 for all of you who are new in the room. Just so you know, unrehearsed futures has started off as a response to the pandemic where we were just asking ourselves questions of, well, what the hell are we doing as a drama schools? I had a separate conversation with Sarah, a separate conversation with somebody from the University of Institute of Arts in Barcelona from Oxford Drama School. And I realized everyone was saying the same things. I was trying to figure out what we as a drama school here in Mumbai needed to do. And then what happened as a result of that is we just realized that there were common conversations that we could all have together. So we started to have these conversations. They were aptly named unrehearsed futures by my amazing communications director back at the time. And after curating eight or nine of them back to back, I was like, I can't curate at this rate. And we were joined by the lovely Amy Russell from Embodied Poetics who created a beautiful second half of the first season called Responsibility. And then the second season, the conversation, of course, expanded to a much wider scope than what the drama schools do. And it was this idea of what is theater's response to this ever-changing, ever-disruptive future. And what can we do? And lots of amazing ideas and conversations have started to happen, a lot of healthy navel gazing, but almost to the point of now we feel like we are at a place that there's almost a palpable sense in the room of in this ongoing conversation that there is something here that one can turn from thought into impulse. And I think we're on the cusp of that as we hit this 11th talk. So just in case you want to have your mind blown the way mine has been blown, I feel like I've come back to school with these classes, with these talks. And all of these talks are live. They're all available on the unrehearsed futures website, which is at the Drama School Mumbai website. There's a page called Conversations. Every talk is recorded there. Falguni Rao, who's managing this affair, also writes amazing reportage pieces after each talk and those get put up in case you want to do a five-page read instead of listening to a one-hour talk. But there is a really solid dynamic amount of knowledge, thought, and information out there that really does spark the imagination further. And I hope you guys will all enjoy it. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to my curator in crime, Ngani. Hello, thank you, Jayhan. Hi, folks. Lovely to see you all here again. It's a rather cold evening in Ketan, which is why I'm wearing a giant scarf and I may look overdressed to you in the Northern Hemisphere. And an unusual time for us. Normally we do the 10 o'clock in the morning sludge, but we are in the evening today. And I'm joined for tonight's discussion by Sarah Matchett. Here's a colleague of mine at the University of Cape Town in the CCDPS. She's our director. She is also one of the founding members of the Mother Tongue Project. You hear a little more about later on. I'm also joined by Phoebe Kisulyi from the African Gender Institute, also at the University of Cape Town, who has been doing work with Sarah and Phoebe, sorry, not Phoebe, pardon me, Yaluia Clark, also from the African Gender Institute, who is having a bit of a technical problem, but will join us as soon as she's able to, who are all working collectively on the Global Grace Project, which is an international project that Phoebe, I believe, is going to briefly introduce to us in a second. I, oh, Sarah, I'm not gonna explore anybody under any buses quite yet, but I guess thinking about the conversation you had last week, which was really robust and we were trying to kind of think through the nuts and bolts of what this work that we are envisaging in this particular forum might look like, what it means, and kind of arriving on recognition, perhaps that we need to think in more concrete terms around what it is we hope to produce in this, I guess, what I'm looking for, this almost utopian kind of moment where we're reaching for a sense of planetarity, of possibility and plurality, as the ground in for a kind of ethics for thinking into the future. It just so happens that the topic that we're going to be discussing tonight anyway is around this relationship between performance and social justice work. And so the project that our three kind of initiating interlocutors work on, as you hear in the second, uses performance as a way of beginning to engage with communities, quote, unquote, at the margins. And I went to hand over to, ah, Yali was there as well. Yali was not joined us. Hello, Yali O'Clock. Yeah, so if one of the global grace folks wouldn't mind just giving us a quick introduction to what the project is, what it seeks to do and the kinds of problems that it kind of seeks to engage in and then we'll hopefully move quite swiftly on into a discussion of the kind of various questions that emerge out of that space. Phoebe, Sarah, Yaliwe, who's going to take the hook? I propose Yaliwe. Yaliwe just settled technically into the room, but Yaliwe will try. Yeah, if there's anything I miss, Phoebe and Sarah, please step in. Yes, so this global grace project, as the words imply, it is global. It is actually involving communities of researchers and activists across, I think it's five continents. So we've got a team here in South Africa, which is Sarah, me and Phoebe are part of. There's a team in Bangladesh, Brazil, the Philippines, Mexico and in UK. And I'll talk a little bit about each as well, but overall it's a project that does something interesting. It looks firstly at equality as a cultural artifact. Yeah, so each of us investigates the various ways that equalities are made, but also contested in different parts of the world. And the other thing it does is it looks at the ways in which cultures might best be understood as practices through which people create the worlds in which we inhabit. So we investigate how people's creative practices challenge inequality and also engender new possibilities for more equitable ways of living together. And it's tough work. I mean, each of the teams tries to really be creative in also recognizing people's, what we call it people's hard-won achievements in terms of this ongoing struggle of what it means to live on the margins of economies, on the margins of social systems and each of the projects works with people who kind of live in very difficult circumstances. So the teams, we're gonna be talking about our team that works very closely with a group of sex workers that are part of an NGO here in South Africa called the Sex Workers Advocacy and Education and Task Team, SWET, which is an NGO that has for many, many years, I forget how many now, but has been pushing for the rights, legal rights of sex workers to practice sex work. So they push very strongly for decriminalization of sex work. And they do that, they push for it, yes, in the very typical ways inputting into legal processes, pushing government officials, members of parliament to discuss legal systems and how the law needs to change, but also have been very creative in pushing for the de-stigmatization of sex work and looking at sex workers work. And there they've created some very interesting forms of what they call creative activism. So with us as a team, we partnered with this group of sex workers, which is a well-functioning, quite large NGO, when you think of how NGOs are in terms of size, I think they're quite big in terms of staffing and network of sex workers on the continent and also in South Africa. We work with that team and we as myself and Phoebe located at the African Gender Institute and Sarah at the Center for Theater Dance and Performance Studies. And we call our, we've, we call our, what we call work package or research project. It's called participatory theater and the production of cultures of equality amongst sex workers in South Africa. We'll talk more about that. Bangladesh, the team in Bangladesh looks at what they call working women in men's world. So they're looking at female construction workers, visualizing the work of female construction workers, really working on, in a very male dominated masculine space and what it means to, to work on the margins. Yes, of a male dominated, actually particular kind of economic system. Brazil looks at what they're calling decolonizing knowledge and masculinities. And they're looking at that through street art, dance and dance in the favelas in Brazil. So in the informal, urban very densely populated, quite militarized in terms of the way the government responds to favelas, but also the kinds of violences in the favelas. So their entry is street art and dance in terms of the way in which they're looking at equality as an artifact. The Philippines looks at what they call making life lovable and they're looking at digital and literary productions of equality amongst LGBTQ young people in the Philippines. And they're working a lot with poetry, engaging with poetry. Mostly I think I'd say amongst gay men, but maybe that would have changed over the years. We haven't been interacting closely due to COVID. Mexico looks at creating cultures of equality through the migrant museum. They call Moomi and they work with indigenous communities of the Chiapas in Mexico. Very interesting because they're taking the museum away from this, the way we usually think of museums, this formal structure that collects artifacts and puts them on display separate from the communities from whence they came. They actually create the museum in the midst of the communities, the indigenous communities they work with and they focus on migrancy, actually the way in which people migrate and how that has actually a certain kind of migrancy created by capitalist corporate industry and how it has created certain kinds of migrant labor in the Chiapas. So that's a really interesting one. And United Kingdom UK looks at what they call space invading curatorial practice and the making of the global museum of equality. And they look at critiquing the mainstream museum, particularly those in the global north in UK and how that museum is actually implicated in colonial histories, ongoing colonial histories. I would argue a lot of the artifacts from the former British colonies are still sitting in these museums and really about contesting that space and alternative narratives for that. And each of the projects is also contributing to a museum, like a display of the creative pieces we have made, we have co-created in each of our teams and to have those pieces in conversation with each other was the plan and then COVID happened. So we're trying to see how we can actually put them in one space online. That was a mouthful. Did I miss anything Sarah and Phoebe, please? A beautiful mouthful, really rich and rigorous mouthful. We love a mouthful. Thank you anyway. And Sarah and Phoebe by all means, feel free to kind of step in here if you have anything to add. But I guess one of the things that excites me and strikes me about the global grace project itself, as it's conceived, is that in all of these kinds of different sites where these different, I guess, research groups are working art or what you're calling creative activism seems to be the undergirding impulse that is driving a lot of these interventions either into kind of structures of inequality or institutions that sustain those structures. So it strikes me on the one hand and we can pass this any number of ways that firstly there's some kind of value that is being recognized around creative practice as a way of intervening, speaking back to somehow responding to these kind of global structures by which or in which we are all entangled. There's a slight irony there as well, right? Is that we certainly are all in institutions. We arrive at this work via our institutional connections, via those kinds of networks. And it's of no small irony to me or our very is not lost that in some ways we're kind of using or thinking about creative activism as a way of engaging institutional critique. And in the same moment are still engaged within the politics, the frameworks, I guess maybe the ontology, right? Of having to work within these kind of institutional structures of frameworks. So I guess as a provocation, a question to ask, I'm wondering whether we can talk a little about how we perceive that relationship and how it may reproduce certain kinds of forms of power or reify them. And then more importantly, what kinds of alternatives, performance or the use of creative kind of activists or entities that term now kind of allows us to or kind of alternatives performing or working creatively allows us to imagine, right? And also as a secondary question is the degree to which we feel that practice of imagining may be sufficient given the size and scale of the problems that face the people with whom we work generally also outside of those communities. So there's that relationship as well, right? There's a lot of points of access to these spaces too. I already have two questions or comments in the chat run from Jehan. The idea of creative practice being an essential part of healthy social practice is so important. How do we make it ubiquitous? What do you mean by ubiquitous though, Jehan? Hi, it just goes back to my, how do we make it understood by, it's part of the bigger question that I have, which is how do we make it where, where everyone understands the role of creativity in finding voice, building community, speaking back to power, all of those things. So when I'm talking about it, it shouldn't be in the hands of just people who have trained in creativity or who have had access to or have the capacity for creative expression. How do we make almost creative expression a right because it's a social tool? Thank you. And Leserco's comments seems to be gesturing in that same sort of direction and maybe picking up what I've thrown down, which is struggling with this idea of arts activism and questions rather to utility and what it places at stake. Yeah, I guess instinctively I want to do the thing that as theater practitioners are quite prone to doing which is, well, it's performance, right? It's this kind of beautiful utopian thing that allows me to kind of inhabit the space of the other. And, you know, those are very, I think, simple, perhaps overly simple ways of thinking through what we're doing when we're performing. And I wonder if there's a way of deepening that inquiry a little. Sure, we are being alerted to, you know, subjects in their locations and there's similarity with differences to us. But much like Leserco's suggesting, I'm wondering what there is beyond that kind of immediate function that we automatically assume theater or performance or creativity is always already fulfilling, which is opening our awareness towards the other. There are lots of questions there. So I'm going to... Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think I'm going to start off if I can be in the other way and then perhaps you can jump in at some point just to speak to your questions and bogey me around kind of the hierarchical structures within which we operate. And, you know, this project is framed as a research project. And the grant, the funding comes from the UK. It comes out of Goldsmiths. So the principle of primary investigators are from Goldsmiths University. And so, you know, and it's a fantastic project and it's given us three years to three to four years to really engage, it's quite a kind of, I think it's given us the time and space to engage with the people who we've been working with in this instance, the suite and with sex workers to form a sex workers theater group. And, but that having said, you know, the project has a lifespan which is dependent on funding. And in fact, the project is drawing towards a closed and initially the idea was to get us to a point where we could launch an independent sex worker theater company, a first in South Africa. And yes, that still is the plan, that still is the dream, but, you know, we're not quite there yet. So the big question for me, and I guess it's an ethical question really, what happens beyond this research project? What happens to the sex worker theater group beyond the research project? And so, you know, it's, yes, we've kind of trying to figure out ways of ensuring that it continues and that it's housed within sweat. But there are all sorts of things like funding that we need to ensure the kind of the ongoingness of the project. But essentially, as academics, as practitioners, our role, myself, Yalu and Phoebe in the project comes to an end at the end of this year. You know, so it's a kind of an ethical and then in a way one goes on to the next research project because that is what the university requires of us. That's what the hierarchical structure requires of us. So, you know, I find myself kind of faced, I find that I'm in a little bit of a dilemma, but I think Phoebe has an alternative view, which I think when we were in conversation the other day, really helped me to think through that. So Phoebe, I'm gonna hand the pattern over to you. Thank you, Sarah. But yeah, indeed, Bongani and everybody else raises key issues here around contradictions. Give me a context or space that we're working in without contradictions, knowing that we are all embedded in various hierarchical power structures, capitalism, gender inequality, racism. And yeah, now we have the university and the NGO dynamic playing relation to research and research funds coming from the West. So there's a lot of contradictions and interesting power dynamics that are displaced, but re-assert themselves in various ways. But speaking to the question of sustainability that has been thrown at me, I mean, having closely watched, and for me, I'm a gender studies scholar. This was my first encounter with theater and performance. So it was an incredibly, incredibly learning curve throughout the entire project. And having closely observed or interacted or being part of the group over three years, not in the kind of work we do. And indeed, Sarah and I have written a couple of articles around this, is in relation to the question of sustainability. I would like to call on Jackie Jobs-Notion that she works with in relation to and building culture elements with the kind of what she does that engages the body and with that kind of interaction. It interrupts inherited cultural elements such as, you know, related to structural inequality. And with that, I point to the element of healing, which is very much embedded in the kind of what we do. And this is something that will remain with the theater group. As a material means that they can draw on over the six theater group members. The material means that they can draw on moving forward and does not necessarily play within the framework of finances or money or economic aspects within which we root and locate sustainability. So going back to Jackie Jobs-Notion of and building culture epistemologies, that where one is producing new epistemologies in relation to what it means to be a sex worker and living on the street and how to navigate that in a way that deals with trauma, which is an aspect that's gravely neglected given the circumstances that, you know, the circumstances, you know, the human condition as a result of structural inequality that has placed sex workers in the margins. So, yeah, these new epistemologies live on in the body. And that's my way of looking at this element of sustainability as opposed to, you know, the economic aspect in relation to that. Thanks, Phoebe. Let's see your hand. I'm going to circle back to you in a second if you would just give me a moment. Yeah, I love that we've landed in this place of sustainability on this question. And what I'm hearing the suggestion here is that there are two kinds of tracks that we tend to think about sustainability in terms of, right, is the institution which demands deliverables, outputs, research papers in our field, a play here and there. But perhaps what the suggestion here is maybe we need to begin thinking about sustainability along other routes that perhaps remain invisible within the kind of capitalistic institutional framework that kind of codifies sustainable things in terms of the reproducibility of products, right? I know that one of the things, you know, and Phoebe touched on it around the work that Jackie Jo was doing with this crew, right, which is using Botoro to impart not just a kind of technical exercise on how to move through the body, but they're working to philosophize for a better word, right? What it means to be on the body and engaging with all these politics while they're doing it. So I wonder if there's any profits in thinking about the intangible, I guess, things that we're doing in performance as perhaps the place where we find a version of something we might call sustainability. Because the performance may end, the intervention may end, but what they're left with more than just skills is a critical apparatus that they can deploy in other scenarios and in other spaces in their lives beyond just the moment of performing in the theater. I'd like to come back to that idea at some point. Yes, sir. Sorry, I realized I started speaking while I was muted. This is a trigger warning like this whole conversation around activism, optimism and the sustainability thereof is a trigger for me personally. Because on one hand, I believe that to be an artist is to be an activist and does not need to be overstated. Is that to do this kind of work is to do activist work. Is that to attempt to content, conscientize is always to be an activist, right? But there is a facet of practitioners that calls themselves this specific thing. And I think my prior question was asking, what does that mean? What are we actually doing when we call ourselves activists or activists? So when we speak of creative activism or whatnot, all of the words, there are many words for it. But what is it actually? And what is the desired outcome of it that sits outside of just being an artist? Because my frame of thought is that being an artist is already doing that work. So there is that, that is a struggle for me. The second thing is, and it points to this question of sustainability as well. And Camilly, please, please correct me if I say your name wrong at any point. Camilly also speaks about this, is this idea of romanticizing our art and overplaying the hand of our art, so to speak. But also stretching the hand of our art beyond its limits. I think we take our art and we put a particular kind of pressure on it to do something that it maybe cannot do. And maybe that's not its job. Maybe it's not meant to do that. Maybe it's not meant to activize as opposed to conscientize. Maybe it's not meant to incite as opposed to make you think. Maybe it's not meant to, but I think this idea of arts activism, or I hate all of these words, so I'll always keep coming back to that. I think this idea puts a particular kind of pressure that is about doing outcome. That is about an actioning beyond the moment of impact, beyond sharing space and communing in exchange and in thought and in sharing. What Phoebe talks about, we have left something real and personal and moving with the sex workers that they can always take with them, is fricking powerful and that is what we do. But I think that this idea of activism or whatever, those buzzwords that I keep using, I think it takes away from the work that we do, which is the work of the soul. And there is a soul thing that happens in this exchange. I've seen quite a few of those productions and some friends have even directed these works. And I think the conversations I've had with individual sex workers one-on-one after those productions have been monumental, but because we put this pressure on the art to do this thing that is beyond its scope, which is to active in a particular kind of way, I think we neglect the actual work that this work is doing, which is making humans experience humanity and sit in a human experience together, right? I don't know, I'm rambling now, so I'm gonna stop. But I think there's a thing there around activism or activity, activity, let's use that word because they have been rude. Activity versus actively engaging. Camelia is clapping because he and Jehan also in the chat are on the same sort of thread and I absolutely feel the point that you're making because I was wondering the same thing. To what extent are we to use the word gently, our anxieties around what our art is doing and our anxieties around its value more perhaps about our anxieties around how intelligible that value is to people beyond ourselves and beyond the people whom the art is engaging with. To use Camelia's word, ego, right? I would start by saying, stop calling it our art. I'm sorry, you're just saying that. When I come in here, I just wanted to respond to Liseho. So Liseho, me and you, we're on the same page. There's this binary that sits up between what is now called applied theater and theater. Like, what is it? It's all theater, right? And it sits somewhere on the continuum and it's all about some kind of shift in one, in the performer, in the self and in other and whether it lands or not, we don't know, sure. So I completely agree with you and just to be a little bit anecdotal when we started the project that I was initially asked if I would come on board to work on a, with foreign theater. And I said, no, no, we don't, this is, let's, I agreed to include participatory in the thing. So participatory theater and performance. But, you know, and the training itself, for example, you know, Jackie Job was mentioned. We included Bouto as a modality, for example. So I am completely on the same page. I think, and maybe Yaliwa can come in at this point. I think that the term creative activism is, comes, it's something that SWIT has named that they do, right? As part of their activism, which is very much activism and label it is activism, right? Around decriminalization, destigmatization. And so my understanding that there's some kind of coming together of SWIT as our NGO partners and active partner in this, coming together of the two. And I think it's definitely necessary and I think it's something we need to challenge. But I think it's kind of come out of that. And maybe Yaliwa can add to that just now. But the other thing I wanted to say, you know, I think, what did I want to say? Something about what Phoebe was saying. And, you know, how can we, how do we know what you were saying and what Kamiliwa was saying is how can we, you know, are we expecting too much from this thing, this art, this art of ours, you know? But I think for us, it's been quite, you know, in the project we have, like every time we meet, we have a check-in and a check-out and there's a lot of checking in and checking out. We have an arts therapist who works with the group regularly. And over and over again, this idea of how the work has landed in the bodies of the sex workers who are part of the sex worker theater group is that there has been some kind of shift. There's been some kind of different understanding of the body and how the body navigates this world that is grossly unfair and grossly unequal. So I think a lot of the, yeah. I mean, I'm not sure how one, you know, how one measures success, but I think a lot of the reflections speak to this. So yes, what Phoebe is saying, there's a, you know, the things that live in the body, the resonance of the work that we've been doing over the past three years is in a sense, speaks to this notion of sustainability, but a different kind of sustainability, not necessarily something that can be monetized, you know. But Yaliwa, do you wanna come in just because you have a longer history with sweat around this notion of creative activism? Longer history with sweat, yes. Not the notion of creative activism. I think I learned from sweat what they think creative activism is. And coming back to the point about institutions, right? Which institutions are we embedded in and what's the background ontological framing of these institutions? So if you look at the NGOs sector and the way it has evolved, it's very much about setting up an institution. And from a feminist perspective, I see more and more it's a liberal feminist kind of, you know, sitting too comfortably within a utilitarian kind of, we do this, there's individuals who work together to achieve that, to change that in society, quite linear and structured working very much within legal discourse. That's very dominant in liberal feminisms. And sweat is there, right? So sweats have a labor rights argument about sex work is work. It's a labor rights argument and it's very much reliant on legal discourse. And it's very much reliant on a perception of social justice that relies on individualism, right? Even though in fact they are articulating other things, but their official narrative is that. And when they're talking about using what they have came to co-creative activism before I met the framing creative activism is about using working with ways of communicating this message they have about decriminalization of sex work outside the way in which NGOs usually do it. Now, how do NGOs usually do it? We hold workshops, we have campaigns on social media, we have pickets, you know, we have what goes on. And I'm saying we because I also see myself in that sector. So what's happening? So it was that framing of creative activism looking at how to be alternative from the perspective of the NGOs sector, which for me in this articulation is a liberal form of feminism around sex work and then saying, how do we do things differently? And then come in the idea, how do we be creative? How can we be creative in this form of activism, this form of the idea that we can change society through these roots, legal reform, for example, which requires de-stigmatization. So even the version of de-stigmatization which is what is talking about is about the kind of de-stigmatization that would enable parliamentarians to say, yes, we can decriminalize sex work. So there needs to be an understanding that sex work is like any other profession that requires, you know, that needs to be protected as a form of work that needs fair working conditions. These are the words that, you know, so this is where that framing comes from Leseco. And for me who knows nothing about that or knew nothing about performance arts, you know, I look at Sarah and I sit in those sessions and I'm like, okay, it's been a huge learning curve for me because then I've been able to see myself in this NGO-like institutional framing and see the limits of the discourse that we have and also the limits of the ways of being that we have that do not deeply engage with embodied transformation which is what I've experienced and seen that this is a radical embodied shifts happening whether or not decriminalization happens, right? And that's, so institutionally we're shifting narratives or maybe not getting stuck. So, you know, and then you come as a researcher looking to think and talk about this in intellectual discourse. And that's another, you know, that's another combination of words and framing that we grappling with and Sarah and Phoebe has written amazing articles. You know, what does this mean for social change, radical social change outside the framing of legal discourse that sweat has? Yeah. Thanks, everyone. The word radical has come up and it's pricking my memory of last week's conversation where I very lazily and perhaps in elegantly throughout a term in trying to kind of grasp a way of framing what I believe maybe we desire from this way of working and I talked about perhaps this planetary outlook this reaching possibility for plurality might emerge out of what I then called a radical intimacy, right? Which I've been trying to make sense of since but as I'm sitting here and remembering firstly my own work with the sweat and the workshops that I told which are based on kind of release method movement as a way of developing performance ease but also understanding relationships around balance and all these things that's something that I was working with them and beyond the kind of intimacies or closeness that being in a room with people affords you that you're necessarily going to encounter I think what I mean by radical intimacy is that you enter into a relationship with one another's lives that you are open to extending beyond the immediate mercy encounter that you're intimate and it's radical in that you're engaging on a level of intimacy perhaps or a level of familiarity maybe that's a better word, right? With people with whom you would otherwise not be intimate anyway and I think that's the radical term there is that so much of what we do ends up staying here within the immediate public spectrum you're through comfortably and maybe, maybe what is of value in this work is that it opens us up to that radical moment of allowing ourselves to be intimate with the other when we would not have been otherwise and again, it's not as a way of consuming them and owning them entirely and kind of locking them in your vision of who they are but in really seeing and in the practice of the kind of performance field itself is in the doing and making of work together and sharing space physically there's something about that level of intimacy that I think is distinctly different and initiates or kind of mobilizes perhaps a different kind of ethical orientation towards the practice Yes, I hope You're muted that, darling Sorry, I'm all very exciting to me I love this idea of radical intimacy and I'm always, my practice is always trying to think through institutionality and always inevitably being bound to institution and thinking through institution as discipline because discipline is a result of institutionality understanding disciplines and specialties is a result of institutionality and I think the thing that I find really provocative about this particular project is the way the interdisciplinary comes together is that it's this conversation around sex work and ethically talking about it ethically speaking to it ethically engaging with actual sex workers ethically engaging with the topic of sex work it's about a particular kind of ethics and I like that it happens in the soul on stage with the actual humans who practice this work that is one frame and that it happens in the courtroom and that it happens in parliament and that it happens in the academy that all of these kind of streams of trying to make shit right are happening together in one project I think that's very, very, very generative as a model for how we practice this arts activism or creative activism or whatever is that my work, me sitting in a room on a stage and working with my actors and making a work that is beautiful and wonderful and then sitting outside of that room and having an intimate round table discussion with my friends who exist in the world that I exist and therefore think in similar ways and even our tussles in the same vein that we can move away from that by exercising this kind of interdisciplinary approach I think it's incredibly generative and I think it was Sarah who was saying success is a tricky word and it's a tricky thing to think through but I think that is the success of this project is that it doesn't just happen in one space it's happening in multiple spaces in conversation constantly and that not only one discipline is leading the trajectory of the movement of what the project is trying to do I think that's really wonderful Yeah, and this is definitely the turn that I was thinking about towards right, so if we reject for a moment this kind of say capitalistic notion again of success being quantifiable in products in measurable outcomes that institutions love and that funders love and NGOs love then what are the opportunities that we might be missing to really take the impact of the work we do seriously when we stop measuring impact in terms of these quantifiables? And I think as you've pointed out Lissa and other people have as well there are plenty of opportunities and possibilities and moments that emerge as soon as you stop thinking about success in sometimes language escapes me when we stop thinking about the success of a particular project or a moment or an intervention in terms of again the metric, right something quantifiable there's something far more slippery and perhaps intangible and less easy to group onto but that is eminently more generative that sits beyond that immediately visible kind of set of quantifiable kind of marks, right around what we did that is very exciting and Camilla asked a question here yet we were speaking about what it means for communities to be embodied and I think this question of embodiment is one of those things we miss when we're looking for the ones in the zeros and the slips of paper and all these other things is the things that are happening in the flesh are vital and they're important because all the histories, all of the theorize everything comes back down to the matter of the flesh that we moved in and through that we can never ever retreat from again, I like you, I find that incredibly exciting was there another hand that I saw a second that I possibly missed? No there's a question for Sarah from Jaehan and he's asking whether any new dynamics that have emerged from the global grace project about collaboration across institutions and perhaps opportunities again for changing the hierarchical powers that structures that do exist and if I might also expand that question out a little more, not from global grace necessarily I'm wondering about our friends in the room who may not necessarily sit within institutional structures and how that view from another perspective might form our thinking here help us poor institutional people figure out our way through this mess I'll answer that, but I think Yaliwa has been asked a question by Kamili as well, right? Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry I gestured towards the never actually Yeah, yeah and then I'll answer it so let's go to Yaliwa first, Yaliwa it's okay Yes, so the question is what it means for community to be for that community to be embodied what's an example in that world how did you identify that sense of embodiment? Just to make sure like you made the point about the feminist kind of from where your perspective is what were the results the outcomes that you could actually point to Yeah How do you I mean, is this an art project, literally literally trying to explain exactly how a community has been embodied over the course of a time period or is it something that you can actually give evidence for you know what I mean, like is there something you can talk about talk about how that community has been embodied and even if it didn't have the results you were expecting Yeah, it depends what you mean by embodied how does a community become embodied? I mean, my thinking about embodiment is actually the physical body of the sex workers in the theater group and how they speak about the use of their body breath, movement, you know and then speaking from that breath and movement and then their stories come that create the script and they remember the ways in which those movements those collective created movements by a facilitator somebody teaching them like Jackie Job, you know really they felt a shift in their body they felt some change in their body but they also felt some change they felt that they had addressed something in that was sitting uncomfortably in their body but also in their memory and in terms of how they process what happened to them the kinds of things that happened in childhoods I mean, we had one production that really and Jackie Job's Buddha was part of preparing them for that production but also Iman, Isaac's is it, you know a physical theater where they told the story of from childhood through to adulthood how it is they got into sex work or some of their memorable moments and that was a very powerful piece and the way in which that process of developing those pieces they get to see each other and process perhaps trauma sitting pains that sits uncomfortably in the body together and that's a shared memory that we were talking the other day with them Borghini and Sarah and Phoebe that that's also something that remains with them this shared memory that the memory of sharing those stories and creating together is something they can draw on and they have a community in which they can do that with beyond the end of this funding it just means they do need to find a way to physically get together to do it but maybe not, we also had online platforms at some point, although quite tightly facilitated so I guess there's various layers of the embodiment there so embodiment physical body, embodiment community embodiment the way in which memory is shared communally with bodies getting together and then creating and that community gets created I guess that's, is that a version of embodied community? I'm not sure this is not a word I use very often myself in my writing so you're pushing me Thanks, Elire and just to add to what you were saying I think thinking from the body first for me means that you can't ignore in a kind of Marxist and the terrorist sense the facts and conditions of living thinking from the body first means that I have to recognize that the body is in a context it's at a location or a place or a space and it's in or out of that place or in or out of time to acknowledge the body is to acknowledge flesh and to recognize in some ways that all utterances whether they're spoken or utterances of a different kind emerge from the situated being who is always in relation to other bodies even standing on my ace on a desert island my relationship to others is constituted by their present or absence so bodies become about relationality they become or thinking through the body becomes about relation it becomes about location of our context and one can scarce I think say anything beyond that without recognizing that if one is speaking about through or manifesting the body in some way as a concept you're enjoying to also recognize the context that makes those bodies intelligible maybe Can I add to that? I mean I think you know I mean you said what I was going to say that it's the relationality or the relational aspect of the way we work in theater and performance for me that opens up the space for what we term in thinking from the body and for me it's about I think that the sex workers we work with I mean through various experiences we're working with traumatized bodies bodies that hold a lot of trauma that have been violated over and over again police brutality is common and I think one of the things it's so then there's a disconnect from the body that emerges from those experiences so I think the way in which we work in theater and performance and it's about connection and possibly reconnection to felt perception so the feelings in the body and kind of coming to terms with how the feelings in the body are almost it's like are the drivers of expression the feeling is a thing from which our stories or the expression of our stories emerge so I think I mean my particular work with the theater group is around breath I'm deeply invested in breath and how breath can connect us with our felt perception and how breath can connect us to the stories that live in the body and assist us in finding ways of expressing those stories through the body so the body is central and for me it's about reconnection reconnecting with the body that I think a lot of the participants have disconnected from I would say yeah just to add to that and Lesseho makes a really important point here about the body being stigmatized and indeed because the body is deep criminalized and stigmatized and it's on the margin there's a singularity in existence that this is the main focus whereas you know this kind of work then moves that into multiple vocabularies in relation to what the body is or what the body can do or how they see themselves so indeed it's a great comment there Lesseho yeah so many things firing off in my head I guess it's oh we're five minutes the hour if we've got 15 minutes left in this part of the session my question is do you have the after party where we hang out afterwards Jaehan your question to Sarah okay do you want to rephrase it it's there in the chat yeah I think we're at a point where you don't necessarily need to have the formality of raising a hand by all means though have that just the conversation with Mark and Manila the previous conversations we've had have all been talking about this is constantly this conversation about a much more rhizomatic sort of way of thinking about things and I just want and when I look at the Global Grace Project I went to the website etc I see a much more rhizomatic kind of structure now I know that you spoke about the institutional hierarchies that still are inherent in that but maybe that's the first time around I'm just thinking if I was to imagine new institutional what Amy is who isn't here talks about like you know is there a way we can start jamming in a way like institutional devising you know we talk about devising as theatre makers but can institutions you know different kinds of institutions start to devise together to create a new kind of entity and so what do you think you learned from the Global Grace Project thing that maybe could be a next step or a new iteration of that or something so on multiple levels I think there have been many many moments of kind of creating or opportunities to create new dynamics as you put it and I think that the first is you know this within UC the University of Cape Town we have two different departments within a faculty working together but two departments that work very differently particularly around research and I think Yaliwe has alluded to that a little bit so I think it's been an invaluable experience for both for all three of us for Yaliwe Fibin myself to engage with each other and ways of working particularly around research so I mean my paradigm is practice late research or practice as research it's very embodied right and correct me if I'm wrong Yaliwe and Phoebe but the kinds of research that you do are more within the kind of paradigm or the frame of social sciences right so kind of social science frame yeah so there's been an interesting conversation between us as researchers in the project and in fact I found which was two years ago when we had a gathering in Brazil and I was speaking to the ideas of practice as research and it was quite a a revelatory way of doing research for many people in the room and for me it was like oh my gosh but this is how we do things this is how we do research in theater and performance and I was like which I had just taken for granted you know so in one hand it's it's kind of validated the kinds of work and the kinds of research we do within our discipline that locates within a broader university and we always kind of say oh the performing and creative arts are sort of we were kind of a little bit precarious because you know funding is tight and maybe we'll be the first to go if they cut cut funding in departments but actually no what we do is vital and can and so it opens up possibilities for interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity within this the university structure so for that for me that has been very exciting and maybe you know and just the coming together of just a practical example you know Phoebe and I going away for two days we wrote an article together and it was incredible because there were these this coming together of a very different paradigms but we found a way of making it work and it just I felt I was so kind of it started to engage with another language way of languaging in another way another frame but in finding how these two could converse with one another was a was a very productive experience so I think on a very practical level as researchers for me it has been they've been amazing dynamics new dynamics that have emerged terms of the relationship you know this project I think the Global Grace Project is is a very what drew me to it when I was asked to be part of it is that every project has an NGO partner who is a partner in the project so you've got your PIs your primary investigators or not primary yeah primary investigators co-investigators and NGOs and postdocs on the project so there's this community of researchers and practitioners working on the project so for me that was another another way of kind of challenging these hierarchical structures and so how the academy meets the NGO world you know two very different kinds of hierarchical structures and and that you know I think that kind of trying to find the meeting point there has been very very challenging another very practical example you know when we rehearsed on our campus the security on the campus were very very hesitant to allow the sex workers on to campus and they called me and I said no I'm doing a project you know we're working together in the Bindree lab you know but they were like so it was like oh my gosh you know how how can we allow these people on to the campus and I was like oh my god you know so it's I think it's challenged it's challenged on multiple levels and I think there's something that someone was agreeing to too these kind of hierarchical structures and research and how NGOs work and how you know universities work and and how creativity you know arts or performance fits into all of that yeah so I think that it has challenged in many instances it's challenged this notion of research because you know what is it? Is it engaged research? Is it engaged scholarship? What you know what is it? And is it is it more valuable? Is it so I think it's it's it's challenged quite a lot on multiple levels and I don't know Phoebe and Yalie if you want to add to this I do I'm going to go from that very very quickly I'm sorry you know this this I the sense that yeah there are these these institutional challenges that or certainly opportunities right for re-imagining or jamming as general saying right is imagining kind of different institutional formations if not the dissolution of institutes entirely that point also kind of connects back to what we're saying about embodiment earlier on and what I'm thinking of now is this kind of apartheid of knowledges in some ways is that institutions study a particular part of knowledge and so going back to the idea of the body the other thing that I think is is important in recognizing certainly what performances focus on our attention on the body as the kind of reservoir of knowledge is exactly this idea that I think Gloria Anzaldura called the theories in the flesh the sense that the doing and living or the practice of living is always and already a way of theorizing as well right I'm making knowledge about the world through the very doing of the practice of living it needn't be reduced to an academic text or you know a period of journal or even on stage under the sign of proscenium art right where it acquires the value of an art object something to be looked at the very practice of living itself if we attend to how people inhabit the everyday worlds how they negotiate their relationships to one another is a sign of knowledge and a vital one right and that is theory in the same way as the text I have next to me that's published by a great publishing house so to the extent that we're thinking about a kind of institutional critique there is also something emerging here I think in the recognition of the validity of knowledges that aren't immediately visible to institutions and the structures that they kind of privilege Yeah, I also think that there's something sorry, Camille was at a hand did I interrupt your hand OK, that was a that was a yeah, cool I also think that there's something so incredibly interesting about this way of working which is practice as research so my biggest struggle with practice as research as it's conceived of in the way that I've engaged with it within performance studies is that it's actually just reflecting on practice in theory right, it's just writing papers about work that I've made and I think what this work is doing is it is practical, it is using appropriating in inverted commas performance methodology for research it's not about making performance it is about using performance to do something else entirely which I think is so interesting because it gives validity to performance studies as a discipline it says performance studies is not just as liking to make work and then, you know, writing about our work it's that our methodologies are able to reflect on the broader world and broader ways of living in productive ways which I really enjoy and I like Sarah that you speak of it in terms of practice as research and I think that what I would say is that it's actually practicing research because you're not reflecting on the performance that they're making you're not reflecting on what the performance did what the performance did into the lighting was like this you're not reflecting on the maker's outcome or the performance outcome you're reflecting on its impact on something else and I think that is it and that is where we need to start thinking about going because it is such a valuable way it is another lens of thinking through the world, right? It is as valid a lens as psychology it is as valid a lens as sociology or anthropology and we have such clear language that has already been kind of established and so why not use it because the language is there and it's also beautiful language yes, Camille? Yeah, I was going to ask too just to put a little button on with the same saying right now I'm sorry I'm mispronouncing your name there's something about that final aspect of knowing that it has had impact that can't be quantified in the same ways that might be anecdotally expressed without actually there being some sort of expectation for the next time or the next situation and then we're talking about an ecology that's being created, right? Maybe that's the language we should use when we talk about outcome we're trying to create an outcome ecology that may take five, ten years to even build and it might be a way of being able to talk about that in stronger language than we can when we're writing grants to talk about outcomes the things that we don't really care about in terms of industry just something to think about as far as just whatever we're doing right, thinking about being able to try and find language that's different and actually challenges institutions to be able to come up with ways of being able to think about that, right? We give them examples or anecdotes about this or that and then institution has to go wow I haven't thought about that before because all I'm used to thinking about is how industry gives us the results that we're used to getting yeah, just something to add on to that if it makes any difference it makes a huge difference sometimes the simplest formulation that will completely shift something I think you seized on committee to something huge here this idea that what we're maybe what we should be thinking about is producing or language again in a way that we recognize that what we're producing as an ecology not an outcome we're producing a set of systems an ecosystem perhaps where things can happen rather than outcomes we are creating scenarios for things to happen rather than the things themselves I that's that's gold for me that is, you know yeah, we refer to the job as an ecosystem engine so Jan's also just noticing that that he refers to the driver's school Mumbai as an ecosystem engine this is this is gold to me know that my next funding application is not going to use the word outcome at all I'm interested in producing ecologies of, right yeah, that's I'm finding that deeply attractive conceptually precisely because I think manages to do what I was trying to reach for earlier on is de-emphasize products de-emphasize outcome de-emphasize the quantifiable and focus on the production of spaces of not necessarily equality because that sounds a little like you know, touchy feeling for my liking but certainly spaces where we can meet one another and recognize one another and recognize our mutual positions in relation to one another how oriented towards a world we share and hopefully something no matter what it is comes out of just that practice of sharing space together seeing one another and maybe that's enough my artist's ego maybe wants more but there really is possibly something about the practice of being together that radical intimacy it's coming back in in interesting ways was that was that I actually have no, I love it cool I guess now's a good moment as any to segue we are 13 minutes past the hour which means that we are a minute away from the formal end of the session but as we know the after party continues so please feel free to hang out turn your mic on, grab a drink if it's nearby, it's evening for me so I might try and get a glass of wine and let's definitely keep this going especially because we've now seized onto something that I'm going to obsess with for a while thank you for that offering so I need to just say stay tuned next week next week is me, right guys I believe it is, yes yeah, so we have Ellen Lauren and Jay Ed Ariza who run the city company in New York and they are coming in at a nice evening slot, morning slot for the US 7 a.m. and an afternoon evening slot for us and so, yeah, so that's Falguni's got this and the announcement is there and the conversation the pre-conversation has happened and it was such fun and I can't wait for you guys to listen in but they have mixed both the work of the Suzuki company of Togo and the work of Viewpoints and they have they've worked across cultures and across spaces and they're just exciting people about trying to think about the fact that theater seems to have the tools that could heal the world and it's just a question of how do we make those tools much more ubiquitous I just wanted to say Umgeni, Buenia, me, Amy we all have had the luxury of being in all of these conversations and so our brains are sparking like mad and we are at this space of impulse and all and but if there's anything that one of the things we're thinking about which is a question to you and we want to throw it out to you guys who are listening in and who've been coming into all these conversations but is any of this causing change in something you're going to do next because where does this impulse from all of this this energy of thought and ideation and articulation here how does it transmit into the next thing you do in your practice or we all do in a collective moment which might be another bridge too far for now but we'll get that but just something we want to just throw out to you guys is are you thinking about what is this cause that might how has this become an intervention for you you know just shift something ever so slightly as I just think about that and see where that leaves you because I think that's something we're going to build up to as we go into the next nine remaining talks so by the time we get to the 10th talk it's going to be really well what are the actions we are going to take in terms of going into this unrehearsed future so I'll leave it at that and I think that is where we can indeed stop the recording thank you one and all the after party is officially on