 Welcome everybody back here at Siegel Talks at the Monteney Siegel Theatre Center, the Graduate Center CUNY at City University in New York and in Manhattan and it's another day on planet Earth and another day in the crisis and the ongoing corona crisis and since 14 weeks now we here at the Siegel Center have been talking to theatre artists, performance artists, thinkers around the world about the time of corona what it means how does it feel like how what is changing what has already changed and of course theatre has been hit so hard like no other profession was the first to close it will be the last to open often be here together with massage salons and it's an uncomfortable closeness somewhere there but it's a work with the body as in that's a good connection and to it but the question is you know what will happen we do not know Broadway officially announced yesterday that they will close till the end of the year most probably kill spring and the industry is out of work all the artists performers lighting designers dramaturgs are out as will be also all the small theaters who we feel close to the experimental downtown places they hear art centers and warehouse bam all of them they the chocolate factory they hear art center and jack in brooklyn so it's disastrous people have no income in america when you lose a job you have no health insurance devastating for artists also the restaurants who often provide works are closed and things are radically changing there was supposed to be phase three in new york city new york city has strictly followed the lockdown much better than taxes arizona and other states that we only had 18 infections last thursday compared to a thousand two hundreds and big days in may but still in america it's scary what's happening the fourth day in a row with the highest numbers and ever over 40,000 each day yesterday the center for disease control said it might be a hundred thousand each day what we will be looking at and everybody knows real numbers of 10 times higher so it is a time we have never experienced before in our lifetimes and so we are really wondering what what is happening everybody says to stay at home at the july fourth weekend the national holy day like busty day in house so it's unprecedented new york city will not open the restaurants as it was suggested in phase three that 50 capacity would work people bought food restaurants but it's not happening it's closed the united nation the european union and following also united nations suggestions is not opening its borders to most countries of the world including the us even from rwanda you can come in algeria but the united states because of the disastrous politics and the situation here is not joined and the us with russia and brazil and others is is excluded it's shocking for us of course europeans and and and we we do not know where it goes a us just bought up 90 percent of the world reserves of this remdesivir medicine the one that potentially has some hope that potentially might put it from 15 days down to 10 days to produce the pill it's five dollars what the company will charge up to three thousand dollars um from the its customers from like people perhaps from the theater world who do so much non-profit work contribute but it will say it costs three thousand so insurance if you don't have an insurance then what do you do big companies get buyouts uh airplane car company billions of dollars but a company that seems to be making profit is not required to share it or to do something for the coming good it's really exposes in a radical way everything that's wrong and as richard check knows that he on the program it's the fukushima nuclear catastrophe but the roof is open we are looking down to it and in the horror i think and we have to say so um but theater people have been always say on the side as we say of the struggle the complex struggle for for freedom for liberties the social justice and now it's the time if ever that we need to listen to our art to artists who anticipate the future as roncier said and who often combine an existing tradition with a new technology and something new emerges and brecht talked about the children of the scientific age for whom he does this either in a way the mechanical age still at the time but now we have the children we have the children of the digital age uh with us and um and somehow with this catastrophe um we also seem to be prepared for their zoom and deliveries and so all seems to be uh be connected and theater artists around the world are looking for new ways to deal with this some artists already i think and we had many of them here have started their research before experimenting with new works new forms understanding that we also need to have a representation of new forms on the stages in the exhibitions we at least for a moment to shake what we already think we know and with us we have one of those great artists and also a great researcher it's frédéric aitouatis from france so frédéric first of all thank you for joining us and i apologize for my long opening and and before i say a bit about union work where are you right now and what time is it well first of all thank you very much for your invitation i'm very happy to be with you um i'm in my office which is also my bedroom uh which is in this flat in paris um it's 6 p.m in paris it's the end of the day it's been a very very gray day uh and um i'm very happy to to have this opportunity to to discuss with with you in the other side of the world and i just want to say that i should have been with you uh so it's very very moving for me to have this conversation in this exceptional time my luggage was ready for new york for i was i had a plane for the 23rd of march and of course on the on the 16th of march i discovered that the everything was closed so i feel very close to what you just said also because i'm i've been living in new york in in a way during that that time because it was the plan and everything was organized for me um so now i'm i'm i'm in i'm in paris but i'm the same time elsewhere in a way and that's interesting oh how interesting to be in paris but also elsewhere and i was supposed to go to edouard you if i if i remember right so frédéric is a theater director and a historian and early modernist i think 17th century where you started out and she explores links between science literature and politics she was at the university of oxford and of course at the senspo university in paris and her work many she wrote many books we have the bio online and about the cosmos about fiction about the world of the images and and she deals with ecological issues the geia global circles which we will talk about is something she created and the theater negotiation the negotiation theater and many other things moving earth and of course she's also known for having come with bono la tour to new york with the um down to earth project the lecture performance how to perform knowledge and she has been in very big places we are all impressed which is a theater montier amandier the old patrice shiro theater the laudéant centre pompe d'eau the kai the great kai cedon brussels at the kitchen the signature even and how the Berlin fest spiel and type high and of course um much much much more so um for you before we start with other how did you experience this time um well first of all i i maybe i can say um echoing what you just said that i felt um very deeply that it was a catastrophe a catastrophe for our world our theater world and that everything was suddenly cut and transformed deeply um so as i told you before i had like all of us i had plans i had a trip uh in nyu with my family everything was planned i had a tour that was planned in zkm in kahrsruhe i had lots and lots of projects um on my plate and suddenly everything disappeared and i i would say that i was very shocked like everybody but also very moved by the fact that we were all living the same experience at the same time and maybe this is something uh uh one of the most striking aspect of of the crisis i i uh i won't i would like to remember the the the feeling of experiencing something universal and something that we had never experienced before i think that something in in one's lifetime that's something that you never forget there is a before and after um and i'm as you said i'm i'm also a historian and i'm very interested in in the moment of shift in cosmological changes and i was completely fascinated and i worked for years about this you know 17th century moment when uh galileo kepler decarts you know they they they develop the idea of of a new cosmos you know cosmos where the earth is not at the center but the sun is at the center and suddenly it means that the world in which you are is different it means that the world the earth is moving is moving around the sun is moving on itself this kind of big big shift um i've i've always been interested in and suddenly i had the feeling that all the things i normally read about or write about or create plays about suddenly those things were in our reality uh so it's extremely strong as as a feeling and all the things i'm interested in uh you mentioned that i work with Bruno Latour so we've been discussing for for more than 10 years now the ecology the ecological crisis and what it means to to include other beings in in our mental frame like like the the non-humans uh the microorganisms um so we are Bruno and me very interested in microbes you know in the idea of the microscope and all that and suddenly all those ideas um again became absolutely concrete and real uh and i was yeah um it's it's um and it's also very humbling to to to realize that we we are so much uh bodies we know that we are theater people but that's the maybe the third thing that that that i would like to to emphasize the fact that um with all our plans and planes and ideas and tools and projects sometimes we forget how much we are bodies and and suddenly we were absolutely strongly deeply violently reminded of of of that yeah yeah and and what a reminder it is yeah um and and and but it was at the same time violent and and beautiful in a way that's that's something that strikes me uh um to be confronted with death this is something that can happen in everybody's life but to be confronted with death as a species that's something uh quite rare and of course fiction and science fiction and literature and philosophy uh have discussed that idea of of a of a catastrophe and you know we all have read a lot about the colapsology and the the idea of the end of the world and you know this is this is our time we've been thinking about all that for years but we haven't been experiencing it yet uh everybody at the same time and and one of the very i think one of the very strong experiences i had during the last months since march is that um i actually gave my lectures at nyu i it was not a lecture lectures it was seminars i gave them by zoo uh with five phd students absolutely brilliant students um all over the world because most of them couldn't stay in new york and they had they had to leave one of them was in srasbourg actually one of them was in uh new jersey and so it was all all over the place all over the world and uh it was very moving because we didn't know each other we had never met physically but we we were very very close there was a strong feeling of bond i don't know how to express that but because we were just it was just the beginning of the crisis it was you know 23rd of of of march so everybody was completely distressed and struck but by what was happening so what i told them i told them look we have to do this seminar together but we are also a kind of group completely unexpected group impossible group in the in normally you know you don't talk to people five hours a week all over the you know in in at the other side of the world normally and suddenly we had this feeling of being like a little group that could help each other so i suggested them that every time we meet twice and twice a week it was midnight for me because of the time time zone we would discuss what was happening to us and that was very moving because again it it was even more bonding than any other thing like sharing a classroom or whatever and the topic i had chosen one year ago for my n1u nyu class was about humans and non-humans and it was a class in which we were discussing extinction studies microbes microorganism relationship between animals and humans and really each class each discussion was at the same time a place for reading and thinking but also a moment of trying to cope with what was happening to us um with unknown people you know and i i think that was a that was very moving for me a very strong experience of of collective thinking despite what was happening so you really did anticipate uh that that moment in a way it's uh it's quite uncanny you know to think about that that this was your scene i don't know if it's anticipation really um it's it's an interesting question is it as i told you i think it's it's in the zeitgeist it's in the air i mean those questions are in the air um and in a way it's not a surprise that this thing happens to us uh and and i'm you know some people said in France at the beginning we have people who prepare for the catastrophe we call them the collapse log i think you say collapse on a gist yes yeah collapse and and they said you know at the beginning of the of the of the of the pandemic they said oh we knew it you know we have prepared for that and and and it's it's a bit it's a bit quicker than what we show what we thought it it it comes a bit you know too early but we knew it would happen and of course it's not it's not that it's not you know it's it's it's not the end of the world it's not it's not exactly what they're prepared for and um so i'm i'm not sure about really our capacity to anticipate but i'm very struck by the fact that uh yes in a way we've been discussing those questions for years in a way we are aware of the problems uh which are you know emerging now we know that there is a problem in our relationship between humans and non-humans we know that uh it's in the books it's been in the book for 20 years um we we know that um we we need to to to care for uh uh those other living beings who who allow us just to be alive to exist now in the present but also in the long run um so it's i'm struck by the fact that we knew we knew all that we knew all those questions but um in a way we they were still a bit theoretical and one of those very very powerful thing that's happening now is that it's not theoretical at all it's you know it's everywhere it's we when we eat something we have to ask ourselves where does it come from we can't just ignore the materiality of our life so yes to try to answer your question i'm not so i'm not sure i was anticipating anything but i was just um uh thinking with my with our time and and in a way um uh maybe i was uh i was ready to to embrace the uh the drama uh in in a way in thinking about it preparing for the seminar or doing the seminar what did what did you find what surprised you what what what was your experience of researching that knowledge hmm um many many things uh one of the things i i i discovered by re-reading uh one of Bruno Latour's texts called microbes is that in the 19th century uh people faced the kind of situation we are facing now um they had you know illnesses everywhere they didn't know exactly how it was working they didn't have the medicine for it they were dying by thousands and thousands of people the animals were dying as well and in fact we have um we we have been we have forgotten that time we were used in the 20th century to have medicines to have a solution when there is a problem we were used to you know to be quick to go quickly to the next thing um and what happens with the corona is that we have to stop we have to slow down and we are again in this very 19th century and even more before 19th century situation of not knowing what really happens and in terms of history of science this is very striking and frightening and interesting we we don't know exactly what will happen we we don't know exactly what uh how to solve that we don't have the the vaccine yet and and that never happens that didn't happen in our world anymore so yes rereading Latour Latour's microbes reminded me of of that of that state of that situation of not knowing of not knowing exactly how it works this virus you know all the the the scientific articles that we were all reading you know trying to understand and so that's one thing and the second thing with that book is that it reminded me to what extent we are capable we as humans to forget the non-humans and theatre is an interesting case for that one of the things that fascinates me is the fact that i'm trying to write a book about that at the moment is the moment in the 17th century when the theatre of of of humans and the theatre of nature so to speak the teatro naturae were divided you mentioned the theatre of the world the teatro mundi the the theatre of the world was much more unglobbing you know it was much more full that the even in Shakespeare you had you had lots of plants and animals and gods and and something happened i don't know i don't know if what you think of that but something happened and and little by little the the the theatre of nature became specialized in a way became the realm of science of laboratory and theatre of humans became something about psychology and you know the relationship of one human with another human on stage and at least in France there's the big there's the big tradition of of you know teatro classique classical tragedy racine and then mollière and it's it's very human and what i find interesting with the idea um of doing the history of the microbes like la tour did is that he he explained that at some point at the end of the 19th century the microbes microbes entered the stage the political stage the scientific stage the economical stage and of course the domestic stage and suddenly you have new actors on stage so this is quite interesting for us i think in the theatre to try to make the link between i mean that's the kind of thing i like to do between history of science and history of theatre the fact that theatre is actually a very strong not only metaphor it's more than a metaphor a very strong place to think about relationship between humans and non-humans and and it's also a very strong and powerful place to think about agency agency in the in the broad sense of who acts in the world who is powerful we have the tendency to think that we are as humans powerful and suddenly there is a tiny tiny little thingy not even a not even an organism not we're not completely sure that it's alive the virus it's interesting it's some little bits of dna you know is it really alive this thing we're not really sure anyway there is this little thing that completely displaces our ways of thinking that completely disrupts our life so it is a strong actor it has a powerful agency so yeah that's another way to answer you sorry that was a long answer no no no please go on this is so significant what you are saying yeah so this book of of latour i'm talking about it because it's exactly where we met because he was fascinated by what he calls the theatre of proof he he interprets science as a theatre of proof and again theatre here doesn't have a negative meaning at all theatre means the place where you make things visible as we know so it's a very i think it's a very at least for theatre people for me it's a very strong way to to to understand what happened exactly in the in those years between 1870 1875 pastor created places for visibility places to make this new actor visible so of course what is a place to make an actor visible it's a theater and and and there is drama there is action and you and you have to show exactly what he does and the idea that uh yeah on the stage they are much more or how do you say in english yeah much more actors than only humans yeah yeah as you said it was such a big discovery even in 17th century one understood that perhaps earth is not at the centre it's the sun when science entered the european court said for every young king you had to be scientifically even engaged you were encouraged scientists were they're building instruments and were sharing knowledge of course it went into also military research and it was also the century of military fortification but as you said it was a science and science was significant and and the most probably the shock when people could see through a microscope something that was invisible the bacteria and and what that really meant that there's another world we they one didn't know about there's a great visualization i think of data of the cooler outbreak in london when they didn't know how it worked nobody knew they followed cases and they did some police detective work to see and then they said it must be the water because they couldn't figure out why it were the case so they did diagrams and slowly found that as a famous study and now of course the virus you can't even see on the microscope it's invisible um so the idea that you are have been researching with that tool for such a while i think it is truly significant and i think for everyone who works in theater and performance something to think about the idea also to trust in science to regain trust in science and that theater and the arts and science complement each other in a way that is the search the absolute search for truth and even you know the Galileo's way or others you know it might engage your lab and also the awe and wonder of of such such discoveries so um but you not only made those conclusions with Bruno Latour and said or wrote an article about it which already i think is a significant endeavor and to have do academic work it's a significant but you also said we i'm a theater director also next to a scholar and i'll create you know as amir said one of our great students faroon together with students at the greatest center they created performance knowledge series and and which we have done for a couple of years you perform that knowledge you tell us about that invention what what you um what what you created well it depends when i should start the story um of performing knowledge with Latour um maybe i should say something maybe first i was doing on the one hand on the one hand my my academic work my phd and i was absolutely fascinated by one of the greatest microscopist of the 17th century called Robert Hook who is the one who made the first drawings of microorganism so my phd is about hook and the fiction of the cosmos there's a big chapter about exactly what you said uh describing the invisible so you see it's a long long obsession so i was doing that on the one hand and then i was doing my theater work as a theater director with my company that i created in at Cambridge UK and it was two separate things i was i was staging pinter and you know uh racine and sarote and beket and but it was two different things and then what happened is that um i knew Bruno Latour a little bit already we were friends and he told me look there is something happening we have to make a play about the climate change and you know that was in 2008 or 2009 at that time it was absolutely not fashionable and completely bizarre to suggest such a thing and i told him are you sure play theater climate change what's what's the point what are you talking about of course it was completely right and of course nowadays it's absolutely banal as we know and even uh it's a genre you know the climate climate plays it's a genre so but 12 years ago it was really a strange idea and in fact it was a complete shift for me in in my in my practice of theater and suddenly i realized that when i was studying hook and the microscope and when i was staging pinter actually i was interested in the same thing i was interested in making the invisible visible and there was really no reason to separate those things except institutional reasons because in france it's not a very good idea to be very different than in america it's very very red and also female researcher a woman in it yeah exactly so i had two different curriculum you know and one was hiding the other when i was when i was working in rinse for instance you mentioned rinse at the comédie de rinse i had a special curriculum that mentioned only theater but when i was applying for a position i was mentioning only academia so it was two different worlds but in fact i realized that for me it was the same strong deep um desire to to to to say something about the invisible and to show things and so what happened with this climate change play is that we started to work with bruno and at that time he was discovering himself the idea of gaya he was very interested in in in this concept he was just starting to to to develop this concept and what i liked very much is that in gaya just for all listeners she's the greek goddess the mother of all mothers of mother earth in many cultures and different representations who exactly terra in in the roman david divinity and and she created next to eros i think basically the titans and the world is so he he discovered her because i also was not so much aware of of that yeah often enough we all should right interesting but he discovered her through lovelock so that's important he discovered the gaya's hypothesis of james lovelock and tell a bit about james lovelock i don't know so much about yeah james lovelock is is a bit of a maverick i i think he will be celebrating his 101 birthday in july at the end of this month uh is a fantastic and crazy person i mean he can listen to us so i i should be careful and i never met him uh but uh he's very fascinating he's the man the scientist so he's a scientist um an engineer for a scientist an engineer and he he decided to be a a free scientist so he decided to quit academia and to make his own invention and discoveries uh i could speak for hours about lovelock but what i want to say that in around 65 he was working in in the jet propulsion lab in pasadena in california and he had a kind of vision he understood because he was working about mars your planet mars and he understood a difference a key difference between mars and the earth and he understood and he had a vision he he tells that a lot in his books he had the vision of the earth as a living planet and he had the name gaya for it and then he exposed so what does that mean gaya it's it's actually a cybernetic concept it means that the living make the conditions of their life so it's a kind of circular thing basically the reason why we can exist we can live is because there are plants who produce oxygen and it's also a kind of very very refined um loop uh effect and it's all the living beings together that explain why a certain quantity of oxygen is in the air because if you take the chemical composition of the atmosphere it should explode tears of luck i mean in in pure chemical rules uh and the reason why it's actually remains more or less stable and stably stable is because of life because of the presence of the living so it was such a strong vision to understand that there is one planet in the solar system maybe elsewhere but we know one which billions of billions and billions and billions of planets and galaxies and there might be others but we don't know them but there is one planet which on which the whole system of air earth water is completely actually made by life constantly made by life it's it's it is a metaphysically i think it's it's a very very strong idea um and lovelock developed that uh with lin margulis a biologist i will tell you more about later because i'm completely fond about her her work but basically i was telling you the story of of of how to create together research and theater but the the big shift for me as i told you is the moment when latur because he discovers gaia gaia as i just told you discovered it like as a concept as a scientific philosophical historical concept uh he he and he was also very interested in in in the in the climate change crisis of course 2009 it was the kopenhagen negotiation a big big catastrophe in terms of international politics you know uh so he was completely into that and and we started to work together with my company and it was absolutely great as a process because he was writing his book facing gaia at the moment at that moment so he took us on board on the kind of fieldwork where we met scientists you know climatologists people who were making climate models we met people who were doing drillings you know to to to measure exactly the soil and uh when i say we it's me and my company so actors um you know stage director light person musicians basically we were we were working with bruno on on his topic of of gaia and and that was as a as a creation process that was absolutely fascinating um and then the gaia the the result was this gaia global circus show that you mentioned earlier that went on tour uh a bit everywhere and and it's not so much uh a show that was uh trying to put all the science and all the knowledge we had on stage actually after a few months of of of rehearsals i realized that all the science we had uh learned with bruno was not to be the topic the topic was the feeling the emotion of understanding what happens to us and we will discuss we discussed a lot with bruno what is what is the role of a theater play at that moment what can theater do for us when we as humans and researchers and artists are moved by what we discover what can we do with that and that was an absolutely fascinating discussion and not finished at all it's an ongoing discussion um and and the the the the solution so to speak the the the the thing the form we found at that time uh was to have four actors on stage receiving those those those news bad news from science and just you know kind of uh and reacting to them what what does it do to us and the second thing i i i tried on and that production gaia global circus was to imagine the equivalent of the scientific model on stage what is the equivalent of the climate model and i thought okay we need to find something with our very simple means of theater something that reacts to us which is the definition of gaia by the philosopher isabel stengas who also inspires us something that react to us something uh which has its own momentum which has its own agency and again the question of agency comes back and i thought okay i will imagine a kind of huge puppet with helium balloons something that can move and that can react to what happens on stage but also in the audience for this thing which was huge kind of 10 meters on eight uh could move in the audience and could actually react and it was like another actor so you see it was in a way a very naive way to to experiment with this new type of agency it was a way to say okay how do we how do we receive the idea that we are not alone as actors just to go back to the beginning of our discussion we are not the only actors there are other actors and there is this gaia this thing which is uh not exactly the earth as an organism it's more complex than that as i as i told you in giving you the definition by lovelock and margulis it's really a loop and it's really the the the strange loop between life and material on on in on the earth so that was the very first attempt and for me that was a big big shock to realize that i could do on stage something that was also for me research it was absolutely research and it was absolutely theater and i didn't need to divide them anymore how interesting and how brilliant and how inspiring um so um you didn't do what i mean we did climate change evenings also at the seagull center but often we had someone who wrote a play play but your your structure was then different right is was that also already a lecture performance or that circus or did you had acrobats or the circle where does the that come in i believe very much in that popular century old form we also have to return to but what did that mean to you and how did you formally organize it the texts the actors the stage it's a it's a very good question this form because actually if i tell you after the different um experiments i don't have another word experiments we made with Bruno continuing the process one striking thing to me is the fact that it was never the same process it was never the same format it was as if and then i will go back to your question and answer you but as if it was impossible to have one protocol that you could follow each time of course because the questions has changed around along the years but also because in a way i think for me because this question is so big and it's so difficult and and we haven't answered it yet i i need i really needed each time to try it to try to address it from a new angle so what was this guy agrobats circus form it was very very strange first of all it was a text by Bruno called kosmocolos which was very much a philosophical dialogue in in in the style of didro almost with with kind of philosophical positions you know you had the you had lovelock you had the the climate skeptics you had clive hamilton who was writing a book called recreation for species you know you had those climate scientists and they were all playing together and this kosmocolos play i i said to bruno and he agreed that it's not possible to stage it it's too much of you know position voices so to speak so we decided to go on stage with my actors we were two companies my actors and chloe latour's company we put them on stage and we said okay we have to we have to to invent to improvise actually to tackle that question so we improvised a lot about gaya entering about the different emotions that were the results of those terrible scientific news and then we asked a writer actually pierre do bigny to write another play from the the improvisations and he wrote gaya global circus which is actually a text that you can find published in english i think in the yell theater journal i think it's it's available colors yeah yeah so it is it it became a text but what is important to me is that it was for three years a research process and an improvisation process with lots and lots of versions and to tell you the truth it was very difficult it was very interesting but it was very difficult because again i my my experience with theater where much more traditional it was like you know you're staging becquette which is difficult enough but you know where you come from with the gaya global circus play we realized that we needed to invent the way of doing as we as we were advancing in the question so to speak so yes a lot of improvisation and also having the actors as part of the process very much they were researchers with us they were following the process with us and we learned a lot all together half of them became vegetarian in the process one of them was a climate skeptics at the beginning and now everything he does is about you know the climate change and and biodiversity and so we were completely changed by the by the process and just to answer you about the circus the circus is just a title and that was a title that Bruno wanted because he liked the idea that we were like in in a state of of dazzlement of we were a bit lost and he wanted to give the feeling of in french maybe the circus is clearer the circus a big big mixture of feelings of figures of tones as well because it was both tragic and a kind of comedy and i think that was important for us that it was not only you know a climate play with you know fear and and and problems and and so yeah it was a lot about our contradictions also as humans our own contradictions and how we are inhabited by by by by a variety of reactions of emotions and you still perform it or no no no we performed it for three years and yes what i wanted to say that then to me even that format even then that form was not in a way uh completely i don't know how to say that adjusted to the situation and the the next form we made with Bruno was even more difficult to more difficult to describe it's what you mentioned the theater of negotiation a theater of negotiation and that was very interesting because so different it was two hundred students gathered in Nanterre-Amandier in this huge theater you you know uh and they were trying to to do a climate negotiation for one week but not only humans were invited we we decided that the the delegation would be delegations of you know animals and endangered territories so we just opened up completely the the principle of the of the negotiation and that was very interesting for me because nobody knew what we were doing and it was difficult very difficult to give it to a name was it a performance what is was it a a model united nation you know this kind of moon that people do at Harvard not really because we were not following the the the norm we were inviting animals and and and and different uh different entities was it a simulation was it a exhibition some journalists said that it was the most interesting exhibition in Paris because you could visit it was it a thought experiment i think it was a kind of thought experiment in in the in the old sense of the world what if we invited animal and human entities around the table what if we would give a voice to different kinds of of agencies again to go back to our discussion so you see it it was a very different way to use the theatrical space because it was not only one room it was the whole theater non terra mondia is huge you have gardens you have shero workshop workshop where he was doing his films you have two huge stages you have the the whole everything was occupied by philip ken set design as it was completely crazy so and after that i thought okay that was interesting but a bit heavy to carry um and there was also lots of problems with the idea of reinvesting political form you know the negotiation it's a very strict form and in fact i didn't feel completely at ease with it and i thought okay now Bruno we have to move again we have to change and to find something else and i suggested that it could be interesting to have Bruno on stage and that was again a very big move because uh and i think i join you here on the idea of performing knowledge what does that mean to perform knowledge what does that mean to to do something which is not only a kind of illustration of knowledge but which is really um what i wanted to do with the first of the first performance i did with with Bruno was to to share with the with the audience the pleasure i have in discussing with him and the fact that exactly like in the case of pastor theater of proof when you listen to Bruno Latour it's theatrical in the best sense of the world of the world which means it's um uh thinking alive and i wanted to share that um so i thought okay what should i do and i had a very very simple idea and that became inside the show inside was to put Bruno inside his own powerpoint because he makes powerpoint not very nice ones but he makes powerpoints like academic do powerpoints when he gives conferences and i thought okay let's let's make a powerpoint that becomes something like a space like a theatrical space in which he can actually move and and and he in which he can actually describe to us the thinking he's doing at the moment and the thinking he was doing at that moment was to uh try to change our point of reference he said okay we think we leave on the globe it's again the earth the Gaia problem again and again staged in different ways so to speak so he said okay we think we are on earth on the globe but in fact we live in this very tiny critical zone that's the word the scientists use which is another way to say Gaia ten meters above the earth ten meters below the earth right exactly everything happens there so we are not on something we are in something we are inside this this thing so for me it was an absolutely fascinating stage problem again scenic question what does that mean to be in something and and again it was another way to re to restate the question of what can theater do to help us feel this this shift and it's not really a shift of point of view it's it's deeper than that and that's why i'm not sure i i i i managed to do it at all that's why i need to continue to do theater because because i failed many many times my feeling that in a way all those experiments are somehow failures you know you you try something and you and you feel it's not exactly that yet so but what was interesting with the inside performance is that we i i tried to share with the audience this shift of perception this shift of feeling which is not only intellectual which is not only optical the problem is not only how do you represent the earth the problem is how do you stand in a world which is as complex as entangled as the scientists the earth system scientists tell us how do we welcome so to speak this this change of vision so you see why it's very close to Galileo you know it's a it's a deep change of cosmos in the sense of it's a change of perception and understanding and feeling of where we stand yeah and perhaps that is the most significant reminder art and science can do at the moment to de-center planet earth from just the human experience which seems to be egomaniacally at the center and and to understand that it is a complex system and we ourselves might be part of a much complexer system like our bodies and ourselves they don't really know that they are cells but they exist but they do something together and and to find a way as you say to really experiment and what you describe is an experiment everybody says we do experimental theater but it's not just about rewriting the third act or temporary changes in timeline but what you did is an experiment in a in a sense of as you said or wrote that artwork is a think work like what you are doing or is thinking and what you see on the stage is a representation of thinking of a brain and Bogart who was here also on the talk talked about that that is a way of making the invisible thoughts and things that govern as well as possible so it's really I think a stunning discovery and also what normally puts the fear in every audience member to say oh my god it's play about science or something and I have to learn something but know that you said there's something fascinating it's connected it's both some theater I loved your your your installations in in Montel and their example the thing in opera in Italy just put plants in every seat because they we can't have humans we put they have is the photo you see them we are connected to that there's the famous cat concerto of a track composer who filmed his cat that was playing on the piano and he had the video of the cat and once and he composed something around it it also made made me think Virginia Barba who also gave a great seagull a talk here today he recently had the blessing of a horse in a church like an actor of a French company works where I came in with the priest she was in a costume standing on it but then she bowed down so it is incredible but did it work what what happened what does the audience come are they as much changed as you did I mean it's incredible to say that you're actually the most you would hope for yet your company members changed but did audience how did the audience react and what audiences are you looking for yeah actually I think it really depends on which project we we discuss um so the the Gaia Global Circus again was very changing for the for the people of the company and we had some interesting reactions from the audience where we performed when we performed in in Canada in in in New York in Berlin but in a way it was still very political kind of questions question like do you think we can do something for the climate you know so to me those reactions prove that we were not completely at the level of deep change so to speak you see what I mean and then what happened with the Theatre of Negotiation it was in in 2015 so a few years after is that it was again deeply changing for the people who participated in that was a bit more than for actors it was 200 300 students so it's a bit more but I think we failed in the sense that it was very difficult for the people outside of the experience the people who were just visiting so to speak the negotiation it was very difficult for them to realize that you know how disruptive it was to actually make politics by taking seriously the non-humans so that was extremely strong for the students who did that and now all of them I'm pretty sure work for those questions so participation is at the center yes exactly participation and immersion and I would say that for the two other shows so the one with Bruno Latour alone on stage strangely enough the reaction was much more powerful because of course you have a philosopher talking on stage but the way in which I try to you know to stage him is that he doesn't have the typical position of a philosopher giving a lecture you can hear his voice and he doesn't he speaks on the microphone so very softly and he's completely lost into the set design so basically what he's talking about is much more visible than what that himself and it's also because it's always improvised those lectures but there is a general frame arc narrative arc if you like but it's really it's not read and it's not memorized it's improvised and that's very important because it means that the people can feel that something happens in front of them which is live thinking I don't know as as you say live acting there is live thinking and and I think this has a peculiar power I'm not sure I know why but live thinking is something you can see the thinking happening in front of you and you enter into it and as you said because it's not about an intellectual discourse but it's about change of feeling change of position change of perception change of our relationship be between our species and other species our understanding of our spatial relations because it's about all that it's much more I would say what happens in in in theater at that moment is not what happens in a lecture hall where you have maybe the same conference being said there is something specific about we all know that that's why we do theater but there is a specific power of the theater space a kind of absolute space that makes the fact of performing knowledge on it really really moving and and that was the topic of the other one moving us and it was very important for me that's the this last performance with Latour was about the link between as we discussed before the moving earth of Galileo and the moving earth of Lovelock but also the moving of each person the fact that it's it has to be somehow an internal an intimate movement to reconsider our relationship to to to all the other living beings and and and also yeah just to go back to the virus the next show we are trying to to devise to imagine at the moment is something about again the very physical material aspect of this virus the fact that he goes from one from one mouth to another this virus doesn't this virus needs our bodies but politics also needs our bodies and ideas and thinking also needs our bodies so it's it's a kind of warning it's also it's a kind of reminder of how you know in incarnate we are I don't know if you can say that in English embodied how embodied we are and and how embodied the ideas are and how embodied the the politics also is so yeah sorry I think I was no no no not at all I think it is it is so significant what you are creating also with Latour I think the idea of rejoining that marriage of arts and science which in the 17th century there was no great real confusion about you could be an artist but you're interested in science or the scientific instruments looked like artworks and and that there was a connection but slowly as you said perhaps the the Natura the observable world then divided itself from the artistic expression which was then highly individual I think the great contribution that you really make in putting thinking and the process of thinking in a radical way on stage as an answer to our time where we need some the guidance we need meaning and we also need perhaps reminder us I think this is a significance and not the Karaoke system as as the theater perhaps has been functioned for a long time Milo Rao used that work that is time to change that what you do there and experiment with this I think of real and real significance that the time of corona I guess you also were in Paris at home you had to print out permissions to go out it did add an additional level to your work do you think because of there's something will be different something will you will approach things differently or will it reinforce or something what we did somehow was already on the right track it's a difficult question because I don't know how you feel but I feel we are very much plunged into it and I must say I was very I was very surprised and I admire very much all those French thinkers and not only French but all over the world all the people who were producing thinking during that time because I thought oh how do they manage because for me you know it was first of all it was just a big stop so that's why I'm not sure I will be very articulate in giving a strong answer to your question but for sure it has changed everything I don't know exactly yet how far and how deep it has changed things it's it's very strange because in a way it's it's a it's a big stop it was very interesting and and also terrible to have to stay at home to be stuck to have no almost no body again the body was very strongly blocked and like everybody else in the world I was trying to do a little bit of yoga or something just just to feel alive so it was a big stop and it was also very interesting to to have to stop and and at the same time I felt that it was an accelerator because it it accelerated some of the things we were feeling it accelerated the idea of a of fragility of precarity of entanglement and it it it made it made visible lots of things in a way we were discussing the power of stage for you know making things visible but I'm very impressed by the power of corona to make things visible to make you know inequalities visible to to make inequality gender inequality race inequality of course social inequalities extremely visible and in a way even more disgusting than before you know even more difficult to accept and and it's it's maybe a chance and I don't know how to process that in my mind but I'm very very struck by the fact that it's also the moment when you know the the the the scandal of of the death of of floyd appeared and was so viral around the world you know it it happens now and I don't know if it's really by coincidence you know as if the the corona helps us in a way I mean it kills all of us and it it's monstrous but it helps us to see the kind of horror of of of our lives and it forces us it forces us to look into it eyes in eyes I would say in French les yeux dans les yeux and it's it's very hard but but it's also a good moment for that and of course it will change everything for for thinkers for for artists but I can't exactly yet tell you what it will change I think it's it's too it's too much our presence I mean it's scary you mentioned earlier on the extension of the species you know watch Martin that might be speculations but now there is a hint of reality to it you're right you're right well when you read that was this big book by by clave Hamilton this Australian philosopher I think it was published in in 2000 and and and eight or something like that and and the title is terrible requiem requiem for species you know you read that in in at the beginning of the of the years 2000 and you think oh he exaggerates and all that but now you read that and it it doesn't have the same sound it has it hasn't suddenly it's it's it's in our landscape it's in our mind you're right and and it's it's terrible but at the same time it's interesting because as I just said it's it's impossible to to look somewhere else it's impossible nowadays to to pretend it doesn't exist yeah it's a big crash of a car of a train of a plane you have to look at it you have to look away and we're coming closer you know to to the end of the talk next to a love lock or of course la tour what do you read or listen to what inspires you what what is what kept your kept your motor warm as some of our I could show you yeah please do show get it yes I have books everywhere yeah so at the moment I'm what I'm reading I'm reading it's very strange I'm reading Descartes I'm reading Science on Sen I'm reading all this beautiful book uh Cartes figure de la terre it's it's an amazing book about maps and and and it was a bobo exhibition some some years ago and it's a beautiful catalogue I'm also very fond of Kirche the theater du monde you know the theater moon tea and I'm also at the moment reading Tim Ingold this is next to my bed you see and I also read you know you've got all my bed here you've got and land it's very very interesting also about the soil the soil on which we are uh the soil on which we live and and why um yeah uh why we tend to forget things we put in the soil you know the the uh I don't know how you say that in English the rubbish but also the death people the dead people but also the the roots you know the so and then there's something quite interesting and then you have all my little uh entrap on tropocene library here with a lot of love lock and a lot of Baptiste Maurizio um but as I told you what bacon bacon yes you saw bacon yeah you're right you saw bacon and and also always this link between laboratory and theater that's a very serious uh book scenes of knowledge in the 17th century so you said all that is entangled but I also love I also love that you know the Richard Powers over story and it's a mixture of theater history of theater history of knowledge you know theater and encyclopedia but I during the oh and of course I should mention Brecht there's a lot of Brecht but I was reading a lot Lynn Margulis during the lockdown because uh she's the one who who wrote microcosmos and also l'univers bactériel yeah and and and I find I find her so fascinating you know I read a lot of science because what I like in science is not is is is what I like with 17th century science as well it's it's full of wonder it's full of stories it's full of actors and all the things I had been told in in in college about how boring science is and how different it is from from literature and poetry and theater and all the things I love I discovered it's wrong I mean it depends the kind of science you read of course but I what I like in science is is is the wonder is is the surprise is the passion and is the curiosity of it and again I think that's one of the reason why we met with Bruno Latour is that we met yeah 15 years ago and and and we could feel that both of us we were fascinated by science and we loved it not as a rationalist you know device but as as one of the ways in which the wonders of the world is being told yeah that's amazing I often go back to Alexander von Humboldt the great discoverer of nature and he was friends with Goethe many argue Goethe's Faust is actually based on Humboldt they study together they visit each other and when Humboldt told him I'm going to go to South America which he thought was the center of the earth everything would come from there but perhaps we know a little bit more might be Africa but and he said I'm going to catalog everything and bring the plants and Goethe said yeah you can give Latin names and you can order all the stones in alphabetical order how will you communicate what nature is about to be alive is about the sunset on the extinct volcano and it made him think and he became the first travel journalist who described the experience of nature as part of it and also then did his famous drawings where he organized flowers according to the height of a mountain and said they have more to do with each other from Tibet or the Dolomites than with a kilometer thousand meters below so he became a completely new idea also coming out of that experience and they're saying you really are reconnecting something that's led to this of extreme importance for this theater performance world and we all heard why we have to engage with these things also in a bigger frame and as you said earlier you look out of a window and you see a tree but be aware that what you look through the frame already has been done so it's not just about writing a play about arts and science but you know maybe take the frame out like Joseph Boyce who white holes in the in the walls of his academy got fired but I think that's what you are doing you are reframing this and also telling us in that sense and it's interesting to hear from you that you think we are at such a pivotal moment again like in the 70th century and so um and the idea of the bedazzlement what Sivan Gio writes about who also runs TDM at Tamai and theater and media in at Harvard um who also suggested early on we should talk to you next to Thomas Oberhander from the Berlin Festival who was working with you on the Immersion Festival and do an exhibition and he talked about you and Latour and said how can we do an climate change exhibition but we have our climate control working the air conditioners on we are against getting nuclear energy but we use the energy that you're trying how can you change an institution that for the moment is believed that the window we look at the work work is changed so thanks to two of them also to suggesting you I think is extremely significant important interesting and a new way of looking at things and everybody who works in theater you know you can connect it with your own research and your own traditions but there is something in there and perhaps you really do have answers in the form you found for the time we live in to give meaning and to understand where we come from where we are where we are going to and we really do need answers and we need new forms that will be highly interesting what you're doing I'm sorry you didn't come to New York and could do it and maybe like Walter Wittman I just read that his leaves of grass he wrote it as a young poet but then he continued working his entire life till he died on versions of it they did longer and shorter so maybe your Gaia Global Circus could be something you just keep the name and you rework it and maybe one day with real acrobats we have big circus fans also and that's great work done with the body also by these great institutions that promote circus work which also I think is trying to reframe it and there's so much to discover that it's a wide field as Akaman said so really really really thank you for taking that Seatle Talk so serious and sharing your experience and we could go on or we could have many many sessions and perhaps you should put online your NYU session we stage them with your students and everybody can can see them yeah I'm serious and that might be something before we leave and go and we ask that to our guests and I know it's a big question but if you're a young artist or a young researcher and also our audience at home what is your advice what's important what should they focus on how to use it and is that the outlook what meaning can we make of this time it's such a difficult question that I'd like to reverse it because you know the advice to a young artist is a is a genre almost and what I find fascinating with our time is that I would like to take advice from them I think there is something absolutely new happening in the order of generation and also in the wisdom and it might be it might seem strange but I I feel old already you know I'm 42 and I feel that I have so much to learn from all those young people who are going on the streets for all those young artists who are doing you know extinction rebellion rebellion from all those people with whom I work and and they are so you know strongly feminist anti-racist they are so strongly engaged political you know much more than my generation was that I I wouldn't give them any advice except that please teach us the older generations to to share with you what what you see what you do well this is a significant advice to listen for that next generation that will be here when we are no longer here and that in the way as you said keep the living species going by being alive by the virtue of being alive with the planet planet is alive really thank you again and I hope one day you will come to the seagull center and we will see your work and and we are going on this week with our seagull talks tomorrow we hear from iman on from Palestine who runs the ashtar theater and to hear how how does that feel like in the time of corona next to all the other complex layers of difficulties whether it's social political economically um what wow is that for her and on friday we hear from the english-speaking caribbean after we heard from martinik already and heady and we have a sakina dear and ivone walters from jamaica who will talk about this we are working on like next year's next week's lineup also so and thank you for staying in the talk today also showed why it is so significant to listen to artists performers and researchers scientists something that bridges as we say at the seagull academia and professional theater international and also american theaters are right in the middle of what we do it's inspiring it's new it's something that hasn't been done before and you're not as an artist copying the image that you see in a museum so you do your own new one with all as you said how difficult it really is and how much part of it is a failure and but this is uh um the greatest work i think one one can do so thank you again i hope he didn't steal too much of your time from you and your family and that they will have a good dinner in uh in paris and nine around ismo where are you i mean belville i mean the tense oh you're in the belville if i'm wonderful that's a great live mix diverse neighborhood yeah what's for dinner in paris tonight i have no idea i will find out we will find out you make an experiment thank you all thanks you for listening and really this is all for you the listener to make a difference also in your life there might be something in there that changes or saves your life and what you hear here it's important to have good performances and the art and it's important to have a great audience that also applies what frederick does in her work do it at your home the experiment find out read create connections and i think this is what this is all about it's no longer that we watch master artists it is a call to action it's a call to change ourselves and it has to be as frederick also said an authentic change and then the you know how to change the world thanks for howl round again for hosting us at travis and seeya and the great vj and my seagull team sannyang and andy and i hope to see you all and again and hear from you again in my audience tomorrow and next week so stay safe and stay tuned and au revoir frederick thank you and bye bye