 On week eight, in 10 weeks in Jamaica, there are conversations from Jamaica to the world. I'm Agilina Co-Founder and co-artistic director of Akiba Abaka Arts. We are an international theater company that creates plays, concerts, talks, and processes for making plays, concerts, and talks for the global stage. 10 weeks in Jamaica, the theater conversation from Jamaica to the world is a talk series that features Jamaica's leading theater pioneers and practitioners. Each week, these amazing artists share the behind-the-scenes stories of Jamaica's theater community and offer their visions for the future. We are very grateful to reckon collaboration with Ms. Nadine Rollins, founder of Raw Management Agency and co-curator of this series. Raw Management Agency is an esteemed talent agency representing artists and groups from all genres in film, television, theater, voiceovers, branding, and endorsements. This series is made possible by our publisher, HowlRound.com, a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide. And our sponsor, the Martin East Eagle Theater Center at the City University of New York and Manhattan. Now, whether you're joining us for the first time or you've been watching us weekly since we started the series on November 1st, shout out to you, by the way, if you've been one of those people, we thank you so much for being in our audience today. And we hope that you will return weekly through the end of the series, which ends on January 3rd. I'd like to invite you right now, right now to subscribe to our channel. Go ahead and click that subscribe button. And while you're there, that little bell, click it so that you can stay in tune with everything that we're doing and be notified of our upcoming, of our next upcoming series, episodes, and other events. And while you're at it, go ahead and join us and like us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. We are Akiba Abaka Arts on all platforms. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce my partner, I'm from Boston, so my partner, co-founder and co-artistic director, Akiba Abaka. Now, she's been involved in theater for over 20 years. How I don't know, because the woman looks like she's 16. I may need to see an ID. I don't know if she can handle today's conversation, but I won't spill the beans, you'll see. Right now, I'd like to introduce to you, Ms. Akiba. Girl, I am of legal age. I am all of 21. What, you're older than me? How? Hey, this is Magalie, week eight. Week eight. Oh my goodness, this is, I think I showed up to this more than I showed up to class when I was in school, but this is great. I mean, this is, and really, this is like the best master's class we've had in the last, honey, I got all my education in the grade. Right? Right. And of course, my trusty notebook over here. So, listen. I don't have minds this week, but I'm driving this conversation, so it's gonna be fun. Absolutely, I can't wait. All right, thank you so very much, Magalie. Theater is a place where all people have permission to exist and explore and expand their truest selves. We use performance as a tool to form our narratives, the stories about how we show up in the world. As we talk about Jamaican theater, we believe that all voices should be heard. All faces should be seen and the stories of the lesser known people should be elevated. Among the voices that have been silenced and shadowed within the Jamaican culture are the voices of queer people. In creating this series, we asked ourselves, where are the voices of Jamaica's queer theater makers? They are making theater too. Are not their voices important? What stories are they telling at this time? This conversation is significant because Jamaica has been shrouded in an armor of caustic homophobia and much of the progress that has been made to understand and embrace the differences among us. Oftentimes goes unseen. Our three panelists bear light on the subjects of queerness, their Jamaican hood, and their responsibilities as artists. Carl O'Brien Williams is an award-winning actor, director and playwright whose work has been produced in New York City, the Caribbean and the UK. In 2013, his play, Not About Eve, received three adelko nominations for excellence in Black theater, including Best Playwright. His play, The Black That I Am, has been staged in the Glasgow and Galway, in Glasgow and Galway, for the National Theater of Scotland. And at Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. His recent projects include Reset, theater coalition's online series centering BIPOC playwrights and the Black Lives Matter movement, and developing plays about LGBTQ plus lives in Jamaica. He is currently the author Miller Foundation mentor, the artistic director for broad, tough productions, and the deputy chair of speech and communications at the theater arts department at BMC City University, Borough BMC City University of New York. Welcome Carl. Thank you very much. It's good to be here, Akiba. Thank you. Happy to have you. Seven blue Yankee Koon, Yankee King Pikiboo, the seventh generation maroon, Simone Harris, queer artists and activists based in Kingston, Jamaica. Her work in the cultural and creative industries spans performance, arts administration, business consultation, education and creative producing. Simone is founder of Choreography is Copyrightable, a public education program focused on intellectual property, protection and choreography. As a cultural and creative industries consultants, she has served as local expert for the development of a business plan for Jamaica's cultural and creative industries commissioned by the Planning Institute of Jamaica, PIOJ. Her arts management consultancy, 360 artists promotes diversity, inclusion and equity through a range of creative and cultural initiatives which have been supported by the British Council, Outburst America's Queer Arts Network and the Puma Creative Caribbean Network. Her latest projects include Walking Tall, a still walking performance art program, Lady Blake Ophelia Stratum, a nine week program that was developed to support creatives in designing their online communication practice. Simone is currently an analyst in a dynamic tourist agency and an educator at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, School of Arts Management. Welcome Simone. Thank you so much Akiba, it's a pleasure to be here. Happy to have you. Webster McDonald is a Jamaican theater practitioner and educator. In Jamaica he taught theater arts for five years at the secondary school level. His quest to promote the theatrical skills of his students and the indigenous cultural forms in Jamaica, particularly revival, brookens and kumina was instrumental in bringing 14 students to Guyana in August of 2016 to conduct workshops on improvisation and playmaking with the frame of emancipating theater from colonial prescriptions. Webster has presented at national and international gatherings around the themes of our history, our heritage, black masculinities in African diaspora theater and interrogating hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality unfolding in the Caribbean. Webster is co-author for the anthology Dubbin Monodrama Anthology One, black masculinities in the African diasporic theater, edited by Dibi Young Anita Africa and Christopher Oliver, published by Spoulous, Spoulous Publishing in 2019. Webster's research delineates, deconstructs, and I'm gonna let him talk to you about that because Webster is brilliant, amazing and brilliant. He is a BFA at the Endermanic School of College of Visual Arts and a fellow Emersonian. Webster just finished his MFA at Emerson College in Theater and Community and is now a candidate at the University of Kansas School of Theater and Dance for a PhD in Theater Studies. Welcome, Webster McDonald. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Akiba. Thank you. I'm so happy to have you, Webster. You know I just love you. You know I just love you. So Simone, tell me, what brings a champong maroon woman like you into the theater and the arts? Well, it's a long story, but I'm going to give you the short version, right? Because it's more of a return and a return in a way that's disrupting the traditional, right? So Simone Harris, I'm a Seven Blue, Yang Kung Kung Pikibu, Seventh Generation Maroon Child and I am from the line of Nanny of the Maroons. My grandmother and my great-grandmother were both dancers with Queen A, the Queen of Komina. And I sort of got that in my DNA. So I started out in the theater space with dance and I ended up discovering a deep connection to the drum. So right now, fast forward to 2020, I moved to the beat of my own drum. I am a mover, but I'm also a drum. I see, I live in Jamaica and I am an activist. I am in the LGBTQ community and I feel that survival is about navigating and navigating is also about performance. So the stage for me is the world, society, public spaces, working with bodies in public spaces. That's how I tap into this idea of visibility. What's important for me is not so much, hey, shouting I am here, but more so using arts and culture to discover myself while creating room for others to also discover themselves outside of the frame of you're worthless as a queer person. You're the other, you don't belong outside of those narratives. I'm here to use art performance to teach people in the LGBTQ community and also to teach allies that we are, we're here, we have value and we're gonna teach you something. Later on in the conversation, I'll share more about walking tall and show you how that methodology for me, I'm carrying it into the advocacy space pairing arts with activism. You know, I realized that I should have my little tambourine near me because I see that, you know, it's gonna be, we're going to church today, ain't we? Okay, I'm minister today. All right. So Mr. O'Brien Williams, what brings you into the theater, sir? Oh my goodness. I'm gonna steal from someone who's a genius, Dominique Marisol, right? When she was asked about that, she came in for black liberation. And for me, I'm always saying that the art saved me, the theater saved me. It has, so I think I came into the theater to figure out more about myself and because I just had this itch, this drive, this burning desire to create art, no matter what, I knew that everything in my life revolves around theater, every striking thing. I teach it, I write it, I'm an administrator, everything, everything. So that's really what brought me to the theater. And I'm very happy to have had parents who took me to see, who believed that we should see work, right? I was, my mother, you know, before she went to the hospital to deliver me, she was on a dance floor with my father. You know, I was going to plays, falling asleep, seeing Louis Marriott's stuff. So that was my, I knew that I had a definite calling to be in the arts. I didn't know what exactly it was, but I used to do art classes at the other Manly College on a Saturday. I was taken to the theater, the pantomime, just all of it, seeing Jankuno, you know, so everything that and all of those things just, just, just, just literally didn't need to do that. So I said, I have to be involved in this thing somehow. Went to NDTC, everything, National Dance Theater Company, had their shows. I was just always going to the festival, you know, Grand Gala, all the big things that were at stadium. We definitely went there. So here I am, a theater practitioner. Well, you're somebody who the arts fell on you, just like rain and you grew and are blossoming as a result of what has fallen on you over the years. That's amazing. Webster, what brings you into the theater, sir? Oh, that's a big question. But the short answer is one, I grew up in a deep world part of Jamaica in this beautiful parish called St. Elizabeth. I did not have access to theater. The only kind of theatrical experience is that I would have had access to was the performances that happened on the football fields, the performances that happened in the church, performances that happened in the school. And as a result of those performances, I was almost forced to believe that my experiences would have been delimited to those kinds of performances. Then when I went to high school and was introduced to drama, dance and music, I realized that there was this world outside of my community, this space that allowed me to show up as I am, this space that allowed me to create a voice, a kind of expression that would have been seen as this kind of outlaw where I was coming from. So I was brought to the theater because, and to borrow from Jose Munoz, Esther Band's disidentificatory work, I was drawn to the theater because I wanted to have that space that disidentifies with some of those sociocultural norms. And having access to that theater, I think what I have now is this container collecting stories from across the world to broker some kind of activism, social change and that kind of self-making, space-making praxis. Yeah, that's me. Webster, I'm gonna do my best. You know, when your parents named you Webster, they knew what they were doing. Webster, I'm gonna do my best to tell you how much I love you. Guys, everyone watching, I'm just gonna keep loving on Mr. McDonald throughout this whole conversation and when he's done, I'm gonna put on some trap music because Webster talk big with some big words and I love it and I always learn from it. I love you so much, you're awesome. So Carl, speaking of talking big and words and meaning and language and discovering ourselves in words, meaning and language, words on power as the rest of them then said. What are the words queer narratives mean to you? Ah boy, queer. So queer is always contentious, right? Because of course it's coming from this history of speaking badly about a community and then it evolved into us taking it on, you know? We're gonna flip it, we're gonna own it and it is used to again for me this big umbrella because I guess it's too hard to say all the alphabet but I've got to say I love the alphabet. I love the alphabet. I love every addition. I love the struggle that it involves for the people who are outside the alphabet to do it because I think it's great metaphor for you to understand that language is evolving. It's part of our history. There are words that keep coming and changing and so to our narratives, we've always been here and so when I hear queer narrative for me that means representation, it means storytelling. It means where we get the story from which is not just our words but and especially as Caribbean people, Jamaican people we know that the story is in our blood and our bones and there's a way that we move and think differently from everybody else that is our own and we can't figure it out. So that's why we write, that's why we create. That's why we do it because it's always an interrogation and investigation, a curiosity. Professor Nettleford said that to be an artist is an intellectual act. It doesn't mean that you have to have the PhD or the degree when you sit down to do anything or get up to dance because not all of us sit down and type, right? Some of us when we start to think we start to move the body just start to move and we start to get inspiration from spirit, from drum, from all these things. And I think all of this is a part of queer narrative. So, because when I think of queer narrative I think of inclusivity. I think of taking up space and we have to because as I said before, we've always been here. So now it's time to reinsert ourselves into the dialogue since they've tried to take us out of it. It's time to be loud about the whole thing. So, yeah. Simona, I see you. I have a jump on that Carl, I have a jump on that, I have to say something. So, in 2016 I showed my work, The Tribe, a collection of images that I have. I showed it during the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Northern Ireland. And that's when I, and it's a queer arts festival. And that's when I, for me discovered a meaning of queer that I latched on to and to this day. Yeah, disrupting, counter, anything counter to normative. Like I'm about that, okay? I want to be able to live in my skin. I want to be able to live as me. And that is going to be a fight. And I might not even be able to get to the ultimate level of that in my lifetime. But people have to put in the work. And I'm gonna be one of those people gonna willing to put in the work because we can't be afraid all our lives. As I tell you, I'm living in Jamaica. I'm out because I have to live in my skin, right? And we have to put in the work so that generations from now don't have to deal with the struggles that me and you, Webster, all of us have to deal with as queer people in this country. And the change is coming, change is happening. You know, Simone, as you talk about being in your skin, you remind me of, I think Pearl Clay wrote about the people who could fly, but growing up, one of the myths that I grew up hearing in Jamaica was about the Ashanti people who used to leave their skin to have freedom when we were enslaved, right? We flew out of our skin at night to fly back to Africa. But we're not leaving our skin now in the modern days. We're staying in our skin. We're gonna be free. We're gonna be African people on the side of the earth. We don't wanna leave our skin anymore. Thank you for that. Webster, what are the terms for your narratives? So just to bounce off what you alluded to, Nikola, about this language of disruption, this language of dismantling the grain of the status quo. So I was brought to queer theory when I was introduced to Dibby's process through the surplus methodology, which is a process grounded in self-discovery, self-knowledge, liberation, community. And I think queer narrative centers the experiences of people who are identified as, whether you're gay, whether you're bi, whether you have this kind of burning desire to go against the norm, to go against what is perceived as essential, what is perceived as original, what is perceived as natural. And within that community, you're able to create these narratives that counters the norm. So you're building a kind of identity. You're building a personhood. You're building a kind of poetic that says, hey, I will not be reduced to this identity of queer. I will not be reduced to being a guy who has sex with guys. I will not be reduced to being called this sexual psychopath, this sexual deviant. But I can also have those experiences, but I can also still be a Jamaican. I can still be black. I can still weave the power of some of these cultural practices that evolve. I can also find space in sacred spaces, sacred spaces that once would have said that queer people cannot have this relationship with heavenly spirits. That is it. I'm holding for a reason because I want some listening. We had some wonderful engagement pre the conversation today. And one of the ways that we're becoming more progressive in Jamaica is we say the bedroom. Let's come out of people bedroom and come out of people bedroom or get out of people's bedrooms is a, I think euphemism for, we're not going to talk about gay people. Leave the bottom on them alone. Come out of people bedrooms. And the idea that queer life, LGBTQ plus lives, gay and lesbian life, transgender people, non-binary people's lives is reduced to their bedroom is unfortunate. And what happens in the bedroom of heterosexual people is loud. It's front and center. It's every day. It's in our face. So the idea that the bedroom is the demarcation of conversation of humanity. That's not the levels that we're on. We're on higher levels, different levels. So it's not about people's bedrooms. What happens in our art. It's about what happens in our lives, including the bedroom if you want to go in there as well. What are the questions that you all are asking because art is inquiry. Art is a space of questions, just like a scientist lab. What are the questions that you all are asking at this time in your work as creatives, as scholars, as pedagogues, teachers in the Caribbean, Jamaican Caribbean space around queer culture, in the Caribbean and globally? Webster, what are some of the questions you're asking? Anyone can jump in here, Simone, Carl. So as a part of where I see my dissertation going, I'm asking this question of what are the ways in which Danzol is my site. I'm using Danzol as my site for discourse. So I'm asking what are some of the ways in which the performance of masculinity in the Danzol challenges racialized hegemonic structures, but also enacts erasure and terror against queer identified people. I'm also asking the question, who can enjoy the Danzol space? Who is the Danzol for? I'm also asking the question of what happens if you extract some of the poetics, if you extract some of the space-making, the liberatory politic in the Danzol and take it to another space, would that distort Danzol authenticity? Would that distort its violent emergence? Would that distort some of the masculine epithets that foregrounds the Danzol space? Would that distort compulsory heterosexuality that presents this kind of superstructure in the Danzol space? I'm also asking the question of, can the queer body have a spiritual experience through this syncretic framework where you merge Christian practices with African religious practices? And I think that is where the revival that evolved in the 1960s comes into the conversation because there are a number of revivalists who are able to be queer and have this kind of merge between the sacred and the sensual. I'm also asking the question of, what are some of the ways in which performance modes in the Danzol space can be hermeneuatic tools for deconstruction? So I'm thinking about how is it the body? The body's response to the encroaching commonplace of Europeanism, how does the voice, how does the orality, this kind of celebration of Jamaican dialect can also be a part of that space of, one, emancipating the theater from colonial prescription, who creating this space where one, the bodies are in this process of self decolonization, self theorizing. And I think Esther Bann paints that in such a perfect way when, and I'm gonna read this, this identification is a point of departure, a process, a building, although it is a mode of reading and performing, it is ultimately a form of building. What can we use from those spaces to create a blueprint for the social change that we have been envisaging for years? You know, Webster, your questions are calling to mind a term in Jamaican language, dope conqueror. And I use the reason why dope conqueror comes to mind as I listen to you is for those of us who are not Caribbean, and dope is a ghost. But what is a ghost, but something, some memory of a thing that was once alive that haunts us in the present, that we rest our beliefs in. It is not a thing that is present. And I think about dope conqueror because I hear Bob Marley's song run through my mind as you speak because the areas that you are questioned, that you're asking your question into dance hall, religion, spirituality, academia, all of these spaces are in some ways ghosted spaces for us as black people, as queer people, as people who want freedom, people who are shut out. And I listen to you and I'm thinking these are hallways that are just full of dopes. And you are coming with your question to conquer. I hear you taking space, not just claiming space, but conquering space and filling up space is amazing. Simone, what are some of the questions that you are asking? Well, so my process has led me to three C's. Simply put, culture, connection and community. And those three things at this point in my life are sort of my guiding principles, right? When I talk about culture, I'm talking about the practices of Caribbean people, the things that give our lives meaning, exploring those things, having the ability to explore, engage with those parts of our history and heritage. When I talk about connection, it's about inclusive spaces that promote networking and relationship building, not just with others, but also with yourself. And then community is about bringing diverse groups of people together to learn, to share and to grow. So what I'm exploring right now through the still walking program called Walking Talk, is it okay for me to start talking about walking? We're actually gonna go into that in a second, but we can, as a matter of fact, if you wanna set that up, we can. Right now, I think we can. I think we go to show in some of your work. We're gonna go into the work into the next segment, but tell us about Walking Talk. And we're gonna be showing some of the images from Walking Talk, but why don't you set it up for us and we'll show the pictures as you speak? Okay, so in 2019, I was fortunate because, you know, as we agreed, Carl Webster, we spoke about this, this idea of privilege as queer people, acknowledging your privilege, acknowledging when you have access to knowing that others do not, some others do not have the same access, but for me, it's what I do with it. So I had the opportunity to run a program for LGBT community in Jamaica and I chose to work with still walking. At that time, I didn't know that my father was actually a still walker growing up in Morton, Portland. He, they call it joint up and it's made out of bamboo and they don't strap it on, no protection and they just walk and that's what kids did for fun, growing up, my dad is in his 70s, right? So last year, I, because I had fallen in love with still walking in Trinidad, I decided, you know, this is gonna be a great way to build confidence, but not just do that, also build community. So it started out at bare minimum as that. And then I recognized that these three guiding principles of mine are actually reflected in this program because through walking tall, culture is integrated. Walking tall is a space to explore cultural practices through workshops, field trips, presentations, discussions, just an opportunity to explore connection. It is a space to learn to walk still, learn to build confidence, you're networking because all kinds of people are welcoming the space. It is an inclusive one. And what we've seen over more than a year now, it's a diverse space. And when we say community, we're talking about a space for everyone. So in walking tall, it's not just about coming into the space and the space is wherever we don't own a building, we don't pay rent to meet up. We meet in a parking lot, we meet wherever and we take it over. Visibility also important, right? So everybody has a role in walking tall. You have the walkers. I'm a proud still walker, two feet, I've conquered that. And you can go up as high as three and a half feet, five feet, seven feet. We aspire to get as tall as possible. You have walkers, you have handlers, you have people who deal with administration, you have persons who deal with the music, we have vocalists. We aspire to build out a whole performing group as part of this walking tall program that anyone can really come and book a space and learn how to walk on stilt. It really does something to your body. We have trans people, trans men, trans women, gay, lesbian, it doesn't matter, it is, we have allies. It's just a space where people come together. And the beauty about it is you see that fear, everybody thinks about falling first. That's the first thing they think about. Everybody, whether you are in the community or you are not, because you are human, you have the same feeling, you're fear falling. And guess what? The method was to train members of the community first, to build their skillset so that they are the ones who can now teach other people, people who wouldn't think they are gay person, a trans person, could have anything of value to share, could teach you anything. Imagine I've seen people just passing and seeing people up on stilt, trans women up on stilt and just the amazement, just the amazement of that act. Just in that instance. The imagery of the mind. The imagery of Simone, a picture of that. The people who are repressed, suppressed, pushed down, poor people, gay people, trans people, non-binary people, children. Above. What you're doing is you're creating a space where people who can, who don't have the certain levels of elevation there, the actual picture of people on stilt. And the fear, also the fear of being, because the body, I like what you're saying, it's like everybody, but the body, the soma feels fear when it's elevated from the ground. I work with body. A fear within our stories and within our narratives. Right? I said it earlier, living inside your body. So elevating yourself onto pieces of stick. Elevating yourself. The transformation that happens inside your body. I can't explain that to you. You would have to go up on stilt to feel it. But that is the method that we use in to change hearts and to change minds and to bring people together. As part of walking tall, we went on a field trip to Charleston, which is another maroon community in Portland. And we hiked 2,500 feet above sea level. It took us three hours to get up, three hours to get down. And just the process, what we had to put our bodies through to get to the peak. This is a mountain top that our maroon ancestors used to climb to be able to use as a lookout point to see the British coming. And to take the group to the peak of this mountain. They still live with that experience because when they are now faced in the world with the stigma and the discrimination, they remember what they went through to get 2,500 feet above sea level to where their ancestors once stood. That's the power of walking tall. That's the power of walking tall. That's what I'm working on right now. I'm beating this tambourine because again, I'm looking at pictures. I'm seeing images, right? I'm a theater director. One of the things I do is I work in space and I create pictures on stage. 2,500 feet above sea level. Yeah. And then you put their descendants two feet off the ground, three feet off the ground, five feet off the ground, six feet off the ground to reclaim the dignity, their freedom and their flight. Yes. I am here to continue the legacy of my ancestors. I am from the line of Nani of the Maroons. I claim space for my people and I do not have, I'm not wealthy, but the access that I do have as long as I have breath, I will use it to continue programs like this. And as we move on, so those of us in the audience who are in the minority I'm not knowing what we're talking about when we say Maroon and Maroon people, just give us a quick reference, quick definition of what Maroon people, who are the Maroon people that you referenced that you are descending on? The warriors who fought for our people's freedom, fought the British, fought the Spanish, fought for our freedom. Their story has been corrupted, especially here in Jamaica, but I am here today as a proud Maroon knowing that centuries ago, somebody just like me was fighting for me to have freedom. Sure. Yeah, the Maroon people were inflamed African to left the plantations and ran into the mountains, the cockpit country, Nani, Portland, St. Elizabeth specific areas of year about a compound nation, Mortown, Naniville and these areas. And there were never slaves, they were, they left Africa, they left the continent of Africa, they were actually soldiers, they were actually warriors. And because of that, they could not be inflamed and they took flight. Moving on, Carl, what are the questions that you are asking inside of the space as a creative scholar and as a queer Jamaican man? For me, my questions with art and how I make art have all been reactionary. And I'm asking the question, how do I move from a space of reacting to trauma and get to another space of more empowerment? I'm fully aware as an artist that what I write can change hearts and minds, where this power, language is power, body is power. What happens in a theatrical space, whether it is a proscenium art or a parking lot or a gorilla theater where we just get up and we just do something in protest, all of it is valid. So I keep asking the question, oh, where are we? Where are the people like me? Where are the people like me in the different spaces that Webster spoke about, you know? And I see them. So how do we get from outing of people? How do we get from this notion of and move beyond? You know, I think we're talking the other day and we're talking about, you know, beyond homophobia. There's so much happening. And I tend to be the artist that looks at the paper and reads his headlines, and then I create something from that because I'm like, what is really going on here? When you talk about vicious gaze, is this is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one, right? How vicious are the gaze? And when you talk about vicious gaze, how can we separate that from poor, poverty? Because there's an anti-poor sentiment, not just in Jamaica, but everybody, right? And we don't like to talk about it because it takes us out of our sophisticated intellectual musings that, of course, we're here, I have charities, I do this, but we're anti-poor. We're very anti-poor. And my work looks at people that are similar to me. So yeah, I'm looking at the violence. I'm responding to the violence. I'm looking at the trauma. I'm responding to the trauma and I'm constantly asking myself, at what point and how do we heal and move past that? Because these people are everywhere, right? And I'm looking at now, what is the root of this? Because we're obsessed with figuring out where we come from. And if it's a continent, if everything is coming from that life source of the African continent, then it means that we came over in these ships as well. We were captured as same-gender loving people, as trans, whatever you want to use. The indigenous people of the island who are killed off. I know there's some research going on now that not all of them are killed off, but what happened with their sexuality? What happened with their religion? And when did we become this way? All of these things affect my work. Those are the questions that continue to drive me. And it is from a place of, I guess, trying to be visible, to be validated, but also it's from a bit of an FU as well, right? Because I'm just like, why do I have to validate myself? Why do I need to be explaining my loves and various likes? And it's so interesting that what the theater, because when you look at Jamaican theater, I remember seeing, was it Dear Counselor by Trevor Rohn? And the protagonist in that is going through something harrowing. And he said to this woman, I thought I was gay. Can I tell you, as a young practitioner, I think I was in the pantomime that time, my ears perk up. I was like, did someone just say gay on the Jamaican stage? What is happening? And then I began to look for things. So God for Seal is one of our sons is missing, which again is a work in response to trauma. God bless God, rest his soul. It started a movement. This is about HIV AIDS, it's responding to that, right? And when I saw that on the university campus of the West Indies, because again, those are the places that you can go and see work. So I was very excited to be on the campus because I'm like, oh, this is where I'm gonna see lesbian and gay stuff. This is where I'm gonna see, because again, it is still pushed back into these intellectual spaces. So I'm constantly asking the question, how do we get the work out commercially? How do we get the narratives out into the space and let the people deal with it? Because they deal with it on TV. I listened to you last week and the ladies were so, were so right, the same Jamaican people that talk about, you know, fire, Christian, rah, rah, rah. I've only been involved in relationships with Christians or most of them are Christians that I know of. So I'm just like, I don't know who these Christians just speak of that are not lying with other men and women that are lying with women. Largia was a Christian. We have our children there and we, you know, but it's like, where do we get to the point where LGBTQ is not a catching disease and we have to root it out. So those are the things I interrogate. I look at the comments, people say, don't read the comments. I read all of them because the comments come from people, the people, the same people that I want to come and see my show or come and see my work and engage with. So I read them. I don't take things for granted. So I constantly, you know, whenever I visit Jamaica now, I like to jump on a bus and just take a bus ride and listen to everybody talking. Just jump on it from where you still live on Red Hills Road all the way to Parade and just listen to the conversation and just walk around and listen and just listen to people. And not everybody is as beating the vitriol drums of homophobia, but it is almost like it's a hushed tone as to when you actually become an ally. Because sometimes we don't like that. We don't like those things. You know, the constant thing is why you have to go on so? I remember someone saying to me, you know, talk to your friends, why they have to go on like that? I'm like going like, oh, the same way you go on when you rail up and you're upset, the same way you, you know, it's almost like we're not allowed anger. We're not allowed the same passions. Everything is a crime of passion for us. I'm just like, if you're passionate, you're passionate. If you're angry, you're angry. There's a lot to be angry about. So I think I'll go back, I'll probably rambling on, but these are the things that feed my work. And to me, I always say, Anantination, it go back to that deity, that little spider that is the metaphor for the small man, the small woman, the small person that overcomes everything because that creature, that deity is genderless. You know, right? That creature takes on form and appearance and you'll kill it. So I like, any time I'm creating anything, I think of that ananty because ananty comes over and then we have cuckoo, the actor boy, right? Who is not a woman, but is dressed in women's garb. They have belly woman. Belly woman is not a woman. And, you know, and as we're in the season for Jankuno, I think of these Jankuno characters. I think about the African retention that is embedded in that. I think about the music. When you hear that, they found objects as well as the, so there's always this thing with Jamaican art, the sophistication and not, you know, classes in going kill way, but it's perfect for artists. You know, it's great fodder. I love it. I adore all of this. Because today, today, day in 2020, we are still finding people's malapropisms and grammatical errors as absolutely hilarious, right? It is absolutely hilarious. And that's all well and good. It still is, but can we be honest with ourselves on where that comes from? Let's be honest. Language was used to oppress people. And if you can't speak the Queen's English properly, my own mother, why are you speaking like that? You went to a good school. Why are you sounding like that? Speak like you come to a good school. And then you realize the code switching thing is a big old privilege, right? I know I work with wholly per privilege. And I think it is only right that I interrogate it. And I can't literally write about it because that's the only way. I think I'm gonna liberate myself from it. But yeah, these are the questions that they haunt me all the time, every single time I create art. Leap over my soul. Weep over my soul. I don't know why I don't have my little tamarind because right now I would give it that little shake. You know, the little shake makes it sound like wind. Do a little shake so that it's like the wind went through my tamarind. You know that little shake? That's what I would give right now. Because you see, I grew up in, I was Christian at Open Bible Christian Church. Yeah? Yes, yes. And I know that those wooden pews and the woman would just get a little shake. You know? Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. So much is in here. And I actually wanna move on to show a little bit of the work that reflects the questions that you are asking, that you just articulated, Carl. But before I do so, I wanna dialogue in this space with you. So that I don't want none of that to get lost. I wanna rest in that. I want everybody to listen, remember, and recall what you just said. So let's just rest in that family. Religion, how we got here when we started. And when I say we, we as people, but there's this idea that queer narratives and queerness is this, especially in Jamaica is this new thing, this popular thing. And what you're saying is no, we came over here on the boats. We left Africa, we were in Africa. We were present and we've always been here. We were not transformed through certain practices used to suppress us, buck breaking and all of these. We think that homosexuality in Jamaica comes from that or we are abrasive to the idea of homosexuality in Jamaica because of buck breaking, right? But that's not, what you're saying is no, this is, we've always been here. And the suppression of queer narratives is in line with the suppression of the black body, queer or non-queer. Through time, the suppression of our tongue and how we express ourselves, speaking the language of our mothers and our mother tongue. My favorite was when people would beat you and say, you chop, buddy. Well, they were speaking the language. You chop, buddy. Massenya Glass School for Chatsaw. The irony of that, you know? The work we're about to see, we have a bit of your work from the boys on the hill. Tell us about the boys on the hill. I set up this clip for us. Very quickly, this again was, I started to write this piece because in the year 2013, two big things happened on the headlines. The murder of a young trans person. She was known as, you know, AKA Gully Queen. The name before, she was trans as Dwayne Jones. That's the name that kept everyone around, that everybody knows about. And also the title, there was another print media that had the title, vicious gays, steel stuff or whatever it was at the time. And I just thought to myself, to me, this had a lot to do with homelessness because I'm always trying to figure out what's going on here. When you're homeless, what do you do? You're desperate for things. You're poor. And so what we're about to see are the characters, Riri, who is a trans teenager and Ronaldino, who is a cisgender gay teenager and they're running from a party, trying to save themselves as it was discovered in the party that one of them, you know, we're just like, oh, is that trans? Of course, that's not what they would say, but I don't want to get into what they would say, right? No, but they're running for their lives and they're kind of calmed down. They feel like they're out of, they feel like they're in a section of the terrain that's safe, so they're having a conversation, right? Yeah, so we can leave it there and we can pick a path that you want. All right, so thank you for setting that up. We'll play that clip right now. I'm glad for the rest of me to go through and then I can't you run the back of the church. With the man, we would still be living in that court in our house. As they kick you out, sort it by me, except they pick up janitor, animalized animalistic habits and start to keep on half-sex money. Crap, since they're all alone. That's why society don't like to know. Yo, shut up with that. Help me love you, eh? We was all in the body. Don't get that. Don't you get that? The whole other way. I didn't forget why and how that happened to me because the world would make the whole woman kick me out of the room. They'd go to the room but it's my path. Sorry for mad at that. It's your matter. The society can't help but tell me what I want to see and where. Lee, listen, just lay low and we'll take you in a couple of minutes. Then we'll go over the new spot over here. You see that one? Up where it's at is now. It's not really there. Where you want me to go? Back to the golly. Babel and a beat, we have too much in there. But it's where you going, going. Uh-oh. So now you're concerned. Don't worry about eating, you know. If I get these other little skills, we'll have much of business. We'll have to pay a lot for our channel. We'll find out about the whole island and match it up. Throw it out just like I'm throwing the boys. I mean, eat it in Milborough. They're too bad-mined. Ah, it means that I can't get better than we. You're going like, you never get money to sex yet. It's not chopped all that we eat, eh? Do you know? You see, when I get my money from my surgery to become a real man, I'm living for it. They will personally mention you in my social media update. I'm like, everybody know your story about the boy whose parent kicked him out and he had to set himself up to make money. And while you were trying to go so hard to be a real man, the pilot didn't want to buy from you, but they were dumb. First of all, I love the sound. I love the sound of Jamaican, the Jamaican accent on English, and the tussle between the two characters. Where are these young men in their lives? What will happen next for them? See, that's the thing. I like to look at it this way. Not everyone can leave. I mean, even on the screen right now, Simone is in Jamaica, Webster and I are not. One of them wants to stay and one wants to go. And I, you know, since, I mean, the players develop since then and I've definitely been working with more trans voices because that's very important to me. That's, you know, when we talk about identity and who can tell whose story, if I present as a cis gender gay man, so with some of the privilege and education, so therefore I'm writing about people who are not from spaces that I come from, but at the same time, we share nationhood, we share a number of things. So these two people, Ronaldino is battling for his life as well, but he comes from a two-parent household. He was kicked out. Riri is not from a two-parent household, but she was also kicked out. And for me, I didn't want a victim's story. So it's very important that this is not trauma porn or this is not, you know, but that the characters are not magical either. So I am very interested and very committed to having her story be one of liberation, however she finds it. And for him, his liberation, he feels is still to be found in Jamaica. And that for me represents those people who are within the community who either cannot go or choose not to go. They're choosing to fight. They're choosing to stay and figure it all out. I'm happy that you connected and in connecting, corrected my language. And I know you weren't intending to correct my language, but I'm gonna speak into that space, right? Because we're talking about progressiveness and transformation. You know, I use the term where these two young men, it's not two young men, it's one man and one young woman, right? And people are as they choose to be or not as they choose to be as they say they are. We're working in the way of learning spaces, progressive spaces. So there's a lot that even as much as I consider myself a member of the community through allyship, there's a lot that I'm very ignorant to. There's a lot that I do not know but there are gonna be times when my language is inside of my upbringing, right? I see the male body, the male body is messed up and the female body is missed, right? And so there's gonna be times when there's that language and I really appreciate, you know, the ability for us to listen and to have dialogue with each other. And the reiteration of this is what this being is. Because this is what this being says they are. Listen to that. So as I talk, thank you very much Carl. As we go into this idea of the being and the body, how the body is born, but what you feel inside of your body, how you feel that you are. I wanna go into Webster's work. We have a clip from Who Am I? And I told you all, guys, I'm partial to Webster. I'm gonna love on Webster this whole, I'm an auntie. I got about 12 or 13 niece and nephews and I pick out two of them and tell them they're my favorite. So I'm one of them partial people. I don't care. I like who I like. And Webster is my bonus. Okay. So Webster, I saw Who Am I? And when I saw Who Am I, I said I realized why this gentleman, this person gets into every academic program that he applies to. You are an immense talent. My goodness, you are an immense talent. Tell us about this clip from Who Am I, this dub poem that we are about to present. Just set it up for us before we show it. So I think in the first, the first time I spoke in this forum, I alluded to the fact that the only kind of performances that I had access to was the performance of masculinity on the football field in the church and the school. And after living in that kind of world for years, being almost forced to believe that I was this, the sickness, this, this invader feeling as if I, I didn't belong in those spaces. And so even if you were able to see the full production, my path from home to school was set up like this, this obstacle course, jumping from tires to tires. And if I should not jump into one of these tires, then something will happen. So I feel as if my journey to school, to church was almost paved as this obstacle course. And the obstacle was this challenge of performing and approximating these notions of maleness. And I remember at one point I was in a classroom, which is a scene before this scene. And it's almost as if, because I didn't speak with this chest resonance, I had this high-pitched voice and I was told to, hey, talk like you're a boy. Stop going like you're picking me. And the turmoil that came with that, the consuming phenomenon that was happening in that space. And that was what drove this dub poetry. It is a resistance. It is a revolt. It is a moment where I said, fuck you. It was a moment where I said that enough is enough. And so I draw, I think I use this kind of, this selector in the dance hall to create this. Sometimes I was trying to embody the language of the oppressor to kind of draw power from being this, this, this, this, this Cheryl Brazer, this, this kind of nanny, this kind of guerrilla warfare kind of character. And so it was the first hint at saying enough is enough. Great. Well, thank you for that setup. We'll play that clip right now. That piece, you know, I haven't, I haven't told you. Whenever I see good work, I don't say anything. I just let it happen to me. Oh my goodness. What did, what happens to you when you perform that piece? And what some of the happenings that you experience when you perform this piece, the piece from your audience. What happens to your audience when they see the piece? At first, what happens to you when you perform the piece? I remember when I performed it the first time in 2012 at the School of Drama. And there were a number of straight people who, who saw me on campus. And of course I was reduced to this, this, this batty boy. And, and I think what it was, it opened was this conversation of, Hey, you don't have to view same sex encounters as this, this social contagion. We can have conversation that doesn't threaten your, your straightness. We can have conversation that doesn't make you feel uncomfortable because having a conversation with a queer person doesn't affect who you are. I remember there were a number of guys who were just, just, just crying because it created that space for conversation. And especially in the top back. The top back was so powerful because I didn't realize that there were a number of persons in the audience who were having these same challenges. And now being able to sit on stage, it created that, that space for healing, for conversation and for, for being able to talk about. That space and sexuality in a, in a open, open space. And so for me, it, each time that I. Revisited. I mean, last time I performed it, it was in, in Canada, January this year. I try not to go back to it because I, it is one of those experiences that I feel ambivalent because it was difficult. It was difficult to embody it because I was there wrestling with, with some of these ideas, these notions that were lodged into my consciousness. And I almost believed that I was a sickness. I was almost believed that at some point I would be cured. As if I was sick at some point, I believe that going to church praying constantly, speaking in tongues constantly would at least exercise this gain is from, from my spirit. And so it was liberating, but of course I'm still grappling with that. And at some point I still believe that there's some hope. That some cure might evolve. And I think when, when Simone mentioned the, the privilege of being here in the States. Is now being able to, to critique even that performance at hindsight. And now being able to use that as a springboard for new narratives and narratives that goes. Beyond that. You setting us up so wonderfully here. Narratives that go beyond that. Let's start to open up the Q and A with the audience. Your audience is on the Q and A in the chat here. And they are on fire. Thank you all for being with us on this live. And the subject of where do we go from here? One recurring theme in the chat is around healing. Aaron Washington says that. Who is a member of our audience here. Aaron states that Tony, Tony, Kate, Bambara said that healing is a deep endeavor. Hurts more than it feels good. No. Simone. You are a. Very serious. Space maker administrator. But I also see as a, as a herbs woman. A healer. Where's the healing work for us as artists. As Jamaicans. I don't like the term ally. I'm not my brother and my brother and sister's keeper. I am my brother. I am my sister. So where is our work? I'm not going to say that. What is our work in the healing? Simone. Man. Work is every day, everywhere. Where do I start? You know, the idea of space. Holding space. Is so important. Especially when you are privileged to have. You know, You know, Access. Recognizing that. Being able to, you know, facilitate. Help. Help. Help. Help. Right. Help is not always money. And in fact. Sometime. The money actually do worse. In my intro, you spoke about a program that I just wrapped. Communication for creatives, which was a nine week program. I did in partnership with Ory consulting a group of. Powerful people here in Jamaica. What we've discovered is that. We need to create space and we need help to create space. To allow queer people to. Find themselves. To be able to sit with themselves. To be able to sit with them. To be able to work with them. Find themselves. To be able to sit with themselves. To be able to see. Themselves for the first time. Because when you're running. When you're constantly running. When you're constantly in survival mode. You're not having the time to stop and ask yourself. Who am I. Why. You don't have any time, but those things are so important to knowing. Who you are. If you're going to stand up and say, yeah, I'm a gay man. I'm a trans woman trans man. Non binary, whatever it is. You need. To have that opportunity. To find yourself and know who you are. So as a creative know. Queer creative. How can you even speak to your work. If you don't know who you are. How can you even begin to make work. How can you begin to tell stories. We're talking about queer narrative. I will acknowledge in that there is privilege. We know that. People in the community. Don't have access to be able to, you know, become a car or become a bit, be where Webster is or be where I am. But it doesn't mean they don't have stories to tell. Or we're going to get them to tell their stories. How we're going to get them there. How. So we need help. Reach out and touch. Carl is doing work. Webster know you're going, you're doing work. You're going to be doing some work. We need some help here on the ground. Because like I said, change is happening. Reach out and touch. Challenge ourselves. How can we form a community. How can we form a community. I can go as far back as what my first party was. 2005, 2006, something like that. You know, years upon years. There's a whole new generation now too. But where's the community. Where the elders. Who can teach us what to do. Who can tell us about the history. Of the community. And the movement and the fight and the struggle. Where is that. Where is that. I don't even have that me constantly have to be researching to find that to meet people like you. To find that. But that is something that is needed on the ground floor for a strong foundation. For a strong foundation. There cannot be change if you don't have a strong army of people. Inside. Working inside. And also on the outside. So it's hard to answer your question directly. In terms of. If you get what I'm saying. A plenty work that if you do. A plenty work for the. Underground. Come on and come on. Come on. We're not turning back anybody. Once you. Understand that we are all human beings. And it's one love. One divine love. With Bob Marley talk both with Marcus. One love. That's all we need. And give it a chance. We just need to work together. Much more. Much more. We can't just continue to criticize. We have to do something. To disrupt that. To mash up that darling house there. And we have the power. But we continue to be separated. And segregated. And you know. We just need to come together. May I sweat. I keep saying it over and over. Offer to help. And that's across the board. That is across the board. Enough times we. We criticize. We offer. These scriptures we did. And I'm not. I'm not going into that because that's not this conversation. But I love the fact that you say help because inside of help. I hear the word empathy. Help feel. Help me feel. Help you feel. Carl. Where's the work in the healing for you. Or what is your. Work in the healing for us in the healing, sir. You know, it evolves, right? Because before the healing for me would be going to the parties. And that came even later because, you know, the joy of space, the camaraderie. It was in your little subsets and groups, even though, you know, there were, there were kind of problematic because they're not necessarily all inclusive, but there's a lot of fear and doubt that is within that. So you're not necessarily truly healing. But what you're getting is, you're getting a little recreation break when you go to these parties, you're getting a little looseness, you know, you can set free and do your thing. And then you, then you leave when you go back in society. I forgot back in the staff room. I have to go back to, and they deal with all of that. That's in your here. You know, last time I said, I keep saying this to people. I have never felt a stone or my, my skin has never been cracked because of homophobia, because of anything anti-gay to my body. But in terms of the silence, I have felt what that's like to hush up in the barbershop, to hear people saying the most ridiculous, the most heinous things and shutting up. I was that one at the dance hall, a bonfire for people like me. I was, so I had to heal from that, right? And I'm there with my friends who I love dearly, so many of them, and realizing they're saying some of the most problematic things ever. And I just shut up. I just shut up. So I was, for me, the healing came through art. I was like, this is one space that I'm going to own, that I'm not going to shut up. I'm going to, you're going to know how I feel about things, by what I produce for the stage, by the art that I create. And where I am now, who I'm looking on, and I'm asking myself this, like where am I in my healing process? And where are the, for the people who are on the ground constantly trying to get legislation passed, because we need that too. That's what we need as well. We need the safety of policy, of that, because, you know, the activists will do what the activists do. The party planners will do what the party planners do. The friends will do what the friends do. But we need to keep pressuring the parliamentarians to do what they need to do. And we need to, so it takes everybody, right? All of these support systems. And I think the healing needs to come when we start to look at each other, one in front of each other, face to face, right? Because we keep thinking it as, you know, they might take over Jamaica. So that notion is this big. But if you come and talk to me, come and look in my face and have a conversation with me. And you realize that I am not going to touch my gay finger onto your son and pass it on to him. And have him twirl in a pink frock. And if that's what he wants to do, he's going to do it anyway. I'm going to find a way to do it, because that's where the healing is. We keep forgetting that if we keep stopping people and keep setting up barriers, people are going to find a way to get their own healing and their release. And some of the ways are going to be very toxic, because, you know, people say, go where the love is. When you're not sure about who you are and you're getting all of this angst and awful things coming at you from the society, from the laws, then you're going to find them in places that you think are safe. And then you have to do a double work again to liberate yourself from that, right? So very much in line with what Simone is saying, these spaces need to exist. Research, people who claim to be either ally or whatever. Do the research that is needed. If you mess up, get up. Same thing you would say to somebody who's straight, right? If them drop, just get up. Get up. You misgender me. Say the right thing. Say sorry and move on. Don't throw away. Well, I tried. I tried with these people and I just can't. I try, you know, it's just not, yeah. I donated once and, you know, really. No, it's a constant thing, right? It's a constant thing. It's a constant thing. It's a constant thing. It's a constant thing. And anybody that knows anything about anything that you want, you have to keep working at it. And understand that people evolve. People evolve. I am, I used to be with the cancel culture. I can't cancel nobody again. When I look at my problematic past. And how I came up. You know, it, that's also part of the healing, but it takes, it takes a while to get there. I could have come up. There was a time I wanted to come off the stage because I'm acting. You know, somebody, somebody. The audience is just like, you know, watching my guy like he's straight, watching about the Monday, watching him like I'm really working. So, you know, and I'm just like, really, you know, part of me wanted to be like, you know, go to the producer. I'm not performing again. And then I'm just like, no, actually what you're going to do audience is look at me being placed in this straight body as a character and you're going to deal with me. Cause you're going to continue to read about me. Right. And people like, you know, aren't you afraid of, um, of death? That's, you know, the loss of love. We all will leave. And I keep saying it. They killed one of a more away bond. You kill me tomorrow. More am I going, right. It's just so it goes. So I'm no longer afraid of death. And when I go to Jamaica, I do, I don't go in this way. Like, you know, let me, let me, let me hide out. I didn't, if I didn't from people it's, it's one of the, because I can't see everybody that I want to see in the same breath. You only had some of the people who owed money, right? Listen to me. I only had some of the ones that owed money. I feel a lot of them, but still. It's a privilege to be able to walk and because some people can do it. Some people honestly can't do it. They have to hide. They have to run away. They have to move because the very land that birthed them was so toxic to their progression that they had to go somewhere else. So we have to figure out what is the root of that and kind of attack that in as many spaces as we possibly can so that the healing can just keep, can basically. We're going to start to wrap up for the afternoon, but I just want to say on healing, sometimes twirling in that pink dress is the healing. Yeah, for real. Akiba, I just want to add, I think, you know, all of us coming together, all these stories, we feel a monument, a monument. Let us think about legacy for all the work that we are putting in for the change. If we do it together, we're stronger. I want to thank you. Thank you for that. We do need monuments. We need different structures to look upon, to reflect ourselves, our triumphs. It needs to start to be triumphs when we come together. You know, we have a question and I'm going to take this as our final question before I give my final question to close out the conversation, but I can't leave out our number one audience member, Ms. Chris Alid. She is in the audience every single week, been with us all eight weeks. Chris asks, for any of the panelists, do you feel an obligation to tell more queer specific stories or to tell shared human experiences to demonstrate that we are all, that we all are no different from each other when the labels are removed? So what Chris is asking is are you obligated to tell stories about only your queer experiences or queer experiences as you see them? Are you essentially writing non-queer works? Are you creating a non-queer spaces just to show where the intersectionality is? Is that even a question to be answered for you all? But I do want to pose it. Yes, sir. Webster. I'll take it because I, well, I created who am I from a specific position, specifically effeminate presenting queer men. And I think that was necessary for me to use that specificity to deconstruct some of the inner workings happening within the culture. And I think it's necessary for you to be able to identify, to define what it means to be effeminate in mainstream spaces and to also create a distinction from masculine presenting men whose experiences are different. And so I think it's important for me to kind of bracket that kind of experience and then use that as a compass to find intersectional narratives. And so it's specific, it's specific to queer men who are effeminate because that is a specific experience. And I think it also important to have this self-reflexive approach to understanding that position. And because I'm also interested in performative auto ethnography. I think it's important to locate the individual stories in order to create change. Simone or Carl, any response to that before we do our closing statement here? Really quickly. Yes and yes. Everything he said. Everything. Work intersectional for me. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just going to take another approach. So from a business perspective, I use the 80-20 rule. 80% of my time is spent on working on developing, working on projects geared towards the queer community and the other 20%. Yeah. That's for my other pool of clients. But I recognize that more investment is required for this particular audience, this particular community. And so I use the 80-20 rule. Thank you. We're going to do, we're going to close out with a dream scape. It's landscaping the future through vision, through dreams. But we are also coming to the end of our time. So I'm going to do a little bit of scarcity directing here. In 10 words or less, or maybe take 12 if you want, if you need a few more. Give us your dream scape for the future. What happens when the world, which I think is extremely open and more open than it has ever been, opens more after COVID-19, the vaccine, whatever comes next, after we pass through this gateway of 2020 into further and deeper into this 21st century. Where do you want us to go? I'm going to start with Carl. Because I think as a playwright and a director, you can play along with me. 10 words or less. What do you need a dream scape? Or take a couple more if you need it. It's very simple for me. I always start with a love. I start love, humanity. That's my dream scape, that we continue to see ourselves as Dominican and Caribbean people, as people identify as LGBTQ, that we continue to look at the humanness of each other and love and protect. So we need the laws, we need the laws to protect us. So that's my hope, that the struggle just keeps going. Because after we pass, it'll still keep going. But that every time it just gets better layer upon layer. And we have the constitution behind us. South Africa alone can be the one. We need to show that we can do that too. Webster, what is your dream scape? As we go deeper into this 21st century. So in a sentence, a world where love, empathy, inclusivity, diversity, equity can reign supreme. Simone, what is your dream scape? I feel like Carl Webster and I are all looking at the same dream scape board. Yes, because I agree, and I love what both of them shared. Especially on the love class, I'm always saying one love. I feel like, you know, that's my life philosophy. I think, you know, one thing for sure, what we did for an island like Jamaica, was fast forward immediately for the industrial revolution, connectivity, connection, you know, everybody's online. I'm hoping that we'll see more collaborations, more opportunities like this, more platforms like this. For us to discover all the amazing work that's happening. I think this is the most welcoming thing for me this year. Connecting more, meeting more people and recognizing that you're not alone. Not so much alone, no. And it not only, not just in some kind of toxic social media kind of way, you know, environments that are empowering. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more people stepping up. Thank you, Akiba. Thank you for this opportunity personally. And yeah, just more love and one love. You know, that first love is the love of one self. One love for one self. You learn how to love yourself. You learn how to love the world. You learn how to love yourself. You learn how to love the world. You learn how to love like Jesus said, like Bob Marley said, like Dr. King said. It's a deep one love within one self. That's my dream scape too. Webster, Simone, you know, mother said seven blue young, young king, kid, picky boo. Anytime I get to speak a little maroon, I'm going to do it. Brian Williams, I want to tell you all, thank you. Thank you on behalf of the team here at Akiba Baka Arts and Hallround and the Siegel Center for standing and making the space for us. Bless up on yourself. Bless up on yourself. And in the words of Miss Lou clap on yourself. Thank you. Big up on yourself. Big up tall. And slide. Be brave, be low, be ratchet. I love it. Thank you all. Next week. We will be continuing on to week nine of 10 weeks in Jamaica. And we are speaking with the next generation of leaders. Leaders of a new stage. We will be speaking with Evernay Walters, who have already dubbed the great Evernay Walters of Archibute Jamaica. We will be speaking to Andrew Barracks of Barracks Entertainment. And we will be speaking to the world win playwright and creative Rayon McLean of Quilt. And let me tell you, remember that name. He's one of the people that Garby talked about when he was a kid. And he's one of the people that I've seen me in the world with. That's that Rayon McLean. He's incredible. All of these creatives are incredible. So we will be speaking with them. They are the leaders of the new Jamaican stage next week. Listen, you've heard me say it every week. And if you are a new member of our conversation, I'm going to share this with you. Jamaican people, we have a saying, we say walk good. We theater makers, especially actors, we say walk good. Walk good means see you at the next gig. Walk good means walk good in life. So listen, walk good on the boards. You hear?