 Awesome. Hey y'all are you uh are you gonna put your screen on live? Cool. Great. Great. All right. Hear this? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yeah we can hear you. And I wonder if the cave frits I know that they are troubleshooting something right now but they uh are they able to put their video on? Let's do this. Um how are you? That was incredible. That was incredible. We see you now. You see me. Okay great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Cool. Um before we begin why don't we introduce the two of you uh just so that we know because we saw one of you uh but why don't we introduce both of you right now? Well uh I'm Joshua William Gelb. I'm Katie Rosmoglachlin. And we're theater in quarantine. Amazing. Amazing. Cool. This is our in studio audience. Yeah awesome. So for those who are watching on the uh on uh the internet we have uh Josh and Katie Rose up in a light lab at University of Maryland. We're also seeing a bunch of people seated in another theater which is in the cave frits theater just downstairs from the light lab. We also have an audience in the light lab that that was just shown uh watching in person. So we have a lot of different vantage points and then we have people who are just watching online. Um I would love for you maybe just to begin by explaining uh what it is that we just saw uh that even the the people in the light lab saw um so that we can kind of understand exactly what the what the setup is there. Sorry I'm fixing the lighting. Perfect. You know a little less shine. So for the past week uh we have been in the light lab here uh with a replica of a full-size replica of the closet from my apartment. Uh and we've been working a lot with some new tools in tech that we've never played with before. Yeah. Uh maybe just a little tiny backstory about theater in quarantine is so much of the digital work that we do on our YouTube channel is fully automated. We use a program called Zagora and QLab and basically we time everything out to the millisecond and feed the entire program into my ear so I'm able to synchronize with all of the video and audio. Uh we were really excited to play with a different version of of automation uh by working with uh we're working with a connect and motion tracking uh in order to get the computer reading my movement and responding to what I'm doing as opposed to vice versa. So uh basically you know I've been the computer's puppet for about two years now and uh this is the first time that uh we're trying to actually be seen partners together. Amazing and it's really quickly is this is this the first time you have performed in front of people as well? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's in fact actually the first time that Josh and I have ever made a piece in the same room. Usually I'm on zoom in my apartment in Harlem. Awesome. Could you talk a little bit about that experience I wonder? Both from a collaborative and from an audience standpoint. Yeah it's been really I mean we're able to work I think maybe much faster being in the same room. That's true. Um which is really exciting and also I can help in a way that I can't usually it's like Josh go do that thing versus me being able to actually just like do that thing in that moment. Um yeah and it's been really crazy to think about the frame not just being the closet but being this room that we're in and being in this space all week has allowed us to like see things and constantly move things around and think about what this audience over here is experiencing. For the past two years we've been making work solely on solely digital work and all remotely. But of course now things are reopening. We're talking a lot more about hybridity and we're working towards you know this is our first step in in our evolution of what theater and quarantine can be in a hybrid form. And so it was also really exciting to get a bunch of cameras in here and also allow that to be part of the piece itself. So even the people who are watching digitally get a sense of what it's like to be in the room. Yeah I'm I'm curious about that hybridity. This is my last question that I really want to open it up to those in the light lab or those in the Kayfritz theater for questions. But I would be curious you know your impulse to make work digitally at the beginning of the pandemic there was an impulse there and I'm curious you know you were working in you weren't working as a digital solo artist prior to that or or yeah right. And so I'm just curious like what that impulse was like and then what are you bringing back to the table now that you're going back into the craft of hybrid and in-person theater making you know what are those skill sets and impulses that that started two years ago and now are being brought back into the fold of live theater in-person theater. That's such a good question. Well you know we speak a lot about like the origins of theater and quarantine obviously they were linked to the pandemic and they're shut down of the theaters in New York and very much came from a you know the fact that that I live alone and there's a lot of loneliness and confinement involved. So that's the that's the spark right that's why we started making digital work it was a window into into collaboration and community. And also Josh you know in like the first week of the pandemic we were all like doing home projects or whatever we did to like try to fill our time especially those of us who work in the theater who all of a sudden like spent more time in their apartment than they probably have years. And Josh was cleaning his apartment and was cleaning out a closet and realized that it was the same aspect ratio as his phone and that's how that all got started. And so so like that's the spark right that being said you know again things are opening we're getting back to in-person work. What we've discovered over the past two years goes way beyond those initial impulses to like what it means to make work as an artist in the 21st century to be engaging with platforms and mediums that you know perhaps otherwise we hadn't really been considering before. And so that's what now that we've done that now that we've really like opened up this whole new aspect of our practice it's exciting to find ways that we continue engaging with the digital in a theatrical practice that also includes in-person. Gotcha yeah very cool awesome. Is there any questions from the cave fritz? Are we capable of asking questions at the cave fritz? Now I know there was some like issues is there anyone in cave fritz that would be interested in any questions from a remote, thank you sis, from a remote standpoint. Hi. Hi. Yeah. You're down all here at this age. This is the best. We can't hear you anymore. It is on mute I believe. There we go. Hi. Thank you Louise. Hi. I just want to see for um hi I'm a human under here. I just wanted to say thank you so much to Theatron Quarantine, Josh Galb, and Katie Rose McLaughlin and thank you to the amazing Maya Brinn folks Jared Misaci and Kendra Poitier and Dr. Van Nuyan and Andrew Cisna and also the amazing Brinn GAs Mina Kauhara and Louise Garcia I believe for all of your wonderful work this week. But my question is really like a dorky technique question about vocabulary. So you know when actors are learning to train or when singers are learning to sing we frequently learn basic atudes, training atudes like to help the body develop a certain technical vocabulary that will that will use for larger expressive pieces and I'm wondering if you could talk to us. I felt like we were seeing an atude today like a little study and I'm wondering if you could tell us about the vocabulary that you were working to develop this week. Yeah we should I mean we should talk about that we should just show it if we can. If we can. I'm always nervous about moving the screen. Oh there we go perfect. Yeah well you know atude is not the wrong not the wrong word in fact atudes and studies are words that we use when we talk about developing our tools for working digitally but such as framing but so we started with atudes in mask work and movement and built out you know what it is that's so special about digital you know what it can do that ultimately we can't or is you know cost prohibitive prohibitive in person for instance playing with gravity for instance multiplicity for instance looping these are all things that became part of our language that we never yeah that we've never been able to play with before so that's exactly what we do is we create studies we ran a program called Closetworks that was our short form program mostly dance related pieces that was kind of our playground to develop technical tools that then we would utilize in what we call our long form pieces now mind you long form for us is 30 minutes or less so that's that's our process um this one in particular you wanted to talk about the connect yeah you should talk about the connect well okay um i mean i can jump in and if you want to show yeah so talk about the queuing gosh queuing oh so um so effectively yeah great uh can you hear me we can so just before you begin josh just so that people understand what they're looking at this is the software isadora that katie rose is zooming in on uh and and then go back to yeah right there and that's uh showing what the connect is seeing which are those uh that's josh waving right now right great cool just so people can understand there you go yeah uh so as i was saying earlier this one was an atude in exploring motion capture and what it means for the computer to be reading me and listening to me as opposed to me listening to the computer so you can see that the computer is capturing a frame of my body and uh basically we were uh taking triggers off of where my body falls in the closet uh on various coordinates here by x and y axis and so uh in doing that we were able for like the first time to do an entire piece uh with complete variability and flexibility uh as to how long i would play with the moment uh and that's really exciting uh because we've been so tied down to come back to the uh to the camera because we've been so tied to uh generally our qlab files uh which would conduct all of the video processing done in isadora according to uh very strict time codes gotcha and so i just want to make sure i understand what you just said so when you're standing there there are cues on standby and they will not be cued until your body a specific body part reaches for a specific zone within your closet and when you do that it then cues something new so when we saw your closet tip over that wasn't someone at a keyboard pressing go because they saw you that was the camera picking up your tracking yeah when you hit that and so you could have waited 30 minutes before doing that and it wouldn't have gone until you did that correct correct cool awesome i was actually knocking that closet over and it and it was quite it was fun i mean we really had to play with it because it was quite fussy it worked sometimes didn't work sometimes we did change the numbers like right before the show because it was one of the sides wasn't flipping ever and it worked and it worked this is the first time that consistently it's ever completely worked so amazing amazing do we have more questions yeah uh someone in kay fritz is uh i can't quite see who that is but why don't you come on up and introduce yourself so we all uh know who you are yeah that was fascinating and now with your explanation i have a slightly annoying question to ask talking about yeah we can hear you yep so i was um surprised by the explanation behind the scenes because i assumed when i was watching this that it was pre-edited and i love that it's not but i was also wondering about your decision not to expose that mechanism because what i was thinking before is that you know you showed us like the cameras surrounding the surrounding these so i felt that you were also showing us like how this was made but then you hit one crucial part of that mechanism which is like the isadora software and the Kinect so i understand that you're exploring these but i was wondering whether because i would have loved to see that in action as well like the same way that you show the cameras around and the lightning that like this demo that you did that if that were part of the performance itself and even like these problems that you had about like things not working i actually find that really interesting so i was wondering if that's also how you're thinking about that process thank you noted for future as we continue working on this piece josh actually built a beautiful patch that is able to in our live performances show isadora um and all of the beautiful programming which we can totally we should totally build into that we're actually do you want to just describe why we can't do it and why we couldn't do it this time oh that's true well you know we we showed a bunch of backstage uh shots of course uh but with certain limitations of of uh of camera inputs and things like that and and where our computers all are and which computer can handle which uh which software uh we unfortunately had to pull back from doing that uh that being said of course yeah we would love to love to show the seams more i guess katie rose and i are both surprised frankly that it didn't fall apart programming wise um i'm shocked uh but it's also there's a funny other side to that which i find interesting uh and that we've yet to solve and are continually trying to solve which is no matter how much we put a camera on isadora unless we explain it as we're doing right now uh there's still a sort of stubborn resistance to believing that what we're doing is live yeah uh and so we're constantly striving for uh some way to convey that uh and yeah yeah and even when we do a lot of lecture demonstrations and even then when we spend time talking about what we're doing and we show the seams of it and then we'll like run a sequence they'll be like okay but when you edit your video they're like no no no no um yeah so we're constantly striving to figure out how to let people know yeah awesome um mary ellis you have a question yeah and there's some questions here too oh great we'll go no mary ellis go for it also just like that dance that you just did up to the camera yes okay sweet um i love the program you did with connect i actually did a show similarly in 2021 where like my body melted it was tracking and it was over zoom and i'm just following up on the last question this idea of uh the lack of um understanding of technological processes and how that influences the experience of the viewer not unlike maybe the light shows at the turn of the 20th century where people didn't understand what was happening um so couldn't quite process that it was live or or or even this idea of liveness and it's just like what is happening um but i i feel like uh i would love to hear more on your idea of how we sort of use technology really advanced technology um almost blindly uh sort of moving through it and then so in some ways we see a program like this and can't quite understand uh all the details and and processes that go on to actually make it live so i'd love to hear your thoughts on that because that's something that i'm struggling with as a performer in live theater with technology we're struggling too uh you know that's uh that i think in some ways is the impulse towards hybridity um because in particular you know we were making uh years worth of progressively more and more polished digital work uh and really hiding the seams sometimes intentionally so sometimes we like to misdirect and play magician uh in fact i'd say a lot of what we were showing you today in terms of playing with rewinding and things like that is doing exactly that we were uh misdirecting what was and wasn't live and recorded uh that being said uh that's part of this impulse to to bring an audience into the space here uh because we can start to show like you didn't have any but you knew exactly what was live and what wasn't and uh and so finding uh ways to have different perspectives on the work trying to find more ways and doing you know we didn't do it in this instance but like picture it we do uh often a picture in picture where we'll show the closet unedited unadulterated uh so you always know what's happening in the closet uh but yeah and part of it is actually developing new tools and new technologies to do that which is kind of funny well and also um i think the problem that we had we were spending so much time building these uh these sort of cohesive productions uh that yes masked the uh the sort of live or technical uh but uh scenes of it uh but the problem was it took us until a couple months ago where we could finally get a computer that could handle the ability to start layering other elements and other perspectives and other inputs and uh now we're able to do that but for a long time we were lucky just to to do what we were doing because ultimately the real way that people can tell our shows are live is when it fails that's true when josh's computer freezes something goes wrong um and we have to start the show again and so people can see it happening again like all of those moments are incredibly frustrating for us oh yeah and the one true moment where our audiences are like oh this is well they'll say oh this is theater then and that that really drives me up a wall and uh really quickly because we're getting some feedback from uh those in caper it's right now i'm hearing it fine but i uh when anyone speaks just lean into the microphone uh on your ends uh josh and kitty rose okay great cool uh yeah question from the light lab when you were done i turned to them i was like i feel like we just saw a magic trick because we on the one hand or we saw how it's done and we saw on the one hand on screen the finished product of what the audience is supposed to see or what your audience is to this point has been supposed to see and on this side we had the privilege of sort of watching the effort and the work and the crossing back and forth and the side and the push and the fact that the the closet doesn't fall over but josh is selling it enough physically that it looks like it falls over et cetera et cetera and so i'm wondering for these iterations for you one what are you hoping to explore in that simul simultaneously in those two perspectives and two do you have like feelings about showing your magic tricks a little bit i mean really is there some anxiety about like taking us behind the camera and so on uh i mean just to respond to the magic question uh because we we've talked to and and worked with a couple uh magicians who who expressed that anxiety on our behalf and uh and i don't think we do we don't see ourselves as magicians uh but we of course are using a lot we're not precious about it exactly uh so in some respect it's it's more fun to share what's going on i think one of the biggest problems that that we've come up against because we love the ability the simultaneity of seeing a full uh uncut version of of how we're doing it uh side by side with what we're doing is really exciting uh and we've yet to like within a 1920 by 1080 frame been able to figure out exactly how to do that in a way that doesn't take away from one side of it like i think in an ideal space you'd be able to an audience member would be able remotely to toggle between two views and then you could really choose to like watch the whole thing in one space and or watch it watch it in another um in the way that like you live were able to sort of control your own eye uh and say actually i'd rather just watch the monitor or i'd rather watch the behind the scenes and there's also between between 2d and 3d which is just the best thing and being able to see also the three different cameras and knowing which one was on which one you're walking by is like an immersive theater it's an innumerable yeah it's true well and that's that's one of the big things that i that i've been really interested in is like the real time josh and the effort it takes for him to do the physical feats that he's doing um and the like the noises and the grunts and the fact that he's not actually tipping a closet over um which feels really exciting to share that energy with an in-person audience as well as like an online audience who can still see and appreciate it um but it feels really exciting to start sharing that energy more questions well i think we have time for one one more question uh i don't know if there's i i can't see them in the light lab if there was one more there um yeah anyone else i got one oh hi so can you guys talk a bit about the process of coming into a space where you're having where you are experimenting with new technology and how you balance uh doing something that is brand new while also knowing that you have a product that you have to create uh i i feel like shon is asking that in a sort of leading way because shon was present for a lot of it uh and thank you shon and thank you shon i mean shon was sort of invaluable in terms of helping us understand how to uh how to work with this programming uh so uh among many others um gosh i mean well i think at the core we are always open and excited about experimentation so we are oh like we play and we play every day so that's something that we're that we're very used to and we love to make sort of like basically iterative iterative work so we'll try we'll make something and then be like oh but if next time we could do this the next time we could do this so so whether or not we can master the tools is sort of besides the point because we're so excited to play and see if it works and this is actually the first time that we've been able to work with something that uh didn't work and we kept going yeah we kept trying it yeah um like the the connect wasn't always doing what we wanted to do but we were able to build that into a piece that didn't ultimately break it yeah which is really exciting it's also i guess worth mentioning that that in our practice uh we do work fast um you know our our schedule originally had us creating work in a two to three week uh uh cycle uh so one week on a study is kind of par for the course for us yeah uh i mean yeah there's obviously pressure to put something together and the programming is not um doesn't you know come easy uh but we're also working off of a lot of as you said iteratively like certain sections were sort of like programs that i kind of had half built that we were able to sort of fill out for this time and then that middle section which was just a lot of the like bouncing back and forth uh that stuff was was really what we had built up from scratch and you know does it have an arc necessarily you know i don't know we don't know we started answering asking that question today today so you know in that respect uh you know we basically gave ourselves and we're excited to give ourselves that whole middle sequence to have complete variability i could have rocked that closet any which way and uh i had total control over what was going on there and that's what we were interested in exploring uh in not setting it in not uh forcing ourselves to do a perfect piece that we that we're used to uh so that was that was what we were playing with and that's uh in that way what you saw was a sort of um an amalgamation of of half studies from months ago uh beautiful choreography from this morning and absolute improvisation with a computer program uh that was uh impressively uh cooperative and it must be noted that that that the support from uh from everyone at the school has also made it possible that we could do this much in one week absolutely awesome i think we have i think one more question from k for its uh kaitlin's if you want to hop on okay if you um had a theater in quarantine school for hybrid performance and you um had lots of students to teach what would be the courses or skill sets that students would need to know like theater 101 theater 201 like what you don't need course numbers we don't even like course numbers but i would love to hear like what are the what are the skill sets that new artists need to have to to do what you're doing can i say the first one yeah go for the first one the skill set is like uh being comfortable with failure first and foremost yeah in every way shape and form um the technology will fail you'll forget what you're doing um and being okay with that and building on it um and turning it into something that's exciting for you and makes you want to dig deeper um that would be like the the i feel like core thing yeah and then there's a lot of other things yeah i mean then then it's just an hour and a half a day of uh walking around in an imaginary uh revolving uh closet uh and shifting gravitational fields and uh uh that sort of physical theater work i mean in some respect uh it's it's all about uh balancing and the tension between uh extreme analog physicality and uh and the totally digital and how you can utilize both techniques to enhance one another uh and speak to one another as opposed to just you know uh well anyway uh that's that's i think essential uh and and i guess that would be semester one there we go and is adora yeah is adora fit failure is adora and walking on the ceiling yeah yeah yeah and that physical practice i think would have that would be like a daily physical practice yeah because ultimately when we make pieces we rehearse every day um which means that josh has a like very rigorous uh physical practice yeah amazing that's a great question and i think we should all be asking that every day too it's a good practice of like what do we need to stay flexible technological and also deeply human you know and i think what theater and quarantine does best is all three of those uh at a really amazing balance of uh really cathartic work so i just wanted to thank you uh for everyone who's watching right now uh they are back tomorrow one p.m i believe it is am i am i correct i i will turn off if uh if i go check my my document but we hope that everyone's back uh for those who are watching the stream online those in the cave fritz and those in light lab i want to thank you all for being here um i also uh katlyn said them all best but everyone involved in uh the symposium uh the mya bren institute for new performance the performance studies faculty uh our gas on the bren uh committee it's amazing watching everything come to life this week has been awesome to uh it's a thrill to support the two of you and to watch this type of work uh in just made in just a week is is really inspiring for everyone at university of marron so thank you all for being here uh and keep uh keep pro failing keep going out there and messing around so awesome thank you all for being here uh they are up in the light lab you can go walk upstairs right now if you have any more questions keep the conversation going and uh thank you all take care