 All right, we're gonna get started. This is the first of our lunchtime conversations for this year of Great Plains Theater Conference. I'm Ron Zank. I'm an assistant professor at Culver Stockton College. This panel is Found Spaces and Beyond. We're gonna be discussing immersive theater if the rest of my panelists would introduce themselves, please. Thomas Richio from the University of Texas at Dallas. Justin Townsend, assistant professor at Brooklyn College. Jack Frederick. I'm with the St. Fortune Collective in New York. I'm John E. Gasper, also with St. Fortune Collective. And I'm Danny Carroll, also with St. Fortune. All right, so just to get started, I think a lot of us are aware of the notion of theater and found spaces, that is theater in existing spaces and sort of the sort of resonance that that has. And we've sort of moved beyond that a little bit with immersive theater. Tom, would you like to talk a little bit about how you maybe see immersive theater being a little bit different than what people may have been thinking of in the past? Okay, my approach to immersive theater comes from my work with indigenous people. So they, in a sense, they've been doing immersive theater for thousands of years. The immersiveness is, the fact that it is very site-specific, it's a virtual specific. It's when they perform, they perform the animals, the spirits, the elements that are around them. And they bring them into the conversation. And it's a marked difference from the Western perspective, which basically is a social remediation use of performance and drama, where theirs is a remediation and a celebration of a totality. So in a sense, when they perform, it's an immersiveness. So I've brought that idea into, I'm too hot? Are you waving at me? I'm waving at Alistair. Oh, okay. Hey, Alistair. I see someone waving. Too hot. And so I bring that to my work. I have a theater company, a performance company, called Dead White Zombies in Dallas. And I bring ritual and immersive elements to what we do. Which, I don't know, is that a good start? That's a good start, man. That's a good start. Justin, would you like to talk a little bit about the projects that you've worked on that might be considered more immersive than, say, just traditional theater? We were talking about this earlier on the panel, just as now, and this idea, Elaine and I were speaking about, of playwrights, essentially, through language are creating an immersive environment, right? And so to say, you know, what is this new idea is a bit complicated, and perhaps I worry about it. But to say, let's say, okay, so maybe visually immersive, but again, we've been building playhouses for a long time. But somehow this idea of decorating or making something that one might tunnel through, the audience might travel through the experience, or perhaps that the theater itself is handled in a different way, aesthetically, or how the audience even interacts with the space. So in that sense, there's actually a sort of fuzzy line, as to say, you know, when are we doing work? That is strictly, I'm going to sit in the audience, and you are going to sit in the other side of the proscenium and make something, and I'll perceive it with a sort of unacknowledgment of the space between us. And when are we starting to actually acknowledge the architecture and space and worlds as a part of the event? And I would be, it could be a long list for us to start to say, well, this slides on, here it is on the spectrum of those spaces, that perhaps it's that it is the space between us that for me is what's exciting as a visual artist, making performance work. All right. I'll just speak to St. Fortune collectively. You can answer as you will, because now you're going to interrupt each other anyway. We were joking that we're all going to answer at the same time. Yeah, like the pre-cogs. So just a little bit about your immersive work and how you see it and what you've experienced. Both as creators and even as audience, because I think that's important too. All right. Well, one of the first things that we did was ejected this play called Unloaded for Bear. It was about a safari expedition in Africa, and we ended, and he staged it in our backyard at school. So it was, so the audience like walked through like a forest in a way to arrive at the stage, which was just a tent and like a campfire. Yeah, and it just something about the season at that time it actually kind of looked like the African savannah. And so we were, but that was a really, saying like a having like a proscenium arch in nature going on, you know. And ended its own lighting effects too. Like with the sun setting, I mean was something that you really can't duplicate in a building, so. Right. There were, I think some of the most immersive qualities of that performance, two of the characters as the audience started to walk through a field entered into the forest, they arrived as guides. So they met the audience to then bring them forward to the rest of the camp. And then as the sun set, there were effects that we used with cars, headlights, far off in the distance using the extent of the space around us to create a sense of foreboding, I think at that moment. Yeah, when you get out of a theater, a lot of opportunities open up for you as far as what you can use, you can use real fire, you can use full automobiles, you can use anything. And there's some drawbacks to using an outdoor space. We had some kids who were walking their dog and they were real punks and they like disrupted like a whole performance. Cause they were just like, there's people out here doing a play, let's mess with them. So, sorry. But then that becomes part of the play. Right, people were like, how'd you get all those crazy noises out there in the field? And I was like, yeah, I would plan that. And then, but now we found that we're moving towards more of a dealing with the audience and getting rid of the space between the audience and the actors. So we're working on this on wood music on Friday night, which we should all attend because it's gonna be fantastic. But I can't tell you anything about it because it's a secret. How very informative. Tom and Danny, well, anybody, if you wanna talk, since we are at a playwriting conference, maybe about some of the challenges or some of the differences in terms of working, writing in a more immersive form as opposed to maybe more traditional script, what you find, what opportunities, what presents. Well, I think one of the main things about using found space and immersive theaters is looking at the space you have and deciding what you can do there that you can't do anywhere else and writing the story in the vein of that inspiration. I did a piece that I wrote for Gavin Price, who is usually at the conference, usually a fixture, but is unfortunately not here this year, on the Highline in New York City. And for those of you who know the Highline, there is a section that has these windows that overlook 10th Avenue. And so we not only set it in a situation in an apartment where you'd be looking over 10th Avenue, but also use the fact that we had sort of an endless fly space to do some effects with balloons in front of those windows, and people actually down on the street a couple of blocks away from where the action was happening, filling that backdrop in a way that you could never fill a backdrop in a traditional theater. And you peek in audiences' curiosity when suddenly they realize that these things going on in a busy city far down from where their perspective is, is actually part of the drama. It's titillating, and I wanted to use that. And so I think it is challenging, but it is sometimes even more freeing to write for something that is unique in that way. As far as writing, maybe I'll talk about TNB, which is a performance we did last year this time. And it took place in a former crack house. And the previous owner had just vacated the space few weeks before we moved in. And the man I developed actually, the play had his first reading here at the Great Plains several years ago, I think it was in 2011. And from there I enlisted the assistance of a friend of mine who is a convicted felon and also a gangbanger. And what we did is we worked together and we developed a piece on paper and then we put it into the house. A local developer was gracious enough to give us the house for a dollar. And what we did was we shaped the performance to the house itself. It had several rooms which we could only bring in like 25, 30 people, which was fine. And the whole notion is that this man, this African-American man, is coming home from a botched robbery attempt. And in the house, there was his brother. He didn't know this, his twin brother, who was a white man. And so the issue then becomes are you being black or are you performing black, a gangbanger? Is there an act you're putting on because you don't know any other options? And then there was issues, like technical issues, like if I'm in the living room and there's action happening in the kitchen, it's like not everyone can be in the kitchen, it's just too small of a house. So what we did is we devised the idea of creating close-circuit TV cameras in each room. So you can be in any room, like in the botched robbery attempt, and like a 7-Eleven, the liquor store, where your attempt took place, you can watch anywhere you like the events in the other room. So we used that kind of like coherent to the piece, but also as a practical solution. And the fact that you're in a house, which was decorated as his mother would have left, now we find out that she's deceased, but she's cooking in the kitchen. You can smell collard greens. In fact, she would serve collard greens, anyone who had asked, in washing dishes, et cetera. So it's a very live action. And you're sitting in a living room and it feels like you're at home. Like you would if your parents in the other room or someone else and you just hear the conversation. And so it has this home-like quality, which basically offset the very aggressive style of the piece in this man's life. And then upstairs he comes to find out there's Storm Crow who represents 500 years of African-American maleness who comes downstairs to rectify his shit. And so basically he calls him on it. And so this essentially is its unraveling of his life. And then he realizes at the very end that he's died. He was killed in that Bosch's attempt. And he came home basically. And I mentioned earlier about how I use ritual. Essentially the diagram was not a dramaturgical diagram of the West beginning, middle, end as much more emotive and much more based on a very consciously of a ritual healing, shamanic healing. So he comes in and the white brother, his twin brother, is basically his helping spirit. And he has to reconcile all of the things in his life before he can move on. So once he discovers this in the dining room and served up in the dining room, it's not food, but are bullets at the dining room table. And so once he finds out that he actually had been killed, he leaves onto the street. And where his mother were playing a tamarind, a very good actress who could sing gospel, a woman representing many of the women in his life that he abused and he loved. And the whole really quite bundled difficulties had with women in his life. Storm Crow and then his brother, they're all waiting there. And it is a chalk line of his body on the concrete. And so the entire audience goes in the street. And at the end, Storm Crow, who's a 350-pound spoken word artist, first time acting, calls him, says, let's go, man. And it ends with him walking down the street and pulling this young man named Spooky, the characters named Spooky, because he is a ghost, down the street. And then the audience leaves. And so the writing for us is, I hate acting. I'll put that out there. I despise it. I like and I think part of this whole immersion consideration, which is evolving, is a reconsideration of what acting is and what acting should do. I try to do is to make it very real. When you're that close, you're right next to someone, to act is very, unless you want to artificially create that sensibility, it's very false. And we want a reality now because there's so much artificiality in our life. And this may be something for a larger discussion, but we have to ask ourselves why immersion and why now? Why in our world? Why if immersion is a manifestation of a necessity, as all art is and a marking of our time, what is that saying about our time? We want to be involved. We want to be immersed because you look at our world and we're immersed and we're realizing we haven't been immersed. And because of that, our global ecological systems are failing. And you look at the structure of the traditional proscenium march, which has been talked about here. It's basically the illuminated mind speaking to the passive body. We could no longer be passive bodies. That era is past. And yet we're still kind of like caught up in the dramaturgy and the bureaucracies in theaters, people being employed in such a way that they don't want to give it up. Or they can't because, hey, I do this for a living. This is how we structure our performance. We have a black box, a proscenium. We spend all this money on it, so we have to make sure it works. It doesn't work, just like our systems around us, capitalism, for instance, another symposium here. But it's all interrelated. And it's immersive. It's all interrelated. And we have to consider all these things. So in a sense, it's not just about the architecture of putting something in a space. It's about a whole another way of creating a narrative. And it's the artist who must lead and create new narratives. And this is only part of a composite, a larger picture and a larger puzzle piece that we have to put together. And that's the charge. So we're in a very interesting place historically. And for me, we have to jump in very knowingly. Because I think or I worry that in the best light, that's the version, that it's a civic, it's a proactive, it's an engaged society that comes to immersive work. I worry on the other side of it that it's no more than our internet experience. I'm a single point of camera traveling in the world where I may or may not pick up an experience. I didn't see this performance. But other performances, immersive work, can be on its bad day. I get lost staring at the structure of the closet because I'm interested in the architecture of that, but never in fact engage in the story. Which I wonder about as we create these things, how we continue to adjust them. Because I think that immersiveness is an extension of, is a continued pursuit of naturalism or realism, let's say realism, on stage. That it's the next step beyond that. Well, and maybe that's your perception of it. For me, again, going back to indigeneity in the indigenous world, which is my model, we tend to think that story is only told by humans. That story is only told through text. Stories told by a multiple, this room has stories in it. If you're doing site-specific, what's the story, what's the character of the room saying? What are the histories there that need to be unbundled? What do animals, how many times on stage do we consider animals or spirits in a way that is of equal grounding? In a sensorial way, we don't. We look at them basically in this old, kind of like Western perception, human-centric perception. We can't look at the world like that anymore. So in my immersive work, I try to basically, it's an exploration. I don't know. I have no idea if it will work or not. But I'm trying it, and what's happening is audiences are responding. Because whether conscious or unconscious, we're sensitized that we have to kind of change, that things are happening, and we need to fundamentally rethink how we do things, and not just propagate older ways of being in the world, older forms. But you're right, there are issues that this is an important discussion that's much longer than a few tidbits we can give here. Justin, what about turning back to that design question in terms of, I mean, because it's a very different thing to craft a design for something that's more immersive as opposed to, you know, okay, the audience is gonna be in a proscenium space, and they're gonna sit here for X amount of time. Yeah, yes and no. I mean, right, like again, the idea that we're sitting up here, and we have, maybe you all are sort of scooted onto a small table, right, in a series of other tables. So I propose that we actually never lose track of where we are, this idea that we can go, we can, in the olden days, we might turn out the lights, and really, when the lights come on, we're in your subconscious, right? It's just one I don't feel connected to, right? I just, I'm like, no, I'm still sort of in these uncomfortable chairs, I'll pack in all these people. I wanted that seat over there, but okay, this'll be pretty good, I'll take this. You know, that's part of the experience of my playmaking and play watching and engaging with the thing. So, okay, now we can extend design so that, well, should it just be framework, right? And we saw our friends of generations and ago where we said, American theater needs to, what we really need is to be in the thrust. That will save the world. Because everyone will get closer to the performance, it'll feel realer if we're in the thrust, or the round, right? And across the country, we can go and celebrate those theaters that are still there. And now we're in this big idea of we are gonna make a black box that could be anything you ever wanted. And it turns out that's frightfully expensive to adjust every single time to make whatever we want to make. So, I think there is a process where we can engage or open our hearts to say what would be the most exciting way to perceive this story, to engage with this story. But I do wonder these empty boxes, these frames of space that we have, are we always investing our stories or having a relationship with a story in these civic structures that have certain histories to them? Yeah, there. No, I think that's great. Well, and I think it kind of responds to something that Tom was talking about. There was an article I was looking at that talked about site-specific theater in terms of productions being placed within a particular space. But they said that's really some of the most powerful, or I think more of what Tom was referring to, which is site-responsive theater where you're really taking into account the space that you're in, the history of that space, whether it's its use or its architectural placement, something like that. So I think those possibilities are really great. And actually guys, I think with your piece coming up on Friday, I think you're doing some of that. Can you speak to that abstractly since you don't want to? Yeah, definitely, yeah. No, basically everything that is being built and has been built and will be seen on Friday is about activating some part of the history of this mill that we've learned about. And whether that be through things that they have in the mill, a prop, a song that we would supply. Anything, there's a lot of different ways you can tell that history. So we're really interested in all those different ways and exploring with that. Site-responsive I think is a really good term for what we're doing here because again, it is a place with a great deal of history. And so going into this as outsiders, of course, we have to be examining that history very explicitly and making sure that that is a loud voice in how we interpret and use the space. And it's essentially like Tom said, like making the space a character. It's like the mill is the main character of this play. I mean, there are like actors. I know you don't like actors, but there are actors who are walking around in it and they're interacting with it as if it were an actual breathing thing, which I mean, maybe it is. Maybe you can hear it sometimes, like speaking to you and establishing a dialogue with that. I mean, I just got here, so I'm really eager to get up there and work it. But before we came down, we wrote this whole script of what we wanted to do in the theater. Or in the theater, look, I'm even talking about it, it's a theater. It's not a theater. But so like trying to reconcile those words that we wrote with what the mill is actually saying to us, like we need to listen to it and we can't just be like, oh, we're just gonna force these things onto you and we're gonna like pack all these people into this little space because that's what we were going to do. Yeah, exactly, we've rewritten this show countless times at this point. How many times? I don't even know. And like basically we were working off a video, which was the thing is that you should really ideally build a site specific piece off the site, having been there, but we were working off a video that Kevin sent us. And so the technical problems of a video is for some reason the perspective might be off when you're standing in a different area. So it was very funny because we built this whole thing on what we thought the mill was gonna be. And then we got into this space and it's been an incredible experience, like reconciling something that was completely in our subconscious now with like, well, what would this actually be the night of the show? To go off of some of what Tom and Justin were talking about in regards to site responsive, these concepts. I think you can also be site responsive in rebellion to a space when we're asking about like, why immersive now? Why are we calling for it? I just remember very early in our company, we had a black box that we always used in our undergraduate and one of our last performances, we really made an attempt to change how everyone was approaching the space. You know, everyone for every show would enter through the same double doors and for this show, we had them go through this back corridor that we lit this way because we wanted to make that space a bunker. And that was just immediate and instinctive because it was a rebellion against what was constant in that space. And I think, you know, that is why immersive now is a good question because I feel as though theater in contrast to all of the other media story, especially story delivering media, we wanna know now how theater can function for a population so affected by that. And I think visceral, visceral is really what it's all about. When you boil it down. Maybe it's the internet ruining everything. Like we're kind of just living in these digital spheres so we just crave actually seeing somebody up close. Whereas like back in the day, I mean, I lived back in the 70s, you know, and I didn't actually. But from theaters, that's why you sit there and you see real people at a distance and that was real. But now, since we have TV and film and it's like immediate in that way, maybe that's why we're turning to immersive now is because it's like you're so close that you can touch them and you can touch them even though they are performing and they're doing something that you can't experience on a daily basis. Just. I think too is an issue of the relationship with the audience. I found that our audiences become characters. In fact, in our next performance, we're deliberately moving more towards that. And also our audiences in the main are very few traditional theater people in Dallas, which has a very thriving theater scene. I'd say only maybe 20, 25% of our audiences are traditional theater people and the majority are people who basically have given up on theater. Visual artists, people essentially saying that theater doesn't really respond to the world. It's kind of old fashioned and stodgy and it's like it's dated. These are things I hear. And our audiences tend to be young. Whereas most audiences and most theaters tend to be middle-aged to older. We get young audiences and they're very hungry for it. And they like the fact, not that they're going to perform, it's just that they realize, and I'm thinking of one anecdote. This is a man who's a partner of a major law firm in Dallas. He and his wife, Kang, and we had another performer who did a 36,000 square foot former welding shop. And it dealt with the journey of two souls after the fall of Troy throughout multiple lifetimes. And so we limit to like 50 people in the audience. And essentially it can go from an hour and a half to four hours, this durational and loop depending on the interest of the audiences. And so you can never see the entire thing in one night. I mean, every night you go, it's something different. In fact, as a director, sometimes I would go to one space and not having been there and realizing that they evolve something. So they have room as performers too, and I use performer rather than actors because that's what a broader span of like a spectrum. But they're encouraged and we evolve it in a way that it's part of what we do, that they're encouraged to evolve it. But this lawyer was with his wife, guy in his late 60s, and he realized that he says, I was watching others watching me as well as watching the scene. And in a sense that's a wholism which I really aspire to, that we're all part of this. There is no exclusion. That we're all part of a condition now. And we are disenfranchised and our media and the internet is manipulating us in a way. And more and more if you just look at the business page of any newspaper, more and more large corporations are gobbling up smaller corporations which basically wanna control the story. So it's like, where do you go for real story? Where do you can go to even have like a free internet that's not, you know, things popping up from research from two years ago? Where do you go? I mean, so in a sense, it's a grassroots kind of activist approach is how we perceive it. And people I think are sensing that that is an alternative. And it's a way of reimagining and invigorating the imagination and creativity for our community. Right, you're encouraging people to actively participate in it rather than be passive, you know? And to be aware of who they are. Right. In the TNB show, it was interesting that we allow video, all of our shows. So you wanna take video, fine. If you wanna walk out, go to the bathroom, come back. People go out, have a cigarette and go back in. It's like, it's kind of relaxed. And it's based on things I've seen. One inspiration was this event in Burkina Faso where there's major like a ritual but there are events over there, over there, over there. It's like, I didn't know where to go but I went to where I needed to go. And that's what I needed to see. So chance is how the spirit speak. That's how the perception. So if I go there, if I go looking at the door, that's what I need to see. I need to see that door. That's my story. That's what I need to see right now. So it's kind of breaking our concept of like how we function and what we present as artists. What our vocabulary is. What our responsibilities are. Yeah, and I think as a theater maker what is most exciting about immersive theater is it's a type of thing that you can only do with theater. I mean, it's easy enough to get a, to shoot a movie on your iPhone. Like, why does the story have to be told? This, in a theater, well, it only seems to follow that. Why not use the medium in a way that only, that you can only use it for. Questions. Do we have a microphone around her now? We do. Once I, vamp, vamp, vamp, vamp. Thanks. Working on this piece that was male piece with you. And, What's your name? You name it. And with all respect for immersive theater, because I do love it, attending it and doing it. But when is it just a gimmick? When is it an actual response to the fact that we can no longer sit in a theater and just listen and having that in immersive experience and that creating a full world for us? How is it that we become such a visual society and the need for physical simulation and visual simulation all around us that we are forming our theater in response to that? I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all. But when have our attend, is immersion theater a responsive fact that our attention spans are too short? Well, I do think gimmick does have a bit of negative connotation. So, but to take that away. I wonder. Maybe hook? Hook, yeah. Is there something about, maybe part of, for me, the experiences to break it away from, to make it event versus story? That somehow, for me to see an immersive event is to see the event of the thing that many things can happen, that I can get lost staring at the door and maybe miss the fact that, oh, this is all based on Macbeth. I didn't realize that. Because there were so many people walking around in white masks. That the there becomes a different experience. I do wonder though how it continues to be specific. That the event continues to be unique and link us to a, I'm a theater artist because I'm interested in story. So, how does story layer itself back into that? I'm not entering anything. I want to further that question actually that Elena had to go off of the example you just used. You were mentioning Sleep No More, I think there, which is the probably the most famous immersive theater in New York right now. It's based on Macbeth, but it came up early in our talks about the mill. And I think very quickly we decided we didn't want to maybe use Sleep No More tactics. I've never actually seen Sleep No More, but I am wondering how much of that is composed of things that are gimmick and how much of that speaks to what you were talking about before about the individual, like they travel through the internet, having such a subjective experience that it is detrimental because they can take their, they can walk their way through and perhaps only skim the surface because they're not an immersive theater person. I'm not sure, but Sleep No More is an example, I think. Well, I think Justin mentioned like story versus events is like the perfect way to phrase it because I mean, I've seen Sleep No More and it was, yeah, it was like there wasn't much story. You made your own story in a sense, like maybe just like what Tom was saying, if you find yourself stuck in a closet with somebody who's like cracking eggs in your hand, what does that say about? But we did, but both the examples on the table, Tom, you really talked about a story. I mean, there's a real clear beginning, middle, and end. I think it's conceptions of what can tell a story. Again, we're very alphabet culture minded, which is a part of what civilization is and part of how we got where we are right now. But it doesn't mean we always stay there. So maybe I don't see a visualization as a negative. It's maybe we're at the onset of something, a kind of a new consciousness. I see, so everything is a text in a sense. I see the whole world is like a force of symbols. So when I see a tree, it's like that thing is seen so much as an elder. It's saying things. It's just that we're not hearing them because someone has to write a poem about it or make an alphabet documentation of it. Then we hear it and then we see it. It's been speaking. Having worked in Asia a bit, it was very interesting. He has a designer, maybe appreciate this. We had a production meeting in Korea and the designer was coming in and so he just held up some paper and he did like this dance with this paper. It was beautiful, like a hand printed paper. And everyone just sat there and we were all feeling that it was the right paper. We think, and I've worked in Alaska, Alaska Native people, oftentimes I had to caution my non-native students who might be working with us that, and I'm a fast speaker, I love life, I wanna share what I have, but Alaska Native people and the many indigenous people, they, when you say something, you have to give them time for them to respond. So there are sometimes there were students, there were performers who would, they would leave the room and I go, is everything okay? And I go, yes, there's just so much feeling that I had to leave the room. And so it becomes very, almost meditated the communication. So it's a very different way of looking at it. We're kind of thinking that it has to be worth to communicate and that means we're alive and thinking, I don't feel that's a necessity. There are one component equal is the way I see it. With sound, with movement, sensorial interaction, with emotion, they're all equals. And as a director, as a creator, as a performer, you have all these things to work with. So that's how I'm approaching it. So again, it's a reconfiguration, a reformalization of like, and a way of like conceiving performance and how it functions is where I'm at with it. And as the more it has a lot to do with the type of story you're trying to tell, because as we learn more and more about the mill, the reason that we structured the initial project, the way that we did was because it was learning about the mill. It has an incredibly rich history, but it's not a history that is particularly interesting if you tell it start to finish, I think. I think that there's really fleshed out sections of the mill's history that are worth looking at. And so how do you tell that story that's so episodic but doesn't really have an arc necessarily? It's been so interesting listening to you guys talk. I was wondering, I'm struck that the title of this panel is found space versus site-specific space. And I'm interested in hearing if any of you have made work where instead of being inspired by a single space or creating work that is site-specific, that you've created a work that either has wandering, which kind of, there's a lot of theoretical interest now in wandering and sort of revolutionary construct or structure, right? Or that you're interested in found audience, which would have a moving, because we're in a medium of time and space, right? So I don't know, are you thinking about space and beyond just being in a non-theatricalized environment? Yeah, I was part of this project with the Institute for Psychogeographic Adventure, is their name, last year, that my role in it was essentially to sit on a roof and give people tarot card readings. And the audience chose to go on, they didn't know where they were going, but they knew they were going on a journey. And so each new location was a new story in a way. A new story in a way. And like you mentioned, non-audience, they would be on the street, like people would be walking down the street and watching this ballerina dance down the street, and then an astronaut come over and pick her up and things. So they became, I guess, unwilling audience members, in a sense. And then also there was a pretty violent altercation on one path, and somebody intervened and stopped it and was like, this is wrong. Like, stop hurting this person, leave her alone. And everybody was like, can we go on with the play now? But that was, like I said, that became the play, you know, that this person interacting, like an unwilling performer in a sense, you know, like they became part of the play. In years past here at the conference, actually, I think some of what we've done with the Fringe Festival that will be happening again this year has involved maybe delivering a reluctant audience, if you will, into our hands. You know, one of the first things we did for the first Fringe Festival, we built this just frame story around the entire Fringe Festival, just involving birthday clowns, because at the time we had all been making our money by doing some birthday clowning. And so we had just gotten so much from that that we created this piece that wasn't necessarily a play in and of itself, but was a guiding force through the rest of the festival. And we just called it, what was it? Don't feed the balloon animals or something like that. And that, it again, it was just having these characters that were not in relation necessarily to the themes or the stories of any of the other shows in the Fringe Festival, but instead this rogue force that was going to bring things onto you at some point, whether it be an interview, you were gonna get a balloon animal, you were gonna get a birthday cake, Spider-Man came in, he was at the party. Yeah. Your question was about found audiences? Is that, is that it? In a way, I mean, is this a site-specific performance right now or what we're experiencing? I mean, and what would make it, quote unquote, a bracketed performance? What do you need to make this a performance? This event right here, right? Programs. So I mean, I'm saying, so in a way, bring it all the way down to, you know, boil it, you know, to its essence, what really makes performance and what does it function? I mean, in activating, I mean, what would activate this as a performance? I was recently in Turkey and at an artist residency and the area I was in was really nice except that it was big area for demonstrations. So I was tear gas several times and water cannon and there they put this orange stuff in the water and it marks you for arrest, but also as a skin irritant so the police are pretty nasty over there. But it was really performance in the streets and having performed in the streets in the 70s against the war in Vietnam, et cetera, was kind of like charged. I mean, the performance aspect was also, it was alive and the feelings there and the garbage burning and the canisters shooting back and forth and the students and demonstrators throwing the canisters back and then the entire neighborhood and these small streets opening their windows and banging pots and pans so they would distract and make communication for the police very difficult. It was like spontaneous and what activated them was in a sense abstract. It's something going on in the air, a current, meaning the political situation, how it's becoming more fundamentalist Islamic as opposed to the secularist tradition in Turkey. So that's a big issue. And so these ideals, so in a sense it's abstract. So these actions basically refer to and activated and abstract like a myth in a sense you could say or story that's in the air and in everyone, but never spoken yet highly powerful and very performative in many ways and very involving, very immersive. So, you know, is that performance or where do we draw the line? What do we call it a performance or how do we validate that? There was, there are little texts at all. A lot of visuals. All right, and that is our time. Thank you very much to our panelists. We can continue the conversation. That's our time. Thank you.