 in your heads, feel free to start sort of, you know, adding that to the conversation because this is an ongoing conversation. And it is in very short a conversation to determine sort of how do we train for the future? What can theater do for the future? And because it is an unrehearsed future. All of our talks are available. The entire history of talks is online on the Drama School Mumbai website. And it's a really great body of knowledge and I'm almost convinced that it's a podcast series in the making, so maybe that for later. And we're joined here with my buddy, Curators. Mwanya has decided to write Shotgun with me. Thank you, Mwanya. And Amy and Mweny are here. Mweny disappeared, you know, there he is. And we're the ones who are sort of leading the thrust of we have different quests ranging from sort of intersectionality and interdisciplinarity and hybridity to transcendence, to voicing. And all of this is kind of like what we are thinking about. One of my quests in this term came up in a pre-talk with Mwanya and her last two speakers. But my questing is really about what can theater be and how can it sort of take us, like what can learning theater and training in theater be beyond that art form and that craft that we use to make a well-made play or to be in a live space together or to do something on stage. And the question of course was a slap in the face right at the beginning of the pandemic. And Ben and Amitish both, I don't know if Amitish is still here, but I'm sure when he is, he's just signing in and joining us. And Amitish, hi Amitish, welcome, hi Ben, welcome. So I will be very quickly and very brief context and I'll leave it and now we can formally start and I will leave it to Ben and Amitish to sort of describe themselves and their work in a few opening remarks. But the reason that I asked them to come in is because both of them have been working at length and for a lot of time in spaces, non-theater, beyond theater. But they both come in from intrinsic sort of theater-making, Amitish is a teacher at the National School of Drama, Ben studied at Lisba and they both are theater makers, but they have deployed their skill sets in very exciting ways, which you can see on their websites which I'm sure Falguni will based at some point into the chat window. But the question was to Ben and Amitish when they first came in and talked to our batch that had gone into lockdown was, can you give these guys some joy and some hope because they're gonna be locked down for a year, a year and a half, can you help them figure out what they can do with this deep in-person training that they'd had for nine months? And Amitish and Ben both sort of took them through a few talks and showed them ways forward. And I just think it's really an exciting question to ask is this, how do we transcend, how do we transpose, how do we transfer and transpose our skills and our capabilities and our aesthetics and our sensibilities as theater makers into other spaces? So I will start there. Amitish, are you settled in, would you like to start or should we ask Ben to go first the menu? I'm very happy to go in a non-alphabetical manner. Yes, okay, fine. So, great. Ben, the floor is yours, please tell us all about it. Non-alphabetically, just barely. Hello. So I'm Ben Samuels, nice to be here, lovely to be here. It's a pleasure and a privilege and an honor. So I live and work in the UK. I'm originally from California. I run a small touring theater company over here called Olympic and I also work as a kind of visiting director and practitioner at sort of drama schools and universities in the UK. And both of those kind of roles have meant that I slowly over the years kind of have developed an interest in sort of what comes to be, what kind of comes to contribute to the totality of a kind of theatrical experience. So the writing and the performing and the directing but also the lights and the sound and the costumes and the makeup and all of those things, how all of those things come together into a performance. And this has been going on for a long time, my very first job out of uni. I built sets for regional theater in the States. So this sort of what are all of the different elements of theater has always been something that I've been interested in. And a number of years ago, a few years ago, I saw a call out for theater companies that were interested in experimenting with motion capture technology. And I trained with Amy at LISPA in physical theater and some of the cock based approaches to devising and creating theater. And so working with motion capture seemed like an interesting extension of that training essentially, which is, so using sort of the body essentially to animate, to animate digital characters or avatars. And so I replied to the call out and I was sort of thinking about a way to reply to it. And in that, there was also something else that kind of came from that sort of Lakaka approach, which is one of the things that had always stayed with me was this classic sense of everything moves and that we can observe the world out there and observe how things move and then try and embody that. And in that act of embodiment of observable phenomenon, we discover a certain kind of movement dynamics and out of those dynamics might even arise a kind of poetry. And then there's a sort of extension from that, for me, which is that essentially, which I think is really beautiful that kind of for me came from the training, which is this sense that everything kind of contains its own metaphor. And so when I started thinking about how to approach working with motion capture and technology, I sort of started asking this question of sort of what's the intrinsic metaphor that sits within the technology? And motion capture is sort of this sense that you have these kinds of things that are on you that trackers that sort of, that you've moved through space and this sort of computer system knows where those trackers are in space and then it essentially assembles a movement based on everything it understands about movement and then assigns that movement to anything, to any kind of character. So it's this weird, so this notion of almost, it was almost disembodiment for me or certainly existing in a physical space and a virtual space simultaneously. And so reflecting on that, I was trying to put this application together and I was back in California and my dad was napping on the sofa behind me and my father suffers from Parkinson's-induced dementia and that has gotten progressively worse over the years and is now pretty far along. And so he, as I'm sure if you have an experience of people who suffer from dementia, it's from an observer's perspective, he seems to spend a lot of time somewhere else, though his body is physically present, his mind seems to be present elsewhere and sometimes present here. And so thinking about my dad and thinking about this motion capture and embodiment and disembodiment and presence and absence, I sort of started to say it might be interesting to make a piece using this technology around a story, around a story that circled around a character with dementia and the experience of dementia and that became ultimately a kind of interrogation of reality and sort of where different notions of reality sit. And so that piece became Fatherland, which, yes, there it is. And so the way that we made the sort of the mechanic of Fatherland was that there was a performer who was me, who was sort of in the motion capture, would invite audience volunteers on stage and I'd get them to wear a virtual reality headset. And then I would perform different characters, multiple characters for this audience volunteer who would then experience the world of the story as well as those different characters from within, they would see it through the headset. So they were seeing a virtual world with all of these characters unfolding inside of it. And then we would project what they were seeing to the rest of the audience. So the audience was essentially seeing a kind of live animated film being constructed for them. So it looked kind of, I'm just gonna do a quick screen share like this. So you can see there's me, there's Alex who's actually the technical director of the show but in a rehearsal wearing a VR headset. And then what you see on the screen is what Alex is seeing in VR. And this is of course, and we'll talk more about this later. This is a classic acting exercise. It's the mirror. So in this moment, the character, so Alex is seeing the world through the eyes of one of the characters in the piece through the father. And he's looking in a mirror and he's seeing his own reflection. I am basically mirroring the person in the headset. And so this piece as this moment as it unfolded, unfolded in that kind of nice acting exercise way where I would just follow their movement and the person in the headset was, yes, had this amazing sort of was startled to kind of see that happen. This is another just example of it. So this is, again, there's a character with a piece called Esperanza and she's inviting someone to dance. And then here in the spinal one is the character sees a crow dancing on a window sill. So you can see me and then in the background, there's a crow. So the story of Fatherland sort of revolved around a father with dementia and his son in their care. And the sort of the central idea was that each character had a different link to reality and had a different relationship with reality. So the father had dementia, the son was sort of conspiracy theory adult and had all of these ideas around what it was that was causing his father's dementia and he ended up sort of compiling all these different conspiracy theories that involved everything from American mythology to giant pharmaceutical companies. And then the care had sort of much more grounded, both feet on the ground, was very much about the present, the here and the now. And so that was sort of, that was Fatherland and in two minutes. And one of the things that we encountered working on that piece and one of the areas that we hadn't really considered was sound when it came to making it. In that, how you spatialized sound was sort of one of the areas that we ended up kind of doing a sort of a quick fix for. But it became sort of a thing that I was interested in. And so I went and sort of investigated that a little bit more and discovered this whole amazing world of spatial sound. I should say in all of this that the work that we were doing in virtual reality and then as I'll talk about in spatial sound became was, there was a certain intuition with it. And because virtual reality is essentially, it's working in a kind of virtual space. It refers to space. And so as a result, when we were trying to construct for it, it was a very sort of theatrical experience of trying to imagine space and then enact stuff that would happen in a virtual space, in a physical space. The constant work is essentially to map physical space onto virtual space. And a lot of what we do in acting and in performing is essentially trying to imagine ourselves in other spaces. And so working in this kind of virtual reality with virtual reality was very much a very intuitive shift because we were essentially imagining, you're on an open space, but imagine that you're in a kitchen and this is where the sofa is and that's where the TV is and then there's a door over there. And you're making, as we say, you're making the invisible visible. It's just that the visible is manifesting itself in a virtual space. When we started shifting over into spatial sound, it became equally fascinating because you discovered that that sound has space and that space has sound. And so a lot of the work that I've been doing since the lockdown, moving on to Fatherland, which was a big, big project that we can no longer do because it involves audience volunteers and headsets and all this stuff. But further I investigated spatial sound and three-dimensional sound, the more kind of fascinating that became. Really briefly, the idea of spatial sound, which would be pretty familiar, I think to everyone who sort of knows the encounter, it's the same idea. It's the idea that there's a sound sphere around you and that you can locate sound anywhere on that sphere. So whereas you were used to sort of stereo sound, just hearing something in our left or right ear with spatial sound, you begin to get a sense of height as well as distance and proximity above, below, near, and far. And what's amazing about beginning to craft stuff with spatial sound is, again, there's a reference to space and you're beginning to think dynamically in terms of the sound of space and how you can create a story that moves through different spaces and that those spaces have a sense of physical presence through what you hear and that you're considering sort of, again, this sort of dynamic journey through those different, through the sounds of those physical spaces, as well as the other kind of dynamics that you can layer in through, again, our broader theatrical understanding and knowledge. So how do you so, which would be soundtrack as well as voicings, the sound of the environment itself. So all of this kind of stuff, when I sat down to work on more audio pieces throughout the pandemic and sprinklers, there's a piece that I wrote a short story that we then animated text to and then created a kind of spatial soundscape to accompany the story called The Garden, which I think is, which is now, which is still up, oh, there it is, on BBC Taster. And then we've been working for the last eight months or so on a piece that we'll be releasing shortly, all being well, which is kind of an immersive audio play where basically you as the listener take on the perspective of different characters and you start to hear the world of the story, as they, of the same story as it's experienced by different characters. And so we're including those characters own sort of internal thoughts and reactions to what's happening to them. And that's a piece called Pengea and we are hoping to have it done very soon. And with all of this kind of stuff, just to kind of wrap up what was really, what's been sort of fundamental and as the thing that I keep coming back to is this notion of space and dynamics and using essentially our theatrical understanding of how you created dynamic experience for an audience in space. And then transposing that into either virtual space and virtual reality or the, or this audio space and 360 degree, the sound of space and audio. And I think that's, I'm already over my time. That's me, I really look forward to talking more, chatting more and the conversation. Thank you. And with that, I mean, that is a really, that's exactly kind of where I'm going to trust further in terms of the conception and understanding of space, especially from when we were thinking about it in terms of embodiment versus disembodied space. So I'll come back to that. But Amitish, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Jaehan. Ben, that was fascinating to listen. You have already visited your site to take a look at your work in a more deeper, more meaningful way. But I really wish that one day you can bring your work to India and we can also experience it live here. Before I begin, I just want to express my solidarity with everyone in Delhi who's going through the pandemic and through this immense tragedy that's unfolding around us. The city is grieving, the city is in mourning and the city is extremely angry. And I was really into minds whether to, if I could make it for this talk, if I should, there are constantly messages coming on my phone and I don't know what message brings what news. But at the same time, I think this is the kind of environment that also bleeds into my work. And it's also important to think about how this affects the way I work and what is the immediate future of the kind of work that we're developing here. So I'm here. I just collected my thoughts and might not be as focused as I usually am. So please bear with me. Like Ben's work, my work also has personal triggers. So I tend to work conceptually and poetically. I have no regard for disciplinary boundaries or borders or disciplinary integrity. I have from the very, from very early on in my career, have moved very freely between theater performance, poetry, writing, technology, and visual art and photography and back. And so it's a sort of a blend of work that I end up creating. I'm also interested in my work in investigating non-theatrical subjects. For example, in 2015, I created an entire festival of sleeping in which I invited audiences to come and immerse themselves in different sleeping conditions and in different relationships of sleep with other bodies and with our environment in public ways as well as in private ways. There was another work that I created which was about mourning and this was in collaboration with a professional mourner from South India trying to investigate the deeper, unsayable knowledge that we find in traditions of mourning and grieving and what they can mean to us today in our modern world, where I think we've forgotten to mourn. When I work with technology, I work with it in terms of its political force. I mean, technology can be extremely fascinating and also can help us create a spectacle but for me, what's important is to sort of uncover the layers behind the screen and behind the materiality of these devices and to see what are the different kinds of inter-relational experiences these technologies are sort of unleashing for us, they're proposing to us. So when I work with technology and performance, I sort of work with it in a more conceptual way. And one of the things that I often ask, one question that I often ask of my work is that, should it be done? Do I really need to do this and why? And that question keeps nagging me. It's hanging like a knife all the time and I've abandoned many projects midway because they just didn't seem urgent enough. I also work with narrative in a non-linear way. So when I write or when I work with a dramaturg, I'm not so much interested in building a plot and a story and what happens next, but I'm quite inspired by the way epics are written. And so the event is already there right at the beginning of the work. Everybody knows it. Now the purpose of the work is to actually look at the event, revisit it again and again and again, and to keep hearing about it, to keep participating in it in different ways so that the layers in that event begin to unfold, unpack in front of us. So when I work with original writing, when I do it myself or when my writer does it for me, we kind of write in a circular way to keep coming back to the one single event. And so it kind of produces a very interesting kind. So for me, the idea is that when I invite audiences to watch and experience my work, it's not so much about, it's not so much a time-based work so that you go from 0.1 to 0.2, then you kind of get the, these are kind of immersive works that I think about which you can enter and exit as you will. And you're invited to stay for as long as you like. So there was a work that I made which was a 48 hour immersion in which we had taken over an entire building and it was sort of based on Bertolt Brecht's epic play called The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagany. And so we created the entire city of Mahagany inside this three-story building and there was a choreography of different kinds of performances taking place. And the building also had its own economics, it had its own currency and audiences had to buy and also trade and also, and so there were these different kinds of transactional relationships that were set up inside. And this went on to 48 hours and everybody was invited to also sleep or leave and come back in a few hours. The specific work that I want to talk about in a little more detail is a work that I made last year which was entirely online. And this started right after we went into lockdown in March 2020. And soon after the lockdown, we started to see many, many authoritarian governments in South and Southeast Asia taking advantage of the pandemic and rounding up artists and activists who produced work that demonstrates dissent. And so in India and elsewhere, in China and elsewhere, we, I kept reading about a lot of poets, artists and activists who were being incarcerated. And one of my friend's parents was also amongst these names in India. And I started to sort of work on the idea of losing somebody and this idea of the virus, the biological virus and this other kind of virus that is part of South Asian politics now. For me, went hand in hand and so I started to think of a virtual world that was much like our city, that was much like Delhi, but only that there were some rules that were not there. For example, gravity was not there. And so I started to sort of work with coders and programmers in this coding language called B5 which is a generative coding language. So what happens is that here coders write the code but what that code does is that it kind of loads on everybody's browser and generates a world according to certain rules. And this world could be different, slightly different on one screen and another and another. But these rules kind of guide this world. So I started to write these rules down and I was, and I like writing rules for a world. It's a mode of engagement for me because once you have rules, you know how to break them, you know what lies beyond. And also there are these sort of some relationships between audiences and performers that get, that the parameters of it get set. So I started to create rules and then the coders would translate these rules into code and then the code would generate this virtual world. This virtual world was about 200 rooms and houses that were flying around in a storm. I had went and photographed how the center of Delhi looks when it is the most polluted. There is a light amber kind of haze that pollutes the entire environment. So I photographed that and I came back and that exact haze is then sort of reproduced in this virtual world so that when you enter this virtual world, there are these sort of rooms that are sort of whirling around you and there are the lamp posts and automobiles and cycles and benches and everything that you see in the city around, it's just up in the air, it's going around and each one of these objects is interactive. So you click on one, you click on one room and you enter and you meet a character and then that's how the piece progresses. All performers are live, you go from one room to another room, all these performers are live and they're talking about somebody, they're talking about one person. You know at the start, there's one, a poet in this world has gone missing and everybody you meet has had some kind of a relationship with the poet. You meet poets very close, people who are very close to him, you meet his neighbors, you meet other people who've heard about him, who've been inspired by him and you slowly begin to understand that not everybody can be trusted in this world. There are some characters who seem to be speaking the truth but they really aren't. There are others who can be believed and there are yet others who are very clearly spreading rumors. And so I'm inspired by Italo Galvino's imagination of cities and for me in the city is being in a, how the kind of experience you get when you're in a foreign city and you're walking through an unfamiliar street and you want to hear whispers from the apartments and windows of the houses that you're walking by just to get a feel of what are people talking about here and that is something that I wanted to recreate in this virtual world. So you enter, you listen to these people and every few minutes you get the option to exit the room as well. If you click on the button, you exit the room. If you want to stay, you don't click and then you keep listening to these performances. Every few minutes, an option comes on your screen about what you would like to hear next and then these sort of titles of scenes and the audience is invited to vote just like the votes that we see on Instagram or Facebook or they're these instant polls that are running. And when the audience votes, they get a minute, the scene or the title that gets the most votes probably will be played by the performer. So the performer knows they also get instant poll results and they know what has been voted for and there are rules amongst performers as well that there are times that they will choose to play what the audience voted for and then there are times that they will not, they will reject the poll and go on to play another scene. Other rooms have films and also Sonic Art and you kind of go in and out of these rooms. It's a 90 minute long show and right at the end you kind of come out. One other thing that we needed to do and I'm going to wind up now in a minute, one other thing that I needed to do while rehearsing and building this piece was not only to think about how to adapt theatrical exercises, you know, ways in which we perform in physical spaces to online spaces and a lot of performers because you were in lockdown they were performing from their homes and there was a lot of effort that went into finding nooks and crannies in the house that can be dramatic that has a sense of mystery and can also be turned upside down. For example, there was a scene in which a performer does this entire scene hidden inside one shelf of his cupboard and so in the beginning, you don't get to see what this is but as sort of the scene moves forward, the poetics of the homes that we live in came into play in this kind of online theater but I also needed to create an entire backstage mechanism so I worked with the coders and I created a backstage dashboard, you know, just like the kind of controls we have in physical theater where there are wings and green rooms and sort of these kind of control mechanisms between light sound and performers. So there was a dashboard in which I could see how many of the actors were streaming and were live, how many people were watching them in their separate rooms. There was a start show and an end show button and the code that was running was lying as well so we could track bugs and the immediate things that the code was doing in the performance and then there was a chat button which was a broadcast button between us and the audiences and the audiences could ask us questions and we could broadcast messages to them. So I'll wind up here and maybe open this up to a conversation. I know Jehan has a few questions. I have a couple of questions that I noted down for Ben as well and everyone else as well. Thank you. Thank you Amitish. I have to say that I'm really glad you showed up today. I know what you're going through in terms of, I mean, we're doing it in Bombay as well. And we did have a chat in the pre-conversation about whether we actually wanted to do this or just postpone, but we just decided we will take it literally one breath at a time is exactly what we've been doing here. Thank you so much for being here and doing this with us Amitish. Really appreciate it. I'm going to thread backwards, I'm audible, right? Yes. Yes, okay. I'm going to thread backwards because I'm going to thread all the way back from the idea of needing to make an intervention or should I even make this piece? And why should I even do it? And what is urgent for me? And then thread backwards to the fact that Amitish, you're not making theater, just the theater, you're making it even to be non-theatrical and you use this term, which excites me also, which is the idea of social practice, your work as social practice. And then thread back again, keep going back further than thinking about like when, then when you craft a piece of work as a theater maker but for these non-theater spaces. And I'm speaking from a theater maker's point of view but I hear in everything that you and Ben have talked about, everything that I think about when I'm putting together a play or creating a piece of work, even, you know, devising a piece of work with a group of actors for an audience. But I can see all those sensibilities at play. So I'm just trying to thread back through that and understand sort of how does this go from instinct to actual craft, because if we thread back further that we talked about audience interaction and the fact that in your work, there is a relationship between audience and performer, audience and piece. And then there's a relationship between, between in terms of how we manipulate the space, a space for the performer. And all the way to the beginning because this is the point where I feel like everyone stops before they even take a step in this direction, which is they say, it's not embodied, it's not live. I can't breathe and feel the person in the room with me. But over here and over the past set of conversations, I think when we even talk about holding space, under your speeches, for example, is holding space, but it's holding space in a virtual place, but it's still giving us a real experience. The digital course that we just did feels extremely intangible because I don't know what my 28 students went through because every time I close my laptop, I'm back here in this room. But yet something has happened, but yet something has not. And so I just, I'm gonna leave it there and ask you guys to sort of, maybe you guys can now thread forward and maybe five minutes with Ben and five minutes in imitation and we'll just literally open it up to the room because I really do think there are some interesting comments that are starting to emerge over there. So threading forward back again through the conversation, but now how do we take that from instinct to craft and do we even take this step? And what happens to that thing that we left behind? Did we leave something behind? Question mark, question mark, question mark. So I guess I can jump in quickly. So I had the real good fortune, Jehan to work with you and Ira last summer to kind of put together this short course on transference and transposition for DSM and I think one of the questions that we asked ourselves the outset was essentially, what are we doing when we make theater? And what is, and what do we mean when something is theatrical? And we sort of tried to deconstruct that and we sort of split it and we ended up calling it a superpower because it is a superpower to get a group of people together and work for a period of time in order to put something on stage for an audience and hold them in that moment is an incredible feat. And we actually split it into two different parts into essentially a process, an understanding of that there's a process that comes with making theater and then there's a kind of, and some kind of a moment, a distinct moment in time of performance and then sort of to start to deconstruct those a little bit into what is it that goes into that moment of being on stage and then asking essentially what, of all of those different elements that exist in that moment of being on stage, which are the ones that are fundamental? Which are the ones that you're like, I cannot negotiate on that. And from there, you can then begin to move forwards and sort of thread forwards from which are the ones that, so okay, I want to retain this from my practice and then how can I take those threads, take those threads forwards into other mediums and into other and into other spaces. So I think that's sort of a chemo and I think from me and I sort of spoke about this last year and it sort of threaded through the little talk that I gave, it had to do with space. It absolutely had to do with a sense of space and retaining a sense of working in space, whether that was physical space or sort of immersive digital space, but that space as a partner for me was, if I had that, I sort of knew where I was. And then I could then sort of try and upskill and sort of learn all of these new bits of technology and software and all the stuff that you needed to do in order to manage that, but that intuitive knowledge of I'm crafting something for a sense of space was kind of got me through it. The other thing that I was interested in from what you just mentioned, Jehan, was the sense of lightness. It's funny, we use this word capture with this technology, motion capture and sound capture, audio capture, but we were doing some recording the other week with this sound engineer Heinrich and one of the things that we've learned, so we use binaural microphones, so which capture space. And one of the things that's really amazing is that usually when you're trying to do video and this kind of stuff is do you wanna get rid of sound? You wanna try and have a clean sound, but when you're working with these tools, there's something really fantastic about capturing the moment and the sound of that moment. And there's an immediacy to that and a presence to that that then translates into the work, I think, so that when you're doing this recording and a plane goes overhead, usually that's a killer, but you're like, no, actually it's amazing because you listen to this. And at that moment in time when we were doing that line, that plane flew overhead or there's another recording where we have a fly buzzing, you know, a car goes past, you know that that is a discreet, unique moment in time and that you are taking that moment that you have caught in all of its kind of fullness and then transport and then sort of turning that into the work that the audience is then receiving. So it's not necessarily live, but I do think it retains a sense of its presence and its immediacy. I think, I was gonna talk about iteration as well, but I think I'm gonna say that. So yeah, that's some threading forward thoughts. Anateesh. Yeah, one example I give when I teach students about liveness is that, think of a cricket stadium since cricket is the core of all sports in South Asia. Think of a cricket stadium, think about, imagine that you're sitting inside in the topmost row. Will it be possible for you to follow the game? The ball is this small, right? And what you see in the post technological era is that even when you are sitting live in a stadium watching a game live, you often turn to the massive screen that is installed in the stadium to actually really follow the game. And so you follow the screen plays slow motions, it plays zoom ins. We have the third empire, which is again a technological intervention into physical live sport. And so even a game like cricket, which is live and is being played physically needs, it's a post technological game now in the sense that in the way in which, it is experienced, watched, played and results are declared. It's also sort of this idea of liveness also affects the way we watch things on screen. For example, you would respond differently to watching a cricket match on the screen if you knew it was live or not, right? And so nobody can deny the fact that you will have goosebumps in a tight game even if you're watching it on your screen if you knew that this was live. So liveness is just not, liveness is an ontological category. It is a category that it is enough to know something is live and the other conditions of physical proximity, et cetera, need not be fulfilled. And, you know, I mean, Philip Oslender and several others have actually spoken about how our experience of liveness has changed from one decade to another and from one century to another. One of the things that I find fascinating about amphitheaters is that they are very, very fascinating about amphitheaters and something that we also saw in Occupy Wall Street movement a few years ago was the idea of the human microphone that the liveness of a speech was not just a relationship between the speaker and the listeners but it was actually a relationship in which the speaker would speak and then sections of the audience would actually transfer the speech from front to the back and that everybody was actually participating in speech making as this was happening. And that's another kind of liveness where, you know, I mean, there is a physical proximity but there is no one nodal center of liveness and that it's a liveness that actually takes place in waves across different sections of people. So I would look at, I would sort of open up the idea of liveness across physical and digital boundaries and try and invoke different kinds of settings in which this can take place. I also, yeah, sorry. Sorry, finish your thought and then we'll take it to something else. I would also say that I think that most technological theater has made it more difficult for physical theater to take place, not just the fact that there are new rules in place for physical theater, but also, if intervention, interaction, participation is not possible in physical performances, then why am I witnessing it in the same physical space? It's something that I would ask myself that physical and live performances for me in the post-technological era are necessarily interactional, they are interactive. They are, you know, that the mechanisms and the tools and the parameters and the ways in which performance unfolds in the physical space needs to have some kind of unpredictability to it. And I think that is something that liveness for me has become more dangerous in a sense. It's more radical, not just of the effect that it has on my skin, but also of the unpredictable nature that's inherent to the life. I have a really interesting question, Amy, your belief in theater as social practice. Angir, sorry, yes. So, because we're talking about, Amy talks about spaces of resistance here. And Amy, why don't you take it and actually ask your question? But Amitish, I also wanted to maybe ask you what your thoughts are in terms of the urgency of why you're making particular pieces of work right now. You talked about Delhi being very angry right now and what does the virtual space offer us in terms of these spaces of resistance that Amy speaks about? Amy, why don't you elaborate further or? I think that's a really wonderful way of making it concrete, Jehan. But I couldn't hear Amy. Oh, sorry. So, Jehan was making concrete what my reflection and question to you both had been in the chat, which is, you mentioned this sort of secondary plague of demagogy and it seems so obvious that there's this focus on bringing live bodies together. That seems to be crucial to these kind of demagogic leaders. I mean, Trump had flouted all the dangers to bring people together for games and for rallies and it just seems that they seem to understand that if people are brought together in real space, bodies are brought together. They have, there's a kind of concrete political power to that. And so I think, Jehan, you're bringing it to a very good point, which is, you talk about this anger and the reaction in Delhi right now and just wondering how the virtual might become a both. And I'm just sort of still struggling with the way in which it seems such a fragile alternative to the concrete power of real bodies in real space. I mean, the demagogues seem to really understand that. And so I'm just curious about your thoughts, both of your thoughts about this. If I can jump in here. Amy, that's an excellent, excellent question. I think this is a question that I'm going to go back with after this interaction because this is right after my heart. There is a traditional modern power of gatherings. One of my favorite authors, Alan Reed, has a lovely, has a quote-worthy sentence in his book on theater, where he says that theater might be the last human gathering left. And one also knows that how the theatricality of a gathering can be whipped up to produce the kind of demagoguery in authoritarian powers that we see today. In my experience, the physical and the digital amplify each other so that physical gatherings in India, for example, have become larger and larger and larger precisely because of the digital mobilization that is compelling people, driving people to gather physically at these rallies. And there is a significant effort to mobilize people through digital means, which then we see the results of in physical spaces. And the opposite, I think, and the traffic sort of flows backwards as well, where there is a physical gathering or a physical event, which actually has much bigger ramifications in the digital sphere. One of the popular means that are going around in India right now is that imagine if this pandemic had come in the pre-Internet era to India. We would not have had a fraction of the truths, the facts, the real news floating around and being consumed by people today had we been living in a state-sanctioned period of media and without the internet. Now, South Asia has a very different relationship with digitality, which is that our digital spaces are freer spaces right now. The physical spaces. For example, if I do theater in Delhi, I need to take permissions and licenses from three different authorities to be able to stage my play. In the digital world, I don't need any one permission. And this is how we're seeing social media erupting in South Asia, where social media is a space where people are able to express far more freely than they are able to express within the confines of their families, friends, and also institutions. And this is what I say a lot when I lecture here in India is that our relationship with digitality is a political one. It's not just a social one. And we have to understand what this new freedom and also chaos that it unleashes means for us in our cultures. And I think if we can understand this, our artistic practice here can take a different turn so that resistance can be produced both in digital ways and in physical ways. And I'll just end with one example, which is that one of the projects that I've been doing for the last two years is a billboard art project. So I've taken over and occupied a public billboard in the middle of Delhi, which is just about a kilometer away from the parliament. And I've been writing text for it for the last two years, produced about 150 pieces of text that I've gone up every day. It faces the parliament, so it's for the parliament and also for people who pass by. But what has happened is that the poetic nudges that drive my text have actually encouraged a freer debate on online platforms. Because as people pass by, they take photographs, they upload those photographs onto social media, and then there are these threads of conversations of hundreds of people who are talking to each other around what that text means and to our current scenario. So that the physical billboard kind of flows into the digital circulation. And then from there, I also try to follow the different conversations that are going around it. And then that affects the way I write my next text. So let's think of it as land and ocean, we kind of flow in and out between physical and digital. Sorry, I keep having this internet issue. Mark Phoenix, I saw a note from you, and I just wondered if you could step in and elaborate on that. And also, I believe you wanted to know about the backstage dashboard. But the other question first, Mark. So which are the things that I've been chatting about? What are you? I thought it was really interesting. You were trying to say the rooms for rumour lies and truths were surrounded by fake news. Yeah, I like this idea. It's almost like rewriting whatever Joseph Campbell sort of archetypes of who should be in a room. And it feels it's really nice, the room among the liar, the truth teller or something. And I think it's just interesting in our current state with a Q and on and science denial lists. So we've got problems over here with people walking out on the streets, increasing the virus because they want to be together. They want to make a complaint. They think they're rebels. And then we see in Delhi what the result is if we carry on doing that sort of behaviour. So it feels like it's a very current idea to be playing with, which I was inspired by there. Yeah, and then you mentioned this backstage dashboard. I want one to go about making or finding something like this, because I've been trying to work with improvisation, bringing it into reality and people using, as you describe, people being in their own cupboards, with the heads inside washing machines, sitting on the toilet. I've had some great sort of student plays with what they do with their camera. But in terms of producing something for an audience, I'd love to be able to have some sort of backstage communication tool that works a lot better than that I'm finding with OBS and things at the moment. So I don't know whether. Yeah, just so regarding the dashboard, we actually I am going to release the skeletal part of the code for the open source community at large. So we put in a lot of how we built this virtual reality space was that we actually sort of built the skeletal code and then adorned it with sort of ways and colours and shapes and forms that can be taken away entirely and be put back and assembled back in a very different way for a different idea. So in July is when our IP of the code will get lifted from our sponsors and we should be able to release the skeletal code for the open source. And so that will have the dashboard as well. Mark and I'll maybe I can take down an email later and send you the link when it gets released. Coming back to the first observation of Luma's it's been a favourite subject of mine because also because we went from a partly ironclad socialist state into a chaotic neoliberal capitalist state. And so what so the purpose of rumor changed overnight. In the ironclad socialist state, the purpose of rumor was to actually let people know the truth because the state would be a propaganda machine. And so it was only through rumors that you actually got to know how indeed that war was fought or how indeed that policy was passed in the parliament, etc., etc. In the neoliberal capitalist world, rumor has been weaponised to create panic in the stock market, to create panic amongst communities and to actually demolish truth with a capital T. And so as an artist, I've been trying to work with rumor as material and to see if it is possible to actually sort of unpack these different layers and levels of what rumor means and how rumor gets performed in the politics of rumor itself. Could there be a rumor university where one could actually admit oneself for a moment and learn about rumors? After all, what is acting if not performing a rumor? So these are current sort of sessions of mine which might become more. But thank you for pointing that out. Thank you. I have, Nitika, you've had your hand up in the participants' hand up section for a while. Nikita. Yes, thank you so much, Rehan. Yes. Firstly, I mean, I've been Amitabh's student and I've also vehemently followed his work over the past seven years, I think. And I know him as an artist and as a teacher and I just feel like within under his futures because we've also discussed, especially in season one, the pedagogy of teaching. I would love if he could also, hi, Amitabh, by the way, thanks, lovely, lovely talk. And I love the rumor of university, sorry, the university of rumors. I would like it if Amitabh could also expand upon how his process as an artist also sort of affects or guides his pedagogy while he's teaching students, especially because I know that recently NSD also did all the diploma shows online. And how does that teaching translate? I mean, I can see it in his work, the ideology that he holds, it's very visible. But how do you transcend that while teaching someone who's just beginning to create work? I, so we have about five minutes. And actually I would love this question for both Amitabh and Ben. Because they haven't been teaching theater as far as I know. They've been teaching theater for all of these reasons. So it's a great closing question. So, Amitabh, and then Ben. Ben, would you like to go first? Oh, sure. Ben, could you unmute yourself? No mute, Ben. Yeah, I just had, I just had the question spinning in both ears with a slight delay. So I'm just wondering if you could, if you could re-articulate it. I asked if, Jehan, if you'd like to do this, you can do this too. Sure, just, you know, your work as artists has taken you, you've had this whole experience and this whole new understanding of and how it's informed your work as artists. But when you go back into the classroom and you're teaching students now in a space where they have to work, not just as theater makers for physical embodied space, but actually for all of these new possibilities, how is that shifting your teaching or what is, I don't think, what's being foregrounded in your teaching now, I think is what I would ask. Yeah, I mean, so for me, I think, one of the, this is what I was gonna speak about earlier, it's great, is this idea of iteration, which is something that I picked up from working with technology and with technologists, which is basically the idea of doing something over and over and over again until you get it right. But when applied to, but having come from theater and then sort of working with technology and with technologists, they're understanding that there is a process by which they're trying to get something, they're trying to make something happen. And that, you know, I came from having sort of almost no background in this stuff. So sort of had this mystified idea that people sort of went to computer, do this and the computer did it. Whereas in fact, realizing that that's a whole entire process that people go on that takes stages and that there's some little thing that's not quite right and that's not quite working and that by going into that and fixing that thing, maybe that gets the result that you want. No, not exactly. And so you have to keep going through this sort of this process of iteration and reiteration until you finally try and arrive at the sort of the result that you're looking for. And recognizing that that is very similar to any process, to any process of creation. And so taking that into working with students. There's other aspects as well, I think, that have to do with, for me at least, having slightly more sensorial awareness is the only thing that I could. So again, as I said, I've been working a lot with audio and I've found that I listen much more than I used to. I used to be guided by sight. But I find that my ears are much more open as well these days than they used to be. And this in terms of, because at the moment I'm working in a room with people, which is a fantastic privilege to be able to do. But just sort of, it's, I find myself, yeah, like I said, hearing to what is going, hearing what's going on. I don't almost equal level to seeing what's happening. Yeah, that's quite valuable to listen to, Ben. But the question is quite tough, actually. Nikita, you've seen me struggle in class trying to translate ideas into pedagogy. I do know that it is important for me to to translate questions that I have personally as an artist, but also questions that I see are coming from the students community and to see what their meeting point could be. And if there is a meeting point, then can I translate my concerns into their language or that is it possible for me to observe my process and to distill a few exercises that I found useful while creating my work. And, you know, invite students, offer it to the students and to say, why don't you make, you know, in Ben's words, why don't you make an iteration of it and see if this is helpful. I actually, I mean, the other question is also very valuable for me because what we create in the pedagogical space with students is also personally extremely inspiring for me as an artist to then feed off when I make my work. So there is a sort of a back and forth, you know, between these two spaces where I'm constantly translating what I've learned in the field into exercises and experiences and articulate them for the students and also to then see the experimental ideas and practices that we are evolving with the students and to see if they hold in the professional independent space outside and so it's difficult for me to mark very clear boundaries or where this happens. Just want to also sort of, you know, acknowledge the two other questions or observations that have come in the chat box. Mongeani, I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing the name correctly. And Ongwenya, I completely agree with your observations and completely in sync. I think we do need a new vocabulary because we're going through extremely disruptive times and also the idea that we need to think about lightness and meaning making, not in polarities of embodiment and disembodiment, but a third way. And a third way is a good place to wrap this up. It is on the dot. I think even three minutes early, so I'm a bit proud of myself. I want to formally just say to Amitish, Ben, thank you so much for making the time and doing this for all of us. You guys can always pick up the recordings for the whole talk in case you want to go over anything. Again, on our website, Drama School Mumbai, there's a page called Unrehearsed Futures. Every single talk that's going up in season one and season two are recorded and just stored there as a living and growing body of knowledge. Please, Amitish Ben, come back to Future Talks because you'll get to hear Mongeani, Amy, all pure, amazing people. It's been mind-blowing and a really, a spot of mental refreshment and rejuvenation that is much needed in these times. The room is open. The recording can finish now, so thank you.