was embodied and it wasn't always easy and beautiful there were lots of moments of play but there were some moments of discomfort too some moments of touch that maybe weren't negotiated appropriately that needed to be cleansed and moved through and all of that so I hope that answers your question in some part yeah thanks for the opportunity to do this it was really exciting I think one of the things that came up for me is this idea of a reflection and I do think I realized that I was in a room with very creative people or people who had self-selected to come to this type of experience and so then I was curious to hear more about times that you've done this with people who are not artists or people who would self-select to come to this sort of experience and if you have witnessed that or what's come up for people in communities that are not artists or like you're saying there's some mixed community and artists yeah so just like hearing about what that's like Michael it's different first of all I mean often there's a self-select artistically minded crowd in especially closed parliaments because of the institutions that are interested in presenting it when we do it in museums it has a different quality to it because you actually carefully curate who's coming to it so actually the three months preparation of curation to convince different communities to partake in parliament is actually the most labor so that is definitely very different for bigger situations bigger parliaments I'm okay with dancers coming to it because dancers are citizens too right but it's more it's a work for citizens in general and it's conceived as a kind of technology for citizens and I'm getting excited when people who never in a room together when you simply have never been in a room with this kind of demographics of people and start parliament then that's exciting just the room itself you hardly ever in a demographics like that anyway from the immigrant to the billionaire in the room doing parliament so we did that for Greece and it worked not dissimilar I have to say you know maybe a slightly different but that's more country to country specific like in Greece there would be a couple of people who sit in you know whatever just outside open the door and smoke and you go like well we said there's no real brand they're like don't worry don't worry and it's just normal of the cultural kind of it has a different cultural feel to it and in each country that I observed the parliament there's a clear difference but there's also a more self similarity than difference but comment thoughts I thank you for coming again I thought maybe because you have this beautiful book that you've been passing around that you could talk about the process of co-writing the book I've read it and it's a remarkable piece and it really gives you process on the page and so and I'm grateful for that as a person who likes process and I'm interested in your process or Cory Cory and Michael we didn't really co-write it, Cory wrote it I'm just saying you know I've been involved and we've been closely communicating but she did the labor and I agree it's a great book I actually re-read it started re-reading it and I just I read it completely different it's always a good sign if you suddenly like you pick it up a year later and it can reflect something completely different back to you and it's I just love the structure that she's created and I let you talk about it yeah thanks Jess um it is it is a very multi- vocal book um for sure so I also think it makes sense that you use co-writing to describe it the process was that we did Parliament here Michael and I had um I had met Michael through an earlier piece of his and then we brought Parliament here and we did a conversation afterwards it was very similar to this basically and the conversation was a really good one um and and Michael and I also talked a lot about about the piece and other iterations of it and Michael said you know it's never been written about I don't even know how you would write about it and that for me was also kind of an exciting challenge to sort of think through how you might write about it and Frank was sort of encouraging us to to turn just the conversation that we had into some kind of publication and we both wanted to go kind of further than that so I did a long interview with Michael over a couple of days and we looked through the sketches that that he still had from the very when he was first sort of trying to think through just trying to design Parliament and stumbling towards what it how it could work and also reached out to a bunch of people um who had participated in Parliament in the past and asked them if they'd be willing to reflect on their um on their experience in it and then and then I had all of this material and and also did a a lot of journaling myself basically about a lot of a lot of written sort of memory of my own going through Parliament and um spent a long time wrestling with how to sort of fit all of that together um in a piece of writing that attempts to kind of lead you through it attempts to be like or kind of one of the driving ideas was um to sort of think through what a what a book might be that could give you a kind of Parliament like experience. I don't know how successful it is in actually doing that but um but that's where the form came from is trying to play with that. I think that um it looks so unusual in the representation of idea. Um yeah it has uh I mean it's meant to be turned uh this is also Raphael Kozakowski designed this book sort of took these ideas that I had about um the book being an object that you have to really like uh you know work with physically as you read it and he really um translated that very well to a design so that's part of like as you're going through it the text goes in different directions I'm trying yeah it's true I know I'm showing you to myself sorry thank you Emily um and and then there are so um let's see there's like there's a central a central text central text and then there's a the interview runs along the side so you have to turn the book to read that um and then there are also uh the reflections from um from participants kind of interrupt the book they're the blue pages um and uh and they're yeah so they sort of interrupt the flow of writing which actually makes me think another one of the another one of the images that became important I mean part of one of the instructions uh that Michael gives at the door that belongs to the beginning of parliament is to sediment and um and that's an instruction that um just ask you to sort of sit with and bring back to feel free to bring back things that happened to you throughout the course of um of the parliament and to sort of like let them build on each other um I had a really beautiful experience with that today I'm like literally looking at the person who I know knows what I'm talking about and I was like there's a sedimentation and uh I almost cried when it happened like it was really nice um it was just a gesture that we had shared early very early on in the parliament that came back in a way that was a very surprising like private moment of dramaturgy between us um so sedimentation is sedimenting is uh is a kind of key instruction for parliament and uh and also just a very special has become like a special word for my practice that I'm really grateful to Michael for um because I work with water I know Emily also has a recent project um working with Tibbets Brook Broker Creek here in New York um and so I was like my own practice with bodies of water was kind of weaving through my thinking as my formal thinking as I was putting together the book and um and sedimentation of course is also a word that's used that that describes how a body of water how a flowing body of water sort of builds and unbuilds itself at the same time um and so a body of water is also one of the images that drives the design of the book and the sort of interruption also of um that it flows and turns but that also gets interrupted by different perspectives um and voices other than mine kind of like splitting the flow of the book and letting it come back together. Yeah and to point out it's a Siegel Center publication and so I think it's about beautiful book we ever did any more um we have about five, eight moments a more a comment, a question yeah. I think well I've done this before and we've spoken about this but actually I'm curious about other I know that you've been developing like different new choreographies at Duke and I'm actually curious is Parliament yeah how is Parliament related to them and the instructions giving I've never experienced any other ones besides Parliament but is it something that kind of was a seed for like a whole new area of work because you said it's kind of started at this point that you were switching from everything you were doing in Ireland and is that yeah just how is it the seed for something or it just started in a chapter and how they're related. Yeah it took me a while after Parliament I was sort of in a little bit of a pickle as in where do I go from there uh like where do you build that out in what way and it sort of took me probably another five six years to come up with a follow-up work which is called amendment so and it really tried to amend this notion that if we only negotiate between each other what's happening the ecology in terms of where the animals where is all the other sort of and so it's a score or similar situation but it's just amending the Parliament in a way and it's with electronic noise so it's a different kind of situation with electronic noise and light so it has a completely different experience it's shorter it's more compressed also Parliament usually is six hours long I think you people should do six hour Parliament this is just a taste of Parliament you have to fall asleep deep sleep and wake up in the Parliament and continue to really appreciate it I think amendment is shorter and it's almost like works faster and then there's a third one which called constitution which I Premiered last year and so that's the whole trilogy and constitution is like a starting culture of difference and it works again different but it's similar it's all one trilogy and now I'm getting more comfortable with these situations for citizens and I'm building them out I've got a Premier in April called D11's Organ and that's where citizens I haven't got it down yet so obviously I'm struggling but citizens together imagining what could be done together how to move together like an augmented reality of a completely imagined dance floor if you want in which everything is possible but actually nobody's really moving and so it's one hour with electronic noise the wildest dance floor of the imagination who can really stretch the imagination and so I mean the rehearsal process of that with a research group of about 20 people and figuring out every week how this could could potentially work or not I just thought that maybe because you brought up amendment as as something that pushes more into the ecological possibilities of social choreography but I also think that in general like I think Parliament has I think it's interesting to talk about this work in general for the implications for ecological thinking and I know for you it's always it's part of your thinking from the beginning and that I'd be interested to also maybe talk about that with Emily right largely since you're an environmental writer largely I don't know if you have I don't know if you have thoughts about that but I guess for me like one of the very basic things in performance I think I think on the surface people wouldn't think of this as an ecological work because the content is not making an ecological statement but but I think that the very basic way in which it it makes you as a participant so aware of your networkedness of your embeddedness in the entire situation to the point where how sensitive the entire situation is just it makes you aware of yeah makes you aware of your of your sort of larger embeddedness which is also an important part of ecological thought so even this one though this one in particular is very human it's very much about throwing yourself onto the other and onto the other person there are still have deep implications for for like espousing ecological thought I think it's interesting to talk about that I know we're close to the end of time just to say very briefly I was thinking about that because increasingly I'm thinking about you use the word network but in indigenous practice we often think of web of life and so you think you're very aware of being part of a web when you're in a room like this with other people and though it's we're not thinking we're not being asked to think about the non-human world so much we were invited very in a very calculated way I now understand to negotiate touch would have to be negotiated that was so interesting to me because behind that I'm thinking in my own practice I think how do we lay most lightly on the land how do we not how do we not cause harm to be very very deliberate about that our touch was so tentative at first you remember we just reached our fingers out like this it's like our fingernails and our fingertips and then we were laughing but I think there was a lot of deliberate thinking about our connectivity with each other in a way that would that would not harm others I just say I believe in that there is something like or my experience points towards the fact that there might be something like mammalian wisdom in us that we know what touch is appropriate what touch is not appropriate and it has been sort of torn or kind of confused or but there is actually a simple return to it I mean there are thousands of people who've done so many things and I've never had a real complaint that you will always have psychopaths I mean that's important there will always in the metro in the subway you can always encounter I mean somebody who breaks the social contract but within such a situation where there are so many people touching each other without any sort of formal instructions except negotiated people can do it it would be great trust in our mammalian wisdoms that we can actually coexist well if we if practiced or if allowed to do so yeah so thank you thank you all for coming and again it's a great 21st century work I think it's non-traumatic post-traumatic it could be done outside with sunlight even in a big field you don't need stages and nobody needs to have expensive lights up in theaters as we normally do and also theaters where big consumers of energy we forget it all the companies that fly back and forth it is a great piece it's inspiring it really makes us think and I think this is really what art is about that we see something really completely different all of a sudden and and thank you all for being in that space even so it was just three hours instead of six but in New York that's 12 hours maybe so thank you all and thanks to our viewers in the whole round thank you