 I have a territorial welcome that I also want to read for you today. Just getting Gary right on my end. I had a flashback to grade eight just there. Spiderweb show performance and folder acknowledge that the venues for our activities today and the rest of the week are situated on the traditional Anishinaabe and Harushahti territory. We're grateful to be able to live, learn, and play on these lands. As artists engaged with digital technologies that expand how time and space are perceived and experienced, we also acknowledge the many traditional territories across Turtle Island and the indigenous nations that predate European colonization of these lands. We look to the south and acknowledge the borders that were made by settlers who saw this land as the empty. We look to the east, where the Bayotuk Nation was decimated. We look to the west and acknowledge our ancestors' efforts to eliminate indigenous people using hunger, disease, cruelty, and violence. We look to the north, where the land itself softens under the effects of consumerism. We acknowledge that the digital tools that we use daily to communicate, to make our art, and to bring you all here today are privileges that are not available to many rural and indigenous communities across Turtle Island. We consider our role in reconciliation, and we ask you to do the same. Thank you. My name is Michael Wheeler. I'm the Artistic Director of SpiderWood Show. My name is Adrian Wong. I am the Festival Director and Co-Curator, and there's one person missing today. And that's Sarah Stanley, Sarah Carton Stanley. Many of you may know her. She has been just a bigger part of us putting this festival together. She's not here today because she's opening a rather large show at the Luminato Festival called Out the Window, but she'll be here later in the festival, but just to acknowledge that for better, for worse, whatever you see is the three of us made that happen together. For better, for better. Yeah, and mostly for better. SpiderWood Show started, the Genesis of SpiderWood Show was a dramaturgical question, which was what is the state of Canadian theater now? And it was an aspirational question. Obviously, you can't really ever answer that question because now it's changing, and it's now, and then it's now, and it's now. So you never really know the answer to that question. And over the past five years, we've found a lot of ways into trying to answer that question. So we've had podcasts, we've had a magazine, we've invented a technology, we've done different experiments with how to use the Internet, and eventually all of those experiments drove us to create this festival. And so we really see Fulda as another attempt to answer the question, what is the state of Canadian theater now, and now being the digital era? I just wanted to acknowledge a couple of other people that have been really important to the creation of SpiderWood Show. Obviously, the three of us have been in a leadership role, but over the five years Laurel Green, Christine Quintana, Allison Bowie, Joel Adria, Camila Diaz-Varela, and Catherine McKay have all contributed significant efforts to getting us here. And I would also throw in the over 200 artists across Canada who have written for our magazine over the last five. And I just wanted to mention kind of what are we doing here? We ended up in Kingston. None of us were from Kingston when we started this project five years ago. Well, Sarah. Well, that's so funny. I mean, she has a house. She does have a house here. She sleeps here, we saw that. And yes, and sometimes she lays her head here. But I think, you know, she committed more to being here, and obviously I've moved here, you're here now. And it really revolves around this idea that we would like to create an arts organization that can provide the participants with a reasonable standard of living and a reasonable life. And that this is a real challenge to us as artists that success seems embedded in 80 hour weeks in poor nutrition and low wages. And that we've come here to try to build something that is going to create great art. And if not great art, great experiments, great attempts at art. And that the people involved perhaps live wholesome and fulsome lives. And so just wanted to mention that that's really embedded in the core of what we're trying to do here. Also part of the core of what we're doing here at the festival is showing work at multiple stages of development. So you're seeing things at our alpha stage, which are like first experiments. Those are, you know, anybody's guess whether they're going to work or not. They might, they might not. But those we know as artists that those first steps are critical to getting to the next step. So that's one of the things we really wanted to do is give artists the support to try things to fail and to bring things back multiple years. So you may see something in an alpha stage this year that you'll see next season next year because we'll be back next year, bring all your friends, that in a more fulsome state. And we're not here because we think digital is awesome and we think everybody should move into the digital realm. We're actually here because digital is here and it's changing the way that people are seeing art, are experiencing art. It's changing their expectations of what happens when they experience art and engage with ideas. And we as a community need to start, not to start, I shouldn't say like that. We, we want to provide opportunities to grapple with that. See, what does that mean to live performance? Great. I also just want to mention all of our wonderful team members. You can kind of tell them, many of them are wearing full of t-shirts, but I just want to give them a shout out. When I say your name, you can put up your hands so they know who you are. So Jeff McGilton is our associate producer. Katie Reddy-Walters is a volunteer and outreach coordinator. Madison Limer, transportation, food and accommodation. It's a very full file that Madison is handling. Naseem Loloie is our videographer. Mariah Horner is our digital content producer and she's also our Metcalf Foundation intern for the year. Remington North is the festival technical director and production manager. Clayton Baraniak is our access coordinator and Bridget Gohuli is the festival producer. I think she's managing the table up there, but you probably met Bridget on your way in. That's right. So the festival itself is an experiment. I would say that we are in alpha stage and you are our test users. One of the experiments we're running is by, is running the festival off of Slack. All festival communications are off Slack. I know that there are some who stand in resistance to that technology and that is okay. But just know that if you need somebody quickly, you can message all of us who are on the team through Slack. The daily schedules will be put out in that way. If you're not using Slack, you can find somebody who is and ask them a question and say, get me Adrian. And I think just to communicate the motivation for that, what is a digital festival for us that stretched into what is the infrastructure to the festival as well and how could we create all the tools that one needs for a festival without printing a whole bunch of things on paper and that we found that Slack was the singular solution that allowed us to avoid all of the paper that usually comes. You'll notice that normally when you come to a festival, you get a big kind of duo tang with a whole bunch of stuff in it and all you got is this and that was very intentional because we feel like everything that you would get in that package you can find on our Slack channel. But we still printed out our notes. We did. So you see, we're on the cusp of change. Unable to fully commit. It's about light though because I've seen so many people get up in front of people before and pull out their lights and their cell phone and then if you're in a speeder like this, it's washed out and then you're in a lot of trouble. Yeah, sure. That's fine, yeah. I wanted to mention a couple other things. Festival bar. The alibi is our festival bar. A bunch of us went there last night. Very nice. And so at the end of each night, a trolley comes here and goes straight to the alibi. So if you want to have a beer, it's super easy. You just literally need to get on the trolley and it deposits you at the bar. Yes, they have food at night. There is a menu so you can have your late night snacks. And the other kind of housekeeping items just to bring up the date is every day there's a schedule. It will come out on Slack the day before. The meal times are listed in the schedule. Trollies take us between anything. So you see on anything in the schedule, it's like, oh, that's not here. There is some sort of transport organized to take you there. It's almost always a trolley, I believe. Or you're welcome to make it there on your own. You know, obliged to take the trolley. But just to know that if it's not here, we have a plan to get you there. And today there is a bit of a complication in that we have Facing the Street, which is a walking tour with podcasts in the late afternoon, early evening. And some of you will be booked for Good Things to Do during that. And so if you have a Good Things to Do slot, the trolley will take you up to the Facing the Street after you've had your Good Things to Do slot. So we've thought about that just if you're worried about having that conflict in your schedule. Don't worry. Oh, this is me. Yes. If you're looking for washrooms and you haven't found them already, they're out to the left end of the hall there. You may have noticed that there are no breaks scheduled into the schedule. And that's because Sarah Stanley made it. She's not joking. No, but seriously. All of our sessions... Did you get that, Ramona? All of our sessions are relaxed sessions. So the doors are going to stay open. The house lights are going to stay up. If you need to take a break and take care of water, self-care, sunshine, you need to get out of the room, please do take care of yourselves. Take the breaks that you need to take for those who will be speaking up on the different conversations. It's not personal. It's not about you. It's about our people. And we can create that space for each other where we can take care of ourselves. The times outlined for each session are soft targets. If we are finding that the conversation is coming to a natural close, then I will end that. And we can go and stretch our legs. If we feel like we're moving past our time, we do have a little bit of leniency. But with our trolley schedules, there will be times where I may have to like call it to a close and head out to catch the bus. Great. Of course, I should mention all the people that have made this possible. It obviously takes a village. And so here's some people in the village who have money and resources and believed in this project. First to the Isabel Bader Center for the Performing Arts for Making Spider Web Show, Artists in Residence this year. The Queens University Dance School of Music and Drama. Also Queens University's Department of Film and Media. Plank, who is our digital and graphic partner. So awesome Plank. Not only build our website, but they designed our logo. And I'm really happy with how the whole thing works together. The Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts, Canada Summer Jobs, the City of Kingston, the Metcalf Foundation, the National Arts Center, and you for being here with us today. Yes. So good. You can even contribute more if you're so inclined. We have an Indiegogo, which you will find on Slack. There's t-shirts at all kinds of stuff that you can get. There are levels of rewards. And just to get us off stage, I just want to say hi to our friends on the internet. And thank you to our friends from HowlRound. We're streaming this conversation in the next one to the world. And I think at Spider Web Show, we feel a deep affinity to the HowlRound organization as kind of an American version of what we're doing. And it's really nice to have you here and broadcasting this first thing to the internet. Thank you. Thank you. On with the show. On with the show. Okay. So that didn't take too long. All right. So I'm going to introduce our first conversationalists today. I'm going to move my computer so that they have a place to sit. I'm not going to read the full bio. The bios are all on the website. But I want to introduce Andrew DeCruz, the executive producer of CBC Arts and the exhibitionists. Andrew, come on up. And I want to introduce Donna Michelle St. Bernard, playwright, activist, mover and shaker, award-winning playwright. Come on in. I arrived. You arrived. Everything is here. Hi. Hi, Andrew. Hi. Nice to meet you. Are you on Slack? I'm not. No, sorry. So we were actually just trying to figure out who's starting. It looks like it's me because I see some logos. So that means me. So hi. Our conversation is about disruption. And I think there's a lot of different ways that we're going to take that. But I'm going to start by talking about how it applies to what we do, what I do, and we will go from there. And then we'll hear about some interesting things from you as well. I am very excited. So I'm Andrew DeCruz. I am the executive producer of CBC Arts and CBC Arts Exhibitionists, which is a TV show. And CBC Arts is a digital content vertical to use the horrible jargon. And I just want to talk a little bit about what we are, why we are, why we do, what we do, and how it might be different from what CBC has traditionally done with the arts. So I'm going to start by asking who here remembers the TV show, Opening Night? Anyone here? We got one. We got one. Cool. So it ran from 2000 to 2007. It was a primetime broadcast show on CBC and it really shone like a spotlight on the capital A arts, you know, classical music, ballet, theater, lots of performance, lots of, you know, feature documentary, that kind of thing. And it had a pretty small but pretty loyal audience. I was part of that audience. I was sad, like a lot of people were sad in 2007 when that show ended. And for a while, the arts program at CBC was mostly, you know, we had a lot of great radio shows, we had a lot of good news stories. We didn't really have a focused strategy around the arts. In 2015, we launched CBC Arts. You know, it sounds like I think it's always existed. It just sounds like your public broadcasts are in the word arts together. But this version of CBC Arts was an attempt to do something a little different, an attempt to make arts content in arts programming that was really catered to the way that we saw people were actually consuming it these days. So basically, make arts content for, I don't know, what screen do you look at most of the time? Your phone, right? Your laptop, probably your phone. If you're a turbo nerd, maybe one of these things, but like, no one actually uses them but me. And so, that is what we did. And I want to show you on the next slide, Adrian. Hopefully this will play and hopefully a lot of audio a little bit about what we did. Oh, no. Really? Well, I won't show you that. It's our really sweet trailer. Yes, I'm sorry. That's okay. Want to give it one more try? Is it something I can find online? Yeah, but it might take a sec, so don't worry about it. But imagine a really cool trailer with lots of amazing imagery, disruptive artists. You know what, can we just all react to the trailer? Yeah. Oh. And most of all, our awesome host, Amanda Parris, who is not that lovely lady there. It's a different person and is really cool and you would have been all charmed by her, sadly. You cannot be charmed by her right now. Let's continue, shall we? Cool. All right, here's some real quick mission statement ease. So, we're a conduit to bring Canadians closer to the most interesting and inspiring and shareable art and artists. And I'm going to talk about what that all means in this act. So, let's keep going. Here are our values. We are fresh. We are diverse, both in our staffing and in our content. We are distinct. We are irreverent. And we are where the audience lives. So, here is a little bit about what we make. And there are actually, I think, no more videos that we need to watch, so we should be good. Next. So, what do we do? We make videos. So, this right here is from a piece from a series we did called The Move. It is, you know, six dancers tell us about the move that changed their life. They first realized, you know, oh, I could be a dancer. All right? I figured out this thing that no one has ever done before. And this is a young, but I'm not the young dancer. And she had a really beautiful, lovely story. And so, a really talented producer on my team, you know, shot this five-ish minute profile video of her. But as we know, disruption, things are people don't consume stories the way they used to. Five minutes sounds pretty short. But really, people watch videos that are like 60 seconds. And so, we make a version of this that goes on Facebook that's 60 seconds long. And it's optimized for people who are just doing this thing. They're scrolling. And we want to stop their scrolling. We want them to be able to watch it. Their sound is probably off. We want them to be able to understand what's happening without sound on. So, that's kind of what we do to our videos sometimes. And if you go to the next slide, we also do this thing, which is what you guys probably look at all the time. We make Instagram stories out of them. So, we went from like a five-minute video, which in the old days might have been like a 45-minute profile. So, a five-minute video. We cut it down to a one-minute thing. And then we do these Instagram stories, which are like, I don't know, 30 seconds of content maybe. And what we're doing is we are where the audience lives. So, we know that this is not the full story about her. Hopefully, the people will swipe up and learn a lot more about her. And her story is really beautiful. And her dancing is just sublime, particularly her facial expressions. But we know that we have to also be where people are actually consuming this stuff. And we're not just there because we're trying to, like, grab a slice of their attention or whatever. We're there because we know people actually want to engage with this kind of content. And, you know, can't often do it, because most people are not going to be in Toronto during the two weeks a year that she might be performing or more, but still. Right. Next slide. We also make videos in other ways. So, we have a great team. It's a very small team. We also work with freelancers across the country. We have a small army that's making incredible videos for us. This is one of them. It's part of a series that we did called Canada is a Drag. And you can kind of guess what it's probably about. We saw that there was this incredible appetite for RuPaul's Drag Race. I don't know who. Anyone here watch RuPaul's Drag Race? Yes. One, two, three, four, a few. It's super popular for lots of reasons. And heck knows, we're not going to be able to do the same kind of thing in Canada, but we know that there's all kinds of incredible drag performers in Canada. And very few of them have actually had, like, high and high production video pieces made about them of any kind. And, you know, while they're legends in their cities, they are known by everyone. You know, they have this incredible history that can tell you about their city. And so we thought, you know, drag performers were a great lens to explore that. This series, Canada's a Drag. Do we have, yes. Our drag performers are Sashing the Spotlight. I just want to blur this. The Mary version from Edmonton, who was wearing this unbelievable Euler's jersey with a fishnet combo, which is, like, my favorite thumbnail image of all time. We keep going. We make articles. This is an article. This is an article about a public art project. And it's the kind of thing where, you know, you put a headline on it. You can scroll through it. It gives you kind of a taste of some cool art thing that you might want to go learn more about later and experience for yourself in person. Next. And we also make, oh yeah, that thing called TV shows. So on the left there is CBC Arts Exhibitionist. There is Amanda Parris, who is a little static here. She's not talking to you, as she might have been earlier. But the way this TV show works is we make all these cool videos, and then Amanda, on a weekly basis, takes you through a curated selection of them. These are the ones that are, you know, we take four or five that fit one theme, and Amanda is your host who brings you through it. So what we are disrupting here is the conventional model of TV. I've worked on lots of TV shows before, where you make a TV show, you cut it up in bits, and you feed those bits to the internet. We are doing the opposite. We are making things for the internet, and then we are pacing them together, pacing them together, I don't know, bad metaphor, with Amanda as your guide to this incredible world. There's some other great TV shows that we also put out, but I won't go through them now. We also do live events. This is The Secret Path, which was the Gord Downey collaboration of the story of Cheney Wenjack, the anime film after the film played. We had this conversation called The Road to Reconciliation, and it was talking, these were different indigenous writers and artists, and they were just talking about the artist's responsibility or job, or if there is such a thing with regard to this question of reconciliation. What I really loved about it, it was a live event on stage. It was at the CBC Broadcasting Center at the Glenwold in Toronto, but we had a real kind of beautiful dialogue with people online too. It was live streamed on the internet. It was live streamed on Facebook and YouTube, and like you do a lot of these things, we had people reading the comments that were coming in from the internet, and usually they're garbage. There's a lot of really horrible comments, and it breaks my heart, especially on indigenous stories, the horrible, disgusting comments that we get. But on this, we had a real, genuine, beautiful interaction where people were sharing their own personal stories of survivors from residential school, or children of them, and asking really good questions and then having this really esteemed panel kind of respond in the moment, and I really was quite inspired by that. I can say that because we did this before I was officially working on CBC Arts, so I was just part of the audience, and I was just really moved by it, so I'm not just tuning my own horn. Continuing, and then just a selection of some other cool things we do. Artists My Country is a digital series of sort of mid-career artists who all come from different places around the world have come to Canada, so immigrants, refugee stories. One person is an indigenous artist who was like moving to Montreal, was like immigrating to her, coming from her own community. At the bottom there is a series called Creative Lines of Talks. On the left are three images from an episode that a partnership we did with the Winnipeg Art Gallery on the show that they had called Insurgents Resurgence. Is there anyone from Winnipeg here? Now, it was the largest, oh, Winnipeg, the largest show of contemporary indigenous art in Canada, and so we went there in the special on location sort of looking at each of those artists. And continuing. And like I said, we are where the audience lives, and the audience lives on all these little screens. So middle ones are our website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, yeah. And we also, you know, you can watch everything online on our website. So a digital first approach. This is like flipping the way that we do TV. Instead of building things around television, we're building things around what people actually spend their time doing. My boss took this photo on the bus, and she saw like every single person is staring at their phone. And you know, for good and ill, I think it's both. But if we don't engage with that reality, then you know, we're missing an opportunity and we're also, you know, not doing a service to the artists who are trying to shine a spotlight on. We find that we need to nurture and grow younger audiences and creators. This is like a thing that CBC is obsessed with because most of our core audiences are a bit older, and that's fine and that's great and we're really happy to have them, but we also need to know that people, you know, my age and younger can also find a home with their public broadcaster, which they're paying for. So we're really, you know, concerned to be serving those audiences too. And then this last thing. When we launched CBC Arts, we didn't really know what's the mix of content that's going to resonate with people. We did a lot of different things. We tried to be through a lot of things against the wall. And blessedly, some of the things that worked really well were the things that really engaged with diverse communities that were underrepresented. I think the reason that we did that is that we had so many people on our team who were from those communities who could bring those stories. My senior producer is a Filipino descent and as a result has brought this unbelievable, amazing overrepresentation of Filipino Canadian stories, which was really a thing on Canadian TV and we're really happy. And as a result, the second most popular city for our Facebook page is Manila, which is great for CBC Arts. I'm thrilled. I think it's not too many more, but it was true in season one. And I'm thrilled that that's the case. And so, again, we found that not only is there, there is, we have a responsibility to serve these underserved communities and I absolutely believe that as a person who is from such a community, but I also think it's a digitalist this unbelievable opportunity to do so because the means of production are cheaper and we can really try and reach out and have more organic partnerships with them. And so the last thing I want to have here is this next slide. This quote here, this is in survey after survey and research after research from big art institutions in Canada. This is like the number one reason why people don't engage with the arts. I didn't think this was for someone like me. And I think what we're finding is as we turn our focus on all these different underserved communities, whether it's drag performers, whether it's the Filipino community, we find, oh, if you, I mean, it's the most basic thing ever. If you see someone who looks kind of like you, you might start to think, oh, maybe this is for someone like me and sort of pull people into this larger arts conversation. So I think that's all that I wanted to say. I had some lessons. I'm not going to go through them all, but I think the most important things here are serve the communities that need you and listen, publish, iterate, repeat. Every six months, everything that I know about the internet changes and is wrong and we have to try it again and try a new thing. And so that's why the last point be humble, because the second that you think that you know how to do digital, you're dead. So yeah, that's me. Awesome. Thank you. I just need to write down. Yeah. Be of service to the awesome. Yeah. I mean, not everything we do is serious, weighty topics. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's really beautiful art that's spinning. And that will give you a second of not thinking about certain presidents who you don't want to think about, because you're thinking about them every other second of your day. So, be awesome. You know, there are... It's a real service to people, I think. Thank you for your service. I don't know. Cool. I'm going to pretend you didn't just tell us a bunch of stuff and talk about myself now. Yeah. I hate talking about stuff. You do that. Yeah. This is me at a dinner party. That's fascinating, so what I'm working on. So, I... This is an interesting place for me to be because for me, technology in my practice is disruption. Just the suggestion of it. I have the best face for anyone who suggests any technology in my work. And I guess that's my starting place in regard to disrupting the status quo is acknowledging and being in my discomfort because the nature of my work is to ask other people to be in their discomfort because of a thing I need to talk about that they might not want to hear. So, I want to love it, y'all. I want to. It's slow. There's a lot of reasons why I don't immediately take to all the digital support that is available for storytelling. And one of them is... I just didn't think that forms like that were for people like me. It's true. We're pulling a thread through people. I'm working here. But it is absolutely true. And sorry, I'm going to talk about myself a bunch. I know I told you that. I'm now just saying it again to reassure myself that that's fine, because that's the things I know about. And I can't talk about myself without quoting my mother. So, let's start early with that. Once upon a time, my mother was like, you never know where you are or are supposed to be. Could you just write it in a calendar? And I was like, not really, because if I could do that, I'd probably be where I was supposed to be. And I'm just not a calendar person. I'm not an organized person. I'll write down things and then do them. And she reframed it for me, annoying, and said, but for people that know where they're supposed to be, they don't need calendars. Like, the calendar is a tool. It's for you. It's for you, because you don't know where you're supposed to be. Please use the tool and show up at the thing that you said you'd be at, please. And so, like, I sort of am... That's a life principle for me, a tool that I resist, because it seems like it's for other people, is often to bring me closer to achieving the full capacity that comes more naturally to some other people. And there are ways that that can bring me closer to my vision for a project. Slack is not that way. But there are many ways that that could be more useful to me. Majdi Bumitar once said at an impact conference, when you write a grant to produce theater, if you wrote a grant to produce theater and you had no lighting designer, you'd have to explain why your play happened in the dark. And that it was his feeling at that time, people change, I don't know if it continues to be his feeling, that we should have to explain any time there is not digital arts in our production design, that we should have to explain why there is not projection in this piece or there is not amplification in this piece. I thrive on disagreeing with Majdi, but it's an intriguing thought. It is an intriguing question about what is it for and what is it not for. So I primarily create theater and hip-hop, and it is my relationship with stories that each story calls for its own form, because my central body of work is the 54ology in which I attempt to create an artistic response to each nation-state on Constantile Africa. There have to be at least half that many ways of going about it. I can't tell 54 stories in the same shape, or they're probably 54 of the same story. And so I try to understand from, I try to move from the story through what I want to achieve with the story into what shape of storytelling is most likely to achieve that outcome or to deliver the aspects of the story that moved me when I first came to understand that story. And so in that way, I guess I'm forced to engage with all the tools that are available in order to have any hope of achieving a quarter of this lofty goal. So I got to talk to an incredible Saskatoon artist named Joey Tromblay recently, and he spoke about, and he was probably quoting someone else who I cannot attribute this to. I apologize if he was talking about the way that we've come to conflate the word style with aesthetic. When people say that's not my aesthetic, they really mean that's not my look. And Joey broke it down into, which I will mangle, and aesthetic is actually an artistic ethic. And then having that ethic often results in a style, but that those two things are not the same thing, even though there may be a causal relationship between them. And so for me, this comes into how the way that I'm telling the story replicates what the story is about. If I'm going to be asking actresses to come in and perform a story about sexual exploitation of young girls, that better be a really safe room to be in. I cannot have a replication or a hint of the thing that we are addressing within the process of what we're working on. And in a lot of ways the ethic that informs the art is not going to be visible on stage, and that's not the thing that we're working on, because that's about the look. It's about what's actually happening. So as much as I've been resistant to working with technology in terms of projection, amplification, and streaming, I recognize that a lot of that is about control and the way that if my video didn't play, I would just cry and run out. Because I am a child, and that is frustrating. I'm going to do that later, it's fine. Are you? I'll stroke the air above your hair because I respect your personal space. Will that be comforting? So that is quite horrifying to me, partly because projection, for example, is a language of the production. And a piece dropping out of the show for me is like if an actor started speaking the lines and dropped every fourth word. I would just be like, curtain down! Curtain down! No! That's the opposite of the thing I... I'm continuing because that's how shows go, that's fine. And I understand that too, and I appreciate that. But I also really want to run out there and explain what I meant. And I feel like that's one of the places where technology is... where I'm starting to become more capable of being engaged. I have no sense of time. You picked that up, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're just going to give me a minute, thanks. So, okay, a couple of shows that I've worked on recently. You guys will probably think it's hilarious what I think engagement with digital forms is. That's okay. I'm hilarious and adorable. I recently got to tour with Pandemic Theatre. They showed The Only Good Indian, which has a projection screen that we pop stills up on. It's mostly a stand-and-deliver lecture performed by different performer every night. And the stage, the set is a chair and a music stand with a laptop on it. And we just walk over to it and go, here's a picture. I'm talking about it. It's gone. I'm talking about another thing now. Okay, awesome for control. 10 points for control. 10 points for... If it didn't happen, I'm not sure... I should wait 10 more seconds because that guy might be about to push the button. No, it's all me. I didn't push the... I did push it, nothing's happening. I'll move on now. That was super-duper comfortable for me because of the directness, because of the more steps I am away from the technology, the more a mistake that may or may not be my fault cannot be addressed by me. And so that actually really helped me understand and appreciate the way that this visual language that is now accompanying what I'm saying, without me saying, what you're looking at and this is what it is, gave information that I was not actually able to speak and that would have taken longer than a festival slot to talk about. That there's so much visual coding and signaling that goes on in that kind of material, that when it's used in that way as an integral element, if any of those pictures had dropped out, I would have probably kept talking. Yeah, I would have. I always keep talking. The use of my story would have been missing and if that were not the case, I would resent the presence of those visuals because that would have felt like I was reading a children's book. And then there was like, and then we also used a microphone. I lied, there were three things on stage. And so I'm an emcee. I'm a hip-hop emcee that's like a rapper, but for realsies. It's like a rapper all day, every day. And so I do know, I have mic control. I have a mic in the studio. I know how to use a mic on stage. But in the theater, because I'm not a trained actor and I'm self-conscious about that, I do not want to use a mic on stage. It feels like cheating. It feels like refusing to project. And so at first they were like, oh, sometimes use the mic. And I'm like, no. I'm doing it like a realsies actor. And then I yelled a bunch. And it wasn't very good. And I realized that I took for granted a concert. You mostly want to be yelling. It's very exciting. Everyone's looking at you in those lights. But when I'm in a studio, I do a lot more emotional range vocally. Because I'm able to have that much more control. And in the telling of this particular story in The Only Good Indian, I came to understand how that intuitive way of using the mic in the studio was a layer of meaning on the story that was being told. Was a layer of communicating intimacy or outrage or reluctance to tell the portion of the story I'm telling. And that, specifically that piece of information, I'm reluctant to tell you the thing I'm going to tell you. Which is often, me standing alone on stage, that is often the subtext. I'm reluctant to communicate this thing, but I feel that it is necessary. I can give you access to that thing. That is a part of my ethic and my aesthetic. It is a part of my ethic to reluctantly get up on a stage and be uncomfortable as shit like I am right now. Because I feel like there's something that I want to say to you that is bigger than my feeling of discomfort. And that support allows me to do that. I'm going to move us to the next part of the conversation. Thank you so much. That's way better. Everything is awesome. And that was an arc, right? Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. So you said that each story calls for its own form. Yes. And you were talking a little bit about, sorry, it was called The Only Good Indian, isn't it? Yes. What about the story of The Only Good Indian, whatever the particular story was there, what about it called for that presentation, that laptop chair microphone presentation? Like what's the connection there between story or narrative or, you know, topic and that form? Great. Great. I'm now going to answer as if I've given this a lot of thought. It's a collaborative piece developed with Jevesh Peresram and Tom Arthur Davis. So that one's a little bit different than work that I work on on my own, but still I think had really clear reasons for its presentation. One of which is removing a veneer of performance from what is very clearly a performance. People came in. They sat down. They looked at us. The lights were on us. We were clearly the ones talking, but at the same time we were there speaking as ourselves. And while we wanted these other aspects, the visual and the amplification and all of that, there was obviously lighting design that helped to isolate moments for us and bump those moments up. We never wanted to be in character. There's something slick about being like, you know, I visited the place where my mom was born and the place where my mom was born pops up and you don't look at it and you don't acknowledge it. And you're not in a relationship with it. This is not like a quality judgment about either of those approaches, but it's different. It's a different setup. You're communicating something different. Yeah. So in that setup where a thing pops up and you don't even look at it, the subtext of that is now you're in my mind. You can see my things. Or you're controlling it. Yeah, like I control the universe that you are now in. When I think of a thing, you have it. And in this one, it was very much, I'm now choosing to deliver this thing to you right now. No bones. This is what I'm doing. I'm pressing this button. This thing is up. I'm going to see it. You're going to see it. We're all going to acknowledge that this thing has been brought into the room through these artificial means. And now we're going to move on with the story. So it's like a transparency kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But I think flows through into the personal nature of the stories that were being told. Because very much each of the performers was talking about things I haven't seen them or even myself talk about. That personal aspect of yourself being in the work was very unusually vulnerable. And then I think for me inside of the performance, there was this other character. And it was hard to be alone on stage. And so I was able to be like, you with me, picky? Cool. We're both in this together. That's why I had so many slides. Right? You have a relationship with a thing that you're referencing. It's something to lean on, yeah. Yeah. Has there ever been in your work a show where, you know, again, each story calls for its own form? Has there been a story that calls for a ton of digital? Like what is the most, you know, immersive, interactive, projection-y, whatever that you've ever had a story has called on? Because I mean, you're doing these 54 stories. Yeah. 54 copies. One of those is going to have to call on something super-digital, isn't it? Oh, it's coming. It's coming, right? It's coming. I'm moving towards it. I can say a short thing about Sound of the Beast without wanting to dominate this. That's what it is. Thank you. I know. I thought you were getting me there. It's also the thing I ran out of time to talk about. So we worked it. Yeah. Okay. So Sound of the Beast, another solo show. I swear I do shows with other people in them, like all the time. But it was another solo show. Yeah. This one. We're in it together. Hey, buddy. We're doing all right. So it was a solo show using hip-hop spoken word and monologue. I was responding to a story of a Tunisian emcee named Welldell 15 who made a song called Belicia Club, meaning the police are dogs, and then got a three-year jail sentence for performing that song. And then went on the run. Zoink. Very exciting stuff. And relating that to my experience with soft censorship and state control and police interactions. And a lot of it is to do with what is suppressed and what remains unspoken. So for that show, I wanted to collaborate with a deaf artist and get their perspective on all those themes, as well as the struggle to be heard. So we worked with Tamika Bullen. And in that particular show, I was incredibly stubborn. And Theater Passing by was incredibly accommodating of the desire to... So Tamika performed some of her own poetry in American Sign Language and was projected larger than life, so super-duper on stage buddy. And was captioned. And part way... So part of the ethic aesthetic consideration for that show was I resisted using existing easy or easier ways of captioning that cost money. Because I wanted to find a way to do this that I could do again on my own. Whether or not I had an accessibility budget. And I wanted to be just damn it about it's too expensive, we can't do it. So of course, then relying heavily on the labor and brains at Theater Passing by, we managed to get that done, only to realize then that if to make a word to invite anyone from her community to see her in the show, they would only be receiving her portion of the show. Because the show itself was not captioned. Partly because you could never guess what I was going to say for large chunks of it. And partly because I talked this fast. So it's really difficult to caption this and then to keep up with me. Which the team then did. We ended up doing a captioning experiment with open... I don't know the right words. Open access. Open source. Open source, is that the right thing to say? YouTube basically. Yeah, we used YouTube. I don't need smarter words for that. Thank you. That's the one I use every day. We use the YouTubes, yeah. And just figured out ways to do it that I think the main way we thought of was you not sleeping anymore Jim. Worked? Yeah, now that's just a tradition of life. Oh gosh. But yeah, so that's the most technology because again, in keeping with the themes of the show of amplifying voices, voices and creating access for communities that are suppressed for either practical or political reasons, was really important for deaf communities to be able to access the show and to make it to be understood because of course at first I was like, this is beautiful, don't translate it. Let them suffer. Let the hearing audience wonder what you're saying and she was like, oh, but I wrote words that I want people to know what they are. Exactly. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, ethics before style, right? Yes. That's before style. We just did a piece with Tamika too and it was such a consideration that we are not going to use her. When she performs her, she's an incredible performer and her body and her hands and her face speaking in ASL are incredibly compelling to watch but she's not doing these motions. She's not dancing. It's not a spectacle. She is communicating and it's so important not to use her really compelling looking speaking as just cool visual material because that's not what it is. She's speaking, right? So every time that she's speaking we had to consider exactly how we were captioning and how we're building the piece that a hearing or a deaf person watching it could understand it. Yeah, beautiful, right? And you also don't want to place the captioning in such a way that you miss any of her performance which is often the case. Captioning is often far, far away from the thing that it's meant to be. You don't want to cover our hands either because there are lots of considerations there but when you do it right and the producer on my team, Lucius, who made it it was an incredible, incredible video producer, filmmaker he really worked with her and said, I'm going to send this to you. You watch it. Can you understand this? There's no sound and you can't get the sound of this. All of your ASL intelligible did I shoot this right? Did I frame this right? Wow. So he had to make sure he was a little less tight than he normally would be. Don't do all the close-ups on the face which are beautiful that he would normally do because that is not of service. Hopefully people will watch this video. Yeah. And that's a really perfect example actually when you talk about her facial expressions that we think of ASL as being a hands language but it's actually a body language. It's a spine and a face language and so even like if I'm just reading ASL captioning I'm also missing half of the messaging and that's that sort of challenge of a wholly integrating languages. The written language. And that segues me over to a question for you which is so I'm intrigued by the trajectory of the stuff that you create which is created for online ability and then moves and I wonder if you've ever encountered a situation where the nature of what you need to do to capture or what you're capturing influences the art affects the art and or slash also too how does that affect the kind of art you curate for the series? So the first question I think is that we try never to influence the art because we are not the artists like I'm not an artist or not in any way that I would ever share with anyone but it's not my job and it's not what I'm good at but you know we're trying to really shine the spotlight on other artists. The second part of your question is to influence what we curate. Sadly of course it does. There's lots of really cool art that can't be captured in a formative video and you know we're always trying to find other ways talking about those things we have articles that we can do you know we have done live streams there's other stuff we can do but yeah for sure there's kinds of art that you know don't you can't if you if we can't put a good headline on it that really entices you to click on a story then people aren't going to click on a story and that art will not get appreciated but it's absolutely yeah it's absolutely a consideration and you know I think in our first couple years we chased a lot of easy quick wins like really high concept things that you could really explain in the course of a really good tweet but you know there's more to art than a tweet and so we are grappling with that all the time what are the stories that we're kind of given over because you know there isn't a great thumbnail image of it that you know that it just doesn't work that way I think theater is harder for us to cover frankly than you know visual arts are for a whole bunch of reasons it's hard to do justice to a work in like a you know 90 minute work or a two and a half hour work in four minutes it's hard to there's you know I'm a union member myself and I believe in that but there are lots of you know difficulties with the way of capturing certain kinds of performances and rights and technical things about digital versus TV which I don't want to get into because they're really boring and really complicated and I'm so not a lawyer but I also mean that like theater and dance is a little bit harder for us to cover and there's more expense but it's less the expense than the incredible amount of paperwork that goes with every theater piece we do but we have a commitment into actually doing that stuff so we are you know we are trying to we're doing more we're trying to find new ways of doing them but yeah to answer your question there's lots of art that gets left by the wayside art that I like art that's really cool that we just don't do not right now but you know always tomorrow's Monday everything will change on the internet I'll find a new way of doing it you know I believe in you yeah I'm trying I we've been talking for a while now oh no but also these people are these people have lots of smart ideas that are not our ideas and I don't know I wonder if there's any questions about these conversations of whether it's about what either of us do or about this question of digital disruption how would it affect any of your work if anyone has any contributions just kind of following up on the idea of like the medium matching the message and also what you're just saying Andrew that I kind of disagree with a little bit where you were saying well I'm not the artist and like well like or you're the video producers you work with they are artists right and like so if you're making you're making a video about an artist it's a collaboration inevitably right and the way that you present something as like a video producer you very much have to take into consideration the art of that and how that is actually telling a story right oh yeah absolutely there's so much art in the filmmaking of the people that believe that Lucia is on our team or other filmmakers and that I imply otherwise what I don't want to pretend is art is coming up with a really great facebook throw I think there's a lot of skill to it and we sweat over those details too but I don't want to pretend that art is the art because it's not but you're absolutely right there's in the filmmaking in writing an article obviously there's an art to it and the A. Collins our staff writer is killer at that yeah yeah and just one other comment I had was I think it's interesting what CPC is doing with bringing stuff more into the digital realm my one comment is that I'm getting old now but I'm still squarely millennial and the stuff that I respond to more and more is long form content that's what I really click into long podcasts long videos, uncut interviews that's the kind of stuff I really like to seek out I would just say that I hope CPC is looking at doing long form stuff too I mean I don't know what the corner is CPC but I do think you're right there is a need for forms with deeper engagement and intimacy that you can really sink your teeth into podcasts are the one that is dominating now I think it's been half of my waking life listening to a podcast at this point and yeah I think it's super important and I think there's lots of opportunities there I really like CPC News my app that has the stories listed and you know from as it happens is there a movement to put a CPC Arts similar one for CPC Arts there won't be an app specifically for CPC Arts but you will be seeing our content hopefully but there's stuff in the works that I can't really talk about because it's in the works but yes or can it be sunk into that into that app? probably not that app but stay tuned super secret we're getting a little wrap up signal okay well thank you jakes and thank you all and if you guys have any questions or you want to chat I'm around Don Michelle do you want us to see this video that you sent? Oh no I meant for you to run it behind me I don't want to waste any of this time it's fine I'll run it behind as we walk out I love that, I love that you're doing that Post it to Slack, put it on Slack Yeah put it on Slack you got me on Slack Thank you