 I am delighted to pick up our culture rock series, which are two sessions, just for this weekend. And it's going to be, it's going to be, so put together, I'm just going to give this a little bit by Andy Forrest, who's kind of founder of CultureBot Arts and Media, and he's going to be more about it on your program, and actually a fantastic website, CultureBot.org. But Andy and I, and the Festival Service, we just got four or five years ago. Really, because, you know, you're here at the festival, you know. It's a great festival that's happening right now. It's a great festival to be a team. But really, it was about having a conversation about not just seeing the work, but how the work is made, how the work is received, who is making it, how they're making it, the business of making it, how they're translating it, who's performing in it. Like, how do you get all of these things? We thought that it would be just important to start that conversation going in the context of the shows, the festivals, the festivals, the shows that's going on. Just to sort of sit down together and just have a conversation about why we do what we do, how we do what we do. So I'm just going to have to give it up to Andy, and thank you all, and all of you here. Oh, we are also being streamed on HowlRound.com. So if you don't want to be streamed, I'm sorry. Yeah, actually, hi, Andy. Thank you, Megan. And I'm just going to get up for just a second. I also want to thank Megan, and I want to thank Mark for wrestling with me. Thank you very much, Bob. I mean, it's just cultivar would exist without Mark. He made it possible for me to start it. I work for him at PS1.2, and I'm ever grateful for that. Also, we did work together this year to put some writers sort of embedded in the festival, and you can read their writing on both CultureBot and under the radar website, and it's something we hope to continue as to this sort of like ongoing contextual material related to the festival. I know this is super annoying, but I'm going to do it anyway. Why didn't they want to come down here? Because one of the things we've been doing over the past couple of years is going to do formats that aren't quite as formal and stuffy as normal. And this year, we're going to have this wonderful talk show set, which I was hoping I could get to do the talk show most of the time. And just come on down and give a close... Thank you. So today we're going to talk about... What I'd like to do is sort of start with just sort of... We'll introduce everybody really quickly and have them introduce themselves. You know, very briefly just sort of like name. Because I have everybody's files on here, etc. They also need to be done close to that. It was a last mix of shuffling of emails, and you didn't know how fast it was. But then I think we'll do some talking up here. And then we'll just open up for questions and open up the conversation a little so we can actually have a more participatory type thing. So all right. So I'm Andy, and I'm the founder of Social Media. We'll start here. So everybody can introduce yourself. So people know who you are. You can read more of their files. I'm Andrew Adler. I'm the founder of the Media Outlook from St. Paul. That's it. We're representing you. Thank you. I'm Katie Gubbald. I'm the founder and producer of The Play Company. Thank you. I'm Gail Rathenberg. I'm one of the founders. I think I actually use the company's space to fill it out. I'm Abby Brownie. I am the co-director of 600 Thai Women's Basic Area. I am a translator. I'm here. I'm here also. I am Edwin Masch. I'm a freelance director. I'm here to operate. I'm Doug Powell. I'm the co-founder and executive director of New International Theater Experience. And I am Henrietta Sophie. I'm based in Buenos Aires. I'm here this year. And I'm so excited. That's right. It's very selfish of me, but every year I get to do this just to invite a lot of people that I hear so it's awesome to get to talk with them. So that's great. The sort of main, and I remind about this from a bunch of different perspectives, but I'll start with this question of context, actually, which has arisen a lot from the past year so it's seen different work. And the work of the people assembled here and then just sort of throw it open. I think when Dan and I worked with Kate on Okada in Joy, and the last tortoise piece, there's this... It's very interesting because you have a close relationship with him, and if you're very close, it's just sort of aesthetic, I think. So I think there's this question of sort of how you as individual theater artists respond in his work and think about the way you're putting it on for English-speaking audiences in translation. That's one piece of the puzzle. I saw a book with Charity. I really want to speak Portuguese now. And I thought it was very interesting because I don't know that it was made necessarily with the idea of being in other places and I'm quite curious to sort of think about how that process happened. I'm also very curious about there seem to be little signs in there that, you know, like the Polish thing, like is that random or is it because I've actually had people say, oh Polish, what do these have to... I'm very curious about that. Mariano, I've seen a couple of three of your pieces and also the video screen piece that pushed. So I know that you've thought quite a bit about or not only made it at home, but how it will translate into the world. So I'm really curious about how that decision-making process happened. When you work, when you did a piece in programming, did you use local... I'm like tour the record, it's all local. So you're literally re-making the work with the people on the channel. So I guess maybe if we can start here and we'll just go down and sort of like, how does the idea of... which is the start of something... how does this idea sort of play? For you, did you go ahead and start as a local project specifically for where you are? And then what did you think about as you wanted, as it started to go out into the world? Yeah, I'm a little shy to start, but... I think it was made to... it was made to some probably... it didn't have the idea that we could travel and it's from our blades, it's the one from our shoals, it's the one who travels most. It's surprising because it's a very text-based piece, I think, and you have... in Portuguese you have a very clear connection with the sound of words. So sometimes what you see at a local who has been in the show, but when you listen to something here, you see something here and you listen to something that's outside. So you have a sound connection, a language of text, the lines are connected. The cues of one square of the scene, one piece of the scene, are related to another one. So it's a very text-based, so it's very surprising that we have a lot. So that's why we use tricer titles and the audience can see the tricer titles. And it's very difficult to translate because we... the show is all based in the actors' memories and my memories. So we have real things that have very contextualized things about their lives, about Brazil. It's not about... not only about the history of their intimacy, but also the history of Brazil that we have 80 years in history there. So you can see the time changing and what changes in Brazil too. So the popular references that are in the show, it doesn't make any sense sometimes, but it has a very strong connection with the collective memory in Brazil. And what I think that happens in other countries is that something that we didn't expect that would cause some kind of reaction are very different with the collective memory of the collective memory of each country we are traveling to. For instance, we talk about the Second World War in a very brief moment and we are a country that hasn't participated in any war. We don't have this history. We are a country with no almost... We have a very weak relation with our memory. And that's one of the reasons that I was made in the show at that time. I wanted to talk about memory, how we relate to memory. We have a very recent dictatorship in Brazil that we are going to dictatorship for 25 years now at most, I think. And we don't talk about it at work. I think it's very difficult. We are very close to Argentina and they talk a lot about their dictatorship periods and I think that's important with the collective memory. They have something to sow and the way we deal with it is to forget we forget it and we go over and the pretend it's not happening and now we are in a moment of very rights to the rights. We are walking to the rights in Brazil in several aspects. So I think that's related also because we don't have this kind of memory. So when we travel to Europe for instance, I was talking about this memory. Instead of us, they are attached to the memory, I think. So they have this feeling of memory. So when we talk about this little joke we do about the Second World War there, it's very huge for them because they see the whole history, the capital age history in the lack of a father that's seen on the play. They can connect to different ways. When we talk about the Polish in Europe, when we talk about the Polish in plays because one actress, her mother is Polish. We had a lot of immigrants in Brazil and we talk about this in shows and how and we talk about this and it is just for that we don't have this kind but when we presented in Holland for instance they have a very xenophobic relation with Polish. So it was very strong to and everybody talked about this. Another thing that's very different in Brazil is that we have one relation, one of the scenes, it's about a maid and the owner of the house and that's a very common relation in Brazil yet. We have very many that are raised together with the family and are almost slavery, I can tell and that's not common in Europe anymore or here I think. It creates a little disturbance to the audience to watch this. What was your question? I think you've answered it very well. You were talking about some of the things that are, especially because you say you built the work with your ensemble and a lot of it comes from their memories and that so it was really built in Brazil with Brazilian actors very specifically to sort of cultural symbols and references there and how it changes in this environment. One of the things that I love to come back to at some point in the conversation that we had was this idea of memory and how memory and how something was very powerful in the piece and I think it raised a lot of questions but I think it's something that physical objects and stories and most memory I think all of us were in the distance of where the art maybe theater somehow engaged with memory and how memory sort of persists over time related to physical objects for non-physical things. So actually since you mentioned Marianna since I know that we actually have that but I know Marianna has to leave to go work on his show so I want to throw the ball over to you and tell us a little bit about you know your experience of making work in Argentina and bringing it out into the world and what do I have to do with this? Yeah well I started to produce performances around 2002 in Argentina which was the moment of our most economic crisis and I had the impression I mean there was a lot of riots on the street and I had the impression that what was going on on the street was far more interesting than what we were producing on the inside of theaters so the first impulse was to go outside in the street for performances not specifically related to the political or economical situation at the time but somehow to place our fiction in the context of the reality and to see how much our fiction was transforming the reality and how much the reality was having an influence on our fiction and I think that since that experience also my stage performances has taken this idea of the local context where the play is taking part has an influence on the story of the characters and how much their own histories are transforming the big history of the plays thinking about seeing us as filmmakers the play that we are presenting here I remember that at the beginning I started the play making a series of interviews to me of the makers in Argentina to learn about their own experience their personal experience by creating fictions I was interested in to see how much of their personal experience was present on the films and how much to produce that specific fiction was transforming their private life so somehow I have the impression that it became a sort of fictional portrait of a city not through the real life of the three habitats but more through the fictions that they produce in a certain time frame so that means that there is a lot of local references besides the pieces it's more focused on our universal relationship with fiction and how much we are all building fictions all the time and how much we all live our experiences according to the fiction that we have been consuming from the beginning of our life besides that it is extremely focused in certain local aspects of what it means to produce fiction in the Argentina context so it's always tricky for me while presenting the play abroad what to keep and what not to keep so you change it depending I don't change anything that was the answer it was mainly a discussion if I had to change something or make an adaptation and then I decided I want I would just present it as we did in Buenos Aires because besides we have been doing quite often in the last five or seven years and we are aware that our world might be also presented in an international context we decide a conscious not to think about that too much and to keep on producing basically for Buenos Aires and then well to see what happens when we contrast that performance with the local audience and of course there might be a lot of subtleties or small cultural references that might get lost in translation but I have the impression that still the main experience it's there it's fun while presenting the play here how much or how many American influence we have of course in our culture and there is a lot of references that here it has well they have another meaning we have a scene where Barack Obama appears in the play which of course in Buenos Aires it has certain meaning and here it will be different there is a lot of references to American filmmakers as well and the experience that I had changing the stories or changing the content of the work was with a site-specific performance that we did in the past which was called La Maria which was a site-specific performance that we did in Rio Street with 16 local actors and small scenes which look like ordinary life situations and people are like to change the stories and historical references or the political backgrounds of certain characters but just because the idea was to keep the audience the feeling that they were spying to the people of the city where they lived in and also there were a lot of work with local actors so it made more sense to change the stories and I think some sort of hybrid or like comedy of West Virginia West Virginia when talking about the fiction and transforming reality for the first time really I think for me that sort of the process of cineostasis actually or that question as it's explored in cineostasis related to the piece that I saw in Bush in public writing it was called Sometimes I Think I Can See You Sometimes I Think I Can See You and it's a piece that Mariano created where you find local writers to sit in a public space with laptops and their writing is being projected in this public space and they are creating, they're not getting really I don't know, can you talk? I guess there seems to be a linkage about sort of quoting cineostasis and it affects the personal life and it affects real life and it's a two-way conversation and then similarly in Sometimes I Think I Can See You and the sort of loop on that question of the tale that I'm going to share is because what we've done is sort of developed another strategy for creating the same question in different places so one is a fixed play and one is a theatrical performance situation in public space I'm just sort of curious do you see those as links? Yeah, it was not something that I planned in advance but it's true that there is those concepts that are coming back and forward in different formats and with that specific play that you mentioned I was interested in this idea to sort of tackle the reality so the writers are basically working as a sort of literary surveillance cameras in a specific place and they are inventing stories of the people that they are watching and all the fictions that they are building they are presenting, you know, live on the moment so it's like well there is a lady waiting for the train she's thinking about kicking herself or whatever so the interesting moment for me when each person realized that there is somebody else writing her or his story there, a possible story, not the real story because it's what the writers imagined and again it's this idea of how much we can be transformed by fiction plays in public context and also how much that real context is changing our fiction because for the writers it was this sort of godlike situation where we write everything that they want of people but on the other hand they were really forced to write just what they were watching on the moment so they had to write about that first it was very, I mean I have to say when I was sitting there having coffee they realized they were writing about me it was just very comparable and it really I think proposes some very interesting possibilities of how theater artists made theater happen they can explore I don't think people always think about theater artists maybe exploring similar ideas in different ways all the time and not thinking just plays that happen on stage and asking questions and I just I think it's really interesting and to that end I might ask Abby about 600 highwaymen I know that this great country was made in Austin pretty specifically and then I feel like I don't know about the record that I made specifically for here so what was it that you worked a lot with sort of a base of training performers and you know civilians how has that sort of as you've sort of gone out into the world how has that a lot of the choices I think some have come from deliberate vision and some have come as accidental like what I was saying is like in advance and the piece sort of takes on a biology of its own you know the record just as a little exposition is a project we did it here last year under the radar and it's for a large group of performers around 40 or 50 people and we work with each of these people completely individually it's a large choreographic dance piece and they perform it together and they don't meet in advance we are touring the work and none of the performers tour with the work we cast locally wherever we are so we just did it this summer in Holland and we'll be doing it this coming year several places around the world so the thing that started that piece was not oh we're going to make the show where we go wherever we're going to travel with it and we're going to do the same first of all that was like a company growth thing we didn't have touring opportunities at that point when we came up with this idea the thing that the seed that really started it was can we make a show for a large body of people who don't meet beforehand and then once we were making the show then we were invited to do it here under the radar and then we made it a larger ensemble and then when the opportunity came up to tour it it was like a split second like how are we going to tour the show if it's going to be on the plane and and it means that the performance there then becomes a bit of reflection of place the casting process is a way of looking at the seed that you're in so the New York cast looks very different from the Dutch cast shall we say and the French cast will also be very different and it means that the act of putting on the show and the barn raising of making a play becomes a very shared event between Michael myself Michael Spank has been the co-director of the company and the performers but also then the performers and how they reflect their town back to their town and he was referring to another piece of art in this great country which is an adaptation of Death of the Scalesman and we made it originally in Austin, Texas at the Feesbox Festival and then brought it up here to the River to River Festival and in the process of doing that didn't bring up the entire cast we brought up a few people and then we recast the rest of the show with New Yorkers that again was like that was budgetary I mean I think if we were talking about the Texans we probably would have done that and that's what I mean by a backdoor crafting of a project that's more the logistics and the producing of it actually become a part of the artistic vision because then we built the show with a mix of Texans and New Yorkers and it turned into a whole little thing because it became about place again it became about us being here in this moment even if some of us are from Texas and some of us are from New York So two questions I would love to follow the spread I don't know if you're interested about how the production and budgetary and logistical voices in effect what pans up in the show because that's a huge thing that we'll talk about a lot but also how if anyone's ever phrases for Coppola we're just talking about this where are you? Hearts of Darkness this is incredible documentary about his wife was filming and recording and it's amazing to watch him basically like go insane and lose control of the production process but keep fighting to go through and then he somehow finds all the disasters and mistakes documents everything comes back to Hollywood and makes one of the greatest movies of all time whereas being able to sort of use the hardships and the mistakes and the disasters to create great work but anyway is there a conscious thought in your casting choices when we talk about cineasas and also even the set construction and the way you constructed that you were sort of proposing we have to go, sorry you're all sort of proposing to the audience that they actually look at things in a different way and you're showing it I don't want you to look at it you're asking different questions I don't know what these pieces are I felt like with the record specifically you were kind of saying look at all the people and we're making this cool sort of like moving tableau different types of people so in a way you're also theatrically asking a very different question and inviting the audience to have very different relationships so is the casting a part of how you think about constructing this? Absolutely, we didn't actually finish making the choreographic score of the whole thing until we had cast everyone for the first time that we did it in New York when we did The Invisible Dog we had some ideas of how it would look and then we had to get at that point it was 35 people okay now we can make the score because I can picture David has to come down here and then Stuart has to come down and they should have this interaction and then they should go away and we should get these people together and oh it should be actually we should have that person in because that is more exciting to see them standing together than just those people so I guess there's a surface element of how you're looking at people and you mentioned that we tend to work with diverse groups of people so those backgrounds that are in trained in theater and dance but also not or in other kinds of performance or not and putting these people together I think that the record in particular has so much because there's no text in it and the score of the piece has a very minimalist hand to how it's constructed it really is about the people who are performing it and so a lot of it is about giving those people the proper computer and then getting out of the way and letting the audience see them and I think that the Death of a Salesman project is different because that's actually while there's a similar it's a similar entry door so it's all about these people who are doing this thing there's another beast in the room which is Arthur Miller's story and so it's about actually getting out of the way seeing these people and seeing them have this thing for dinner so I want to do moving from sort of the visual to the text that sort of and I want to sort of propose now to Aya, Kate and Dan some questions about working with Okada's text and then with you guys actually working with Okada Toshiki Okada is a very well esteemed Japanese playwright probably the most important playwrights I don't know and I don't know how much I'm curious, I don't know how much of a relationship you guys have, like with Happy and Joy and the text that you've been sort of working on and then how when you actually went to work on Okada then you were actually collaborating as part of the sort of first play which is encountering through text and then there's sort of moving into collaboration and how that works and then I want to talk a little bit about that if you guys could share I'm told I have so far translated something like a dozen of Toshiki Okada's plays and I first encountered him because I spoke with the Japan Society and my boss I really wanted to bring his company to the United States but he was like what my work would never be understood outside of Japan because he's really he was like really putting up a mirror to his society he was working very much about the government dealings going on right now with a certain ego like the landscape of Japan and he didn't even really think about how that might be interesting or even translatable to another to another culture so and Yoko at that point put me on this project and being a playwright myself and also the same age, the same generation as Toshiki kind of really helped to ease that translation process because I had a relationship with my generation of people in this country as he does in this country and I'm also familiar with what he's referring to in this place so you know the process of translating his work was more than just like a textual thing it was really trying to find the way the feeling that he the feeling or the tone he was trying to achieve with his audience and finding a similar kind of parallel in speaking to the audience is here so I guess I translated about two of his plays when Kate became interested in joy and the play company commissioned me to translate it right? The way I learned about Okada was through tech and through IA actually I can read Japanese and I really never heard of Okada before I read I think it was like 20 pages maybe of translation that he started as part of another process that we're going to but in fact I just read those 20 pages and said we have to produce this and then we finished it too so it was yes, yes, that's right and then we so I then I translated it and then we were like well, who should direct it and the play company and I really kind of were looking for the right match knowing how Toshiki works like most artists most theater artists in Japan they write splash directors who have their own company and they write plays for their ensemble etc not that we thought that it had to be that way but maybe there was some kind of just resonance with someone who had resonance with that that might be a good match but that among other reasons we met with Darren and thought I mean, bye I guess then began what's now been a six year journey for me working on Toshiki's scripts Toshiki's scripts and the idea of translation and its productions and then also eventually inviting Toshiki into my company Pig Iron to make work specifically for us I mean the funny thing about that encounter is you said you think that our aesthetics are similar oh ok I said that when I saw Enjoy that you had done because I at first saw Picata's work through All Spotlight Japan at the Prairie Loop Festival and then seen five days in March in Japanese at Japan society when I saw Enjoy I thought you were very faithful to the visual the movement because he has a sort of very specific movement vocabulary this was my impression right so my intention was the opposite oh so I'm not offended by that at all I think I mean there's so many things so many ways that we can reach the audience with Picata's work and with IA's translation so my theater company was born as a theater company without text and focusing on image and I had a rule to ban all narrators like please let there be the narrators and Kate gave me the script which is 100% narration it was just narrators and I was like ok well I also like to do the wrong thing so this guy's in here that's sort of exactly opposite and he's so great and another thing happened which was I sort of saw Toshiki does this really interesting formal movement specifically in his writing where someone will start quoting someone else and then sort of do a not sarcastic but impression of the other person as though to say so Andy asked me this question and then he said oh I'm sorry I'm sorry so that is like one statement I'm sorry I'm sorry and then this actor will continue doing the impression much longer than I just did of Andy to the point where you're like who's Andy again is it this body or this body which really opens up so many possibilities in terms of staging and casting and really cultural translation so there was that aspect of the writing that really excited me then I did go to see Toshiki's work 5 days in March and I thought he's even more opposite of what I create the original visual work that I have been creating was quite focused on clarity and I found all of Toshiki's visual gesture to be opaque and beautiful and unlike anything I've seen before and yeah I mean I think probably most people miss a lot of different kinds of movement so I was thinking I've seen a lot of different kinds of movement at this point and I really don't know what this is and Kate sent Aya and me to Japan to meet with Toshiki and to watch him work with his ensemble and I really he was extremely cagey I call him and I still call him I call him cagey in his autobiographical play that he wrote for us he has another character describe him as a savant like an idiot savant and certainly that's what I sort of can't believe it but it's not very easy to get Toshiki to talk about the quote of what he does so I remember saying okay five days in March this play nobody touches in your play what's that about not a single person touches and he said oh that's just because we're Japanese and I said your play is about two people who spend five days in a love hotel bed and two people who get swept up into a protest march normally if someone was staging that they would touch I said I don't know it doesn't matter if they touch or don't touch but they don't touch at all after that conversation with my first meeting with Okada I said it's really important that I not attempt anything like Okada's movement style so I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about the strategies that these guys are making sure to cast a multiracial cast of Americans and here's a small that we would put in tons of cues to the audience that you know who we are so that this would not be a piece that said that's how it is in Japan but that in all kinds of ways we would cue the audience so certainly it's become more common in American news casting to change your pronunciation when you speak a Spanish word I remember back in the 90's Jimmy Smith's on Saturday Night Live that skit where they were like they bought costas and they would be a fanato so that was already starting to be a joke then but I would say that liberal minded people when they are expressing hearing I'm talking about a Japanese person we'll talk about Atsushi and a little Japanese pronunciation and I would really train the American ensemble to say the same way you say Tokyo don't do that pronounce all the names that way so that all of this stuff is being communicated to the audience you know exactly who these people are like you chose to keep Japanese character names too I did I guess I thought that was a really good parallel with what Toshiki was doing with that formal move of quoting people that he was specifically interested in watching how description could float and vibrate against the body that speaks so it was sort of the perfect I do think Toshiki's plays can really be done really well with all kinds of different performers because of that I mean I have lots to say about how it all went down when we invited Toshiki to come specifically to talk to us about that movement vocabulary you know sitting on this panel I think I got to go back and do another Toshiki play in this past year with Kate and I which was a piece that he had made for Japan and Toshiki made some very radical moves as a writer for that piece he said I'm going to write a lot of biography you're going to write about myself it's kind of funny to have Americans play me because I would be too embarrassed in that and also that he was going to speak about issues that were very hard to speak about in Japan and I guess I feel like it's taken me a couple of years but I feel like that middle piece where I got to be so much closer to Toshiki himself but I think of that piece as the least successful translation and partially it's a question of place and partially Toshiki was mostly imagining American actors in Japan and how that would work and I don't think that we successfully in a way that play takes place nowhere as opposed to having a script that takes place in Tokyo or a staging that takes place very strongly in New York and there were things about that piece that have to do with context and politics that I don't think I succeeded in conveying to the American audience like Toshiki was doing you know so this was a piece and he was writing it as it was happening he in the course of the commission and the collaboration the Fukushima meltdown happened and the tsunami in the Fukushima meltdown that happened between workshop one and workshop two it's like about zero cost house in the course of this collaborative creation of Toshiki and then he turned it into an autobiography and had our characters document how he Toshiki moved to the west of Japan and it was only a year and a half by the time we reared the piece maybe a year and a half he has the character playing himself say to his manager I think we need to change the whole system I'm moving out of Tokyo you know to be an artist to move out of Tokyo which is the population center of Japan and the cultural center of Japan I think there was a lot of feeling in Japan that that was almost treasonous you know in the comparison I kept making was like imagine that it's 2003 and a New Yorker says to another New Yorker you know it's good that 9-11 happened because the whole system that made New York is fucked and is going to fall apart and tear us apart and the more people who leave New York the better but even imagine the wound for a New Yorker or even an American that you're putting your finger into to say the characters quite say it's good but to say you couldn't hear anything I think as a New Yorker after you know it's good that 9-11 happened in 2003 in particular so the to me what would happen knowing the little that I knew about the Japanese political situation that scene would I would just like stop breathing watching this happen and I just couldn't figure out how to make an American audience feel that we eventually toured the peace to Japan and boy didn't get quiet in that scene but there were pieces I feel like I would have to stop the play and say what I just said so just so you know put it in a way and I think trying to figure out the collaboration I think right now sitting here I wish I had done that so but there were a lot of one thing about that that particular collaboration I mean my company figure often brings in a wild card who will stretch what we understand about everything acting style but sometimes those people face each other because they're like I'm going to write something that's really big like we want to do what you're interested in and I think that piece may have landed in that yeah so I want to come back the thing that really kind of one of the main this is who we are and that idea of establishing trust the beginning of a relationship with the audience of the show and I'm curious to come back also a political because heroin spent a number of years in the cultural diplomacy field still involved and I want to come back to that before we do because I know we're going to lose you soon some of the things that came up when Dan was speaking and talking was sort of learning from seeing how the work presents in different cultures and thinking about establishing trust and I'm just curious I don't actually know do you have how do you work, do you have a company that you work with regularly and then from your experience it seemed like Mariana was talking about how the scene in this show where Barack Obama comes in like Barack Obama showing up in a Latin American country reads much differently than it does here and so I'm curious the things that you're learning from playing the show inform what you really go back are there things that so my first question is how do you work the second question is are there things you're learning about the way like you're saying some things are so Brazil centered and we don't are there things that you're learning about the way things read to other audiences oh that's interesting I want to write a company we have a six sector with me since the beginning of the company of the company. And every piece we create, every work we create together, we start out of a very long process. This piece, this show we took 13 months to complete it, because it's very, very geographical, it's very, very geographical. Each show is geographical, even the other students, can we escape fission from fission? Because I'm talking here, in the slide, there are very fictional contexts here. And I think that's what I think when I present the show in another place, what kinds of fictions this audience looks for? And what fictions do they have in their memories, and that will save how they read the show and how they look at the show. The garden is a very melodramatic show. I know it is, and it's on purpose that it's melodramatic because melodrama is the fiction we mostly consume in Brazil. We have soap operas, we are very famous for our soap operas. And the soap operas travel the world, and 90% of the population watch the soap operas. And it's very, very melodramatic. So our reference to create and to watch shows and to assess our memory is melodrama. We, and a lot of American movies too, that's also melodramatic sometimes. And we, so that's why it shows melodramatic. So I think that when we present, I can feel different energies of the audience. And like trying to understand what kinds of fission they, how they fictionalize their own life, I don't know if that makes sense, but I don't think it's a, I think of course it's a question, it's a matter of the context of political situation, the social situation, the environmental situation of each country, the cultural background which one of, from each country. But I also think it's about this cultural background that is related to the fictions we consume and the fictions we create and how we understand fiction. And how, and with the very simple fission, how we say we degreed fictions for, for it's very, very good about degreed fictions. In Brazil it's very, we touch and we say, hi, we talk, a lot of monkeys, degreed fictions takes almost three, four minutes. I know! And if you write it, it means nothing. But here, I think you have this very polite, it's a, it's a, for farming impression, it's not a prejudice, it's just an impression. You have this, this very polite greeting, but very sharp greeting too. And my feeling is that you have always to agree with everyone. There is a lot of, yeah, yeah. That's, that's a kind of fission I think how we understand that, that how we create these fictional situations, how we are comfortable with these fictional situations. So I, I, like Dr. Rios about this and I wanted to put this in my work somehow, I think. James, how he's writing that scene. You, I mean it's actually because at international, especially like this time of year, it's hard to remember how you're supposed to greet different people. Like the Dutch, because three times, the French do twice. Some French do. Some French do four. And like, and when you go to England, you can't tell whether they're being mean to you or actually nice or what's going on. And you know, and so there's these really complicated layers of sort of our expectations of behavior and greetings and, and, and even if we are coming from the same place, often we're not necessarily, let, even if we're trying to be nice to each other, we're not always possible. Yes. Or we accidentally, so I think this is really interesting. And so I'm, I'm curious to see what your next show is about. We hope Mark, Mark, you're going to do that. And so I want to turn that over. On that idea of sort of like, because you've spent a lot of time working with a lot of different people when you now live here, but you're Dutch and work for the Dutch Consulate and you work for the Netherlands American Foundation now and you've spent a lot of time working with lots of different cultures. So I'm sort of curious as, as a director, how do you think about the, the issues? Well, I think, alright, thank you very much. Well, as a director myself, I think what is really interesting that has come up is this balance of how much do you keep on to, to the cultural reference and how much do you let go. So for example, first, my, my first piece is here. I had a mission to do like this very Uber Dutch. Uber Dutch play in, in a city like New York. And the Netherlands, of course, is very small. And I had to think immediately about how to, who's my playwright director, also filmmaker. And if you look at this place, it's, it's really about how this, the Netherlands is a man-made country, almost, and it was at the low sea level. So everything is square. There's a little house, a little long smoke out coming out of the house in the Netherlands. Like that's typical like this Dutchness. And that's how he writes. And to do that here with Dutch people, I don't know how that would translate. So I wanted to do that with American designers, American actors. And very quickly, what started to happen was I could hold onto it or start more working with them. But I don't know if it was almost this very low budget, the Cirque du Soleil, kind of the feel of, of magic and, and imagery. Which was very interesting, because what I was going on to work with a lot is the pheratils of the Grimm, the Grimm pheratils. So it was a completely different look and feel that what I initially had in mind. But it actually kind of came almost closer to, to what he is trying to do. And I think also working with a lot of other companies, for example, Evo van Hogen, with Pete Rubenstam, this is something that I've always been very interested in. That if you translate words, it's always an adaptation, particularly when it comes to Shakespeare or Greek, Greek plays. And for some reason I feel that if I see Shakespeare in a foreign language, particularly also a language that I don't understand and I've seen quite a lot of them, I almost get Shakespeare more. Because it seems like the actors are not so, how would I say, not so stuck by the language. And also when I see some of the Dutch translation, it seems like they go straight to the core of what he's trying to say. Now that's great to be in Holland and see that. But then why don't you bring that piece back to the English country and that's what has been happening, of course. And I thought that one of the last pieces of them, for example, which was a very American play, The Ages in America, was quite interesting to hear feedback from people reading the subtitles because it was the Rubenstam. And it was of course a different language than the original play because it was the subtitles of the Dutch adaptation of the play. And so I think there's a lot of interesting realms and hybridization that I think is actually really interesting and I think it's going to go even more into that direction. Looking with younger makers right now, I'm very intrigued by how the very, the new generation is so not stuck by borders. I feel like even, I'm not, I don't think it must have been that old, but I didn't grow up with the internet. And I feel like even your question in the beginning or how it was said to like create locally, think globally, I wonder how the new generation of creators is even thinking what local means, what is local because there is no order at all. Well, I think it's a, I mean, I've titled it that because I think that there is a local, this is local. Exactly. And I think, and it's really interesting, I wasn't here, unfortunately, for Angels in America, but I was here for Roman tragedy. Evo Bonova, if anybody's not familiar, is just this incredible Dutch director and he did the all, he did a piece of band called Roman Tratch, he sorted the three of Shakespeare's Roman Tratch, and performed them back to that over six hours at BAM and it was general edition and you could walk around while you wanted through the opera houses. Pretty extraordinary. And I was thinking about that when we were saying that, that tradition, because it was a translate, the super titles were a translation of the Dutch sort of like Moose translation of Shakespeare. Adaptation. And adaptation. So it really created this interesting space and then I was, and then you also sort of brought to mind Ust-Lundgren, Ust-Lundgren is, that's me trying to sound like a Norwegian. He's a Norwegian director who often creates made-up languages, so, and... Did you work with him? No, he had a commission on delay work that's up close, so I had to like see this and stuff. So in terms of that issue around sort of language, how do we deal with the language obstacle? Or destroy it entirely? Well, I think it's also like a cultural difference in theater making. When I first came, well, first in England, but then also here, I was kind of struck how important the language is in the American theater. I was not familiar with that. That language seemed to be very, very important. Where in the Netherlands, we don't have any history of playwriting. It's actually really kind, just now, I think. We now have one school, I think, where you can study playwriting. That's only ten years old. So there's a lot of work that is not based on language. Well, that's a big cultural difference, I think, that would be interesting to talk about. Which is, you know, American theater is largely influenced by British theaters. Playwriting is very important. German theater is mostly about the director, you know, by just theater. So there's these interesting cultural influences that we, you know, and we're lucky you're not a writer without being able to see you a lot. And what I'd like to do since we're sort of, there's so much to be brought up I want to come back to, but I think it's not, I think we should open it up to everybody to talk, and hopefully give some of these other things that come up. Anybody have a question? Hi, thank you. I'm British, so I'm very happy to be here. I have a question that relates to whether any of you see your work in a way related to what happens out in the streets, like protests that have been going on through New York, these people's causes. So I guess I'm going to turn to you around how you place the work you do in relation to public expression, demonstration, and the time that you make work in some other way. But what is the interaction of those things being applied to you? You can say it briefly. It's certainly something, I know it's on my mind, I'm sure it's on other New Yorkers mind because the last six months in particular have been particularly tumultuous for us. But even, you know, we live in New York, which is a great city for demonstration, and we have Union Square as a sort of resource or platform for us, past or at any day of the week, and there's a gathering of some kind. For the record, for our variety of work in particular, I always, once we actually do it, we have this massive people on stage, and it's like the kind of thing that's like, oh, you need a permit to do this. There's something about the right to assemble a large body of people that always is the kind of thing that still looks like to me about creating that work as much as we are doing so. And just to speak back to a particular experience we had with this piece because when we just did it in Holland, in Romania, we were working in the state theater, which is like this big historic city theater, which is not something that we have the passion on for as Americans, so we don't have a big state fund of theaters. But we've gone to as children, and to have a body of performers who are coming to be in the show, and they were going into the building that they had been, as children, growing up going to see these shows and feeling that they were always going to be sitting in the seats, but they would never have the opportunity. And even being on the stage to them was ridiculous. It was almost so prosperous to them. So when they got the opportunity, I still want to explain this to me when we were there and I was like, yeah, whatever, it was a big deal. And then actually when we had people coming in to do the performances and realizing that it actually was a tremendous deal, that it was a real emotional and meaningful experience for them to be on the platform, on the podium, that it was a bit of a switch of who's being watched and who's watching the sort of democratic hierarchy of that. And I do feel like that's, I feel like that all of the artists at the moment should, we do have the duty, I suppose, to be listening to this climate and protest that's happening right now because it is important and it is relevant to what we're doing. I think it's a great question, particularly when it relates to international work and also international presenting. Comment that, for example, from Roman tragedies. When Igbo made that, it was in 2005, I believe. It was very much also a comment from Bush in Iraq and there was a lot of that around it. So it's quite interesting to see it only, it was 2012 or 11 that came here so many years later. So how much is still of that vibrant in the room after so many years? I think that's an interesting question that we don't really talk about a lot because international work sometimes takes years to get somewhere. And then the other thing, Jacob here, theatreing from Australia, we were talking yesterday, this reminds me of it, about your work with Aboriginal work but then through how it is difficult to translate that through a Western lens. I mean, talk about what's happening in Paris right now. There's so much going back and forth but we always still look through our Western lens to that of what's happening. So that's our... I don't know, I'm just getting excited. I don't want to enter you or anything but it's just something that I think about a lot. And I think it's really interesting for others, creators, what do we do with that? But I think, because Doug is working on a festival, a translation project, right? So one of the things that comes up is that I was just in Poland at a festival there and I saw a bunch of work and the work that I wanted to bring here would not be legible but it would actually tell us so much more about what it's like in Melbourne right now than the work that is legible because there's the work that people make that... I'm thinking about it because it's a classic but I can't say his name out of an issue. I think it's Miss David. She's the most important writer in Poland and the show that I saw was this radical, crazy deconstruction of this epic, epic piece. It's like with all these weird American, the Joker and it's like this weird end. Their sort of radical reimagining of this classic text is very, very relevant. Everyone that was Polish loved it, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The one that everybody, all the presenters loved was the one that looked exactly like everything in Berlin and in Paris and whatever with the video screens and the microphone. So I'm really curious about that old-fashioned technology of writing and text and language and how does that... I mean because we come to it and whether it's otherizing, there are cultures that don't have written forms. They're performative forms that are non-text-based. There are cultures like ours that it is text-based. So how do you think about... and you work so much with illness and places from non-western places, how does text as a tool and translators working with text as a tool to sort of like parse the semiotics of different cultures? I'm just curious. How do you work with translators and you as a translator? How does that sort of work with you? I was just wondering if you had seen how this working festival that you and yourself found it legible or not in the same way because you have such a specific movement of vocabulary that goes along with it. I mean... Well, I mean I'm really fortunate. And this is a bigger question. I'm very fortunate that I was working at Curious Business Festival that I got exposed to this work with a whole bunch of people in the room that could tell me what I was looking at. And so when I finally got to see it at the Japan Society, I had all this information. And I think this is a big... I mean this is a larger question which is what a festival should be in the context of a work so legible. But I'm more curious at your stage of going out to read scripts, like how do you engage... Like if text is sort of like the old fashion tool in the West to tour the work where it's like, well, we have the script of, you know, Simulphene or whoever. And we're gonna, you know, and you are gonna produce it with my own actors in my own language. Like that's sort of the oldest fashion way of touring. And I don't mean that pejoratively. So I'm sort of curious how does that process of like when you pick a show and work with an artist or like how do you think about that? For me, I would say I think that a different thing for every show it really depends on what the piece is in the case of Pokada I came to a few taps rather than first seeing his performance style. And then at a certain point when I knew about his performance style and I knew the team that we had it was important to me that Dan not feel like to recreate Pokada Pokada's style that people are making a new production for here. And so whenever you go out of that that felt important and germane for audiences here that would have been great but in that particular case sort of teasing the tune that part worked really well. With someone like Simulphene like Roland Simulphene is a German writer I think his work is much closer to what we're used to so there isn't such a need in terms of what sort of production style you could not put around it but as a producer and we normally do start from text it's about really listening to whatever instincts we have first responding to the text really when you're working with international work I feel like you really have to know what that instinct is and sort of preserve it it gets really complicated afterwards so just know what it is that we respond to because that's the impulse that says okay this should be seen in New York we can make something meaningful in New York but then also thinking about the team that you put around it and we've done plays there's a play we did about 10 years ago from Ikea called Sopram Bonder by Vijay Tendulkar that needed a very realistic production very rooted in village life there and the sort of sexual hierarchies and all sorts of things if we had tried to bring some other context around it it would have been inscrutable so in that sense it was for that play it was very important to sort of recreate as you were saying this is what's happening over here but it was of course very powerful for people whereas with Bocata sort of bringing us and that to some common ground is pretty scary to do because you don't really know where you're going but it's very exciting I think from a textual base I think the translator is sort of the step child or the neglected child in the sense that so often that we it's not just the text it's not just the literal words that you are translating they are an artist in their own life that it is literary that you're not just translating the text but it's context and subtext and pretext and all of these things so there are different entry points no doubt so I'm saying often I have a stack of ways to read or you're seeing a production and it's so often that what we're trying to do there's a work that's going to be as well bringing translators and playwrights and dramaturgs and directors from 16 different countries to the O'Neill and to the Lark next week and to have everybody in the same room it's going to be really exciting so we're exploring these ideas and what's the difference between a lone translator in a room who's writing for the page as opposed to thinking about well this is now going to have to be spoken by actors so the difference between on the page or on the stage and then also you're talking a lot about the audience and how do you want to relate to the audience that you're presenting this to how is it going to translate from that putting all of that into your head it's so daunting who do you honor you have to honor the author, you have to honor the actor you should have to honor the audience but that's why it's so great I think we're so important also to have a collaborative process in the translation itself like having actors it's almost it's so important that I remember translating one of the Dutch pieces and the actors actually picked up on there were several translations and one of the things that the actors really picked up on was the rhythm of the text because of that playwright's typical rhythm if you just translated the words you didn't get the rhythm of the text so I think if you're just by yourself in your room translating it you might not get that without the input of that and with Jonas Kimiri's work he's a Swedish writer and his father is from Tunisia so he sort of brings a particular point of view to writing in Sweden and the first point is that we produced this called Invasion and we first read it in German and we ended up our colleague who works with us speaks German and she got a German translation and she went to see it over there then we got an existing British translation which allowed but just did not feel German into New York we ended up commissioning a new translation Jonas's work is really slide based translator who and he wanted the woman to translate his novel to translate the same effect no it's not a theater person that's a terrible idea however in that particular instance she was just sort of the way Aya is imaginative able to translate the kind of Rachel just got his rhythm an American version of that play and he workshopped the translation you know wouldn't be able to do it without him and Rachel and the actors and Erica the director all sitting together to figure out what is this text for New York it's much less a process of translation and more of interpretation something that tries to kind of to wonder you asked about pro-casts and street street activity something that's really coming up out of all of or something that's coming up for me and listening to you all is that the complexity of creating performance and that it doesn't happen in isolated pieces they're actually sort of creating social sculptures that exist in time and space and it's a very complicated process of negotiating what that series of relationships is that's happening in a room and it's not fundamentally different than inviting people to have a protest in a public space they're just the set of social relationships that you're asking to provoke and prompt and structure are different and it's really exciting I think to hear and that's why I come back to two things that Dan said as well one is that like you know who we are at the beginning of a show and I'm wondering you know is that something that you think about in general at the beginning of a show or was it specifically this show and then the other question that comes up is Zero Bus House was a break from your normal style or was this interesting hybrid and I think it raised in its complication it raised amazing questions how do you and yet so these are like two things really because someone comes out of the beginning of a series of all of these I don't know I don't really know I guess we're talking about everyone is saying what I'm hearing is a lot of really thoughtful how much of life how much of art making is creating a private language and how much isn't and how much as the artist do you think about your private language that you are that doesn't reach any audience even in Brazil and so the way the questions are the questions are the questions are so the way the questions are aren't always the same and I guess but I do think I guess the answer to your first question of I do think that you can divide work into genres of you know what this is or you don't know what this is and but I don't think there's one that's more valuable than the other I think that's a sort of a technology and you start there and certainly the greatest compliment for any of our work is when someone says oh what I like about your work is you teach us the language at the beginning and then by the end we're there and I guess I feel like I guess I feel that the only sort of pitfall when you start working with translations people from other countries, people who it becomes so kind of piousness and then then you so as long as you're trying hard kicking yourself in the butt to not be so respectful be for a sort of political and a personal reason then you can deal with that you know I mean I think that for all of the effort that I make in the Okada collaborations that I've done to say this is you, this is you it's almost like a neurological experiment with like optical illusions there were some movements that I created having only seen like an hour of Okada work totally from my own movement background that were but they were specifically not resolved they were not illegible and they would go on to the brains of the American audience and people would say how did you make that movement so Japanese and I would say I really tried not to make it Japanese at all and I just don't know if when you add into your information that it's Japanese and then you see something that isn't resolving your brain is made to categorize and just goes that's, I know that that's Japanese because I know it's Japanese and I know that I don't know what it is so I guess I wonder as you do dance between opacity and hey you know what's going on I mean I guess in a way something that Okada and I do share is interest in Brett and I guess for me one critic long ago I mean turned me on to an idea about Brett and his anti-melodramatic thrust of saying that when you go to an audience and you say you shouldn't sit and go I know exactly what that is that's so sad because then you're done with your political action and then you should go and say like that's not what that is I can't be like that I don't know what that is I reject that and that would provoke political action and my strategy for that means a lot and a lot pulling from my research in clown is to like look at the audience and be like hey you know you know what it is very much what Leonardo said about our interactions like if I look at the audience and nod and go you know you know I can tell them anything I can say you know how we all commit genocide and they're like I can't I guess to me that's sort of a fundamental Brechtian move where then the audience should go oh I just did not know on that so I guess that's sort of what I think about that and I guess I don't know that I don't know that it could never be totally overcome whether or not a play can make people think those people are just like me or not you know I don't know where that how that happens, how that transaction happens or maybe it doesn't have to happen the question has to keep going on so we're pretty tight more more just something I thought I think this will be a conversation happening tomorrow which is that when you talk about adaptation and you're talking about translation you're also talking about performance language which is what you've been talking about and so as you think about theater performance coming forward how your work is creating perhaps new performance languages that are part of my state so I thought that was a cool bridge to think about the conversations that some people make questions, questions, answers it's darling moments in preparation alright well I think we could keep this I know I could keep this conversation going with these guys for a couple more hours but I think we should wrap now so we have to go hang here and chat for a little while so why don't we just do that I also would have to be so if you guys couldn't stay talk for a little while and just do that come back tomorrow we're going to do another conversation that's going to be about acting and actually now that listening to this idea of collaborative translation I'm finished with all the things that happen with performers on stage I think