 Welcome everybody back to Siegel Talks here at the Martinie Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown Manhattan in historic times, not only the times of Corona but it's the week before the election and the entire nation is in anticipation of what will happen and we all can explain one day why it happened and 10, 20, 30 years from now when we are in the middle of it we are so close it's hard to find out to understand what's right what's wrong and what is obvious and what was not and of course we all hope that people will go to vote and vote for forms of democracy forms of art forms of life that are good for us, for the city, for America and also for the planet and it's a very significant election and artists have been of course here on the forefront on this imagining of a new world of a new place of also creating spaces in cities so to let people share worlds and to understand the other and it is now about, Embey says that Achilles Embey we it's no longer about you know that we show solidarity and we always our own group right now what is important how can we include what is not us and to imagine it in a good way so many problems we have have our failure of imagination that people cannot imagine a present you're sharing the world the globe sharing with plants with animals with diverse groups from everywhere but people who are not the same as us and we and instead of seeing it as a as a as an advantage and that it makes our life richer like music from around the world we experience globally a nationalism that is very dangerous after all I'm from Germany and someone combined nationalism and some kind idea of a socialism just thinking about yourself it was an invitation to a movement that had devastating consequences so I we all do think this is serious so never I think the arts have been more important as places to share experiences to have an open discussion to have an agonistic a field arena as Florian Malsakow told us about the world of Chantal Mouff who says you know this is what theater is about we have to create spaces where ideas can compete there will never be an end of conflict ever we always think one day one idea wins over the other no but let's play fair with rules and show what the best ways is to have less suffering in the world and art and especially theater is a fantastic forum soon also we will have a session on political theater documentary theater theater of the real that deals with as much more but to this week again we have the second week of the prelude festival festival the seagulls end of dust in 15 years preaching academia and professional theater and new york experimental theater theater at the forefront young artists emerging artists and quite an amazing track record of the artists who have been with us very early on and again this week it is happening week number two online this year nobody would have thought of this david brun and miranda harmon put it together as curator said david is with us here today but first we want to welcome our guest today and as we say this is about listening and radical listening and i always start off with a long talk by myself so i apologize for it but with us today is a prelude artist i think someone whose voice should be heard whose voice is important and reminds us what art and theater performance and music is all about and what it can be doing so we learn more about each other and create meaning to imagine a future that is a better one and we need that if ever a time where we need that it is now so we have with us a kelsey pyro she's a brooklyn based a black and a jibway artist originally from st paul and minnesota music producer and vocalist for goodbyes which is a peer contribution to prelude you can go to w w prelude and vice u 2020 to see it has been fantastic contributions from all pieces quiet pieces reflecting pieces i think it's a fantastic lineup of of work which tries to use the site specific and the website is the site and and kelsey specializes in music composition sound art and performance her work often in in multidisciplinary genres and her experiences and stories from the african-american and native american indigenous identity of course within she has played with many many significant musicians in great places like the linkedin center and of course also the shed where she did a big production she is about the 2019 booking arts council community grants and many many other things david is with us here and we will talk a bit about his engagement he's the curator a great curator of predator young emerging curator we also see this prelude festival as a space to create new work and they all curators also have an open invitation to create a vision for a festival for the theater for the world and if it's real in the moment on that stage and that what you look at it can be real in in the real real world even so of course in the moment it is real and so everything has consequences and just by observing by doing things the world already changes so david welcome kelsey welcome how are you guys doing very well thank you so i apologize for my for my long introduction but i also think perhaps people have so much on their mind you know you need to hear something that's not so important and distracting and then you settle down and you open up to the message that is really important and kelsey so so tell us a bit about about you where do you come from well i'm born and raised in the twin cities which is st paul minneapolis minnesota and i moved here in 2011 and i've been working mostly in education with with youth in different ways for the most part as a teaching artist and arts educator and my cultural background is african-american and ojibway native american so african-american on my father's side and ojibway native american on my mother's side so and how did you connect to to producing art creating music sound how tell us a bit about your story well i've always my mother is an amazing woman and that she's always had me really involved in a a lot of the arts minneapolis st paul is a place where you know most people think of it as like fly over country but really there is a huge beautiful arts community there and a lot of free arts programming so my mother had me in a lot of arts programming from a very young age and i actually grew up with just my native family and i didn't grow up with my african-american family but my mother knew it was very important and that my reality in this country was going to be that of a black woman and so she put me in african-american dance spaces like drill team or the penumbra theater summer camp which is the i believe it's still the only african-american theater in the twin cities and maybe minnesota as a whole and then she also had this dream that one day i would become the next yo-yo ma so she had me take cello lessons so she really is the one who instilled arts in me and and really even though my mom sided the family never pursued art professionally my mom is an artist my grandmother is an artist my great grandfather i know is an artist because he made jewelry for my great grandmother so it's it's just all been really embedded in it and my mom really wanted to instill my pride in being a black woman by really infusing me into the black community as much as she could and especially the black arts community in minnesota and from there i really got into spoken word poetry and that took me a long way so i was doing poetry and theater and music i eventually got a full scholarship and undergrad to be a part of the hip hop arts program called first wave in madison wisconsin the university of Wisconsin madison of all places and that provided me with a lot of great opportunities and training and i got to learn how to produce and develop your own shows and projects in that program and we got to travel around throughout undergrad and then i guess i decided i wanted a challenge and i moved to new york city with a thousand dollars and slept on the floor for a month but i finally you know found my way after being here about nine years and really getting into the arts community here yeah and so yeah david yes kelson i'd love for you to talk a little about goodbyes um and maybe two things to think about i'd love to hear more about how your work has taken shape since you arrived in new york which feels very similar to my own story although i'm not a very good artist um and i'll just say something that really struck me about goodbyes and maranda as well my co curator you know is the way it seemed to invoke all these different timescales on the one hand there's these very long sweeps of history think about the the you know the history of the americas more broadly and the history of people from africa in the americas also your own personal history uh you know the show seems driving some part from family members from you know close kinship relationships and then also um what's what's happened with the uprisings this summer especially your connection to minneapolis and st paul it felt like all those were coming to bear on the work in these very interesting ways so i'd be curious to hear you talk a little about more goodbyes and maybe how the last year or six months have have shaped the work as you've as you've put together with your collaborator okay yeah um whoo no i know but it's my last the last six months i mean i'm sure for everybody has just been a whirlwind uh has been a very emotional time and a time of intense grow and uh my collaborator kino gal galbraith he wasn't able to make it here today um he's my partner in life and he's my partner in art which is really great he's a jamaican artist jamaican photographer and um i guess filmmaker now so we have really he has really supported me in many ways over the past six months so um goodbyes initially started five years ago as me getting back into music production and some of the songs were actually made on garage band where if you know anything about music production it's the software that just comes with your mac it's not that advanced um and then as i began to relearn music production and just grew and grew and grew into six songs which i realized were all love songs about different african-american men in my life who are no longer in my life um for various reasons two songs are about a dear friend of mine um who passed away and was a victim of suicide who was an artist in uh minneapolis minnesota who touched many lives his name is andrew thomas and went by phonetic one some of the songs are about in um my past romantic relationship where i thought that was my life partner and turned out he wasn't and then there's a song about my father and it's about um the story of why he is no longer in my life whereas he was swept up in in the 90s in the 80s in the 90 early 90s when cocaine and crack hit the black community really hard all over the country and that is how unfortunately that relationship ended with my mom and with me when i was a baby and so these songs have been coming together for a very very very long time and then when the pandemic hit everything has just been like boom boom boom boom in my life so the pandemic hit and it affected everybody and being here in new york as we know is super super intense the virus was new we were all locked down and we were taking it really seriously but then i saw you know people in minnesota weren't taking it as seriously and that was really scary and then george floyd was murdered and there was an uprising in my hometown in one of the neighborhoods in the neighborhood i was born and in the neighborhood where my mom my mother was living she's disabled and so literally she's telling me they're burning everything and i'm scared and i can't go i can't go to her there's nothing i can do and then um and then because you know unfortunately people in minnesota were not taking the virus seriously the people that she was living with were not taking it seriously and my mother caught the corona virus and spent um two months in the hospital and one month in rehab and um that was really really intense and then finally in july even though the numbers in minnesota were going up every all the numbers here were you know went down quite a bit and i was like all right it's time for me i need to go i need to go home and i need to see my mother because they finally were letting people come into to see their loved ones because the doctors were realizing like that it helps people survive when your loved one can be with you and so the doctor told me they would let me in so i was like all right and my partner is amazing he got me a flight back to minnesota and um i saw her and she got better in like a week of seeing me it was crazy but during that time i stayed in an air b and b in south minneapolis and i had no idea that the neighborhood i was born in a neighborhood that i've lived in and loved very much was still very much a wreck and i didn't feel comfortable take i could have easily taken a bus from where i was living to the hospital where my mother was but no one was wearing masks on the bus and so i decided to walk and on that walk happened to be pretty much the same stretch of where the uprising happened and literally seeing buildings that i used to go into buildings that used to there was a small theater i used to break dance that's another part of of my artistry but there was a small theater that used to hold like break dance practice it was totally burnt it was rubble um and that was all very intense because no one wants to see their home ripped up like that and um and it's just the fact that there are people in the world where that is they live in spaces like that year after year who are in civil war and that is for for me to see that just for you know maybe it'll be like that for a year i don't know how long it's going to take to rebuild everything but just the idea that that's how a lot of people live was was really hard to see but the beautiful thing is like i said before miniapolis is so artistic it's so full of life and a lot of people don't realize it because they think of new york or they think of l.a maybe chicago but you know that's where princes from you know that's lizzo actually moved to miniapolis to make her career there's a ton of art it's got the most theater seats next to new york and and the visual artists in the arts community literally came together and started making hundreds and hundreds of murals on all of the um plywood boards that the businesses put up to protect you know their shops because that neighborhood is a black neighborhood it's a native american neighborhood and it's a latino neighborhood and um there's a few white folks as well but they're fairly new and it kind of like reminded me i guess of like the broncs in the 70s where you see like those videos of the graffiti artists like doing like beautifying their neighborhood themselves so even though it was really hard to see like open spaces and piles of rubble where buildings had been there is also this resilience of the community members like taking back their community cleaning it themselves and beautifying it in their own way and sending a message with their art and it was really intense and i just on those walks to and from the hospital i just started like taking pictures and video of everything the good parts the ugly parts um there's some really interesting beautification there is one where youth were literally like planting flowers in one of the buildings that were burnt down to the ground and um i just i just love where i'm from and i love my city and i know what it's like to be black in that city and native in that city and i've had the police called on me when i was 13 when my mom moved me into a white neighborhood and you know there's why was the police called huh why was the police called oh me and my sister who is um she's adopted she's native alaskan we were listening to like cindy lapper really loud over and over again the same song but it was just like we were listening to girls just want to have fun and like washing the car or something like that so it was ridiculous um but yeah it's it's really interesting because i wasn't there obviously i was here in new york quarantine when the uprising happened but there's also you know a lot of talk i hear from my friends that the fires weren't started from people in that community that they were started by you know white protesters who really don't know how to be allies in this instance and there's videos of like white protesters smashing in windows at the auto zone that used to be standing there that's that's not anymore and so it's very complex in that we need white allies to fight with us so we don't have to fight these battles alone and sometimes you need to mess things up so that you can finally be heard but then you leave a black and brown community a complete mess and we're left to to pick it up ourselves so it's like this needed to happen what was this the right way is this how it needed to happen i don't know i think that's an ongoing talk and debate and then a black life metal movement was in a way hijacked perhaps even you know by you know some what would you say white extremists of whatever reason who then also make it more about them and then this is what became the dominant reporting about the movement but i also i mean i i read about the Minneapolis things and we saw it all but i didn't fully understand that it's almost like warlock you say so many buildings really burned and were destroyed and uh so tell us a bit i um what were the houses or people lived in or pectory buildings or what were the targets and most of the targets were more commercial institutions um and some were pawnshops and like literally people had to write on the plywood boards like you you'll see it in the video like don't burn this pawnshop because people live upstairs because because kids live upstairs and i know for a fact that um one building was burned because they thought it was a condo going up and in minneapolis a lot of the affordable housing programs and projects they look like new condos which is really good it's cool so one building that was burned where they thought it was a condo for wealthy people coming into the city was actual an affordable housing you know project that was being built and right now like on the other hand with the pandemic minneapolis and st paul is starting to look a lot like la where a lot of the homeless people are living in tents outside and so that is also really really really intense to see because of the pandemic there's not as much space in the shelters and so you have parks there are areas that it's designated or people have no choice to to set up camp and to camp out and so it is it is really rough um to to witness that right now and a lot of my friends who do social justice work are like you know what's gonna happen because it's already snowed there it's so cold yeah so it's not like here and it's not like la so i'm really praying for my hometown right now and i hope that um goodbyes which mixes my personal loss with black men that i love amongst what's happening now currently with the black lives matter movement i hope that you know it at least might bring a little attention to what is still going on in my hometown because it's not over just because those officers were arrested and charged it hasn't gone away it's still there gels you have a question you know one thank you for sharing your story and i'm also sorry to go on to you i have construction outside i don't want to interrupt but when you're filming did you imagine that this would become you know a kind of work its way into your into your art obviously a lot of us will film and do things now because we have the access to or did that impulse come later i mean and maybe one version asking his question is was was your was your art a way to kind of process and think through and maybe even find some healing in the moment or how how did that how did that interaction happen i mean i think because some of these pieces started so long ago it's kind of come to be over a long like a period of time and just the music has had so many different names itself as it was coming together and um at first it just started out like i'm going to make an ep and then it was like oh these songs are all about the same theme and let's process that and then i thought it might be cool to work with kino again because we worked at on the same piece at the shed he did some film for that piece so i asked him who'd be interested in doing some more like experimental film work around how he felt when he heard the music and he said yes and then the whole project was like paused uh when my mom got got sick so initially before she got sick and before the pandemic i had a whole bunch of plans on how i wanted like the film portion to come to light but then when the pandemic hit we had to change everything because i wanted to work with like dancers or actors and not really be in it myself um and then it's like oh if we do it we have to be in it we have to change we have to film some of this inside my studio apartment and so kind of allowed us to be a little bit more creative and kino who is really does not like to be on camera took a risk and is in two of the videos to be a part of it so that we were able to make it like the film safely and like social distance even with the other two actors that we did end up um working with it was like how do we do this and be safe and um then when i saw i was sent the opportunity for the prelude festival and i already had all of the photos and images for my trip back home in july and i applied to the prelude festival during my second trip home in august and i knew that what me and kino had was already 30 minutes long and then i realized that what we made you know connects the personal can also connect to the universal issue of what i was feeling of when i was making this work about losing these beautiful beloved black men in my personal life and what me and kino were feeling and what i feel like probably most or all of black america was feeling in losing george floyd and amod obry and brianna taylor and um everybody else and so it just felt like it made it made sense to use all those photos and videos that i took as a whim um to use them in this way to make that connection so from 2015 to today and uh and how do you how are you thinking about um i mean music just seems so central to your work it was one of the things that ran i love i love the sound um you know i spend a lot of time in your sound lab but how have you thought about over the years and then maybe since the pandemic incorporating media and performance and even you know things that are um theatrical acting you know stage design things like that how do you think about your work as performance and do you think that will change going forward or um are you still excited about the possibility of you know live multimedia performance oh yeah i'm still excited about that definitely my artistic training in first wave and undergrad and the theater and everything that i was thrown into um growing up is has made me into a very like multimedia kind of performance artist um so i'm excited to uh start doing that again in person and i'm also interested in figuring out how to do that virtually now because that is now a really big deal and at the beginning of the pandemic i actually bought the gear needed to be able to to perform virtually but with everything that happened in my personal life i haven't really been able to have the space to learn all the tech to be able to do that but now that my mother is in like a much better place i'm hoping that i can get get into that and start learning how people do performance um in a virtual space um as well as a live space um kelsey you said i i grew up in minneapolis i know what it means to be black but you chose to be an artist um tell us about that experience growing up also as an artist and compared to you know your friends others look up is there how how did that work and also why do you make art what what do you think is uh so essential for you days you say i'm going to do this as a reaction to the world around well again i feel like growing up in minneapolis there's just so much art and my mom just made it a big part of my life which is really amazing and so i was always involved in something artistic if it was dance if it was music if it was visual art it was theater and and because also my whole family is also very artistic it just felt really natural to me it just says it's fun to me it's something i can't help but do and i feel like my artist especially in recent years like sometimes i make things just to be sillier to relax but a lot of my bigger projects in recent years have been a way for me to express who i am and my cultural identity and also a form of release or therapy i feel like i'm a kind of person where i don't speak much outwardly about my emotions i'm usually pretty bubbly and happy but then sometimes i keep it inside so i feel like a lot of my art is a way for me to express what i'm saying in a different way where i feel more comfortable and um i also am really into doing things that women are the minority in so i got into break dance because i'm like i want to be one of the few women who can spin on their head and and being in a space that kind of space and i love challenging spaces like that and it's the same thing with audio engineering and music production whereas like me and my friends in high school my high school actually had a music studio in it it had a lot of great arts programming and me and my friends were some of the few girls in that space and there's something thrilling i like about it and i'm sure they like it too which is i'm here i i can learn these programs as well as any other guy and i'm going to make cool stuff and so a lot of my practice comes from like that idea of just because i'm a woman and i'm not a cis male doesn't mean i can't do these things and challenge myself in that way and then learning music production just led to me recording my own poetry and my own story and putting out my own music and i feel like i make art because because i have to and even now more recently with my project at the shed during my 2018-2019 artist residency the project was called maka du yasikwe which is an Ojibwe word that translates as a black woman a woman of african descent so when i got that project i realized that through music production i could learn traditional music from my Ojibwe background and incorporate it with r&b and hip hop and black music genres because i had empowered myself to become a music producer and then i realized like hey there's a lot of stories about what it means to be mixed with black and white or mixed with natives in white but there's not a lot of stories about what it's like to be native and black and all of the rich history of native americans and black americans in this country some of it's good and some of it's bad but it's not really out there so then my art became a tool to really push that narrative and how was it in comparison from the sound studio in your high school when you're at the shed which is this is big new new york age you tell us a bit how did you experience that moment at the shed that was an insane opportunity um i'm very thankful for it but i've never worked harder in my entire life because i had a full-time job and was trying to deliver this show it was a nine-month residency and the show Makaduyas Ikwe was a performance piece that incorporated music and oral tradition and was a commentary on the Eurocentricity of the five stages of grief so the entire narrative was about loss in the black community and the Native American community and how it is impossible for us to get to the final stage of acceptance because we're as an oppressed people we're so resilient but it's just not that linear for us as a people that and that there's different ways of healing than just going through these cycle of stages as prescribed and so in the final performance it did a four show run during a week in June 2019 and i worked with a whole bunch of amazing friends and collaborators and all of the music was a mix of electronic music and live musicians so i worked with uh my friend who was a drummer and audio engineer his name was Compton Timberwolf and i worked with my other amazing friend who i've known since undergrad his name is Ben Hoffman he primarily plays piano but he also does vocals and drums he's and these they're both geniuses in their own right and so i played the music with them and then projected on the screen in the background was Kino's work so what me and Kino did was we traveled to Minneapolis Minnesota and we shot in the black community and then we traveled what we call in Minnesota up north so by the Canadian border to the native reservation that my family is affiliated with the founder black band of of Chippewa Native Americans and we met with my aunties and we filmed in that area as well and so all of these elements came together to create like a very i guess multimedia production and it was it was it was really fun and it was really crazy we had to do all the set design ourselves um and so i had a pizza night and i was like i've got pizza and beer come to this warehouse and paint these long strips of paper um with these basically slurs that makes people are called like red boned high yellow or colloquialism not really slurs indian hair things like that with the different colors of that are attributed attributed to both being african-american and the medicine wheel being native american which is red yellow white black and then also green you said you had to do by yourself did this shed do you feel that they supported it it was possible to do within the framework what you got what you wanted to do yeah i mean we were definitely the first year that you know they had done this they're brand new and of course there's it's the first year everybody's learning there's gonna be bumps along the way but what i really appreciated with them is they're very responsive we did a few studio visits i could meet whenever i felt like i needed and then um after the first year was done they um took a few of us out a couple times to really get some feedback about our experience and i really appreciated that i heard that they had they forgot dressing rooms is that true in that that it's um oh i had a dressing room you had worked out at the beginning that artists couldn't find their ways around yet and they had to use you know the bathrooms and things so um but as you said maybe it wasn't a very um very beginning yeah tell us well i do know like i kept my production my cast very small like they gave me a good amount of money but i knew it was going to be a lot of work and i wanted to make sure everybody was paid very fairly and so i had you know two musicians i had a friend very type a to help me with admin and i had kino doing the film and then everybody else who who helped out with the set was like volunteer like beer and pizza but i wanted to make sure everybody was fed and paid fairly so it i really did not have a big crew some people had like dancers and or their space was outside not everybody was in the same space so mine was just like real small kelsey i'm curious building on this your experience this shed i want to ask you maybe more broadly about your relationship to institutions and what it's like being an artist i know for my peers um in the profession you know some of them have been have felt very supported uh meran and i often talk about soho rap which is uh for people who don't know the theater in downtown new york they recently put several i think it was eight artists on their payroll and health care other of my friends are extremely disappointed by let's say broadway or other institutions that have seemed to have done nothing either in the form of programming or in reaching out to artists uh roger feather kelly who's a great writer for wrote a piece about this actually early in the pandemic um and so my question is along the lines of what would you like to hear from an institution um if they asked you it could be the shed it could be anyone else i mean if they said you know what do you need in this time um what could we do for artists such as yourself what do you think you would say i mean people need like so much right now and that you know i mean i feel like i really just started working with institutions in this way outside of university in the past few years like when i first got a community arts council with the brooklyn arts for the brooklyn arts council community arts grant um but as an artist i've also gotten rejected a ton and i've been told that even though i pitched this these project of hey i want to push the african-american native american narrative that my work or is not that's not what they're looking for um i wish institutions would just take more risks and say yes a lot more and really do what they can during this time to to help artists that they say that they serve but it is really hard to say uh because everybody even these institutions i know are losing funding right now but i guess if they could perhaps try to bend more with the times like the prelude festival has done and to keep going as much as they possibly can with their programming to hire artists and to be innovative with how they can keep putting on production safely um that's the hard question that's the hard question to answer i know i've you know lost lost work definitely as a teaching artist i lost most and then all of my work i don't know i hope that they could do what they what they can as much as they can now thank you for sharing i mean i don't think there's any easy answer for sure as you said there's multiple things i mean um to some extent there are days you know just to share a little bit there are days when i feel like they should just all band together and figure out how to give people healthcare and and not even worry about the programming i mean i'm glad what we're doing at prelude i'm i'm proud of it i'm thrilled to have you in the festival among everyone else but then there are times when i'm like okay maybe we can just turn this into one large mutual aid sector um but i also know there's a you know people are making interesting work and every institution is so different having worked at others um but i think what i've gathered i think some of my peers have gathered is that it has become more clear who means their rhetoric when they say we serve this community including artists and for whom that rhetoric might be a cover for a you know other kind of corporate project um but as you said there's no easy answer and thank you for you said about prelude um you know for people listening at home we're trying we're certainly not the shed but um it's thrilling to to offer some some opportunity and space and a little bit of resources for for artists such as yourself yeah i i definitely appreciate it and even though prelude is not the shed i i love it because i feel like i can really get funky and take risks and see a lot of cool work um because prelude is just like you know do your thing and and submit it to us and you know there's not a lot of you know we need to see this we need to come and make sure you know it is a lot of trust and i appreciate it well you gained brand in my trust i think immediately when i heard the the video and heard the music come on i was like yes this is this wants to be a part of it and i i loved in the sample you sent um you know it was a video of of a young black man hanging out i mean just just kind of there was a certain joy and just being with someone with the you know you as the viewer kind of as the camera and the music helping you be a part of the of the scene and miranda and i feel like to some extent there there can be a revolution and just being with people and just taking the time and walk as i was so inspired when you were talking about the story of just walking the street you know and capturing what what you felt was important to to hold with the camera and and hold inside of yourself and that to me can be as much of a revolutionary activity as you know any kind of other thing we might think about under the rubric of protest or direct action but people taking care of each other is to me you know as much of an insurgent activity as and it's uneven of course for people in your community um there's so many more obstacles and struggles than perhaps someone who would have at certain vectors of privilege but that was what struck me about the sample you sent uh in tandem with the language you had about it in your larger project but um immediately i knew i wanted to spend more time with this so thank you so much yeah i yes i i agree with a lot that you said like hanging out and taking care of each other is an act of protest and like that resonates with me even more now because as soon as my mom got sick and i knew i would have to go and take care of her as much as i wanted to be on the streets and protest you know i knew that what is most important is that i use you know taking care of people and self-care as as protest because i want to make sure that i'm not bringing this virus with me into the hospital around vulnerable people and then i also rents um from um a really amazing 91 year old woman and so i also knew that as much as i i protested a little bit but then when she moved back into the house with me i knew is most important for me is to make sure that i keep her safe because i saw what the virus did to my mother and i do not want to witness that again with anybody else close to me and then basically this piece became my protest in the art wow so that that is so that is great it is a protest piece a piece of the pandemic of the time of corona you know archiving the moment and and you know just putting it out there and as an exploration but not as an explanation so it's it's an important really artistic uttering of of you so really thank you for being there how is the situation i mean i don't you must be connected to the black community black woman and the indigenous community how is the mood what are people thinking about are they doing work what's on their mind of your friends um i mean i know they're always doing work there was doing work before they're doing work during and they're doing work after they're amazing friends to do amazing programming there and i'm so proud of them and everything that that they do um and it's the the the fight is not done yet it's not going to be done for a very long time because that unfortunately is how this country was built it was built on mass genocide and slavery and so it's going to take a lot to be able to heal and and really this country needs to step up and admit what the heck they did you know and until the leaders of that country do that work we as a people have a lot of work to do to make them do that work so it's going to be a long time coming but i'm very proud of them and um they're they're just so amazing and they not only supported themselves their families the entire community um but then in my time of extreme need like they were there for me the entire time i've been going back and forth um to Minnesota with my mom so i love them dearly they're my family we had also spider women um on here and Native American artists from Canada so how is it when you go back to the as you said the reservation because we don't know we don't hear enough about it it's also at the moment as i hear it's also a devastating moment so what what do you hear what do you see when you said you went there how was the mood um well i wasn't able to go this year because of the pandemic but i try to go every year and every reservation is very different um so i can't speak to to every reservation you know and i actually can't speak to the reservation that my family's affiliated with too much at the moment but i do know that because i have spoken with them in order to support my mom because my mom receives resources from from the final act reservation and they are doing everything in their power to use their resources to support um to support the tribal members that's great that your mom had such a recovery even after such a devastating period of illness um how is she doing if you can if you are willing to say of course you don't have to she's doing so much better great she's doing so much better and um she's still on like oxygen um she's going to be healing for a very long time a very long time um but um i found her a really amazing one bedroom apartment in an assisted living so because it was very important to her when i first went to see her she told me not to move back from new york she wants me to keep um her and my grandmother they're very adamant about me um going after my dreams i go back very often and but my it was important for my mom to feel independent so she's able to heal and the space around her looks like a regular apartment and feel independent and it's just amazing how the first week i went back in july she was on to give you context she's on like five liters of oxygen right now when i saw her she was on 50 liters of oxygen and in that week of spending time with me finally having someone be close to her and touch her and be near her her oxygen levels dropped from 50 liters down to 10 liters and she was able to go to rehab and leave the hospital so being with your loved ones is so so powerful and that connection is is so so important that's great i'll be thinking about her uh throughout the week as i watch the piece as well um maybe as we're closing down here a little bit i'd be curious to hear what has been inspiring you recently maybe it's a long time favorite maybe it's something you've seen online or a performance i'll just say when i heard your cover of um uh so much things to say right now i had to go back to the loren hill unplugged album which is one of my favorites uh i just found it at the right time and place my life but i'd be curious to hear you know what what what has been inspiring you if any if anything um i think like right now an artist i'm really into um is sev delisa and um she's um a really cool artist and um she's a vocalist and musician and um i don't want to butcher where she's from but i know her roots are from the middle east ah she's a dutch iranian senior songwriter and her last project like really mixes like the traditional like uh iranian sound with electronic music and it's so cool because i feel like that's what i was trying to do with the um relearning the ojibwe music and then mixing it with the electronic hip hop and r&b music so she's she's pretty amazing wonderful so and so yeah so i hope everybody will comment and uh and tune in for your for your show on prelude and um you know for the goodbyes and when is it exactly maybe david you repeat it it's on thursday the 29th at 8 p.m so you can check it out at uh prelude nyc2020.com it'll be there make sure you have a good pair of speakers when you listen don't listen to it on your little mac speakers you know put your headphones on or something else and turn it up loud so it's going to be 30 minutes or how much how long it will be 47 minutes 47 minutes yeah so something totally extraordinary and as always prelude it is free and open which is incredible um as a festival it's the only festival also in new york dedicated to work of artists and ensembles from new york city show work and uh process and development but also to talk about it to make your business works of art their philosophy their ways of thinking their you know instead of writing in a tutorial for the times or doing a painting or a sculpture or writing in a political speech artists create work and it is as significant and as serious and her anticipation also earlier works of of loss of mourning of bodies you know black man which is so central we really have to um take that serious and we have to see how do we can be share that experience and also that we should take note of that that is something that um is so existential for her and that we also should engage in a way she is business but also by some people in our lives with us but especially also from the community and i would like to everybody also remember she is a black artist indigenous artist she's a woman you know and now also a musician who had no place to perform at the moment in new york city any street cafe where like people are out with their guitars and listen to play for 20 people these are the largest concerts that are going on in new york city at the moment they used to be medicines career garden there are no jobs out there so what you do against all odds is astonishing and that you produce the work that you put it out and it's a very important contribution i think for us to understand the world and the fine meaning and also what art can do and to when we listen to the songs on thursday at eight um you know to really spend time with you when you're thinking in your mind as an extension of your thinking your dreams your brain so we feel you and and this is what art does and that's why we need art to imagine the better world as you do because in the loss it's also the longing for for change and and to take care of what we have and what we also can lose so it's truly extraordinary and thank you you know for for joining david also so great that you that you made it you'll also be here with us tomorrow and hopefully on thursday and where we will continue this and it's also a snapshot next to print and everything these are new york artists emerging on this one that's very very very difficult circumstances compared to other countries in the world make art and this is what they do and this is what is on their mind so it's something very important and significant and i hope um we uh got the uh message also for you the viewer that after all this is really about you who listen now at at home at their computers you know how can this affect you and how can you do your research about your loss and how do we kind of put it perhaps also put in the form and to learn from it that such things change as kelsey said um we have to acknowledge what happened in this country and we can only go really forward if there's some atonement for for things that have been brutal so um thank you for sharing thanks for hull run for hosting us david and miranda you know thanks for putting this festival together to be the curators of this in this very difficult moment that we would also online and the idea that this is site specific website specific it's a great one and we have you know because of that we have a kelsey with us and healthy again thank you congratulation everything you do and where you know your journey and your work and this is also in the very beginning spider woman a burial set the time right now is an indigenous thinking also it's the beginning of a creational myth we are in a new time something has ended this is a creational myth and we do not know how it will end you know we are the heroes in a way and we really have to take this series we have to change and um for for survival and there's Bruno Latour a set and Frédéric a tweet to you who are here this is a general rehearsal this pandemic um for that's what's coming in ecological disasters and or perhaps also political complications could be very little but this time we have to do that right we have to learn we have to change we have to take that series there will not be perhaps another general rehearsal with all the resources we have now as little as they are so this is utmost significance and artists have been always on that side of change and to point towards right and and just and also truthful so really thank you all and um I hope you all will stay tuned of all stay safe encourage everybody to vote who you know and the vote for you if you can't and we hope next week will bring a change we all need bye bye thank you and thank you thank you for talking to me and Kianos peace thank you definitely