 Good evening everyone and welcome to this wonderful and exciting seminar with verbatim theatre looking beyond boundaries, binaries, sorry. My name is Amina Yakin and I am chairing the event. I'm chair of the decolonising working group at SOAS and it's a great pleasure to welcome you all. And tonight's event is really kicks off. It's a pre-event for our festival of ideas which is taking place in the week of 19th to the 24th of October. So as is first festival of ideas, it's dedicated to the theme of decolonising knowledge and it builds and borrows from the work of Achille Mbembe and looks towards how we are thinking about from ideas of decolonising the curriculum to a structural decolonisation within institutions in our current climate. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's guest speakers and to welcome back a theatre group who have been a very important part of this journey. They last year, Butcher Boulevard were invited for a residency at SOAS to examine individual and institutional responses to decolonisation through a new piece of work. And they presented this amazing verbatim show decolonisation, not just a buzzword, which captured campus conversations and compelling interviews and narratives that were recorded by the creative team. And the show will be performed at the festival of ideas with an online performance and Q&A on 24th of October from 5 to 7pm. It is free, so please do register and we look forward to welcoming you to that as well. In today's session, this is very much a pre-event. And it gives me great pleasure and to welcome back Söder Butcher and Neela Dolez-Jalova from the core creative team to share their journey of using verbatim theatre to make work that democratises theatre to amplify voices of underserved communities and to help us think about how is it that they bring these amazing storytelling methods into our spaces and share them with us. So I am not going to speak anymore. The format of the evening will be that I will hand over to Neela who will introduce you to what the rest of the stuff is going to be about. They will do their bit for an hour and then we'll have the panel discussion in the second hour and I look forward to reconnecting with all of you then. So for now I'll hand over to Neela. Neela, welcome and thank you for joining us and welcome to all the team who are here. Thank you, Arminar. Thank you everyone for having us. We're really looking forward to this evening. Before I pass over to Söder, we don't quite know what you're seeing on your screens at home so we wanted to just see if we could get some zoom settings that might help the webinar look even better for you from wherever you're watching. If it's easy for you, if you could go into your video settings, which for most people are in there, if you see your stop video button, there's a little arrow next to the stop video button. If you click in there you can go into video settings and there's a box to hide non-video participants. So if you can tick hide non-video participants that will give you the best view of the seminar this evening because we'll have some performances by the actors that you can see on screen and it will look best. So if possible go into your video settings and hide non-video participants. Otherwise the easiest thing to do is just to make sure you're in speak of you rather than gallery view that should give you a better experience as well. Lastly, in terms of the chat box, the chat box has been disabled for now because we're going to be sharing some links with you during the seminar but it will open again for the Q&A so that's the way we can kind of start a conversation once we've gone through the main part of the seminar. I hope that's clear enough but if you can't do anything else just going to speak of you and hopefully it will be a good experience and I'll now pass over to Siddharth. Thanks. I'll unmute myself. Thank you so much, Leela. I just wanted to say a welcome from Butcher Boulevard from myself and Suman Butcher who initiated this project and relationship with SOAS. We're delighted to be here for this seminar. As Amina and Leela have said, this is going to be very much a sort of sharing, a very informal sharing of our creative practice and journey. You know we'll talk a little bit about the show that is going to be on campus and we also have some wonderful actors with us so there will be some very practical examples. We're going to be looking at headphone verbatim technique as well as how verbatim can be used as a starting point for work in the way that sometimes I make my work. So we're going to just introduce you to the actors. We have Hasina Raja, we have Anna Nugin, Rajivin Vasan and Naveed Khan. In the scene we have a taster from decolonization, not just a buzzword, Lai. And can we please invite Anna and Rajivin who will explain the technique and also share some voices from the show. So you're going to hear the voices of some students and then two voices of teaching staff. So that would be the taster. Thank you, Siddharth. So this is headphone verbatim. It's a whole process in itself. And basically it starts with sort of interviewing, there's a technique in sort of the interviewing stage as well where you're trying to extract, thinking about the kind of questions you want to ask and extracting the story from the people that you're interviewing. And then it goes through to an editing process. And again, there's a sort of a skill around editing as well to try and really hear the story that the person is saying. And then once these interviews are edited, they're sort of put together by the director to form a cohesive piece of theater, which are then played by a number of actors or just a solo actor. And then we are hearing the interviews through these headphones in our ears. And I'll just pass to Rajivin to tell you a little bit more about that. So as we put the headphones on, we hear the voices coming through. And it's our job to repeat them as authentically as we can without any kind of judgment or any kind of comment. So with that in mind, Anna, should we go for our group piece? Let me know if you're ready. Start with the group piece or puppies. Oh. Mila. These are just excerpts from Buzzwords. So start with the group piece. Okay. That'd be brilliant. Second. Anna and Rajivin are currently trying to coordinate pressing play at exactly the same time because they're obviously not in the same room. And this is the slightly tricky part of what they're about to do. So I just had trouble with my dropbox. Ready. Yeah. Three, two, one. Well, we had our culture in Africa class or first class. It's okay for you to want to know more about African culture as a white person, but to say that the reason that you're taking African culture is because you want to help the poverty in Africa. And not even be specific about what poverty you want to address. There's so many people like that in my class and I'm like, yo, like what's good, what are you doing here? It's not even that. They had this whole like monolithic idea. Africa is just a lot of us here just trying to find who we are. We're just trying to find our whole ancestry. We're trying to find how we come from, you know, what's a flag that we carry every time in our house. What does that mean? But for them, it's like, you know, let me just discover stuff. Let me just learn stuff. Mila, do you want us to go on to the next one? Yes, fantastic. So now I think Anna will share a voice, which is from one of the teaching staff at SOAS. And then after that, Rajiv and we'll share another teaching voice at SOAS. Thank you. I'm not sure about the artifacts and having to go back the apology. And I'm not sure why I'm not sure about it. So I need to think it through the question of reparation. I think it's an important one. Maybe the idea of apologizing or I don't know if you're related to apologize. I think it's more recognition of the past and that that past was one of hierarchy and domination as political power. So rather than venerate someone like Churchill portray him for what he was, he might have been a great leader with regards to the war here. But actually he's an impressive despot elsewhere and provoked great misery in India and elsewhere in the empire. Thank you, Anna. And now Rajiv and when you're ready. Sometimes there's a question about who it will be returned to. So whenever the initial the coin or for example is brought up the diamond. This is passed through so many different homes, Persia, Iran, India, different kingdoms that the idea of an original owner is very difficult to pin down. There are other cons where the artifact does have a clear provenance. It's from somewhere it means something to a particular community. Now this is an interesting case the British Museum, I think has said that by displaying these objects and artifacts in the British Museum, it has effectively opened it up to the world to come and see. I don't buy that argument because to get inside Britain is not an opportunity that's open to everyone. Thank you, Anna and Rajiv and so Anna and Rajiv and we're sharing extracts from the show that we put together last year at so as called decolonization not just a buzzword and I'm going to post the link to it in the chat now because it will be part of the festival of ideas on the 24th of October. So if you want to sign up to see the whole show and hear lots more voices from so as performed in this headphone verbatim technique that that's the place to sign up. I'm going to talk now a little bit about the history of verbatim theatre and for me verbatim theatre is can often be referred to as like a documentary form of theatre where you're using words from real life and putting them on stage. As a young child, I was probably first introduced to verbatim theatre going to the tricycle theatre which is now known as the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. The tricycle has had a long history of putting political theatre on stage, and they had the colour of justice which was about Stephen Lawrence's murder and the trial that followed. And I remember going to the tricycle theatre and seeing this put on stage and this was like court proceedings on stage. They also had a verbatim play about Guantanamo and about the prison there, which I also saw when I was quite young. And I think those two pieces of theatre really stuck with me where what you were seeing on stage you knew that these were real words that people had spoken and said in real settings had a real impact and effect on people's lives. That type of verbatim theatre is where those words have been used to write a script and the actors are then learning those lines and performing them on stage from that script. Other shows have been more recently made like London Road by Leckie Bly, which have looked at the brutal murders of the sex workers in Ipswich. So this form has a long history of being used in political theatre specifically. The form that you've just seen Anna and Rajeven do with the headphones on is called Headphone Verbatim Theatre. And I'm going to try and explain briefly kind of how that happened. It's a relatively new form. From what I've learnt about it, its origins are quite almost by accident. This form has come around. So the theatre maker Anna Dewey Smith in America was putting together a verbatim show about the Crown Heights riots in New York. And she was interviewing lots of different people about the riots, the impact on their lives, how they felt that those riots had been portrayed in the media. She's an incredible performer if you've ever had the pleasure to see her. And to learn these people's voices as closely as possible as she could after she'd interviewed them and edited these interviews, she was listening to her original interviews in her rehearsal. And in rehearsal she was listening and speaking at the same time to try and pick up all the tone, intonation, patterns of speech that these people had. And she was planning on taking the headphones out for her actual performance. So for her listening to the original material was just to get her kind of head around it and to be as accurate as possible. Another practitioner called Mark Wing Davies actually saw her rehearsing and said, you know, actually this technique of having the headphones in during performance is very interesting. And so that's how people have started to work with that technique. He's kind of worked with it himself and passed it on to others. And I would like to now pass back to Suda because Tamasha Theatre Company is one of the theatre companies who was very close in learning that technique and using it quite early on. So Suda, please take over for me. Thank you. Thank you. You know, very briefly, I mean, the other co-creative Christine London Smith, who can't be here. She and I are co-founders of Tamasha Theatre Company and we were introduced to the headphone technique through a practitioner called Louise Wallinger. And so, you know, we were very thrilled with that and we made a show called The Trouble with Asian Men. And at the time it was when Asian men were in the news for, you know, ostensibly being seen as trouble, you know, something that has carried on the trope of the Asian men. So we actually wanted to look at what was troubling Asian men. So we did about 100 hours of interviews with people, you know, the kind of stereotypes are their mummies, boys, metrosexual men, looking at their masculinity, their relationships with Asian women, their mothers. And so we went right to the apron strings. And actually that show was very much, you know, there to sort of overturn the trope of Asian men being trouble. And so after that, I mean, you know, that was a Tamasha Theatre Company. But then Christine and Neela have teamed up quite a lot in recent years, and they've done a lot of shows for, you know, headphone verbatim. So Neela will now take you on the journey of their work and her practice. Thank you, Suda. So a little bit of history of how I've ended up working quite a bit with headphone verbatim as a form and why I enjoy working with it. Five years ago, I was a math teacher in London. And in my math teaching, I had also had some responsibilities in PSHG education, so personal social and health education, including in sex education. And found that this topic was one of the most complex topics in schools in terms of how sex education and sex and relationship education was seen was taught was talked about. And I'd always also had some kind of love and work in theatre outside of my teaching. And when I left teaching, the first thing I wanted to do was to make a play about sex and relationship education. And I wanted to make a play for adults, not for young people, because in my opinion, it was the adults who were struggling to have conversations about sex and relationship education. And it was their inability to talk, which was kind of hindering young people's learning and their ability to get the education that they needed. I decided to make this play a verbatim play and I wanted to go and collect interviews to try and work out what was stopping adults talking openly and having conversations about these topics. I saw that Tamasha were running a workshop on verbatim theatre, but something called headphone verbatim run by Christine Landon Smith. And I it was for actors, it was actor training, and they were going to learn the whole technique of how to interview how to edit and then had to have the headphones on and perform. And I wrote in I said, Oh, I'm not an actor, but I would love to come and observe the workshop process. So learn more from my own practice. And in doing so, and in being part of that workshop and watching Christine teach, I fell in love with the idea of actually using headphones for my own project. I found it particularly interesting to see actors have to deeply listen to the words that they were hearing and what impact that had on performance. To me, it's the fact that deep listening is at the heart of every step of making headphone verbatim theatre that makes it particularly useful for a topic that might be complex or socially contentious. As an interviewer, so for me going out and gathering interviews from my play, you have to deeply listen to people from a range of different opinions and it's their voice which is central in that interview. It's not necessarily about my opinions, although you could argue that it's impossible to remove your own opinion from an interview process. But you as an interviewer your role is to deeply listen to that person and allow them to tell the story that they want to tell. Then when you go on to the editing side of that, you obviously have taken your interview, you've got written consent and legal consent from them. They've signed a form to say that you can use that material, otherwise that breaks a whole load of rules and laws. So once you've got your consensual piece of recording and you go into the edit phase, I learned to edit in that workshop with Christine and it was much easier than I thought and I was very pleased that I'd learn a new skill. So in the edit you also have to deeply listen because you're trying to find out what's the heart of this story, what's the heart of what this person is trying to say, and there are a few rules that you follow when you're editing for headphone verbatim. Well I personally keep it chronological so I don't take minute seven and put it before minute three. I try to ensure, well I make sure, hopefully I do, I don't always get it right, that you stay true to what that person is saying and you try not to change anything that would change the context of what they were saying. You know that that person you've interviewed could be sitting in the audience when your play is on and you want to make sure that they feel accurately represented on stage. So you have to chronologically edit those pieces and to do so you have to deeply listen to work out what is it that person wants to say on stage. Then in the rehearsal process, the actor's job is to deeply listen. I know that Anna and Rajivin will be happy to talk about this in the Q&A, but it's a very strange feeling I think as an actor to put on headphones and you just have to channel the voice that you're hearing. You can even hear yourself on what you're saying. It's not about you adding any layers on of your own emotions, how you think that person is feeling, how you feel about what they're saying. You are just trying to capture their voice and every breath and change of how they speak and in doing so hopefully you are sharing that person as honestly as possible and honouring their voice and their story. The most important part of headphone for me is then the impact that it could have on the audience. Now how it looks on Zoom is probably very different and I think during COVID we're all learning and working out how these things land. But in a physical space with each other, the actor's role would be to ensure that they maintain eye contact with the audience as much as possible during their performance. So whenever they're delivering, they're delivering two individuals in the room. They might look at different people throughout or they might just pick one person and share it with them. So for the audience's experience, it's almost as if they are in conversation themselves with the original person who was being interviewed and you are just there to deeply listen to that person. You do not have an ability to kind of reply to them or start a debate if you disagree with what they're saying. So you do just deeply listen. My reason for the kind of thinking that deep listening is so important is for me theatre is political and should be political and it should be used to talk about topics that aren't often talked about or that need to be talked about. And at the moment the thing that I care about the most is that empathy is something that the world at the moment needs far more of. And I've always thought that this practice of deep listening for me as a practitioner for the actors for the audience is something that builds empathy between people. A few weeks ago I listened to a hidden brain podcast, which threw me a bit because they had some research papers that said that empathy. If people are very score very highly on empathy, which we often assume to be a brilliant thing. What we often forget is that actually that empathy only applies to the people that they perceive as being in their group. So even if you score incredibly highly on an empathy test as someone who's very empathic, this doesn't necessarily mean that you will treat everybody that way. And that's something I'm sure we all know is a problem. And the thing that made me kind of feel a bit more hopeful at the end of that podcast is how they talked about the fact that that idea of your group is something that people can expand. How people define their group is actually something that you can change over time. And so I'm beginning to think and enjoy thinking about in headphone verbatim how can this form be used to make people actually expand who they perceive to be their own group. And if you're building empathy at the same time that to me feels like a good and exciting thing to be doing with with theatre. So I'm, yeah, whether you argue headphone verbatim can build empathy, I believe it can if it's done in the right ways. And that's what makes me really interested to keep working in it. Having said that there are a lot of risks with this form of theatre. Lots of ethics to consider. So in the interview process itself, obviously, you need to have consent from the person that you are recording the interview with because you need an audio recording. If you're dealing with sensitive topics, you have to make sure that you understand the impact that you have as an interviewer on someone you're talking to what your positionality is as an interviewer how that impacts their ability to speak. There's a whole for me a question of how extractive is this model as a piece of theatre. Are you taking people's stories putting them on stage. Is that an extraction model. How can you work with the people that you're interviewing to include them in the in the whole process so it becomes potentially a piece of community theatre, rather than just a, a theater practitioner going into a community, taking stories and putting them on stage which is a potentially incredibly trivial. The risks in the edit are that you manipulate your edits so much to the degree that you are no longer being honest about what the person's original words were, or that you use an edit for a particular purpose I don't think I've always got my edits right and you can sense that as a practitioner when you know someone sitting in the audience watching themselves on stage. If you've got the edit slightly wrong you can really feel that and I've definitely learned from that process. I'm just trying to think what other main risks are. The main risk is in performance itself. I think that for actors this there's a very fine line here between performing with empathy and the performance tipping into ridicule. As soon as an actor stops the deep listening process and starts acting I feel the technique can very quickly turn into one that is about mimicry and ridicule. And the way that lands on stage can be really horrific. So as long as you have a director in the room that really understands the technique and the actors are encouraged to be themselves on stage literally just sharing a voice I think you minimize the risks of it feeling like ridicule but that risk is there. So the kind of projects that I think this works for and that I'd like to work on more in the future are ones where there is a tension and where there are conversations that aren't happening that need to happen. And you can physically then stage those conversations and put people in a room to talk to each other on stage even if they aren't speaking to each other in real life. I also think there's an exciting future in multilingual headphone verbatim theatre. I worked in a primary school last year to create a piece for the school that celebrated the multilingualism of their students. And for this we had to then have a multilingual cast who could perform in the languages of the children and for the children to see their languages played back to the rest of the school on stage built so much confidence in their own language use and their own multilingualism and really helped them celebrate it and actually the impact on the school and those kids academically because they had far more confidence in talk across all the languages that they used was really interesting. I would really like to share some other demonstrations with Anna and Rajiv and now if that's okay can welcome them back. These clips are from the play that I ended up making about sex and relationship education called the talk. And this has gone mainly to be shared at universities and to be watched by trainee teachers. So just try and encourage more trainee teachers to discuss their own feelings around delivering sex and relationship education and why it can be such a taboo and awkward topic for teachers. There are three clips we're going to share with you and we're also demonstrating here how in headphone you can cross cast across age across gender. So you'll see here that you know Anna's playing a much older woman in one piece which evens playing a woman in another piece and you'll see that it's just about how well the actors can connect to that voice and share it with you. So the pieces because of the nature of this play being about people's experiences of sex and relationship education, what they wish they'd learnt, why they wish they'd learnt it. I do want to give a warning to anyone that these clips do contain some stories around abuse. There's also mention of suicide. So if for anyone doesn't feel comfortable watching, please just take that warning. But I do hope that you'll see the power of hearing people's stories who may not have wanted may not have shared them before on these topics. So if I pass over to you. Thank you. Well I'm a great grandmother as well as a grandmother. I'm 92. I went to the primary school which was in New Elton where I lived and there were two boys. They frightened the life out of me because they kept poking me and they said we're going to get you down the alley and we're going to take your knickers down. I mean we're fine for heaven's sake. Funny isn't it? Sex education absolutely nil and we had biology and oh I must tell you too. We were into dogs my family and we had a dog called Nelly and I remember standing there with my father and watching her have her puppies which I thought was wonderful to see all these little puppies pop out. It was a very vivid picture in my mind. The first recollection I have of ever talking about sex is that I had this special friend. We both had dogs and every Saturday morning we would walk from New Elton to Tisselhurst and I remember distinctively that Joyce telling me about sex. I stopped dead in the middle of my tracks and I said don't be stupid. My mother and father would have never done that. It's dirty. Thank you Anna. That piece Puppies opens the show The Talk. I'm now going to pass on to Rajeevan to share a piece. This person I interviewed didn't actually want to remain anonymous so the first piece that Rajeevan is going to share with you is by a poet called Simon Maddrell and it was important to him that he wasn't anonymous in the sharing of his words and the second piece that Rajeevan will share with you is from someone who wanted to remain anonymous. So Rajeevan will share two pieces with you. Thank you Rajeevan. No one really talks about HIV. He just caught AIDS which was a remarkably interesting concept. Of course originally it was called the Gay Cancer and to a large degree it was used as a weapon by the homophobes to justify God's punishment. I actually saw something the other day that said actually 30% of people still think that you can catch HIV through kissing. The ignorance is rife. I mean for certain everyone should know about pet, post-exposure, prophylaxis. I probably wouldn't have HIV if I'd been properly educated about pet because I had an exposure with someone that then four or five hours later told me that they'd been diagnosed to do before my brain was in a scramble mess. You know if you know what the morning after pills you should know what fucking pet is for God's sake. It was an all-girls school which was a bit of an experience to say the least. You had to have navy blue knickers. They were school regulation knickers and every now and then they double check that that was what you were wearing. And you weren't allowed to have paint and leather shoes because this was associated with the navy knickers, believe it or not, because boys might be able to look in your shoes and see your pants. There was one class workshopping on periods sponsored by Orways and the other session was a bit more like proper sex ed. It was just about periods. It was about sex and relationships, I think, and parents got letters home to say whether they gave permission to their daughters to go to him. And I think my parents were fine with the periods one and not so fine with whatever the second one was. I never really knew whether it would have been useful at all but I guess I assumed it would. I had some fears about sex because they didn't know what entailed. And the first relationship I was ever in, I didn't really know how to say no even though it did feel quite ready. I thought maybe everyone doesn't really like sex and it's a painful thing. I thought maybe it's one of those things that's enjoyable for men and not enjoyable for women. I mean, it's difficult, isn't it? There's all sorts of reasons why my parents would have been uncomfortable with, you know, having someone come in and speak to me about sex at school. They would have never had sex with anyone else. My mum was engaged when she was still a child and my parents are both very committed Christians and so they don't believe in sex outside marriage. But I guess from their perspective, what on earth would be the point? So yeah, I don't know if anyone would have been able to persuade my parents it's okay. I think the school publishing has sent a letter home saying it's up, turn on up to out. Probably shouldn't have never been asked. They must know that I've had sex now but it's still not something they'd confront. If I go home with actually this is an interesting one. If I take a boyfriend home and make up my brother's bed for him to sleep in. If I take this girlfriend home, she stays in brother's bed with him because boys will be boys, right? And they know that I don't go to church and they know that I don't believe we've had that conversation. And it's a shame actually because there's things I've wanted to talk to my parents about since that I haven't been able to as a result of the fact that we don't acknowledge that I might have sex. I was as date raped at uni. And obviously the thing that you want when something like that happens is the next day when you're pretty distraught to speak to your mum. When a very good friend was raped and went through a court case that I was a witness for. I spoke to my mum about that. I spoke to my mum about my friend's rate but wasn't able to talk about my own. I mean that's not really in my mind. That's not really sex. It's an act of violence. But it still falls into a bucket of things me and mum don't talk about. Which I think is a shame because you just kind of just want to hug from your mum when something like that happens. Thank you so much Rajivan and Anna for sharing those and I'm sure we can talk more about headphone verbatim in the Q&A. But now I think I'm going to pass over to Suda to talk about verbatim in her practice. Thank you very much Nina. Yeah so I mean for me you know as a writer I'm not one of these people who sort of sits in a room on my own and creates great works of fiction for my imagination. I've always I've often been described as a magpie you know the bird who will go and collect things that shine and out of these unusual and things that seem so disconnected you know make something out of that. I've always found people in their own words really really powerful the poetry of the everyday. So when I've had children for instance you know I literally find the way they speak you just as a writer I couldn't make it up so I started to use you know what my kids have said so I wrote a play called child of the divide where the words of my sons would suddenly be put into the mouths of other characters. So child of the divide is actually it's about a lost boy during the time of partition. And you know my young son when he was going to primary school, he found it quite hard to settle so we had this game where I would just say to him, you cry let the ocean out. And then the ocean, you know, as he got settled it was like no mom today it's a lake. And then the lake became a puddle. But those kind of words that he spoke, when I put them into the mouths of a boy who had lost his family during the partition, they took on sort of even more power. And so I started to feel as though, you know, these, this is the gems that you make work from. So, you know, Alan Bennett, you know he talks a lot about the writers suitcase and how he's when he's trying to go through the airport and he says he has nothing to declare. But the customs officers will open his suitcase and you know out comes the skeleton out comes the photographs always, you know, sort of dirty linen, and, and that is full of you know reminiscence characters from his past. So he, you know people have this storehouse of memories that they use as writers. And verbatim is sort of making that more explicit is making that relationship more, you know, what we say to the people that you will interview is that you know you are making you're not just going to quietly listen and then they'll be really surprised because you've stolen their words, you're actually making that, that sort of relationship with them. So another writer that I'm, I, you know, when I started using verbatim is a writer called Robin Sones. You know he wrote things like the Arab Israeli cookbook where he went to, you know, this he went to Israel and Palestine and tried to look at that through talking to people about their recipes and what they eat. And so there was just a, you know, he talks about the, the indispensable rules of verbatim. So the first is don't try to write a political play. If you do it'll end up as a prop worthy one dimensional and boring. If on the other hand you write a humanitarian play. It's got every chance of being funny, moving and political. Secondly, look for the detail and the minutiae in people's lives. Thirdly, never forget that it is someone's life. If people are letting you into their lives, you have to treat them with the respect that they deserve. And fourthly, never prejudge. So the less prejudiced you are when you arrive, the more likely that you're going to write a faithful account. So for me, you know, my journey into verbatim, you know, I'm actually petrified of head for verbatim. So that might be one reason. But I've often used sort of research and interviewing as like the impetus for my fictional work. So I just wanted to share with you two pieces that I've made, and also with examples from the actors. One of them was a true story that made the headlines in 2006. And it was the story of a young girl called Molly Campbell. It appeared in the Saturday Guardian. Well initially they were on the news. She had run away from home and she was a half Scottish and half Pakistani girl, you know Pakistani heritage but her father was still Scottish. And she had been, she had run away from her home in Stornoway, and literally Interpol got involved because pretty soon that became a sort of Islam versus the West, because her Pakistani father bearded wearing the Shirakamese was accused of kidnapping her. And then a few days later she appeared in the hall and, you know, did a news conference and said, you know, I went with my loving father of my own accord, and my name is not Molly. My name is Misbah. And at the time I sort of ignored the story because it was literally playing into agendas that were bigger than the personal family tug of love story but two years later an interview appeared in the Guardian. And I'm sure Nina will share the link in a minute but this is what got me sort of interested in this because behind those headlines was a deeply personal story of love and how that went wrong. She was a teenager of 16 who was Molly's mother, and she fell in love with the father, he used to run the markets, he was 20. And, you know, he would say that, you know, she was a wee girl sort of tagging along and they got friends, you know, made friends, and one leap here, you know, which was when she was 16 she asked him to marry her. And I'm really interested in how this love story. And also, you know, when they got married, she had to convert to Islam, how actually she took on the religion with the sort of full sort of immersing herself in it wanting to belong. They had four children. And how that story became a kind of, how did it become this sort of political story that made the headlines. And I was lucky enough that I actually went to Pakistan. I interviewed the father and the daughter in Pakistan, and then I interviewed the mother in Stornoway. And by then two years have passed since the headlines. The mother had given up her right. She had, you know, lost her children that she, she put it. And after those interviews, I transcribed them, there was over 100 pages of transcripts, and I agonized over writing a fictional piece, but I could never ever get away from their voices. And actually in the end, my dramaturge Lynn Copeland, she encouraged me to actually look at their voices. And I ended up crafting the piece from the verbatim material, and from the newspaper headlines. I want to share with you now with Hasina Naveed and Nila, the beginning of the play. So the conceit of the play is that the three of them are talking to me. So Sudha, me, is the audience. And this is how it began. It's like when you sit on a beach on a sunny day and and having a picnic. How wicked is it? Like a million times more better. That's how heaven is. That's how John of this, like, John of this, John of heaven is heaven. When we say one Subhanallah, you know, when we say one Subhanallah, everyone, every Muslim, who's even said La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasoolallah. Even my little sis Sana, she's half my sis. She just thinks it's like twinkle, twinkle, little stuff, but La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasoolallah. But even when she said that, Allah ta'ala ne uskelye, even for little Sana, how big is my heaven? It's like our own Jannat is up to how much zikr we do and how much we obey Allah ta'ala. When we say one Subhanallah, it's near like one Iq, the Rakt, the Qutqah. One tree comes out and it's so big that if you get the fastest horse on earth and if you get him to run under the shadow of the tree, you will run 500 miles and he still wouldn't get to the other end of the shadow. That's how big the tree will come by just saying one Subhanallah. And it's a hogege, let's be, there will be a river and it can be of any of your flavour. Like if you want it to be of chocolate. Like this is what Baba told us, like if I was, you'll get a chocolate. It's true. You can get anything you want. It's like a river. You can even get a chocolate milkshake river. And if you go inside, then there'll be another world. My new little girl, she's pretending to be shy. Got my kitty last week. Come here, give me cuddles. Still have to give the tow rager name. I was desperate to have something, someone, some little heartbeat to come home to. Make me smile because I don't have my children. Two years. Gabby's door is still shut. My kitty comes and lies beside me at night. I'm lost. Only a mother in my situation can hear my screams which are inside. The other day in Glasgow, I saw a white woman in a shallower commies and I wanted to go up to her and scream, your family are not safe. And I had to stop myself. Nadeem, son, heat this cup before drinking. I hate cold tea. Son, sit down. Well, Sunda has come all the way from London to talk to us. I have to cut down on sugar. The doctor said, lose the weight, blood pressure, sugar. You can pay attention to yourself in Pakistan. You have the time. Well, at the time, we spoke to so much media. What is left to say after two years? Look, in Islam, it's Babandi. Not Zabudasthi. Suzy did a good job. I'll give her that. She had Zazba. I had to try hard because she's a Ghori. We're Muslims. We have Kalma, Allah and our Kitab, Holy Book. Suzy's culture is when you're 16, get out. I am easy to find. With the media, every taxi in Stonaway knows me. Suzy Imri, local celebrity. I was made out to be absolute trash. The media slashed me to pieces. When it first happened, they descended on me from everywhere. It was a case of I was mental. Mentally deranged, alcoholic, drug taker, and my partner all tattooed. We were just scum. And Lenny is the most polite gentleman you have ever come across. He's never hit anyone in his life. He doesn't have a tattoo. He's got scars where he let his dog chew into his arm. The dog was dying because he fell out of a window. Mama, in a way, she somehow got that figure in her head that Baba did really bad with her. Like, Baba turned her into a Muslim. So what happened? Mama, because she knew Baba loved me, he would do anything for me here, no? Because I was the youngest. I was like, when's Baba coming? I'd tell my granny. Dadi Papa, Papa Kobalano, Danali. So Mama knew, if I'll get Ghazala, then she'll get back at Papa. You get it? All the newspapers, they got it. They all take sides. It was not me who kidnapped my daughter. It was Suzy who kidnapped Ghazala from me. I was still Farhan from Glasgow. Yet suddenly, I was this bearded Muslim jahadi fundamentalist. You tell me, why didn't she fight for custody of the older kids? She knows she has lost them. So the media, and I couldn't respond. What's been said in the papers, it's way too sore. And just shows a tiny, tiny part, like an absolute fraction of what we all went through. What the children went through. Abducted. Gabi or Ghazala. Tug of love school girl. Mother of all battles. Fundamental clash of two cultures. If it was a movie, it would be a blockbuster. Girl snatched from school gates and taken to Pakistan for forced marriage. Barbaric practice amongst third world immigrants. Fears grow for a kidnapped bride. Mentally unstable mum left devastated. Gabi or Ghazala. Life with mum was a living hell. I am not a runaway. Love affair that became a war. And the children who became its weapons. British media reporting akin to psychological side of the so called war on terror. I love Scotland, but I love Islam more. Thank you very much. So that was the beginning of the play. When it was performed, it was obviously, you had to imagine the voices being Scottish accents. But what was wonderful about the, in a way, their voices captured in their own words, gave that play its kind of nuance and complexity. The story that had been reduced into an Islam versus the West was sort of unpacked through their own words. And actually, as the play went on, the media headlines that they respond to are there in the backdrop, and we sort of uncover, and you very much get the feeling of them sort of looking back two years ago. So that sort of gave it its conversation across continents, as one of the reviewers called it. But the three of them were on stage and they would invade each other's stories, borrow each other's words. And verbatim was used in a sort of more, there was an imaginative leap from the real people. I had changed the names. And this is one of the things like when Nina was talking about in the headphone verbatim, you are as a writer or as a creator of this work, you are juggling, you know, these are real people, you know, who will come to see the show. And indeed, that is something that you've always got that, you know, that's your emotional labor. And I was there to make sure that you don't do what the media had already done to them. You know, it took me six years to sort of navigate that to keep in touch with the family. And I was delighted when actually the mother and the daughter came to see this show. The father was in Pakistan. And one of the things that really struck me was Molly, who by the time she saw the show, she was actually 19. And I had interviewed her when she was 14. And what she said afterwards was watching the show, you know, it was my words but not spoken by me. She said I saw myself as a, as a 10, 11 year old. And actually what I realized was that I was innocent. And so I felt that that was something if I had helped her, you know, that was one moment that struck with me that actually watching your story back that it can be something that's cathartic but it is it's a fine balance. Definitely. The example I'd like to share with you is a project that I'm working on at the moment. It's called touchstone tales, and it's a commission by Revoluten Arts in Luton and welcome collection. And this is an example of where art and science, you know, can work together, because the radio for and welcome collection they commissioned the world's largest study on on the sense of touch. The touch test and indeed this week on radio for there are programs which are revealing the results of that study. So 40,000 people have taken part in that study. And the kind of things they're looking at is, you know, what is the role of touch in terms of well being, what does touch mean in your life. The concept of touch hunger, you know, actually hunger, you know, a sort of longing for touch which is not there, which is made, you know, ever more sort of poignant during this time of COVID. It's a specific study, and at the same time, welcome and Revoluten commissioned an artist response. So I have been resident in Luton, although, you know, I was physically going there and doing a lot of engagement work but also now it's a lot of it's online. And indeed the canvas of the absence of touch has become the sort of frame around this work. And so what I've been doing is looking at this looking at the touch test and through workshops through creative encounters have been interviewing people about their lives through the theme of touch. And I've written a series of monologues and a do a log. And we also had, it was Ramadan during lockdown this year. So we invited the people in Luton to submit how they, how they actually did Ramadan when they could not be a sort of convivial and very much communal event became, you know, people were in their own homes. Indeed, Hasina Raja contributed to that film. She's a Lutonian. So there was a, you know, there's a crowdsourced film and this body of work that I have written alongside logs and a lot of other sort of sharings. So I'd like to share with you two excerpts from monologues. And the first one, before we sort of hear the excerpt, the piece is called the Ninja Sister. And it came about from me interviewing a girl called Hasina Ramal, who is the founder of the Pink Diamond Martial Arts Club. And so she, you know, she's an expert in sort of martial arts, mixed martial arts, Thai boxing. And she got, she came to that through being bullied in school. And she now runs this female only club. And it is, you know, there are a lot of very many sort of Muslim participants, but also, you know, people from other faiths, female only, they come there and they spar and they learn martial arts, they gain confidence. They touch, they spar. It's very much a contact sport. Now they're doing on Zoom. So I've done workshops with them, interviews with them. And from that verbatim, which I took as a starting point. I wrote this short story, a short monologue called The Ninja Sister, which combines verbatim and fiction. So Hasina, please, if you could share the excerpts now. The cool clique at school. They were all hijabis, Newtonian sisters. It's in our DNA. The older ones set the trend with all the colors and patterns that betrayed their personalities, contour makeup and smoky eyeliner to set off the look. Some of the girls like me were more sober with our choices. We got checks, but obviously there's a boundary created. And the brothers know not to cross it unless they, the girls want them to, and they're going to put a ring on it. Even the non-Muslim men see hijab as a stop sign, like do not approach, look, but do not touch, inviting the idea of consent. I was good with that. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love my purported bits. But in the end, it wasn't her that helped me dig deeper. That came much later. I'm 19 and stood alone outside Pandora's in town centre, checking out all the latest gems, listening to Adele's hometown glory and my headphones. That was a bad idea. The headphones, not Adele. My bracelet's already quite full, marking the years and touchstone moments. Zimbabwe Mufasa Sunset, just because I love the Lion King. The Roots and Tree Charm from the fam for my 16th, Rainbow and Rose for my A-Levels, and Zara got me the friends of the family you choose, Dangle Charm when we left school. On our last day, she came in to give me a squeeze, but then knew to back off. I felt bad as she was moving to Birmingham for good, but I'm only huggable at home. I had my eye on the copper and silver, spread your wings and fly angel in the window. I just helped deliver my first baby, not mine. I've always wanted to be a midwife, and now it was coming true. Maybe go down the baby at home. I love seeing new mums bond with their babies, touching skin to skin. That's when I saw them coming. Three of them with their football hoodies, boots and wide white boy swagger. They surrounded me. One of them tried to unzip my coat. So you got an instant name then. It was afternoon, so the centre was quiet. Plus, they were subtle. No one noticed that I was frozen to the spot. Like I had been at the hospital, when a porter was helping me move a patient who just had a C-section, he was going behind me. There was plenty of space, but he still brushed his arms across my back resting for too long on my waist. Man, why? Was that necessary? But I just, I just kind of took it. Like today, it had just taken me by surprise. Then, Alhamdulillah, out of nowhere, she was there, floating in full niqab, gloves and everything. They were like, what's your instant name then? Ninja? Her voice like projected through the net on her mouth and just cut through. Get lost, you losers. What do you think you're doing? It speaks. They started making ninja sounds and laughing. Yeah? Like what are you going to do? One of them put his hands on her wrist. She just calmly picked it up and pushed him away with such force. He went flying and they just backed away. Totally shocked and ran. Show confidence, sister. No one. Like no one has the right to touch you without your permission. The C-word confidence. Like, where was I supposed to find that? I didn't end up buying that charm because my wings had been clipped before I'd learned to fly. You can't let them get away with this or they'll do it again. She marched me to security and made me find a report. I told her I thought the hijab was supposed to send a message against unwanted attention. But she was like, covering up is not for sending messages to others or hiding a bad here day. It's for you to feel special as a woman and be closer to your creator. I've never thought of it like that before. Self-defence, you can learn. Thank you very much, Hasina. So, I mean, what was great about that process was, you know, there was a sort of layers of it from me interviewing Hasina Rahman to doing a workshop with other participants from the club, to them sending material for the Ramadan film. And each step of the way, like when I wrote a blog, you know, I sort of shared it with them. When I wrote this monologue, I shared it with them. So, at the end of it, you know, they actually felt like they could see themselves in the story. So even though it was no one person, they felt that they had been listened to and that it was their collective story. So that's what, you know, I try to navigate. It's a delicate thing. It doesn't always work, but that's what I'm doing. I'd like to share a second extract. Now, this piece is called The Eid Hug, and I interviewed a man who was sort of probably in his early 50s, you know, British Pakistani, and what really struck me, again, you know, like in the in the headphone verbatim, I interviewed him, recorded it. And it's when I listen back and deeply listen and actually transcribe, I find that transcribing is laborious, but that's in another part of the listening. And through that for me, the story that struck me, his story, was how he craved for his father's hug. So he said how, you know, his father just seemed to exist on the Eid, because that's the only time they got the hugs. But how that relationship, he sort of, he's very sort of gentle with his father, because he realizes that it's also, he's a product of his time. And now as a father himself, he is much more tactile and available for his children. So Naveed actually, for this time, you know, sometimes we share, so I actually asked Naveed if he wanted to hear the real person, and he actually did. But the job in this case, when I've been, you know, when I've been sort of freer with the material is not for the actor to emulate but to bring something of themselves, they're not trying to be the person that they're hearing, they're being a fictional character that they bring their own essence to. So here is Naveed with an extract of the Eid hug. I used to think, does dad only exist on Eid day? The rest of the time, even though he was visible to us, we were invisible to him. But on Eid day, he stand up, his arms outstretched, oh, me lo, me lo, me lo, and scoop you up into a hug so pure. It spoke more than he ever said in words. If you hadn't washed up, for example, hadn't dressed or hadn't prayed, you're not supposed to receive that hug because you're not a complete person yet. With my head on his chest, I long to say, we've been here for the last seven, eight months as well, dad. It was his upbringing, or he wasn't articulate enough to think, well, hang on, I love my son to bits. Let's put my arm around him and say, how's your day been put there? You're supposed to know the love and affection was there because parents said they'll die for you. Everything they're doing is for you. Dad was a taxi driver. Mum sewed skirts and blouses and the house. Close, she never wore herself. Given their circumstances, they lost themselves in the circumstances. I'm the eldest of 10. My elder among the sisters looked after younger siblings and as us brothers got married, sister-in-law did the same. You didn't crave the touch you didn't know. I remember mum used to hold my smallest finger at night when I'm lying down and rub that finger all the time talking about the thieves who would come if I didn't go to sleep. In the story of the thieves, they go to steal something or their noses get stuck, noses get cut or something and they, well, we always said, tell us that story again. Like thieves, we wanted to steal more time with her. She was my rock and now I'm hers. I think I got to know back in the village in Kashmir. Dad had sent her back with my brother and I and a sister who had just been born. Now, for 11 years, he came to visit us only about twice. Now, bless them. My dad's parents embraced her wholeheartedly, but it's always others to be honest with you, the community. Whenever there was a conflict, she would get, she's outsider, non-Muslim, blah, blah, that kind of thing, indirectly. Then I heard it directly from my favourite uncle. My first memory of a hug is from him when he lifted me up in the village and made me feel secure. We've not seen eye to eye since he dropped the bombshell. Our mum was Sikh before she met dad. I started liking someone in sixth form college. Same faith, same caste, everything. Father found out, not having it over my dead body. Objection was perception of other people. Now, he married out of the family, don't question him, but his kids were promised within the clan. Now, I came to a stage, if he's in a front room, I'll go in the back room. If he's in the back, I'll go in the front. If he's downstairs, I'll go upstairs. If he's upstairs, I'll go downstairs. Avoidance from both of us because I was questioning him. She's same faith, same bloody brotherly, same ticking boxes. What's the problem? His answer was to marry me to my cousin and for her two brothers to marry my two sisters. A triple deal, a range of one of dad's handshakes. All three marriages now failed. It's like East is East, but better. This is a live issue, same twist in the story as well. Dad was married already. Mum was wife number two. She didn't know. Show me a household in Luton who doesn't have issues of relationships, divorce. We call our WhatsApp group the Royal Family. The best, including the broken marriages. Now, just brothers and sisters. Yeah, no room for extras and grandkids. We're close knit. We're bedding each other out. And just like the Queen, Mum's accepted our new loves. Now, sisters, they suffered in silence the first time round, but now their husbands, they mind the kids while they go for their chill-outs with their friends once a week. I approached my eldest daughter when I was asked for her hand by a cousin for her son. At least have a conversation, yeah? It's your decision. Dad, I will not be going back home to marry Ayadee. He's not Ayadee. Lou and boy, yeah? Works at the airport. He likes cooking. Dad, we need to widen the gene pool. Can't argue with that. As a bottom line, as a father, I'll never raise that again. Thank you very much, Naveed. So, Nile, if you would kindly share, there is a second installment of stories in this Touchstone Tales. So if any of you are interested, there is an online event next Thursday, the 15th, and you can sign up for that. And all the Radio 4 programs are available to listen again as well to find out more about the Touch test. So I think that's sort of pretty much the journey of how we've been using verbatim, a sort of a whistle-stop tour through. I think if we could invite Dr. Armina Yakin to come back, and this is the time for you to ask questions and for people to open up the chat as well. We're all here. Please put your videos back on. Thank you very much, Siddharth and Nila and Naveed, Hussina, Anna and Rajeevan for such a wonderful and exciting treat that you've held in store for us. I didn't quite know that we were going to be sort of creatively led in so many ways. So it's a real, I think, exciting journey. It's been a very exciting journey to listen to the personal narratives as well as the techniques and the methodology and the examples. So a fascinating journey. Thank you for sharing it with us. And I'm also delighted to welcome Suman from the creative team, Suman Butcher, who wasn't with us at the start. And I would like to invite Suman to say a few words. But before I do ask the audience that we would be very interested in getting your questions. You can use the chat box to post your questions that is now open or as has been indicated in the side panel, you can raise your hand. Our wonderful administrator Sunil Pan is sort of invisibly in the background making all of this work brilliantly. So thank you to Sunil for that. And if you can put your question in the chat box, then I will invite you to come forward and ask your question as well in person on screen. If you don't want to ask it in person, just put that in the chat box and we'll just read it out loud. And yeah, so I hope that you all have some stuff that you might wish to ask the team about. Suman, you've been instrumental to all of this. And I think it would be really interesting to hear your perspective on all of what has been talked about this evening with regards to the Batem and also from your lens, what's your involvement and how do you kind of make the... I mean, I've had the pleasure and the honour to get to speak to Suman and Nila over the time of this development of the Decolonizing project that you did at SOAS, but I think the audience would love to hear more about your sort of inspiration and your journey within the project as well. Thank you very much, Amina. Well, it is fascinating, it's lovely to see all the work here. In short, my own background is actually in documentary king and I was thinking when Suda and Nila were discussing about how you listen deeply and transcribe, that is something that I've spent a lot of time doing, but in the kind of television documentaries that tell stories about the Asian community in Britain and the same sort of rules in that you don't really want to be distressed about the person that you are talking about. You tell their story, but you have to cut and edit and so on and there are different rules. We may not follow the chronology rule in the same way as we follow it for headphone item that Nila was mentioning, but we do follow a rule that the story, how we've come into this technique, the main thing is that, you know, I've been coming just to hear the events and so on and I got to Dr. Edward Simpson who was the head of the SOA South Asia Institute about how it would be great to see if we can do some more theatre work with the university. You're breaking up quite a lot, haven't you? Okay, well, I'll try and be brief basically. Just to say that, I mean, everything has happened serendipitously in a way. I used to come to SOA to listen to the talks. I was interested in the university about trying to do some theatre work and it grew organically out there. This was a topic very much being discussed at the university, not only SOA, but also other universities. And again, this rule, we decided that we should have a conversation within one university as a microcosm of trying to look at the subject of decolonisation within the curriculum and see if speaking in one space tells us a human story that is wider than that. Were you able to hear all this? Was that okay? Okay, I give up. Most of it, yes, I think so. Yeah, that's fine. I'll come back to you again. Yeah, yeah. All right, great. There are some questions. There are some questions popping up in the chat box. So I can, if, and I'm going to try and get, pronounce the names as best I can. So apologies if I get this pronunciation wrong. Shatharupa Mishra, would you like to come forward with your question, please? Can you unmute? Yeah, go ahead, Shatharupa. You're on. But you need to unmute your, your sound. Maybe we should just ask the question. Super. So Shatharupa's question is, please tell me a little bit about how verbatim theatre functions in speaking for others discourse. Shall we take a few, a few more, and then perhaps you could respond to them as, you know, to the panel altogether or perhaps. Yes. Why don't you just read out a few. So, are you there? Okay. Yeah. Would you like to put your question across? And you. Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah. So my question is for Sudha ma'am. Is there a player concept that talks about Indian colonial experience and also could you shed some light on what languages are a part of the verbatim theatre that you practice? Like I could hear some Hindi. So could you shed light on that? On what languages do you use? Thank you. You want me to answer now? Would you like to? Yes. I mean, I don't, you know, in terms of a play about the colonial experience, you know, if you know of any one particular play, you know, I can imagine, you know, this technique would be very good for something like that. But for me, like I'm always interested in how, you know, there isn't one colonial, colonial experience if you like, you know, I'm always interested in the ordinary people and what they go through. So when, when we're talking about Brexit or we're talking about the partition of India, you know, if you go and talk to the people on whose lives are being brought up and that's when you get a sort of textured piece, I feel. And in terms of the languages, I mean, I do use, yeah, even as Nina said, you know, it can, if you're recording people in how they speak, so there's a sort of multilingual, you know, where even in the play, my name is, you know, when I recorded the young girl and she was going in and out would do, and she had a Scottish accent. I think that's what adds to, you know, making that piece very nuanced. So, yes. I mean, I can speak Punjabi and Hindi, you know, conversationally. So I always include them if people use them when they're being interviewed. Great. I wondered if, would any of the actors who were using languages, did they want to add anything to that? Navid, Hasina? Didn't have anything to add. It normally helps. It just helps with the character, the character, ready? So as soon as there's a splatter of a different language, I, it's great for me because it's, it takes the character to a different place. It helps building the character basically for me. Thank you. Hasina, did you want to add anything? No, I think Navid pretty much said it. I echo what he said. It really helps create the scene and the backdrop for the character to give the audience an insight to where they're coming from. I think it just adds the layers to it. So it's really useful. Great. Thank you. So we have some more questions popping up. Annie, Annie George, are you there? Do you like to put your question across please? If Annie's there. Okay. I'll read Annie's question. Annie's question is for Neela with, with HP verb, Batem, I guess in the edit, what do you do when, when an interviewee is telling a good story and goes off on a tangent, so often happens in real life. Do you have an edit out the tangential story or does that become part of it? Great question. So. Yeah. Thank you, Annie. For me, I think originally when I started off interviewing, if someone went off on a tangent or what I believe to be a tangent, I think probably in my earlier interviews, I'd try and steer them back on course, but I've quickly learned that the, what you think a tangent's often aren't. And someone's actually trying to tell you something, even if it seems to you tangential, it's not for them. I often just let what I perceive to be a tangent, just run its course in the, in the interview. And sometimes trust that when I listen back, I'll figure out why that person wanted to share that at that time. Cause there's often a reason that I can't see until I've listened back to it three or four times. Sometimes I'll just end up editing that section out cause it will be literally a tangent that's not, not useful or relevant. But often I'll find there's a reason why they, why they shared that particular aspect with me. So it's a mixture. But yes, you, you have the power to edit things in and out, which is why for me, I don't necessarily call this technique like an, like authentic I think is often a word that gets used because as soon as you edit anything that anyone says, you are making a manipulation. And so I am very aware that you're manipulating in some ways, what somebody has said, you're just trying to do it in the most ethical way possible, which is, which is the hard part. I think I hope that answers a little bit. Okay. Thank you. How about a reach? Can you join us to ask your question? Cause it's, it's a very short question. And I don't know whether wanted to elaborate on it. Yeah. I reach. Hi. Sorry. I didn't expect to speak. I just like to say that I think the actors did a brilliant job. And also the pieces were very well written. I find myself reading a lot about, I guess, lately I've been reading a lot about Marxist theater and, and specifically in relation to. And I'm just wondering, this is my first time coming across verbatim theater. And I'm wondering what greater role or, or purpose does it serve in terms of, I guess development or change of, of any kind cause all theater has a purpose to at least present a story or, or any event or, or something in a particular way that kind of leaves their audience feeling something and think maybe they don't have control over that, but they themselves can at least control the narrative. So I'm, I'm wondering what is the purpose of verbatim theater in that sense in terms of development or social change or along those lines. Could I start with just because I'm one of the practitioners of verbatim theater that Neela mentioned, which is Anna Devere Smith. And, you know, she does pieces that are very much, you know, social drama, what people would call social dramas. If I could just quote from her in her recent piece that I saw, which looked at the poverty to prison pipeline for black American young people. And it was called notes from the field. And it exposes a justice system that pushes youth of color living in poverty into prison. So this is what she says in her, in her introduction. She says, sometimes there is an expectation that in as much as I am doing social dramas, I am looking for solutions to social problems. In fact, though, I am looking at the processes of the problems. Acting is a constant process of becoming something. It is not a result. It is not an answer. It is not a solution. I'm first looking for the humanness inside the problems or the crisis. The spoken word is evidence of this humanness. Perhaps the solutions come somewhere further down the road. And I think she's put that really well in a sense what verbatim can do, as Nila also said, is to bring contentious conversations into one platform. People that, you know, even with the SOAS project that we did, one of the observations was that, you know, the conversations aren't necessarily happening with each other, perhaps because people don't know they can have them, or why are they not having them. But when we have managed to record them, representing them as if they were happening in the same room, it helps to sort of uncover the humanness of something. So I think that's what is very powerful about verbatim. I don't know if you want to add anything then, anyone else? Yeah, I was wanting to link that to the question earlier that I think someone didn't manage to unmute for, but it's in the chat which is around. I think the question is how does verbatim theater link to the speaking for others discourse? I'm not fully aware of that discourse. I've tried to do a quick Google to check that my gut instinct about what it is is correct. And I think it is about who gets to tell whose stories and who, which I think links to that idea of extraction, which for me, if you're dealing with kind of social issues and complex social topics using this form, then I think you do have to be incredibly aware of when you are potentially trying to speak for others. And there's a big difference. I think I get frustrated if verbatim theater is phrased as it's giving people a voice. It's not giving people a voice because everyone has a voice. Just some people aren't being listened to as much as other people. So as a practitioner myself, not every project should be one that I should be involved in. And I think that's an important thing as an artist to remember that not all projects should be yours, all ones that you can go forward with. You might not be the right person to go and collect stories on a particular topic. You might be someone who can support others to do that. And I think that for headphone verbatim, what's great about it is you can teach the form and the technique to other people so fast. You just need a phone or an MP3 player to record. They need to know the ethics of getting something signed and a release form, how to edit online. And then you can also train people to do the technique as well. And so if you're running projects in community theater, then you can actually train everybody to do that technique and then go away and make their own theater. And sometimes that's far more powerful than kind of saying, I'm the one who needs to make this show rather than I might be able to support in some way of other people making the show that they want to make. Not sure I always get that right, but try. But yeah, I don't know if that answers two questions in some ways. I hope a little bit. Simone, I saw your hand go up. Did you want to add something? Thanks. Yeah, well, there are a few questions on the side that I was trying to see if I could attempt to answer. So one was around the issue of how can we support the decolonizing the curriculum in schools and colleges and is there a publication of the transcripts of the show? And then there was another thing about Canva Baton Theater. Does verbatim theater avoid critique because it's perceived to be more authentic than using the, because of using the words of the interviewees. And a third one was about when we first put the show on what kind of response did we get? Were we able to incorporate the responses of the interviewees? So trying to answer them in a general way. Um, yeah, I suppose, you know, for us, this is a show that's been evolving. And as I was trying to say earlier on that what we decided to work with one university because it felt like a microcosm of the conversation that was happening all around us. We feel that the show is still growing. And yes, I guess in the future we could think about publication and so on, but it's not something that we've really thought about very deeply. In terms of the response, we did have some good feedback when we performed it as a kind of a work in progress to the service community last year. But I think that there was also a general conversation because some people, that is the difficulty about verbatim theater is that not everybody wants to talk to us. And we did think about that when we were doing the thing that how do we incorporate the people who do not wish to talk to us, their voices into the story and do we incorporate their voices or is their silence a voice in itself? So yes, the response was good, but you know, obviously we haven't been able to speak to everybody. And does it avoid critique? I don't think so because I think when you're looking at the show or you're judging it, I hope that you are looking at it as a play, a documentary theater as a show because even though the actors are not parodying the voices, they are being authentic and empathetic, I think you do get a sense of what's the story? How does the story work? Does it make you laugh? Does it make you cry? You know, all those emotions that we associate with a different type of theater. So those are my kind of answers to those questions, but Ila and Sudha, Anna, you've had a lot of experience doing verbatim theater. You might have a view on this critique question. Yes, please. The actors do join the discourse. Is Anna there? She's joining. Anna. Hi. As in the critique of like, what do you mean as in? How do you respond to the word authentic? Yeah. Could me and Ila had a similar conversation about this, didn't we? The authenticity for the performer is different to the authenticity of the maker. They're two different things and mean two different things. So for the performer, for us, it's really insincere for me to do a version of this person. And like Nila was saying at the beginning, I just don't feel that I would give a, an honorable performance of this person's testimony when I'm not being authentic and the authenticity comes in the actual listening and the skill as well is actually, it's a real, there's multiple things going on in your head at the same time because you're one beat behind that person's voice. So you're, I couldn't tell you what I said. So you're so, as Nila was saying, so deeply trying to listen on a, on a really kind of very quick thinking very quickly as well to try and capture how that person is saying it. But at the same time, not trying to, being aware as an actor, not trying to layer anything on top of it and trusting that what you're doing is enough. Cause I think sometimes you can get tempted to, you don't realize even over time, like we were told from the directors not to over rehearse, cause it's not like a play where you're rehearsing it. You can actually go off track. If you over rehearse in your room, it's actually just enough to familiarize yourself. In case there's like words that you're not, you know, you're not quite catching because of the way they're speaking, but to a point where you can keep it so fresh and your listening is fresh every single time. So that is the skill and the authenticity is, as just the authenticness of the listening and saying, this is what I'm hearing. And I'm going to relay that to you. And nothing else, keeping it that simple. Reggie, but what do you, what do you think? I think something Nila mentioned before about who story it is to tell. Something happens with the performer as well, where I think you can feel like you're not sure if you're quite the right person to embody that, even though it's, you know, anyone can do anyone's voice. But there's this idea of, you know, is it ethical for me to be playing a woman who's talking about a particular sexual experience or something. So that can, that can be quite difficult as a performer to get your head around and think about how can I do that authentically or how can I do that respectfully. But I think this is maybe one of the only mediums where that can be done, because you are just being a conduit for that voice in its entirety. Just on that note, in regards to casting and headphone verbatim, I think the first thing you do in a rehearsal room is you just let the actors choose pieces that they want to try out. And then you work out who channels that voice best, who's the most accurate, who do you really feel can just let go of themselves and deliver that voice as close as possible to who that person is. But then there is this additional layer of all those casting decisions, what message do they give? Are you giving a particular message? Is anything deeply uncomfortable? Why is it uncomfortable? Is it uncomfortable for the performer, for the audience? Would it be uncomfortable for the interviewee? You then have all these other complex questions in a casting decision on this. I think the headphone verbatim would fall flat, like Rajeevan said, like if I'd have done the talk and it had lots of voices in it that talked about sexual assault and sexual abuse. Many of those voices were women, but not all. If my entire cast was people who identified as male, that might feel incredibly uncomfortable and wrong to work with that cast. So if you've got the right cast, you can crosscast, but you have to think really carefully about individual stories and how that would feel for the person if they're watching whose voice it actually is. So there's a lot going on in making those decisions. But from an empathy perspective, if it's all about putting yourself in someone else's shoes, then also seeing actors do that, I find quite powerful. Because if you can watch an actor do that, which is what actors do anyway in their jobs every day, they're always putting themselves in other people's shoes. But in headphone, it feels very direct. Then the actors are kind of modelling that for the audience and that I find quite interesting. I don't always get it right, I don't think, though. There's lots of other questions. That's fascinating. I was just, if I can ask a question with regards to empathy and the actor and the headphone production, because I suppose in a creative writing piece, you might have your villainous character or you might have a negative character and a positive character in portrayals. And as an actor, you have a little bit of freedom to kind of add bits or maybe not do bits that you might feel totally uncomfortable doing. I was just wondering in the verbatim performance, because you're doing this as documentary theatre, what if you as an actor have completely no empathy with what is being said and you do feel that I actually don't want to do this. How do you work that situation through as a professional and as someone whose job it is to draw empathy but knowing that you can't... Does a documentary form mean that you can't make any changes? For me, the headphone stuff, I think, the verbatim, I suppose, you can't. But with Siddharth's stuff that I've worked with, it depends on what Siddharth's written down. That's the actor's job. You have to perform what's in written and you have to find your way to do it and to believe what you're saying is what you believe in. That's the actor's job. Obviously, if there's something you're really not happy with, then you can talk about it and then refuse to do it. But we can't just change bits. That's the responsibility. I suppose there's an added responsibility because it's verbatim, but you have to get it right because it's someone else's word. That's how I feel. I think it's also, for me, some of the pieces I heard were, you know, there were a lot more and some of them really a lot more political that I didn't always agree with, but I had to say it. So for me, I think it was about removing myself out of the way in the sense that, you know, it's not about me. It's actually particularly with head phone verbatim. It's about I'm here to serve this story. And so I'm going to remove myself and make it about this person's story and that enabled me as an actor to have that empathy to say, it's not about whether I agree or not, but I'm here to be a vessel to deliver these words. Thank you. That's really interesting. Fascinating to think through. So I think someone you picked up quite a few questions from the chat box there. And the one about decolonizing the curriculum in schools and colleges, I think has been addressed in education. And I think if I can add something from the play, because I watched the decolonizing, not just a buzzword show, when it was done at SOAS, and certainly one of the questions that it picked up was the question of how history is taught in the curriculum. And that led to a really interesting conversation, both with the audience and within the performance itself. So I think there's some kind of things that connect with the broader discussions that are taking place at the moment around the curriculum in schools. And so I think it would be fascinating for something like this to go into beyond the university sector as well. So there was a question from Imran Mahmood, which is, is there a risk that verbatim theater avoids critique because it is framed as being more authentic due to using the words of interviewees? I'm not sure if this has been answered yet or if. Mila, did you have something to add to that? I don't think it should avoid critique at all. Never. And I think that's the risk is, I think there is a risk there that verbatim is presented or this is people's real words so that you can't argue with it. But ultimately, somebody has edited that and you could, someone should always critique my way of editing something. Totally. Sometimes, I don't know about how you feel, Mila, but sometimes actually verbatim theater can get, I mean, I've certainly heard, you know, oh, but you didn't write that play. So, you know, where's the, where's the sort of, if you've just taken someone's words as if it's easier somehow, you know, to edit and there's no authorial kind of narrative. So that's sometimes things that you have to address or people find people who like work that is, you know, muscular and in your face and has a narrative that has high stakes, you know, I find that a lot of the time people don't, they don't really want to verbatim. So it's also a question of taste as well, isn't it? You know, what sort of work people like to see. Okay. I see a hand up from Irem, Irem Dahar. Are you there? Would you like to put your question across, please? Oh, okay. Irem says it was an accident. Okay. Well, you have the opportunity if you want to ask something. There's some comments about expressing from people expressing from attendees expressing their appreciation of the panel and the presentations and the interesting work that's being done by the wonderful team here. So we're nearly coming to the end of our time as it is. So I was just wondering if we can perhaps get some last comments in from the panellists with regards to today's kind of title, which was the Baton Theatre looking beyond, was it binaries, looking beyond binaries? And I was interested in that title, the use of binaries. And I was just wondering if we could, if you might be willing to just unpack that a little bit for us before we wind up. I think, yeah, I mean, you know, it is very, this is a technique which is very much the opposite of, you know, arguments of fall or against black and white. So when you have, I mean, certainly in my piece, you had the binary of Islam versus the West and how the media had manipulated a story into that. And this, you know, this allows you to, to give nuanced and detailed pictures and not in a non-judgmental way. So that's what I hope. Thank you. Did any of the other participants, Nila, would you like to sort of add anything to that? Yeah, I think that the role that Headphone for Baton Theatre can play, especially when it's made as a collective, I think when collectors work together to make a piece like this to really delve into like an issue that might be a current point of tension somewhere is really powerful. And I hope that more kind of theatres take more risk with Headphone because you can make a show really quickly. If there's a local issue that's like people feel very divided on, then you can bring a community together to make a piece very fast. And I don't think, well, maybe many theatres don't know local communities well enough to do that and to know what the pieces would be about. But I think you can trust the form because you can go out quickly and get a lot of material from, from somewhere and work together to make a piece that puts the nuances of how complex things are across. And I kind of hope you see more Headphone being used in kind of rapid response work to make theatre fast on difficult topics so that you don't just get binary views on something. Okay, great. That's what Neela has just said, something there that's made me think about a view that I'd like to get from everyone here, which is about theatre, not just the Baton Theatre. Theatre is going through a very difficult time in the pandemic. I was wondering if, from, from all of you who are involved so deeply with theatre, is there a message, is there something you would like to say about that, that you would like people to think about when they're thinking about all the different things in, in, in the pandemic? How does the, how has the pandemic changed the world of theatre for you as performers, for you as creative art, you know, contributors, all the different things that you do. And Neela, what you said about, about this particular technique of a Beethoven working with communities is something that, that sort of struck accord with me in terms of, of the changing sort of landscape as we live in the pandemic of, of where we are and what we do, because theatre has been so associated with, with the sort of certain parts of London, shall we say, and that's out of bounds at certain points now. So just, just throwing that question out there to all of you, just to see what you think. Do the actors want to go? Yeah, so I work for a venue in Manchester. And yes, it's, it's definitely, I think the landscape of theatre is going to change. I've already seen, one of the positives is I've seen artists become so innovative in the way that they're working now. Headphone verbatim, I think, you know, when I spoke to Chris, she actually, you know, it was the sort of the first time she did a show online and she actually found out that it worked really well online. It's one of the mediums that actually worked really well online and offline, which are the stage. So I've seen so many artists just break, you know, really out of the box. It's been hard in that everyone's had to throw themselves online and all of a sudden theatre makers and, you know, are having to become experts overnight, which were not, you know, we've always been made for live theatre. So artists are creating work that I think you will be able to see going forward is really exciting actually and really innovative using the post, using social media, using outside spaces, audio walks, all those kind of things, you know, we're starting to adapt to this new phase of theatre to become more, you know, equipped for what's coming ahead. And just working with artists, you know, and creating that duality of having a digital aspect as well as a live aspect that are both equally of high quality so that going forward, you know, people can still enjoy theatre whether the pandemic happens, continues or not. Thank you. From my own perspective, I mean, I feel that as a practitioner, what we are trying to do is to tell our stories in my case, let's say the stories about the Asian community in Britain and how we fit in this country in the context of our history, our colonial connectedness and our contemporary lives together. And in a way, I'm always feeling like I'm working one story at a time. So to a certain degree, it's really, really sad there is no live theatre in big spaces or small spaces, you know, and it's great that we are all learning how to adapt to new technologies, what it can do for us. I mean, it's really been a learning curve over these last few months for all of us in some way or the other. However, in terms of the push to try and continue to tell our stories is something that I just think, well, I hope it's gotten easier because of this conversation which has begun with the colonisation of the curriculum, but it's going into Black Lives Matter now, Black History Month and ITV and, you know, that resonance and the teaching of colonial history. So you feel that maybe the path might be a little easier to be heard, being an optimist, but hey. We definitely need optimism in these times. I worry I'm, you know, try and be optimistic, but, you know, theatre will is struggling during COVID and the arts in general and there's a lack of support, you know, the government has said to artists, you know, you need to go and retrain and I think my fear with that is that, you know, not sounding too grim, but authoritarian government shut down the arts because the arts is where people imagine and reimagine what futures can look like. And if you stop people from having access to that, then they want better for themselves. So I think we have to be really careful that the arts don't die and that we keep it alive in all these places that we can and not just, you know, for people who have traditionally been able to afford to go to the big theatres, but art is so crucial to communities across this whole country and I think there's a purpose for not allowing it to necessarily get through so I think we have to fight to keep the space open for imagination, basically. Very important point, absolutely. Well, I think people's career, you know, and on a very sort of practical level, you know, how people are going to sort of earn a living, you know, if the theatre, you know, theatres are closings, cinemas are closing, what's been made, you know, all of that, I think it's important for us who are, who rely on this as our core income as well, you know, we can't deny that it's a very difficult time at the end. Yeah, that's... Any of the others want to say, any of the actors want to come in on that? Yeah, I also agree with Neela as well. I'm hoping this doesn't mean that the working class actors, writers, directors leave the industry because they can't afford to support themselves in it, you know, so but in terms of audiences, this viral world might make it cheaper and more accessible for people to view things as well, so there's people doing like companies like Slunglow and Outdoor Drive-In Theatre, so that's new, so there's new stuff happening as well. In terms of a personal level, we're getting a theatre fix in terms of performance, I've done some online Zoom performances where there's been a green room on WhatsApp where we've got our beginners call and our five call and actors have chatted like you would in a green room if you've got ten minutes before your next scene and you've still got a buzz for live performance, I have anyway, on the screen, it's different, but it was the same, I can't describe it, but the same buzz being on in my living room, so yeah, there's lots of nice things happening, but hopefully, you know, we'll survive, hopefully we'll survive. Okay, yeah, thank you for that. There was a question that came in and I think from a region she said you've answered it, due to COVID, many working-class artists have lost their livelihoods and I can find to private spaces, do you think verbatim theatre can fill that gap or reimagine theatres that we could engage with people meaningfully and if so, how? And she says, Naveed is answering my question. So then there's a comment from Annie it's allowed us to strip everything back, songs, bells and whistles to focus on story and that understanding can be gifted to non-makers, to communities and individuals making it more accessible that we are all storytellers, that's powerful. So I think there's so many things here that I think we could continue the discussion for another hour, couldn't we, because there are the all-important issue of the class divide in this country is a big one across the arts in education, it's across the board and it is a very serious time for communities, absolutely. So I think that the power to the community and the consent, the sort of how communities rebuild in times of disaster and in times of crisis like this one is something hopefully that we will look back on and think and they will help us to think differently to what the state perhaps would like us to think. So Nila, I hope there will be optimism amongst the pessimism and sadly I can sort of not say that there will be a lot of financial support for that because that doesn't, like you all said, the film scene is changing the whole kind of the way big companies work, the sort of James Bond film not releasing, so certain big companies deciding to do things and how the whole system of capital works within the arts also has an impact on people who are just working in small theatres and the arts organisations. So it's a huge, huge challenge that's ahead and hats off to you guys for doing the fantastic work that you do and for giving up your time to be with us here tonight. If we were in a live audience we would have had a round of applause, so please imagine the round of applause and I think on Zoom you can actually put hand clapping sort of gestures on, can't you? I'm not very good at that. But thank you, thank you to all of you and it's been an absolute pleasure and please visit us again and we look forward to the verbatim performance from Butcher Boulevard on Saturday the 24th of October very much hope that you will tune in again for that and also sign up for our Festival of Ideas events. We also have lots of stuff happening there's master classes, there's panel discussions there are all things decolonising so tune in and join in and we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you everyone. I just remind everyone as well that Touchstone Tales is on next Thursday so it was in the links so if you want to watch the second half of monologues and duologues around the theme of touch please sign up for that as well please. Next Thursday. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Bye for now. Thank you very much. Bye.