 um this is uh now conversation number 17 of season two of unrehearsed futures and we continue to sort of try and understand um where our future lies and uh are our way forward and Kameli's been coming into a lot of these conversations. I've also had some conversations behind the scenes with him. Abhishek and I have I don't know come up come up in theater around the same time in India. I think that whilst I went into pedagogy and I'm trying to do something there, Abhishek has just done some phenomenal work over the last over the same period of time that leaves me awestruck. Beautiful article about him in an Indian magazine called Caravan recently which Falguni will paste the link to in case you're interested. um and I'm going to really start with uh the blurb question um that is the sort of conversation here but it's a conversation which is what kind of theater writing is expected of us the writers the theater makers now beyond the pandemic has a pandemic provoked us to think in new directions uh what social responsibilities to write do writers bear and in what ways can an imaginative approach to writing for the stage transform for issues like social change for example and that kind of is the official sort of thrust area um and we'll just start there just to let you know the format of the conversation because we've discovered over the last couple of unrehearsed futures conversations is that uh some people are comfortable speaking on the record whilst it's being recorded but as soon as we start the after party usually a lot of people more people come off mic um don't imagine this as two people on a stage and a bunch of us in the audience imagine it as everyone has come into a room and there's a the setup is a circle of chairs and we're all sitting there together and Kamali Abhishek and I are sitting together at one side of the circle to just start off things um but please do um feel free to put your comments your provocations your thoughts in the chat window to start with and I'll ask you all to come off mic uh somewhere around the 45 minute uh somewhere around the 45 minute mark we will go so we're going from recorded moderated to unrecorded uh moderated and then at the one hour 15 mark we will officially wrap up but of course feel free to hang out for the water cooler chat that happens afterwards um most of you are known to each other um please do if you can stay on camera so we can see you so Abhishek and Kamali also have a feeling of who they're talking to it would be lovely um and otherwise do listen in and uh also I just put my name in a particular format you can look at it Jehan M Mumbai uh and you'll see that it's a a good way to just sort of sense a sense the plurality of the space that we're in currently uh one of the teams of this season possibility planetarity plurality so without further ado uh Kamali a few words about yourself and then um your thoughts and Abhishek a few words about yourself and then your opening thoughts sure sure sure um thank you for joining us yeah thank you guys for inviting me thank you Jehan for uh setting this up I've been sort of semi-badgering you for the last month I guess or so about this particular topic I guess um I think Amy had brought it up to me originally because she and I have been having some kind of deeper conversations both in and out of UF um and uh yeah uh we started talking about bringing Abhishek in on the conversation Abhishek I've known for uh oh god we met in for the 2007-2008 and I've known him for a lot of years but I hadn't spoken to him in probably 10 or 12 so it was really interesting catching up to him but Abhishek's been very prolific as a writer uh since I've known him actually and I remember him talking to me he was one of the first people who came up to me uh in our pre-Lispa party we both went to Lispa together and uh he was very he was very uh curious about some things about writing and I was like oh who's this guy and and we started to kind of have a more interesting conversation about because we were both kind of fish out of water right I was this black American in this kind of uh British environment that was very multicultural at least from a certain perspective but we're all kind of middle class aspiring somewhere and then Abhishek uh was very he was very adaptable but you know you got the impression he could speak multiple languages and he had been in different environments before and he was he was very he didn't have a problem with space I remember us black Americans were very big on get back get back stay away from any of my space and I remember thinking boy Abhishek is so adaptable he could live right and I mean he was he was very good in parties and things too so uh I don't know if that's a good introduction for Abhishek since he's done so many things but you can read his bio later I just wanted to make sure you understood that he's a very lovely guy uh maybe that's just me I'm not a close talker but I love that somebody is very uh somebody can be intimate with you very closely and you understand who they are very uh from from a close angle and that's that's that that was rare for me to see a kind of person who I can see their heart beating um so this is Abhishek and and I'll speak a little bit more about this whole project in a second too but Abhishek I don't know if you want to speak a little bit too yeah thank you Camille uh I think that's a great introduction thank you for introducing me as your friend I think more than anything else and uh and yeah I I I do have to say that I this was one of the most important friendships for me as well in that time uh I was out of home for the first time in my life out of the country and um it was great to be in that diverse a place and yet to have a bearing in friends like Camille with whom I think we started in a way thinking about the theater outside of the tradition quote unquote whatever we had so I'm excited to be here and also excited to be here thanks to Jahan in drama school which were all ideas that uh you know I remember talking to Jahan about drama school and he him talking to me about it before they started in Adishakti in Pondicherry and we were talking about what might happen uh so that's really exciting and of course there's Amy who uh I have never actually I realized when I saw Amy's name here I had never completed a piece in front of Amy ever in my life because she she wouldn't she whenever I sat down performing about after about two two and a half minutes she would say thank you and she would stop us and then she would tell us what we were doing so I'm hoping for the first time in my life to be able to finish something in front of you Amy but other serious love thank you very much for being here and Madhu who's also a very old friend um and I really look up to her yeah thank you Amy sorry what you're saying no I was going to say thank you Amy for putting that a stage fright back in us after all this time too and uh we have another person here Carlos here he went to go to school with us he went through our first year with us too Carlos so hello Carlos so listen the the the topic that I kept pestering um Jay Hahn about was this particular uh notion that we've got posted up on the chat I want to make sure I say it right so I'm gonna read it out loud what kind of theater writing is expected of us writers in and beyond this pandemic with a social responsibility to writers bear in what ways can an imaginative approach to writing for stage transform issues like social change right and um I was much more confident during the middle of this pandemic about everything right I thought okay what as soon as this these ideas I have as a theater artist uh are able to be implemented during this pandemic things will kind of sprout out and things will just magically uh take place and I've really related to I've heard Jay Hahn talk very uh romantically about what he felt like his school and his theater is able to do and I'm always kind of right behind him when I hear him speaking um about what could be what what could press through all this pandemic uh these pandemic problems that are that are likely to uh to press through our lives and uh how does theater work in that way um in my mind um what I remember about theater is being a very collaborative imaginative project right very close to the way uh I had my mother read to me when I was a kid and so uh I felt like while she was reading to me I could read off the page and I would be halfway building the house with her that she was constructing while she read it to me right and that's how I always understood uh theater to work as a verb right if it was ever a verb to me I didn't call it anything it might have just been a ghost that kind of uh I guess kind of possessed particular uh I guess rituals or behaviors that we got into and one of those was when my mother told me stories I the only way I could participate is when I read along with her in the story then I was constructing the house and so I always felt like theater unlike tv and film which kind of seeks a certain versatility was really fabulous for me when I got a chance to actually experience it as a kid when some actor or actors came out on stage and start speaking to us creating the world and then we went with them on a journey in a completely you know otherwise completely bare black box theater and for me that meant something like belief like I had to believe in what they were doing in order to go on that journey with them and I wonder if uh because I read about some of the things that you've gone through in terms of your producing a play I'd be sure and you've had these these these political tumultuous things happen around you I wonder if you can talk about the role that belief has in terms of what theater does for an audience how the audience is working with what they believe in front of them and what does that mean when you're doing something that's kind of politically fraught just curious yeah I mean I think in the kind of you know there are two or three different kinds of things because of working in different languages invariably you know like when I write for say a street theater performance it's very different from you know writing for the royal court let's say as a spectrum of do I know who the audience is I know more or less when I'm in that street theater performance do I know at the royal court I don't know I land up and then one day I figure out okay there are these people who come towards this play but in terms of belief I should say there is a particular challenge that I find right now and I'll stick to you know a very specific example I developed this play for a street theater company Delhi called Jan Nartiman which is quite a you know historic street theater company in Delhi that they work is very political and the show I did with them was called Tathagat which which is another name for the Buddha and it is a play about caste politics and how there is a sculptor who has been commissioned by a king to in the 8th century to make a sculpture for for of the Buddha because it's a Buddhist kingdom on the day of his you know grand coronation he's going to take over multiple states and become an emperor from Mr. King and the sculptor ends up making this sculpture which he's been given a lot of white stone to make this sculpture and instead of using the white stone he sculpts the Buddha out of the black rock and the king calls him and he says you're going to be tried because you're insulting me in front of everyone and he argues that well actually is the Buddha yours or mine if the Buddha has mine then why would he be why would the Buddha be white the Buddha would look like me which means he would be black and you know so it's a it's a play about who does this god belong to is it the people or is it this king and how he imagines himself as well now this is often performed you know in this has been performed in the pharma struggle earlier in labor there was a big march in India which was done by labor unions and it's also performed in a lot of localities in a very politically charged atmosphere now during the pandemic the challenge has been that on one hand social inequities have been at their peak you know they have been exposed remarkably because people haven't had food to eat if they were not you know employed and they were daily wage employers most people who were our audiences for that show were essentially taking the largest hit in cities during the pandemic which means that that even politically they were at the most marginalized place and they needed to have the greatest warriors but at the same time the street theater company very simply couldn't go out and perform in large groups because they would be also placing these people who they are you know becoming the political voice of they would be placing them at risk by performing so it was a continuous catch for a new situation with display whether to perform it in its original with its original intention and how should it be and how do you social distance in a locality in Delhi you know like in the crowded market in Delhi you cannot really be social distance there it's not that's not what happens and we have audiences you know I've seen shows of display where there are women standing in houses on there's a guy who's climbed a land post and there's a man with a chicken in his hand all of them are there to watch this play so there's no question of social distance I think those are some of the challenges that I find Kamili of that kind of work I mean not with the I think the proscenium is extremely guarded you know there are there is a unionization if not in India but in other places but you know there is there is something like when we say protecting the theater I think there's a lot of focus on protecting these big theaters and these you know the the big proscenium stages of the world and I wonder you know what happens to all this other theater which goes and performs amongst the people how does it get protected and you know I want to ask the question back to you as well like with your practice where do you do you see challenges of performance affecting the political intent of your work and how do you think that can be you know negotiated yeah I'm I'm always really hesitant to talk thank you I mean that's a great question actually I'm always really hesitant to talk about the the American political scene because I say this I'm embarrassed to admit that I as a black American I'm always having to gaze through a lot of filtered understandings of of of an American as an American citizen so in other words somebody says they're helping me because they're interested in black lives but there's no material advantage in them trying to help me right they're just doing something that says they're doing something and again I can't tell anymore right as a black American I'm completely confused often by someone saying they have my my my my best interest at heart I say my being black Americans and yet there's no material advantage at all and the the projects or initiatives you engage in or what ends up being a six to eight month kind of initiative that becomes very complicated I think black farmers are going through this where biden assigned something that says black farmers should get something and apparently no black farmers are getting what they're supposed to be getting because people are complaining but it's also been set up to look like ah white farmers can't get anything so it's like what is this poor is this a game we're playing so so when I talk as a black American I'm talking as a person who's lost a lot of faith in what I'm seeing in front of me right and so as a sensitive person as an artist right when someone lies to me in front of me and we both know they're lying I don't know what to do with that because that feels like force that feels like hostility it feels like somebody's punching me in my face so and I mentioned in other unrehearsed futures that I've lost a couple of friends through this pandemic but it was bound to happen because I'm now negotiating their friendship through a zoom and um these are people who you know because of traumas it's always because of traumas right but these are people who uh who may not be able to face multiple lies and this is what I think is happening in society at least in my society right now which is that sometimes when you're caught you say anything but once you say anything you set something in motion you free up a demon right and now you've got multiple demons being let loose every time you say something because you're lying right and now you can't catch all of those demons they're just flying around the room and so the political experience of a black American typically is to just go along with whatever the left is doing or saying because it's too far too complicated to understand it through all these other filters we have somebody who's and I won't say their name but who's the second in command who's done uh who's done a pretty good job of locking up people who look like her and so again I don't know what that means this is a person who was so unpopular that Andrew Yang pulled better than her and yet she was chosen as a second in command to this country so I don't know what all this means except that I as a black American need to need to tread very lightly and figure out how to abstract what I do and say so that it seems as harmless as possible even to the point of just removing myself from authorial kind of of a presence in terms of the writing just because I don't know what my face really means to people other than an opportunity to take advantage of it because I'm black right and again I'm speaking very honestly about what I see is my colleagues people my age people young given me being absolutely taking advantage of I feel when I see all this black lives matter I see black people being exoticized and and it disturbs me because it wasn't like this only five years ago wasn't like this every 10 years ago and I don't see material advantages happening as a result so this is why it concerns me this is why I brought but all this up in the first place is because I'm not sure if everybody's having the same political kind of disadvantages that I'm having in terms of being able to trust anything that anybody's saying to me anymore especially with the face like me you know and so it becomes a concern because my mother with when I was a kid the mother with I had was that I could trust most black people that I ran into because we were navigating some sort of underground even in the 1970s I don't know if I have that same feeling anymore so it's put me into some sort of you know I'm 48 years old so I'm not a boomer I'm not a millennial I'm in this other world where I've seen both worlds right where it was much more a clear cast system and now we're pretending like there's not and it's it's just bizarre so anyway I say all that the kind of almost give up the goose back to you I wish and I hope somebody else can actually speak a little bit about this even if you're not African-American you can relate a little bit you don't have to be African-American you don't have to actually not it's just something it's been a concern of mine so the biggest concern for me now is just what do we because even just you're talking about being able to do something while social distancing dealing with all these factors within the context of trying to do this performance with a belief systems that you're kind of pushing up against what are we as artists to do and you've had situations there life and death are we artists picking up bricks and sticks and stones what do we do with forces that don't feel so malevolent but they don't feel benevolent what do we do with forces that don't feel so aggressive but they sure as hell don't feel unha style they're just maybe passive aggressive and as artists is that our is that our responsibility so that can be open to you Abhishek right now but I'm just curious about it yeah thank you for sharing what you did Camille you know first I just want to say that a year ago I started being very interested in the relationship between Ambedkar and Debuyi because when we speak of Ambedkar we often speak of you know Ambedkar being the most probably important leader of the anti-caste movement in India so on and so forth generally known as the person who was the founder or the father of the constitution of the country but I think he's also had a much larger role to play in terms of cast politics in India and not just this one constitution but what is very interesting is that Ambedkar had when he went to Colombia I think early 1900s it was the time when segregation was being taken away in New York and there were still areas which were segregated and the impact that that had on his own thinking especially his reading of Debuyi Ambedkar's own writing in Colombia at that time has a lot of footnotes and you know on the sides which are all him kind of working through caste oppression but learning in a way what to do through the work of Debuyi and through what the black movement was shaping up to be at that point and I find that really interesting because it's just an early example of genuine international solidarity because it's not surface solidarity there's no I don't think there's any from whatever I have read of Ambedkar there is no general sense of you know that is an operation and this is an operation so it's the same he doesn't equate it like that in fact he finds much deeper connections and things that are similar and things that are separate the Dalit Panthers movement in India is sort of named after the Black Panthers movement in America there are so many you know like Martin Luther came to India and it was it's very interesting because what is his relationship to Gandhi on one hand is you know to learn non-violence but on the other hand Ambedkar is Gandhi's one of Gandhi's greatest opponents and Ambedkar is kind of criticizing Gandhi for his policies and saying that this is a very upper caste Hindu Brahminical idea that everybody has to be you know non non everybody has to be vegetarian and you know everybody should follow this but violence is not just hitting people what you are doing to us as upper caste Indians is violence for years so when you play some Martin Luther there who has resonances who himself learns from Gandhi but who also learns from Ambedkar so I'm just saying that I think that is a very interesting period to study that I have found in this in this time because it really complicates the notion of what is international solidarity what does it mean to you know find from another place the tools to be able to address your own your own inequities and how do we go beyond sort of very narrow I would say you know identities which are not historically defined but identities which are defined post the rise of capitalism because this kind of very watertight identity politics is very useful for you know the spread of a certain way of thinking and there are resonances of this in 1920s which is which I just find fascinating that you know you are you're talking about something that was there even at that time as far as my relationship to you know aggression is concerned look unfortunately I was brought up in Delhi Delhi is a great place but it also prepared me for Delhi is also a very aggressive place you know so this sort of aggression doesn't bother me ever you know I've had two or three death threats in the last 12 years but you know guys who give death threats are even right now sitting around the corner from my house maybe you know they're just some guys who sit around and bum around and then they very easily give you know death threats and things like that so that's not the problem I think that the real challenge and that's something I'm I'm up for like I wanted to be a writer because of you know Salvador Hashmi who was at Jannatimanj and Lorca and you know all these my all my heroes were people who stood up for things I don't know if I'm as courageous as them or if I'm as relevant as them or if I would ever be able to write something even close to what they have written I'm not sure that only time will tell but they are definitely my heroes so death threats and bands and censorship this doesn't it has an impact on the family for sure sometimes you know like you go back home and then nobody is watching you you realize that it has had an impact you know you're at your home like one morning I remember my wife and I Pallavi and I we were sitting and discussing whether we should send my daughter to school or not because in the papers it said that my play has been banned and it's a you know there is the thing of you know it's a national it was in the national news and the current mood in India is such that it can blow up so easily you don't know whether you should send your child to school who's who's going to kindergarten at that time so the effects that a writer's politics can have on his or her family is enormous you know I think that's been a real one of the concerns but personally otherwise no I don't think so what has been very interesting for me is while working abroad I think I've been able to spot the real the really damaging racism versus the kind of easy racism like easy racism is somebody saying you know oh you know I remember this British academic one said international theater started with the first ship which went from England to Indonesia and that is where I said you know but that's really strange that everything in this world starts with the first ship that leaves England and to assume that that is what internationalism is this kind of bizarre but that's easy that's easy to pick you know that sort of racism what is hard to be is sometimes what happens is you you realize after two or three years in a in in a certain kind of relationship that you know this person is not hearing you and they don't want you to argue like their notion of an Indian is somebody who doesn't argue is somebody who's spiritual and who has an you know who's kind of a little bit in the hills all the time and who who always checks in with themselves and some kind of you know 1800 year old god to come up with you know and there's like full of wisdom and but this is not obviously this is a huge generalization and there is a problem in many international curations when you start arguing I suppose that's the kind of racism that is hard to unpick you know because that's that's that's the racism of the benevolent which is infinitely more damaging than the racism of the person who's clearly racist I mean I love those race that kind of racism which is open and not this other type yeah I suppose that's what I you know is my I'm riffing off of what you're saying talking about race and color no you said a lot man I mean and I first of all I want to appreciate the fact that you're kind of defanging these these people these individuals who make death threats I think it's important for us to hear that from someone who's actually faced death threats that you know they're just guys hanging on the corner these are they're actually people right you can actually define who these people are and so on some level I mean I hear people talk about Jeff Bezos and these kind of he's almost a trillionaire he'll be a trillionaire soon in a couple years and you know the fact that he's flying over our heads and everything and I think it's important to recognize who these people are right they're just because they they have these huge monstrous mccanton mecca kind of existences around them that there's still individuals with uh I I guess maybe just predispositions and maybe even flaws and fallibilities that allow them to be a part of some sort of you know inhuman mecca in some ways too so I mean I think maybe that's where speaking with with jayhan is actually writing in the chat is that where do where do our creative impulses take us uh then when we when we're dealing with I mean again I love the idea of saying those people who have power those that person behind that tank who has the ability to press a button and explode my life and turn into uh and turn my life and my life and my family and everything to have these enormous consequences I wonder if there's something about that that I can make fun of first of all I don't you know again as an african-american and as american you're taught that first and foremost you protect yourself right and um and my brother and I talk about this a lot too when when we're talking about um our experience with people who are immigrating into this country or immigrate who have immigrated into this country they're sending money back all the time and always concerned about your family not just their family back home and my brother and I always talked about it when we were younger as boring right you know because we're so used to having this experience of being these kids who have these individual lives even if you don't have no money as an american you tend to think very selfishly about some things and um and I wonder if for for for here part of the revolution is is just to present fables or morals where we actually put ourselves into some sort of contention around what we want versus what other people need and want around us right and I think we as as an american I can only safely say that I see those morals needing to be re-taught to us in certain ways whether you you color it or texturize it or put a different kind of spin on the story I think the story still needs to be that we as america for whatever reason we take pride in having this lens of focus just on us so are you saying something okay sorry no don't worry but that's that's one of the approaches I'm I'm concerned about is just how do I then articulate that do I is it a matter of going into you know I talk with one of my colleagues about like figuring out levels of abstraction right am I going to talk about COVID whenever we're able to get back into a theater space uh am I going to talk about it as a direct correlation of what has happened in my my my locality am I going to abstract it in some way so that you know we're talking about COVID but there's something kind of a little bit tingly about the fact that we're putting the parallel uh experiences together really close by or am I going to abstract it to the point of we're just talking about large shapes and sounds and it's going to be like children's theater what's healthy what's helpful for an audience right now is a question um um that I have I have uh for artists in the future and I'm just like you can you can take that but I'd be curious about anybody j hon or anybody else whoever's whoever's interested in that answer to that question how abstract do we do we get and how close to the bone do we want to get in order to be able to make sure that everybody's getting the point of our story I've got um if I can just jump in with a couple of uh queries um I've got this sort of question which is really about this bear with me for a second if one is I mean Camille I got a real sense from you that that there is a sense of being unmoored recently uh and unhinged with what what you know what's not unhinged but unmoored and then therefore you know not knowing how to respond next and that's why this topic has been so uh uh close to you I wish I I don't necessarily get that feeling from you because I feel like a lot of the experiences you've had uh is constantly in a state of change flux uh danger this that the other um but at the same time and you said that you know the pandemic is not really uh I've got a lot of things going on in terms of notions I want to explore etc but this moment or this moment that we've all experienced going through I'm just trying to figure out where it's you know what is it bringing to the fore in terms of potential uh interventions and impulses going forward as writers in terms of who do you write for what do you write um how do you how do you write about it uh abstract cutting to the bone or not seems to be one one fork but then which fork do you take and why as Camille said so that's one um and I just want to know like maybe if you think about projects you're thinking about or ideas you've been thinking about going forward you know not just the commissions that have been postponed indefinitely but literally like if you had to sit down and think about something you want to do right now what what what is coming to mind and that's one big question um the second one is also this question when you describe the Jan Natya Manj situation and you know whether they can do that play uh we went down to Mumbai Marathi Satya Sangh where the drama school Mumbai exists after nine months to just check out you know is everything okay etc and the lady I met there vaccinations are now happening all over the all over the place and all and she was just like you guys are worrying about this way too much I was like you haven't gotten vaccinated she's like no I mean I'll get around to it but I mean you guys are worrying about it way too much we're all fine over here we've been fine the whole time we've you know we've worn our masks we're drinking a hot a hot decoction every night Kolkara which is made of you know turmeric and peppercorn and other kinds of things and we're good uh you've made too much of this you privilege people and I just imagine that moment where you also you come into that space and you're worrying about how to conduct a street theater play responsibly with social distancing norms etc but when I'm walking through the gully on any given day there is no social distancing they're all managing somehow cheek by jaw because they can't afford social distancing so suddenly when we come out to perform with that that it's a privilege responsibility maybe or it's a responsibility that comes from I don't know and and I'm just thinking and then who's writing like this act of creative authorship where uh what would happen like who needs to tell the stories and and because the other thing I'm questing about sorry this is the distraction but the other this is the final thing is is there a way that they can be given the tools to tell their stories or are we missing a point because I just felt like I completely missed the point when I walked into that room and Shanta Devi was saying to me you know you guys are making too much of this and and we just I felt like an idiot for like not not running a drama school all this time in the pandemic and just I feel like we're missing a perspective because of who I am and where I am so two things one is that so there are really two questions very separate but I used the first one to just say where your creative impulse is lying what are you thinking about right now and the second question is is really about have we missed the point because of where we're speaking from I wish you want to want to try and see I'll tell you Jehan with the I let me go for the second one first my experience is that it different from yours in that case because all the places that we performed in many of those kind of places where we were performing were also places where I was regularly in for relief work then I'm part of these schools that you know which which are running in which have been going for 12 or 13 years now so in my case at least it wasn't something that was outside of my community it was very much a part of a community where either I'm at night school from like 11 at night to four in the morning anyway or if I'm not at night school then we are involved in you know some other during the pandemics particularly with ration and you know the food supply and then later on oxygen and this and that and the one thing that I learned very much in the pandemic is that information had to be made available from anyone who had more information to anyone who had less information so there were a lot of things that I was learning about social distancing from the mall view of the mosque who runs the free school you know now on the surface one would think that oh you know this is would be a very crowded place and so on and so on but he was trying to tell people who are part of that locality whose children come to our school that look we need to make sure that the children are able to write some of these exams that they were writing and at the same time they are socially distanced right and the method some of the methods that they came up with for those were things I was learning from him because he was there all the time right so actually I don't think the the difference the demarcation was so much in terms of you know we and us was not at least from my experience that you know people who who live in this particular area or people who don't but it was really even within the community there was a lot of there is a lot of disparity about who says I will go back to my village and I will not live in the city anymore because in the village there is no coronavirus versus who says that no I'm going to sit here and wear double masks so that I can continue to work because I have to repay the loan that I've taken in my village like there are lot of differences and I just want to say that sometimes I think our imagined not in your case I mean you had this real experience but I'm saying sometimes our imagined sense of who we are and who they are is very different from actually what it is once you know once you're in the community and you're working in a community it's really you know different ballgames so I didn't quite feel that was the case I think politically people who are setting up markets in Bangalore for example are so scared you know just one month ago we had so many deaths due to COVID everybody knows at least three people who have died every single person and when they have opened up shops it is because they do not want to stop that's why they've opened up the shop it's not because they don't believe in this and somehow I think our popular media has created this myth you know that because people don't believe in coronavirus that's why India had very large numbers but of course that's I mean they didn't have anywhere to go how would they get home or what would happen to them I think there's part of it is that yeah let me stop there let me pass the first question actually or maybe even the second question to Camille and see what he what he has to say yeah I'll just follow on with questions that are originally put the Abhishek which is the you know around around the idea belief which is I mean again for me theater had a lot of competition growing up and again speaking at a particular time it was just wasn't accessible it was a little too expensive even though we had the the oldest black American theater in the country at the time of freedom theater in Philadelphia it just wasn't it was it was until August Wilson came along it wasn't necessarily always doing anything but commemorating past experiences of black drama and so we would have a show that would start and it would be called black whatever and it would be some sort of form of the the Jesus story the Christmas story or whatever and so it wasn't really speaking to me as a kid so trying to find some way of you know having an artistic life so to speak was through video games comic books tv and film and those were very accessible right they weren't $35 or $20 a pop so for me what I think might be possible within theater is not necessarily that you just stage things in a space or even over a crowded space or a protracted time period I think theater ought to be as cagey and as fun as what advertisers do right they put a lot of hidden messages and things they're trying to be cute but what they do is then turn your mind like lying right it's setting off demons outside of things you can control so you'll end up finding yourself as a kid repeating behaviors that you've seen in a commercial that no human being does to another human being and what I'm saying is that we can turn the tables in terms of theater by just enabling our audience to be as smart as us so that when we put out advertisements that look like advertisements you might see I don't even know if you get anything you snail mail anymore but email certainly and there's sort of a wink around this being something that you and I know is going to be a production of some sort it might be a way of being able to sneak theater into just the promotion of theater right you're actually telling story you're promoting a world but you're not necessarily doing it in one staged event and I'm sure everybody's kind of practiced this in their own kind of ways of presenting theater to other people but I'm not even talking about necessarily even having a staging ground I'm talking about just entertaining people in ways that make them feel like they're part of the like I said with Children's Theater right you feel like you're a part of it because on some level you have to imagine so much you know and I think that may be available to us right we've got acrobats we've got clowns we've got comedians we've got strippers we've got all these things that are part of theater that we never take advantage of and if you put them into play in a realistic way I say realistic meaning that they're a part of life you know and that they wink at us occasionally as audience members and they wink at us occasionally when we're participants it might it might be a really interesting way of being able to bring Children's Theater into our real world and I think a really constructive way that's my idea and however I'm doing it I won't even get into the details of it because we can all imagine what we're what I'm talking about it's not too hard it's just a question of um whether you're going to pay for it and whether you're going to get me authorial credit for it that's another thing right so I'm going to take this moment to just say that you know there's been a lot of material put out of varying natures um we're going to stop the recording but continue to have a conversation in chat um so do feel free to raise your hand use a raise hand feature or just put your hand up and I think I have an eye of everybody who's on video and we'll we'll continue to the conversation so