 Hi, everybody. I'm Rachel Chanoff, the Director of Office Performing Arts and Film, and the co-producer of Banksacall. We are thrilled and delighted that you're joining us today for this panel, which is entitled, From Cambodia to the World, Creative Collaboration Among Unlikely Partners. The event is part of the Arts and Healing Banksacall Virtual Festival, which is co-produced, uh, co-presented between Cambodian Living Arts and Arts Emerson and made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan and the collaboration of 50 other partners and artists from seven countries. Today's event is contributing to hell around theater commons, a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide. It'll be focused on the commissioning process of Banksacall, a requiem for Cambodia. We, the office got involved in Banksacall as producers early on and our mission was really to bring this profound and compelling work to the world because the beauty of it in, is it so specifically speaks to Cambodian experience that resonates globally and with all of humanity and so important, especially now, when there are genocides that have happened before and after and it's a story that must be told so that hopefully humanity learns from it and we don't keep repeating this horrific event. To make anything happen in theater, it takes a whole ecosystem. It takes the brilliant artists who conjure up the work but it also takes the collaboration of the people who are going to produce it and present it and the presenters are people who've commissioned it and brought money to it and brought audiences to it and brought their institutions to it. In this case it was commissioners from across the world led by Joe Malillo who is at BAM and Stephen Armstrong who is at the Melbourne Festival and also David Dower from Arts Emerson and they really were key in making this happen. Joe Malillo decided that this was a piece that needed to speak to the world and he as a leader in the field really gathered the troops from across the world to have everybody come together and make this piece be possible. So today we're going to hear from all of the presenters from the commissioners who were key players in making this happen and to guide us through this panel is a woman who is a total force in our international ecology of arts and presenting. She's the executive director of the Hong Kong festival but she's also an extraordinary advocate for art and she's an author and she is an important campaigner for women's causes and she is someone who has been instrumental in bringing art all over from all over the world and creating a platform where artists can be heard. So we are so honored to have with us to guide us through Tisa Ho. Before we move to the panel we have a video from Stephen Armstrong who's the creative director of the Arts Center at Melbourne who unfortunately couldn't join the discussion today but was so important to the process. He came early on to our first workshop in Cambodia and thought so deeply about the progress, the creative process and who could be involved and should be involved in making this project and really the creation of this project. So Stephen has some words for us and here they are. I'm Stephen Armstrong and I'm creative director for the Asia Topa program at Arts Center Melbourne and it was my pleasure to collaborate with Pluen Prim and Rachel Chernoff to help bring the premier of Banks of Coal to the stage in Melbourne in October 2017. I'm really sorry I can't be with you. I've been called up to do what's called jury duty here keeping our democracy alive in Melbourne. I know where I would rather be but please accept my apologies. Melbourne is home to the largest Cambodian community in Australia. Most of the Cambodian community here arrived as refugees in the 1970s and 80s so on average they are in their 20s. By the time we presented Banks of Coal most would have been parents and grandparents of second generation Cambodian Australians many of whom as I understand it did not know their family stories. The truth is that while we've all grown up together in multicultural Australia, Khmer culture along with many Southeast Asian cultures is really not very often seen on our main stages. Something that I work very hard to counter. So when I met Pluen Prim and I think it was in Tokyo and I heard about the work of Cambodian living arts before I knew it I'd changed my flights and I was heading to Nampen. I doubt that I'm the first person this has happened to and as luck would have it, CAO was hosting a symposium on art and a post trauma society and when I think about that subject from an Australian standpoint there is nothing post about the living trauma of Australia's First Nations people and the generational inheritance of so many migrants living in Australia so the subject is a really important one and especially through the lens of the Cambodian experience. The visit had quite an impact on me not just visiting the sites of the Khmer Rouge atrocities but also enjoying the vitality of Khmer culture today and the extraordinary vitality and virtuosity and imagination of contemporary and traditional performances that I saw both in Nampen and CMR. One of the things that really struck me was spending time at Bipana and exploring the documentary archives with Riti Pan. After viewing his film The Missing Picture in that context that was a very powerful experience the impossible beauty of Riti's work filled me with a kind of need to be part of this project to bring the Australian community through his art of survival and resistance together. The promise of nurturing a future through the imagination and even more so I can't think of a more significant thing to commit one's self to now in this very fragile century and the more I learned about Riti's concept the banks of coal and hymns of his amazing music I literally began to imagine it on the stage of Art said to Melbourne and by now of course I was completely in the thrall of Plurin and Rachel I knew there was no getting out of it we were in together I also began to think about how singular and authentic moments in art demand really new vocabularies we build on the forms of traditional and innovation simultaneously to try and give voice to the present even when that's tethered to the past banks of coal was not only an eye-watering poetic song cycle and film it was the dynamics of performance by hymns of E and Bell and some up and the traditional and western instrumentalists in the extraordinary chorus from Taiwan there was a narrative being created through the placement and movement of live bodies on stage which needed to acknowledge the immediacy of hymns score and the enormity of Riti's images and the emotions that both held but what worried me was how the spirits of the the murdered were going to be freed if their families and relatives now living in Melbourne weren't integral to this event in the conversations that we'd had together I was really aware that bringing the Melbourne festival into this partnership as a major presenter which we definitely needed to do and bless them both to secure the financial resources but also to give it the artistic status that it needed as a major international work that this also whisked the performance being thought of as an exclusive or a lead event especially as we were presenting it in Melbourne Arts Centre it's very beautiful but also quite prestigious concert hall and it wasn't just possible it was actually probable that most members of the local Cambodian community had never been to answer to Melbourne it made us ask ourselves why should this community trust us with their story why should they pay money to come to answer to Melbourne to experience their own culture these were important questions and the solutions needed to be found I felt we felt in the art itself in how the work was actually finally conceived for the stage the work needed to insist its own authority and certainly we couldn't think about marketing the work as a separate activity we needed to build community connection into the actual producing and connect the imagination of the creators with the imaginations of the audience as a fundamental act we needed to think of banks of coal not as a film and song cycle but as a requiem a staged ritual and an event where things are literally enacted as well as felt and we needed a stage director to serve Riti and him's vision while bringing all of these elements together I proposed Australian choreographer and theatre artist Gideon Abazanik Gideon has been specializing for many years in creating events which dissolve the distance between the stage and the auditorium and Gideon's work also has always showed the great strength of choreographic sensibility in shaping physical and emotional experience through the push and pull of music and imagery in real time and how to create an alternative experience of time through ritual and gesture our hopes for banks of coal were nothing short of connecting the living with the spirits of the forgotten to create a space for the past and the present to occur simultaneously and in doing so to free the future so while Riti and Gideon resolved how this was going to be presented through the beautiful river of life created on stage and the extraordinary moments with the young people back at home I was working with a woman named Cedar Douglas and her colleague Sambath Kim for quite a few months to socialize the project and we did this primarily through Khmer radio and through melbourne's Buddhist temples we produced information in Khmer we organized transport at the right hour many of our local community could not afford to take time off work which meant traveling at dinnertime which meant making sure that we had buses that could accommodate their families and provide meals on those buses appropriate food it was really important to us that when they returned for the opening night performance they were returning they were comfortable with the protocols and relaxed about bringing their kids and their food into the building we made hard copy tickets available to avoid the problem of credit cards we've been advised that credit is not popular among the Cambodian community and we also obviously invited the monks in to ritually cleanse the space understanding the potential distress of this work and the fact that many families have not seen Khmer culture performed on a general public stage or seen any imagery from the genocide represented through artworks we screened the missing picture and we hosted a large community event with some of the original artists from non-pen in the weeks before the premiere this also gave us the opportunity to introduce the artists to melbourne's media so they could understand their responsibility in reporting the event we were overjoyed when more than 500 community members volunteered to be part of the performance which enjoyed a fantastic and highly emotional and an unforgettable response from full houses the concert hall at arts in the melbourne seats close to 3 000 people so these were really big gigs banks call offered a really exquisite demonstration that despite the horrors of the recent past Khmer art and culture has an enduring role in our common story and that it is creativity which about saves our collective future thank you for listening i hope this perspective was interesting i would so much rather be in a conversation than presenting like this i remain very proud of banks call i adore the people that we worked with on this and the creative daring and finesse of the team the performance the creators uh and and my colleague produces um some projects need the whole world to wrap their arms around them and these are the projects which in turn give life back to us all um so thank you everyone and um thank you shawnt that teased and the cal team uh and everyone take care all right we're so we're so honored to welcome tisa ho thank you rachel thank you so much i feel like uh johnny come lately or or you know journey come lately whatever in in this process um not having been a part of it from the beginning but enormously privileged have been allowed a little role in this discussion i think commissioning empowers us all um those of us who make art those of us who present performances with with co-commissioning with working together we we have more resources we gather the the the the abilities and the capacities of more than one and coming together is really very often what the arts are about so therefore co-commissioning makes a lot of sense not it's not always easy and um as anybody who works in partnership understands there there are fantastic partners and sometimes wonderful work result as in this case and partners go on to become friends which is even better and i sense that this is the case here and of the people who who i will have the um the honor and the privilege of having a conversation with us three who are really critical to this process so i would like to bring them on perhaps one by one starting with the man who for with whom this whole thing um started and is of course an absolute force in the Cambodian living arts today right and we we know him from what has been happening in this festival already so um my i i would like to address the first question to to friend and then to introduce Joe and to introduce Johnny who will join us with other questions from them so that we can have this conversation flowing um um if if i can ask friend and go back to actually pre-history before this project before um about the the the project began even to a couple of years when he was working when he brought a whole group of Cambodian answers to new york um i think it was 2013 how did is how did that happen and did that so seeds for this enormously important collaboration when uh when Cambodian living arts uh in 2013 um organized and produced this huge humongous festival called the season of Cambodia uh in new york in 2013 when we brought about 125 Cambodian artists to new york with 34 venues in the whole new york city during one month the process of of pulling that amazing festival began also by connecting with many people around the world but especially in new york um we the way we were able to connect with with presenters in new york was to invite them to Cambodia and it was the beginning of of a process where you know at that time we we pulled out a really small funding a seed funding from the asia cultural council to sponsor a trip for five uh presenter from new york to come to Cambodia in that trip uh there was someone from the asia society uh someone from a dance dance festival now i had a blank but also uh at that time the executive executive producer of the broken academy of music joe who's in this panel um and it was also my first somehow professional engagement on hosting also major presenter from from New York to Cambodia and uh we weren't sure how how these international venue would look to our work uh in in the country so we it was a one week touring uh on several places in Phnom Penh in in Batam Bang we didn't have like the infrastructure of having a ready uh theater and proscenium stage to present the work and so most of the work have been seen kind of on more like rehearsal or even in those those schools where things were happening and it's from that that i think my relationship with joe melillo started when uh you know in his uh rigid status of the executive producer of bam i wasn't sure how i can even get him involved and interested to to us because uh at that time like i understood that he was a big name of of this uh of the presenting world around the world so i was quite impressed by him and and and um and it's hard again because i always remember that time when when he saw the the work and the dress rehearsal of the royal ballet of Cambodia in the setup of the school at the end of the conversation later on at the end of the presentation later on i think just after lunch he took me aside and he said plan um i really now understand the work that that you are doing here in Cambodia and i will uh that well the brooklyn academy of music will present the royal ballet of Cambodia if i remember wow repeat that that conversation and it started to begin the relationship between i think people to people that have built the institutional partnership and then leading to that when we had the bank school commissioning uh i reach out to him and say you know we have this production would you be interested and and it it began that way in fact that's such a good that's such a good narrative um and and this is obviously the moment to bring in Joe Malillo who knows the world and you can't mention new york you know without mentioning Joe he is one of the most pre eminent producers he's led brooklyn academy of music from strength to strength uh he is that odd well nowadays it seems odd but but actually it it applies this this comment applies to all of our speakers uh in this panel deeply deeply rooted in his own nation and yet a complete internationalist i mean Joe has been honored by the governments of france of britain of sweden of uh i i can't remember the list of honest goes goes on no he's a cultural diplomat as well as a producer so um Joe you know that i we can we can take about two hours just going through this but i would like to focus now to to to on your response was that your first visit to Cambodia and how did you respond to the invitation uh the answer to the question first of all practically yes that was my virginal inaugural visit to Cambodia and um it is uh interesting to note that a colleague of mine who's no longer with us sam miller would go to Cambodia with some consistency and i had conversations with him but the kind of of curatorial work and what he was interested in didn't conform to what i think bam brooklyn academy music i'll use bam the acronym um the service that the institution can provide so that's why i want to connect the dots between fluent and my conversation which simply for the season of Cambodia that he wanted to position in new york city the service that my institution could provide his objective was by putting the work of the largest scale on the opera house say japan that the it's it was disarming to be able to see these very beautiful young women some more mature than young um actually being sewn into their costumes in order to do this exquisite work that i had never seen before and i was certain that no one in new york city during the season of Cambodia would have seen it themselves and so that there was like a just an amazing discovery a very extreme traditional form with the background being um artistically sensitively being reconstructed and um i want to make sure that i say the framing correctly that in my time with mr prim i understand his vision and strategy for Cambodia culture for the Cambodia society that how to enable this post traumatic society how to revitalize it through art and culture and the phenomena was that this was one of the great artistic accomplishments of the culture of Cambodia and i know that i could make it possible to bring that to new york city which gave it a context of this is one of the great cultures of the world and this is it's it's now reconstructing its art and cultural life thank you thank you that that's a very thorough inside i we see this now coming from both sides from from the Cambodian perspective of reaching out to york and and from from yujo of seeing this discovering as you say this amazing culture this exquisiteness and and what it has to offer not only new york but possibly the world's you know but i i'm sensing although you the both of you are very modest about this i'm sensing that was a real personal connection as well and forgive me if this is pushing in into a non-professional realm but a lot of what we do in commissioning actually is based on relationships uh we're putting our institutions you know to some degree at risk we're putting our resources out there where and we're getting artists to do stuff that maybe they hadn't even thought about before so there's a lot at stake here and the trust and the and the and the and the the the linking between people i think on the basis of which great collaborations can happen cannot be underestimated so uh i like both of you to to speak a little bit about this as well um there's a higher higher priority which is revival and Cambodia and and heritage and the arts uh and and an international audience but beneath that there is a very personal dynamic that i'm sensing that love me to speak about well i'm going to be emphatic and telling you that at the foundation of this professional adventure that i had was a friendship with fluent that that uh i respect him immensely i'm my my life my major career was to service the bam and the new york city fluent was servicing a country with his vision and i have rarely encountered an individual who wanted to tackle an artistic and cultural strategy for their country so yeah i spent a lot of quality time with this man and understood what direction he was going and how i could help him and and one of the things that i could help him to do was to remain objective about his thinking about how he wanted to produce thanks a call that that was the end game of like oh you're going to get the best of my objective thinking about what you're telling me i'm not going to allow the friendship to mess up i want you to have my best thinking on the subject of how to get from a to b to c and to an opening night within a global context i i can totally see that happening on an administrative and management and resource allocation and contractual dimension all of the nuts and bolts that make this work at the bottom of this and and this is the third layer right there's this enormous agenda that you both have in your respective organizations in in your country and in one case there is the the wonderfully deep and and and respectful friendship and and then there's the nuts and bolts but in there's in there there's another layer which is the artistic work so i i i want to ask from where were the where what bits what parts of it were you driving what parts of it did did the co-commissioners come in with either either in new york and melbourne for that matter how does the selection of all the partner artists work and at one point in the creative process did the commissioners that the co-commissioners you know have to have input have brought their way to bear on the process and the outcomes thank you thank you joe i guess also one thing i'd like just to add on to kind of completing joe's beautifully shared friendship is also joe had been such a great mentor also i think in the world that we're working in the performing arts on arts and culture in fact being mentor by you know some of the most senior professionals in the industry is is is really helping us in terms of guiding our decision because the world this world is so big and it could be frightening but in fact i've received so much it's not just the friendship but the but the mentorship that that joe had provided throughout all the different process of work that we had had so i just want to mention this uh for for tisa um you know like so i've run Cambodian living art is a grassroots it used to be a really small grassroots organizations finding masters in countryside and then setting up classes in in those countryside with two staff and really like in in the supporting masters and the transmission of these oral tradition of Cambodia we grew up out of that for on our first decade and when i came as the executive director of Cambodian living arts uh i i was enormously taken by that vision of of the country and i think what joe's mentioning is myself being Cambodian i was born in Cambodia but but fortunately uh i you know i i escaped the genocide grew up in Canada was educated and it came back 21 years ago uh and uh my sense of reconnecting with my culture was so strong and that's in the Cambodian arts and i think connecting to what joe says is the organization really have a bold vision of of of helping to support the sector and the country as a whole uh from that my work is just to carry uh the legacy of of the transmission that had happened with the masters and the students but also to share it to the world but i i i wasn't a producer or executive producer and either like even like that those term that i've learned throughout like commissioning and all of that that learned throughout working in the field but i was i had that passion and from that passion i started just to meet people uh and and i guess you know maybe lucky in this world is that i've met really interesting influential uh and uh meaningful people uh through the work that we have done through fundraising activity through uh a meeting with people and so from that why i'm setting the context is because as you said Tisa you point out it's by building those relationship that we then find the directions to push important project like the season of Cambodian banks goal because there's no way we could pull it out on our self because we would not have the funding we have uh the presenter and neither are so the artistic collaboration that is needed from the beginning bank's goal started with a beautiful meaningful project it is totally mission-driven it's not about like the work of one artist that wants to be stages but it's about the mission of why we are producing this work so dr. him so p the composer composes Requiem with a sense of of his own story of what he and your dream the genocide and when i i heard the first bits of the first six or seven minutes of the music i'm not a music specialist but i was taken by the music i i i i had goosebumps on on just like listening to it but i i didn't know how that would perceive and i thought like maybe if we were to look at only a music concert uh it will not tell the whole story so i i i didn't know much Riti Pan in fact at that time the Cambodian filmmaker but i've seen his work so i i i introduced him to the music of him so p and i started to create that artistic collaboration together and both of them didn't know each other well and never worked together but were inspired again by the idea and the mission of the work artistically and they came together yeah it's it's it's again about bringing people together uh and i think uh since you talk about music uh it's a perfect cue to bring in the other panelists who's been waiting in the waiting room i'm sorry to have you so long johnny but these conversations are fascinating and it's hard to break into this um there i i want you to read right now for two reasons one is because uh for i mentioned music and you are the specialist in this i mean johnny's uh involvement in music is deep and wide particularly in choral music uh and and his organization has something like so different from from the Cambodian um arts one has something like 40 different uh organizations within this this umbrella right and and he's active in the choral work throughout asian and indeed the world so uh another person who is deeply rooted in his community and yet entirely globally facing so what was your impression of this process and also working and this is where the co-commissioning collaborating dynamics come in again working with an organization that is structurally so different from your own um we first heard of this project banzocco was in i think 2016 and you know at that time uh to be honest we we knew very little about Cambodia it's a name of a country we've never been visited there before but we saw this project and this project is so interesting for to us because um it's the draw the inspiration from the Cambodian history and the tradition of music and it requires Cambodian traditional instrumental instruments and western orchestra and choir and also film and theater everything and as tis i mentioned before my organization type of your harmonic is an organization relation that has 10 choirs three orchestras musical theater and opera so this is a perfect project for us to you know to to to try to get involved and to get to know a different culture and the process you know i have to say it's difficult for us first because first of all the choir the singing in such you know such difficult language it's it's not Cambodian it's actually an ancient buddhism sutra the Pali we couldn't understand anything of that fortunately we found a monk who's from Sri Lanka and what happened he happened to be in Taiwan studying at that time so through this kind of collaboration and work we learned more about this piece and we did our first workshop in Taiwan which is i think the first time everything put together and at that time that was the first time we saw Redeban's film and it was that moment we realized that everything every work that we've done was worth it because it was so moving and all our players and singers were you know crying after our first dress rehearsal because we i mean through the music we know that it is a powerful but with the film together everything combined together we know that we are making the history and we are very very happy and honored to be a part of this and then after that we started to you know perform in different places and we did some you know changes through time but all in all that this experience for us singers and players it was an unforgettable experience but how did the first connection happen Johnny between you and Fran was this was an invitation so we know that in 2013 there was an invitation to a group of presenters um you were not party to that no i'm not yeah and i know and and we know from this conversation that Fran reached out to Sophie to to filmmakers to various people to put the the creative team together as it were aided in the business and guided and mentored by the redoubtable germany love and and so your your connection how i i think i think people interested in how these collaborations happen um might be curious to know and as i am of of how that contact how that was done um uh well either of you could could answer that go ahead go ahead i can complete okay we actually first heard of this project from the ministry of culture of Taiwan because they got this information from plan that they have this project so and they were looking for an institute that can manage all these different things because at that time believe let me was already have this piece almost finished and looking for a place to do a workshop to do a test run to do the final adjustment and that's where when we heard from our ministry of culture that there's there was this project and my colleague Esther she actually met Plum the year before in i believe it's in Melbourne Melbourne Festival so when i mentioned this to our colleagues Esther told me that oh she met Plum before and he has some you know um he he heard of this project too so that's when we started to look into this project and in December 2016 i was invited to come in to to watch the rehearsal or at that time if it was Gideon working with the dancers and tried to put together this theatrical piece and that was my first time visiting Cambodia and that was my first time actually looking at the score and and the piece so then we decided that this is the project that we can do and this is the project that we must do okay so what i'm getting is that again that that human dimension that dimension of somebody that as joe had defined so there's there's a passion there's a real mission there's an alignment of missions of the parties and then on top of that or below there are supporting that i don't know wherever that is a real personal connection and mutual respect and admiration i think that that those are those are the most wonderful and precious ingredients to come together to make a project like this succeed and congratulations to all of you on this phenomenal success on this phenomenal work that's been created now one of the things about these sessions is that there's a limit on time and so i i think we have you know moments for last words on this panel before we probably need to be keep quiet and and i've be shunted back into some some sort of waiting room so uh joe would you did you want to say something i wanted to compliment your artistic statement and observation because the response to the project was purely authentic by all parties and and when you encounter authenticity and which is based on humanity it's a very disarming truth and you uh there's a certain intrinsic beauty in this path and that has been the success of bangsta col and everyone was doing their best work and the credit to rachel chanoff who was the earth mother of driving the project to its multiple opening nights in again and thoughtful insightful decision making sensitive to the artist sensitive to the presenters and coming to a path to get to the opening night my final words tizia thank you joe um johnny before we go back to flam this is uh this project is really brought a lot of a lot of impact to to i should say our singers our players and also those audience who were in the workshop presentation because it's it's been three years now but there are still people asking when are you going to bring that complete work back to taiwan because there were a lot of audience a lot of presenters in that audience for that workshop presentation and for this kind of work it's not just an artwork it's the the meaning behind it the humanity which is the the you know the the the united language for the whole world and this is the thing that people will pay attention to and should pay attention to so hopefully we can bring this piece to many more places in the future thank you johnny and the last word to you before we hand this back to us mother just to to wrap up the the session and also the kind of connecting is um one part that people might have asked is like how do they fund it or how do they make it happen but in fact we we've never had like it's not like we've received like the the funding and we knew how to spend it and to make the process happening in fact it's through each of the processes it's a mixture of because it's so much mission driven it's a mixture of partnership and of course the funding but it really began by the partnership the partnership with the Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra was because we didn't have a choir and I was looking for a choir within the region I wanted a choir that that is Asian that can can be can be sensitive to to the language itself even though we are talking about a a language that has to appear and I wanted to bring Asian together so we've connected with the Taipei Philharmonic in this way we also work with them because we didn't have a proscenium stage in Nampen so to to workshop that we needed a space so they they contributed you know those space and that that expertise to us so it was really building the partnership that led also to ways of funding and I think in this time of of the world and where we are it's impossible to have like a million-dollar funding to make something you have to believe in the how artistically and mission-driven your project is and then connect with people that can come and support the work that you're trying to pull out and it's the way then from from as I think Joe said like from from having finding the right producer like Rachel Shonoff in her production office to believe in this project and not charging us at the beginning a big fee but but believing that she will accompany the process so then you know she she gets a way to get involved and so through every like every step of this process like money was not like what had driven us it was the mission the creative process the partnership the friendship that had led us for hope for making and presenting then this Cambodia product to the world stage of the Melbourne Art Center Melbourne and the Melbourne International Festival and then to Brooklyn Academy of Music to the the Arts Emerson in Boston and then to Philharmonie of Paris and then back to Cambodia so this has been really beautiful and I hope that we will be as Johnny said like continuing to to tour this world and especially in this time of of the pandemic why why arts matter and and and you know through difficult time how do we how do we become resilient and strong and continue what we're doing thank you so much thank you all for all of the wisdom and and the I have so many keywords buzzing now to take away from this and I hope that other people watching will have this as well for me there are two important takeaways including one don't be afraid of big ideas without the resources and two you don't need to have the complete work to show people so find a school hall it's a showcase it's what you're thinking about I think Joe from Joe came that word authenticity from Flem vision you know and from Johnny the partnership so thank you for the privilege of having this conversation with you and I think my job now is to hand this back to the redoubtable Rachel earth mother of this project to write out for him thank you so much I'd like to thank such a brilliant panel of creators and too so for guiding us through and for being a force in our world and I just want to also say that in things like this you see it takes commissioners and artists and mission driven producers and in this particular case it also took the audience the audiences from all over the world was extraordinary because we were in all of these festivals where you usually look at and see a bit of a homogeneous audience and in everywhere in the world we went there was the Cambodian diaspora was in the audience and was so moved not only by the piece of art but a piece of their own history and the diversity of age was extraordinary there would be grandparents and grandchildren who had never discussed this before and it was the moment of catharsis and of course art is cause for catharsis but this was so real you could feel the moment in every audience where they were connecting in such a visceral and personal way and over generations right there in front of you so that made it just a really really rare experience that took it beyond art into people's lived experience so an honor to be a part of that so thank thank you all so much and if everybody you can also go to banksacall.cambodianlivingarts.org to view all of the panels in this festival and also to find out about the arts healing 2020 challenge which everybody is invited to join so hope to see you at the rest of our festival