 and welcome for the second day of the fresh web radio live. It is half past 10 today. In Bannieu, we are in Bannieu. It's next to Paris. It's 10 kilometers south to Paris. We are the 21st of September. Aud Lavigne speaking. I'm a French journalist. Be your guide. I'm your guide on this exclusive, on your journey. I wanted to say that on this exclusive web radio station, streaming live for fresh, fresh. This is the meeting, the event of Circus Prada's network, the network of contemporary circus and outdoor arts celebrating this year, 20 long, beautiful years of existence. Here we are in Bannieu, I told you, but we are in a very, very special place, beautiful, huge. It's called Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde, the smallest circus in the world. And this is absolutely false. This is a lie, because it's not small, it's big. It's a big circus place that was made by the architect Patrick Bouchin, who is an architect in France, who was used to make cultural center. And this is a beautiful place in wood. We can see big pieces of wood in this circle place, which looks like a triangle. And we are on the, in this triangle, but we are a circle in the triangle. And in the air, we can see another circle. It's beautiful, it's really beautiful. This is where it is happening this morning, the second morning session of Fresh. And today, the main topic will be safety. Safety in this world of contemporary circus and outdoor arts. Yesterday it was about care, and tomorrow the topic will be about sustainability. As you know, there is always an order. First, to start with a 20-minute keynote. And after, there will be a half an hour artistic talks to artists, we'll talk about safety in the world. And there will be a round table. But a round table, we won't put on stream, because for safety reasons, the panelists wanted not to be recorded. So you won't be able to listen to the last round table. But we will invite and grab some artists and people to talk for an exclusive moment. On this radio, we'll manage to catch everybody we want. As you know, it's not always very easy when you have these live moments, things are moving. But anyway, we'll find a solution to make you listen to the maximum of what we can find for you. Thank you to be with us in here. Listening to this web live streaming of Fresh. Radio, we make it possible because we are working with making waves, recording, and all around, streaming it all around the world for you that are not here. Let's listen to the entering of the audience here in Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde in Bagneuil. We are listening to Fresh. Web, Radio live stream 2023. We are in Bagneuil, Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde. Yesterday, we were in La Villette, Paris, and tomorrow, we will be in the village de Cirque, where it's in Paris, it's in Paris à la pelouse. Roy, today it was raining, never rains in Paris, but today it was raining. So we should have started earlier. But because of the rain, there is more traffic. So we decided to wait a little bit to start the second morning station of Fresh. This is why you are listening to the ground of the audience behind my voice. We are in this beautiful place, as I told you, the smallest circus in the world. This is a new, not say new, but quite a recent, fresh place. But the project of the smallest circus in the world is not so new, it already is, maybe around 30 years, age, years. And it's a specific project with circus classes. And it wants to make the link between the circus and the people, the circus and the city. And it's a fantastic democratic project. You might have a look on the website, Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde, on the website also of CircoStrada.org. You can listen to the streaming today and tomorrow again at 10 o'clock. You can follow what we are recording live for this morning session. And you can also have a look on the CircoStrada.org about all the publication of the network and also the previous podcast that were made before the event and that are called Around Fresh and produced by MAKEMUS. And then you will be able to listen to different podcasts about these different topics that are discussed also during these days to be safe, sustainability, and to take care, care the notion of care. So important in this world. On the website of CircoStrada.org, you may find also documentation and resources. And it's in English and in French. And after the event also fresh, you have to know that we will produce also a podcast of these different morning sessions. And then also a book will be made and will be available in the beginning of 2024. This is a publication on these three days. And it is made with the collaboration of Sarah Bushra. So from now we are live. And when it's live, it's a moving time. So we wait for the beginning of the second day. First person that will talk this morning for 20 minutes cannot to introduce the concept of safety is Guillaume Dupuis. He's a national teacher in Scientific University of Orsay. And this keynote is always a dynamic break. Oh. It's time to listen too. We are very happy to host you here today to celebrate these 20 years of CircoStrada. And we are very happy to cross the borders of Paris and become outside of Paris to see how Circus outdoor arts are working, are dealing with the territories, how artists are investing these spaces. So five minutes to tell some stories about what we do here. So first I would like, of course, to present you our president, Daniel Forget. He's here, the founder of Plupeti Circo du Monde. And then Elisabeth Favel. She's a deputy mayor for culture. And the mayor could not come today, but he's a welcome to you. So Bannieu is a town of 40,000 inhabitants, very in a city with a lot of history and a working class history. And the circus came to town 31 years ago. So it's really a story of the territories. It's a root grass. And the name, the Plupeti Circo du Monde, comes from this story because 31 years before, a small team around Daniel, they founded this place. So, and tomorrow we start a new page because we've got a national label and we'll go to open what we do now to heritage. What is the heritage of peripheral areas? What is heritage in disadvantaged areas? And how circus and outdoor arts can bring and build new alliance in order to give positive change in this area. So it's a very interesting subject. Two years ago, we had an important meeting with Chico Strada and the French Institute in Alice about art and territories. And this year we have also a spark event. In LFC, now you can find, of course, information on the Chico Strada website about what positive change can we bring in the town like LFC in Greece, industrial town, but also the space for heritage. So we'll be here the whole morning and in the afternoon there will be three pass. So this day we have really built it with our very close partners, Las Immunes. So the whole team is almost there. And Las Immunes is a national circus center for national circus. And we work closely in order to do what? First, to support young artists, especially young emerging artists, of course older artists too, but we focus on young artists. So here is a place for residencies and you will have the occasion to meet some of them. You have an incubator, it's called Pipinier premier pas. And so it's the idea, how can we support them? We host both French and, of course, a lot of European and international artists with a focus also to territories that are out of Europe. The second important point is the territory. So we work a lot with the communities, we're in the middle of quite disadvantaged areas, 70% of public housing. And so we do a lot of outreach and artistic education, both with circus, hip hop, parkour, we're running and now more and more with also architecture, ecological redirection and urban planning. We do a lot of community events. We are also a space where we can not only program our artistic project, our artistic programmer, Gaetan Lavec is not here, but we can meet him tonight with the show Esquiv that is going to be presented at Teatro de la Piscine at Las Immunes. And the third part, you will have enough time, one of the paths to discover, it's called L'Ulysseave en L'Élysse, it's the high school before the high school. It's part of our work with architects, it's the idea how a circus community, a music community, a dance community, and citizens can work together with public and private stakeholders to build a high school. How can we build a high school here in the disadvantaged area and make it a space for opening education? How art can influence all this part? So we'll have enough time this afternoon to discover, and of course I would like to thank the whole team of PPCM that have facilitated all this part and that is running this project, so we can meet all around today, Matilde, Lucille, Catherine, the whole technical team and all the people that are working here. So, I mean, it's already gone and we'll be happy, of course, to give you more information, to give you a tour. You can have also our information, our newspaper. Thank you and please enjoy your day and we hope that the rain will clean our territory and this afternoon we can enjoy all the paths. So, let's enjoy this second day of celebration. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you, Lefterius. Thank you, the PPCM for hosting us and thank you also, LazyMuid, for building also together with us this second day. How are you doing? Okay, how was the party last night? Okay, who forgot this on the boat? Anyone? I'll keep that. Okay, we'll post a picture on the WhatsApp group. Otherwise, I will keep that in Paris. You think you know? Okay, we'll give it to you then. Okay, so thank you so much for waking up, for being almost on time, for braving the traffic. We're so happy that you can see and discover other parts of Paris and the region. Sorry for the rain and the accident on the street, but these were beyond our control. And we have another little issue for this morning, so sorry to say, we invited Guillaume. Guillaume Dupuis is a professor at university in optics in a very important university in the south of Paris. We invited him because he's also in charge of international relations and also because he's chairing the office for inclusivity, diversity and equity at the university. Unfortunately, Guillaume couldn't be with us this morning. So we had to reschedule a little bit and we called a friend of his. Her name is Poulet and Poulet will be with us this morning. So please let's give Poulet a big round of applause. Okay, let's encourage her. So, Poulet. Are you hearing me? Yes, I can hear myself, so that must mean that you are hearing me. So as Stefan introduced, my name is Poulet Havikiki. See the pun I did here. First of all, I would like to thank Stefan and the organizers for inviting me to present this expose today. I'm going to try to explain to you how safe spaces work. And I also would like to underline the fact that for once, the drag queen was on time and the public was late. So I know it's not your fault, but I just wanted to start with that because it doesn't happen quite often. Next slide, please. Yes, so this is the guy who was supposed to be here today. I forgot to put his pronouns, but he's him. So as Stefan explained, he's a professor in optics and he works a lot of other stuff at the university that make sense for the expose today. But I'm not this guy, I'm this woman. So my name is Poulet. You can see my credentials up there. Almost all of them are two. Almost. And the question I wanna address right now is whether I feel safe with you today. And right now I do because I have a lot of light. I don't see you really and I'm on a stage, meaning that this is my space and I can do pretty much everything I want. But when it comes to getting here and I know that you had trouble getting here as well. Next slide, please. I wanted to show you a picture of my dear friend, Enza Fragolla. So this is not me here. I know we kinda look alike because we have like mustaches and beard but we're not the same person. And the main difference that we have is that she takes the metro to go to a gig, which I don't because I'm not crazy and I don't feel safe in the metro. She takes the metro so often that the system for public transportation in Paris used her in their advertising campaign. So there are some pictures of her in some metro stations because she's that famous. We call Enza and the others who take the metro the subway queens. So Enza is a subway queen. But I don't feel safe in a metro. Next slide, please. In order for me to feel safe, I need to be surrounded by other crossdressers basically. And when it comes to other crossdressers, of course there is a long history of crossdressing, drag queens, drag kings, stuff like that. But in terms of picture, I'm pretty sure you know about this one. This is a series of pictures that were taken by Brasai in the early 1930s. And he was going to, I don't know where. Next slide, where is she? I don't see her. She's there, yeah, thank you. So next slide, well, perfect. So these pictures by Brasai were taken from a ball that happened every year for Mikarem. And as you can see, the idea of this ball was to crossdress. And the fact that everyone was crossdressing created a space where it was okay to show something that you usually wouldn't show. And what's more interesting, I think, is the fact that when you look at the kind of people that were there, they had this common thing of crossdressing, but other than that, they were very different from one another. And if you look at the journals from this period, describing the kind of crowd that were there, I have this, no, back, thank you. As you can see, there were the cream of Parisian careers, regardless of class, race, and age. Every category came from Thaggards, Cruiser, I can say Thaggards, I have a gay friend, okay. All Queens, don't see why I should consider that. So basically poor people, rich people, everyone. So what I think what we should learn from that is that when you start to create an environment, when you don't mix people, meaning it's a space where the non-mixity is the fact that you have to be a crossdresser, then you have, you open the door to a new kind of mixity that wasn't possible. These people would never have met one another if it wasn't for that kind of ball. So this was a French example. There is also an American example of that kind of a safe space which was, well, you all heard about Stonewall, so I choose another one because, you know. So this one is Compton Cafeteria, it's in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, and this picture I think is from 1966. Yes, and this was not even a ball, it was just a cafeteria where drag queens and trans people could just like have coffee, which is kind of great. And they look pretty safe right there, having fun and drinking coffee in full drag. But next one, as you may or may not know, Compton Cafeteria was actually one of the first raid of police in the US even before Stonewall, so it was safe inside, but if the police decided that it wasn't okay, then it wasn't safe anymore because you have to make sure that you have a continuity of your safe space, other than it doesn't work. So this is something that we queer people know about, like the queer places are the places that we look for when we want to feel safe. But in terms of, it's more like some sort of reptilian strategy, just try to avoid trouble. But when it comes to trying to theorize that kind of stuff, what it means, what is a safe space? How does it work? What are the rules? What are the objectives of a safe place? Ironically, the first one to theorize it was Kurt Lewin in the early 1940s, and you could think that it would be like to help some sort of minority that was in trouble, but no, all the theory that he came up with was actually designed to cooperate, to make the companies work better. And not even the workers, but actually the managers, because the managers were having trouble to express themselves. They were, they feared that it would be judged. They feared that they would be perceived as the bad guy. So the managers needed some sort of a safe space where they could complain about the workers and be mean in order to get rid of that together and then go back to the workplace and pretend to be nice managers again. So this is a bit caricature what I'm describing, but it's actually, it was designed for the managers. I learned a lot of stuff when I prepared this expose. So this is called sensitivity training, and it was like, it's a whole theory. They built a whole lab around it in Harvard, I think. Well, somewhere in New England. And that was in the late 40s. Next one, please. So here are some rules how it worked. This is a picture of Kurt Lewin. And as I said, the idea of these groups were the space where people could give their honest feedback to each other without fearing of being judged. But that was only for the workplace and the idea behind that was to create the environment for productivity to increase and not people to feel better ironically. So when it came to realizing that you could actually use that kind of method to try and make people feel better in their everyday life, we have to thank, well, we have to thank the gays and the women, of course, but like for the theory, the guy who came up with that was Carl Rogers, and he invented in the early 1960s what's called person centered therapy. So it's some form of psychotherapy where you create a space with your therapist where the therapist is not going to judge you for whatever you're going to say. So you can feel completely free to say whatever you go through at one point in your life. But the, and the idea is that the relationship that you develop with your therapist in that particular context is much more efficient in terms of helping you to reach the goal that you have of feeling better at the end of the therapy. So the key points of this is that, well, in the way he theorized, the way he thinks it is to, first of all, you have to wanna be better and feel better in order for you to open yourself up to say whatever goes through your mind and not feel judged by, well not fear of being judged by it. So he sums it up with three conditions eventually which are empathy from the therapist towards the patient. Genuineness meaning that you have to be genuine and authentic when you say whatever you're going through as a patient. And the therapist is supposed to have some sort of a non-conditional, positive look towards whatever you're sharing with him. And that's how this kind of person centered therapy was started to be the first theory of safe space as a way to improve not the productivity of your company or your managing skills, but yourself. Next one. But when I was doing research about this presentation, the thing that I found most interesting was what is called consciousness raising. And this is a term that was invented by women's liberation groups mostly in the US but also I'm sure in France and other countries I just didn't find any sources on it that I could show you. So this is one of those groups of women that were trying to raise awareness among themselves of the things that they were going through as a woman. And so they were, next one. There are a lot of rules for it to work and there are a lot of pamphlets that you can find on the internet and on specific libraries. And I really encourage you to look at them because it's really simple, it makes complete sense and I will come back to that at the end of my presentation but I realized that what they came up with is something that, they came up with that like 50 years ago, right? It's something that somehow I had to rediscover myself when I was trying to introduce it in the way I practice my teaching. Okay, I'm also Guillaume. I just, I'm not sure it was clear but I guess nowadays, right? So really I encourage you to look for those and try to read them because it's, well I learned a lot and I realized that I was already doing most of the stuff just by trial and error, right? So what are the rules, next one? So the rule for this meeting was first of all you have to select a topic. The topic is going to be what you're going to be discussing during the meeting. Of course, they recommend topics that are related to women's issues, health issues but also work issues, stuff like that but to be honest, it works for every kind of issues. You can go around a circle and the idea is to always speak personally from your own experience. Never interrupt someone else which I'm happy you are doing right now. Not interrupting me, that's really sweet. Never challenge anyone else's experience because it's their own experience and you can have an opinion of it but you cannot change it just based on your opinion of it. Try not to give advice and at the end of the meeting you try to sum up everything that was discussed after every woman had a chance to share her experience. Next one, please. So the idea of these women's groups it's based on non-mixity, right? So in order for this honesty to happen and the no judgment kind of policy of the safe space you had to be only among women. So of course, well, the Americans, they didn't like it and I'm gonna start with the Americans but don't worry, I will end up with the French because we don't like it either. Well, I do but like French people usually don't. So you can find a lot of that kind of images where you see that the men fear that the women are going to like take the power and steal the power from the men which should be apparently very scary. Next one. Also the Americans, they, well for good reasons they have this trauma, cultural trauma about segregation and when you go back to trying to create some sort of a safe space, for instance in this university they were trying to create dormitories only for black people because black people didn't feel safe around white people, not the other way around. Black people were African American people, they were traumatized by all the microaggressions of racism. They were experiencing every day. So they just wanted to have some sort of a space where they could at least spend time together and sleep and live without having to deal with the fact that white people are completely ignorant of the kind of problems they go through as African American. But this triggered some sort of memory of segregation where you had places where only white people could go and places where only, well the other color I don't remember, which is which one it is, but anyway. So segregation, ooh, scary. Next one. And yeah, the last problems that the American have with that kind of safe space is the fact that it doesn't go with their idea of free speech because of course, if you start to pay attention to the kind of things you say because you don't want to offend other people, then you, well, at least for this guy, Brett Easton Ellis, who published this book called White. Yeah, obviously he's white and he's a man. Great. I think I have some, like on the next one I have some really chosen pieces of this book. So he basically sums up in this book that I don't recommend. Everything that is really bad with the new way of thinking about safe spaces, the idea that you tend like wanting to surround yourselves with people that are a bit more like you than people who are a bit like very different like you. He goes into a long rant about, well, I think it's the next one. Yeah, he wanted to be challenged. He learned a lot by being challenged by other cultures, other writers, other pieces of cinema, music, whatever, whatever, so it's great. He wants to be challenged, but like he's a white male, it's great on top of it. So I mean like, of course he would want to get challenged because well, he's not challenged ever in his regular life. So I mean like good for him for wanting to be challenged. I mean, I guess it's better than people who white males straight who don't want to get challenged, but still the people from the minorities, they get challenged even when they don't want to be challenged, you know? Because it's just like everything is designed to work for white, male, cisgendered, straight guy, right? So for these people, everything is a lot easier than it is for others. And I think it does make sense that people from minorities would want to be at some point in a space where they can a bit relax just from the outside world because the outside world is not nice. I mean like when I was walking from my car in full face earlier today, before you arrived, well, I mean like it's fine, nothing happened to me, but like the way people were looking at me was not really nice. And I mean, I'm used to it, so it's fine, but like white male guys, they don't get that kind of stuff. So anyway, enough about the Americans. Let's talk about the French now. So recently in France, we had this woman journalist from Le Point, I think, and Marianne occasionally, both of which are kind of conservative newspapers and news magazine. She published a book about safe spaces and non-mixed environments, especially in minorities, especially in queer minorities and more specifically in queer people of color minorities. And it's called The New Inquisitors, undercover investigation in woke territory. So she went undercover in woke territory. And do you know how she decided to go undercover? She did this, she did this. As a drag queen, I feel very attacked by this because like nothing about this makes sense. The wig is crusty, first of all. It's obviously cheap. The contouring is really bad. I don't know what she did with her brows, but it... And then there is some sort of glitters. I don't know if you can see it, but it doesn't work. And the flowers on the shirt, I mean, no. So with this outfit, she went undercover in the organization of something called The Radical Pride, which is a pride that is not as mainstream as the regular pride. And especially this pride is designed for people of color and trans people who of fun don't get to be at the front of the march, the day of pride, because they are not gay or lesbian in a way that straight people tend to accept more. So she went into this organization called Pride Radical and she came up with like really scary stuff. First of all, when you meet people in this Pride Radical movement, people ask you for your pronoun. I mean, apparently it traumatized her. The fact that she had to take into account the fact that it would help some people to share the fact that the pronoun that they use on a day-to-day life is not the pronoun that they were assigned to at birth. The fact that she had to do that as well, that was something that traumatized her. Anyway, what else? Oh yeah, she had a trouble with the fact that she was white. And as a white person in a radical movement that was specifically designed for people of color, queer people of color to be in the front of the scene instead of in the background as they usually are, she was shocked that she had to be in the background for once. And she published a whole book about that. And not only she published a whole book about that, but she was on every TV interview about that kind of stuff. With this crusty pink wig. I mean like, no. But as a drag queen, I don't allow it. So anyway, this is the only example I took from the French trouble with that kind of stuff. But there are a lot of other examples. I just took this one because of the pink wig, obviously. But the thing that they have in common is that in France we tend to have this ideal version of we call it universalism. Meaning that, well basically we don't see color. We don't see gender. We don't see whether you're straight or gay or lesbian or whatever. But that's just the idea. The truth is we actually do. And more than that, we act on it usually in a bad way. Sexist practice are the rule in the workplace. Homophobia is also the rule in the workplace. And in every kind of spaces that it's not designed to be a safe space as is the subject of today. So I don't know, where am I on time? It's, what? It's time to wrap up, so perfect. So the next slide was my take home message. So I guess it was indeed time to wrap up. So I did this bit of, I went back to this pamphlet from the Women's Liberation Group from the 1970s. I think they were from New York, but there were similar ones over New England in Harvard and so on. And this is actually written in the pamphlet. And so as I said, when you wanna create an environment where people can feel safe to share their experience and grow from that and try to see the kind of connections that can be made with your own experience with the experience of someone else, the rules are as follows. As I said, always speak personally, don't interrupt, never challenge anyone else's experience. Try not to give advice. That is something as a professor, which is sometimes really hard to do. But as a drag queen, I realized when I started drag, that people had this capacity of always telling me how to make my wig, whether I should wear nails, my nails are fierce, right? Whether I should wear nails or not, whether I should wear this dress or cinch my waist. So when you present yourself in drag, I like, maybe some of you do that sometimes, you will notice that people just give you more advice than they would when you represent yourself as a dude. So learning from that experience in my teaching practices, I try not to give advice anymore, unless it's asked for, of course. Of course, you have to sum up in the end. I just wanted to add two things that I do as well. So as I said, I am a professor in optics and in optics we work in the dark most of the time. So when I'm teaching a lab session with students, when I enter the room, the room is completely dark. And some recently, and also my job is very manual. I have to align optics in a very specific way for it to work. So when a student is not doing it properly in the dark, because we work in the dark, I have to sometimes take their hands and put them in the right position and help them feel the way it was supposed to be done. And it's starting to create issues among the students. I mean, and now I understand why, because I'm actually touching them. It's a teaching practice because it's the only way you can learn, but I am touching the hands. So it's, I mean, I understand how they can feel weird. So we discussed a lot about it among the other professor and we decided that now, because we know we have to do it, so now we will enunciate it. Everything that we do, we, before we do it, we say that we are going to do it. And that helps a little bit. I can see now that the, especially the female students, they used to be very scared about going to lab sessions. And to be honest, I know most of my straight colleagues, I would be scared of being in a dark room with them. Anyway, other question. But they feel better now. And the last one I wanted to say is as a performer this time, well, it works as well with students. So with students, I tell them, okay, is it okay if I take your hand and put it on the lens and okay. But as a performer, sometimes when you improvise something, especially in a drug bar or whatever, with people from the audience, which I won't do today, don't worry, you have to check for consent. And also check for consent means you have to enunciate what you are about to do and check whether it's okay or not to do it. So, well, I'm not giving you advices because well, you're not supposed to, right? But this is just what I do as a teacher and as a joy queen. And I think that's it. Thank you very much. I'm happy to have with us, and I can see we have two of us, we are on the ring. Okay, we can do AS. It's kind of sexy, this way of talking. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you, well, you're welcome. Because it's not easy, as you said, to present ourselves in a drug queen outfit. We can describe it a little bit. You have a beautiful kind of Mondrian. It's exactly a Mondrian dress. It's a replica of a new Saint Laurent dress that was already based on Mondrian. And I have the matching nails, as you can see. Yeah, beautiful. It must take time. Yeah, I didn't do them. I have a friend who does nails, and she did them for me. Okay, and you have a blonde and brown hair. Yes. There's a blonde and brown bob. Yes. And blue, I am not very good in makeup. Yes, I have a blue cut crease and a red lips. But it's very interesting here, because you are, in a way, as we listen to you, you are a geomdupi, a teacher in optic, in the dark places. Yes. And you also pullettes. Pullettes have a key. Yes. It's the first time you do a conferencing pullette. Yes. I've been, pullette has been alive for about eight years now. But it's the first time I'm doing something that looks like the kind of job that I have as a scientist, because I do a lot of presentation as a scientist. But it's my first one doing it in drag, which was very scary. I guess. But the organizers told me that the audience was really nice and really happy about how the thing was taking place. And nobody knew that I was going to be in drag, so I knew I had the surprise element to make it work. So yeah, I hope it was okay. Of course it was fantastic. And also we can hear in your voice the tension and the kind of dangerosity we can feel when we expose ourselves. Yes, yes. There is, every time I do drag now, I don't do it the way I did it today. I always ask for a room for me to prepare myself and get in full face at the place where the gig is happening. I don't do the metro, I don't do taxis. I just wanna be, I arrive as a guillot and I transform into pullets on site and then I will remove everything and take my car and go back to my place. But today I couldn't do that because it takes me two and a half hours to transform. And I was supposed to start at 10 and they don't open until 8.30. So I just didn't have the time to do it here. So what I did is I did the makeup at my place and then I took my car and drove an hour to get here and walked from my car up to here. And still this was, I was okay in my car to be honest, but like the moment from my house to my car and then the moment from my car to here, this, well, this is the moment I don't like. You talked about places, you talk about light and we know you're an optic teacher. So let's talk about it because you talk about safe spaces. So the space is important. The light is important. The dark is a danger, but it can be also a security. And what is important, to be seen or to see people, what makes you more into a vulnerability? Like when you're in the street, do you fear more the fact to be looked at or you to look at other people? I don't, like, ironically, I don't like to be looked at except when I'm on... We do the live streaming and there is a performance behind. Let's listen a little bit. Sorry. Excuse me, seconds ago, they were close to the ground. Now they're elevating. It's like they're in a different world. Jesus Christ, help me. Hold on, I've come on this side because I need to ask them a question. Hold on. Do you guys understand what's going on here? What are you doing? We can see in the circus place, it's a trio, two boys on the ground, two men on the ground, and the third man making comments about them. Let's continue. Okay. So, pull it. Oh, that's fair. Yeah, so you say, ironically, you don't like to be seen. No, I don't like to be seen on a street, like, for instance, I like to be seen when I'm on stage, either here as a dry queen or as a professor as well, because we are on the stage. Yeah, of course. It's a sort of performance as well. It's... You have to, everyone is supposed to be looking at you and listening to you. And so, yeah, it's a performance. And this is fine. And to go back to your question, I... Okay, this is your moment. What was I saying? I don't remember. So that's the question, but the light, dark light or light? Yeah, and, yeah, well, yeah, so... And I try not to look at people too much as well, because I know it can make them uncomfortable. So, yeah, but like sometimes you... Not give advice as well as... We continue. Thank you so much for joining us. Live stream, fresh, second day. That will be the second moment of the artistic talk. Let's listen. It says Oshan Mele, but I do prefer to be known as May. And I'm Daria. We're very happy to be here, and glad that everyone made it despite the party last night and the rain. I'm very thankful to be here. Yes, thank you for the invitation to be here, and thank you for everyone for coming to listen to us talk. So, as Stefan said, we are both artists, and safety isn't necessarily our expertise. So preparing for this talk, we started to think about what safety means to us and how do we incorporate or how do we think about safety in our artistic processes? Yeah, so like Daria said, we're no experts on safety, but we are here to hold a conversation, and we've had a few conversations prior to being here today, where we've started the discussion around safety in our own work, and we're here to continue that conversation, and we're here to offer questions, things for you to think about, things for us to think about, and reflections on what safety means. Yeah, a small window into a very big topic. So through these conversations, we came up with three key terms that we felt were coming back over the course of our meetings, and the first was familiarity. Yeah, the second was communication. And the third was respect. And we will, in the next 30 minutes or so, we will touch on these themes through the lens of our respective works. So we will show you some slides eventually and talk about safety. But so before doing that, speaking about familiarity, I've done this before in the dive event that Stefan mentioned. So I would like to invite everyone to stand up, please. I'm going to put this on the side. Yes. Lovely seeing people stretch out already. It's really nice. Yeah, and so we're going to start also with familiarizing ourselves with the space. So I invite you to look around to this amazing space that we're in here today. And May and I are also familiarizing ourselves with this space since we're also new here. And wanting to feel safe as well. And take a moment to also check in with your breath. Maybe you're holding some tension. Maybe you're rushing or maybe you're just sitting or what I need to get something out. And I was introduced a while ago to this concept of power poses. Maybe some of you are familiar with this. So I'm just going to introduce one today. And so it's pretty much just having your arms out. You're going to be sort of like in an X. So have your legs slightly apart. Watch out for your neighbors. Safety first. And we're just going to hold this position just for a little bit. Feel free to close your eyes or lay them open. And on your next breath, feel free to start lowering your hands. If you had your eyes closed, feel free to open them and shake it out a bit. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You can sit down now. If you want to, you can stay standing if that's what you'd like to do. So I'm going to lead you through a short exercise. So once everyone's settled back in their seat, a very short exercise, just so we can all check in with ourselves today and hear how we're feeling. Check in with the space that we're in and also check in with each other. So the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is to quickly just look around the room and spot five things that you can see and list them in your head. Note them, become present in the space. So you're just finding five things. It could be a lamp, the screen, Daria, myself. Then four things that you can hear. And I tend to not talk during that one so you can all listen. And then three things you can feel. So it could be the clothes against your skin. It could be a breeze from the air con with your feet inside your shoes. Looking to your right and then to your left, whichever there's person, we'd like you to introduce yourself to the person next to you and maybe just tell them what you felt, what you saw or what you heard, just to check in with them. Thank you. You could bring your attention back to the space and I hope you've had conversations, lovely conversations going on. Lovely. Thank you very much. We're just going to bring that back into the space. Nice. It's really lovely to see, yeah, everyone chatting, actually, and already feel more comfortable and feel safer. Yeah, with your presence in the room. So we're going to do our introductions now that you've introduced yourselves to each other. So I'm Oshan Maylive, my pronouns are he, they, and I'm a dance artist and choreographer from Wales. And thank you. And I work as a choreographer and a performer. I create work for the outdoors. I also tour my work in the UK and internationally and I'm very delighted to be here. Mover, I work with materials and with the body as a material. I work cross-disciplinary, so within different contexts, moving through circus, visual arts, and performance arts, I would say. I mainly present work in non-conventional spaces, I work a lot outdoors in industrial spaces and never really in a black box. And I work a lot also with participatory methods, so considering how I can engage the audience or work the audience in other ways. I am currently based in Stockholm. Thank you. And I am from Jerusalem originally. Thank you, Daria. I think we're ready for our first slide. That was dramatic, wasn't it? We are going to be introducing the topic of safety through introducing our work. And the first work that I'd like to talk to you about today is a work called Queren. Queren is a work I created back in 2021 as a commission from Articulture. And Queren is a contemporary dance theatre performance for the outdoors. And it's the first work that I... It's the first work that I created, apart from a solo that I made on myself a few years before, but for the first mid-scale production that I created. And that was for the outdoors. So I had a lot to learn. So Queren is inspired by traditional Welsh folk dancing. I grew up around folk dance in Wales. My family is a family of folk dancers, and that has grown to become a big influence on my contemporary practice. So Queren takes steps, patterns and structures from traditional Welsh folk dance, and having played and sort of ruptured those patterns, taking inspiration also from queer club culture. So I'm looking at the intersections between what it means to be Welsh, but also what it means to be queer. And I guess what I'm going to talk about is the presentation of queer bodies in public spaces. It was great to hear Paulette talk a lot about that, actually, in the talk this morning. But what I was interested in, and having been presenting this work, was how do we protect those identities and how, when you're working with themes that are... As an artist, as a queer artist, my work will always be inherently queer, seeing the world through a queer lens. But how do we present work that explicitly deals with themes and issues around this topic? And there are safe spaces for these identities to exist and to congregate. And it's important that those spaces are preserved and that communities can have space, minority communities have a space that is safe for them to be in. But in this particular sector, we often present work in public places. And I guess the question that I'm bringing up is how do we take steps to make sure that we're safe? And how do we take steps to make sure that we protect these bodies and identities in these spaces? I was thinking back to a rehearsal that I did of the work we had in Cardiff, and we just took it outside because we needed to get used to be doing it on different terrains. And we had a group of young boys around 15, 16 years old. They had bikes on them and they had some cans. And I'd already made a lot of assumptions about this group of people. Being a queer person, always sort of being on guard and trying to ensure my own safety. And we went to perform the work and checking with everyone to see if they were OK to do a run-through. And we were like, oh, this is going to cause a bit of trouble here. But they stopped what they were doing as we were performing. They sat down and they watched the entire thing all the way through. And I felt really bad for making all those assumptions. But it is something that I have to consider when presenting this kind of work and when people are booking and programming this kind of work as well, is how do we protect? It's not always a bad thing. But yeah, how do we protect and make sure that these people are safe? Well, it's me again, yeah. So these images are from a work of mine from a work called Lock In, which was part of a series of performances called Suspended Islands that I produced along with Oirana Morais. So this was one of the performances where the audience was on boats and was during the in-between lockdown. So we had to be creative in how we keep our audience safe. So the audience was on boats and went through the Canal in Avedo in Portugal and outside of the city to experience different performances. And I'm bringing in this work mainly as an example for the work that I do before the performance. A lot of my considerations of safety have to do with the preparations. So as mentioned, I work in this specifically with a very non-conventional space. It's in the Lock for Boats, where boats have to leave the river and go into the sea. And it's a space that is very male-dominated and art doesn't really happen there in general. And so a lot of them... I spent there two weeks going, familiarizing myself with the space, and most of the work was actually just communicating to the people who were working there and making them feel safe with me being in their space and me feeling safe to test and explore and make work that made sense in that context. And touching on what May was saying in terms of safety of bodies in spaces as a female presenting body working in industrial spaces, I am confronted many times with certain assumptions of what I can or cannot do and have to sort of jump a lot of hurdles to even have my voice heard or considered. And so yeah, so when we were talking about safety and identities, this element came up a lot in terms of how it leads me and my processes of working. Yes, I'm going to go on for the next slide. So we are back to Quarin, it's the same work again. But this time it has more people involved. So in 2022 that was last year. So last year I received some funding from the Arts Council in Wales to expand the work Quarin into a larger production for six people, which is the traditional number of people you would normally see in a Welsh folk dance. And with expanding Quarin came a lot more challenges and I became very aware of the people that was part of the production and part of the project with me as an artist. And coming to the realization of a feeling of responsibility and a responsibility for their safety. And I think what I want to touch upon today is how do we, as a freelance maker, the challenges that I face when creating work by myself and how to ensure the safety of others. Not being linked to an organization or having an infrastructure in place to be able to support the people that I need to be able to support. So I've been thinking a lot about this recently, especially with touring internationally and I think I'm just offering this something to think about. But how do we support independent artists that employ other people and go about creating policies and procedures for safety and to keep people, yeah, to make sure that everyone feels supported within that environment. And it's something that I've, as I said earlier, haven't been making work for a very long time. So I'm learning a lot of things as I go and these are questions and these are challenges that I'm currently facing as I get offered opportunities and that's something else in terms of when do you accept opportunities that are offered to you even though you might not feel fully prepared. And that's quite difficult at times as an independent artist and wanting obviously to make the most of the opportunities that are given to you but without the support and without the support structure and network around you. How do you go about pursuing and presenting your work even though you're facing all these barriers? How can we help that as a secretary? So this is a work called Tired Out. It's a one woman street show me and five tires. The concept of the show is that every place I go I only have one tire that is consistent with me and I meet mechanics from the local place. I come a few days before and I collect tires and have this encounter with a group of people I wouldn't have before and they're always invited but they never come or not yet at least. And this work has a participatory element to it so in the second half of the show audience is invited. There's a game with the tires and I brought this example as well as again a female body working with an object that is it's circular yes so it could have a feminine connotations but it is in a world that is not usually inhabited by many women. And so also the process of making this work and the process of always presenting it is a constant confrontation with identity and feeling safe in certain spaces. And to touch on what May was saying also as a freelance I work mainly as a solo artist and so there's also a lot of there's this constant work of how would you say? Yeah there's no infrastructure that is representing you or supporting you and I experience a lot in festivals as well that there's um and people who are in companies so they have a sort of support system and and they go off and as a solo artist it really doesn't exist so actually my experience of the festival is quite lonely I would say. So how do you how do you also support how to create support for individual dependent artists and that they feel safe to continue during their work? Yes that was what I wanted to say about this work. Yeah I think I've got a little maybe an anecdote that maybe reflects a little bit about what we've been talking about and so recently came to a festival in Lorient in Brittany and being presented with an opportunity to have my work at an amazing festival that I've always wanted to perform at but they're not really knowing how to who to go to support in terms of all the logistical elements of everything and I ended up driving a 12-seater minibus with all my dancers in the back and although everything went well and people people did feel safe and supported I think it's also really important in that scenario when I when I arrived home like how what I I don't think I felt safe so hold as a person holding responsibility for those people and I think it's really important for us to ensure whoever that person is to have a support network of your own to ensure that you're you're also being taken care of and feel safe to be carrying these activities out here. Yeah and before we move on to next slide also to touch on we'll talk about it more in relation to the next works but as I mentioned there is an element here of including the audience and inviting the audience into the work and and a lot of the creation process was also considering how do you invite people into the work and how do you make them feel comfortable and not put on the spot necessarily as as can happen many times. Yes so that was also something in relation to safety. So this is a work I created this year this summer for National Dance Company of Wales it's called ENED and it is a work for the indoors which is the first work that I made for the indoors and this came with a different set of challenges but I think what I want to talk about is the sort of the themes and ideas that I like to work with in general are themes around culture around identity and most importantly building a sense of community and I think when a work does that successfully and if you can create an environment in the performance itself where people feel accepted and included no matter who you are then that also sort of bleeds out into the audience and making them feel and that they're also a part of what you're doing. But I know we've been chatting a little bit about indoor spaces and yes and I think you had something interesting to say. We can go I guess to the next slide. So this is the most recent work I did in the context of my master's program which I just completed and also it was indoor space so very new territory for me. I built a space within the space so this large six by seven transparent cube made out of fabric and the audience actually can't really see I realize with these lights but the audience was invited to put on these transparent raincoats so everyone was wearing the same costume I guess as me and my collaborator were wearing and I was very curious in this work to think about what is seen and what is not seen yeah about exploring the idea of transparency but also what assumptions we hold what we think we see and what we actually see and this was also one of the first works I had a collaborator with me on stage so in the process as well thinking about how to he's a musician his name is Pedro and he's usually a musician so he's in the background doing his thing not really as a performer he doesn't think of himself as a performer and so the process of incorporating him into the work involved a lot of communication and understanding his boundaries and what is what are my needs or what are the what is the work's needs and how to how to respect that and how to find a middle ground for us both to work in and also how to create a space where the audience comes in and they feel they feel safe and comfortable to put on this this costume they they didn't they weren't informed before um so that that came across a lot in this particular work yeah I was want to pick up on the word comfortable there actually um because we've been having a lot of discussions around comfort um and relating safety to comfort um which is um which is something that that is important and is and is uh and is relevant to to feeling safe or having creating a safe space um but as artists our work um is is to provoke or is to make people think differently or um to to challenge people in different ways through our artwork um so uh in that sense there is an element of um perhaps being uncomfortable um and one of the points I wanted to bring up today is the um the importance of of that and for us to keep pushing um pushing people to think differently and uh to provoke um with what we what we make um so the question I have really is how do we how do you create a safe space for people to feel discomfort um and how do we yeah how how do we how do we create a space where people can feel safe to feel a range of different emotions um and um that comfort doesn't always equate equate to safety um yeah and also how to um be able to yeah create a a safe space where um yeah not only feelings of discomfort can be felt but also can be spoken about and we um both as freelance artists I think it came up as well as as being um uh confronted or in situations where there is a certain um imbalance hierarchical imbalance economic imbalance um and how how do we navigate those spaces or how can we communicate um um discomfort while also not worrying about the safety of our future as well so sometimes you don't say something because your word maybe that will imply not being able to collaborate again in the future so um in relation to discomfort also thinking about how to cultivate a way of communicating um sensation discover uncomfortable topics um while not uh worrying about the safety of yeah of your work safety is uh something that would is always changing as well so we've just like um through these conversations the meaning the meaning of the word safety is constantly changing it's never it's never one thing at one particular time and um what makes us feel safe today might not be this the case in the year's time so these conversations are important to um to have but also to keep having them um as as the meaning of of safety will will always not not be not be the same yeah so as I said in the beginning what we shared or what we're sharing with you now is just a a window or a peephole into our dialogue that we also just met in the context of this um event and so um we start we invite you for next day or just to continue conversations about what safety means to you and understand that that also changes per context and that yeah and discover what that means thank you very thank you very much so I want to thank you also to thank the interpreters for translating and again for Circus Strada for inviting us today and for listening thank you very much thank you hello this was the artistic talk of Daria Efrat and Ocean Meleir we are still in Banu le plus petit cirque du monde and there will be another performance for the audience but as you cannot see it I want it to be with a an artist that will perform this afternoon because you know this afternoon and during the fresh this fresh days there are performances so so welcome to you Mathias hello Mathias Lyon I will ask if you can to talk like me not very loudly all right okay okay the performance I'll do this you perform with a horse with a horse yeah I'm a rider and a hip hop dancer wow so uh I'm doing this since I'm 17 I was a rider in a company called Singa Ho very well known company yeah and so this is my first show that I built it myself and it's called the sol duels you are alone but together yeah and that that's the subject of my show actually it it's a ceremony that's health urban health rule and that shows this relation between the rider and his horse and as this relation can be very sensitive very emotional and it also can be uh somewhere violent like uh in every time you meet someone else yes it can be violent do you get along with your horse that's his name that's a little bit his name is bubastis he's a spanish horse that I met two years ago so he he was uh he was in a suburb of marseille and uh he was he was uh with a guy that was uh that had uh how do you say cock a cock uh um cock chicken uh fight birds yeah fight chicken that we don't eat that they fight so it was a guy that that had five birds in uh in in in the middle of of of these birds there was this horse it's a very violent environment very violent environment and it was a violent horse at this moment but it's not anymore how did you do uh weren't you scared was it safe uh it was uh actually that's why I bought him it's because it was safe I I've seen in him that I was going to be able to talk with him uh but it's very simple and very technical it's work of every day that's how you build a relation with the horse it's it's the every day you come to see him and you work with him and little by little it's a very long relation that you have to to build on a very long time then then you can obtain some some things do you think there is something to learn from this experience you have with your horse than the experience you can have with uh human beings yeah of course uh that's how I I live actually uh meeting a horse was for me a way to to encounter my own body like uh I've first of all I've been a rider then I became a dancer and uh it's actually uh I started to ride horses because my father is half a Native American and so it was a way for him to to show me his culture because I I lived in France in the suburb of France and there was no contact with this culture and so uh with the horse came a whole imaginary and uh and this imaginary uh with this I I encountered dance and uh and it's this culture that I've never met that that melted these two practice dance and uh and horse riding we can listen to some human screaming behind us it's a two-man duet and there are maybe you can see can can you tell us a little bit Mathias if you stand up can you describe the dance because you're a dancer the dance that the two guys do well they they jump all over the place and and on classical music and sometimes it looks a bit like a fight or or or lose sometimes they fall but it seems to be kind of funny do you know them do you know them do you know I don't know them I don't know them but probably I know someone who knows them of course so it's a duet like you and your horse yeah well uh our horse horse is funny is it able to love with the horse you um I I don't know if it's good words for a relation with horse actually uh words are not made for horses and so their emotions and their way to behave is uh is it's not in this language uh actually when you meet a horse the language that you develop with him if you want to ride him it's a language of the contact it's by touching him but when you ride him you it's uh it's your back on on on him it's uh your hands on his mouth it's uh your your feet and so uh it's like this that you meet him and this contact can be very sensitive because horses have a skin really more sensitive than ours but it can also be very very strong and and it can be violent because it it's a 500 kilos animal yes and you are a bit less so uh it's two years out how did the relationship progress uh you told me it's your first performance i'm called sol duet and even if uh places like festival are safe place to present the work you still told me I was a bit scared like it's always uh even if it's in a festival you can be always scared to present a work yeah well be the ideal place to do or to do there's no uh that's the subject of my of my work uh when you bring a horse in a city when you're bringing a horse in a place to do a show it is not done for him and so uh and it's an animal that can have reactions very important my horse is very young it's the beginning of his work and that's what I wanted it's uh actually it is scary and I have to be very careful about that but little by little I can do more and uh also that's what what's the experience of this show is that you see a horse that have a lot of reactions that is very emotional and so this is a really big part of uh of the show is to to see my horse how he expresses I actually it is scary but I want to use this I you're playing not playing but controlling dealing provocating yeah of course yeah your perfect your horse never too much never too much could be dangerous for you um well everything can always be dangerous but I I don't go as far as I could on a show when you do show you do only things that you're that you know that works but uh for for the the public it is very it can be also an experience that can be scary because I come very close with the horse and uh and you see the horse going very fast very close from you so uh so I'm not I'm not the only one who who's dealing with this when in this show you're playing with it in a way do you you have the experience of big artists on stage and now you're alone what what what do you feel do you feel more confident when you have a lot of artists around you or do you feel more confident when when you're alone how do you know well uh I feel I felt really confident in this company that we had like 30 40 horses we were a lot of riders and it was uh we could always share experiences and right now my what I wanted was to be in Zyngao and so right now my what I wanted was to be alone and to work with my horse alone and to show that that's uh like even in the title of the of the show you you can hear this this this this subject alone dual and uh and so uh what was I saying uh so the difference between being in group in Zyngao and being alone in a way so so the first thing to say is that I am not alone on this show I have uh uh Julien Defaye that is someone that that has a place in the show and also he's he he's a little bit like a master of ceremony he you know uh in uh in in tribes when you do uh a fire ceremony there is one of the guy that uh that doesn't do the ceremony but that takes care of the fire well that's that's his work yeah taking care of the fire so I'm not alone because I have him right now and uh and that's what I encountered it's that even in a in a relation uh with with uh only two people you have to be open to the other you cannot just only be two people I can I can see there is a small talk let's go back to the center of the circus to listen a little bit stay with me Matthias for a few minutes I'm just listening to let's go back to what is it okay um as you know we're going to have a little bit of a schedule question but don't worry everything will solve itself we're going to be a little bit late but we will have a shorter lunch okay it's just the organization you can go everywhere with your horse Matthias Lyon that's what I want yeah the show is done to to to be performed in the city places or in the rural places but what we what we're working on is also to do a show but but also a global experience actually when you when you come somewhere with a horse you need time for him to get used to the place and you can travel every day with a horse it would be too hard for him and it would be just a sad life for him so what we want to do is to take this this time that we have to take and to use it to to make a a artistic performance more global like uh actually in in a in a city I I can come with my horse somewhere else than in the place where we do the show uh to dance in the middle of a a suburb for example or I do also drawings so I could come with my horse in the middle of a market and and then draw somewhere we want to create a whole experience around this time where we live and it's a on this place so so a full experience with the neighbors with all the city ah great I hope you'll travel the world like like that and so this afternoon you will be perform solo duet there is training well if if we can do the show we'll do some of these performances in the ppcm yes thank you very much uh matias this is the the end of this morning session it it will continue but we won't put it on the live streaming because different panelists wanted a safe place to speak so we respect it tomorrow morning we'll meet around 10 uh 10 local time here in Paris central european time for more discussion for more question about the topic of sustainability I'm waiting for you followers and the cirque strada dot org where you can listen to the podcast also called around fresh produced by making with thank you clement from making waves all around for streaming the sun waiting so for you tomorrow it's odd loving reporting live from le plus petit cirque du monde see you