 future holds and this is the 19th of 20 conversations and then we're going to take a mix break which we'll speak about at the end but yeah the very little to say today except that just keep coming back to these conversations and see the previous conversations if you can they're all on the website they've become an amazing tome of knowledge provided one can sit through them and sift through them and without further ado Neil thank you for being here many thank you for curating this and take it away thank you Jayhan hi everyone and very excited to have you here again as usual good to see some familiar faces and yeah so today's discussion we're going to be talking with Neil Coppin about collaborative theater making and participatory justice or collaborative theater making as participatory justice um Neil is a writer director and activist based in Durban South Africa in 2011 he was named the standard bank young artist for drama and featured on the men and guardians 200 most influential young South Africans more recently Coppin has been awarded the out of Shriner prize for drama um Coppin's work has been performed internationally and his plays are taught in schools and universities in South Africa abroad and some of his most acclaimed ones include Tin Bucket Drum, Tree Boy at Normal Lords, His Bottle Bottle and New Family and his all-female cast adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm to the country for a substantial amount of time and Neil has more recently served as a dramaturg for Canada's leading contemporary indigenous dance company and has recently also just worked on reimagining of Hamlet for the Fugart Theatre in Cape Town. Those are kind of the professional directorial kind of products but the focus of today's discussion turns more towards Neil's kind of more recent substantial project which is a company called Empathyator that is based outside of Durban and we will learn a little more about the kind of work that they do and the kind of impulses that shape the kinds of I guess interventions that Empathyator is invested in making but we thought that it would be interesting to kind of start us off with just a short clip that kind of gives us a little kind of background on what Empathyator does and also the kind of glimpse of the kind of aesthetics I guess and what the work kind of looks like so if you'll indulge us I know it's a rather unusual way to start our process but yeah so this will be a couple of minutes and then Neil we will we will move on swiftly just after this. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Complex problems in unequal societies require careful yet rigorous explorations of different ways of knowing, being and doing. When popular and political debates are polarized and filled with judgments entangled livelihoods and marginalized voices are often ignored. It's why we believe that creative and empathetic methods can facilitate multiple forms of listening to and sharing knowledge across diverse publics. Empathyator is one such method. Emerging from the South African context Empathyator has over the past five years developed innovative new ways of constructing social spaces for equitable public dialogue creating an amphitheater for empathy that embraces rather than shies away from complex entanglements in society. Since 2014 the Empathyator team has tackled social concerns ranging from land-based mining and displacement, street-level drug addiction, the vulnerability of migrant women and the impacts of xenophobia, gentrification and public housing conflicts and more recently ocean heritage and governance. Empathyator nurtures not only public storytelling but a tent of story listening. This research-based theater method offers a new form of participatory justice in decision-making, meaning-making and solidarity building across societal spheres. The Empathyator process begins with extensive action-based research. Here the creative team, co-participants and key partners work to identify matters of critical concern for social justice and together define a pressing central question. The Empathyator team then set out to explore this question with as many people from diverse backgrounds as possible listening to multiple narratives that relate to the topic from different scales and positionalities interrogating archives and reading broadly. The creative team then bring these findings together and works to shape the research into an engrossing, relevant and true-to-life theatrical script. The initial iteration of the script is first shared with participants and partners in table readings and other formats to test and verify the credibility of the play. The Empathyator team then devise and rehearse a theatrical production and share this again with relevant knowledge holders from a variety of backgrounds. In this way the team are continuously enriching and verifying the research. Once the project collaborators are happy with the production, performances are rolled out to strategic audiences across the country. Policymakers, participants and other concerned publics are invited to sit together and experience the production. Empathyator audiences are generally made up of people with different levels of agency, power and privilege in relation to the matter of concern being explored in the play. Ideally invited audience members should hold diverse even conflicting views on the central concern represented. Post-play conversations are then carefully facilitated as public dialogues between the audience the actors and playmakers allowing for yet another layer of research in consultation with the public to emerge. Since its inception Empathyator productions have reached thousands of South Africans with performances opening international conferences, community meetings and theater festivals. Venues for Empathyator performances have ranged from state-of-the-art theaters and art galleries to church and school halls, police stations, football fields, aquariums, rehabilitation centers and homeless shelters. Across these various processes Empathyator works to amplify a chorus of voices, particularly those of marginalized groups. With and for our non-academic research partners in powerful and validating ways. Moving forward Empathyator is expanding into international policy dialogue as well as further grassroots engagements aiming to deepen and enrich our ability to support democratic decision-making processes. If you would like to join these efforts get involved donate or learn more please visit our website at www.empathyator.com. Lovely, thank you. That clip was pretty effective at kind of mapping out what is emerging to me certainly as a kind of method and as a kind of formal set of practices right that that are geared towards as you say you know engendering different ways of knowing, being and doing through performance. And it's quite clear that the kind of work that Empathyator is doing is obviously animated by a deep investment in a particular kind of politics, a kind of different modalities of justice that are in some ways trying to respond to these various histories of unequal distribution of power of agency and these various other things. And that seems you know quite self-evident right at the top. But before we kind of sink our teeth into that kind of work specifically and perhaps talking more a little about what the process looks like and the kinds of things that you know that that that attracted you since kind of work in the first place. I'm interested in talking a little about this kind of shift from well I don't know if it's a shift but in the kind of you come from a kind of straight theatrical background right where you began interpreting and kind of staging other kind of works, pre-written scripts and so forth. And that worked for Fornt of the Bedouid system what one might loosely call the popular realm where people can kind of engage with the work that they aren't necessarily being compelled to recognize that there's a kind of physical gesture even if they might be and there often is right in the so-called straight theater. And then you have this other thing which is very clearly emanated by as I said this kind of deep investment in kind of social justice issues and so forth. So I'm interested in how and perhaps why you found the need to move in the other direction or move towards this other space and how you've kind of managed to kind of hold those two spaces for yourself as a writer, as a director, as a theater maker. Kind of balancing out that need for the popular and kind of audience building and that kind of open public that we desire but also without diminishing or stepping away from the need to do work through the theater. I suppose it just I think it working in South Africa as a theater maker gets to the point where you can't you can't just do that festival circuit and the pop the mainstream theater scene and I don't know get away with it anymore. I felt like it was just it was just such a limiting space you were preaching to the converted to a certain sector of society could afford to come to the theater in the first place and attend to it. It felt like you would go through all this work. I mean my theater making and whatever format it's been has always been extremely research based. It would take five years of a gestation and research before I even created my what you might term my more popular theater or mainstream theater. So I was always doing that kind of accumulation of research but then you would either get to tour to a theater or two or three theater festivals if you're lucky and the play would also just die. It felt like a kind of I couldn't go any further than that and it was again who is in my audiences who is attending to this work who are we able to have conversations with yeah and it felt like incredibly limiting and exclusionary that the kind of the mainstream theater circuit scene. So yeah there just became a point where I was like if I want to remain in this world of storytelling and storytelling to really feel like I'm learning from it all the time as well as storytelling has you know been able to have a wider impact and theater being able to be a more accessible and democratic kind of conversational tool needed to shift. So I think that became very very much yeah I something else something needed to give. I was also doing a lot of work with what are deemed problematically community theater groups, community theater performers in Komashu and around KwaZulu Natal. I was on a project called The Twist Project where I was assigned to collaborate with different groups every year and I was so excited by seeing what was going on there and the incredible talent and storytelling abilities and also this inherent need to address social concerns in all those works but as and while attending them and being a part of all these processes and meeting all these group leaders and directors and theater makers it also became apparent that like when we're dealing with social concerns how are we doing it? Are we necessarily imparting something new? I could see that there was some sort of new sort of collaboration that might be exciting where we challenge each other around how we choose to articulate social concerns and moving away from just the didactic or the polemical and what would it mean if we really place research at the center of a process before the theater making even begins? The same time I was doing my masters and understanding the kind of limits of academia and the frustrations of the academic world for me in the sense that all this research happens it ends up in a thesis and dies a horrible death on someone's desk or on a shelf somewhere after all of that work and all of that insight that's generated and how can we take research and what are the forms how can we use storytelling as a form of kind of dissemination in where this research can really matter and count and really be accessible you don't need a PhD to understand what the hell it's talking about so all of these different strands started playing on my imagination I was working with the most extraordinary performer and pulmium timbani who considers herself as sort of traditional healer but using theater and storytelling as her healing I also met Dr Dylan McGarry who was a sociologist has done his PhD in empathy and social sculpture and all these forces kind of started coalescing and we came up with some processes and started experimenting and that just started growing and growing into variety of different theater projects and outputs oh that's so exciting you know because you know one of the anxieties that I certainly feel as a practitioner who is based in academia is exactly this tension right between I guess the exercise of of theater making and performance making all these other things as part of an international or kind of theoretical investigation of politics in the world um and as I say you know it's somebody who's just recently completed a PhD too I'm well aware of that anxiety of this thing sitting on the shelves and thank not keen for people to read it right I'm okay with that but I'm also aware that there's some extraordinary investment in knowledge production that ends up staying in relatively kind of limited circles or limited spaces and in many instances you pointed out earlier we had a pretense required to write so our work ends up perhaps not being as effective at addressing the very things that that that it's focused on as it might be um so I find this this idea really exciting um because before for one thing you kind of found a way to leverage that kind of space of of the research and and the kind of thoroughgoing investigative elements of of of of um what you know somebody like me would ordinarily do as they bread and butter but you're using that as a stepping stone to producing a kind of work that is aesthetically and ethically grounded in a slightly different place um I'm really interested in how the actual company right and by coming together so you said that you you met um Dylan and um how did the kind of thinking around the organization itself and and and kind of projects that you'd be drawn towards kind of come together I'm I'm interested in that kind of the formalization I guess of of what is emerging I suppose the bit the implement I were working on a variety of projects and like I said my my theater making's always been research-based and it takes a very long time often they will outside of my own that demand a rigor and a deeper a far deeper understanding and a collaborative sense of storytelling in the way that I've never believed in the kind of master playwright director the hierarchy's narrative that that writing can only be a connective process for me it and I've just done a piece around sexuality um with a friend of mine Seizwa and Yahan and Afrikant and a Zulu friend whose two realities uh these men had never met but their realities and in the stories they were telling me about their lives were so uh fascinating to kind of devise a theatrical scenario to bring these two worlds together and explore what would happen if they would meet and you know tease out the parallels and as well as the complexities nuances and differences in those stories but I was using theater making the art the imaginary realm to then yeah explore what it would mean to put stories that ordinarily don't happen together or meet or collide and in that way um and again finding those parallels so I was playing a lot with that pulmena was very involved in these processes with me and then we were approached by Imsen velo a very problematic conservation organization here in Pozil and Ital around the Shashlui Game Reserve which is a big wilderness area up in the northern Zulu land and the initial brief was you know we hear you do you do theater and you do research but there's a community um the Fulani community that live up there on the border of our Nash on this wildlife game reserve and the community are currently facing a major critical decision of whether to sign away their land or not their ancestral land where the community was built to sign it away to a mining company that was coercing different leaders within the community sowing a lot of division and rifts and trying this kind of decision was coming very soon where the community would have to make a collective decision to vote whether we move away from the land give away our ancestral land for this giant coal mine to be built or do we say no and there was a lot of confusion a lot of tension a lot of violence starting to happen within the community the Imsen velo wildlife were putting a lot of pressure on the community to obviously say no um you know don't you this is going to impact the wildlife and the national park that will be a you know if this mine comes so there was a lot of complex different things happening there um and a community very much divided about what to do obviously a mine seemed like an appetizing possibility around employment uh we said toms and velo we wouldn't take any of their money because we'd not theater for development company we don't take a message and then push it on people the research needs to happen from the ground and that research then needs to be shared with all the stakeholders that's the only way we work and if there's any kind of ulterior funding moating of pushing an agenda on on something that's not not what we do we're not an advertising company so we went in and we sent some a company of zulu actors up to a community around the corner from feleni who had faced the same decision around do we sell out you know hand over the land sign it away they've promised they'll move us relocate us to a new community where they'll build even better amenities etc etc and so we thought let's just go do a case study with the actors living in that community which is called some kele not far from feleni and just listen to the stories about what happened did those promises from the mining company materialize etc etc the actors obviously went to live there gathered these stories and we simply created a piece that tried to articulate all these different complexities and we got the opportunity to perform that theater piece in sdzulu at the final big endava function out in a tent in a field for hundreds of community members again it wasn't just about advocacy and pushing and don't vote for the mind but looking at all the different complexities we also understood that the more we interviewed about the wildlife park obviously people were like well that's that's not an option for us either that employs about 20 people where the mind's promising deploy employees 600 so there were so many different nuances and complexities that we needed to try and sum up in an hour long theater production and we learned a lot of lessons by that but also this production tended to have a really exciting impact on how people were thinking and also theater is the kind of form of conflict resolution because what was happening was the community and how the mining companies work is they like to fracture and splinter that community that's exactly what we've seen going on in the wild coast and all it's the story of the world sewing internal divisions you know giving a chief a whole lot of money in the community but that the rest of the people never see or never materializes into anything for them and so yeah that was the challenge and then we got to perform this and and it was so much more effective obviously than in a power point but it also allowed the post discussion to happen and we know this about theater and conflict resolution is that rather than blaming your neighbor or talking more directly about people around you you're able to articulate your frustration or thoughts by using the characters and the play itself as a scenario to describe those things um and again we set a scenario of a mother who was stuck between two sons one was for the mine one was against and it was this family drama modeled on Zulu radio plays that are very popular in the region so we took a kind of popular form of dissemination but really tried to subvert that from within with a much more complex look at these problems and then asking the community there what do you want how do you want to you know making that a much bigger discussion forming a charter that was not based on what the wildlife company wanted or the mining company but what did the people actually want what what's their vision for that community and by playing with that kind of early project and seeing the results and seeing the effects and and working with activists in the region and how exciting they found emotive storytelling like this and its power um a company kind of started forming and and I had been very interested after that in Woonga this heroin drug that was exploding in Quasalina at the time in an unprecedented sort of way and the next project we tackled was well let's look at Woonga let's try and understand street-level drug addiction in Quasalina and that became another whole project and and so they started rolling on from that and more and more lessons were acquired with each project we did more exciting ways of evolving the methodology the way of working advocacy strategies and storytelling and that's become the kind of yep journey we've been on for the last five or six years now. Oh excellent thanks Neil um yeah so that I mean it's very clear that there's a range of different spaces politics I guess social situations and scenarios that the method allows you to intervene and it's clear that the stories are kind of grounded in a closer tension to things happening on the ground to you know kind of different communal experiences of these these kind of difficult politics as they play out in the real world. So I'm wondering how you arrive at the stories and make choices of which stories to tell and to investigate further um and also identifying the issues in communities where you conceive the work is needing to happen right um and I see Jayhan you've you've popped a question into the chat and that's absolutely something I'm interested in as well and I'll ask you to um give us that in a second but if um yeah we could just kind of quickly think about that quickly um yeah how do you arrive at the stories that you're talking um I mean is it a process of going out and just kind of recognizing that there are these issues broadly or is it through kind of close conversation where people you know are more intimately related to you in your life that then open up to those other communities um um yeah constantly um I get the opportunity to constantly do workshop with young theater makers and storytellers from all over Pozzolini and his life crimes so one of the I learned it was an exercise we did in a royal court writing residency I was part of for some time and it was a wonderful exercise of just like one of the five most important things to you as young theater makers writers the five most pressing concerns that you face right now in your community um and we write those down everyone gets a chance to say the five things that they feel most urgently need to be addressed or impacting them or need to be discussed or unpacked further and it becomes then after we've listed all these things we kind of do a short list of let's choose five now that we all collected that the group collectively feels and for example the Wunga the heroine project about street level drug addiction in all the workshop I was doing the number one problem at that time that was surfacing there was Wunga Wunga and you know what are you how are we going to address this how are we going to do this in our theater making and storytelling around that um that became a much bigger research project you could also see it very tangibly in Pozzolini tell where I live just on the streets everywhere was this problem you could see it mushroom these these sorts of traffic islands of users that were kind of expelled from their homes that were congregating I mean it was a very visible the parks and the cities suddenly just became burgeoning uh kind of places for users to gather and um people who had been kicked out of their communities because of their drug use problems and it just growing and growing and you could physically see it you could see it in the headlines on the lamp post the letters to the newspaper so one is able to really see what's concerning people what's on their minds and also how problematically the media are talking about these things I did a kind of analysis at the time to try to see if this was a project maybe worth exploring further of just the words the media were using around drug use in the city and how they were kind of the the amount of terminology that related users to zombies and werewolves and ghouls and you know this apocalyptic narrative of really dehumanizing users further and further um so it takes a lot of different analysis I mean that that was a project then I went to a komar shuk theater group and I said does wunga interest you and affect you and is that something you would like to talk about in theater this group were like of course we'd be my neighbors family members everyone spoke very personally about how it was impacting them and from then we were able to say well let's get together and do a year and a half research process of trying to understand this problem um not just from the perspective of a neighbor or a user but let's go speak to police let's speak to social workers let's speak to activists let's do a year long just listening to the stories attending to those stories first before even trying to devise some sort of theatrical output or shaping an advocacy strategy through the theater let's just listen and that project was incredibly incredibly dense and rich in a way there were seven of us involved in the team and Pume was also she was from Imlazi which where the problem was manifesting in a different way to how it was in komar shuk and we were bringing this together meeting every few weeks to just talk through the research to do improvisation exercises to realize where the gaps of knowledge were and as this was going on we were forming partnerships with a homeless shelter in the center of Durban with academics who were researching the problem we were just trying to understand it from all of the different angles and then try and articulate that complexity through the creation of a theatrical production and then looking at well now we've got this theater production we're speaking to all these problems we played it back to all the informants who who who have uh granted their stories for us to use how do we you know the problem became what this is and my problem with the idea of just theater of the oppressed is that what about the oppressor if we're not using theater to actually challenge and change oppressive behaviors then really what is how is transformation or change ever going to be possible through storytelling unless we really try yeah trying to work at higher levels and not just preaching to the so-called converted not just mirroring back people's realities as they are to them because people will watch it and say yeah I know that that's my story and I feel honored that it's been seen and presented like this but tell me something I don't know right now you know one of the first yeah the biggest challenge became we're like how can we stop moving these stories then into into spaces of power and agency agency to really impact how policy is made um and that a wemble became a really exciting project and that we were invited to parliament to perform it for the heads of you know drug policymakers within government it started climbing very high levels of power where this play was performed and unpacked it was invited to drug conferences around the world in New York where the play was used as a really fascinating and interesting kind of starting point for conversation um and that became really exciting to us was like yeah how do we move these stories into spaces where they need to be attended to and they can actually start shifting how people are um you know defining their policies around and that became you know connecting to harm reduction strategies etc etc and the project just kept growing and changing the more the more more recent strands kind of immersion to it so we might you know I was approached by the open society around another project on corruption where they were pairing theater makers with um with journalists who were doing exposing corruption uh that social housing the project around gentrification in Cape Town and social housing boxes emerged out of that for example saying you know pair up with a journalist who's exposing and in this case it was corruption within the democratic uh the the democratic party in in Cape Town around land and you know the exclusionary practices and so kind of social segregation that from apartheid that happened in city planning and was continuing so that became the point of entry there it's like reading the journalist research and then realizing oh there's definitely a sort of empathy it's a project in this so they come to us in different ways um and but you certainly see what's in consciousness what's in the news what's on people's minds and and where the political acupuncture points I think um we need to kind of target uh become quite clear through the process of listening yeah thank you um Catherine was asking that you speak in more detail about your process of listening and story gathering collaboration which I guess is one of the questions that we're going to kind of engage with anyway is is what does this look like right um and to lean into and kind of sit with this idea of of empathy and deep listening and careful listening as as ethical points of entry into doing work right that's basically kind of ethical a way of relating differently to the people with whom you're working um and we'll circle back I'm sure to kind of come and go and in terms of the conversation but something that just came up now as as as we're kind of thinking is it seems to me that you're you're also very aware of um relative position right um that people in the process first of the process is constituted as one that that that um initiates encounters between different stakeholders people who come from different kinds of places in order to kind of have that conversation right um but it also seems that in that awareness I guess of the differentials of power with which we enter into this space and those sorts of engagements um I'm interested in you know how did you engage with the challenge for example around um gosh how do I put this around being cognizant of I think the compulsion to enter into a kind of savior narrative um that is often one of the side effects I think of as well intentioned as we may be um of our desire to kind of make work useful to other people is that we then often kind of slip into this well I'm the person of knowledge I'm arriving and I mean to help you save yourself at best if not me directly saving you right and and not to put too fine a point on it but in a country like South Africa especially you know the kind of um racial history that that already announces itself before you even started talking already positions you're really complicated raised I think to the the diverse communities that you're working with so I'm I'm interested in thinking a little about how empathy listening carefully this destabilization of hierarchies that we you know announced right at the beginning as a mode of working how that helps us maybe think about how to address those those those unequal distributions of power that may have perhaps an undesirable effect on on um on the work being done right because it ends up kind of centralizing the imperial subject what are the better phrase right um and the others kind of become local flavor rather than anything else so it seems to me that that there's there's there's an explicit relationship in terms of I mean it says so in the name right empathy um between empathy and the ways that you're choosing to do the work and how that asks us to I think imagine ourselves and orient ourselves differently in terms of power right within the rehearsal space within the collaborative space um Catherine I hope I haven't butchered your question by by adding a whole lot of bits and pieces to it um but yeah so so empathy and and and and kind of careful listening as an ethical point of entry into the making I think fascinates me I think to to respond to there's so many parts of that question so remind me if there's anything I need to touch on but to start with the kind of listening and positionalities of the team itself and acknowledging um that the powers privileges different forms of agency or not within the group that's obviously essential starting point it's why the production like I say is is collectively researched by the team for around about a year or more before any semblance of a script or play idea happens it's uh the biggest lesson I've learned in the most exciting part it's by no means new in theater practice but certainly it has a profound impact on the kind of work we do and the nuance and insight and and authenticity if you with all the problems that word comes with is establishing a team where this problem is direct where the actors become ethnographers essentially the actors are the researchers so the actors are involved from and and team members are involved from the research to the developing of the characters to the strategizing of the story play plot what the theater production becomes um obviously in a production like a wimble I'm not going to go and interview people within Qomashu and it's I want to understand about drug use and stuff like that the Qomashu actors had family members as the starting point neighbors who were drug dealers friends who were users runners that they could directly access an interview as a starting point Dylan had access to the more academic kind of structures doing his ph having done his phd he was able to do a postdoc within the urban future center around drug use too so he could enrich our understandings from a very academic what's the latest research emerging in Durban in the city are from that frame of reference uh and Pumir was she was interested in woman in the police force how they were dealing with this problem woman who also mothers of sons who may be users and how would that complexity manifest if you were forced to police this problem in a certain way but then your own son is using and you discover that halfway through the story and she has to readdress all the misconceptions and all the ways she's been you know treating the problem and policing it by physically you know there's a scene in the opening of the play where she catches a young user her son's age and forces them to eat his own stash which is what a lot of users were telling us was happening in the police force at the time um and so we're able to look at it from all these different these different chorus of voices and um again you can only do that if if the actors are from within the community or the story you're exploring have access to the language the knowledge the traditions the culture cultural aspects um we couldn't begin to speak on behalf of that my job is to more open up a space and and a starting point for a conversation and try and hold all those different strands that are emerging and together we collectively try and navigate how that should coalesce into a story how do we condense a year of all this insane research into an hour-long experience that can begin to speak to those complexities and that that becomes a challenge um but I find the actors creating the characters themselves by virtue of listening to people that they will then embody and play in the production itself has such a profound effect on the work on the authenticity of the way they hold those characters of allowing us to avoid stereotypes or melodrama by imagining rather this is a deep form of research where the actor themselves is is acquiring that story and honoring that informant with the character they create and put on the stage it creates a new sort of respect um with how you portray that story and how you want to honor that person who's been prepared to be vulnerable and open themselves up to telling you their story there's a lot of ethical complexities of course in this sort of work as as there is with any academic sort of research we do we have a kind of code of conduct a code of ethics uh that has been written um one of uh our colleagues Taryn Pereira at Rhodes has has got a few points which I love we work with with all of our our collaborators um some of these points are just worth mentioning do not harm but don't be afraid of a little generous of tension waste no one's time be trans transparent not invisible contribute what you can time resources network skills access and care listen observe and then help to articulate what is happening make space for others to articulate describe explain and strategize acknowledge and celebrate the undervalued work of activists and spaces that we're working in expose injustices when you encounter them after seeking mandate to do so and to create new opportunities for understanding growth and change so we try to work with principles they're constantly growing as we learning um we do you know everyone there's it like with academic research there's a consent form there's a deep understanding of what I'm lending to my story to do I consent to this story being used in this way the stories are then played back to all the informants before they go to rehearsal so everyone can see how they've been represented and comment back and talk back to that and laugh changes happen so it's it's the ethics of care and very careful delicate work understanding all these juggling acts one is it's kind of trying to balance in this process I'm not saying it's a perfect one and there's always room for improvement and new understanding and reworking what we're doing um that's constantly happening um but yeah I hope I've touched on some of some of those no no no and and and I love that kind of I guess list of of of news and documents um primarily because they seem so practical to me um that there's that kind of bit of poetry don't what's it don't be be transparent but not invisible and all this sort of I like that there are the kind of these these very explicit practical hooks that that perhaps um help us to orient ourselves in that space and in that environment and recognize the kind of dynamic books I play uh there was the question actually it's come up twice now um Jaehan you you asked about fundraising to let the community's own voices and stories be heard and then when you're also asked further down about fundraising I guess that also connects to a question that I have you know um is work of the size and scale right because unlike again a kind of straight in terms of where kind of a standard theater work right where maybe you'll be working on something for six weeks you have these incredibly long timelines that involve research that involve deep investigation in communities um and you know iteration seems to be a large part of what you're doing and how you're doing it like this is kind of turning the crystal over and over and over again to kind of look at the thing through different facets seems like a deeply luxurious way to work and one that I'm eminently jealous of um and I guess that that's the question right is is is how have you strategically leveraged resources to kind of create the space to be able to do this kind of work I know that from my perspective you know I spend probably 75 percent of the time I hold creative time writing funding applications but it's a very very clear kind of process for me from within academia because I know you know there are specific places that one goes to for funding there are specific kinds of outputs one can expect but it seems that this is because it's a combination of these multiple different things it's kind of a theater company um there's kind of this deep ethnographic process that's happening and kind of literal kind of scientific knowledge production um there's this kind of social interventionist kind of paradigm that's at work as well where the hell does one turn to find people sell on the idea enough for them to be willing to firstly invest in the process but also invest knowing that it's a process and they don't necessarily have an idea of what the product will be at the end because that's often often one of the things that we're tied down to um within these funding paradigms right is that they want to know how long is it um how many times it's going to show how many times is my logo going to appear at the bottom screen with each showing um but you don't necessarily have a place or needs guarantee those those kinds of nuts and bolts of the funding around when you make these applications for funding how do you how do you make work happen and also when you're very clear about that you will not accept funding that is there about enforcing an agenda I mean we could get so much work if we work more theater for development doing government study health you know that kind of health the theater for education health theater that kind of thing where you handed the brochure of what needs to be imparted and find the way to articulate that input that in performance as I've mentioned that is everything we don't do we will say to anyone who's interested in sending us they're going we will tell you after the research has been done within those different spaces uh what's needed not the other way around um and obviously it funders with an agenda or a funding agenda where they want to know what the outcome like I said to we can never tell you what this will be we can't tell you how long it will be how many players characters what the story will be about until that period of research has been done and held by us only then are we able to articulate what the the kind of artistic output will be so you're right it's a it's a much longer process and in this day and age where there's no funding for theater work where do you find funding to do this sort of work and I've been amazed at the budgets the research budgets that go into universities I've never been very much embroiled in the academic world until more recently through these sorts of processes and there's huge funding grants that come to universities by doing this work without much funding in the beginning universities have seen and academia seen how vital this form of dissemination can be for research in making research live beyond the limits of the library shelf in in in the university so there's suddenly a lot of universities like the urban future center who's very dynamic in their thinking and Quasalina tell here who are restructuring budgets to make sure that amphitheater is a major part because it meets a lot of their research mandates but then it also comes with this beautiful idea of well then the research goes out and is able to speak and we're able to get more research by doing the play and then listening to the stories that play generates it's a constant iterative process of surfacing new stories and so often stories that researchers at universities don't have access to I mean the actors and and actors I say make the best ethnographers actors are the our naturally storytellers the actors here in Quasalina tell that we work with are the most extraordinary intuitive researchers intuitive if not you know ethnographers in how they used to working anyway by listening by responding by by collecting and gathering these stories so a lot of those skills are already there quite intuitively so we tack on a lot now to universities through research grants but we are approached saying you know we're doing this this piece on warwick junction on informal trade is down in Durban City we would love for this information that surfaces over this for amphitheater to be a very big part of our budget and we finding that increasingly now people seeing the power of this work and including us in their budgets of obviously we fill out lots of funding applications we're working with the one ocean hub on a on a kind of ocean governance project right now which has been long running there's been funding there from stress guide university that's put into ocean research but we doing the storytelling component of that and so we factored into that budget is kind of permanent employees now through roads on a long empathy at a research project that's generating a whole lot of plays and different storytelling that's that's playing out in policy and conference spaces so it's a hustle I won't lie it doesn't land on your lap it's not that we just get to roll these things out they take a lot of hustling but the more people with agency and power within university systems and within academia that are understanding how what this does to research what this means for research are really throwing their weight and clout behind it and as a result we're getting a whole lot more possibilities for expanding and doing this work it's also a lifetime of funding applications as running any theater company is the problem is the work around social justice work is obviously very critical of government so they're not too willing to jump behind it and you know it doesn't meet their mandates of nation building and all the things you need to take on those boxes and then organizations like the open society have been involved we're trying to work with the US embassy right now just any kind of bigger funding applications that are happening we kind of jump onto a lot of people send me stuff every day around maybe you could tie in with this kind of thing so it's a constant battle and no one's kind of well off from it but it's it's it's it's starting to happen a little easier I think the more we built up a kind of reputation yeah and a community that recognizes the value of the work I do want to note that we have crossed the 45 minute threshold at which the official recording of the session concludes but of course we will continue we have about another half hour in this part of the session and then we have the water cooler chat afterwards um jehan let's say it's like Amy