 Almost, we're almost there, yeah. So welcome everybody here to the Martini Siegel Theater Center is a big day for us. It's the first event of the fall. Normally we don't do events before prelude, but Florian is with us and also Claire agreed to be with us, which is a big deal for us. So first of all, welcome both of you. Florian flew in from Germany for the book talks. He was just at Duke University with Michel Klin, who we also published a book with. And I'm Frank Henschka. I'm running the Siegel Center. We bridge academia and professional theater, but mostly international global theater and American theater. We are preparing our prelude festival. I don't know if you guys got the emails. We're gonna have over 60 presentations and actually 17 locations. We have it a little bit bigger because we didn't do one last year, two years before they were digital. And it's a big privilege to have you guys with us. We are still feel like it's new territory again, talks in person haven't happened so much here at the Siegel. A lot of it is on Zoom and it's online now. We were one of the pioneers, I think early on in Corona time to do it. But we believe in in person, in the liveliness the buddies in the room and we hopefully will reconnect and slowly also rebuild our audience and also find new audiences for what we do and learn what's really needed. Today we're going to hear from what we think one of the thinkers in Germany and also one of the great thinkers here in America about performance. What does it mean to make performance? What is political theater about? Where is it now that great tradition of theater over centuries to be in a context? And so really again, Claire and Florian, thank you for taking your time. I'm gonna talk a little bit what they do. Florian is a curator, a writer, a dramaturg and he hosted the great art of assembly. I'm sure in the time of Corona, a lot of you have listened to it. He also did it before he combines brilliant thinkers, artists, theater artists, philosophers, sociologists and talks about what it means to do theater and to assemble. It is about art, activism and politics. His current project is training for the future and he works with Jonas Stahl about it. And he was the director, artistic director of the Impulsa Festival in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mühlheim-Anderru, very important in Germany. And he was a core curator in the Multidisciplinary Art Festival, Steirische Herbst in Graz and anyone who's a part of the international curator scene, art scene, performance, he knows that this is a very important festival, it was a great tradition. And he's the co-author and co-editor of numerous publications on contemporary theater, curating performing arts and the relationship between arts and politics. This was what his book is about. I thought it was really a really good one. And after Hans-Ties Lehmann's book, who also was my teacher in a way, so this is one of the books that really in a clear way points us to some directions, ask the right questions. And I thought it was worth doing it. So we published it, we translated it, we paid for it, what we normally never can do. We don't have the money, but I think this time it is important, his texts have been translated in more than 15 languages. And we have parted with us here from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. He did books on Remini Protocol, I think first entertainment and many, many others. So it's worth to look at he works with the Alexander Falak in Berlin, which is our publisher, co-publisher and collaborator for this. So this is a great opportunity to have that cultural exchange globally planetary. Or as we say, I think it's what we need in this time of climate catastrophe, of a time of a rising right. And of the questions what we have, what is happening in theater, out of that destruction that we're experiencing, perhaps some great, some creation will come out. And I think these are voices from both of them that help us to understand better and to learn. Claire Bishop is a critic and great, great professor here at the PhD program in Art History at the Grad Center. We have collaborated on many, many events. Claire has influenced very deeply while we think about the, how I think about theater. Her books include Artificial Health, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. We actually hosted the book launch when it wasn't really clear that it became such an important significant milestone. Marka in the history of also art history and her idea to look at art history through performance, the idea of not through painting, just as culture, is a really radical one and an important one. But she also moved on radical museology or what's contemporary in museums of contemporary art is one of her books, very important. She's a contributor, an editor contributing at an art forum and maybe one of you read her great, assess very provocative and strong ones on the Shad or the Biennale and the documentary and others. And she's now about to publish two new books. And I think it will be very interesting ones, Cunningham's Events, was Cunningham's Events key concepts and disordered attention how we look at art and performance today. And this is this evening what's also about how do we look at it and how do we present it. So those of you really thank you. I apologize if I talk so much. If you have a cell phone, take it out for a moment, I'll do it too. And it should be off or it never rings in the Segal Center events. And so they would be great to have it here. I will come also at Taylor Everett. So we should say hello. She's our new Nick's Generation Fellows, the first event. She's here with us and to everybody, we would like to say thank you, but especially, of course, also to the Goethe Institute, who's been over our decades, a great collaborator and partner here in New York City. And we have York Schumacher here. And they have been a collaborator for the Art of Assembly here in New York. We also have Sack here. And the intern, your name? Ali. Ali, you know, who came with us and she's from Berlin. And so she's in how do people talk to each other in New York City? So you're gonna see how it works. So welcome everybody. And Claire, I'll hand over the word to you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, it's loud. Thank you, Frank. This is very nice to be here again, sitting in the seagull. It feels like a very long time since we've done this. Scrolling behind us, a selection of images from Florian's book. So you're gonna see these looping around. So rather than going systematically through the structure of the book and looking at different case studies, we're giving you a flavor through a scrolling PowerPoint. And, you know, when we do come to a light on particular examples, I'm hoping you'll be able to retain them in your mind. But let's start with this book, which is why we're here. I thought maybe a good way into this would be to just read you a paragraph where Florian describes a particular type of political theater, which I think maybe epitomizes the assembly mode of the art of assembly, of the different chapters that you have, because you'll see the page content, the table of content scrolling by at some point as well. And you'll see that there are different sections, theaters, assembly, participation, activism, identity politics, representation, all the important words. So I'm gonna just read you this one. Oh my God, I should have brought my glasses. It all seems so clear upstairs under a bright light. Okay, so listen to this. Trials delivering verdicts on artistic freedom, religion, and censorship. Summits convened to wrestle with climate goals as core cultural policy. Parliaments that give a voice to the otherwise voiceless. Theater in recent years has become the setting for a wide range of social assemblies that walk the tightrope between art and reality. A democratic arena built on a foundation of fantasy and imagination. By using theater's ability to create temporary communities, its unique selling point as an artistic medium, defined by space, time, and shifting rules. This theater not only reflects society, but also defines a container for trying out, analyzing, performing, representing, testing, pushing the limits of, and even reinventing social and political procedures. End quote. So when I got to that paragraph, I thought actually that's quite a good summary of the genre in general that you were trying to capture. And so if I was to put this work into the kind of, oh, thank you. Now I don't need my glasses. Put this work into a nutshell. I'd say that an art of assembly really strikes me as the outcome of post-traumatic theater encountering Occupy Wall Street. And we can say more about, like we can unpick those in due course, but would you agree or is that too reductive and simplistic? I mean, that's the Twitter headline basically. No, actually I like this as a summary. And of course it's a bit more complex, but what I think maybe is the encounter is that both post-traumatic theater and then the encounter with the square movements, Occupy, and all these other movements was maybe putting the focus again on something which I think is in the core of every theater, that theater's always an assembly. And suddenly this became clear and maybe more sharp again. So in this regard, I think it's an encounter, but it's actually towards something that goes for even for the most conventional theater, but often is denied or forgotten. And through this politicization of recent years, I think this came back into focus. What is actually the job of theater? Or what can theater also be useful in a way? I notice there aren't dates on these, but do you notice then a shift around or after 2011? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are predecessors, but I think that it was a moment where not only activists were thinking that something had to change, but a lot of artists were also looking for it. And actually for me it was a bit working with Styrus Helps at that time. We went to Egypt, to Tunisia and everywhere and tried to relate to that. And I was a bit disappointed that there was not much theater there, that it seems like visual artists are much faster. And in a way it's maybe true because it's like a collective task. So it maybe takes longer. And then I discovered that actually one outcome of it is this focus on assemblies where theater has something to offer which other art forms maybe don't have. So, and I think these movements were really giving a push to a lot of theater makers and also visual artists working in the field of theater to redefine or to rethink their medium. Can we pause for a moment and push on post-traumatic theater as a term? Because I know there are some people from art history in the room and there are also people from theater and performance that I know you're familiar with the term post-traumatic theater. And we have some practitioners and exponents of post-traumatic theater here in the room. But what do you understand by Lehmann's term and is your understanding the same thing? And what do you take from this theory that you think helps you formulate this category in art of assembly? And where does it differ from it as well? Well, what the term means for Lehmann in a way is that there was only a very short time span of dramatic theater in history. And but that took over the term. So that actually when somebody says theater, everybody thinks of dramatic theater and he wanted to liberate it from that in a way. So there was a pre-dramatic theater which lasted well for thousands of years basically in different phases. And then there's a post-traumatic theater. And the core of it maybe for him was to say that there is a theater that doesn't need to be based on text. There's a theater that doesn't need to be based on linearity, on causality, especially psychological causality and to liberate it from that and basically say that every signifier could become the initial or the initiative for theater work. So I think that was very important for him. And also to put the focus on what he said is unique to all theater of course that the production of the artwork and the reception of the artwork happens in the same moment. And that this is not, this is also in dramatic theater the case but there's not a focus on it. So I would say that was his take. But the thing is the book came out in 98 and basically none of the artists that today would be considered post-traumatic theater in this book. So it's not even for sentiment. I think the Wooster group is probably in it. So the term is also got a little bit independent from his writing. And for me, maybe the biggest difference or let's say further development to him is that he, and that's also very much this time wanted also to liberate theater from the dominance of content in a way that also political theater was, if there's a political topic, then it's political theater. So there was a shift, let's say from content to form. I mean, very much simplified but that there was much more focus on form than in post-traumatic theater and thinking of what does, what do the aesthetics of theater mean? What can they produce? And also very renziere in that regard. And I think for me, and I think for a lot of theater makers in recent years, that's maybe the development also described in the book is that by this, well, the content got lost a little bit. And also the, especially for political theater, the substance of the word, the political or politics, both maybe got lost and that they, because the political was looked for mainly in the aesthetics in the form. And in a way was here could interpret into a way that even saying like, if a work is directly political, it's not political. So that somehow I think there was also feeling around the time when all these square movements happening that the political potential of theater is maybe not used anymore, that there was a reaction towards an older form of political theater that was necessary, but the new forms also didn't work anymore. And so I think it sounds very simple or it's maybe very simple that it was a movement of saying, okay, for political theater, at least the form needs to be political. So also the way of working needs to be political, not only the form of the performance, but also how the performance is produced needs to be political, but it needs also political content in relation to that and to balance this new, that would be maybe the development after Lehmann's book that I would describe. You also draw a distinction, I think, if I remember correctly between a different relationship between the individual and the collective from post-traumatic theater to out of assembly. Can you remember that line? It struck me as quite a good insight, but now, of course, I can't remember where it was. Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of the experience, I mean, there's an interesting effect that in post-traumatic theater, the focus is so much on the each audience member to create the work for themselves. And this was seen as a liberation. There's not one topic produced that everybody should see, everybody gets, I mean, like in a form and piece, right? Everybody sees something else and gets something completely else out of it. But the question is, at the same time, it kind of individualized the audience, and is that not also a neoliberal way of thinking? Like, everybody gets their own work, everybody is unique and everybody has, so I think it's not going back to another model, but to also understand, okay, what is happening there in terms of the collective in this thinking about post-traumatic theater? That's helpful. Could we move then to assembly and its relationship to Occupy? Because clearly, the title of your book and the theme of your podcast is indebted to the theorization around assembly that happened in the wake of Occupy. And I'm thinking of Butler's notes on the performative theory of assembly from 2015 and Hart and Negri's assembly from 2017. But the examples in your book date back to the late 90s, even though they're kind of fairly well-balanced between the 2000s and the 2010s. So what do you think is the relationship between these theories of the 2010s, these post-occupy theories and the longer history of experimental theater that you're surveying? I wondered if you thought of the earlier works in your book as anticipating these theories of assembly or do they exist in some way in friction with it or are they are even challenging it at certain points? No, I think that a lot of the works, like participatory works of Shishipop and other groups or Schlingziew's works and so on were of course already used a lot of the techniques and also had these ideas of assemblies. What they had with Schlingziew, it's a bit different, but which they often didn't had, it was a political, let's say a political aim. It was more an exploration of assemblies of being together. And I think that's happened, well, with the assemblies actually happening. And then also with the theory that there's a shift, like when you look now to which works a lot of theater makers refer. So as I said, like before it would have been post-structuralist, it would be in Rossier, et cetera, and all the French people and so on. And now I think there's a lot of referring to Butler, to political theories like Chantalmouf, but also to let's say Latour's idea of the Parliament of Things and so on. So there's a shift also in the theoretical interest, which I don't know what is first and in which order it comes, but it's quite visible that there's new interest in looking at theater also through this theory and not only to post-structuralist theory. Yes, there's a kind of chicken and egg question around that. So people will notice looking through these slides that there aren't that many US examples in the book. Of course, this invalidates the entire project. No, of course not, but there is a question about whether this is primarily a European phenomenon. So in terms of the American examples, there's Anne-Leviang, experimental choreographer. I never really think of her as choreography. The Yes Men, which I maybe group as tactical media and Reverend Billy. And you also discuss an example from Korea, but the bulk of this is really European and central European. So can you talk about this? Is this a result of you, you're writing from the position where you are located in Berlin. And so is this a primarily European phenomenon or do you see that the differences in contemporary performance in the US simply just, people are just not exploring this in the same way? Well, partly it's my limited view of things. I mean, that's for sure that I don't, and also I saw in a way examples in there not more like, not these are the best examples on earth, but these are the ones that stand for something else. But I think it has, I was, since you said you would ask me this, I was actually wondering also how that happened. And I think there's different reasons. I mean, one is, I think that of course the also post-traumatic theater is very much rooted in a European context, which also has to do with, with fundings, with institutions and so on. And then the assemblies are, a lot of these works are, it's really about creating bigger assemblies. It's also about where do you do that? What institutions do you have to do that? And there might be something in that as well that it's played via Europe. And actually in a way I don't really, I think the question of why are there not US artists in it is actually not so interesting, but the question is why are there not more other non-Western artists in there? And that's maybe also a bit related with exceptions of certain Asian theaters and certain Latin American theaters that I think which I didn't dip into is completely different theater traditions because that would make a completely different strand. And there's of course a lot of assembling in that, but it's really like a, would be like a different books. So this focus has also to do with that, that there's a lot of blind spots, but partly they are just blind spots, partly they are on purpose because this is a Western theater tradition that this is in very clearly, which changes and opens up and so on, but this is a root of it. I mean, it's true. Having asked you that question, I can now ask myself, I should ask myself, who would I suggest that you put in the book? And it's true, I'm struggling to find examples, or I would have to change the terms of it and think about the way artists and performers bring together people, but it might be around music or a more informal situation. It wouldn't be structured through the forms that are recognizable as assembly with its reference to democratic traditions. Also, I really, this book focuses on political theater and political assemblies. Like we could, of course, talk about nature theater in the group that I obviously admire, what assemblies it creates through duration, through going through moments of tiredness and so on. So I think that these are also assemblies. So there's of course work, but the book has a very specific focus that maybe is then not so much represented here, or I don't know it maybe. Just tell me if you have examples. Yes, we can have appendix at the end of extras. The New York appendix. I would like, because my default setting is to be a historian, I'm gonna push, and I've already commented on the egregious lack of dates on your slides and the PowerPoint, but I'd like to try and put Art of Assembly into a historical context. Maybe also to, so that it doesn't become something like the relational aesthetics of the past decade, which is a term that pulls together a rag bag of different phenomena and tendencies under one curatorial umbrella. So I wanna think about the longer history of an Art of Assembly. And the examples in your book, as I said, date back to the late 90s, but in the last chapter you mentioned, every now and then there are mentions of different examples from a longer history, dating back to the Living Theater in May 68, to the Brechtian Lehrstuker, to Soviet Adjiprop Theater, and then all the way back to the Brussels Revolution of 1830, which famously began in a theater. So what is the relationship between the Art of Assembly and this longer tradition? Is it a tradition or is it just a curatorial, a snazzy curatorial rubric for talking about the last 20 years? Just as a short detour now that you mentioned relational aesthetics, I could have said, maybe that this theater is also a reaction to relational aesthetics, certain assemblies and politicizing them, but that's just a detour. No, I think of course there are important predecessors and then maybe it is that it pops up once in a while. So of course without Brecht and Piscator, Piscator was of course doing big assemblies, political assemblies, and he's maybe the first one which were in a German context at least or a Western context and you have all the Adjiprop experiments in the beginning later they were less experimental obviously. And so I think it pops up, but it was short time. So even Piscator did it only a couple of times. Brecht was mainly writing about it. So it's actually more in his writing than in his doing. Well, Adjiprop, we know what happened. So it was never a longer time span. And in this regard, I think this longer time span and this amount of works around it might be, I'm not a theater historian, but it looks for me like something different. But they very much relate, especially to many questions of the 20s. Maybe you could say like also, what does Occupy relate to all these movements that you have certain moments and maybe it's not by chance that we look when were these moments in theater that these were kind of quite parallel to these moments in politics. So it would be the 20s, the 60s, 60s, 70s and so on. But I think there's clearly a lot of referencing. I mean, Brecht is appearing quite often. I already thought like, okay, the Germans writing about Brecht all the time. But I think it's why things are super important and interesting still from what he imagined theater could be. And that these moments where there's a focus on theater creating communities is stronger. That would be something to look at historically, but it's quite clear in the last 10, 12, 13 years. Could you talk maybe about the range of different types of work that you pulled together under this term? Because we've, and now we have no images when I turn around. Because the outdoor interventions, there are more or less fairly traditional pieces on stage. There's experimental forms of choreography. There are works that directly mimic parliamentary forms. Can you talk about where did you draw the limits? How did you decide what came in? In a way, I would say that the title, I mean, the book has a different title in German. Maybe that's part of the thing because it's called Gesellschaftspiele, which is not translatable. It's like a parlor game, but it's a society game. So really in a more specific sense, the works I would call theater as assembly are really assemblies. So works of Juna Stahl, of Milo Rau, and others. And the others are more mapping a field of political theater. And there I purposely also looked at pieces that function in quite conventional places because they try to produce a different relationship with the audience or the way how they are produced. Like one prime example in the book is a work by Antonina Recke, a young black German theater maker who took an existing play in München and Kammerspiele, which is one of the traditional theaters in Germany. She took a play with all white cast and like one to one, like in appropriation art piece, took the piece, everything was the same, the set, the costumes and so on, but had all black cast in it. And this would work differently in New York, I'm aware, but in Munich in Germany, this was quite an intense moment on stage. So it clearly talked about the audience, it talked about the production means in the house. So what kind of assembly is a theater and ensemble? An ensemble that is all white and so on. So this would be in a conventional piece, but I think it explains a lot. So that's why there's a wide range of works and not all of them would consider themselves to be. Theater as assembly. I'm glad you mentioned the German edition, which came so it's put first published in 2019 and then this English version is 2023. And in between, of course, we have the pandemic. We also have you starting to do a series of podcasts with some very high profile and exciting speakers in January, 2021. So how much did you change in the book for the English version? Actually a little in a way because first it came out actually 2020. So on the day when the lockdown started, the book came out, which was already like to talk about assemblies. I mean, it was a very good moment. So, but that means that these years were also quite, well, confusing in many ways. What does it mean to have live events? What does it mean to assemble? And at the same time, not much happened in theater. So when it was the English edition was supposed to come up, I was kind of thinking like, how much do I rewrite? And I realized like, in a way either I start from the beginning or I leave it and mark very clearly when it's written because also there would not be new works to add so much. It would be just a reflection that changed. So actually I cut out some examples, some German examples put a bit more other examples in and kind of tried to contextualize it a little bit more. But it was interesting. I mean, maybe that's like always comes the question. So with COVID, what changed in the view on assembling? But I think it's too early to say, I really don't know. I mean, I think something has changed but with so many things I wouldn't know and the works don't show it. I don't know how it is here but in Germany we get to see all the works that were meant to be presented in 2020. So we are in a retrospect. What happened in a way is, but also with already with the German edition that it became more of a US and art historian, more historic book, I feel. Like it felt, it feels like and that came clear with the English edition that it may be about something that doesn't continue the same way. So maybe it is something that doesn't come to an end but that is summing up something. And this was enhanced as a feeling through the pandemic, I think. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm gonna come back to that, I think. But right now I want to use this as an opportunity to ask you the kind of awful question that I'm asked endlessly when I give talks, which is all about measuring efficacy, right? So if this is political theater, how do we know when something is, how do we evaluate how successful this is? What kind of criteria do we bring to this work? I hate this question and I'm asked it over and over again. That's why everybody refers to this Belgium example where the revolution started in a theater because you cannot really top that, I guess. So compared to that, I would, in a way because all the answers that one can give are kind of obvious and disappointing but I would maybe then argue with the Butlerian way of thinking like the performativity of these events in itself is something that changes a certain reality. Like with, and I think that I found really interesting about Occupy where it says like, so what did Occupy change? What is the efficacy of Occupy actually? But already there, I think there's more to it but already that people try to live and organize differently on the spot and it does something and it might not be possible to measure it in quantity but I think that's the job of theater and these works in a way to create environment temporary communities in a way that try to think differently about what is possible and not if that's effective on a larger scale that would be very difficult to say but as it is difficult to say if Occupy changed anything or nothing, we will first of all have a discussion about it but a second of all maybe also only know in 20 years or 30 years so but I don't think that any of these works in itself changes something but I think in relationship with the square movements with a lot of other artistic works with a lot of activist work with theory and so on I think this is a field where something can be experienced and tried out which otherwise would not be done I think so avoiding the answer Yes, okay, so let's pin you down you're a curator who's worked with a lot of these artists and actually you don't mention this in the book at all but you've got quite a few of these people that you have programmed and worked with directly but what we'll get on to that in a moment as a curator how do you know when something when a work is successful when it's been pulled off when you can look back on it go actually that was really good and does that have anything to do with efficacy and here it could be efficacy in the broadest sense of the word that could be aesthetic, social a question of energy, I don't know Well, I think yeah, I mean maybe it's first the question of energy I think that would be even when I used to be a theater critic for a while even there I would say first you feel in the work that something is changing something is different that you cannot maybe verbalize and it takes you a while to verbalize it I don't know if that's a success but that's a rare moment you have in an artistic experience that doesn't happen so often in theater but if you sit somewhere and think like okay, something is happening and I cannot grasp it completely yet so that would be my personal feeling for success that might not always work for the audience or whatever in the curator than you have to have other criteria but as you know very well in participatory project it is about also something happening that was not expected to happen is there something opening up a way of thinking about this kind of community or procedures or whatever that is tried out there and that doesn't happen so often but I think that's one thing another would be that I still would say certain projects have a political implication maybe even in small like Yunus Dahl's New World Summit I think where he created parliaments for people that are excluded from political discourse by being labeled terrorists usually I would say over time because of doing it over years and years created certain alliances and certain networks, certain conversations that otherwise clearly wouldn't happen I think so also this is difficult to measure if that in the end helped the Kurds and Rojava or the people in the Philippines but it had really for them I think an impact and then you also and that's something else when you feel like okay it changes something in these lives but that's very specific can you talk about the public movement piece make arts make arts policy because you describe this work which I've not seen but is a work that assembles politicians from different sides of the political spectrum to generate new cultural policies and you describe an example of this that gets sabotaged by a politician from the AFD and the Alternative for Deutschland and which I think would be and it gets sabotaged to the point where the discussion breaks down and would be by any kind of objective criteria maybe a failure of the of the artist's intentions but you talk about it in an interesting way well actually I would say it was not sabotaged by the AFD it was sabotaged by the other politicians but maybe to explain it there's one concept that I find helpful in thinking about the theater as assembly is the concept of pre-enactment and maybe also in terms of efficacy because we don't know it so it's a term but pre-enactment obviously is the opposition of a re-enactment so it's not repeating an event from the past but it kind of tries to maybe anticipate a political moment of the future which is not possible because as the politologist Oliver Marchard says the political moment cannot be it happens it cannot be anticipated it's never happening when it's planned but he describes the idea of pre-enactment as he compares it actually to dance to ballet even where the dancers would train on the bar for a choreography which is yet to come they don't know what choreography will come but you train to be ready for it and so the idea of pre-enactment is in a way a training for the future being ready for the future but also creating events that or situations that could be helpful if the event would happen so this is the idea behind it and public movement in Israeli performance group is using this term quite often for their own work and I found it interesting with this work it happened twice and I would say once maybe it was a pre-enactment and once it was not a pre-enactment it was more re-enactment because they wanted to bring cultural politicians together with a simple proposition to say like okay if I would want to vote for your party depending on their cultural policy and not on other things so what would be the reason to vote for your party so we have a couple of more than you do here so we started talking to politicians oh she did it in Helsinki first and there it really was at quite a big effect I think because all the politicians they found really got involved in it they really went for it they wanted to convince people actually for their cultural policy I don't know why and the local art community was very much involved because there was the plan to bring a Guggenheim branch to Helsinki which would have sucked the money out of all the other things so there I would say a moment of a different kind of parliament with these politicians maybe happened and actually I talked to people in the Helsinki art scene that say this was really also a moment that helped building coalitions within the art scene the Guggenheim thing was not built at the end so maybe this had really a part in this and when we tried to do it in Düsseldorf in the state of Norte and Osvalier in Germany before the elections we went to all the politicians and said like okay what's different in your position and the conservatives said ah you're not so different we really all the cultural politicians have to work together against the mean financial ministers and the social democrats are the same the green parties are the same so they it was basically impossible to find a unique standpoint only the right-wing party had a different idea about culture which was disappointing and then we said okay but please don't don't don't you know find whatever is unique and make a strong point and the other thing we said don't talk all the time about the right-wing party why they are wrong but say what you propose instead and then the event happened and all the politicians said that the right-wing party is bad and otherwise they said the same so so in that and only the right-wing party guy actually made a used the chance to make a statement of something that was quite clear I mean nobody liked it but it was very clear so so so it was really in a way of representational theater I think it was very good it really represented the way how every talk show works how cultural politics in Germany works with this idea of consensus and so on but it was definitely not a pre-enactment and so I found quite interesting that twice the same work really had a completely different different effect and and also different relationship to this idea of pre-enactment it's great so the pieces are effectively an index of the of the political taking the temperature of the political situation wherever it's wherever it's shown you know it's great to hear you talk about something from inside your experience of organizing it can you can you say a little bit more about your position as a curator and the experience of working with many of these artists that you're writing about and how that informs your writing because this kind of you know inside nugget that you tell us about this particular work it doesn't appear very often in the book where you're much much more distanced and even handed and not really spilling the beans about about what went right or wrong with the with different projects which is of course what we all want to hear first of all I must say I think I very clearly say in the beginning that I'm involved in a lot of these parts so I don't think I'm hiding it actually as a full disclaimer I think in the beginning saying that I write that I write from a very that it's a very subjective book in in in soles and the choice of artists but at the same time because of the focus a lot of artists I admire not in the book and also actually most even with artists that I collaborate with like with Juna Stahl I didn't write about the works that we did together so so my involvement with these works is maybe that I curated them or invited them but I'm not so directly in it so so so that's maybe something to say and yeah and I don't know I think that that the writing of it of course is informed about how how it works but but to show the mechanisms of works is something that it yeah it doesn't do here except that it's one example when I when I was a critic still in Germany the rule was like as a theater critic you cannot even talk to an artist you know like if you would be doing a beer with them you're like you're out so so and then there was a change afterwards but it was really the idea the German theater critic is outside of it an objective to all of it and already then it was clear coming from Gießen from all these other kinds of theater when you're right about this this doesn't work because if I said it's crap nobody knows why it's crap because because the rules of the game are not even clear so so it's and even I would maybe not understand it if I would not talk to people and and so so my getting out of criticism and changing the sides and becoming curator and dramaturg had also to do with that this kind of theater needs maybe a different kind of at least at the beginning different kind of explanation but before it's established so I have actually a feeling that always when I write I write from a maybe not from the inside but from a proximity I don't write actually I very seldom I write about things I don't like anymore since I'm not well I've noticed I've noticed except below row was has a bit more critical because he's such an important figure but yeah but in general I was going to ask you where you see the line between critical and curatorial writing because there's something that's very noticeable in your writing is it's very even handed on the one hand Jimi Efsky and Sierra and Renzo Martins you know you say they make very strong work it's a very clear idea on the other hand there's a problem that they're merely replicating problems in the so you're on the one hand this on the other hand this right this is the the pattern of your of your writing I noticed I mean every now and then you break out of it with something but for the most part you're in the you're measured yeah I mean I don't think it's always like this but with this book I wanted to lay out a field but I think well a lot of people are not in it that other people like if somebody else would figure out political theater there would be between the German context there would be Oster Meyer and a lot of people that I don't even mention so I think my way of revanch is just not to have in but I still feel maybe that that is still left over for my decent time in these beginnings that I still feel this kind of theater is very is in the end there are some famous exceptions and Milo Rau is everywhere and Rimini protocol is more prominent but but besides this it's a small a small part of theater and it still is not even known by even a lot of theater people so so I maybe still I have the feeling it's still about showing this exists and why is it important and then so yeah it's easier for me to have a critical view on Milo Rau because he doesn't need my support and not that everybody else needed in there but I still maybe that's still the feeling it needs to be still explained to to a degree so that's why it's but I also say actually I also say that it's a partisan book so so it's okay I mean really I need to go read the introduction again I am picked off you describe the book as a this is from the introduction actually I did take one that you describe it as a searching book written about a searching theater within a searching society and the book struck me as having a lot of curatorial soul searching in in here right you lay out some of the polemics surrounding particular works not as I think we've established to establish not in order to assert a polemic or a strong critical judgment about it but in order to explore the pitfalls the warnings guidelines and so on for this work I wonder to you imagine the audience is is it potential curators of programmers of this kind of work like what would you getting yourself into if you start wading into this kind of theater or is it more for viewers who might be a little perplexed about what they've seen and want to need to be led through it well I don't have too much illusions about a possible read aspect but I would say yes it's maybe actually yeah it's it would be more for maybe more for viewers because that's why I also try to I really try to explain like every term like like and where many people say okay why do we need to be explain what is identity politics again or what is representation and so on but I felt like a lot of these terms are being used without really understanding them and I don't go into depth but at least try to explain each term and that is important in these discussions so in that regard I would say it's like for sure yeah maybe for an informed viewer but in a way and again it comes back to about post-traumatic theater there's still no book for a larger audience and Lehman's book which is 25 years old now which is very academic and not fun to read for most people is the only book that tries to give an overview over something so this is also very different from the field of visual art there's basically very little written outside of clear academia then there are PhDs and so on but if you're an audience member that is interested to read something there is not much so in that regard again maybe as a defense why I'm still saying but it's maybe not so critical it's still it still needs explanation to degree or No it's very interesting to think of you you're speaking to the middle right and the middle that has been perhaps forsaken in our society for the polarization of the of the culture wars and that's particularly evident in your identity politics chapter where you talk about well there's some dangers to safe spaces and the sort of language you're triggering on the other hand there's also dangers to outright antagonism all right so you're very this is the even-handedness really comes across there and so I wanted to bring this back to a kind of curatorial or or dramaturg question I'd like what kind of skills do you think the contemporary curator of this kind of work needs to bring to this kind of political theatre and do you think it differs from more traditional types of theatrical presentation well well I the the term of curator comes came up rather late to theatre and I think actually it's still not very much filled with life but do you think you call yourself a curator rather than a programmer yeah which was which is again something I think in the theatre context is different because because I mean while in the arts the curator is already a dubious figure and criticized and so on I think in theatre it was for me a term to actually introduce something else than a programmer somebody who has a different involvement in it but also for me it was always I think a festival could also have in itself a performative form so what is the difference between a music festival and a theater festival so how can you also in terms of programming play with and you know it from visual arts but for a festival how can you play with one is when is the performance starting where is it happening blah blah blah I mean even with the simplest things usually that doesn't happen and I don't mean big festivals have bigger problems with it but to say like what is the curatorial form for it like when we did a project at the Steirische Herbst in 2012 which was dealing with all the movements at that time through this concrete we decided to have a a week-long program day and night non-stop without any interruption really without any break and like a clock going like this so to think about what would be this moment of exhaustion how can it be represented but also to show we are not an activist a movement ourselves we are an institution there's also curatorial violence to this program and so to think about how this how these assemblies function as a curator also that would be something I would wish from a performance curator because it would relate to the to the tools and means of their own medium in a way so yeah that's why why I was always pushing for this term to just make a difference to the programmer if it was the best choice to take it from visual art is another question but it was at hand that's not what I was expecting you to say I guess because I was thinking of the again this sort of identity politics chapter in mind I was thinking of all of the mediation work you have to do with different types of audiences and how things can whether this kind of work prompts more extreme reactions than other types of theater and what kind of you know social cultivation work you need to be doing in order to tread this fine line between people demanding more so safe spaces or being upset by antagonism but I think that's not in contradiction to it because I think like the spaces you create would also be like who can find into these spaces and who finds their way in it and I think it would very much relate to the actually I always liked to use Occupy Wall Suite as an example for something that is good creative if it would be that piece because my feeling when I was here was actually you can go and it was quite interesting people were friendly immediately explaining what's going on and you can go after an hour or you can come back every day and at some moment you start working in some committees and so on or you bring a tent and move in but I felt like in terms of adjusting yourself how much you get into it how much you want to understand and at the same time of accessibility I found it quite interesting and I always thought like ah if a festival would work like this that it's so easy accessible in one hand but so demanding if you if you go further with it that would be a great festivals this is a lovely point have you ever seen that anything approximating that did your projects ever approximate that of course of course yes and none of us were there so of course yes no but it's but it's I mean it's more to put other challenges out there and then there are a lot of pragmatics and that's the problem in theater with the festival you have so much pragmatics with the spaces and if you do a show at six in the morning who would come and see you know like like I understand all the pragmatics and they will water it down and compromise is an important part in theater I'm not against compromise it's an art that always has to work with compromises but at least to to aim for something that would be already good I have two more questions and then we can open it up to all the rest of you so a few years ago I was asked to contribute to this anthology that we were just looking at on my desk upstairs about assembly by two European authors I can't remember their names and I and I declined I said I don't have anything to write about assembly because I felt that its validity as a rubric for the 2020s was debatable and that this had really been fragmented you know through the through the Trump experience I felt like assembly was just not a political term that had any relevance to us anymore through the culture wars through the hardening of polarization we the idea of this this sort of rather rosy idea of a Habermasian public sphere in which we can discuss reasonably and agonistically it seemed to have completely fallen apart into into what Jodi Dean I think in one of the Art of Assembly podcasts that is that assembly is a completely inadequate term for a situation of civil war which is what we're in so I wonder what are your thoughts about this I mean you're keeping producing you're keeping on with the podcast you've got your books is this now a closed period or is this a term worth fighting for well at one end I think obviously something has changed and obviously there's a shift I don't really know periods I ever closed but there's a shift and also a shift in terms of looking at assemblies but maybe it means that the scale of assemblies changes in where they take place but we still need to assemble still need to exchange I strongly believe we still need this and it would be good if the assemblies would also be larger than owner or own bubbles and I have the feeling maybe maybe still theater can experiment with that and work on that and I think these these are attempts to so how diverse can actually be the people we assemble like what conflicts can we still hold because also well theater is always about conflicts and assemblies I think are also always about about conflicts and this is difficult of course at the moment so with whom do we want to have conflicts with whom can we still have conflicts but there's no I mean I think there's no alternative which is something I'm against but in this case I think it is and then of course like I'm I'm using quite quite clearly Shantel Mof's concept of agonistic pluralism of the idea that that democracy should be in agonistic pluralism and often it cannot be anymore as we can see and that's exactly what she says because if it is then it's a civil war so but can we still at least in certain artistic context try to try to try it out to rehearse it to see what are the limits but yeah so on one hand I totally agree on the other hand I don't think we have an I mean we cannot give up on it what would that be and so on so assembly I'm left by the end of the book thinking that assembly sort of has a kind of a bifurcated meaning for me by the end of the book so on the one hand it seems I feel like it's a nostalgic relic of European social democracy not the one hand right and on the other hand when I think of what assembly might mean here what comes to mind is not occupied but Trump rallies right the right wing assembly as mobilized by the right and so I wondered if you know can we think of the you know would you see a right wing rally as an assembly or are there fundamental difference that you already mentioned moves agonistic pluralism and I guess there's a question of like do we see that or not in in a rally but but you know where are we with the with assembly in the right I guess is what I want to leave as a final question on one hand I I mean I'm not defining assembly that closely but I would say a rally is maybe never this kind of assembly so what these kind of assemblies usually are deliberating assembly so it would be neither left nor right wing demonstration would be assembly in this regard so and from what I know about Trump rallies deliberation is not that strong part so that would be wanting on the other hand not only for assemblies for everything changes with the with the well with with the growth of the right wing or with the taking over of techniques of the right wing you know for years I thought an artist is per se a leftist and then I already at that time coming to Russia I saw oh no artist can be right wing and now we can see it everywhere so so I think it's something where where not only but in terms of assemblies but in all all artistic expressions we have to see okay certain means are not per se liberal or leftist they can be used from all sides and they can be also skillfully used from from other sides but still I would say the idea of deliberating of and of pluralism would be something that is not really occupied by the right yet and maybe also that would be the limits of what they could occupy so yes watch this place yes let's have let's have some Q&A Q&A tell me if you could go so if there are comments or questions or something Peter thank you I'm really I'm really fascinating talk because I think the the question of assembly is so interesting to think about now and I wonder whether on the one hand we have butler's notion which is no longer working in terms of a kind of idea of assembly that is full of hope and potentiality and possibility on the other hand as Claire's rightly pointed out in the United States Assembly is the Trump rally or or another form of assembly is the you know a couple of weeks ago here there was this flashpoint assembly at Union Square where some social media people announced that they were going to give give away electronic games and suddenly there were more than a thousand people on the square descending I was actually there in the middle of it and it was quite it was an assembly of sorts and it had a certain kind of chaotic sensibility that one might think about in in context of the Trump rallies as well that there's a certain kind of performative anarchism or violence or something but I guess it's not so much the point of assembly but it's the way they're framed I think because in some ways what you're talking about is the framing of an assembly the framing of a parliament or the framing of of a kind of constituted group of people coming together to deliberate but I'm also thinking about the potential for other kinds of framing coming back to Claire's point about what happens if we re-enact the storming of the the White the Congress if we actually re-enact it as a as a the thought came to me after somebody described a performance that Romeo Castellucci did in in Western Europe where he re-enacted the police storming in the Black Lives Matter and he had all of these actors dressed in New York police uniforms with their you know highly militarized kind of garb walking through the public square behaving in a very kind of highly militaristic way and I thought that was kind of an effective framing of an assembly of a certain kind and what happens if we could bring that conversation here a little bit more in terms of the way that we frame the possibility of re-enacting these kind of moments not because we want to repeat them but because we we actually want to make them somehow available to criticism I mean yeah thank you also for bringing the question of the question of framing in this because that's something we didn't talk so much I don't think that Occupy was political was a theater piece in a way so it's of course about the framing it's of course about this bitbrechtchen idea that you create a situation that you can be inside and outside to observe at the same moment which in a political moment I guess doesn't happen so that's the artistic twist in this so the question would be like yeah is it possible to frame this rally in a way that it would be that you could understand something that you maybe didn't understand otherwise about it is would it be would it be what would be the productive mode and looking at it and I don't know I mean there was so many Milo Rau also did the re-enactment of the he stormed the parliament in Germany that was before the US storming for the anniversary of the Russian revolution and so on so but I personally I never really got the idea of the potential of re-enactment somehow but maybe because for me the this moment of finding out something that I didn't know before was not strong enough what would you find out the structure of it how it could happen which is the context where it happens or there's something maybe also because it has the idea of immersion to a degree at least if you participated and I'm very skeptical about immersive theater in terms of its political terms because I think it's the opposite of what I mean it's like not not looking at it from the outside not trying to understand the structures but but to to relive something so psychologically I understand that you could understand something but I'm not sure that that's helpful this is very interesting because I think of assembly more in terms of Joseph Boy's concept of social sculptures and your reference to the Occupy Wall Street I was there at the beginning of Occupy Wall Street which actually started in Union Square as a student protest against the loans the slavery of student loans and they marched to Zuccotti Park and that was the beginning of just as a reference point also the Burning Man is an example of a social sculpture that I felt could have applied to your assembly was started out of the diggers and then there was a group called the Suicide Society and the Cacophony Society and they formed the went out to Black Rock and formed the early days of the Burning Man but where does my question is where does Joseph Boy's stand in your mind in this? Yeah here's the book in terms of because there's also assemblies of knowledge and then this free university is would be an example for me I think why it's not a stronger reference point for me is that I'm not an expert on boys but this idea of an outside of the framing is not in its concept it's more in a way it's more immersive to a degree it tries to bring people in and then it creates structures but it doesn't have this critical reflection part that I find important in this but maybe I should look more into it it could be that my question is just a follow up to my neighbor's comment and the question but um can you be a little bit more specific if you don't find let's say the reenactment as a productive mode what are so-called for lack of a better phrase this sort of poetic theatrical image speaking figuratively that you'll find in your content of incredible theatrical works that you've described in your book that you'll find most productive, forceful and more subversive meaning modes of presentation I don't know how to better say it in English I guess what I mean is that you know what I was would be interested in your book not so much the acuteness of acuteness of topic or the direct political content that makes the work political but what are those methods that explode that make that theatrical image much more subversive and ultimately political I don't know if that's clear or not I mean there are so many different strategies I mean one that doesn't make maybe makes it subversive but makes it political would be actually really in the form of also how it thinks about the people involved in the work so I think that's one point that how do you create a participation that is not only an artificial hell that is not only just following something that somebody creates for you to be in but what would participation mean as a radical thought and I think these works not necessarily that's not something to be reached it's something to work on or try it out but since you talk about images I would say like the you know style would be a good example for working with images because that's his aim is to in a way to create counter propaganda propagandistic means and to create images and to resist the propaganda machine from the right so I think what he tries in his work with the parliaments or with the New World Summit and so on is to to use image that we think we know so it looks like certain parliaments it looks like certain assemblies but there are certain shifts in there that that maybe are not even visible in the beginning that maybe create a different a different image but also a different way of behavior in there so yeah maybe we'll just pass this back and forth the different parts of the house my question is I wonder if you could speculate on the kinds of pleasure that the art of assembly makes possible of course Brecht talked about pleasure as kind of the highest calling of theater or one of them for the living theater there was a certain affinity between revolutionary politics and libidinal satisfaction or freedom of certain kind but in this era that we're talking about what's enjoyable about assembly not a very German question I know but I'm still curious we don't like to enjoy anything and maybe a reason why I didn't focus so much in the book is because of all the relational aesthetics stuff which was so much on the question of where we cook together which would be a usual answer to that no but I think in a way I think it's for the forms that really create assemblies I think it's quite clear that there's an enjoyment of finding out certain things differently together if you feel that this situation which is not forcing you to follow certain rules and it's not participatory in the way that you have to do things that you don't want to do and so on but where you have a moment where you feel like you find out something together I think that's enjoyable other works are clearly also enjoyable to watch I mean of course they use also as Brecht said they use theoretical means I mean one example in the book is the Church of Stop Shopping and I would say the way of singing and the performance is enjoyable it brings you to something where you're then suddenly in a situation where you maybe think like because first we thought it's about singing and being together and you end up somewhere else so I think there are a lot of strategies of that but maybe it's not the main aim in truly the of political theater to be enjoyable in the first place so that's and especially when it's about situations like well we were pointing at where the world is going with the climate catastrophe with the right raising of the right wing so on one hand of course you need to create situations where you want to be in but I think maybe the question of enjoyment is also less important for me than the question of is it productive is it just you know is it which maybe also would be a question about resistance at the moment so is it is the the horrors we are facing is it repeated and you have situations where you basically can just say like okay I'm paralyzed by fear or is there a moment where you think you can you can engage in it and maybe my reluctance to what we enactments is also the look back so it's more about like how can how can we develop in this situation still ideas of what we do with the future and what kind of future we would imagine I think some of these works try to imagine different futures maybe very pragmatic maybe in small scales or it's not like a completely different world but how could at least a little bit different the situation look like other ways other works maybe try to train for a certain future and and prepare for a certain futures but the but the direction this this in a way has to be the direction and and so yeah maybe this in terms of being productive is maybe more important than being enjoyable for these works yeah I would just say you know even the the the the skepticism or the the the anxiety about assembly just shows us how unpracticed our assembly is and how we have forgotten how to make decisions as a group together we're so we're so far away from our own agency as groups as as collectives that were unable even to imagine doing it so the the simple thing that this kind of theater does is just remind you that you can make decisions together and do things together I mean I think there's something so profoundly pleasurable and beautiful about even with the group of friends on the sidewalk deciding where to eat I mean that's to me that's far more like an indication of assembly than a bunch of people coming to collect free products from a social media influencer which is nothing like my understanding of assembly as an activist or an anarchist like that is consumerism gone haywire that has nothing to do with the urge we have to make decisions together and do something different and we have completely lost our ability to do it as far as I can tell like we're so siloed we can't confront another kind of decision we're so alone in our skill sets that we can't acknowledge other skill sets so it's great just to even contemplate new kinds of assembly or any kind of assembly at this point and then say yeah let's try it and you know it's often a failure we all know that too it doesn't always lead to a good decision or you know something you can move on I mean Occupy Wall Street was full of failed meetings that ended in tears and shouting and exploded social groups and activist groups I mean it was a mess but we remember it and you know there's no question that it changed a lot of things for a lot of people all over the world so thank you Florian for you know bringing these things forward as assembly as as a reflection of that urge to be in a room together talk about the future explore the future and and find a way because our our choice is to to not do that and that doesn't look like much of a choice to me it's a little bit like how we talk about public space if you want public space to be public space go get the fuck in public space don't stay home you know if it looks bad out there go get in it it's on you you know so thanks anyway I like I like the and yeah that that these works remind us that we can assemble it all is actually very good this is the answer I should have given so it seems like a lot of these works share a value system involves pluralism and possibly can be framed as using discourse as a material are there other political principles beyond pluralism or sort of the inherent value of discourse that you feel this particular community of artists share you say they're generally left or liberal are there other principles like Rawlsian justice as fairness or that every individual's viewpoint is just as valuable as any other or can you speak a little bit to the very principles and values of work but I think they they differ with the different artistic work so so this and and my answer would be the obvious some yeah some have a focus on solidarities others would have a focus on conflict others would have a so so I think yeah it's really I think it's rather for me was interesting that that besides that most of them are leftists and at least liberals yeah yes but that they have different approaches to do that and maybe since it's art so I would say the idea of imagination if that's a value is something that maybe combines them that I would say that they have different ways of try to open up certain imaginaries some quite pragmatic and some more flamboyant or more utopian but but this is I don't know if that's a value but that's something they I think they have in common because they are artistic works also and or primarily primarily they all have an artistic approach Thank you so much for the talk and I just wanted to say that I love your podcast Save My Life During COVID I have a question regarding the concept of assembly because we I think a lot of us share a certain kind of value here that we believe in future and we believe that people would take agency to shape the future I want to ask what would you say to the people who would benefit from the concept of assembly but cannot bear the presence either physically or emotionally of assembly Yeah I think it just goes back to your you touch upon the concept of access in assembly I'm just curious about a lot of a lot of people like today we're assembled we're assembled here to discuss this book but for those who cannot be here either physically because of they have class or other like responsibility in their life or just emotionally cannot be here what would you say to that yeah I think that's something that in the book is mentioned about but it's not not really a lot about in there and so I would rather but from from a praxis point of view like we it was a big or it was maybe the major aspect of the last training for the future that you know Stalin died together and in Torino where we really thought a lot about how these assemblies could look like and then of course with different partners and investigating different aspects of that and I think it was that so I don't have an answer I just say that was an interesting journey to really have a three day this three day training camp from the very beginning and with this focus on on on yeah with this focus yeah so I think that's of course a very very important aspect of it at the same time I would say there needs to be more thought on this more assemblies in this regard and on the other hand I would say generally for these assemblies not all of these assemblies are for all kind of for all purposes so I think that that would be also an interesting which which assemblies exclude certain people because they for for whatever reasons out of carelessness or purposely because of the aim of the assembly so that's something that that needs to be further investigated but I think it's it's it's very interesting and it's it tells something that this since the book was finished three years ago how much the like say an awareness curve also in theater for this is just happening so so that if I would write it now for example I would already bring in examples which I which I didn't know of because of my ignorance of course when it was written for five years ago Hi it's not quite a question but this all this talk about reenactments and the limits of reenactments got me thinking about dread scots slave rebellion reenactment which is a reenactment of a slave rebellion that happened in the United States pre-civil war and I find that to be an incredible use of reenactment as a form as a tool and so far as it's both a critique of the kind of reenactments that people dress up as a confederate soldier and as a civil war guy and go to Gettysburg and fight each other for fun in a sort of like to me that's so perverse but then you have this other way of like reclaiming a history that's often untold especially in the United States slave rebellions are considered like something that didn't happen even though they obviously did and this is a way also I think of reclaiming the kind of archival history that's like in between the lines in a sort of Saidiya Hartman sort of way so I guess this is just a little push about the possibility that reenactment as a form could actually offer something productive in the kind of ways that we're talking about an assembly in the kind of way that recovers histories No, I agree that my reenactment bashing was a little bit a little bit harsh and there are some examples that I find super interesting but generally I think without having written and thought too much about it I'm a bit skeptical about this way of trying to understand history so for me I think the contextualization of this reenactment and maybe the shifts in this reenactments would be very important because the idea that I can reenact history I find even if it's for the right purpose I'm generally skeptical about and then it would be but I'm sure something can be done with it where there are twists and frames and so on that take care of that but I have a certain distrust against these ideas even so also the Battle of Orgrey or whatever that I found this was a great word but still I'm also there skeptical about the idea behind it Lauren wants the future not the past so thank you all for listening and I don't have any words of wisdom to finish up with but by the book you've got 10 copies in your bag so if anyone wants to buy it you can be I could have a limited edition signed copy right here right now thank you so much