 streets, less traffic, less people walking around. So it is different. There's no anarchy and chaos, as the president said in the in the presidential election. They could be called so and there's also not a deserted town. So it's quite something different, but still the situation for everyone involved in the arts and theater and performance is so, so difficult, so dangerous. And we do not know where it will go. And at the end of the year, unemployment support will run out what will happen. But not only it's about, as we say, financial, economical things with the state of the art is all about, but also we really do question us, what are we doing? Where do we come from? Where are we going? And for four months, Segal Center holds talks every day with artists from around the world. If you want to check on some of the excerpts, PHA performing arts journal just published with MIT Press, I think quite an impressive array of excerpts from 30 artists, a big undertaking, Bonnie Noronka and Bill Gillespie went through and Ben Gillespie went through. So now we are opening up to people who, in my view, also artists are in the sense of Joseph Boyce, an idea of an artwork. They are curators, they are presenters, they are producers, but also thinkers, academics, philosophers. And with us today, we have an important voice, an important producing artist, curating artist in the landscape of New York City and with us here, and someone who's influential, but also successful, but in the right way. And there's a lot that we can learn from him. We have with us today Gideon Lester, who's the artistic director of the Fisher Center at Barth. Later on, Tanya Alcuri, his collaborator, will join us. She is in Beirut at the moment, and she is an artist in residence of Diedem performance and the co-director of an MA in Human Rights and the Arts at Barth College. And we talk about this, which is an interesting and important and I think significant initiative. For all of those of you who do not know about Gideon, and we also have many international listeners, he is the director, as I said, artistic director of the Fisher Center at Barth. He's a creative producer and dramaturg. He has collaborated with and commissioned leading international and American artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivien Bond, Sarah Mitchellson, Nature Feet of Oklahoma, Chloe Aron Keane, Anna De Laer Smith. And recent works include Where No Wall Remains, An International Festival on Boros, which he did with Tanya, who later will join us. Daniel Fish, Oklahoma. And for all of those who do not know, it did get a Tony award. It's that rare thing, something crossed over, like the hair production in a way, a date, or the Hamilton in some way. He did Ashley Tata's Met Forest, which we talked about here on Seagull Talk. We had a session with her, and also Gideon encouraged us to have her helpful on here. There was a single brilliant work and one of the significant works of this time. And Peter Sellers' upcoming This Buddy is so impermanent. So he founded and directs Live Arts Barth, the Fisher Center Residency and Commissioning Program. It's quite unique, and he also chairs, and I don't think it's the side job, but normally people that's the full-time job, he chairs the Undergraduate Theater and Performance Program at Bot College. He worked with everyone at Crossing the Lines Festival, the great festival that came out of Fiat and on collaboration. And he was the Acting Artistic Director of ART Theatre, the great ART, where many think maybe he should have gone there and taken on the helm looking at the work you do now. So Gideon, sorry for the long introduction. Seagull Talks is all about listening, as they always, and then I talk and talk. I hope you forgive me. So Gideon, how are you in these days? I, you know, given the state of the world, I would say that I am doing pretty well. First, Frank, I just want to say thank you for the invitation and really thank you on, you know, behalf of the whole community for the incredible work you've been doing since March, because you've been providing us with a lifeline and a window into what extraordinary artists all over the world have been doing. So this archive you're building is necessary and really magnificent. And as I was saying to you earlier, you know, some of the projects that we're working on now have come directly out of Seagull Talks. So I hope we can talk about that. Anyway, I'm doing fine. I have nothing to complain about. I'm working with really interesting artists on some great projects and that keeps me going in dark times. Yeah, so I know you were in the middle of productions, right? Ashley, talked about it, you know, when it happened, you were in full speed, a big semester, still in the beginning in a way. How did it happen and how did you all react to it and what would change in your work? You're talking about Mad Forest, the production that Ashley directed. You know, I mean, it happened because, well, so for anyone watching who doesn't know about the project, this was a production of Mad Forest Carol Church's play about the Romanian Revolution that Ashley Tato was directing with our students abroad. And on March 13th or 14th, when it became clear that we weren't going to be able to carry on in person, I called Ashley and said, you know, we have two choices. One is just to cancel the project and the other is to find some way to keep going, having no idea what that might be. And she said, yes, we have to keep going. And she spoke with her collaborators and spoke to even Farrell, a very brilliant video designer and director who she's worked with before, who said student of mine happens to be a Zoom coder. He's developing a new platform that may be helpful for you. And so we moved the production online. The production staff at the Fisher Center, who are totally magnificent, reinvented themselves in about two days as a digital production center. We set up remote studios for all the students who had gone off to their respective homes all over the country. So we set up, you know, we sent them green screens and lighting and their costumes and so on. And we made a film. And you know, although it was an extreme change, certainly none of us when Ashley first proposed Mad Forest had any idea that this would go online. It's not so unlike many of the projects that we work on. I mean, I would say when a project is really cooking or when an idea is right, we actually have no idea what the outcome is going to be because we're going on a long, long journey together. The institution with the artists, the artists are really leading. And I think that that's the key thing here is that, you know, the only thing that we do right is to put artists right at the center of the process and do everything we possibly can to open up artists' dreams and to support them as best we can and to reimagine our infrastructure all the time so that we're never doing the same thing twice. There's no cookie cutter approach. There's no duplication. We're really focusing all of our resources on what a particular artist and a particular project needs. And in this instance, what was needed was a reinvention of how we produce to be online. And we're continuing doing that. And I've been thinking a lot about, you know, there are stories that Peter Brooke tells in the empty space about theatre during the Second World War. And he tells a story about coming across a bombed out theatre in, I think, Hamburg and going in and seeing one of the most electrifying performances of his life that a group of performers had just put up because they felt a deep necessity to perform. And I keep thinking about that analogy, you know, of the Burntale Theatre. And right now we can't be in theatres, but for me, this does not mean we shouldn't be producing. In fact, I think in very dark times, we really have an obligation to produce because art is essential. And we can't say, you know, because the world is so screwed up in so many ways, we're going to stop prioritising the creation of art. Actually, we need artists more than ever at the moment to help get us through. So that's a very long answer to to your question. But just to say, you know, there is no business as usual for us, except that business as usual is supporting artists. And that's what we're continuing to do. Did something change? I mean, was the metaphor or in general, was the COVID, do you feel something on your internal hard drive moved as an update or do you think, no, it reinforces what we already knew and now? That's a great question. I mean, I, in a way, I'm in a very privileged position. You know, I work for a really pioneering institution, Bard College, which has long, long been in the forefront of, you know, putting the arts at the centre of everything. We never have to apologise for art at Bard. And I am very grateful for that. Because I know what it's like to be an institution where that's not the case. So and we are not in the position that, you know, say a large opera house is where we have very large fixed costs. So we haven't had to follow anybody. And, you know, our budgets are fairly small, but we raise the money that we need to produce what we're producing. So in a sense, I feel actually some freedom at the moment because we're really having to imagine how to reach audiences and develop work in new ways. So it's a very rare opportunity to think about new infrastructures. And I'll give you an example. And this came straight out of a sequel talk. You had Peter Sellers in, I think, early April, very soon after Matt Forest had happened. And Peter was talking in your conversation about this project that he was working on, which is an adaptation of a segment of the Vimalakirti Sutra for a century Buddhist sutra. And he wasn't able to continue with it because it was initially conceived to be performed in art museums and, you know, the art museums are closed. So I saw the talk and I called him and said, you know, I don't know if this is ever useful to you, but we have started to develop a new digital platform. And if ever it's interesting to you to imagine a virtual rendition of the sutra, we're here for you. And, you know, Peter is Peter and his imagination expands in these cosmic ways. And within five minutes he said actually cyberspace is the right place for a sutra because the part of the subject of Buddhist teaching is our relationship with the infinite. And the internet is the infinite and we can be in many dimensions at the same time. So, you know, I don't know what form this is going to take, but yes, let's do it. So we started working. And he's collaborating with Michael Schumacher, a dancer in Amsterdam, and Ganavya Doriswami, a South Indian singer who's currently in Portland, Oregon, and Wang Dongling, a very, very fine Chinese calligrapher who is in Hangzhou, and also with an eminent Hong Kong cinematographer, Yulikwai, and they're rehearsing on Zoom. And they've now invented really a new form, a kind of digital film that they're making remotely. And we're going to be working with cultural partners and hospitals and wellness institutions because the subject you may remember from Peter's talk is really about the wisdom that can come from sickness, the wisdom that can come from a pandemic. And early in the new year, this is going to go global. And it's going to be offered as a gift to audiences all over the world. Now, none of us in April or March had any idea that this was going to be how we were spending our time. But the project and the artists, but really, I think in some way, the project, the essence of the project tells us what needs to be done. And then we figure out how we're going to do it. So the creative problem solving and the flexible thinking needed to support this kind of work, don't stop with the pandemic. And actually, when we can't get into the building, we do have some opportunities to work with artists to imagine new forms of production and new forms of reaching audiences, which are probably not here forever. And no one's pretending that this is a substitute for live performance. But, you know, boy, is it interesting to be making work when the world is on fire. Interesting and essential. Yeah, yeah, really, really, really is like that old Japanese haiku when your roof is broken, you see the moon, right? And it's all that complicated that it has. A question, Gideon. You are also at a university like we are. And everybody, of course, thinks what is the meaning of what we do? There are universities, CalArts, as a presenter, and also teaching university. There is Scrabble as a presenter or Jay and Montclair. But most probably the Bard Center, in a way, is leading in its whole thing, in a holistic way, what is putting up and took over, perhaps, a spotlight under Bruce Dean, ART had, you know, ART that has lost a bit its way, even, you know, accusations now that we do here, even on institutional racism or not listening, you know, there is the great TDM initiative that I think is bringing life into campus there. But what do you think, as your vision, what place does the performance has at the university? It's a great question. I would say that my vision is changing very rapidly at the moment because our truly magnificent students at Bard have become very, very active in the Black Lives Matter movement and are questioning everything that we're doing and working with us in very collaborative ways to reimagine the future. And, you know, we all grew up, I mean, you talk about ART under Bruce Dean, which was my school and my home for many years, and you're right, it produced some of the greatest work in the country. But what we didn't understand then for me in the 1990s was that this is a really patriarchal institution. I didn't understand it because I was in the middle of it. But, you know, this was a model in which we had, you know, one artistic director who was a white guy making all of the artistic decisions. And then the institution was there at the service of those ideas, you know. And I have only admiration for Bob, who was really a mentor to me. But this was very much a system of its time. And what our students are saying to us now is let's imagine other structures which are not top-down, where decisions are made much more naturally, where you're inviting other people into the conversations, and where we can learn as much from a 19-year-old as we can from a 48-year-old. And I'm very, very excited about where this is going to take us. And it's work that we'd already begun to do up, I mean, wherever possible, you know, bring in guest curators and colleagues to shape the program. My closest partner at Bard is Caleb Hammond, so I hope one day you'll have a procedural talk as well. Sure. He was a curator. That's exactly right. He was a creative curator. He was a curator with Push. He worked at Soho Rep. He was a founding administrator with 13P. He was really responsible for incredible life and times, each bit of Oklahoma cycle at the public. And Caleb is increasingly taking a programming hand. But we've, you know, we had five years of justing, Vivienne Bond curating and programming and hosting our Stegal tent and creating a brilliant alternative, highly political space there. And then, you know, Tanya O'Curry, who will be joined within a few minutes, curated with us festival this time last year on the subject of Borders. And I don't think it's interesting for one person to be making all the decisions all the time. But you asked about the relationship between, you know, a theater center, an art center and a university. And I would say that the vision for what we have tried to make, and I think what we're going to continue to try to make, at the Fisher Center is very influenced by Bauhaus and Black Mountain. And Black Mountain College and Bard had a lot of crossover. The idea that if you have students and professional artists and faculty and audiences all in the building together, but there has to be deep cross-fertilization and cross-pollination. And again, this idea that, you know, professional artists should be learning as much from students as students are learning from professional artists. So when I got there, there was quite a separation between the academic programs in the Fisher Center and the professional program. And in order to shake things up a bit, we started a new program called Live Arts Board, which is a residency and commissioning program. And the idea is that artists come and join the community sometimes for quite a short period of time and sometimes for a very long period. We did a, with Sarah Mitchellson, Sarah had a four-year residency with us and made a project with students and then also with professional performers over the course of four years. And that in a way, we're all, you know, we're cohabiting a space, we're breaking bread together. And it's interesting because in our conversations with our students at the moment, they're really holding us accountable to that idea and saying, you know, we need to rededicate ourselves to that founding idea. And I'm so grateful for it because the great danger is after a number of years of any kind of structure that you become institutionalized. And the opportunity in working with artists or students is not to calcify. Never to think I'm going to do the same thing that I did last year, but to constantly try and be led by what is urgent and exciting and complex and new. And that has to be, I think, a creative dynamic between the academy and the professional performing arts. It has to be the future of the arts in this country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I do think that perhaps the barred model of the ART before and even in a different structure or other is, you know, the closest perhaps to the European idea of a theater, you know, that is in a way a non-profit that is about thinking, about research, about experimentation, where you rework perhaps psychological family situation, but also problems in society that you, you know, that gets reflected of what is happening in the moment or what might be happening that it is anticipated. And that is why so significant the work of Bardot or what you are doing that it is really a model. And if it could happen there, it can help and also somewhere else. And so many of American universities, I might be misinterpreting it, but they are looking to Broadway and to that highly commercial theater that success is, you know, who made it in that, you know, that form, which of course has is a beautiful one and an important one, but also with its limitations, you know, we don't want bookstores where you only see the bestsellers on that small shelf and you buy them. We want to have a gigantic bookstore and you need to be a lot of books like these to even write one of them, these bestsellers. So the universities should play a role and they should be supported. Perhaps it is, as you say, a model like museums that they are caretakers of a theater that has a global perspective, a political clear political idea and also attest aesthetic values that are not dominated or influenced by will it be successful, will people are people buy the shows tickets that are now getting also very, very expensive at nonprofits. So Gideon, we changed a bit, as I said, from talking with artists, artists, because we feel this is a time now and anybody who watched the debates and everything, we are in deep concern about this country where it goes. Das theater has to rethink what it is doing. And we had Baraka Saleh here yesterday. Unfortunately, she, you know, camera didn't work on the computer and the photo we put on to see her somehow didn't translate it. So was her voice and people looking at me and said, what is this guy there doing? But she talked about, you know, about the state also of black artists and black life matter and for decades what she's been talking about and people were really, I was a bit annoyed of hearing it. Did something change for you? Is there a different listening? What are you doing that is different before or what should theater do that's different from your perspective? It's also a great question. I mean, I can't speak in generalities about theater. I think Tanya is about to join us. Perfect timing, because Tanya is going to change everything. Hi, Tanya. Hi there. Hi there. Maybe let's give you an answer and then we will weave you into the conversation. So Tanya, Frank just asked me a question about how I think theater should change. I mean, it's a huge question. I really think that the opportunity we're being given at the moment by this universal shutdown is to go back to our core values. Whatever those values are for, you know, and the answer will be different for different artists and different institutions, but business as usual is no way to work. If we're not, you know, picking up every situation and looking at it and thinking, you know, how can this function for now in this current moment? Then I don't think if we're not doing that, then we're not doing our job. And I can only speak for myself and say I am so glad I at the moment, you know, I'm not responsible for an institution where I have to run a season where I feel that I have six slots that I have to fill where I have to raise a certain amount of money, which is the same every year to sell a certain number of seats and so on, so that the business is leading. No, no, I think the art has to lead. And the opportunity at the moment is to put the artist back where they belong in the center of the process. And if we really do that and pay attention, then we're going to learn how we need to change. Yeah, so in a way, we have a Tanya with us and who is an artist you brought in, actually, something you talked about that Tanya is a life artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and its politics is based in Beirut in Lebanon, and which is such a complicated place at the moment, where everything was also crystal clear next to Corona. We just had Sahar, Dima last week giving us an update from there. But Tanya, she's a distinguished artist and residence of theater and performance and co-director of an MA in human rights and the arts at Bart College. And I think this is something to really talk about. And she has presented in multiple languages across the world. She's a Soros art fellow, someone who was condemned by the Hungarian government. We just had the Hungarian school, the great Budapest school with us, which is being closed down basically after 150 years of a government institution is going to be privatized. And people from a party will be put in charge of the school, as if the Republican would say, you guys, close down Julia, they're working model. They had three Oscar nominations, student films in a role one-one, but they are in deep, deep trouble, four weeks of student occupation actually at the moment. But she has been with many, many different places. She got the Bestie Award, the International Life Arts Prize, Total Theater Innovation Award, and the Arches Break Award. So she has a PhD in performance studies from London, the Royal Holloway University, and she is co-founder of the Dictafone Group Research and Performance Collective Tanya. So how does it feel to be brought in as an artist in a structure like the one Gideon is moving in? Hi, thank you for having me and sorry I was late. How does it feel? I think you should ask me in a couple of years. We just started, I don't know, we've done the festival last year, but we co-curated. It was such a privilege for me to actually be. Yeah, festival Gideon invited me to co-curate it with him. It was a multidisciplinary festival that took over Fisher Center at Bard, happened in various places, encounters that are not necessarily traditional in the way they invite the audience in, and they all focus all of these commissions because they're all new pieces. They focused on idea of borders and how people engage with idea of borders, whether it's national borders, borders within the body, borders between people, archiving the borders various ways in how we engage politically and socially with the idea of borders. And it was, for me, it was such a privilege, first because I had to also create work and then situate my work, see it conversing with other people, other artists, artists that I care about and I find inspiring. It was extra special and exciting for me because I usually just see my work come to life and now I've seen my work, but also other works come to life next to each other and how they related and spoke with each other. But for the other type of work and creating this MA and working with an institution, I'm very excited for you, you'll have to ask me. I'll be more honest then. You could maybe just talk a little bit about how it, how, I mean, how this crazy idea happened. Yeah, I have never done MA in human rights and the arts. Well, I mean, it hasn't started yet, Frank. You're hearing it for a month for the first time. It's about to exist. But it's not yet. Sorry. It's something completely new. It's something completely new. Well, yeah, it's something completely new, but it comes out of the work that Tanya and I were doing on the festival last year. So in, you know, 30 seconds, I guess in my first or second year at Bard, I had been asked by Johanna Burton, who was then the head of the Graduate School in Curatorial Studies at Bard, if I would work with her on an exhibition about performance in museums. And she'd raised a grant to do an exhibition about performance in the galleries at the Contemporary Art Museum, the Hesse Museum at Bard. And we started talking with artists and commissioning them. And then she left Bard to go to the new school and sorry to the new museum. And the grant went with her. So suddenly we were in a situation where we had a bunch of artists that started commissioning to do work in galleries and the money had gone and the galleries had gone because Johanna had gone. So Caleb and I loved each other and said, what are we going to do? You know, we have all of this work that is exploring the relationship between the performing and visual arts, and we don't have a place to do it. And we could do it in the Performing Arts Center, but that doesn't make sense because this is not work for theaters. And then out of desperation, we thought, well, what if we do this utopian thing of pretending that the Performing Arts Center is actually a museum and we borrow the infrastructure of a museum, we build galleries in unconventional spaces, we open up, we turn black boxes into white cubes, and we ask the audience, the public, to interact in a completely different way with the building. And we'll see what happens. And it was amazing, I got to say, and it came out of necessity. It was not our plan. The building showed us how to use it. And it came alive in completely new ways. And halfway through that first performance exhibition that we called The House is Open, we decided we would do another one in two years time. And in two years time, Trump had just been elected and he's coincided with a performance exhibition we did on the subject of surveillance. And we commissioned a number of artists, including Will Rawls and Annie Dawson, Alex Sagaday, and so on, to make work thinking about surveillance. And then we wanted to do another one. And Tanya and I had just met at the end of the Radar Festival, where I'd seen her incredible piece, Garden Speak. And I asked her whether she would have any interest in working on this festival. And we worked together. And then we took a road trip, Tanya and I, up to Dartmouth, to do a studio visit for Emily Jassa, Palestinian filmmaker, whose work we wanted to include in the Borders Festival. And on the way up and on the way down from Dartmouth on a very snowy February couple of days, we started dreaming about ways to get Tanya to stay at Bard. And Tanya said, how about an MA program? And we went back and started talking with colleagues of ours at Bard. And it so happened that, and we didn't know this at the time, that Bard was becoming the lead partner on a huge international network called the Open Society University Network, which George Soros was about to launch with a billion dollar gift. So this is a consortium of many international institutions, all working together to imagine new forms of education, particularly education in areas of the world, where there is very little higher education. And we were invited to make a proposal with two colleagues of ours, Tom Keenan, who heads the Human Rights Program at Bard, and Ziad Agourish, who's a historian, Jordanian historian, who also happens to be Tanya's husband. We were invited to make a proposal to start a new program. And so we out of the work that happened on the Borders Festival, Tanya and Ziad and Tom and I began to dream of a new way of bringing artists and activists together in a global context to find new ways of working. Why is that important? Why do you think? Tanya? I mean, I guess we're gonna find that soon. There are different ways, I mean, there are different ways to think about the intersection of art and politics. Artists have been using tools of activism for a long time and activists have been using creative work, creative tools for a very long time. There is a very clear intersection in many work, in many of the works of artists that we enjoy and the work that I personally do. So I think it's an area that needs to be studied more. And I just think it's very exciting to put these disciplines together and see what happens, see what will it be like to have artists studying on the same course with people who work in activism, others who are just critics and see how they can learn from each other, how they can interact. I personally, as an artist, find it the most exciting when I collaborate with people who are from very different disciplines. For example, urban researchers, architects, historians. I find that exciting, but also very enriching. And I personally, and I think a lot of us probably share that, I'm sure Gideon too has talked about that. We're interested in art that doesn't just have a political stand, that doesn't just say I am with the right of movement. I am anti-discrimination of people just because of their colours or where they come from. But we're interested in work that actually adds to the conversation, work that function as a knowledge production, that function as almost like info-activism, that adds something to the conversation and that we can build on. All of us, activists, journalists, the scholars, can build on that work, can use it sometimes as a historical object, sometimes as evidence. We've seen a lot of work recently in the last decade that provided evidence, artists that actually dig into certain events, contested events, contested spaces and provide evidence that we can all learn from and build on. I would also say, and we'll see how this evolves as the programme develops, but Frank, you're asking questions about how 2020 is changing things for us. And I suspect that one thing that's going to happen is that there's there already has been a huge shake-up in the way that live art performance theatre are produced, funded, toured and so on. And for all kinds of reasons, I suspect that the infrastructures that Tanya and I grew up with are over. The major festivals are probably over. They're expensive. They're environmentally catastrophic. There's a tendency to globalization, which was very exciting in the 90s and now has created a kind of homogeneity, so it doesn't really matter which city you're in. The festival looks the same. And I suspect that this form of production and of touring is unsustainable now. And that a lot of the artists that we're interested in, and Tanya I think is a great example of this, for Tanya, the production infrastructure, the way that the work is made and toured, is built into the artistic project itself. It's very self-sufficient. And it's therefore nimble and responsive, and yet has a very, very deep emotional impact, cultural impact on the people who participate with it. And so I think that part of what we're going to be exploring is how to help artists to see the development of infrastructure as an integral part of the way that they're working, because I don't think we can rely on systems of touring and production that we have been used to before, 2020 is just wiping all of that out. And that's not necessarily, I mean, it's enormously hard for many, many, many millions of people in the cultural sector. But in the long run, it may actually be a breath of pressure. So in a way, joining the ecological movement of local products, of building, joining, reinforcing communities, interaction with the audience, you know, with the people on the market, and it's something that they already always had as part of it, but perhaps as you said, you know, in these kind of global reach of festivals where it is, as you said, was hard to know, you know, which festival really is it, they, you know, copies sometimes, you know, of existing artists who then toured and perhaps did not fully engage. We had Jean-Luc Nossi, the French philosopher also with us, who I talked about earlier, who said, you know, he didn't like this idea of tourism, you know, that I was like ghetto tourism, I would say, where you fly in a resort and then you fly out, but you don't want anything, you don't connect to a community. And theater companies who toured here go back, because they never then were able fully to connect or have an impact. And, and yeah, so I think there is, and should of course be a place that we see theater from around the world and globally, like musicians listen to global music, to do their own music. But I think what everybody talked about in those four months when we talked five days to everybody said, yes, it has to be smaller, it has to be more local, we have to listen, we have to look in the eyes of the people who are our audiences, it has to make a difference. And it's great if they see us the next day, the next month, the next year, and they know who we are. So it is a big change. But I like the idea of very, very much to say the human, kind of the human rights, you know, to connect it to it, access to the arts, like access to education and to healthcare is a human right in a way anyway, but also that it is very clear that the arts are on the, on the side of the struggle for freedom and for speech freedom of liberty. And so will you then invite artists to be on staff? Will they come for a semester and then they go? Or will you use existing teachers, model people who teach in different departments of the college? How is this going to look like? Will there be productions, audiences invited? What is going to happen? First, can you hear me? Because my internet is a little bit cracking. The video off to be able to hear you. We are still very early on in actually conceptualizing that we, there will definitely be part of it that it's public, whether it will be part of the program or a side project that uses the same people and staff. We're trying to figure that out. We would like to continue doing these festivals that take over the Fisher Center and like engage with one theme. And then we will definitely invite artists, whether as guest lecturers, but also to join, there will be some new people who will join the faculty for sure. And we're also hoping that ultimately the program will have an international component too. So that, I mean, one thing that Tanya and I were hoping to do on the borders festival was to have chapters in other cities as well. So that we were, we were imagining a festival that could sort of touch down in Berlin, where Bard has a college, actually also in the West Bank, where Bard has a college. And now with Osun, this is really a worldwide network of existing institutions and then also institutions that don't really exist inside a formal structure. So there is an invitation to, I mean, it really is a, it's an invitation to imagine a new form of education and of art making. What we do know is it'll be a small cohort of students. There'll be artists and there'll be activists and human rights scholars working together over the course of two years. And there will be a mixture of existing Bard faculty from different disciplines teaching, and then also some visiting artists and activists as well, who will invite to join for a short time or a long term. But you know, again, like everything else, I hope it doesn't become too predictable or too institutionalized because it needs to stay responsive to what's happening in the world. So the process that we're engaged in at the moment, Tanya and Ziad in Beirut and Tom and me and our colleagues in Anandel and Hudson, is to imagine a structure that will allow us to be open. And it's also very important that this, to us, that this is, you know, this is not an expensive program to participate in, that the barrier to access is very low. So it's not going to fall into the American MFA, you know, cash cow trap, which makes it so difficult for artists to be able to work. But perhaps our more academic colleagues will, you know, shudder if I say this, but I think we are in a way building this as an art project, as an extension of Tanya's artistic practice as well. So it will have the innovation and the flexibility that an artistic project does as well. Is that fair, Tanya? Yeah, let's see. We're going to work on a website that will have all these information and all of call out for students and for people to join us. So watch the space. No, how inspiring to think that such hybrid forms can exist, that an MA program at Respected University, you know, can be an extension of an artistic practice of an artist, the moments in Beirut that there is interest from disciplines to connect to the arts and use the form as a way of reflecting, of thinking, looking at work on a stage or in a space as a way of thinking a philosophical reflection. And I think it was also bright said that perhaps it will be philosophy, you know, that it will be the theater of the 21st century and we understand things through movements and lights and objects like in Japanese tradition, you know, the way a meal is presented or how objects are created, you know, in itself are philosophy statements. And it is really stunning. And I want to everybody who listened really to point out how radically different such approaches compared to, yes, let's do a directing program and someone comes in and teaches the students how to do 42nd Street that maybe one day could be on Broadway, and they could dance in it or they could direct the revival of it, you know, which is a big would be the big success story. And this is cannot be more different. And it is such a significant contemporary and I think also much needed piece of a mosaic where a theater and it was 21st century will go as a political but also as an aesthetic practice coming to the aesthetics. What, what do you look for? What do when do you say Gideon, but maybe then also you? What, what defines the aesthetic that you say this is significant? If you can answer that at all, you know, or perhaps name some artists or you feel this is what we are talking about. You know, I think it's not, I don't think it's conscious. I don't think I have an aesthetic. I will say that when I meet someone that I really want to work with, that I get a feeling in my chest and I mean, maybe it's in my heart that and that the people that we tend to work with at the Fisher Center we develop long term relationships with. I mean, this certainly happened with Tanya, you know, Tanya and I had breakfast the morning after she gave a talk at the public theater during under the radar guard four years ago, I guess something like that when they presented when Mark Russell presented Gordon speak. And by the end of the breakfast, it was like, you know, you know, a love affair has started. I mean, not in a, not in a, not in a literal way, but in a, you know, here is somebody that I would really like to, you know, be deeply connected with who, who is going to open up new ways of thinking and being. I mean, my, you know, I don't want to take up too much time with this, but for me, the kind of, you know, the most significant example other than Tanya at the moment is a relationship now with with Pantano, it's the choreographer who is now the resident choreographer at the Fisher Center and we, you know, we're creating many, many works with her. And it was, it was, it was a crazy thing. She, we presented some work of hers at the Fisher Center in 2015. We very rarely just present, we're not a presenting organization, but that summer, because it was the summer that we were first doing Daniel Fisher's Oklahoma, we didn't have the bandwidth to commission new dance at the same time. So we presented some existing work of Pam's and it was amazing. And I had breakfast with her the next morning and we were talking at a cafe in the Hudson Valley. And I was just amazed by the complexity and beauty of what I'd seen the night before. And I asked her if she could tell me about one of the pieces had a very strange title. There is a point to this story that the title was a broken story wherein there is no ecstasy. And I said, this is such a beautiful title. Can you tell me about it? And she said, well, a broken story is part of a JD Salinger short story title. And wherein there is no ecstasy is a line from T.S. Eliot's Falkhortense. And I said, I love Falkhortense. And she said, I love Falkhortense. And we started talking about it. And by the end of that meal, I said, you know, this is a crazy idea, but what if we commission you to make a dance based on Falkhortense? And three years later, it happened. But I mean, it was really a three-year journey to make that work. And when it works well, I would say we're all, you know, my colleagues, the artist, and ultimately the invitation to the audience too, taking a leap into it's such a cliche, but like a leap into the unknown, we had no idea where this was going to take us. It was literally the beginning of a journey. And it was as if we took each other by the hand and said, let's go on this journey together. So it's not about the aesthetics, but it is about bravery. It's about courage. And I am really interested in supporting artists who are courageous, because I think courage is what we need in the world at the moment. Whether we're talking about a major proscenium dance work, or whether we're talking about a very small interactive performance for 10 people, or whether we're talking about a one-on-one online experience doesn't matter. But it's about an invitation to a new way of seeing. And that makes me very, that makes it worth, you know, living for me. That's nice. Actually, I'd love to hear you talk about that. I mean, I knew that, and I've noticed that you tend to kind of encourage a work that doesn't necessarily, so they're not very similar. So people, you like working and you encourage and you present work, there are different in terms of forms, but they have some similarity, I guess, in how the artists engage and what they represent. I would add to that that I, too, tend to be inspired by artists and artwork that is innovative. So there is not predictable in terms of the form, in terms of how they even engage with a certain content. I've spoken before about art, that it's that functions as knowledge production, art that actually takes itself seriously as a research engine, whether it's in the form or the content. So it's not just work that decimates certain ideas, but actually is an engine to discuss these ideas, to put them out in the word, to allow or create a space where people can be transformed, truly deeply transformed politically or opening up emotionally. I'm inspired by that and I try to practice it as well. I would just add to that and say that I think that the experience that we're both talking about is simply put, I think if an artist is exploring something for the first time or is in some way reaching for something that they don't know how to do, then that sense of trying is also going to communicate to the audience. Whereas if what we're doing is simply trying to repeat what we've done before, nobody's going to be awake. I mean, no one's interested in that. Again, I just, my wish, I guess, for 2020 is that we take this as a serious invitation just not to do things the way we know how to do things. And that's going to start shaking things up. And I do think that we have a necessity right now to make work. But we can't look at Black Lives Matter and the American election and the global pandemic and say, well, this is a good time not to be creating art. I really, if not now, when? Yeah. It is to, and I like how you're connected to knowledge. Two of our students, Armia Frangione of Israel and Corey Tamla, they created the Performing Knowledge project, which we did for a couple of years where they invited students from all the 30 different disciplines, what they work on, what they research, they're not performers, they are not, you know, trained in the, in theater or anything, and they, let's perform your research. I mean, you know, we host the days of, you know, 20 sessions or 15, you know, when it was traumatized by students and the idea to perform might be an idea to invite them to perform knowledge and also to see theater as a performance as you said, of knowledge or you used a different word. I think this is something that is a way or a new way of looking at things and your program for sure will be there on the forefront and will be of interest. You talked about getting on the Black Mountain and the Bauhaus, Bauhaus was in Dessau, Black Mountain was, yeah, in the Black Mountain, Bard is in Bard. Not really sure how you convince Soros to say it's a region with no, very little access to education, you know, but he might have looked around it, but do you have to be outside the centers, outside the metropolis, Stacey Klein's work, this work of so many of us, whether we're from Indonesia or Sri Lanka, everybody talked about it, go outside, do a start, start a small in a different way. Is that something also that perhaps comes out of this lesson, it doesn't have to happen in the centers with something like your place can flourish that is, yeah. I think it's a good question. I mean, I certainly think it's easier, it's easier to make work outside New York City. I mean, it's, but that may change now. I just, I can't say, because we don't know what New York is now. I mean, it's so different now, you know, maybe it's about to become the best time to make work in New York. I don't know. I mean, we did, when we ran Crossing the Line, the Chopra, Simon, Darvin, I, you know, I think we made pretty good things in the city too, but it was always, you know, the, we were very aware of the obstacles. And I think as long as you're, as long as you're aware of the obstacles, as long as you can see what makes something difficult and therefore creatively interesting, you can be anywhere. I mean, Tanya's made work in the center of major metropolis is, but also on, you know, the island of Malta, or on the coast of Lebanon. Tanya, I don't know whether you think it, it makes a lot much difference. I agree that this is about to change. It's been happening for quite a while where there's a sort of exodus from artists from big cities, because they simply can no longer afford to live there. But I think with the climate change and with different, with the pandemic happening now and the threat of more pandemics that might happen, people are starting to think a little bit about a different life, perhaps a healthier life, a slower life, a space where you can just focus on work without having to rush to be able to pay rent in a major city. I think there will be an effect on how we've been using the internet to disseminate work and to perform. So I guess some of that will continue to happen and will make people feel that they can basically live anywhere. I'm starting to think that we should think site specifically a little bit more. I've done a lot of work as site specific performances. And I found myself now with a pandemic missing that more than the more like a globetrotting from a festival to another just showing the same work again. But I found myself now with a pandemic missing that deeper engagement with a space with certain communities who inhabit those spaces and make a longer and deeper research and artwork. And I suspect that more of that will start to happen. So I'd say that, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of artists have found places a little bit more rural or outside the major cities. So Gideon, if you could, I mean we come closer to the end of the conversation, but what if you know, there were more George Soros's of the world and other things, what would you do to embark, which by the way also you said we reconfigured the building, it's a spectacular building in itself, your place. So what would you do? What do you feel is still missing? What would be your dream? What would you do if you had both of you, if you could really have an open suitcase with gold coins like Pippi Longstockings, what would be the work you feel that's essential, that's important, that's what I would do. Now I don't think I can really answer that question because I can't separate, I can't, it's very hard for me to fantasize about the future. I mean, although I'm not from the States, I've grown up in the States in a situation where we really have to raise the money in order to, I now see fundraising developing resources as completely integral to producing a project. So you know, we often say at the Fisher Center that the question is not what are we making, but it's what are we making and how are we making it. And so the limits of, you know, a budget or the development plan are part of the structural recreated process. So I couldn't say, you know, if I had two billion dollars, what's the program that I would make? Because the not knowing where the money is going to come from is part of the excitement now of making the work. So actually limitless resources is not an interesting or useful proposition for me. I mean, it's great to have support. I'm enormously grateful to, you know, to our patrons who make it possible for us to take these kinds of risks. But, you know, the president of Baldly on Botstein often says that, you know, our poverty is not such a bad thing. And I, it's easy to say that. And I am not underplaying my gratitude for what we have. But I think there's a danger in having too much. That really didn't answer your question. No, no, no, that's, it is true, of course. Thank you. No, I think you did well. And I agree with you. And working with obstruction is often pushes you to be innovative and to think outside the box. And I wouldn't really think that what we need to create differently or think differently is what you call like a big larger box of gold or how you put it, I think we just need to simply create a more accessible, more diverse, more sustainable art industry and the art world. And we could do that without even a lot of money. And also, we should remember that if we really want to be part of thinking and reimagining a more just reality or political reality, we need to think about art policies. And we need to think that art should be supported. And that people paying taxes should go into art that inspired them, not only going into the military, you know, for example. And so we have to rethink also what we rely on, that we shouldn't just imagine and rely on public funding, private funding. Yeah, I mean, I think the, you know, the two, the two huge challenges for us as Tanya says in our field are finding ways to create points of access and interest for people who are not currently either able to come or interested in coming or engaging with work for sure. And the other is just that, as I said, was we both said earlier, you know, the model at the moment is an environmental catastrophe, and we can't continue to be part of the problem. I mean, wonderful, though it is to build a big production and take it to 15 cities for two performances at a time. This is not healing the planet. And we have to be smarter about the way that we are developing networks that can engage with artists, that don't involve everybody getting on an airplane and shipping us that. Yeah, yeah, no, I think these are absolutely the right, the right, the right answers. And as Brett said, you build the house with the stones you have. And just to be able to work and change the institution, you know, and it's tremendous, we had Thomas Oberender from the Berlin Festival, who did a project with Bruno Latour about climate change, where they feel this is the big theme. And they said, we would like to take off the air conditioning. How can you have air conditioning in a gigantic building in Berlin, but you want to talk about climate change. And he said, just to solve that. And to document in itself, you know, is something, first of all, that you can do it by how complex that it really is. And also that, as you said earlier, you know, that the way you produce the way you put projects together, the way you collaborate has to be integral to the artistic and aesthetic, you know, messages, you are sending it has to be honest, radically honest. And it has to be rethought, you know, that Rainier Polish, the Berlin director who says, I write the words of my place with the actors, I don't distribute them to main actors. They choose because otherwise, there is that system of hierarchy of stars and other, and if I do this in my work, what am I'm doing different than the people I criticize so harshly in my work when it comes, you know, to the failings of that kind of neocapitalism in Berlin that has already or as you know, destroyed a lot of what made the city so great or endangered it. So I think this is of real importance and what you what you do out there and we all, of course, have been there, people will go, people should go and also universities should look at it. And also theaters, you know, what what does it mean to really engage with communities with knowledge, with the big themes of our time, how can we combine the human rights and the arts and many, many other things that are possible. You know, this is just one combination that you have and it's exciting. It's inspiring. We are proud of all what you do. You're part of our community and that you are exploring this as test pilots in the sky and we hope that airplanes will hold and and the motorists will will run and maybe even get to outer space once in a while. And Gideon is a both new to a tiny but what's up at Bart College is there, you know, you mentioned that Peter Sellersing is a closing thing. Tell us a bit what's what's cooking in the in the on the shelf and well right now, right now we're working with Charlotte Brathwaite, incredible director on two projects. One is a collaboration with Michelle and a gear cello singer songwriter, which is in the deepest sense a tribute to to James Baldwin, which is taking, which has many outputs. They're making some digital work, some animations. Michelle has recorded some songs, but also they're distributing broadsheets, newspapers, and there's a phone line where members of the public can call in. And it's a it's a very, very beautiful project that doesn't have one culminating performance, but it's going to be spread out over many months. And then Charlotte is also working with a team of collaborators across disciplines on a project called the future is present. Which he's making in part with our students abroad, which grew out of a project she's been doing for several years, called casting the boat, which has been looking at patterns of voter suppression and systemic racism in the US. And this particular version of it is very much about amplifying the voice of Black teenagers and really using the dreams of Black youth as the, those dreams become the authors of a series of artistic projects. And we don't know what those are going to be yet, but they're going to be developed over the next eight or nine weeks. And then there'll be a further iteration to the next year. So it's very, it's intense, beautiful, radical work. It's completely non hierarchical. In fact, it's a kind of inverted triangle where, you know, the people who are normally really disenfranchised are going to be calling the shots in the project. And it's, it's magnificent. Then we have a number of other projects that we're working on with Pan Tanowitz. And we're working with Daniel Fish on another project, which will be in the festival next summer in whatever form it can take. Of course, we have no idea whether we can be in the building or not. And we're now thinking about, I mean, something I'm working on a lot with our, with my colleagues at the Fisher Center is how we can produce in a state of not knowing what the outcome is going to be. And also how we can use the challenge of reaching audiences in places where we are not as a creative advantage. So I think there'll be much more on that soon. I have a feeling that the, you know, although I completely agree with Tanya that, you know, the internet is here to stay as a creative tool, we're not going to want to be staring into laptops by ourselves for too, too much longer. And there may be new new ways of creating and new ways of experiencing work collectively out there waiting to be discovered. Tanya, what what's next to preparing for the MA program? Are you working? Yeah, so I am supposed to be touring, I was supposed to be touring my work all this year, but some of it is going online, others are just kind of postponed. So I should be showing work with Under the Radar and Bard as well, partnering with Bard early January. And then we'll continue to work on the MA program and the other public programs next to it. And hopefully we'll launch all of that next year. But as Gideon said, I mean, it's all, it's very interesting to be creating or thinking about the future now when everything is a little bit shifting and we don't know how the future will be. Yeah. So as Meredith Mung said here on the talk, don't be afraid of the unknown, you know, so but it is, it is unknown. What will do? Last tips, what are you reading or listening to or view any tips from books, music, movie, something what people should focus on? I've been, this sounds very grim, I've been reading, my dad passed away over the summer and I've been reading a lot of books about mortality and the end of life. So particularly I just read Atulka Wanda's incredible book Being Mortal and a beautiful work by a Zen palliated care nurse from Oregon called Sally Tisdale. And the book is called Advice for Future Corpses and Those Who Love Them. And it was enormously helpful to me in my dad's final days as has working on the Peter Sellers project as well because it's very, very connected. So yeah, that's been my reading recently. Yeah, I've been actually mainly listening to loads of things while on the move and I've been really enjoying listening to these radio projects that started with the pandemic. I mean, I think this is a practice that started with a neighborhood radio that started in Italy and then a similar one happened in Beirut and another in Ramallah and another in Tunis. So I've been listening to all of that. Some of them are just people talking, rambling and some really good music and DJing happening. So I've been mainly tuning to that. Yeah, yeah, that is true. We listen much more careful than we did before and perhaps people also talk in a different way. Those thank you both really, really for taking your time and I hope you know it was as informative and meaningful. As far as it was really an insight into your minds, what you're doing, what you're planning, the open question. Thank you for being so honest and I think it's really inspiring what you are doing and we should all watch and check out what is happening at that Barg college. Tomorrow we have a little bit of the work of the Segal Center out on a focus since 15 years. We do a festival called Prelude where we present work in progress from New York artists and New York companies. It's exclusively actually New York artists and companies because we felt there is not so much left as a space where people develop work or do it for where people look and watch for David Broome and Miranda Heyman. The two curators I work with, they put it really together. They will be here talking a bit about the selection, the process, what it means to make a festival which also now will be completely online and there's like 15, 20 artists participating and what we should look out for. It's still also very much in the process, very much unknown, Sammy is the producer and and many others I wouldn't be able, we hope we will all get it together. It's going to be starting October 22nd, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then the following week and we haven't announced it's a program. It's also work in progress but we're always a little bit late but this will also be interesting and I hope we will also give a little home for some productions coming out of this great city that has a great energy and New York has been through a lot over the centuries and the city will bounce back and it will be different and we think perhaps also have learned something that makes it an even better one because they were, as Gideon said, they were the big problems also here and things that perhaps you know were not right. So that's an update from us. Thank you again for joining thanks for listening and take time out of your daily life, ultimately really this is about you, what Gideon and Tanya talked about is to reach you, to put something out in the real life, in the real space as Eduard Lissot, he said that your thoughts are not in your head, they are not imaginary, they are not in cypher space, they actually real outside and they produce imagination and change something. So this is important what you think and that perhaps something in your life also it gets inspired or changed or you're interested or do some researches. Boracca said yesterday where she said you know do your research, read, find out, it's not her job alone to let them know about situation, I think your project that is so connected to knowledge and performing and the arts and the aesthetic and the political really combines a lot of what is so needed and it is inspiring in one of many forms that should be out there and should be tried, these are also real experiments we wanted from artists but do institutions really do that, do they really experiment, do they really give a space to try something out where a failure is okay, I think this will not, it's a fantastic idea but it should be and you have to try out many things to find what works and no director in this theater stage knows on the first day of rehearsal what he is doing but everybody pretends especially in shows at university, if you know everything and you just execute something and then often actually it does not work. So the unknown doing by thinking and the thinking by doing is a recipe that we can transfer from artistic experiences, aesthetics, into real life wherever we are in any way we are in, it's actually a model that works at your regroup, you have an idea, you change, you go ahead, your regroup change and hopefully then you will arrive at something that will be working. Thank you all, thanks for howl around for hosting us and it's a big privilege for us to have you guys here knowing that you took it so seriously, thank you for your really kind and generous words Gideon, it means a lot, it's really for me at the theater center because we know you mean it and it also stays with you know with your entire work and it really congratulation everything you guys do and also as you said Kayla and it's been a great friend of our center and so many many others and Tom who also you know your partner who was a curator, there are many many connections but you do something, a lot of people talk and have ideas and do things but doing something is complicated to have nests, to build nests for ideas and and bring out something alive that's really complicated and this is happening at your place. So thank you and Tania one day, I hope that we will meet, we show some of your work also in our film festivals of theater and popcorn. So Valen speaking, I remember that in the cafes that was great and good luck and stay safe everybody vote and stay tuned.