 Hi there, I'm Lea. I'm just getting Mike on the phone here. This is how we do. Hey, Mike, I'm going to have you on speakerphone. Join us. Okay. So, my name is Lea Tawil. I'm an artist and a curator. And on the phone we have Mike Query, who's my collaborator, and also an artist and curator. Mike, do you want to say hi? Can you hear that? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, can you hear him? Cool, sort of. Mike, okay. So I think what we're going to start with, actually before I launch into kind of a description of Arab experimentalism, which is what Mike and I will be discussing. I just wanted to glimpse our work together. We've been working together since 2006. And this is our sort of like, I would say touchstone work called ATLAS, which premiered at New York Live Arts in 2016, and has had some international touring, which has been very interesting. So let's just play a few, like, less than a minute of it, so you get to see what we do while we talk. So you get the idea. So they're just watching me roll over and over again, Mike, just FYI. So Mike and I operate in a field called Arab experimentalism. What the two of us are mostly articulating with our work is live art practices. So obviously there's a whole kind of intersectional field into like visual arts and written work and this whole thing. But we're going to just talk about the body and sound and space and time. So Arab experimentalism can be defined multiple ways. I'm going to define it as a field that narrates and accumulates regional and diasporic realities and futures through transgressive arts practices. Let's see. One of the main tenants of Mike and I's work and sort of the ethos of experimentalism from an Arab perspective, particularly as Arab Americans, as Mike and I both are, is the premise of we own our narrative. So the idea that we own our narrative and we own our references is almost of utmost priority because of the way that our culture is narrated over and over again for us and usually misnarrated for us by people not from the community. So this idea that we can narrate ourselves is really important. I think that a lot of, I think that actually works hand in hand with a lot of arts that are situated in diasporic communities, as was discussed earlier. So we've kind of layered up a discussion really beautifully today already about diaspora and narration and identity and also safety and visibility. So I think I'll start actually by asking Mike a question and then we can bounce around a bit. So Mike, since they're watching Atlas, I thought that it might be interesting to discuss how Atlas sits when it's performed in the United States versus how it's performed when it's performed abroad and sort of also maybe address the visibility of this new Arab voice that we talk about a lot. In New York, we performed it in San Francisco. We've also performed it in Berlin and Beirut. It's read differently depending on where we're performing it. When we performed it in Berlin, it was a largely, it was sort of a Palestinian festival of arts in the diaspora. In Beirut, there's a lot of in which we performed it, so it got read and we had a different way there. You know, in the United States, while received that some people try to, I think, take some time or some of the audience tries to take some time or to register that matter to reconcile how it fits in with their narrative or their notion of what it means to Arab artists. In the case that people are looking, when they hear the word Arab, you might identify with a little bit more traditionalism or expect to see something like that. And although there are elements, so there's a reconciliation process that people may or may not have to go through to understand how it fits in with a thing about Arab extremism, you know, be able to demonstrate the connection of how it fits in the lineage and history. Thank you, Mike. Yes. Sure. So this idea of also, that was discussed earlier, inherently inherited information and the idea that, you know, Mike and I both being sort of for second generation Americans, he's Palestinian, I'm Palestinian and Syrian, that we have this information in our bodies that doesn't necessarily need to be legible on stage and that, I think, is key to the practice. So the inherent knowledge that we have, whether we experienced it firsthand or ancestrally, is resonant in our body. And so just placing the body in whatever else we need to say with it on stage redefines the Arab body, also defines Arabness in a way that does not have to, we don't take on the burden of explaining that to a willing or not willing public. We just jump ahead to knowing it and then moving into the work itself. I think it's interesting to state that the work by its very existence of Arab experimentalists, even just by its existence, actually challenges the narrative or can offer new representations to the conversation without having to, just in its existence and in the naming of the context. And that's a thing that I think is getting more visibility. I feel like there's a lot more attention and subtlety in Arab representations on stage these days, just of recent, and we can see that also in visibility and recent funding. Mike just received a Night Arts Award in Detroit, which is a prestigious grant that not only was Mike one of the grantees, but of the 25 grantees, I think there were five Night Arts funded projects that were related to Arab experimentalism and five out of 25. And this was a coup, I think. I'm sorry, it's very exciting to see it come into play. So Mike, I'm sorry we didn't get to hear from you again, but we're getting the tone that our minutes are over. Okay, we're good. So, thank you. Thank you.