 Good morning, good evening, and thank you for tuning in. My name is Susan Chinzen, and I am one of the producers at Arts Emerson in Boston, Massachusetts, on the unceded land of the Massachusetts Wampanoag and Knitmuck peoples. Before we begin, Adrienne Wong of Spiderweb Snow show in Ontario, Canada has written this digital land acknowledgement, which I'd like to share. Since our activities are shared digitally to the internet, let's also take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technologies, structures, and ways of thinking we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many Indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we make leave significant carbon footprints contributing to changing climate that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging all this, as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship. One of the privileges of working with artists from around the world is finding opportunities to connect with them. Today, we'll be hearing a conversation between Boston-based Igor Golak and Beijing-based Wong Chong to discuss their experiences making online theater and the opportunities they see as we navigate making theater while we are unable to gather in person. If you have questions, please feel free to submit them using hashtag the future of online theater. If you are watching on Facebook, feel free to chime in in the comments. Now, I'd like to introduce our moderator today, Annie Levy. Annie is a theater maker and director whose work often revolves around mythology, historical turning points, and scientific breakthroughs. She has worked all over the world, from Brooklyn to Taiwan. She is a founding member of the World Wide Lab, a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, an associate member of SDC. Currently, she is the artistic director of Emerson Stage at Emerson College. Take it away, Annie. Thank you so much, Susan. Before we start today's conversation, it's my honor to introduce our guests and to share a brief glimpse of their work. Igor Goliak is the Arlekin Players Theater Artistic Director and he's directed the New York Times Critics Pick, The State versus Natasha Benina, which carved out a new live performance genre in the age of virtual theater, performing to a worldwide audience in 40 US states and 60 countries. Igor received the 2020 Elliott Norton Award for Outstanding Directing for Arlekin's The Stone and was also nominated in the same year for his direction of Arlekin's The Seagull. He is an associate professor at the Boston Conservatory and has spent over a decade teaching the art of theater. He is the founder of the Igor Goliak Acting Studio, an artistic director of Arlekin Players Theater, which has won numerous awards in the United States and internationally. And he has received an Elliott Norton Award for his production of Dead Man's Diary at Arts Emerson. Arlekin's Players Theater is a multicultural, multinational collaborative that is growing year to year in the number of audience members, company actors, and volunteers. His theater has been invited to perform on famous stages at world-redown festivals all over the world, including Moscow Art Theater, the Festival of Yerevan Media, New York City, Chicago, Lviv Ukraine, Monaco, and many others. Wong Chung is the founder and artistic director of Beijing-based performance group, Teatro Terev Experimental. In 2008, Wong founded Teatro Terev Experimental, and in 2012, he started the Chinese New Wave Theater Movement by presenting a series of new performances with innovative use of body, live video, and sound. In April 2020, he directed an online performance of Waiting for Godot, with four actors performing live from three cities, including Wuhan, the epicenter of COVID-19 that was still in lockdown. The performance attracted a record-breaking 290,000 audience members. With his unique touch, he has also translated and directed Chinese premieres, including Ruler's Hamlet Machine, Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, and Willie Allen's Central Park West. He has been noted by the Beijing News as a new artist of the year, and has received the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in New York, and the Han Suyun Award for Young Translators. Now, let's take a moment to get familiar with their work. Take it away, Travis. Man, it was like I knew something was gonna happen. Natasha, you're the best damn chick on earth. Would you marry me? He's mine, he was mine. I had no intention of getting him away and that she comes in one. And then, Valera asks me, Natasha, what is your dream? Dear friends from North Rhine, Westphalia, and friends from all over the world, hello. I am Wang Chong, a theater director based in Beijing. I am here now in Beijing, and today is June the 19th, 2020. What I really wanna share with you guys is the situation of theater and cinema in Beijing. Cinema has been shut down since early February. Vice president of a big cinema chain just committed suicide, which is a huge tragedy. He must be very desperate to see this situation. This situation might not be caused by COVID-19 only. Maybe the authority doesn't think a cinema and theater are essential parts of this society anymore. You can watch it at home, you can do it at home, maybe you don't have to exist. That's the attitude, I guess. Anyways, cinema workers and theater people are suffering in China. As of my practice, recently in early April, I staged online theater performance waiting for Godot with four actors performing at home in three different cities, including the epicenter of the pandemic, Wuhan. Our waiting for Godot performed through two nights act one in the first, act two in the second. We had nearly 300,000 audience in total for one performance waiting for Godot. This is a record-breaking number in Chinese theater. This is very inspiring process for all of us because when you are hit by COVID-19, theater cannot be theater anymore, but at the same time, our innovation may open up a new space, which could be online theater performance, could be virtual reality, could be anything. Our creativity has no boundary. After the success of Waiting for Godot, I published online the online theater manifesto. I wish more artists and theater practitioners could be part of this. We have to face the new reality and traditional theater might not be that solution. Currently, I am preparing our next online theater performance, The Plague 2.0. Obviously, it's going to be an adaptation of Gamyu's novel. I wish to have six actors from six different countries performing in their own cities. So The Plague 2.0 is not going to be a plague in one North African town. Instead, it's going to be about the pandemic that we're facing. I hope that more partners could join this project so that we can create it together. I know we're not as big as the stars of the One World concert, but our hearts are no smaller. I wish you guys get a chance to see this upcoming online performance, The Plague 2.0. And I wish the best of you guys. Take care. Thank you. I want to invite our two guests to join us. And let's start talking about this new form of theater that we're all on the forefront of. Good morning, good evening. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. I want to start by defining our terms. When people hear the phrase online theater, they often think about prerecorded performances from before the pandemic that different artists and companies are now sharing out from their archive. But that's not what we're talking about here. So to start us off, how do you both define online theater? What do you want your audience to anticipate when they get a ticket to an online theater performance? It really takes time. Sure. Hello, everyone. Very nice to be here with all of you. Hello, Chong, Annie. You know, I was brought up in the Russian School of Directing and one of the first things that they taught us was the fact that when you enter a new space, physical space, you have to understand what is the energy flow? What is the best way to affect audience from this stage using this architecture? If it's round audience seating or is it just direct? It's completely different ways to affect audience. And as a director, as you come into a space, you have to understand what are the best uses for this space? How can you use it the best way possible to ignite the material that you're staging? And when the pandemic hit, you know, with our new virtual space, it's the same process for me anyway. You come into a space, this time it's virtual space, and you try to understand what's the best way to affect people, to ask the questions and be effective in asking those questions and getting the response from the audience that you need in this virtual space. So be it virtual space or in-person space, I think the approach is exactly the same for me. Chong, what about for you? Yeah, as I wrote in the online theater manifesto, recorded videos of theater is not theater. It's merely bad copies and passing shadows of theater. It definitely has academic value and historical value, but it's not performative in the sense that it's happening now, it's happening in this shared virtual space. It's like we can have a conversation right now, 12 hours apart, and we can have this conversation in very different locations, but this conversation has to be here and now, here being in this Zoom room, being in this streaming being, but it has to be like theater in this way. So you can have definitely different definitions of theater, but online theater, but my definition would be, it's created online, it's created for an online audience, it's live, it's in this shared space, shared online space, be it Zoom, Facebook, virtual reality, other forms in text forms, but it has to be here and now. This is the essence of theater. Thank you. Yes, the importance of that ingredient of liveness is something that is such a huge part of online theater even when we're using technology in a different way, which leads me to my next question. I'm curious, what was your company's relationship with incorporating digital components into your work before the pandemic? Did you or your company frequently utilize digital technology in your work, or did you avoid digital technology? We had used digital technology, the stone as you mentioned this year, we had eight television sets and it was live and it was altered, it was two realities. I think it fit the play very well where there is a reality, there's the truth reality that people are digging up from the ground and there's the reality that's kind of mirroring this reality at the same time and those two realities can be completely different. What's interesting when there's a combination of live theater and the screen reality is that although the camera and you see the same things, you actually see different things. So the camera could be used as an additional reality that's created that's also absorbed and used for the themes of the play. That has been my experience. Thank you. Sean, what about for you? Yeah, this is a great question because I've been doing it since the very beginning of my career. I've been doing it actually since my pre-career years. You know, when I was a graduate student at University of Hawaii, my very first directing work was Hamletism. It's an adaptation of Hamlet, but I used heavily recorded videos and digitally created videos in that work. And in my third work, E-station, I started to use live video. Later on, I used 13 cameras in one work. For example, in this constellations that we just presented under the radar festival in 2020 in New York, we had 13 cameras, 12 of them form 12 o'clock around a round platform. And the other one was in the audience. So the two actors only needed to remember where they should walk to and which camera they should be performing to so that they can walk out a cinematic visual presentation on the stage. And at the same time, you get to see their physicality, their relationships with cameras and so forth. So I was a big fan of video-based theater when I, before I studied theater, then I very soon adopted this approach as a director. Great, it sounds like you were both in a position to really embrace this opportunity of utilizing technology in this different way. Igor, you already mentioned a little bit about the questions that a director asks themselves when they move into a space. And I'm curious, what questions do you both find you need to ask yourself when you embark on creating a piece of online theater? How is the way of making work online different what has stayed the same? For example, in the state versus Natasha Bonina, the role of the audience is very, very specific and it's such a large part of the way to experience the piece. I'm curious if figuring out a role for the audience is now a much larger part of your thinking as a director or what questions do you find that you need to ask yourself now that you're working online? In my opinion, in a lot of ways, European theater or theater in general is going, is revolutionizing again and changing. And I think one of the revolutions that has already started in theater is the role of the audience. The role of the audience is no longer, it seems like generally theater is no longer a buyer of art. It's more of a collaborator where the theme or the message of the play almost depends on the audience where the audience is absolutely needed to make the play work. So the audience is a co-conspirator or a collaborator of the piece where they make the piece. The audience make the piece. And I think it's generally what's happening in theater right now where it's going because being a buyer of theater, it's no longer interesting, it's very traditional. And I don't think it speaks to today's world. So the questions that I ask myself are exactly the same is how do we take this play and how do we effectively, professionally, effectively use the medium that we have be it a physical theater or a virtual space? But the role of the audience is very important no matter where you're staging, virtually or in person. Thank you. Chang, what about for you questions that you asked yourself specific to audience involvement or otherwise? Yeah, what's specific of this year's theater practice is that online theater is not just another technological gig. If you create such a work in 2019, it might have been, but this is 2020, we have a very heavy context in this world that every audience knows. So every audience comes to your online performance knowing that theaters are closed. How can you still create a work using this platform? So you have to keep that in mind as a creator in our waiting for Godot, definitely the whole interpretation of the Beckett's text has been directed at the current situation of the world. We have the two leading characters talking to each other in different homes. They are obviously separated by the COVID and they are waiting for something to happen so that they can free themselves. This something might be the end of lockdown in their community or in their city or the invention of the vaccine or the zero number of weekly increase of patients. It could be anything, it's more specific than the grand philosophical Godot that a Beckett has imagined and in our version, we definitely used all sorts of spaces in the actor's homes and what's so different from creating a work on the stage is that the actors were on their own. They have to manage where they move their iPad or MacBook, they have to manage what light should be added over what, over where and how do they smoothly move such a camera to the next scene? How do they make the transitions? Is the time enough? And they lead the audience explore their own living and now artistic spaces. These are very new creative experiences for us and it's also very new for our audience. Can I just say something? I think I just find it so incredibly interesting and I don't think there is a better way. I don't think there's a better way to stage right now waiting for Godot than from Wuhan. In-person theater cannot compete with this idea of waiting for Godot from the epidemic from the center of this epidemic. I think just this idea directorially just blows up the content to a completely new level where there's nothing that can compete with that right now because this is theater because it's taking a point of pain and it's taking the epicenter of all of the pain of this world and bringing something to us and we're all waiting for Godot right now. All of us are waiting for Godot, right? But it's coming from Wuhan. There's nothing in theater that can compete with this idea I think right now. There's no better way to stage waiting for Godot right now in my opinion. Then unfortunately, I didn't see the production but the idea is just incredible, right? The dramaturgy is inserted in this idea and it has to work. And I think that this is real theater. It's no matter if it's site-specific or it's, I don't know, documentary or inclusive or whatever, it's all theater and this is I think very important that theater has different representations unlike a book or a movie. A movie is just you watch it on one screen. If it's two screens, it's already video art. With theater, you can have the representations of it and so many different with actors, without actors. But the main question that theater asks is what do you express right now? What's the point of pain you express right now and what's the best medium to express it? And I think in this idea, as I'm hearing about waiting for Godot from Bukkan, there's nothing better in theater that can outthink this idea, I think, so. Our current limitations are freeing and sort of helping us create the most truthful ways of telling these stories. I'm really curious, and just from the clip, it looked like for waiting for Godot, you see a lot of online theater right now trying to make it seem like actors are all in the same space and it looked like in your Godot that you embrace the fact that each actor was in a different space entirely. With the state versus Natasha, the use of space and the sort of magic that can be created in a confined space is a very active part of the performance. I'm curious, how has your thinking about space and its limitations and its freedoms changed as you continue to work in the online theater medium? Has anything, have you noticed a shift in how you're thinking? I'm just curious of how that's all changed over the course of the couple of months that you've gotten a chance to develop this. Zhang, do you wanna start us off? Oh yeah, I think a big realization for us is that what is presence, what is here and now? You know, what is here? For example, what is the here in our conversation now? Is it in my room? Do you have to be in my room to be here? Or do you have to be in your rooms in order to be watching us? No, we're all part of this. We're all here in this virtual space. We're all here and now. This is the big realization. So when you create a work for online theater, you don't have to be pretending that the audience and the performers are in the same room and you don't have to be pretending that the performers are in the same room because they're not. There's no way that you can create such a reality. The real reality is that we're in different cities, we're in different homes, but we're here and now in this conversation. Thank you. Igor, what about for you? Any discoveries about the use of space that evolved over the course of working this way? Well, when I started again, we started rehearsing State versus Natasha, we rehearsed it and then about two, three days before the opening, we understood that it's not working. None of it is working because for the issue that the audience didn't take part in it and it was we're just competing with film and this medium is completely different. We can't be competing with film. Film has much bigger budgets than me in my living room. So we have to insert something where the audience takes part and the audience plays a role, the audience is active, it's happening here and now live and the audience knows that they can be called upon to participate. Therefore, some audience starts out with a drink like this and then by the end they move in because they know that they can be there needed for the production. Unlike when you're watching Netflix, you're not necessarily needed for the film to work. Thank you. So I know the audience hasn't gotten a chance to see this yet, but you created and released an online theater manifesto, which I encourage everyone to sit down and take a look at. And in the manifesto, you state that theater has been big surprise revealed to be non-essential. I'm curious what are your thoughts on how theater can become essential again? Yeah, I think every artist right now is trying to answer that question and we see a lot of just by looking at the theater section of New York Times. I can see a lot of answers including the performance of a state versus Natasha Benina and some other online theater works. We're all answering this question. This is really good. We haven't stopped. We haven't been waiting for the miracle to happen. We all provide what we think about the current situations and we are all in the way creating something like what Peter Brook has coined as immediate theater. We have to make something happen. We have to make it work. And my version, my answers are waiting for Godot in April and the plague 2.0 in 2021. In that work, I'm imagining a performer in Wuhan and a performer in New York and a performer in Europe and three other performers in three other different countries. So it's going to be really about this pandemic. It's about here and now. It's about the problems we're facing and the problems that theater artists are facing. So this is definitely, as Igor has said, this is definitely not filming that screen. This is what theater people can do. Thank you. Igor, what about for you? Do you, I don't know if you agree that theater has been revealed to be non-essential in these times, but what do you think needs to happen for theater to become the essential force that it potentially could be in the future? Is there any steps that you see being taken collectively or individually to make theater much more essential to a larger perception? It's a difficult question. I don't know what it needs to do. I think what theater needs to do is relate to people, as Chung said, in today's world here and now and speak to them about today's truths and in the forms of today's language where theater has to have the breath of today, the intake and the inhale and the exhale of the atmosphere that we live in today. The worst thing that can happen is we reopen theaters and somebody finds a vaccine. We reopen theaters and we go back to traditional theater as is, then it becomes irrelevant. It has to stay relevant. Look at how the weapons of the world have changed so much since the 50s, but theater a lot of times has remained the same. Weapons that kill each other. So it has to stay today. It has to be relevant. Then it becomes essential if it's relevant. If it's a relic of the past, if it's a museum, then it's harder to raise money for that. I totally agree. If you look at the major theater movements in history, it's all about the here and now, in their times. Theater is never the same after World War II, for example. Theater shouldn't be the same after and during this pandemic. We're going to move to a new genre, a new ism after we come out of this. We're going to need to. Another question that also comes from our audience is what do you wish to see incorporated into theater in the future? What have we created an experience now in online theater that we hope we continue to carry over? I suppose both philosophically and perhaps practically and technically. Igor, do you want to take the first crack? Sure. I think the main thing, the main approach, I also teach at Boston Conservatory Acting Laboratory. One of the main takeaways I think for last semester for my students was to remain flexible, to remain creative in any circumstance. Because we have to be generative artists. We can't be theater, okay, this is the way we've been doing theater. Theater has to be reinvented every day for it to be alive. And that's the main takeaway, I think, for my students and for me. And I should be for the rest of the theater world. Theater has to be relevant today and flexible and express today's world with today's media. Not complaining, but using it as a springboard. Using it as a springboard for new inventions, new inventions of theater where it speaks to me. Where Godot never comes to Wuhan. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think what we have to note is that it's not easy at the same time to make your theater practice flexible. It's not easy as a theater artist to make yourself immediate. And that's a big challenge for any of us. It's not that I'm speaking right now. It would mean that I have, you know, I have solved all the problems. No, I also have my artistic past. I also have that tradition of theater heavily in myself, in my brains, in my everyday practice. But we have to question ourselves every day. We have to, you know, ask again and again, is it current? Am I innovating? Are we speaking the immediate truth to the audience? We have to ask ourselves a lot of questions like that in order to, you know, be here and now. And I think, can I just mention one more thing? And I think the worst would be two possible bad outcomes would be to do theater as it was done before the pandemic. And the second one, no, it's exactly the opposite. We should do a lot of cameras in our productions. Maybe no cameras in our productions. But it's their approach that's very important. It's not about using more technology or less technology. Technology is very difficult to use and very difficult to make it relevant because technology in theater, you know, it has to be, it has to be just perfect in a in-person production for it to work because it has been done so many times. It's also become somewhat of a tradition. The takeaway is in no way. Okay, let's use more technology in our productions. It's only a way, it's only a tool to express something meaningful. Only if you cannot live without it, then you should use it. But the takeaway is in the flexibility, is in the approach, is in sensing, is inhaling and exhaling today's world. A question that I hear a lot floating around when different theater practitioners get together is once it's safe to assemble again, will online theater continue to exist as its own art form? Or will it be folded back into theater that happens in a theater space? Igor, I've heard you speak in the past a little bit about where you might see the future of online theater, specifically for your company. Would you speak a little bit to that? Do you see online theater sticking around as its own entity or being folded in completely to theater as we used to know it? I think it's definitely here to stay. The proof of concept, look at 300,000 people came to see. That's a pretty good house. Yeah. It's a pretty good house. I don't know many theaters in Boston that have that large of a house. And, you know, so the proof of concept has happened. And I think if we like it or not, it's going to exist. You know, there's going to be better versions of it, and there's going to be not so great versions just like in live theater. There's better versions and not so great. I think this is going to continue. I think it's convenient. I think it's equitable. And I also think it's another door to the theater. You know, in one of our productions of State vs. Natasha, I had an audience member mentioned that, you know, I have a, I have a young daughter. I have, I have my wife and it's very difficult for us to get out to, to see theater in downtown in Boston, where ticket prices are 100 bucks each, then we have to get a higher babysitter than we have to hire, get there, get back, find parking and so forth. And it's the commitment is so big for us right now to, to go to the theater. And for me to just, and I haven't been to the theater in a while. And she says for me to open up a computer and see a show, the commitment is so small because I could close the computer. So as, as one of the, another audience members formulated it is, it's a new door to the theater. I think it's a new door to the theater where people can examine. And she also said, you know, now I'm interested in your aesthetic. I want to come to see your in person shows. Otherwise, she would never have made her way out to meet the Massachusetts, if anyone knows where that is. Tom, what about for you once there's a vaccine and we're in the future, do you see online theater as becoming part of your practice, separate from theater that might happen in a live in a theater, or is this something that you see yourself folding together in the future. I definitely see a future of online theater because we can do so many things in our lives online. We can manage work online. We can talk to people in another city online. We can, you know, save our most precious data pictures, memories online. We can do so many things that we cannot do offline in, in the manner of being online. So it's the same. We can do so many theatrical things online, which we cannot do offline with some things. For example, you can, you can talk to the audience in theater. Yes. But you can talk to the audience in another way in online theater, just as we saw, just as I saw in state versus Natasha, the work talk to the online theater audience in a, in a way that cannot be done in a real theater. So definitely online theater has a future. It has its own aesthetics, but maybe not in 2020 yet, but with more artistic practice from all over the world, I can see that. Great question came in from the audience. And both of you have already spoken to this a little bit. Where do you see online theater in five years? And are there, what are the barriers to getting there? So this is, this is online theater, not in the immediate future, but with real staying power. Do either one of you want to take a stab at imagining what that future online theater looks like? I just, I cannot address that question directly, but I cannot get rid of this image from my mind from time to time, that one day a performance, an online theater performance may happen in the space, whereas the audience are watching it from this planet or another planet, or the online theater happens somewhere and the audience are watching it in the North Pole. I seriously had these images in my mind. And we're at the beginning, perhaps, of World War II, and we don't know how long the war will last. Maybe the vaccine would come in early 21. Maybe it comes, the effective one comes 10 years later. You don't know. So you don't know the development of online theater. If the worst scenario happens, then online theater might be the only legitimate theater form for several years, which is sad, but it's an opportunity of online theater. And again, this is only an opportunity for online theater. Without this opportunity, I would still imagine that there's a big future for online theater because it has its own aesthetics. Thank you. Igor, what about for you, five years in the future, what is online theater? I started dreaming the Chong's idea and I already, so I had to come back to earth a little bit. But I think it's a beautiful point at the time. But also, I think our theater, our small theater company is based in neither Massachusetts, which is outside of Boston. And the state versus Natasha, again, in a lot of ways deals with systems failing young people. And to speak to that and have a person, not from a North Pole, and thankfully even Chong came to see, but from Dorchester or from Roxbury, people that maybe don't drive, that would never have come to see that show from nearby. And that maybe can't afford to see the show. This makes it much more equitable. And I would never have these audiences from, from 15, 20 minute drive for us. I would never get these audiences from Dorchester, from Roxbury that come and see something new. It makes it equitable, which is something that I hope this type of virtual performances will bring attention to. Right. And it's something that the theater is actively always trying to work towards. And now it might actually achieve it in a different way. The audience member was also wondering about barriers to success of online theater and, you know, other than hardware, software, technology, do either of you get a sense of just attitudes and disbeliefs of the art form as a barrier to the success of online theater as an art form, as a medium. I'm sure all of you, both of you have encountered conversations about people who do not believe that online theater has value. It's just a placeholder. So do you, do you have any sense of the barriers of what audience members need to embrace in order for online theater to drive and to flourish? Do you want to try? Yeah, as Igor has said, seriously, online theater is breaking class barriers. And very often, especially in the West, you see not only class barriers in theater, but also a very specific age group and ethnic group are watching theater, but maybe not other age groups and other ethnic groups are watching theater. Online theater might be an opportunity for more audience to be involved. And it may open up new spaces, not only the aesthetic ones, but also viewership, participation, democracy in the art form. It has a lot of opportunities. Yeah, Igor, what about for you? Any barriers that you anticipate philosophically? As Chong said, there's a Russian fable, one, never mind. So I don't know barriers. There's so many barriers for artists in life. It would be strange for Chong and I not to have barriers. It's impossible. And the proof of concept, 300,000 people came to see, what else do you want to, when are you going to have a house? So the proof of concept has already happened. The people that don't believe in it, that's fine. It's not about belief. It's about what you want to do and how you think, what do you think about expressing the play in a specific, using a specific medium. It's about making an artistic choice. And it's my artistic choice. I don't have to have people tell me that it's a good artistic choice or not, but it's my artistic choice to express this point of thought through or love or passion through this medium. Thank you. And another amazing thing about the online theater art form is it allows for connection and community between artists that otherwise may not have crossed paths. With that in mind, I'm curious, do you have questions for each other that you want to voice in this space? I know Chong has had an opportunity to watch the state versus Natasha. We just saw clips from Godot. So there's not been a lot of time to really study up on each other's aesthetic. But just in hearing each other speak, do you have questions about process for each other? Yeah, Igor, what's next? What's next? So it's a secret. No, it's actually, I'm really, and I just heard that you did display recently or somewhat recently. I'm really curious about Hamlet Machine by Heine Müller. And I think it's very timely and it relates with the civil unrest that's happening today in our society. And it's kind of grassroots, you know, upheaval of some sort. It also is, you know, in Hamlet Machine there's a character, Hamlet, that takes off the masks and says, you know what, Hamlet no longer expresses me. And I think doing it especially with the Shakespeare company in partnership would be ideal. What about you, Chong? Yeah, besides the plague 2.0 for 21, I'm also preparing a cyber performance, also online, using the hottest game of the year, Animal Crossing New Horizons. I want to tell a story about class and consumerism in contemporary China, using this very lighthearted, cute world of Animal Crossing. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful idea. I went and researched it after you mentioned it in our talk because I had no idea about this game. I think it's a great idea. There's a virtual theater attempt by a company in Russia that did, I think they did the cherry orchard using Minecraft. Yeah, I saw that. So it's all the characters and you kind of, they built their own theater virtually. So you go into your theater, into this theater, this actual theater, model of this theater, you roam around, you can roam around just like in a game and then you can pick a seat for yourself and you're watching. I think the idea is interesting and I don't know, I don't know if it worked all the way, but yeah, yeah, it's a great experimentation. Yeah. Great. We're almost out of time. I want to leave a moment to see if there are any other questions from the audience while we wait for any questions to come in. I'm curious throughout all of this, what has been the most surprising? What has been the most surprising thing that has happened in both of your journeys in making online theater, whether it's positive or problematic, what is a surprise that has revealed itself to you in the past couple of months since we went into lockdown? I'm looking for the light bulb over either of your heads for who to throw that to first, but Igor, do you feel like you want to take that one as a surprise? Well, the surprise was, of course, when you put it on the play, you never know what's going to happen. You never know how the audience is going to use it. It seems good to you, but you never know. And with this, with audience members, and Chunk has much more experience in this, but with audience members, they start chatting in the beginning of the show, and hello from China, from Australia, from Egypt. What time is it in Egypt? It's 4 a.m. And they tune in to see your show. And it's just an incredible feeling. And the thing is that I see a lot of YouTubers have already gone past through this because they do their live feeds and live things and people appear from different parts of the world. But in a theater production to have audience from all over the world, this is just a completely new feeling for me and such a huge surprise. I mean, logically, it's not surprising because, okay, if people are interested, they're going to buy tickets, but it was just to see people from all over the world in my show and saying hello from Cairo and from Mexico City. It's just an incredible feeling. Thank you. Chunk, what about for you something that's been surprising in the past couple of months of making art? Yeah, especially in the creative process of waiting for Godot. You know, I had this vague picture of what online theater could be and what our waiting for Godot could be and we stepped into this exploration. But in that creative process, we found so much pleasure in creating stuff using this platform. You can do all sorts of things and the actors, they transformed their own homes into performing areas. And we rented two cars to capture what's special on the street and what's special in Wuhan and we really captured the vibe of April 2020 and we really enjoyed that creative process. This is really something besides, you know, the audience member and audience participation and so forth. I found something that has been missing for a period of time in my career. And to end things, any brief pieces of advice you want to give to young or established artists who have been a little nervous and trepidatious for attempting to make work online? Any piece of advice you can give them to at least dip their toes into the water of online theater? Yeah, I would suggest try it. Try it, approach it. But forget everything you know about theater and kind of relearn things as you go. Don't try to put in theater into this. It's not going to work. The acting is different. The directing is different. And the thing is that you have the tools that you've been given by your studies and your experience, but you kind of also have to forget it and relearn things, re-approach things, question things that you already know. See, forget that you're a theater artist. You're an artist. Go forth and create. Thank you. I just want to say be bold and be wild. Yes. Be bold and be wild. I think that's a great way to end things. Igor Chong, I want to thank both of you for taking the time to share your experiences and your journey with us. I want to let everybody who watching know that you have an opportunity to catch state versus Natasha tomorrow night and Sunday night. Tickets are available at artsemerson.org. Thank you so much, everyone. Go out be brave, be wild, make art and have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye. Have a good day.