 All right. Hello and welcome everyone to panel number three material and labor in performance for networks 2020 which is networks mapping labor in theater and performance. So, in this panel we have deep Sikha Chatterjee who is a fellow student of mine at the theater and performance PhD program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My name is Maya Rakshi, send a fourth year PhD student at the same program. And before I let deep Sikha take it away from here. I just want to plug in the how to the details for the live Q&A session that will follow our speakers presentations. You, our live stream viewers can send in your questions and participate. So there are three ways of doing so. Number one, if you are watching this live stream on Facebook, which will be our Facebook page, the PhD program in theater at the Graduate Center CUNY. Just simply comment your questions underneath the live streaming video. Number two, if you are watching it on HowlRound.com. And if you're a Twitter user, you can tweet your questions at HowlRound. That is the Twitter handle for HowlRound at HowlRound and use the hashtag networks 2020. If you are an Instagram user, you can private message us your questions at our official Insta account, which is at PhD Theater Graduate Center CUNY. Remember, all the theaters end with TRE and not TER. So deep Sikha take it away from here and I will be muting myself. Thank you, Mayu. We have Christine Snyder, who is our fourth year student in the CUNY Graduate Program. I am Deep Sikha. I'm a second year student in the CUNY Graduate Program, and I am moderating the panel. And this is my seventh Zoom session today, so excuse me if I'm a little frazzled. Also, I have invisible labor of having two kids at home, so they might pop up and make this a little bit more interesting. And we have Jessah, left from boys, who is a graduate student at Carleton College in Canada, and we will be talking about invisible and visible labor. Jessah, go ahead and start. Thank you so much. So I'll just get right into it. Performance art is not a singular art form. It is a genre of art history that can be divided into various categories. These categories are established by strategies that artists use to disseminate their concepts and assert their bodies. Types of performances that I have explored in my own research include temporary live performance, photo documented performance, and material trace performance, material trace performance being the subject of today's discussion. The material trace performance that I will be analyzing here is called Butterfly Kisses by Jameen and Tony. Butterfly Kisses is a series of performative drawings made from Covergirl's fake lash mascara. The resulting image was created after the artist applied mascara to her eyelashes and transferred pigment to paper through the acts of butterfly kissing. Understanding the way that Antoni activated her body during the creation of Butterfly Kisses reiterates that while we are viewing a stagnant object, Butterfly Kisses is not solely about what the work looks like. The imagery in Butterfly Kisses signaled Antoni's actions during an experience that she cultivated for herself. As a result, the demands of conducting an analysis on a material trace performance like Butterfly Kisses means that visualizing and understanding the performance that took place is just as important as understanding the stagnant image or object that is on view. As art historian Amelia Jones explained, this hybrid art form requires hybrid modes of analysis. To advance Butterfly Kisses as a type of performance and grounding my approach in feminist dialogue and theory, much like Antoni did in her own studio practice, I wish to explore the labor in this work. The importance of how the work was made in relation to labor is ultimately problematized because Antoni does not strive to obviously depict herself in the process of cosmetic adornment. So long as we recognize that each eyelash stroke represents a moment in time, and when accumulated in Butterfly Kisses, they represent the duration of Antoni's performance, then labor should present itself. There are several questions that need not be evaded when openly interpreting material trace performance. And of course, the one I'll be exploring in this presentation is how does labor exist in this particular material trace performance and how do audiences understand labor in a work like Butterfly Kisses. To approach this question in relation to this work, what needs to be analyzed is cosmetics and their role. And that suggests that the use of cosmetics is what leads to the creation of Butterfly Kisses. Through the participation of everyday makeup rituals, and Tony off to reveal the resulting material impact that cosmetics, particularly mascara can produce. The performance of adornment is the labor that occurred, but the use of cosmetics is what embodies labor for the audience. While all viewers can engage with Butterfly Kisses, those who experience cosmetic adornment in some way, whether through personal experience or by association, are likely to have an easier time interpreting the labor in this material trace performance. While some butterfly, while Butterfly Kisses represents the artist process and subsequent labor, the fact that viewers can only assume how the creation of this work unfolds is ultimately fundamental. Through the works of Butterfly Kisses, we witness the artist asserting her presence through the traces of herself that she leaves behind. These visceral traces stand as markers for the artist's touch, which in turn symbolize the artist's presence in performance. This creates an unorthodox awareness that exists only once the artist is removed from the viewing experience, yet forever engaged in the work through its materiality. We witness Antoni's body and the gestures she engaged in during this prolonged performance that created Butterfly Kisses, we can interpret labor. The repetition of form within this material trace performance stands not only as a record for the artist herself, but as a record for her action. Butterfly Kisses tracks the movement of the artist's body without the body being present. The signs of having been made correspond to a body having been in motion. Because Antoni's adornment lacks clarity, we must infer a hidden process, a task which demands thoughtful involvement. This results in the performance being both about what the artist did and what happens in the minds and subsequently the memories of the audience as they recognize and relate to the work. At the heart of Butterfly Kisses, like in much of Antoni's work, is the artist's pursuit to imagine how her audience will understand her experience and experience it for themselves. Each spectator who receives Butterfly Kisses will see the work differently and interpret labor differently. What follows is my understanding of her actions and her labor. So here is an image of Butterfly Kisses from Jeanine and Tony's website. The frequency at which the lines are inscribed across the paper vary and signal a trajectory of motion. Each of these drawings are not overly large on their own, but their size does highlight her need to move around paper. She would not have been able to remain stagnant during its creation. Not only would she have had to move her head as she went across the paper, but her body would have to be activated as well, so to ensure that her eyelash traces reached the far corners of these performative drawings. Sometimes jagged and sometimes seamless, each trace is connected to the trace of another. Some lines are thicker than others, and some are misshapen lines of heavy black mascara. These dark spots throughout the work are likely the result of Antonia's heavy application of makeup. While she could control her much mascara she was putting on and where and when she fluttered her eyelashes across the paper, the way the pigment would disperse onto the surface of Butterfly Kisses appears more difficult to regulate. This was further perpetuated by the physical limitations of Butterfly Kissing. Every time Antonia made a mark on the paper, her eyes would have been closed. This, along with her close proximity to the paper, meant that Butterfly Kisses was largely developed through an allotoric approach to art making. When constructing Butterfly Kisses, Antonia would have likely visualized the entire composition, however the individual strokes which make up the composition were more dependent on chance. So, Butterfly Kisses is ultimately the result of a tedious process. But the meticulous labor that went into creating Butterfly Kisses was complicated by the physical demands of this material trace performance. Antonia took part in the performance aspect of this series in intervals. Three times a day she applied cosmetics and proceeded to Butterfly Kiss paper 20 times per sitting, totaling 60 winks a day. This project proved to be physically demanding and the artist felt that this was the most she could do at a time. In structuring Butterfly Kisses in this way, Antonia's process is thus not represented throughout the progression of a single adornment ritual from unadorned to fully adorned, but instead time extends over several routines that she performed day to day. When spectators recreate the development of Butterfly Kisses in their minds, repetitive line work is not only visually overwhelming, but signals the artist's overwhelming labor. And this is achieved when they not only observe the visual qualities of the series, but also understand the logistics of the artist's movement when creating this material trace performance, reading Antonia's traces as visual cues of an action. This awareness of Antonia's performance during the creation of Butterfly Kisses can also be taken a step further. To truly understand her labor, spectators should try to feel her traces. The artist acknowledges the importance of this viewer engagement when she explains, quote, I want the viewer to feel it in their body, to register their own eye blinking, and then imagine how many times it would take to reach 2124. I also want them to feel the accumulation that that number provides. Those who have experience of putting on mascara can also bring that ritual to the work. So to truly feel her trace, one must perform it. There's an urge to follow along with Antonia's motion, blinking with Butterfly Kisses, imagining that you were adding to the accumulation of the eyelash strokes in these performative drawings. Of course, blinking repetitively is not truly what she did. There was more to this. So, developing off that, I decided to actually do it for myself. I applied mascara and I Butterfly Kissed a piece of paper, 20 winks per sitting, three times throughout the day. While Antonia did this for many months, I did this for one day. Here are the results of my butterfly kissing. Here are my traces left by Cover Girl Stick Lash Mascara, an accumulation of 60 winks. I barely filled half of this 8 by 11 inch piece of paper. And Tony's Butterfly Kisses were 32 by 32 inches, and she created multiple iterations, all through the same performance and adornment process. Through this, I have literally felt Antonia's movement now more than ever recognizing the artist labor during the stage of her performance. But it's also made me more aware of her labor on different levels. It's irrefutable that the application of cosmetics maintains distinct levels of progression. Yet there's no visible transition that is present in the composition of butterfly kisses. Audiences do not gaze upon the artist as she applies mascara. All we really know is that every trace left by Antonia's eyelashes is the artist returning to the medium surface to perform the same gestures. That's the only labor that's been present in Antonia's work is that of butterfly kissing. But so much happened prior to the moment that the artist embeds into the visual field. Prior to my re-performance of butterfly kisses, I never really considered the adornment element, the moment where Antony applied mascara repeatedly as a laborious component. We can see the demands of butterfly kissing, but the application process is what entails the unseen labor. From my experiences, I can infer that Antonia applies makeup almost daily for a set number of days. And while eyelashes are coated in fresh mascara, she brushes them across the surface. Every time, without change, Antonia would have done the same action during the same phase of adornment right after she is adorned. The more mascara the artist applied to her eyelashes and the quicker the turnover between application and action, the more pigment would transfer. But mascara as a medium is complicated because it dries quickly. From the time she applied the wet mascara to her eyelashes to the moment she transferred pigment to paper, she would have been limited to the amount of time she could butterfly kiss the paper before having to apply more mascara. In my experience, I was able to transfer pigment from my lashes to paper approximately two times before having to return to the adornment phase and repeat the process all over again. Because of this material limitation, Antonia would not have been able to veer from her particular arrangement of action, wait too long and the mascara would become dry, resulting in no traces being left behind. Start too early and not enough pigment would transfer. Now, in participating in the labor of this private performance, it's made me wonder, why did Antonia endure the process for so long for so many months? What does her labor mean? To explore this question, I think it may be useful to perform Antonia's gestures in a manner that does not simply reenact the artist's movement, but respond to them with one's own. We should explore how our movement participation and engagement with this material trace performance lends to a grand narrative of cosmetics, adornment, and how our traces would exist in relations to Antonia. Following this notion, visually speaking, butterfly kisses to me seems to recall the material remnants of the act of removing makeup, all the same as it represents the application. In the case of butterfly kisses, Antonia accelerates the process though. People who adorn themselves in cosmetics tend to stay this way for extended periods of time. Antonia not only rubs the makeup away from her eyelashes instantly, but no one sees her adorned. In butterfly kisses, cosmetics don't seem to serve a purpose of vanity. It's not a tool Antonia uses to enhance her appearance or boost her own self-confidence. So Antonia then sheds light on what cosmetics look like when they're no longer on one's body, when she accumulates her material traces into a series of images. This leads me to assume that Antonia's material trace performance is more concerned with the act and the implication of the adornment. So, removing mascara in a practical, non-performative sense mimics an adapted version of Antonia's butterfly kissing. Following this, I myself have created an innumerable amount of butterfly kisses like compositions on makeup removal wipes. Spread across the surface of these wipes are the traces of my own eyelashes. Now, I do not suggest in any way that my material products of the daily makeup removal routine is identical to Antonia's intentional or conceptual material trace performance. But analyzing butterfly kisses has led me to observe my own cosmetic traces that I leave behind. What butterfly kisses look like and what the traces mean have translated to my own personal experience with this process. I see my own actions in butterfly kisses. I see my own markings in butterfly kisses. I experienced similar subject matter in Tony's performative drawing on a regular basis. But I come into contact with these markings through a single makeup wipe, which stands to represent a single adornment routine that is washed away or disposed of almost immediately. The butterfly kisses in this sense resembles the accumulation of makeup wipes and over the course of several months. In the case, in a sense, Antonia constructs a powerful dialogue about Western beauty standards and consumers culture, and in effect, the labor involved. The industrial strokes of her eyelashes all at once and at this overwhelming frequency for extended periods of time, forces me to confront my own position within a dialogue of consumerism, beauty standards, and the labor of my own adornment. Facing a single makeup wipe was never enough to indicate the extent of my own labor. To save these makeup wipes and the traces of mascara that I leave behind, I imagine that I would be faced with an emotional experience parallel to that of Antonia's material trace performance. And so, and Tony's labor is enlivened with every spectator who engages with butterfly kisses. Partingly, the artist's absence and presence ensures that spectators, like me, are looking beyond the physicality of the work, and instead begin visualizing the artist's experience and in turn their own. The artist's labor is wound up in the materiality of butterfly kisses. Inscribed into its visual field, audiences can work to interpret the artist's movements, actions, and process. Thank you. Thank you, just so that was so great. Christine, take it over. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for that paper. Hi, hello, my name is Christine Snyder, and I'm a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. My dissertation work will focus on the Civil War musical and the weight of document the archive and place both setting and production location on the musicals creation audience reception and larger questions of us historiography. However, I have a personal interest in off stage labor practices, specifically in the commercial theater and particularly on Broadway. When I first arrived in New York City in 1997 my first paying job was as a Broadway usher. For the past 23 years I have worked in Broadway front of houses for both for profit and not for profit theater companies, as well as backstage for 10 years as a door person. The original form of this paper had been along the lines of a lecture performance. I plan to bring in a dance belt and some pit pads which are wardrobe essentials for maintaining clean lines and sweat free cross tunes, and wash them for the audience while I talked about the sometimes forgotten and unesthetic work of off stage laborers, including wardrobe hair and makeup departments. The tone was meant to obtain some vo ban or smellies vomit absorbency powder to pass around as a visceral way of accessing the off stage labor of the front of house staff, including the porters and cleaning persons ushers and house managers. The tone was meant to be light and playful but to also serve as a reminder that off stage labor is often not only not beautiful, but monotonous gross, hard and forgotten. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately the all factory capabilities of zoom are nil. So the vo ban was out. So to the physical labor the embodied in the roomness of washing clothes is lost in this online format. So I've dispensed with the lecture performance format, but not the more serious points I wanted to make. So first I would like to establish the object of study, who are the off stage laborers I want to call attention to. They are anyone who lacks what would be considered an artistic or aesthetic impact on the actual performance through agency and choice. This eliminates actors directors musicians dancers choreographers set costume and lighting designers and producers from my conversation. I would interrogate the labor of the box office staff, soundboard operators and microphone technicians ushers and ticket takers carpenters and set builders infrared hearing and translation system providers, lighting operators and technicians, press agents, house managers, security guards and canine handlers company managers props makeup and wigs door persons engineers porters and cleaning persons dressers and wardrobe supervisors child guard child actor guardians merchandise automation and stage managers. That is a long list, and we only have a short time. So I will do my best to honor these diverse labors as I can. I should also say that I believe that the theatrical arts can and even should make labor beautiful on stage. I would even argue, I would never argue that artists shouldn't use labor as a means of theatrical expression illuminating the multiple meanings of work for an audience. I believe that the works delivered today have made the case for the aesthetics of labor on stage, and the importance of recognizing labor, particularly on stage and audience witnessed labor, as a part of our working in theatrical worlds. Through butterfly kisses, and the materiality of mascara, which was amazing. Jessa has reminded us of the invisible but physical and emotional labors that linger within the material traces in performance art. I would argue that offstage labor can't be made to be seen as beautiful when mediated by an interpreted through an art like photography. Kristen Essen writes that the potentials of photography to make beautiful, both the labor of the lighting technicians at her college and the laborers of the 1930s in her theater topics article the aesthetic of back backstage labor. It's from 2011. This is a correct assessment and I love this article for asking us as scholars to think differently about offstage labor. But I would also argue that it is not the labor itself that is inherently beautiful, but the mediation through photography that makes it so. Arguing here instead is twofold. One, I am interested in work that tears down the hierarchies that exist between onstage and offstage laborers, as is so wonderfully expressed in the introduction to working in the wings, new perspectives on theater history and labor by Elizabeth a Osborne and Christine Woodward. But I would argue that an impulse to aestheticize offstage labor automatically reiterates the hierarchy by reinforcing the notion that only labor that can be viewed as art is worthy of equality with onstage or artistic labor. Second, that what an aesthetic offstage labor leaves out is a vital messy and quotidian aspect of offstage work, emotional and effective labor. I would argue here that care, when this word means the supporting of another person or persons while repressing ignoring or excluding one's own needs desires and feelings is far from aesthetic or artistic, but exists in a place beyond the concepts of art. I will begin with this first point, however, that aestheticizing offstage labor reiterates the notion that in the theater artistic labor is a labor against which all other labor must be measured. I'd like to tell a recent story from my own experience. I was a lovely interaction, but it has influenced my thinking about how my own offstage work and the work about my own offstage work in the work of other offstage laborers. A few months ago I was given the assignment of monitoring the men's room line during intermission at a popular musical. This particular theater has its non accessible restrooms up one flight of stairs, and the restroom line so that it doesn't interfere with the law, the theater's tiny lobby and its bar and merchandise lines must snake up the stairs and into the theater's balcony. The other ushers gave me very clear instructions online control as this was a very popular show with many male and male identifying patrons, and I was able thanks to their instructions to execute the line as it should be executed. The line is there want to do when they have to wait in line for the bathroom, but one man in particular stopped me and said, that was great direction and choreography. I laughed and I think to him it was meant as a compliment and I took it as one, but I began to ask myself, must my labor be acquainted, equated, equated with all onstage work in order to be considered well done and therefore valuable. Of course, a further complication between commercial not for profit and regional theaters and the established hierarchies of theater labor. That is of course pay scale, and the role of monetary renumeration in determining labor hierarchies. This is interesting on the level of who in the theater has a second house and who in the theater has a second job. As this asks questions about the effects of capitalism on self worth and worth in the eyes of others. I'm remiss not to mention this, but that is an entire paper on its own and I'm looking more to a movement that continues academically to acknowledge prejudices in our own studies of theatrical labor, and to an opening up of deeper conversations about care and emotional and effective labors as performed by offstage workers. As anyone who seeks to a fetishize cleaning up vomit has never done it before. Such work is care, I am purposely using the word care because there's an emotional aspect to even this kind of labor, especially if the sick person is elderly or a small child, or even and in a different way, drunk or somehow otherwise incapacitated. So many reporters who maintain the theater building during the performance and the cleaning people who maintain the front of house and back of house before and after the performance, reiterate the importance of this kind of care, which is so often rendered invisible by the concerns and needs of the performance, the artistic labor itself. Backstage workers may well notice their garbage cans are empty, but the audience is often little concerned with this labor unless something is wrong. The definition of wrong is as multivalent as the word audience. And it is when something goes wrong whether backstage or in the front of house that emotional labor, the managing of feelings and reactions may kick in. We can imagine, and perhaps many of us have heard the calm collected voice of the stage manager over the God Mike, calling a halt to a performance for technical difficulties or for once in my experience because a fist fight broke out in the audience. In front of house, we've been taught a metaphor for these moments. Think of a swan, a bird who glides gracefully over the water while her little feet paddle furiously underneath. I would also apply this metaphor to emotional labor with its surface calm and frantic movement below. The sociologist Arleigh Russell Hosh child began to explore emotional labor in the workplace. Initially by studying flight attendants in the 1970s and 1980s. She used the concept of acting as a metaphor for the physical physiological psychological process of repressing one's actual emotions in order to project emotions expected by the other person in a real life or non theatrical interaction. And this case, the other person is an airline passenger. This repression occurs in public during the interaction but it may also carry over into the private life of the person as well, who continues to feel the need to control or manage bad reactions to others. Hosh child and other sociologists and labor study labor scholars have that have followed her have also emphasized how much of this emotional labor is done by women. With the experience in the theater I would also add persons of color and members of the LGBTQ plus community. When scholars have applied concepts of emotional labor to the theater, they have in these very few incidents instances taken the queue from Hosh child and applied emotional labor back to actors. Moving on emotional management is performed by actors goes back to at least the 18th century and didn't need it arose, the paradox of the actor, which asks how an actor can seem to suffer emotion on stage, but remain unmoved herself. One of the contemporary studies of emotional labor in theater is privileged emotion managers the case of actors by David Orch as those oswitz in the June 2008 issue of social psychology quarterly, in which the author analyzes actors in a community and at three universities, as well as directors and acting teachers in order to dissect and understand their emotional management techniques. No such study has yet looked at offstage workers. So, in the spring 2015 Canadian theater review turns the conversation from emotional labor to questions of affective labor, the actor and the audience and in his article marathon performance that of nature theater of Oklahoma's life and times for example, affective labor, a close cousin of emotional labor is the labor produced to change the emotional experiences of others. What might be flippantly and dismissively called customer service when applied to the front of house, but would, but what should just be called care when applied to either side of the curtain. A truth of affective labor is that it is so often closely paired with unacknowledged emotional labor, whether by performers or audience, or in this paper by offstage laborers. The notion that we workers on a theatrical production are a family often comes from stage management company management and house management. But as with family emotional repression, giving in and covering things over or smoothing them out without solving the internal problems occur. Sometimes as with family the pressure is to please rather than to satisfy oneself or be happy to put one to put others always first like the stereotype of mother, the ultimate emotional laborer from the past is to sacrifice oneself to care and often without acknowledgement. I have one final concern for the continued scholarship of emotional and affective offstage labor that of the long running show when saw while some aesthetic or on stage laborers particularly musicians may remain with a show for three or five or 10 years. This is the so called golden handcuffs. In my experience, it has been much more likely for an offstage labor to work the entire duration of a long run. What told us this unique theatrical experience that of years of steady work and an industry not necessarily built on that model. What does it take on a laborer who lacks an aesthetic intervention within the work. Now I know at times this paper may have felt anecdotal and that it speaks in generalizations and to that I can only say that the published research that would feel my paper does not exist. There is a model for contemporary Union scholarship in former musicians Union business agent Catherine P molders unions in class transformation the case of the Broadway musicians published by root legion 2009 and intimacy our whites blue collar Broadway the craft and industry of American theater published in 2014, but there is not yet a robust body of academic writing on contemporary theatrical unions and practices. However, an intensified interest in labor studies in the theater in the 21st century academia which is exciting and hopeful. Considering contemporary questions of commercial not for profit and regional theaters can feel sticky or uncomfortable as theatrical institutions in the United States, including unions can also be intertwined with some disconcerting networks of money privilege whiteness and power. The fact that the theater business is problematic does not change that actual workers who are emotionally and physically involved in their labor are actually performing this offstage work every single day all over the country. Or that they were until the pandemic. I'd like to end this paper on this positive note that offstage labor is in New York and all across Canada and the United States has stepped up to lend emotional affective and physical labor to one another and to health and medical professionals in this time of need. The wardrobe unions in particular and regional costume shops seamstresses and freelance wardrobe workers have been sewing masks and gowns for doctors and nurses and needs in their local areas, and posting instructive mask making videos on YouTube, and do it yourself mask PDFs online larger union bodies like IOTC have encouraged younger members to connect with their older brothers and sisters who may need assistance in obtaining groceries accomplishing outdoor tasks, or may merely means of communication with others outside their home. This is a moment in which offstage workers are actively demonstrating on a larger scale, and outside of their profession that they are well aware of their deep and daily connection to care. Thank you. Thank you Christine that was so wonderful. As Christine knows and some of you know I am a costume designer also and I teach costume design and technology at Hunter College. And this mask making process has been such a present activity for costume designers and costume technicians in the past. One month in the US, especially after we realized how lacking the essential workers were in personal protective equipment, and that we have this necessary skills to create masks. So it's actually been a privilege to be able to make some masks or provide material for the masks and and distributed to essential workers now. I wanted to start with and seeing if there's any questions online right now I don't see any questions. Yes, there's so many interesting connections between both of your work. Oh, there is a hard on question here. Caroline writes, I Christine I'd love to learn more about your paper and your work. I work on these unions and their practices so that's, that's great. Maybe Christine you can connect with her. I'll put my email address here and I please contact me I'd love to speak with you, or email with you. And actually on the topic of masks right now a lot of the unions are also encouraging some of the Broadway shops have been working on mass making Broadway costume shops have been working on mass making so that's, that's really exciting. Jessica, you mentioned the issue of time, and how long it takes Anthony to work on this butterfly kisses kissing work. And then Christine I felt like your paper was also discussing the issue of time, because there was, there's a finite amount of time that the performers designers musicians are on stage. While all the theatrical essential workers ticket takers cleaners janitors ushers all of them are working at a different time. So I was wondering if both of you wanted to sort of talk a little bit about the sort of added expectation of time, when you consider the work of artists who are creating who are who are doing this work. And, and in Anthony's case just so this is, this is an is today's process. I am, I, as I understand so I would love for you guys to talk a little bit more about this issue of time. Christine you want to go first. Oh, oh, just. Sorry, I just picked Christine so every person go first and then just a single. Okay, great. Thank you. Sure. Yes, it's fascinating to me to think about how long a theater is open theaters typically open at 730 or eight o'clock in the morning with the doorman and the cleaning people who arrive. The cleaning people arrive to clean the theater from the day before and to clean the dressing rooms. The box office usually arrives around 10. So the theater is an active building the entire day. Usually the front of house staff, the porters again will come earlier the porters as the cleaning folk. The front of house staff usually has to be there about an hour an hour and a half before. And then as we all know traditionally actors are there at half hour. That's the traditional so half an hour before the show starts. I happen to be married to a musician, and their local here in New York is called local 802 and their joke is always that's when they have to be in the theater. There's actually no requirement for when, as long as they're there by downbeat as they say then you're okay. So like this whole idea and then when the show closes. It's over. Everyone else sort of goes home, but then there are folks like the door people who are there and have to remain there until everyone is left the building they're the last persons to leave the thinking about the security guards and about canine. The canine folk now at New York is a different place you know, many of the theaters have metal detectors now. So there's all these different layers of these folks who come in and out and have different duties and who are keeping the theater functioning in all of these different timeframes and who can leave when and where the security guards have to stay till all of the actors leave because they're there to provide security. All of the actors are outside the autographs etc. So I mean there's just all these flows of folk in and out of the theater persons that are, you know, here then gone then. It's really fascinating it's a really vibrant world that is so much more than you know the two and a half hours of the performance. And just going off that I think that one of time is absolutely a really important aspect in butterfly kisses, but I think a big aspect is that Anthony has complete control of her time. She can decide when to start the performance each day. She can decide the amount of time she needs to rest before starting the next interval. And I mean just from, you know, doing it for one day. I found that it because she broke it you break it up into three parts. It does take up a lot of your day because 20 butterfly kisses might not seem like a lot. But again, it's you do the butterfly kiss which takes a couple seconds, and then you reapply mascara. And so the amount of time it took to actually do one interval was more much more sensitive than I had expected. And so, for me, the aspect of time now after doing this experience is definitely something that I want to explore more in terms of butterfly kisses because I do really think that it's a really important element and it affects the artist's ability to engage in the performance and enjoy the labor. Absolutely. Thank you, Jessica. And I think both of you are talking about one thing that's like what is personal time versus what is collective time and how personal time is up to you but versus collective time within a theater setting is sort of, you can't really approach, you know, you have to sort of, it's defined it's very, very strictly defined. So we have a question here and it sort of relates to the work to one of my questions so I will open that up. We have a question on from Strabosti coach and she writes, how does the performativity of offstage labor affects spectators. And what about the gender role in equality in offstage labor. Maybe just saw and then Christine. Well, I think that in terms of butterfly kisses. It, because it is a private performance, nobody did actually see it. It's hard to the performativity kind of exists in each spectator's understanding of the work. And so, in terms of Antonia's work. She did it for many months and activities repeated over many months increases this sort of the relevance that they have to the viewer, at least from my understanding. And I think that to me is a way that she accesses the performative of offstage labor when in fact she's not able to see it. And the performative is kind of hidden in the traces. Hello guest. Yes, excellent. Um, I think the gender question is really fascinating to me. I have to be really some deep talk about some union membership and some ideas, especially in the Broadway and commercial theater, and what areas have traditionally been open to, to women to gay men and to other of the LGBTQ plus community. And what has been open to straight white men. I can say like speaking from the front of house. I was the very first female door person that my company ever hired. So door people. I mean, for a long time they were men. That was just how it was for a long time ticket takers were paid more money than ushers were paid, including the head usher who is technically their boss. And I think that the gender thing a lot of times almost entirely ticket takers were men and women were ushers. So it's it's really interesting to think about those things and then the areas particularly where women have really been able to break in now traditionally women were involved in wardrobe. But there are so many women stage managers like stage managers, for example, yes. And I believe that those are two roles that I really associate with care and was emotional and effective labor. Also sound board operators, a lot of women in sound board operation. And some of that is because that is a skill that is something that you, you have to learn and you have to be excellent at. And so I do know a lot of women sound board operators. But it does. It really is a great question to ask about that gendering of roles and then I forget there's something about performativity yes of off stage labor. It's interesting sometimes the performativity of off stage labor if you think of like accidentally seeing a stage hand or if a show stops and someone has to come on and fix a set. That's always kind of one of my favorite things. Because it sort of changes our life in the house is one thing but I can also say as a front of house person. You can imagine that in the world of cell phone technology, and sometimes people behaving in different ways inside the theater. So we're both to stop behavior and then also not to get in the way of the show. So that would be ways that we have to perform as a part of our job to sort of, you know, stop videoing for example or whatever those things might be if somebody is being particularly particularly disruptive. I have worked on a Disney show and people do sometimes think that this is a sing along for their child. And so that can be a problematic to and that the performativity of the audience is actually causing us as off stage laborers to have to perform in a way that we'd much prefer not to. Because other audience numbers are irritated or what have you. Thank you, Christine. That's great. You have another question for you. And this is specifically about union regulations from Curtis. Do you foresee any potential union regulations or cultures that might indeed further research. I don't think regulations there is no like code of silence that you know, whatever that might be. But cultures, most certainly, the reason I'm not writing my dissertation on this topic is very much to do with that I am still a union member I'm still employed well hopefully one day I'll be employed again. I'm in the theater and I don't want to write about this I'm not comfortable writing about this in as like a dissertation topic as long as I'm employed. Because one I mean, I'm a member of the union I feel that I am a union member and that that is something I should respect. I would say that there are there can be cultures I think it's not surprising that the book that I talked about the, about the Broadway musicians that she wrote it after she stopped working for the union so she she wrote it with her her past knowledge. Because I think that's just, I think that's proper. I think that's, you have to look with with hindsight, not while you're in it, not while you're a part of it. Absolutely. And I know that in the costume designers union there's a big issue with not costume designers themselves with costume technicians, but also in the nonprofit sector. I mean, technicians and designers are paid so little that now there's a movement called costumers for wage equity. We're really trying to, because the scenic design fees are not usually at par with costume design fees and then you know, it's sort of like trickles down the costume technicians get a lot lesser amounts, and so on and so forth. And that could really turn back to the gender question again. Absolutely, absolutely. And wardrobe costumes tends to be a female LGBTQ friendly space so, you know, very, very easy to become invisible in those spaces. Jessa, I am going, you made one point that we're at 313 so maybe we'll have one, one more question and we can sort of wrap up. What is so there's a question here. I'll come back to my question if you have time from Sunday fun there's a question what is the role of the theater director in offstage labor. And, Jessa, I'm the theater director and offstage labor well I don't consider the director and offstage labor because of the way that I'm looking at at artistic creation and about having agency and choice in the final artistic project so to me. The director leaves her mark, and often if a show runs for a period of time, she comes back multiple times. So to me, I feel that the, although this, what gets interesting is when you consider the stage manager who maintains the director's vision. That becomes a whole other interesting question that would actually be really fun to explore but we don't have a lot of time. But to say that yes the director I feel has that agency and choice and so is not the offstage labor that I'm interested in. Justin you want to add to that in, in your case it seems like Anthony is working both as an artist and a director. Yeah. So, I mean I would say that all artists are a director in some sense because they do have that that their own creative license but the parallel that I can connect to that is and would be a the role of a curator and what happens when Anthony's work is put into a gallery or a museum. And in terms of what I understand from from and Tony is that because a lot of her performances are material trace. And she uses real life materials real like she's used soap and chocolate and hair dye. A lot of times, if her work becomes part of the collection. There is this deterioration rate that becomes part of the performance once in the gallery and for the curator. From what I've understood in my reading is that that becomes a problem and the curators want to stop her work from deteriorating or changing for example her soap sculptures. They change over time. And that's become a really big issue for her work being on display, but to Anthony, the endurability of her materials becomes again part of her performance and she really advocates for what happens once the work is not in her hands anymore and is in the hands of the curator and in the gallery space. And so, I would say that in terms of her material trace performances. She definitely wants her work to be shown and on display. But at the end of the day, like I said, a lot of times artists are the director as much as they are artists and they're passionate about where they want their work to go speaking as an artist myself. This is how I feel. And so, yeah, I definitely think that the role of the curator is an important and integral aspect, but with Anthony. She's more concerned with the honesty and integrity of what she wants her work to be. Absolutely. Thank you, just so that is really, really great to know. We have one more question, and my, I think we are a time now. We have one more question and then I wanted to sort of wrap up with this issue of something you discussed, just so which was familiarity with the process and Anthony's case. We have a lot of audience members who have familiarity of putting on makeup, have a better ability to gauge that work. And many of us working in theater settings within the academia, try to give our students this familiarity of different areas of theater, whether it's backstage work, ushering, cleaning up after strikes, restocking costumes, restocking, breaking down scenery. All of these aspects, first building the scenery and then breaking down the scenery so that they have this experience of putting everything together and then wrapping it up. And Lin-Manuel Miranda famously said, I think after his successful Hamilton creation, he said that because he had familiarity with every aspect of theater, he felt like his work was, he had a better grasp of theater making because of that. So that's sort of, I just wanted to raise that within how in the training process within academic settings. We try to make sure that there is this equality in the theatrical experience. And then maybe we can finish with Ruziao's question, which is how are technologies, especially new technical availabilities on and off stage, changing the presentation and aestheticization of both the product and process of invisible and off stage labor. Thank you. Jessica, you want to go first or Christine? Sorry. I guess I guess I can go. You know, technological advances, I mean, pretty much since the ancient Greeks have affected off stage labor. When you think about, you know, the Deus ex machina, you know, coming out somebody had to be back there, you know, moving that lever right. So it's a really interesting question. You know, when the musicians went on strike in 2005, there was the whole question of, are we going to be replacing musicians with virtual orchestras, you know, will we just plug in a tape and play them. And I mean, people died when the microphone got introduced. And it goes to me that often technology doesn't make the labor anymore visible or maybe a little bit more invisible in that once upon a time a guy with a rope in a pulley was pulling the set down. Now all those dudes sit downstairs at a little desk with their TV, and they're they're bored and they, this is automation basically, you know, press buttons and. And I've talked to lots of automation guys and the job is very serious because they control machinery that can actually kill people. So they take their jobs very seriously. But it is different something that maybe used to require seven guys with pulleys. Now is one guy pushing a button or two guys pushing a button, or buttons to make effects work so at times I think technology both eliminates and makes labor invisible but you don't think about the guy that's down there while you know this the stage is rotating right. But also you weren't really looking at the guy who was on the treadmill either when you're looking at like the Tarelli system right where there were guys down there you know shirtless sweat and so I don't know that it renders it any more invisible, but it is definitely the kind of labor and the ways in which that labor is invisible but still invisible, I think. Um, yeah, I technology and material trace performance in terms of butterfly kisses is not something that I've ever really thought that too much about just because in my own. I've seen variations of types of performance art. I've seen this type of performance as one that is rooted in the creation of an object, so specifically a painting a sculpture a print a drawing. Whereas, I've looked at photo documented performance, which obviously utilizes a type of technology as a separate form. For me, I would say that if you know technology depending on what you know you mean by technology but my first thought when it comes to this would be a camera or something else right and or a video camera and so in that lens I think that had Anthony utilize technology, her labor would be more visible right just from my own documentation when I documented me doing that one session. I think it's a bit more clear of the labor and my actions and what I did during like how close I actually got the paper, each, you know the steps that I had to take. And so, of course, depending on what type of technology we're referring to. I say that I would say that there is the possibility for it to make labor more visible, especially in a work like butterfly kisses which at the end of the day is quite ambiguous and abstract. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I think it's time for us to wrap up. So I want to finish with a quick applause for both of our speakers, and then we can open up the space for our next panel. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Stay well and be safe. You too. Thank you. You too.