 You're welcome. Hello, everyone. Cool. Great. We'll just do a three, two, one, and here we go. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Everybody that is tuned in, welcome for the final time this year to the last episode of our series, The Stories Women Carry. Once again, this is one of our special recorded episodes, so we're very, very excited to be sharing this space. I'm your official question asker for the last time of this series, and I'm very, very excited to be introducing our panelist today, Sheba Haest, who's with us. Hi, Sheba. I suppose we're in the middle of a little bit of a tech challenge here. You may have to bear with us throughout the series. There's just a lot of network issues that we're having in the country today, so thank you for your patience. In the meantime, as we wait to get Sheba back, again, just want to thank everybody that's here, that's watching and listening, and also want to thank our sign language interpreters, our American sign language interpreter, and the whole company, and then, of course, Lucy and Raphael, who have been with us from the beginning of the series. It's really, really special to us to be able to present both American sign language and Kenyan sign language interpretation as part of this series. Again, with the support of HowlRound, thank you so much for making this possible for the first time, and we hope that it's something that we can continue to do in the world of accessibility. Of course, just to mention also that the series is being co-produced by the Tabiriats Foundation and the Nairobi Musical Theater Initiative, so thank you all so much for all your producerial support through and through this time. It's great. It looks like we have Sheba back. Hi, Sheba. Hi. Hi, Karishma. How's it going? It's good to see you. It's going great. It's having all the drama of trying to schedule Zoom conversations with phone calls and all the other things that are part of this space and re-learning how to use everything that we literally know how to do again. Yeah, it really feels like picking things up from scratch all over, and everything we knew isn't really helpful anymore because the world is operating differently. Absolutely. I feel like we're doing the most dramatic season of learning and unlearning things, and while it's terrifying, it's also opened up such interesting creative possibilities, actually. I'm trying to look for the silver linings all the time. Always. Such a positive person. I mean, it's the experience, I think, all of us that work with you have of you, and yeah, I think it's so marvelous to be able to be connected in the world much more closely because of the time that we're living in, and so I think that the world of technology brings a lot of advantages to creative connections across the globe. So on that note, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you for making time to speak to us in the midst of crazy production schedules, which hopefully you'll be able to tell us a little bit more about later on. But I'd like us to dive in and start off by just hearing about who you are. Tell us about your journey. I mean, I know you, I first, so for those that are tuning in for the first time, the last time of the series, I first met Sheba in 2018 when she was in New York producing Tingatinga Tales on Broadway. And we've been working together ever since as part of the Nairobi musical theater initiative and a lot of other projects. But Sheba, tell us, for our audiences, tell us how you got into this field. I'm still trying to figure out what this field actually defines itself as. I'm kind of like a jack of many trades, many, many trades. But I really, I run the, I'm the director of a production company called Rainmaker, which I run together with my, my business partner and husband, who is a musician in Kenya, called Eric Waidaina. And Rainmaker basically is a management and production house that we set up about more than 10 years ago to basically support his career and to create like, you know, a production outfit that would reinforce like his creative production. And so that brought us into owning a studio, building and owning a studio, having a record company. And then because he went into writing musical theater, I also started to produce musical theater, kind of really landing on the job and figuring out how to make that kind of, make those kinds of productions for our audiences here in Nairobi. And then I later also started a film festival because that wasn't enough, right? So I also run the Nairobi Film Festival. It's one of the other projects I do. And now you're doing Map Theatre Kenya as well. And now I'm doing Map Theatre Kenya as well. Yeah. So everything seems to kind of birth another thing and birth another thing and you kind of find ways to adapt and move. Yeah. It's just crazy and so wonderful, at least for us and so admirable when I'm sharing the space with you to see how you're able to just so skillfully and gracefully navigate all of these multiple roles that you're playing with everything that you're doing. It's really, I don't know how you do it, because I think there was some, at some point we were seated together and I think we counted 12 different responsibilities in both your personal and your professional life that were taking up all your time. So it's incredibly, incredibly admirable and something that I think us young people look up to. Oh, thank you for that, Karishma. Sometimes it feels like, yeah, I mean it can feel overwhelming at times, but I think one of the really interesting things about working in Nairobi and in a place where there are not a lot of well-established practices in the different creative sectors, you find yourself having to develop skills that expertise basically in completely new areas and sometimes having to really invent the pathways that are going to get you there. So it's not really about just making your creative content but really having to build the structure through which that creative content will then reach audiences. And so, yeah, I think in a sense what seems like an overbearing amount of work in one context has then turned out to be quite useful because we're innovating all the time and we're not sort of restricted to the practices that we've specialized in, which I think is models that exist elsewhere in the world, but by necessity we're having to be very adaptable to different situations. And that's turning out to be something of an asset in this particular context, actually. Yeah, I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about that with specific examples from your life. You know, my experience of you, and I said this to you a few days ago, is that you're a very grassroots producer as in the work that happens in the space is happening as you go and just as you've said, you're making it up as you go along, but with years of experience to back you. So how is it like as a music producer, as a record label producer, and then also being a theater producer, and then also being a film festival producer, can you speak to a specific example of how those skills were transferred in your personal life? Well, I can say, I think that I would say like with the theater production space, for instance, because the music production space, like by necessity, you have to reach like hundreds and hundreds, like thousands and thousands of people to be able to have like a sustainable craft and a sustainable career. We already had built a lot of competencies, for instance, in how to reach audiences with ticketing platforms and things like that. Whereas Nairobi has a theater scene that had quite would do its productions are quite a limited amount of time. I think our expectations of the numbers of people that we wanted to reach with our productions was already quite like aspired to a higher number than that, just because, you know, we know about producing concerts with like hundreds and thousands and thousands of people and the mechanics for making that happen, which we've been part of building and being able to bring those worlds into our world. I mean, to be sorry, to be boring and talk about ticketing so much, but it's such an anchor of my work. A lot of like the ticketing platforms in Nairobi, for instance, were very much geared towards selling single day tickets. And so the whole like software engineering behind the scenes that those those platforms had was really here to like one or two or three days of a single product. Now, when you're talking about producing, say like I produced the Tinga Tinga Tales, which is a family musical that we put on like two years ago and at the National Theatre. And suddenly you're demanding of like your ticketing partner that they have to now create like individual tickets for like 30 days, four categories, five categories of tickets with the possibility of individual seating charts, which was not something that they had innovated yet. And I mean, it's a grueling process because you're helping them to innovate to towards what you need, but you really have to be part of building the tools that are going to allow you to be to be free to actually focus on doing the creative work. So you constantly having to bring skills from this area and knowledge and insight from this area and using that to build tools that will serve this other new sector, for instance. That's very interesting, particularly for our Kenyan scene, right? Because we're always having these conversations about creating a culture for theatre going, which is something that we're doing as we're also creating work, which may not necessarily be the same experience elsewhere in the world. What happened when you went to do Broadway with Tinga? How is that different from when you were producing it at the National Theatre here? I mean, I have to say that sometimes it's really interesting. We had done an earlier edition of Tinga Tinga in a very much smaller place. We've done it in a tent in our own space and then we transferred it to the National Theatre in the year that followed. But part of the thing that made us be able to scale our National Theatre run to the levels that we wanted to get to really professionalize was that we had the opportunity to take it to the New Victory Theatre in New York. Our production team had an incredible learning experience by just preparing ourselves to present in that space. It gave us so many insights into processes that now we're talking about people with decades' worth of experience in producing these kinds of works. Because we were having to rapidly learn not just the language, but the culture, the practice, the professional processes that they involved in, we were incredibly upskilled in a very short space of time just because of trying to meet those expectations. Even the amount of planning time in advance was so much further ahead than we would normally do. But that is because that is how that practice works in the New York context. In the end, it ended up expanding what we were able to do and really resetting the standard for what we were able to do. And it made us grow our culture around our tech like maybe 10 or 20-fold. We were incredibly mentored and upskilled by basically working to this other criteria. We also had a very powerful experience taking the cast. It was a huge fundraising experience to just get enough resources together to be able to take this cast of 15 or 20 people. In the end, I think it was such an eye-opening experience for all the band members and the cast members who had an opportunity to see that their work resonated with audiences far beyond. They had a successful run in Kenya, but to see their work then connecting so seamlessly with children in New York and children from who are regularly exposed to a grand and wonderful production, that to be able to hold our own in that space was quite a powerful experience for everybody. We believe in ourselves. We would like to get that affirmation that we're producing content that speaks across spaces. And there was also a really just interesting thing that happened organically just by being in another person's space and learning a lot, for instance, about the union rules and the way that performers and practitioners in the field are carefully protected by years of having to, I guess, to gain those levels of protection. It gave us a lot of insights about how to improve our own health and safety and fair work practice culture, just which we transferred a lot of that knowledge back into the way that we do things here now. So it was great. I mean, we also had a lot of a chance to see a lot of inspiring productions. Everybody had tickets to go see once on this island while it was running on Broadway. And it's mind blowing, you know. But inspiring and also interestingly brings things that seem quite far, quite close in accessibility because you can see what the inner workings are. Some members of our crew had the opportunity to sit in lighting boxes and sound boxes in other productions that were arranged for us through different friends in the US. So our tech teams also got to sit inside, behind the scenes kind of context and get to see the inner workings from that perspective. It was amazing. Yeah. I can't recommend it enough. Yeah, that sounds like such a wonderful exchange as well. And just hearing how the tech teams were able to learn from each other as well, because I'm sure that just how you've spoken about the agility of what it means to be a Kenyan producer, working across various different contexts, I think the same is applicable to our tech crew here, which may not necessarily be the same over there. So it's exciting to hear you speak about how that exchange was, you know, in person and fruitful. In that sense, I look forward to the day when we're able to fly out again like that and be able to be in the same space or in the same enclosed capsule without catching whatever viruses are in the air at the time. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But just to go back to one thing that you spoke about ticketing and how that is so central to the work that you do as a commercial producer, even as you know, music and theater as well. How do you foresee, of course, this pandemic shifting the way that we look at ticketing or the way we look at audience buying for productions and music? Yeah, I mean, of course, there's been a lot of like, everybody has been forced to take a good, hard look at the world that they live in. And to be honest, like really have a crisis of confidence about like whether our field has adequately prepared itself to weather a situation like this and whether and the reality of needing to really consider how your work lives across different platforms. But in doing that, sort of realizing as well that things don't have the same automatic entertainment value when they shift from in-person to an on-screen experience for example. And so beginning to explore very intentionally what content that is, you know, looking at what their on-screen experience needs to look and feel like and beginning to create content that goes directly towards that. For instance, like we normally produce a big like Christmas concert at the end of the year, that's what we're in the middle of like making right now. And it's a big convening event that brings, you know, lots of people together to watch this quite magical contemporary Christmas experience. And we have, we took the decision to like work really hard to make a an experience that is designed from the onset to live on television and that has shifted a lot of parameters for us but it also has opened up also in like wonderful possibilities of what we can do, you know, using the lens of the camera and the spaces that we create and collaborating with a whole new version of like a whole new group of like creative people who come from a cinematic background in a cinematic tradition who are adding a whole other layer on top of the thing that we already make. And that is very, very satisfying, very gratifying. What's really interesting about moving on to these other platforms that then have the opportunity to reach not hundreds of people at a time but millions of people at a time, you begin to see how much earlier you need to start to work on this content so that it does have that sticky effect. And it also opens you up to the two different possibilities of financing this work, you know, because now you're able to speak to commercial partners who are very interested in accessing that much larger potential audience. We're working very closely with the broadcaster for instance on this particular show but it's really got the cogs in my head thinking about like how do I bring this whole experience that I'm having around this concept to creating theater productions that are designed from the onset, not to be films but to be theater that's designed for living on digital and broadcast media. So it's kicked off this whole other line of thinking that I think was really the preserve of the most elite theaters that could afford to have the most like high tech people come in and do these, you know, we watched some of those beautiful productions I think coming out of them and forgetting their name, the National Theater was doing those beautiful filmed Shakespeare I think is what I watched earlier this year. And again, sometimes the standard production seems unattainably high but going through this musical, this Christmas musical experience, suddenly those parameters have become much more accessible to me and I'm like able to imagine what that would feel like if we were applying that to a stage production. No, yeah, I mean, you know, it gets me to think about this other question that is really present in the scholarly world of performance studies which is this idea of archival and how, you know, within the Western world, within African traditional performance as well, what has been written of course is not enough but what it is is that it's primarily written. So how central would you say in your process as you think about incorporating film and broadcasting and all of these other elements, how do you think that's going to change the way what is happening in the contemporary Nairobi scene or contemporary African theater scene will shift in terms of archival? I mean, yeah, you're taking me to the territory that I always find myself sort of like trapped by where you're like this, I'm here to make a place but now you want me to think about how they live in this archival. And maybe it's an interesting moment to talk about like the project that we've been working on together which is this MAP theater project. You know, we realized that because everything in the theater sector in Kenya, which is such a fragile ecosystem anyway, came to a complete halt and, you know, people's livelihoods were on the line and everything was just completely like we couldn't see the future in any kind of way. And so we're just in a sort of like hold mode. And we kicked off this research project to basically map the space and to begin to like dig into understanding what the challenges are of the space and what the threats to the sustainability of the Kenyan theater space are and to really articulate that from a practitioner perspective and really get as many voices heard as we could. And I think as we discovered during that process, like one of the things that there is so little continuity from one set of experiences to the other and there's needing to be such deeper investment in getting the work that you do written about while we're making it, documenting some of those processes behind the scenes so that that knowledge is somehow available and accessible to other people and really considering like what portals of like archiving to use your word can exist. Whether it's like, whether it's in sort of magazine type format, but also engaging more directly with people who write academically about the space to continue to take an interest and really kind of trying to break down the silos that exist between the space. I mean, we convened a group of producers who have been producing in Kenya for like maybe, you know, in the last 10 years who have never been in a space together in a way that they were able to like in a way that they could share sort of what their practices are, what their processes are. And this big pause allowed us to do that to take stock of where we've come from and to really consider collectively and together where we're going. I mean, those conversations by necessity because of the Zoom platform or by convenience were able to be recorded. So suddenly we have this record of really people like a documented exploration, you know, interrogation of like where we are at now and where we're trying to get to. And I think, yeah, that's, I don't know that I have an answer for it yet, but I certainly think it's really, it's really brought you to the forefront, not just for myself, but for many of us in the field at the moment. Yeah. And what I find so valuable about what you've just said is that it's very practitioner driven, meaning even the process that we've spoken about or that you kind of highlighted in terms of research and collection is focused on what exactly will be helpful in the next 5, 10, 15 years to build an economy that is practitioner focused, that is sustainable for the folks that are in, you know, in the moment all the time at that time. And I think that also presents a very different perspective toward the way we think about sustainability in a creative economy because oftentimes I think it can, that can be so lost in the cultural policy world of things, which is still valuable, but to have this other side and hear from practitioners is really, really interesting. And I'm sure it's been, well, since we work on it together, I know that it's been very, very, given us some like powerful insights, but also powerful solutions, you know, and we found lots of low hanging truth things, like the fact that narrow be just doesn't have a centralized prop shop, like, you know, that where people can hire things from. So you're like having to buy everything every time from scratch and then store it in your mother's garage, you know, and like, is this, is this really the way that we, is this, is this really all we can do narrow be, you know, all of us, all of us producing in the theater sector can get together and practice one. So it's that's been, that's been really useful in terms of just coming together to, you know, creating a hive mind around something that says like, oh, this is really something that we should talk on the head quite quickly, and need to be improved the experience and the sustainability of the state. And I think one of the things that is very exciting about producing in a place that I'm not very well established, not not very well, not very long theater practice tradition in the contemporary theater, then is that you cannot escape from the work of you don't have the privilege of just being like, well, I know, I just want to, I just want to write my plays and put them up for audiences, you do have to be by necessity part of creating the environment. But it also means that you can create it how you need it to be. And you can create it, you don't have to inherit something and then adapt yourself towards that. But you can create things that are agile and useful and built on built very much in this contemporary moment. And that, you know, have the usefulness of all the tech innovation and all the different ways that we're thinking about labor and all of these new insights and thinking, I mean, and even around the culture of their practice of policy and that kind of thing, we have the benefit of like, you know, starting us out from a very strong position of having built a lot of consensus to each other. That's really, yeah, I mean, I think that freedom and flexibility to create our own system is really, really, really exciting. Allow me to pick your brain a little bit about that. Just in terms of the next generation of theater makers and in terms of thinking about creating this sustainable economy that hypothetically will last to support this new generation of artists. How do you, how do you, what do you see the ideal version being for us in Kenya? Do you feel like it's more aligned towards what we see as a Broadway model? Do you feel like it's different? And if so, why? Well, I think that it's, I mean, I don't, I think that, you know, you have that Broadway model there as a reference point of what one society has done with its thing and used something that sustains, you know, millions of hundreds of thousands of people. I don't know how many there are in the theater system, but there are many, you know. And that's something that's an interesting reference point. Of course, we live in a very different economic context. So that already becomes something that what is your thinking to work a different way. One of the things that I think is really, I learned just the other day, I was talking to some friends who are live music presenters and this guy that I was talking to he owned a company called Life Beats, he's called Shafiq and he was saying that in order for there to continue to be audiences that want to go to live gigs and that don't only have an appreciation for live performed music, kids have to learn music in school. They have to have this connection to the fact that it's hard to play the guitar well, but it's also a joyful and rewarding thing to experience. You have to kind of cultivate that love for the thing from quite a young age so that when you're faced with the expertise of Benjamin Kabaseke playing, you know, expertly in a gig, you have this profound appreciation for what that excellence is and, you know, you can access that. You have a way of reading that, you know. And I think that there's something quite fundamental that we as the theater sector who are like, you know, in this end of the professional end of the as practitioners, we have to really take a very keen interest in how we get things started right from the grassroots in cultivating children's love and appreciation for and access to the language of theater. Now, the theater in kind of still lives in schools, but in very much like, you know, part of the drama music festival, but it's not considered something that's called the learning experience. And if we don't get involved in being the most rigorous advocates for that experience to be part of what we cultivate in children from an early age, that we're undermining our own future audiences, and we're undermining our future practitioners. And we're, you know, we're losing wonderful creative minds to banking and to banking and legal and, oh my goodness, and, you know, love you guys both. But like, you know, we also have, we have to take that responsibility. It's not going to just happen automatically. And part of like, having a sector that is organized around like the futures that it wants to see that you can start to really champion these values right from like seeing the education system. And then at another level also championing those values to like our arts and culture, our arts and culture ministry and ensuring that our arts and culture ministry is not being for the right amount of the national budget allocation so that we can build spaces and we can equip those spaces and that we can provide professional level training. It's really working at the grassroots level. Yes, with like, with kids and people who are having a first access to theater experience at a maybe very rural level. And then also working at this other end, this other end that now celebrates excellence and shines a light on things that are, you know, have risen to the top basically of the practice and really investing a lot in expressing the value and the esteem that we hold that. I don't know if that answers your question completely, you know, but that's been on my mind quite a bit since that interesting conversation. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a very complex answer because, you know, and that is the nature of the kind of work that we have to do because it not only all of a sudden means that we're focusing on the practitioners, you know, working at the moment, but we're thinking about education and we're then thinking about statistics and then we're then thinking about national budgets. So it's a much larger ecosystem to think about than just the current cultural practitioners and people that are, you know, moving and shaking now, because the now won't be the now tomorrow, you know. Oh, exactly. And, you know, just to focus a little bit more on, and this is, I guess, is more of a personal question now as we've spoken about the philosophical, to focus still on the next generation of producers specifically or folks that are interested in the administrative side of making theater, making any sort of art happen. What's, I know you don't like this question, but what's the biggest piece of advice you wish you had when you were still emerging? You know, let me kind of switch it around a bit instead of asking what advice you have to give? What sort of advice did you wish you had when you were 20? And for that, I think it would be really helpful if you're able to share a little bit of your journey as well from where you started so that our audiences know what amazing things you were doing when you were 20 and you were like a director at that point. You were not just, you know, apprenticing. Apprenticing, it was you were running an entire trust. What advice would I wish I had? I mean, I think that what I, well, let me say what I think I did right, you know. I think there's a fearlessness that comes with youth and an audacity that comes with youth where you just don't have the experience to know that it's not possible. And I think particularly in this ecosystem where things still are there, they're available for the defining and for the making, I think leaning into that energy and continuing to lean into that energy of if it doesn't exist, let's make it is incredibly, incredibly useful and will allow you to make a lot of headway, you know, will allow you to make leaps that are not obvious to people who become then very well established in the tradition. I think that you get to a place as you become more experienced where you know all the reasons why things won't work and you spend a lot of energy. Sorry, this monkey's running on the roof. I don't know whether you've heard that. Okay. I live out in the wild. We live out in the wild a bit. So there's always a little bit of wildlife yet trying to do something. I think that so I think that audacity and holding onto that I think that is very useful. And saying yes to situations you are going to have to learn how to do it by doing it. And so the sooner that you can get involved in helping somebody else who's trying to do something, do that thing, the sooner you can insert yourself into situations where you're seeing the practical application of ideas turned into actual things because I think that's what producing is. You know, you an idea happens in someone's book or in someone's song and in their head and then your job is to basically marshal the resources to make that happen. And literally anyone can do that. Right? The more powerful your phone book becomes the easier it becomes to do that. But that's literally the practice of learning to become a good producer is producing. There isn't another simpler. There's not a school. There's not a book. There's not a manual. There is the accumulation of your own lived experiences once again, especially in this context where you're having to make those things happen from scratch. I think I might have wanted myself, and I still challenge myself to do this, to not stop looking to keep on looking very dedicatedly at what else is going on in your field and keeping on feeding the creative part of yourself. Because, you know, I mean, you said the word administrative, and yes, there's a big administrative part of it, but a huge part of it is creative, you know. And it's creative in the sense that, like, you have to be able to have this, like, to carry this vision, basically, of what the thing could be. Sorry, I just got a phone call. It was my mom. I pushed it away. I'll call her back. Hi, mom, if you watch this. So just to put it was, I say, yes, you have to keep on feeding your creative spirit. You have to keep watching stuff. You have to keep listening to stuff. You have to keep reading stuff that challenges what you think you know about, like, how things are supposed to be done. There's too many times where, again, in a small context, like a smaller context like ours, things have been done a very exact particular way. And before you know it, you will become one of the people being like, this is how it's all done. The play that was done from Saturday and Sunday only. Audiences won't come on a Monday, you know. And suddenly you're, like, here making self-fulfilling property. That stage has to be done in this space, only this space. Like, there's no way this supermarket is a theater, you know, until it is, you know. And you do, and we have incredible resources now available to us both in things that are printed and things that are, you know, that things that are living online and things that you can go see in person. You have to stay connected to what's being made in your world. And you have to carve out time to internalize that stuff. No, it's shopping for ideas. So whoever, so whoever thinks producing is just administrative, actually, there's an art. Who said producers were not artists? Who said that? The biggest one, a master artist. We just paint with people who are like, yeah, let's see, I think this person and this person will have this wonderful energy together and make this thing. Yeah, and it's such a profound way of thinking about it because, as you said, we are the vision carriers, right? And, you know, it's a true form of leadership in that context because it allows artists to actually do the work that they're doing. But without that sense of consolidation or being able to question yourself in that space, it becomes very difficult. So thank you for that. Thank you for that jewel. You always drop so many jewels for us. I have to say, I think there was one other conversation we were having and it changed my view of ticketing because I come from very non-profit fundraising style producing background. And you said at that moment, when an audience member buys a ticket, it's like getting a vote of approval for whatever work you're doing. That also stuck with me because, again, you're thinking about infrastructure as not just being one that is sustainable for development of artists, but one that actually feeds the people that we're making this for. Because without the people, what's the point of the art and vice versa? Yeah, I mean, that thinking comes very much from my dad with a cartoonist. And I mean, there's a lot of development corporation funding in this context. And in a way that development corporation funding because it's the resources that are available to make stuff start to shape the conversation about what's going to get made. And the same thing in the comic book world. And so you have a lot of what you would call like programmed issuing. Here's a nice comic book. It has a nice story. There's an underlying theme about like water or sustainable forests or something. And these things can be done quite elegantly in a very useful education tools, but it shouldn't squeeze out the other voices. There's so many other stories that need to be taken. They should be they should be reinforcing something that is also speaking directly to an audience and creating a space for that audience to like, you know, negotiate its cultural norms and and interrogate them as well. And have a chance to see, you know, how how, yes, that that transported thing that stories do that allow us to see the outcomes of a set of choices that we might be grappling with in our lives, you know, seen to the conclusion. My dad would always say that it's so important that one point you've got to put your comic on on on that you've got to put your comic on the stand, you know, on the newsstand. Because that thing will tell you like if a kid is willing to be like, I won't have break today so that I have, you know, I'll sacrifice my lunch money or my pocket money to get this thing. That's a really strong endorsement of the work that you're doing because, yeah, for, you know, well, here we are in this transactional society. This is how we express value at this moment. That's not to say also that there isn't a huge value in, I mean, you always have to think about what people are putting in to get that thing. So again, I mean, I don't think that the not-for-profit world is not challenged by those things as well in terms of the fact that like, you know, you put up this show and yes, maybe you have a whole bunch of like tickets that are available at concession rates because you're also trying to always meet people at the place that they can afford to participate. And I think you have to have a real, I mean, I'm definitely a, you know, a social change activist on one level and I'm always looking for that. Like how do I make sure I'm making as broad a range of possibilities available to people who can participate in this? Because even if you're giving somebody a free ticket, people are like, oh, free tickets, you're devaluing things. No, I mean, the person who needs that free ticket still has to figure out how to get there. Still has to figure out like what they're going to do with their kids while they're going to have that experience. There's a cost to them. They still have to figure out, you know, what their lunch money is going to be that day. And sometimes people are negotiating between those two choices, you know. Yeah, so we've got to be constantly thinking with our audiences about where we can meet to have this exchange. Shiba, I think that's such a wonderful note for us to let our viewers reflect on. Thank you for sharing your experience and your journey and, you know, these valuable insights with us just for us to, for those that are artists that are watching this, to be able to think more deeply about their contribution and their work and the infrastructure they're creating. And for those that are not to really reflect and think about their involvement in the cultural space wherever they're at in the world. So thank you so much for giving us your time, bang in the middle of production hell. Thank you really for dedicating this time to speak to us and sharing your journey. It's a pleasure, Karishma. I have just like enjoyed like just being in your spaces and also learning so much from you as well. I love the series that you put together. I think it was a brilliant thing to have done to bring all these voices online. I've learned a great deal by listening to the others as well. And yeah, I just, yeah, onwards and upward. Thank you so much. Thank you. And just to, just to end, I just wanted to ask if there's any social media or any other platforms people can follow you on to learn more about your work. And of course, feel free to, you know, reach out to me directly if you're interested to speak to Shiba or pick her brain about more things. But curious if there's a space for us to follow you anywhere online. Well, I am on Twitter as myself, Shiba has. And I'm on, I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram. And those are easy places to reach me. I'm a very frequent stalker, maybe more of a poster. But you can also find my work. You can also see a lot of our work through my husband's, through Eric wininer.com, which is my husband's social media thing and a lot of our work together. So you'll see some there. And of course, there's a Nairobi musical theater initiative, which will tell you all about the work that we're doing in developing new musical content for, for the continent first, and then for the world outside, alongside that. And I may be encouraged by you, you, you probably have, but we're on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter with NBO musical theater initiative. Yep. And actually, this will be streaming on that platform. So hopefully you'll be able to check out this platform. Yes. Thank you so much, Shiba. I'll let you get to speaking to your mom and running rehearsal and the 12 million other things you're doing. But thank you again. Right. Thank you. Take care. And thank you every way. Bye. Bye.