 Hi. Good morning everybody. Wow, we have people. That's amazing. When I saw that the open space was at the same time, I was like, wow, we're going to have nobody, but you guys came. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So my talk, I don't have a PowerPoint because I want to keep this with us here. Because my talk is all the stage is a lab. And what I'm going to talk about is the science that goes on in theater, the aspect of what we're doing in performance, not specifically theater, but in performative events. What is happening scientifically? We're here in the center for describing and understanding science. I thought I'd work the other way and say, well, what is the science of performance? Well, what are we doing here? What's different here? Well, a lot of what I'm going to talk about actually happens outside of the theater in our normal lives. But here in a theater, in a performative event, we control the environment. We control the lights. We control the sound. The design. It's like a lab. We are in a controlled environment in order to conduct a form of research, really, especially when we're doing scripted drama and when we're doing improv. If you think of scripted drama, Hamlet, you could look at it as an equation, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. And the variables are who's the actor? What are the costumes? What's the setting? And we're testing that hypothesis of does Hamlet still work? What does Hamlet mean? What does it mean now? So we are running a hypothetical experiment every time we do a scripted drama with improv. It's more of action research, discovering new hypotheses, new potentials unheard of. So when we're controlling this environment, we're controlling the light. We're controlling the sound. As our technology advances, we advance how much we control that. For thousands of years, you would not hear me this way. Right now, I have this beautiful little mic. It makes everybody like, I can talk really soft. So now I can control the environment. I can control it. But in the old days, he's going to help me here for a second because I want you to experience what sound was like for the several millennia before we had these wonderful body mics. Where we are now in the theater in a very controlled environment conducting experiments, what kind of actual science is going on here? What's happening? We'll think of our bodies as organisms. How do they function? We breathe, our hearts beat without air, without blood flow. We're gone very quickly. And we are experiencing that now. We experience it every day in our lives. Would it surprise you to know that in a dance company or a choral singing, the performers' heartbeats sync up? They do. It's been tested. What about the audience, though? A couple of years ago, there was a research done on the West End. Granted, this wasn't musical theater, but they found that the audience's heartbeats sync up during a performance. And what's interesting is even during intermission, and this was between people who knew each other well, those heartbeats remained in sync during the intermission. If you didn't know each other well, they kind of drifted, but then they came back together during the show. So in a sense, now I'm not saying I'm a West End musical, but maybe in some way you are drawn together more as an organism, a single organism in this event. So that's the biology, that's one aspect of it. What about the chemistry? What's happening chemically here? We have a room full of individuals. We have an individual on stage. We're all sharing the same environment. What's happening chemically here? Well, when I'm speaking, what am I doing? I'm breathing. If you studied acting, if you studied performance, you know that your energy is your breath. Well, what does that mean? What's happening? I remember learning that. Energy is breath. Your breath is your power. Where does that power come from? I read an interesting study not long ago about a doctor who lost 30 pounds. And he said to his physician, he was a scientist, a chemist, he said, where does that go? What happens when, and he actually started interviewing and he interviewed 150 different physicians and nutritionists and they all said, well, you burn it up. But he was a chemist and he said, no, you don't burn it up because there's a composition of matter, the conservation of matter. You can't burn up matter. So it has to go somewhere and I said, well, maybe you poop it out. But that didn't happen either. And it turns out 85% of your body mass that you are losing or using comes out in your breath, in carbon, 15% in the water that you urinate. So while I'm standing here talking to you, my body, my carbon, is going out into you. We're sharing atoms. So there is a physical, chemical connection in this room. It happens also when you're talking to your friend over coffee, of course, but here we're in a controlled environment. That's what I'm focusing on. But like I said before, what I'm talking about happens every day all the time. So why is it important to look at it in theater or in performance? I keep saying theater instead of performance. I work in the theater so that's my wheelhouse but I'll try and keep it more general here. So why? Because when we come together as an audience, we come together for a purpose with an intention. We have a reason. There's a focus. Just like an experiment. Now you may be coming together because you want to be entertained. You may be coming together because you want to be moved. But there's a focus. There's a focus on joining together. When we come together in an audience, we make the public personal. We make the general, the universal individual. We join together as a group to share an experience. And what happens when you share an experience? What's happening with us now? One of the reasons I started working in theater, actually I didn't really realize it until after I started working in theater when I asked myself, why? Why? People say, oh, why don't you do film? More money? It's true. I hate film. I mean, I love film. I hate working in it. It's like working in a factory. But in the theater, something very special happens. And I didn't realize it until I started reading Gertrude Stein. And she had heard discussions of time and how we experience time. We're experiencing it right now. And you're always experiencing it right now. As a matter of fact, you only have that option right now. There's no possible way to experience what I said 30 seconds ago, 2 seconds ago. It's gone. It's now. You may have hopes for the future. Those are aspirations, conjectures, hypotheses. You may have memories of the past. As we all know, those are probably half fiction. But we hold on to them. But the only thing you truly, truly, truly have at any given moment is right now. And what's happening now. So we exist in time. And in a physics aspect, time, you may think, some people think of it like a big gelatinous blob that we move through. Some people think it moves through us. But we exist only now. And theater, performance, exists only now. You watch a cinema, a movie. That exists outside of time. You can't alter it. You stand up and walk out. It still runs. If you all stand up now and walk out, this is over. Do I cease to exist when you exit the room? There are some scientists who would say that the world is so complex and we live in a virtual reality in our heads. What you're seeing now is not real. You are creating what you see in your head. So in a sense, you're creating me right now. The world, you cannot take, there's all sorts of rays and radio frequencies. You're not seeing it because you're not capable of it. What you're seeing is what you're capable of perceiving. And in that sense, you're creating what you're seeing in the synapses and the firing of your head. So what's happening now is an experience. We're creating an experience together. And in that sense, we're not knowing something. We're not believing something. We are experiencing it. We are creating it. And the laboratory that we're in, the stage, is the environment where we can do that. And I just got a wrap. So I'm so sorry I have to finish up. I had about 20 minutes worth of stuff and I'm really happy you got here for 10. Thank you.