 Oh, yeah. So everything is good. So just let the participants come in. I'm like, the breakout room is because I really wanted them working with each other. But if there's a small number, we'll just play games in front of each other and I think it'll be okay. Danny, if you can hear me, can you set me up as a host so that I can share my screen? Hi, people. I can see there's 17 participants. So I think there's probably people coming in with their videos off. Is that right? Yeah. Can you guys all turn your videos on? If they turn the videos on, then you'll lose... My prominence is the speaker. Yeah, my prominence is the speaker. I don't know because of the load that it puts on and the connections. Stephanie can maybe... That's a story, that's an issue. Hey, Eileen, you should see a green share screen button at the bottom of your screen. Yeah, I see that. Okay, so you can share it. Good morning, everybody. I can see that there's people in the room. I know I can't see your faces just yet, but thank you so much for joining this libido webinar session, advising session today. What we're going to do is we're going to do a bit of chatting first, and then later on we'll turn on your cameras and we'll let you guys introduce yourselves to each other. So that'll be in the next little bit. Okay, great. So shall we start? It's 9.07. The director's in the room and she's already taking us in through the plan. So good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third day of the SOAS Festival of Ideas. I'm Amina Yakin. I'm the director of the festival, and it's a pleasure to connect with you all and to welcome you to this masterclass with our wonderful theatre director, Aileen Konant. It's a theatre masterclass in devising, non-hierarchical theatre making as a tool of disruption. And I'm going to just give you a brief introduction to Aileen, who is a Japanese-American director with a passion for daring new works of theatre that engage audiences with untold and untold stories in a visual, visceral way. Her Colchester-based physical company, Theatre Témoin, is a, I don't know if I'm saying this right, one degree East portfolio Larry developed with and without walls portfolio company and has worked in collaboration with the Salisbury Playhouse, Oval House, Roundhouse, GDIF and others. Aileen has worked for various companies in the UK, including the Bush Theatre Yellow Earth and Theatre 503. She has received awards twice from the Wellcome Trust with a rigorous approach to, she has a rigorous approach to community engagement and research and my screen is showing her trailer. Can we sort of just hold on to that for a minute? And she's worked freelance for various companies in the UK, including Bush Theatre Yellow Earth and Theatre 503 to repeat. She's a twice recipient of the Wellcome Trust People Award with a rigorous approach to community engagement and research. She's a board member of stage directors UK and a delegate member of artistic directors of the future. And she is somebody who is working towards greater equality and inclusion and integrity in the UK theatre industry. I've got to know her over the last few years and the energy and ideas. She is a buzzing theatre director and I think if I were ever to write a play, I would definitely want it to be directed by Aileen, although I'm not sure she would want to direct it. But I think you're in for a treat. It's going to be absolutely amazing. Thank you, Aileen. Thank you, Aileen. We are so grateful to you for doing this and I'll hand over to you. Brilliant. I just want to say good morning again, and I just want to thank you all for coming at 9 o'clock on whatever morning it is, Wednesday morning. As you guys can all see, I'm in a beautiful church. This is the first church of St. Barnabas in Bethnal Green and they do... This is a hot tip. Don't tell anyone. They do rehearsal space for 90 quid a day in this enormous hall. And what I'm working on is I'm working on a piece that has a Japanese taiko drummer, so you can see all those music instruments back there, and a Wushu weapons specialist. So we've got a bunch of weapons and we're doing this kind of East Asian women, amazing Japanese myth thing. So that's kind of my context and to explain why I've got all these amazing windows behind me. In terms of what I wanted to talk about today and just to kind of let you know how the session will go, I'm going to release some, a little bit of anxiety in the chat in terms of like, oh God, if we turn our cameras on, what happens to the recording? Like I said in the introduction of the session, the way that I work is that I get groups of people together, getting to know each other. It's actually very unusual for me to be talking to a bunch of people without getting to know you first. Very unusual for me to be doing it without seeing your names or faces or anything. So what I want to say is feel free to use the chat space in this space here as kind of a community space, just to say hi, say who you are, and maybe even put in the chat what you might be interested in learning today in terms of devising and what your background is, because I don't even know if I'm dealing with like majority theater students or majority literature students. Like I don't know what your backgrounds are, and I really want to make this session work for you. So go ahead and stick that in the chat. And in the meantime, so one of the things I wanted to, basically the theme for today is disruptive theater, which is a bit of a, it's kind of a buzzword, isn't it? Disruption. And it is a little bit of a misnomer, I'd say, just in the sense that there's nothing sort of aggressive about the type of disruption that I'm talking about. I think that there's something inherently disruptive about coming into a context and breaking down the hierarchy so that you are effectively making everybody equal in a space. There's something inherently disruptive about that. You can see it doesn't work with a webinar, for example, right? So the structures that are already in place, they don't work with this idea of like everybody, non-hierarchical, like that. That's just in our society, there's hierarchy everywhere. And so the kind of theater that I do often, if I go into a space where say there's NHS care workers in a mental health hospital and service users, for example, if I go into that space with a non-hierarchical attitude and I go, who are you? Who are you? Who are you? And what does everybody here have to teach to everybody else and learn from everybody else? There's something inherently disruptive about that. And I think that's what I've found in the different contexts that I've gone to when I work, especially in post-conflict settings. So I know this is a million miles a minute. I think just to give you kind of a flavor of what I do, I'm going to play a very short video, which just is the last project I happen to do in Northern Ireland. So we'll watch that and then I'll show you a kind of a PowerPoint with a couple of my shows. And then we'll get into the kind of the more collaborative kind of Q&A and getting to know each other and then we'll make something of our own, whatever that means. So without further ado, let's go ahead and load up that video. Nobody has grieved in this province yet. Nobody can accept anything because they haven't grieved. We're still in shock. We're doing the bomb explosions, doing a lot of incendiary attacks and that was mixed in amongst all the routine, if you can call it that. When people say that it was a dirty war, God, it was a dirty war. I just knew that it was my time to tell my story. We had removed houses that are still living and we were gone. You never actually saw a paramedic or an ambulance being interviewed. Many of my contemporary colleagues were taking before their time through a variety of things from depression to PTSD to cancer and there aren't that many of us left. Northern Ireland is one of the highest rates of suicide among young men. A lot of that comes from what happened in the past and looking at the past and what we can learn from it and then bringing that into today. Are these yours? Some of them? What's inside them? I'm not sure how to explain. Can we open them? It's probably best to leave them. I want to see what's inside. What's in that one? I was talking to my sister earlier on and it was almost like for years she lived with a box under the bed with dirty washing on it. Every now and again you sort of make the bed and it picks out from under the bed and you kick it back in again because it's not something you want to think about or talk about. And this is almost like opening a box and taking it and shaking it out and even talking it through and talking to other people about it. I've just found that really, really very positive and therapeutic in a very practical sense. We didn't get counselling and therefore you had to put the individual trauma parts empty boxes in your head. Anytime I was interviewed in the television about my stories I kept saying that and I hope that I gave her the idea that maybe she had it the first place. In order to create a narrative that has meaning I needed to do something poetic or transposed or non-literal in order to kind of bring seven people together into one story. I'm saying that going who's the antagonist will clearly be the ensemble. Then who's the antagonist? Their memories were in a way revealing the people, persons, individuals and listen to what the drama students are telling us. We were doing the crying in December angry with each other, storming out. They started crying just one week ago the young people and that was because they suddenly began thinking what were their parents doing at that time. Our family we never really talk about it's something that I never really even thought about in the early rehearsals as long as like a big blur and you were just like wow I don't know what to say but over time you start to learn about the past, what it was actually like and it's also reflects on the society that we live in. When we told them our stories they'd never heard of them before. I feel that their generation needs to hear our stories so that they will never get involved in anything like that again. It moved from the young people being some sort of signing board for us to bind stories of to an actual real conversation starting for them to start to open up and share their experience with the difficulties that young people are facing today. A lot of the first responders have mental health issues because of the troubles they have PTSD and depression and flashback. We don't have that but we still have anxiety and mental health issues. I think a lot of young people are still anxious about Protestants and Catholics and the divide between that. They start to pleading with us for the stories. We tell them stories then their attitudes change a little bit. We want to hear any more but get the box just keep coming. You could walk down any street on our walk past someone who has suffered more trauma than we have. I think the conclusion we came to was at the end of the day you can only tell your story. If something comes out of that when people can learn from it that has to be a positive thing I suppose. It's not about more stories now. They've all been recorded. It's about what we have done or what we have left for the next generation. The very real challenges that they face which I think are are probably more so. How we can help them deal with them and the insight and perspective they can still give us under the life we led. These workshops this play is not going to solve the problems but what we can do is listen to each other's stories what we can do is agree that we can live for difference. That is Northern Ireland today. There's lots of realities differing realities. This is across the path cut deep into bits. This is her turn to call the storm to march. Shout in the glass and break the battle chain. It's real freedom we thought we would never see again. There's a lot of people out there who haven't told their children. You need to know something about it to make better decisions in the future and they are our future. What happened was awful like it was horrible but at the end of the day as well as that we have to learn from it and we need to take what we can from that and I think especially now there is a focus on young people in mental health today which is really important. If there was one thing that came from it it was the delight that the audience got it they knew what we were doing they knew why we were trying to do it and they reacted to it and people made them think they had engaged with it they had empathized with it as a work. It was like a family. We have connected we have cried with us and they have accepted us. I'll unmute myself. That's just a little kind of brief introduction to some of the kinds of stuff so that was a participatory project. I also work with professional actors but whenever I do that I do try to make sure that there's a real participatory element to the work that I'm doing so I might be bringing for example I did a piece of theatre that was about a boy who was experiencing homelessness and it was a mass theatre piece but I made sure that the actors were working in hostels and working with people with experience of homelessness and getting kind of almost trained by experts who had lived experience and sort of the first run of the show was when I was a student I worked with a group of directors and I worked with a group of director hostels or going into recovery colleges before we took the show out into kind of more traditional theatre spaces so that's kind of that's a bit about the work. Here's another. I'm just really quickly going to share my screen and show a couple of other projects so this is just running through some of the projects that I've done. This particular project was working in Lebanon I have a question can people see my pointer or is that I'll actually just name them so Drop of Honey was a project that we did in Lebanon and we were working with major kind of commanders from opposing sides of the Lebanese civil conflict and what they did was they created kind of a database of stories from the past and then working with young people we created kind of a farce around that a comedy about Lebanese civil society but drawing kind of grounded in these really real stories so that we were always going back to this isn't a joke, this isn't a joke in Jammu and Kashmir that was an interesting one because that was a context that was not really a post-conflict context it would be a current conflict context and so a lot of the projects that were there were less about processing something that was past and it was actually more about in a way protecting from what was going on now so a lot of the projects that were there were not so conflict focused that were much more kind of working on things like dreams and just working in joy and working in play and working to access that in a space that was quite heavy in Rwanda I worked with a group of young I say young men they were children they were between the ages of sort of 12 and I think the oldest was maybe 19 so they were all young people who had been demobilized from fighting in the Congo who had originally been Rwandan before the sort of before they escaped after the genocide so this would have been young people who didn't fit into the national narrative so the conflict in Rwanda there was obviously a massacre against the Tutsi but the people who there was a big population of Hootsu who after that kind of ran away to the Congo and then what's a little bit less known is that there were counter you know counter attacks and I'm not saying one side better than the other or anything like that but these children their experience was that a lot of them lost family a lot of them lost their parents very very young and then were kind of left alone or kidnapped or taken into a context where they became child soldiers and were being repatriated into a country Rwanda where they were actually the enemy in terms of the national narrative there they were they were the bad the bad kids you know so they're kind of suffering didn't fit within the the larger kind of narrative frame and that was a really interesting project because then when you go and you go okay what I'm fundamentally going to do is go what's your story and your story has value within this context where it might not hierarchically necessarily fit there's something inherently disruptive about that there's a really amazing group of young people and then these two projects so again this is an interesting one so in Israel when I worked in Israel I was there for a very very short period of time and for me personally I had just come off the back of working in Lebanon I had been so for me it felt on my journey it felt important to engage with the IDF and that was kind of the reason that I was there and what happened was that I kind of first made contact with a group of older veterans from a disabled veteran's center called Betal Haim and a lot of these guys had like lost legs and arms and eyes and in the wars of the 70s and then obviously while I was there I was also meeting a very important group of young politicized women who were from breaking the silence and organizations that were very engaged in the current political narrative and conversation around Israel policy design and what was really interesting about that project was I kind of had to make a decision there was one story which was sort of the trauma narrative which is here's my own personal issues and here's how I dealt with it and here's me recovering from trauma and then there's this whole socio-political piece of context but it was almost like I didn't have the time to do that justice and to throw those two things together in a way that would have been that would have honored the original participants that I interviewed like it would have been a bit too dimensional but it would have it would have I didn't have the time and the space and so I made the decision not to do that which I wanted to bring that example up because I think there's something inherently political also about who you choose to work with and who you don't work with and that within that making the decision to exclusively work with one group it was a it was a politically difficult decision it was very difficult for me and it was destructive as well and it's in its own way and I'm happy to talk more about that if questions come up the caravan is a piece that was working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon right now 25% of the population of Lebanon is Syrian refugees so there's a real tension there where they can move and there's a lot of there's a lot of resentment from the local population so what we did was we took we took a group and got their stories and their voices and then created a sort of interactive piece of street theater where they go out and share the stories and then have a dialogue with with the audiences who were predominantly Lebanese and what was again interesting about that is kind of working in those kinds of contexts where you talk about health and safety like you have to there was a moment where we kind of had to pull half of the tour because a big bomb had gone off and people were blaming the Syrian population it was physically dangerous for our performers to be going out and putting themselves in that situation so I think it's really interesting because whenever that happens you kind of grind to a halt and I think that there's something inherently sort of I want to say almost imperialistic about going oh we're the ones who are going to make the decisions about the health and safety of the people who are going to cast and go what do you guys want to do and yeah in the end I think that was the big piece of learning there was that the most important there's some of times you're doing art in insane situations and there is no there's no safety and there's no right and wrong and actually it's less about what conclusions you come to and it's more about who you include in that conversation and how you come to them so that I'm going to pause there and talk about broad areas it would be lovely to kind of get to see your faces and to kind of move into a section where we're kind of now chatting a little bit more openly and maybe do a Q&A is that something we somebody had a very very good suggestion which was that people might be uncomfortable turning on their cameras and what we could do is we could just stop the recording because it was for archive purposes only would people be more comfortable doing that if we could if we stopped the if we stopped recording at this point so great it's good to see your videos coming online can I just say I'm not to interrupt you I was just going to say the Q&A feature is there as well and I think it allows people to say things anonymously if they don't want to say something by identifying themselves so perhaps that's something that they could also use oh yeah I think that if we're if the eventual goal is for us to create something together it's very difficult for me to imagine what that looks like if we're not engaging with one another so I think eventually we'll want to kind of see each other's faces and be able to hear each other anyway so I would be great if we could just get that going now I'm really happy to do that straight away ah it's good to see you guys hi that was a really weird experience for me I was just talking into a vacuum I would really love the recording to stop because I know that these things can be used in ways that we haven't consented to yeah and just the idea of hierarchical theater