 So I think we're really exciting to have you now, and I'm very excited as the receptionist. And as a person you don't know, my name is Peter Axel, I'm the executive officer of the PhD program in Tilly. And also somebody who has a research interest in drug surgery and works in drug surgery periodically. But in New York I've been majoring in Australia where I'm from. And the theme of this session is drug surgery on the wheel in relation to thinking around drug surgery. So I'll make some introductory remarks around the concept of real in theatre and then I'll ask some questions and then I'll introduce our panel. So the order is going to be that I'll make the introductory comments. Each of our presenters will take about 10 minutes or 12 minutes to 12.5 minutes which will be timed. And then we'll have a discussion in the next session. So what can we say about the theatre of the wheel? Well first of all I think the thing we need to say is that the wheel is apparently a paradoxical problem. I was interested in a discussion this morning around the trauma of 9-11. It reminded me of, Gisex spoke about 9-11 which he called the Desert of the Wheel. Welcome to the Desert of the Wheel. You talked about this post 9-11 environment that was very paradoxical, that was very troubling, very disturbing. But also when there was a lot of confusion about the way forward. So in some respects we think about the wheel as authentic and pretty realistic depiction of the everyday world. And in other respects the wheel is very confusing and troubling indeed. And if we read Gisex's book for example, the wheel becomes an investigation of paradox and confusion and compromise and even malfeasance, political blocks and malfeasance. But the theatre of the wheel, as we've come to know it, has a long history of course. We can go back to the ancient Greek theories of theatre and they talk about the wheel. Not western theatre practises such as the word Zeami, they talk about the wheel. But really the concept of the wheel comes into very significant prominence in the 20th century theatre. First of all we've got a thing called realism, another thing called naturalism, which are out-depicting various real states. But then of course we have the challenge of the operate who I think is crucial to our discussion today because it's through his theory that we have the challenge to make visible states of power in the world. And so I think when we're talking about the theatre of the wheel as we've come to understand it, what we're actually talking about is not naturalism or realism to say, but actually this task to make power visible on the stage and how we might do that. In the 1990s we saw a conservative return to the wheel as a reaction against the kind of excessive theatricality of the theatre of the 1970s. Actually as a reaction to the 1960s I would argue. But certainly that kind of hyper expressive theatre of the 1980s, I think in Farber for example, or Suzuki Tadashi, we have a return to the wheel in the 1990s, a return to a certain kind of discipline on the stage that is designed to show real people speaking with real language in real situations. And we also have very much the rise of performance studies which come into its own in the 1990s with the founding of performance studies international, the rise of the program at NYU under Richard Shekin's leadership and Iggy Fielder's leadership and others. And of course one of the key cornerstones of performance studies is this theorization of the everyday. So we had the wheel and the everyday coming into a conversation in the theatre of the performance for the 1990s. And in the 2000s I can only say that what we have is an intense, intensification of that interest in career. A rejection I think very strongly of certain kinds of spectacularism in the theatre and in the contemporary performance world. We have a lot of work that becomes interdisciplinary but very much focusing on this idea of everyday practices coming onto the stage. Everyday people, we have the appearance of for example non-professional performers, vocabulary and other tourism coming into the theatre. We have the diversity of languages in my own culture for example in the 2000s sees a huge amount of indigenous theater in indigenous language being presented on the stage. And of course if we go back to that theatre, the theatre that works with people to see if they have an interest in it. We have everyday disabled audience coming onto the stage meaning not community theatre or theatre of therapeutic theatre but remarkable contemporary performance with this very striking vision. So one could say that we have had the performative turn of John McKenzie but maybe we also had a kind of return towards theatre of the real. We are in a kind of moment of real if you like. Theorising this has been most prominently in the Gerald Martin's work on the real which actually has the book Theatre of the Real which we have taken our term from today. She claims this as a naming of a form but she says the phrase Theatre of the Real identifies a wide range of theatre practices and styles that recycle reality whether that reality is personal, social, political or historical. And she also notes the relationship that the real has in performance has to medium. So we have this visibility of the power through the real but also an extension of real bodies into media escapes and an extensive use of video technologies to interview subjects, to present subjects in various ways. And then we have I think an expansion of theatre, a considerable expansion of theatre into other forms of media as a response. I'm looking here at the mapping journey project, video installation artwork which probably many of you have seen by Borja Khalili who documented journeys as refugees travel throughout Africa into Europe and the constant ceaseless movement that really a form of diarisation of the mobility of the refugee presented as a map project as a series of maps. We also have the rise of companies like Women in Protocol in Germany who have produced a series of works around mobility of refugees and also distribution networks, they specialise in making visible networks of power. I remember one of the first performances I saw of that company was a performance I saw in Germany that featured the workers who work in Turkish rubbish dumps that actually deal with all of Germany's refuse. So this was not a performance about refugees or about people with migrants per se, it was actually a performance about invisible things within society what happens to the rubbish of Europe? It goes to Turkey and there a group of workers have to deal with this kind of excessive waste of European society and that was a piece that actually documented that in very real terms rubbish of what kind, what do you do with it, what happens when you burn it, what's the pollution of that and so on and so forth, what is the impact on the local society. The third example that I just briefly want to mention is the Max Exist. It's a company that's very dear to me, a Japanese company called PORB, a documentary theatre company that made quite a lot of different projects around the idea of the real their most recent one is at McDonald's University where they recognised that in migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East McDonald's restaurants became the stopover points for people to meet up in the community one because they had bathrooms, people can actually use the bathrooms there but they were very cheap and so you can actually sit there for a long period of time for the cost of a coffee or a hamburger and they decided to set up a series of universities in McDonald's restaurants in this migration route into southern Europe, across Greece and out of Turkey where they had little radio stations, micro broadcasting radio stations so broadcasting interviews with migrants and passing on information about where people could access services and so on and so forth so it's both a documentary theatre piece, it's a theatre of the real piece but it's also a form of activism and a form of documentation of the problem so to today's panel we've got the real there three I think very interesting speakers who all work with this concept of the real in one way or another and obviously not in the same way I'll just very briefly introduce them, the buyers are here and we will run in order of the presentation the first one is Sahasov who is on the film panel and I speak with several times at the conference as an actress stage director and assistant professor at the University of Beirut I went read the fall violets in the program that just to note is Sahasov and it's the members of the exchange that has produced this event alongside the Siegel Center and the PhD program in theatre and breaking the history of Beirut our other speakers on the panel are Amil Kauri a career of trans-beast race Georgian, working with playwright and theatre maker based in Munich, author of several plays and I won't read the plays out because they're in the program and finally Rima and Melinda, the founding director of Theatre Muti is a director, writer and creative technologist whose practice and theoretical work is situated in the tension between acting and performance, theatrical design and installation and multimedia and interactive technology he's also a professor at the New York University where he teaches performance making and theatre so just a very quick welcome to our panel so the first speaker is going to be... I'm going to really to respect the time given to me frankly in 15 minutes of my presentation and I have some images to show you the absence of developed playwriting tradition government support and funding opportunities and with the presence of prior censorship theatre makers in Lebanon find themselves using every accessible artistic method that would get the stories they choose to tell to their audiences this ongoing exploration needs to create a synthesized dramaturgical approaches or using the term of British theatre maker and academic is Tomlin, productive cross-pollination in what follows, I would offer two examples of plays we produced at the Theatre Initiative at AUB that reflect this cross-pollination dramaturgical approaches the first is Garcia Borca's Blood Wedding which I directed and Robert Myers produced and also was the dramaturg of that piece performed in a prominent site-specific style during April 2018 in Hamanah Village of Mount Lebanon for capacity audiences the production offers an example of a dramaturgical approach that combines two stensibly binary positions text-based classical theatre and innovative experiments with space the second example is No Demand, No Supply a device of documentary play that offers a rereading of Lebanon's 2016 sex trafficking scandal using interviews, police reports, newspaper articles and sociological study of prostitution and joins all within the frame of the prescenary Blood Wedding, the first tragedy of Borca's rural trilogy written in 1932, dramatizes a true story that took place in 1928 Spain in a veneer plot of three acts representing the theatre of feud repressive social structures and suppressed bodily desires the play opens with the bridegroom's mother lamenting her son, her lost son and husband in a violent feud with the Felix family as her son, other son, confirms to her his wish to marry the bride, a young woman who was previously engaged to Leonardo Felix we are then introduced to Leonardo who is now unhappily married to another woman as a child and expecting another the father of the bride and the bridegroom's mother sealed the deal for the wedding by discussing merging their properties for their descendants sake Act 2 begins with a heated conversation between Leonardo and the bride sorry, as she's preparing for her wedding the couple declare their flaming love for one another and they run away together in the next scene during the wedding ceremony Leonardo's pregnant wife announces their escape and the mother encourages her son the bridegroom to chase them the realistic style of Act 1 and 2 is broken by a surreal atmosphere in Act 3 where we are introduced to symbolic characters in a forest three woodcutters speak about the scandal offering three distinct societal responses to the event the moon appears expressing its thirst for blood joined by a beggar for telling death the beggar takes the groom to his fate under the light of the moon meanwhile the bride and the unarmed wife are expressing their endless love as well with knives and soothes where both men perish the last scene in the play joins the bride with the mother both lamenting their fate and their losses our own dramatization of the play was a faithful adaptation of Lorca's text in terms of characters and plot yet we chose a village instead of a proscenium to present it the audience arrived at Hamana Artist's house and at the beginning of the play they were divided into two groups by two beggars I doubled Lorca's beggar whom we meet in Act 3 and gave them an extra function the beggars guide the audiences just like they guide other characters in the play it was as if Lorca's death character is taking us into a journey of life the audiences are first greeted at Hamana Artist's house by the two beggars at the beginning of the show and led to the houses of the mother Leonardo and the bride that is to say houses of the villagers of Hamana the beggars take the audiences to the wedding ceremony and onto the following onto following the manhunt hunt at the end of Act 2 the last two scenes of the play took place in an old cinema house named Roxy and a church respectively the audience are taken to an old auditorium and asked to sit and watch as the play becomes surreal in the 60 year old Roxy cinema the beggars stop being the guide for a while and join the action on stage to assist the group in finding Leonardo and the bride with the synod of the Rita Hashishu we chose one element to come into the village and Lorca's forest the tree to create a surreal atmosphere in the Roxy the forest where the men kill each other is flipped upside down being in an old movie theater the love scene between Leonardo and the bride is projected on a large screen reminiscent of the cinema layered with grotesque trees after they complete their mission the two beggars guide the audiences to the last scene in a church acting followed a realistic approach the actors were immersed in their characters and tuned with the realistic untouched in spaces except for the Roxy but despite the realistic acting and the ready-made realistic atmosphere of the village the dramaturgical approach didn't aim to conceal the theatrical fabrication what we aimed at is to create a fictional world in the context of the realistic setup of the village the costumes belong to a different era of the music to various different countries and most crucially the Ami translation of the play presented a familiar yet elevated language observing the spirit of Garcia Lorca's poetic text and likes to use equally lyrical translation to English, which is the translation I used to compose the Lebanese version of the play the difference between the stage scenes and realistic houses slash settings and the experience of the village in between the scenes served as a central dramaturgical structure the village is happening and its characters served as another dramatic layer on top of our choreography of Lorca's story the spectators were constantly invited to switch between two main channels the plotline of Lorca's play and that of the village both simultaneously presenting images and actions it was left up to them to combine both channels in one vision this prominent difference between the world of the play and that of the village presented the audiences with a complex puzzle they not only had different perspectives into the scenes and the environment of the village but they were also constantly aware of the presence of other audience members it was up to them to create a synthesis of the various pieces staged and on stage presented to them for instance as the audience leaves the church where the last scene in the play takes place and head back to the artist's house and as they are marching silently a graveyard appears in their view which simply happened to be on our way back to the initial meeting point this ready-made setup generated a powerful effect and gave audiences a much needed closure after an intense last scene some thought that it was choreographed the second example I would like to give to the most synthesized dramaturgies is that of no demand, no supply unlike with blood wedding this work started with a personal reaction to factual news and ended up on a pristinium early April 2016 like many Lebanese I woke up to the news of the special operation that the Lebanese security forces did to bust a human trafficking network and save 75 Syrian women imprisoned in two brothels east of Beirut the news outraged me to do something about it in 2017 with the support of the center of arts and humanities at AUB I decided to put the stories of the women survivors on stage though I had no idea then about what exactly I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it when the story came out it gained huge media attention as the women told horrifying stories about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of one of the lead figures of the network which was making more than one million dollars in months according to the police reports few weeks after the uncovering of the story the media lost interest in it and slowly it started fading into oblivion my starting point was the written and video reports of the mainstream media it struck me that there were no comments about the sex buyers who frequented these brothels despite the fact that the Lebanese law doesn't criminalize the sex buyer I found it inexcusable that there was no discussion in the mainstream media about the culture that entitles these men to freely purchase sex with no consideration to the situation of the women and no attention to the fact that they were trafficked this became the focus of the performance and defined its dramaturgy in the process of texturing the performance I adapted the following material the video recorded interviews with refugee women survivors conducted by investigative reporters the audio recorded interviews I conducted with women survivors, investigative reporters the coroner who took the decision to raid the brothels and the expert on sex trafficking and prostitution at Kafa in Shiro the indictment issued seven months after the arrest of the ring at Kafa's 2014 sociological study on the demand of prostitution the resulting texture of the theater production was that of a performance lecture which I played the narrator and hired actresses to play the roles of the trafficked woman I employed Anki's wife recorded delivery technique to deliver the testimonies of women survivors and recorded delivery performances actress on stage listened to live audio recordings through earphones and repeated exactly what they hear they don't memorize their texts I hired male actors to audio record the words of sex buyers I pulled from Kafa's study these were played during the show as voiceovers juxtaposed with the testimonies of the women the staging of no demand of supply was minimalistic the first stage imaged as a birth stage with a music stand on the left side as the narrator I take that music stand every time I introduce a woman survivor an actress would bring the chair and place it on the right side of the pristine when I get to the part of the sex buyers stage managers would bring the chair for each voiceover at the end of this section there would be 55 empty chairs mid-stage fully representing the anonymity of the sex buyers and 55 because that is the number of the interviews that Kafa's study could reach in 2011 the last image of the performance is comprised of the narrator of the left six actors on the right and 55 empty chairs on center stage light dims on left and right and brightens on center stage before it all black out in my retelling of the story with the help of the actresses I was presenting a posi news report on the case however it differed from all the reports that the mainstream media presented which were purely sensational without any social or political observation the performance achieved its most substantial impact thus far by bringing the demand aspect of prostitution and trafficking for the first time to the attention of the mainstream media Rima Kareki, host of the national program on the TV one of the major local TV channels was attending the performance at El Medina after the show she dedicated a 20 minute segment of her program in 2017 on prime time TV to talk about the demand aspect of sex trafficking Rima Kareki, your opening question was why is this aspect meaning the demand for prostitution totally out of our attention as audiences why did I have to wait to watch the play to comprehend that the buyer is a criminal somehow to close in these two examples I provided the cross-pollination dramaturgical approach of the spectator in the state of an encounter with the text or the performance rather than watching blood wedding through a virtual fourth wall with the safety of the prescenium spectators were forced to physically move to encounter one scene after another synthesizing the text with the production and the village as they go from one ultra real estate location to another despite the stylization we maintained through various theatrical elements for many audience members who are more and aren't familiar with the work as works the play was written for Hamana village today and now for Spain in 1930 no demand on the other hand negotiated through a theater building a social event back into public memory although audiences watched the performance while comfortably seated in the auditorium of the prescenium they were addressed directly to connect the theater event with their social and political world both performances although theatrical approaches challenged their audiences into an experience rather than restrained them into a selective role and by that offered two different forms of theater of the real being left to the audiences to create and we'll take questions at the end of the three papers I think so we've got time we can create a conversation between the papers so it seems very interesting insights there our second speaker is I think you're next oh we're running in order of the program if you're following the insights I think so if you could use the microphone please it's just I don't have the papers I one two perfect when Frankie called me to be part of this I was a bit nervous because I've never had to talk about my work let alone figure out what's going on with it think about actually what's the drama what's the dramaturgy behind my work and this is something that I do a lot with plays that's easy for me and then I had to turn it on my own life that was quite a challenge so this is the question that's driving the presentation today and so I had to start unfortunately from the very very beginning and and it starts with my parents I'm a mixed race person I don't know if anybody here is mixed race nobody yes okay so you know what I'm talking about being mixed race is especially if you're a white passing person of color it's like I vote into a supermarket it's in New York and he's an Egyptian guy starting to speak to an Arabic your Arabic is so good and I get that constantly not being recognized in Germany they call me oh you're a refugee although my mother is German I have a German passport there's no way I'll ever be German and there's no way I'll ever be Jordanian so it starts with the kind of impossibility that maybe you know mixed race people can understand and this seems to be impossibility seemed to me the best way to describe the work that I'm doing that's driving my work those are my parents and behind that is the village of my dad when I was very young I think in first grade I wrote one of these paper dances we grew up and I wrote I want to be an artist or actor and this was already an impossibility because I was living in Saudi Arabia I don't know how I said I wanted to be an actor there was nothing to be a few things in Saudi Arabia this is what it looked like the Salvation Plan that's what I knew was the sea and the Salvation Plans it was a little bit theatrical there was like markets and the fish market especially it was quite theatrical so I can see where I got some of that from but I honestly don't know how the actor part came and then the principal came in to visit our class and she saw my paper and she said but you can't be an actor you're a girl you have to be an actress so she asked me to cross it out and to write actress and the problem is that it wasn't possible for me to be one gender either that's another possibility the impossibility of being one gender I'm a trans person so there was another possibility right there on that paper at age six I've changed it back I don't know this is another way of impossibility that I find in theater is theater itself when I was a child I used to imitate this is my father's village in the 1950s there was a woman she used to get her mail from her son who lived in the US the mail was brought by a guy on the donkey and he gave her the letters from her son and she would come to my father's house because he was littering to read the letters and when she was gone I began to imitate her and then it became a thing where my father would say I'll give you ten piastres if you can imitate this woman and that's how I started like making money from theater it's all I've ever made but I think theater itself is also there's something inherently impossible about theater and this is a question a lot of people do theater am I the only one who sees theater as impossibility right there when somebody who's gone who's gone home is appearing again in the same time, in a different time and space this is my father and I I come from a very conservative Jordanian background and so there was the impossibility of actually studying theater this is asking my dad if I can study theater so I wasn't allowed to study theater at all and that was one more impossibility I'm asking myself is it impossibility and I want to talk to you guys about this during the break if you are sharing a similar feeling about impossibility as a necessary condition for theater to happen and then I became attracted to impossibility on every level like outside of the theater as well it just became the thing that I was drawn to or that I could do or that I could understand just physically as well I went to Sarajevo woman here we passed by the graveyard and I looked at the gravestones and all of the people in the graveyard were 130 years old so these are the kinds of things that I began to to feel I think we visceral level just by fantastic contributions that's her speaker yeah so about reading Olendo I think has a connection to the previous speakers project so it's a good connection to talking about his own project about a time myself good afternoon everybody my name is Ruben Olendo I'm the founding artist and director of theater me too I'm also a professor in the chair of NYU's Tish drama and I'm a huge fan as a further intro I'm going to do your trick of using this mind so that I can navigate this and I'm timing myself Frank I'm long winded so so I'm keeping an eye on this I want to spend a little time talking about some of the work that my company does in regards to the theater the real and its interjection into the Irish speaking world so I want to use a little context first if I may I also have to say I'm Mexican and we talk really fast so as time gets going I'm going to get faster so feel free to just raise your hand and let me know that you're hearing words but understanding nothing so feel free to say that so my company is theater me too and I want to tell you a little bit about theater me too and our mission so theater me too is a permanent group of trans-global inter-disciplinary collaborators the company's been together for over 20 years and we are not a contractor company we don't bring or audition actors or designers we've worked together for now over two decades the company is committed to expanding the definition of theater through methodical experimentation with its form but that means that the company is really looking at pushing some of the boundaries that we ourselves as theater artists establish in both practice and in process the company researches global performance in collaboration as a source for our training our work and our methodologies this is something the company has been committed to from its beginning I grew up on the border of Mexico and the US and so my entire experience not unlike what I was mentioning is that of a border vendor and so that space of actually transmission reception and communication between borders has always been inherent to me as an individual and has been the DNA of the company in ways that have impacted its own practice the company is driven by a term we call whole theater and I'm going to drop these kind of terms over this short presentation my purpose perhaps to impact them if they are of interest as we travel through the conversation I want to talk about theater media's drama trilogy and again I'm going through this fast just to give us a bit of context theater media's drama trilogy is really focused on looking at what we call the architecture of performance or the structure of work we further really really obsess about what the proposed impact in other words we move away from a kind of narrative stance into a much more porous and much more non-narrative ideology of how we make work and really invite a conversation around that and really the proposed impact one of the best ways I had a conversation with a parent of one of my company members and she gave me the best answer to what theater media's drama trilogy was about a big dinner table and everybody's talking and sharing and connecting and linking and it feels like at the end you feel like you talked about 20 things but really you were talking about one thing and that's what was really moving because it cited me back to my own upbringing and realize that's exactly how conversations happen in Mexican tables and connect that to the air world in a moment because when I first traveled there I literally felt like why do I understand this dynamic so here in the why do I understand the ability to link and travel and engage in this kind of tributary conversation that is really traveling through rivers and back to the main one and so forth in a way that was fluid, seamless and impactful modes of storytelling and story making for us as a company we really relegated the idea of us as storytellers and really invite the audience to become story makers I say that because again our drama trilogy infers a whole host of conversations images and voices and the invitation is really an engaged one on the part of the audience the performativity of collaborative tensions for us as a company as a collaborative team there's a way I would say this to students that we often of course confuse collaboration and democracy and the idea being that collaboration is actually about the tensions as much as about the harmonies and as a company it's not about agreement but it's about how do we give life and performativity to the tensions and disagreements that we in gender and engage with as a company technology and the idea of prosthetic memory as a company we've been committed for over two decades to investigating the frameworks and conversations around technology not as a backdrop but as a collaborative force in the work we have really established a practice of engaging technology as a way of creating what we do on prosthetic memory it's the idea of really accessing a link to our memories and in many ways creating a shared memory space and I'll link to that a little bit in a moment the actor as transmitter and this will come to bear in the conversation around theatre of the real as a company we've really moved away from the idea of the actor as an bodyer or someone who really inhabits character for us we've really taken on the actor as a transmitter of information as a transmitter of emotion and as someone who actually sits as part of the connective fiber and the idea of interdisciplinarity part of our agenda and mission is certainly to push the boundaries of theatre practice and theatre performance and for us something that's become very clear is that we often as theatre makers don't look into the remarkable practices and processes of artists in other fields there's as we know much to learn from those practices and really fuel our conversations so the work of theatre me too takes on a very visual shape it is a very physical form and again you'll see shapes of interaction our source material ranges as we engage in the work and takes a different shape really and develop the work the work takes over three years to develop and that really begins its trajectory of performance which is also a development space for us we have to just close the show here in Brooklyn in our new space we open the new space we have a space we invite you all to a space it's our space I say that very it's a huge warehouse in the Gowanus area in Brooklyn the space is called Me Too 580 we premiere it with our piece which you're seeing images of now Redmond and we hope for that to become a space of incubation and conversation not unlike these so the work of the company continues and of course develops but I want to really sit in one particular project that is relevant to our conversation so I'll give a little backdrop for a moment in terms of confidence so as I mentioned I'm from the border with when the US from the city calls you that's why it's Mexico this is a map of where it is you see it there on the top and it really is a remarkable area and if you know anything about geography that happens to be where the river that separates Mexico and the US is as thin as the Rio Grande and so it becomes a massive passageway and historically has been a massive passageway throughout its early life and certainly into the 40s 50s 60s and 70s so you thought quite as was this incredibly idealic landscape it was seen as a seed of innovation it was seen as a seed of communication with the US and really as a seed of really elegant conversations around culture, around architecture and this is the city that I grew up in there was however a huge influx of changes and histories that took place many of them dealing with economic changes, governmental changes and ultimately moves that affected the trafficking of drugs so that particular portal because of that ease of crossing became the main thing through which drugs entered North America this became an incoherent burden on the city and ultimately became an incredibly destructive force so the images that you see now are actually images of the city that I remember I left to college when I was 18 came to the United States started my trajectory and I saw the city change and develop from a distance so much so that by the time that I returned to the city it looks like this this is a drastic change the city takes on a whole other life it really becomes in many ways destroyed by this trafficking of drugs, the corruption that attaches to it and a whole host of navigations so much so that the amount of murders and crimes that happen in the city top not only any city in Mexico, Latin America but in the world so much so just as a little side note the images that you're seeing of a murder crime are in front of my mother's house we're literally waking up to that so much so that by 2009 that's what is this small city is titled Murder Capital of the World it is averaging between 90 to 120 murders a week I'm hearing reports from my family while I am in my own educational art and you are seeing decapitations you are seeing hanging bodies this has become the trajectory and the city becomes incomprehensible to me of course it's great concern but again it becomes about understanding this way of the identity of a city as I proceeded in my own practice and with my company one of the spaces to bring ideas of confusion and understanding has really been that company collaboration is to do my company I brought this conversation about Juarez and my attempt to understand it because in many ways I have become a foreigner to it there's a great difference from being having grown up somewhere to living there every day a great difference and so to me that kind of ordered-lander relationship became a space of confusion and so with my company we really started exploring what that conversation be like I'm trying to understand this and is there a role for the artists to play in this conversation and so we started to really look at how would we explore this we decided to Juarez to engage with artists there and start a conversation as to what role the arts could play and what was most astounding to us was that the conversation at Juarez was not about the violence and about the horrors but it was actually about the remarkable change that citizens of that city are enacting in that landscape that in fact the journalistic headlines were 200 kill, 300 murder, narco trafficking all of these conversations but nobody was telling the story of the work that was happening of the belief in that city and so we as a company felt that there was a work to do in collaboration with artists that work was actually to yes acknowledge the complication of the situation but to celebrate and honor the spirit of the people there and the work that was happening and their belief in the city and in a culture that really had a history much richer than this past we started looking at modes of engagement with this and looked at of course documentary theater practices I had the great privilege of sitting with many colleagues or steeped in the practices some of which you've worked you know since Kaufman and your Smith KJ Sanchez Steve Costin conversation with them about their practices about their methodologies about their engagement right but there was a little bit of dissonance in that space because so much of their work is about embodying those narratives and a for us one of the premises is the actor as transmitter furthermore my company though global and international in both stance and in terms of bodies on stage is not a Mexican company I am the sole Mexican member of that company and so embodying Mexican voices became deeply problematic to me and so how could we really hone into that yet of transmitting the work that we were witnessing in the conversations we were witnessing and so we turn as was mentioned earlier to a conversation about theater of the real as a larger framework taking literally a page with a dear colleague Karen Martin theater of the real of remaining front of cost work and also in conversations with Hilton and his whole theories of spectatorship and how the spectator engages in an event and I was happy to hear the word paradox in relation to the real because the minute you know that there's a whole conversation or that is its own invention in many ways and so our work started we spent the next three years into the quietest going back and forth spending about every other month there interviewing the citizens of what is we interviewed every single person who would speak to us we spoke to mothers politicians to artists we spoke to people who have been incarcerated we spoke to literally wrestlers that we are to an amazing wrestling match to interview all the wrestlers whose entire grammar is on the performance of violence and how does that thrive and what does that serve we continue to engage in all of the voices again that were in dialogue and that were impacted and again what we can find in was this incredible spirit this incredible sense of leadership and this incredible sense of hope and that really gave drive to the work that we would make which is a piece that we titled why does a documentary mythology and this is the piece that we gave shape and in fact made a commitment to premiere in violence and so we took the piece after working in it for three years and premiered it first and foremost to the audiences in the community that had imparted building it and in fact asked for their approval and their golden seals so that we can take this story further that's one of the most intense things we've ever done I'd say when people are like the New York Times is coming we're like now we're like that's easy we have 500 people who trusted you with their voices with their experience and they sit there witnessing I've never seen my companies remember when the piece literally the audience rushed with an embrace with a gratitude saying please please please tell my story and my father was one of the people who interviewed said the most amazing thing about the piece and he said in many ways this story is the story of every city abused by progress and my father is a mechanic and I only say that because he claims again and again that he's not an artist but I'm going to tell you he's an artist he's a reputable artist and that's why I actually saw that as a model as an artist but I say that because that statement became such an elegant mode of engaging the conversation beyond bias that in fact there was a conversation to be had in different parts of the world and so the piece itself which took on as with our pieces are very physical a very engaged space of technology really began to take shape and began its tour first nationally and then began its international tour as we explored the piece in different spaces now what was most interesting to us was definitely that the conversation shifted and expanded and engaged audiences in different ways it's also worth noting that the piece was accompanied by a whole host of visual art installations that we generated as a company there was another mode of expressing this we have too many stories to tell too many things to say, too many images to share for just one mode of transmission and so this brings us to the the key link to this which is part of our tour was through the air speaking world we went to the Le Bon to North Africa and to the Gulf we had remarkable, remarkable partners and this was a further sunny space of connectivity for me the first was we spent time in Beirut that mentioned La and had a remarkable reception we had some great partners one would just see it right here the Navya Malkori Minds of Beirut Suka which you cannot have a conversation about what's happening in this in this work without that and a remarkable visual art is Ena Halio because Ena becomes an interesting link as many visual artists engage with the work in really meaningful ways what was astounding to me about the experience there is that it was received in that dinner conversation mode and with that in mind it really opened up beyond the performance what was most astounding to see in that air landscape is that the drama was received and continued beyond the end of the performance we literally would sit after the performance for three to four hours with audiences there and keep them out because in many ways the dinner conversation continued the piece then traveled to the NYOA WB Art Center and again we worked with a whole host of visual artists named Isar al-Khbabi a remarkable visual artist who really explored the idea of Emirati perceptions and how those stories are unfolded we engaged with a series of organizations there and with a whole host of regional artists we were then able to travel the piece to Israel for contemporary and experimental theater and had an amazing amount of support from our colleague Dinami who really supported the work in a meaningful way not only in presenting it but in the context and finally to wrap up I just want to mention three bullet points that became really key sharing this work in that part of the world the first was this continuing dialogue about communities abused by progress the piece pivoted in a radical way what is presented in Gulf Nations this continuous dialogue about progress without the consideration that progress though a benevolent force can also cause a great amount of damage that it can disrupt families pathways of operation in the community and actually destroy culture and the idea that a community halfway across the world will witness this work and find this incredible connected threat was truly truly meaningful the idea of the personal history of borders as we traveled particularly in places like Beirut there was this hyper-awareness of course with the conversation around borders and truly the fact that these histories as they've changed in one generation have changed the life and the day-to-day of communities in the same way that the border I grew up in people used to cross to go get bread from one side of the border to the other and as colleagues and friends and audiences shared the travel from Beirut into other parts that were nearby and then it used to be a fluid space in order to become so politicized and charged and injured that it changes and affects our cultures framework and those relationships and then the last of the idea of identity and violence perhaps one of the most significant comments that we received as we engaged this motive drama energy in the Arab world was a remarkable comment that came from an audience member after one of our performances in Beirut she turned to me and she came to me and said you know I don't see a lot of theater and this was very exciting and you know I thought very very great thank you and so forth and she grabbed my arm and she said there's this thing we say in the Arab world which is somehow we made ourselves believe that to be Arab is to be inherently violent and inherently corrupt and she said in watching this and seeing somebody in a community halfway across the world wrestle with this makes me realize that there's nothing inherently violent or corrupt about being Arab but it is a situation with histories and layers and political and economic priorities and so I feel this kind of liberation because I feel like we can actually change and impact history that night I picked up the phone and spoke to my father and shared this and he shared the same reflection he said in Mexico we have a narrative that to be Mexican has to be corrupt is to somehow inherit violence and in many ways one of the awakenings of this kind of conversational drama energy is to reawaken those histories and to claim a kind of individual identity both for communities and for culture and so to us it really reawakened the narrative of the peace and of the Germany quite as much mythology continues to tour and to travel through the world and it itself continues to reveal itself to us which has been a really meaningful space and I'm incredibly grateful to all of the colleagues I mentioned them all but there's a remarkable colleague who literally felt like there's something about this that we even don't understand that is meaningful in this conversation and to see them really bring it to life I think to us was a great testament and a great boost of confidence to the drama church and framework they're engaging so it's no longer simply about experimentation but it's actually about a kind of democratising of the experience of watching theatre I'll stop there so thank you so much thank you very much thank you for the three videos I want us to come back up and we'll take a few minutes for questions just to reflect on perhaps three points that really seem to resonate for the presentations the first one is the problem of the real and in creating the real we also create the problem of the real possibly we could extend that into the impossibility of the real that was such a wonderful meditation on the idea of impossibility and what my colleague in the Balkans calls misconformance and thirdly the idea of the prosthetic memory and the potential for drama church to remain in tune I think very much resonated across all of the presentations there so there's just three suggestions that we might begin the conversation with but we'll look to the people on the floor for questions please use the microphone and if you could keep your question brief because we have 15 minutes we might need through as many as we can thank you congratulations on your new space before you and J.J. Elf is with the Balkans how wonderful the extent to which your work ultimately in this particular piece is informed by the sort of naming constant disaster capitalism the idea of creative destruction in capitalism or whatever the idea but drama church is defined in this world where there's only one economic system we call it everything else but the extent to which since you know this place from childhood I just thought it was a stunning the judgment position of childhood the extent to which this is a capitalist progress or a capitalist development and the extent to which that in whatever way is an important way yeah I think thank you for the the critical patience I have to sneak that that bit of fact in but one of the words one of the reasons that the title of the piece has this word mythology it's looking at mythology in the more anthropological framework versus this kind of myth but rather the stories we tell to make sense of the world around this but of course it becomes more formal mythology but I say that because what was interesting is the stories we tell as communities the stories that are told it why does it make sense of that who tells the stories how the stories are told and so you realize that there is in many ways depending on the structures of power a story that is inherited to include other stories including large scale actions that are really driven from a financial standpoint and there's a way that what is broadcast to communities isn't that it was major for us or at least a theoretical framework that was major for us and to really impact what the stories are our relation was actually that community sounds like such a simple statement but communities know so much more than they're allowed to know and by that I mean that there's a way that you really get into a 2am conversation with a group of people there's a deeper understanding than what's shared in the kind of day to day and you realize it's a keen awareness of economies of economic shifts of the impact that global conversations have made even in a dining room conversation and that to me was really astounding and looking at really complicated structures in a very kind of straightforward way so absolutely those frameworks were really important to us one quick we're not going to do that sorry just the extent to which it's what else makes it about it's fascinating that's the wonderful beautiful paradox and would other people like to comment on the question of cultural economy or capitalism more broadly because I think there's a remarkable way that the three presentations do address theories of globalization or experiences in the global world but also this very problematic relationship or might I really feel like if the civil environment and the way in which the west and the rest I'd like to think about the former west as a kind of way of disorienting our perspective and the way that the east extends into this dialogue about violence hysteria and failure failed histories and so forth it becomes this representative in those terms which of course is really to interrogate hysteria taking a problematic depiction of vast geographic interrogation so it wouldn't be essentially cut off from the idea of the west as a success we'll take the next question I was we saw the pictures of the wedding and we saw audiences there and I was just wondering you know we are talking a lot about what we do but I was wondering how do you relate to the audience how do you get your audience who is your audience what is the relationship with the audience as you are doing things and that's for everybody right you know at the theater at the American University of Beirut what we try to do since day one when Robert and I started working together in 2013 is to really move theater outside the campus so our main audience is not the AB community to begin with but in general there's this idea that we have 11 people who go you know see theater are the familiar strangers these are the same people that we see over and over and over again and we're talking about a very small country where we were like maybe 4 5 we don't have a sense of it but in general it's a very select group of people that go see this kind of theater I would say like 5,000 this is the figure that we put in like 3 to 5,000 this is the figure that we put in in our budget estimate in terms of how much money we can bring back in the box office but when you're doing work like this I would talk about people because you have to estimate how many people are going to come and see the play but when you're doing like social comedies they said for a long period of time they can play for up to 6 months but it's really I don't want to make generalization about the audience but I think it's very serious you know like the people who go see theater I mean you experienced theater and you presented, can you? Yeah I'm really curious though because I left them 2 years ago almost 3 now and I'm just curious I didn't get to see Blood Wine but I'm very I think it's a fantastic idea to put Lorca and I love his village I think it transposes so easy I'm just wondering what the audience reactions were up there like did they relate to this play as I predicted what we heard we didn't do a study of the audience but what we heard like through personal feedback to me, to Robert, to the students to the actors working on the play I had 2 people come to me and say because they didn't know Lorca they thought this is a play which is for her men and people were really engaged they loved the experience of you know some people it was the first time in the village some people knew the village before but they saw it from a different perspective some people were curious about why I kept the name Leonardo Firenze because you would never hear that name you know we got all kinds of feedback but it was you know we we sold out really in the first day it was a very limited capacity for audiences that was one of the reasons but also because it really was no experience it was offering people theatre cover something different to experience I'm just wondering about the question of were you want to reach out and you say you want to take it out of the box of the UP did you feel like this was I don't know if it was a success but how I would say yes we have been succeeding throughout the work that we've been doing at the University Theatre outside of it you know if you look at the history of theatre at UVN how other theatre practitioners in the country and theatre critics used to reflect on it and you look at how now they're reflecting on it we're not framed as a university theatre you know even when people review their play they're not referring to it as a university theatre although it is produced thanks to the institution so it reaches out but again it's always limited the number of people who are interested to begin with we don't have a theatre culture we don't teach theatre at schools people don't know where the theatres are I teach university students at UV who come from when established economic backgrounds and you would expect that these people have been exposed at the schools they went to are very good private schools that you would expect to theatres and this is something that happens all the time if I want to take them if I want to give them directions to go to a meeting I would have to say it's next to Dunkin Donuts so they don't know so the question here yes thank you thank you all three I love those presentations I mean there was one thing that I found very interesting and it just kept me thinking what language which language do you use being in that position of impossibility and imagining growing up between two languages meaning mixing languages probably quite dominantly too how does that translate that impossibility and that mix transition name hybridity that we spoke about into your performance texts well it's for me to do the play in an Arab country in Arabic so that moves it out when we did the reading of the country we did it in Arabic I insisted on doing this because even though I can never get my place produced back home it was a political thing for me to put on a trans play in Arabic and we had German subtitles and actually the audience stayed through the whole time and they were laughing at the jokes it's completely it worked even though I was a bit worried but I think now it's going to be in German in Vienna German with a bit of English it's tough you have to Angela Davis says freedom is a struggle even though for example now the director of Vienna is going to be a cis white man he's not the one who tells me that if we bring people of colour they have to be talented it's a step by step thing so I'm just seeing it in a bigger context and accepting the little victories that I can have that sense take one final question I would like to ask about because I really am not happy that I'm here and couldn't hear all this I had a question about you start both of you starting from your own questions and concern and that makes sense to share it you can perform it up in all the countries, all the places and there is a kind of sharing concern about it but I don't know because it's a really questioning I do not know of every university I have been in contact with the scene and with all these things but I don't know how it's function my question is how your student is there a space for them to be able to propose their starting from their own stories and if they are like privileged people and economically comfortable how can you get others within this university within your environment to have a kind of all the concern that can contaminate the university also Thank you this is a very good question but to begin with I have to say that we don't have a major in theater we don't teach students to become theater makers or actors or we've been successful in the sense that many students who come from business or engineering or architecture background actually went on to master's degree theater, drama therapy cultural production different fields but we don't have a major so that is number one we don't have a space we don't have infrastructure on campus but not a proper that's why we don't perform really on campus because our intention was to we used this production class to create it really fed to what we call later the theater initiative and it became the university that is producing this professional theater it starts with an idea we bring in the students to share that idea with us we bring in professionals to work side by side with the students and then we take it out to the Lebanese theatrical scene so at this point I'll have to answer to your question it really happens within certain classes like in the English department the proper teachers we have playwriting class that students can write about any topic they want we have a filmmaking class that they can also produce the short films on various topics in the directing class the acting class these are obviously free for them too but in the production class in particular these are projects that we initiate basically and that we bring students on board but then they have room to work with designers in areas that they wanted to and actually I just so many here who was in one of those classes and I don't know if you want to share your experience I don't want to put you on this part so I took the production class and I'll share it with you I took the production in 2013 it was for rituals of science and transformations I think it was the first one right it was the first one to come up and I was a senior at the time and it was really interesting I was already a little involved in theatre but it was such a lovely way to get your foot in the door in a major production it is a university production I mean it's an unprofessional production I think that sets the standards and I think that was a really lovely way to prove ourselves as well as students that we can also be professional break this stereotype of it and I at the time as being a student I was one of the actors as well and I assisted with the design so it's a really nice collaborative way to be exposed and then I actually after graduating I continued working with Sahad as another production it was a great way so it's a nice cycle of how in May you were studying what you took that class on I was studying sociology and anthropology at the time and now you are doing the MA yeah I'm doing my master's now at CUNY but the school of professional studies and applied theatre I'm a full bright scholarship I always try to encourage my friends at the drama club and they agreed to try to get a lot of things so it's a nice way to expose themselves thank you very much to our analysts we'll be back at 2.30 for about three sessions welcome to go down to the eighth floor to be in the cafeteria here