 to go, Andy and I, Andy and I were friends there, founder of Kuchibot, and I started talking. And in this sort of crazy January festival season, we wanted to really have some time to just create context for the work and have opportunities for the artists to engage and dialogue with each other and with the audience so that there is just more of a circularity and a dialogue going on. And so this is where the partnership with Kuchibot got created. And so we're very happy that you're here for the conversation. We are also streaming on HowlRound, so any comments, any of you are asking questions, just know that it's out there to the public. Hello. And I just want to introduce you, Mary Pan and Nicole, it's who has, since those five, six years ago, been located to the West Coast, but very proud of him because he just gets into a position as the director of programs at the Skrubel Computer Center in Los Angeles. Woo! He's there and I'll just leave you to it. Hey, great. Hi, good morning, morning. So, I'll just stand up over. Just really quick before we jump into it, so I, culture by, exists in the eyes of Mark Russell. I was working at PS122 in 2002 and 2003 and he kind of said, oh, it sounds good to do it. We wrote an NPN grant and that was how all things started and so I, the reason I'm saying that is because when I moved to the West Coast, I was like, how, what does this mean? And so one of the things I learned from Mark was learning how to give the next group of people an opportunity to do their thing and make things their own. So, as I've stepped away from culture by, I want to introduce right there, we've got Dan, Sarah, and Lydia, and they're the sort of new core culture by team. They've been holding on to the board for about the past year and a half and familiarize, meet them, say hi, get involved. They've opened up the range of people writing and events, really exciting. So, and then also at the end of this is Eva Peskin. Eva has been a great partner in organizing and thinking about these conversations and I'm actually gonna sort of have asked Eva to kind of take the lead on this. I'm gonna be here. I usually can't restrain myself in talking, but so anyway, thank you all for being here and find the new culture by people and yeah, and Eva, turn, take it away. Thank you, Andy, thank you. So, yesterday we were talking about wrong strategy of media and this term came up in familiar elevation. And so, this talk today is kind of cheekily titled, Destroyer of Worlds, which Andy kindly gave to his mind from what Robert Oppenheimer said about the Manhattan Project, the idea that you destroyed the world and it also comes from the idea of Shuba, the Destroyer of Worlds. I have become death, Destroyer of Worlds. Right, and so we're thinking about theater and its compacting to destroy the world, change the world through this defamiliarization. And so, to start, I would love to just hear how that concept resonates for you all in your work, this idea that we do familiarize something in the theater to be able to see it differently. If anyone, does that make, I mean, a call to speak? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, let's start. I'm Abby Brownie, I'm half of Sixth High Women. We make the creation of the work moving forward where the categorization of the work becomes a process of organizing structure with which to actually make and show the work that is it theater, is it dance, is it performance, pushes you into, obviously, the infrastructures that are built for funding and presentation and marketing, but they are also the space where things can exist in overlap and form is sort of complicated, so maybe that's one way in which worlds should not be destroyed. And I also think we tend to work with bodies of performers and performers who are not typically, who are not always seen on stage, and we ask them to behave in ways that are perhaps not, according to a scripture of virtuosity that is best described by our poets and now we're working with theater. I mean, initially when I get into the story of worlds, when I think of me, how much destruction and violence it took to get us to the point where we are right now. How much blood there is in the land that we are sitting on, how much we inherit, and it's this legacy of ongoing and continual violence, right? And for me, the idea of journalism, like the profession of journalism has always been a really weird one to talk about, the experiences, especially under colonialism and capitalism of communities that I align myself with, right, because the idea of journalism relies on the idea of news and novelty, and of objectivity, I don't think any of that exists. I think what theater allows us to do is to destroy all those concepts, throw them out, right? Say all of this is ongoing, it has never stopped, it's been here since forever, it's been here like in the United States in particular, right, since 1492, we have had resistance on the base of race, gender, and sexuality. It's not some sort of new fangled thing or a trans tipping point or whatever these terms that the media comes up with to describe particular moments that we're in. I think of things in cycles and non-linearity and emotion and feeling and trauma, right? And I think that theater and art and poetry ultimately are all just different attempts to scream in a way that journalism and news and all these whatever other apparatus don't allow us to. It's a space to say something loudly or to whisper it or sing it, something that is totally irrational and illogical, right? Something that actually should not be expressed in a way that is boring. Yeah, if there's anything that I wanna do with my work, it's to destroy boring. Because if boring is so violent, it makes it seem like the world is not doing fine. And it's just not true, this has not been true for millennia. So I just wanna make things that are beautiful and interesting and honestly so beautiful that it destroys someone's world, right? That's the goal. It's like I wanna make it so beautiful they can't look away and they have to listen and then a moment of crisis happens and that's where you open people up and whatever. Have a conversation, initiate moments of transformation. Just to add, I feel art is one of the only places we have left to scream. People go to the university to scream and it becomes an incomprehensible situation. Sure. Art is one of the only places we have left to scream anymore. People go to the university to scream and it becomes an incoherent dissertation. People go to the streets to scream and we get arrested. People go home to scream and it doesn't resonate beyond there. People go to the internet to scream and we get dismissed as angry millennials. Or censored. Yeah. So I feel like what I love about theater and why I think that we have really enjoyed moving into the theater world is that it's given us a space to actually just create a space like I kind of think of it as like a watering well or sort of an oasis to just like be sad, angry, depressed, hurt. Frustrated. All these parts of ourselves that I think get cleaved from us in order to survive in a world where we have to become desensitized in order to exist. And I think it would also add that I think a lot as a trans person, I'm already always on the stage. When I walk out of my house, if I'm not performing the types of gender required in this heterosexual system, then I'm told that I'm fat, gay, or trans and I should die. So I've learned from a very young age how to survive through performing. And what I found is that actually ironically, the theater allows me to be myself in a way that nowhere else would because everywhere else, the rules are structured for me where I have to wear pants or a suit or whatever or whatever. But in theater, I can actually in some ways make people familiar with my strangeness through my ordinariness, which is like a very strange equation. But I can actually tell a story about heartbreak or corniness or loneliness. And people are like, whoa, this person that looks so different for me is actually experiencing the same thing as me. And I'm like, duh. Like, we're out here not just like being some alien. I am an alien, I identify as such. But I also am an alien that experiences heartbreak and loneliness and sadness in a way that other humans might as well. So I think also what's interesting is that the destruction isn't just about like blowing up, explosion. It's also just about the destruction of these arbitrary borders that have been imposed on us by this heterop patriarchal system where actually only 4% of people know a trans person and their lives, which is like ridiculous to me. So when they actually see our work, they're kind of like, whoa, trans people are just like everyone else. And I'm like, duh. So I think that that destruction is like the quiet sort of explosions. What I'm interested in theater too is that it's not just about like setting fire to something which I'm down to do, but it's also about the sort of like setting fire to all these socially constructed borders and identities and labels that we've created as a way to keep ourselves in the distance from one another. I want to pick up on word resistance and also, because I saw, this is Guillermo Calderón and in his piece, Escuela. And it's very much about resistance, political resistance to you, right? And I kind of lost the thread of my question. Maybe I could talk, I wonder if you're in your piece, or if you're learning about how to do the revolutionary. And so there's this really process that we're watching. And can you speak to why that is your brain device for that piece that relates to this idea of destroying the world or creating a new one? Oh no. The place about a group of young people getting a sort of parameter training during the late 80s in Chile in order to destroy the big dealership. I'm using the word destroyer, sorry. Not only the dealership, but capitalism as a whole, a state. So they think, of course. So the play is about trying to destroy but failing to destroy it. So it's a play about failure of the possibility of destruction and also what comes after that failure of theater. So theater is in many ways, I don't know, a way of acknowledging failure of a true political change. So for us, we have basically feelings about the political freedom. We feel the impulse of destruction, but then again, it happens on stage inside of a beautiful theater. So it's a play about that contradiction. I think we think about maybe flipping failure into something like trying. And I feel like in your work, I feel like Abby, there's a real aesthetic of trying. And I wonder about how you choose the performers that you choose to work with. Like you specifically work with non-professionalized performers and the way that you have to use their bodies. I feel like what we're seeing is we're seeing them trying something. I don't know, but how do you experience it? Just to contradict you slightly, we also do work with professional and trained performers, though we are often asking them to strip away the habits or the skills or the vernacular that they've acquired from a training so that it's getting to a more unbehaved body, I guess, or an unbehaved way of being in a room. I think we're interested in vulnerability, which is a word that gets thrown around a lot. I think there's something about what a vulnerable, I think there's something about vulnerability on stage that recalibrates the experience for the audience and somehow can make them think about the event, think about what's happening here, think about why we're here, what being a witness to this is. So I think we are generally trying to put some kind of vulnerability on stage so that we can raise the stakes, so that we can wake the audience up, so that they can think about what we're doing. So I think in terms of who we put on stage. Well, can you speak specifically about working with these young children and how that changes the conversation about vulnerability with children are more vulnerable in a lot of ways? I think on a mechanical level, I don't know if anyone has seen Employee of the Year in the show we're doing here. The people who are on stage are between, now they are between the ages of 11 and 12 and they each are performing a fairly complex intricate choreography while each performer has about 15 minutes of a monologue and the challenge of that has changed as we've been working with them for such a long period of time when they were nine years old, like getting through the whole thing was like, can they even do it? It was like giving these five girls a piece of the car and then saying, okay, go, you can't reach the brakes. I think that that has changed now that they actually understand and have a deeper level of awareness of the story and the words that are coming out of their mouth and so the vulnerability is less about the sort of apparatus of the show and like the actual mechanism and more it's actually about, though this is still present. I mean, there's still small young people and they stand in front of stage, and on a stage in front of 200 people and sing and do all this stuff, which I couldn't do. And I think we are asking them to make contact in a way that pushes their level of comfort but I think that now it's almost like inside of the storytelling in a way that it's used to be when they were much older. And so, Susan, it feels like what we're witnessing is this de-familiarization of the compositional tools. You have presence, like the presence of the bodies. We have time, which I feel like functions in a very interesting way, and we have story, which is not necessarily the only or most important thing that we're paying attention to. And I wonder if you're, maybe for Guillermo, although if you think about these specific elements that you're putting together at the screen, or as your storytelling, like your storytelling is a very different way than you might normally experience in play, or is that a story in this experience that you're operating? I think you're crafting the arc of our show as in like what poems we're able to do first and then what poems we're able to do in the middle of the show versus last, all these things, right? I think there are sort of two calculations that go on and it's like what do we want to perform? And then also how do we make sure that this audience who is not used to seeing people like us having things to say and having, you know, beautiful words with which to express them say the thing, right? If we're trying to like be heard, create consistent moments of rupture and then opening and whatever. I think of this as kind of like cellular transformation, right? So we all have to die in order for them to be replenished and so I think of each sort of arc in our show as moments of micro transformation that allow them. So we start with a lot of humor, like very queer tradition of campiness because humor becomes this, like, there is joy in resistance, right? And so humor becomes this way where we're able to make people laugh in a really uncomfortable way and then like shove truth in while that's happening. And then later on in our show, I think there's more and more of our personal stories that get unwrapped. And then the end of the show is like very solemn. It's a little bit more universal, right? Because people think universal things are things that are not explicitly about recent under. Most of those things are also universal. And there is this sort of resign madness to the end of our show that isn't giving you happiness, but maybe a true one. I don't believe in people. I just believe that every person is a constellation of story. And I find it very difficult that we just in a world that tells us like, oh, I know a lot, oh my God, I know a lot too, they're great. It's like you both know fundamentally different people. Like I'm simultaneously a million people. And it's just really ridiculous to me that we keep on pretending like we're individuals. Like so funny. And so for me, what really frustrates me is that we exist in a system that affords infinite complexity to whites as gender straight men and increasingly white gay men. So I go to cinema and I see another story about a white man in love with a white woman and another tortured love story about I can't tell her, oh my God. And then like, honestly honey, you have 600 years of cinema to look through to get advice. When I think about flirting, I'm like, wow, I could die if I flirted with this person, that's great. And I just think about how actually I've seen every flavor of sadness that ever exists from white men. Like there's sadness about losing your mom, so that every single thing has been explored. And I've been taught at a very young age to think, wow, people, sorry, you love me for a phrase because under the society of people allowed humanity are white men. White men are so tortured and complicated and wonderful and brilliant and exclusive. And then when we look at representations of my communities, it's like we literally have to say, from the moment I was born, I knew I was a girl. And I touched a doll and I found myself and it was incredible. And from that moment I was trapped in the wrong body. Then I went to a nice white doctor in a white coat and I said, doctor, I've always wanted to wear a dress and he allowed me to explore my own truth and now I'm a happy, wonderful, full woman. Oh my God, no, we're not allowed to actually be like, hey, I kinda like cars too and that doesn't in any way invalidate my gender at all or like, hey, actually I didn't need to have medical examination of my body in order to dictate the terms of which I live my life. Oh, so what I think what we're also trying to do in our show is show, hey, actually these people who you've been taught unidimensional narratives about immigrants, brown people, people who you perceive as Muslims, trans people, gender nonconforming people, sexual people, queer people, we're actually just as complicated as your boring white ass and actually you're not gonna come to my show and hear some boring arc of like how it's been so hard for me and now I've overcome because it's part of the same wanky level establishment where you're not actually allowing me infinite complexity and I think the project of what I'm both trying to do as an activist and as an artist is to make people recognize that people are terribly complicated and that the state in particular relies on very traditional and boring narratives of oppressed people. That the reason we get away with supporting undocumented people which we're doing more than we've ever done before in our entire lives, hundreds of thousands of undocumented people are being deported every single year. The reason that we get away with murdering black people with no impunity, incarcerating black people with no impunity, continuing the ongoing conquest of indigenous peoples is because the representation that we have of our communities is so basic that you literally do not think that we are human and the way that we get to be seen as human is not actually through empathy, no, it's actually through complexity which is a very different register because empathy is about I understand you and therefore I can categorize you and own you whereas complexity is about I do not understand you but I still affirm the fuck out of you and that's what I was taught to do for white men and that's what I wanna do for everyone, right? So I feel like for me, the reason that we make our show so contradictory and one sense we're like saying this is the politic, like one sense we're saying we hate white people and the next sense I love white people so much and the next sense it's like I hate myself and the next sense it's like I love myself is because the truth is we're all going through that process. I've never met a person who's so self-actualized where every single man on the day they wake up and they're like I have an assured sense of myself and they're like it's a shame to say this and I refuse to be contained but I think part of the way oppression works against my community is at the level of narrativity that we cannot actually be contradictory and paradoxical in our narrative and I think that we lose so much in politics if we require oppressed people not only to experience violence but then to narrate their violence in a way that is appetizing for other people, boring. So I wanna get narratives of violence that are actually contradictory and complex and the way that we layer that in our show is we're literally taking you from like elation to like trauma, to sadness, to rage because that's kinda like what it's like to live as a person by the way. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to pick up on so much. But you know that we're all in those people and that identity or personality or character is not fixed in a way and I think actually every piece, every maker on this team is actually negotiating that the work is homemade. You know I feel like the girls are always the girls. They tell the stories, they become the thing but we're always very aware that they're young girls and so there's this tension. In your piece, we don't ever know their names really. They tell their names of the people or their resistance names. They're masked the whole time. You know, so I kinda wanted to ask Fred the other question. How do you, do you think of them as like, how do you think of them like, are they based on real people? Is it an idea? Are we supposed to all be able to sort of imagine ourselves as revolutionaries? No, they aren't based on real people. People are doing the whole thing. They are masked. You don't see their faces at all. So that's because they engage in political violence so once you do that, you are sort of tainted, whatever, you're not supposed to talk about that. You know, that's a unique of everywhere. And also the mask, to mask your face, has a feeling sort of a strong, iconic, what's the right word, or black torture in fact that will make you ISIS. And it's a very common thing. We are, it's also a very complex thing but the way we use it, it's a way of saying that basically we're all engaging in political violence either actively or passively. So if you live in the US and you pay taxes, you are paying for war, you are engaging or whether you like it or not. So it's actually impossible to call yourself a fascist because you are basically engaging in everything that I guess the US is doing. So the idea of hiding yourself is, it means that you are doing something illegal so you might as well hide it because you don't want to be sent to prison but it's also, it's a matter of hiding yourself because there's something shameful about engaging in violence. So that's the best way to use it, yeah. I mean it's interesting that there's sort of like a local, I'm sorry. Yours is all about not hiding. It's kind of like your work is about this particular piece is about hiding but it's both in the service of resistance in a way. I don't know, it just feels like there's a, well I'm especially interested, I'd love to hear about, I mean the idea of a mask, you know, using a costume name as a framework for understanding how you're meeting resistance to not just non-analog, you guys have a real like political fashion aesthetic that is both like super rigorous and super playful and I wonder how you would think about playing and identity. And I think it's also, I also love to pull this through with Aria and Michael, we can feel like we're seeing these girls play it really interestingly in a way and just this idea of being playful as a way of resisting being. One of the things I really loved about the magic patient is that to me it felt like everybody at one point was teaching somebody else something and so there wasn't like this summon of the teacher all the time. And they also were to play becoming characters like the capitalists of the state. Anyway, that was the, I think there is a different sense of pickleness that you get from wearing a certain thing versus not. But I think it is actually related to this question about political fashion because putting on whatever particular piece of clothing, ostentatious or not, I think it does unmask the idea that clothing itself is a mask, right? That regardless of what gender you're presenting as, who you are trying to be at a particular moment, everyone is performing something. They're trying to be seen as something, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether purposefully or like without agency, right? Without the ability to actually choose and purposefully craft that thing or somewhere in the middle, which is where most of us are. Most of us don't have the ability to like completely choose the aesthetics that we have to fall into, right? I think for us, part of this aesthetic project is yes, about like, yes, everything, everybody is making these conscious and unconscious choices about who they are at a particular moment. And it's like really ludicrous that transgender and alcohol people are like spat on, like kicked for particular choices that everyone is actually making. But then honestly, I think it's like another way of dismantling the board. Like I'm tired of, I don't know, like living in a world that is not saturated with bright colors, where we've lost this sense of like playfulness and fun and being children, being weird. If there's like any sort of group of people that I really wanna fight for, it's weirdos, strange people who fortunately through touring get to meet all over the place in like really unexpected places. We have like this internal list of weird people. We also have an internal list of nice people. Because these are the kinds of things that I think, you know, like we can talk about brown people, whatever, trans people, et cetera. But I think there are these like categories that are outside of those identity frameworks that also get lost to the violences of the everyday world we live in. One of them is strange people. One of them is babies. Because we are just told to like grow up and be professional. Interesting people, nice people. Anyway, these people are fighting for it to be taken. Well, in case you didn't know, there's a genocide going on against trans women of color in this world. Every 32 hours on average a trans woman is murdered. And that's a conservative estimate because when trans women are murdered, we're often misgendered in our deathbeds by our own families, by our own communities, and called men. And then on top of that, I identify as non-binary, which means I'm not that a man or a woman. So we don't actually know what violence against our communities look like, because we're always already, our dead bodies are always, are more poorly designed at birth. So I would actually say that it's probably even higher. And in 2015, there were almost over 30 murders. And to one transform a murder, there's absolutely no news coverage. And the news coverage that does exist blames us for our own death and actually misjudges us and calls us poor and slut than terrible people. And that actually there's no human outcry at all. And we often say trans women aren't murdered, they're disappeared. And it's a very different politic when you have no one left to grieve your body. And so I think a lot about issues of murder a lot. Because these are the communities that I'm fighting for and by. And almost every single one of my trans friends knows that feeling of walking down the street and thinking does this man want to fuck me, kill me or be me? And recognizing that these are all mutually informing systems. And a lot of this is negotiated through fashion. Because if I wake up and I say, today I'm gonna wear a dress, I have to prepare myself. Because the minute I step out of the house, I have to fight for the integrity of my life. I have to justify my ability to breathe. And I have to, I have all of society's hatred of everything, not just femininity, but of everything thrown on me. And I have to literally just sit here and be like, okay, this is your projection of your insecurity around your own gender, got it, great, cool. Just trying to live my life, just trying to drink a juice. But I have to deal with all of that. And I've been thinking a lot about that because it's a very different reaction when I'm on the stage. When I wear what I would normally wear, because everything I wear on the stage, we always joke, because being independent artists, we have to file our own taxes and so we can list costume wear as a tax deductible. But I'm always like, wear all of this off the stage too. So, I don't know, my life is costume wear, I guess. The trans privilege looks like you can't work back here, everybody clothes is costume. I know, everything is costume. So, I always think this is really weird for me because like online, when I post a photo of myself or like at a show, you look amazing. And I'm like, you realize that if I step two blocks away from the theater, people are gonna call me some very bad things. And I've learned how to run in these platform heels really, because I have to. And I know how to take these shoes off really quickly because I might have to hack a bitch. But anyway, so I think about that disconnect of what's actually happening there. And I actually think the reason trans people are getting murdered is the same reason in which people congratulate for me for my fashion. And they're mutually informing systems because you still think that we're performing as something that we're not. And that the only way you can accept trans people is when we're on a stage because we're making literal what you already felt, which is what we're making literalist of the society, which is Western colonial society, hates femininity, hates it so desperately that when we see someone who we read as, quote, a man who would dare wear, quote, women's clothing or, quote, women's makeup, that's disgusting. And what you're hating is not actually us, it's femininity. And the only way we've been taught to understand femininity is as theatrical and as performative and as excessive, which is a logic that facilitates the mass murder and atrocities of cisgender women as well. But the secret is cisgender women rather than aligning themselves with trans people say, oh, that's gross because they've also internalized their own misogyny. So for me, I think it's really, what I'm trying to do in my fashion is make explicit people's misogyny. The reason you're uncomfortable seeing me, quote, with a beard, quote, looking like, quote, a man, quote, wearing, quote, women's clothing, quote, is because of your own internalized misogyny, darling. And that you've been taught from a very young age that femininity is weakness and that's something you need to recalibrate in your life because it's leading to your own repression of your divine femininity, which is making your sex life boring, which is making your relationships boring and it making your fashion choices utterly drab. Work out of it. So that's what I'm trying to do in my fashion. It's really confront people's misogyny to survive. I want to pick up, I'll keep yours, but. One of those things you talked about is the culture of violence in America. And we have a very violent culture here to each other, like Americans often kill other Americans, mostly white Americans killing other white Americans. The nature of systemic government violence against the citizenry of America is quite different. It's not much more quiet and it's certainly not explicit. And this is why, so I want to ask, having watched, I'm not going to say that there's, if you see us quite a lot, there's a moment where we know that you experience this systemic repression under edictatorship personally. I guess my one question is how, how does, I mean, this comes from your experience. So I guess my first question is like, and you talked about the failure of resistance. Like how does making this work? How is that part of your making reconciling with the failure of that and of the revolution? And the other question is, you know, can we, as Americans, like, do you think we can actually get it? Do you think we can actually understand and experience your piece and really get inside it? Or do you think there's been a difference because you have never experienced that in that way as it's too far? Ah, good question. So sometimes you read that you write a play or you direct a play only to say one sentence. So then I, when I, when I sort of see my own work, I realize that in this play there's a sentence that says that our armed forces are powers and players. And that's great, that makes me feel really proud because it's in a little anger. So I think that this play is sort of, it's just a bad word for expressing anger and frustration. So, and that's, it doesn't cure me of anger, just sort of recycle time and sends it into a new stage. And I think what I presented the play here, it's wonderful, people really connect and they mostly are really sort of generous and making connections with the current violence all over the world. But I think there's, there's the experience of living under a leadership that is pretty unique and people who have experienced that really can connect to that. And it's a matter of, if I can explain it briefly, it's basically having someone, I don't know, I don't know, something like China financing a coup, a making alliance with a sector of the armed forces in the U.S., bombing the White House and killing Obama and tens of thousands of people and basically closing the Congress and taking over the country and then staying in power for more than 15 years. So what would that do to the country? So that's what happened in my country. So that's, as I described it, as in the context of the U.S., sort of explains a little bit of what's the impact on the sort of the core of the countries, the soul of the country, if you can say that sentence. So that's my experience. So that's what fear is trying to deal with now, basically. So that experience, I think people in the U.S. cannot completely relate to it on an emotional level but definitely in an intellectual level. So definitely it's completely satisfying the way people are understanding what you're working on. I think the scenario you described, I think you can sell that to Hollywood. I'm pretty filled with that. If I can, I'll pick up on what you're saying a look in this idea of femininity and I really feel about that. And I really wonder about, like when Abby went, like did you work specifically with girls and it's weird that it feels like that's such a, amazing and powerful choice, but it does and it feels really valuable to see a bunch of girls who have completely manned the stage in this really interesting way. What led you to that particular choice? We actually didn't, oh when we started the piece, we didn't know it was gonna be performed by young people, by children. And then when we made the decision to work with young people and we held auditions, we didn't just exclusively audition girls. We auditioned a lot of children with various stripes. And it was actually, it was a default. I mean it was like there was one boy who we were really interested in, but then we thought the politics of having one nine-year-old boy and several nine-year-old girls was gonna be a really complicated social experience. And also frame, would frame something in the room really specifically. And so we started working with the girls. I mean, honestly we were inspired by a girl we saw in a movie. It was as easy as that. And we saw the movie and we thought, let's do that. When we were testing out the idea, I think it was sort of like really trying to, we were writing the play at the same time and we were working with different actors and performers at various ages and genders. And we, I think we were sort of trying to concoct the scenario and like who should be the messenger of the story and who should we see on stage and who should, whose truth sort of brings a layer of complexity to the story that we're telling and bends it and shifts it into a more complex way than we can do just by putting the story out there alone. Like who's the right person to tell the story and who's the wrong person to tell the story. And usually there's something more interesting in the wrong person. And so I think the idea that as this, as the narrative moves forward in time and it's the story of one woman's life and that as she ages it diverges from the performers so that you know that these people are telling you about experiences that they have not had so that there is a sort of widening of the gap between the character on a theatrical level and the performer on a real human level. But actually I think a little bit there that in the widening of the gap there's actually a contradiction that happens that because of the amount of time, because of the different command of the room because they are very powerful presences and also because of the sort of seduction of the actual story that you actually come deeper in. The widening of the gap actually is a closing that you actually get closer into the story and you can have more command. But so do you always have the idea of having a story to be about this whole life? Yes, that was a constant, that was a constant thing that we had. The inception of the piece was that it was like a lifetime. You do have a part out of there at once, so do you want to open it up to the audience? Do you have some of your possibilities yet? I actually wonder, it seems like all the people on this stage act and transform and destroy both in the theatrical fence and in the world. You know, it's just in the theater. But we also know that a lot of people who are coming to see these performances have all the courage to experience that and there may be some particular file or how you choose to act both in the world and in your work to be destroying and recreating in the world and not just in the theater. I'll be very explicit. I'm here to recruit. Every time I speak, every time I act, every time I dress, every time I think, I'm talking about the struggle of this whole period. There's never an apolitical moment for me because there's a type of urgency of which one year friends are done and you don't have to fight like hell for that, right? And for me, I realized from a very young age that people are much more likely to pay me and listen to me if I say what I'm doing is art versus if I say what I'm doing is activism. Because we live in a culture that hates activists even though activists have created the conditions with which all of us are living. There'd be no such thing as theater. There'd be no funding for arts if there wasn't for people screaming, historically saying this is important, right? And so what I think about with what we're trying to do is we actually have an organizing strategy and philosophy. So we think how do we bring in people into the room who wouldn't normally be there? We have a really sexy social media presence. We are constantly thinking about ways to bring in people through really neoliberal things like our fashion, our selfies, like some liberal love narrative, whatever. Whatever breaks people in. And then the first thing you learn when you're a social movement organizer is you do base buildings. We build that base online. Then we do political educations. We teach them about the issues we're experiencing. And then we give them opportunities. So we say, come to our show. The show sells out, great, phenomenal. Now we bring them into the room and we think how do we fundamentally destroy this person's entire universe? But they're not just going to do this white liberal thing where they come and see us and like, wow, diversity. I'm gonna give you an experience today. I'm gonna go and tell my children, wow. But actually I'm gonna be like, I feel deeply implicated and I'm going to actually support. So then we do that in our art and then we say follow us on social media. We bring them in and then we present the new opportunities to go and support other artists, activists, jump into other campaigns, actually support different issues, recalibrate their politics, right? So for me, I think one of my biggest critiques of the theater world is that it sees the job as ending when the show is over and that's just when it began, darling. What's your follow-up? How are we gonna bring them in? How are we gonna actually build with these people? How do we get people to understand these concepts? Because people don't learn in a two hour span. They just don't. They learn over a lifetime. So that's why I think we always need to be thinking about how does theater and how does art fit within a bigger strategy of what we're trying to do? And I hear a lot of people say these really nasty things about young people all the time. Like, oh, young people's attention spans are so small and they can't enjoy theater or oh, the turn towards digital has made it so people just don't want to go in there and experience. No, it's because your work is boring. It's because it's irrelevant and actually young people aren't discerning enough to recognize I'd rather watch Netflix because they're actually giving me things that actually interest me than going to go see Dead White Old Man and make really boring theater at the public, right? So for me, it's really about recognizing that it's not enough to just be like, oh, my theater's amazing. But actually make it relevant and make it accessible and make it actually relate to the people who need to be in the room, not the people who are already coming. I think to add to that, this one question I've been trying to grapple with is a question of how regardless of who we are, our right to some extent, we've been influenced by this culture that tells us to individualize, or put it in particular, receptacles. And so much of what has happened, and it's relevant to what they're from, but so much of what we have experienced, right? Whether it's the on-going genocide, the complex religious people here, whether it's the slavery for the accumulation of wealth, whether it's like now this thing called the war on terror that we justify by saying we're sad, that we're gonna bomb everyone, right? I think there is this sense that people don't know how to grieve in ways that are broad and empathetic and lovely and hold that pain, and instead they put that pain in things like marriage or deportation prisons. I think it does become this sort of cyclical thing to the spiritual fabric of who we are when the only ways we can think of dealing with things that are uncomfortable is by incarcerating them, deporting them, bombing them, right? And I think to a certain extent that's what we've done in the realm of culture as well, and that reinforces all these other systems, right? Again, what the local saying about how if we have these flat representations of people, then it is okay to call them terrorists. If we have these flat representations of people, then they are illegal, right? So I don't think it's, when I say I wanna make spaces for people to grieve, I mean, I want them to be able to grieve for unmarked bodies and for systemic violence and for all of history and all of time. And anyway, to your question, I don't actually think that most of the audiences like at the public are generally used to going through those kinds of processes. I don't think that much of our work is initially intelligible to a lot of the people we perform for, not to see it all over the place. And that's part of the beauty of it. I don't wanna agree with everyone I perform for. I want them to challenge me on my ways. I wish I could say that I was preaching to the choir, but the choir wouldn't be preaching to it so small. Like so small, there are not that many non-binary, like, anti-colonial activists out there. For us, like, popularly to show with them, we would never make money. But if we even have a great theater space where we can do that, we would totally do it. If you wanna pay for their tickets, like, feel free. My question up there. Okay, I have a question. I'm curious about theater's role in not just deconstructing or storytelling or destroying the current world, but actually ways that you're seeing, and I love the point of theater doesn't end off the stage, and it's actually connecting to education and activist opportunities. But where are you guys are seeing examples of theater that's actually imposing a vision for a new world? So instead of carrying down the current world that we have, who's being really effective and actually visioning things for people so that this is to be inspired by theater, and then go out and create your own world, but to actually see a proposal for a new world. I just wonder if that's happening. I haven't seen it in a long time, if you have. I feel like I see it a little bit in your work, like on Avenue, really in a particular way, in that you ask us to spend different quality of time together. Sorry, I don't even see it for you now. I just really speak to that. I feel like you slow things down in the way that you're asking them to experience, like things that we understand, like story and actor and stage, but we experience it. But I feel like in a lot of the shows that I've seen in yours, I'm surprised when a time's passed, or I feel like something's happened for a long time. I feel like that is kind of radical to be spending time with something. What do you guys think about it? I think we're kind of interested in boredom in a way, but I don't know how to defend that quite. I think it's because it's just our own. Well, I mean, I think it was interesting that Shani brought up boredom as something to fight against. And I do think that our fascination with it is a bit of a fight in its own way. That changing a time signature with which you are, if you can change the time signature of a group of people with which you're experiencing the passing of time, then we can reframe a theatrical event, that the lifting of an arm, or a simple act of intimacy between two people is, all of a sudden, can be perhaps more, there's like a magnitude, to perhaps something that might have been on YouTube. There's so much that's, it's, you know, I have like, you know, notes of my kind of love to actually, you know, the kind of dig into boredom much more is because I think boredom is massing me. But I'm thinking of on like, on grief and boredom and all these things. I just want to ask, actually, and your question about envisioning other worlds, and I think that behind the title of destroyer worlds is the idea of destroying what exists to create new ones. In Escalar, they're very clearly articulating a vision of a sort of post-capitalist Marxist utopia that they want to achieve. We know, because we're watching the play, that they fail. It seems that there is, my experience, the players, that there is grief about that. How, I guess, as the playwright, and sort of, do you feel that they, or as an individual, do you still feel that the impulse to try and create a sort of utopian, better world is an important one? Yes, definitely. Of course, I used to work pessimism, but there was also idealism. Here, I guess, under a few years. We don't know what's going to happen. Maybe capitalism is going to destroy the planet, and something new is going to arise from that. So, and that new thing, it better be better than this one. And that's going to motivate us for a long time, I think, for the rest of our lifetime. I think now we live in a sense of the middle of a big crisis, a crisis that's just going to keep growing, and I think that we're going to need to sort of gather all the ideas in order to create something new as soon as we can. So, and I think that's one of the things that fear is now desperately doing. I think that's a great place to end, which is to gather all the idealists. I see you've got a bunch on the stage and they're doing that. Eve, everybody thank you, Eve, y'all.