 Welcome to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY and to Prelude 21. Start making sense. It is our annual theatre performance festival celebrating the work of New York theatre artists of ensembles and it's hard enough in normal times to create work for the stage and for spaces inside and outside but in the time of corona we all are faced with exceptional challenges and we are here to celebrate again the extraordinary achievements that come out of the New York theatre community. It is time I think and we feel to start making sense to ask questions why are we making theatre but also how are we producing it and for whom and this is a great investigation again into the mechanics of making art in New York City and we also invited theatre ensembles from around the U.S. from Detroit and Cincinnati and Lewis and Philadelphia New Orleans to join us and this will be extraordinary look into what is on the minds of artists right now we also have many panel discussions we have an award which we're giving out to honor outstanding members of the New York theatre community so I would like to all of you to join in and get an insight of what is happening. Welcome everybody back here at Prelude at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown Manhattan it's a great day on planet Earth because it's day three of Prelude and we have with us curators and artists from one of our chains like Chain 3 we created something new we experimented and had the idea of chain creation and actually Jay Wegman was the one who said that would be something to do and he here is with us and let's ask one curator to create one artist and then the curator selects another curator so we distribute power that we invite we leave in the sense of a John Cage a possibility for chance out there and I think it proved to be extraordinary interesting so really in the sense by by by perhaps by default as a diverse crowd of artists and curators and I think it's a fantastic beautiful and inspiring mosaic or kaleidoscope of a New York work of course there are many many other great artists but this is now who we have this is where curators that we should listen to these artists and we should listen also to the suggestions of these curators so I think it's a fantastic little festival a tiny one a little homeopathic pill into the gigantic body of that big theater we are all faced with that great German writer Peter Sonder he wrote about theater said theater is like a Heracles who is chained on a rock and the eagles are coming and eating out the liver and he's or Prometheus here they are chained and Heracles came to to to liberate him and a theater has to get out they have to take away the chains and the things that the out of that rock and become free again and I think this is a little attempt to to do that so we have with us Jesse today Jay Isaac Alessandra Lumie civil and Alex it's a great honor to have you with us that you take your time your energy to be with us to share your experiences in this truly complicated time and it's a great honor it's all about listening and I hope I will shut up and not talk too much first I do want to acknowledge the land we are on it's important to us we actually have a panel on indigenous New York theater today at 430 Ryan Palani attack one of our greatest students he also will will lead the panel but I would like to acknowledge the Lenape people upon whose land we are gathered today and yes also the airwaves that coming out of here and we do pay respect to the Lenape people and ancestors past present and future so that is important to us so I'm gonna ask everybody to say where they are and give it a little short introduction not everybody knows everybody I'm often finding out of a work of artists I haven't heard of and at least we take pride of looking at the scene and we do not know and so this is a great great way to discover so Jesse maybe we'll start with you or we go clockwise on the zoom screen sure hi everybody my name is Jesse firestone I'm an interdisciplinary curator I've worked in a range of institutions from like really grody DIY spaces to sort of new cleaner large civic institutions right now I work on the curatorial team at a cultural center in garden in the Bronx called wave hill I'm having a bit of that moment in Wayne's world where they meet Alice Cooper and they're like we're not worthy we're not worthy because this panel is really amazing and I'm just so so glad to be here fantastic thank you Isaac can they say a little bit yeah I'm Isaac cool I'm an interdisciplinary cross-disciplinary artist often trying on new disciplines to kind of like follow fun problems that are there I'm really excited to be here I'll echo Jesse with everyone today um yeah I'm in I'm in Brooklyn when I by hooking land yeah fantastic thank you thank you Alessandra hi everyone it's so great to be holding space with you all I'm very excited to be on this panel Alessandra Gomez I am calling in from Brooklyn on Lenape land I'm a writer and also an interdisciplinary curator with a focus on commissioning new work I currently work at the shed which is a fairly new arts institution that opened in April of 2019 we weren't even open a year before the pandemic and shutdowns happened but our focus is really on commissioning and producing presenting a wide range of work from visual arts to music to dance and sort of everything in between so I work on the visual arts team but also work across performance on a lot of live projects in our other theatrical spaces thank you thank you Louie hi everyone I'm Louie Tan very excited to be here with all of you I am a senior curator at the kitchen where I am currently so you might hear some doorbells ringing or some soundtracks for Alex's performances later tonight but I curate both exhibitions and performances of all types with I don't know if I have a focus actually but I do I do a lot of commissioning as well as you know kind of straddling that curator-producer role so excited to talk with all of you thank you and Alex they will perform tonight and we will see it you know at 7 p.m. if you go to our prelude NYC.org site so Alex hi everyone I'm Alex Tatarski it's so fun to be here I'm backstage at the kitchen at the moment so feeling a lot of the delightful pre-show panic which is the reason that we all do what we do so just soaking up those adrenaline vibes and yeah excited to dive into what everyone is thinking about and feeling in this very peculiar moment yeah I'm in residence here at the kitchen and this this will be my first kind of peek into the process so it's nice that it coincides with prelude yeah so incorporated for prelude Frank what are we gonna do if we lose Frank I mean he looks great he's frozen in a good moment but it's frozen nonetheless Frank I think I was maybe next should I just go and then hopefully he'll come back okay um it is a great honor if you can hear me say hello is your sound is a little yeah Frank we can't hear you that well okay so let's wait a moment okay and you're still frozen yeah this is so intense okay thank you Tanvi my name is Sybil Kemson uh I'm so excited to be here with you all um some of you I know and some of you are new to me and I'm really excited to talk with you I'm um I'm uh stream yarding in from Newburgh New York in the um the Hudson River Valley it's Monsei Lenape territory and also Mohican territory and I'm originally from uh Lenae Lenape territory in northern New Jersey and I lived in in also in Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan for many years um so almost my whole life I've been on Lenape territory and it's a wonderful part it's wonderful um land so um I'm very happy to be alive and to be here with you all and to have a talk today and I guess I'll go right uh Jay Wegman I am the director of the NYU Scribble Center for the Performing Arts I am stream yarding in live from my office at NYU normally I would have a mask on but my door is shut so um my staff is safe from me I have been doing this role for about five years before that I was at Averins for about 10 years and I I guess I'm a curator I um Mark Russell who many of us know he says he's not a curator he's a presenter or a programmer and I'm like well I'll I'll honor any of those so uh but I like to work across theater dance and any of those combinations or even the new whacked out stuff like uh like Sybil's doing so uh that's me um Sybil since we're still waiting for Frank why don't you talk about your show oh I thought you wanted me to do some of my impressions oh do that do whatever you want um okay well uh I am on um so I there's a okay I should say that I'm mostly a playwright and then I started out as a performer and I felt dissatisfied so I I started writing plays and then my plays were maybe a little too crazy and uh they were I was having trouble getting any convincing anybody to do them and then when I did convince them uh I had trouble behaving myself in the rehearsal room I was becoming control freak and so I came to the conclusion I need to start my own company even though um oh okay maybe should we okay I'll just finish real quick so the piece that I'm doing is um it's called the securely conferred vouch saved keepsakes of Mary S and it's uh uh the second part of a diptych and the first of that diptych was Sasquatch rituals which Lumie brought to the kitchen in 2018 which was a fantastic uh experience and um and now uh the the second part of it is it's a play and it was supposed to happen at Abrans in the playhouse and then the pandemic came and then so it ended up it's like a video now but it's it's almost like um it's photography too so um I don't know how to explain it I don't know what it is really yet so um hopefully showing a little piece of it here uh at Prelude will maybe y'all can give me some feedback when you see it but it's it's gonna screen at the chocolate factory who co-commissioned it on Halloween Sunday night and then it will stream from Abrans um who is also co-commissioned it um from November 4th to December 22nd and um it's actually the first half of it because it was uh time consuming and I wasn't I didn't manage to finish the whole thing uh so I'll show the rest of it next year so that's yeah thank you Jay so yeah now Tanvi says she wants the curators to speak yes very good so I'm back I don't know if I couldn't see you but maybe you were on all time and it was just me we lost I think Jay did I don't know if he went um to you I wanted to ask you also you know a bit of a little bit about the chain curation and tell also a little bit about you uh sure well I did talk a little bit about me but this I just need to say that do you remember an awful movie called airport 1975 and Karen Black was this on it and somehow the pilot disappeared so she had to take over the plane so I kind of felt when you got frozen and then you left I was like oh my god is airport 75 all over again oh good good I thought everybody got lost but that's good it was just me good yeah yeah no um so the chain curation idea uh I don't know when I first heard about chain curation uh but I love it it's um it's a wonderful way to share uh power uh to um to also uh counter things that people wouldn't like you had alluded to that earlier uh because of the way the the festival unfolded this year you're going to experience things that you typically wouldn't have I mean that's certainly true for me um so I just you know I I've been toying with the idea of doing that at skirball uh skirball is always um oh we're so embedded in a university that we're not all that independent so uh and like we still aren't even back in the theater yet quite honestly um but uh so the chain curation thing is something I'd like to try here down the road it's risky but the risk is the exciting part I think um so uh that's really all I have to say about yeah no really thank you it was um and great to get you know that push also from you to do it and to and we have asked artists to take risks and cure it as everybody but also we as presenters in the way we are we should do it I would like to ask all of you and we can go around you know how how is this moment how are you experiencing this moment which is in Germany we say it's not fish it's not fish it's not meat it's something in between how do you all feel and how do you make sense out of your work maybe with Isaac they start yeah sure um it's interesting because the project that I'm sharing was started before the pandemic but it was already all about isolation um and sort of about this like uh very private like individual world of dreaming um so when the pandemic happened it sort of really deepened those questions and and those thoughts um and I was actually really fortunate to uh get more opportunities during the pandemic I had a few residencies so I was working uh pretty intensely but without any collaborators without performers to talk with so I kind of turned the project into a sculptural project for a few months and started doing a lot of researching and writing and working on the soundtrack so I kind of had to morph the way that I was working and thinking for a while and made a lot of discoveries along the way and it was actually like a really rich experience which I know is probably irresponsible for me to say um but uh yeah I think that the pandemic made me realize also that it's really important to take time um to work more slowly and to sort of push for that wherever possible um and to kind of uh embrace the idea of taking longer than you might think you need and trying to push up against the pressure to to overproduce I think um so in many ways it was a really really powerful learning moment for me. Anybody just in um Alex maybe? Yeah I feel like I learned so much from the experience of not having to work and getting money from the government and that changed my entire practice and relationship to labor in a way that I'm still processing and also like witnessing and participating in uprisings and revolt and the possibility of community mutual aid and rent strikes um in this way that I think for a lot of us we like didn't feel that we had time and energy to do and that was really striking to me like oh when you are better rested and you're eating several times a day and you don't have an anxiety about where the next paycheck is coming from you discover what you care about which in my case is like soil science and organizing redistribution of resources which like was this total discovery actually I must say because I never in my life had experienced this um yeah a sense of actually amidst crisis kind of financial stability for the first time so I'm just thinking about that so much and I have this real um bunch of like ugly feelings that come up when I revisit work made in the before times because it comes out of such a feeling of intense stress and overwhelm so part of the time at the kitchen which is called untitled freak out tell me what to do is like how can we rethink our relationship to work but like actually genuinely do that and can that happen within the structures that we have um and I'm finding like a lot of resistance in myself to even attempting what I said I was going to attempt which is try to work differently so um it's really fascinating and then of course like all these images and things are coming up out of that like unemployed court gestures and so I'm just like following the the impulses with these questions in mind um and like totally what Isaac what you said really resonates like letting things take a really long time and trying to not have this like shame around lack of product really makes me aware like the extent to which the way we make theater is really product oriented and what does that mean just to be like always thinking about selling a finished thing and what is that not allowed to happen so yeah I'm very excited and like freaked out by these questions and whether or not it's possible to make like substantive changes in myself and how we do things structurally yeah as someone said there will be bc and ac like before corona and after a corona civil you were on a long seagull talk but still what are your thoughts at some moment how do you feel all right I'm gonna try not to start crying on this one that in the seagull talk I was telling Jay I just I was so embarrassed I just started crying I was talking about love and I just couldn't keep it together we're serious we're serious and profound thanks Frank so I'm absolutely relating 100% for me it was it was about having enough solitude for the first time since childhood I have a younger half brother and half sister and they're way younger so by the yeah I have the mentality of an only child and when you're working in theater it's very communal and community oriented and and and I found this way of working that I didn't know what I was doing and but I had time and space to figure it out and I really made a point of observing that thing of oh my god how am I gonna finish this on time and we we had to keep pushing the deadline back because I was basically ended up doing like almost animation kind of and it and I didn't know what I was doing I was really excited about it but it just was so time-consuming and I was all by myself figuring out these kind of like staging problems not all by myself there were a bunch of us working on it but when it came down to putting it together um I there was a lot of figuring out was working on iMovie which I don't even know really what I'm doing on iMovie um and so at a certain point I shifted the way I was thinking about it and I just because I was getting really bad anxiety I was putting all this weight I was getting high blood pressure I had to go like get a blood pressure monitor because I was so stressed out and then I was like wait a minute I there I it does there's no room for this kind of stress right now there's plenty of other stuff to be stressed about so I shifted what I was saying to myself which was just like to let me see how much of this I can get done let me see how much I can get done so it became more exploratory and um and the whole year and a half has just so much been about learning anyway so I said let me just keep myself in that learning space and let me just see let me each day get up and see how much I can get done and that completely changed the way that I was invested in it and I really don't think that I would have even gotten as far as I got even halfway through um if I had kept that uh former mentality of like panic um that I realized I I have been operating under since you know 1995 really ever since I started making work in the world and then you know before that in school so uh that it was a big deal and now with everything starting back up again it's like wait wait wait wait like we but we learned a lot right like we're gonna isn't anything and then we're not gonna readjust at all for that so um that's the new space of navigation for me it's like oh no like come on wait wait wait but we learned so much we found so much didn't we so that's kind of where I am yeah yeah well thank you thank you for sharing to our curators you are curators which are in a way also dramaturgs or we talked about it yesterday with Sponnie Merranca and Katani like you're like editors you know you put things together you collage you point with your finger two things to the text you know almost like a synagogue or whatever but um but you don't touch it um but what what is different now what has something changed or what are you thinking about at this moment when you are as Jason we don't really know haven't really opened yet but you will after a time of um closure any one of you who wants to start Alessandra maybe sure I can start um I mean for me at least I wish I could say that things have slowed down I think on the curatorial side sort of curating producing work working with artists it's been really complicated to be able to produce and present work safely sort of with this other layer of administration um around COVID protocols and making sure that it's safe for audiences and for performers so just thinking through like rehearsals and um tech and then the actual performance so I think we've had to adapt new ways of working together both within an institution with various departments and then also with artists and I think the silver lining at least for me is that there's this real heightened sense of care and in my own curatorial practice I really try to bring care and empathy into the work that I do but I often have started finding myself um opening conversations with artists saying like how are you feeling how can I support you what do you need in this moment and I think you know the past two years has been really rough for the cultural landscape and for artists and so that's something that I've been trying to sort of um do in my own curatorial practice like enter everything sort of with care and empathy and I think another great thing that has come out of the pandemic is that institutions right now I think are looking a lot more towards collaboration and that really excites me sort of pulling together resources thinking about co-commissioning as part of the season at collaboration becoming really embedded in the future of programming which is something that really excited me about this idea of pain curation like a collective sort of coming together and bringing together different voices and artists and sort of an example of that also is you know the shed we're hosting Bushwick Star for a month-long residency in our spaces and I think we have this commitment to collaborating with local organizations and so you know it's something that I hope we continue and I hope to see it more across the field in general. Yeah um Lumi um I think I can take my mask off as I talk there's there's a lot of well actually never mind there's a lot of traffic in this office so um I would agree with Alessandra in terms of the the kind of inability to slow down because there are just so many more things to think about now and I think that the kind of qualities of like the emotional labor that you know as curators we always put into the work has really been forefronted during this process and I think that's been um really uh a great I mean you know it's been a learning process as well so um I think that like this is a time when you know we all are very hopefully just very generous with each other in a way that we couldn't feel previously um you know because as Alex and Sybil and Isaac have all mentioned you know we were just rushing towards that next product the next opening you know the next grant application whatever and you know I think just um having time to like understand where those kinds of limitations are within both within ourselves and within our institutions has been really crucial and you know even like you know at the kitchen we're doing like much less programming that we had done previously um we are extending the periods where we worked with you know where we or how we work with artists in terms of kind of these like residency projects versus like you know just having an artist in for a week or a night or you know all these things um all these different kind of timelines so it's been um I think a really great moment where all these things have like coincided but it also uh it still presents many many challenges so I think it's like I don't know if there's going to be a before and after to be totally honest I think it's going to be much more of like a oh an up and down wave of like trying to like Sybil's that carry on these lessons that we've taken with us and then like you know just kind of checking ourselves through this through this time being like is this what we really need to do um and like you know just as as much as we all want um that kind of like normalcy just to like really take some time to be like what like why was that normal in the first way jay how do you feel how's it uh well as I mentioned earlier so uh Skirball is embedded in a much larger institution and um whose primary purpose is not Skirball so um we uh uh the COVID um COVID tide as I call it was called for us we uh NYU had us early 14 and 18 staff members which um was truly one of the hardest things I've ever in my life and um then the remnant of there were four of us total during COVID um from January to roughly March uh trying to reinvent ourselves uh we didn't jump on the um that uh wagon where people were streaming performances just because we didn't have the resources but we did pivot to really increase our humanities offerings so we were doing walks and things like that and um and then in May uh staff started to come back uh but um all the calls are such that we have not been able to open the up and through out the virus you're doing things internally for NYU uh because they can they can totally track daily the folks who are in the building like every day I get up I have to fill out something called the uh I don't even know what it's called uh but I have to fill a pass every day that's dated uh and all of that and we still don't know for sure that we're going to have a spring season and we we have uh planned it and that was rather largely because you know most of the curators here had things lined up and then that all went away or did it just go on pause or so that so I wasn't really doing my curatorial role during COVID because I really had no agency and I guess agency was taken away from a lot of us because we just didn't know what was going on and what we could do but um um so I'm we're hoping to open uh in February uh through May with uh I mean seven days and three productions and more seven different shows uh but like I said it could all it could all um it could not happen and I guess that's something we're all dealing with I mean I learned anything in COVID is like I knew nothing from day to day from hour to hour things change all the time so um it was kind of almost as bad like I was in the moment and wanted to be elsewhere um but uh it's also gonna you know the the truth matters too um COVID made me rethink the climate and Scribblat does a lot of international program so are we going to continue to bring artists here uh it's it's a huge complex question yeah uh and there's also not much touring for artists anymore in the United States especially international ones unless you're somebody you know I mean I don't I don't know who really gets a lot of tours so what we bring in are really kind of um not brand names who are going to then go have a statement about the United States touring so uh so that's one thing I'm thinking about the commissioning thing is easy for us uh and um totally the co-commissioning thing uh a lot of people have to be proud to us as that's the one who participates commissioners like I love cooperation uh I think that's also what I like the chain curation idea is you're actually working with other people so commissioning the climate uh uh realizing how much I actually cared for this yeah here especially with people and um also just not knowing planning hoping the way it happens but not knowing if it's yeah thank you Jesse how's that for you are you based at Wayfield in the Bronx is your office then there is that um oh you work from home how do you experience them oh and what are your thoughts yeah I mean I work primarily on site and we've been on site um since July of 2020 so because we um have a large outdoor space we were able to open up quite early um and I think that has also influenced the way our programming team and our institution as a whole sort of sees itself and has responded um and on a personal note I know for me and it sounds like for many of us um the beginnings of the pandemic were quite a rough landing um sort of being like torn from the comfort of familiarity um and it was quite painful um but also opened up what I see is kind of a portal into another way of operating um and I really use that moment for myself to like do some personal work but also then extend that into my own curatorial practice where I dove really hard into accessibility online um or thinking about sort of transparency with artists in the terms of timeline and sort of I remember there were these opening emails we were all sending around like I hope you're safe I hope you're well I hope like everybody in your network and in your consciousness is also well and I've noticed that that sentiment has been lost in some places but also in one-on-one interactions with artists or curators so I um encounter we've really kind of been holding that still um and I think that that giving space for that and sort of the fluxes of emotion that come when you ask those questions is partly why I was so interested in Isaac's work because Isaac was teasing out this yo-yoing that I think many of us have felt and been kind of articulating over the last um year and a half and right now I feel this intense tension between like the world I saw possible and then the integration into the world that is now and where that world wants to be going back in some places moving forward and so I'm trying to find the moments in my own small way where I can still amplify those ripples of what I want and what that looks like for me is um building out and I think Loomi spoke to this building out larger project timelines where I can start engaging with an artist earlier on and be able to give that space to go through whatever motions they need to go through or being even more transparent in project timelines and sort of maybe institutional idiosyncrasies um and I've found that that has been really helpful for me as someone who has to work between both an institution that I I love and institutions that I love and have complicated relationships with an artist that I love that I want to have relationships with these institutions um and so it's a lot of this sort of I feel like I'm juggling balls that don't exist right these balls of emotion or psychic energy or things like that um in the work in a way that I wasn't necessarily before yeah it is it is certainly a time of upheaval of disruption and maybe not just modifications someone said you know be inventor of some like at Steve Jobs who's the iPhone he disrupted an industry and others then the google form that can be adapted it so the question is what what moment are we in now is it a mixture of both and I would like to ask you all um what do you all think what do we really need now what is urgent what is meaningful how should the theater performance look like what should be presented maybe examples you like but but also from you what do you feel you know what does this city need people say states have the democracy they deserve so i'm saying you know countries or they have the theater they do but what what would work for new york city what is important what do you feel has to be done that might also or should be different anybody it's open open uh mike well go sorry oh yeah go ahead alex yeah alex alex um yeah I I guess to return to some of the things that um I was saying before the question now is so in meshed for me with um economic needs and structural needs so like for instance I don't think that the in a place like new york city the theater institutions can fully be responsible for offering what artists actually need to make work and so there's kind of this like confusion of sorts where arts institutions um are maybe expected to provide things that they actually can't because what artists need is cheaper rent um and I think about that a lot in terms of the history of new york city um and just the squeezing out of um like spontaneity and possibility of long periods of experimentation that are really only possible when you have cheap space um and so I've increasingly been thinking like what I want to advocate for as an artist is like commitment to the redistribution of space not just for working but for living because institutions arts institutions can offer um space for rehearsal which is incredible and I think like all spaces should be open for rehearsal including like empty bank vestibules just taking up valuable real estate like I really mean that I think people should be able to have their dance rehearsals in these empty glass cubes you know but furthermore like we need places to live that are affordable and that make a different kind of thinking like slow deep complex thinking possible um and so it yeah just seeing new york city specifically kind of empty out as the rich people went to their estates um and the business is closed it was just sort of a this embodied sense of horror walking around like there there is the space there are the resources and that shouldn't be on arts institutions to provide it should be really on governments um and on how we think about resources and how we think about what we what we deserve and the kind of horrifying iniquity of hoarding empty space um so so yeah that's one thing I've been thinking through I sort of feel like it would be nice to see the real estate industry like put some support into the arts more because the whole city has been gentrified to the point where like I had to move an hour and a half north just to be able to like live and um the artists are the ones that go into and and start that process um of of pushing and then until they are until they are pushed out and um um so that would be nice to see some um I don't know similar like someone was saying at new dramatist a couple of years ago like I think it was one of the guys from um a cornerstone theater company how and they're they're LA based how the television industry like goes in and harvests playwrights and then doesn't do anything to sort of return the favor or to plant seeds and so I there's you know to kick artists out or to push artists out or to uh uh offer so little support on the on the business side like not I'm not even talking about art arts institutions but um the other uh the other uh industries that that profit off of off of arts and culture in in New York and all cities uh how about if they could start kicking in um because artists need support we need places to live and um and we need financial support more than more than it's not sustainable and um yeah that was that in looking back to uh pre-print pandemic times it wasn't sustainable what the way I was the way I was doing it um so I don't know I I don't know what it's going to look like from here but that that would be so great to see um some of the industries that that profit so much off of um artwork to really uh give back in a way that's um uh not so much about policy or gatekeeping even but just um giving giving support and um not looking over not looking out just having faith that we're gonna we're gonna know what to do with that support I think about a middle ground between how that can happen and I think it I I think about Ellen Baxter a lot have you do you all know this name she um was an activist in the 70s who started the Broadway housing committee and um ended up suing the city of New York to kind of ban single room occupancy and through that started and got funding from the city of New York to create affordable housing through this Broadway housing committee which um Sugar Hill is one of the projects part of this housing group and I I I come to this middle point between I guess Alex and Sybil here because like yes the government needs to do it no I don't think the government or real estate will do it benevolent benevolent whatever that word is benevolently right I think there's a level of force that has to happen and so I am starting to look at these strategies of where like lawsuits crafty doings um can maybe result in some middle form of policy that's not quite government that's not quite amorphous but something that does create a middle ground where these two spaces start to create some fruitful um change but that also took like 11 years with like Ellen and like two volunteer lawyers who were suing a city and that has resulted in maybe like six housing complexes so I don't know where that gets scaled up but I think those types of antagonisms with um our our policymakers and sort of the institutions at large kind of need to start start happening because I think as Alex said like institutions feel responsible or some falsely feel responsible to change it all when when they can't and I think that actually ends up watering down an institution's ability to do meaningful work because if they're spread so wide in one way it limits the engagement or actual depth of contact in other other ways yeah I I find that example you offer um a backstory really helpful like work can operate in different spheres and different modes like neither the arts institution nor the artist I think has to do it all and it doesn't all have to go into the piece you know what I mean so to respond to your question frank in terms of like what kind of work we desire to see it it's not like I necessarily need to see the activism around housing on stage although I would be delighted to but I'm not necessarily saying that I'm saying like I want to see the totally unbounded experimental joyous embodied deep complex strange work that might emerge from the circumstances of having time and space to live um so I don't even I'm excited by the fact that I don't know what that could look like because we haven't had that circumstance in New York for several decades now I'll jump in for the type of work that I would like to see I've discovered this week isn't really what other people want to see which is doesn't really surprise me and I'm talking specifically about like Tina Satter's show which is fabulous I hope everyone here is well let me say yes um but um you know it's closing uh it's closing early and I'm like you know the artist by the way she wasn't prelude you know so a couple of times yeah so um so I was thrilled when um that show and Tina and all those wonderful actors got made it to Broadway um and maybe they've been running a month or something like that and to read in the paper on Monday or whenever was heartbreaking to me that it was closing November 14th I was like please like I I hope those pony voters get to see it because um it really deserves to be seen as does Dana H I I actually hadn't seen that until just last week these are wonderful works and they are from colleagues of ours than the downtown scene and it's like all right well Broadway doesn't want this I guess they want Jake a little pill or any of that stuff and um so if anything it makes me want to even embrace work like that even more the problem with Skirvall isn't so large you know it's it's 806 so um and I'm fine with reimagining the use of the space but we can't make a home for everything because of the scale but I somehow would love to get Skirvall involved more so in sustaining experimental local work um so that that's the type of work I would like to maybe I'll just follow Jay since um yeah you know Tina's show premiered at the kitchen which is 155 seats and a two week run um and then went to the vineyard which is like kind of similarly scaled theater off Broadway and then went to Broadway and you know my like I was so like made sure like everyone was so thrilled when this room made it to Broadway and just thinking about just the like you know uh the idea that like in one night at the at this Broadway theater you know the amount of people who were exposed to reality when our story was like the same as like the entire run at the kitchen um but then you know of course then you're exactly as Jay said you're like budding up against like that the idea of these different publics and like what these publics actually like want and desire and like um you know thinking about like you know maybe this play could have run up the kitchen for like three months without any interruption and like just have a completely different uh attention and you know um kind of like understanding of like what what is happening on the stage but you know I think that like something that we've that's been really helpful here to kind of like you know help us understand like what I don't know I don't know if it's like what we want to see but like you know coupling what we want to see with like you know helping artists transition through this stage is just like this um this idea of like getting away from box office and generally you know like this was the idea that we had um free programming during COVID we had a sapphire clear race show um in september which was just for one person at a time sapphire did um I think eight performances so the total run was you know I mean the total kind of like box office was like eight um but like without sacrificing like any of the kind of like theatrical um aspects of the work as a production aspect of the work um and then you know like now finding this uh kind of um balance with you know alexa shows are 30 people from the gallery which is half capacity and like what you know what can be achieved through these like you know different types of audience experiences and you know uh just kind of again like moving as as thrilling as it is to have like a piece go to Broadway like moving away from you know like all those um things that define success in that uh in that traditional sense yeah I can jump in here too I've Alex I so appreciate what you said and have just been thinking about it um please pass a few minutes just about this idea of separating the artists from the work and like I think there's what the artist needs from the institution to be able to make the work and then there's what an artist needs to be able to live and thrive in New York City and that includes like housing foods that all those things that sort of relate back to um security and I I mean for me those issues are so vast and micro and I'm grapple with how to tackle that I think working with an institution it could sort of be done on a micro scale and I think um from the pandemic like I'm okay with incremental change um and I've been thinking a lot about changing infrastructure to like you know the artists that that we work with if someone is making work about climate change or climate emergency like how can we also embody that within the institution so like what does a carbon neutral performance or exhibition look like do we really need to be building existing walls and spending money and creating all of this additional waste can we be working with local fabricators or performers so I've been thinking you know I think the the work I want to see needs to be reflected also back into the institution into our own practices so like if an artist is making work about you know sustainability like how can we take that inwards a bit more um and I know that's quite quite broad but I've just been trying to think about that with the future programming that we have and in my own curatorial practice so I really appreciate that you said that and ensured that piece about artists versus the work and you know how that's reflected back yeah um and maybe one question you're next to of course the difficulties the financial one the private hill of ways of living of existing or caring this someone said yes they bought my parents or grandparents you know as a as an artist they're real these are real issues you know how can you be even a supporter family member you know and if you have such a hard time even for yourself and it shouldn't be that way but the way the work we see um we often had also Carol Martin um with us she you know is writes about that kind of the theater of the real the engagement with layers of reality with um you know like um Tina's work you know she collaged the FBI files and put it together and Bonnie Moranca yesterday who was with us says well perhaps I am now thinking about the theater of the imagination um something that goes away actually from the representation of what is real um or seems to be real what what do you all feel um um if you look around to your friends colleagues will there be um something emerging um that um that is is different in East Berlin they had tragedies in the time of Hainan Motor he said you know tragedies are for dictatorships once the wall came down or opened up he said I'm not a comedy writer I'm not really so he stopped writing you know he said I couldn't really adapt for it anymore what do you think what are we what what do you pick up from your colleagues or friends what do you feel is or will be important or audiences would like to see um something that I've been thinking a lot about that I find out there's work that's really exciting to me is and I think it's happening more and more after you know the past few years in this real grappling with reality um I like seeing work that has a sense of possibility that isn't really connected to utopia um and I think that that's maybe even controversial to say now it was a very big like like especially like a very big queer locus for many years in the New York performance scene um of course thinking about Jose Nunes who's a brilliant thinker um but I think that and you know in other parts of his work he he also sort of touches on this but I think that what is really the most interesting is when people are trying to rework the the material that we have to live with that are kind of contending with the things that we can't escape accepting that the systems are always going to be a burden on us and not from a place of antagonism but from a place of making uh the making do of coping with these things of rewiring these things um and sort of like finding new ways of looking at them that don't get so far um beyond the material or beyond this actual space that that have a little bit more of a sense of grounding and I think that can still be an abstraction I think that can still be in really exciting kind of indulgent forms in a lot of ways um but I think that what's most exciting is having some kind of um almost like a sense of of humility and thinking about these like big ideas like you can like I get the most impacted when something is like extremely poetic but also is affecting and like relatable in some way where I have to take a moment to kind of process the sadness that comes with it as well um I have been noticing a lot of work being made with improvisation and pleasure as a guiding principle and I'm really yeah delighted and curious about like sort of reading what that those trends in a way like very recent I mean I'm talking in the past few months I've just been like noticing people talking about their work that way like um the improvisatory nature seems to me to be about a kind of inability in this moment to set things when things have been so tumultuous from one week and one month to the next like it it actually seems illogical to set something that based on the experience of the past two years might have to be totally reworked um and so it's almost like coming out of that I see a lot of my peers and colleagues and people whose work I love like sort of offering well what we do have is like pleasure and delight in the body and that as the thing to be followed and welcomed and celebrated and like when we are in shared physical space together um how like delicious and lush that is um and so curiously I've like not been seeing that much of like an impulse to sort of like deal with what we all went through slash are still going through but rather like when we're in space together um how strange and how joyous and how odd that can be and I'm like I'm curious I think when we like pass through to somewhere which may never happen there might actually be more space for processing and we're so in the middle of like understanding ourselves and our bodies in relation to each other and each other's bodies and like breath and gaze and all these things that it's kind of like in that realm of just delight in having a body or something um so yeah I'm really really curious to see how it feels very different for instance than like work during Trump let's say or like it like I hear what you're all saying in terms of a kind of like imaginative desire but reached through simply sharing space together and I think I think with that there's a messiness in a way that we're allowing um artists and ourselves where like the awkwardness of being in space is very messy all of a sudden the breath of somebody next to you is leaky in a way that it wasn't um before and I think work like I think of Godard as a filmmaker who um didn't make films that had such a clean narrative arc you were kind of just rolling with the sequence and there is like also a messiness with that where you may not have known where you were going and I am looking at artists and looking at work and especially live work that does that where it's confusing or it doesn't have such a clean bow and I think that also um can take the work outside of the realm of entertainment like I think so much of live work in the mainstream space um is understood as live work for entertainment even music sometimes is looked at as entertainment or a backdrop and so I'm interested when the mess or the that sort of openness can free work from that that pressure of feeling like entertainment and instead it's this um this active process of you kind of not even knowing where you're going or not knowing that it may end in this way you expect it or it may never end it can live on in you kind of after. Jesse everything you just said kind of describes Sybil's piece that that I picked for for you know as my thing um about the messiness because it's incredibly messy but not in a uh I don't I encourage you to win Sybil Windsor Friday tomorrow right okay at seven we're only going a couple scenes but you can um you can stream it from Abrams and see the whole thing after November 4th but it's totally like where is this going everything you just said I was like it's it's so I encourage you to to tune in because if that's the work you like you'll totally I will I can't wait it's a mess yeah um well you know I really think about a geography right now I think partly because I'm not living in the city anymore and it really it's not that far away but it's also a million miles away at the same time and uh well we were making this piece that I'm going to be showing tomorrow night um we had one performer in New Orleans our composer was in Austin we had performers from Brooklyn I was up here I had another performer across the river so we were kind of all over the place the whole time and we were able to do it thanks to the internet and just sort of put it put it together and man we really use that internet um and then I think about uh when the lockdown first happened and I've been moving around sort of like squatting in different friends houses the whole time all my stuff is in storage it's been a little bit insane um and and when the lockdown first happened I was I was uh staying uh in the empty home of a friend who is even further upstate and um on a hill and you know there was and I remember this about September 11th too like how far is this gonna go you know is everything gonna shut down are we going down are we becoming extinct even um and so I had this uh I had this moment where I was like what if I have to do all the performance that I'm gonna do like on this road that goes up this hill where there's four residents on this road and one of them has a trump flag in their yard and another one is like I don't know what's going on with them but they're very troubled a very troubled couple and then then there's the ACLU lawyers up the street and then the you know stock traders I guess you know what if what if these four people were my audience and I had to you know does that change my work what kind of what would my work look like um and I I actually don't think it would change that much weirdly but the way that I would do it would would change and so uh I don't know if this question is is like about the whole the whole thing or just about our work individually but I think the um like the the subject matter of my work I don't think would change very much but the delivery system would have to change it and that would be quite radical of a change and would and would say a lot uh about it but it would definitely probably still be very messy um and uh yeah but but but thinking about geography spanning geography and then like rooting down into one very small geography either one or the other it it seems to me are the are the possibilities that are um compelling me at at the moment yeah I guess two things are coming to mind for me based on some things you said Jesse and Sybil and Isaac like um geography maybe in relation to utopia which like famously means no place nowhere um and how that like collision or contradiction feels like a place I want to be inside of as a world like what is a world that is no world which makes me think of apocalypse and like the apocalyptic moment or the sense of end times as a generative space to be in so like uh end of the world is possibility of worlds or possibility of something beyond world um and uh also Jesse the mess messiness um which I really relate to and cherish and love in your work Sybil um it makes me think of messianic like the messiness inside a messianic impulse um messianism as like for me as a as a Jew is like helpful way to frame like utopia in terms of a thing that will never come like Moshe is that which will not come to save us um yet we must continue doing everything we can to bring about his arrival but he's not going to come because then we'd be Christian you know I mean like devotion to the unarrival of the messiah even though all we want is his arrival and so in like thinking about no place and utopia I don't know that just like I was feeling these this excitement hearing all of you talk like yes yes to be in the place that is no place or to be desiring and moving towards a place that is not there and that is nowhere and and like embracing the the contradiction and how that feels and um that we're like never going to get there and we have to keep trying to get there and maybe there is like brief really brief moments and like sharp shards yeah it's very exciting to that's like a there's always when you have a contradiction like that you're always it feels to me like there's always a lot of truth there you know and like we are devoted to what is impossible you know and that's always been true but it really now it seems to me like it's becoming like a mark like real mark making like we have this moment like we we could be I mean it could be it could still be over you know for us so what are we what are we going to do in the meantime like what are we um uh what are we here for in the meantime Alessandra and Lumie both of you what do you pick up as signals you know you have your ear closed to the to the landscape and what do you what would you guys like to see um I mean I don't know I actually don't know what I'd like to see but just like picking up I mean or just like continuing this conversation a little bit you know I it just reminds me of a lot of conversations I had like the beginning of the pandemic or I don't know middle of the pandemic or sometime when we thought there was going to be a very finite period like that there was strict beginning and end and you know artists for life I'm never going to need work about COVID or I never want to see work about COVID and I think that like I think we're all in a state now of like exactly what Alex was saying like we're never going to arrive at this like end you know so uh that the impact of this moment is like felt through all these different ways and the work is never going to be like about COVID like it's never going to be like a narrative about the virus but it has deeply of course shaped everything that we've done all the approaches to everything that we do those ideas like you know not being able to fix anything because everything might change in the next you know 24 or 40 hours or whatnot to that like you know it's not just artists that are capable of kind of thinking like that but like making sure that like our infrastructures around that are also you know aligned with with that thinking yeah that's that's a great response I feel sort of similarly I think a lot of the work being created right now is almost a continuation of conversations that were happening before the pandemic that are just like amplified so again it's not necessarily about COVID but artists are like continuing these really important themes that they have been working through related to like race or equity or accessibility or sustainability like these very heavy topics so for me it's been like a continuation or heightening of some of these ideas and Jesse I love what you said too about sort of the messiness and I think there's this embrace of not showing work also that's completely polished or finished and I think it is really a testament to this moment that we're in like taking the time to slow down and not being so precious about the work and who it's shown to and I think I really appreciated that as a curator like you know I I went to a performance this past Sunday as part of Performa and found myself on the beach at the Rockaways and I think there's something beautiful about also taking work outside of the theatrical black box space and into this known civil like what you were saying into the natural environment and sort of leaning into this idea of chance and surroundings and so that's something I've really appreciated over the past few months just seeing work again and experiencing things outside of like the black box space yeah I mean some some people do do refer to that time we're in as a kind of apocalyptic but in a sense of the word that means unveiling it didn't always mean disaster it was actually the unveiling of a truce like apple is taking away and calypso is like a you know the taking away of a shell or something and that's what it did it exposed real structures we see how are people our institutions make it in a way it's scary I think Richard Schechter said it's like a nuclear reactor burst and we look inside it we are on top of it and and the big question of course is where where will it be going and yesterday and Katanya said you know theater people performance people have been on the outside always they are outsiders nobody want them till a hundred years ago they wouldn't get buried and married even in New York City there's that little church you know on 29th street they were a lot nice to them you know that she said this is what we always have been and perhaps we have to go back to apprenticeship systems like companies artists will take people on we have to say goodbye to the universities who charge you $80,000 you know you go into debt already when you start how work how can you do an experimental artist you know when you have so much that so to carry with you so perhaps this naked truth where she says you know Shakespeare's work was actually outside the city of London next to bear fights and dog fights and even now people say you teach Shakespeare it's a microaggression you know in some universities they say we can't teach it anymore it's incredible what is happening at this moment I mean but the question is will that be again that these outside status also what Jay says he live feels a little bit at the university you as the artist feel and perhaps you know also you as curators what the question is where will we go but what what will be presented for a city to celebrate life to experience life to experience art you know what what will work and there will be stuff shown there will be stuff done and I think you all make a big contribution but do you think it will lead to kind of the Obamacare that people will be embracing the asthma or will it be more they said no you're the outcast actually and we don't care you can you know be in your wagon and go through you know and perform in cities which some people I think have done you know but how fun I mean what a beautiful image like that's the lineage you know that's the what I feel like I come from as a performer is like being the outcast and traveling around in my wagon with my hand out you know and that's like the issues that I'm still grappling with and of course like the work of performance and I'm speaking now as a clown primarily is to like charm the audience or entertain them such that they are open to receiving ideas that they may have thought they were not open to and so being an outcast is sort of the best way to sneak in because you're outside and you're able to observe and you kind of have like the space and the chance to observe and to formulate your critique and to formulate your mockery which is the classic tale of the bouffant for instance that I return to again and again that the people who were forced to live out in the swamp well great so now they have lots of like time to hang out in the swamp and they can watch the elites of the kingdom at a safe distance and really like hone their their criticism of the way society is structured and when they're invited in it's kind of the job to yeah to entertain enough to get your food and your drink for dinner and and allow people to laugh instead of kill you and then maybe after the performance is over some of the ideas linger and linger and linger and then the king and everybody goes to bed and and right before they go to bed they kill they all kill themselves because suddenly like it hit them what the bouffant was saying um so so yeah I feel like that's actually maybe a more appealing model to me than supposed embrace which actually functions as neutering or something like that like a kind of couch being couched in in resources and institutional embrace um which I'm like always slightly skeptical of because who's behind the money you know and why are they being so supportive it's always like um you know this weekend I went to like an experimental clown party that it turned out was funded by peter teal so like you know he has reasons right people with money have their their reasons and I'm and I think that's important to have like a certain skepticism about the the you know caring embrace um that it has mysterious the where the king is kind of hiding let's say I'm you know I can add to that Alex and I'm gonna um echo something that and a colleague who I met recently who is a legal representative and a member of the shinnecock community on long island um they started their career working in cultural institutions and they've since sort of left and they're now really a lawyer and representing this community and suing the government and all of that stuff but they still keep a foot in the door and all of these cultural institutions where they worked and if you go to an event where they're at they're always asking questions um and it's because they realized and they told me that people come to art events and and cultural organizations and while there's a lot of problems with them this is one of their powers is that they come disarmed and they come ready to almost listen to to the artist right they they're willing to be fed whatever an artist will give them and there's so much power in that vulnerability of an audience um and I think as you're saying Alex to continue to kind of really work that delicate space and sort of even expand on that and amplify that more intensely and more intensely so that at the end of the night um they're shook awake or shook to death is really um that's a goal right it's something I can certainly believe too yeah I know it's such a big it's such a big theme we are coming also closer um um um to the end and um and I think we're asking questions and we should actually have better questions we won't find answers that's what artists should do to ask questions to disrupt to create problems actually and not solve them I feel very strongly that this is a time and perhaps it has to become a bit more militant with lawsuits perhaps lots of people talk about strikes you know that people should just say no this is not the way it works we need to be paid we shouldn't be just adjunct we shouldn't you know get tiny honorariums meanwhile leaders of big institutions you know make 30 times as much as someone on a low level in that same institution that's wrong so we'll see where this all will be going and I hope that our little festival is a contribution towards it tonight we have um at 4 30 I said in the afternoon the indigenous theater panel I will listen to that community that's really overlooked that said you know we often go out also in the black lives matter and a lot here for everything very few come to our events to our things so and we were there before also be a foreslaver and they shouldn't be compared but you know there is an important um to listen to it of course tonight we have alex tomorrow sible um tomorrow we will hear from the 5 at 12 noon of the 5 cities you know New Orleans Austin and Cincinnati and Detroit and Philadelphia we are very proud that we were able to put that together here how does it feel for them and they are perhaps as close and as far as sible at the moment you know on the internet and since we don't do live shows we thought we invent we bring them together to hear um um what they will be doing on friday is our open small discussion you be are thinking about to create in the summer of 2023 something like a citywide festival celebration in parks outside with existing institutions in all five boroughs who knows if it will work or not I hope you can be part of it but to seriously think what what does a city really need what does listen um to people for war and the cuny theaters which are public theaters in the way but they're underfunded and they don't get noticed but how could they help the community how can the cultural international institutions the Goethe Institutes and the French and everybody in the Finnish Norwegian Italians you know spring in a global consciousness that is missing as Jay pointed out where will this be going all and and then also with some of our curators and others to really think how could that look like we don't know if it's going to work it's also an experiment it might fail but we think it's worth it and um but we can this little resources as with this festival I think we can ask question I really really want to thank you all for being with us and I know a panel with seven people is some some people might even take it as an insult to even you know participate but I think that spirit also you all talked about Alessandro and Jay and Lumina others you know to collaborate to be together to listen to each other even if it's difficult and to hold that space of um antagonism of complications things they will never be able to solve that or break the great writer said you know you should be able to think in controversies or think that cannot be resolved actually if you think it's black and white right and wrong you are small-minded you know you have to live in contradiction you have to accept it and like democracy that's never there but we have to go to it and we have to work for it and the same is perhaps with this atopia and I think art has to make a statement I think it's really the art that can save a city unite people bring people's together the Columbine shooting as someone said yesterday that wouldn't have happened if the school district hadn't eliminated art education in the schools there whoever did it might have said all their films and things and others have outside my tiny universe I don't have to kill myself and everybody so um I think this is the hope it's a very dangerous time I feel it's also a time where perhaps you know the the ghost of fascism appeared for the first time in America and the arts have to come out and have to do something you all are such great workers and agents of change and so as you have our highest respect and we really are very thankful that you participate and I hope you also feel that this festival is a celebration of you your work as curators as editors or producers as artists singers dancers performers and whatever form musicians it is so thank you all and thanks to howl round that's a so fantastic that they host that you know it's nationally streamed we had listeners from over 25 countries people want to know what's going on in America what are artists thinking in New York what are curators thinking so it's a stunning that we have such a big reach which we normally couldn't do it our space were open and I would like to thank Andy Lerner and Tanvi Shah who put this all together Gourav and the cactus juice company in Mumbai who made this possible it's incredible came off our 24 hour talk we did with Indian artists so we are very thankful and but it's also we are very concerned and this is all very serious what we talk about this is a future of our lives of the city and I think art has to take a stand and you all do and we have to investigate how we can do that in a meaningful way where we also include everybody and and keep the community the environment everything in mind so thank you all sorry about my little preachy thing is my last talk after the threes tomorrow Jake will put this together with the companies he selected and I hope to see you all again and we are trying to get together a prelude party it might take a week or two or three but I hope to see you all in person and we get a DJ and celebrate and dance hopefully so thank you all goodbye and see you soon and tonight I'm going to come and see Lumi and Alex I can't wait one of the few new things to see bye bye