 Good morning, everyone. My name is Martin Diego, a steering committee member at Directors Lab West and I want to welcome you to Directors Lab West Connect's Eight Days of Conversations by theatre makers and live streamed by our partners at HowlRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page where you can join the chat, tell us who you are and where you're tuning in from and also ask questions for the Q&A following our speakers conversation. Also, I'd like to say thank you to Jennifer Brazel. I'll say that again. Thank you to the wonderful Jennifer Brazel for providing ASL interpretation and to all our ASL interpreters throughout the course of this week. We really are so grateful for your support and you can also head to our Facebook page for auto captioning. So this particular session today is all about connecting with international theatre makers and hearing global perspectives from theatre artists outside the US. And I'd now like to introduce our speakers. We have Daniela Atiensia and Daniela Atiensia is a Latinx-Canadian theatre director based in Vancouver. She is a bilingual director, a dramaturg and divisor whose work has been seen in Colombia where she was born and raised and further afield in countries like Lithuania, in England, Denmark and here in North America. Gianna Fordemacone is an Italian theatre director based in Germany. She directs contemporary drama and works on projects that are based on songs or poems or short texts by contemporary dramatists and then reimagines those texts through a devised process. We're also joined this morning by Mikiko Shibuya. She is a Japanese theatre director currently based in Tokyo. She's lived and worked in Japan and in Australia and here as well in North America. As an artist she directs and writes and adapts plays and musicals. Actually musical theatre is her main focus and she also loves to create devised work. So in an interesting way this is one of the things that connects the three of you. I had a chance to discover when looking into your biographies in a little more detail. And last but certainly not least is our moderator this morning, Abavit Shaked and she's an Israeli theatre director based in Israel. She's also the founding artistic director of Instead Israel which is a director's lab and she is a theatre director, a playwright and group facilitator of community theatre. So these four wonderful people, theatre artists, directors, devisors, dramaturgs, are going to be in conversation with each other for the next 30 minutes or so and I'm shortly going to disappear from your screens and I'll return later in the conversation with some questions from the Facebook chat and also questions provided by some of the people that registered for this event earlier. So thank you everyone for being here and for taking part and please take it away Abavit and enjoy the conversation. I'll be back soon. So welcome and so wonderful to see everybody and for those who cannot see us with the visual impaired, I will describe myself. I am Abavit Shaked. I am from Israel and I'm in a room with Indian objects. I have a painting of mountains and river behind me and to my right there is a dream catcher and Anador. This is me. I look, I'm very pale actually. I have brown hair and most of it already white but you cannot see that and I wear blue t-shirt so this is me. We will just, I want you to hear and know who are the people that will talk in this conversation. So please describe yourself and let us know who you are so people can recognize also your voices. Okay hi I'm Janna and I'm in Augsburg. This is my place. Actually I don't think you can see so much in my place. It's just a wall and I think I look like a Mediterranean woman I would say but not so sure of black hair and yeah. So very, very happy to be part of this. It's so great to be here. Thank you. Thanks Janna and Daniela. Hi everyone I'm Daniela. I'm in my bedroom right now. I think we could see a black, sorry a white wall and I've got some fairy lights behind me. I have dark brown hair which is styled to the side. My head shaved on the left side. I'm wearing a red top and long earrings and very excited, happy and honored to be part of this conversation so thank you for having me. Makiko. Hi I'm Makiko Shibuya. I'm talking from Tokyo and now it's 3 a.m. here so I have to close my curtain and this is my kitchen. But yeah I have a typical Japanese face and black hair and I'm very petite small and I'm wearing black t-shirt with colorful bubbles on me which express my excitement to join you. Thank you. Thank you very much that was super. Now we can start and I want to start actually with something that came up on my mind while thinking about what are we going to talk about and I just want you to have it in the title or maybe as a question or a phrase or whatever. If you want to refer to that during the conversation or it brings you something please do share and the phrase is we will make theater everywhere. That's something to have in our mind and the first question that I would love to ask you is what is happening right now within your artistic community as a response to the pandemic? We'll start from there. Whoever wants to answer it's your call just start talking. Okay I'll start so I'm in Germany and okay I'm Italian but I'm living in Germany so actually I've been I'm very in contact with Italy so I was experiencing this pandemic a bit earlier or also stronger than the German people here because it started before in Italy and then yeah you know in Italy it hasn't been so funny and what happened here is actually that everybody started to of course to think about what is this and what is going to make with us. What does it mean for the theater world and how do we want to treat this huge situation because we all feel that it's something so big it's something bigger than we are and we don't know how to cope with this situation and actually it's nice because I have the feeling that a lot of people are reacting very in a very creative way which is nice and of course yeah through the digital world which is not so the theater world so it's a bit difficult I think for all of us but there is a lot of I think we all want to not to not to die with this pandemic we want to react yeah. Okay great creativity creates creativity creates creativity yes yeah cool. Yeah I think it seems to be a bit of a global response in our industry to stay alive and say yeah let's be creative I definitely see that happening in Canada as well there's been an overwhelming amount of online response this initiative to go digital obviously has been very strong because we are all at home but for today I definitely wanted to highlight some Canadian artists who are also trying to think non-digitally and trying to engage with their audiences this way and I'd be curious to see if it's been in your countries as well for example a theater company in Toronto is doing something called mundane mysteries where you can sign up and they give you a call on your actual phone every day for seven days you give them a mystery to solve in your house obviously it has to be a mundane one but they do a series of improvisations with you over the phone and it's a phone call that you can look forward to every day in the hopes that they'll solve your mystery like my cup went missing in the kitchen or something like that and then there was another initiative where an artist was missing her friends and so she asked kind of her friends if they could pick a place that was in biking distance to where she lived and if they could just narrate five minutes of why that place was so significant and then she would bike to all these places while listening to her friends talk about the significance of this place and therefore invited other people to do the same and so she compiled so if I messaged her she would compile all my 10 friends and then I either actually do the bike ride or I can do it on google street view if I'm not able to leave my home and had several initiatives like this so yeah I'm excited to see artists in Canada also thinking outside the box and trying to get us away from the the screen so just to understand they are not on in between them they're not online it's just the audio you can't see the visual well it depends so yeah I mean ideally it's trying to get you out of your house and do a little bit of exercise and having your actual friends voices in your ear through earbuds and then you bike to these significant places and you hear them talk about it but if for some reason you can't leave your home then they encourage you to do google street view from your computer and walk walk it through virtually while you're listening to yeah that's super cool I think that this initiation this kind of stuff we should share and later on maybe there is a possibility on you know on a chat or whatever to put on the link of this great stuff because they are and super interesting to watch that or to see that thank you Daniella of course uh so for me in Tokyo actually it was very interesting because I just read an article about the similar thing about the phone improv it was written that they especially do for elders elderly people who usually live by themselves and it's very helpful helpful for them to communicate so that was one thing that was also happening in Japan as well but for me what's very interesting is that uh many of the theater people are being united and of course there was a couple of union here but now that we're starting a new kind of union and um trying to figure this out together so there are like several groups that is doing like theater people are doing that kind of fundraising to help themselves support themselves and another group is a bunch of associations they are asking um more support for the government which was very successful that we got another budget from the country and another group is about a bunch of big huge producers who are also having a trouble of difficulty in this situation so for me it's very fascinating how we are so united and also the people who were used to be rivals are now becoming a team and for example uh one of the big like anime theater producer is trying to make a theater district virtually and he is gathering people from other genre of the of in the house of theater so i'm yeah i'm very excited of course it's a hard time but i'm really i'm seeing a lot of future and a new style of theater and people really wants to do theater yes gianna can i go back to the not digital theater world because i mean at the beginning i've done some streaming shows because it was the beginning and then i told myself okay this is not theater actually i i mean it's okay now like for um for like um how do you say provisory how do you say like that for for a situation that is not um that is not going to be the situation that we want to to have but i actually i don't like this so i was always thinking about how can i do it uh in a not digital way and of course i've done also here in augsburg in the city i'm leaving i've done a telephone action so it is called like five minutes of joy so we just offer i i've written to a lot of artists here in the city and i asked them if they want to join this action so somebody some people elder people in the city can just call the number and then an artist is going to call and to say a poem or to sing a song or to play something and so this yeah this is nice and then the second step is that we are going to have actually tomorrow we're going to have a live show in front of a building so all the people that are so elder people and people with disabilities are going just to watch from the windows and we are going to say some poems and to play some some songs and yeah i'm very excited it's going to be like real theater not digital i want to say that you just made me cry really i work with elderly population and this is like this is brilliant a lot of things happen here in israel in front of the elderly houses but not a theater people come out and and seeing there are singers that does that but but to do theater and this is so important for those people that appreciate it very much this is wonderful and if i want to share something that happens here and i'm connecting to what the kiko said before and the fact that we are sharing i feel that there is more and more sharing and i can say that also that a lot of artists in israel and they created workshops for the zoom and they are sharing the workshop for writing and for uh i don't know weird visual arts and a lot of stuff that they can share and people can try that at home so to create uh if we are talking about device work and i'm appreciating your your way and i myself love device work and i'm trying to do that as much as i can also so from that point of view i think that a lot of like there is a an artist i think her name is no far in israel and she's doing a workshop at her home and she arose arose as questions for people and they create together everyone from their own home from their own spaces and this is kind of a device work and talking about device work did you have i i don't know i it's not one of the questions but is it do you have any ideas or you know seeds of ideas for that for the next device work uh do you mean specifically digitally or in general i don't know it can be digitally and it can be not digitally it can be international or or not international but some do you have some stuff that you want oh my god i have to do that this is like my next device oh it's a secret okay i mean i have a lot of different things um so and lucky because on monday i'm gonna go to the north of germany and i'm going to be in a theater with actors with distance and we are going to rehearse in a normal way so i'm so happy and then i i actually um i'm actually trying to get the money for a project here that i want to do like in cabins i just tell you because i mean if this idea is going to be if if other people want to to get this idea and to do something i think it's nice i mean i just share with you i want to put all the actors like in cabins in like in the glass cabin or something like that so that you can keep the distance and you can shout because the problem is also that you cannot shout you cannot sing because if you're shouting then your your breath is can get more can get how do you say longer and more in the distance so it's yeah then the the audience should have a bigger distance to the actor so i want to put them them like in cabins and then i want my main topic is going to be the contact so you have in the form already like a way of of avoiding avoiding the contact and you have also the so the the situation of corona because i mean it is we cannot have this contact to the other people and the audience can just walk from one station to the next station and then i want to take just different poems or songs and also some some movements connected to this topic of contact okay it's interesting you say that jenna i i honestly i really hope this is the resurgence of site specific work and and really starting to think about theater outside of our conventional spaces i think that's what we are being called to think about especially since a lot of the conversation has been around how to serve our immediate communities and i think it's it's it's a good starting place to answer your question um i think it wasn't meant to like oh no secret it's just yeah i think it's um it's it's really uh fascinating to hear you think about um our immediate surroundings you know i live close to a hospital so um there's a lot of healthcare workers in my neighborhood right and so starting to think about how i could serve them um lots of conversations around um audiences being in vehicles and performers being able to perform for um people in their vehicles or if you're outside yeah through their windows and just non-conventional spaces if that is the future of theater that's really really exciting yeah so maybe like adding to daniella i also thought of site specific because of the distance and um for me my interest is now in musical theater so i was thinking some ideas for doing musical theater in site specific situation because musical theater is about singing and dancing and it's really hard to avoid the distance and in terms of it's not exactly device work but as a collaborative work i'm trying to put together something that we collaborate internationally of course online but because of this situation i'm focusing more on the writing process because that could be done internationally and it could be something for the future and that could be something that might be interesting to challenge as a collaboration but under the same theme theme because we are all under the same situation so that's something that what i'm trying to put on this is the word that you gave us jana the contact the fact that we are connecting but we are not in contact that's very interesting and the fact that you are sticking out of the box is amazing i like it very much uh i want to ask you the next question uh connected uh but not connected um have any international collaboration working virtually been successful for you did you experience something during this time the pandemic or or not even not virtual it will be okay um okay it was not during this time because um yeah you cannot do so much in a short time but so i don't know if you want to if you want to get to know something about that i had some international projects and of course we were just in contact digitally and it's i mean it was not a problem of course you don't have the the feeling of being together but if you want to do something international that you can also pay then usually like the digital way gives you the possibility of connecting and then bringing the other countries to your theater project so yeah yeah so actually i'm right in the middle of that uh process i'm trying to put together some musical theater artists from three or four countries together to work on one project and what i found now is um i found that the time differences really works well of course it depends on the country but now that we are all in a similar situation our schedule is more open and people are at home in daytime so we can schedule our meeting in a really convenient way and we can work on something in each country when others are asleep so i i feel like we are still and because of this um situation i feel the distance is the same even though you're in the same country or in another faraway like on the opposite of the world i feel the same distance and i feel more working to get a sense of working together so i'm not sure if it will be successful or not but i'm in the middle of trying to put this together the experience in this success i just wanted to ask you miciko if you could talk a little bit more about that in terms of how are you um so you spoke a little bit about um bringing people together for the writing so how is how is that structured did you um yeah like is everybody contributing a little bit of the story and then you come together and talk about it like how does that collaboration work um actually we haven't released yet we haven't announced the project yet so so i can't speak much of the detail but yeah very close to what you said like we we have the same theme and towards the same same theme each writer will write their own songs and i'm the person who put together as one work that's kind of thing that what i'm trying to do in a form of musical theater whoever hear us and want to join this opportunity this is this is amazing because we're creating opportunities and the fact of that that this is the lab i think this is the most amazing thing that happens during the lab and this is an opportunity to work to continue work because when you're in the lab when it happened actually then you separate and and maybe you can connect during the year if you have great ideas or whatever but this is actually an opportunity so if someone wants to call for someone to join the their own work so i think this is great to do that here and i want to share also something from myself that i actually i really love to learn to study and i studied i went to new york actually before the pandemics or at the beginning of the pandemic and we had to do i wanted to i wanted to study the check of technique in new york and i finished the half of the course and then it stopped because of the pandemic and i needed to come back to israel but then everybody was it was an international program and we decided that we are going to perform the the finishing show and to work on this on zoom so we did all the rehearsal process on zoom and we were it was a long christmas dinner that was the name of the the play and Leonard pete directed it and we just were on zoom and yesterday we two days ago we performed it in front of an audience on zoom so that's an international thing that also successfully happened from my side it's yeah go ahead go ahead jonah can i just go back to something because uh daniella and makiko um told that oh which is nice is also that uh the the artist community is getting together this is happening here as well so every time when the government says like yeah we're going we want to help you and then they don't do anything we just put all of us together and then we shout very loud and then demonstration to us so this is something that we really learned here in germany that putting us together is better because we are we can be louder and it is not about the being having a con being how do you say having concurrency how do you say to be in concurrence to be against to be one against the other it's better to be together yeah well i want to jump in there because you mentioned um governments and uh i i learned yesterday that uh shinzo arbe the japanese prime ministers just lifted the state of emergency so uh i think we've got time for a couple more questions and i just wanted to ask is there any specific government advice where you are about when we're going to get back into the theater um you know for example uh makiko um it is you know has life returned to sort of normality now in in in japan where you are or is there still social distancing maybe you could start with with that question yeah um of course we are not in normality but a step by step we're of course towards to open the theater at least there's like a strict guidance to open the theater that governments showed us and if we can do that we are allowed to open so for example from yeah from this weekend i think there's a small theater which is going to open with one one man show but without an audience and they're gonna do live streaming and i think most of the theater are aiming towards this summer because now that we are allowed to get out this is the time that we can actually start rehearsing so probably maybe like small theater might open without audience in june but not a big theater and especially if we want to tour that's another step so even though we are allowed to go out in terms of theater i feel we there's a lot of things how to run the rehearsal with avoiding the distances and we were even there was a discussion whether actors should wear a mask on stage oh really you don't mean theatrical masks you mean no medical mask okay yeah well it's interesting it sounds that actually that although there are restrictions still in place there that you are sort of some some way down the line from from the situation here where we're maybe looking at you know much longer before we can get back into the the theaters how about in where you are daniella have you had any specific advice about you know when you when you can get back into a physical theater yeah it's it's interesting i mean it's looking like government is saying that we're either in the last phase or pen under penultimate phase of what you know reopening the economy but i think that a lot of theater companies also experienced in the last two months making decisions and then having to go back on this decisions because of course the situation is so volatile and it's constantly changing that i think now we're at a point where it's it's trickier to plan and make specific concrete choices about making shows just because even if we're given that date of september experts are also saying that the fall is when we might get a second wave and so i think people are feeling a little nervous about depending on these potential dates but yeah as far as i know they're saying september for gatherings over 50 people but i wouldn't be surprised if it's not until 2021 where we're opening the theater again and does anyone else want to make a say something on that either either from your perspective avavita in in israel because i think you mentioned that you were involved in some street theater you were able to take some performance out onto the streets is that is that like a step in the process of getting back to live theater um it uh dealing with the obstacles so i said we cannot go indoors and we can't perform in venues so we can just go out to the street and perform as janet said before in front of places or on the street for groups that organized group so there there was an organized tour for people who wants to see street art and i suggested that hey we can do a short uh performance on the street during this because this is important and we have the chance to say something and my show my performance specifically was about actually it was a some kind of a protest hey we see everybody uh going back to work here in israel because we start going back to normal but the last and the last last last people are the people from the arts and this is crazy because you cannot survive without arts this is something that we know from our history uh and this is something that's so important for us just to just to shout for the artist to say we will create wherever it is and we will uh because art is our life and i think there is no life without art and uh janet um i think you've already addressed this actually when you said that actually you're going to do this performance uh in front of the building so it's so interesting to hear all of these ideas that when we're faced with these limitations our our drive and our creative energy is is kind of you know hardwired to find a way for us to to to bring communities together through uh you know live performance somehow and i have to agree with you um you know for me uh as a as a technophobe that i mean there have been so many benefits to being able to connect this way but also i feel that um you know uh that's this is something different and actually in a previous interview janet i just want to remind you of something you said you said that this is a symptom as well of of this pandemic and when this pandemic is over this will go away i mean i think that's that's true uh but also it will there will be artists who embrace this technology and employ it um so it's it's it's so wonderful to hear uh such a kind of diverse group of people and i've really enjoyed the conversation and sadly we are running out of time so now might be a good time to to bring you this last question and uh in closing um would you briefly share something that you've learned or discovered during this quarantine or pandemic that you plan to incorporate into your practice as an artist moving forward and um does anyone want to jump in on this something you've learned during this pandemic that you're going to uh incorporate into your practice as an artist moving forward um mackey yeah i thought like what what i gained was it was very useful to do rehearsal on zoom because we could focus more on our voices and text so in terms of like the process of reading i thought this style is was also very effective and something that we can also cooperate and this international like collaboration is something that i want to keep on doing and also personally i have four months baby so it was a great for me it was a great opportunity to try to figure out my life balance working at home and still try to direct something and it was a very good opportunity to keep that life balance in this situation yeah thank you thank you so much yeah and that's um so you're actually you're actually used to being up at this time of the morning anyway so it's it's fantastic it's fitted into your schedule but i really hear you on that in in the way in which it can serve us as well uh this kind of technology um janna how about you is there is there something you're going to take forward from this experience i guess it is something more about me i mean and it is more about the way i feel i really learned again that um what helps me is to be resilient do you say this yeah um and i think this is also like what theater and the arts can can help us i mean the art can help us to be resilient because through creativity and we can just create and so this is what what i'm going to to feel more for the future and yeah probably this is what i yeah what i'm going to have more in myself for the future thank you so much for that and um how about you daniella um i think something that's been highlighted in my own spirit is um how easily it is for our industry and us artists just because of the the pace at which we have to manage life is how self-absorbed we can become um in ourselves in our world in our art um and just a a reminder that that can take us away from having a generous spirit uh not just towards uh the work that we do but just our outside life and so it's um yeah i've just been thinking a lot about how i can practice more generosity once we start returning to uh somewhat normal life and just remind myself of how easily and quickly i can be absorbed into that um self-world and and forget about family friends loved ones or even my community or even the people that i'm working with because i'm just so absorbed in what i'm doing and uh yeah i would like to practice more the act of of that generosity that we're all feeling through these times yeah that's a wonderful answer and one i really connect with this the limitation of being in your own apartment or and and slightly sort of cut off although this is so wonderful to connect this way uh we have the opportunity at least to do this and i also want to include abhavi in that question because you know she's been asking the questions but i'm also interested to learn from her as a theater maker um what she's going to take forward from from this time in this pandemic abhavi thank you very much i appreciate it uh so actually what i've learned that uh it's a lot connected to what daniella said what happened here uh that during this time short very short time we had so many holidays and the biggest holidays passed over and we celebrated it through zoom with all our families around the world so basically people that you would never see so much then you see them and you get the get together so and there was a production that i really wanted to do for a lot of years and it occurred to me that they just connected the the threads connected and i'm like oh my god i can do that through zoom and it is it is that it's actually some kind of a ceremony that ceremony that we need to do all over the world at the same time these different places in different languages and to see each other and exchange information and it was written in the 70s and i don't know but the the artist wrote she wants that to be online at the same time i don't know how she knew online or video or whatever but this is amazing this is crazy and yeah this is liana clan she's a very interesting artist she already died thank you so much for that's wonderful and i just want to say i wish we had another two or three hours to chat about some of these questions i've got a whole page full of questions here um but but i just want to finish by saying thank you to all of our fantastic speakers this morning and also to our partners at howl rounds and of course to the wonderful jennifer brazil our asl interpreter and who's done a fantastic job thank you so much and this conversation will be archived and available with closed captions on both howl round dot com and the directors lab west dot com um we should also just take a moment to say thank you to our long-term supporters people like sdc and the pasadena playhouse and boston court theater so so people like jessica kubzanski and um you know dany feldman and before him shelvin epps all of these partner organizations have helped keep directors lab west alive with with uh selfless um support over many many years so we really are so grateful for them especially during this difficult time we want to show solidarity to our fellow theater makers and theater arts organizations here in los angeles and further afield so we hope you'll join us tomorrow uh when the the conversation is going to take place between scarlett kim and matty barba bacheman and they will be discussing reimagining liveness and connection for virtual space so that sounds like a very sort of timely conversation so finally just to say one more time thank you everyone for being with us today and we hope that this conversation sparks more conversation thank you and goodbye thank you thanks everyone