 Hello. Good morning if you're on the West Coast. Good afternoon if you're in the middle of the country or on the East Coast. I'm Douglas Clayton. I'm a director playwright and producer, as well as a past artistic director and currently Senior Vice President of Arts Consulting Group. But most importantly, I'm an alum of Directors Lab West from the class of 2007 and a producer for this year's series Directors Lab West Connect. I'd like to thank you all for joining us here today. Very excited for this conversation. I'd also like to thank our ASL interpreter, Danny Casey, who you can see there on the screen with me. And know that this is being recorded and will be archived on directorslabwest.com and on HowlRoundTV with appended captioning as well for anyone who watches this after it's posted tomorrow. For our low-sighted colleagues, I am a four-ish white male identifying individual with brown hair, a short brown beard wearing rectangular glasses and an open-colored blue shirt. I'm seated in my office presently with a comfortable couch behind me and two paintings over it by the Polish bisexual art deco painter Tamara de Limpica. And our interpreter Danny Casey is a young, light-skinned woman with short, tussled, dark hair wearing a black shirt in front of a blue curtain. So Directors Lab West, for any of you who are not familiar, is a 20-year-old all-volunteer-run organization that every May provides an eight-day intensive full of workshops, panels, masterclasses, and more for emerging and mid-career theater directors, choreographers, movement directors, intimacy directors, have been crafted for and by theater directors and choreographers, live-streamed by our partners at HowlRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page. So if you're having any trouble seeing it on either platform, try a global art and technology community. Hello, Scarlett. Hi. I am a youngish white woman with short brown hair and glasses that are brown and rose gold. I am sitting in my room in Brooklyn, a green plant on the other side, which I don't know the name of, and a poster that says Block Party, 7 p.m. Excellent. Excellent. So the three of us will be in conversation for the next 30 to 45 minutes discussing reimagining liveness and connection for virtual space. As I said before, please feel free to submit questions in the chat, and at the end we will try to bring those forward and fit them into the conversation. Scarlett. So let's get started. Scarlett and I have had several conversations already. And one of the things we wanted to start with was the fact that right now our entire community, basically, what do we do right now? And then what should we plan to be doing in the future? And for a lot of us, very, we've been trained and we've become very confident and very comfortable in a certain way of creating our art and sharing that with people. And I'm thinking that perhaps a good way to get into the question of what's going to happen in the future is to start by looking at the history of change and innovation in the past for people who've been really invested in that and sort of bringing the past president future together that way. So I'd love to start by just inviting you, Maddie and Scarlett to talk about the broader trajectory of La Mama and Culture Hub from the past leading up to today and how that frames the way you're thinking about the future now. Great. So Culture Hub is a global art and technology community that was founded in 2009 by La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York City and the Stoll Institute of the Arts in Korea. These two institutions were founded around the same time in the early 1960s and perhaps late 1950s for soul arts. And they were both founded out of necessity. La Mama was was born out of a need. Ellen Stewart had some brokenhearted friends, brokenhearted playwrights living on the Lower East Side who needed a place to do their work when Broadway just wasn't quite it. And so she rented out a basement space on East Ninth Street and she said, you guys do do plays at night. I'll turn it into a boutique during the day because she was a fashion designer. The boutique never quite happened. She was a very successful fashion designer on Sex with Avenue, but you know she she made a life supporting others and creating a vast space for people to experiment. Seoul Institute of the Arts was founded by Chijun Yoo because there was an emerging style of performance and he was a playwright and he wanted actors and performers who had a different sort of training who could offer his work more interdisciplinary approaches that could really meet the contemporary needs. And Ellen Stewart and President Yoo were both had a deep deep deep relationship. They, they brought shows to each other's countries. They had residency as there was a rich history of cultural exchange. And that that was the same for them and many other institutions and relationships with artists and organizations around the globe. And in 2009 they got together and said hey, what can we do with the internet with emerging technologies to deepen these collaborations these these cultural exchanges. And, and how can how can we do it with a healthy level of skepticism, not to say that that this can replace all of these plane rides that we have to take but it can augment it how can we open a window when I'm in a studio on Great New York and have that window go to Seoul, Korea. So that's what Culture Hub was founded to do it was to explore emerging technologies. Now we've grown into, we're not just focused on Le Mame and Soul Arts there are collaborations and partnerships around the globe. And, and this is what we're exploring international exchange and creativity. There are many other facets of what we do but it's a little more relevant today, asking the question how do we work distributed. Right. And that to a sort of important key for our whole conversation today, which is that this isn't a conversation about how we replace what we already know this isn't a conversation about, you know, replacing the world that existed and it's certainly not a conversation about how we replace the experience of live theater that drew so many of us to this art form and have made us really committed to this either and we want to acknowledge all three of us want to acknowledge that there's a lot of emotion going on in our community in our international community right now we've heard a lot of that over the last five days at the lab. There are people who are really energized by the experimentation and the change that's going on but there are also people who are frightened. And there's also a lot of us who are mourning right now and are are really feeling that loss and a really impactful Some of us, we're in a place where we can take that forward right now into explorations of new ideas but for other people. They just need to process the morning right now and that's okay. And that's great and that's the nature of our humanity in our art. So, instead, a lot of what Maddie and Scarlett have been doing is exploring what new things we can do that are additive and that are complimentary to the we're all together live experiences that we've been doing and in a way that is explorative and looking to the future and that isn't just trying to solve our problem right now either. So, I'd love for you to you both to talk about that that relationship the relationship between live connected in person human, but then also what that means when we're talking about form or a distance or the use of technology that facilitates that. You know, it's it's been really important for me to nurture an expansive framework, as opposed to a reductive one so thinking of virtual engagements virtual art remote connection distributed engagements of these things not as an attempt to simulate or replace or replicate the physical real world, but as as more of like an alternate strategy full of potential energy so yeah it's been a really interesting journey like Maddie mentioned culture as a history of engaging in collaborations and intercultural exchange through remote forms so now, you know it's a moment for us to kind of respond and celebrate to the unique parameters that virtual context is proposing and kind of letting that teach us how it opens up all these new ways of thinking about liveness and connection. And I think that kind of. I don't know the duality is important because one day I wonder if I'm fetishizing the og liveness and I truly have so much faith in the committed presence and intimate exchange and shared physical and the next day I'm so enamored with all these mind blowing ways and metaphors and all these different spaces that come up and rethinking liveness through technological means so for me it's been important to chase curiosity and accept a contradiction and you know, like, I would say I'm very much in mourning of the shared live experience and in tandem, you know I appreciate the current moment that's allowing us to reflect on our ideas and biases about liveness and presence and everything else so I think that's something that has been sort of grounding for me and for the for the people that I'm working with on a daily basis at La Mama and at Culture Hub is that this is our life this is part of our lives now and and I almost think it is a disservice to say, well, is this theater because if this is our life and if this is really part of our lives in a in a way that is weddings are happening here funerals are happening here your people are meeting their first grand child here that we can just remove that distance and say okay this is life this is theater if if if theater is is our lives. And, and I also, you know I feel like theater is essential theater and art at large are are essential to having a culture a shared culture. And, and you know we're in this mindset that of of of being on a linear journey towards reopening and towards finally after after many steps getting to a place where we can have education, and we can have art making again. And I think that we need to take every step of course, towards public safety and health and that is the most important thing. But that in order, the reason that we that we work so hard to have public health and safety is so that we can participate in a shared culture that this this this work that we do together is the reason that we have cities it's the reason that we have roads. And, and yeah that it doesn't really get to just be pushed off to the side and said hold on to as an artist you can have that relationship to your own practice, but as a culture. We're all here. This is our life. This is happening. Yeah, it's it's so funny because that when I first moved to this country, one of the best advices that someone gave me was like, don't wait for the thing to happen like don't wait for someone to give you the opportunity to do the thing because you're already doing it. So, bring like focus on the awareness of the fact that you're already doing it and that's the story. And then like one of the first things I learned about was in high school being an artist was fluxes and I was so mind blown that life and art can have such an intimate and interchangeable and fluid relationship so I've been thinking about that time a lot and you know how I think that really informed how I position my art making in relation to my life living practice. And right now it feels like there's this more of like a sense that theater is something that can be embedded or embeddable in everyday life rather than theater being outside of life that you like opt out of life to opt into so that's been I don't know that's been kind of a part of my optimistic kind of perspective of, oh you can actually engage in your own terms or you can author the terms of your engagement and it's not something that you know going to the theater even as a theater person can be a daunting experience because of the formality and all of these other things associated with it so it's been interesting kind of, yeah renegotiating like reauthoring my relationship to life and theater and life and art and how that can kind of coexist in tandem in a much more fluid and kind of embedded relationship. And, and it also speaks to accessibility, like through the programming that we're doing at the mama and at culture hub. There, we've had viewers in like the majority of us states, which at any given shows I think we would have some non local to New York City folks in the audience, but not not at the same scale and a lot of that is actually thanks to how around and it's been saying, we're in this together. We, I keep on thinking the something that I've been thinking is that we're in this sort of collective hackathon moment, where we're all sort of all of a sudden, we all have the same variables and the same problems to and if you're, if you want to be a part of it. Yeah, go for it like your, your exact way that you're going to approach this problem is different than everybody else and so. So we have this like collective visioning going on of so many people just, you know, putting something up on the board and saying ha, I got that what what about you and then and people are going in so many different directions which we're having before this moment. There was it was much more niche, if you were working in this in this sort of blended zone of of live web and live performance. Even though it is, it is such an integral part of our lives, you know, through through phones and talking to family members and friends who don't live near us. It's the, the, the whole thing of, you know, what arguably the most famous theater quote ever about, you know, theater holding the mirror up to nature from Hamlet. We forget sometimes that we're supposed to be engaging people about their lives and that that's that's what this is and we can get so into our own box that we're in and now, as you say it's it's broken open in different ways and we need to be responding to what people, the way people are living their lives which is such such a great point there. Can you talk a little bit more about the, the access thing is really interesting both in terms of, of what, what this kind of experimentation or progress or exploration means to who we can connect to but also to we've had a lot of conversation last few days about the, that our industry has been controlled by gatekeepers and sort of who controls the buildings controls the arts, and that that's changing maybe. So, but to hear more about that. Yeah, the collective hackathon. Maddie spoke this phrase last week and we're like that's perfect because we're actually as part of refest our annual festival bringing together artists, technologists and activists we're hosting a hackathon this Saturday so you guys can actually be a part of a actual experience but yeah that really resonated with us because, you know a way of thinking about our current moment is a time where you can become your own sorcerer to your own theater magic, magic of theater. And I, you know, like the product driven production model can feel fatiguing and also just like a regurgitation of tried and true methods and other ways can other ways of working can feel untenable due to like very real issues like what Doug mentioned about like who gets to go into certain spaces and you know all of these very real issues so yeah during this time you know it feels like the definition of art like what the where the work is located has expanded from the end game to encompass the whole process of figuring out how to work together so the, you know, like the medium feels like the message, more in like an acute way to me and like the act of working together to configure our orientation to the virtual interaction is the work like is the story and I find this empowering because you know I have so much faith in this decentralized democratize grassroots way of working together you know I really believe that it can yield new strategies and short circuiting biases and hegemonic structures. So I think that kind of like the conventional spectatorship model prioritizes kind of one directional transmission of message and also all of these things about formality and class and yeah it's, and I also think, you know another keyword for today is intimacy and for intimacy comes from this process oriented approach as well, rather than intimacy as a content, you know, intimacy in the act of working together. So much more depends on the personhood in a way and the presence and I like that, because we're all kind of babies learning together that our perspectives in a way can't be like so polished or sophisticated so we're just kind of try to communicate with me, which I think often think is one of the most important things, and there's like no bullshit to fall back on in a way. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I've enjoyed working in this zone of like art and technology is because I don't come from a tech background and I don't have this like, I don't know I feel like you have to be like into tech in order to engage with tech or you have to be a techie or something, which also you know theater has some of those same. Like, are you a theater kid or a theater person, you know, like there are these these barriers and boundaries, but I feel like working in this, in these sorts of ways, you know before coven. It really required me to connect to like Scarlett said my curiosity and I just had to ask questions and I had to just meet things where I was and where it was and from that distance whatever it was what can I see, and, and, and what can I do about it because if I, if I, you know if I can barely see a thing. Okay, what is that outline. Or if I can hear, you know, you know, there's a different, there's a different way of engaging with something if you're not trying to do the same thing that you've done before which is also an experimental approach to working. And, and we all have to be a little bit more experimental which is really exciting because a lot, you know, a lot of people think that that's that is the work of the fringes is to be on the on the experimental pulse. But, you know, to me experimentation is really just about a process, a procedure, a set of variables, some of which are controlled and some of which are uncontrolled, and what happens when we go through this process and invite an audience in. So yeah, it's just it's connected me a lot, a lot, a lot closer to my curiosities and to the gut and and to just say, Okay, what do I want right now I want to I want to joyful experience I want laughter I want to work with people who I love, or that composite is really interesting to me, I want to go towards in that direction. And I want more people to be able to do to have license to just go towards their curiosities. And to not be, you know, we can't be so worried about selling tickets or making sure that you're, you know, you, you get the right listing in the right right magazine to get the right people in the in the seats like we have to re restructure our relationship to all of those things. And there's one of the things, of course, for the lab that we were very clear on is that, you know, there's lots, lots of people out there in the world talking about how institutions can survive, and what's really interesting to us in this context is how we do the work, what is what is it, we're doing and you know we could do a whole five day collective discussion about what theater is which you know we don't need to try to try to define today. But getting away from that and saying like what are what are we in it for what are the what are the deep components that are underneath, you know it's not just the molecules it's the atoms it's not just the atoms it's the quarks or whatever so. And you know you've brought up intimacy before certainly the title of the session is about liveness to. So I, I'd love for you to. We say live theater all the time. And there's a whole set of assumptions built into that word live so I'd love to know how you two are thinking about what liveness means and can mean and not just in that one paradigm of the proscenium theater or whatever but in how it relates to the the artist experience and the audience experience and the collective connection so how do you define live or intimate right now. Yeah I mean, go ahead. I was saying a lot about like the, the, the process is the is the real intimate thing that's happening here which I really appreciate. And I, I just did a project last night with a few good friends in Texas at the vortex theater obviously it was, you know done on the internet. But I was talking to some folks afterwards. And one of my friends who played a character in the in the play in the play let as a as we called it says not quite a play but not quite an episode either was that, you know, she was. First of all, you know it was emotional, because we care about each other and we cared about working together and got it kind of felt so, so good and rich and also bad, but really fall to to work together and to care about something. Which is, which is, which is something. And then she was just talking about that she was committing what her work of this process was committing to how to speak to another person during this time that that was her actors work and learning to really believe it. Learning to really believe how to connect with a person digitally, and then reflecting on on how much or how little how able she was to say yes to that. And that she realized that she was clinging to the idea of someone physically being with you in order to really feel them. And I think is so interesting because, especially in the, the and and Bogart talking about theater as a space to eulogize the dead. And yeah that this space has to bring up things that don't exist and people that are not with us. And is that an act of liveness to conjure, not necessarily in some mystical way just, but, or maybe but maybe just with imagination. Maybe that's liveness maybe it's not the necessarily the spit that you get from the actor, because you're in the same room, but that it is a different, a different. Yeah, and I think also I was just like reading about liveness and it's like, oh the definition of liveness really changed a lot throughout history like when TVs came into suburban homes like that totally changed what liveness is and our relationship to media and like what we think of us live so I think it's also important to remember that you know it's we sometimes it's like I noticed this in myself that I start thinking of it as an immutable concept but it's actually historically always been in flux and also live you know when Doug first post that question I was like okay live so the opposite is dead or you know what is what is it in relation to like and also like another very, I don't know, controversial world word is real like real versus virtual virtual is fake, or like, and you know like in Maddie's beautiful anecdote it's like all real, because it's all, you know, it's all we're having real experiences in virtual and real and live and dead context so I guess for me like again going back to the expansive framework, it's been generative to think about everything as real and, you know, kind of tease things out that way but one of the kind of threads of the questions that we were getting previously was one one kind of area of questions was, what about the audience's experience of presence and their own experience of presence and their experience of being together like how like how does that work. So I think there's something there in how we can think about liveness, you know, and in our refest gallery so we are annual festival bringing together artists technologists and activists. It's a virtual this year, and it's online and you can visit it at our cultural website, and there's a lot of really interesting examples of this kind of participatory strategies or ways in which folks can contribute their presence and actions and gestures in a way that has impact that's that's been like an interesting way for me to think about liveness an audience member enacting a gesture that ends up being the thing like not being inconsequential but actually affecting the thing and changing the changing the thing and becoming the essence of the thing. The story first and foremost becomes the actual, like, call and response and the exchange, like some of the artists are working with like games and idea of play. And in that case the entire narrative is dependent on the participant subjectivity, and them showing up and the artist showing up and participating and collaborating together. Yeah, I would, I think something about co authorship multi directional exchanges. Where your action matters to each other, I think that to me is a key way into liveness and another one is thinking about liveness in terms of the unknown and the slippage and the errors and technical technical difficulties and glitch and latency and I find those all really generative sites for thinking about our relationship to life. And Doug, you mentioned that when you ask people what their most memorable moment in the theater about half the people say that it was a moment where something got messed up. I find it liberating to interface with technology almost as like a mythical creature like a mystery like whether that I'm collaborating with as opposed to trying to understand and analyze. Because, you know, I, a lot of the times I'm more most interested in intentional misuse of technology or adapted use of technology that strays away from its intended use, which is also bound with all of these hegemonic ideas of like best practice and it creates this unnerving space, which you know maybe I can call liveness where we can examine what we assume to be true. Yeah, and I think like we all, especially like in this zoom call. We have that little heat of the moment before we go live and there are all these little, you know, the howl round producer and the other lab producer and the people doing all the little orchestrations that are going to make this come through at exactly two o'clock or 11 o'clock. So, you know, that's a, that's a heated thing and it's something I'm also experiencing on downtown variety. There's the liveness of the collaboration between the artist and the technologist or the technologist as the artist or the artist as the technologist because we're all blurring that way. And then there's that that heat of the moment of the audience of, am I in the right place, am I seeing the right thing. Okay, what, what exactly is this thing that I'm hearing or what. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if anyone missed so apparently our feed cut out for a minute while Scarlett was talking. So if anyone missed what she was saying she was saying that sometimes the glitches and when things go wrong actually are a great thing to explore and a really exciting part of the experience so she was literally speaking to reality as it happens. So there you go. I'm interested, as we talk about the liveness of the audience and the artists and all the different pieces that that interactivity part that you were starting to talk about there both of you. I think it's something that we're all experiencing because the, the, the step one of us all learning how to do zoom theater or any other kind of theater online, basically was what you have to put a big wall up against the audience. We've seen so many things where the artists may be collaborating live, and the audiences in a chat box like we have now or in some other way are experiencing something live and able to interact together. But what we have in a live theater experience where, you know, the moment where the actor changes their performance because they can feel the energy from the audience is something that's that I think a lot of us are missing right now so can you talk a little bit more about that and where you're seeing people experimenting with that and, and what that adds or or is lost on that front. And there are, we're working with some artists, particularly a new collective will be on downtown variety on June 5 is there they're working with different sorts of data streams that can flow between computers, like a microphone or a video feed that can not pick up like okay here I see 30 different people's faces or I hear 30 different people's voices, but there's like a different level of data or a metadata that can get transmitted between to have a live interaction. So that if I make a sound as an audience like, oh, like that that could get get in get routed to the performer and will affect the performer I don't I can't speak on it so so elegantly because we don't know exactly what they're going to do yet. So there's that level there's this the same the same way that you can like put a heart on the Facebook data driven. One way that you know I've been exploring is just through imagination is putting one person in the audience when I'm sitting on my bed and, and, and imagining how they would react and it's, it's almost a little bit more of a of an acting exercise to hear the person laugh and then say like okay that that that landed, which is kind of wacky and doesn't make a lot of sense, but I think it speaks to okay how do we talk to people now how do we feel people now. And I think you do just have to be a little more open to what that means and you have to go beyond this idea that it's people in a room together. Okay, so what if it's not, is it, is what if it's plural what if it's people in rooms together, then, then what when what do we open with that. You were saying. Oh, good. I was going to mention I was talking a little bit about games and play and that as a really generative framework to think about interactivity because it's the story is dependent on the action of the participant and it's a kind of the game starts to serve as a site where there's a culture and all of the myriad directions of potential energy being kind of determined into into embedded like, executing in time in real time based on the input of the artists and the participants so that's been a really interesting way to think about interactivity and yeah this year's refest was curated with two kind of core curatorial missions and one was participatory strategies and one was intergenerational collaboration so both were very high risk activities. It was kind of an interesting very specific inquiry that we had of like okay clearly we're going to have to reimagine this festival in a virtual space but how do we take those kind of, whether it's sensory experiences and something that has to do with touch or like, how do we smell or like holding each other, things like this and also like intergenerational community conversations and how do we translate those things online so it's been yeah and I found that, you know I've been having a range of experiences as a curator as a director like I've been going from working with someone who doesn't own a computer even or like doesn't engage with the computer at all in their practice and doing a very technical how to to going into like, let's, you know, improvise and jam out in a 3D virtual avatar form and do all of these things so all of that feels like the same thing in a way and if there's like no like tech part and the theory part. And that feels like I don't know and that also relates back to the intimacy question for me and the access. But yeah it's it's it's it's very, it's an interesting it's an interesting question of interactivity because there's also so much content in the world right now and it's so it's at the tip of our fingertips to let go and summon a media content to come into your living room. So what does it mean to sculpt experiences that are calling for a more proactive engagement on the audience is part of it and is that something, you know, like, what does that mean when you're, are you trying to guess like what people do and this these are some of the same questions I asked in like immersive theater when I make when I make, you know, it's the exact same questions actually and it's like, are we trying to guess what people are going to do or like create a fertile and rich enough environment that it can take, you know, like infinite amount of impulses. So, yeah, I have found that, you know, instead of trying to translate what worked in a physical space, trying to really try to not know and try to respond to the parameters of the virtual world has been helpful. Because I also work as a translator between Korean and English I've been thinking about that metaphor a lot of like what does it mean to translate because it's never a purely technical job it's it's technical and it's also poetic and it's also artistic and personal and all of these things so Yeah, using that as a metaphor of like you can't fully like in a sanitary institutionalized way take a that work thing a that works or was a certain thing, a certain DNA and real life and then translate it into a virtual space and for it to be a literal like carbon copy of it it's always going to be a different thing, a different creature with its own DNA so how do we actually embrace that and Yeah, I feel like I strayed away from your question about intrac This is great. And I really love the the resonance there that you just put you just highlighted about the fact that some of the things we're pursuing and questions we're asking in a quote unquote high tech, more environment are the same things that a lot of us have been exploring in the even more low tech than a traditional theater environment in a immersive theater environment or site specific environment where it's trying to get away you know it trying to be more interactive more live than the experiences sitting in a 500 C theater watching people behind a fourth wall. So that that a lot of these questions are still the same questions. It's not new questions really it's applied in a different context that's really, that's really interesting. And also, you know, interesting back to the additive point that we move forward and going back to access but you were just talking about that there's certain kinds of access to our physical spaces that we have. Obviously technology is allowing access to different kinds of audiences in different places and in different manners that can work better for others but technology doesn't work for everyone either to your point some people have access to virtual reality and virtual sets and can have a whole experience that way and other people have phones or computers, and other people don't have any of that. And so this, this is all different ways to explore, you know, the core things that we're after. So, I would like to speaking as our time already is flying past speaking to stage directors, or I should just say director maybe not stage director directors choreographers specifically. It's a physical element to what a lot of our experiences, obviously for Korea, choreographers in particular movement directors. So what's your, your experience or what are your thoughts about eight people engaging physically with work that has a lot of technology or virtual elements to it and we were talking the other day that, you know, zoom theater where we're all sitting in a chair with a box is different and even how you know seeing somebody in downtown variety last week who just moved back and like we're in a zoom shop but they were from here and standing up was, it was almost thrilling because there was suddenly a physical component that we're losing. So we'd love your thoughts on just that the visceral physicality and how that can live in these kinds of things. I mean, I think there's a set of expectations that come with working in zoom or in a platform that was built for corporate meetings. And there are all sorts of different things that are just going to come up. And this isn't necessarily the physical but say scarlet is is doing movement and we want that full screen. And I am speaking a poem or a monologue in that moment but we don't want it to switch to my feed or I'm playing flute. And, and we want that to underscore what what scarlet's doing. There are so many ways that we can't do that we can't like in in the zoom sort of setting. And, and it's because this these things weren't built for performance. So I do want to just also say that something that culture hub has been building for about five years now is live lab which is an open source experimental interface for web based collaboration. And it's a very flexible tool where we're releasing it beta to the public on June 5 beta meaning we're close. We're not all the way there but we need you to experiment and come work with us to get us there. Yeah. And, and the idea is is that we want pure media feeds of cameras and of audio that that can hold many many many different ways forward for artists so that there is we're not confined to a flattened plane of 2D boxes. And that it's interoperable with other softwares that allow for more, more potentials. So, so even just being in that mindset of not trying to figure out how to get around a zoom or like a video conferencing technology, but to, to say, look this is this was needed beforehand because we can't. Some people can't cross forward or some people can't leave their home some people can't travel freely. And so we've needed these tools and we will continue to need these tools for art making purposes and you know the the the simplest things like creating your own frame around the box and playing with that or, or yeah like you said putting. Like I keep on wanting to like put the the computer in and in the microwave or something, just doing things that are unexpected, and that are curious to you and, you know, or having the shots start like like that and then coming up, or anything really like there there are so different ways to to subvert what we expect like that was probably really unexpected you didn't expect to see my legs and we're like, we saw the legs that right we're only supposed to see from here up. Yeah, I mean everything everything is physical I mean that's like kind of everything is real everything is physical even as we appear to be these talking heads you know I was just I'm rehearsing this play. You know a player it's written by guys remember men and a lot of he said some the player it says something to me that blew my mind like, Why are we so tired all the time when we're doing zoom rehearsals. And it's like, Oh, maybe because our brain is having to furnish the rest of the perceptive reality like it's like we're just like kind of, this is like a frame of like a camera it's like a viewfinder that we have like a one to one relationship to and because we're having to do imaginative to like actually populate the rest of this like reality maybe that's why we feel fatigued so that you know it's like it's a physical experience and I also feel like, I don't know my I always feel like my life is like I tend to gravitate towards creating collages and nonlinear narratives because that feels like that reflects my life experiences more truthfully as like an immigrant woman of color like I, my story doesn't, you know, and I, like, I was Blanche in streetcar name desire in high school when I realized this of like, Oh, this is a really interesting story but like how can I also like craft stories that feel like a more direct reflection of my like entropic life that where things don't make sense and things don't add up to a cohesive summary so I feel like working with technology you know like not knowing messing up you know glitching out all of these things are in a way more sincere so it doesn't feel reductive in that sense it feels like more naturalistic almost it's like whatever that means like more of a sincere reflection of my contradictory existence and my uncohesive self and I always say you know for me theater is really an act of rehearsing life and even like the act of managing feeds like in that play I just mentioned we're doing a lot of stuff where we have like three cameras and an actor so that we see the actor from like three different angles and like the actor might be seemingly doing one thing to one camera but like to another camera and might look to he might be texting under the table or something nefarious might be going on that you can't see on one feed so all of the all of the contradictions of the possibilities of multiplicity of self of contradictions collage narratives this feels very actually like much more naturalistic to to my life and to how I my relationship to life so yeah that's my response to the physicality thing like it's all physical so you know like how can we embrace that and like think about the rectangle zoom feed more critically. Yeah, yeah that's great. And thank you so much for the live lab beta that's going up in a couple weeks I know there's definitely people who have been really assertive on the exploration of using the tools that are out there and having tools that are more conceived with connection to the to performance or to flexibility to the creativity is that yeah created by artists for artists. Yeah, and it's not going to be a magic solve fix everything but it's a, it's a different path forward, which is exciting to have some choices because a lot of things have been limiting choices. Right, right. So just kicking over to some of the questions that have been coming in there's a lot of questions I want to say that are are sort of technical there's some how to questions there's the how do I get involved with culture hub questions. There's questions about what you know what what tools are out there that they should be looking at what really innovative innovative things are happening they should see. So we talked a little bit about that that we might pull together some sort of curated links or something and share afterwards you two are up for that. Yeah, great. We'll probably pull on our folks at culture hub who wear different hats than us because it's not one person or one get genius bar it's over here we we have this because we have we work together. Great. Excellent. So let me let me I've got like two, two questions just to toss out here as we're coming to the end of our time from the chat. Just as you are working with technologists and artists together right in the refest but in a lot of the work. Where, where does the impulse come from first because there's some folks who have expressed some concern about saying I have this technology now I need to find a reason to use it right as opposed to, I have this artistic impulse how do I best facilitate that or I have a human impulse what's the best way through. And since you've got people who come from different angles. What's your, what's your sense of what's the cart what's the horse what's the chicken what's the egg. If that makes any sense. That's a really interesting question and something that we intentionally engage, we intentionally engage those questions when we select our resident artists. You know we're currently in the process of selecting our next generation and yeah that's very much a question like is, are we looking at an artist coming from, like, maybe they're a playwright coming coming into like experiment with VR. And what that what that is and maybe maybe someone's like a UI UX designer, looking to come in to work with a playwright. So it's kind of like, we very much want to nurture the diversity of where people come from and like how they want to engage other realms, whether it's something very defined like I want to work with VR, and use that to stage my play or whether it's something more, more open. And also, like a part of what we do is play matchmaker and like kind of facilitate those relationships so that folks that who might have shared space before, because of all of these isolated disciplines and spaces like, you know we see culture as a site where people can come together and kind of not know together. The tagline for refest that we use is bringing artists, activists and technologists together to explore our role in reshaping the future. And yeah I think it's a it's a collaborative act theater making is a collaborative act. And, you know, we've also with our experiments in digital storytelling program we've highly believe that the influence is going to go it's a dynamic state. It's a back and a forth it's not. And, and if there is this technology, when a writer gets wind of it and starts to write for that technology it's going to pull the technology in a different direction, and vice versa when a when a when a technologist, when a writer has an idea the technologist will say well, what if you can actually shut off the light in that room what if that happens. And so you know we're going to. We just need to have more sites of intersection and collaboration, so that a, you don't feel like you have to be everything in order to work in this space and and to have a voice in this space and to play. But yeah to know that that we need to come at it together. And it's not a commercial for like tech industry come come support our work you know it's it's a look we're artists are really good at imagining things tech activists are really good at imagining, you know, a world in which emancipation for all exists okay how do we get there. The technologists are really good at saying okay, here's, here's one, here's one way. Okay, it's going to steer us a little this way and then the imagination says, no we need, we need, we need this. So yeah, it's a. Specifically as a director, I think like the directors practice is a really amazing resource and I, there's a lot of potential energy right now like I find like I said I find myself playing chameleon a lot. The metaphor that I've been thinking about a lot is slime molds because slime mold is like these organic material that it's it's like internet for trees like they kind of communicate with each other through by being infinitely adaptable and infinitely like non self in a way but in doing so it's able to transmit information and like bridge collaborations in a way that's like so it's like so rhizomatic and so kind of collective intelligence, so I feel like yeah I've been thinking so much about how I appreciate my background and training as a director and being able to kind of plug myself into different places and kind of different places where there's riffs or spaces or glitches slippage so that I can play chameleon be the slime mold and look at the kind of dramaturgy from a very kind of multifaceted role. It's great. We always try to capture key tidbits and takeaways from each of these sessions and I want to be the slime mold is definitely one of those. Theater as the slime mold of society. We are, we are almost to the end and there are certainly other questions that people submitted which like I said we'll provide to you afterwards so we can share back your thoughts on them. But there is a question that we asked to all of our guests here during Directors Lab West Connect so I'd like to ask each of you. This is the question and whichever one of you can go first as you prefer but please briefly just in a few sentences share something you have learned or discovered or started thinking about during this quarantine period since covid kicked in in March, that you plan to incorporate into your practice as an artist going forward. Do you want to go first. I can go first. I think for me, building an intentional relationship to technology driven by awareness and curiosity has actually allowed me to build intentional relationships with everything else so you know I've been obsessed with propagating plants as you can see behind me is my little jungle that I've created in my house but yeah it really heightened my attention towards completely non technological systems like nature and plants and also a big part of my practice is very much based on the act of making with my hands and you know so I've been actually able to connect with that part of my practice more and I think there's such a pressure in a way to like oh we have to become all very tech savvy and like you know like really do something with technology because this is our time but in a strange way like I'm trying to be have the discipline to be generous with myself so that like you know it's not like the only thing you know that the definitely the very intense relation heightened relationship to technology is there but how can we let that also bring our attention to what is not that I have two but I promise it won't be crazy. The one is a more sustainable relationship to living and working and potential dismantling of the 40 hour work week requiring 40 hours in a physical space if that's part of your life or the sort of like hustle hustle hustle hustle but but a different relationship to with the sort of propagation of online spirituality and learning and art making a different relationship to being there excites me so that we you can be somewhere else and have that not disrupt and dismantle your career which artists have been doing for a long time now saying I live in the mountains and then I will also live in the city but I think people deserve that of all stripes and I like being in a space where there are no greats who have come before me and there are no rules that have yet been set I feel free here and yeah much more playful than than I have been even in unconventional theater performance contexts and I feel a little bit more drawn to what do I love what what makes me laugh what what makes my heartbeat. Thank you. Thank you. That's great. Thanks so much to both of you to Matilda Scarlett and thank you to our fabulous ASL interpreter Danny Casey. Thank you. As we've come come to the end here we'd like to also acknowledge our long standing partners for the director's lab the stage director and choreographer society Pasadena Playhouse and Boston Court Pasadena we're excited to be back physically in those spaces next year but I certainly hope to engage with all of our alums and our our new community in a different way in the future as well. So again, all those questions you've submitted have been captured and will be shared and this recording will be archived and available on directors lab West calm and how around TV. Very soon with closed captioning. We hope that you will all tune in again tomorrow at 11 o'clock Pacific for a conversation between Luis El Faro and Lori willery who will be sharing reflections on remote teaching and community engagement in this time, which is yet another angle into this world that we're exploring together so Thank you all so much for being with us today we hope this conversation sparks more feel free to continue a conversation on the directors lab West Facebook page and otherwise we hope to see you all tomorrow. Thanks very much. Thank you. Bye.