 and get going and move on with your evening. But we, first of all, wanted to really thank you all for coming. And also just wanted to hear from folks in the audience, you can either tell us right now, or if you feel like you want to share it in another way, you can also always tweet us, hashtag Godproject. So we're taking feedback from you Twitter as well. If you could just let us know what were some things that stood out for you, things that you're now that you've seen in another show since you've seen ours, just moments or phrases or pieces of the show that you either resonated with or just were interesting to you. Yeah, so you can just call them out, whatever, whatever you kind of pulled out or you noticed or stuck with you. I might tell, like, you almost never spoke to me. I didn't know what that was supposed to be, but I liked it. OK. Anything else? I'll be short. I have a question. Is it difficult to maintain objectivity on it? I mean, you're bringing all these different views. And I'm presuming you bring all of your own personal experiences to it. I just wondered if that's even an issue. Maybe it's not an issue. Is it more clinical in your analysis of it or? Sorry, what was the last sentence? Is your analysis more clinical? Are you sort of removed from it when you're sort of talking about all these different issues, the religions and these different religious experiences? Well, I say, well, we have a process that really invited us, like I'm a community member, I'm not a performer, to read these surveys. And we were asked often to respond to them in movement and games and exercises. I guess we never thought we were trying to, it wasn't something like, just really, how do you respond? There was no right or wrong answer to how you might respond. And just kept working with this material and then also deriding ourselves to kind of develop a slight sense of character, some more than others. And then how, and I think you heard this last night, one thing too is, well, now how does your character respond to these surveys? So really, I'd say the emphasis was on relationship, like how do you relate to these stories? What are they evoking for you? And it wasn't about objectivity more, it was about immersion in this diverse layers of stories and really kind of thinking of the show after, it's kind of cooking with them as different ingredients. A church service, that was my response. Well, just as an example, one of the things we did was we started looking at all of you, we had almost 200 responses. So we started, and some people wrote very lengthy stories and some people wrote a few sentences and so we looked through, we all looked through the material and thought about a potential character that was emerging and we actually then filled out this online survey as our characters and wrote monologues as our characters. So for example, my monologue started off as the monologue wrote as my character, but then I went back into the surveys and totally redid it pulling pieces so I probably pulled from 15 different responses from that. Each line was a different response. So it kind of ended up being so much of a composite that it wasn't really, you know, everybody's got something of themselves in a character, but ultimately it kind of got constructed. Here's another question, are there parts of the piece that you would want to see more of or things you want, questions you've had, things you wondered about? For example, a question like why didn't I speak? What was going on between me and this character? So any other questions or things? Yeah. Yeah, there was a scene right when you were on stage where you kind of threw up a red tablecloth and all of that stuff and I think I got it, but it wasn't entirely clear. It was about pleasure and that kind of thing, but I think I knew that just because I knew that. I'm not sure it's obvious to me, you know what I mean? Well, in the process of making the piece, we thought about kind of the journey that we wanted the play to take, and part of that was called the Mass in the Middle. And we were thinking about how religion has a lot of carnal, very sexual aspects, and we thought that would be a very climactic part of the piece, and that would really portray some of those carnal aspects. Oh yeah, I got that. Well, pleasure to be a spiritual practice, but I would have liked to see more of that, I guess. Oh yeah. They're not more lonely when I'm maybe not. Thank you. That's really helpful. Anything else? Any questions or things you want to see more? I think it's more clear. What are the types and whatever else we're receiving on your phone there? Is that an improv thing or was it all for it? The responses to what was being said was an improv. Like we kind of had, yeah, so everything that we heard, that was basically our first time on stage hearing it, and so it's just how we react to those phrases right now. We're prepared using random phrases, but what you saw on stage was you worked really well together. There's a lot of, I mean, your energy was a lot the same as what you said. I enjoyed in the beginning when the actress kind of was, she was somewhat removed from the play and was describing to us what the play was going to be about or setting up for us. For me, it seemed like she was almost like an abstract for some kind of investigation or some kind of essay, and I would have liked to see a recurrence of that if that were turned into a motif throughout the piece, so that it's like, okay, we're going on this exploration together, and we go into it and we come back out, and we go into it and come back out. I think... One of the things that we're talking about is process, as the way that we work, the process is really important, and it's a community building exercise as well as creating a show, and so I think the idea of bringing the process into it is really important, so that's really helpful feedback for thinking about how that can, you know, and certainly motif is something that we really love, so thank you, and that's really important. Sorry? I think we can talk about one more question. Okay. I had a good fortune of seeing the talk back yesterday, and you all mentioned that you have probably like another year of development on this piece. How much is that in the black, Christmas, year on black as you keep moving forward? I'll take a stab at that. One of the things that we're really, that we're wanting to do, is to definitely engage with more LGBTQ spiritual communities, so get more people involved to contribute material, because our last project probably had about, over the course of the project, we had probably, you know, over a hundred people contribute, but we'd either be at interviews or workshops and use kind of interactive story circles that we held, so getting like as much of a plurality of voices as possible, like I think that's the first thing, is trying to get as much, go back and get a lot more material, and then work on it a lot longer. I mean this is our first kind of, we used this festival as a deadline, like really kind of like through, we had to go on slack together pretty quickly, so you know, taking more time to really build it out and engage more and more people, because it kind of seems like ever-widening circles of people involved who've touched the project or process along the way. Thank you very much. I'd still be watching the web-streaming, because we know we had people watching from Chicago, Pennsylvania, Denver, potentially Uganda, Indiana. So we're very, very happy to know we have an audience around the country at least, and that actually fits with our process, which we've been thinking about. So our company, or the Bruno and the Wire, actually has a number of other collaborators who you don't see on stage right now. All three of us, Michelle, myself, and Josh, were involved in the creation of the piece, but we also had another actress who worked in Chicago, a designer on the East Coast in Carolina, some of the actress in New York, and a choreographer, and then me in California. And we were in Chicago. And these two were in Chicago. So a lot of our process actually happened via the internet, which is why this is so appropriate. We would conduct rehearsals kind of digitally sometimes, but also up until last week, I was helping out with the writing process and submitting things online, which I would then see show up in drafts of the script that I could read, and then just actually recently started playing the part to prepare for this festival. Great. Which actually was played by someone else in Chicago, Lindsey, who, I don't know if she's watching or not, but hi, Lindsey. So she played it in Chicago. So it's been a really fun process for us to bring all of that together. I just wanted to say that because that's been so important to us. So I would be interested in hearing just quick moments, images, any little thing that stood out to you that sort of resonated with you or that you still remember or you're wondering about or curious about. Starting with just little moments and then we'll go a little deeper. Are there any things that, and if it doesn't have to be a judgment, just I remember this or that struck me. Don't the really nice small attention to detail of your physical movements like kind of bend with your constant like little fluttering of your wings and how that would kind of come out throughout the play and show up even in kind of unexpected places was really, really nice and same with your movements as well, Michelle, like nice attention to detail. That's what I was going to say as well. You just had so many, just seemed meticulous, like that you had so many small actions that were very obviously choreographed. There was the side, oh goodness. Well at least that damn buzzing will be gone. No, we're fine. Those things, locking and unlocking your door, opening your laptop and working from your hip, all of these tiny things like that, I thought were really fantastic. I think finally, you know, or Claire was finally getting this connection with the bees or the single bee or the plural bees, whatever, but there was no physical touching and I thought, I don't know, that was really interesting to me because usually that's something that you would expect. I just wanted to piggyback on that. I just remember at one point just feeling this tremendous relief that you weren't touching because I just feel like there's such a fortification of the entire public space at this point, you know, and I'm totally pro-sex but it's just especially to see a man and a woman interacting on the stage and especially you as me without it becoming sexualized was just, and that the relationship was something else was just so fantastic opening up a different space. Another question I have is what did you think it was about? Or maybe about is the wrong word, but what does it explore? Like, so what did we tell them? Yeah, however you'd like to answer that question. If someone asked you, what play did you see tonight? I'm curious as to what you, how you would summarize that. Well, I already spoke, but I'll just put it out. I'm not going to tell my friends about it and I'm going to say that I thought it was a very beautiful the fatigue of your character and with the use of new technology. You said that one moment when you said, you know, you couldn't taste anything anymore. It was all about the things you love. Like Bill Gates said, all this technology was going to help people explore what they love. And here we finally see somebody who, like Colony Collapse, you've had the human version with new technology and you've lost touch. You're just exhausted from this buzzing machinery all around you. And the B is having in their own parallel universe a similar experience related to the same culture. And then finally there's a beginning to get together and perhaps a vision of collaboration to stop this. I know I'm being inarticulate there. Oh, that's very articulate. Thank you. Anyone get something different? I mean, mine is sort of similar but I could think of the moment I saw the show last night. But when the B started saying that there's no more honey, there's no more love, etc, etc. It just kind of, for me, turned into a moment of how hard it is to be happy. And like all of the happiness these people experience have got away. And so that's kind of what became about for me in that moment. And then with their transition into the manifesto we're trying to take something into that. To me, my own interpretation was that it was about alienation of the woman seemed so closed in and alone that she kind of psychologically starts communicating with the insects that are just outside. I was wondering, the story was so unusual. I was wondering if you could check some line on how it originated? Sure. It actually was sort of random in that I wanted to create a little for another project. I wanted to create a little three-minute piece. But yeah, I wasn't going to say that. So it was for an audition. And they wanted to see an original piece, not a monologue. Well, they said you could do a monologue if you wanted to. But we prefer to see an original piece. And I had this deadline coming up. And so I didn't know what to do and I felt all this pressure. And so for a while I thought I was going to do this monologue, but actually was about falling and falling in love. And I personally really enjoy falling. I kind of find it fun to just find different ways to fall. I know that sounds weird, but the idea that you would be standing and falling down is I was intrigued by this monologue, but then I realized I'm actually intrigued by that idea. And then at the same time, my house was infiltrated by bees. So suddenly I had, well there weren't bees, they were wasps. And so I had gradually all these bees coming into my house and it started with 10 and then there were 50 and then there were 100 and then there were 200 and then calling the landlord saying got to get rid of bees somehow. And meanwhile I'm trying to write this piece. So I was like, well, I guess I'll write about what's happening sort of. And I kept avoiding writing about it by going online. And being like, I think I'll go do, I'll go check this news site instead. So then I started writing about that because I just thought I have to do this. So I'll just write those things. So I made this three minute little piece. That isn't really what you saw tonight, but it's where it started. And then I approached all of these people to help me make it more complex. And so we started researching myths about bees, the colony collapse disorder, how technology was related to that. And then just ideas started coming in from that of the story more. Yeah. So Michelle first approached me at Christmas this last year and told me that she was working on this piece and asked if I wanted to be involved. And at first, I mean, I would say for the first couple months of the year we were just collecting information about bees. And we had this Claire character, we even had the Fees character. So we were doing, I think we developed a lot of material, not all of which made it into the final product. And then very little probably. Yeah, that's it for the iceberg. And at some point, we narrowed it down to kind of a through line that you saw, which does have a lot to do with alienation. It has to do with technology. And then centers around this kind of transformative encounter between the bee and Claire. So then once we knew we had that, we knew we had a story and we started putting these pieces that we developed together. We spent a long time just figuring out the story structure. Like we got it down to two sentences and then created scenes to fit those sentences. Oh, because I am. Yeah, well, go ahead. I was, I don't know if this is going to be helpful, but since I've seen it twice now, it came up last night. There was a question about the shift from into the manifesto. Yeah. And when I was watching it for the second time tonight, I was thinking to myself that that prior to that, there's this, like there's little by little, there's a self discovery about, you know, what, like, what, you know, why everything tastes like cardboard, why it's like the bee is kind of trying to, you know, egg rod or trying to kind of be, like, catalyst to that in this relationship. And so there's, like, these kernels start to happen and it's, it happens in relationship. It's also the self discovery and when the manifesto portion starts, it suddenly is very presentational and it goes out. And I don't think that's, I don't think that's necessarily, you know, I don't think that's necessarily, like, doesn't work. I think it does, but it's, I think what I'm missing is a little more of a transition between this internal process that she's having, that she's like, oh, like this, oh, oh, oh, and then all of a sudden it's out. Yeah. And so I think maybe it's, my, my thought tonight was maybe it's just a transitional, the, there's more of a transition there that kind of pulls out and suddenly what, what feels like it needs to be better. Right, because the, because the rhythm is so lovely and it kind of, and with the music goes this, you know, so it's, yeah. I'm doing just for an hour. Well, and that's great. If anyone wants to talk to us more, I'm, I was going to ask the same question, they asked at the end of what you wanted to know more about or what stood out or didn't quite fit for you, so I know we need to end it, but I'm curious about that person. And if you want to keep talking to us, I think this is in the program, but we are at tellingofthebees.wordpress.com. Yes. And we have a collaborative blog, which you can talk to us on. Yeah. And we're going to keep going. So, so yeah, that's us. Thanks for having me. I'll be sitting there now. Thank you so much. Thank you.