 So please join us for the entire process. We really want you to have the full experience of all three projects together. And then we hope to see you later because we have two studio visits tonight, one at 6.30, one at 8 o'clock. Those are experiences for you to see an exciting new work and dig deep into their process by appearing from the artist on how they make their work and also see critical response from invited guests who are responding to the work. And then we also have a new drop of charges for a different one tonight we'll be sharing some of her research. So we have lots of things going on tonight we hope to see you and then all day tomorrow we have tons of activities, look in your books. But right now I'm going to see the stage to Nicky Douglas. Weekend at the festival, so long live the perimeter festival. Now my name is, my thumbs are not strong enough, either is fine. But before we get going I would just really love to hear if you all have a good time. So can I see your show hands? Can I see Artem? People for Artem? Oh yeah. Can I see the Artemians one more time please? Yeah, okay, I just got some people crossing over here. What about Artem people at Artem is just only the American version of my actual name which is Artyom. Artyom, yes, and that is the Russian version of my Ukrainian name which is Abel. Never fucking Artyom, please. Why am I telling you about me? Yeah, see I've been thinking a lot about my identity and that's what really made me want to write down this story. And yes, by the way, this is just a story anybody was expecting to play and I was just swearing to disappoint you about it. Everybody likes stories. This is just my story. And since I started sharing this story I really don't know how many things people respond about the story and I do agree the story is about a lot of things but to me it's primarily about one thing or primarily one place, Ukraine. Now all of you incredibly gorgeous hearing beings, sitting here right now at the Premier 2018 festival which is happening at the Bukhumi Graduate Center which is located in the one only city that never sleeps in New York City which is inside the United States of America. What is your relationship to Ukraine? It's probably a question you don't really ask yourself very often but for the next 10 minutes that we have together I invite you all to indulge yourself in this fantasy you didn't already had in someone else and I welcome you to ask yourselves what does Ukraine mean to me? No more no disclaimer. To protect the identities of real people and to tell the story of this place as truthfully as I can I have fictionalized a few details. Now let's begin for real. Every time I tell this story, I start at the same exact way because this story is a very classic beginning. We begin on the banks of a river so about an hour before dinner and today this day is Thanksgiving. I'm sitting on a bench on a bridge and we're looking at a huge river. Pine trees pierce the skies along the banks and birches crown the beaches and somewhere in the distance a solitary melancholy willow tree is digging its way. This is the Dima River. A Dima River runs through the middle of Platonovka, Kiev, which happens to be the capital of a country called Ukraine. Everything across the Dima River comes right down the middle. From the Black Sea you can watch the Dima River run up the middle and it goes right through our neighbor to the north, Belarus, and then it keeps going further on still to the westernmost parts of Russia. Now as I'm sitting here overlooking the Dima River, I'm reading a text message for myself. The year is 2014. Oh by the way, if you'd like to see pictures of the Dima River or Kiev or Ukraine or any of the things that are talking about today, I strongly recommend you google it. If you need to google Ukraine, I'll tell you the basics. I was born in 1985 when at the time here was the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, which is part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the USSR. By the time it turned 6, the USSR falls apart, Ukraine becomes an independent nation. When I'm 10 years old, my family finds out that we have won a green card lottery to come to the United States of America. And surely after I turn 11, and a week after I turn 11, my father, my sister, my mother, and I all together emigrate to the United States. We arrive and we settle in New Jersey. So now, 20 years later, I'm back in Kiev, I'm back in Ukraine, and I'm overlooking the Dima River and I'm reading a text message from my mother. But just from where I'm sitting when we're looking at the Dima River, just two miles away is the Central Plaza Fountain of Lydon Nezoletius or Independence Square. It's this vast, wide open area that reminds me of Gregor and Plaza down in Brooklyn. But it's got the distinct feel and noisiness of Times Square. Now right here in the Lydon, over the winter of 2013 and to the winter of 2014, what started out a special pro-European Union demonstration started to riot when private police and regular police brutally beat, fired upon, and murdered peaceful civilians right in the streets. In fact, over the course of that winter, the riots became so savage that they quickly grew in the name of the Maidan Revolution. And during the revolution, the Maidan was literally set on fire. You can google it with thumbs up and find a whole slew of Maidan Revolution images. But by March, the revolution has resolved and the results are that the President of Ukraine is impeached and is charged with committing war atrocities against his own citizens, but before it would be arrested, tried, and sentenced, he flees in a minimal amount to his homeland, which happens to be Russia, where he's given full asylum. Now just about the time that Maidan is wrapping up, Russia pops up again and annexes the autonomous region of Crimea. Crimea, which is a peninsula that jumps out into the Black Sea. Crimea, which is the southern most point of Ukraine. Crimea, which is actually kind of Ukraine. But sure, why not? Crimean. Crimea, which is more than 25 states of Ukraine and annexed, which is a fancy word for a hostile takeover, immediately following the annexation of Crimea. Two more states, but at least the state will not, and it's southern favor then yes, proclaiming themselves independent peoples republics, and then they band together to form one brand new super state, which at the time they called Novorossiya. The creation of Novorossiya, who pledges their allegiance to Russia, throws Ukraine into a civil war. So, the Yemper River cuts our country half. The West is all pro-European union, the East is all pro-and-new Russia. And that's the significant thing, the East isn't pro-and-new Ukraine. It's pro-and-new Russia, it's literally in the name, Novorossiya, Novorossiya Russia. So, here we're going down our set of fire. Krenia, Luhansk, Leninetsk, 325 states are now actively changing their Ukrainian identity, possibly raising it all together. And at this point, it's only April 2014, so all of this has happened in less than six months. In May 2014, pro-European support is a cheese down the street in Odessa, and a trap inside the trade union's house. The building is locked from the outside, the building is set of fire, and the people are burned alive. In June 2014, don't really know what happened in June 2014, sorry. In July, my uncle is forced to leave his home in the Leninetsk state, and he has a fling the country called together. Leaving behind a place where he was born, we can go up, where he raised a family where he served as a civil worker for 20 years, had to add in some injuries to the week after he leaves his home, his entire town is bound up by areas where he may not be trusted at all, they may be nowhere to see a truce. And then on August 3rd, 2014, my 29th birthday, my brilliant and beautiful mother sends me a text message. And this text message reads, now there is no home for us anywhere. Just out of the blue to say, finish your note. She's telling me that this text message says that after almost 20 years in the States, the US is still not our home, but now, when either is Ukraine, which it will say there's no home for her, she says, us. Now there's no home for us anywhere. Would you all like to see what might not look like after the revolution? Now there is no home for us anywhere. I keep reading this text message over and over and over and over again. Until finally, I'm going to get right from what I hear on Thanksgiving holiday, I go back to keep to see my birthplace for myself. So now that I'm back in Ukraine, I'm back in Ukraine, and I'm going to be the emperor. I realize that I'm all of this way to say good-bye to Ukraine. Ukraine has become an absentee parent. The kind that pops up in the wild just reminds me where I'm from, and then it bothers my mother. Ukraine stresses my mother out. Ukraine makes my mother text crazy things in the middle of the night, but another's no home for us anywhere. So I'm here on behalf of my family now to say good-bye to Ukraine before it changes and becomes something we don't recognize anymore. I'm here right now in 2014 to say good-bye, just the case, just the case in the same 10 years Ukraine as a country disappears. And I get a tap on my shoulder. It's Simone. Simone is 16 years old. Simone was from high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She's about this tall and she has kind of a lean-hungry look about it, which is very uncomfortable. She also has this faint jet-like hair that just seems to just like fall out of the back of her skull. And her eyes are also jet-black. Her eyes with that special shade of soulless, I'm only happy when it rains, 10 to 12 teenagers. Just you or darkness. Simone is my wife's youngest sister, and ever since my wife and I got together, Simone's always been there. I talk all the time. She looks up to me. I've got a doctor who's my niece. None of which explains what are you doing here Simone. She says, I have it in the 24 hours. I study abroad, high school scholarship to Prague, because Cambridge, Massachusetts got it like that. But for less than 20 hours she's been trying to be from Prague to Kiev with a faint eggy to ketchup to me. She's giving things giving back in the States. Just a surprise, and she's trying to me down, thanks to Instagram. Why? Simone, she says, because I want to record your journey. Oh, would you like to Instagram me bringing a civil war symbol? No, she says, what the fuck were you talking about? You know what I'm telling, language. I'm just going to take pictures, jeez. You're going home. And I've got this stuff for the man, right? But Simone statues it out again. And then she jokes back, which seems like 10 feet in a single knee. And then she winds up and she throws my phone into that number of river. What the fuck, Simone? And as if you answer my question, Simone, and she winds up and she throws that into the river. Do you have another cell phone? No. Simone, you are truly marvelous from here right now. No, she says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, she says, let's do this together. No, that is a crazy idea, Simone. You have to go home right now. She says, no, I'm saying, yes, you do. And I grab her by the hand and she pulls away and she punches me in the chest. Simone does have a camera with her to take pictures. It's a quality of a school like 70s energy that she borrowed from her photography class. And this whole thing's got like a steel body. It's just a brick of metal. And she, you know, brings this, this brick over her head like a, like a holder. She's going to smash her fucking skull a little bit. Oh, look at this, Simone. What are you doing? This is when a cargo van pulls up and two men jump out of it. They're very fast. One of them grabs you by the arms while the other punches you very hard in the balls and that collapses. A third man the driver jumps out of it. It's a stupid motion. He picks up Simone, he throws her inside the van. I hear her hit the inside of the van. I hear her start crying. And I'll toss that inside the van after her. My face hits the floor of the van. I hear my skull crunch. The door's closed. The van pulls away and we have our cell phones. So this is how I spent my things giving in 2014. I'm off there. Thank you so much for listening, for watching, thank you Lee Craig. And I hope you get to see a lot of fantastic theater. This weekend at Craig's Festival. There's a fantastic performer coming up next. And again, my name is Art. Thank you for having me. Chief, there is to make Mars seem possible. Make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes. And you can go. And is there really a way that anyone can go if they want you to? I think that's a really important thing. So... And what I really want to kind of achieve here is to make Mars... Why go anywhere, right? It's going to fight along two directions. There will be some. The alternative. The calm planet. In its own right. A truly multi-planet. Just to sort of put things into perspective. Jupiter. Planet. Civilization. Are limited. Option. We have Venus. Super high pressure. A hot acid bath. So that would be more to the actual goddess. So that would be tricky. It would be very difficult for me to make things work on Venus. Mercury. Way too close to the sun. We could potentially go to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. But those are much farther from the sun. A lot harder to get to. So that only leaves us with one option. We could conceivably go to our moon. And I'm not going against going to the moon. But I think it's challenging to create... to become a planet. It doesn't have 28 day a day. Whereas the Mars day. A self-sustaining civilization. Well just to give you some comparison between the two planets. They're actually more than close to a lot of waves. In fact we now believe that early Mars does a lot of light. And in fact if we could just warm up. But where things are now. We're about a half of these far from the sun. Still decent sunlight. We're in the case of Mars being primarily CO2. Western nitrogen. Argonne. And a few other trace elements. Which is also incredibly helpful for growing plants. It'd be quite fun to be on Mars. Because you have gravity. Which is about 37 percent light of work. So you could like... 200 billion dollars. Encourage your dollars. Again we sent 12 people to the surface of the moon. Which was an incredible thing. And probably one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But that's why these circles only barely just touched any civilization. If the ticket price is 10 billion dollars. If we could cut the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly the median house price in the U.S. In fact I think a relatively small number of people from Earth would want to go. But enough to want to go. And you could afford the ticket price. That's probably towards 5.4. Because you have to figure out how to improve the cost of moving to Mars by 5 million percent. We'll actually exceed the physical size of the moon. And this is going to be the latter end. It's going to be the highest. And probably the highest thrust away. Oh, we so fool the oxygen in that thing to densify it. So compared to when propellants are used closer, they're boiling points in most rockets. Density improvement of up to around 10 to 12 percent. Which makes it a new rotation risk for the turbo pump. Such as the grid fins obviously functioning. A lot of engines at the base. And the big difference really being that the primary structure is advanced form carbon fiber. And yet it's supposed to be a combination. And we get rid of helium and nitrogen. And we use mine on Falcon 9. And with Falcon 11, we should launch next year. There's 27 engines on the base. So we have pretty good... It also gives you rezoning. So if some of the engines fail, it's a little difficult to interpret at first. We decided to put it up there for people who want to watch the video afterward. Probably what's most relevant. And that gives you TORRICTA! And rendezvous. No raining form. The trick time could be at 6 kilometers per second. So partial velocity can be as low as... I mean in order to make it appealing and keep on and exciting. And it can't feel crap. The compartment is set up. A few weeks ago I was at Burning Man in the Nevada desert. I was in Mars. It was a dusty storm. And it was really cold at night. And there was no problem at Burning Man. With a population of only 75,000, there was a lot of shit. And there was no water to take it into the rivers, which is kind of what we do today in our current sanitation system. So I was like, is this what Mars is going to be like? Just a dusty water that should be at home? It serves a better plan for humanity. But you didn't touch much on how we will keep humans safe on the way over there from either deep space radiation or how they will live on the planet. Can you just give us some insight into the life force systems, habitats, stuff like that? I'm Zach. I'm a space enthusiast and a local Indian for researches. And I was just wondering, you know, can you talk a little bit about the future of humans in space? And are you going to go to Mars? Because I would not go. I think the first journeys to Mars are going to be really very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There's just no way around it, so I would not suggest sending children. It would be basically, are you prepared to die? And that's okay? Then you know you're a candidate for going. What's about, you know, like who goes there first? The thing that really matters is making a self-sustaining civilization on Mars as fast as possible. It is, this is different from Apollo. This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure. Mars really represents, I mean, there's the whole life insurance and protecting life and ensuring the light of consciousness is not extinguished, which I agree is incredibly important. You know, backing up the biosphere. This is not about everyone. It's about becoming multi-planetary. I think Earth would be a good place for a long time. It's just the probability of human civilization surviving is greater for a multi-planet species. Now that's the defensive argument, but the argument I find most compelling is that it would be an incredible adventure. It would be one of the most inspiring things that I can possibly imagine. And life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future and be inspired and want to live. Thank you. Thanks for us to get to ask all of these artists some questions about their work. These are works in process, so probably going to be a lot of questions about process and things like that. And I'll ask some questions we'll also open it up to the audience to ask questions. And so when you're thinking about what kinds of things you want to ask and how to formulate a question, I just ask all of you to be generous to your fellow audience members. So, and to be generous to the artists, what we really want to hear is these guys talk about their work. So really try to formulate your question in the form of a question. The audience member, if you can come up with a question that all of these guys can speak to at once, that is really amazing. So, all thank you. But yeah, just to say, if I see things going off in a direction where it's not really leading to the direction of a question, maybe sort of like, you know, a statement or an observation, I might reserve the right to gently cut you off and ask you that. Maybe you save that for the bar afterwards, later tonight. Can we maybe quickly go down the row and just and say everyone's names? We're starting with Artem. I don't know everyone who's on stage. My name is Artem? Yeah, it's Anon. I'm going to be starting with Taris. Taris moves. It leads us to Neen. And her board. I'm sorry. So, I wanted to start off I'll throw out the first question and ask you all about where the work that we just saw is in its journey. So, where did it come from? Where did it end into? Where is it now? Is it any, I mean, anyone? We can start with, I'm sorry this time. That's easier. Sorry, you guys. We're at the dining room. This is the first time I've shown anything. It started with a photo that Janine showed me of a bunch of people playing golf in Washington State while the firefighters were raging in the background because they came this photo a lot. They got into a lot of icing. So, it had nothing to do with the regular Mars, but it looked like the red planet and people widely playing golf in front of that. And so, that led us to look at space colonization and sort of this new group of space serens, Bezos and Richard Branson, and especially Elon Musk. And so, from there we sort of focused in on this very famous speech which millions of people have watched on YouTube. And so, we just started playing around with that speech. I would say that it's hard for me to know where I am in the process of making this piece because it's not yet finished. So, I've been working on it for about a year. And, I saw it now that So, I have a full Spanish show of this. Please, we'll be praying for about the 16 minutes straight on the show. And I've been performing a few venues in the last two years and sharing around. And before that it took me, I think, it was like three years to write it right now. And really the process was, you know, how I feel about foreign conflict as an Americanized immigrant. This is the question was, well, let's like go over there. What I actually have to do with me and what's happy are, you know, it was like really this was something where I would maybe wonder about why is that my immediate reaction. That's the place I was born. So, that's where I start. Can I follow up question on to that? What does a, for all of you, what does a day in the life of the personal process of this piece look like? How are you, how are you processing right now? For me, it started every morning with memorizing all of the verbatim speech. Which is really hard because verbatim in the light are well written, right? Sometimes it makes sense as they go down. So, there's a lot of back and forth and they repeated stuff. So, that found a huge part of my personal rehearsal process. And then for us, we did a development in August and then we started rehearsals. And our rehearsals have been really non- typical of traditional players. We literally were just feeling out, like we're feeling it out as we go. Every single rehearsal we find should be new or something changes or be flipped. So, it was really like sort of more like sculpting and then maybe a little bit more easy to reverse it, but still being sculpted though. Um, rehearsal process. I can't, I want to first just say these people are so starved as one of my composers or one of the composers of this piece. So, this Jerome and then Paris and Nari are performers and like R-E-P alive in the work as well. And I sort of run rehearsal. There are a couple of moments that this piece operates on the right. There's dance. There is song that happens and then there's like these moments of text. And there's all of the moments in between. And so technically, you know, you just do like an hour on dance, an hour on everything, an hour on the other thing. But as far as the feeling and our rehearsal vibe goes sort of the energy around I'll just sort of pass the mic to one of my collaborators here to me. There's so much laughter in our rehearsals. And so much joy and adlibbing and improvising. And because there's probably, there's like nine or ten of us at this point. So there's a lot and there's a lot of like oh I love what you did there. That was very right. Oh that was good. And I feel like a lot of us grew up in church. So we we can recognize when it's authentic, when a certain phrase or hallelujah is just authentic. But there's, I would say the laughter is my favorite part. Artem, what about you? Yeah, so when I first remember this piece that, so there's a company in Brooklyn that I worked with called The Oya Group. And we did a festival that I was part of all of the different festivals two years ago. It marks representative for consideration of this. And I had a director that I worked with. And it was, you know, it's 60 minutes and we talk it. So there was just a lot of just finding simple ways to run on the internet that a comfortable accessible experience for an audience where they're not just telling like, when is this guy going to stop? And then ever since my rehearsal process is, I like, I like go to albums that I've brought on my head from. I like go between just a real midget flip in my process. I've brought a Stranger Things soundtrack, or I've got a leavening, a Beyoncé. And I just would go on for hours, just during a show, be out loud. And I brought headphones. So, you know, in New York we're like, oh, it's just a person on their phone talking with an attitude about Ukraine. Are there, are there any questions from the audience? All the way back there? What is your research process like? Where do you buy resources? What's your research process like and where are your sources from? That's the, the whole development process so far has been about research. And, and there's a lot of space at the moment. And then there's also Elon Musk, I think, is trying to upstage us every day, which is more of a greatest behavior to the full attention of people playing in the festival. So just sort of keeping up on the views is going to be a great deal for somebody like Elon Musk. There's a lot of thinkers both, you know, in the nationality and in the arts sort of thinking about the earth and the availability of the earth. So it's a kind of vast topic of research and that's, that's sort of what we've been waiting for. And the, the geometry of this piece is multi-layered. So I know that the two of you sort of speak to how I came how I pushed you about music. This is how I came, I came. There, there are some research elements attached to how I'm interested in exploring music in this piece. I don't want them to speak to that. But what I will say in addition to that is that I'm reading a lot about religions and all, sort of all religions, not just the ones that I know, the ones that I was raised inside of and reading about spirituality. And so I'm trying to inform, introduce what I'm finding from that research. And then I'm also researching myself. And asking for my collaborators to also do that sort of work to sort of try to pinpoint where they are at with their spirituality and how they were raised and to bring all of that information into the world. Yes. So Vicky sent text to Jerome and I and said this is the text. Please don't add anything or change it. Yeah. And I was like, oh, a container, I don't like. And yeah, literally, I just was coming through and I was like, I like this. And then I started playing around with some stuff and then there was a thing. And I was someone who grew up in the church singing a lot of hymns and gospel songs and things like that. The culture is very close. And I there was like a little bit of like, can I just write something to these words, which I like are in me so much and like such a specific way. But because it is my culture, although I might not be steeped in it now, it has informed my life, especially as an artist in the way that I write and communicate. And what I think about art as like the communal space, a lot of that comes from being raised in the church. So I do have something to say about that now and I have a chance to. And I just want to have the text that I sent over to them is our various Nilo spirituals, the lyrics of those songs. But I attached no music because I wanted to be open a little bit. Thanks for that freedom. Thank you again. Okay, well, I was really sort of an interesting question just because I find like that whole idea of inspiration and other good research is kind of complicated because I wanted to do this in my own voice. And so parts that are fictionalized and I want to pull something out of you know, I'm like a microphone friend that is native foreigner. So like whatever anything happens in like, you know, Russia, Ukraine, they're like, oh, what's going on there? I'm like, I'm not the text of like, I don't know, you know, and so I started kind of the big part was just first responding to like, how do I feel about this without any contact? How do I feel about this thing that's in the news without any contact, without knowing where it came from? You know, so there was like this process of finding my own voice to respond to. And then there were that it just almost started to kind of fall in place where news that occurred events, especially once they were like what my family was being affected, it all became sort of these things like, oh, this is analogous to this. You know, like my uncle had to flee because this was happening. It's like just a strange way to piece together in a sterile place that like you didn't think you had an interest in piecing together as like, as maybe like, crap, because that sounds the same. But until something trends are kind of, you know, so that's the process. I think we have time for one more question from the audience, right in the middle there. Could you speak about the moment in the process where you said I'm ready to show this to people? Do you want to switch out the order maybe a little bit? Someone else other than Andy and Jeanine over? I think I can say something to that. There was a point where this was like, I had these two friends that I shared their early script with these two, and by about an hour and a half minutes, I was only a third of the way through. And it was very shocking to me to be like, oh no, no, no, no, this is not going to work. And I then proceeded to have like a very erotic weekend because I got much too integrated. And I started to skim off the things that were all about, like the thing I just mentioned, like, oh, I feel crappy that I don't know more about my country and where I just started skipping off the things where I'm self-deprecating and like being negative to myself about something that isn't necessarily a part of my daily experience and I shouldn't feel necessarily guilty about it. I should be motivated to investigate it, you know, I should be enthused to learn more. So everything that was like, oh, I'm sitting in America, turned into how, how can I, how can I be a part of this culture and I culture together. So after I lost that and after I recovered from the hangover, I was feeling like I'm, if it were up to me, I wouldn't share anything in the process. I am, I have been in the residence currently at our SOMA and some of the folks who manage that residency have been like, can you want to, can you see some, can you show it? Um, and so because of that, I have, that was the moment. Yeah, I think that's like, for us, it was like, it's sort of backwards. It's like, let's do prelude it. Okay, then we should make some, you know, we're going to show it to people. Um, so it was a win, it was a really, um, I thought, conscious thought process of like, now it's like, you're going to do this now. You're going to go running, you're going to do it. You'll never do it. So you have to give yourself these workshop presentations just to show. I mean, then if you don't know if this will ever be in what we actually, it may be in a starting place. Well, I guess, I mean, I think that's a good, uh, thing to wrap up on just to ask all of you, um, quickly, if there is a way that, that any of us here want to, if you want to follow and see a, a fuller iteration of this work, there may not be a way for all of us, for all of them yet that we know of, but, but if there is, can you tell us? How do we get to see this? You know, if you have a living room, I will come over and do the show. That is what I'm on right now. I'm looking for legging rooms and I'm looking for not theatrical spaces to perform the set. Bars will suffice, cab, coffee shops, I mean, the list goes on. But that's what I'm planning right now, sort of a tour of neighborhood places and also just, uh, domestic locations where I could just do this. I will bring my residence to the arts movement in January. And so if you, uh, want to ask me correctly, just at the end of this, you can all be that way. I am not officially saying anything in this moment, but if you were to look at the Shed's website in the spring, you might find some information on how to see this show. Great. Thank you all so much for sharing, both your work and your process with us. One more round of applause for eight o'clock in the Seedle Center. So stick around all night with us and thank you, guys, to the arts.