 that we've been having ever since the beginning of the pandemic every Thursday. It started off with drama school trying to figure out what are we gonna do? How are we going to respond to this time? How are we going digital? Should we, all of that existential stuff happen? Practical conversations happen. And after which, can we just, if you're not speaking, if we can ask you to mute please? Thanks. Yeah. After which, we got to a place where we actually, Amy took over the conversations and basically, talked about our responsiveness in this moment. And then later on, Wenya and Amgeni joined. And by this point, we realized in general that we were talking about a world that is perpetually in a state of disruption, an ongoing disruptive state. And how do we respond to it? What do we do as theater makers, as theater teachers? What does theater do? So the scope and the territory that the conversations covered got wider and wider. And when Wenya and Amgeni and Amy and I got together to do season two, we really thought about some of the themes that came out of season one. And the key ones came out, which was a planetarity because we're all of one planet. This was especially inspired by a talk with Felipe Cervera from the first season. I think it was a second or third talk we did. And all these talks are available on our website, Drama School Mumbai under the section Conversations. And then plurality, as you see, you're witnessing it and there was a call for it as opposed to globalization, which was more sort of homogenizing. Plurality seemed to be a conversation around us being able to live with difference, live with change, live with in a state of mutual tolerance. Not even tolerance. Tolerance means I have to put up with you. Pluralism is beyond that. And possibility, which is of course why I'm here and I'm truly here because of the possibility. And I got mistaken for a bit because when I first talked to Ellen or thought of Ellen and Jay had coming in, I thought about the fact that they at the city company, they've been doing work with the Suzuki company from Togo and with viewpoints training and then they had this whole merge. They have both a history of cross-cultural practice and I was on that whole intercultural jag to sort of figure out, well, where does plurality lie? Where does universality lie? How do we work with the differences and how do we work with the similarities or how do we reach across the differences to find the universal truths? So that was really my initial impulse to reach out to Jay and Ellen who Falbani will put their profiles in. I mean, their profiles are illustrious to say the least, but really what they do speak of is a great breath of knowledge and experience of which is what we're tapping into today. And we're really happy to have both of you here. So thank you for being here. But Ellen said something because we've always had these lovely exchanges on email and she basically said, it is clear to us as theater makers that theater has a great repository of tools with which to keep the world healthy. And I just loved it. And I just thought, well, that is actually what we're trying to figure out. And one of the ongoing conversations that we're having is now how do we take this time and this pandemic moment to realize what else theater can be for society? How can we contribute to the good, to the building, to the making, to the creating, to leaving things better than we found it as theater makers, as pedagogues, as all of whom are gathered here. And so I really thought that's where we should start this conversation. So I will leave it with Ellen and then Jay Ed to maybe spend five or 10 minutes each, maybe 10 minutes each as opening statements. I'll leave it to you how you guys want to run it. But a little bit of introduction, but really moving fluidly into thoughts so we can actually start the conversation. And the other thing that whilst they're doing that or even before that, one of the things we're asking all of you in the ongoing conversations is, I have a question that maybe you can respond to in the chat window is a simple question. What of your practice or what of your intention going forward is changing because of what you have been picking up during these conversations? It would be really nice to know or hear from you if any of this huge discursive dialogue that we're having here is actually somewhere affecting and creating some kind of change in practice. That would be an interesting first step. So let that happen, but here we are. Ellen, Jay Ed, welcome. Thank you so much. And it's truly a great pleasure and honor to meet you, feel you, reach out and be together this morning for us here in New York. I'm zooming in from upstate New York. I left our apartment in Manhattan about a year and a half ago. I still go back down, but in the course of this time, the city company, we let our studio go in the city. We began to shed all of the trappings that come with being a theater company for 30 years. We began to give things away from our storage to people who might be able to use furniture and goods from that, from 30 years of a repertoire stored away, not doing us any good. And it was a great time of mourning when that happened. I am very lucky, Jay Ed and I have a place out of the city about three hours north. And this is a great privilege. I recognize that and all of the parts of my world that have allowed me to have this place. We refurbished this old dilapidated barn and this became for me where I met the world. It was the last thing I thought years ago when we started to fix this place up that this is where I would meet as many people from around the world as anywhere. I also am on the staff for about, oh God, 20 years now. I've been on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Drama in New York. So I also go back down. I was one of two faculty members at Juilliard that agreed to go back into Lincoln Center, which looked a little bit like a spaceship. It was completely covered in plastic and roped off. I'm sure you'll recognize the environment. What that was one of high energy and certainly stress from the students, but always a place of great joy. It had turned into a very strange sci-fi setting. But I went back in for a variety of reasons for the nature of what I do. And I was allowed full run of the theaters to distance. And I began the work, but the bulk of also what I did with the city company was online. I've had a world where I live in the horizontal and I live in the vertical. And for the duration of my life as a transmitter, this is what I've tried to communicate to a young artist for making purposes, which is to recognize things for what they are in the horizontal and see it as potential and material with which to make one's work. And I also have spent over 40 years working with Suzuki Tadashi, the artistic director and founder of the Suzuki Company of Toga, which is located in the wild mountains, the southern, essentially the southern Alps on the western coast of Japan up in a small village in the Toyama Prefecture where they have lived and worked. You perhaps might know a little history about the Scott Company, but that's a very curious vertical world for a Western middle class woman to have landed in. And I have toured with them. I'm about to head into another tour coming in November. We are touring Indonesia. I am the only Western actor in their company. And it's very strange. People always think I'm the tour guide when we land at the airport. So that's a very, very vertical world. If you know anything about the Suzuki training in terms of setting the body, the spirit, the mind against a set of criteria and recognizing then where one falls within that criteria. It's not to make anyone look the same as the other as in Corde Ballet. It's more to recognize the individuality in each person as they face the criteria and bring forward what's already there within the young artist, within the old artist and bring it out into for expressive purpose. It often is maligned and misunderstood. And I think that's why Mr. Suzuki has asked me to be an ambassador for that work around the world for so many years because people are so disappointed when I get off the airplane because they're expecting up some kind of monk or some kind of priestess, I think. And it's just, again, just a white American middle-class woman, essentially. And the work speaks for itself. What I have found during this period, I think I'm perhaps like you and I won't speak for my partner in crime here, J.Ed. And we have worked together in the city company for about 30 years is, and I didn't know it early on, how could we know it, that the work I'm able to communicate and I'm in the middle of a month-long intensive that's usually on the campus of a small upstate New York college here for, again, 30 years. We've brought 60 people, 60 artists of all disciplines together for one month, trained and made original material in the afternoon, attended symposiums, conversations, and lived together. That was all stripped away. We're online and it's a little bit like, I haven't been this happy in a year and a half. I, the first, I couldn't believe how the knots in this rope of my life were able to be handed through the screen, handed through the generosity of the artists gathered from all over the world, and they were able to grab these knots and I didn't pull them. They are pulling themselves along and the knots are the metrics, the knots are the point of view, the knots are the entry point into a way of thinking, into a way of receiving perception and appropriate response to the world, the horizontal and then the metrics of that vertical, measuring the self against these really hard criteria where I can't make an adjustment on them. I'm not in the room with them in terms of three-dimensionality of their world, but what they're doing to come forward, their embodiment of the ideas in their bedrooms, in their kitchens, in their basements is so moving to me and I think there's something transpiring that is very reaffirming for me. I'm not suggesting that anything I'm doing other than transmitting and being witness and perhaps that's what we're able to provide right now. It is, as we've all learned, a place of great access. We can do better, we can just do better. Zoom is challenging for the non-hearing community. There is close captioning now, learning to work better this way and creating as we have continued to create as a place of great coming together but also allowing these affinity groups of people who self-identify and need to connect with one another so that they can come together in the studio and be together with their own altogether alone, which is a critical practice in the world right now. We are living here in the US in a continued roiling time of racial reckoning with our past and a complete political upheaval. That is the part of this equation. I don't know how to respond to yet both as an artist and as someone who walks into a room with people from all over the world, young and older and I'm being quite frank with you. I know I have a body. I know I have a voice and I know how to breathe to get the voice out into the world like a seventh limb. You know, we work a lot. The idea of head, tail, arm, arm, leg, leg and generating all that movement from the center of gravity and the voice being that seventh limb. And that's what I'm working on right now in the studio with the artists that are gathered which is still about 60 artists. So it's just the administrating of it and making sure everyone gets in the right studio has been not something I've solved. I have far smarter people around me helping get all the color coding and you click it and you're in the right studio. But this idea of the necessity of the body and the whole body of getting people up into their spaces and creating a theater, creating a disciplined, focused, energized space around them allowing them a transformative experience which is the point of any artistic preparation and taking them through that has been, I've been astonished by the ability for the artists to come and meet. Maybe even more than halfway. I was thinking the other day, teaching through this medium has been, for me, so revelatory in terms of, and I'm sure you're finding it too, you have to be, you really have to boil things down to what it is you think, to what it is you feel, to what it is you know, be it right or wrong, you have to speak so clearly and boil off all of that. And boil off all of the anecdotal things. And the silence on the other side is palpable until you learn to press against it and welcome it because you can feel the thinking, you can feel the breathing and carry on. And we're now into the phase where we're making a great deal of work. And the tools are all there. The frame is another piece of material. The frame is another way of seeing and exploding the way we can work together and experiment, a time of great experimentation. So I can speak specifically about these two trainings that I teach, but overall, I do wanna speak from a place of positivity and goodness and that's coming from the people that I'm meeting and I'm so deeply grateful to them and this chance to tell you that message. I hope, I really hope with all my heart you're experiencing the same and I'm anxious to hear from you as well. I think that's a great start. Jayed, thank you, Ellen. Good morning, everyone. Afternoon or evening, where you might be. As always, it's difficult to follow my articulate and talented partner. Ellen talks about how people are sometimes surprised when she gets off a plane and she's a white middle-class woman and then they often are surprised that she's followed by a brown male Chicano from South Texas. So I think we make a pretty pluralistic image as we walk off the plane. I'm gonna talk a little bit about myself as a background to get to the topic material, which is quite fascinating and I'm a so articulate about that. I've been very lucky in my life. I never did theater until not even university because I didn't go to university at first. I went to a college. I went to a community college, which if you know anything about the educational system in the U.S., are two years locally-based, low-funded, mostly working class and lower students. I got interested in the theater class by accident and so for me, art and theater are a gateway to education in the world. I would never have gone to university even though I did go to a small university in South Texas where the majority of the students were Latino, Chicano, like myself. But art and theater were my gateway to the university and so it's very interesting that from starting community college, I am now a professor, head of graduate acting and another title I can't yet officially tell you for a couple of weeks, but I am now a professor at one of the leading research universities in the world, coming from a lower working class environment in South Texas where the border is fluid. My family has been in Texas for over six generations but the border didn't really exist for us. Half of my family spends half of the year in Mexico, half in Texas. As migrant seasonal working conditions happen when the economy is good in the U.S., our relatives are welcome, the economy is bad or there is a president elected who has a difference of opinion, immigrants are bad, border is tried to be erected and immigrants are pushed out. So I am bicultural, I am bilingual, I grew up speaking only Spanish until I started school and now I'm again a professor at UCLA. So for me, this is a really great question because this idea of remote access and plurality is fascinating and something I've been dealing with for almost all of us for the last year and a half. I've been teaching here instead of in Los Angeles at UCLA, I've been teaching here in upstate New York since last March, I think it is March 2020, I've been teaching only remotely here and it's been difficult, it's been very difficult for the students, it's also been difficult for the faculty and the staff. It'll probably be more difficult next year because our students are gonna be coming back on campus for the most part if the spirits hold out and they're gonna be hungry and demanding rightfully so, things that were denied them for a year, pardon. And it's gonna be difficult for us to try to make that accessible to them due to the limitations of the economy. And while I hope that soon the pandemic is if not over at least lessened to the point where we can all be in the room together, I think we can all safely say that most likely the economic repercussions are gonna last a lot longer and that's gonna make it very difficult. So we're trying to learn that UCLA as we're learning with the city company, what are their benefits to remote accessible teaching and if so, what might they be? So I've been very lucky since I started my career, I started as a writer and then quickly morphed to a performer because writing is lonely and singular and when you're in the cast of a show that you've written, you have people around you, there's a community, it's a little more exciting. So for, I was primarily a performer, I've primarily spent most of my working life as a member of Ensemble Theatres, spending the beginning part of my career mostly in Chicano Theater, which is a very politically based community based form of theater that began as adjuprop and then morphed into a more polished, multi varied way of looking at the problems of identity and social aspects in the Latino Chicano community. So I've been mostly working as an Ensemble member. 30 years ago I was quite lucky to meet Ellen Lauren and Anne Bogart who was one of the co-artistic founders along with Mr. Suzuki Tadashi of the city company started working with them both in the William Inge play, you can get much more American regional theater than William Inge's picnic, but we started working on that play. I found an accessibility and an interest to the type of work which I've always done, which is bodily based, physically based. And so I've by accident luck fell into working with Ellen and Anne was asked to join the company and I've been working with him for over 30 years. For over 30 years, I've been very interested in the following. One is trying to find a type of theater practice and theater training that is objective as opposed to subjective. I find in the U.S. a great deal of actor training is very subjective. It's what the teacher like. It's what the guru thinks. It's their own particular style. The Suzuki method is extremely, extremely objective. There are certain physical tasks you attend to. This is something that I've borrowed as most of my lines are from Ellen. We don't know a lot about how Greek theater was performed, but we do know that they had the same body that we do. So that is our link in our connection to Greek performers is we have the same body. So there's an objectivity to the Suzuki company training that I found very thrilling. That married with the ensemble collaborative nature of the viewpoints for me became a very holistic way of working. They're very different these trainings, but I think they're symbiotic and they support each other. And what I found immediately and continues to thrill me both as a performer and as an educator, and I never thought I would say that, but yes, I am now an educator. I am now a tenured professor at one of the greatest research universities in the world is that it's very empowering in the U.S., in my opinion. In my opinion, in the U.S., a lot of performance and performers have lost a sense of virtuosity and of training towards virtuosity. There is virtuosity, but for example, most actors in the U.S., not all, but most actors are interested in television and film, even though the training is still somewhat theater-centric. And so most of the virtuosity, in my opinion, in film and television is virtuosity of the camera, virtuosity of the cinematography, virtuosity of the sound designer, virtuosity of the director. And the actor is an interesting package that is made to look even more so. The Suzuki method and the viewpoints give back some of the power to the actor to make stronger artistic statements and choices. And that to me is very thrilling. As a person of color, as a multi-hyphenate actor, I started, as I said, primarily as a writer. I've been mostly a performer for the last 40 years. And in the last 12 years or so, I've become, again, mostly a writer, director, and professor. These tools for me that I offer to our students, and again, I keep mentioning UCLA, and I'll talk a little bit more about the city company, because UCLA is the University of California in the city of Los Angeles. So it is a university in a pluralistic community of California in a hyper pluralistic community of Los Angeles. So for me, these tools are a way of empowering younger artists to tell their own stories. My job is not to tell artists the stories they should tell, but to try to give them the tools to tell their stories. And that is my primary interest nowadays. As a member of the city company, we have found, as Ellen was talking a little bit about how our company is changing, how we've had the leg of our studio, we've found, and it's interesting because I would say maybe this started to happen before the events of the last two years in the US, which has empowered the US to necessarily look with a long overdue, open-eyed gaze at the structure of power and hierarchy, not only in the country, but specifically also in art making and theater and filmmaking practices. Our company was starting to examine that as well, going into the future, knowing that our company might be changing, what do we do with these tools that we believe in? So we started actively, and it was not easy, actively looking at a way to share our vocabulary, to share our training with a larger, pluralistic community. So Ellen and I have been teaching all over the world for the last at least 20 years. Ellen probably longer as a member of the Suzuki company. But for the last 20 years as members of the city company, we've been performing, but even more training and teaching all over the world, mostly at the beginning to a more Eurocentric community. But we've started more outreach to every continent in the world, except yet to the African continent. We've done some work in Asia, mostly in East Asia, a little bit in South Asia. We've worked all over Latin America, but we still do not have access to the African continent yet. Why is that important to me? Because I think these tools are wonderful as a way to empower artists to tell their own stories. It's not to tell people in any continent what stories they should tell, or even how they should tell them, but to give them the tools to re-embrace a sense of virtuosity and to tell their own stories. What have we learned from Zoom? For the last year and a half, I've been forced to teach from Zoom. And like a lot of us, I went kicking and screaming into this little box. It was very difficult. It was also very interesting in my classes at UCLA. You could see immediately a sense of class and of economic position. I would see some classes because it was primarily a movement classes where I would say, let's start examining the space that we're in. How can we break outside the tyranny of this box, of this frame? Turn your camera around. Show us where you're working. And some students would turn the camera around and you'd see a beautiful, huge glass wall with a beautiful, huge manicured lawn and beyond outside. And then there'd be some people in class where once or twice during class, you would see a mother or grandmother walking by literally with a basket of laundry. Or if someone would unmute to speak in class, you would hear children speaking in the background. I have a student who just wrote me a beautifully moving final paper for a viewpoints class that I taught and she was talking about kinesthetic response, responding to an outside influence. She said that very often her kinesthetic work, even though we did not know it, those of us watching her on Zoom, was to the noise of the children that her mother babysits as a living in her small house. So there is this sense in Zoom, which is a kind of a dichotomy of the remote accessibility, making it accessible to people everywhere. There is that potential, and yet there is also the financial drawbacks. Some people are on a computer. Some people are on a small telephone and that makes a difference. So for me, as we continue to go forward, I wanted to see how I can continue and we're trying to do this at UCLA of making equipment available to students that they can use or borrow so that they can have a little more of a, if not equal, a little less unequal level technical ability because then of course we know that we're also limited by the amount of broadband that someone has in their house. So how do we deal with that? But yet, at the same time, it does make it possible for students who are not able to come to the university, whether because of public transportation in their city or they don't have a car, or people who live in the countryside are able to take classes. So those are both the positive aspects as well as some of the difficulties, as well as the nature of how we have to change what we're teaching. I find that myself in Zoom, I teach about two thirds of the material in the amount of time that I have that I would normally would and it takes me twice as much effort, energy and preparation. I find I have to be careful not to get too excited as my partner might text me and speak too quickly. I need to try to calm my chi down and be a little more articulate and yet at the same time, I need to reach through the box to the students and bring them with me. I will say respectfully, not disagreeing even though Ella and I do have great lively conversations. So I'm not disagreeing, I'll say a yes and in terms of- I'm unmuting now, okay. In terms of hearing impaired, we currently have a hearing impaired participant in our summer intensive and one of the interesting things is the closed captioning allows us to make it accessible to her without her or our company having to employ a translator, which is an economic issue. If we had someone who was signing for her or if she had someone, that would be great but that's an economic issue. The closed caption might not be the best option. It might mistranslate some things but it makes economic availability and I think the closed captioning is also good if I am teaching at some place where they speak English but my dialect, the speed of my articulation or my regionalisms as a Texan from the southern part of the US, more accessible. They can look at the transcript afterwards and my attempt to be charming, my euphemisms might be a little less accessible. They can look at that later and have a way of reaffirming what I was hopefully trying to say. Does that make sense ladies and gentlemen? So I think that there are some positives to this including not only with the hearing impaired but also with students who might not understand what I am trying desperately to articulate to them and the ability to share the sense of empowerment. I think for me that's the most important thing. I'll end with this for now. Thank you. I'm gonna say one last thing. I'll say this one last thing. Very often in my classes at UCLA I ask the students, have you, am I the first Chicano or professor of color you've had and this is at the University of California in Los Angeles and it's always striking to me how many people say yes or how few people say Dave had a professor of color or specifically in Los Angeles, a Latino Chicano professor before. So I think even just that, as many educators as we can put in front of them that reflect the reality of the student taking the class, to me that's huge and instrumental. And I also think that remote accessibility is a large part of that. That's all I will say for now. Sorry if I rattled on. Thank you, Ellen, for starting us off so well and thank you everyone for listening. Thank you for both of, thank you for that. I think those are both of you have left us with lots of possible launch points and places to sort of take this conversation. And I don't even know where to begin. There is also some very interesting questions already in the chat window that Ellen has provoked about frames and frame being material, which we'll get to in a second. I'm gonna hold, put a pause on that, but guys, feel free. We're gonna raise hands and go off mic and just turn this into a conversation amongst the whole room. It's think of it not as a panel discussion with two people on stage, but us all sitting around in a circle having a cup of coffee together. But Ellen, I'm just gonna provoke actually both of you because there is this thought that you talked about Chicano theater, how it was politically agit proper and then went on to a more refined sort of search for identity, JN, and how art and theater were your gateway to the beginning of your story to education, et cetera. And Ellen says that I have this voice. I have this body. I have these limbs. I have all of this. But in the middle of this, when we talked about how can theater heal the world, you also said pointedly, Ellen, that we're in a state of political disruption which I don't know what to make of right now. I don't know how to respond to it. And it's almost like, if I'm gonna say, I've walked onto the planet with a first aid kit but I don't know what the injuries are that we're tending to, something like that. So that's one thing. So I'm just gonna put that on the back burner for now because it's more of a kumbaya type of question. But I do, but also building on something that Ngani and we have been talking about is this sense of radical intimacy. And Jayad, you kind of described it towards the end of what your experience of Zoom teaching has been. But Ellen, you so eloquently talked about it in terms of knots as well and how they reach forward to pull the knots. But, and I've been wondering about is that good enough for us to... I think we've had a lot of conversations about whether this digital space is a substitute for the in-presence space, et cetera. So I'm not sure if we should go there. It's not, I agree. I don't think anyone in the Zoom thinks it is. But the accessibility thing, being such a huge thing and this idea of giving people the tools with which to find their own voice, et cetera, is that, if that's the place of healing, then that's where the starting point is where by giving people these creative tools. So that's where I'm thinking and that's my sort of thought on this. But I'm also, I think I'll, let's go to Jayad's question and Ngani's question around the frame. Sorry, not Jayad. Ngani's question about the frame and Ngani's question about the frame. So, Kamili and Ngani, if you, Kamili first, Ngani next, if you can just start off with your notions about the frame and then we can, we can take the conversation from there and then we'll go to Amy's next question. Yes. Oh yeah, I'll just keep it really simple. Yeah, I was curious about when you talked about the frame and, excuse me, when you, is there anything that Zoom can do? I wonder if any of these technologies can do, if anything these artists, us artists, the trainers can do to kind of help Zoom help us. Just curious. Well, you know, the first thing that comes to my mind and is I wish Zoom, whoever Zoom is, would figure out a remote, turn your camera off. This, it sounds pretty simplistic and nice to meet you, Kamili. I went to Temple back when you had to kill what you ate, so I know, Philly. Yeah, I went to Temple as an undergrad too, so. Brother, sister. But, you know, the idea of an entrance, the idea of an exit, which exists in this medium as much as it exists in the studio or on a stage, is corrupted with this idea, you know, you can see a student, they're like trying to get their camera off or in. Right now, we're working on the theme this summer. We usually, sorry, I'll back up a little bit, the city company, when we do our intensives, we throw into the pot the next upcoming production and of all freaking things, we're going to be doing a production of Christmas Carol, so then we boiled that down because that's just so, you know, Eurocentric to the idea of ghost stories. And so they're creating compositional material online for us, they're beginning to show them of telling ghost stories and they're spectacular, what they're doing. They're mind blowing what these people aren't doing and they're very analog, you know, it's just really good storytelling, depth of field, but the one thing that they're having trouble with is making those entrances and exits because you can't black out, you can't, you've got to come forward or in an open improvisation in viewpoints, you know, you can't enter and exit very well and that's, I think that would be really, really helpful. In terms of the rest of the frame, I don't, what are you finding in your studios? Are you finding that students are experimenting with moving frame or our virtual backgrounds? I find virtual backgrounds to just be so creepy. I don't know how anybody else feels, but you know, don't be doing that. It doesn't look good and half of you disappears or comes in and yeah, it's so janky in terms of that and I know a lot of students had fun with it early on, you know, with the planets behind them or a floating bowl of cereal or something, but once we kind of got through that and God, thank you that we could play around, now it's the use of it and it's still three-dimensional space or the nine quadrants of space. For me, it's temporal and spatial is how to use the frame and I'm not sure any kind of technology, but I really mean that Camille. I'm not sure because I'm not, I frankly have done very, very little work on a frame as an actor, it's really been. The reason I was asking too is just because I'm worried that Zoom will then come up with some brand new thing that I'll literally park right in the middle of all of us and say, now we can use it and it'll be completely for us theater folks, unmagical, unrealizable and it'll just be like backgrounds, right? Where we just kind of get out of here, you know. I'm right with you, I agree and you know somebody's, I mean, half of Zoom is so interesting because it's really, I mean, it's pretty amazing that I woke up this morning and we're all meeting, we know that, but it's really made for corporate situations and what we have done, I feel and not necessarily, I mean, we as I'm reaching through to you is just try to keep it real. So I worry that any kind of additional bells and whistles that Zoom might come up with is gonna mess it up. Right now, it's just a place to meet and this is maybe what I mean by the repository. We just have to keep getting together and slamming ourselves up against one another philosophically, right, spiritually, emotionally and even physically and I don't mean obviously contact, but we all know that the physical transcends and I think we have as theater artists made a Herculean effort through this year and a half to keep the body awake and alive and so yeah, I would resist it as well. I think it would just be like a bad, going through that period of bad set design that we suffered through and then realized we didn't need all of that. Yeah, may I jump in for a second Ellen? Again, I'm going to respectfully disagree with my partner in this case. I think there's two issues. Yes, there are technical issues that we hope Zoom will make better. That's going to happen. For me, there's two things to think about and this is such a great question, Camille, thank you. Is that one, there was one thing I would ask Zoom to do because they're making so much damn money off of the whole world is make the accessibility free to more people. They're making enough money off of corporations. This limit of how long you can stay with smaller groups, there are community college or community groups that could benefit by more broad accessibility. Also, of course, technical issues such as finding a way to have better visibility via telephone or people with lower broadband because not everybody has that. But aside from that, I'm going to say this and this might be a little, no, I don't want to say radical, it might be a bone of contention. I really do think we have to embrace what it is. We have to say, this is what it is and really our students, younger people, they were doing this before the pandemic and before Zoom. Our students are on TikTok. Before they were on TikTok, they were on Instagram. Before they're on Instagram, they're making YouTube. So we have to accept that. We have to say though, how can they do this better and how can that lead them into wanting to work in person because they're watching TV and they're going to the movies a lot more than they're going to the theater. But how can we use those things to bring them to the theater? How can we? So at UCLA, it's a multidisciplinary program. It's all about content creation. So we have a class at UCLA where students learn how to, and I'm always behind the curve on terminology, on how to use new social media platforms to make their work. How many students are starting, and now the students in the class are doing TikToks, which are way too small, but how do they start to do small things on YouTube that then someone sees and picks up? How did Lena Dunham start? Donald Glover is a genius. How do we take the limit? Because as theater artists, I think the great thing that theater artists have more than anybody is that we're really great with obstacles. If it's a theater that doesn't have a walk around, you've got to build it into the show. You walk through the audience or someone who runs across the stage. So we're really great at making limitations obstacles. And obstacles are what gives us conflict and conflict in theater is art. So we have to somehow find the limitations of this medium and use it to our advantage. So I don't want to let go of studio classes. I can't wait to get back, but for example, I teach a class in Chicago theater and I found that breakout rooms were interesting in this aspect that it enabled me to quickly go, okay, we're breaking up into groups of five. Here's a topic. You can discuss it. And then after 15 minutes, you elect one person in your group who's going to come in and give a short report on what your group decided. So I'm proposing next year to teach the class hybrid. So one day a week, we're in the studio altogether sharing the space. And then one day a week, we are going to be remote because that way instead of me going, okay, we're not going to break out into small rooms and we lose half the class time going to another space and coming back, I can quickly do that. So I don't want it, does this make sense Camille? I don't want to lose the sense of being in the room together with them, but I've got to accept that it did make some things more accessible. It also means some of our students who cannot afford to come to class because they have to work on their lunch hour, take a class from their phone. So I don't like Zoom, I really don't. I don't like being in a box, but I'm trying to figure out a way of accepting the limitations and using them to our advantage to tell better stories and to help our students. Thank you. Okay. I mean, just to remind you of what Ellen talked about. I mean, Ellen talked about so beautifully at the beginning about the horizontal axis being recognizing things for what they are and starting there. And then looking and discovering what the vertical possibilities are in this space, which is this whole conversation sounds like that. Amy, I think that's a really great question and it also plugs into something that we were talking about, about systems of training that are very rigid versus fluid. And do you want to just sort of put words to that? Amy? Yeah, sure. I spent so long composing my message. That's fantastic. But I need to hear you say it. So yeah, no, it's really interesting because I've had long interviews with Norman and Ellie and Camille about the neutral mask in the lineage of the Jacopo and Suzanne Bing and Jacopo Cook, the noble or neutral mask. And when I hear you talking, Ellen, about the encounter between individual and the rigorous form that really strikes a chord. That sounds a lot like what the neutral mask is. Essentially, it's a kind of discipline that can bring out something in a performer. It doesn't really have to be justified in any other way. It could be a tea ceremony or it could be motorcycle maintenance or it could be at any task that is rigorous. However, it does seem that in theater training, certain aesthetics get prioritized. Simplicities, symmetries, certain states of energy. I mean, these are kind of, they're given a kind of reverence where other trainings wouldn't be considered to give people a valuable performative state where in fact, it's just might be a different aesthetic. So I'm just, obviously forms cast shadows. And I'm just curious about how you and Jay think about the shadow that's cast by the aesthetic of a rigorous training. That's extraordinary. I'm a little intimidated by you, Amy. Wow. So forgive me, I perhaps can't come up to the eloquent question and brain you have. I was an athlete as a young person. I was an equestrian. I was on the junior Olympic team, obviously very highly trained. Training was my life. The rigor of the Olympic committee is as it is. And I was drawn to the Suzuki training. Just as she animal to animal, I just liked it. It just was, for me, it was fun. And then something in the back of my mind knew that it was also the alchemy of it was working to, and I finally felt, oh, I'm home. I'm home, I'm not, I finally have found a place where my energies and my habits and my skills and my taste and who I am began to find a place where all of those things were moving towards expressive purpose. And then I worried for a while, oh, am I learning a style? Am I learning, are these shadows taking me into an appropriation culturally of a place in myself? And that was really quickly put aside because I also met Ann and Bogart and we began to experiment with the collision between, and first let me clarify the Suzuki training is by no means like any great training, by no means to dictate a style. It's really foundational. You can do multimedia, puppetry, videography, anything. It's just a foundational way of being in the world that makes who you are a little bit better, right? But meeting Ann and beginning then to cross and work with the viewpoints and research that work as we continue to do because it's a slippery slope, as we know. But we found the chocolate and the peanut butter, so to speak, where they intersected, that sweet spot is what on any given day in terms of communicating to an artist in my own practice you're looking for and that doesn't cast shadows. That opens up the box and lets the light in. That isn't about any, how can I explain it? That's not about any kind of look or feeling or recognizing the work that's coming out of this. I would say if anything, in my experience at least, there's no such thing as view-pointing. It's not a verb. It's simply perception that there's no such thing as performing in a Suzuki style, perhaps if you're working for Mr. Suzuki. And so the shadows of it maybe are spiritually in the sense of allowing an artist to open up their aperture about what their own personal criteria is when they look at work, when they make work, when they work with others. It's about sharing language that I can have a student in New York immediately meet somebody from Jakarta and because they both shared a two-week workshop, they can speak together and make work. I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I really think that the idea of a shadow is the thing that we're trying to figure out how to keep from it catching us. Other than the idea of the whatever is left over from being marinated inside of a training, whatever sticks for each individual, whatever allows their potentiality to come out, their centering in the world, their sense of self, their sense of, oh, we're gonna go into the studio and we're gonna try to make a model society and maybe about a family that's all at each other, others' throats, but that's our task, as we would say. A model society, and again, when I say the theater is the repository for these things, it's to create that, a way to be together, that's better, over and over and over and over. Yeah, and personal taste, is that a shadow, is that a shadow wrong, maybe I'm misinterpreting, that shadow dictates something that smacks of a style that somebody's not freed from. And I really, really feel that that's what we're trying to resist and get away from, certainly, I would hope. Well, may I respond? Yes? Thank you, Amy, for the question. Ellen is so eloquent about philosophy. I'm going to, what I think I heard in your question, from you and your colleagues, is something she and I have talked about. I'll be a little maybe more specific to what I think I understood of your question. And it's a word that, you mentioned the word rigor and I think that's a huge issue to deal with. I know Ellen and I, and to a certain extent, in our company, we're talking a little bit about this idea. There are always isms in this country. The new ism is ableism, is a rigor of our work exclusionary. And I think it's a really interesting question. I think you have to ask yourself, what is it that you're trying to do and why are you doing it, who are you doing it for? I think it's a great question. For myself, she meant Ellen mentioned her being an athlete. Not everybody is destined to play basketball in the NBA. Not everybody is meant to dance ballet with ABT or sing opera at the med or play rock guitar at Madison Square Garden. But I think everybody can play basketball in the backyard or down at the playground, as I did when I was a kid. Everybody can sing around the campfire or sing at family gatherings in Spanish with the guitar. I think that's all great. But what is it that you're trying to do and why? So for me, as a teacher, there is a certain thing I'm aspiring to. I'm aspiring to give people voices. If someone takes the training that I offer them and they're able to have the time, the interest and the ability to translate that into opening up to a community that they think needs it, I think that is wonderful. I don't feel that that's exclusionary on my part. I am offering it at a particular level, which you could say is a sense of enablism. The part of my job is also to teach people to use this work and that using the work might mean that they make work or using the work might mean they're gonna use it to try to make it even more accessible that I'm trying to do to another community. So I think that it's important that I tell this to my students all the time, you don't ever have to do the Suzuki training when you finish school or when you finish training with the city company. You might never ever wanna do the Suzuki training again and why would you? It's difficult and physically taxing and it's painful in a way sometimes because we use muscles we're not used to. However, I would ask you to think about finding a discipline you can devote your life to, whether it's writing down your thoughts every day, whether it's doing quiet, thoughtful meditation, whatever it is as an artist find a discipline you can devote yourself to. And I think you can do that for everybody. I'll be very honest, I made a mistake because as theater artists, aren't we lucky? I think the thing about theater artists is we continue to learn. Every time you work on a play, you have to learn about that play so you learn a whole new culture, you learn a whole new world, you learn a new way of speaking, which is the way that playwright speaks. So as theater artists, we continue to evolve until we die and then someone posts our picture in the memorial. So I think we can do that as theater artists. What I've learned is about five, six years ago, recruiting for the MFA acting program at UCLA, a person came in in a wheelchair and they were really talented, but I was worried. How do I make the training accessible to them? How do I join them? Because it's about recruiting a cohort that's gonna work intensely as an ensemble for three years. How do I include this person and not make the next three years about taking care of that person? I'm still grappling with that. If I had the chance to recruit that person now, I would probably take the risk. Five years ago, I didn't feel I was up to taking the risk. I worried about the financial aspects of it. I worried about the accessibility of the training spaces and I worried about it unbalancing it because a lot of the casting of the cohort is how we balance the cohort out. So there is that learning and so I am still grappling with how to make it, how to include more people, but at the same time, I wanna do that without losing the sense of rigor. I might need to adapt the sense of rigor, but there has to be a sense of rigor because I'm teaching, it's a professional training school and I don't think there's anything wrong with a community training at a community center, at a community college where I started. I don't think it's either or. So I just think we have to be very clear about who we're trying to reach and why are we trying to reach them? But it is a continuing conversation, it is. And I still think about that young man. Thank you. Kunal, you had a question? Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Quick thing, quick thing. It were coming on to 10 past the hour, so at 15 past, sorry, well, 45 past the hour for most people, 15 past the hour for us in India. That's when we sort of closed down the formal part of the room, but also I feel like this conversation is just on the cusp of getting really started. So there is a 45 minute after-party water cooler conversation. Jay and Ellen have given us two hours of their time, so that should do it. So just without further ado, I know that we've got Kunal, Omgeni, and then we're probably going to go to the unrecorded session of the conversation where everyone can, this really can genuinely be unmoderated and everyone can step in. So Kunal, go ahead. Yeah. I had a wonderful opportunity to be in a classroom of viewpoints with Dr. Jay Paul Skelton. He has been with the city company for a long time and he creates this really wonderful atmosphere in the classroom where the tools of the viewpoints are not the end, not the goal, but they provide a vocabulary for exploration and discovery. So in the atmosphere, the students almost become like a scientist exploring their own creativity through the vocabulary. So how do we make this atmosphere over Zoom? Well, the viewpoints are just a lens to look at what is there and to discover one's own response to the world around you. And so there are these identifying words that break and this is the work innovated by Mary Overley, who passed away last, summer. Certainly, Mary stands on other shoulders of giants, passed through to Anne and city company as we've continued our research. So I just wanna be clear and make sure Mary. Mary's name is said and my colleague Anne Bogart and all my colleagues in the city company. And we have had the great privilege to be in studios with thousands of artists and simply putting labels to the temporal and spatial issues of architecture and repetition, et cetera, et cetera. I won't teach you a class. We could do that, that'd be fun. But what it allows is, and you can do this, we're doing it. Nah, I'll do it in about two and a half hours. Is if you help someone simply change their perception and let things come to them and they're receiving the news of a difference, they're receiving the world around them and then their own perception of themselves and the possibilities of response come into play. And so what you're really watching is the flowering of the individual and there is no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. There are degrees of profundity, perhaps, as Mr. Suzuki would say, but the viewpoints is really truly a purely horizontal world where the improvisations, where the research, and you said this beautiful word, that's what it is. You're getting a student in a position of putting on their lab coat and going into their own room, going into their own life, their own emotional state, their own sense of what story is and researching it and finding out to their own delight what's actually already there. Not putting on any kind of style or theater game. It's much more sophisticated than that and a deeply concentrated space where the individual is fully allowed to be and there are so few forums, there are so few places for that in the world to come with beginner's mind and really practice and find one's own sense of humor and taste and do that in collaboration when I say all alone together. I mean you're in collaboration with everybody else going through that same thing and then coming together and processing what you've been through as a human being and I don't think, and I'm really trying not to blow smoke up anybody, I don't think I've ever been in a session at the end where people didn't feel reified, didn't feel renewed, didn't feel like they could go on and pay that forward in some ways, make the theater better as a community, as a city-state, as a citizen of theater, to take on the responsibilities of it which is to be fully present, kind, sharp, listen, see, receive, perceive. So when you have that along with a body that's trained to breathe better and hold still and anchor and plug into Mother Earth to notice, to be able to project energy, to concentrate, to deal with the invisible world and things that are usually unconscious, brought to the consciousness, when you have these two things working in tandem, you are watching a human being along with their own cultural background which are so necessary in the room. You really are watching a full fruition of somebody as they come through. So for me, I'm so glad you've had this experience. Come play. I'd love to work together, do it. Because we can. We can walk in the room right now and make something or be together and do our research together and then have a coffee and be friends. So thank you for the question. It's the last few minutes. So I'm gonna leave it with Omgeni's question or Omgeni's remarks and then Omgeni, do you think you can close us out into the after party as well? Sure, maybe. Hello, thank you so much for all of that really kind of rich thinking. I'm kind of obsessively stuck on this idea of the frame and it was going to be a question but I think I've come to the realization about my own kind of pedagogic, critical ethical investments when I make choices on how to teach and especially with this challenge, right? And I've been wondering more and more whether it's not this tension between the kind of laminated surface that these kinds of devices and scenarios produce so we kind of miss the details that sit just outside of the frame, right? Zoom when you enter into this kind of environment or any other kind of digital environment, I think has a way of quite forcibly bracketing out everything outside of it. And I think in those moments, you might forget that we're all sitting in very specific contexts. So the tension between that, that kind of bracketing, erasing, laminated effect that these kinds of devices, surfaces, interfaces have and the labor of recognizing that frame as a frame. And I think I work in ways to try and help students not just on Zoom, but in the everyday kind of in real life practice of performance to recognize that everything we're doing is a practice of framing. We are bracketing out an experiential space, a conceptual space where we're agreeing to hold things still for a moment in order to engage with an idea with a perspective of whatever it might be. But I'm always trying, I think, to get them to recognize the multiple kinds and unequal forms of labor that it takes to produce that frame and stabilize that frame. So that even when we're coming into this laminated space, if there's a way to help us recognize all that is beyond the edges of this frame, then I can't enter into this discussion without recognizing the individual humanity of the people with whom I'm engaging. Because I'm always thinking about the context and the different kinds of, I guess, routes that they've respectively taken to arrive here in the first place. And I think it connects to what Jay was saying when I started learning about maybe just the practice of taking the camera and looking around the room as well, just to help us recognize that this is a device that replaces us, but in this kind of a non-space. And maybe what we're trying to find is we're recognizing that practice of being in place by this device. Yeah, it's a good lesson, isn't it? Because even as you're pointing at, when a young artist or young participant or I don't know the language that you prefer to use, some people are getting rid of the word student, I know. But when they walk in a studio, it's the same. The frame is around them. We often already have put a frame of around somebody and you're just so beautifully said, opening up that frame of how did they get here? And yes, Anne, and what's really there? Who are you? Who are you? What if Virginia Woolf says it is so difficult to describe any human being? And just keeping that in mind for, and not making any judgments about how that person learns. Everyone learns at a different rate of speed. I'm a very slow learner. I'm a little dyslexic and I pick up choreography. I pick up movement sequences and rules very slowly. You know, and I realized I wasn't looking at a young person through my very own lens. I had framed them. They're young, they're here, they wanna learn, they're gonna slam up against all this stuff. And I really had to have a talking with myself. And it really has been through Zoom and this thing you're pointing at that I recognized how I've been doing that in my studio and all those assumptions, because studios are frames, they're just boxes. You know, they're the same thing. Thank you for that. Thank you. You're an amazing teacher. They're lucky to have you there. Oh, I hope so. They may argue differently. That's what we all think about as students. I believe me. And as a passing out kind of thought, the other thing that I'm trying to grab within relation to that is I kind of always talk about using what's within reach because that tells us a lot again about the perspective from which we each individually come. So I use the limitation of a strained in projects specifically to force students to work with what's in need here on them. Yeah, I'm sure you can have all the bells and whistles but I'm more interested in what's on the table in front of you. Yeah, you know, there's, it's that idea. I'm sorry to interrupt. It's just that sparked that image of the story of less, less, less, less, less. It's something Anne said not long ago in a rehearsal and it was in reference to us having to rehearse through Zoom, which we started to do and we were all like, how the hell do you do this? But she said, you know, in, it's been recorded the prisoners of war separated from one another and their solitary cells worked out these taps to one another and survived through tapping on the wall next to them and survived for many, many years communicating just with the, you know, the limitations of communication of human survival minimized to such an extent. She said, we're tapping. That's all we're doing right now. We're just tapping and we're trying to hear one another and make an alphabet and thus a language from these taps just from one tap the next and figuring it out together. It was so moving to us. She has a way of doing it, organizing it. But thank you, Pongani. I'm going to, yeah, I'm totally agreeing with what Kameli is saying in the chat window. I'm going to close out and say thank you, Ellen, Jay Edd, Kamali for being here, making time for this. I think on behalf of all of us, we're really happy. This has added a lot of rich material to the ongoing quest. Of course, I know you guys are supremely busy, but just keep an eye out. And if you can come and keep joining the conversation and asking your questions to others in the room, it will be wonderful. Next week, it's Ongeni's up with Ongeni. Who do you have in the chair? Oh, Amy's up. Sorry, Amy, who do you have in the chair? My guests are Eric, a team of Cal Shakes in California, and Kirtana Kumar of the Infinite Souls Theater Farm in Karnataka. Yeah, and Kirtana is an amazing human being. And she's just written an amazing blog which we should actually post up here for you guys to share about what a crazy year she's had. But the drama school is going, drama school, Mumbai is going to reconvene in human person in a COVID bubble at her farm in August. And we are currently terrified because we are still mid-second wave. And some people saying this is an act of insanity. I say it's an act of theater. So I'll leave it at that. We are now, so just this talk is available. All the talks beforehand are available. If you guys want to be on an ongoing conversation, there is a telegram group that nobody really talks on, but it's there, and you can join it and have chats there. But beyond that, really, just hang out. Be off mic. Imagine we're at the water cooler. And Falguni is putting some interest.