 Welcome, everybody, back here at Segal Talk in Manhattan, Midtown, and it's still a bit cold here. But we are restarting, luckily, our Segal Talks last week. We had the great Bob Wilson with us. It was a quite a significant conversation, I thought. And as we all know, it's one of the most beautiful things one can see on the stage. Have been created by him, but his outreach to the community, his great Water Mill Center that he created out in Long Island to be close to nature, but also to contribute to a community is quite stunning and truly, I think, extraordinary. Today, we continue. And we have, I think, a very significant, important, and meaningful conversation. And the guest today is Olga Garay English. And Olga is, what would we say, would be having of stars, of presenters, of people who support the arts and theater and performance in New York City, is one of the stars, the guiding lights who we listen to, who has engaged deeply in the field. Olga has been an independent arts consultant since 2014. And she is based in Los Angeles in California. And there she works on national, but also international projects. She's been a senior advisor to local and international programs to the city of Los Angeles and to the councilman, Tom Lavon. She is a creative strategist to UCLA Center for the Arts and Performance Center. We all admire, we look to, we at CUNY is the big, big public center, but also UCLA is something we have followed. And we have many, many artists and also teachers from there with us, Travis and so, so many others. And she's a resource and program development for Emerson College, Office of the Arts. I think the California branch, HowlRound, where we are on is also supported by Emerson. So we are really grateful for that. I think Olga also supported HowlRound very, very early on and was on the national advisory board. She's a senior international advisor to the Foundation Santiago Amil in Chile, the director of the California Institute of the Arts, Latin American Caribbean, Latino initiative and a visiting professor for the college school on theater and management and planning. She's a project manager for the Ford Foundation, the great Ford Foundation and to the US Latino Arts Future Symposium and the senior advisor to the France Los Angeles Foundation, FLAX or FLAX. So it's a, as you can see, and this is only touching some parts of her work and over decades, she has, I would say also dedicated her life, work and energy to the field of theater and performance. Olga, welcome and sorry we made you out before nine o'clock in Los Angeles. Well, I'm so pleased to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Frank. It's been a long time. We haven't seen each other. That's true. That is true. As with so many people in the world, Olga, how are you in this time of Corona? Well, it's been a very difficult year, as you can imagine. You know, our field, the performing arts especially has just been completely stricken by the coronavirus lockdowns and various regulations. So it's really, it's been a challenging year in terms of trying to stay connected, trying to stay relevant, making sure that we as a field of performing arts presenters are committed to keeping international cultural exchange and engagement alive and vibrant now and into the future. With all of the travel restrictions and all of the uncertainty that has really gripped the world, a group of us have come together digitally. As a matter of fact, the next conversation I have is a Zoom call with this group. It's called the International Presenting Commons and actually HowlRound has been supplying the administrative support for this group. It's a group of about 20 of us, people who are committed to international cultural exchange and engagement, to keep, you know, discussing this, keep it on the front burner, not let people, you know, sort of slide into protectionism and really to keep the international arts ecosystem as fully integrated as possible during these really very challenging times. What do you talk about when you meet? What do we talk about? We talk about everything from how to advocate for increased resources from both the public and private sector to keep international work fully vital and engaged. We talk about things like visas and how do you put together a digital program so that we can continue supporting the artists as they make work. How do you break the way that the business was conducted in the past in terms of, you know, people like me just jumping on a plane to go see a theater show and then turning around and coming back two days later and what an imprint that has on the planet. We talk about how do you rethink what commissioning work should look like so that it's not as product oriented as it has been in the past, but really more about keeping artists fully present and provide resources so that, you know, when we can open up again, there will be shows that we'll be made. And so we talk about a lot of stuff. How do we collaborate more effectively with our counterparts in other parts of the world? So it's a pretty intellectually focused group of people. We have some of the top presenters in the country. You see UCLA, the Center for the Arts for Performance. We have the Public Theater in New York, Art Semerson, Stanford University, ASU, Arizona State University, all, you know, some pretty major centers and leaders. And then we also have a handful of people that are creative independent producers. So these are people who actually work hand in hand with artists to get the resources in place that artists need to make new work. And so they are a very vital part of the delivery system that we have in this country for sure. And many of them support U.S. artists wanting to do work abroad and sometimes they support artists from abroad who want to come to the United States. So it's a very reciprocal kind of enterprise. And we have been meeting since about May of last year, so almost for a full year and really are very keen on engaging with both public and private funders and policymakers so that we can just keep this item on the table, you know, when the pandemic first hit and the lockdowns began, a lot of presenters were talking about just focusing on local artists or artists who could drive from their hometown to, you know, where the presenters theater was, but that really sent a chill. And of course, this was during the past administration. So there was already a feeling that America was increasingly closing itself off from the broader global community. And so there was a real sense of urgency that people just wanted to gather virtually to start just breaking down these barriers that keep cropping up. And so it's an ad hoc group, people have been volunteering their time, although the Mellon Foundation gave us a very small amount of money for administrative support, but by and large, most of the people involved are just, you know, volunteering their time because this is just such an important element of what the artistic programming for some of these performing arts centers need to be. Many, as you know, Frank, our country is very pluralistic. And so if our performing arts presenting colleagues are going to be filling the needs of the multicultural communities where they are based, they really need to put people on the stage that represent those diverse communities. And so the people that are involved in this international presenting comments, and we use the name comments really very much influenced by the work of HowlRound and the theater commons, the Latino theater commons that HowlRound also supports because we're committed to sharing intellectual knowledge and cultural knowledge and really looking at this as a way of breaking away from competition and, oh, I have this premiere so you can't have it or I have this exclusivity clause so you can't present that artist within six months of being. And so there have been a number of behaviors or practices that became sort of entrenched in the presenting field that we're really questioning about is that the best way to work? You know, it's not, you're not doing an artist any favors if you say, oh, if I present you at my stage, you can't work anywhere within a 90 mile radius for the next six months, you know, that kind of we're really questioning the way that we do business and trying to align our business practices with much more progressive goals and that's everything from, you know, climate change to exclusivity clauses to, you know, how do you build a tour that keeps artists, you know, working and secure and reaching audiences without some of the harmful side effects that were more prevalent? Yeah, tell us more about what are your question. This is significant for all of us to hear that you are so deeply engaged in a discussion that in a way will start by Corona at the time of Corona. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting side effect that one of the results or the outcomes of the Corona crisis has been a soul searching, if you will, of people really trying to figure out how to reshape their, the way they do business so that respectful of the planet and so that they're more collegial with each other and in service to artists. And so for example, Art Semmer since we're on HowlRound, one of the things that they did was they have a relationship to a Chilean artist, a playwright named Guillermo Calderón, who was one of the most well thought of artists. He was on Seagull Talks too. I didn't hear you. He was on HowlRound. Good, so he's a really extraordinary artist and he very much gets his vision from contemporary social causes. And so he has been at Arts Emerson on a couple of occasions and was supposed to be there during this season, but of course because of COVID that had to be postponed. And so what David Dower, who was until very recently the artistic director of Arts Emerson, decided that he was going to give a $25,000 commission to Guillermo to just work on whatever he wanted to work on with those real strings attached. It wasn't like, oh, we're gonna give you $25,000 and we need a three act play by October of 2021 that we're going to show at our theater over a three week period. It was very much, what are you working on? How can we help you get to the next level? You tell us what you need. And it's a very different way of framing a commission which had become much more transactional of what are the deliverables and what is the budget and how many people are gonna be on the stage and that kind of thing. This is much more of a nurturing of an individual artist's voice. It's like, what do you need from us to help you stay working and engaged and to keep your company going? And so thinking more expansively about how we support artists is very much part of the discussion of this international presenting commons. Are you guys worried about the future of international presenting in the US? Yeah, I think that well, we're more hopeful now obviously because the administration that is currently in the White House has a much more progressive vision as to how the United States fits into the global order. And we are re-entering into like the Paris talks and the environment, the Iran nuclear talks. We're regaining our seat at the global table on so many different topics. So far, the arts have not been really targeted in terms of getting us back out there. But I think that conversations are starting to happen. I just participated in one that the Kennedy School in Boston and Harvard put on last week about international cultural diplomacy and the role that cultural diplomacy needs to have in our new administration and how we can get back to that kind of soft power discussion of how to deploy that in a way that is not maybe as manipulative as it has been sometimes in the past, as you all know, that it was much more sort of anti the Cold War. There was a not very hidden strategic and tactical approach to the, I wasn't arts for our sake. It was, how do we show people behind the iron curtain or people in countries that are kind of on the target of the communist block that the United States offers artistic freedom and nurtures artistic dialogue. I think that the current vision is not quite as transactional as that. And it's important that we are part of that kind of a global discussion, because it's a powerful and positive discussion versus how do we talk about nuclear disarmament? So many of our global interactions are based on crisis and pandemics or climate change or whatever and to have a place where positive cultural exchange can take place and build attention and awareness and sympathy is something that we can offer to the globe in a way that politicians can't, the artists can bring a sensitivity to an interaction that is very rare in other settings. Yeah, we just featured a bit of work of Mido Rao, for example, and certainly that's the case that it makes it so clear that art should play a role in cultural diplomas and a good one. I do know that also after World War II, American expressionism and painting was much highly favored than the work of the Living Theatre or politically engaged artists or Augusto Bois or others. They said, no, that's much safer. We don't, but it was serious engagement with the arts. Louis Armstrong was a cultural ambassador and he's underestimated how important arts is and someone once said, Los Angus you sing, whose book you read, whose films you see, that's it. It's a powerful fiction and it is a strong one and it's important and it's also honest or there is free art or there is not. And I think we can contribute to that. What do you think was really wrong before Corona in theater? Like let's put aside, what do you think did not work at all and what needs to be first? In theater specifically? Yeah, theater performance. I mean, to me, the regional theater movement in the United States, which really was a product of the Ford Foundation back in the 60s kind of coming up with this idea of what a cultural community should look like. And I don't say capital, cultural capital. I don't use the word capital per se because it connotes a very big city, to me it connotes a very big city, sophisticated, et cetera. We're talking about any kind of community that prides itself on having a cultural infrastructure. And so that meant that you had to have a theater, that meant you had to have a museum, often a performing arts center, maybe a ballet company, an orchestra. And in the case of theater, it led to the creation of what we call the regional theater system in the United States that is still alive and thriving today. I think that it was a very place-based strategy, so it was about that community and what that theater meant in that town. And what I think resulted is that there has been a hermitization of theater in the United States that many other countries don't have, meaning in many countries in Latin America and Europe for sure, many theater companies are structured so that they are, so it's a touring art form so that they can go to festivals, that they can go, they can be itinerant, they can go from town to town, country to country. That is much less prevalent in the United States. As I said, the regional theater movement tended to reward and prize being in that community. And so there was a lot less openness to other ideas and other ways that people worked. And so a very American type of theater language has emerged, which is pretty inward-looking, whereas theater in other countries has its own language and its own persona, but they expose themselves much more to influences that are going on in other countries. And so I think that that's one, and also here there is, I think, an over-dependence on set design and the look of the production so that sometimes like the larger theaters, they spend half a million dollars on a set that is up for a production for three weeks and then they tear it down and it goes to landfill, whereas in other places there's a lot more dependence on the corporal manifestation of the actor. There's a lot more emphasis on sort of the imagination and almost minimalist set design because it's meant to tour. And these are huge generalizations, of course, it doesn't mean that there are no companies here that do that, there's certainly companies that do that, but they're sort of more the exception than the rule. And I just think that, and again, in many other countries there's a real festival culture, which I think is pretty much missing in the United States. You can count the festivals and probably in one hand that are of any major consequence. For example, the Next Wave Festival, which the Brooklyn Academy of Music has produced for I don't know how many years, 20 years, whatever. In my mind, that's not really a festival, it's a season, because it's like over what, four month period, performances happen individually. It's not a festival, I mean, to me a festival is when you can go and see 20, 30 productions over a 10 day period from all over the world. The Lincoln Center Festival was like that. And unfortunately, it's no longer available, it no longer exists, but there's very few really world-class festivals, theater festivals in the United States as far as I'm concerned. And that, I think that we really need to look at that because it creates this atmosphere that is very heady, very intellectually stimulating. It really engenders dialogue across cultures. And it's a format that I think, the United States is sorely lacking. I mean, can you think of any exceptional theater festivals that you know? I wish, I really, really do wish. And it's a stunning, as you know, we are trying to put together for June, 2023. We're gonna ask New York theaters to present a great work of their own, also host someone, maybe it was a group of international curators and hopefully you can maybe also help us to do something, the Avignon Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, came out after World War II, after a time when there was no exchange, a time of fear, a time of death, not as actually as light as corona, it's as fast as to imagine what our ancestors went through our forefather, people who are still, it's incredible to think really, and the older I get, more stunned and horrified I am what happened, especially also of course Germany. But I think we do need that, and we will try that and think you are right, that kind of the idea of the festival, celebrating life, but also celebrating a city, Avignon celebrates as other people, they are proud, they see things. And there's what we really miss now is exactly what theater gives us, is conversation, art, looking at things, and also trying at least to convince not the people we already now are, you know, on our side, but also the ones who, Edouard-Louis said in one of the talks on the Miller Routes said, I write theater, so not for the people who are already convinced, for the people who don't understand, who maybe to help them with imagination, they're saying festivals can do that, and they are more powerful than corona and demonstrations, because they have life in them, and they have truth in them, and, but we will have to work for it. Do you, what do you see also, you're globally connected, also of course a lot to Latin America, but do you see new forms, do you see something emerging where you say, that's interesting, that's, we haven't thought of that before, what people are doing at the moment, or what they are planning? I mean, I think that to me, the whole rise of the digital language has been really an interesting development, obviously there are great limits that having to rely on a digital platform impose on you, but there are also liberations that the digital medium has brought to bear, such as artists in two completely different parts of the world being able to collaborate on a piece, because all of a sudden somebody that is based in New York can be working with somebody that's based in Sao Paulo, digitally, and create a work that would have not been possible before, they can stay in their own communities and they can collaborate with a number of people. I think that for me, the least satisfying digital manifestation has been when people just take three cameras and shoot a theater play that was just, they just shoot a theater play, so it's still framed for what should be a live experience and that becomes kind of tedious to me. The works that I have resonated with most is our works that are conceptualized for the digital medium, and that really take advantage of what that interaction is. For example, I've been involved with this artist from Chile, his name is Francisco Reyes, he's a very well-known actor and he's been in film and television. He was in that Oscar winning film from Chile a couple of years ago, A Fantastic Woman, he was the love interest. Anyway, about six or seven years ago, he and his adult children put together a very stripped down version of Hamlet that they took to small towns throughout the country of Chile, many of which had never seen live theater before, let alone Shakespeare. And they introduced Hamlet to these villagers. Well, about a year ago, they decided that they were going to make a digital version, but instead of just filming an outdoor performance of the work that they had translated and interpreted for the film, they decided that they were going to make a digital version that they had translated and interpreted from Shakespeare. They rethought the whole thing for the digital medium and it became, all of the characters were Clay Puppets and Francisco, the main actor, read all the, or said all of the dialogue as if these Clay figures were enacting the play of Hamlet. And they did really interesting things like they spliced film into it and they did the shadow puppets and it was just a completely new show. It wasn't just we're regurgitating the show that was supposed to be in front of a live audience. It's rethinking what does the digital medium afford you that is not possible in life there? Like, there was a lot of close-ups. There was a lot of focusing on the hand. There was a lot of things that if you're sitting in a theater with 200 other people, you would have never gotten that perspective because you'd be watching from afar. So, really, I don't think that the digital medium is gonna go away once our theaters reopen, but I think that it's gonna become certainly a component of how theaters enter the post-pandemic world. And it does give you possibilities that were just not really ever implemented before. I mean, they were available, but nobody really took advantage of them. I mean, even how around this platform, it's a way of reaching people that had we been at the Segal Center, we were able to do that. I wouldn't have been able to reach. I mean, I did a couple of programs with you at the Segal Center over the years, and it was who managed to be in New York City and made it to the lower side, and that was it. That was your audience. And now people can, they can tune in from Germany or Shanghai or Great Britain or Argentina. So it has its pluses and its minuses, but I think that I think people are starting to really adapt to it so that it's gonna have a life of its own from now on, in my opinion. Wow, that's quite a prediction. I think it's interesting one. In Germany, traditional in France, theaters have three divisions, it's drama ballet opera and something, yeah, there might be a fourth one, the digital branch, because it might happen again and also the numbers of people who each are enormous, what people experienced, and we will see that. And but as you say, it has to be a reinvention and not a double fold already so often, especially in the U.S. theater looks like television and it looks like a reality. And then if you're on Zoom, then films theater, but it should look like TV, but it won't look like TV because they know what they're doing and they're getting into that. No, we have to be like painters and sculptures who were liberated by the photo cameras and say they could do their surreal work or they could work that deal directly with imagination. So Olga, tell us a bit, you started out also, you didn't mention in the RBCD, but in Miami, how was your experience for your, so how did you get to your job? What you did, how was your experience as a woman? Well, you know. That's an American word. Tell us how has been, what was your journey? So I didn't study the arts. I studied, I have a master's in community psychology, which is very different, but it's different and it's alike in certain ways, but I was in Miami. I had just finished graduate school. I was working in a program. Were you born in Miami or? No, I was born in Cuba. In Cuba? In Cuba and I came to the United States in 1961 and my family was in Miami for about three years and then we moved to Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Northern Florida, you know, for job opportunities for my mother mostly. But I was working with migrant farm workers using Paulo Freire's liberation pedagogy as a means to teach them reading and writing in English as a second language. And we use the arts as a means of building community and building trust, but it wasn't an arts program per se. It was really more about literacy and language proficiency. And then Ronald Reagan came into power and he squashed all of those programs because they were grant funded and I needed a job. And back then you still looked at the want ads in the newspaper to look for a job. And there was an ad from the Metro Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. They were looking for somebody to run a new program called the Neighborhood Arts Program, which was to give grants to artists of color and organizations of color and artist-run organizations sort of smaller and mid-sized. Because back then, which this is in the, I would say the mid-80s, most of the money that the county was giving to the arts went to the opera and to the ballet and to the mainstream theaters. They weren't reaching community-based ensembles or dance companies or whatever. And a lot of people applied for the job and the executive director took a gamble on me. And within three months or so, I knew that that was my life's calling, that I just really just blossomed. And it was a very interesting time because at the time, the National Endowment for the Arts, this is before the culture wars, was really leading the conversation about diversity and inclusion. I don't think that we're calling it that back then. They were still talking about minorities and having a seat at the table. Those conversations were happening and the National Endowment for the Arts was deliberately trying to include people of color in their peer review panels and their policy discussions. And so because I'm Latina, I was just at the right place at the right time. There was an openness and an appetite to bring new voices to the table rather than just the SOBs, the symphonies, orchestras, and ballets, the sort of the other tier of art making. And pretty soon after I got the job in Miami, I started being invited to serve on panels at the NEA and then the Rockefeller Foundation. And so within a year, I was already getting noticed at the national level just because I was getting, and I said yes to everything because I really feel that you have to be present and you have to be over to opportunities and embrace them. And then within a very short period of time, I started having an international profile. The Rockefeller Foundation asked me to go as an evaluator to a gathering of about 15 or so. They didn't call themselves presenters because that sector was not very well defined in Latin America at the time, but they were art makers that also helped other artists get their work shown. So they looked to the National Performance Network here in the United States as a model and they were having the first meeting in Parachi, Brazil of people from all over Latin America who were acting as presenters in their communities. And the Rockefeller Foundation had given them seed money, but they weren't sure if there was, if creating a network similar to the National Performance Network, made sense and it made total sense because especially back then, but even today, it was much more likely that an artist or a company would look to Europe and sometimes the United States, but especially to Europe as kind of their North Star and they didn't have any relationship to the country next door, right? So an Argentine theater company had more of an opportunity to present their work at a festival in Italy, for example, than going to Peru, which was just of the continent. And so we created something called Latin Americanas productores de arte contemporaneo and I went from being the evaluator to becoming very much part of the discussion because I was part of the National Performance Network. So I knew very well what function, what the parameters were, what the structure was. So I volunteered to write a proposal on their behalf to the Rockefeller Foundation, which I did when I got back to the States and Rockefeller gave them $750,000 to get started. And they funded this network for 10 years. So they gave over $7.5 million over that 10-year period. Plus I also helped them get money from the Ford Foundation and AT&T and I was kind of the interlocutor, if you will, between this group of Latin American presenters and the United States because the money was here, so I helped to unlock that and that really gave me a very significant role to play in Latin America ever since then because I was really the go-between the philanthropic community and the artistic community. And it's a role that I still play today. Very involved with Fundación Teatro Amil in Santiago, I've been working with them since 2014 and do everything from help Chilean artists to come through the US and beyond to, I've helped them go to Hong Kong and different parts of the world to show their work. And I also curate American artists to go to the festival that they put on every year. I think it's one of the top three international festivals in all of Latin America. And Bob Wilson has been there a couple of times, actually you said you had Bob on your program recently, but Elevator Repair Service, the Wooster Group, the Actors Gang here from Los Angeles, Tim Robbins Company has been down there. I've helped them get work from Cuba, because I'm Cuban, but I really don't limit myself to just the exchange between the US and Latin America. I really see myself as an internationalist. And I'm just as prone to promote a work from a Chinese playwright that I've seen. I've just been in touch with Wang Chong who presented a work under the radar. About three years ago, that was just stunning. And so I'm trying to get them to Chile. And so it's really about being impacted by the work. When a work speaks to you, it doesn't matter where it comes from, you just wanna share it and support it. And so that's been my philosophy throughout my 30 plus year career. It's like be present, be engaged, speak your passion, promote collaboration, all of the positive things that being involved in the arts can afford a human being and that sometimes are just absent because it becomes a commodity or it becomes a business. And I think that it's a shame and it's to our detriment when we don't focus on the many positive things that the arts bring to humanity. What are the lessons you learned in all these decades? What are the important ones? So everybody also starting out or young curator artists, people like you who are in between cultures who are putting things together. You as a woman, as a Latina, as an organizer in general, what has impact do you learn? What work? Well, I mean, I think that, again, understanding your own motivation and understanding what you bring to the table is a critical part of finding a seat at the table, right? So know yourself, know your strings, know your weaknesses, know what you're passionate about and just make things happen. Don't wait for somebody to tap you on the shoulder and say, oh, what if it's make work? One of the best things that you need to, the people who are entering the business need to learn is how do you raise money? How do you write a grant? How do you review a grant? How do you bring financial resources to bear but also intellectual resources? How do you connect people? And I think that having that realization that this is a business that you don't just, most people don't just go into a studio by themselves and compose a big work of art. You were talking earlier about the abstract expressionists. They could go into a studio and make a painting on their own and that was kind of like the iconic thing to do, right? The artist in the ivory tower and the garret just imagining things. The performing arts are a lot more interactive and they require people working together. So I think that being present and going to listen to things like this, like this program or tuning into HowlRound or showing up at a festival, even if you don't have a function there, just see work, see what artists are saying and which ones really speak to you and discuss it, talk to your peers about it, develop a vocabulary that is perceptive and intelligent and grounded and just be in the community, be out there. And I think that the more you make happen, the more people will come to you because they know that you deliver and they know that you can make things happen for them. And so I think that those are the... They seem obvious, but a lot of people just sit around and expect to be tapped on the shoulder and discovered or something. It's really about being part of a larger community. I mean, the fact that Melanie Joseph, a dear friend of both of ours said, you should talk to Olga because she's dealing with international matters. That's an act of proactive engagement, right? It's how do you connect people that are in different places in your life so that new dialogue can be engendered. And that to me is a very giving stance in persona. And I think that that's what you need to... That's what people need to lead with is how do I become... I mean, that's why the concept of the commons is so intriguing because it's really... It debunks competition. It is about collective good and creating a collective path forward in the most deliberate and philosophically healthy terms. And I think that as a society, the more that we can permeate everything we do with those kinds of values and ideals, it comes back to you. Those actions and those belief systems have a way of making you attractive to people in the deepest sense of that word. Yeah, that is true. And also things are possible as the great work of the Foundry Theatre and not on the shows. You said, you know, so many theatre machines were designed to do plays. And we love them, but like in the museum, there's a variety of paintings, of colours, of projections of what... That's also what we need. And the Foundry has done that. Stunning how complicated it is for them to be funded and to do the work. But there is... It also shows it is possible in many, many ways. It's getting slowly closer to the end before I ask you what you are working on. Who else do you follow? Who are theatre artists, companies? No, you don't want to play favourites, but something that just comes to your mind when you think this is at the moment, that's meaningful to me. That's an interesting question. I really think that the work that is coming out of Latin America, which is very socially engaged, is finding resonance with me right now, because with all the racial injustice protests and all of the reckoning that we're coming to as a country, grappling with those themes is really important. I just saw a piece that Dale Orlander-Smith did after the flood, dealing with the killing of Michael Brown and how it impacted the community in St. Louis and Ferguson. And people who are bringing those kinds of issues to bear witness are really meaningful to me right now. I'm working right now on a really interesting project, actually, that tells this very little-known tale about a program that the president of the Philippines initiated during World War II to give refuge to Jewish families fleeing Nazi Germany. And it's over 1,000 Jewish families were harbored in the Philippines. And a very... I find him just an extremely talented and delightful playwright, Boney B. Alvarez, who's Filipino himself, is going to write this story. It's a true story, told by a gentleman named Ralph Price, who's now 90 years old, and he was invited to the United Nations to tell his story. But he went with his family when he was eight years old. I was eight years old when I came to this country from Cuba. And we chose Boney as a playwright very deliberately because he has this kind of magical realism touch to the works that he creates that I thought would really bode well for telling the story from the point of view of an eight-year-old child or a 10-year-old child versus a sort of a more typical melodramatic Holocaust story. I really wanted to bring that sense of... His daughter, Jacqueline, said that her father saw the world war through the eyes of a child. And how do we tell that story that doesn't belied the horror but also shows the magical elements? They wound up being on a mountain with guerrilla fighters and other Filipino families that were hiding from the Japanese invaders. So the idea is to tell this... What was a tragic story at a very real level with this other story of empathy and a poor country reaching out to peoples to give them safe harbor when the country was economically very precarious staged itself. And so there's a beautiful metaphor in there. So that's something that we just started working on and hopefully it'll be ready to tour in 2022-23 season. Yeah. As they once said, in the year 25-25... Listen, Olga, we are getting close to the end and now you have to join that significant important also, a group of international arts presenters. Thank you for caring with your group and your people for us to create work and to make it happen that we can see something outside the tunnel vision of the U.S. We have a lot of voices. And the Writers' Organization always says 95% of all books are American books. You can buy books just for British, mostly American, the rest 5%. Half of them are French or German because they are supported by... There's only two books out of 100. And the same, I guess, is this place. Maybe we even have a worse record. Who knows? So this is important. We feel we are on your side and also our work has been part of it. Thank you and congratulations on going on. Also, tell us, thank you for telling us a bit about your project and how you got to this field. So it's important to everybody. She said, listen to what's happening in Latin America. So this is a significant hint from everybody. And we believe that, too. And so this is of importance. And what she said, don't wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder. As Susan said, don't wait until society kisses you on the forehead and then you do something, engage, listen, participate and show that you care and contribute. So really, really, thank you, Olga. Thank you, Frank. Thank you for inviting me and stay in touch. And if you're going to do this festival, I'd love to be involved. Thank you for being such a good friend to the Siegel Center, but also to Hallround and to the community and internationally, the bridge you created. And these are real bridges. And yes, it goes back to a foundation like Rockefeller Foundation. So we're going to take a chance, like someone took it on you, they also took a chance on an idea and it has been so important and significant. We're going to continue this week. Tomorrow we have John Glover from the New York Use Symphony behind and we're going to hear more from John. And on Friday we have Peja Musicewicz and he's going to talk about the Baruchnikov Art Center, but also about the Tippett Rice Art Center. So, and I have both of them do create interesting work at this time of corona. A little bit of his haste suggested us also to connect to them. So we will hear what can be done and to our listeners really thank you for taking time when we started last March we were one of the only people doing these talks in the time of corona. We did it actually five times a week. We were the only institution worldwide in the theater that produced the content every day and we talked to over 150 artists from 50 countries and we are continuing. But also with the outfit, what can we do now? We want to do something, want to be part of it. We cannot also just talk. We also have to do something, but it is important to listen to what we are doing today. Olga, thank you for sharing. Everybody at home, really thank you for taking your time. It means a lot to us that you participated in things. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Three minutes late for the talk. Say hi. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.