 It's noon in Midtown Manhattan, another day on planet Earth. And with us, we have Carol Moss, a significant voice in the landscape of US, New York, but global theater. And it's a big honor and a great gift to us to have her. Thank you, Carol, for joining us. No, I'm happy to be here. Where are you in Abu Dhabi? Or are you in Berlin and Tokyo, Israel? What's going on? No, I am just in New York City in Greenwich Village in my NYU office, which is on the corner of the Broadway and 8th Street. No, Waverly Place. Yes, that's where I am, my little office. Next to the famous Waverly restaurant. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, now we get there. Manny, for all of you who do not know Carol, she has been with us. She actually was the one who co-hosted a series on what she calls the Theater of the Real, a theater that engages with the question of reality, documentary theater and how to use different forms to reflect the new world. We do live in, and she wrote for a long time about artists, ensembles, and countries who found new forms for the new times we live in. Carol, if you forgive me, I'll read a little bit about you. Not everybody does know. We have also many international viewers. Carol, as she said, is the professor of drama at the TIS School of the Art here in New York at NYU. And also, she's part of the faculty at NYU in Abu Dhabi. And her books include, and I encourage all of you to read them and to study them or find out more about them. It says Theater of the Real and the Dramaturgie of the Real on the world stage. This is important, Theater of the Real and Dramaturgie of the Real on the world stage. And our audience, we have a lot of people think about Theater of the Real. Oh, here it is, yes, the hardcover and book series in performance, national anthologies of play, performance texts, and it's published. And it also sounds like us, the C-Gull Press. I wish it would be us. It's a fantastic publishing house. And Carol, and also with Richard, have done a fantastic job as editors of a series. That really is one of the very, very few series that a lot of the drama takes it serious, publishes it, comes and puts it out there, like musicians who really listen to musicians from other places in the world. And also to understand that German philosopher, Kaiser Ling, got the shortest way to yourself from the world. You want to really know who you are. You go around the world, and this is the same thing. In theater, and she has got so many on documentary theater, performing the city, the return of the real, and she has so many fellowships, and we call that so many universities, and has been keynote speaker and contributed to the gathering, so people who share it. It's a way too long to read it out, Carol. Thank you again for joining us. So how have you been for you? It's breathless moment in New York City, at least, where it's spring, it's late spring, it feels a bit like summer, things are opening up. It's also a time where we begin to ask, well, what do we make of the past year and a half? And the sense of that, year and a half, is evaporating in a certain way, and not in a certain way. I begin the semester teaching a blended class, part on Zoom and part live here at Tisch School of the Arts. My family did not want me to teach live, and I could say just let me try it. I know that a lot of the students in the class had taken class with me before, so I kind of knew their habits and their behavior. And the surprise was when I came to Tisch, it was empty. It was just the security guard in the lobby, the elevators were empty. I went to the classroom. The six students in the room arrived, that was it. After class was over, I didn't see anybody. But gradually, so that, and I worked very hard to get the coordination between the live presence in the room and the students on Zoom. And so what we all know now, what happened over the course of the semester, is that the students in the room began to attend on Zoom, because it's just too easy to wake up and stagger over to your computer and not have to get dressed for class or whatever, not that they get dressed up for class. And then in the spring, I taught two classes on Zoom, both courses. Well, it was fine. I felt like NYU did a very good job with safety protocols and procedures. And in my department, the Department of Drama, excuse me, everyone was very kind and attentive and constantly acknowledging the situation, which helped a lot. I did feel sorry for the students on the one hand, because, you know, I heard from the students who in the spring were studying remotely, they were freshmen, and they were still in their, in their homes, in their childhood bedrooms, attending college. And, you know, they were a bit at sea, but, you know, I did give them certain moments to talk about without wanting too much to shift away from the subject of the class. So that's, you know, that's been their extraordinary experience on the one hand, and I feel sorry for them. On the other hand, you know, somehow this experience is going to be, I think, generatively productive in the way they think about their future and the future of the planet and governments and art in ways that, you know, we shall see. So just like living through all kinds of huge traumatic moments socially with a bunch of other people, or in this case with the whole world, gives us a common point of departure, frame of reference in ways that I think are unprecedented. Yeah. So it's been, it's been, you know, and now there's this very different moment that has already emerged and, yeah. Yeah. And how are we doing this time? What do you sense? So there was a tremendous outpouring of creativity in terms of using digital media generatively finding ways to make it work, finding ways to let it replace the live experience. And I think that was, you know, really in the mode of meeting the emergency of the situation and wanting education to continue. I don't think it has yet tipped over from functionality to real and aesthetic innovation, although there are some indications of that. So I think they're doing okay. I think right now NYU, like many places have said, we're going to be all in person in the fall. And there's good news about vaccines and about back certain, especially I think Moderna and Pfizer really having a great lifespan in terms of their protection. And I think there's this other moment that is upon us, which is, you know, helping us survive the rest of the summer and think back on the past year and a half. Yeah. And how was it for you? I mean, education is a transfer. You know, it might be distinguished as other species, you know, we transfer knowledge. And, but as you say, the child of homes. So how did you deal with all of it? And how did you as a person as Carol, how did you go? You know, I kind of subscribed to the theory that after the trauma is over is when one really begins to feel what they have been feeling and to sort it out, right? And to reflect upon it. So it's kind of like surviving the year and a half. And you know, we were very fortunate. Everything is fine with families and friends. But surviving it was the only month. And now we have a little bit more space because we're coming out of it to think about it. And so, you know, I personally feel a bit of mourning for the, you know, the, the, the bits of life that were kind of taken away from us all. And, and I just have to think about that. Yeah. I mean I think many say that this. You confined you can. On the other hand, you're constantly. You don't have solitude and how was it for you? Yeah, I will say you're breaking up just to touch, it's better. I think Frank still when you're closer to you can hear. So you know, the, the first thing I wrote, I think you've read actually it's called reprim and that was I wrote it last summer, and, and it was supposed to be like a paragraph and it turned out to be like I don't know 15 to 18 pages, and I felt like I just needed to pour everything into that. And that was very, so that was like, I could write something that was articulating my experience at the moment. And that was very, very good at that moment. But that was June, right. 2020, we know. We were right. We were like, yeah, exactly. The city was empty. All we saw were, were food, we're food deliverers, you know, riding around on their bicycles, few and far between. And you know you felt like you were risking your life to go outside. And so, yeah, so it was writing this one piece in particular was a kind of lifesaver. If you don't mind Frank, I just want to read that first one of the first paragraphs of that piece. It's published in TDR, and it's called Requiem, but I wrote, when this is over, we will have collectively gone through the time of the Coronavirus in different ways in different places and uniquely among diverse people but also all together. We will remember the rapidly changing consciousness, the uncertainty, and the radically fluctuating notions of the near and distant future. And that was one of the, one of the strange disruptions of time that happened in the, you know, at the advent of the pandemic. And it was consciousness of what we did, how we adapted of the overlap of the isolation of the virus and the kind of massive public outpouring on the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd or protest spread around the world will inform everything artists and scholars do and think the new normal will have a new consciousness. The essay felt like I was writing for my life, right, and I was trying to grasp something that, of course, could not entirely be grasped at that moment, but that's one of the wonderful things about writing brings stuff into focus. And you mentioned the Ract of Medusa and the turbulent nests of it. And I agree it was like everything was in stasis and in turbulent motion at the same time. It was like kind of being caught in the eye of a storm and moving while staying still. So, and now there's this new emergent different moment. Yeah. I touched me. I think it was important also theoretically let's say you would get a corona infection and you would end up in the wrong hospital could be the last thing you you wrote one had a feeling there was some urgency and seriousness to it that stood out in a way from a work where normally, you know, we like musicians play the same song variations over decades where you learn and play go back about this. I think what about now did you see any theater that you did you were able to go out and see work after that moment of so live theater, you know I watched some stuff online I wasn't driven like many people were to watch a bunch of stuff online. During the during the school year during the two semesters I felt real zoom fatigue staring at my students on the screen. And I also had to honors thesis students. And that was a very intense and wonderful experience but I felt like I was so much on zoom and then just regular faculty meetings and other things, but you know, this is what I'm trying to make sense of. So, the last work I saw before the pandemic was Okada's Eraser Mountain. And at Skirball and it as you did you see it. Yeah, we'll say the same evening when you were there. Yeah, yeah. And so it's a work, as you know about environmental responsibility, you know, it questions our human centric approach to relationships between people objects the environment, kind of implicitly was our responsibility to the earth. And, you know, Okada was really looking at ways in which humans displace the natural environment, and at the ways that machines displace humans. So, I mean that seemed like an incredibly prescient work. Once the pandemic hit that its questions were absolutely driven by the specific context of Japan and post Fukushima, the nuclear meltdown and the tsunami so many years later, and the attempt to reconstruct the environment. But at the same time that the central ideas, what are humans doing was really, you know, omnipresent question during the pandemic, you know, what is this why why this now, how did this happen. And we still don't have so many answers to those kinds of questions. Yeah, so In the play, they put some screws for the one step like putting machine and help the Western world do everything better. And in the big question really is going back to Kamu said how can we do art in the face of starving people. How can we do theater performance with the environmental face of states. deadly. I think this play. questions. Yeah, I mean, and I don't know that there can ever be any kind of singular answer. You know, I mean people can invent answers but I don't know. You can ask the same kinds of questions. You know, I mean I always ask myself how can we have, you know, a huge number of children growing up hungry with inadequate schooling in the richest country on earth. And it all has to do in my mind at least with certain levels of enormous in efficiency, like mind boggling in efficiency, and also the corruption of, of governments, and yeah, and others and institutions, even, you know, unfortunately, you know, I still wave the flag for our theater in particular as as being, you know, it's not a mirror hold up to nature. It's really not that it's that the theater is deeply interwoven with the current realities in ways that does critique them and reflect them, but is also very much a part of them in the ways that it's institutionalized and produced. And, you know, there's been some conversations about revising those methods but it's not clear where they're going yet. But I know I have to mark Russell the other day and under the radar is going to happen in 2022 he has his budget he's thinking about it. So live performance will come back. I did see. So, the kind of bookends of my experience were a racer mountain. The last work I saw before the pandemic hit. And then the first work I saw was last Sunday was afterward Ness. I don't know, did you see it by Bill T Jones at the Park Avenue Armory, and I followed Bill T Jones on and off for a long time. So the whole thing has this resonance of, I know this man's work. I am familiar with the phases of his work from early on when he was dancing with Arnie Zane. And, yeah. So, I think afterward Ness is is a reflection on the pandemic on the murder of black men and women on the loneliness of isolation on survival on time. And being before and after humans that's the other thing that kind of emergent notion of time as being fundamentally apart from humanness has entered our consciousness. It was meticulously done beautifully the space was divided into areas with a central performing area and kind of avenues that float in and out of it, and all the dancers and all the spectators wore masks. And so I think that made it doubly safe. We had, we showed our, our, our vaccination certification on our phones to get in. They may have had an area for non vaccinated people, I'm not sure. But it was beautifully designed. The movement didn't have a linear arc, but it was like portions of phrases from earlier works of Bill T Jones. And there was this wonderful kind of fleet footed runner who seemed to come from nowhere, and end up nowhere just rushing through the environment. You know, it was clearly afterward Ness refers to pandemic. And there was some kind of iteration of dates. Not dates that I could attach specific events to but the last date was the premiere of the performance. So it was very much about us now. At the same time, not literal. At all, not realistic. Evocative suggestive. Summoning our collective experience. I mean, I loved it. I thought it was really, really, really beautifully, really beautifully done. It was well laid out in terms of coded. We were walked in by ushers in a spaced way and the seats were spaced really far apart. So you couldn't really feel the other people but you could see them all. Right. And you could, you know, there was some kind of ambiance. Yeah, so that's as far as I've gotten in terms of live performance. Well, for someone who most probably goes a couple of first time since last March. How did it feel. I mean, that's what we miss all this. How did the moment feel. You could live up to what you were thinking how it would be. I got a little weepy standing in line waiting to be back again. And then when we were, you know, there was an officialness to it. And a formality, because they were intent upon keeping people well spaced apart. And then there was just like this, for me, relaxation into just watching the dancing. And there was opera and a beautiful clarinet player and some street sound effects here and there. For me that a great sense of relaxing into the aesthetic experience and just letting it flow over me. Yeah, and so I wasn't disappointed, you know, it was different though it had all the markings of code. Still being present. So, yeah, it's hard to describe. Did you forget, forget about the movement wasn't always present. Forget about the situation we are in or what you were immersed in watching it. No, no, no, because the perform the dancers were wearing masks. I was wearing a mask. And I think that the situation in which that we're still in was constantly enunciating itself. At the same time, the whole, the whole dance the whole idea of the choreography, what was kind of both looking at what we've been through being very careful about now was some touches with some glances to the future, right. And there's also, you know, at one point a beautiful beautiful white column of light that one dancer walk through which reminded me of an earlier. This work called still here, which had a huge kerfuffle about it. When the New Yorker critic Arlene Croci criticized it, because shortly before still here. Bill T Jones had announced publicly that he was HIV positive. She called it victim art, but she never saw it. But in fact, it was a beautiful piece about both surviving and facing terminal illness, right. So, you know, there were kind of when you follow someone's work you can see layers of frames of reference. Yeah, it was good. I love that the park armory is also going to do enemy other people next or something. Yeah, yeah, things will be will be coming, coming back as over the last months and also closer to us with this emergency moment now it feels like the detonations are slowly fading away and in this landscape where we can walk through and and so how was was change the office? Are you a different person? Will you teach differently? Will you organize your life differently? Yeah, I think teaching differently, you know already is there. And I'll continue to develop new teaching techniques. The students here. I'm, I forgot what it is we read and I said, you know, they love to go into breakout rooms because they're without me, but basically they get to chat for a few seconds among one another and then they have to address a specific question or issue and then come back and give an account of their discussion and their thinking. But I gave them a choice of several things I said, or do you want to discuss this in relationship to the capital riot or George, the murder of George Floyd. And they divided they wanted those two things more than a highly theoretical relationship to theater. So, you know, being really sensitive to the opportunity to build in understanding that emerges from theater and performance thinking to situations, events, realms outside of specific theater plays performance is one of the things I'm going to do more of. And he's done it to a certain degree in my theater the real class because it takes a significant context to understand some of the performances and plays and literature and theories, but I'll continue to develop that. Yeah, so since you mentioned. Um, you know, it's still, it's still a really hot subject and artists all over the world are really working in within what I call fear of the real. I think it's less about literal documentation. And, and less shy about combining fiction and nonfiction and more provocative in the use of the stage space. So, I think, initially with the idea of both verbatim, which is the term that comes out of the UK, and I describe as driven by interviews that are then reproduced verbatim on stage and documentary that are the result of, you know, trial transcripts, letters, diaries, and maybe some interviews that part of the impulse originally was then to stage all that realistically. British play the color of justice, which is about an inquiry into the McPherson inquiry into why five white men, young men, got away with murdering a young black man, and the aesthetic impulse was to stage it exactly like the inquiry room with computers and, and now I think that kind of literal staging those ideas are have kind of evaporated as far as I know that I haven't seen anything coming out of the UK. So, I don't know, lately, remember Nicholas Kent when we talked to him said he was working on a new thing. So, so I don't know how do we see this we see this in, you know, it was always there we look the work of rugby roux, that he was never he was the performed lecture, and that's what he is the leading expert still at, but none of it was in, it was in the mode of or if we look at the work of Milo Rao that he's he's using the stage space in ways that that are that reveal the rehearsal process that reveal the constructiveness of theater. So, so, I think that finally that you know, appearing through the fourth wall effect is has gone away from this kind of theater. As far as I know it can change any moment. There's, there's also Milo Rao says he's he's revisiting and revising tragedy, I'm paraphrasing. And a lot of this work is about tragic events. So the whole question of how do we understand tragedy now is an important question on theater artists minds in in really ways that make us revisit Greek tragedy. And some of its pillars assumptions from Aristotle onwards. And some of the ways that we've understood certain plays like the Oristaya, for instance, which is, you know, celebrated as beginning of democracy, but yes, but people are taking another look at that. There's a woman. I think she was on seagull talks. Avra Siridopoulou is doing a contemporary anthology on modern Greek tragedy, which I'm, I'm actually in but I'm really looking forward to what people have to say. Yeah, so, you know, conservative right wing, you know that we think right, not on the as much on the side. I lost the last part of what you were saying, she she argues that perhaps not as much on the side of democracy as we wish. We have to remember that Athena, Athena cuts a deal with arrestees, so that he won't attack Athens from Argos. She turns the furious into the humanities and disempowers them and makes them, you know, household goddesses. She says, she will always be on the side of the male. And you know that's slightly prejudicial. So, I think the impulse is to look at okay yeah it was good. I mean it was the, it was the end of this cycles of murder by retribution. At the same time, the juried system of democracy had certain blind spots that we still need to address and that we are addressing. I think, you know, in the United States in particular with, with African Americans and, and with women and with Asian Americans and with Jews that we really need to, to be very considerable in new ways about our whole justice system. And so, and so the pillars of tragedy as we know it in theater are shifting I think in interesting ways, and have the possibility of contributing a new a new new perspectives to the public forum. So, you know, even with Aristotle. There is the prescribed recognition and reversal happening at the same moment and then classes. I think that's no longer part of modern tragedy for the most part. And really importantly, there's, there's mostly no there's day new mom, there's the piece has to end in some way, but there's no catharsis there's no, you know, exit from the emotions that the piece arouses. You know, I think we see that in, in both the Milo Rao's work and in Rebea Roy's work they're, they're both people I've written about certain they're always in the forefront of my brain, but in many other works as well. If you talk about me around I know you wrote recently was an article. What's fascinating. What do you think is new in his work. Why do we need to look at it. I think he's making theater even more transparent than Brecht ever imagined. And that his, his, the particular thing I like about his work is the construction of the stage space. So, typically, in the work I've seen thus far. There's the central performing area. There are tables on the side of the stage. And for me at least the tables give some indication of a rehearsal room process. There's a large center screen. Sometimes things are live feed sometimes they're pre recorded. And as in five easy pieces and law reprise. There's the staging of the process of auditions. And during the staging of auditions. There's a kind of revealing about the mechanisms of theater being both for real and faked at the same time. In law reprise one of the professional actors teaches an amateur actor how to do a fake slap. And in five easy pieces. The on stage director who's a character says to one of the children, you know, it's, it's, it's like you, you're, you're angry but you're not angry at the same time. Right. In law reprise, one of the actors says, his parents are from Benin so he gets cast as the Arab, right. So, and, and, so the whole idea of typecasting, one of the characters said one of the, one of the non professional actors says he looks like the murderer, one of the murderers. And so then later we see him play one of the murders. So, you know, theaters, the way theaters entwined with reality, and also wants to pull at that fabric of being entwined simultaneously is very interesting. So like all good theater, perhaps the both Rue and and Milo Rao really tell us something we didn't already know. This is a story we haven't heard before. I think for five easy pieces, it was a relationship of Belgian colonialism to life in contemporary Belgium, after colonialism, and the kind of a certain kind of mindset that it was or is still operative. You know, yeah. You, you watch Milo Rao as well right. Yeah, we were a bit involved in presenting his school of persistence. We hope maybe there's a way to bring him to New York and this little festival idea we have there some some promising times that it might happen. I like what you said about him. You said he actually not just mirrors the world, or a time at least that already okay for the theater, of course, right. It's no longer okay, but also you say Milo Rao mirrors the theater and I think that you made. Yeah, yeah he's. So, you know I can talk a little bit about some of the stuff in theater the real that is is now so different from documentaries. What we think of Peter vice is the investigation, you know, it's an early indication of a different notion of theatricality what is the investigation in German. Yeah, and it's about the Germans themselves at Frankfurt, not the Jürgenberg trials with the Germans themselves and put dialogues, you know, together as a documentary. It was the beginning. Yeah, yeah, the Frank it was the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Yes. And vice sat through portions of it in the courtroom and then it was all published in the newspaper. But what he does with all of that material is transform it into I believe nine cantos or I'd have to look again, but he gives this cautionary tale at the beginning is this is, this shouldn't be theatricalized it shouldn't be performed traditionally. It should be about facts and figures, and the whole play. It has so many numbers in it. And it was criticized initially for that. But, but what I really want to talk about is the idea that vice had in relationship to that play was that in no way should it be presented in realistic terms. These people come on stage, they give their whatever their testimony is and then they leave the stage. So that is, is not holding up a mirror to nature. That's not about realism that that is about figuring and reconfiguring an enormous body of information in a very succinct way with a very specific outcome. And, and it doesn't really know the only changes over the course of that particular play is that the Nazi method of extermination becomes more efficient. At the center of the play there's two lives put next to one another, a young SS officer and a young woman in the camp. And they, and they're put in contrast with one another, but it's not about a literal or realistic representation of the trial, or of the scenes that the trial stages in our minds right. So I think that a lot of stuff, especially that comes out of Europe, not England, but out of Europe is, is really following in that tradition, the, not literal, not realistically portrayed. And I think there are many different kinds of reasons for that. What are the reasons why changing. Part of it is the way the institutional funding of theater has worked with assurance of audiences, and the cultivation of greater and greater degrees of sophistication in audiences. What is also I think certain European theater makers being enamored with experimental American theater artists who began touring to Europe from the late 60s onward. And, you know, like the Worcester group or that the performance go toward Europe, I don't even know. Mabu minds that this was radically experimental stuff that European theater makers of a certain kind were enamored with and they began making theater in those forms and dance as well. You know, Bill T Jones, many times, and also, you know, in Germany in particular there's a lot of Germans dance scholars who have worked on Trisha Brown or early postmodern dance. So I think the idea of the experimental was already there. And, and also peanut bouch, you know, who had major institutional support and funding in the theater of her own. And that makes a huge difference in terms of, of the imaginative reach space of theater, where you're not bound to an audience that only wants to see versions of things in ways that they're already familiar with. Yeah, I remember one of our single talks, quite a stunning interpretation of theater. Yeah, yeah, I mean they do it with little puppets and, yeah, grant grant again it's really about a certain kind of sonography, right, where the sonography itself is much much more sophisticated than it's ever been in the past it's not just, oh let's make a living room that looks like a living room or office like an office. It becomes its own iteration of meaning and content, and its own artistic form, I think more so than ever before in certain ways, you know, but again you know, if we look at Robert Wilson, who you know well that his idea of sonography was very very much in that way. So another American artist who, you know, who has transpired it to Germany and It was interesting. He once said, you know, if you really want to see a baroque chair, you put it in a modern room. He will not even see it, you want to see a computer put into it 17th century, you know, this Versailles setting, you know, so the idea of what is really real and what it is. The reproduction, it's also on screen now, right. The work that was done. Often theater artists on television or it could be filmed on the screen that it looked like like a film or television. Did you watch it? You said you did not watch it. What did you see in that time? What made you think? Is there anything that inspired you? You know, you created it in a way that many people of course wrote about also the theater of the real Marvin Carlson, many others. But you created it as Hans T. Sleiman created that, you know, the post-traumatic theater idea and many wrote about it, you know, Andrzej Wirt, Richard, and so many others. But you kind of mapped that field out. For that year and a half, what signals did you get? What was the field you surveyed? And did you like it? What did you see? Well, one of the things that in my mind is connected to theater of the real was entirely different at the same time is that I was part of an American society of theater research seminar devoted to the idea of memorial. So in the United States we are, we had gone through the idea of taking down certain kinds of statues and memorials. And there was a lot of passion and public debate and history revealed around certain memorials. But I had already begun thinking about house museums, as which I've been looking at for a while, as, as, as connected to my work on theater of the real, in that they are, they are very photographic. They're a staging, if you will, of someone's life. Some of them are absolutely for the most part authentic. They are the house as it was when the person last lived in it. Some of them are kind of reconstructions. This is what we thought the wallpaper was. And we found a couch room period to give an indication of what the house might have been like when the person lived in it. And so, I think the most authentic one that I have visited is Miss Zane Seem de Commando from Paris. And they, the De Commando family donated it to Paris on the condition that they would keep everything as it was. And he was an 18th century, 19th century art collector, I'd have to review that. So there was, there's a tremendous amount of art and then the family was extinguished by the Holocaust. So the monument speaks of both their life and, and their devotion to Paris and French culture and the end of their life. They thought they were French, of course, this is a very common story among Jews, but it turns out the French didn't think they were French. So, you know, then there's some fabulous ones. There's Frederick Douglass House in Washington DC, which actually sits on a hill and looks over, looks over the Capitol. And when we visit, my daughter Sophia was the one who said, we have to go visit this place. And we did. And we were late. So it was all by appointment. This was before the pandemic. And we had missed our appointment. So we were standing at the foot of the stairs to Frederick Douglass House. And there was a large extended black family going in. We were just standing there. And I just said we missed our appointment. And they said, Join us. And it was an incredible experience. Because the docent was really quizzing us in black history, as we walk through Frederick Douglass House. And, you know, and of course when you're there a lot of his writing comes alive, and you understand something else about his life and how he lived, and how where his life ended. I, I'm still working this out, but I think that these house museums which really exists. I mean, we can visit Brett's house right outside of Berlin that they are little explored in terms of how they stage a spectator in terms of what it means to be in the middle of the sonography of someone's life. They both their presence, and their absence, and the, and the sense of intimacy of a life in their home. And, and in the sense of the way in which there, their houses are used for purposes for a specific maybe governmental institutional social cultural purposes other than the occupant may have originally the house to be used. So I'm thinking a lot about that. And, and that was easier for me to think about during the pandemic, because I had visited so many places, but I, I actually lost a huge chunk of research funding completely was rescinded because of the pandemic and it happened to everybody. So you lost the research to NYU or through a foundation outside of your NYU Abu Dhabi they, they usually let us roll over our research funds, but the crisis was just too great and it happened to everyone. So, yeah, so that's where I am now with all of that. Yeah. For sure. What you were saying something. Yes, that's, I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I did watch some, some, I wrote, what did I write it, I wrote about Milo Rous law reprise during the pandemic. And, and I just finished this essay on tragedy for Afra. And that's very nice to think about because tragedy definitely moves throughout all theater the real and ways that that really deserve our careful attention I'm glad I was doing this book. But I think that the tragic form offers a lot in terms of artists being able to ask certain questions about portraying violence or not. As we all know in Greek tragedy violence always happened off stage and the messenger rushed on and said, Hey, this just happened. But like in, in Milo Rous where the tragedy is restaged, right, especially in law reprise we, we see the murder on stage, and yet we've been already schooled in the conventions of theater, right, a real slap a fake slap. Who are the actors playing which parts and why and by the way in his work, the actors always retain their own given names, even though we also know simultaneously the names of the characters that playing. It's a really deft feet that he does. And we see Yarpi, but we see Yarpi, you know, murdered on stage since essentially in the headlights of the car. So, what does it mean so you know, previously, certain questions like let's say with a play, the Laramie project about the murder and I think that moist says Kauffman was careful not to stage the murder of Matthew Shepherd on stage right not to show us, but then becomes. Well, how do we know how horrible it was. You know, so we of course we have to know it through narration. And so the police officer who found him. Reggie Flutie described, I forgot who plays Reggie Flutie but describes having found Matthew Shepherd and then they're the hospital updates, which describe his condition. Right, so that the extremeness of the violence is absolutely staged in our minds, not on the literal stage. Rao does is something different he's showing us explicitly the violence, reenacted and he's alerted us to the fact that this is a reenactment, but why does he have to show us, what does it mean. What does it do to our understanding of how of the replication of violence, right. I think I don't know how to answer that entirely but one of the one of the ideas that Rao in particular is dealing with is, is the way in which theaters entangled with real life. And is there an analogy or a correlation to be made between how we learn to act, the role of a murderer, and how we learn to murder in daily life. And he kind of puts those things next to one another in no uncertain terms. In law reprise, so you know that's the amazing thing about his work. It's not only the story. It's about the implications of the story and the implications of telling the story. Right, so it is in a certain sense that modern tragedy, you know if we in the most progressive ways looks asks us again and again to look beyond the frame of theatrical, right. Always in the theater and outside. Right, it's almost like when we're in the theater we're being asked to also look beyond the frame of theatrical and then when we go outside the theater, we're asked to think back on the frame of the theatrical right. Yes, so I mean it's just it's fascinating it's just it's it's really, I don't like this word but it's actually really brilliant and and layered, you know, complexity. Yeah, and that the observatory, the observatory itself is implicated. You watch it, you know. And, you know, this is a fake one, you know, where the crew was following a murderer and then they kind of things didn't work out, helped him to commit the murder because they were filming they didn't have more time. You know the question of and of course this was as you said about us and our lives you know also where do we murder and and that me know often around talks about that there is no pure art you know that even doing the art himself he does not really something that is you know just that even for him working already also is committing some kind of crimes ignoring realities and but as you said, close it. So what do you predict do you see for for your theater in general what do you think will happen when things open. So, you know the whole world has been through a traumatic time and I think we have to deal with it. I was talking to Mark Russell the other day and he says I think we need joy, and maybe I'm, but I actually think that may or may not happen. I think that we've learned many profound things that were not yet entirely aware of. And we've learned something about time, a whole young young young generation has been schooled I'm thinking about the omnipresence of death. Usually, until now. So recently or, you know, maybe past 100 years, we've had the great gift of feeling many of us and talking about a privilege rule that were immortal, until we like maybe turned 50 or 60 there's a sense of, I'm going to live forever, right. I'm going to paraphrase that famous song, but now I think young people may not have that sense of eternally young, eternally immortal until they start a certain age right. Some of them have I heard from my students, family members who became ill, and they had to suddenly be the, the, the adult in the home while going to school, and dealing with frightening illness. Some of them lost family members. Some of them saw, you know, stupid mistakes in terms of maybe family parties and people getting ill. And I also think our sense of time, really following Ocata's work is it is very different now remember, you know, at one point. It was hard to remember what day it was. Yeah, and that was very, very, very disorienting. So, cutting loose from a sense of clock time, a sense of institutional time. But of course, calendrical time in terms of the seasons remains. So I think we have a different notion of time. I think, you know, you can hear the sirens of New York City, which are always much too loud. Is it fire somewhere? Is it just someone getting home faster after? Yeah, is it. Yeah, is it now normal? Yeah, we don't know. Yeah, you know, I also think the thing we reverted to zoom and, you know, zoom performances and, and that was all good. But I think it was more, you know, to meet the crisis at the moment. And the deeper conversations about technology and media are should hopefully have to reemerge. And of course, the person who's most significant to date in terms of understanding technology is rabid. In his pixelated revolution, he was really asking, you know, look, the, the, the, what, what the Syrian protesters were uploading to YouTube was, in fact, more legitimate than the legitimate sources of the news, which were controlled by the state. And I think now, so the whole question of what is truth, how do we know it? How do we assess it has to, you know, again reemerge. When this documentary theater, you know, became omnipresent, there was also at the same time a kind of postmodernism about idea about how the truth can't be known. I think a lot of the theater practitioners were really asserting look. We know the story we can show you why these walk five young white thugs were not convicted when they murdered a young black man, we can find the truth we can trace it back. We can even find the source of, in this case, the McPherson inquiry, the unconscious racism that was operating. I think that, that, that there'll be hopefully a lot more inquiry into the, into the mediatization of everything. And, and, and what our relationship is to knowing what happened, what enabled it to happen, what his implications are for the future of any kind of event. And, and that's a big question. You know, I think I, I, I alerted you to the work at one point of Timothy Snyder a male historian, who really says, the moment we say we cannot know what the truth is, is the moment that we become kind of vulnerable to what I'm paraphrasing to fascist governments. And I think that, you know, around the world, we've seen the way that that operates, perhaps in India, perhaps with the previous administration in the United States, that that few that feeling signed on to the indeterminacy of what we can know, and the truth itself, in fact, makes us extremely vulnerable. Right. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and there is, there is a truth out there, and if they are facts out there. And I think the role of artists, and also scientists has to, you know, look for the truth. I remember in Germany, we don't have the big celebrations in PhD thesis, but you know, someone takes your hand and says, I do your square to search for the truth, nothing but the truth, only the truth. And then you say yes, and then you get your, you know, you'll think that's it, you know, there's no throwing the heads and the musicians do it in songs, they try to find the truth. So there is some, it's part of it, but there is something like a truth and that we have learned. And the inability of those baby boomers, that's a quantum generation, the conspiring people, they did not grow up like this generation, or as we had on our air, these incredible news from Chile, the young generation, the high school kids who said we're not going to do the subway fare, we ask everybody to go on strike, go outside, it became a very big movement, and the result is, there was a landslide lecture and said, constitution will be rewritten, a constitution, Pinochet put it into place, and the reason is that kids, young, especially, what's true, what is not true, and that kind of generation, so it didn't grow up with it, a culture, a drug of their own culture, you know, if we say like alcohol, you don't grow up with it, you don't know what to do with it, it can be devastating, and that's in the online world where you are not being taught what you did in your classes, or who speak of the real, and you ask us to inquire what's really true and make up your own mind. So, if you are an insider in this great collection of things, thinking without banisters, you know, you have to make up your own mind, you cannot follow something that isn't true, and once you refer, and she went back actually to the Frankfurt, and said, someone told me, I did not think for myself, this is when fascists and creeps, and this is why I think freedom performance has this big mission to help us to get adapted to this time we live in, perhaps one of the best ways. Different things, and as Lesan said, there's a few imagination, and you see what we can imagine, people can follow that, or in their seats for an hour or two, about the story they already know the ending, let's see how it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, Aaron also said that justice takes place, I'm paraphrasing, in seclusion, behind closed doors, and the theater is in a certain sense in every sense the opposite. It's all about the public. It's all about contagion. It's, I see it, and I see it seated among, you know, a mass amount of spectators. And together, we have, you know, more or less the same experience or view the same thing, we may have different internal experiences. But so I think, you know, theater is an incredible vehicle for activating public consciousness in new ways, I can say it like that. And, you know, theater reel is the most current iteration, we have new things to deal with the omnipresence of technology, we have a generation of students who, you know, I have to convince them to read. You cannot read an article of 20 pages and discern the meanings. I don't know how you're going to be able to analyze and engage with all the stuff that's going to come at you during your life. You know, you're politics, understanding the way the government works, understanding, you know, the way your local city government works. You really, you really, I think we need to actively, I'm a member of the university academic affairs committee for undergraduate education. I said we really need to, to get them to sign on to reading again. It's the most important thing in terms of understanding the way the world works. And yeah, so yeah. I get messages back, I send them one, and I get TLTR, and I don't even know what it means, it means too long for reading, you know. The person doesn't even take the time sometimes to write the words, but that already takes too much time. But I like what you said, activating consciousness. And I think performance and art has always done that. And I hope that our talk contributed to that a little bit, to be a little bit over time, but I really thank you for sharing an interview on the middle of your research. And I think what Carol decided also in her academic work to say, I'm going to follow the real, the real world stages as something that can understand the world better through this way of presenting work. And also audiences complexity and they can create their own meaning. So this is an important, you know, an important research. Practitioners to see if best work, you know, how does it work best? And after all, it is about the truth, the search for beauty, and, and what, for what's real. And so really, Carol, thank you for joining. You will join us again. And we'll be on the next Thursday. I think it's Wednesday. Then the 26. I think it's. Oh, no, it's June already. It's June already. So we're going to have a week first one hand comes cotton from the Edinburgh theater festival and great. Oh, great. Great. The preparation for that festival at the moment looks like it might go on. What does it mean? Like we hear we heard from theater developed and, and the work that will be an update from one of the significant places beyond the Vienna festival and then Emily will be back. And then Johanna Varsava and your muskulu, if I say, on the balconies in Berlin, Robbie was one of them artists who live so close to work. He was curious to create and work on their balconies for audience. Extremely. How they did that and what it meant and perhaps also what the future, you know, Yes, for theater. Interesting weekend. And so thank you. I take it this time. I know how hard it is to teach on Zoom. It's also for your research. So, but also in the moment. That's why like TDR, the PHA magazines moves faster, but a talk like this also perhaps it's the pulse a little bit of the moment in us really for doing this. Thanks for our listeners to stick with us. It's been such a long time now and so much more out there. But what Carol has to say is important. It's meaningful. It's significant, I think. And thanks for how around hosting us. We can hope for a great memorial weekend for everybody. Carol talked about the idea of the memorials and memory. And so we need a moment to think about what comes to our own life. What do we do? Is it a bad play? And would we trauma target in a meaningful way? These are all and thanks to Andy to see a VJ at HowlRound. And tune in again. Thank you. Thank you for having me. See you next week. You next week. Bye bye. Thanks, Carol. Bye.