 in a in a town that is somehow coming back to life. The streets are full. On the other hand, everybody's very, very nervous. And it feels like a little interruption in a civil war where you say, can I go out on the streets or not? Or will I get shot? And we are very concerned, of course, of the new viruses that are coming around. And it puts everything again in question. This fall, as you all know, we focus on writers, on thinkers of theater who have used the time of corona to put things into work, to put it into a form, publish it, getting it out. And today, we have a very, very significant talk, I feel we have with us two guests from Europe. And it is Avra, who comes here with her book Staging, 21st Century Tragedies, Theater, Politics, and Global Crisis. And she comes with Frank here, from who's based at the Humboldt University, who contributed one chapter, but a very significant one and one that really asks us to question everything and to realize the moment we are in, mankind is in planet Earth, is in, because he very strongly feels, as so many others, something is shifting, is changing, we are entering a new age. Very few words about my two friends. But first of all, guys, where are you? What time is it? Where are you now? How are you doing? Avra? Well, I am actually in Nicosia, in Cyprus, and it's 7 p.m. Well, Frank? Yeah, Berlin and 6 o'clock p.m. 6 o'clock. Well, it's evening time there, and perhaps say a little bit ahead of us, and looking at this book that Avra put together with 20 collaborators, she collected essays and also applied actually here from New York, from Kara Melpied, and thinkers. It's quite significant, and perhaps it's closer to the future than to the present, and no longer in a way, in a past that they claim, both say, you know, perhaps something is behind us, and we have to face it. Avra Sidiropoulou is the Associate Professor of Theatre at the Open University of Cyprus, and she's also the artistic director. She is a director also of the Athens Space Persona Theatre Company, and she is the author of Directors, Directions for Directing, Theatre and Methods, and Authoring Performance, the Director in Contemporary Theatre. This also is of significance. Both of them are thinkers. They write theory, but they also work professionally in the theatre, and produce, create, and put place together. Frank Radatz is a German publicist and dramaturg. He wrote about the Great Honour Miller as his dissertation, and published on aesthetics and drama theory. He was the editor of the very important Theatre at site, the publishing house in Berlin. He worked for Lettre International, perhaps one of the leading, some even claim the leading, intellectual magazine that only exists actually in print, and he has taught at many universities, and right now he is the Humboldt University, where he created, together with Antje Boetius and Sabine Kunst, and we come to that later, the theatre of the Anthropocene, a centre dedicated to the research of man and nature, somehow in relation to the very great Alexander Humboldt. Both of you, thank you for being here, and how does it feel? How are things going in Greece at the moment? Well, if I may start. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having us here today. It is amazing to be part of the Siegel talks. This is the third time that I'm joining this very reputable and meaningful series of talks where people actually share their insights about this ongoing pandemic, but not just the pandemic, about theatre and how it feels to be placed in a world that is surrounded by crisis. And it is a very important thing for me today to be able to present this book on crisis, which I think on a personal level, kind of helped me survive the coronavirus pandemic. Things are a little better or very little better until very recently in Greece and Cyprus, and theatres have been fully operational, which is amazing. Nobody knows what's going to happen from now on with a new variant circulating all over the world. And when this really huge crisis of health is going to finally abate, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. How is it in Berlin, Frank? How does it feel? What's the theatre doing? The theatre is waiting for the next shutdown, and because everybody is waiting for Omicron variant, but we have a new government, that's very important. There's a Green Party in this government. There will be some changes in environmental politics. And I think this is a sign that there is a big shift in connection with this anthropocene, and it's just starting. And this will be a very long debate. This is not only a question that we stop with gasoline cars or something like this, because what is in the air today will be there in 120 years. So we are in a process which is a vote for many or for some generations, and perhaps needs 200, 300 years. And this is a big challenge. And I think behind all these discussions on the surface, there is a fear, which is connected because everybody knows in the world now that there is something dangerous, which is ecological threat in the horizons. Yeah. It is a real moment of change of terror. And I feel that all our talks, I feel, are significant and important. This one again, I think, is one of these theoretical talks we had with Mila Rao or Florian Maltzaker, Carol Martin, Thomas Oberhander, Friderick Aitui, and the question really is in this new age, in this new planetary age, Frank, as you call it, the age of the anthropocene, how do we do theater? How do we react? What makes sense in this age that we are entering? We are realizing that our species is not only part of a historical process, as you write, but also part of the history of planet Earth. The planet does not lead us humans, but we do need the non-human life, the plants, the animals, and with Latour and others, you say, we have to change our perspective. National borders don't mean anything in the face of Corona. We are in a new age. And Avra's work, where she said, let me use the time to ask my friends and collaborated people I admire to collect essays into saying, how do we stage this crisis? She calls it a theater of crisis. She's a crisis theorist, if we say it right. How can we look from different viewpoints and create an analysis of performance, of dramaturgy, of scholarly work and artistic work from different groups, different continents, but also different approaches. What does it mean to stage? And is the theater of crisis, how is it connected to the attic, the ancient tragedy? So this is a very, very important theme. I think it's right in the middle of what we have to think about. So Avra, maybe start with you, the term crisis and you write about it. What does it mean? Well, it is a very dangerous and slippery term. And we have to be very, very careful how to use it. But it is essentially a characteristic of the modern times. It is connected to conflict. It is connected to rapture. It is connected to change. And it forces us in a sense to look back to the past and interpret this past and look forward to the future and find a way to channel our responses to what is happening to us politically, socially, in a way that is meaningful for human beings and in a way that makes the world a better place. So there is a very long conversation on how crisis has also been appropriated by different political parties, by all kinds of media formations that use it to create a state of alarm that is not necessarily always warranted. But in a sense, crisis is something that gives us the opportunity to assess the world we live in and create and try to produce paradigms of a better world. And this is what the book deals about from the perspective of the performing arts and how theater can become that lens that evaluates the moment of time we're in and how we can use this moment of time and our perspective about it to think about our world, think about our planet and create choices for us and for the people around us and for communities that can make life better. It's hard to pin it down. Sure, the entire book won't answer it, but also you mentioned it, you said often people think tragedy is seem dated, they seem obsolete, you are looking at it closely, what is your answer? Well, tragedy has a double meaning, it is both an ontological and ontological phenomenon and a cultural and artistic phenomenon. And I think crisis theater, the way I see crisis theater today, 21st century crisis theater, is very much connected to the idea of the tragic because we are going through tragic times. Crisis is intertwined with tragedy, but at the same time the theater of crisis actually has created forms that are very much akin to what attic tragedy gave us in the sense of a chorus and a community of people taking a stance. What I think may feel more obsolete about the attic form has to do more about how the plot is constructed, more or less the idea of a noble hero that goes through a transformation, the idea that there is an explanation for what is happening to us, divine agents and so forth. We are really past that stage in the world we live in, but we can very much use the structures of the communal essence of attic tragedy to inform the theater practices of the 21st century so that they become political again. Yeah, and it really, really does have a place, but we have to look at it carefully and redefine it. It's no longer enough to put on the white linen or whatever was, you know, a white linen sheet and say, I'm doing a Greek play. We have to examine what it is about as, you know, track no date with Dionysus in 69 and actually Frank is asking us to re-evaluate, to look again at the idea of the Dionysian. But Frank, before we come to that, if I understand right, with many, many others say, you say, we are in a radical moment of transformation on planet Earth as societies and in our own personal lives. We are too close perhaps to really realize it. The whole scene, the idea of the man kind that from hunter-gatherer, you know, learned to with long spears, you write about it, you're to hunt in groups, imitated the predators they were afraid of and became this incredible species that invented the steam engine and the telephone and rockets. But this idea of that hollow scene is in a way now coming to an end and we have to look at the world in a different way in the idea of that very new age of the Anthropocene that is entering us. Corona in a way points out that we are in a global context, in a global sphere. We have to live in it, understand it and you say theater has an important part to play. So tell us about that center you created at Humboldt University. Actually, it was the president of the Humboldt University. Just to mention, NYU or Columbia, the president creates this theater center and participates and together with a marine biologist. So tell us what is the theater of the Anthropocene? What's your idea? Okay. I was working as a drama tour at the Berlin ensemble two years ago with Frank Kastoff and Jürgen Holtz. And then I have talking with about the responsibility of science with the way in the Breschen theater, Galilei. We have made Galilei. And in this moment, we are talking with this marine biologist, Antipoetius, who is an arctic researcher and she has a dream that the theater can help her because she has the experience that her voice is what's strong enough to reach the people. And then this idea was to connect art, theater and science under this premise of the Anthropocene. And in the following month and now two years, we make some productions, theater productions about the forest, breaking for a forest. It's a montage, or another is called critters like Donna Haraway is speaking about critters about the animals in the soil. We have now a project of scientists of three Berlin universities about the future of water in the area of Berlin. And we have to create an artistic framework for this so that there is a collaboration now, more usually between natural science and theater. And this was five or four or three years ago, was not thinkable. And the best or the climax was we make this Alexander Eilenach as a director at the Volksbühne, the early post tragedy, but we called Anthropos Tyran, early post, and then it's going on stage. And she is a modern seer. She is reading the future of mankind from a war, ice war core. And of course, you can see, okay, for 800 years ago, you know, 800 million 800,000 years ago, we have this in this conditions. And then the water is five meters higher than today. And so she can make extrapolations and bring it to the future. So we have a very strong connection between old, ancient idea of interpreting the future. And now this modern scientist is the same situation they must give us warnings because they have simulation satellites. And I can say, okay, this will very bad development. So and this is for a new point of view. And there are new combinations now. And I never had thought that in my life, I want to bring scientists on stage, but it works. Yeah, and it works so well. I think you've got the Nesteroir Prize. It's a very prestigious prize in Europe of the best, best production in German speaking countries for your work, Anthropos, Tehran, Oedipus, rework. You nominated for it, but it's just a stunning achievement that something coming out of a university in collaboration was a great established theater and a visionary director. Avra, I don't know if you saw it, the Oedipus from Frank. But you say something is changing and also in the idea of tragedy, if I understood right, that tragedy used it to be in Nietzsche's sense also that you see the human suffering on stage, all the mistakes we make, but ultimately it's life affirming. And you celebrate it. But you say, actually, in a perpetual state where we're repeating and don't seem to come out so that is tragedy giving us a contemporary tragedy? Is that a new message? Is there a new way to think about it? Well, in a sense, I mean, yes, tragedy used to be life affirming, and I'm not sure it can be that at this moment in time. But what we get from tragedy is the sense of communal suffering. I think this is what 21st century tragedy is about, that it is not about the fate of one individual, but it is mostly about how it all comes together in a world that is relevant to all of us. So what happens to me is affecting the way that you live, is affecting the way that people outside of our small circle of friends lives. It is all about globalization. And communal suffering is the suffering of the entire globe at this moment in time. And I think this is where tragedy and crisis intersect, in that they create a structure where everything is and feels interconnected, that nothing can be standing on its own anymore, that every plight, every crisis, every conflict in the world will eventually get to you and me at the end, will not leave anybody unaffected. And it has become very, very clear with the COVID pandemic, when at the beginning of it all, we thought it was mainly isolated in a part of the world that is quite removed from where we are, speaking as a European, and then it infiltrated our lives in the most devastating way. In a way, if you can talk about a silver lining is that it made us all think that unless we act together, we are in for very, very big troubles from now on. And of course, climate change is another, it's the major calamity and the next big crisis that is waiting, awaiting us around the corner. And again, it is teaching us that we have to take collective action. It's not something that one person can solve. It's not Oedipus' riddle to solve or a politician's way to move forward. It's a way for people to come together and make collective decisions. And I think that's what makes contemporary tragedy, in a way diverge from the more ancient forms of it. It's still adapting. If I understand right in the antropos to run Oedipus, Oedipus is us realizing that he has been blind to what he has done to nature, the rape, the killing and how do you deal with that contemporary tragedy of an environmental destruction, a devastation of a landscape like Fukushima. We're going to have Aiko, the great dancer with us next week. We will talk about her repeated travels to that landscape and how she engages with it. Frank, you say that what's called quoting Latour, the Gaia, hypothesis, Gaia, the mother, the mother of all that Greek idea of it, is at the center of this. And the planet Earth has to be the object of observation, the center of everything that should happen in the theater of Anthropocene. So how do you connect that idea of a global view, which is a new one? That famous photograph, the American Astrolux top of planet Earth, the most significant image of the 20th century. Many say that kind of a planetary view, how do you connect that in what you call the rudimentary organ for the theater of the Anthropocene with Brecht? How, where can theater come in and what does it need to do? Okay, so many questions. The first point is I think that now we are entering this planetary age. Yes, because everything what we are doing now as a mankind is refers to the planet and his reactions to our actions. He's answering. He's not dead anymore. In the reading of the Bible, of the nature, it's the non-speaking material. Yes, but it's not a non-speaking material anymore. And therefore, it's like in the old Brecht ancient time, that the planet, the nature is responding. And now we have to learn to articulate what we want, but to react to see what is the reaction. And we see some things are some actions of mankind are not possible anymore. So in this framework, Michel Serres says, okay, the nature is behaving like a subject. There is now a subject. Okay, and then we say, okay, we have subjects on this stage, but this are always humans. There's something between humans and humans. And therefore, we cannot bring it on the stage. But then I say, okay, what I was thinking about, what is the beginning of theater? And this beginning of theater in the tragedy and the origins before are dealing with nature. There are dancing in the spring. Dionysus is someone who can change in animal. Yes, the Dionysian ceremonies are in the spring time and the greening, the god of the theater is a god for the greening of the trees to misrepresentability. And he is dying. He's the only god who is dying because in the autumn, the nature is dying. So we are with a theater very, very close at this planetary rhythm. The Dionysian is a planetary effect or express this planetary effect, which is working year for year. And not because mankind is doing some work and say, okay, nature, let's go, we have to work. Nature does it and mankind in the old theater times of tragedy is improving it with ceremonies on a symbolic field. So, and there we have a point we can connect now. We can say, okay, we have to think how we can, this origins of theater bring in our global times. Yeah. Yeah. And you also point out, you know, there's a shamanistic element, you know, indigenous communities that actually did see their individual life or the life of their tribe, not disconnected from the plans of the animals. It is actually something very, very ancient. You quoted Colote Levi Strauss, you know, who points out that if you bring out the dead, the resurrection of the dead, that kind of Miller vision of theater that they bring the dead out, but they also give something back to them. Yeah. With this new age or with this step we have to do, this has epistemic consequences. Yeah. This means when we see there is a forest and it's a resource, it's an object, then we can deal with it, cut the trees and sell them and so everything, what we are doing every day. But when we say, no, it's an effective power, it's a quasi-subject like who said, then we see, okay, this impact of the forest have an impact on the global climate and this for the US, for China, for Europe, but it can be located in Arizona, not in Arizona, in Amazonia, in Brasilia. Yeah. So we see it's the same thing. If you say it's an object or it's an effective power, it's very, very different. And when we say it's an effective power or something like this quasi-subject, it's like an amuse. It's working, it has a soul, it's connected in another way like an object. So there is an epistemic revolution now with this Anthropocene. And of course, this is for the philosophy of history, the same thing. We are not more in the history of progress. We are not in the end of the history. We are in an absolutely new history, which is not following the logic of progress and the logic of the last 100 or 200 years with all these inventions. And we have to find out what logic is working now and how we can have more ideas because we have in Europe, for example, making all this diffusion in the air, but we have impact in Africa or in other parts of the world, which have no eye industry. So this is now the connections between different cultures in a very how to say, not in a literary way. So yeah, I'm very impressed by that connection you also make with in a way, resurrecting the dead. As Hanamula said, they should get the dead out on stage and then they go back after the performance. The concern for the unborn, for the future life and the planetary view, that is really something of significance and it is overriding, you know, personal ambitions. I think now, you know, theater is putting out new plays, you know, to compete with others. There is, we are facing most serious crisis and theater has to react. Avra, that's how also I read your book. You do ask the question, how does theater represent social and political transformation on stage? And what are the new forms and revised norms you write of artistic expression? You quote, if you have Ostermeyer, I think, Rabbi Moroi, tell me a little bit, where do you see it manifesting on stage? Well, to respond to what Franck was saying about this different logic, I think there is something in progress not being linear, but becoming more of a cyclical thing and reconnecting us to the roots, which I think is also in the heart of interpreting tradition, but also looking to a way of taking future action. And I think that's very much what's happening in political theater, if you can call it political theater, a theater that carries a social and political consciousness today. It is, we often see that a lot of the new productions that deal with the political experience or the experience of communities are actually based on Greek tragedies. And we see a lot of that in Rimini protocol's work. For example, I'm off the top of my head, Prometheus in Athens was this kind of project that brought 103 citizens of Athens on stage to talk about their experience of the Greek crisis at the time when it was stage. I think it was 2010, so at the peak of the crisis. There is a sense that we are both, we're balancing between the interpretation of history and tradition and revising the form to lead us towards a new dramaturgy of the commons, a dramaturgy where the audiences can participate, but also the experience on stage is asking questions rather than providing definitive answers. So we always seem to end with question marks. And I think that is a very different idea of dramaturgy than the one that used to prevail until, well, say the end of the 20th century, where things came to an end. So it is a little bit, I think, a way of connecting the Greeks with Beckett's understanding of cycle and cyclical time and time never ending and things being perpetuated until we find that solution to make them move forward. But it is all about participation, I think, and it is about a different understanding of time as something that is ongoing and something that is connecting past with present and future. I don't know if I'm exactly answering, it's something that I'm grappling with. You also wrote that productions appear that are independent of the sources' textual format, you say, productions give rise to tragic experiences in a way that proves to be independent of the story of the written tragedy. What do you mean by that? Well, I think that sometimes the text is a pretext and what happens around the text and how the actors embody their own experience of loss becomes more important than the words themselves. In my chapter I talk about Borborigmus, a project that really fascinated me when I watched it in Berlin in 2019 by Rabbi Chmrué and his collaborators, which is all about a collective experience of loss and devastation. And it is based on the text that these three creators, Mats Dalany and Kerbats put together. But after the text, the experience of being connected to the sounds they made, the music they played, irrespective and aside from the words they spoke, became so resonant that you didn't really care about the words as much, but you cared about these three people standing up front and sharing moments of extreme personal and political and historical and communal tragedy. So this is sort of the thing that I'm getting at, that it can no longer be about one person's story, that different stories connect to make a collective history on stage, a history that concerns all of us. And it is a political statement, in fact. Yeah, it's a question, I think, Carol Martin, she wrote about Mila Rao, about La Reprise, I think, and she quotes Hannah Arendt and said, who said, tragedy requires sorrow, not anger. Question to both of you, what is the tone of the tragedies? How do they work in that idea, Frank, you also quote Brecht and said, we have to learn from him. You're at the beginning of your essay, you talk about Galileo, that great play of science and theaters together, but now we have to also move on. How should tragedy approach it? What do you think works? No, I can answer it with a very, very right. With Brecht, we have a scientific theater. This was his idea to make the children of the scientific age or something. With the Anthropocene, we have a scientific theater too, but for the children of the side effects of the scientific age or something like this. And now we can say, what is the difference? And we have to explore this. And there is now a connection between tragedy and science. And this is very important because before we separate all these problems, the moods there and the knowledge, the scientific knowledge on the other side. And now we have in a situation to bring, to combine the two grammars of science and of art or theater to create a new form, a new construction of a scientific tragedy or something like this. We have the both moments. We have scientific thinking and we are thinking in this moods categories of this, what was called quasi-subject. It's like a subject. The earth is like a subject. Of course, it's not really a subject to phone him or phone the earth or something like this. But this is now the challenge for the artist to create this new language for the humans on the one side. I would say it's very nice about my text. It's like the polis and the wilderness. And now we have the techno sphere and the planet. And we have to bring it together that is don't exploding us. And then I wanted to talk another aspect by the way. We have now a new role. Yes, a new role because before we was the actor, we were the kings of the earth. 2000 years or whatever. But now we are not only the kings, we are atlas, atlas. This man who have to put the sky on his shoulders because we are responsible for the balance of spheres now. And this is absolutely the new double role. And we don't know in the moment how to fulfill it. And how we should shape it. But it's our time now. I have a before you also follow up question. How important is it that it happens at the Hombald University? You know, someone who also was maybe one of the first to say everything is connected to everything. Nature is a system, the invention of nature. Something go back to him. He created also the Urania and the theater for the science. Are you reconnecting to that old German idea of the enlightenment of theater and science? How do you connect to Hombald University? Yeah, I have some some courses there. And I will give lectures, but I'm working together with some of the scientists. There are scientists networks. And for the scientists, it's a very, very new situation. Yes, I asked some speaker of some network of scientists was an artist before me was here and speaking with you. And he was thinking about it. And then he said, yeah, there was someone who was a geologist. Yeah. And so it was not really different between an artist and other types of interpreting not scientific viewpoints on the world. So it's there. I have some some basement. And of course, it's very, very much easier if you want to make such a scientific theater, let's say in a new type. And you can work together with scientists. And you are close to them. And when you are not when this theater is only a free stage in a free scene, free of scene or something. And so you get impact from the scientists, we give them impact. And we try find out ways to collaborate. Yeah, there are in the first is anti poet. She is very simple. She wants to, to tell the people what she knows. Yes, she was something like calling Wissenschafts her mid lung to, to, yeah, share this, share this information on science. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then there are other scientists who want that the people are speaking about their themes as an example about the water. And then we have to invent new forms of theater to communicate with the people. Because science is not the, the solution. But it's a very, very important tool. And we must, as a society, find the solution. Yes, the science will us not give the solution, but science will us say what will happen, what is possible, what is probably happening next 20 years, if we go this way, we go this way. Yeah, we have to adapt or we will perish. And the question is, how do we perform knowledge? How does knowledge feel like? And how does it feel like to perform knowledge? Avra, you also directed coming back, what do, how do you feel? How does this theater of the Anthropocene, where in a way we can locate also your work, this book, you are part of that movement in your own work on others? What works? What do you think? Is it anger? Is it sorrow? Is it logical? Apollonian arguments? Is it Dionysian ecstasy? What, what do you feel? I think it's about connection and finding always a way to relate to everyone in the room, including your collaborators, including obviously the audience, but also outside of the room, including the world and bringing the world in. So I think it, we can only, I mean, personally, I believe that the only way to make theater that is actually speaking to other people is to connect to your thoughts and communicate your thoughts in ways that relate to other people's pain. So it's not about the isolated incident. It's not about your story. It's about everyone else. So what I think works is to also bring people from different disciplines together. I believe a lot in, you know, creating forms that borrow from science, that borrow from technology, because this is the world we live in. It feels that everything is experienced at the same time. Everything is about simultaneous experiences and consciousness. So you need to have all of that in the room with you, whether it is the visual arts and technology and text and, you know, physicality coming together. You really cannot leave certain aspects of life aside. And that's why theater becomes more and more participatory in a way that it is not just, you know, having immersive spectacles where you include necessarily the audiences in what you make, but you include different experiences that have little to do with literature, as in text, have little to do with movement, but have everything to do with how we experience fragmentation in our daily lives. So yes, you know, observe the world and bring the world into the room and recreate this experience for your audiences and for your artists and the people you work with. Live nothing to chance and live nothing outside. Include, I would say. That would be the word. Connect and include. Yeah, yeah. And you quote Lehmann, Hans-Ties Lehmann, who said, tragedy is a figuration of transgression and it separates the possible from the impossible, you know. How trans-crafted should it be? I mean, we have rebellion, extinction, you know, the urgency which you both are realizing in your work. How can it really be put on a stage? Does it still, does it work? What are you looking for? I think you're going to stage Karen Malpiet's work, the play you chose to include in the volume. Why did you choose this and how are you planning to stage it? Wow. So the play is called Troy II and it is a pandemic play in the sense that it was written during the pandemic, but it also brought different forms of crisis together. It was about the BLM movement. It was about the pandemic. It was about what the New York, but the world at large was experiencing this past two years. So yes, it's a good question, Frank. I think I would like to bring the world into the play in some sense because the play is based on or is inspired by the Trojan women, the Euripides tragedy. And it's in a very, very poetic way. It connects tradition and the lyricism and the clarity of thought of the Greeks to the chaos, the experience of chaos that is very much prevalent in our times. So it plays with different discourses and different languages. We're going to use a lot of technology to try and simulate the sense of fragmentation that technology has brought to our lives, but also the idea of speed that is very, very much at odds with how our natural impulse to slow down and find that clarity that the Greeks were always looking for is about. So what we're going to try and do is connect those two worlds of the past, the remote past and the knowledge and the wisdom that that past or interpreting that past can give us with the frenetic rhythm and the violence that we've been experiencing recently in politics, in our physical health situation, the violence that has been around us, and try to see if there is a way to find some enlightenment in this bridging of the past with the present. I'm very much looking forward to it. It is a question of getting the people together and we're thinking of working with people from the community as well, and not just professional actors, but working with students and working with frontline medical workers just to see how the cities represented and approximate this idea of the demos that was so powerful and dominant in Greek tragedy. Wow, so the pole is the city is part of the production, is part of the creation. So it's not just looking at it, it is part of it. So the local is a little bit more universal as is the global sphere. Frank, also a question for you when you worked with Alexander Eisner as a drama talk for antropos to run Oedipus. What did you guys talk about? What was new? What was the difference if let's say you had done it with Heiner Müller 20 years ago or 30? What is new, what you brought in from that idea of the theater of the Anthropocene? Tell us a bit about your work. There are two points. The one point is that I bring this anthropologist, Arctic researcher with me and I say to Alexander, okay, I will come when you can put her on stage. So he was a little bit surprised by this idea between his very good actors to have this sign speak. And the other point is the viewpoint. You must know that Alexander Eisner writes very much scenes, he's overwriting the old text from Sophocles. And so we have, and he has many much talking with us and this conversation and he brings all this in his writings. So there is a new type of text which does not exist in this form without our talking. But the question is, perhaps you want to know or to ask how we deal with these scenes, with these old tragedies? I don't know. I only can say we have a new point on this. And we must understand that what we are talking about and you are speaking about the deaths and Heiner Müller and that, for example, I bring a text from Gilgamesh in another production. And this Gilgamesh is five or six thousand years old. It takes material and I have read it very long time ago. Heiner Müller don't read it, but Robert Wilson make a play about it, something like this. The Forest, yes. Where I was actually in as an actor. Yeah, yeah. And I don't understand this problem of Gilgamesh. They are going to spirit of the forest. This was the story, the spirit of the forest. And now five or six thousand years later in this connection of the Anthropocene, in this framework of the Anthropocene, this viewpoint, I understand, okay, there it starts. Yeah, it starts and the people are talking about it and they are thinking about it. And now six thousand years later we are speaking about the function of the forest and we have to make campaigns to save the nature on Amazonia or whatever. So this is that we see how the viewpoint changes on the history, on the material, on the text and how it's very important for us to have this old roots, to understand our history and the history of mankind, how it navigates into this Anthropocene, because we don't want to have this Anthropocene. We want to navigate out, but probably we need five or three hundred years. And then I think, okay, this a theater or an art which may be relevant, has to deal with the problems of the time. And it has to look in this abyss of the time and this Anthropocene is a very, very threatening dystopian challenge, yes, for everyone. And now theater has to think how we can deal with your questions. That's how we can deal and we must find it out and we must find it out in a global conversation. We don't can make it from our viewpoint alone. So I bring perhaps a shiny singer in singing about a tree or we have texts from Alexander von Humboldt, but from John Muir, John Muir, who makes those national reservoirs in this Theodore Roosevelt, I not really know this. And so it's very important to bring it in a global framework of a global culture, because we want not, we have to change this culture, therefore we have to communicate. You say the same thing that climate is not stopping at the borders, at the national borders, of course, yes. And therefore we need new ways of communication. We are not one mankind, but we have the same problem over the planet Earth. And we can only can solve it together, I think. This is a new situation and we need very much construction, thinking, artistic research and inventions. And we don't know the way, but we must find it. We must find it. Yeah, I think the corona shock is so great because we are living now in that a new age. It affected everyone globally, it was a shutdown globally. All theaters were closed, something that has never happened. And we have to find answers. You also quote Bruno Latour and his significant work. I liked the Thomas Oberendorff Project Down to Earth, which he named after this. You also mentioned it. Well, they said, let's do outside productions without electricity. How can we do an exhibition or a play about our catastrophic situation, but we have the air conditioning running and the electricity and the computers. So this was one idea I thought is great. We are thinking about maybe doing something in New York City Parks next summer to invite also such productions. But the real question is, how can it be done? And there will be lots of flowers, I guess, on the meadow that will be trying it. And Katania mentioned in her book, she said, I like the idea of birds flying in early spring. That there will be lots of approaches. Avra, you collected 20 voices. I know we dedicated a lot of time to you guys, but you guys are here and Brexit built the house with the stones you have. And I thought that was important, of course, to have you here. But maybe give us a little inside. What are the other contributions you thought they are so significant? I would like to include them in my book. Thank you, Frank. I'm very, very pleased to do so. If you can allow me to read from my notes, just to do justice to all the chapters, I will be very brief. But I don't want to leave anybody out. All right, so some chapters analyze the theoretical underpinnings of crisis as reflected in the subject matter of 21st century plays. The volume opens by Yana Merson's tragedy and crisis, staging force displacement and its reluctant hero, which explores the theatrical devices that theater uses to approximate the reality of force displacement offstage to the one evoked as fiction or otherwise on stage. Anna Fernandez Caparos in her essay. And this is just to say she has any baker in there, right? And Lin Nottage to write to us. Yes, yes. Yes. I mean, the one I'm going to discuss. Yana uses three examples of plays. That's fine. Yeah, but that's yes. But so Anna Fernandez Caparos in her essay tragic and post tragic representations of precarity in 21st century US drama fractured togetherness in Lin Nottage's Sweat and Annie Baker's The Fleek uses the notion of precarity, which conceptualizes a novel condition stemming from a distinctive phase of capitalist development associated with neoliberalism to examine two major Pulitzer Prize winning American plays that someone workers lives onto the stage and engage with precarity in different ways. Costandina Ziropoulou, a colleague from Greece delves into some of the prevailing themes and formal aspects of contemporary Greek dramaturgy. Her chapter is entitled How Many More Thousands of Years, dystopia, otherness and the Greek crisis in the work of three contemporary Greek dramatists. This work covers a wide range of topics linked to the Greek crisis such as unemployment and the dire working conditions, the large inflow of refugees followed by outbursts of nationalism, poverty and social inequalities, violence and state corruption. There is a wonderful chapter, Modern African Drama and Crisis, two African authors in search of identity by three co-authors, Tygoo Afolabi, Steven O'Gena Ruro, O'Kpadah and O'Gah Mark One, which engages the notion of crisis to explore ways in which contemporary 21st century African playwrights are grappling with prevailing ontological realities on the continent. The essay argues that one preoccupation of theater of crisis is a continuous question around identity, power and finding voices to speak out within neoliberal realities. Now, two of the book's essays trace how popular plays of the dramatic canon are renegotiated through the lens of crisis. One of them is Living the World Good or Living a Better World by Aldo Milokhnic, which analyzes Brecht's response to the social and economic crisis during the transition from the 1920s to the 1930s concentrating on Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and then focuses on a potential post-Brechtian response to the present, a time which is defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as economic, ecological and global disasters. Silvia Bilacic's Caesar Must Not Die, Italian political Caesars in the New Millennium, discusses the possible ways for Italian theater to approach the topic of Caesar and Caesarism via Shakespeare in the New Millennium when a widespread right-wing resurgence once again raises questions of hegemonic crisis, collective forms of intolerance and in need for strong authoritarian leadership. Other academic essays elaborate on the work of directors and theater ensembles for whom crisis is not just the prevalent thematic concern, but is also compositionally present in the mise-en-scène. In Profet's Needed, Five Easy Pieces and La De Prise Histoire du Theater by Milo Rao, Carol Martin discusses how Swiss director Milo Rao's modern tragedies reject the off-stage violence and heroic protagonists with fated outcomes typical of Greek tragedy. Rao revisits tragedies arising tensions, climax, catharsis, unified plot and resolution, but unlike Aristotle's tragic hero of noble character, his tragic protagonists argues Martin are common men and women and meshed in a tragic mythos with endless mutations and there is no suspension of disbelief, no catharsis. Treating Milo Rao's work from a different perspective, if Freddy the Cruces chapter theater remains traditionalist and Eurocentric about Milo Rao's theater of crisis, examines the principles upon which Rao's political activism is based while asking why Rao succeeds in giving new meaning to the tragic climate that hangs over recent times. I've spoken a little bit about my talk. To touch up, he has this term of global realism, which is very interesting, that he says what is emerging is a global realism. Carol Martin's idea of the theater of the real, but this kind of idea of a global realism, Milo Rao just staged in Switzerland, I think, another just this week, another trial against the Swiss company exploiting Congo and a huge data lack of Swiss world news came into it, but go on. Yeah, so I talked a little bit about my chapter beyond suffering or resolution tragedy in the 21st century collective experience, which reads forms of theater practice through the lens of modern tragedy, both evoking and reformulating the Aristotelian sense of tragic. My chapter draws on Thomas Ostermeyer's production of Edouard-Louis' history of violence and on Borboregmus that I talked about by Irabih Mruhe. And it looks at modern tragedy as a performative form that reveals the quote apprehension of a common human vulnerability, and this is quoting obviously Judith Butler, and stimulates an awareness of the social and ideological context that aggrandizes it. The volume sympathies on theater making processes that articulate major global calamities from within. And on the performance of crisis as an experience in which the audience can partake, I talked a little bit about that, is made manifest in the discussion of contemporary performances of protests and resistance, which may be indebted to tragedy. In Marca Espana making theater from precarity, state violence and fiesta, Anna Contreras analyzes the aesthetic paradigms regarding themes, forms and artistic processes that emerged in Spain after the 15M revolt of 2011 and sets out to relate an overview of Spanish theater in the last decade from feminist, decolonial and anti-capitalist perspectives and a geopolitical delocalized position. In theaters assembly, radical dramaturgy in theater commons, Uchino Tadashi introduces Florian Malzahir's notion of theater as assembly and then goes on to look into an alternative Japanese form of this concept in which after a complete neoliberalization and depoliticization of the cultural sphere, the other, the more humane kind of exploration has been emerging. Now, I have to say that I'm really, really indebted to all our international collaborators because they brought this global perspective to the volume. And we have people from Lebanon to China, Germany, Venezuela, Spain, Greece, the United States, both academics and artists that came together to give us their own perception of how the world feels in their part of the world. Right now. And in a way, it is also what Frank writes about the planetary view, what you also have there in that book. It's a planetary view as our seagull talks, in a way, we're a planetary view on the state of the world, the Weltzustand. I was actually quite inspired by the talks and believe it or not, they did help me formulate the structure of the book in a significant way. So thank you. But I will say that a little bit about our artists collaborators. And I will start with Hanan Haj Ali, who is an award-winning activist from Lebanon. In cards of identities, poetic luxury, she uses a first-person narrative perspective to illuminate profound issues of national and political identity that continue to challenge artists and citizens of a country severely affected by manifold and prolonged crisis. In a different chapter, I.D. of a country's living history, Lupe Gerenbeck, an author and director from Venezuela, poetically traces the way in which her engagement with the theater communities in her native Caracas has consistently addressed some of the country's relentless social and political predicaments. So again, there is a very strong coming together of politics with... Yeah, she was at the Segal Center, we once had her as a guest. And then there is an interview that I had the joy of conducting with Daniel Vetzel, founding member of Rimini Protocol, that interrogates the interweaving of the artistic with the political. Vetzel elaborates on socially and politically minded work that often enters the public sphere and celebrates an openly agonistic agenda, manifesting notably participatory, immersive and of course, documentary practices. In chorus and crisis in the contemporary United States, Peter Campbell discusses three of his recent works that address the political potential of contemporary choruses as they both embrace and reject the virtuality of the masses that dominate our mediated world. And he looks at contemporary crisis of collective voice and the diminishing of a politically viable contemporary policy. Ernestis Azaz, a theater practitioner from Greece, and Souk Siao Gang, a Beijing-based actor and director, talk us through the challenges of creating theater during the COVID-19 pandemic in theater and COVID times, a report from Greece, and all is related to me, respectively. Following a visionary approach, Miguel Rojo and Javier Hernando of the Spanish Ensemble Los Bárbaros have compiled a list of imaginary plays that could help us process the anxiety and loss incurred as a result of the pandemic in an essay entitled Place, Parenthesis We Didn't Do to Survive a Worldwide Crisis. Of course, Frank's chapter that brings to the fore the crisis of the environment has been, I hope, adequately analyzed here. And finally, the collection's farewell piece and the poignant nod to the future of humanity is Karen Maupid's original short pandemic play, Troy II, that I also talked about, which illustrates the interconnectedness of modern crisis, COVID, climate, and racism. And this is what the book is about. And of course, I put everything into a very concise form, but it is beautiful to see how all these people who were suffering at the time when the book was being created gave their unique voice and really walked us through different, very different forms of crisis that all felt totally connected in the end. And I'm grateful to them. I'm grateful to everybody who took part in this. Yeah, no, it's a fantastic resource and also a document, an archive of the time that Planetary View also, Milo Rao put out that Y Theater where you ask theater artists around the world to write statements. It is a big, big work ahead. Frank, a question for you. Are you hopeful that theater will have that impact or do you think it will be on the streets? Manifestation is a people, as Camus said, sitting at home reading a book. Will it be film industry? Do you think theater is at a center of that sort of movement or is it part of it? It's a part in each case. But I think there is a possibility that it can be very powerful. Especially in Germany, where theater has this much big houses and much money. But we have first must develop new forms which are in another way theater, which we don't can see through today. There is the idea to make theater in the landscape or to connect in another way with nature. I think it's very important what is the task of the theater. When we look at animals, at plants, at everything in the nature, we think, okay, this is the reality of nature. But we know that if we are in an ancient time, we will look in another way on a river because there is a god of the river. And then if we are Christian people, we look there and we know there is no god in this river. And when we look with the eyes of René Descartes or some others, we say, okay, how we can change this river to make it productive. And now when we look with the eyes of the Anthropocene, we see, okay, this is very difficult with this river. Tomorrow it can kill us or he's full of poison whatever. So I want to say behind our viewpoints, there are many, many history decisions and we must must put them on the surface. We must understand that we in a way cultural relatives, this is a relativity. And that there is no in this sense reality, but there is many sediments of culture, history and see it as to bring it out to bring it on the surface. So that we that is like a theory of alienation. Yes, that they say, okay, what we think what is normal, what is naturally in reality, it's historical and people must bring this historical attitude to nature on the stage, that we understand ourselves better, and then we can better navigate or make decisions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it says. Nature is absolutely artistic, because in the nature is not one complete thing. It's always a process of many, many decisions in the nature too, and development. And of course, in our cultural history, it's the same thing. And we must try to bring it together or we will fail. Perhaps it is a hope that that theater can play a new role, perhaps gain additional meaning. It has lost perhaps in the pop culture of the significance compared to television film and music. And I think it's perhaps a way back door, as Kley said, the way back into paradise. There might be a door open and that theater can help us to at least see it experiencing and to experience it. I remember us talking about Humboldt and theater and Goethe that Humboldt and Goethe were friends. And I think before Humboldt went on his long three or four year Latin American journey where he then wrote his entire life about and he also I think had a planetary view. He wrote about the cosmos as well as about the plants and the beetles and everything. And Goethe said to him, and you can list up all the stones with Latin names in alphabets and put them in boxes. You can give names to all the plants you find and dry them and bring the leaves. People will not understand what nature will be in Chile, where he thought it was the, he thought Latin America was the center of the earth. He said, people will not do it. You will have to describe the sunset or the sunrise, your view on the forest and Humboldt became the first travel journalist in a way and invented that idea of nature. And I think theater may also be something that connects that scientific discoveries and the real of the world, but in a way that mankind will understand connected, feel it and perhaps that is also a Buddhism thing. I really would like to thank both of you. Yeah, please. And he discovered the principle, the principle now of the Anthropocene because he said everything is connected to everything. And that's now exactly our problem now. That we don't can separate the spheres and the landscapes and everything. So we must learn with this systematic view or systemic view to describe our reality. Yeah. And there has to be a symbiosis or there will be a death as you quoted Michel Ceres and I think that is a very serious crisis and I think also we all in the theater have to acknowledge that and we have to confront this terrible, terrifying, tragic state of the world and we have to bring it on the stage and communicate it. This is how you say it's very heavy stuff, heavy scenes and we need a place for this heavy scenes. This is not the pop culture or in the TV. This is not a TV stuff. This is really tragedy, pathos, people is everything, but we are dealing about our future and the future of our children. And this is a very, very difficult situation for the whole mankind of the globe. And so we have to deal with it in a new way to handle it. And I think as artists and theorists of theater we have to learn to prepare ourselves and prepare our readers, our audiences to transform ourselves and themselves. We have to be open for this transformation that the new theater will allow in order to move forward because yes, this is very heavy stuff and these are very difficult and dangerous times we live in. And we must make a point of changing because honestly that's the only way forward. Yeah, yeah, it is really interesting. Also, Heiner Moller said using Brecht without criticizing him or putting it in a new form is treason. I think also theater people have said now producing theater without having that kind of a galactic global view is treason to the great basic idea of what art and civilization has been or should be. And we have to engage with it and also interpret the classics in a way that is respectful to this new shocking realization of the Anthropocene age which we entered. And I agree and I think we have to relook at it in this little way out. Dionysus Reloaded as Frank said, you know, there is something that we have to adapt to. We're going to have Aiko, the Japanese dancer who is based in New York who created that book, A Body in Fukushima with us where she will deal, she's dealing with a result perhaps of that apollomial or more theoretical age for 800 years or 1,000 years that landscape will be contaminated. People will not be able to get in and she went into a demarcation line where you could go in or not that is surged railroad stations, the stores, the streets where the grass is coming and where the concrete is blooming. And so we will also see the seriousness again of this. We had fantastic writers with that Bonnie Moranca, Teresa Smalik on Ron Ward or Alexis Green, Ms. Emily Mann, Kary Perlov and Katanjou, great to work us in the theater who perhaps in this Holocene age, in the Golden Age of theater, created work for decades and interpreted this theater as it was needed for the time. But now we have that new age coming in and that was, I thought this book is so important as highlighting this and Abra was also a Segal Center scholar that we knew each other. So I think it's an important comment and should be taken seriously also as the concept of it itself. So thank you both to our readers. I hope you have listeners. We have time for next Monday, December 20th to join us with Aiko who's in Japan. She actually flew to Japan and sits still in a hotel room. I think it's 14 days of quarantine before she can come out and she will talk about her work. Her little ASA is a beautiful writing about that shock, that Fukushima catastrophe and I think also Richard Shackner is here in the program quoting a friend that what we are looking at now at the time of Corona, a nuclear reactor explosion, but the roof is off. We look at inside in real time and we have to react and we have to prepare us as we said and also our audiences and future generations of it and we have a responsibility as theater artists. So thank you both. Thanks to HowlRound for hosting us at Abra. I apologize, it's impossible to get it all in from your book and Frank, your center alone, your initiative is worth three talks and I hope maybe there will be ways of collaborating or bringing you over here once it's possible and it's easier. We still don't know if we will have public programs next spring. It looked yes, but now we are very worried. Cornell University, 900 students got infected just two days ago or three days ago. They got closed on the entire campus. So we don't know what really will happen, but I'm proud that we are part of that global sphere and that we exchanged and our ideas is very important to hear from you and to HowlRound. Thanks to Vijay and to Thea for hosting us and to our listeners who stuck with us and also was listening to all the contributors and their names and what they wrote about. It is important and if there's ever a time in the time of Corona perhaps we listen a little bit more so we can hear better. Thank you all and thanks again to everybody who tuned in and one day we'll all see each other, Frank and Avra and over a cup of coffee, a lunch and keep us and things in mind. Bye-bye, thank you. Thank you, thank you so much. Stay safe, bye-bye.