 Welcome everybody back here to Segal Talks in New York City at the Monteney Segal Theater Center, the Graduate Center CUNY. The Segal Center at the moment, as far as we know, is the only theater institution in New York or the US creating daily new programming. And we don't put up past performances or new things on video, we think it's a time to think, but also a time to listen and to listen carefully and to use this crisis. We had Milo Rao in yesterday who said, this is a tragic time in the sense of the tragic time. It's a real crisis. It's for thousands of years we went through this, but we have to take it serious, learn from it and prepare. So we here have theater artists and thinkers. It is a time, I think, where we all have to listen to theater people and artists, as we say, they artists have been on the right side of history, on the right side of social progress, on the right side of also what is right. And there is this old saying, if you don't know what's right or wrong, always do the right thing. The question is, what is it? What's the right thing to do? And with us, we have the great Richard Shackner, a grand master of our field, a great, great thinker, philosopher of theater, but also a great practitioner whose work has changed the field, has changed what we think about theater and performance. And Richard has been often to the Seedle Center as a good friend. And so we ask him also to come on here on our talks to tell a bit about how he experiences his days, what he's thinking about, and what's on his mind, which is, of course, a great, great mind. So Richard, welcome. I'm very glad to be here. And I just want to say I saw, and tuned into Milo Rau yesterday, that was really extraordinary. So congratulations. The whole series is a fine idea. Oh, thank you, Richard. That really means a lot to us. Maybe someday you can have it so some of the viewers can phone in and we can do some questions that come from outside of the room. That would be awesome. That's true. If we should do, maybe we should have them a bit longer on the talks. Yeah, though, this was a good talk yesterday, which you also can access on the archive of the Seedle Center YouTube channel, but also through the great howlround.com, our host here at Emerson College. Richard, so where are you now? And how do you feel? Well, where is one of those questions that's both physical and metaphysical and social? So physically I'm at one Washington Square Village apartment, one U, which is my workspace, my studio. Around here you see a lot of books. Back there, let me see. You see a mask, there are many masks. And this is where I write. I think there's a single bed there. Sometimes I take a nap. So that's where I am physically. I'm not here all the time these days. I'm also at my apartment, which is on 10th Street right near the Strand Bookshop. One blocks out of that. Across from Grace Church. But metaphysically and socially, I'm in a really liminal space, an in-between space. I think many of us socially, philosophically, spiritually are in this in-between space because what the COVID-19 has done has kind of destabilized our lives. It's complex, and I'm sure you'll ask me some questions about it, and I can elaborate. But my friend David Letwin, who is an actor I've worked with a long time, also a teacher of acting in New Jersey at Rutgers University, he said that what happened with the COVID-19 is it's like the roof has been blown off of the reactor, like in Fukushima or... And so we see the meltdown. We see the meltdown of our social systems. Obviously something, quote, natural, quote, the disease has happened. But at least in the United States and perhaps elsewhere also, the consequences of the disease are social, political, aesthetic. And at certain levels, there's been a meltdown. In other words, there's been reactions that are beyond scientific, are different than scientific. Lack of leadership in the United States, for example. And at the very top, many, many conspiracy theories showing that we have a kind of far-ranging imagination about what might cause this, and also it gives place to the fears. And it also opens the possibility for true reconstruction, whether we'll take that opportunity or not, remains to be seen. Where I think in the... How would Breck put it? We're past the beginning, but we're not yet anywhere near the end. We're approaching a series of middles, or my friend, Victor Turner, who talked about social dramas. We've had the crisis, which has... We've had the breach, rather, which is the introduction of this virus. And we've had the crisis, which is the dispersal of this virus globally. And now we're thinking of redress of action. What are we going to do about it? And the ending of this social drama phase, the fourth one, is integration or schism. In other words, either we will find some new way, some different way to go on with our social, political, and aesthetic arrangements, or we'll split. Because one of the consequences that's happened, and even this morning, Donald Trump has said he's going to stop immigration to the United States. It's kind of a hollow statement, since there isn't any immigration to the United States as this present moment. All flights, pretty much all flights have been canceled anyway, but it's an added kind of statement of intense nationalism. And that's one of the questions. Are we going to go forward after this with a kind of global set of cooperations deeper than we've had? Or are we going to go back to the Balkanization of the world, in which strong nations remain in their own gated communities, weaker nations, are left out to hang out to dry, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, although I'm a critic of many of the practices of globalization, I'm a supporter of the underlying idea of a single world, of a diverse world, a free movement, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think that we're at the cusp now of whether that idea is going to go forward, or whether it's going to be, I won't say stopped, because I think the arc of history is very clear from smaller social organizations to larger ones, from tribal groups to communities to states to nations, to United Nations and so on. The arc is clear, but it may be a 200-year dip in that. You know, the arc of history is also a very funny arc. It doesn't go like this. It goes like this. It's only when you get far enough back that it looks like a smooth arc. So there are many, many questions. So I spend part of my day thinking about that, of course. I also, I'm still editor of TDR, and for those of you out there who write to and want to be published, I'd be very glad for you to send me your articles or your performance texts, TDR at nyu.edu. I mean, so I spent a lot of time reading submissions and deciding on issues and working with the consortium editors, the editors from different institutions that collaborate with TDR, Yale and Brown, and Stanford, and the Shanghai Theatre Academy. So I do that work. And then, you know, I'm smiling because I also do a lot of cooking. I like cooking. And when I was a younger man in my 20s, I actually worked professionally as a cook, not a fancy cook. I was not a chef. I was just a guy who turned lobsters and steaks and made eggs in short order cook, but I did it. And I learned how to make soups and this and that. And I like cooking. In Jersey times. You know. No, no, this was in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I ran a theater out of my kitchen because I was working during the day as a cook and I was running a theater, but there was always, you know, in restaurants, there's always extra food. There's food that you can't serve the next day because it's no longer fresh. There's food that's never been touched from the table that people just don't eat. So I was able to feed my theater from the back door of my kitchen because I was the second in charge of this, this place in Provincetown, which is a great artistic community. That was back in 1963, 62, no, no, earlier than that. 57, 58 in the late 1950s. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, we all some way get back to kind of home cooking, like real. And so. In a way, in your mind, I don't want to say what's cooking, but is there something where you feel it has an impact that's different than other crisis. You have seen so much. You have seen the civil rights movement, but you know where you were at thinking in Arkansas, even the famous March, you have seen the Vietnam war. You have seen, of course, the Iraq crisis, the Kennedy assassination. You have a lifespan. How does this feel to you, this crisis? You're making me sound like I'm Carl Reiner's 2000 year old. Yeah. I wasn't there for Henry VIII. And I wasn't present at the crucifixion. But those other things, yes. Well, all of those other things that you're talking about, the civil rights movement, the freedom movement, the Vietnam war, et cetera, were human made, right? The instigation was done by people. And even if you're a biological determinist, we have the appearance of free will. The virus is not human made. I reject entirely the idea that it came out of a laboratory. But even if it did come out of a laboratory, it is itself not a human person. It doesn't have agency in that sense. It has biological agency. It has the determination of wanting to, if you're actually wanting to is the wrong word, but it does spread. But it's not under human control. And that's one of the reasons why it takes on this mythic qualities. Now, Milo yesterday said it was a tragedy. I would more likely say it's somewhere between a melodrama and a farce because in the great tragedies, you have noble leaders who are coping with insurmountable odds, whether it's somebody like Lear, who makes terrible mistakes, but still is a noble person. Or if you have somebody like Hamlet, who overthinks the situation, but does really think it through, or somebody like Oedipus, who's really an innocent, right? I mean, he himself does nothing wrong. Maybe you said he shouldn't have lost his temper when he meets Lyos in the road. But in that, what has he done wrong? He's tried to defend himself against this prophecy. So that's why he leaves Corinth. He leaves Thebes well, one supposes. And then the plague comes and he wants to take care of it. So he is, in a certain sense, the toy of destiny. And in a way, his powerlessness is what attracts us to him. He is a great king. He's a noble figure. And that circumstance is just overwhelming. And I'm not sure that's the situation we're in. I don't think Donald Trump is either Lear, or Hamlet, or Oedipus. Donald Trump is not somebody who makes noble mistakes. He's not somebody who overthinks things if he thinks at all. And he's certainly not somebody who has the, the, the well-being of all of the people who are afflicted by the plague. Like in his heart. And there are many other world leaders also, several other world leaders, you know, in Poland, in Brazil, in Hungary, who is, who are not Oedipuses. So what we're seeing here is, if we want to use a dramatic metaphor, is not so much a tragedy as, as a melodrama, which is also full of, of, of violence and bad outcomes. Although melodramas usually resolve themselves in a happy way, more or less. And it's also farcical in the deep sense of farce and the Charlie Chaplin sense of farce in the, in the deep Shakespearean sense of farce, you know, false staff in farce where the farce has consequences or Molière's farce where, where, where, where we laugh at some of the inanities that are put forward, but still the outcome is very bad. The, the other thing, you know, there's so much to say about this situation. I can speak mostly about the, what I know about the American situation. I really can't speak to what's happening in the UK or Poland or, you know, I will speak a little bit about the global south in a moment, but about the American situation, as we know, disease has a, I was saying that it is natural and not human made, but the reactions are human made. And the reaction to it is, it continues and exposes how the American society, as it's currently constituted, crushes the poor, crushes people of color, much more. I mean, I am acknowledged. I am a man of privilege. I don't consider myself white when I answer the, the census question, because I'm Jewish. And I think Jews have also a long, a long history and often enough European so-called, I reject the notion of race anyway, but if I have to accept it, I don't place myself as a member of the white race. That does not mean that I don't see myself in my current situation as highly privileged. I'm absolutely highly privileged. I live in a nice place. I have a nice place to work. I can put on my over there. I have my mask when I go out. I'm not in an old person's home. I'm not in a prison. I'm not in a crowded neighborhood like Central Queens. I'm not working in the hospitals. And in all of these places, it is the ordinary person of the, and the poor person who's taking the brunt of this. And that is not by accident. That is when I said, when let one said that top has been blown off of the reactor, we can see the meltdown. That is because American society is constituted and has increasingly been constituted on profound inequality, systematic, systemic inequality that is baked into the system. The last time we had a real move against it. Well, to last August, the new deal of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. And then what Lyndon Johnson kicked off in reaction to the civil rights movement, the freedom movement, and the changes in the 60s. But that's already 40 or 50 years ago. And since that time from the presidency of Nixon on forward to the catastrophic presidency of Ronald Reagan, who laid the groundwork to this, the Annette presidency of Gerald Ford, the stupid presidency of Bush two, and the downright evil presidency of Donald Trump. These systemic inequities are more and more being acted out. And, you know, Trump's motto for this, make America great again or keep America great, which means keep it this, these inequities in place. So the virus shows it, it exposes it. Now you're asking me, or maybe you'll ask me what's the remedy for this. We'll get to that. We've got almost an hour. There are a few more things I want to say about it in general terms. And then I'll stop and see what specific things you want to know. Having said all that, this virus is not the big thing. This virus is really the little wave. The big one is the climate change. It's behind this virus. So this is like one of those early tremors that seems to be big on the scale, but it's not 30 or 40 or 50 years from now, but slowly the large disruption will come. When New York will not have 250,000 cases and 15,000 deaths, but be under 10 feet of water where Amsterdam and London will have disappeared, where Bangladesh will be flooded out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know that scenario. So now we're getting a kind of pretaste in fast motion of what's coming at us in slow motion. And the astonishing thing is this pretaste in fast motion has generated a response of $2 trillion from the American Congress, daily press briefings by the president. All this attention, nobody is paying attention to climate change. When the virus goes away and people go back to normal, they'll still say, oh, it's not happening. Oh, forget about it. While the amount of disruption that we're suffering now, the amount of death, the amount of misery, the waves of people who will come from the global south because of food disruption, climate and drought, et cetera, et cetera, is incredibly greater that we're having now and just as inevitable. So if you want to talk about tragedy, if you want to talk about the oracle, the oracle has said to us, this is coming. And here is a little taste. And you can mobilize for this preview, as it were. You can mobilize for this instant shock. Why can't you mobilize for the great thing that's coming? And what do I mean by mobilize? First of all, of course, to forget about oil, get as quickly as we can off of that. One of the good things, and maybe if there is a God, this God, she is telling us, look how clean the air is in Delhi now. Look how clean the air is in New York. So why can't we only have mass transit and electric vehicles? Why can't take climate change seriously and stop polluting the atmosphere? Take climate change seriously and make preparations for the times that we're going to have to move millions of people, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a warning. So if we're in a social drama, there are two social dramas, the mini social drama of the COVID-19 epidemic, pandemic, and the larger drama that is unfolding in slower motion, but with just as much even more horrific consequences down the road. Yeah. That's quite an assessment on coming from you and very, very seriously. I want to say one more thing. So if I said that the virus in the United States is aimed at the poorer people, it's working itself out in that way, who do not have the option of spacing out for six feet in tiny little apartments, who have to go to work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing is that there are huge epidemics, not pandemics operating in the world today, cholera and malaria being two of them, who are killing several million people a year, many more than the COVID-19. But because these epidemics are in the global south, in poor people, we have gotten used to them. We say, oh, yes, malaria. So oh, yes, cholera and diarrhea, a simple diarrhea kill all these children. So we have kind of accommodated the death by disease that takes out people in the global south that takes out people who don't have proper plumbing, that takes out people in the mosquito area. And when it happens in the industrialized north, and it starts in China, we think of China, South Korea, Singapore, Italy, the places where this is raging at the present moment, then we pay more attention to it. So that also shows how we're structured. We don't really give a damn, finally, in the same way about malaria. I don't see or about dysentery or about simple diarrhea. At the same time, the COVID will come to India and Africa and Latin America. It's starting there. So the consequences there were yet to see. The question will be, when we plateau in the north, in Europe and North America and start to go down, will we pay the same attention to what will happen in Latin America and Africa as we're paying attention now? I would hope we would, but I am not hopeful that we will. So your prediction is that, as someone said about history, it's important to study history because you learn that people forget about history. So you think there will... Mark said the first time in history, second time in tragedy, third time as far as... Yeah, so you think interpretation, it's a farcical time. Milo said it's a tragic time. I might not sure if he hinting to the consequences that he said it's a tragedy, but you are right. And so you think, from your life experience, this rapture, what we experience, which is real, I think, as you said, things have already changed. Often revolutions come, but things already have happened before the revolution, the moment it comes. But do you think it will be for the better, or what is your evaluation? Well, again, I have a short view and a long view. The long view is that everything is for the better, even if the human being species disappears from the planet. Somehow, the older you get in a strange way, the last phase of life is a kind of conflict between despair and wisdom. If you're not going to be in despair about what happens, then you have to get wise about it. And the difference between despair and wisdom, despair says, ah, it's all gone to shit. Nothing is good. I'm tired of my life. I'm tired of you having your life. Wisdom says that the long view of history is that a life, or whatever it is, or even non-life, perseveres. The really long view perseveres. So these are little, little... in that huge trajectory. Already, science tells us, and I subscribe to it, that the universe has been in existence 16 or 17 billion years. Think of that. 16 or 17 billion years. Now, that may or may not be so. We don't know. We can't verify the Big Bang and all. But we know pretty well that the human species, modern Homo sapiens, have been in existence only 250,000 years. I mean, their earlier species, proto humans, a couple of million years ago, the, you know, the creatures, Australopithecus, et cetera, et cetera. But modern humans, like you, Frank, like me, like the people tuned into this, we've been around only a quarter of a million years. And I've been thinking recently and writing about the Paleolithic period, which is like 50,000 years to 10,000 years. Long, long before there was Greece, long before there was Egypt, you know, 10,000 years ago is when it ends, but great artworks having occurred. We have the remnants of those artworks in the caves of Europe, but also the caves of Indonesia, rock walls in Australia. It's a very widely dispersed, what people were doing 35,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago. And they were making art and they were making performance because this art is not a gallery art. You can't go into the, you know, the Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet, those places are not art galleries. They are places where people made art as part of a performance complex. The behavior is evaporated, but the remnants are there. It's a kind of action painting, not Jackson Pollocken, although some of it is, and they're the hand prints. There's the sense of action having gone on. So within the frame of that history, we're also going to be okay, but in the frame of the immediate history of the world since the Renaissance, in other words, the world since Europe expanded and colonized most of the rest of the world, the world now bouncing back basically led by China, which is now a hybrid civilization. Because China was Marxist under Mao. It was his view of Marxism, but it certainly wasn't Confucianism as such. It was a hybrid. So China has emerged as a kind of resurgence and it is with its belt and road policy going to be on the world scene, global scene for the next few hundred years at least. It has a kind of long view of history. The United States is kind of teetering now because unless we kind of adjust how we organize ourselves, the United States will become ideologically, if not economically and militarily a second rate power. In other words, the United States' force, America's force, what attracted the immigrants was not the muscle that won the Civil War, was not the colonization of Teddy Roosevelt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it was the idea of America, opportunity, liberty, those kind of things. That's what attracted people. That's what even attracted people a few years ago. That's what made people come. Now, if that idea gets corrupted, it has already been corrupted. If we don't restore the notion of creativity, the notion of imaginary, the liberty that the imagination can give, the idea of what America stands for truly make America great again, then we're sunk in the short term of history. So I think that this virus gives us the opportunity, just like I'm doing now, to take this through. We have, it seems to me, about 25 or 30 years between the end of this virus and the deep consequences of global warming. Within that time, we have to totally reconstruct or re-figure the American contract particularly and through it the Western contract and be in negotiation with China and their social contract. So how, and take into account the ambitions of India and the global South. I mean, these are big, big questions that are going to be, that are far beyond Richard Shetner to really solve. But I do grasp the immensity of these questions and the need to do it. And the fact that artists can participate in this because artists job is the imaginary and the participatory. So you're going to ask me about, you know, making art in the period of the virus. And I think when it's over in that level, because I do feel that participation, however much it's stimulated by things that like what you're doing, we're doing right now, talking through Zoom and so on. And I don't want us to give that up, but we need, we cannot also give up the smell, the taste, the touch. Even if we were able to make an internet connection that would allow us, I could reach out and touch, that would allow us to smell and taste. It still wouldn't be the same, you know, as the actual physical, erotic, sensual, sexual smell and touch. So right now we are privileging the eye and the ear and leaving the nose, the mouth, the skin out of these interactions. And that's okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. So I look forward to the time when we can reconvene. Hopefully we won't reconvene only in a standard, you know, black box and proscenium theaters. I've long advocated for a more active kind of theatrical environment. I think Milo does it. Lots of people do it, performance art does it, but I would like to see performance art also undertake the staging and restaging of great texts. That's what I've tried to do in my artistic work from Dionysus through to commune through to imagining own through to my work currently to see how non-prescenium, non-picture stage, non-fixi staging can not only give us personal intimate work as in much performance art, let's say the Marina Abramovich direction, but can give us interpretations of classic texts, new interpretations of them and make new classic texts in this interactive way. So I am, you know, my, let's put it this way, my belly is always hopeful. My cook self is always helpful. But the self that admires Bertolt Brecht is always hopeful. You know, Brecht was a survivor. He knew how to handle the House on American Activities Committee. He could live in Hollywood. But Brecht wasn't a rigid moralist. I don't like Savinarolas. I don't like rigid moralists. I like people that can move and accommodate and move forward and do better to do a little good than to die a martyr. You know, so I'm not profoundly a Christian. I'm a Brechtian. I don't want to hang up on a cross. I want to do something. So, well, anyway, enough of that. So I do feel that we can, we can, we have the opportunity locally as artists to reconfigure power structures and aesthetic structures. And then to collaborate with our allies in the social world, the political world to make deep structural changes, especially in the United States. In other words, if the United States could in one fell swoop become Norway, I'd be happy. It's someone who really has an overview of global theater through your practice, through your teaching, but also through your publishing. I think you have come across every significant, I think, movement artist. Even though you are a professor, but let's say you're Dr. Schechner. What do you prescribe? What do you say? Of course, you have to think locally, act locally, but think globally. But what do you think would work from your experience, but also from your study of the history, also a history of theater? What works? We are in a time of crisis place normally I'm made about. That's what people write about, you know, but now we're in it and we don't know, but it's not a Netflix drama that has an end, season one, two, three, and then all this, nothing changes. What is your prescription? What really work? Well, you know, again, there are two possibilities. At the immediate time when we're in quarantine, we have to work the way you're working now. Like this is the second time I've made this kind of appearance. Last week I was participating in a festival in Petersburg. And I'd be glad for those of you out there to do this once a week, once a week under different circumstances, you know. So I think that each of us, you know, the potter makes pots and the bread maker makes bread and the performance maker makes performance, but within the given circumstances and the lecture lectures, within the given circumstances of what we have. So the immediate given circumstances is sheltering at home and distance performing. Okay. And at a certain point we'll be able to make performances in spaces. All right. So if, if indeed we are told we can't put people right next to each other so that the physical arrangement of a theater is not possible, you know, then let's see if we can make performances perhaps outdoors, where people are spaced further apart. And let's see if we can, you know, we can accommodate to those temporary situations. But, but ultimately we, we have to foresee the time when we can assemble again. I mean, if we never can assemble again, then the human project is, is, is sunk the human project. I mean, we have to assemble again, right. Sexual reproduction cannot occur over the internet. But more than that, you know, the whole situation demands getting, not getting back to normal though, getting forward to something new. Now you were asking me, what would I prescribe? I am, I'm bad at that in the sense, I can tell you the work that I want to do. What I heard Milo describe yesterday is very good. I think that these stock theaters, the city theaters in Germany, all of these, and the festivals should rethink how they present themselves. I think that their one level, you know, at the economic level, tickets should be, every performance should have every performance, at least half the performances should be free. And not necessarily only going to where people are, but let people come to where the venue is. I mean, let's start opening the performances up. When I did a performance in South Africa in 1986, it was one of the, it was the first African-American play ever done in South Africa. And I had the permission or blessing or approval of the, the, you know, ANC, because it was at the last moment of apartheid. So the, the, it was at the Graham's Town Festival. It was August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. And the sponsors said, yes, the theater will be open to people of all races. That was really new. And, and, but the tickets were so expensive that I knew that people from the quote, colored regions and people from the black townships could never afford to go. I mean, maybe some high level professionals and all, but the ordinary people wouldn't. So what I said to him, and this is kind of a Brechtian strategy. Well, you know, I do this kind of environmental theater. It's very complex. I can't see how it's going to work in this gymnasium. I need to have a few previews because to see if it's going to work. He said, well, that's a good idea. I said, but you know, because they're previews, who knows how good they'll be. I mean, I knew they would be very good. Let's open it to the community. Let anybody come for free. And of course people came and they mixed, it was 80% people of color, a black or, or what the South Africans, then we're calling color Indian, a few whites. And we had three performances of the total of nine performances he gave were, were like that they were called previews. So there are different strategies to really open up these official theaters, Lincoln center, whatever you want to call it, which are now when I go to the theater in New York, I see mainly, you know, older people, except if it's a show aimed at African Americans or people of color, mostly white intellectuals. And part of it is even though the tickets aren't so expensive, they feel expensive. So we need to have a kind of a certain number of performances, absolutely for free that would bring people in. I like the idea of going to the community, but I also like the idea of traveling, of having people from different communities having, having like, like bringing people so that there's a mix. I also think that performances should almost always be accompanied by discussions afterwards, not just occasionally and not a little surface discussions where the director or a couple of actors come out and say a few things, but like what we're having now, the discussions in which people can really engage with what the artist intended and whether they accomplished it or not. You know, let's take the notion of criticism away from the few critics and the newspapers and put it into the hands of spectators by saying after every performance, there are discussions. Let's, after every performance, even the paid ones, give out 50 free tickets to the people who are there to give to their friends. You know, there are ways of expanding, democratizing, changing these things that are kind of structural that we don't think of. You don't think of going to the theater and leaving with one-fifth of the people getting a free ticket, but the free ticket, the intention, of course they can come back themselves, the attention is that they give it to someone so that you spread it out that way. Or we don't think of a theater as always including perhaps something before then the event and then something afterwards that it is an intellectual engagement and a social engagement as well as just receiving the artwork. In other words, we've conceived of theater since the Renaissance as something fixed like in the art gallery. You go to see it, it's there and you leave it. But it shouldn't be. It should be a social event. The art galleries are art galleries. I'm not so, you know, I like them, but I'm not a great museum art goer because it's too concentrated, it's too passive for me even though I'm interacting with the artwork. I don't want to be too critical, but I do enjoy it. But I'm seeing that performance could be much, much, much more interactive profoundly at its structural level. And that's what I would like to experiment with. Also all performances should be streamed so that every performance that you have people in it that thousands of people who are not there should do it. And we have this stuff, we're doing it now, but every performance should be streamed for free, open on, you know, whatever channel you want to make it, YouTube or whatever, so that every single performance going on in the world should be out there streamed for free. I don't think that would deprive people from coming to see it. People will want to come to see the actual thing, but it would vastly expand the audience, not just a few, not the Metropolitan Opera at eight o'clock at night for $100 in a little theater. Every Metropolitan Opera should be for free on the stream. So those are things that, you know, I know it's utopian, but I would like to see happen. Yeah, yeah. That's true. I mean, be by music recordings, but still we crave to see the music playing life in the band. Yes. All live events. We should now, because we're learning how to do this, we should take as auto as axiomatic, Shetner's first axiom of post virus, live performances streamed. Good. Good. Yeah, it's time. You write also a manifesto. You put it together. Milo yesterday came to it. He said, you know, referring also to your work. He said, I look back because he has time. I think he also actually studied Greek language and, and Latin. I can't hear you. Can you hear? Can you hear me now? Yeah. There's a siren outside. Yeah. It was one of the New York sirens going by, having a patient. Yeah. Everybody listened to it. There it is. That's the virus friends. But, but that sounds like a fire truck. Not an ambulance. Okay. I can hear you now. Yeah. So Milo said, I'm also referring to your work. He is looking at the Greeks also again into. I mean his Antigone project, which he did in Brazil and where he's going to rewrite the ending and all of it. I mean, I don't know where he has actors who are actually the activists really from, from real life. But he said they were serious events in the city of Athens. They were in a crisis like us. Wars ending on you. And they reacted in creating that. So, so your view. Looking back, what has, what has theater performance played? What was that specific role in that. You know, the role of Athens and people. What did it really do if you could. To give us your view, what, what was the, what, I'm not understanding. The function of the theater is on the play at the time in Athens. In the time of crisis. Yeah. Yeah. In the time of the crisis because Milo said they created performances. I'm not so sure that the end of the fifth century, you know, when, when Sophocles wrote, uh, uh, uh, you know, in a different order, uh, I think Phil Octeney's, uh, was his last play. Anyway, when he wrote, and it was I'm not sure that Athens was quote in crisis, uh, Athens, you know, uh, the, because after the fifth century came our style, you know, the plays were still performed for a couple of centuries afterwards. So I don't know what crisis Milo was talking about. There were the, uh, continual wars between Athens and Sparta, but Sparta was basically a victorious. I don't think we should romanticize or European eyes or racialize Athens. So let's, let's look at it in its own historical context. First of all, most of the people in Athens were disenfranchised. They were slaves or women. So although women are really important characters in the dramas, they don't perform in the dramas. I'm not sure that they actually attended the performances. They certainly were not political players directly. So that is an interesting question, the answer to which I don't know why are women so important in the dramas when they were not so important in the society? What was going on that we don't know? I think that opens a great question or maybe some classic scholars out there who know a great deal more about that period than I do would tell me about the function of women, but they're there as best I know, there are no real antiquities or medias or Clytemnester is, uh, you know, or Phaedras in Athenian society at that time. And also there were many slaves and there's a great book. I've forgotten this time as author, but it's called black Athena. And part of the thesis of black Athena is that Athenian society was not, was largely influenced by Egypt and Egypt was nilotic, not Arabic at that time. If you look at the statuary of the pharaohs, uh, you know what we have the painted, uh, uh, scarcophagi and things, they're brown skinned people and maybe they were even darker and they have a full lips and full noses. They don't look a Middle Eastern. They look more from the bottom part of, of Africa coming up and remember that, uh, uh, Luxor used to be the capital of Egypt way down the Nile River. And then they moved north to where the pyramids are. And my theory about the pyramids are that in Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings, all the pharaohs were buried inside the mountains. Then for political reasons, uh, Egypt moved its center north to around where Cairo is today. And, but the people were still nilotic. They were not modern Middle Eastern people and they didn't have mountains to build the Kings. So they built pyramids which are perfected artificial mountains. So the Kings could still be buried in the mountains as they were buried in the mountain down in Luxor. And that there was a, the black Athena says that this civilization, uh, came around to some degree up over through Turkey and around and down through Macedonia into Athens and up through the Mediterranean that Athens was a much more Africanized, uh, society than we want to have it now, that the Athens in our imagination created by Renaissance European scholars is painted white and is made European and made, we're thinking of it as the beginning of, of Europe, but maybe Athens was a much more colorful in the cultural sense as well as the so-called racial sense, then, then we conceive it now. And, uh, that these, uh, these, uh, we, there's a lot we don't know, you know, we do know that also Athens was reconceived by the Romans, by the Latins and their origin myth. I happened to be at the present moment. One of the things I'm doing during the, uh, this time of, of pause and reading, I read the entire New Testament. I had never done that and I'm halfway through the Old Testament, but I'm also reading the Aeneid, uh, Virgil and so the, the Roman story of their origins is a very interesting story. It's Aeneas Fleas Troy, which is an Asia minor in current Turkey, certainly not a Greece and comes and spends time with Daito in Carthage in Africa, right? The place where later Hannibal would come from Carthage. He moves north to Latina as it's called it. He moves to Rome and founds and founds Rome, Aeneas founds Rome. That's the story that Virgil tells the, the imaginary that they wanted to have. So their imaginary is Asia minor, Africa Rome, not Greece Rome, Rome swallowed Greece. And we get it from the Roman perspective. Greece did not form Rome. We, that's the myth that we want to have, uh, uh, that is created by Renaissance. So there's a lot that we really don't know. And I think that history by people who are much smarter and more versed in the language, uh, need to rethink, but I don't think that the Greece of the tragic, tragic of the fifth century, uh, the century of Plato, not Aristotle, the century of Sophocles, Escalus, Euripides, and remember Sophocles outlived Euripides by one year. So they were really contemporaries. We think of them, Euripides coming later, but no, he didn't come later. He was, he was younger, but Sophocles lived to be 96 years old and he wrote plays until he was in his nineties. Philoctetes is in his nineties. Uh, Oedipus and Colonus is very late also. Or maybe it's Oedipus and Colonus. That's the last play. One of those two plays at any rate, their contemporaries, maybe they weren't white guys in the cultural sense. Maybe they were something else, maybe in the society that they envisioned women were very important in the imaginary, even though they weren't very important, uh, socially or politically in the actual society. So there's a lot to know there. And I, I, I would like Milo to tell me what the crisis was in fifth century Greece. I don't know of any. Well, certainly that theater was closely connected to the life of the city in a kind of a spiritual sense. But yes, also the Greek, uh, statues as we know from that great Sankenberg museum exhibition, statues were all painted and they were all washed. Yeah, they were all dark black faces and they was taken out, sanded away. They found little pigments and some statues that were then came out. I think also Pompeii, what they thought they all painted. People thought they looked so ugly. Uh, there can't be the real things, but that's what they were. But coming to your work, you are also working on, uh, as a theater artist at the moment on your, on your play. So, um, how does your day look like when you get up? How do you do that? What, what are you right now? What do you do on that for your artistic work? Well, right now I'm working on a book about Ramlila of Ramnagar, which is an Indian 31 day Indian cycle play on the life of Ram. Who is the, uh, one of the avatars of Vishnu, the seventh avatar of the seventh incarnation of Vishnu. So I'm collaborating with a group, uh, Rishi Kabirishi who's a young Indian scholar on this particular book. And I'm also working with Melissa flower and a group of Indian younger, uh, scholars and artists. And we're putting together this book, which comes out of the 8,500 photographs I took and some of them, my son Sam took in India of this performance, which I've been attending from 1976. The last time I went was 2014 and I'll go back one more time. So I'm working on this book and a daily basis prior to that, when we could get together and meet, I was working on a project called dark. Yes. And that, uh, uh, is, uh, I put that aside because I'm not going to work virtually on it. But it is a, uh, it has four basic, uh, uh, uh, uh, performance texts. One of course, as always is the life of the performers I'm working with. Uh, group, some of whom I worked on with imagining. Oh, which was an earlier performance. We can talk about, you saw it. I, you know, imagine. So some of those people are working with me and some new people and dark. Yes. Has their lives and their desires. It's about desire in politics. So the texts are the dark is from Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness. And, uh, so that text. And if you know that text is a story within a story. So that text is Marlowe is, uh, on the boat, uh, in the Thames as the tide is going to change. And they're waiting for the tide to change. And he tells the story of the time that he went up the Congo river to the interior of what was at that point, the Belgian Congo, probably the cruelest of the European, uh, colonies. And a lot of them were very cruel. It's hard to compare them for cruelty, but certainly the Belgian Congo, the personal property of the King, King Leopold of Belgium was, uh, extraordinarily cruel in its quest for ivory and gold tusks, uh, more ivory than gold, but there was gold in the interior of the Congo as well. So that, that text and, uh, then, uh, I'm also using the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses. And, uh, that's where the whole novel Ulysses is a kind of take on the, on the odyssey of Homer, but it's Leopold Bloom instead of Ulysses and it's different bars in Dublin and places in Dublin that he goes to, rather than the, uh, spots around the Mediterranean that, uh, Odysseus did. And Penelope is his wife, Molly, waiting at home. And the end of the book is a chapter, is a long monologue, her speaking, of course, it's a man writing a woman's voice. And, uh, but it's a very, very powerful, you know, Joyce is a very powerful writer. So we're using some of that. And the final, final sentence of that is, yes, yes, I said I would, uh, he, I brought him down that he could smell the fragrance in my breast. Yes, yes, I will. Meaning I will marry him. But, uh, but, uh, so that's where the yes comes from. And then a third text, which I discovered as we're working is Roger Caseman. Now Roger Caseman is not as well known as Conrad or Joyce. Uh, and, uh, but Caseman, like Joyce was Irish. And Caseman was a very, very vehement Irish nationalist. Uh, he was also, uh, gay. So he also went to the Congo and he wrote to a Conrad and Caseman had a correspondence about the Congo. A lot of, or some of what Conrad knows about the Congo comes from Caseman. Now Caseman was hung by the British at the, uh, in World War one, because he wanted the Germans to deliver arms to the Irish so that the Irish could, uh, be successful in their rebellion against the English. His reputation has now been, uh, largely recuperated, but he was hung as a tried and hung as a traitor. But part of the trial is, uh, about him being homosexual and homophobia because he, Caseman kept two diaries, the black diary and the white diary. In one of the diaries, he wrote his anthropological studies and his reports and so on. And the other he wrote about his personal life, which was a lot of sexual encounters with very young, uh, uh, males, boys in the Amazon, really Amazonian, which is your, is Corona changing that is the, let me just say this, that the Amazon is to Caseman, what the Congo is to, uh, uh, Conrad. So the Amazon is also up river of a great river, the Amazon river and not the Congo river. So I'm putting all those together. Now we, what did you ask about the, is your work, do you feel there's a change? Or in that, just go deeper into the Corona time. Does that influence now? What do you do? Or you feel it doesn't influence dark. Yes. Yes. Because I stopped working on it before the virus. So it wasn't the virus that stopped me. I worked on it for a year last year. And then in the spring, I decided to do this book about India. So, uh, definitely the, uh, experience, whatever will happen on the other side of the virus, when I return to that artistic work, it will inflect it. It has to inflect it, you know, uh, an artist makes work out of both what is, you know, Brechtigan said, you want to build a house, use the bricks that are there. So the bricks that are there are available texts, of course, we know that, but also the performers, but also the creators own experiences. So we've all gone through this. It's a kind of an initiation. We don't know what the outcome will be. So of course it will affect what I'm doing. A real question would be, is it affecting how I'm working on the Ramleela in a way? Yes. And in a way not because that's a traditional performance. I want to know if it's, I would be very surprised if it's not going to be done next fall. It attracts hundreds of thousands of people. So the question is, where will India be in the world of the virus at the time when these great festivals occur? There are a number of them. The Ramleela is not the only one, but the Ramleela is one of the largest. So what will they do? I don't know. I don't think they know yet, but I'd be very surprised if they cancel it. Yeah. I mean, you talked about it at the seagull, but we had the Shekna day and for weeks, three weeks, the ongoing festivals in Germany, most probably it looks like even till the summer next year, they will not have any major big air. Well, they cancel. They stop. Which is interesting because Oberammergau was made to commemorate and celebrate survival of the plague. So if there's one thing they shouldn't have stopped is Oberammergau. They should have had it and videoed it or have people scattered around because it is, it is a performance traced to the earlier plague. You know, I will write the director Kristo. We know him. We had him and that's a good suggestion. So, yeah, I think in Egypt, mosques are closed for the first time in a thousand years. So it is a serious, serious thing that is happening right now. We are coming also closer to the end. And maybe we should just have longer talks. I hate to break it up now because as you suggested, maybe you should have. Well, this is a great pleasure. So I'm not inviting myself back, but if you invite me, I'll come back. Yes, you will. Of course. So what for, and you have been such a great educator also, you have generations of artists and also theater academics, thinkers who went through the Shackno school. So what do you see? What, what, what, what do you say? What would you say to these young faces in front of you? I would say uncertainty that's out there. And as you said, the fear, you know, that is there. I would say to them, human history is full of crises. You know, if you think in the days of 1939, 40, 41, 42, when Hitler was about to rule the world, when the terrible blitz of London and so on, those were very dark and hard days. The great depression from 1931 through the 30s were hard days. The, the, the, the Spanish flu, as you say, the bubonic plague, the black plague. In other words, human history is, is full of, of times and of bad times and good times. Maybe we have gotten used to a fairly long stretch of where bad times are a little bit like this and not a whack on the face. So now we got a whack on the face. It's not the first one. And as I said, because of climate change, it's not going to be the last one. Hopefully we learn from them. So I would say to the younger people, you must do your work. And you must keep hope. But what is hope? Hope is not an idea. Hope is an action. You know, you are hopeful when you do something. You know, you're in despair when you say, I can't do anything. But you can and you must and you will. Thank you, Richard. That's, I think, is a good, good way to end. Really, thank you for taking your time. It's a lot to think about. What you said should be back and, you know, this is an important contribution that also theater artists and people in the theater are very most significant commentators also, as you said, on the three spheres of where we are and where we are going to, but also where we do come from. Tomorrow we have Basil Jones from the great handspring theater company on the South Africa. Fantastic theater artist. He's going to share also with what he's creating in his home. It's a, it's public's work, but also he has seen as Richard changes in his country and was part of the change. We have Arthur Noziciel and Karen and from Ren in France, who are creating at their theater as a Santa Tomata. I think a response, one of the few theaters actually in France, the Avignon festival has been canceled and greatest leader festival, a most significant one, which it may be always went on doing the business as usual. It's also as Richard said, a slap in the face. Who knows what will happen, but also that will re-force hopefully a restart and a re-thinking of what we do. Great festivals actually have been created after World War II. I think the Avignon festival and also the Edinburgh festival, if I'm right, came out after the closure, then end of social life as we knew it. And we know society works when theater works, when theater is great and performances are out, that's we know when it works. And then we have the great Guillermo Calderón from Chile, who also lives in the country with a history that has gone through change that we hear from him, but Richard say, say, Well, I want to thank you for doing this series. This is a very important series. And it's a marvelous piece of work you're doing. And I know it's a ton of work to organize it. So my kiss to you and thank you very much. Yeah, because it comes from you and I know you mean it, that it's really means the world to me. Thank you and thank you our listeners. And again, thanks to Hallround for taking on who he hosts us every day. And I hope you will tune in again and also re-listen maybe to some of the messages we heard from Burkina Faza, from Burkina Faza, from Hong Kong and from Italy, from Merles Monk and so many, many others. Thomas Ostermeyer in Berlin and many, many others. So thank you for joining in and hope to hear.