 space. I celebrate all of you coming back and seeing regular faces because our dream is that this is not a webinar-type thing, but it's much more of an ongoing conversation where everyone joins and everyone participates. And to that end, we are trying to get it to be much more participatory because the idea is to build a body of knowledge through this. That's one. I was spending just a website, which you can pop up onto the thing, but every single talk week by week is up there. So even if you miss one, you can still access it. I wish I could find a way to get it editable into a very nice podcast, but they're just worth putting in your yo-yo while you're chopping vegetables and stuff. Invite. Hi, Carol. I'm so happy you came back. Hi. I'm sorry. I cannot get on camera. That's okay. You're here. It's vanity, but I am very happy to be here. Very, very happy. Hi, Amy. Do you have Jay Han? New York is here. Yeah. All kinds of places are here, but without further ado, really, also, if you think that there are people you would like to hear, and if there are things, deep conversations you want to have, just reach out to any of us, Amy, Mugenie, Wenya, whoever you fancy, me. And notice how I said whoever you fancy, and then I said me. And, yeah, and just really keep the conversation alive and even going forward, because we're all on crisis here to figure out how we want to, what we're going to do with this great unrealized future. So I shall leave it now to my partner and I am Amy to take us off and go. Great. Thank you, Jay Han. So welcome to everybody and to my guests this evening, Asher Warren and James Brennan. Thank you for appearing with me tonight in this Hobart and Lawn System, Tasmania-centric session of unrehearsed futures. So this is number five of our second season and it's entitled Carcerality, Ritual and Spectatorship, Prisoners Coming Home. And so we're going to be looking in the first half hour, we're going to be looking at the work of James and Asher, James in particular on carcerality and theater in prisons and Asher on his work with audiences. And so I'd like to break with my tradition of reading out people's bios and ask my guests to introduce themselves, because I think that will be much more lively and interesting. So may I begin with you, James? Sure. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks, Amy, for the intro. So I hope I have something to offer this room. It feels like a really an amazing, I can't really tell yet because I've shrunk everyone's heads, but it feels like there's a lot of experience and enthusiasm, wisdom in the room. So hi. I'm in Tasmania in Australia and one thing we do here when we speak on country, which is what they call, you know, a word used here for the land here, is we acknowledge the traditional line. And so I'll do that even though we're everywhere because I'm on this land here and it's a practice that we try to honor at all times. So I'm paying my respect to the traditional and original owners of this land, Tasmania specifically, Hobart or La Truita, the Moinana people. And that means paying respect to those who've passed before and also acknowledge the current Tasmanian traditional owners who are still here. The land was never really seeded. So it's important to start with that. It's also a pretty strong intro to my obsession with justice because there's a lot of injustices happen on this country and continues to, but I'll get to that later. I'm going to try and talk about myself over there as dispassionately as possible for the next little while. So I guess the intro, the main thing to say is I'm an artist. I've always been working as an artist with an exception of a little break I had when I got bored and I became a parole officer for a number of years, but mostly I trained as an actor and I worked in the theater for the last 20 years. I did a bit of straight theater and I found it pretty uninspiring and I guess I started to make my own work early on as soon as I was training really. And that came out of, I guess, disinterest in the work that was around me in a more constructive way, an interest in making work that was more physical and experimental than what was in where I trained, which was in Melbourne. Australia doesn't, you know, talking about theater in Australia is an interesting, it's sort of an interesting thing to Asher might have something to say about that later as well. It's, you know, the tradition here is limited and you might say that we might not be suited to certain types of theater just because of our sort of national psyche and our history. Also there's a lot of elephants in the room, which seems like a good thing for theater, but in Australia sometimes it hasn't been the case. Anyway, elephants in the room is something that's compelled me in all sorts of directions for the last 20 years. I'm a musician also and I've always made and performed and composed music, but I decided early on that I would not study that afterwards because I wanted to keep it a bit sacred. Funnily enough, I did study theater and that's what I've been doing pretty much all the whole time. So I was interested in my physical theater early on. I made my own theater for a while, in probably 10, 12 years, off my own bat and did that sort of continuously and eventually got a bit jack of the culture. That means I wasn't, I was not sort of, I didn't have enough contemporaries around that were doing what I wanted to do. So I had a break and went to Berlin and made music for quite a while and when I came back I just, I actually just didn't want to make theater, so I became a parole officer. That was a pretty sort of odd, there's a story there which I won't go into, but it didn't, I didn't, I didn't hunt it down. It sort of happened to me. It was great. If anyone ever wants to try and become a parole officer, if you're getting bored of theater, I highly recommend it. You know, I guess, you know, I guess one thing that was missing for me in the theater was a sense of danger or rawness in the, in the work and I didn't know this at the time, but when I went into the, into the prison, well, you know, I mean, those two things immediately changed for me. Of course I made some pretty strict rules that I wasn't, I wasn't going in there to sort of harvest stories for my own theater. I was, I was having a break, but I loved it. You know, I was, a little bit of context is I was, when I worked in the community, I was, I was managing offenders in the community. That meant people who'd come out of prison or people who were on community orders and there's a whole range of sort of situations and people in, in quite a poor sort of crime, high crime neighborhoods where I was working in West of Sydney. I, you know, I interviewed, the main task you do is you interview people. You get to know them, get to know their backgrounds and the issues they have and their, you know, what's called in parole, offending behavior. You're supposed to understand that and anything that feeds into that. So it's, I mean, I found it quite incredibly privileged sort of role to be able to get all this information about individuals. I just thought it was so, it was just so unusual. I just, if anyone had handed me the files that I was reading years ago, I would have just been gobsmacked. There's so much information about people's lives, their personal stories and it's compelling, you know, it's compelling stuff. Of course, it's attached to a real person. So it's, it's obviously very difficult material with real, you know, real risks involved in their lives. I, I, I eventually moved to the prison where I worked for three years and that was a different story. Everyone was always on time. I didn't have to go out into the community finding people. They were all there and my task there was to assess them for release. And so I really had to get my head around where they were at and that really meant getting to know them quite well. You know, you got different sorts of parole offices. I think, you know, I, some of them probably thought I was a bit of a pushover because I was interested, so interested in their, you know, their reasons and where they got to where they'd got. The reason I'm telling this story is because it really has driven everything I've done for the last eight years. There was one interview in particular where a guy, a guy was involved in quite a serious series of crimes and we'd got to this point of trust and he broke down and confided in me some further crimes, which he hadn't been charged for. And I knew that I needed to report those crimes, those alleged crimes and I, of course, I was able to tell him that after, but the thing that struck me was the interpersonal relationship between us had got to this point where something transformative was potentially unfolding. Unfortunately, it was not in my remit to go down that path, you know, to get stuck into whatever was unfolding for this guy. It was, it was a breakthrough in my opinion. He was facing something really significant. And as I left that interview, I mean, I knew that I was, I was confident that it would not, this would not carry on in a way that I was interested in carrying on. That is, you know, getting people involved who understood the psychology of what was going on, etc., in order to sort of harness this transformative moment, well, potentially transformative moment. As it played out, I went back and reported to the police and, you know, the psychologist got involved and nothing much came of it for him, that individual. I found that terribly disappointing. The one sort of moment that should be capitalized and sort of just everyone sort of gather around and pay attention to this moment wasn't able to be handled in the system that I was working in. That really led me to make a work called the chat, which was a theater work, which was basically about inventing a utopian parol system. It was totally, it was meant to be ludicrous, you know. We went, we went all out playing with the idea of what would make a, what would make a utopian parol office, dancing, playing, games, sensuality, you know, all the things that you just, you couldn't dream of when you're working in a parol office. It just doesn't match. But I was with a bunch of people who were well suited to those sort of things. And anyway, what came out of it was very surprising. It was made with three, including myself, three experienced performers and four ex-offenders. And it's been, we did multiple iterations of it. And so I worked with training up these ex-offenders to be ready for performance with my colleagues. And they were on stage every night with us, semi-structured performance going into territory, which was very sort of difficult really for them at moments, but also very uplifting at other moments. I guess the model of that has taken me into a sort of area of interest, which I would say is thinking about what the boundaries of my artistic ambition are. I think that my assessment of socially engaged art to date, I've generally hated it. You would not have caught me having any ambition to be involved in socially engaged art 10 years ago. Art for Art's Sake was what I was totally about. Unashamed about not having to answer why to that question. I just did not feel the need to answer why I was making Art for Art's Sake. I thought it was enough. And I still would defend that position. But after making a few works with these people, my sense of purpose is completely different. And I don't think I can go back anymore. I can still make music which doesn't have socially engaged purpose, but in theatre because it is necessarily sort of collaborative, I can't really go back. So I found myself, I guess now in a very, you know, I had no, I didn't, I mean, I just started the ethics from the ground up. I just tried to reflect on what I thought. And it took me years to get there, to get to being ready to do it. I just could not work out how to ethically start making work with people who had been in prison. There's so much, it's so messy. I knew how messy it was going to be. And believe me, it's been even messier than I anticipated. You know, risk to myself and others involved is just a sort of daily reality. And the rewards, the unlike working in theatre that I had done before. And so where I'm at now, I guess is, I'm doing a PhD about it. So I'm applying some, apparently applying some rigor to those questions. I still feel, you know, probably as far away from understanding as I did when I started. But probably I'm under, I get to understand some other people's approach to some of the things that I care about inside it. And I'll continue to do it. I think I've, it's not a, I made a decision to keep doing this. I thought long and hard about whether this would be a flash in the pan a couple of years. And I decided, no, that I was going to keep doing this. So here I am. I'm just about, I'm just launching an organization. I'm moving away from my own artist, my own name as an artist, which I think my website is up there, which what's been for the last sort of while, to a company name. And the idea there is to put a bit of distance between James and the work because, and I'll finish, I'll finish on this idea, I think, because basically what's happened is by working with people in prison and who've been in prison and who are in and out of prison. The idea of trust and my my decision in the end to have real friendships with these people, not the professional boundaries that make sense in the work has been really integral part of my work, not one that I would put in funding application, mind you, or necessarily write about in my, well, maybe I will write about it in my PhD. But it has led to some really difficult situations recently in the last year, which I hadn't second guessed. And there's probably more of those. But each time so far, I've, when I stumbled and thought, geez, how can I move through this? I've taken enough time to decide that I want to and I will. And so I'm just starting this organization. The first things we're going to be doing is making, dedicating the first period to music making prison. Prisoners love music. All the stuff comes out. They get to learn a bit of, you know, songwriting, whatever. And it's a real joy, you know, music does something. The theater has a lot of trouble doing, you know, the immediate response is just great. So anyway, that's a bit of a ram. I think I should, I think I should shut up now. There's probably other stuff to talk about. I hope that's a useful intro. I sort of wanted to reveal some of my sort of, I guess, more personal reasons for doing this stuff. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thanks. Thank you. I think it's very helpful to know your background and your personal experience that connects you to the work. And I'm sure that already there's lots of you've provoked a lot of thoughts about things. Asher, can I ask you to also introduce yourself and your research? With pleasure. Can everybody hear me okay? Thumbs up? Oh, fantastic. Amy, I don't think that I have as a compelling story as James has. I might be a bit briefer. Is that okay? It's fine. Okay. So my name's Asher Warren. I teach theater and performance at the University of Tasmania, the same island state that James lives in. But we do not reside in the same city. I live in Launceston and teach in Launceston, which is in the north, but is also land which was stolen. The Palo Alto people were forcibly dispossessed here. And I want to acknowledge the traditional owners as well. I like to start with my name and these kind of things because my name gives a lot of way and hides a lot. My first name is Asher and a lot of people sometimes think that's back to front, but my given name is Asher and it is the Hebrew Asher from the Old Testament. But it is not, I'm not Jewish. My family is not Jewish. My family is actually hidden behind my surname, which is Warren, which was anglicized when my grandfather landed from Holland in Melbourne, Australia after the Second World War. It was changed to the closest thing in the phone book to Van Viren, which was the Dutch name. So this is to kind of situate myself as a second generation Australian with a heritage, which I have a distant relationship to, but still is a part of the identity that I have here. My work up until a couple of years ago was really focused on interactive and intermediate theatre making, participatory theatre, and people working, particularly Australian artists, working to make really innovative work, which was remarkably open in its structure. Participants actually got drawn into these works and had quite a lot of say in what happened. They could determine where that work went. Every time those works were staged, something different would happen. So I spent quite a lot of time watching those works, participating in those works, and looking at what this meant for theatre as a practice, performance as a practice, once it started becoming so much more dependent, so much more formally dependent on how participants engaged. And like actually James said, it really drew out the collaborative nature of performance practice in a much more kind of concrete way. So that's always been a strong interest of mine. What draws people to the theatre? What do they do in the theatre? Not necessarily just the artists, but audiences. In 2018, I got a job at the University of Tasmania, an island which I had never lived on, a new off and visited, and started working here and experienced essentially a form of culture shock, which was an entirely different culture of theatre making. I'd come from a large major city to a much more regional city and encountered a very, very different set of attachments to theatre making, expectations of theatre, and ways of valuing the work. And since then, this has really kind of like reoriented me to start asking the same kinds of questions about what are you doing at the theatre? Why are you making theatre? What are you doing when you go to the theatre of this set of regional audiences? So this has kind of been my recent turn. And it has been really interesting engaging with this regional theatre culture, because it is remarkably self-sufficient. It's so kind of powerfully self-contained. It doesn't need external validation. But what that has meant for me as a scholar and a critic is that I'm not necessarily always welcome. And it's been very difficult for me to become a part of this community and to engage with the community. I think I'll stop there, because I think you have some questions for us, Amy. Well, yeah, I mean, it's very interesting that you stop there, because I think I have an excessively ambitious list of questions. But when you speak of having difficulty feeling part of a community, that leads me to wonder what theatre is for. And I think that's something that you might have different answers for that question. And then it'll be interesting to find out what the room thinks about it. But when we talked about this before, Ashley, you talked about a kind of cruel optimism. And so I was wondering if you would segue into that reflection on what's, yeah. Certainly. So yes, this is to borrow Lauren Ballant's wonderful, wonderful phrase, cruel optimism. I first started thinking about our attachments to the theatre when I had been ruminating on a series of uncomfortable moments, watching work in Melbourne, actually. Some which were very awkward, one where an elderly audience member got up and walked out of a show during a performance. And the actor on stage turned to her and addressed her and said, thanks for coming. Great to see you. Mind your step on the way out. And I was torn because I felt, yeah, you shouldn't walk out. But, you know, just go on. You've taken us out of the moment of the show for actually like a pretty self-serving go, right? Like you're doing this for you. This is meant to be about us. And so I had this, I've called them in this paper that I wrote about this, I had a sneaky feeling. And it was this feeling that scratched at what was happening on stage and took me out of the suspended disbelief that I had given. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was in, but not in that moment. And so all of a sudden, as soon as I started thinking about these sneaky feelings where you're watching a show and all of a sudden you're not there because something has broken the effective machinery of the theatre, I realised it related a lot to the kind of attachment that we have and the willingness that we bring to the theatre to kind of get something. And we have this expectation. And I think the cool optimism sums it up nicely because we have such high hopes for theatre to deliver us moments of beauty, of insights, of pathos, of bathos. And so often, at least in my experience, they don't happen. I sit through a lot of bad theatre and this is perhaps because I sit through a lot of student theatre. But I continually return and sit with this kind of optimism that it will happen. That optimism is really different in Tasmania because it seems much easier to satisfy. And that bothers me. People don't have as higher hopes of the theatre. And so they are kind of, you know, more readily satisfied. Their optimism is direct. Yeah, no, I won't say that. I might give that to James now. I mean, I'll say one thing about that. I mean, I'm fascinated by those moments. And I think that they are compelling theatrically. And I think I probably have obsessed a little bit about capturing them and reworking them for my own theatrical purposes. Because, you know, when you've got shit theatre and that can still happen, you've sort of got good theatre. Because it is compelling. That moment is absolutely, you know, it's awkward, sure. But, you know, you're paying attention and there's a lot of tension. There's tension. There's uncertainty. There's surprise. And, you know, it's got all the ingredients that make me my ears prick up in the theatre. So I think when you described that, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I mean, do something with that, couldn't you? And I think that I, in the theatre I've made in the last years, I've been really playing with the inadequacies or the elephants in the room as content and as form, really. Because I know that they work in this context anyway. You know, I am absolutely obsessed with high art, beautifully performed impeccable theatre. I love it. I want to make it. I want to be in it. I want to, like, live it. But it's not happening in Tasmania right now. I'm just like, forget about it. And that's where I live. Now, what have you got then? Well, you've got that, what you've just described. And I don't think that's the answer to how we make good theatre here. But it's a little window into your question, Amy, of what's art for. I mean, I don't really know what art's for. I don't think I ever know. But I do. But I do. I did become obsessed with what art can do. And at the moment, I'm like, I have sort of social purpose in my work. And I know there's something that can do. And I've learned about it. It can make someone who's marginalised feel part of something. It can make money for someone who doesn't make money. It can, you know, there's all these sort of practical things. And then there's more ambitious things. So I guess when I reframe your question as can do, it really changes things for me. And I think that my ambition, which has changed in the last eight years, has landed on that. Because I never had any interest in working out what art was for, what it was. I was just like, I'm in it. It's cool. That's cool. I like it. But when I found purpose, then I'm like, well, actually, I've got some tasks now. And how can I do them using some of the some of the stuff I got? So I, it's interesting to go. I don't know if I want to go in deeper into Ash's moment or take it away. But it is, to me, fascinating stuff. The awkwardness that Asher was obsessed with, I would say. Is that fair to say? Those moments of awkwardness. Yeah, obsession. Yep. Yeah, positive. Obsessions are a good thing in my mind. I think that, you know, they're the clues to our little tiny, crappy palette, theatrical palette that we have in Australia. You know, you got one of that's one of the little things you probably want to keep on the palette or train up and be, you know, brilliant, you know, experts. I feel, I feel like there's something else that I want to add to that question that you've raised, James, which is theater is good at creating communities, performance events and the act of making theater is an amazing moment of bringing people together with a shared purpose. Because it takes so much energy. Like, how can you not be invested? But for me, the interesting thing about that is that the cohesiveness of that group that comes together in the groups that I'm seeing around me are exclusive and exclusionary. And they're based around so often a kind of we are separating ourselves in order to define ourselves more clearly as something. And that has been the real kind of trouble because I, you know, I see it when I see the students that I have auditioned for these shows and they're excluded because they're not in with those people. Or they've said something about a show that they didn't like or that there was, you know, they've raised a criticism and they're not allowed to, they're blacklisted. So they're kind of like, you know, the two sides of creating communities around an identity when those identities are, you know, complicated or, you know, clearly defined, they're also methods of exclusion. There's some very interesting questions already in the chat about the question being raised about social engineering in terms of the creating of community around theater. And then also a question about utopia or reflection on utopia and your parmoigna. The room is small enough that I just think it would be really wonderful if people would just unmute themselves and speak out the question. I don't think I'd need to curate from the chat. So I'd appreciate that if people would just sort of, you know, basically unmute to make their reflections. How does the hierarchy work? The most interesting question or the one at the top? I try to go from the top. So Jaehan, I think you were the first. I actually think maybe because, you know, I'll speak at some point, but maybe we can go with Clark because I haven't just opened it up to people non-curatorial. I don't know. Otherwise I can go, but up to you Amy, you decide. Okay. Well, I think then I would be asking Wenya if you wanted to talk a little bit about your question about utopia, whether it is a utopian quality in the projects that are being described. That is, you're pointing to... It's the other side. I'm pointing to Bongani, who is right here, I'm asking. Yeah, hi. Thank you both for those really kind of rich initial kind of opening thoughts. And I guess, Asha, what I was hearing as you're kind of thinking around this question around, I guess, and James picked it up, you know, what work does the theatre do? And perhaps it's connected to a question of ethics, right? Is we can engage in the art for arts sake, but we also seem to be recognizing that perhaps that's an insufficient grounding for an ethical practice of theatre making. It's the question I'm asking, right? But I immediately suddenly thought of Jill Dolan's, and I put the book in the comments, the utopian performance, Founding Hope at the Theatre, where she kind of engages with exactly what it means to approach the theatre with, I guess, you know, to use the termities and cruel optimism. And still somehow, even in the recognition that perhaps the performance event doesn't leave anything that's specifically tangible afterwards, that there is some kind of utopian impulse that allows us to generate something hopeful, something meaningful, just in the act of gathering together, and I think the words she uses are embodied, passionate and live in the same space. There's an interesting tension there, right? This desire for work to be larger than itself, but also recognizing that the fact of showing space in and of itself is perhaps beginning to crack open the efforts and politics of what we're doing when we're sitting in those spaces together, it also connects to, I've lost the train of thought, but yeah, so there's that kind of interesting tension between this kind of cruel optimism and the utopian impulse, nevertheless, that perhaps might emerge in spite of the cruelty of optimism. Yeah, or precisely because of. Is it Helen Evall, or there's a great phrase talking about one-on-one theatre that came out of some research, about the desire to give good audience when you attend the theatre? And I had a lovely conversation with a friend a little while ago who found it, he just couldn't explain why he was so disappointed in the show, and he puzzled and spent the time interrogating himself and interrogating what he saw to process his thinking. And it was like, I was at that show too, and it wasn't underdone work, it wasn't well, he kind of fleshed out and it really needed more time, but he felt bad in that moment to kind of like not have a good response to it. And I was struck by him feeling bad as that utopian impulse, right, like that's the manifestation of the utopian theatrical impulse that you've internalised this desire for it to be good, like so much so that you're kind of pained by it. I think the problem is not enough people, sorry, I feel like there's not enough people that feel bad about bad theatre. Can I add a thought there? I think that when you add social purpose, let's just say social purpose to a theatre work, you're right and almost responsibility to be that sort of crude, real audience who just like in old times, you look away or have a beer when it's boring and you clap when it's good. I think that the contract has changed, that there is a different requirement on audience now when there is social purpose inside the work, and that has to do with the ambitions of the work itself. You have in a way, and you know, and theatre, I look a lot of socially engaged theatre, I'd say including some of what I does, doesn't necessarily always do a good job of conveying every, all of the ambitions and all of the history of the work that would lead you as an audience to be responsible for that. However, it doesn't change the fact that when something is made and it has a purpose which is beyond, way beyond entertainment, then there, this is a question really, then possibly the contract is shifted. You know, what is now, if that's the case, if the work is aiming to create a precedent for reform, for example, and it was an experiment that is to be tested and applied in a, in a real context, a political context or a social context, then surely that would shift that contract in a way. If you are an audience member who gives a shit about that stuff, then, so I guess what I'm getting at there is maybe we're not in that same state anymore. We, our, our right to entertainment has shifted. We can't, as audience, we can't respond. Surely the audience role has shifted. If we assume the artist role has shifted, and then we can no longer just make art for art's sake, then perhaps, then there's an implication for the audience too. I'm not saying, well, I'm not sure what I'm saying there, but it's really a question. And I, I, I imagine that there's been, there's a bit of mixing up with artists at the moment, and it's socially engaged art generally, about what is trying to be achieved. I've seen a lot of socially engaged art, which is thinking it's going to do something, and I'd say it doesn't do that. And then you go, the audience goes, well, you wanted to change the world and you didn't do anything, so what, you know, I'm going to look to the entertainment, and it wasn't entertaining. So, sorry. And I think when I talk about you, you know, when I talk about utopia, I'm really talking about the, the attempt to jump past a problem because art can do that. You can launch yourself beyond the usual obstacles to the, to a possible answer. And you don't have to get involved in all of the obstacles. I mean, that's all we do. That's what I've been doing with some of the former prisoners is that we don't have to focus on their offending. We can just leave that all completely out and get them to focus on their positive traits. Now, you can't do that in prison, but that's utopian, right? But it does come up with some solutions. James, I'm going to direct the utopian reference to Clark's question in the chat. I'm having trouble reading the chat. Clark, do you want to unmute yourself? And thank you. Yes. I recall reading in the description for this workshop, something about returning rituals for ex-prisoners. And I think that was in reference to your work, James. Yeah. I was wondering if you could say something about that. I found that very interesting as a notion coming from a theater perspective. I'd be really interested to hear about that work. Well, thanks for the question, Clark. It's research really at the moment. Some of the work I've done to date, I would describe it as reintegration rituals for the people taking part. It wasn't intended to be that, but it sort of turned out that way. And what that really means is that the feedback and the sort of evaluation of the project revealed that the process and the outcomes of the art had the effect of integrating them both internally and externally. And what that means varies greatly, but there's an internal reintegration, I think, for them, which is just them going, sometimes it's just as simple as, I'm not a bad person. I'm not an all-bad person, and they sort of work something out internally. And externally, it can be as simple as working in a group. And what that does for a person who's not used to having a cohesive social experience. The research at the moment, which Asher is well aware of because he's involved, is seeing if I can sort of answer the question about whether or not performance and experimental performance in particular can serve as a reintegration ritual for former prisoners. And the idea there is that to build a ritual with a prisoner and work with them to develop and deliver it on release from prison. And what is a ritual? I don't quite know yet. I mean, I'm studying it, but I can't tell you. And I think it can be something as small as a handshake and something as big as the biggest parade you've seen in your life. I hope to try and make something that is really... At the end of the research, there's going to be an example that sort of tests out the findings, I guess. So I think that the research is just applying pressure to the concept. The reality is that I think that my work in some ways is doing it each time I'm doing it. And I need to learn more about what ritual can do and what it is in order to be more confident about speaking about this stuff. But that's sort of really here, I guess. Does that make any sense? Well, it certainly did make sense to me, James. And I'm really glad you're doing that work. And I'll be fascinated to read about your discoveries and to hear about them. Thank you for doing that work. I appreciate you saying that. Clark, someone who knows quite a bit about ritual and theater. That's basically specialty, isn't it, Clark? Well, I sort of cross applied theater and psychodrama. And so a lot of the heightened aspects of communal experience that are captured in that mode of working. Yeah, so that really intrigued me. But I think I'll leave it there just to say I'm really excited about hearing about your work there, James. Thank you. I think it's very interesting that we've gone from a discussion of utopia to hope to healing. There's a kind of, there we seem to be in that terrain. There's the idea that there is something called bad theater has sparked some thoughts here. Veronica, can you unmute yourself to talk about your problem with the notion of bad theater? Or do you want me to read out the channel? Sure. I think it's pretty much encapsulated in what I've written there. But it also strikes me that it is to do with the tension between process and product. And so the idea of creating rituals for re-entering society or creating rituals that have to do with perhaps psychodrama, or to be in a process where people are asked to be socially reintegrating or kind of learning about themselves, which is very much process driven, sometimes needs a product to fulfill a contract to themselves in the process. And that may be bad theater, but it's it's in the eye of the beholder. And so I really have a problem with the idea of bad. Sorry, Veronica, you've gone mute. Oh, sorry about that. And so I have a problem with this idea of bad or good theater because in a multicultural, multi-lingual, multi-everything society and across the world with the enormous numbers of aesthetic choices, the range of cultural forms of expression. When I hear bad theater as a term, and sorry, Asha, I'm not getting on your case. Or maybe I am, I don't know. But I start to think, okay, it bugs me because I always think it's to do with a Western benchmark with the Northern Hemisphere, Western dominance of aesthetic criteria. And it really annoys me because the global South or whoever are often judged and applied theater is often judged. And I use unapologetically use the word applied theater because you know, really life is complicated. Let's just accept that there's problems with the term. But when it's, you know, that it's bad theater, why is applied theater bad theater so often? Well, to whom is it bad? And how do we consider the context of what what process has been followed in order to make that piece of work? For whom is it most important? Is it for a fee paying audience, a ticket buying audience? And then why have they come to that? You know, if they've come as an act of solidarity, well, then who cares if it's bad? If they've come to be entertained, well, they shouldn't have come if they wanted mindless or aesthetic high art, all these terms really begin to frustrate me as a practitioner also with ex-prisoners here in Cape Tom. So that's my 10 cents worth. Thank you, Veronica. Do James, do you want to answer that? I mean, I just have one, I just have one thing to say about that really is that it reminds me when you go and see a show made by kids. No one hates it. I think just because they understand it. They understand it fully. They don't know what's going on. So I use that sometimes because when you go and see your nephew or just anyone's nephew or kids theater, your enthusiasm is flowing from goodwill and adoration and also an understanding of the context. I think you fully understand the context and the process. And so I think I only say that, Veronica, as an example of when there is full understanding, then sometimes there can be really high enthusiasm and goodwill from an audience. It doesn't have to always be goodwill. It can be an alternative. When you're not, when they're grown up, those same kids grown up, I think that the goodwill can be replaced with other things. But it can be, it can come, I think, yeah, going back to that other point, I think coming from understanding and maybe that's a, that's a role of the artist to spend more time working out how they can convey what they think needs to be known about that artwork, not just the artistic outcomes, for example, and finding interesting ways to enter into a dialogue with the audience, maybe beforehand, maybe as a, as a ramping into the work, maybe as a conversation after or whatever. I think just judging it on the work itself is always going to be troubling for someone. Jenny, I'd like to move on to your comment, but I just want to first ask Asher if you'd like to reply. Yeah, I think so. I think it's probably like, I really appreciate the distinction and I think it's great to call that out because I don't think I mean bad theater in a vague term. I think theater that bothers me the most is unthinking theater and theater that does not engage with its purpose. And so last week was the 25th anniversary of a pretty horrific event in Tasmanian history, which all of Australia saw, which was the Port Arthur massacre where 35 people were killed by a gunman. It led to the gun laws which Australia has now, which is something good that is an outcome, but a horrific event and a kind of, Australia's kind of most violent historical gun crime. And last night I went to the theater and I saw a local company stage the play Gloria and I'm not sure if anybody's familiar with Gloria at once awards in the States, but it is centered around a massacre in an office in a New York publishing house. And that show that show last night told the story of the play but did not acknowledge its context in Tasmanian. It made no reference in the program. It made no attempt to kind of bridge the gap to what relevance that has to us here, what it means to tell that story here and now, the week after we're commemorating this, you know, active violence. And for me that was unthinking. That was a chance to make a show that connected to a community and people here. And it didn't need like they didn't need to do good accents. They didn't need to stage it well. They just needed to think about who they're telling that story for and why that story should be told. And so, yeah, I agree there's like lots and lots of criteria we can measure from, but so to step back like that's what I, that's the shorthand that I am trying to sum up when I say bad theater there that doesn't think about what it's, what it's doing and where it's doing it. And this is, you know, I think that this is what applied to it. It doesn't very, very well. It's very clear about what it's doing and where it's doing it. That seems to segue really perfectly into what your comment is Jenny. Do you want to unmute yourself? Yeah, I think Asha came to me then that rather than bad theater we should think about lazy theater that it's lazy and that it's not making those connections. I just made a comment about the fact of we training a lot of us as educators in this space. We're training new young performers. We're training them in skills as actors or in theater makers and theater creators. But perhaps we also need to maybe be spending more time than we do at the moment in getting them to think critically about what they're seeing and to be demanding more of that as an audience. I'm certainly a little like what you said James about theater in Melbourne, which is where I am. I don't go to see the major theater companies because I don't want to spend a lot of money going to a play which has not been thought through properly as you just said Asha about that or directors got I've got a great idea let's set you know Shakespeare's play in this particular context but actually haven't thought about it at all and you've got lots of money in the person right next to you who's in a wonderful big job with lots of money sits down and goes to sleep and they've paid $90 for the ticket that's not what theater is about but I think audiences aren't critical enough in this country or pushing us enough to demand something that has a resonance from the work and I guess that's just me thinking through what's my job as an educator with young people that may not have seen a lot of theater don't go and go oh yeah that's great just because it cost me $150 and had lots of moving parts it's great theater not necessarily so just trying to get those cogs kind of working which is you know for me as well thanks for that yeah again do you want to oh so Frank mentioned that perhaps we should be using the terms uh unthinking or thoughtless uh theater instead of uh instead of bad that seems I think it was Asha's point I was agreeing with Asha oh yeah I had it thoughtless which is just a synonym yes yes indeed um um genny uh I like I like lazy as well I think that's that's good yeah I guess I was agreeing and I'm the same lad and trying to find that I was also kind of um riffing on and according back to I think a point that James made um about the frustration of not feeling like you're a part of that community um or not finding the points of access and I'm now sitting here wondering whether that maybe isn't the exact political function that this work could potentially serve is that I think our expectation of the contract between performing audiences usually founded in some kind of process of identifying with its proximity it's all these things and I wonder whether that that breaking of the aesthetic frame of this kind of theater whether we read that as um you know the implication of bad theater tactics or whatever it might be is to position us exactly in that place where we recognize that we are in a context we're engaged with people who ultimately um for various reasons of statehood and you know we can discuss those ad nauseam are actually within a classroom economy um that positions them radically differently to where we ourselves are sitting so I wonder if that constant breaking of the frame is because the work doesn't meet our tastes or it doesn't need you know the aesthetic markers of good theater of of I like this lazy theater term as well I think it's it's it's more precise analytically um is about that being the utopian gesture of this this theater that fakes right is that the failure is the work um it's that that refusal to allow us to slip into the fantasy that we might occupy the same subject positions of people and perhaps as a function of that begin ignoring the very real kind of national global economies of causality right that have produced this this this scenario in the very first place I mean no good someone's saying something James uh no I'm just I just uh no stay with it because I want to take it somewhere else I think but I mean I just feel like provoking myself and and you now in response to that I mean I think to what end oh everyone's gone can you see me still yeah yes to what end you know those those exercises of the imagination um in terms of utopia and theater making are you know the stuff that we're all I think familiar with as starting points and sometimes as endpoints of our work um and if you apply that I mean we're getting in these terms about bad theater and lazy lazy theater or um thought thoughtless theater you know maybe brave theater or whatever they're they are intentions right you know they they don't necessarily have embedded modes of of of gauging outcomes or um successes necessarily and um they they're aspirational and I think we don't necessarily all want aspirational theater in my case I you know I I accidentally in the last work I made which was very problematic I think but I I decided that we accidentally landed on a potentially a strategy that could be applied to parole in it definitely not in this current climate but we landed on this thing basically which was an interview technique which I decided I'm going to pursue that and see if I can put some structure and formality around it and write it down and get some academics on board and put it down for posterity and try and plug it that you know one day maybe this this is not applied but you know if you want to buy the book you can um maybe one day someone will go you know what we should try that weird theater thing out because our parole office is not working that well why don't we try that interview technique that those theater guys made up yeah now that sounds far-fetched I don't think it is I really don't think it is I've worked in a parole office and I know there are imaginative people in there I guess my point is when you have aspirations inside an artistic context I think it's it's um it's a fun idea and an important idea to see how you can peg that to the wall somehow and see where it sticks because the life of an artistic work we all know has limits um it's just comes and goes and it doesn't really necessarily mean that much socially in some ways but if you can crystallize something into something that's applicable then you can you can gauge what you're not able to gauge inside the art making process I've just never been it's impossible to know whether you've made anything that's worth anything when you're making art but if you if you sort of join a line from something you're making out into a measurable something that you care about in my case criminal justice then you've got this sort of parallel universe that you can um crystallize these this work this good work that you're making in the real world I mean I say the real world that can be the stage too but um I think that that's one of my ambitions anyway I'm trying to work out ways of doing that um and of course I'm not the first um Nikita sorry has had her hand up for a long time and I'm sorry did she just disappear Nikita did you want to unmute yourself right here yes yes I'm here um I actually wanted to speak right after Jenny because she brought up a really good point so I practice in India and um I've I've I have had conducted workshops in correction homes and specially worked with women um in correction centers and I think what I struggled with is that it is intentional theater I understand that in India I think it's different because the authorities themselves don't understand it so a lot of time there's a lot of um backlash from the authority saying why do you want to do this what's the point of corrective justice and um to actually add to that another point is that there aren't spaces that also train you for it so when I began I think seven years back the biggest problems I've faced was I did not also know how to I was facilitating but I also knew that I was filling myself with a lot of stories and there weren't avenues to go and take care of myself at times um also something I constantly worried about was what if I opened a can of worms that I wasn't even prepared to handle um I figured ways out in India there aren't many places that you can actually get trained for applied arts um so now whenever I work I make sure that I work with a psychologist or a counselor in the room so that if a can of worms is open there is someone to handle that but something I still do struggle with is when I'm filled up to the brim I really don't know where to take that and I worry that it might affect the work um and so I was just wondering if if there are any thoughts on that Nikita thank you so much that's such an interesting experience James you mentioned how messy it is when you get involved in these projects yeah um yeah hi Nikita I I'd say that I mean we've probably been doing it for the similar amount of time Nikita seven years is about this amount of time I've been making theater in prison I think I guess I came to it with some um having encountered a bunch of these stories before I did it so I was I wasn't desensitized but I I saw a lot and heard a lot working in prison that prepared me I guess but I think it's hard to you know in in parole there was the system for decompressing was to talk to colleagues because they know the territory and so you just find yourself recounting these horrific stories and that was part of the culture and that helped somehow so I would say that talking to someone about them who you trust is is a good start um and there's obviously you know you have to think about your own ethics about about that and what you can say and can't say and um but I think it's important for you if you want to keep doing the work that you have some way of um sharing it because it can be really hard can it yeah yeah that does that James thank you I think that's also what I'm just by instinct do that I talk to I make sure that I have a therapist who can take care of me so that I am also ready to then take care of the work that I'm doing I can share I can share a couple little tricks of mine which I'm happy to tell you which are just part of my practice and when I'm working with prison I'm going to work with prisoners I am I have a couple of rules and one is that they can tell the truth or lie at any time and that way I don't know if this horrific story is theirs or if it's really happened or it's just something they want to express so that gives also I mean also you've got to think about them gives them space to tell or not tell or tell in a particular way because I think when we go in as theatre makers they think that we want everything we want to know all the gory details and so I think you I've tried to make boundaries myself and tell them upfront you don't have to tell me a story you um you're working with me as an artist and we're going to work on making art together so sometimes that's helped that's a wonderful thank you so much for sharing that yeah that's great and Nikita you've seen um uh Veronica's uh reference to Sheila Preston yes I'm just looking okay so I think uh I think we are at our limit in terms of our time we don't have a hard stop in this um discussion we can have a a post post show discussion so no one no one needs to leave but I think it's a great for me too at this point thank very much my two guests uh James uh Brennan and Asher Warren thank you so much for joining so much so much for having us both I felt the real great pleasure to be in this room with all of you so everywhere thank you to the room for all of the wonderful remarks and participation it's just been a really nourishing evening and I wanted to mention that uh we have decided to make a bit of a shift at unrehearsed teachers and put a call out um to people in the room if they would like to co-facilitate with us especially if they have people in mind that they would like to invite onto the discussion um that we can actually start collaborating with you because it is not our intention to create a weekly webinar but rather to create an ongoing discussion um with people becoming more and more um having more and more echo you sort of echo effect of previous discussions and of deeper and deeper enriched field of conversation so I'm going to put um the email address of my organization info at embodypoetics.org into the chat um please if you have any ideas if you'd like to um co-facilitate with me or or one of my wonderful co-curators at any point we do get in touch and suggest yourself that would be a great pleasure to us to hear from you so um thank you so much to DSM and to Falguni for um the continuing support of this project and to my fellow curators Jehan and Gany and Wenya thank you for being here tonight there there's um Gany's email as well and um I think we will close with that and as I said uh I'm just going to stick around so if you'd like to you can too