 Adrienne Wong, we're here on day three of Fulda, the Festival of Live Digital Art. I'm the Artistic Director of Spiderweb Show Performance, and I'm here with the co-curators of the festival, and I'm gonna start, I'm gonna turn to my right, and head over to your right. Yeah, I'm Sarah Garten Stanley, and I'm one of the co-curators, and then I'm gonna just jump over to my right, and who are you? Hi everyone, I'm Michael Wheeler, the third co-curator. Whew! Whew! So ordinarily, what's that? No, you go. Well, I was just gonna say that ordinarily we do like a physical description of ourselves, so I'm gonna do that quickly right now. I'm half Chinese-Canadian, half French-Canadian with kind of messy dark black hair that's short, and I'm wearing a bright blue t-shirt that says Fulda on it from last year's festival. How about you, Sarah? I am a middle-aged, middle-heighted white woman who from European heritage background, and I almost always wear hoodies and generally wear hats, but I don't have one on tonight, so it's different. Yeah, and horn-rimmed glasses. Mike? I'm a really tall white guy in his early 40s. I'm also not wearing a hat, although I usually wear a hat, and I'm doing that because my wife showed my daughter a picture of my Twitter profile, and her comment was, daddy had hair? So I realized that I should try to just live as the best person that I am. So the two of you tonight are in Kingston, and I'm actually two hours behind in Banff, Alberta, so, Sarah, do you wanna explain what's going on here and by what magic we appear to be all in the same room under the Fulda Moon? Yeah, under the Fulda Moon, so great. Yeah, we're in what we call CDN Studio. It's something that we developed a few years ago now. Joel Adria and myself created this space. Joel had the capacity to be able to make it happen technically, and together he and I sort of envisioned how it might work, and yeah, we have used it for a number of different experiments and rehearsals. As a director, I was really interested in finding ways that people could meet, performers could meet when they were in different parts of the country or for reasons of accessibility, it could be a space where they could try out certain things, and over time, we've also found that it's really good as a meeting spot for people, and other kind of fun experiments with looking at the ways in which size and play and animation and stuff can happen. So it's something that we like a lot, and we thought we would share it with you all tonight. Well, here we are, we've had two incredible days of programming so far, and this is the third day, the last show that just wrapped up, this world made itself by Miwa Matraec. It's always so stunning to see her work, and I always have to shout out that she is performing that live in her living room, in LA with her partner there, pressing go on the computer to trigger those quick time animations, and it's just stunning. And then before this world made itself was Haven by Murdoch Sean and Angelica Schwartz out of Montreal, and then before that was, may I take your arm, red dress productions, another like just like bam, bam, bam, really interesting, challenging work at times. And then we started off the whole day with the closing part of the green room's conversations, which was a co-creation process. I'm really curious actually, Sarah, I wanna put you on the spot, but I'm gonna put you on the spot, because I wonder like, how long did you have to work together to make that creation, and what was that process like? Well, we had together as that group about an hour and 15 minutes, I guess. We had some prompts before figured out, and some ideas as to how we might flow it, and Matt Rogelski, he was doing a lot of the live recording. We did that all within that time period as well, so he was able to play it back. And yeah, we set up a few things in advance, but really it was about an hour and a half to pull it together, yeah. Which went really fast. Yeah, I bet, I bet it did. And can you just remind me, how many participants were there as part of that session? You know, I don't know the exact number, I have to go back and look at it, but let's say there was 30, 40, something like that. No, that's actually not right. There was probably just under 30 in total. And yeah, I mean, a number of them had been even there as part of the tests earlier, when we were trying to figure out how to build that space for the green rooms. But there was people that I met in the room at the end who I'd never met before, and that was really cool, because we finished the whole sort of co-creation, this closing act by bringing finally everybody back into the same Zoom room, something we hadn't done with everyone for all of the green rooms, and then Georgina Real closed it, and it was extremely moving. And yeah, we really felt somehow like we'd managed to gather digitally. So yeah, thanks for asking was, I look forward to going back and looking at it, because there was so many things going on, I don't really know what it looked like, but I know what it felt like, which is cool, yeah. Yeah, I was just really struck by, in all of these pieces like that notion of space, like where the performers were in relationship to my body, I mean, we're obviously mediated by the screens and cameras and all kinds of things, but certainly in, may it take your arm in the way that Alex experiences mapping a community through sound and story was something that really stuck with me through the day, just that idea of space and how it was turning up in different ways in all of these things that I saw today. Mike, is there anything that really stood out for you today? Yeah, quite a bit. Maybe instead of just going into what's going on there, I'll bring up a couple of tweets, and one of my tweets is about Alex's show, and I wanted to talk about that, but before I get there, we all need to lean to the side so that we can talk about this tweet here by Andrew Burke. And Andrew says, I also just did a run around the Citadel and across the bridge and recorded on Strava because it's gonna be part of some kind of distributed digital art project with spider web show, Hope They Like the Starshape. Yes, Andrew, thank you. We did enjoy the Starshape. And I bring that up because something we haven't talked about yet is the digital run. And for those of you watching who don't know, I think he's probably disappeared this week. Oh, okay. We can come back into the floor. We can come back in the frame. The digital run asked people from across anywhere in the world who joined in exercise earlier in the week for one day to attach your data to an app. And then two artists have spent part of the week interpreting that data and creating art out of it. And so that tweet we saw was just one of 178 different people who contributed their data to this project in seven countries. And over that single day, all of those participants logged 1,375 kilometers of activity. So those artworks will be revealed tomorrow on folder.ca at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And so come check them out there. We'll be doing some social media action about them. But interesting to see what all of that sweating turned into in the art world. The other tweet that I wanted to bring up is just one that's a quote of Alex Bulmer from Amaya Take Your Arm. And it's just a quote. It says, this piece is about my affection for interdependence. And it was something she said really early in the piece and I felt like it was a real through line to how I understood not just what the piece was about, but maybe also what it seemed like Alex was mourning in that piece. Those long shots of Alex and when this piece existed at folder and something we experienced together physically it felt quite hopeful and today's felt less hopeful. And I feel because that interdependence that existed at this time last year is not available to her. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to say something about that piece too because I felt the magic that is Alex and I think that core group of collaborators they did such beautiful work. And that was a real to use that over word pivot but they really found something truthful and reframed the question in such a profound way. And I was struck by how many times I laughed aloud, and that's something that I think is truly difficult to achieve in this medium. Something about the way in which they worked was so true and proximate, I felt close, even though it was a piece about kind of not being able to get across in some ways. Anyway, I thought it was really successful and I hope they continue to think about ways to tell that story and to keep reframing that story because it's beautiful here. I have, you know, when you say that it just though the word that comes up for me is love, like I could feel the love and appreciation that those four collaborators have for each other and it felt like that's the thing that held true in the center of it. And allowed for kind of investigation and digging but also playfulness and whimsy and it's that those people that you can laugh with when you're in the worst times because they're your buns. Yeah, lots of, there's tons of love today and all of these pieces, tons of just really beautiful, gentle, sweet humanity is almost too much, almost too much. Like you find someone to hug, it's really tricky right now. Let's talk a little bit about tomorrow though. Oh, I'm sorry, I talked over you. We're allowed to hug in Ontario as of today in your circle of 10. Within your circle of 10? Like you get to increase your circle of huggers? Yeah. Okay. I hugged my neighbor yesterday so I guess she has to be in my circle now. I'm doing a couple of things. One, I'm starting to feel like we're towering over and so I tried to sort of sit way down and go, I'm sorry if it looks weird but the other thing is about that thing about Ontario as Adrienne said, we're in Kingston, I'm in Kingston right now and I was downtown at like five o'clock and it was like the pandemic had never happened. Even though people lined up like chalk marks behind one another, there was still a lineup to get into the ice cream place. It would just happen to be like six feet apart and all the boys were out on the patios and the vans were coming by saying, oh, back again, let's do some, like it was just like this kind of crush of, yeah, so this hypothetical time here in Kingston anyway where I wonder if people will just go right back or will they be too, it's like, no, it was just like right back. It was really shocking and just one last thing on that when we were planning this festival, there were so many questions about what would this time be like? What would be happening from June 10th to June 13th? What would the world, you know, and so it's just so interesting to be living in it and going, well, here, this is what it's like today. And in Alberta, was it today that up to 50 can get? Like there's these extraordinary slips that are, yeah, occurring. Yeah, you can go swimming. Like the pools and everything's open. They just basically opened everything with, you know, some adjustments, but I don't know, it feels fast to me. But I'm just, I guess I'll just stay in my house for a bit longer and watch some great shows tomorrow since we have some, hey, that's my segue. So Michael's already talked about the digital run. There's gonna be a pod plays walk party. So pod plays or audio plays have been written for specific walks in Vancouver and the New World Theater artistic director, Chelsea Haberman, is gonna take us on a walk and show us what she sees as we're listening to those audio plays together. We have part two of Haven. So those who tuned in today will see the second part where actors take on the roles of the strangers who meet. We have, oh my gosh, I'm blanking a little bit. We have Iskway, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Beautiful performance. And I'm allowed to, at the theater center, the Iskway and Chamber Trio, is that right, Mike? Is a trio with her? It is a trio. Yeah, it is a trio. And then we're gonna wrap up with Miwa Matraeus, newest piece, which is called infinitely yours. And for those who've caught her work this past tonight and then two nights ago, just like stunning, amazing. So come check it out. Anything from the two of you before we sign off tonight? Did I miss anything? Yeah, you didn't miss anything, but just you brought up the notion of love and I feel that with Miwa's work. I felt that in Haven too, I should say, like this urge towards it and then sometimes this incredible expression of it. And Miwa's what feels like absolute love for the world that she gets to live in or seize. It's just, it's so beautiful and it's so filled with a kind of a love or a devotion, maybe devotion, it's really remarkable. Yeah. Yeah, any last words from you? Man, I'm so excited about Iskway. I'm obviously excited about all the programming, but two things about the Iskway performance that I'm really psyched about. One is like, maybe something has happened in a Canadian theater since the pandemic started, but I haven't heard of it. Like it's really the first activation of a theater since this all started. And so I'm so excited that we're part of that. And then Iskway is performing new material and normally Iskway performs with more of a band and she's playing with this classical trio. And so I'm just so excited that such an important artist is bringing new work to reactivate our theaters. And I think it will be an important moment historically. And how wonderful and ironic it will be that the Festival of Live Digital Art is working to reactivate theatrical space. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can't pin a stand. Yeah. You can try, but you can't. Thanks everybody for sticking with us tonight and we hope to see you tomorrow night for all of our last day events and shows. From Banff and Kingston, good night.