 four, three, two, one, and we're live. Welcome, everybody back to Segal Talks, our weekly programming during the weekdays, where we do focus on artists' voices from around the world, global voices. It is a time where we need to hear from artists, listen to artists, and perhaps also realize that might be artists' voices that will be heard stronger now, and that their voices reach people's minds and ears and eyes. It's a difficult time you live in, a complicated time. There are studies that just came out yesterday that perhaps the amount of dead people in the New York state that doubled might be 20,000 people. It's just unprecedented. It's still everything is closed. Theaters are closed. Restaurants, businesses, they are doomed to stay prediction. A third of all nonprofits will close. And if art ever had anything to say, this is also a moment where we have to think about what are we going to say. Maybe it's a bit about thinking to give meaning. And artists have been on the right side of social progress, of justice on the good side of the history of the world. And I think also, again, they are here. And now in this space, the Seedle Talks is a space where we do listen to the artists. And with us today, we have a special guest every day. But today, we are really proud to have with us the great Peter Sellers, an internationally renowned director of theater artists, curator, producer, and who has been creating transformational work in America and Europe and around the world. Peter, welcome. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, thank you. You are, in a way, also a colleague. You are professor of art and culture at UCLA and next to all your work. It's stunning to see how much you do. So where are you now? And how does it feel to not be able outside in the world where you normally move so fast and so much? Well, I think the message from our teacher of the virus is to be quiet, is to stop. I think the world was running like a crazy pace. The world was running out of control. Everybody was too busy to really notice anything. And this incredible speed and acceleration that was running the planet and making the economies go crazy, making a whole series of injustices that nobody had time to stop and say, wait, this is wrong. And then they start being accepted. And then they start becoming something you can't even, you can't take apart again. It has its own nightmare momentum. I mean, for example, just the founding of something in this country called Homeland Security, which happened in an emergency overnight. And you want to say, stop, hold it. And suddenly it's permanent. It's part of everything. The drug war suddenly got funded and is unstoppable. All these things that happened with the accelerator on. And what does it mean, a message to the whole human race, stop right now? Just stop. And we don't even know how to do that, because our metabolisms are so geared to this craziness. And what does it mean to stop and turn the gaze inward and say, what are we doing? What are we doing to each other? What are we doing to the planet? And what happened to those skills of taking care of each other, of recognizing that we're living in a really intricate ecosystem that is being violated in ways that make life impossible. I mean, life itself. And so to me, the virus is sending this message. I've never been at home this long, I think, in my life. It's incredible not to get on an airplane. It's incredible to be quiet. It's incredible not to have an opening night. It's incredible to really stop being productive and really learn something in the quiet. And I think theater frequently can just try to keep the wheels moving and the kind of entertainment going. And now what's powerful is to be in a moment where entertainment is not the point. But creating a space of focus, a space of concentration, a space of meditation and contemplation, where the heartbeat is much slower and the thought process is much more intense and charged with another kind of emotional weight. And I think a lot of theater responded to television and film just trying to get it everything faster, not bore anyone. And of course, now we're in that state where boredom is the only way we're going to learn anything. And the only way our thought opens to other possibilities. And the only way we live with something and realize we should not be living with it. We should not accept a whole series of things that have happened in the last 50 years that are moves down the wrong road in the wrong direction. And our societies have gone very far. And we have to stop, turn the car around, and walk back and start over on so many questions. So for me, this is a really incredible moment of learning. And I hope a moment of different types of solidarity. I mean, what's so very moving is all of the people that have stepped forward to volunteer, all of the people who have stepped forward to help, the schools that are closed, but the school cafeterias that continue to feed children, and the level of international cooperation that we were told two months ago was impossible when it was about working to solve the climate emergency. And suddenly, with this virus, there's global cooperation occurring at this incredible and truly unprecedented level. And so I think suddenly in this period, a lot of things are possible that were not possible just a few weeks ago. And people are rallying, and of course, are shocked by the depth of tragedy of whatever the numbers are. I mean, of course, the death of a human being is never a number and can't even really be fathomed. And at the same time, human beings don't get serious until people are dying, until there's blood on the altar. And so I think our line of work in the theater is we deal with tragedy. And tragedy is about not pointless suffering, but that this is here so we learn something. And so the question is, what are we learning? And what do we take from this tragedy? What is the message of this tragedy? What is this tragedy trying to tell us? And what does it mean that the planet has climate emergency? Human beings couldn't figure out that this was really serious. And so the virus had to be engaged to come and say, no, no, you don't understand. The planet is unlivable. And you people are poisoning not just the future of the forest and the ocean, but your own future. And the virus is here to deliver this message. And how we listen and hear, how deeply we hear, how deeply we listen to a tragedy and say, what do we take from this? What is here for us to learn? Is what's in front of us right now? And again, it's so strange that when one of the largest crises in human history occurred three months ago, the first thing that happened was all artists are out of work. And you're like, we don't need you. I think it's probably good for the artists in one way. In one way it's terrible because nobody has income, of course. And very few people have life savings. Everybody's living on the edge, week to week, moment to moment in our line of work. But OK, I think maybe artists do need some time to be quiet and do need some time to reflect and do need some time to get off the merry-go-round and really find their footing again. Find what it means to stand still and on your own two feet and know where you're standing. And I think the power right now is going to be with people who can lead with some vision and make sense out of tragedy and say that tragedy is not the end of the story. Tragedy is the beginning of a set of stories. And of course, there's huge pressure from the business community and from people who are going crazy in isolation to just get everything back to normal as quickly as possible. And of course, that would be a crime to have learned nothing from the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the depth of courage of people who stepped forward to help in the medical, overrun hospitals, in home care, in all kinds of ways where people have stepped forward to help. If we just go back to normal, we didn't learn anything. And meanwhile, we're not going to get the idea that we should live differently from business or from politicians. And therefore, I think artists have to be the class of people who have to become, first of all, deep in our level of wisdom and insight, which means that we have to be associating with people who are not like us, who are scientists, are people who have larger ways of understanding what's going on environmentally, what's going on medically. And then to come back to our original roles, which are communicators of difficult subject matter in a society and create new models, new working models of other ways of living and demonstrating what needs to happen. And most people can't imagine anything because they haven't. They've only seen what's around them, and so they can't imagine something else. And our job is to help imagine something else and to not just theorize it, but to embody it, to step into it with our bodies. And it's the bodies that are speaking in the COVID crisis. It's the dead bodies. It's the sick bodies. It's the struggling bodies. And I have to say, for artists, it's leading with your own body and putting our bodies on the line and demonstrating in our bodies what we're trying to hope for as another way of living in the 21st century. Anyway, so for me, it's a really incredibly rich, intense period, and I think I want to try and create a couple of ways in which artists can begin to talk together, to gather ideas and to say, yes, we have to move forward differently on so many levels, one of which is, of course, with the arts economy, that the arts economy just went out of business instantly when there's a crisis. I think that's completely upside down. We have to figure out a way in which the arts are a meaningful part of every progressive action in a society. And for that matter, every regressive action that the presence of artists in situations of difficulty creates a different way of understanding and reading those situations and a different way of gathering people to come forward with collective solutions that have a deeper solidarity and a deeper sustainability. And to me, theater is about gathering people even virtually but emotionally and with a sense of experiential consequences and to begin to find points of shared agreement or understanding. And of course, in this period where in most societies we're at such astonishing and violent, divisive positions, what does it mean to share space? And theater is just shared space. Theater is a group of people sharing space. The space belongs to all of us in this space right now. What does that mean in divided India for a Muslim population? What does that mean? How do we share the space? And then how do we share the resources? How do we share the water? How do we share the air? And how do we share responsibility? And to me, the 21st century is just this project of sharing the planet. And theater is fundamentally about one topic which is sharing. So to me, it's about now how many ways can we rethink and reimagine theater as shared in as many dimensions as it's possible to share and giving human beings practice and exercise in sharing? You know, one of the things that's just not been good in our culture for the last two generations and take muscles that human beings have actually had for millennia but have not been exercised and say, let's take these muscles of sharing and give them some exercise. Anyway, sorry. That's a little bit of what I'm sitting in my home in California thinking about right now. No, this is actually what we need to hear. What we also want to hear from you. So are you stopping? Do you stop? Well, I have no scheduled work for another year because everything's been canceled or postponed. And I just put up an exhibit in the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles about 60,000 refugees trying to come north from Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala and all of whom are caught at the Mexican border and many of whom are in these nightmare detention centers with parents separated from children. We had just opened this exhibit when suddenly everything shuts down. So how we move this kind of activism through other channels becomes very, very important. And this kind of social awareness that, again, goes inevitably under-reported of what's really happening in the world. And again, even the most compelling article still in our newspaper doesn't actually take you into the experience. And I think in questions of equal justice and questions of, again, what it means that the virus does not respect borders. You can build the biggest wall you can imagine and it will not stop the virus. And the virus is moving across every border on Earth. And in this period to have built prisons instead of hospitals and schools, you can see it's criminal. And now all over the world, societies are so weakened because of the absence of serious and sustained infrastructure, which has all been ripped out or underfunded for at least a generation, while prison security and border patrols have been stepped up. And we see that all of that security and all those border controls have made no one safe right now. And in fact, that the prisons and detention centers are the absolute highest sources of breeding of the virus and the worst nests of contagion. And we just got it very wrong. We got it exactly backwards. So how we, again, emerge from this, but also have to then understand very deeply the priorities have to shift and have to turn. And it's incredible because there's very little political traction. And I think this is what makes this virus feel so biblical is that when on the ground, you wish there was more political call for let's tear down all these walls and stop this crazy thing about migrants and let the earth open and breathe. And well, the virus is here to say it's time. And the virus is sending a message you can't ignore. Like human beings, gifts for denial are prodigious. So I think what we have to do again as artists is to really hold these insights and these messages that are coming from the planet itself in front of people in a way that we can't just move on. We have to really, really stop and address these questions. This is so very, very true. And as a question for you, I do know that you also practice sin, you're close to Buddhism. And on the other hand, you also have a call to action, where you have to do something. How do you connect these two strands of the silence and the speaking out? Well, I think, again, that's the beauty of theater is you're trying to create and deepen inner space. And the inner space is the space of reflection, the space of understanding, the space of contemplation, the space that understands that reality is deeper than the world of appearances. And so we're trying in theater always to represent the world, but not just on the surface. But to say behind this story, there are many other stories. And to say we have to look much deeper till we arrive at the story that's underneath this story, till we arrive at what does not meet the eye, till we arrive at what didn't appear in the newspaper article, till we arrive at what this family has never admitted about itself to itself. Theater is always about digging and digging and digging until we can get to this other levels of reality that are really shaping what's going on. And so this inner space is extremely important in this inner space, which lets you be honest with yourself before you can attempt to be honest to anyone else. Theater is about letting that space open and breathe and meet itself more regularly. Because the one thing we're not good at is listening to our own voices, our own inner voices, which know much more than most of our outer exclamations. Anyway, so theater is constantly trying to hold in balance this question of our inner voices and our outer behavior. And so that's, I think, the job description. And of course, theater also has to have that compelling sense of urgency and of flair and the image that stuns you and that you leave the theater. And 30 years later, you can still remember that image. And we have to craft those images in a way that, as people reflect on that image, many years later, content is still emerging from that image. That image remains rich and charged and filled with content. So that's part of our craft as theater makers. And that moment of emotional flashpoint or moment of sudden open, open, open, open conversation or silence charged with meaning that people can recall years later. And what we're trying to do is plant these seeds that will grow across a generation. And if those seeds have any kind of water and sunlight, they will become trees. I mean, I see the sun going up in California. I think it's 9 o'clock in the morning where you are. Do you feel something has changed for you in these weeks when I don't know how many you are in quarantine? Is it different or is it a confirmation of what you already thought or has something happened? Well, all the things that we're talking about, we've known for a long time, but delayed acting on. And I think the virus, together with the climate emergency, creates the urgency of acting now. Creates saying, you can't not respond. You actually have to now respond. And so that's what's changed. But of course, again, for me, Donald Trump is, of course, but everything Donald Trump is doing has been in America for a very long time. And most of the very destructive behavior and structures have actually been here for a long time. And so for me, it's very rarely that today's headlines change what we're dealing with. These things have been here forever. And they've been sitting there either latently or unacknowledged because this kind of violence against women has been going on a long time. This kind of violence against the environment has been going on a long time. These are choices that were made in a society that, again, agreed to accept all of this as moving just under the surface. We've been building prisons a long time. There's been appalling police action a long time. All these things have been going on a long time. So again, I think one of the hardest things is to uproot something that's so much part of what people have accepted as a normal part of the landscape. And to say, well, no. So I try not to react to everything as if, oh my god, look at this morning's headline. And you try and say, well, wait a minute, where did this start? How long has this been happening? And where are the sources of it, of course, is what we're really trying to look for, not what is the latest symptom of the disease, but what is the motivating cause? And I think, again, to talk about theater, we're constantly in a world where politics is about effects and where art has to be about causes. And we have to constantly deepen the political question by saying, well, what's the cause of this? And we have to focus at those causal points that are the only possible points of intervention so that you have a way of intervening before it's too late. Because if you intervene at a later point, it's hopeless. So getting that kind of thinking and those kind of ways of understanding our own behaviors and then also trying to not just critique, but give a positive set of examples. And because, again, I just find this is, yes, it's a period of widespread disaster economically and so on, but it's also a period where so many people have stepped forward in such beautiful ways. And there's new solidarity that was never previously imagined. So I don't just want to dwell on the negative. And I think that's really, really important, is how we can really create positive and inspiring models. And just so to say, to answer your question finally, earlier this year, I've started on a project which I will now really continue and deepen of staging a Buddhist sutra from the first century called the Vimalakirti Sutra. And the subject of this sutra is illness. And it's a really, I mean, the first century is already a pretty interesting century. But it's a real moment of transition for Buddhism, where Buddhism moves from a primarily monastic culture literally into the streets in a democratizing way. And this Vimalakirti Sutra, I think, was intended for performance before a literate public, like in a marketplace. And it has a lot of comedy, a lot of amazing transformations, theatrical, stunning theatrical moments in it. It's all, of course, in dialogue. And I think it's, from what I can tell, the first statement in the literature of the equality of women, gender equality. And its primary figure is this businessman named Vimalakirti, who is ill. And Buddha tells his disciples to go visit this person who's ill because they could learn something. And they're all afraid. And the first four chapters are the disciples giving their reasons why they want to visit the sick person. And then they finally, Buddha says, shut up and go. And they go and visit the sick person. And then their lives begin to change. And it's a very, it's incredible, amazing text. And I've started working on it in last May. And now I will really, I will work further. And just to say the theatrical form of it is one dancer and one singer. The singer is from South India. The dancer is from US by way of Frankfurt and Amsterdam. And it's two people holding a stage. But, and I project just the text of the sutra. But it's just two people creating a universe and a universe in dialogue between a man and a woman. And it's theatrically not about props and not about spectacle, but about what is possible with two people. And of course, the text itself is a revelation with incredible lines in the text like holy liberation is the equality of all things. And if we can create the theatrical space where those words become actual, that's very, very powerful. Another beautiful line is evil spirits have power over fearful men but cannot disturb the fearless. If we can take these words and open them into multiple realities, that's worth doing. So a little bit right now, I'm working on some very, very basic, basic texts and, again, away from the headlines and trying to deal with something of a more ancient level of understanding. And at the same time, as always, what's powerful about stepping into the words and into the bodies of your ancestors is to say, OK, now, where are we in these deeper contexts? So anyway, that's a little bit what I'm thinking about right now as next steps. But the other thing, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I really have in mind is trying to create some process of convening artists on a global basis, a lot like your beautiful program here, and having a real exchange of ideas for a year of what are the paths that we have not taken and what are the paths that we need to open into this next period? And in what way can we support each other? In what way can there be a different ecology that holds the arts in some kind of other economy where the necessity of the arts and the role of the arts, which is, in my mind, at least not about making a brilliant art world. I mean, for me, art is here to make everything else work. It's the thing that allows the justice system to work. It's the thing that allows everything else to work is that you have this maintenance facility, which are the arts, which remind you of what a healthy state looks like and feels like, and is courageous enough to go into difficult places where things are not working and reimagine and reinvent what's going on. But also, report. That's something we really should listen to and think about. So your suggestion, we quote a bit Brecht, saying that what he said that new times need new forms of theater in your suggestions. So let's actually go back 2,000 years in a way like he did with his distancing, by the way. This idea of distance, he went back to Chinese theater. But so you say, let's listen to texts of early mankind. In a way, like you said earlier, we should go stop and go back on our traces. What are your thoughts of online production or doing something for the screen by theater artists but artists now too? Well, again, what's so great is, I mean, you and I are such incredible fossils. But young people, truly, this technology, I mean, they're looking at three screens simultaneously, all day with no big issue. Young people live in this screen life and have a certain, not only facility, and competence, but genuine ability to catch things in this amazing environment of multiple screens. And so a younger generation is already on this and is already doing this and has been doing this for already a couple of decades. And the proliferation of screens and screens that can deliver lots of levels of content with lots of layers. It's very exciting. And for me, this question of Sammilton 80, which is what theater is, theater is this live moment. And this idea that there's a live moment in multiple geographies that suddenly converge is super theatrical. And that one screen is somebody in Brazil and on one screen is somebody in Bangladesh and in one screen is that kind of thing. And there's some electrical charge happening at this moment in all those places that it's meeting. That's exhilarating. At the same time, there's this other issue which is video is so bad at sensing emotion. And video is so clueless spatially. There's the space stays so flat. And again, this project for me of sharing space, what it means that nobody owns, there's not single ownership of a space, but that we're recognizing that we all own and participate in the space. And that we all bear responsibility for this space. And if I could borrow the term from Samoan culture in the Pacific Islands of, they have an idea of space is the va. The va is the thing we all share. And when you're behaving badly as a kid, your mother says, stop, protect the va. That we all have to protect this space we're in, the space that belongs to all of us and we're all responsible for equally. And video is not so good at comprehending what the space is. But I have a feeling again, the technology is, it's like a pencil, it will change, it will become whatever it needs to do to become, to be effective. And so I'm, there's no point in saying no. There's, the point is to say, yes, let's have richer and better and deeper technology. And again, just treating technology as a pencil, let's get better at drawing. Let's actually lift our level of skill and deepen our level of content. Peter, are you back? I'm back, hello. Yes, hello, I am, I am sorry if I lost you or you lost me. Yes, I lost you for a bit, but now you hear you. This is great. Yes, yes, we were talking about the va and that in a way we share that space, but we also responsible for it to keep it up. It's not there on its own work, it's participatory. Yes, yes. And to me, that's that, that is the energy of theater. And that is again, why all over the world, cultures create ritual and ceremony because we all need practice in how to create deeper relationships and how to create human, the way in which all of us have a part to play in these bigger questions. And so most societies absolutely survived by centralizing ritual. And ritual is not just a performance where you're a spectator, it's where everybody is there to participate. And that's a, I think if anything, that's something we need to elaborate and deepen because we've created in the last two generations a real spectator culture. The idea that someone else will handle this and the society of spectacle. And so the way in which we deepen the participatory content, I think is really, really crucial. Yeah, yeah. So one way is a socially engaged participatory art. The one Claire Bishop also writes about the one which you can buy actually, you can see often it's free, it's outside and where not the artist like the Andy Warhol or Joseph Boyce who were still in the middle of it. No, the perhaps what is all about is about the people who are participating and there'll be questions. What are those spaces? What will they be? Are they like New York where they built the new gigantic spaces and people are trying to fill the 1,000 seats or maybe to celebrate life, to celebrate art, to celebrate our being alive, the vow. Maybe it has to be in different spaces also. What do you think about theater and space? Well, I think most of us have had our, some are most memorable experiences of theater, not in a theater. And theater is designed to theatricalize and hide and deepen the spaces that we're living in. And so so much theater that's memorable are performance that are taking place in people's neighborhoods or in a site that already has a very charged history or in a space that has multiple levels of ownership. And to me, we're already past that point of trying to get people to come to our theater. Please hear some tickets. But what does it mean to do our work where people live? Do our work where people are? And to actually again use theater to elevate and improve those spaces. I mean, I think one of the most memorable things for in the 90s when we were making the Los Angeles festival was, we made the 1993 festival in the, just the year after the LA uprising. And we made a five week festival with 400 events in the, right in the neighborhood where the first fires were lit in the LA rebellion after the Rodney King beating. And most people were afraid to go into that neighborhood. And but because we were artists, we could go there as a festival and go to the city council. When we toured that neighborhood, of course the street lights were broken. There was trash everywhere. The fountain had never been turned on in the park. And we could go to the LA city council and say, the New York times will be here in three months. We need the fountain turned on. We need the trash picked up. We need the lights to be working. And it happened. And it happened because of an arts project. And I think, again and again, the presence of the arts allows things that wouldn't happen in the normal course of events to happen. It creates a point of attention, a point of focus and also a point of renewal, a point of new energy coming into a situation and interrupting what is quote unquote normal and what has become accepted as normal. And instead it creates a moment of the unusual. And to me, the world moves forward not in what's expected happens, but what is unexpected happens. When it's unexpected that Nelson Mandela will step out of 26 years in prison and become the next president of South Africa. And it's the unexpected that is incredible. And so for me, creating a theatrical event in a neighborhood or in a institution or is that the theatrical event gives everyone involved permission to go beyond what's expected, beyond what has been normal, beyond what has been accepted. And to say, well, wait a minute, what else could we imagine? What else could happen here? What could this look like? What could this feel like? What could this be? And that act of, again, bring to bear people's imagination and giving everyone permission to imagine something else and something better and let it be not just one person or a little group of imagining it, but creating the way in which a whole group of people re-imagined their future and can participate in building that future. Well, that's really exciting. And that said, that's amazing. Talking about that in powerful images, what is the first piece of theater you ever remember? What did you see? Well, I have a bizarre thing in my life because I apprenticed at a marionette theater beginning when I was 10 years old. And I really had no connection to theater before that. So I already started in a way backstage. And of course, what was beautiful about puppetry was puppets do everything people can't do. Puppets can fly, puppets can transform, puppets can do all these miraculous things. And so you actually believe in the presence of miracles and transformation and you get that nothing is what it looks like. And you get there's a trick and there's a special little string that makes that happen. And you begin to realize that there's many, many layers of reality that are going to surprise you, that nothing needs to be what you thought it was. And so that sense of the miracle of a puppet is pretty strong in my life. And this theater that was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was one of the most polluted cities in America and a steel town, a coal town, industrial town, and which cleaned itself up, which really was one of the first cities in America to realize this was an ecological crisis. But that sense of transformation was in the puppets. Of course, still is with me. And that theater also did plays that puppets could do better than people. I mean, they did the usual fairy tales, but they also did plays by Cocktoe and Beckett and the French surrealists and kind of the theatrical avant-garde where the playwrights were challenging theater to do the impossible. And puppets could step into that zone. And again, for me, one of the most powerful things about avant-garde art is that it is constantly asking for the impossible. And I think that's what we have to be responding to every day. And we have to get really good at realizing the impossible. And... So what was the last piece? If you go back, how many weeks are you now in confinement or in insulation? What is the last thing you saw on the stage? Oh, that is a deep question. Oh, my goodness. Well, I have to say, I just, right as the week the virus was beginning to move outside of China. Well, we don't know which week that is now anymore. The new research is telling us is moving that date back, but I spent February in the first week of March in New Zealand, which is, of course, an amazing country and a country where the political leadership is just incredibly impressive. And to see them responding in the early stages was very, very inspiring. But I was part of a festival organized by Lemme Ponofazio, the great Pacific artist, Samoan artist, in fact, who programmed this festival to appear one year after the Christ church massacre in the mosque and was designed as a response by artists one year later to the deaths of 50 people and that active racist hatred. And so I had three of my productions there and I was seeing work by Lemme Ponofazio, which was an astonishing piece that he did in late February, which was about somebody dying of a disease and being quarantined off and the society around having no idea how to respond, but he used these incredible images from Pacific Island Ritual and the work of Faust and Linyakula, which was, of course, coming from Eastern Congo and work that came from the early days of the genocide that happened in Kisangani, where more than one million people were killed, every family lost people and what it meant to live through this time of death and sacrifice. And those were the last performances I saw and I have to say the power of performance, of people living through death, which is what happens in theater is you also come out the other side and you come out with a community. You went in as an individual and you came out as a community. Quite, quite amazing these pieces, how all of a sudden they're meaning the additional layers, as you said, you know, we're opening up and their engagement with the world and what we should pay attention to. So how do you spend your day now? Maybe you walk us through, but if you don't get an early call at nine o'clock from the single center, by the way, we are here at the Graduate Center CUNY at the City University of New York, I think as far as we know, we're the only theater institution in the United States doing creating new meaningful program every day. And so what do you do in, how does your day look like? How does Peter Seller's day look like? What do you do? Well, in California, you get up early because the early mornings are so beautiful here. So... What's early? Well, I'm usually up, you know, five or 5.30 because also the phones to Europe and Australia and so on and it's all, that's the prime time. And even to New York. And I start the day with a long walk and then I'm reading, I'm reading a lot. I'm talking to a few friends and I'm really mostly very quiet. And again, this period of moratorium is a very deep thing. And so I'm trying to respect it. And, you know, in theater where I normally, you know, have many, many opening nights and many lots of deadlines for many, many decisions. And so you're always making decisions very quickly and, you know, kind of on the run. For me, I'm not making any decisions. I'm just really trying to stop and really get quiet and let the quiet itself lead me into the next phase of what needs to happen. Yeah. And then it's okay also not to produce, which is hard, right? To... Well, at the end of the day, when I go to bed, I say I had accomplished nothing today. I'm annoyed with myself, but of course you realize that that nothing is something. And right now, you know, our crazy consumer society of overproduction to just back away from all of that is actually very, very healthy. Yeah, and day after day and without knowing how long into the last. Well, without knowing is, you know, at least what joins us to, you know, medieval culture in a wonderful way because, you know, we've created this culture in the 20th century that everybody assumed we could predict what was going to happen. This is, of course, a total illusion, but at least now that illusion is dispelled. Everybody knows you have no idea what will happen tomorrow, please. And that is very healthy. That is true, that is true. So what are you reading? If you say what are you reading? What are you listening to? You're such a great, so close to music through your work directing and working with these truly extraordinary artists. But what are you listening to and what are you reading that you would like to share? Hmm, my goodness. Well, I'm reading several things. One is I read all the novels of the Libyan author Haisham Matar, M-A-T-A-R, which just gripped me and I just read them straight through for four books and he's just a beautiful author. I started with the most recent book, which is called A Month in Siena. Haisham lost his father and, well, his country. I mean, Libya, he had to leave when he was eight. The Gaddafi regime was, of course, one of the most famously violent and brutal of fascist regimes. And, but this account from a family that was right in the middle of it is very powerful. And at one point, as the country was opening but also the Civil War was underway, he went back, not having been there since he was eight to find his father, who was in some prison being tortured. And he knew already going there that he would need some recovery space. So he planned with his wife upon leaving Libya to go to Siena and look at paintings for one month. And this book is very moving called A Month in Siena because many art historians don't have very big issues in their lives. And so therefore when they look at paintings, they're not seeing very large issues. And when somebody who's lost their country, their father, a whole human rights campaign, stands in front of a Sienese painting and sees a lot. And what it means to look into a painting when in fact all these things are going on in your life and what the painting then comes back to you with the way the painting speaks is very powerful. It's very beautiful. Anyway, then I said I have to read all of his books. So I'm also reading the Flower Ornament Sutra, which is of course the longest of the Buddhist sutras. It's about five times longer than the Bible. And it was the most read book in China for about 600 years. And it's, you know, if you're lucky, you can do three pages a day. It's so intense. But it's the, what can I say? It's the most transcendent and breathtakingly beautiful of the sutras because it just goes into infinity. You know, human beings only think in terms of limitation. And what does it mean if you actually understand the infinity that's in every breath, that's in every flower, that's in, you know, that you're actually touching infinity. And so the Flower Ornament Sutra is about, you know, how many flowers are there on a tree? How many flowers are there in the world? How many flowers bloom, die? Bloom, die, the flower falls, and of course becomes part of the next flower, you know, one generation later. And this idea that everything in the universe is cosmically regenerating and that, you know, and that everything blooms, falls, and then feeds the next generation. And so that life of sacrifice, that life of regeneration, and that life of flowering. Well, of course, that's the heart of no theater. All of Xiami's essays are about the way that flower blooms. So the Flower Ornament Sutra is what's inside of all of those images. And most of Chinese theater, you know, all the actor is called the flower. And the hand gesture is a flower blooming. And every gesture in Cambodian dance is the way a flower, you know, emerges from a seed into a stalk, into a blossom, into a fruit. And so all those images are in this Flower Ornament Sutra. And I've been trying to read it for 20 years and I've read maybe half of it. And so I decided this time, I'm really going to read the whole thing. And so that's part of every day. And I'm reading about Stravinsky in the 30s and Paris Theater in the 30s, in this crisis point after 1933, European crisis point of the rise of fascism, the after what has already happened in Germany and the way that's affecting France. And meanwhile, the world becoming aware of the Stalin death camps and the show trials, this moment in time that is so charged and what's in front of artists, which do they choose? And, you know, Stravinsky of course is very fond of fascism, old style patriarchy and authoritarianism. And at the same time, this avant-garde figure of some kind of liberation, what is at stake? And so, yeah, that's what I was reading a bit last night. And, you know, a lot of stuff, as you can see in my house is mostly books. So I have a lot to read. Fantastic. I mean, it's great that this is fantastic. So we are coming close. I'm tuned in and some of our listeners did sending questions, I tried also to incorporate them. But Peter, you also, since you are also next to all the stuff you do, you're an educator, you are a mentor of artists. So what do you say? As Rilke wrote, you know, the letters to the young poets and well, maybe also for our listeners, what do you think, you know, they should keep in mind in these times and what is our significance? What is really important participation? You know, as they say in the community organizing, business show up and speak up and be present and just presence. I mean, it's really a time for presence and presence can take lots of forms. And I think we're all finding that in our era of uplinks and the internet. And it's a miracle that we're given the internet at this moment in history that, you know, it has actually available. My mother is in an institution where, you know, nobody can enter because of the, you know, the seriousness of the vulnerability of older people right now. And so I can at least see her every day on FaceTime and we can be together and we can feel each other emotionally. We can understand each other. We can make a deep connection, even though we're not in the same room and she's very upset that we're not in the same room, but how come we have FaceTime? That's incredible. That's a gift. It's a miracle. And so, you know, finding how presence works and being there for other people. And I think sometimes with my mother, I've just put FaceTime on and we sit there for an hour and a half and don't even say that much, but just that she's not alone in some important way. And I think, you know, theater is designed to say none of us are alone. None of us are outnumbered is that actually all of us, it's all about solidarity. It's about the ways in which we find and deepen and acknowledge and demonstrate solidarity. And here we are. And this is the century for solidarity. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. And that's really something to keep in mind and also to take a very serious, all you said, but really thank you for sharing your experience that of course, in a way as for all of us, it is existential and it is important to hear from you and it feels less alone. It feels that we are connected. And also you have seen a lot along the way. You're one of the great artists of your generation. So for to hear that from you, of course carries additional value. So thank you for participating. Tomorrow we will hear from Oscar Eustis who runs the Public Theater in New York City. Fantastic. That's beautiful. And then together with Tony Torn who runs out of his tiny home from his father, Rip Torn, who left us. We love Tony a lot. Yeah, he has like 20, 30 people in his theater in Rip Torn and the page space. So it will be interesting to give a snapshot of New York and what's up and what we have to think about. So thank you. Thank you again. And I hope you didn't... I love to all those people. Yes. And I hope you didn't have to shorten your walk too much this morning to be with us. Thank you so much. And thank you for Julia for helping us to put it together. Also the great Norm Fresh, you know, who sent the mail. This is important. Reach out. And I'm sure he's listening to you now. And again, tune in next week. We will have artists from Argentina, Romania, from India, from Hungary. The situation Hungary is at higher and then also from New York. So tune back in. But the big important thing is stay safe. And yes, do think about participating of being part of a community and also to listen as we did today. Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you so much. This is very, very powerful. Thank you.