 Oh, yeah. We can put it on the other side. There you go. You know what to put on the other side? There we go. Front row there. I feel like you should sit there and roll that. No. Okay. Okay. Okay. He wants to be there and I want to be there. I don't. Second time. You're going to have time to roll. I know. You're going to roll them your way? adjusted problem You're going to be like What's wrong? I know. You're going to run now. You're going to run now. There you go. You got this. Take what I have for you. I'm sorry, you said that I could draw up this. I'm sorry, you're... I was in University of Gavon, but for example, that's what it was. I don't know if you said you were selling pork, which I thought was the one for the book. That's a number, but it's for us. Oh! I'm trying to think about it. I'm trying to write it for yourself before you get to that point. I'd like to put it in front of you for a freshman year, or a second year. I'm sorry. I'm going to try to work on it. I'm going to try to work on it, so that's what I would like to do. I would like to come and challenge some fun screen screen questions. Oh, okay. I'm watching it. There's an autographed picture of you. Yeah, you're okay. I've seen all your fancy pictures on Instagram. Oh, my god, that's perfect. You're like a celebrity now. Yeah, I'm going to have to read it. You are definitely. You look very good. That's good. When I want. Yeah, I think I left the work. Yeah. You are kind of the lead. Yeah. I'm the lead. I chose on the lead. I'm the lead. I'm the lead. I'm the lead. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Well, that's okay. It's all you walk by the trailer where a ledge is selling Christmas tree. You wouldn't consider the thing? What? Hi. Who are you? How are you? I know your name. What is it? Yes. I give up. Don't. Give up is not great. Want some coffee? Is from home. From my village. Give to my mother. I put sugar, okay? Definitely. We drink in small cups, but America big. There are small cups here, too. Yes, I know. Oh, wow. Thank you. Please sit in the forest. We've been here many years. I grew up here. Here? In this neighborhood. That's nice. It wasn't so nice then. It was better because it was worse. You have job? Oh, yeah. Actually, don't. Don't. Really want to talk about that if it's... Don't. Everything is... You're a mouse in my hand. You're safe. Sorry. Okay. Sorry, this is really nice of you. Do you do this a lot? What? You must. I'll never sleep tonight. Like in the 70s, before we were born, stranger killers. Huh? Like last year, you weren't here. So, last year, at Christmas time, there were these murders, and it turned out that this had been going on for years. I think five Christmases before that, and they just hadn't told the public... Then they just hadn't told the public, but last year it got out. It was a big deal. Gregor would know about it. It was tremendous. The Christmas ripper. It was... Did they find you? He's at large. Or she? She? Could be. I kept hope, expecting something in the newspaper, but I guess he's laying low or he's gone. You think about this very much? It's not healthy. It's not just me. Depressed. Can I ask you a question? Okay. What's it like? Handsome. Being as handsome as you are. I'm not. I'm just asking. Drink your coffee. Shit. I'm sorry. Drink the rest now. In there? To make him sleep. Don't be loud. This is for you. This thing? Listen. It won't be good for you. It's already such a mess. It literally doesn't even work half the time. It's ripe with disease. Shh. That's my name. I guessed. So welcome everybody to the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center here. The Guided Center CUNY. I'm from Grimley-Hampson from the Julia Track on the Minor Theatre Company's work. So thank you for coming. I'm the director of the Segal Center. We do bridge here academia and professional theater international and American theater. And we are close, I think, to the New York Theatre scene. It's fair to say. We also really put work into it for over 10 years. We have done the Prelude Festival where we show work in progress here at the Segal. Julia was here two years ago in the New York City in a way. One could say has a moment of a revival of playwriting or maybe some even say it's a golden age. We have young writers or women writers, of diverse backgrounds and minorities, but also ensemble work. And I think you and the work with your company really combine the work of an ensemble and truly interesting playwriting. I think new times need new forms of theater, as we always say. And the idea of a post-traumatic theater does actually not mean, as Hans-Tisleman said when he was here, we don't need text anymore. It says no. On the contrary, we need text. But we need new ways of writing. And I think Julia is really someone we look up to, we admire and her contribution to the scene, to the field and also in her work of teaching is tremendous. So this evening is a celebration of the work of the minor theater and of Julia. So thank you all for coming and taking your time and energy. And also we would of course say Kate Benson and Christine Haruna Lee, who we also know well and of course the great Oakley who came with us, so thank you. We are truly honored. And so we will hear an artist talk by Julia. She'll give some thoughts of what's on her mind, what she's thinking, there will be some responses. And then we have a short panel and then we will go right away go to the Q&A. I think we do have a great audience. It's important to have good theater, good audience and then here all you and your faces and some of them we know that really is a testimony I think to New York City and to the curiosity of an audience that really also wants to engage. So we're going to really have a time for you to ask questions. We're coming slowly down to the end of our season. We have new plays of Spain coming up, some young Spanish writers who would be the Julia Charcos of Barcelona or Madrid will be here. But this is an event tonight. I am personally a very happy that we have it. I would like to thank Antio Eugel who also helped to make it happen. I think also the idea to somehow reconnect with the tradition to the classics. Ideas of a racine or a fédre and to trying to connect it to the contemporary world. Rensier a great French philosopher said actually when classical traditions meet new technologies and new ideas then something exciting happens. Just the new technologies, new ideas on themselves often are not as interesting. Just the classical traditions are not unlike we had a panel on Japanese theater here this afternoon when really hundreds of years old tradition and racine of course is part of that. Meet a new new way of thinking and new ways of production and new technologies. So that really is exciting. And I hope you get a little insight in your work and we all learn a bit more as things also end for helping to make this happen and to Michael and Elida and George. So we now go on and hand over the mic. We don't even have to hand over it's already here, right? So Julia and again a big applause and respect to your work. I mean also we're just in this room. Okay. I actually am the Julia Jarkov Barcelona also. No, thank you so much, Hong for having us here. You know, I think it's actually pretty rare that a place is so dedicated to bringing theater and ideas together and it's so important to me yeah, yeah. It's so important to me that we never know how those things theater and ideas are supposed to go together that we keep trying new ways. I do think they're different things. I want to also, yeah, thank Anne-Marie Dore, Minor Theaters Producer for organizing this event and especially the actors and the other artists who are going to join us in thinking together. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about our company, Minor Theater, and what I think is our relationship to tonight's theme, which is basically the question of how theater and performance can usefully become a place where we get into questions about the relationship between sex and violence and gender. And I'm just going to show a few images from some of our plays while I talk. So sex and violence I think that just using the phrase sex and violence invokes mass media, right? I think sex and violence are like the trademark pleasures of low-brow entertainment. Sex and violence as an expression is like a synonym for cheap thrills. It's like a shortcut to excitement. I think we associate it with pornography obviously, but also like the notion of kind of bingeable entertainment in general. And it would seem that theater especially the kind of theater that we make, which is to say experimental theater aka theater that most people don't want to see. It might seem that this cultural practice would be distinct from pop culture precisely because we don't have to offer that kind of easy thrill. Like we don't need sex and violence the way that TV needs it. And that is almost the point of theater. But I am not so interested in a theater without sex and violence since both of these things to me seem necessary for like any kind of fun. And I don't know if all of my collaborators in minor theater would agree with me about this or about anything. But I do think that we started this company partly because we each trust and enjoy the ways that the others perpetrate these two things on and around the stage. So this evening I'm going to show you some examples. We already with Grimly Handsome started showing you some examples of that. But I will also say right off the bat some things that I think we don't do with sex and violence in our work. So we don't use them as ways of distilling moral clarity. We are interested in the ways sex and violence feed off and produce shame. But we don't find it useful to present a logic of guilt or especially innocence. Accordingly, we don't divide the world into violent and nonviolent individuals and we don't uphold the distinction between violent and nonviolent desire. On the other hand we don't pretend that violence is equally distributed in terms of its perpetrators or its victims. We know that white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and capitalism determine who gets hurt most and most of the time. And there is nothing ethically neutral about this fact, obviously. I think, I hope, that our plays are also always about systematic injustice and are always gesturing towards the possibility of a world that would be different. At the same time we don't think that pleasure without negativity or ferocity is the most subversive utopia. I was going to say also that we don't use sex and violence to sell tickets, but this is obviously false. We are always trying to do that. But I'm not sure we succeed and maybe that is partly because no one wants to get too excited in the wrong way in a small dark room surrounded by a bunch of people that they sort of know. But I think it is also because of this other thing that we don't do or that we try hard not to do which is that we don't replicate the fetishes, the shapes in which we've all already been taught to recognize desire and aggression. So sex in our plays usually doesn't look sexy. And actually our lead designer, Austo Benihasta who's not here tonight, I think is kind of a major force in the campaign against sexy sex in our plays. And this is because we don't think sex is sexy. We think it is scary. So maybe that means that the only possible path to a sexiness that would not make our skin crawl would be by way of fear. I know that it's risky and also maybe dumb to make broad sweeping claims about what sex or desire is since as my freshman year boyfriend like to say nothing is always anything. But I am very sympathetic to the Freudian idea that subjectivity, so being a person implies a certain fundamental masochism and a concept that has been helpful and also kind of endlessly fascinating to me is Freud's notion of the death drive. So basically Freud is trying in 1920 to understand why people sometimes act in ways that defy any logic of self interest. And finally he decides that we must have what he calls a repetition compulsion, whose aim is to get back to the zeroness that was before being born. So to get all the way back to being nothing. But what's really interesting is that this drive towards zero, the death drive can only express itself by mingling with its opposite impulse heroes, which is our striving to protect ourselves and reproduce ourselves and assert ourselves and vice versa. So the death drive because it's always kind of battering against the outlines of the self, is what first pushes us outside ourselves and into sexuality or desire for others. So in other words, sex originates as violence. And this means that there's a basic incoherence to everything we do because at the heart of what we want is something we don't want because the drive is precisely the space or the difference or the seam between me as the subject, the person who supposedly is doing this wanting and this compulsion inside me that constantly undermines my consistency, my integrity as a subject or as a self. And you might think that this idea of the death drive is at odds with any kind of good politics and in a way, it is because the drive would be the thing in me that interrupts my ability to be the kind of self that wants anything good like a better life for myself or for others or a better world but the death drive would also undermine the political fantasies that sustain existing power relations. So would undermine fantasies like masculinity or purity or whiteness or nation and I think we can understand these fantasies as attempts to reassure ourselves that we are intact and coherent selves that what is wrong with us is always what someone else is doing to us and the concept basically of the death drive and then I'm going to finish this section I promise, just suggests that what is wrong is always also inside us and sort of points to the pointlessness of taking it out on others and to me theater is a really promising place to keep trying to see this in ourselves because it's a place where the theater is a place where I think we are always seeing selves come apart we're always seeing bodies interfering with the fantasies that they are supposed to sustain and it's a place where I think we can stop trying to hide the kind of total unrulyness of these monsters that we normally have to take great care not to be. So that's what I think about sex and violence but we also promise that we would talk about gender and for the past few years it's been increasingly clear to me that women's desire is an essential theme for my own work and in some ways this has come as a surprise to me since I've never really identified much personally with femaleness or femininity I certainly don't think there's such a thing as female desire if that implies any kind of claim that women all want the same thing or all want in the same way I don't think anyone in this room thinks that I would resist any suggestion that my own desires can be correlated with my anatomy or with my assigned gender and actually I think that kind of correlation always fails I think no one can simply be a woman that's what I guess Simone de Beauvoir said that too a huge part of our unrulyness I think is made up of all the ways that women don't fit into the logic of gender which means that the dominance of that logic makes most of what we are actually inexpressible most of the time like there's no language for it and I wouldn't want to trivialize the kinds of suffering that masculine identity can impose on men but I think those of us whose identities are more emphatically marked than women but also all minoritarian subjects I think we move around in a world that constantly reminds us about the identity that we're supposed to inhabit since unlike the dominant identity, ours never just goes without saying so women always know that we are seen to be speaking acting, writing desiring as women even when that identity seems like something produced by someone else's fantasy so maybe the best definition of women's desire would just be the desire that is always going to be misrecognized, always attributed to a figure that actually no one could be I think my plays explore this thing about women they tend to center around female characters who want incoherently who experience their own desires as pushing them beyond the bounds of recognizable self-hood and this often seems to require violence and the characters in my plays tend to get themselves hurt but as I've already said I think theater is always potentially cruel in the way that it can tear open the fabric of the self and I think it can do this in a way that no other medium can I think minor theaters characters couldn't exist anywhere but in the theater because they're always on the verge of not being who they are and the hope, I guess the feminist hope of this theater is that being on that verge taking it up and enjoying it and enjoying the pain of it could be a kind of superpower in the face of a world that would like to scare us into being ourselves so that's minor theater and over the next little while we're going to read a couple more scenes from our plays including two from our upcoming show Pathetic which is an adaptation of Racine's Phaedra with Hexameter and all which opens June 5th at the Abrams Arts Center and I hope you guys will all come but what's really cool tonight is that three of New York where are we New York City's most amazing theater artists are also going to weigh in on these issues and I'm very, very excited to hear what they have to say I'm just going to read you their bios quickly Christine Haruna Lee is a Brooklyn based theater maker whose work navigates non-linear playwriting auto theoretical performance text and promoting arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater and processed based collaborations her works include suicide forest plural love memory retrograde, sugar shack and war lesbian she's a recipient of the map fund grant Lotus Foundation prize for directing and the new dramatists Van Leer Fellowship and her play Suicide Forest is published by 53rd State Press Kate Benson is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn her plays include Porto Dane November on the banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes Super Magic Wild Forest where are we going and desert for now her performances include fondly Colette Richland good person of such one Nomads I Will Never Love Again and variations on the main she's affiliated with Space at Rider Farm the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab the Club Thumb Biannual Commission and the New Georgia Jam and Oakway Opakwasli performance maker her work includes two Bessie award winning productions pent up a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic which I think we'll be hearing from today she was the 2015-17 Randilovic Striker New York live arts resident commissioned artist culminating in the work Poor People's TV Room and her latest work was Atacus Revolt a shared commission with Fyaf and Arons Arts Center for the Tilt Festival this year commissions, residencies and awards include the 10th annual Berlin Biennale Commission the 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award and Contemporary Dance 2018 USA Artist Fellow Herb Alpert Award Mank Choreographic Fellowship NYFA Fellowship LMCC, FCA Wesleyan and support from Creative Capital the MAP Fund and Nifa, she's also a 2018 University and she's a MacArthur Fellow and and just to briefly say who else you'll be seeing now we'll see Kim Gaynor and Linda Mancini in a scene from Pathetic a little later on we'll see Kate Benson and Ben Williams in a scene from our 2014 show Nomads and then we'll see a very little piece again from Pathetic by Linda interspersed with contributions from Kate and Oakley so thank you for being here Pathetic Scene 14B Rosario is sitting on the couch in her crown Her daughter Swallow comes in what's that what do you mean aren't you taking front it's not like I can understand everything yet it's not even AP sit down sweetheart I'm sorry you were worried last night whatever honey what's up with the crown it was a gift from who and what's that on your cheek uh oh it's cum I paid a guy $100 to come on my face like a dermatologist you know how did you get $100 okay we have $100 we're not that broke you should wash it off it's no disease then it's too late wait sit back down a second what I was school for whatever you did after school fine isn't there a semi-formal dance or something last month man I hate dances I remember hiding behind the pile of mats in the gym and praying that some older guy back there all fucked up on the PCP and just punch me in the head knocked me out cold so I wouldn't have to deal with the dance for $100 he probably would that older boy doesn't exist never existed listen to me honey this is so important I know you think you're ugly now don't you I know you think that Clara say is pretty and the guys like her and teachers want to fondle her and you stand next to her and you're invisible right well Cap when MTV comes to town to cast the next season of the real world is probably not going to be you they kick okay you're not going to be the prom coming queen or whatever fine but and this is the big thing from now on is only going to get worse maybe 10 more years it sounds like a lot it's nothing it's gone and then look at me it's this it's decay you have to understand that every inch of your body will be totally corrupted no one will be able to touch you without shuddering look at me you want that desire your desire will instantly turn murderous because you know so well no other satisfaction can be yours how old are you again 15 exactly people want to fuck you now Consuelo whether you not whether or not you know it and it doesn't last what's the real world it's one of the first reality is there I don't really want to talk about mail I felt deeply turned on it was in my childhood home in Seattle it was late at night and I'm flipping through the cable and this movie boys don't cry comes on do you guys know that movie yeah if you don't it's this film about the life of this young trans man played by Hilary Swank and it follows the tragic story of his murder in this small town the movie is so devastating so there is this one sex scene between Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevignier that takes place outdoors and it's really hot so I recorded it on VHS and then I replayed it over and over again while I masturbated to it on the floor of my living room right with me in this room is this large white built-in bookshelf and on one of the shelves is this box with my dad's ashes and it's a wooden box with a cross on it and my mom usually places white lilies beside it so I'm touching myself and simultaneously I'm really conscious of my dad's spirit and ashes and I'm thinking is he here in this room right now watching me before I could begin to erase this heinous image I fucking came with pervert with daddy cakes and on these days I want all the bad things so you can just call me dirty some slut with big dick energy put it in all my holes I'm imagining bending you over right now yeah that's my power move and these days I can't be so nice and quiet because fuck I just read online that dating Asian women is a white nationalist right of passage I mean fuck that's so fucking painful and I would seriously hurt your fucking if you try to pull that shit on me the kink is that I want to deserve it all all the pain that is mine and my cum isn't clear and white no it's like deep dark secretion like amber molasses coming out of this purple brown body and I'll feel this and I'll release this and I'll come and dick her fingers with the full pain and pleasure just like that many times many times many times so that was an excerpt from my play Suicide Forest that premiered at the Bushwick Star in association with my theater company in February and March this year I began writing this play in 2014 and at the time I had just finished reading Audrey and Kennedy's Funny House of a Negro and in this play Kennedy finds inspiration in her darkest and most painful psychic space and she actually uses that very space as the landscape of the play itself so that's what I attempted to do with Suicide Forest I asked myself what lies at the heart of my darkest psychic space it turns out a salaryman and a schoolgirl from 1990s Tokyo in my play they're both clawing for self-worth in a society that glorifies cultural, racial corporate uniformity laden with toxic gender norms how does a young woman find her sex and sexuality in such a nightmarish backdrop spoiler alert they both fail pretty hard in this environment and we eventually follow the schoolgirl into a symbolic forest and here the play kind of breaks down a little bit the monologue that I just gave comes from this part of the play where now the fictional narrative in the first half that was inspired by my upbringing in Japan slams into the real-time narrative of my now Asian-American self I'm sure you're getting this from the pictures but I played the schoolgirl in the production and then there was another character that lived in the forest this demon that sheppered that herded goats and also sheppered people to their death and this character was played by my mother and so the play ends with the two of us having a difficult conversation difficult because I don't share the same native language and difficult because our shortcomings as mother and daughter and in turn our ongoing intergenerational gaps were being tenderly witnessed by an audience if you're not familiar with Suicide Forest it is an actual forest at the base of Mount Fuji and it has been a famous spot where Japanese people commit suicide since around the 60s it's said to have magical properties the floor is covered with tree roots and it's easy to get lost your compass stops working it is a sacred place to die because you can die without being noticed the forest's Japanese name is Aokigahara or jikai which means sea of trees but it really became sensationalized Suicide Forest when this YouTuber Logan Paul entered the woods and filmed a Japanese man's corpse and then promptly posted that video onto YouTube unlike Logan Paul though my attraction to this forest comes from some place much more cave-like in my body the forest could be my body and there's this desire a desire towards self-destruction that is so fine tuned this location reminds me that I have a generational impulse towards self-erasure when things feel impossible and the repetition of that desire for erasure over time has become part of the bedrock of my psychic space to make myself peacefully invisible in the face of my own shame to me is so undeniably Japanese and it's also so Asian-American and it's also so inherently about an immigrant experience the forest for me is like a talisman or stone that I've been handed down but it doesn't really bring me any luck instead it shows me how to hold on to my pain her mother's pain and so on because this has been the way we survive over time and a part of me really respects this in me but not always there is an attraction to the voided parts of myself and this play started as just a recognition of what those voided parts of me are but over time and with the help of my mother and this Japanese heritage cast and Asian-American women led team it has become a larger conversation about each of our voided parts and what it feels like to be seen collectively and I just wanted to close out by sharing some writing from Andrea Long Chu who I'm such a huge fan of and this particular quote really spoke to me in her own words she's a writer critic and sad trans girl in Brooklyn and this is from her essay the pink happy new vagina that was published in N plus one cis women hate when trans women envy them perhaps because they cannot imagine that they are in possession of anything worth envying for my part cousin I don't want what you have I want the way in which you don't have it I don't envy your plentitude I don't envy your void now I've got the hole to prove it thank you if I close this am I going to destroy it thank you hi hi hi I just am going to get settled and while I am doing that I have a serious preoccupation with science and so that might be something we talk about a little bit I hope that's okay I the first story structure I learned about and I think many of us may have learned about and now I am going to dip into some old time feminism was something we called the witches hat which I later learned to think of as something modeling a male orgasm which is the rising action climax falling action and I think this story structure has some things to recommend it I like a male orgasm I like to be there when they happen it's great as long as I like to be there but I think it's gotten really tired I think it's worn out I think when it works it's at the work of some serious fluffing I think that one of the reasons it's very tired is because it is ironing out a manufactured conflict that will then be performed in the theater through radical acts of consensus this is when I throw the chair so make sure you're not standing in its path okay and then the chair gets thrown the same way every night that's what we all agree to do we all show up on time we all agree to wear the right clothes and say the right words on time and we do that as best as we can theater is essentially at its core about finding agreement with what should happen and so when you take this manufactured conflict that is at the heart of this particular story structure what I think you can see is an organized violence made meat and tidy and expectant and then it satisfies our expectations and then it sets us down gently to go out into the world cynicism intact I am interested in a female sexual model and something that I think is interesting that I just learned recently to get back to the science is that there are two parts of our nervous system that I want to highlight the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system the sympathetic nervous system is the system that gets triggered during trauma during chase during shock during life threatening events it is called the fight or flight response and something that's very interesting to me is that it is intimately bound up in sex it is what allows us to have ejaculations and orgasms and I sort of wonder about the female orgasm part because it's the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest that allows for male arousal and female arousal and so it makes me feel a little confused that women might go through that cycle that rising action to the fight or flight response of an orgasm to rest and digest back to rising action but in some ways that is what it feels like to be female is to not have this one time experience but to constantly have to freak out regroup calm down so you don't behave in an angry way gather get triggered again freak out calm down etc I don't think I need to explain that too much further but so when I started writing plays it was because I was bored with the parts I was being offered and then I started writing plays and I got offered a whole shit ton of great beautiful parts so I kept performing and not in my own plays until I wrote a play about how sausage gets made because I thought that was a decent metaphor for what men are afraid women will do to them and which is to gut them, drain their sacks fill them with their innards and eat them so I started there and I started with that description in the dark and we couldn't find anyone to play the part it seemed puzzling to lots of people and then some other people just flat out declined and so someone who knows me very well suggested that I should do it and then the director said oh I might cast you in that part if I didn't even know you you could do that and so then I did it so I used my voice in the dark to describe the way that sausage gets made at the very top of the play and then I followed that with a romantic comedy that I wrote about a middle aged single woman who is trying to figure out how to re-engage with the human race through steak foie gras and red wine and good times so the darkness I fought for really hard because the conventional wisdom is that if you turn out the lights everyone will go to sleep that will certainly happen to my mother during any play that I write even if we don't turn out the lights she'll see it's okay she's a great lady she just wants to make sure the set looks good but so you know there was like this feeling like oh the dark and I thought well but I'm gonna talk so maybe I can keep everybody awake but I couldn't see the audience so then I I kind of indulged a kind of an addictive habit of mine which was to try to play it for laughs and if I got responsive then I knew it was okay and if I didn't then I fell into a kind of deep well of despair until the lights came on and I could become more aware of the audience but the point is I didn't know that I was doing this at the time but it occurred to me and here's some more science again when you're looking at me the only reason you're seeing me is because photons from the light source are bouncing off and hitting your eyes so we're having this little reflective dance together I can see you because photons are bouncing off of you and so we're doing this nice kind of even trade I see you you see me my eyes are failing you know I'm in the middle so maybe I don't see you as clearly as you see me maybe I see you more clearly than you see me whatever but that's why we're seeing each other is because of reflection and bounce and little tiny tiny tiny particles that you will never see but that your eyeballs can receive that's a miracle but the reason you can hear me is because some crazy gas related and vibrational shit is happening in this part of my body and this part of my body and then luckily I have a pretty big head and so it's resonating around in my head and sounding sort of okay but then the way this traveling through the air into your eardrum and making a tiny membrane in your body vibrate and then the real magic stuff happens inside the centers of your brain the various areas of your focus area and Wernicke's area where language gets processed and made and we're all doing that and I'm doing it to you you do not get to do it back to me until you laugh or tell me to fuck off in the theater I mean in life people have plenty to say so this performance that I made in the dark about sausage and you know as an analog for what sausage is an analog for and I've seen people of many genders and sexual orientations eating sausage with great delight and every culture has some version of sausage so that and I was describing over and over again in the dark the ways in which drain the sack chop up the meat grind it dry the sack stuff the intestine ground meat not the intestine that would be disgusting drain the intestine out of a thing grind up the meat and then shove it back in the intestine casing and then fry it up and eat it and I kept it dawned on me that it was because the real radical act is for my voice to reach everybody else and then I realized that I wanted to do theater because I wanted to yell at people and wear nice clothes and I couldn't figure out what nice clothes were and there are these things in the theater these people this institution costumes and costume designers and design and they'll fix it for you so disco so I think that the I thought that my plays weren't violent and then someone pointed out to me that in one of my plays the entire family gets eaten at the end of the play by a herd of babies and I worked really hard on that part but I also sort of don't remember writing it and this is a thing that I kind of want to say about they were all dead and there's cannibalism and it was the fault of the babies and lots of people were really confused by it because the rest of the play had been a kind of charming if sometimes fraught middle class Thanksgiving dinner narrated by sports announcers and then I killed everybody at the end in this act of infant cannibalism and the only people who really understood it without needing any help were 60-year-old women who were mothers because they knew that what the world does to mothers is that it sucks the life out of them and calls them doing a good job for letting that happen I want to disrupt every conventional idea that I have and I want to do it not by relying on the time honored, time worn out convention of a conflict story structure I want to find questions that I can ask and not answer but thoroughly explore and ring out and shove in the faces of my audience mostly in the ears of my audience so that they can help me figure them out because no one of us is going to be able to reckon with the complexity that is being alive I can try to explain myself to you, I think I have at great length and I will stop soon, I promise but things are happening in my brain that are happening faster than I can register them so I might say, oh I like those shoes but I don't know why and I don't know why I said that out loud and I can try to come up with a reason because I'm really good at that but I have no idea why that's happening right then parole judges in prisons who grant parole are 90% likely to deny parole before lunch and 10% likely to deny parole after lunch because they can't think straight until they get their sandwiches and they're really smart they're people and dedicated and they have really clear terms and they have really big rational logical structures to follow and they're judges, they've studied they've practiced, etc and it's the sandwich that makes the difference so I don't claim to understand my own humanity or yours or ours but maybe, just maybe, if we all ask some really good questions together and stop swallowing the born and the adult and the, you know, should be now bedridden classical story structures maybe we could start a revolution thank you yes I am you guessed it have a good time they won, yes, yes they serve those little objects with the cheese little animals stuffed with cheese they didn't that to me makes a good party good food to eat and good looking ladies well, there were plenty of those but you wouldn't be riding home alone, right? indeed I would excuse me didn't mean to talk out of charge that's all right, perfectly all right what about you? how has been your evening? dull as a Jew yep yet in this line you don't you lose sight of your privacy aha yeah, you're hardly ever anywhere no, it's different there's places and then there's the empty space around them the wastes yeah but you must have friends some kind of support, some help for your emptiness takeover some companionship I didn't say feelings of emptiness I said actual empty spaces that's not a feeling like how you can't feel the inside of your body most of the time feel someone else's but that's what I mean meant about companionship you hungry? why? you seem hungry you're the one who gets talking about food you're hungry I eat like a fox well shall we eat? shall we go eat something? it'll be my treat, please forget I said it, please take me home I don't know where you live where are we going? there's a nice out of the way place up ahead no street lights no houses but nobody looks up it's tenement houses I always thought that'd be a good place to take one of my cussed passengers night like this either torture or murder torture murder moodle are you serious? moodle in the noodle it's 62 Wilhelmina at the corner of clay I really insist take her home, take you to dinner what is it her lordship really wants? dinner I want to share something with you it's a note it was passed between two girls at the tender age of 11 and one of which was me what is an orgasm? an orgasm is what you get when you have sex but I've never had sex and I think I had one what does it feel like? it kind of feels like waves and waves inside of you it feels good do you go to the beach? not that much is it easier to have orgasms on the beach? it's just that when you stand at the shore waves are coming in and then going back out waves look like how orgasms feel but riding on a wave is not the same thing it's not as good as an orgasm because the waves are more on the inside of you with an orgasm but you still should get really wet do you have your period yet? now? you're so late I remember you had so much hair down there you had more than Tasha and you were only 9 she was 12 I started my period like a year after I got my pussy hair you can't get pregnant when you're on your period even if the boy comes inside you my boyfriend likes it when I bleed if the boy comes inside you if you're having sex isn't he supposed to be inside you already? you don't know what calm is it's a verb you know that to have sex a man has to get hard right? his dick gets hard you don't know that a man's dick has to get hard didn't I just say that? you didn't write a sentence with a period at the end you wrote a sentence that ended with a question mark I meant to write a period can you answer my question please? yes his dick it gets hard and when he has an orgasm you can tell easily because he comes he comes calm it's a verb and a noun technically it's called semen and it's white like milk but a little thinner and that's where the sperm is and that's what can get you pregnant that is so nasty no it's not sometimes it tastes good you drink it? what does it taste like? does it taste like pee? it's not pee so why should it taste like pee? and I don't drink pee so I don't know what pee tastes like calm is salty and bitter sometimes we have for lunch and he eats me out so why should I not swallow his cum when I give him a blowjob? what? when I suck his dick why are you sucking his dick? because he likes it and I like it when you suck a man's dick they'll never leave you and he eats me out and I love it and you get him ready you get him hard and he helps you get ready I want to get ready by myself you could do that I think I know how already I think I had an orgasm by myself with a frisbee you can't have an orgasm with a frisbee it's too flat and round you need something pointy and thick and long and a frisbee is dirty people put their hands all over it with a piss and spit and shit and shoe dirt this is my personal frisbee no one touches it I roll up against it I think I've had orgasms in my dreams too I wake up and I feel like I pee it on myself you must have good dreams sometimes don't you have good dreams sometimes? I have this one dream all the time it's an ocean beach and the sand is hot like for real hot like walking on a hot stove top when the gas is up really high and I'm barefoot and I can't find my flip flops so I'm hopping and looking for the shore and I start hopping where I think the water is and I'm thinking I can't see blue but there should be water because it's a beach and finally I do I start to see blue and I just start running and I feel crazy I smell smoke because now my feet are on fire and I'm smelling my burning feet and they smell like Nathan's hot dogs and Vaseline intensive care lotion and Newport cigarettes and the fire is rising and it's up to my knees and then up my thighs and I can feel it getting in my pussy when there are broken shells and the broken shells make bloody grill lines on my feet like real hot dogs and I'm crying and my mouth is open but no sound is coming out anymore and I can feel the blood running out of me and when I finally get to the water it's red but I don't care and I jump in and it's fucking boiling and that's it I'm awake BAM that is so fucked up so that is the that's the first part thank you so much you don't have to go through all that so that's the fart the fart oh lord that's the first part the bronze Gothic which is a solo piece that I did a couple of years ago and what actually so I have to say that the work that I do is I use I think about how far does a body have to go what is the fundamental integrity of the body right and how far can it go before it starts to come apart but at the same time it still keeps going even in its dispersion it's falling apart and so this letter happens after I've done 30 minutes of something that I call the quake or the shake so a lot of my work does involve how far can the body how far can the body go what is an energetic sort of transmission that the body can have before we start to resort to spoken language so it's interesting to think actually even before you hear I think you also see and I think that there are mirror neurons where it's kind of what you're seeing kind of is reflected back on you you're feeling maybe what you're seeing and so there is a sense of what is the possibility of a transmission of a kind of sense of the body that can happen in a space and also what is an energetic transmission that can happen in the space so I start going for 30 minutes and audience has about 15 minutes before they can before they can before it officially starts right and so they have the choice do I sit in here and watch this for 30 minutes do I hang out talk with my friend but what is the shape of the room and how is it shifting I want to make that space and so I guess when I think about sex and I think about violence I'm also thinking about this body integrity I'm like how much can we what is the possibility for transmission what is the possibility for the self to come apart and merge with others right because I wonder if there is necessarily a zero I think there might actually just be this other possibility right what is the subjects total breakdown and how in a space can I create an opportunity for that but also I was interested in this idea of a griot these and also thinking about the epistolary narrative right where you know we're looking at the stories that are told in letter form you know the Bronte sisters did this and Dracula and so I started to think okay can we take these black girls in the Bronx and how much of their story can be revealed in this narrative while also this is existing alongside these moments of the body kind of coming together coming apart and also thinking about adolescence right where the body is in a space of transformation and transmission and how can I as a performer also create the conditions for my body to be shifting and transforming in ways that I can't necessarily for tell but I also do think that in this the space that people of color black women occupy women occupy there is already a sense of a kind of fugitivity already put on us you know we have been the subjects of a considerable amount of violence and so a lot of my work I feel it might be about excavating the violence that's been done and and then you know opening it up into something else I also think that but I also think violence is a powerful possibility for transformation right and it doesn't necessarily have to mean beating and death right but just some kind of fundamental and radical shift in how you look at the world and perceive the world and perhaps yourself and those around you so just I want to also read something by this incredible writer scholar I love very much Sadia Hartman her latest book is wayward lives of social experiments intimate histories of social upheaval and I am interested in these social upheavals but she is sort of excavating these histories of women in the 1920s in Philadelphia and New York and I'm not sure what other city who were subject to these what were these vagrancy laws right where and I think a lot of black women were especially sort of subject to these laws where you know if they were walking around at night police officers could basically arrest them for prostitution or vagrancy and sometimes they would end up spending like three years in reformatory houses right and this is especially you know when we're thinking of the conditions that were created particularly in ghettos when people are living together you know maybe someone has a house but many people are living in boarding houses there was a sense of okay there are men and women who aren't necessarily related to each other who are living together and they were also subjected to these vagrancy laws and that they were living under these like immoral circumstances right and so it was just complicated anyway but what I love about sedia is she's also talking about just the idea of women also choosing to live freely a woman who didn't have a job she didn't want to you know work at you know she didn't want to be a laundress right you know people were for not having jobs and then they would be taking from the reformatories and basically given to people who needed you know people to work in their houses and so but so she's so she's also opening up the histories of women who were trying to live a liberated life to live some other life you know she's looking at billy holiday and you know many artists and choral performers who were also doing necessarily living a moral life and who may have been subject to these vagrancy laws okay so alright wait my gosh sorry my glasses and you know what my thing was not on the right that wasn't on the right let's zoom it's an atlas of the wayward um sorry guys it was on the wrong thing here it is okay so no no you guys I had this on the wrong page it's a chapter on waywardness because I also think I you know I love that word because I think it's just there to not sort of stay in one space to move to transgress to find other possibilities but that is I'm sorry my god well okay I'm sorry uh was I speaking too fast before could you guys understand what I was saying yeah super superb okay um alright a short entry on the possible so wayward related to the family of words errant fugitive recalcitrant anarchic willful reckless troublesome riotous tumultuous rebellious and wild to inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live waywardness the avid longing the struggle not ruled by master man or the police the errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here the social poesis that sustains the dispossessed wayward the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering sojourns without a fixed destination ambulatory possibility interminable migrations rush and flight black locomotion the everyday struggle to live free the attempt to elude capture by never settling not the master's tools but the ex slaves fugitive gestures her traveling shoes waywardness articulates the paradox of cramped creation the entanglement of escape and confinement flight and captivity wayward to wander to be unmoored adrift rambling roving cruising strolling and seeking to claim the right to opacity to strike to riot to refuse to love what is not loved to be lost to the world it is the practice of the social otherwise the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation assembling and huddling together it is the directionless search for a free territory it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the police boundaries of the dark ghetto it is the mutual aid offered in the open air prison it is a queer resource of black survival it is a beautiful experiment in how to live waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads accept the ones created by out are foreclosed it obeys no rules and abides no authorities it is unrepentant it traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence when the terms have already been dictated when there is little room to breathe when you have been servitude when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move it is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive thank you I look at him and said he sent my sister out to die and he said have you managed to get in here and I said I told him I was a present for you and he said were you lying and he put his hands on my cheeks and I bit down on his fingers hard and he grabbed my hair and pulled my face away and I said no I stared up into his eyes and told the truth no I wasn't lying to them I'm yours oh yes and I still burn for him but not the way he's now that he's been through hell he's got his hair and fucked his way through the staff of TGI Friday no he's gone in his hand dog in his side eyes gone empty except for the things they seek the way a shark swims after a newborn whale all night a wolf chases a rabbit through the snow you're like that a perfect hunter everyone who sees you wants you or wants to you how you find it how you run how your back is straight when you stand how your eyes are colorless how the things you say are simple and hard where were you when he showed up on our shores that night why weren't you standing there next to him then holding the leash you would have whispered a joke in my ear and pulled me aside and show me the map of the stars that you're holding your pocket holding it up against me I wouldn't have let my sister go to the movies with you I would have broken her nose if she'd gone anywhere near you I would have made it simple you can have me I say or you can have no one ask Julia and Sophie and Christine and Kate to join us oh everybody here one more chair here so maybe reactions to Julia or you all to each other that was nice somebody had to you know break the eyes and that was my breaking the eye well do you have a question a specific question when you after listen how does it feel for you to hear your colleagues work and you know the acceptance statements and how do you relate to what you are hearing and saying oh I'm really struck I mean the group that you've assembled I you know I was in the piece that Kate was talking about with the devouring the babies devouring the family and I gave that monologue and then I'm in pathetic right now as well and I mean this is kind of aside from what we had talked about but I was really feeling the kind of the physical bonds or connections over time and also how semen came up a lot across the board I just wanted to speak as I think first I just want to say that it's just a pleasure to be here with all of you thank you for coming and it's certainly a pleasure for all of us to have the opportunity to be together because we've all worked together in one way or another but never at the same time so it's always great to see and complimentary to everybody who spoke I think was very complimentary and I sort of feel that unity which is great as a performer you know it's been exciting for me to listen tonight because when I'm given a script I don't really think about what it means I start off by just memorizing the lines and reciting the lines actually I don't start off by memorizing them at all as you all know I start off by reading them just reading them out loud and I kind of I know I have a timeline you know that has to be understood and memorized by a certain date but I try and not think about that and just keep going until all of a sudden something happens that said and that's you know sometimes I can be very frustrating and other times it's just you know in the middle of the night I'll be like oh right that's what that means you know and I actually found something tonight when I read something but to hear everybody speak is also really inspiring been inspiring to me and has helped me as a performer to allow things to drop in that wouldn't necessarily have dropped in so I guess what I'm saying is I'm an advocate of both those things to come in blank you know and not really think about what anything means until it speaks to me and also at a certain point it's great to hear I don't think I even want to be specific but it's just great to hear Julia and Kate and Oakley and Christine the other plays that I've heard before too excerpts of them just resonate in a different way as well so I'm just thankful for all of that that actually makes me yeah I mean for some reason all of a sudden I started to think hunger I started to think how as a performer, a maker there are some things that I'm hungry for in the world those things that I'm hungry to facilitate in the experiment of putting something in front of people and and also your characters Julia all have this kind of incessant hunger and it seems to and yours Kate seem to be sausage but but there is I found myself I guess wondering is it violence or is it hunger it's this you know and sex if sex can lead to death to the zero or again is it about trying to transform and not necessarily disappear but merge and obviously in that merging there is the disappearance of what was but there is a thing so it isn't a void, it isn't annihilation it's just completely unknown a transmutation a kind of hybridization and I'm thinking what maybe needs to start to happen is some kind of more pieces about our hunger and a need to become hybrid ocean plant creatures right we need to start to fuck the world in some way but not not so that something is destroyed but so that a new possibility is can emerge I don't know why that let yeah that sounds a lot like what the in the city of Hartman ends on of this world in which what is it you're trying to survive in a world that in which you're not meant to exist so there's this world where all these characters are very hungry because it's not sustaining them in some way it's not designed for them to feel sated and it's to imagine and also right how do we imagine something else right I don't want to replicate systems of violence that we are living under now right is there another possibility or another framework right yeah I mean I think this question of like your question of kind of like why why zero like why do we need zero there are kind of infinite dimensions in which we could pursue our hunger or transformation or kind of radicality and shifting and change so why does change have to be erasure or destruction and I think you know yeah it's a good question I mean I think somehow to me zero feels important as a kind of asymptote because it's like a form of perfection that it's like a or it's just abstraction and there's something about a movement in a movement towards a goal that actually can't be met that to me feels like a kind of perpetual motion machine in itself yeah it's like it's like because the zero is unattainable I guess that it feels important for me right I mean zero and destruction doesn't necessarily have to be bad right you know as a mom I'm sorry like as a you know mom do you push something is broken right push there's blood or cut or right oh my goodness I just I don't want to talk about this it's a terrible thing that I read today that doesn't someone anyway yes destruction I guess it feels like destruction is kind of even that word sort of has some kind of resonance in a kind of Western European kind of framework right and it feels it even feels kind of masculine I mean I'm no linguist I don't know the etymology of that word but I wonder if I guess I want new I don't I want the transfer I want to think of transformation that doesn't always that where violence isn't necessarily necessary even though even though I think like the disruption of a certain sense of self is a kind of violence for some people right like in some ways what we're looking at what we're dealing with as we see this rise of this kind of this white supremacy this sort of heteronormative or this sort of Judeo-Christian like or Christian sort of neo Nazi movement it feels like they are railing against what they feel is an existential threat their own erasure right and so any idea that you would actually it's we're not going to destroy you but you will merge the violence to those people not that I can like imagine I don't know those people they don't know me clearly we don't hang so I don't know it's like I'm just wondering about escaping certain conditions of language and maybe sometimes that's why I go to the body the languages in the body is Kate was you know beautifully elucidating right the body is these vibrations this sound but maybe I'm trying to go to a place that is pre-sound where we're sometimes just in a room looking at each other yeah wonder something well I just did it what I'm about to say but I think that the seeing is a peer-to-peer relationship of equals even if someone is looking at you in a threatening or a desirous or a judging manner my mother has a look that can cut down you know right but it's peer-to-peer and I mean that on the on the physics level of photons but with sound what I just did to Oakley how I just cut her off and usurped her waves and now they're landing on your fortunate and unfortunate ears alike like speech is power and using speech is exercising a certain kind of power and as a female child and a house full of men I was taught not to use my hands to exercise my power but instead to use my voice and I got really good at it there's you know through the variety of tactics but I wanted to hit people I came out of the womb ready to punch crack you know kick claw bite grab and it was definitely more discouraged in me than it was in my brothers which is just about some kind of heteronormative middle-class white Lutheran garbage but I think that there is something that that allows us to escape certain kinds of power structures if we stop talking see I didn't feel like that was a usurpation either right that's the danger of language right this is the danger right because I thought I gave over I thought I was done and I thought so interesting right and so this is also the trap for me it's like okay how do we make space also for those kind of for these misreadings right which are necessary and fantastic and dynamic against each other right and so maybe sometimes that's why I'm not sure sometimes what am I writing my writing plays I'm just having different people sort of saying things and then saying the absolute opposite later I mean I like it's but no I feel you I wasn't supposed to fight but I did but I yeah I feel like there is but if you when you talking about the power like a sense of sort of voice is power versus what you know I mean the body is not like when there is no voice what what I guess I don't mean a power both things have power both systems looking and seeing and being seen and hearing all of that but what I guess I mean they're not separate right looking is also hearing do you know what I mean I'm suggesting that to look is a vibration that also has a sound yes okay yes yes also I have been thinking about how playwriting is tyranny I wrote a play that has no gender pronouns in it and I wrote it in such a way that I wanted a people a cast of a wide variety of backgrounds to be able to play any of the parts and I hope that someone crazy will give us an opportunity to test that out but I really felt like I was patting myself on the back like a great white lady you know for like finding a way to be in the room with people who might tell me all the ways that I was stupid and wrong and that we were all going to be in a non hierarchical setting and then it dawned on me that every single one of them while they were reading my play sounded like me because I'm not exactly a shape-shifter playwright I write the words and then I make people say them and then they all sound like me but I think that writing is also the way that we allow ourselves to disappear into the structure yes maybe yes but also exert ourselves it's a thing that I love about being in your place is that I might be the character called Joan but I might also like that might not be a confined thing that might not one of the worst plays that I was thinking about to get my ire up was a play the first play I got my equity card in was a writing class I had three lines I said I wrote a poem about my cat and then I was immediately overshadowed by a more powerful woman who spent the entire play talking about a man who was not there the man who was at the center of the play did not have to have an actor speak words he was at the center and he didn't have to show up and it was I was thinking about it later as like here we all are in service to the more powerful man and it was making me really really angry and I had this tiny very confined role and so that's what I was to just make the link between power and power and center and who you put at the center and is there a center and then this feeling of like being in your work and watching your work that people are characters are more like vibrations than they are like fixed things that are going to do predictable things that we will know about and they frequently seem on the inside not to have any idea why they might like to do something next so that the whole idea of a kind of method acting intention is dismantled and you get to really think about doing things with your body like I'm going to stand across the room from you and think about plucking out one of your eyebrow hairs because I bet that would hurt while I say this line for instance maybe as a question to the scene of the evening like staging where do you feel someone got really right or what you feel is how it should be done but you say this is really so wrong so what does you know if one could say you as a group work together now each other so what are your what do you look up to when you say this is something that really should not be should not be shown or written you just want us to like not name by name but in general you know what gets you this is so wrong and this is why we do our work I was just trying to understand the question I think there came a point last week where I said a line and I looked at Julia and said actually do you have to like put that line in there and she said I'm sorry yes what was the line it was the oh I can't even say it someone say it oh yeah no it's a terrible line don't say it oh no oh come on now is that what no I think Kate said earlier that theater is manufactured conflict or that it is you know organized violence and so much about the talks was about violence against bodies and the questions to ask and so you don't really need to have the answer and how far can the body go and if so much of what we see or I see why would say you know it's not really responding in that way to it so but what are your you know in your theater in the world things where you say this these were works these were plays these are directors and of course your work but what does it what does make it right for you I first I just want to say that if it's good then it's good then it's good and it's fine with me and that is a little bit like the Supreme Court definition of obscenity and I would say that that's correct you see it you know it when it's good when it works it works on you and then there it is it's a very difficult thing to pin down but I also want to say that the knowing part of me which is maybe a part that should be cut out and burned but the knowing part of me knows that I don't want to see cynical plays anymore I don't need to see a play that is confirming my sense of the world as I walk out of the theater I want to play to disrupt and trouble my sense of the world all the time I I want to see people I want to see surprising things come out of surprising mouths tonight is apparently all about mouths in my reality I want to see people do things that I didn't expect so that I can start to think about something else besides the sad very low tragic violent horrible expectations I have from living or watching the news so cynicism I mean for me I feel really grateful for all of the artists that have kind of taught me how to work through abstractness and coldness and deferring human connection and warmth and have enabled the kind of theater as a space of putting off and as a place to want communion but not get it I guess that seems really important mostly because I guess I feel like movies and TV mostly give us everything we want right away and so I think I'm thinking about you just like the Worcester group even or I mean Oakley and I met performing for Richard Maxwell I mean artists who have sort of created spaces where something is held and a kind of suspense and that suspense which you know which also you know theoretically is associated with masochism I guess in other context but that suspense I think is one of the things that theater is able to do to take duration and turn it into like possibility in a way that I just don't think happens in other media so that that's important for me do you guys have any questions? Yeah, let's open it up to the audience maybe Michael has some light on the audiences or comments it doesn't have to be a question since HowlRound agreed to stream it we would like to ask you to take the microphone and also maybe say who you are but a question or a thought or a comment Thanks for, it was a really kind of amazing introduction to a lot of your work thank you for all of that I was just thinking about one thing in relation to sex and violence and those themes was humor felt like a really important thread throughout and I think often does something kind of similar about breaking the bounds of the self and sometimes can be that strange abyssal zero but also can be a space of suspense and merging as well so yeah, I was just wondering about reflecting on humor and how that relates to maybe actually humor is the sex I don't know, I'm not sure but there's some kind of relationship between the erotic and desire and laughter which is often also kind of painful I'm not sure if there's a question there so sorry about that what how does humor relate to violence and sex do you guys write humor into your place do you feel it has to be there or does it happen or is it automatically present or you try to avoid it we try to avoid it at all cause I mean, I guess I think that let's see, okay, humor yes, I agree with everything you said that humor is both sex and violence but also I guess for me humor in the theater seems so important I could never enjoy I could never enjoy a piece of theater that didn't make me laugh or smile or you know because I actually think the more ambitious sort of like the more seriously we secretly take ourselves in exploring things like violence and sex and structure you know the more vital it is that we not let on that we are taking ourselves so seriously and that we deflect that impression at all costs because how hideous of us to ask to be you know regarded in that way and so humor becomes really important as the thing that enables any of that exploration to happen without a kind of like unbearable level of pain of self seriousness I also think that laughing is a kind of intellectual foreplay and that if you want someone to have a new idea a really good way to get at them is to get them to loosen up I'm gesturing at the dancer now but to get them to loosen up their bodies by moving by moving their diaphragms you know and then you leave them a little bit more vulnerable to attack and dismantling yeah I don't care about humor personally I could give two fucks about humor I mean I'm just like interested in like how do we how do we shake the ground in a space and maybe that's what I was missing too when I was thinking about movement because I'm not doing like traditional dance or blah right I'm just I'm trying to make something it's a vibrational space and I'm just trying to disrupt something and there are people who you know are in that space and are sometimes like oh my god I gotta get the fuck out of here right it feels like a car I put people in a someone also talked about carceral states right that being in watching being in where I did the Bronx Gothic being in that space was like being in prison with me and I was like what I just wanted it to be like a little bedroom you know what I mean like we're all here together but I was also like okay but that's good that's also what I'm trying to do I want to ensnare you and trap you and if you have the balls you'll get up and leave but if you can't leave what can we do and then it's like you stay and then maybe something happens or you just want to tear your eyeballs out I kind of don't mind that though I do think that a fundamental condition of being human is just that we're just funny as hell we're just stupid do you know what I mean like I think it's inevitable that there's humor because that is the only way we can deal with our conditions but when I'm making something I am not as a tactic or a strategy saying well now it's got to get funny because this part was just totally like you know that's so I think that that's really important is to I really appreciate work that leaves the possibilities open you know I had a really I had a really great experience I was performing this solo piece that I traveled around Europe and the US and Canada with and when I went to I performed in somewhere in Germany it was a hilarious piece usually usually but it was it came from a very lonely place when I created it but and there was no no tax but it depended on the audience you know it was open to any possibility and I think that I did it in Germany in a town in Germany once and everyone started crying and they had to take the children away you know and I thought wow that is just fantastic you know I mean it was it was kind of exciting in a way to know that it could have the reaction could be anything you know so I think as performers it's not verbal or nonverbal with language or with our mere bodies and our energy I think it's important to leave open and I do believe that this work that we saw tonight could go either way you know and I think as performers it's a challenge for us to allow that to be to have an open open-ended possibility for the people can see it as something very humorous or see it depending on who they are in their personal experience so that's the challenge for me in the exciting exciting part maybe a question to Julia why Racine and as a starting point I will not say Helensi or Susan Sontak what is your thought behind it well I like old things that feel old and weird and uncomfortable so Helensi Soo doesn't need me but I actually think Racine does need me and and I guess I think you know the ways in which theater has you know I think taking a classic structure that has taught so many people how to think about sex and how to think about violence and trying to kind of like open up and incorporate that structure and see what happens when you have it inside your body to me feels scary and exciting and yeah and I like writing in hexameter it will be interesting June 5th so we all have to go and there's a closing what's up in the oven the minor theater afterwards are you already thinking about next projects what will you be doing and maybe the same for Kate maybe you first what are you working on well speaking of incorporating horrible objects we're doing an adaptation of Vojcek so more misogynistic violence for you coming up Christine what about you where are we mounting Suicide Forest next year same time 2020 and I started writing a new play it's been a while like a year so what is it about can you share the new play it's my vamping of very old play that I wrote and it is my one other Japanese play and about a matriarch on her deathbed and the family coming around and watching her pass and where is Suicide Forest going up ART, New York Sharon, Kate I'm going off to write at Space and Rider Farm in a few weeks and I'm really excited about that and I have no idea what it will yield I am going to the young Vic and remounting Bronx Gothic after having not done it since 2015 1615 yes it's fun and not fun at all well I think I think we are going to have a little reception here at Garza of Mindswell thank you for bringing this almost overwhelming offerings I think your presentation was so beautiful it was hard for me to ask the right questions but I think we really get an idea of what you are working on and that's different and that's significant and that it's deep but also that it's important what you are doing so thank you but the work you all do and especially Julia's upcoming work is something we really look forward to and I think like a homeopathic peel the body of the American theater especially needs this anti-poison maybe to heal and to get better and so thank you all for coming and for sticking with us normally we have 90 minutes but we have almost 2 hours here that's quite unusual so it's also a testimony I think and again thank you for taking the time and energy and joining us and thank you all for coming thanks to Hal around for coming